6 elements I think about with every illustration

[Music] hey everybody aaron blaze here and you know it's been a little while since i've sat down and just given you a little basic approach to how i do illustration i've done tons of videos live streams all kinds of stuff over the last couple of years where i'm demonstrating things but i haven't really done anything in a while where i'm just really breaking things down simply and talking about my basic uh what are the the six basic things i think about when approaching an illustration so that's what i want to do today i want to give you the six the six different things that i think about when i'm approaching an illustration so without talking about it anymore let's go ahead and dive in today i want to do an illustration of this lion this is some reference that i've pulled from our recent trip to africa that my son photographed uh dustin blaze and i thought this would be a nice um well first of all i love the expression the spirit and the personality uh in this lion's eyes but also i think it it is the basis for a nice composition for a square format that i want to do and that by the way is the first element that i think of when it comes time to thinking about my illustrations and that is composition what is composition well it's the arrangement of shapes light and dark in within the space of your of your illustration so in this case i've got a square format and my composition is going to be how i arrange the shapes and the shapes are made from light and dark areas so it's however i decide to arrange those shapes within that square format is my composition now looking at this um you'll see there's not there isn't any real direct light it's all diffused lighting in here and as many of you know i love to do dramatic lighting so i'm gonna add my own lighting to this composition and uh one of the things that i really love about it is the way we get this nice big curve through the uh the lion's mane and how it curves back around and i think we can continue that with the body even more and maybe even bring the tail up so from a compositional standpoint i want this swooping kind of uh uh feel through the composition and i'm gonna emphasize that with some dramatic lighting as well but uh and and not just emphasize it with lighting but i'm also gonna arrange objects within the composition to help uh to help get that swooping feeling and the only other objects we have in here other than the lion is grass and that's one one of the things i love because you can take grass and you can do anything you want with it so as as the cat is sitting here and i want to get this big kind of sweeping feel i'm going to arrange the grass to help me do that and guide the eye so let's do a quick thumbnail because that's another thing that i like to do and what's a thumbnail you ask well a thumbnail it's just a small illustration very quick i'm going to move i'm going to move this onto my other monitor i'm going to make this gray i like to work on a gray background why do i work on a gray background well i it when you work in gray you can either go lighter or you can go darker when you're working over white the only direction you can go is is darker and so whenever you put anything down it already looks darker than what it really is when you work on gray you get a much better sense of your value structure value meaning light and dark so once again i'm going to jump up here let me grab a brush let me just sketch out now your thumbnail does not have to be pretty but it should give you somewhat of a representation of what you want to draw i've got that square format drawn in there let me put my drawing on another layer that way i can move it around if i need to because i want this this almost kind of wind swept feel let me blow this up even more for you so if we bring him in let me notice how the eyes the face is going to end up pretty much in the center of the composition which is kind of cool there are no hard fast rules there's you know a lot of guys will follow the rule of thirds for their compositions which that's something i like to do but really when it comes down to composition if it looks good it's good now there's things you want to be careful of you don't want your a lot of times your object to having a have a tangent on the side of you know and things like that but on the sides of the of your of your uh image the border but if you can avoid things like that then that's great but really it's coming down it comes down to just arranging things in a way that that's pleasing don't over complicate it you know as in when i was in college you know my some of my instructors would really make it complicated but it doesn't have to be that complicated it's just if it looks good it's good think of it that way bringing this in here i'm moving up a little bit that's why i like being able to have that on another level because it gives me the ability to move things around here's his back leg body might even bring his paw up but either way got everything right here now i've got this idea that he's it's there's heavy shadows another thing you guys don't know some of you know that i love dramatic really dramatic lighting heavy shadows see here i can have some of the grass coming up like so so very very quickly i'm going to lay this in now from a lighting standpoint i'm going to put a layer on top i'm going to set that blend mode to multiply and i'm just going to go to a nice kind of not quite halfway down the uh towards black just that's somewhat gray and because it's multiplying it's going to multiply with the gray that i've already got and i just want to play with my shadow my light and shadow patterns i have this idea of the light coming across his face and there'd be shadow underneath the cheekbones shadows in here that part of the lion's mane would be getting shadow maybe a little shadow or a little light right there really get dark behind him this is it's fun to explore in this stage in the thumbnail stage let's get in there and just get dark with it really dramatic so you can see i'm pretty much laying in everything pretty dark except for where i want your eye to go now in here maybe we pull out some of those let me grab my eraser maybe it's not so so dark in here maybe i can get a little contrast right there like that oh i might that might work get some trees in the background here see this is where you experiment a couple bits of light coming on there i can go a little darker with it now get a little deeper with the shadows in some areas okay so composition the first thing i think about when i'm working out my illustration is how you know how am i going to arrange the shapes that's your composition how are you going to arrange your shapes within the borders right on top of that let's set that to overlay little bits of light here and there so it's just a quick a quick idea of what this illustration can be that's what i'm doing now so you can see that this is a fair amount different from the reference that i'm looking at from a lighting standpoint there we go okay so you're going to take that and i'm going to and you know look at it small look at it big um this light here i think i want to take that light and carry it through a little bit more and go back to my eraser so we have more of a shadow going across his body there we go and get some dark shapes back in here to balance it looking at contrast looking at where i want the eye to go so i'm going to put some back over that again so there we go that's that for me is a rough very rough idea of my value structure what i'm thinking of and come back up in here maybe there's our rough value structure right there that's my my rough uh composition so i'm going to set that aside i'm going to look at it it's going to be my reference and i'm going to jump in with the with the uh the illustration so i've got my thumbnail done and like i said i like to use two monitors so i've got my main monitor here on my cintiq pro 32 and then up above me i keep my main reference and also my thumbnail the little sketch that i just did i keep all of that so i have reference to uh to see it and um you know so i don't forget so let's dive into the finish illustration now i've got my elements that i need right here so we've covered the first thing i think about which is composition the next thing i want to think about is just basically my drawing i like to have a good drawing to go off of there are other illustrators painters out there that just do a very rough drawing and then refine as they go i don't do that i like to have a strong drawing to begin with because for me it's like having good blueprints and the better the blueprints are i think the better the finished building or in this case the finished illustration is going to be so let's go ahead and i'm going to dive in with my drawing the first thing that i'm going to do is i'm going to go in very rough just like i did with my thumbnail and i'll go on a new layer i'm going to go in very rough with my basic shapes you can see here i'm just looking for basic shapes on this lion head and it really you know when it comes to digital illustration it doesn't matter what brush you use find the brush that you're most comfortable with i like to make my own brushes i've got a whole tutorial on how to do that in my digital painting course at creatureartteacher.com i'm going to push the the expression on this face a little bit and i'm always looking at i'm comparing you know i want to make sure this mouth is accurate i look at how it falls according to that eye up there and i'm thinking about bone structure i know there's cheekbones under here there's teeth under there there's a lot of things in there that that affect the shape of the face so here i make sure we're getting that sweeping feel i'll even push the pose a little bit to get a little more of this keep in mind too that your thumbnail and your composition you know when you start out it's just uh keep an open mind to to adjust it as you go my compositions always adjust as i go i might find something better or stronger or a different idea as i go and i'll adjust as i go so keep that in mind so there's my rough i got a very rough scribble in here of what i'm thinking right there i've got the sweeping feel through here got some of the body right down in there and i got enough of the body shown i think and then the rest of this is gonna be really thick grass texture we're going to keep this really loose so now what i like to do is i want to go ahead and refine that drawing so i knock the opacity back and put a new layer on top of that and i grab my pastel c brush which is a brush i made a few years ago that i love to draw with and uh and then just kick back and and uh refine the drawing like i said a refined drawing to me is like having nice blueprints to start with when you're building a house okay so now i feel like i have a strong enough drawing laid in here you can see you know i've got that refined drawing right over the top there's the old rough drawing right there and then i've got that refined drawing over the top i can start using that now uh to start laying in some color so um so so far what we've gone over is my composition and my drawing those are the first two elements out of the six that i really think about when it comes time for good illustration now the next thing i'm going to think about is my local color now local color is the color of an object when it's not in light and it's not in shadow it's just the color and that's really what i want to start laying in i just wanted especially when i'm working digitally i have the ability to do that because i can paint shadows right over the top so in the case of the lion i want to get this nice sandy kind of warm blonde hair laid in here i'll do it on a layer underneath i'll lay it in loose and i'll pretty much keep it all monotone just going to lay it in really quickly because it will get refined as we go down the road that's the other thing to think about you know even though i wanted to do somewhat of a refined drawing um i still try to stay pretty loose throughout the drawing and throughout the painting really until towards the end and then it's just a few refinements here and there and you've got a nice painting so i'm working on him the background i tend to work uh separately so i'm gonna work on that later and i've got my thumbnail to go off of to remember the value structure that i want so when i lay in this this basic local color that's not the end of it i'm going to go ahead and lay in other color as well but one of the things i like about working digitally like this is i've got little things that i can do that i can't do in traditional obviously but one of the things i can do is i can lock this layer right over here on the right i can alpha lock it so i can't now i can't draw our paint anywhere outside of what i've already painted so that gives me the ability to get really loose and have some fun with uh some of the other fur colors now i'm thinking about i'm just thinking about color right now i'm not thinking about shadow i want to emphasize that you'll see me jump around quite a bit because i'm really just just laying in various color differences so the key is to stay really loose because we've got our drawing in here that's going to help us pull everything back you know when we when we go to do details you know we've got we've got all the drawing in there that's going to help us do that so you'll notice you know i don't worry about being too staying you know really accurate matter of fact the looser at this point the looser the better i think so staying loose you can see i'm just just varying up the color the natural variations that you're going to see in the in the hide of the cat we're going to get all the light and dark and shadows and all that that'll be next those are our next elements that i find extremely important so i'm going to go ahead and take whoops not turn it off take the lock off of it the alpha lock i'm going to come in here i want i want to draw some of this fur out so i can break that silhouette of what i've drawn already by turning that alpha lock off it gives it a little bit better full look still no shadows yet okay variations of blonde in the fur i love doing these loose illustrations there's so much fun to do yeah let's get that sweeping feel i'm gonna put a layer on top of the uh of the cat layer just throw in some grass layers real quick ever so quickly i'm gonna first of all match a lot of the dried grasses then we'll throw some greens over the top i'll do this very quickly this is just going to be an under under painting we're gonna fill that in a lot with a lot more now let's get one in the background i'm gonna go a little cooler maybe a little darker with it so now i'm going under the cat behind the cat i want to continue with the compositional elements kind of swooping around some green elements in here they're just gonna this is just a base staying loose that drawing is gonna help and having done that thumbnail is going to help us as well it's going to go to the layer on top i'm going to lock that maybe go a little warmer let's go ahead and unlock it i think we can go ahead and unlock it i'm gonna have a lot of stuff over the top of this okay so right now we're gonna do our first layer of shadows i'm gonna get in there now that we've done this i'm gonna clean up some of this under drawing a little bit just around the main a little there we go so keeping that swooping composition my next uh thing beyond local color that i think about is shadow now shadow is really going to start to define where we guide the eye okay it's light and shadow those are the elements that really help guide the eye and put your viewer right where they should be and that's your job as the magician as the artist is to do that so i'm going to put a layer on top of everything and i'm going to go ahead and set it to multiply what multiply does it's a blend mode where when i draw down whatever color i'm using it's going to multiply with the colors underneath and if i do it right it can look like shadows so i'm going to go a little warm but on the gray side of things so it's going to be cool within the warm a cool warm about midway maybe a little less than midway and thinking about those elements so we're on multiply right now and i'm thinking about that shadow just like we did on the thumbnail coming across the show the face of the cat and along the back give me a little shadow cast right here a little bit under the nose here thinking of a little shadow coming off of the cheek i have some fur coming here don't be afraid to be bold with your shadows but always think about what you're doing with them and then there's that shadow coming across right there there oh that feels good when you start to get a nice dramatic shadow boy it's there's nothing nothing like it feels really strong there we go there's our shadows there so now i want to think about i'm gonna i'm gonna go throw shadows on everything here right over everything all the same layer because now i want everything to start coming together in value this is all part of the composition right you're that's one of the biggest elements of your composition is your light and dark because it really as you can see here it's going to really guide the eye now i'll come in and i'm going to erase some areas out there so you can see as we draw this shadow kind of hanging over him that the light becomes that much stronger now doesn't it and your areas of greatest contrast are going to draw attention so i'm just going to go in and i'm going to i'm going to hit it all hit it all and then we'll come back and add our lighter areas like we did in our thumbnail but you'll see as your illustration grows and develops you might see things that you like better in a large format that you didn't see in your thumbnail that's why i say always keep it keep the possibilities open because look at this i kind of like just having these little slivers of light on him and we can hit a couple of slivers of light on the grass and maybe in the foreground what if we had something see i can because we have it on another layer i can come in with my eraser and play with it let's go hey maybe maybe not but maybe in the corner i think that's too distracting it's too far outside of our center of interest to draw the eye there so i don't want to do that but what if we had i'm gonna change erasers here it would be interesting to have a few areas back here that are catching light to get some contrast like what we were doing earlier yeah see that starts to come so i don't like that and we can keep this pretty abstract back here we get some negative shapes coming through and look at this we can do the same thing oh yeah just have fun with the shapes we were looking up through leaves in the background so we have this kind of effect back here this abstract kind of look of looking up through the leaves just like that oh that feels nice and dramatic see that i like i'm liking that i like that the staged lighting i'm keeping this all simple back here we're going to do some more work over the top of it but i think what we've got right now is a pretty interesting composition so what we've done we've thought about our composition how are we arranging our shapes then we got in there and uh decided to do the drawing and i start loose and get refined i'm going to get that local color in there which is basically the color of everything when it's not in light and shadow and then we go in and it's a matter of finding your shadow shapes and this is like i said where the composition really comes together now keep in mind we're going to go even darker with some of these shadows this is just our first pass just to set up our um our initial uh uh shapes composition what not i'm gonna try taking out even more back here okay this is a big acacia tree in the background maybe you're sitting in a forest so let's go ahead and put a layer over the top of that and i'm gonna set that to uh overlay and now watch this i'm gonna go a little warmer with it and not too whoa more orange and more on the gray bright side and now i'm going to get in here and watch what this does let me go a little warmer with it and just slightly darker now we're getting some nice light oh yeah see there painting we're painting with light with that blend mode set to overlay you get these really great lighting effects because that warm light is going to affect your local color and not only brighten it it'll warm it up see there how about we hit a couple of light areas on the tail yeah look at that well you can really feel that light coming through see one of the cool things about this stage is that this is where you really start to see the painting come together i've had a lot of younger artists that don't have experience taking it further saying hey if i had gotten it this far or would i i would have called it finish but we're actually pretty far from finishing but it's amazing how much you can get in here uh because at this point we've got everything laid in now it's just a matter of getting the details in some of the the um uh some of the reflected light that we're gonna talk about um slight differences in values against other values and and um and then obviously the grasses uh and then we've got basically an illustration done so i'm going to go ahead and dive into that and what i want to do is to start refining areas within the shadows you know there's going to be darker areas within shadows and in lighter areas within shadows so you can model within there so i'm going to put another layer on top i'm going to set this one to multiply as well and go about the same [Music] darkness as i did before except now i'm just pushing some of these dark areas a little bit more that i think can get a little darker one of the ways to get hair texture is to be is to deepen the shadows in between clumps of hair so that the lighter clumps stand out and they'll come forward so i'm not really painting individual hairs i'm just kind of modeling the the big clumps once again i want to keep this loose but you can see i'm working my darks within the shadows i'm staying out of the light areas and right now i'm not worrying about going really warm or really cool although my shadows would be considered a little bit warm but they're on the cool side of warm so i'm still thinking about temperature just now i'm not taking the temperature all the way over to the cool hue which would be our blues and greens i might do that a little bit later but right now i think i want to keep it all fairly warm i might get a little a couple of hard shadows within the light areas just because they will be there as they cast shadows on top of each other clumps of fur so i want you to see that even though this is a loose illustration at this point still we're approaching it from where of our a very methodical approach of how we you know create our light areas dark areas that sort of thing and so we're keeping it under control the whole time and by doing that you can really kind of work your illustration in a way that you're not putting any effort in in areas that you don't need to i'm trying to keep control the whole time by doing that or the way i do that is approaching it methodically each each time you know i i find that drawing i lay in the local color i lay down down that first shadow layer lay down the light layer lay down the next shadow layer and so on and so on now watch when i when i draw the shadow between his leg and his belly i'm just going to draw negative shapes disappearing into the grass and we'll work that out later with more shapes of grass keeping that nice and simple always the key word same thing here i'm just going to start drawing in little negative shapes as the grass overlaps there see that light boy that light's really starting to pop now isn't it i might even be able to get a little bit of right there so it feels like because it's coming across this part of the leg maybe we want to get a little bit right there little spots of light coming through that can't quite get past all the other shadow areas there we go nice now i want to throw and start throwing in some grass um actually i want to hit a couple of areas uh let's refine this a little bit so i've i've gone dark on the on my multiply there i'm going to do a layer on top now and i'm just going to keep it normal it's just normal air and i want to hit some of the lighter areas that might come through and these are going to give me my fine details so i'm going to grab the color lighten it up and here's where i just hit a few details in the fur here and there not many i don't have to do it a lot these are the things that really carry a lot of weight see there doesn't need much see whenever you draw these little light accents over there dark negative spaces that you've created it creates depth and the way i'm doing the fur right now is the same idea that i'm going to use when i do the grass it's the exact same idea they're no different in their thinking look how loose i'm able to keep it once again just get selective a little bit selective of where you you hit some of these because you don't need a lot like on here i can go really super bright because i know it's sunlight hitting it there see that adds to that feeling of light one thing i want to do in here is get a little light on those eyes a little sparkle on the eyes because the this part is kind of black it reflects sky color so you tend to get a little blue reflection in the black of the eye maybe a little bit in the eye itself from the sky so i'm going to go ahead and start doing the grass over the top and i'm so i'm going to create another multiply layer and i'm just going to quickly go in and start painting in negative shapes between grasses just made up negative shapes lots of triangles and imagining if you know a stock was coming through some of the negative shapes that that would make and then we're going to work over the top of that don't be afraid to make some of these negative shapes big so that you can get some depth i know it looks weird right now but trust me just do this and then we're going to work out our grass composition i'm trying to keep these negative shapes moving in the same direction that i want the eye moving in okay so i'm going to lay a layer put a layer over the top of that i'm just going to grab some of that local color and i want to go i think i'm going to go gray with it but just go a little bit lighter and i'm going to grab my pastel c brush and put the taper sensitivity on i'm going to start drawing grasses i'm going to pay particular attention to hit areas in between my negative spaces but don't be afraid to draw through your negative spaces because that's where it's going to create depth and you don't want to go too bright because remember this is all in shadow so we want to make sure that this feels like it's staying in shadow remember keep your grass feeling spontaneous so once again i'm trying to i want the grass to feel natural but i also want it to [Music] support that sweeping composition that i'm trying to create and this is just one layer we're gonna we're gonna hit more layers over the top of this we're gonna build this up now this grass i'm laying in here really spontaneously but it also comes from years of looking at grass and really looking at the way it grows especially when i was in africa that was one of the things because i know grass in africa is going to be different than grass that i'm familiar with here in north america so i want to make sure that i'm drawing grass accurately so we shot a lot of pictures of grass so i boiled it down to a shorthand so here's our first layer with our negative spaces in there coming along now i want to go behind the lion create a layer behind the lion and basically do the same thing so now i'm thinking about the grass behind the lion i can't put a layer behind the line because i've we've got our shadow layer over the whole thing so if i try to put a layer under the shadow layer the grass will just come out dark which isn't terrible i can do i can do that an element of that you can definitely have some dark grasses coming up these grasses when you get enough in there it just creates a nice kind of pattern i'm going to try erasing back some more of this guy here it's getting a little complex i want to see if i can simplify it so the head has a nice simple silhouette which is exactly what we put in a thumbnail it always comes back to the thumbnail i'll put another layer on top i'm going to set it to multiply this time i'm going to do a gradient layer and i want it to gradually get darker i'm going to come over here and go to my gradient tool just come from the bottom up just a little bit at a time so we have some nice shadow areas falling in here there we go so now i'm going to go in i'm going to go over the top of that again see we've got a nice little build up of our grasses so now what i'm doing is i'm just going in and hitting areas that would be catching a little bit more light within the shadow so they're not big long strokes of grass they're just little bits that are just catching little bits of light here and there there might be some more than others and you know in certain areas but what this does is it starts to break it up a little bit more and we're going to do that with the with the dead colors as well so here i've worked my way up to a little bit of a lighter dead color and i'm just laying in little details over the top this is where your eye will go these lighter areas that catch your eye even though it's in the shadow it's light within lighter value within a dark value all right let's throw another layer on top and once we make an adjustment i'm going to put this to multiply that new layer on top and we're going to go ahead and kind of darken again i'm going to go with maybe a little cooler color see what happens there we go i want to get a little darker in the foreground there i'm going to put a little bit of um just a little bit of a haze back there it's kind of bluish to balance it out a little bit i'm going to knock back the opacity on the layer there we go i like i like having that little bit of atmosphere back there i'm putting this nice cooling kind of blue in here against all that warm feels nice there there we go i think that that atmosphere right there adds a little bit that's another thing to be willing to do is to get in there and change up your your on the fly change up your your your drawing and your uh your composition a little bit if you have to here i'm going to get rid of some of these heavy lines i don't feel we need everywhere there i'll leave them on the face a little bit there i like that now i can go in and just push a little bit there we go now what i want to do is i want to hit like some of these blades of grass they're going to get hit by sunlight this will be our finishing touch so what you want to do you got to think about the grasses being blocked and in some parts of its stock from hitting the light hitting it but other parts is getting is getting lit so it's like these little area like little spots of light here and there that are gonna hit through the grass we put a little bit of that on the on the lion himself there see this is the last little bit that gives it a little bit of zing a little pizzing there we go i pull some of these back just a tear just pull them back there it is i think we got our image i'm pretty happy with that and so this is our pro my approach to you know my illustration it's sitting down and figuring out those six elements and the six elements being composition how are you going to arrange the elements on your within your space okay that's composition then i'm going to sit down and figure out and do my thumbnail drawing and then i want to sit down and figure out my drawing itself um and i like to sit down and do somewhat of a refined drawing so that i can guide me throughout the entire painting process let me pull that up a little bit more for you and um and then from there i want to lay in my local color and that's the beginning of really getting a sense of the richness of what it's going to be but it's not until you get that next step where you start laying in the shadows that you really start getting a sense of the composition and light and that's where it really comes together and starts to sing and you can start to get the the drama in your piece um and then we're going to add the light areas and then we do the details and that for me is where it starts to sing the details are in the grasses the little bits of reflected light here and there a little glints off the eye you know those little things but it's making sure that you're tasteful with where you put your your details and it's not going to be easy it's something that's taken me years and years and years to uh refine and i'm still working on it to quite a degree so it's something that hopefully you'll be working at for a lifetime but if you follow these these simple these six elements that i go for and and try to hit that every time you do your illustration i think you'll have a little bit of a head start and get something that looks pretty good to come out of it so i hope you learned something today going out there put some beauty back into the world and i'll talk to you next time thanks

Channel: The Art of Aaron Blaise

Views: 22,529

Keywords: The Arts, Animation, Art, Illustration

Id: F8lVaNFOIQc

Length: 47min 13sec (2833 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 30 2021