Blender 2.83 Grease Pencil: Comic style from reference (part 1)

hey everybody Paul here once again in this tutorial I'm gonna be taking a photo reference for the purposes of creating a comic style portrait now this is a question I get asked quite often so that any further ado let's jump into blender and let's start so when you open up blender 2.83 for the first time you'll get your customary default scene and this is all well and good and we could change the layout if we wanted to but there are some hidden defaults which we should really take advantage of so the first thing you want to do especially if you're going to be working in Greece pencil is to go to file new and select 2d animation all of a sudden you have got a preset which is custom ready for you to get drawing I can straightaway draw you know little whatever here and it's already looking through a camera and I've got my tool sets and I've got these neat little Colette collections with a stroke in one and the camera in the other I've even got a grease pencil timeline down the bottom now what this is actually gone and done is just giving you some defaults like a world setting that is easier to draw on it's got a forward facing camera that is set to 90 degrees in the X and about 12 meters away from the origin and it's even made a few things invisible such as the 3d cursor which is set at the world origin if you want to see it you just have to go to viewport overlays and you can click on anything that you you know might need such as you know a 3d cursor or maybe you want to see the grid when you're in front view as you see the camera is kind of annoying when you're in front view and so this little collection over here is very handy to antique just to make it invisible this stroke object has already been created with lines and fills and the set of materials ready for you to apply and draw with and so we don't have to set any of that up now I'm just going to delete everything here and go into object mode because the next thing I want to talk about is adding references what we're gonna do is gonna go struck shift a image reference now you'll see that there is reference and background I'm going to add both to show you that they're technically one and the same just with different settings let's go ahead and add a reference picture I'm going to go over to my reference pics and select the one that I'll be working with here then I move this over to the side here and I'm going to go shift a add a background picture and add the same picture so what is the difference they kind of look the same and I've deliberately enabled this grid to help us differentiate between the two if we select one and we go down to its object data properties you will see some very interesting things such as the depth and display on the reference is set to default and both the background however the depth is set to back and the side is set to front and the display is only set to auto graphics so that means if we swing into perspective mode the background image suddenly disappears selecting the background image and setting the display to perspective suddenly we get it back now swinging this around the other side you will notice that the background image now isn't visible from behind that's because the side that is shown is only set to front the reference image is set to both similarly the reference image has got a depth set to default now default just means that in whatever view it's going to knock out something in the background and in this case default is only knocking out anything behind it whereas the background because its depth is set to back means that anything is over laid on top of it so to demonstrate selecting the reference pick and setting its default to front now you can see that it's knocked out that floor grid this sits in front of anything else that is displayed now it doesn't matter which you put in as your reference you can always change these settings to suit your purposes so for instance we can delete the background picture set this back to its center and we can set this depth to back and we will actually need both sides showing at some point so we're gonna leave the size to both but and I'm also going to leave the display orthographic and perspective ticked the other thing that we might want to do is tinker with the transparency by ticking this you can make this less opaque which obviously is a really good idea for when you're drawing over a reference so now with our grease pencil stroke selected we can make sure that we're in draw mode and with all the defaults as it is you're gonna go ahead and do this you're gonna draw a line and you're gonna wonder why does my line look like this let's take a look at some of our default settings yes we know that our solid stroke is actually set to black it may not be on self overlap it's a good idea to have that ticked but this strength is set to 0.6 which means it's going to be less opaque than if it was set at a hundred percent okay so you can sort of see over here what we're actually seeing here in material preview in the viewport shading is an interaction between the grease pencil and the world color and this is sort of knocking out an alpha through our reference image all we have to do is go into solid viewport shading this solves our problem and for the beginning steps it is probably best to work in this now the one caveat here is that you're going to have to work in materials if I was to for example enable our vertex color mode and let's set that to say like a red line I'm in solid mode I'm drawing my stroke you're still only going to see black the vertex coloring only becomes visible in the material preview and above so if we went there you'll see that this stroke is indeed red but we are going to get that problem that if we drop that stroke you're gonna get this really weird-looking thing and you won't sort of see through to the reference image which is kind of what we want so for starters what I recommend you do is create a solid stroke material if you want to work with the color pencil to the color that you want all right so let's go ahead and erase all of those and let's do just that I'm going to create a new material based on solid stroke let's hit that - let's call this red line and let's change the base color to something like a Moroni type of color that's generally what a red line pencil looks like making sure in solid mode we probably don't need this toolbox right here we can begin to draw now because this is going to be a stylized drawing okay we start by putting in our construction lines we put in everything that is going to be basically what will then be drawing over [Music] now at any point you want to sort of do the flip reverse method you just go control one which gives us the other side [Music] and once you're happy with your draft that's when we can make our empty invisible I'm just going to drag it down to the camera layer which is hidden okay and we've got a pretty good trace and because this is creating a stylized version I'm going to switch the edit mode to points select my proportional editing tool and see what I've got there so I want to make these eyes a little bit larger let's say [Music] all right so now we have something that is a little bit more stylized a little bit more anime and you can sort of go to town with you know how much you want to sort of push and pull and stretch and and do all those sorts of things with with stylizing but generally just sort of exaggerating with features ever so slightly to make it slightly more cartoony is generally how I approach this if you want you can do like a second pencil pass before you do inks maybe drop the opacity on that one lock off those layers as always draw I might end up working where the ink pen tool on red line and I might enable my stabilize stroke that sort of just lower the settings a little bit just so that I can see what I can do about these shapes and then you can begin to sort of draw in some shapes based on your reference [Music] and so now happy with those pencils going forward now the process is basically just adding layers and adding inks and colors and so I'll continue to time-lapse this at this point it's quite safe to kind of just make that empty invisible and continue to work on this image let's go ahead and add a new layer and call it ink s-- let's drop the opacity of these pencils here and let's just working in the inks layer in draw mode let's go back to solid stroke making sure that our stabilize features are set our radius is nice and big and our strength is at 100% without any pressure sensitivity beyond that and time to get to work [Music] now when filling in solids it's sometimes a good idea to go into solid fill and for this purpose because we're no longer using the reference it's quite safe to go into material settings output and switch over to vertex mode and set the color of the fill to black it's important to make sure that your mode is set to stroke and fill so it will affect both strokes and fills obviously and let's go ahead and draw in these eyebrow shapes there's one two it's also sometimes a good idea to use shapes especially for things like eye so I'll just go back to solid stroke here and let's draw in ah obviously the thickness is a little bit too dense so we got to go down maybe even further to something like five or six and try drawing this now we've got these nice little handles on these circles so I'm going to create one eye here and then I'm going to switch this over to solid fill with the material and I'm gonna create another circle here for the iris so set that there and I can always go into edit mode selecting one vertex on this circle and keep hitting l2 selective links with alt s I can actually scale up or scale down the thickness as I need and so for instance if I wanted to I could even scale part of that that curve and so we've got this bottom bit a little bit thicker than the top bit of course I've got my proportional editing mode on so this is working quite nicely now this iris I can reposition maybe rescale and then when I like what I've done with one eye I can select all of those vertices by clicking on one vertex clicking another another vertex hitting L and then hitting shift D to duplicate and move that eye over maybe scale that down a bit scale a little bit in the X and position it here now don't worry about anything overlapping you want it positioned correctly because then all you have to do is say select a vertex here he'd X to delete it and select another vertex here and hit X and then you can select the vertex of the the curve or the the stroke that we no longer require here l and then delete all those points and so now we've got these nice two eyes [Music] [Music] now at a point when you've got lines that overlap or interset going into edit mode is very very simple select the vertex on the line that you wish to delete so here we've obviously got two I'm gonna delete the nearest one and I'm just going to edit that curve over here and I can just sort of massage those points into place very very easily this so if you get gaps that are unwanted you can always just pull those strokes back into place to kind of connect up even more easily until you've got something that you're satisfied with now once you're satisfied with your inks the cleanup process is fairly time-consuming and it involves a lot of editing and a lot of repetition until you've got something that you really want so for example say you've got an end of a curve over here that you don't quite like how it caps selecting it and hitting vault s while in proportional editing mode will taper that line back [Music] [Music] and here are my final inks now I did a lot of tweaking that I didn't end up recording but basically the process was just repeating what you've seen I've gone and done a few things like added a few extra strokes on the the the eyelid here and on the nose to sort of delineate where the shading will be a lot more contouring on the hair cleaning up a lot of the clothes so on and so forth now these highlights here on on the layer that you're seeing here are actually inked you know with a vertex coloring of white so that they match the background now let's say we went to a gray background you can sort of see those highlights there but because we're going to be putting colors under this it sort of doesn't really make a difference and it sort of keeps those highlights on the inks layer and so I'll be leaving this tutorial at this point here the next tutorial will be focusing on coloring and shading it's a very involved process and I really want to take the time to explore value systems and using the airbrush and you know how to get nice bright shadows all of that good stuff it's going to require a little bit of intermediate knowledge but I think it's stuff that you guys are really going to level up once you've learned those techniques I'm really looking forward to sharing that with you but for now this is where we're going to be leaving our portrait so I hope you got a lot out of that tutorial today of course if you find what you saw here today really useful and want to see more upcoming videos do consider subscribing to my youtube channel and if you're feeling at all generous head on to patreon it's the support over on patreon which makes the production of these videos possible thanks for watching everyone bye for now [Music] you

Channel: Paul O Caggegi

Views: 75,302

Keywords: blender, grease pencil, comics, inking

Id: hNXrUmySbnM

Length: 20min 3sec (1203 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 15 2020