Can You Get Better at Visual Storytelling?

hey it's brooks with character design forge a term that we use a lot that sort of acts as like an umbrella term for character design for story art for storyboarding for concept art and illustration is visual storytelling and as much as we use it for those things and it's accurate we actually can kind of get lost in the weeds as far as what visual storytelling is visual storytelling isn't just about backstory it's not about a complex diatribe of betrayal and deceit it's not about lore it's about conveying a feeling or an idea with an image i've compiled a couple of critiques from over at the novice bard tier on patreon which you can get yourself these folks have already gotten their own personal video but i wanted to share these with you the public at large mainly because we can always talk about how to improve our drawing skills and make those more robust and that's definitely valid something these folks could still work on as we all could and that filters directly into our visual storytelling but i think that we can very easily forget about that why that purpose of visual storytelling and how to make it stronger so our set of examples begins with amy's art here and amy is obviously doing work traditionally on this very nice quality sketchbook i forget the brand name off the top of my head these copic markers right and obviously photographed very nicely and we'll get back to all of those factors in a second as i mentioned there are some drawing things that it would be a good investment for amy to put some time into but uh the sort of thing that i wanted to point out here is that when asked about what she wanted to work on she mentioned storytelling in a single piece or backgrounds and that kind of set me down a little bit of a rabbit hole with her work obviously some adorable characters here and i picked out some of the captions that she added along with these images to see what is the story she was trying to tell not the captions always necessarily meet up with that image but what's the singular idea that you're meaning to convey a couple of practical tips as far as visual storytelling is concerned that i've put together here the first one being eye lines either between your characters or between your character and an object that they're holding or their environment or something like that our eyes are very expressive they're the windows to the soul it's what we look to in other people for ideas information their feelings right and so if we can understand and believe that a character is thinking something feeling something and that they are directly physically connecting with that object as far as we can tell it helps sell that illusion some much larger points here but using shapes and value and contrast in your images what can you readily see immediately when looking at something what do you kind of implicitly understand about an image before you get into the depths of it i think that we all too often want there to be subtlety in our visual storytelling we want this complex emotion to be conveyed by our characters but really the strength is going to come from being able to show something very clearly is our our audience going to understand something immediately that's the good thing about using very simple looking characters like this or in animated films it's not just about it being easier to replicate think about how easy it is to understand that simba is mad in the 90s 2d animated flying king versus a realistic looking simba it just is easier to read those things from simpler shapes and lines and of course the energy the acting how much can we push the gesture and arcs in our character can we add gravity or weight or some amount of extra energy always a beneficial thing it also goes without saying that we need our characters to be able to be capable of what we ask them to do that's a very core tenet of character design right is are they going to be able to fulfill the purpose that we have for them so in this case for any maybe not necessarily the same exact stylistic choices but adding some perhaps you know body to the character places for these limbs might allow for them to do more act more pose more without necessarily breaking the rig remember how i mentioned we'd come back to the art supplies being used here i know that at least for me if i had a very nice sketchbook and the only time i was ever drawing was in this nice sketchbook there are so many ways that i would start to become precious with my work to my own detriment i wouldn't necessarily be doing pre-planning or sketches and if i just started with these traditional mediums worked from point a to point b there's so many things that come up that you almost have to be reactive to as you work you want your characters to fit in this square sheet okay so you do that and then you start filling out the background around them because it needs to fill up the entire sheet i'm not necessarily advocating for digital necessarily but digital allows us to make a lot of mistakes make a lot of undo's and iterate a lot now whether you are working digitally or traditionally you can always iterate with your work you can always do messy thumbnails and quick sketches to figure out the story of your image that's my suggestion here this is a very quick sketch that i've done of this image up above and there's a couple of things that we can do here right we see there's a bit more of an energy carrying out throughout the arms of this character we're also telling a little bit more of a story the character here has the high ground hey right they also seem to be a little bit more confident their eye line meets the other characters and kind of bypasses the stick in their hand right a lot of confidence the other character on the other hand is sort of being reactive maybe overwhelmed their eye line is meeting the stick in their hand maybe like they're sort of bewildered or not sure what to do a lot of things that you can convey with that and of course if we kept working on this we can always add over top of it add more detail right but the further we push our initial sketches the stronger the final image will be here's another example we have our our sandcastle scene here and just by changing the staging of our objects remember that we're working somewhat theatrically right we don't need to think about well this sand castle's here and this one's here so we need them to be in these places no we're playing to an audience there's a fourth wall here that we're playing to so if we can reposition our things the things in our scene in order to play better or sell something better than so be it here we have just in this suggestion right there's a dynamic or an idea that's being conveyed beyond just building sand castles right both characters are engaged in the same action this one has a much bigger castle the shadow of it is almost looming over top of the other character and we get a sense here maybe of something that's very universal to us right without necessarily needing to say anything it's sort of the dynamic between a big sibling and a young sibling right where they're both trying their best but it looks very different or just a contrast between the characters maybe you want to be really mean and say look how dumb this one character is we see this kind of thing in all kinds of films which is a great place to look for visual storytelling information but especially think about the fact that because you're working in a still image and maybe just a single still image you need to be able to sell those things they need to be strong within that context only okay so one more exercise with this group of characters for the sake of argument we're looking at an image here right where there's something happening right there's a story being told um what i think is supposed to be happening is that our s our two main characters are gifting acorns to this squirrel right however there's a lot of layering of different elements in the scene something that reads a little bit like a a reactive drawing on traditional mediums that you don't want to mess up right there's actually a little part of me that when i first look at this image looks like the squirrel is walking away with the bag of nuts that's actually from the main characters right and this again is all about selling a single idea so even something as simple as this something that you might see in a kids book or something it doesn't necessarily always have to be these big mature comic ideas or or you know symbolism that you're trying to sell sometimes you really do just need to sell that these characters are being nice to a squirrel and understanding what transactions happening now a staging like this with a different set of expressions might actually work to our benefit right so i've done a quick little draw over of these shapes just so that you see what's what's happening this character is behind this sign and then we have a lot of layering of these things here actually if we wanted to show that this squirrel was was like you know they're all mad at him right that actually might be a good staging right where you know we can use more shapes and composition of these characters to convey that but instead i think what might sell this a little bit better is something that i did here so over here we have our same scene we have our sign it says free acorns it's facing this direction we have our character leaning against it we have the same bag we have our character who's actually now waving goodbye to a squirrel and a squirrel that is carrying off very happily the free acorns that we were given to them and then when we have another squirrel over here that's waiting in line and if we wanted to maybe we could add you know a second squirrel also waiting in line so that we're selling this idea a little bit more very basic but again the strength of visual storytelling and the more you practice this kind of thing the better you're gonna get now for our next example with seagull we're actually not going to change anything necessarily with the composition of the image we're only going to work with light and color what's so important about these things is again like theatrics you're not working with the exact correct lighting if you were you know trying to draw or revoke a certain mood you don't just necessarily go for what the in room realistic lighting is we want to draw our attention toward things light generates and helps create contrast in value light and dark colors so all of those things are interconnected and when we want to tell a story or show something about characters that's always a great place to to start an aim so we have our character fishy here with his pot of soup or something he's he's cooking you know it's splashing around there's a few drawing changes that we make but let's move a little bit further ahead here i did a little bit of a paint over with this okay down here we have our legs on fishy that are getting lost behind in the cabinets and the floor underneath him right thing to do there is to pull the value uh of those legs out and maybe push our back background away in value in contrast right now there's actually a lot of black in this scene right so we're gonna try and fix that the the black that's coming through this very strong dark value from the background that we don't necessarily need to call attention to moving forward a little bit here i did what i could to kind of separate him away from those lines very messy just a kind of a quick paint over here so we throw a little bit of a multiply layer over top of fishy so that we can use our shadows in a way there's a lot of shadows that are sort of arbitrary or just very localized individually shaded objects in this scene so we're going to try and flat shade them away here in a way that just kind of represents a single light source right we're gonna light him most strongly from this left side here very quickly cutting that away and now okay now we can see that our our legs are pulled a little bit more we have that little rim on the edge of this foot here right even as messy as it is this is a very very messy piece it's just demonstrating some things and we're also calling a little bit more attention to the face and the pot the the oven mitt rather right here with our with our light now that background that we've kind of separated away from we're going to add some extra layers to like that right where we're toning it down uh separating the character a bit and now now that it's just all blue sort of a blue tint over the background we're gonna add some of that yellow light from the upper left-hand corner over the back of the the painting and it looks nice um here i just did a couple of little over paint things um because we have some of that same arbitrary lighting happening and here i actually changed it so you know we can get a stronger read on the energy of the scene right instead of having the liquid in the soup kind of splashing around haphazardly let's do it just like this so that it's sort of sloshing off into one direction and he's he's just starting to lose it right just selling the energy of that scene a little bit more and we finish things off with a little bit of rim letting here's an example i brought up last week but i think it bears repeating in this context start early with the shapes in your composition make sure that your composition is working well to the format and context that you want make sure that the things in your composition are important use those shapes make things clear the clearer your shapes are the clearer your expressions your posing are the better your visual storytelling will be and then you can carry those things forward into rendering and figuring out you know how to make things look a little bit nicer something that we've been doing recently this past month with the help of tay is a weekly newsletter wrapping up the week every friday with some extra things thrown in we've got a recent pdf for how to clothe characters which is sort of a downloadable version of an old video that i think is helpful another thing that i've been doing is drawing over some of my own uh old work from things like instagram and figuring out what i would do better actually one example that i did this week was of improving the visual storytelling in a comic panel just practical ideas and and ways to do that you can head over to brooksegleston.com to sign up for the newsletter you also get the character design survival guide when you do that and you'll be up to date and notified when we do cool new things like virtual booths and you don't have to rely on youtube notifying you when a new upload is up if you'd like a critique of your own you can go over to patreon.com bagel denizen and choose the novice bard tier you can also get biko's backpack which this illustration is from our card illustration for this month for october as for november though i gotta go thank you for watching and have fun creating [Music] you

Channel: Brookes Eggleston - Character Design Forge

Views: 25,358

Keywords: visual storytelling, narrative, brookes eggleston, character design forge, storyboarding, sequential art, character design, illustration, storytelling, art critiques, critiquing your work, critiquing your art

Id: 0UoYkXGXl7w

Length: 15min 23sec (923 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 20 2020