Creating Creatures from Basic Spheres: Drawing Tutorial

hey everyone welcome back to my channel where I help you become a better artist today we are learning about using basic spheres and turning them into creatures so one of the funnest things about doing spheres is that because creatures are so organic that you can fit these shapes in pretty much anything that you're going to be drawing so what I'm going to ask you to do is draw along with me and use your shoulder in a circular motion the reason I say shoulder is because you don't want to use only your wrist and you don't want to use your elbow the reason is is because you're going to end up drawing kidneys football shapes and pretty much melted ellipses almost so you want to keep these as round as possible so once you get that in there and you're going to use your pinky as a guide going across your paper all right and this helps keep or stabilize your hand so that it doesn't shift in a direction that you don't want it to go in okay the second thing I want you to do and this is where it gets really fun pick a spot outside of the sphere any spot you want and do a secondary sphere but don't do it as large it's almost going to look like uh a moon and then a second moon next to it you know some kind of distant planet in a galaxy it's going to look like a toy you name it it's probably going to look like that all right once we have this we're going to do an even smaller one and we're going to add it at any point that we want outside of the sphere now this one originally I did say to put it in front of it or outside of it but you can also put it in front of it just keep things loose notice how you can see the original one go through this this is called ghosting okay this is when you draw through the object and it's if you're doing product design if you're an industrial design this comes in handy so let's do a third circle all right notice how light I'm keeping this very very light when you use that circular motion with your shoulder you can lock in the movement of doing a circle and you you get better at going over your previous marking so that it stays on that line and it just becomes a darker version than the original Circle it's pretty fun okay so you're probably wondering what the heck am I going to turn this into it just three blobs on there and I have no idea well let's start connecting the shapes very lightly let's start connecting these shapes into something pretty cool looking okay so this could be it looks like a a molecule or some kind of virus almost probably thinking man this is this is pretty nuts it's like yes yes it is okay the other thing that I want you to do and and if yours does look exactly like this one that's okay if your three spheres don't look like this that's all right too I'm going to start putting some smaller spheres on different parts of this shape that I'm drawing because these will be the joints for my creature now if you're familiar with taking complex shapes and breaking them up into simpler shapes you'll notice that cubes cones cylinders and spheres can fit inside virtually everything that we can draw cars people you name it all right so it's already looking pretty freaky and I haven't really done anything yet all I've done is circles all right now now that we have that I'm going to start connecting these shapes again kind of like I did at the very beginning with my larger pieces so it looks like we got some mandibles going on here it's kind of freaky all right so what else we got we got this crazy thing over here I think I'm going to put some tentacles coming out of this let me move this up here so you can see it a little bit there we go now those of you that are familiar with my channel you probably see me draw some pretty scary stuff demons dinosaurs your name I haven't really drawn anything that looks like ancient bacteria or some kind of alien DNA shape I I don't know but this is the fun part all right notice how the lines got darker right around there all right that's really really important because you want to be able to differentiate what's in front and what's in the back so this tentacle is in the front now I've been keeping everything really loose and that's important you don't want to dive straight into details notice how sharp I'm keeping my pencil all right those of you that are drawing with mechanical pencils this is the one instance where having a mechanical pencil is good because you don't have to sharpen them but I do encourage you to use graphite like an actual pencil such as this because the spread of the graphite is greater so you can have thicker lines at once especially when you're drawing something as loose like as this thing all right so I'm going to be using some more spheres here just as an experiment you'll start to see them cover the surface of this thing all right there we go so see all these lines that I'm putting in and they're more gestural than anything you don't need anything fancy have my basic shape I'm going to darken up the belly of this creature because I'm pretty happy with that shape I don't want this to come down any more than it already is okay so now I still don't know what it is and that's probably one of the coolest most freeing things about being a creature designer is I have no idea what I'm drawing but if you follow these basic principles then you your chances of making something cool are going to greatly increase for you okay so now I'm really liking these I guess you can call them mandibles I'm going to be doing a couple more and maybe they're all going to be coming out of the head so originally I didn't really know what this this uh I guess an appendage was it was just like a bubble but but now that I see it I'm going to be using the little circles to give me the joints similar to if you're drawing a figure and figure drawing class and the shoulders the hip the head and and everything are made up of of spheres okay that's you want to follow the same rules all right there we go okay now do I want this shape over on the other side not necessarily okay we're gonna make this truly asymmetrical truly organic maybe this thing evolved in a very very strange atmosphere where it it didn't need to grow legs to walk it didn't need to grow wings um maybe it's floating maybe it's not even in the ocean I don't know all right so I want everybody to sit back and I want you to look at your creation so far look at all the loose gestural lines now look at it and think about the potential where does it live how does it crawl does it swim does it fly does it float does it live inside of an organism is it like a tapeworm we're getting kind of gross there I know but just think about what it does okay now when I look at this thing I'm thinking straight up bacteria or something that lives in dare I say raw sewage like I don't know but it's gross maybe it lives in slime maybe it makes slime okay so these these things are I'm going to put another circle on top of the smaller ones and then I'm just going to draw another tentacle coming out you want to add a little chaos to it so make sure that the tentacles are not all going the same direction pretty soon and you know if you're sticking with me so far which I appreciate pretty soon going to be adding some details to this and you're you're going to be able to to watch a little bit of time lapse and you'll see how I can take something so rough so weird looking and we're going to make it beautiful in its own right okay I'll be adding some shading I'll be adding some probably some scales and hairs you know I'm going to add teeth somewhere in there I'm going to add teeth doesn't have to have teeth no but I think for this particular creature it probably wouldn't feel complete without teeth all right so now that I'm looking at this I guess marble down here um I'm probably going to have to draw it on the other side so let's do a little bit of arching the pencil notice how I'm holding it I'm using my pinky and I'm guiding my pinky across the page okay and keeping things very light see all these markings that I'm putting here just and move my hand that's okay just let that happen all right I'm going to put another marble down there like this and then maybe I'll put some other tentacles in all right right like that but it's going to be loose all right so once you start getting the hang of this you're going to start to see the power of using just basic shapes I started with a giant sphere and I'm ending up with something that looks more complicated than if I were to just sit and plan this for 5 hours and worry and scratch my head and Pace back and forth going I'm going to screw this up it's not going to look good all right so just embrace the Simplicity of these shapes okay I think we're ready let's put some detail on it [Music] [Music] [Music] e for [Music] e e for [Music] [Music] [Music] e e e okay I hope you enjoyed that little time lapse section now I just want to briefly go over what I did and hopefully now that you have seen my process you can not duplicate this but try it out for yourself see if you like it there's a lot of power to be had when sketching this way and one of the reasons is because it eliminates any kind of anxiety you have of making anything perfect now I focused on the face because it's the closest to us and that's where the personality is even though there are no eyes in this creature you you get a sense of who the creature is when you do the head first and this is just with years of experience both studying Old Masters when they do portraiture when they add people in big environment paintings look at all of the character concept artwork out there you'll notice that 90% of the details are always in the face so all this out here is left for interpretation and this is what you want with gestural sketching okay you don't want to go all out with details everywhere unless you're literally supposed to illustrate everything whether it's for a client or for your own sake now with me and when it comes to conveying the idea quickly I do the face first because you the viewer can look at the details in the face and go oh okay well if that's what the skin looks like on the head that's probably what I'm going to expect throughout the entire creature okay now the tentacles you can kind of see the tentacles coming out of the head here it like again everybody that's viewing this I can leave this up for interpretation each person's going to look at it and think of a different kind of material whether it's squid like whether it's it looks like seaweed or a tapeworm I don't know it's gross but anyway uh that's that's how I tackle these you know all the I can keep going with the details in here for the next four or five hours but I'm not going to do that so what I would like all of you to do is grab your sketchbooks if you have not done so already drawn along with me and try this out for yourself do some spheres you could do one sphere and turn that into a creature okay or you can couple six seven eight spheres together and combine them with a bunch of appendages and tentacles and wings just to see what happen but remember don't be perfect okay draw through your object okay like this this right here the all the detail in the face I'm probably still going to be adding stuff on here maybe some hair down here make it truly truly gross looking truly otherworldly there's some scales up here again this is the fun part so thanks for tuning in guys and uh can't wait to see you next time see you

Channel: Draw Sessions

Views: 252,059

Keywords: drawing, how to draw, organization, how to organize your projects, sketching, portfolio building, concept art, fine art

Id: xpBP4fMB7Do

Length: 20min 34sec (1234 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 26 2024