FREE 2 Hour Koi Fish Drawing Course for Beginners | Step by Step Tutorial

okay guys welcome back so now that you know what supplies you need in this section we're going to be going through and breaking down each and every stage of drawing the koifish I'm okay I know I've got some explaining to do if you're a regular on my channel you might be thinking is dagget designs back and why does he look so different so unfortunately I am still on an extended break from YouTube from recording any form of content and even from creating art I had a surgery on my wrist unfortunately was unsuccessful and it looks like I'm duw for another surgery in the next couple of months now the video that you're about to watch was part of a much larger project that I started a little while ago I never got around to finishing that project off but I thought it was so good that I needed to share it with you guys so it's not the complete project but I wanted to give you guys a gift and share this with you now before we get into the video I want to take this quick chance to plug my book Japanese dragons secrets to drawing mythical creatures now this is my first published book it's a culmination of many years of hard work dedication and study on Japanese dragons and I take you through each and every step in detail so that you can learn to draw them too it's received a great review from at Tattoos by Mikey he's an award-winning tattoo artist from Australia and he's also my personal Mentor it's also received High Accolade from tatsutoshi the first he's a disciple of the revered tattoo Master Hoshi the first if you want to hear what they have to say you can check the link in the description the book is available in ebook format as well as a heart copy and the link is in the description if you want to check that one out and pick up a copy of your very own now Not only would I really appreciate it if you pick up a copy of my book I really do think that you guys are going to get a ton of value out of this for anyone that's a serious student of Japanese tattoo design or Japanese illustration and you want to learn how to draw dragons this is my definitive guide now with that being said welcome to the free course on Japanese koifish koish I'm going to break it down into smaller sections so that we can cover the head the fins the body and the skin scale separately and then you'll be able to combine all of this knowledge together to create a koifish illustration now this is going to be a lot of fun let's get into it okay guys welcome to section one and welcome to the table we're going to start off with our koifish head using some cheap sketch paper an eraser and a clutch mechanical pencil to sketch but you could use whatever sketching medium you've chosen now we're going to start off by showing you the base construction the base shapes and the core shapes that we used to build this thing and how to sort of uh interlock them to build the koifish head so that it has a really solid structure and Foundation that way when you put your details over the top it still has the right shape and structure nothing gets lost so let's start off with an oval like so now this oval is the the hole in which the body connects into all right so you don't really see this oval at the end but it's a good place to start I find there start with this now the width from here across to here is generally how wide the koish head is going to be and the width from here to here is how deep or how uh thick it's going to be uh so this is this oval will help you sort of understand that from here I want to build a line from the top comes forward and then curves down at the front like so so okay that's the top line of the head and now from the bottom of that line we're going to come back to the bottom of the oval with a slightly straighter line it's still curved but it's got less of this Dome shape to it and it's a little bit straighter across the bottom now from here I like to add the center line across the top of the head so I come to about here and add my central line or my dorsal line across the top of the head so in this case we're seeing a fair bit of the side of the head now I like like to come to about halfway up the length and add an oval in and I want this oval to sit approximately 45° like so from the the central line so if this is where the central line the peak of the central line is this is going to sit around 45° this is about 90 okay so 45° for our oval here you can adjust the width on this if you want the cheek to be wider you want the side of the koifish face to be wider then you can bring that angle out or if you want it to be Slimmer then you can bring that angle in I like to sit it at about 45 now I'm going to add a sliver of an oval behind this not a hole oval just a sliver of one that's just going to give me space for the gills and at this point I'm going to separate the top and the side of the head so that you can see the differences uh in this top and side plane however I tend not to do this uh when I'm actually drawing koi we'll come to the front of the head and I'll curve around and up over the top of this oval okay and so now you can see that clearly separates the top of the head from the side of the head all right so this is the top plane and this is the side plane here top and side now at this point I want to drop in an eye I like to just come to the very front of the cheek oval and go about halfway between the top and the bottom line here and put in an oval for the eye don't make it too small but at the same time um a common error I see is making the eyes way too too big in googly and it looks very cartoony so I try to make them uh sort of a realistic size then at the back of this you can add an additional curve which creates an eyebrow Ridge like so and then at the front of your koifish head I like to come like just above the central line and come out with a curve like so that curves around to where the start of the eye is or the front of the eye is so about this point and that's going to give you the right sort of space and sizing for your mouth okay let's start another koish head across here this where we can start to look at some of the core lines for the koish head okay so we start with our oval I'll come up with my top line of the head curving it down towards the front and coming back flatter across the bottom and I'll start by adding a central line like so and and now I'm going to find my halfway point and add an oval that sits at roughly 45° for our cheek like this now off the back of this oval I add another sliver of an oval which gives me space for our gills like so and at the front of the oval oh first we add in the top plane so just this line to separate the top and side plane and now at the front of our oval I'm going to add a smaller oval for our eye with an eyebrow Ridge over the top now I'm going to come to the front off the left of center and add in a curve that comes around to where the eye starts like so so that's the basic construction uh the very core shapes of our koifish head it doesn't really get much more complicated than that but adding in the details now so we're going to start um I like to start by sort of trying to match up the sides of the head a little bit so I just want to come to the front of our eyebrow Ridge and you don't want to draw a straight line across because the top of the koifish head is not flat it's curved so I like to curve across the top like so and same with the back of the eyebrow Ridge as well this is going to give you the guidelines for where to place the eyebrow Ridge on the opposite side in which case you can just put a little curve like so now coming off the back of this will go into the back of the head and off the front of it is going to come down into the nose now I like to come to about half way into where the central line is and that's where I'll stop that Top Line and then on the top plane of the head I like to add this little Nick in on the front side for a nostril all right now for our cheek area I like to come back from where the eyebrow Ridge is a little bit leave a bit of a gap there add a curve in add another curve in underneath this like so and then I'll add one and an S curve like so just underneath the eye so that's one curve and an S curve like so just underneath where the eye is and overlapping to where the mouth is there now one thing I'll mention here is that you can sort of add as many or as few curves along this line as you want there's a couple of variations on how to do this that I will go through uh this is just how we're going to do it for this beginning one but this is essentially like bumpy texture on the side and bottom area of the face and cheek now for the gills in this case I'm going to keep it quite simple and just add some curves along my gills and as we get to the bottom I'll just curve back in and then I'm just going to do lots of little thin lines coming along it like this okay keeping the gills nice and simple for this particular demonstration now the whiskers are going to sit in front uh sort of towards the front plane of the face and a little bit on the side so we're going to come onto the side plane kind of a little bit in front of the eyes here down towards the nostril and I'm going to add in a whisker and I'm just going to do little whiskers on this guy one on either side of the same space of the head and I'm going to go through some variations on that shortly as well now for adding in the mouth I'm going to follow my eyebrow line down when I get to in front of this whisker just going to add a little line okay this is going to help separate that top portion of the head from the front and now I can come to the underside following this line around to create some separation between the mouth and the bottom of the head there and then for the lip you can do one curve I guess in this case we'll just do two long curves like this but there are some variations that we'll look at now if you want to close off the back of the head which I normally wouldn't do until I've got my body uh linked into it but what you can do is find this angle here by coming from the center and sweeping out like this that close off that side of the head and then you can create the same angle or a similar angle on the other side like this I like to make sure that this touches onto the cheek area and not the gills and so this will become the top line of our body okay like so now I mentioned that there was some variation in the styles of gills and cheeks of course there's going to be many variations depending on everyone's personal Styles but I'll give you a a couple of different variations that I like to use one of them is going to be a little bit of a sharper variation so I like to come again to the back of where this starts the cheek part starts leave a bit of a gap and instead of coming down and round I'm going to come down on a bit of an angle rounded Point like this and then down and then we can come up into the next section so this is going to be a much sharper sort of cheek look instead of having a rounded part this is a little bit pointy here and then for this style I'm going to do the same sort of thing with the gills so when I come out for the gills I'm going to do this sort of wavy line for the gills they're going to follow the same shape as our cheek all right now another style we can do has a few more uh sort of bumps to it and it creates a little bit more texture on the cheek so again you're going to come back from that same place add a curve and an additional curve just behind it to add in a fold in the flesh add another curve and you're essentially going to add these little bumps uh all along this area and it's going to add a little bit of variety and texture uh to the cheek area of your koifish and you just got to play around with the different ways of doing it essentially but you're just adding these this variety through adding more curves as opposed to such a smooth curve like the original example or a pointed curve like the second one uh these ones have a little bit more texture to them now in terms of doing the gills we did the wavy line on that one we can do the same for this one but instead of doing all the small lines you may choose to do individual spines just by adding these little sharp Peaks uh which are essentially just a very sharp angle like so that's going to give them a little bit more of a rigid look instead of a soft look uh but depending on the style of koish that you're doing or the you know depending on your personal style that's another uh thing you might want to look at considering is changing up the style of gills that you do from a more soft and flowy style to something a little bit more rigid now in terms of whiskers I just wanted to give you a couple of different examples like I said they generally originate around here around the sort of front side plane of the head uh just in front of where the eye sort of sits and I like to do really little whiskers so I like my whiskers to just be these little noodles like this and they're essentially little cylinders if you imagine them like little Hollow tapering cylinders which you can construct using little Rings or you know a spiral that you just taper down that's a really good way of sort of Imagining the shape of these they're like a little Hollow uh nood noodly sort of thing so I like the sort of short whiskers sometimes I'll have them flowing backwards and I'll sort of to do this sort of thing have them sort of flipped backwards uh but depending on how you want them to look I know some people will draw koish with really really long whiskers that actually curl around themselves like so so you draw them with a spiral you follow your line around like this and they curl around themselves like that these really long whiskers they tend to look a little bit more like Dragon whiskers so I don't particularly like doing this style but again this is sort of um giving you options so that you have many different styles to choose from uh another style which I really like is just a little nub like this they're essentially just the tip of a whisker I also really like the way that they look they're more common on like goldfish and smaller fish but they can look quite nice on koi fish as well especially if it is meant to be a younger koi uh but yeah there's the sort of longer whiskers like so and then there's the really short ones another little variation which only works on the longer whiskers is to add these additional little I don't know what you'd call them but like Spurs I suppose like extra little bits of whisker that are coming off your main whisker uh if you're doing a really really big koifish maybe like a big back piece or you're doing this as a really big painting or illustration maybe you want to go with this option cuz obviously you'd be getting a much closeup look and you'd be able to see these tiny little imperfections on their whiskers so it all depends on the size uh of where you want to put them as how you want to put them on your koi and how they're going to work with the background in this case maybe I'll do my reverse flowing whiskers I like those ones that sort of go backwards across the face like that but it all depends on how you want this to look now in terms of how we do our mouth I just want to point a couple of things out and I draw the front portion of a head here okay and put our curve in for our mouth sits like so just roughly I like generally to split this up into two or three parts depending on how much of it you're seeing in this case it'll be two to come around with one curve like this and another curve to join into the face there generally there'll be an S curve here right below where the I sort of sits which would sit you know about this sort of space and then to sort of separate the mouth from the top uh part of the head this Top Line which is the top line of the head needs to come down and I like to just bring it to where that Center Line is and then from the other side I like to make sure I'm adding in a curve like so or a couple of Curves this is going to help add a little bit bit of fold to the flesh before the mouth which is going to give the illusion that the mouth sits a bit lower than these areas and is creating folds within the skin there now in addition to this another really important thing is to point out where the mouth actually sits uh there's a common error of putting the mouth too high on the face let me explain so I'm going to draw a a basic koifish head but we're going to do it from a side angle like so it's where the nostril will be it's a it's a the the mouth does sit at a quite an awkward angle so I can understand it's uh slightly difficult to draw but once you understand the angle of where the mouth sits it makes it a lot easier okay so if this is the head of our koish the top of the face stops about here and that's where the top lip sits and it sits on this sort of an angle and then the bottom lip comes up and joins into the bottom of the face or the bottom of the head like so okay so that top lip sits on this sort of angle in relation to the the front of the face it sits on this sort of an angle so when you draw that top lip uh which is obscuring the bottom lip almost entirely so you don't really need to draw that bottom lip uh when you're drawing that top lip you need to remember that it's not sitting at the front of the face so sometimes I'll see koifish that are drawn okay like this they'll come down like this and then it's almost almost as though the lip does that before coming down so the bottom lip I guess would sit like this so it almost comes up too much um and the best way to sort of described that on a front on illustration or the right angle that we're looking at here okay is if you come too far past your Center Line to start your mouth okay like so so as you can see what that does is it picks up uh that side of the mouth too much this area and it makes it look like the mouth is the lip is coming up like so uh which doesn't quite look right so you want to have the mouth on this side of this sort of an angle okay and again that's probably 45 roughly 45° uh 45 from the angle of the face the top of the head here okay it's not going to be perfect cuz we're not drawing a realistic style koifish but I want the uh dimensions and proportions to be somewhat accurate to what a fish looks like that way uh things tend to look at least look more correct even though they're artistic and stylized so that's an important note about the mouth okay now before we move on to the next section I'm just going to quickly show you guys that this method can be used to draw the head from other angles as well so another really popular angle is going to be a koi swimming Downstream and I'll start off with my oval now obviously the back of the head here is not visible cuz we're looking at it from the other angle but I'm going to start with that outside line like I did last time curving it down towards the front and then coming more straight across the bottom okay like so adding in my central line like this and and then finding the sort of halfway point and adding my cheek in at around 45° and just behind this the sliver of the oval that creates our gills this I'll add an eye at the front of that oval we can separate the top and side plane if you'd like to if that makes it easier as well and add the eyebrow Ridge on top of this follow the Contours across the top of the head and add the eyebrow Ridge on the other side and we can add a nostril in on this side here now at this point I'll come just past the central line and throw in a curve to create our lip or our mouth here and that is going to give the construction shape for our head so now we can follow our cheek around with a couple of lines like so like this uh add in our whiskers coming forward in this case we'll do slightly longer ones add in our little separating lines and then I'll go one two for that front portion of the mouth there and we can of course come out and add in our gills okay now again if you want to square off that top part of the head I'm going to come forward and on either side like this and that's going to be where the body joins okay and so that's going to give you a koifish head from more of a front angle like swimming down stream but it's essentially using the exact same method and just flipping it so that we're doing it upside down so it's a good idea to practice both doing it upside down and the facing upway and that way you can draw a coish on any angle without worrying about whether the head looks right and you know in this case it's a good uh place for me to give an example remember I said the cheek will determine the oval would determine how far the cheek comes out if it's on more of an angle like so we end up with a fatter head or a wider head now when we separate the top and side plane we're not looking at a box like so where the it comes across the top and down the side it's not that much of a corner because we're looking at a fish head right it's rounded uh the box is a great way to look at it uh in the beginning it's like a very tertiary understanding or a very beginning understanding of it but it should be more more curved and rounded in nature so you still have sort of a top and side plane to your face here but it's more curved in nature and the cheek is going to bulge slightly so if we look at the Contour at the front of the face it's going to come across and down across and down but in a smooth curvature like this our cheek for example though is going to come across and like out slightly like so across and out slightly it's going to have this sort of a look to it because it's slightly more rounded and bulging out uh and this is what creates the thickness uh the width of the head there before going into the body okay all right so I really hope you enjoyed this first section on drawing the head of the koish and let's get into the next part okay so now we're going to be looking at the fins of our koish and how they look how they function and how to draw them so to start off with is the dorsal fin and I've actually cut out a little strip of paper here which is going to represent our dorsal fin and hopefully help me show you uh some important features now to start off with the straight part of the dorsal fin is the part that's attached to our koifish body this is the spine of the koifish essentially the wavy part is the opposite side of that and that represents the sort of wavy texture at the top of the fin this curve at the front represents the sort of front spine of the dorsal fin and this is the rear point of attachment close down to where the tail is so this is essentially a small model of a dorsal fin like this and this is going to help us draw our dorsal fin so let's just say uh we've got a koifish body and I will show you how to do how to go through and draw one of these more accurately we've got a a koish body here that is swimming and it's sort of turning a little bit like this and so the tail is coming off in this direction like this and this is where the head would sit okay just a really rough sketch uh our dorsal Fin's going to sit on the spinal line which if you follow the center line of the head up the body like so and now in this case because the the fish is turning the fin is going to turn with it to end up with the top line of our tail okay the top and the bottom of the tail are essentially exactly the top and the bottom of the body so your dorsal fin needs to follow along that line no matter where it goes unless the whole fish is turning or flipping in this case it's just turning so it follows on with the line of the tail like so now to draw the dorsal fin I like to come back fairly far I don't want sitting too proud another common mistake I see is Dorsal fins that are way too close to the head to sit this one you know not all the way back where a real dorsal fin starts on a fish but you know about halfway down the front portion of the body there you can bring a line up and out like so which is going to create that uh spinal line at the front of the dorsal fin and now this line here is essentially the bottom of our strip of paper right so I'm going to follow our wavy line down like so and now it's turning around the body to end up on top again like so so if you look at how that turns our wavy line comes down the page let me just hold this with one hand the curvy line comes down and it crosses over itself like this so we come down we cross over our central line and complete our wavy line on the other side okay like so now there's this line created by our fold it's not actually a hard line it's actually a very very soft curve as it bends around but it's represented by a solid line like so that is going to create the bend in your dorsal fin so we cross that central line and make sure the line of curvature is there and we'll erase the spinal line in between like so so that gives you a basic sort of frame for your dorsal fin and then there's multiple different ways to style it the sort of Base way that I like to do is just these small flicking lines as this is going to give you a soft look which is more sort of accurate as koish fins tend to be quite soft but there are other ways to do it I like uh I also like a more rigid style which I'll demonstrate here so I just draw in the dorsal fin there like so now I can make the front spine of our dorsal fin a little bit more rigid by doubling up on the line basically adding some actual thickness to the front there and now instead of doing lots of small lines along this I can essentially do these double line spines along my dorsal fin these are going to be slightly more rigid looking it's going to give a little bit less of a soft smooth flowy look to your dorsal fin but it's going to give it a little bit more rigidity which depending on the style of design you're doing and your other background elements maybe you like this sort of style of dorsal fin now another thing you might like to do with your dorsal fin is add a little bit more detail to it so I'll add in the basic shape for our dorsal fin like so and I'll erase that central line and add in this connecting line like this that's going to create the smooth folded portion and now what we can do is add in that front sort of spinal line now as I come back for my waves here can add some little tears in when I get to a wave like so I could drop a line in curve it back and around like so and now varying length lines okay so lines of varying length like so to add a little bit more of a realistic look to it where some of the lines would be a little bit more visible a little bit more shadowed than others like so so there's a few different styles you can play with there to see uh how you want your dorsal fin to look whether you like the more soft and flowy version a more rigid version or something something a little bit more realistic there's a few sort of different styles that you can work with now I just wanted to point out that with this basic shape the dorsal fin is essentially this very very thin piece of fin material that sits directly down the spine of the fish and so you can see depending on which way your fish is facing and turning this is able to turn uh pretty much in many many different ways along with the spine of the fish as long as it stays on the spine of the fish it's going to be accurate so another way to look at this uh we'll draw in another head here okay is we'll have the body starting off in this direction okay but maybe I want the body to turn off in this direction and there's actually a bend in the body like this so it's actually uh flipping in this case it's just turning the fish just swimming in a circular shape in this case he's actually flipping so his body's going this way and this part of his body is going that way he's actually sort of flipping around himself in this case the dorsal Fin's still going to follow our central line around like so and it's going to follow our curve and this becomes the top line of our body like so right so now in this case the dorsal fin again starting about here is going to come around cross the body and end wherever the tail starts uh towards the back of the fish here but it's going AC cross the body in the opposite direction right so in this case the top half of the dorsal fin started facing this way and it flipped to be facing up this way the turn happened in this Motion in this example the dorsal fin is facing the opposite way and the flip goes underneath itself and comes up in this direction to be facing the right way so no matter which way your spine is Flowing that's the same way that you want the dorsal fin to go it always follows the spine and in the case of the tail it always ends up on the top line of the tail so now we're going to be taking a look at the different fins that a koifish has of course we've taken a look at the dorsal fin and how that functions but we're now taking a look at the other fins so a koifish has five fins on the base of its body one of those is the pectoral fins which are like I like to call the main fins cuz these are the ones that are mostly visible and with tattoo design in particular we actually changed their placement a little bit to make it more visible they then have the ventral fins the there's two of these and they sit on the other underside of the body closer to the tail and then right before the tail they have their anal Fin and it's just the one fin that sits right at the base of their body um and we're basically doing the same technique for all of the fins however the size changes and the location and placement changes for them so to start off with I like to do a little circle as my starting point now the reason I like to do the circle is it gives me a starting and ending point for my fin and not only this but it gives me a place to start Fanning out my veins or my spines that are inside the fin so a little circle like so and then I like to sort of come out this way and you can either start your curve I'll show you two different ways to do it so you can start your curve out like so and then come down back in slightly like so creating this slight angle and then again in like this so it's a sort of rough triangular shape with rounded edges it's a bit of an odd shape this is like one style of Fin and then another way to do it which is going to give you a softer and slightly more realistic style fin is to curve in first and do an S curve as opposed to a smooth c-shaped curve so we do an S curve like so and then instead of coming around like so we do another S curve coming in first and then back out and then we can have a very similar finish on this one just cutting back towards the body or this the circle here okay so these are going to be two different shape and style fins uh but you'll see in a minute once we add the details how these are going to look now for the rear or vental fins they're going to be exactly the same shape as these however they're going to be a lot smaller and they're typically going to be facing the opposite direction so it it can help a little bit uh to just sketch and play around with your shapes making sure that you can draw these in the opposite direction uh when I say that they're facing the opposite direction a lot of the time with koish when we draw them we draw the front fins facing forward as though they're mid-stroke or they're jumping out of the water this is very common with Japanese style designs and for the other rear fin again we can do like the S curve and then S curve back in like so and cut back towards our circle like so okay now a little look at stylizing the different fins so we'll start off with this one here and we're going to start with a soft flowy style fin so we come up the front and in this case we're not adding a rigid front we're just doing a line and now for this outer line we're going to do a similar thing to what we did with our dorsal fin and just do a wavy texture on the outside of our fin this is quite a common style uh fin for a koish and then for the inside of the fin you could just do uh straight lines going back towards Center uh so this is our Central Point and we can do lots of these long thin tapering lines that all lead back to that point okay and I find it helps to turn my page a little bit while doing this so that's the first sort of style of fin that we can do this is like a very soft uh flowy style fin which again is very similar to the dorsal fin we did previously uh now if we want to stylize the shape of our fin differently we can still use the similar method here but following this different style shape and sometimes I'll add these stopping sections in there just by adding curves like so and then we can follow our lines back on the same curve that we have there okay so this is going to give you a very different looking fin using essentially the same technique so that you have a very soft and flowy looking fin so using a very similar technique to this one however we have a very nice and different style of shape depending on how you want your koifish to look so now looking at a more rigid style of fin uh what I'd like to do first is start with a more rigid line at the top like so and now if I'm making the fin more rigid in general something you might like to do is draw in a few lines like so and then create rigid spines that come up to those lines like so using uh the circle as a template from where they come from so they should all sort of start on your little circle or oval shape there and then the Peaks can just come out on your lines this is going to create like rigid spines uh within your Fin and then to sort of do the outside here we can still use a wavy line however wherever there's a rigid part or a spine here I'm going to stop my line like that and then I'm going to start again maybe do a wave and stop and start and stop and then I'll bring it back around so this is going to give us a way more rigid style of koifish Fin and then what you can do of course is add in your lines if you'd like to so as you can see this gives you a much more rigid looking fin now a little bit of a discussion on why you would do different styles here well for starters you know everyone's art is different and you try to sort of make your art a little bit unique a little bit your own I think it's important to sort of follow along with the more traditional style if that's the aesthetic you're going for but there's lots of stylistic changes you can make and these are just a few variations that I I want you guys to play with and we'll give you guys some options when drawing your own koifish but not only that but change in the style depending on the type of illustration that you're doing maybe your koish is leaping out the top of the waterfall and he's about to get granted the wish of turning into a dragon as the tail goes he's going to have slightly more rigid style fins this is going to help the fins stand out a bit it's going to help him really stand out uh because these lines are going to be a little bit more bold than something soft like so and then maybe if he's swimming underneath the water or swimming Downstream a softer fin like this is going to work well so it all depends on exactly how you want this to look now as for our last fin here we're again going for a more rigid approach so this Top Line can be divided into two here for a more rigid look like so that gives a rigid spine to the top of our Fin and you can even add some contour lines to this if you want to now in terms of our fin I'm not going to put rigid lines on the inside of this one again we'll change it up a little bit and I'll start with a wavy line for the texture sort of breaking it up in areas maybe adding a little Kink to it here and there this is going to have a slightly more realistic look with these little Brakes in there and then maybe I want to keep this more simple and just do lines coming out from Center following the shape of my fin like so so now you got these wide spines as opposed to all of these little ones and again this depends on what illustration you're doing and how you want it to look maybe you're going for something more bold and simple and so this is going to work really nicely for that of course you could do a series of very small lines as well now in terms of your vental fins like I said there's there is two of them uh typically uh only one of them is going to be visible if at all and sometimes you'll make the anal fin visible and again they're all going to be roughly the same shape but slightly smaller and so you're pretty much going to do these texture these the same way that you did the above fins cuz they are essentially the same thing so this one will have lots of small lines like so and the one below it maybe we'll do that similar to our rigid variation on the end there like so like so so you can see that we stylized these in the same way that we stylize the pectoral or what I call the main fins but I like to sort of have it a more rounded finish so if this is the body of the fish going down into the the tail section and the anal fin sort of sits here uh as opposed to having it uh so separated from the body like just sort of have it so that it links back into the body it actually touches back onto the body like so but it's pretty much going to be the same sort of style uh as any of these fins above so you can play around with the different styles but hopefully you get a good grasp on what shapes we use for the fins and this is going to give your koifish a really nice look now in terms of actually placing them on the koifish uh if you stick around through the next section uh we'll be covering how to put it all together very shortly so now that we've looked at the different types of fins that are on a koifish we're going to start looking at how to draw the tail how to construct it and how it functions so to do this and to illustrate this I've done the same thing I did with the dorsal fin and I've created a little paper tail which is hopefully uh going to help explain this and essentially that's cuz it functions a very similar way it's essentially a flat or 2D piece of th material which functions like a couple of pieces of ribbon cuz we do have the split at the end of the tail this is typically uh the shape however it's a little bit more uh SPL out the koifish tail is a little bit more split out but depending on the illustration sometimes I like to have a more flat-shaped tail okay so just to start off with I'll point out here that the koish tail is sort of okay so it's going to attach obviously ly at the end of the body here so I'm going to round that off now the top and bottom line or the top and bottom spine of our tail is going to start at the top and the bottom of our body to ensure that this is correct you always want to make sure that the top line of your tail is in line with your dorsal fin wherever your dorsal fin ends that line or the spinal line the central line of your koi is the top of your tail okay so it's going to be slightly more sped and fanned out uh than the paper example I've done here okay and the other end is obviously opposite to that wherever that sits so this is the sort of shape and then there's going to be this split down the middle like so so that's typically how I put the tail on now one little uh thing to mention about the size and proportion here is that your tail needs to be big enough I see a lot of coish F tails that are really small and it's a common error to make the tail really small and the head really really big uh when really it should quite be the opposite when you think about it the tail needs to be big enough to propel and push our fish through the water as it swims so the tail should be quite large and it doesn't necessarily need to be huge and way bigger than the head or out of proportion like that but it does need to be big enough to allow the koish to swim uh with some strength so when you're looking at it in that sort of realistic um uh attitude it needs to sort of be quite large in relation to the head and the main part of the body so this is sort of a good size I would say now how can we uh change and Elevate this to make it uh look a little bit more interesting and look a bit more stylized so I'll start by drawing the end of our body here again okay and this is the end part of the body now one thing that's quite common and I think I think looks quite good is to have a fold over in one of the fin uh the part in the fin so we'll start off with one side here this side will leave more normal and the other side's going to have a fold over so just to illustrate I'm going to find my size first like this now we're going to look at the tail uh as something that can fold and bend like our dorsal fin and so in this case maybe the water's pushing here and it's folding over this top portion of our fin like so and so now you can see the kind of angle that that creates so we're going to come up to like here and I want to smoothly fold it over as though it's a more rounded Bend like so then we'll see a little bit of this edge here before it drops down to meat itself okay like so we can erase that that false tip there and so now you've got the folded over portion of one side of your koish tail there now something uh important to point out here which again is like a common error is to texturize the outer part of the fin this line here connects in with the body and this line here connects in with the body you can't change that and those two lines always need to be smooth they are the outside portion of the tail so now looking at our tail and thinking about ways that we can stylize this a little bit so we've got our base sort of tail shape like so now if I want to stylize this we've got a folded over portion here so something I could do is take one end of it make it a little bit more flowy by adding this little recurve at the end like an S curve and then bring that in towards the center now when I do my fold over I can have that flick out the same way before coming back like so so now we have a much more flowy looking tail which again lends itself to a different style of drawing so we can have something a little bit more rigid a little bit more firm or we can make something a little bit more flowy by adding these soft s curvatures to the end of the tail this is going to make it look a lot more realistic and a lot more flowy sort of with the background there now in terms of stylizing the tail uh there's sort of not much to it and I'm going to I'll just demonstrate over here cuz it's going to be very very similar to how we stylize our fins so just to start off with something simple and more rigid I like personally to add a rigid spine to the outside of the tail this isn't something I see very very common with koish but I really like the way that it looks uh so you can add more of a rigid look to it if you'd like and then you can add this waviness texture to the outside of this uh vshape here like so and then if you'd like to you can do all your soft small lines going back towards the body now the difference with the tail and the fins is there's no Circle uh Central Point like we have on the fins so your lines just go directly back towards the body now in this case if I want it to look even more rigid I'll create 1 2 3 four spots and create these little rigid spines and I'll make sure that they are uh I like to make sure that this is the longest followed by this one and this one and then shortest to medium to longest uh sort of in that order so that's a nice sort of style of rigid tail which is you know the way that I typically like to draw it uh a soft way of doing it so I'll just put in my fold over using my S curve there okay coming down the center for my split and then another S curve for that soft part of the tail like like so now if you don't want to do uh rigid spines on either side that's okay you can just follow your line down nice and smooth on the inside V portion of this we're going to have a wavy or bumpy texture for the end of the tail you can do the same on the other side like so the outside lines are always going to be smooth they may not be rigid but the line is always going to be smooth including this line here this is the outside line and it turns into the inside line because we fold the line over and so now you can probably imagine I I'll demonstrate here so you don't have to imagine when we fold this over like so we have our outside line turning into this line here as it folds over so that's our rigid line across the top here like so now the Wess that is here we see a little bit of that on the fold over and then it transitions to our curve the actual line that is folded around so this line would be smooth cuz this is our fold going in this direction and then at the base of the tail we start to see a little bit of texture okay this texture would fold around and join into this texture here so hopefully that makes sense with the fold over and then in terms of stylizing a softer tail like this I might come from where the body is and add in just a whole bunch of those small tapering lines and into terms of following around with our curve okay okay the lines that start here are going around the tail if that makes sense so I find it helps you don't have to make it perfect but adding in your lines like so and then coming to where your curve line is this line here and adding the ends of your lines in that's going to Aid in the continuity of it so if I was to use this as another example here fold this over if there was lines here right because these are the veins on the on the tail which are slightly transparent you'd see them through onto the other side right and so now when I fold this the lines from the opposite side of the tail will bend around with it if that makes sense like so and so now you're going to see lines on the inside and you're going to see lines on the outside of your fold so just make sure you get that angle right these lines go this way and the ones wrapping around from the back follow around with the shape of the fold of the tail which I've Illustrated here with this Arrow okay so that's going to give you the sort of folded tail look and all you have to do really now is experiment with different ways of folding the tail just keeping in mind those two principles that this is the outside line and it turns into this line as it folds across and this is the outside line so those lines cannot be texturized they need to be left smooth and the lines that are inside the V or not part of the smooth folded line but the tip of the tail they are the ones that you texturize so if you keep those principles in mind you're really able to play around with folding the tail in many different ways I like to do usually a simple single fold or no fold at all for a more rigid look like it's actually swimming uh you know a folded look like this is like the water is smoothly flowing over the tail and it's sort of gently folding it over uh other than that I typically don't get too crazy with my Tails um I find these are the best looking angles aesthetically but feel free to play around with different ways to fold your tail and obviously feel free with different ways of stylizing it I've just given you a couple of my favorite examples here so hopefully you've now had a chance to practice working on some of those different elements the fins and the tail and very specifically the head we're now going to be taking a look at how the body functions and how to put the body together and this is uh probably one of the more important sections bodies is definitely one of the more difficult parts of the koifish so I like to make sure that this is sort of as accurate as possible make it look as nice as possible so to start off with we're looking at uh two different way ways that you can sort of twist the body there are other ways that the body can be contorted and look a certain way but these are the two ways that I typically see koifish drawn and they're the ways that I I personally like to draw koifish as well so I'm just going to start off with drawing in the head and I'll do this nice and quickly for you so you don't have to sit around watching me draw koish heads all day okay so there are two shapes that I like to use to build up the body of the koish uh the first one being just an oval like so now this oval can be looked at as this is the spinal line of our oval and the oval it does technically have side planes however it's very very smooth and rounded so you can just drop in a very smooth line line across here very sorry a very light line but don't take that as a hard Edge that's a very soft rounded Edge and now the contour lines for this are going to come up to Center down and then sort of drop down around the side like so so this is the shape of our koifish uh body or I guess what I'll call the chest section cuz this is the oval that sits closest up towards the head okay so that's the shape for this one and it basically looks the same no matter which way it's facing whether it's upside down or the right way up and then the rear shape now this one's weird cuz it's able to twist and contort in many different ways uh but I do like to give a base example for this so the best way for me to explain it is almost like this to start with and then it smoothly goes round on the side and then down like this okay this is roughly the shape that it is this is where our spine sits and the contour lines are going to be very similar they're not going to be dropping down the side dramatically they're going to smoothly curve around our shape like so now this is sort of an angled view from a top view I suppose the shape would be a little bit more triangular like so with our spine line coming across here and our contour lines wrapping it in this way and so let's go this is like a 3/4 view this is a top view and then a side view is going to look something like this okay this is this is not a perfect shape this is like an imaginary 3D shape but hopefully gives you a good idea of how I want the tail shape to be with the contour lines wrapping around this way and the tail coming off the end of the koifish so let's put this as our side shape okay so this is the second shape and the only reason I show this from so many different angles is cuz like I said it can twist and change a lot and not only that but it's it's a really irregular shape whereas this is essentially just an oval like a a football shape uh so this is the two different shapes this is shape number one this is shape number two now if you add these two shapes together in various ways this is how we create our koifish body so just to give an example we got one shape the spinal line coming across it and the contour lines wrapping it like so now I want to attach my second shape now it's very rare that they're going to be attached just end to end in a straight line koifish sort of flip and turn as they swim so let's just have this one uh turning in in this direction so I'm going to turn this around this way now I want to see the flat side or at least a quarter view of this so that our tail comes off nicely so we're going to have the top section taper down like so and this will turn into the top and we're going to see some of that bottom section as this curve happens okay so as you can see it gets a little bit tricky cuz it can turn in many different ways but this is essentially the shape this is your spinal line it continues down from here onto the top of our shape here or the bottom of our shape here the contour lines are going to change shape they're going to get wider on this side um wider and they're going to get tighter on this side because they are bending with the body so now our tail would come off here this is the central line or the spinal line I like to insert our football shape into the back of the head here so the front of the football shape should be on the inside of the head and it needs to be big enough I think to where the top touches our line at the top of the head and the bottom part uh comes into just underneath the gills and I like to make it long enough that it makes up the main portion of the front of the body there almost the head almost twice the length of the head okay so I like to make it fairly big and now we can just add the first first section of our spinal line like so across the body now I like to have the body flipping off towards the left you can have it flip towards the right like what we've done here to flip it off towards the left again we sort of work with our two shapes here so now this is the top of this shape coming down like so and we're going to see a little bit more of that tail section down here and this is the top so now to get our curvature in we follow our spine around the top of our shape like so and we can just smoothing out that area a little bit so that it's not so choppy like so so our line our central line now carries smoothly around from the top half of the body here onto the second half of the body here okay now one reason I like to make it two shapes is that there's this transition area where the body curves and I like to show that in my illustration so I like to bring this line down and then come out again slightly for this part of the body that's going to show where the curve is actually happening now this section can be widened where the tail is and slightly skinnier towards the transition point there now in terms of attaching the dorsal fin I'll come back to about halfway on our oval put in the first line for my dorsal fin now it's going to flip around to the other side to follow our central line making sure we put in that fold over line and so that's essentially going to give you the curvature in the body by using these two shapes and that's how I like to organize my koifish bodies now we have our tail area at the end here and of course our fins and everything attached to it which we will cover uh once we put all of this together but that's essentially how I like to construct the body it's two um one of them is a simple shape the other one is a more complex shape but it's essentially two shapes that sort of interlock and the rear shape it's almost on like a ball pivot it can hinge uh mostly side to side so it's more like a door hinge pivot it can go in this direction or this direction and the spinal line is rigid and the belly line is rigid so this shape can sort of flip side to side and it can twist uh around the spine to create these uh nice bends and twists in the shape of the body so hopefully that gives you a really good idea of how to put the koish body together and like I said I like to sort of use two shapes for it uh to give me accurate size and it helps sort of ort to figure out where the scales sit and where the spine sits really nicely so hopefully you've got a good understanding of how to construct the body now of the koifish and we're going to look at putting it all together this won't include the detail portion we will cover that in the sketch section however we're going to put together all of the elements so that you can see where they fit together and proportionately uh in size relation to each other basically the proportions of the koifish so we'll start off by drawing in our head if you remember we start with an oval for the back of the head here okay and we can draw our Top Line over coming down towards the front and cutting smooth across the bottom and add in a central line that curves around the front plane adding in a big oval at about 45° to that line for our cheek and at the front of this is where I put my eye just a small oval with a bump behind it for the eyebrow Ridge and behind this I'll put in some gills keeping it nice and simple for this one now at the very front I'm going to come out just near the center line here and wrap around to the line just underneath the eye there okay adding in a little curve underneath the the eye a little S curve and joining that back into the cheek Now find the opposite side of the head add the eyebrow Ridge in and come down to the front of the face to sort of complete the shape of the head adding the whiskers in at the front Okay so that gives us our general sort of head shape and I've done this as a thumbnail sketch nice and small just so I can sort of show you guys the entire body as a sketch so the second thing that I generally do here is add the body shape in so in this case I'm going to add in the oval like I said it needs to be big enough there where it touches the top of the head and the bottom area of the gills okay like so and I like to make sure it's long enough to fit you know 1 and 1/2 to two lengths of the head I think 1 and 1 half is probably a better estimate for that so I add in this oval shape that will fit one and a half the L of our face there like so and now I want the body to flip and go this way like he's jumping out of the water that's typically what it will look like so I'm going to add my spinal line across like so and now I'm going to start curving the body across this way like this this will be the spinal line so we're going to follow that around to the top of this shape like so and we're going to start seeing more of the tail end of our shape like so okay now I like to do the back end of my fish slightly smaller than the front end uh for the tail so just make sure this shape is a little bit shorter than your oval shape which is at the front I like to fish to have a slightly fatter sort of belly shape and a little bit smaller on the tail end here okay now the next thing I generally do is add in my dorsal fin I like to make sure the spine is sitting correctly and that the dorsal fin folds correctly before I go ahead and add all the other fins so I like to come back not completely halfway on the main part of the body but you know a little bit in front or a little bit behind is okay add in the rigid line at the front of my dorsal fin which can be stylized in a rigid or a soft way and then add my curve uh my textured line down towards the spine crossing over the spine for a fold and down towards the tail and adding in my fold line towards center now this line becomes the bottom of the dorsal fin comes through the fold and around to the Top Line of the tail like so this is going to put a very obvious twist in the body making it look like it's flipping around now from here typically I'll add in my tail in this case I want to have the fold over going down so the end of the tail here I'll add an S curve to like so and I like to make sure the tail is big enough that it could Propel the fish through the water so no tiny little Tails make sure it's big enough and adding in a fold over for the other side like so and linking them in the middle the outside lines of your tail this line and this line both need to be smooth as they follow along from the body the inside lines can be textured or wavy if you'd like I'll add these lines just for texture following the fold around for the tail there the next thing I like to add is the fins the pectoral fins come first these are like what I call the main fins now typically they sit uh far further down towards the bottom of the koi fish but with the tattoo illustration we like to add the them a little bit higher up on the body not on the side or the top of the body that's sort of too high but I like to add them right at the base of our gills here generally they'll be a lot lower on the body uh but you want to see you know you want to see the fins you want this to really stand out so adding them towards there and I'll do my long S curve style fins for this one to match with the style of the tail and the fin so if you want uh you you want to make sure that the fins the tail and the dorsal fin all match up now in ter terms of the size for this one it can vary so I'll sketch it in lightly first to see if I happy with the size now I think that looks pretty good I like to try and keep the size of the fin uh relative to the head I don't like them to be tiny little wimpy fins that don't look like they could function but I also don't want them to be these monster fins that are way bigger than the head so I try to keep them a little bit smaller than the the head shape there especially for this outside fin which is more VIs visible uh now our fins don't have rigid lines so we're doing a softer style I'll just quickly add in a bit of a texture and some lines like so the opposite side of the body is where the pectoral fin will sit however you're not going to see the entire fin because we've got this top line of our body obscuring where this starts so you need to imagine roughly on this curve of the head where the pictorial FM will start and for me it looks like it'll be about here so you can sketch from that line and this is going to give you a nice look at how big it is so this line here actually disappears behind the body like so okay so that's going to be our two pectoral fins and where they sit uh like I said if you want this to be more realistic they actually sit towards the underside of the body but for tattoo illustration this is typically how we do it now we've got a solid Top Line of the body I'll make the lines towards the tail a bit more solid and now there's this section now you can just bring a smooth line around and a lot of a lot of times that's how it will be done I like to make sure that there's this tiny little bump where the connection point between the tail end and the front end is so bringing a line down down and then just down again it's a very very small bump it's not uh like exaggerated like so it's if this line was just separated slightly like so so there's this little kink in there that just shows where the body turns and starts twisting and I sort of like the way that that looks and in this case you'd actually see the anal fin cuz this is the bottom line of our belly so maybe we can draw that in so just coming out and L linking back into our body adding some texture to that bottom line and then drawing in our texture there so this is typically how the koish body comes together or how all of the elements come together and it's it's a rough guide on how we do the proportions for the koifish I like to make sure that the tail is big enough to propel the body the fin is slightly smaller than the whole uh length of the head there but it really depends on your Style and what you're trying to accentuate what parts you're trying to show this is all a stylized approach as koifish uh typically don't actually look like this they're a lot skinnier their heads are a lot longer and they're a lot more boring looking so this is a very stylized approach however this is typically how they're drawn for you know tattoo style illustrations I'll just add that little V up towards the top of the head where the body uh joins into the head okay and that's essentially how our koifish comes together so in the next part we're going to be covering what I think is the most important and one of the most difficult elements and that is going to be the scales so we're now going to take a look at one of the more difficult parts of drawing the koifish in my opinion and this is the scales uh this is probably the biggest sort of problem area that people have this is one of the areas I really struggled with in the beginning and it's one of the areas that is most challenging with any koish dragon or snake illustration however if you can learn to get it right your illustrations will look so much better it's a really important detail with these traditional Japanese style designs or a lot of traditional designs in general not necessarily just Japanese designs and I find that if you can get the scales right and it it just really elevates your artwork to the next level and it's going to take it from looking amateurish to looking really professional so learning to do the scales properly is really important especially for a koifish and I think the best thing is the koish is a really nice place to start uh this is one of the reasons that the first uh course that I've put out is about koish or the first Workshop because the scales on a koish are really easy compared to a dragon or a snake illustration and so learning to do it on a koish is going to be much easier because it only has one twist in the body and the thickness uh only changes once so this is going to make it a lot easier to learn now our tool set's a bit different for this one as well I'm using a couple of colored pencils these are just those Faber Castel tricolor pencils they're just cheap really really cheap pencils and I just use them cuz they're different colors and this is going to help with the visualization process you could use whatever pencils you could even just use your sketching lead however using two different colors I recommend doing cuz it makes it a little bit easier to learn and we're also going to be using uh a mechanical pencil instead of a clutch pencil this is just to give us finer lines so to start off with I'm going to be using the blue pencil here and we we're just going to do this flat first and then we can learn to curve the scales learning to do them flat is a really really important step so I start with a blue line like so now this is going to represent the spine of our koish okay now on either side of this I want to have a pink line and I want to make sure that between these two pink lines is exactly the amount of space that I want one scale to be so depending on how big I want my scales now how big to do your scales all depends on how big your koish is or how big your snake or dragon is because of course the size of the scales will change depending on how close the viewer is to the subject matter so if the koish is really big on your page doing tiny little scales all over its body is not going to make a lot of sense you want to do nice large scales so I think uh the best way to sort of figure that out is to do this on the koifish body which we're going to do very shortly now what we can do to create the next space is the space between here and here so uh between this line and this line we're going to do that exact spacing on either side of our pink line using our blue pencil like so and now we repeat that process with our pink pencil on the other side now I find when doing this it helps to move my whole arm instead of using my wrist this is going to keep the lines nice and straight at least for this example now like I said this is going to be our flat example you would almost never do scales in this way uh when actually drawing a subject matter however this is my preferred way to get people to start practicing them it's a really good way to learn consistent sizing and it's a good way to learn the basic shape and structure of each scale so now what I like to do is start with our Center because this is our spine and work down from either side of that and we just start by starting on our pink line like here drawing a line up to our blue line and then back down to to Pink then we can go back up to Blue back down to Pink and we we can repeat this process for all the pink lines on that side so this gives us our first R scales now you can see that they look very angular very much triangular so now what you can learn to do is Curve Your lines a little bit so let's start from Blue now we'll curve up to Center we'll curve back down to Blue curve up to Pink curve back back down to Blue and either end is going to curve up to Pink so now we have our scale split into two curves from here we can learn then to smooth those curves out into a single scale now you may think of this as oh this is too easy this is too Elementary and if so that's good at least you've got a good grasp on the foundations however building up the muscle memory to create smooth scales that are roughly similar in size and look consistent it's quite difficult to do starting on pink coming up to Center But continuing down to Pink coming up to Blue continuing down to Pink cutting through blue and continuing down to Pink so now you can see we're doing a more smooth scale which is really what we want to end up with but breaking it down into straights curved lines and then a single curved line makes it a lot easier to get the muscle memory correct and now you just repeat the pattern so we'll start on pink come down to Blue cut through pink and come down to Blue cut through pink and come down to Blue and come up to Pink now whatever color you ended on is the same color you're going to start with so now we'll start on pink again come up to Blue and down to Pink cut through blue down to Pink cut through blue down to Pink and you can continue this pattern until you've completed a full set of scales now this is a really really good way to learn to do nice consistent scales now if you're doing this for the purpose of just drawing and illustrating this is going to get your muscle memory working you're going to learn to draw scales really evenly and take this nice and slowly definitely don't rush it and try to get your scales smooth and a pretty consistent consist size they don't have to be perfect but trying to get them nice and smooth and a consistent size is really going to help you in the long run if you are tattooing this or if you are a tattoo artist or an apprentice this is really going to help with your muscle memory and learning to draw uh the scale shape is going to really help when you go to tattoo this on skin especially if you uh get to the stage where you're comfortable freehanding and you want to line your scales directly on the skin this method is going to be invaluable to you so once you've worked through this entire panel of flat scales you're going to have a good understanding hopefully of how the scales fit together and interlock and this is going to give you a great foundation so what I recommend you do is take a ruled notebook you can get the notebooks that have lines all through them and pretty much repeat a scale pattern through it if you need to you can use your colored pencils to sort of add these lines in color and you can just fill up an entire notebook page with a scale pattern this will really really help help drill that muscle memory into place so now that we've done a flat portion of scales we're going to look at a curved portion of the um should be curved a curved portion of our scales here now this is a little bit more difficult but it's going to illustrate a really important example of how the the scales themselves need to stay a consistent size even if they spread apart so I'm going to illustrate this by just doing a curve blue line to begin with now again depending on the size you want your scales you're going to do pink on either side of your blue like so now that we've determined uh between this line and this line that's how big each scale is going to be and now we need to recreate that with blue on the opposite side or either side of our pink okay like so now that inside line is a little bit too close to the pink I'm just going to bring that out a little bit more like so okay and maybe we'll add one more line of pink to the outside okay so now we're starting on a curve this is our spine right here so we're going to start on pink come up to Blue and back down to Pink and we can do that for these lines as well this gives us our first row of scales and now I'm going to start on pink on the outside drop down to blue and then repeat my process coming up through pink and dropping to Blue and now you can repeat this now something that's going to happen very shortly uh is close to this inside line where this inside curve is you're going to see the scales get smaller now they're not actually getting smaller they're going to be obscured by the scale that's preceding them and the scales towards the outside of the body they're going to look slightly larger and not only this but they are going to spread slightly the scales are actually going to spread apart and you'll see it happen but to illustrate this more clearly you can draw these lines that fan out like so this is not the neatest example of this but it's just to give you an idea that these squares are much bigger than these squares here showing you that the scales actually get smaller towards the inside line now the best way to allow this to occur naturally is to try and keep your scales a consistent size just like we did on this flat example trying to keep them a consistent size is going to be difficult as we get down to here they're going to get smaller the front line of your scale is going to remain the same size but the the width of the scale so this portion of the scale here is going to get smaller as it gets covered by the scale preceding it okay so as you can see as we get to this point the scales towards the inside of our curve here are much smaller than the outside curve okay this is not the size of the scales I just want to repeat that it's how much of it is being obscured so if we look at a full scale here like this the outer scales more of it's visible because the previous scale is only cutting off this much of our view the scales that are on the inside here there's more of this scale covering it okay so you're going to see a little bit less of the surface here it doesn't mean the scale itself is smaller but more of it's being covered so you need to take note of that as you come down your scale I think the best way to make sure that this happens is to make sure that the ends of your scales I'm just trying to think of how I can best illustrate this the ends of your scales are consistent in size so this scale Starts Here ends here this one starts here ends here and it keeps going like that and that way they stay the same width but the surface of them from here to here is going to be different in size okay something else you're going to notice here as you start to come down your curve is that you're going to start having splits in the middle of your scales this is okay this is perfectly normal and again is actually correct this is sort of uh the way that scales actually fold and function as it gets really wide and you have areas where the body gets much rounder and much wider the scales are going to spread a little bit to accommodate the extra space needed for that curvature to occur and so you're going to have this little spread and split on the inside of the body now again the way to make that happen is to make sure that the ends of your scales this example here the ends of your scales match up as closely as possible so to give you a demonstration on how this curvature affects the uh spreading of the scales I want to slightly spread my lines like so now we'll do the same thing next to it so that I can show you a correct and an incorrect variation okay so you can see that my line spread to accommodate extra thickness of the body or a curvature so our scales start off correct we start on the blue line and we cut through our pink line and we continue on like this now if if you continue to try and make sure you're touching back to each line so blue to Pink cut through blue to Pink and back to Blue and you continue in this way the problem is your scales are going to get enormous they're going to get much much bigger in areas of curvature and parts where the body gets thicker and that's not going to look very nice and it's also not going to look very accurate as scales I mean they are there are smaller and larger scales on the body but they're not just going to get bigger because the body curves or because the body turns so this example is I guess the incorrect example you don't want them to start a certain size and then to get gigantic towards a curve and then all of a sudden they're going to have to get smaller as you come back around the bend instead what you want to do is start the correct size just going Line to Line the way that we practiced and then a as soon as you notice it starts to need to spread if you keep the the spacing we do this in blue if you keep the spacing between the scales accurate from this line to this line if you keep that space uh relatively accurate you won't have a problem with this so it's not necessarily about the lines when there's a curve so I want to keep this in line with that scale and this in line with the scale before it and so now you can see it starts to create some gapping and that's okay because it means we've kept the size of our scales relatively consistent okay like I said this will create some gapping in the scales but that's that's okay that's going to look correct once you've filled all of the scales in the gapping should sort of never get too big if the gaps start to get too big it means your body is too wide or the section you're trying to curve around is too wide so then you need to assess the shape of your koifish and make sure that it's uh the right shape that the parts of the body make sense sizewise if it's getting if the split is getting really really wide and by too wide I mean like um like this and then the next set is like wide like this is the gap here to there maybe we're pushing towards too big and you need to start slimming the body uh back again so I hope this is making sense this is the best example I could think of to how to split this up but you will get some gapping in there when you come around a curved section of your body so just keep that in mind now with that information hopefully you do some practice on the flats and the curves these are really crucial to getting your scales down we can now just look at how I apply these to the koifish body and then we'll take a bigger look at this and a more detailed look at this when we do the sketch but we'll start with blue and we'll use that as our spinal line like I did in these examples so in this case it's going to follow a curve follow the line of our dorsal fin around cutting through the fold and it becomes the top line of the body here like so now I'm going to do an equidistant pink line on either side of it determining how big I want each scale to be the smaller you make your scales the more difficult you're going to find it to to draw them in on on such a small drawing such as this one the larger you make them the more difficult the bends and turns of the body are going to be so try to keep them I try to just make a nice mid ground in terms of size so now you can see we have a line that follows down this side of the spine and this one goes around the spine and comes out the end part here so if you use visualization to follow that through the dorsal fin it emerges on the opposite side now we create the same amount of space between the pink and the blue line on the opposite side of our pink line using blue okay making sure it follows the curvature of the body so in this case our body and I'll have to draw it again next to it just so we don't confuse too much our body comes down this way and curves around this way so I want my lines to do a similar thing following the top curvature of the body coming down the side plane and then wrapping around the back of the body like so on the opposite side we do the same thing an equidistant line of blue imagine it going through the dorsal fin and emerging next to our previously drawn pink line like so now we can take our pink pencil and we continue the process in this case this pink line is just going to become the outer line of the body so you don't really need to draw that in now that you've drawn all of your very colorful stripes onto your koifish body we can start to use our uh sketching lead again and we're going to do a similar thing to what we did with our curved uh curved scale example here and so what you're going to see is that this area is quite bulging if you consider the Contour lines of our body shape this area is quite bulgy we have a curve on the outside of the body here that's going to be a little bit wider and this area where there's like a pinch and an inside curve is going to match up with the inside curve of our curved example here so what we're going to do is start our scales around the spine area I'll come up from pink to blue and back down to Pink now the next scale is not going to be visible okay it's hidden by this part of the head this line of the head so in these examples we did three scales right next to each other in the example of our fish here this is our leading scale and the scale is going to be on more of a diamond angle so the first scale being like this and the ones underneath it sitting like this that's how it sort of starts out so first scales here then we're going to come up from Center to Pink and back down to Blue and we start to repeat our pattern which we already know how to do now making sure we keep our scale size consistent because there is going to be some spreading uh in terms of our example that we did previously trying our best to keep our scale size consistent is going to allow that to happen uh in a really natural way okay so it doesn't look forced we start to fill our scales in uh basically using the same method that we've already looked at which is going uh from one colored line to the next making sure we keep the outer lines of our scales consistent even though it causes some spreading to occur and making sure that the scales get slightly more obscured and smaller uh towards the outer curve oh the inner curves or this inner pinch right down here now you'll notice when we get to the dorsal fin the scale is going to hit the front of the dorsal fin and where do we go from there we just continue our scale pattern down either side of the dorsal fin so in this case we're going to start on our blue line and come up and back down to Blue and so now this is where the dorsal fin interrupts and we'll come back and do that in a second so when we come back to the dorsal fin we now start on blue and come down to Pink and then we can continue our pattern up to Blue and down to pink up to Blue down to Pink when I get to the fin typically what I'll do is I'll start the scale and then I'll just fade it off towards the end and by fade I mean I'll just do a softer line as opposed to a really harsh line and I'll just let that scale sort of vanish where the fin starts now once you complete the scales in this top half of the body it comes around on a bend and we start to see scales on the opposite side all I like to do in this case is find the longest blue line and start my scale pattern again using that as my central line now you can start to see uh within this area here this angle this is where the pinch occurs and the scales look a little bit smaller and on this side they look a little bit wider so similar to our curved example that we did previously it has this sort of an effect where there's wider scales uh wider looking scales here and more obscured scales on the other side now the way that I like to finish my tail off if you've done it correctly and started on Blue you're typically going to end on two blue line scales like so and then I like to do a third one in between them this ends our tail on a vshape like so okay with one scale here two scales here and so on and so forth it ends it on a vshape which is the same shape that I said we started our head with so uh if this was our head okay this is the top of the head of our koish here the first scale starts on our Blue Line like so uh that would be more like this actually and the other scales are sort of hidden partially behind the head because we have an angle here like a v-shaped angle which is how we start our scales and so I like them to finish this way on the tail section with a v-shaped angle it doesn't have to be that way um you can finish them flat by leaving it as two but I like to finish it with that last scale to create this vshape I think it looks aesthetically pleasing uh it forms a nice direct vshape which then becomes the split of the tail here and like I said it matches up with the front of the head design how the scale started on the front of the head so I just like my koish taals to finish in that way but this is essentially the meth method that I use to draw my koifish scales I think it's one of the better methods out there it's going to give you a really accurate looking scale um doing the size in this way U making sure this consistency and size will give you your splits nice and evenly and like I said the best way to practice this is start with your flat example here then move on to your curved example making sure that your scales say a consistent size even though they're obscured uh in the in the pinch here and then you can move on to apply them to a surface such as your koifish body or you could even go ahead and just do an oval and then apply a whole bunch of scales to your oval that way you can get some practice applying it to different various size and shape koish bodies so that is essentially how we do the scales that is how I like to do my scales okay guys welcome to the next section I'm really proud that you guys have made it this far and I really hope you're enjoying it in this section we're going to be doing a full entire sketch walkthrough so I'm going to start from scratch and we're going to be drawing a koifish or sketching a koifish and a little bit of a background as well as a tattoo illustration now hopefully you've practiced the previous sections and got a firm grasp and understanding of each section of the koifish and you'll be able to follow along let's get straight into this one okay guys welcome back to the table for the sketch portion of this Workshop I'm starting off with a Kent clutch pencil but I've also got the other supplies that we've just used uh through the building the koish stage that are going to come in handy shortly but I'm going to start off by sketching out our koish and you can feel free to follow along hopefully uh by now you've had a chance to practice some of the material that we've covered so far and that's giv you a good enough amount of practice to follow along with this illustration so I'm going to start off with the head of the koifish here now I'm using A3 sketch paper here you can do this as big or as small as you'd like to practice with and I'm not going to be sort of talking you through the entire higher process here there are Parts where I will mention things if I find them to be uh important otherwise I'm just going to be sketching and you can just follow along as you wish so we'll just quickly say that I really hope you guys have enjoyed the uh material I've included in this Workshop so far hopefully you've leared uh a lot already about drawing koifish and uh hopefully you enjoy working on this illustration with with me I think you're going to really get a lot out of this now in this case I'm doing the little backwards whiskers they're sort of my favorite ones to do but you can of course do whichever want You' luck so you can see at this point I'm just getting my head sketch in always like to start with the head of the koifish this sort of dictates the orientation like which face which way the face is actually pointing in and um you know it's nice to start off with a really strong element such as the head and find it easiest to draw that way I'm going to be putting in the two sections of the body in this part here and I might actually bring that angle down a little bit and so you can see why I've got an eraser handy with me all the time certainly a valuable tool to have on you all the time when you're drawing like this coming down to about halfway to add in my dorsal fin making sure that there's a curve in my transition there or the fold of the dorsal fin that's going to be really important right I forgot to do my gills here putting in the end of the body uh sometimes sort of helps you figure out where the tail starts helps you get a gauge on how long you want everything to be so I like to sort of round off that part of the body as well sometimes just remembering that the fins don't necessarily start on the side of the body on a real koish but sometimes when we draw and illustrate these things we accentuate different parts okay so that gives us our sort of Dorito shape a little triangular shape but I've just smoothed off these edges and added in the curves to make it look like a fin and I want to start the other fin roughly at the bottom on the other side and now like I said some of the fins can be facing backwards or forwards uh in this case facing forwards cuz he's swimming upstream and possibly jumping out of the water a little bit so that's sort of going to make the most sense and we'll come down might put in one of the ventral fins just uh you know slightly that you can see one of the ventral fins on the side here and maybe we'll drop in the anal fin just before the tail like so okay making sure that the outside line on both sides of my tail is smooth uh even when it curves over itself like so needs to stay smooth all the way along okay making sure that my tail is big enough to propel the front half of the body um you know sometimes I'll do them a little bit smaller than this or sometimes maybe uh it's pretty rare that I'll go bigger than this but yeah sometimes I'll do them a tad smaller just depends uh sort of how I want this to look okay uh now I'm going to come in with my mechanical pencil I'm switching over now that I've sort of done the rough uh sketch for the koifish itself and I'm just going to start adding in couple little lines of detail keeping these ones pretty simple I like this uh sort of simple look okay so I want to start putting in some of the background elements here now this course isn't sort of dedicated to how to do Japanese background that's a very big topic uh in it of itself but I'm going to cover a little bit on backgrounds to do with koish here maybe we'll just do some waves and some maple leaves and I think that's going to make for a really nice looking uh illustration so for our finger waves I always like to start by finding where I want a circle to start like so once I find that I will follow the bottom line of the circle around like so and as I come up towards the front I like to bring it around going to stop my line and bring it back around itself like so into this sort of C shape now from there you can continue the same sort of pattern creating these C- shapes I might cut this back a little bit and I'm going to follow this c-shape around and create another loop underneath and I'll do the same for the next one around this is going to start forming uh my wave or my water that goes up and then hits the fish and crashes back off uh into an actual wave and these are like what we call Japanese finger waves this is the way that I like to do them might add another little Loop in here these can take some practice and sort of playing around with takes a it took me a long time to be happy with my my finger waves the way that I construct them so just play around with them but they're very simple you know it's actually a very simple thing to draw they're um simple doesn't always mean Easy by the way so don't don't think that I'm discrediting here if you if you do struggle with this it took me a long time to get finger waves down the way that I like them but essentially they're very simple shapes they're just c-shaped um lines that link up into one another to create your waves occasionally I'll throw in these little extra curves that just become part of the wave now at certain points of my illustration I want to have water that crosses over my fish or creates some interaction with my fish cuz as you can see these waves all sit underneath my fish which is totally fine but uh it's nice to have a little bit of water or waves that actually crash over your fish or parts of your fish and this creates a little bit of interaction with the background and that way it doesn't look like you've slapped a koifish on top of a picture of finger waves so what we can do is start one of our curves on the fish body like so and from there we can start to add in our finger waves I might make that one a little bit skinnier like so so now you can see it starts on the body and the next part of the wave comes off the body so there's going to be a little bit of shading in that area uh maybe obscuring some of those scales and making them lighter but I'll cover that when we go into the line work section uh of this little workshop here uh now there's also going to be areas where you're going to want to cross over uh with thin um parts of water how would you call it like a thin stream of water so I'll go over this uh back fin like so and I'll double up on that line getting wider towards the bottom okay this is like a a little stream of water that's shooting over that fin so I'll show you once we erase the inside of that bar like so we have this little stream of water shooting over the fin that's a really nice way uh to interact with your background and foreground elements as well okay continuing up and around for more finger waves um cut that one back a little bit so it's this constant um refinement and experimentation to make sure you're happy with the shape of things don't feel like you have to get this the first try you need to play around with it you know find what works for you in terms of drawing your actual waves and also the layout of the waves is going to be different for everybody just depending on your personal style and how you want things to look okay um I might also include some waves splashing out the front he is sort of jumping out of the water so that's why the waves are sort of deflecting away and off of him so some waves coming out this front section is going to look uh pretty nice as well uh sometimes what I like to do is these little cut back ones so I come from here and instead of coming back out I'll loot back and then forward again this just gives me a little bit of variation on my waves makes them look a little bit different from each other that's some waves sort of coming out towards the front there all right now from here we sort of start to look at where our more empty spots are so we've got an empty space here and an empty area down by the tail where we haven't filled in any of the details that's where I start to look at what what areas I can start to fill in so for this area I want to have something cutting through our tail uh similar to what we did with the fin up here so maybe we come from the left with another little open stream of water like this okay and again just for clarity sake I'll erase the inside of that like so so now we have this little stream of water cutting across our tail that you're going to be able to uh sort of create the illusion that there's water flowing over the top of our tail there so that's just another little bit of detail that you can add okay all right so once you've added in all of those waves we can go ahead and start thinking about where we want to put some of our other background elements now if this was a you know really large illustration you might be able to include some flowers as well you could probably include some cherry blossoms in this case uh but I think I want to do uh maple leaves on this one so I'll give you a quick little run through on how to draw a maple leaf I'll do one in this utmost section here I'll start with a little circle and I'm going to go one two three like so these side arms are going to be smaller than that top one I'll go four five and six and those two are going to be shorter than those ones as well uh only very slightly now I'm going to draw a DOT that's equally between the space of each of these um sections now we can come from each of those dots out to the tip and back to the dot okay like so okay and at the bottom I like to come out and back in like so to create a stem uh portion of the leaf so anyways that's going to give you the basic sort of shape for a maple Loof now there's lots of variations on different uh folds and different placements for the maple leaf there however I like to do the more traditional way of uh sort of drawing these and that is to just have them front on like this nice and simple and really bold so you can go ahead and sort of drop in Maple Leaves wherever you'd like them probably won't do too many of them I want to keep this fairly simple so that you guys can follow this one along put in my dots all righty now sometimes it can be uh you know it can be nice to have some of these background elements interact and overlap with the actual body of the fish uh so you could go ahead if you wanted to you know take a space where you think you can fit a maple leaf uh that overlaps a little bit and just drop one in in this case you don't want all your Maple leaes sort of facing in the same direction so make sure you vary that a little bit just by making that top peak the very first one that you draw uh a little bit varied that's going to give us another little Maple Leaf there maple leaves are a pretty common background element with Kish designs I think Maple Leaves cherry blossoms and lotus flowers sort of tend to be the most common with koish designs so uh you could sort of choose from any of those or you can figure out your own uh background elements that you'd like to include but pretty much you can include as many or as few of these as you'd like and I sort of just like to take up a nice amount of space with them fill out my design a little bit more it's also going to help you pack a little bit more color into your design so if you know if you're doing a design that's primarily black and white in this case the background is going to be black and gray I want to have a fair bit of black in our fish uh maybe it would be nice to put some flowers or leaves in this case maple leaves that is going to pack a little bit of solid bright color in there I always like to talk about contrast between uh different elements of the design it's not just about contrast between black and white you know light and dark contrast like most people uh refer to it as but it's also about contrast between the different elements you know uh contrast with your colors creating contrast within your actual Design Elements so a really detailed foreground calls for a simpler background in my opinion and vice versa and in this case uh having you know a darker subject matter or background calls for some bright color in the foreground so in this case the Maple Leaves are going to be the provider of that now I've done four Maple Leaves there you could keep going all day long with Maple Leaves I think I'm going to leave it at that and in this case let's say I've done the Maple Leaves and I want to include a little bit more background uh it's no problem you can go ahead and include some more uh finger waves if you'd like to uh to sort of round off the top part of the design and help include those maple leaves in the design a little bit more okay so once I'm pretty happy with the layout of the background and the shape now of course depending on what it is you know if you're doing a maybe a half sleeve or or something it's going to have a certain shape to it now if you're doing a back piece it's going to have its own certain shape to it so maybe depending on what you're doing to whether you're happy with the the shape of it is a good way to look at it but once you are sort of happy with the shape of it then you can start adding in uh more of your detailed elements okay all righty so coming in with my mechanical pencil now I'm going to start to really refine the shape of my koifish a little bit more here I'm going to go for the soft look on these so no hard edges on my fins the heads are always quite simple I don't really add too much in in the in the way of detail to them so kind of leaving the head how it is I think is going to be fine I like to always leave my eye till last so I'm not going to fill that in just yet that's a bit of a like a Japanese Superstition uh almost that I learned not long ago when creating a Japanese tattoo paintings you sort of leave the ey till last and you fill that eye in at the very end and that's what brings the painting to life so I thought that was kind of cool that was neat okay that's it for my fin there I always like to have a nice smooth long line for that dorsal fin okay okay so from this point we've done like the detailed sections of our koifish as well as the background and all of the background elements this is where I like to put in the scales now the reason I leave them till last generally is because they're that's sort of the most complicated and detailed part of my drawing and I don't want that to get confused with my maple leaves and my other background elements so I try to sort of leave the the scales till as late as possible that way I can also go through and clean up areas like this uh wave that's cutting through the body I can come back and clean that up a little bit which is going to make my scales a little bit e easier to do now I'm going to go through and do the scales with the same method that I already showed you guys in the last section I hope you guys have had enough time to practice this one this is like I said one of the more difficult elements of drawing koifish or any Japanese sort of designs is getting the scales correct but it really does uh sort of add a very nice nice quality to your art when you can do this nicely so you want to make sure you measure a full length of one scale how big you want one scale to be I think that's going to be a good size you don't want them to be too small either cuz with Japanese style uh illustration for tattoos we tend to color each scale individually as opposed to the more I guess new school or near traditional way of looking at it which is sort of doing a color wash over all of the scales you in the Japanese style It's usually the scales are colored in individually now you can probably see here this is a good example of why I use different colors I've now just overlapped my maple leaf but it doesn't matter I've overlapped it in blue and so it's really not going to worry me too much I'm going to be able to just see through it okay now I can come in with my pink pencil and create my middle lines and just keep in mind that we're always following the Contour of the body here this blue line needs to come across a little bit and don't be afraid to to make mistakes and you know need to erase them this is all part of the learning process and you know even once you're an established uh once even once you've established a good foundation uh within your art you're still going to make mistakes that's sort of you know art is a learning process I don't know any any artists that don't still make mistakes in their illustrations and you know you need to go back in and fix those and that's that's okay so once I've done that I'll uh typically turn my page this is just going to make it a little bit easier for me angle wise and then I'll begin filling in my scales just repeating that pattern going from Blue through to Pink and back to Blue it's a bit of a tongue twister and then repeating that all the way down the body this is the exact same method uh that I just took you guys through in the last section so hopefully you've had a chance to practice that just keeping in mind and remembering that areas where the body gets wider the scales are going to be a little bit more visible and the are areas where the body gets tighter or turns there's going to be uh you know the scales are going to shrink up a little bit and look slightly less visible so like I said in the last section they're not actually getting smaller but they are going to appear uh a little bit smaller because of the angle that we're viewing them from now there is also going to be some spreading that occurs and like I said in the last section that's okay there is supposed to be a little bit of spread between your scales as long as you keep your scale sizing consistent that spread will naturally open and close so you don't need to worry about it which is nice it's going to come naturally as your scales uh you know move across the body as long as you keep your scale size nice and consistent now sculls are a really time consuming process I don't want to uh make it feel like or look like these don't take any time at all cuz they do they they're it's a very timeconsuming process drawing scales and especially painting them in individually so almost a painstakingly slow process but the end result is worth it for your art it really does look nice and one thing I'll point out there is that this does take some time to fill in you can make your scales a little bit bigger if you'd like to uh that is going to make it slightly more difficult when you need to curve your scales uh around the body sort of like the smaller they are the easier they are to maneuver the bigger they are the more difficult that's going to be so just keep that in mind when you're deciding how big you want your scales to be there's lots of fancy ways that you can try to wrap the scales around the sides of the body and sort of have a bumpy texture at the edge of the body uh that's the way that I used to do it I don't particularly like doing it like that it loses that traditional aesthetic the quality that makes the the design looks slightly more traditional and I think it takes away from the nice sort of Simplicity of a bold coish design it makes it a little bit too realistic which if that's what you're going for that's okay but I sort of like to you know make it look detailed but you don't need it to look three-dimensional uh we're not going for hyper realism here we're going we're designing a tattoo so when you've got background elements overlapping your scales you just have to do your best to work around them it can be a little bit tricky at times but just try to imagine where the scale go uh meets up where the next point is that'll hopefully help you uh work around those little background details okay so that's the first half of the body scales done starting on the second half like I said I like to start with the longest Blue Line what I mean by longest is the one that comes furthest up towards the top half of the body which is usually the lower one that's where I'll do my first scale and from there it's a simple process of repeating that same pattern now at this point I like to stop my scales before the edge of the wave there leave a little Gap and then start again or another nice way to do it is to complete your scales and I'll do them a little bit lighter and then you can go ahead and just erase that section that's another really nice way to do it hopefully that little uh covered wave section doesn't throw you off too badly it can be a little bit confusing in the beginning when there's a section that covers up your neat scale pattern but this is how you start to learn to overlap parts of your design and it's the sort of thing that people always ask me about is how to create these designs that have so much detail so much in intricacy and you know really flow and sort of interact uh they look like to have movement and Life to them and that's just through doing these things you know overlapping sections of it uh creating creating depth within the illustration okay so we erase a little bit of the scales there make that line from my wave nice and solid and just make the body disappear into that line a little bit and that's going to create this transparency there and we can even erase some of those scales uh and make them a little bit lighter okay so we'd still uh we'd still outline those but we're going to do it in a way that makes them look like they're sitting underneath the water creates a little bit of an illusion and a bit of a transparent effect to it okay so that's basically the sketch for our koifish design I really hope you enjoyed this section uh like I said this was more for you guys to be able to follow along with a complete illustration that way you've got something ready to move into the next section with but nonetheless I really hope you enjoyed it and I'll see you in the next part

Channel: Dagget Designs

Views: 6,641

Keywords: koi fish, koi fish painting, Koi Fish tattoo, how to draw koi fish, how to draw koi fish easy, japanese koi fish tattoo, Japanese koi fish tutorial, tattoo illustration tutorial, how to draw, design koi fish tattoo, how to draw scales, how to draw fish scales, how to draw dragon scales, Japanese dragon tattoo tutorial

Id: lwuGS08bwFE

Length: 142min 10sec (8530 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 28 2024