How I made my Vtuber / Character Ref Sheet - Tutorial Guide

hello everyone it's me Carol coming back at you with a new video in this video I'm going to be showing you my process for making my current ref sheet that I've posted on Twitter and YouTube stories but haven't officially made like a community post yet so you might have missed it but you know follow my Twitter if you'd like more current updates on stuff no way maybe you shouldn't uh my Twitter is kind of suss sometimes and um I just retweet things that I find funny and also just posts sometimes uh I guess just follow at your own risk but moving on why is a ref sheet important and why they need it a ref sheet is pretty important if you're thinking of commissioning other people for art of your character like for a PNG or live 2D model or just some art that you want to have made uh artists will be more likely to accept your commission if your character has a rough sheet in addition it's also very helpful for your viewers or people who are interested in your content to sort of make fan art for you if they would like when I started youtubing I didn't have a ref sheet and I only considered its importance when people in my chat started asking if I had one because they wanted to draw me something and um yeah so I was like oh wait that's a good reason to have it I didn't think it was completely necessary because I was doing all of my own art for my models and stuff so I didn't really think about it but yeah after that I started working on ref sheets I made a couple of failed ones or at least ones that I didn't finish not exactly failures but just just once I wasn't completely satisfied with this one I did actually really like it's pretty much my first finished one I feel like the colors are coherent there is a front in the back and then some extra Expressions to help show character this one I think still looks really good uh there were some reasons why I changed my design and why I moved out of this design but I won't go over that right now and then this one was the more recent one before this current one this one this one I did on stream kind of and this is the most recent one which we will be working on in this video where I will be showing you the process of how I did everything through a time lapse and I just want to sort of explain the parts there is the character full body front and back there are some Expressions on the side and there are like some tiny details that are out on the side to sort of fill up space and there is the color palette if you're not very keen on drawing the full back of your character or having the full body back of your character drawn you can also just optionally have the details of the back prints of your designs or maybe Zooms in on the details of the patterns of your designs instead of having a full body like here I do show off like little details like the book and the little fountain pen I think for the rough sheet it matters uh what works well for you or what works well for your means uh it doesn't have to be fully detailed it just has to show off the important parts of your design full body is preferred but I think some people just do like half body if they're not asking people to draw their full body thankful bodies are only for like models like full live 2D models and Chibis but yeah that's my explanation for the importance of a rap sheet and that is done I will be explaining my process for how I made my Rashi so to begin my process I usually just draw the anatomical base or I don't know what it's called like a body guide for the full body so it's just um I draw the character and its proportions and this will be different for everyone uh depends on what character you have what body type they have what species they are if they have a tail or if they have ears you can probably add that in the body guide I recommend picking out some references of other body types that are similar to your characters and maybe just like look them up and sort of use them as a reference if you're not too good with drawing full bodies yet here I'm sort of using a symmetrical ruler to sort of mirror the drawings that I do so that I only have to draw technically one side of the drawing and uh most programs do have a symmetry ruler I don't know if Photoshop does but flip Studio it is procreate they have symmetry rulers and they usually use them uh I'm actually using this symmetrical view of the anatomy or the body guide as a guide for the actual pose that I'll be doing for the ref sheet I think a direct front view of the model or your design should be fine but for me I prefer to usually draw them at an angle like a one-third usually and so here I'm using the front view that we drew with the symmetrical ruler as a sort of uh guide for the proportions and I am drawing on top of it with a slightly tilted body so here it would be slightly tilted facing the other side with the hand on the hip basically I want the character to have a more organic stance that seems more natural instead of stiff you don't have to do it this way but for me I do prefer how this looks and even if some details are hidden away I would prefer to have The Stance rather than the details which is kind of contradictory to the rough sheet but I do um I do makeup for it usually with the back view or some other parts if I know that the details will be covered I'll try to make up for it with another drawing thankfully my design is simple and somewhat symmetrical so a lot of the details that do get covered are shown on the side that does show uh I usually use a lot of liquify tool to sort of uh sort out the pose and the proportions because sometimes The Stance is correct but the balance is not quite there and you just need to make little adjustments that's why I kind of overuse the liquify tool sometimes because it really does help me out and speeds up my process so this is actually a post recorded I actually did not record this for the time lapse of the actual ref sheet making so I'm just recording it now so that I can show you the process of the bodyguide that I did not manage to record with the procreate time lapse so here we're skipping a little bit I'm sorry you can sort of see the back body guide in the back of the sketch but this is where I started recording on procreate because I wasn't initially thinking of making a tutorial or anything I just wanted to sort of sketch so I did not have my uh time lapse feature on so there's that here I already have the head I'm sorry if I can't go through the details of the drawing the head I think it's fine if we're gonna do a tutorial like that it'll be just like a separate video where in the art face drawing uh Focus video but for here you can sort of see me test out different designs and just like draw and erase and draw an arrays and just like have different layers I actually have like the different variations I do end up liking I save on different layers so I can check them later and sort of just skim through them and figure out which one I'll decide on so I test out a bunch of different designs before I decide on this high collar which is very reminiscent of my very first design I wasn't quite set on it yet so I did try out a different design which is this kind of sailor-ish outfit that I can't explain that I didn't end up using in the end because I was like uh I don't know I don't feel it and then I also tried out a more Regal outfit just sort of reminiscent of the design that I had before my current redesign I think during this process I was just sort of pulling out different Inspirations from designs that I have already liked and also just different ideas that I've come up with and that's just sort of the point of my current redesign is just like oh um what worked what didn't work and what do I feel like doing for my new design uh sort of a trial and error process and I also wanted to make a new mascot so we're doing that here and I think I did uh decide on this because I really like the cut and the silhouette of the entire outfit and I also added the kimono Mimi and some wings these are just some design aspects that I've always thought of having the wings I think I've had earlier on in my designs and the horns are also reminiscent of the first design that I had uh but the cat ears are sort of things that I always draw on my my YouTuber but I don't have on the official design and you know what I think this time I was just like you know what I'm gonna go for it since we're gonna go for a sort of overhaul I just wanted to pick the design that spoke most to me and here I am drawing the sort of back view at first I wasn't gonna do a full back view I just wanted to show the back of the jacket which I thought was an important detail and also uh the hole in the pants where the tail would come out of which I also thought was an important detail and here I'm just trying to frame it and also I think I test out a ponytail as well but I was like ah now that's too much there's a tail and a ponytail um yeah I'm just sort of you can see you guys like undoing and redoing and just sort of trying different things out uh it sort of expand the canvas when I decide that oh I can add more things to this rough sheet and I start drawing like little portraits little little uh expressions and poses to sort of add some character to the red sheet A lot of these don't actually make the final cut I think the ref sheet just turned out too busy for me and I found that it was really hard to look at so I did end up cutting a lot of things in a lot of details just so I could have more um comprehensive question mark uh ref sheet and I was kind of really sad about removing the chibi and the little pedus but I couldn't fit them anywhere where they didn't like take up too much of the screen uh so I well sadly a lot of them don't end up in the final uh ref sheet I actually really like this one uh it's clear of like a nice uh outer concept for the design uh but I thought the balance of it with the like board look uh it's just sort of different it's just like one is a bit much and one is just like chilling so uh I didn't end up keeping uh these sketches and they look really nice now that I'm looking back at them but they just didn't fit the design later on so I had to like just get rid of them and then I do start testing out colors this is probably the last thing that I did in procreate because I did want to do the rendering on uh Cliff Studio instead on the PC uh procreate has a layer limit and I was running out of layers and it was getting very difficult to sort of manage the design without having more layers which I couldn't have anymore in the canvas at this point I was just like I'll map out the colors and then I'll render everything I tried a lot of colors but I kept coming back to this purple yellow I do have like a jacket that's very similar to that but the blue design was also one of my favorite picks because it had like elements from my first design in my uh design for this one which is just less like I don't know what they call this blue but it's just like a sort of desaturated blue green I think one of the most painful uh parts of the process of making a design is sort of eliminating the ones that are sort of good but not good enough and you have to make a lot of decisions for whether you should go with this or go with that so that you can have a final product that you can go with uh from this point on by the way um this will be the clip Studio portion of the rendering or the sheet making process um there's this sort of black border that clip Studio has I think it might be because I resize the canvas and it didn't know what to adjust so it just sort of put everything in the center I'm not really sure how to crop it in Premiere either so I'm just gonna leave it there uh yeah I'm sorry uh depending on the artist there's different ways that people might approach working on the rough sheet I am not very fond of doing line arts so I would just clean up a sketch and put colors under it merge everything and then start rendering I feel like this gives me more freedom to sort of make mistakes and just paint over the mistakes if they get too much and at this point I did end up doing the full body instead of having the um just like the upper portion of the design I think I wanted to show the design of the shoes these shoes by the way don't make the final cut I know they look like clown shoes at at the point that I was making this at this point of the process I thought they looked nice and then they woke up in the morning looked at them and I realized they looked like clown shoes so I spent like maybe six hours just figuring out how I could make them better and make them cooler I'm sorry that I'm not very good at drawing shoes and I ended up drawing clown shoes but that's a sort of later edit so now for now you're just gonna have to sit through the clown shoes they're gonna be there for a while since I only realized that I didn't like them at the very end of the process of making this rough sheet uh this point I sort of tried to make some design elements in the back you can probably make your rough sheet just have like a flat color or like flat pattern in the back uh but I really do like the rough sheets that have a bit more graphic design elements to them even though I'm not particularly good at making those um designs as well but I just wanted to try something out um I think I missed the part where I made those uh triangle color palette uh rectangles triangles uh you can sort of do any shape I see a lot of people doing hearts or something that's kind of uh in accordance with your design this design has a lot of like um color block and like geometrical shape sort of in a design so I chose the triangle I thought it sort of fit uh for you if your design has a lot of hearts or maybe like a lot of ribbons you can make uh the shape for the color palette have that sort of design element I think you know it's not too important but it's quite nice if the color palette also works with the overall ref sheet uh and there's just a lot of rendering here is the shoes oh wait I actually fixed the shoes this early on I'm sorry this video was recorded a month ago I don't remember a lot of things uh but yeah apparently I started fixing it the day after this must be day two of me working on this rap sheet um and here I'm just sort of rendering these shoes these shoes took forever but they look really fast because they're speeding through it and it's also a time lapse so it's like sped through and sped up again I really do remember struggling with them a lot to the point I was just like can I just like wear flip-flops because these are not working out uh I ended up looking at a lot of shoe design I went to Pinterest and typed cool shoes and sort of just looked at the different cool shoes uh that's another tip I can give if you're making Rashi and then there's some parts that you don't can't make sense of or you don't know how to make sense of I'd recommend just looking up references always just look up references when you're getting a little confused with uh different elements that you're not familiar with or the good elements that you haven't tried out before so um you can sort of see that I have moments where I'm cutting out the different portions of the design this is because I merged everything down to a layer so when there's something I completely change the perspective of I need to cut it out and like uh make a new layer on top of it and uh kind of fill up the space that I did cut out so that's what happened for the back post I wasn't quite set on the pose yet but I already had it merged all together so that I could render the colors better that sort of came up with an issue but that's like a skill issue I know that's a design not really designed that's a style issue that's how I would do things and I don't know if it would be faster if I line art and everything but this is just the way that I do it in the way that I'm most familiar with if you're really good at line art or props to you maybe it'll be a lot simpler and you won't have to do the extra things that I do for my rough sheets or my designs or even just my art uh at this point I try out different gradients and just do different designs and I even make the logo directly from the rough sheet uh there was like an empty space there that I thought would be really perfect for a logo but I didn't have a new logo so I designed one just right here and it's a very simple logo I I've had a couple of logos before and I think going too hard on the design has been a detriment to me since I'm a changeling and there's a lot of design elements that change from time to time and uh yeah I was like you know what what if I just go simple since the name is the only thing that I don't change as much I might as well just keep it simple and just have uh simple elements on it and so it's a very simple quick logo that was a hand written handwritten handmade I made the font by hand basically tracing over a sketch of a uh wording or like a calligraphy that I did I don't really know if that counts as calligraphy but uh my dumb brain was just like what if I just write everything by hand so a lot of the typography in this rap sheet um I think all of the typography and spreadsheet is by hand so uh around this point I was just like should I just finish it this way I was sort of putting all the design elements in one side and sort of deciding to just crop it down so that I could be finally done with the ref sheet but I did end up holding off on posting the ref sheet until the next day where uh I woke up and decided that I wanted to suffer and I added more elements to the Rashi and gave myself more of a headache I was just really tired of the ref sheet but my brain was just like you can make it better you can make it better and uh you know what I do think that the additional elements did make it better uh somewhat but it was just a lot more pain than it was worth uh which is just art sometimes uh and you know if you do want to uh add more elements and if you can't if you feel like you can do it then do it but um something simple like just the front view just like the one third of the left part of this rap sheet is good enough and like uh if you want to add like a back view or like additional details uh those are things that you should add afterwards if you still have um time and if you still have energy to do it that's sort of uh my method for measure if uh we should still keep going with the design uh but yeah apparently my uh perfectionism uh hit in this part and I was just like you know what if I make it more difficult on myself and what I did for these uh little boxes with the Expressions is I just sort of had a rough sketch and because I was a bit lazy I made it a lot more difficult on myself by just uh putting the colors in the back and merging it all together and just rendering it uh just on top which is like it works it's uh it works as a method for drawing but there's a lot of cleanup involved especially if you're like me and you're a very messy sketch artist so my my sketches are usually very rough and yet I still decide to do this method of rendering just because I guess and uh yeah I do try to layer a lot of the parts that I feel like I'm not quite set with yet but usually when I get too tired of switching between layers I just end up merging them together uh a very helpful thing that I did was this nice white outline that helped me um kind of make the art pop out more I don't know any other programs other than clip Studio that does this so that you can have the outline thing and uh it's quite convenient for a lot of designs that I do because uh I sort of want to see how it looks before I finish the thing so yeah just a lot of rendering at this point I'm really quite proud of myself for drawing hands in each of these uh different things so the front has hands the back pose has hands and also the little Expressions each have at least one hand no they all have one hand okay um and you know what as someone who usually avoids drawing hands I gotta give myself some kudos for actually drawing them but this time and yeah so this is the final ref sheet kind of sped through everything and it looked much faster than how long it actually took me I think it took me about three days and like different uh intervals I would not I did not spend entire an entire three days to finish it but I did spend most of those days actually just working on these rap sheets to the point where I was just going crazy I was just like why am I doing this to myself I could just as easily settle for what I already have but I pushed myself and I made something I'm really proud of and if you're thinking of making a rough sheet even if you're not the best artist in your own eyes um I feel like you should try it out just so you could um sort of have an improvement and you can test out drawing outfits uh you can test out designing you can test out graphic design if you do like little background things you can test out um color coordination and seeing what looks good and it looks not good okay that's our shoes and you can test out suffering as an artist and uh you know through that suffering or through the the trial and error of working on Art you will get better you will improve I think that uh working on a lot of ref sheets has slowly improved my um full body drawing skills it's a lot less scary for me to now draw full bodies than it was when I didn't do ref sheets before and I usually just drew Bust or like half bodies like I feel like feet are something that a lot of artists don't focus on practicing and I guess this is kind of going on a tangent now we're not talking about illustrations we're just talking about ref sheets in this video and even though it was sort of sped up I hope you did learn something from this video and I'm sorry that it's taken me so long to make it and that I didn't post a lot last month uh I've just been really busy with like moving out it's I spent like the majority of last month moving into the new place and settling in and being very um unused to my new surroundings and just sleeping very badly and just doing my best overall uh currently I'm working on an Etsy store but I don't know if I'm gonna stick with Etsy I might just make my own separate store and that's sort of what I've been working on and I do want to make more videos soon yeah I hope you like this public PNG that I did work on I didn't have time to finish a model yet and I do want to finish a model properly before the end of this month so that I can do some horror game streams I don't know who'd be interested in that but uh a lot of people have requested horror games in my previous streams when I was streaming on Twitch still thinking if I do still want to continue streaming on Twitch again uh twitch is a little oof right now but it's still a little more optimized for streaming but I don't know I guess uh we'll see there's a lot of things that are on my mind that I'm thinking of and just to not make this video any longer we're just going to end it here if you have any questions do ask them in the comments down below thank you so much for watching I hope you enjoyed the video and um thank you and thank you so much for supporting the channel and thank you so much for 12 000 right now we have 12 000 subscribers like that's so insane to me and I do want the channel to grow more but I am just a generally overwhelmed person and I'm working on so many things right now that it's a struggle for me to maintain a more consistent streaming and like video release schedule but I'm working on it and hopefully I get things sorted out soon when I have a bit more money saved up I'll do a giveaway to thank everyone for subscribing and supporting the channel uh I wanted to do a giveaway for so long but I just like been very financially unstable and I'm like I need to take commissions so I cannot get give away free art for the moment so I'm sorry about that but yes um maybe soon stay tuned if you're not subscribed subscribe why am I telling you this at the very end of the video like comment subscribe uh goodbye bye bye

Channel: kaeriruu

Views: 52,051

Keywords: vtuber, reference sheet, ref sheet, character, virtual youtuber, character design

Id: HYVBUtKeg8w

Length: 26min 39sec (1599 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 11 2022