HOW TO ACTUALLY START YOUR DREAM ART PROJECT

hey buddy it's love in Newtown and today I want to talk about one of the number one things that I think holds artists back from actually getting to do their creative projects almost every artist I know has at least one story that they really plan on telling eventually whether it be in an animation a comic anything like that but for whatever reason they find it really hard to actually start now this is something I've touched on a bit in past videos but I really felt like this is something that deserves its own video a lot of people comment whenever I talk about my comic that they have a comic that they want to make but they don't have the motivation or they can't figure out how to start so that is basically what this video is about the way to tell if you're in this stage is basically if you have an idea and it's really precious to you and there's a lot that you know about it but when you try to explain it or show parts of it to other people they have no idea what you're talking about if you find it hard to really explain the plot and you have more like sort of disjointed scenes in your head if you only have some of the characters designed this is basically when you need to start thinking more about organization this sounds kind of boring and in some ways it can be but it's also really motivating especially if you have lots of little bits and pieces that you've been working on to see it all in one place it'll may really make you realize how much work you've already put into this project and how much it deserves to be finished and really put out there in a real meaningful way where people can understand what you're going for so it's really not so bad basically the first thing you want to do is try to go through your files and find every single little piece of your idea that you have go through your sketchbook and try to take pictures probably with your phone if you can get a scanned elation of those sketches that would be great too but just any clear picture you can of almost everything that you've worked on for the project and get it all in a file on your computer it doesn't have to be sorted yet you just need it all in the same file and that will already help you a lot you do not want it lost throughout your computer that is something that I have had a lot of trouble with especially because a lot of my projects are sort of stewing in the back of my head for more than a year and that can make it really hard to track down for the project I'm using today I actually had to go through about two years of different files and two different computers to find everything once you have this sort of loose collection of everything that you've worked on it should be easier to tell what you're missing for me once I was looking at that file folder I realized that one of the characters needed to be redesigned I had never actually settled on any character design for her that I liked and there was another one that needed to be slightly reworked just because I felt like looking back at the old sketches that it didn't match the others as well so basically I needed one full redesign and one partial redesign as well as drawing the character I wasn't changing in the center of the two to make sure that the lineup still looked good so basically it's for your case just try to look at that whole collection of files that you have and try to figure out everything that you feel like is missing it should be relatively easy to tell anything that you feel confused about as you look at it or things that you sort of pictured would be in there but aren't in there are great things to start now if there's a lot of things feel free to make some kind of checklist I like to write things down in real life but there's also obviously a lot of checklist apps and things that you could use as well and just write down everything that you feel like you need to add before you can get started on your story and then start drawing that stuff it becomes a lot more easy to tackle once you have a visual guide on everything that you need to have left to do and you might be surprised at how little you actually have to change or modify because a lot of the times when you've been sort of clipping away at something like this you don't realize how much work you've done until you see it all together so it can be very motivating in that way as well if you don't have a group shot of your characters together especially your main characters I highly recommend you add that a lot of people don't think to do it and just have that all their characters designed separately but you'll be surprised how much you can miss things that are design problems if you don't have your characters together until you actually start because certain things like redundancies similar-looking characters or characters that just don't mesh well together or look good standing together can be a real issue when it comes to actually making like a comic or and and it's not going to show itself if you have them all on separate character sheets so definitely do a little group shot if you can that will certainly help alleviate some of those issues well every projects going to be different and need different things before you get started I can give you a rough to-do list that you should probably have prepared before you actually start any finalized work so that includes character sheets in relatively high detail of all your main characters including your main antagonist a lot of the times I forget to design my antagonist fully and that can be real issue um I also think you should have a group shot like I said you should have any environment did you plan on them going to in the first chapter or the first episode or whatever you're doing you should definitely design and if you can do like a little Sketchup model something loose that you can move around in 3d it's very easy to lose track of where everything is in 3d especially if you're right at the start of your project so I highly recommend trying to do that and last but not least you need some texts so we're talking about like a rough outline beginning middle and end of the entire story a rough outline of the full first chapter or episode and then probably more detailed scenes close the closer you get to actually execution so you'll want to have a relatively detailed script for this first thing that you're going to jump into and keep in mind all of the stuff that you plan to set up for the middle and the ending you definitely don't want it to feel like you're making stuff up as you go along if you're someone who prefers to plan out your stories visually you don't have to have a totally word-for-word script you can have something that just gets the rough idea of everything that you want to happen and then do the rest of your planning in storyboards animatics or thumbnails it's sort of whatever you are more comfortable with once you've filled up all the things if you feel like we're holes that you need to fill for your project to be really then it's time to organize everything this video is sponsored by Wix and non-points identity is also one of my favorite ways to deal with projects that have so many different types of media that we need to get together in one place so how I usually organize my project is I start by just picking out a simple template something that's going to be really easy to plug pictures into so I recommend picking out a template that's made for like a illustrator or a photographer ended up going with this one because it's really simple and it's really easy to customize because there's not too much stuff going on already the very next thing I wanted to do is go into the site menu and add a bunch of pages that were going to be the categories that I wanted to organize my project into so I made a whole bunch I renamed some I rename the about page to my elevator pitch because I thought that would be sort of an appropriate paragraph size for that and everything else I just made brand new pages for like the script the sketches and the character designs so here is where we're going to take that big file folder of all the stuff that you have related to this project and sort them out so get that folder on your computer and then go into the media manager inside of Wix and just grab everything that you want to be on the page that you're working on and just drag it in I'm working on the sketches and concepts page so I'm just basically taking anything that's like old concept work that I may not use anymore or that's like really rough like illustratively wise so that's kind of what I'm focusing on and I'm just taking all of those things out of that folder and taking it into this little window here and you can just drag and drop it I used to do this kind of sorting in my word processor on my computer and it was kind of a nightmare it's really hard to format images and text together in a word processor they just don't seem to be built for it which is why I started basically doing websites instead um it's kind of weird because I know it's not what a lot of people would think of doing right away but honestly it just makes it so much easier to format everything and with a website you can also put on like audio and video and stuff like that so basically any type of media you can add to your big project folder where you can't really do that with a Word document once you add them all to your page you can kind of just freely move them around however you want you can also get Wix to do this for you if you make a media gallery but I really like just dry dropping and resizing things however I see fit it's probably less professional-looking but it doesn't really need to be perfect because I'm mostly using this as a guide for myself plus there are those little dotted line guides around so I can make sure that things are at least relatively well aligned and there's also a little pink like snap guides as well so you can kind of see if everything's where it's supposed to be this is my early concepts page and sketches so anything that was kind of rough or had a design that I probably wasn't going to use any final draft I put right here and like I said you don't need to have a page for this you can make the pages whatever you think you need for your particular project but because I'm the type who sketches a lot and makes a lot of alterations I definitely needed a place to put all of these I changed the title up at the top just by clicking on it and decided to rename it to my actual stories working title rather than the name of some random illustrator and I messed around with some of the design elements basically you can just click on whatever you want and change the design there's like a little circle thing this thing that pops up and you can change the design in there I knew I wasn't going to make this like super fancy looking because I just really wanted to get my project organized but I couldn't help but mess with some of the design stuff just so that would like execute so next I just tackled the character design page again I just went into that same folder where I dumped everything related to this project and tried to select and drag in everything that was related to the character designs I studied to be a character designer so I ended up having a lot of different images related to specifically the character designs so I definitely needed a page just for that I'm a pretty image centric person so I ended up mostly putting just little descriptions and titles in the important images themselves which will show up when you click on them but if you're someone who likes to write a lot more I would recommend instead just pulling in the image and then also making text boxes so you can show right on the same page without clicking them everything that you want to say it's really up to you the white background was boring me so I clicked to change the page background which will just show up if you click on the background area and I pulled in an image of an old sketch that I had if one of the characters and I just messed around with the opacity and the color underneath it until it looked the way that I wanted I wanted to be sort of a warm color because I don't know I felt like more reddish Browns were a good sort of theme for this one I was lazy and just picked from the reddish-brown column of sort of suggested colors that they have in their menus I also found this really cute banner again I just clicked on it and a menu popped up so I could scroll around and find what I wanted I thought this little brown one was very cute and reminded me of like a box of Girl Scout cookies which is what this series is kind of making a lot of parody I guess reference to through a lot of the story so I decided to sort of go with that cookie color palette so now that I've done my more image focused pages I'm going to show you how to do more tech stuff in the script notes page basically just click on that little plus sign over in the edge that's how to add basically everything and then click text it's going to show you a bunch of options for different text boxes and headers and don't worry if you don't like the text like font or anything you can change that afterwards just drag out the box to how big you expect you're going to have to write to and just know that you can you know change the size if you end up for writing a lot more a lot less I decided to add a page for like a mood board and references and the only thing I had so far for that was a giant picture of my second favorite Girl Scout cookie and to finish this up I just ended up on the home page I added a video with a URL from YouTube and just sort of stretched that out to the right size it is my very first animatic for this project I'm going to probably update it as I continue to improve it because this one is crazy old but I just thought it would be a perfect thing to sort of have on the home page of this site because it's the closest to what the final product should look like so yeah I hope this video was helpful to you guys I hope that if you have a big project that you have planned that you really do try to make it become a reality because if not you then who you know I mean no one's going to write and draw it except for you so it's really important if you think that is special that you let it out into the world and give it a chance thank you so much for watching till the end check the link in the description to try out this technique for yourself and thank you so much to wax for sponsoring the video and I'll see you in the next one thank you to all of my patrons including Bella's story Blueboy kalimpong caramel TV clockwork construct Dionysus had journalist dr. casket Elizabeth album hope she'll some imagined creations JJJ Josef Coppola Carla Tapia Katie marigold curated it live live live left Meghan Claire midnight doodles mega dactyl Musa dear Rachel Nora Nielsen of Moray Olly Murs a warlock sergeant pendulums 20 and 2 the artsy moose Tyler your boy is T and Zooey Stardust [Music]

Channel: LavenderTowne

Views: 458,930

Keywords: art, drawing, how to, motivation, artists, organization, website, writing stories, drawing comics

Id: eSrhpEOcxeM

Length: 13min 49sec (829 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 19 2019