How to Create Creatures Without Reference

do you have trouble creating creatures without using reference at all today I'm going to introduce some techniques that I would do if you're in this situation where you want to create a creature like this from head to toe without any reference now I want to give a disclaimer and that is with my line of work and with anybody's line of work when we have to design characters and creatures for games and film we have to use reference because if we were going to invent something from our head we need to pull from imagery that we have already seen and that is collecting reference for months year or days months years whatever it takes to get the project done let's say that you want to come up with something so unique so out of left field that you're not looking at any photos at all and you just want to be able to use your imagination and have fun with it so I'll teach you how to do that and there's actually some easy ways in order to accomplish that you know if you want to do something mamalian okay like this or alien dinosaur is you know we could do that um or we can get stuff that's a little weirder you know maybe some plant-like creatures stuff that looks like rocks and lava or if we want to go completely insane and do something that is very scribbly like this okay something really weird like you you have no idea what what's going on half the time when you're drawing these things like this thing up here it looks like a spaceship but it looks like an exoskeleton mixed with coral I don't know I don't know what it is I still don't know what it is and I drew these three years ago so it is what it is but to add to the challenge today and add to the fun I'm going to be drawing with a ballpoint pen you see right here so if you're interested in the exact type of ballpoint pin it is the ultra round stick grip okay it's just a standard black ball point that you can pick up at your local CVS Walmart Target doesn't matter okay you can order these for pretty cheap you know I have some links right on my on my video so make sure that uh you know you check that out so you don't have to go searching in person for them we're going to be drawing right over here I got this nice little spot opened up that we can do this in and I'm going to show you some techniques so get your sketchbooks ready get your pins ready if you want to do this in pencil that's fine the reason I encourage for this particular lesson to do it in pen is because there is no turning back you are forced to lay down these markings and be happy with it which is going to train your brain into concepting instead of overcorrecting okay there's no erasers involved we're not going to spend hours and hours shading none of that all right so without further Ado let's get into some lessons now if you've seen my previous lessons you'll know that I encourage scribbling okay so I just made a little Mark here that you can see it looks like a little hair ball there's nothing to it it could literally be interpreted as anything it could be uh a dead flower it could be tumble weed a hairball you name it and I encourage this because it's going to free everybody's mind each one of us has a different set of markings that we like to to put on the paper when we draw because it's comfortable okay whether it's bubbly shapes whether it's spiky weird veiny shapes scales Rocky dirt textures whatever so when it comes to scribbling this kind of throws everybody's thought process and drawing something comfortable out the window and what this does is it opens up your mind to new shapes things that we probably normally wouldn't draw including myself so I will be the first to admit whenever I draw stuff I kind of go the insect route just because when I grew up I loved bugs I obsessed about them yes I was a nerd about that uh along with Dinosaurs so I mixed the two together hence why I draw creepy hairy alien bug stuff but I get most of my work because of the creepy hairy alien bug stuff so whatever your specialty is you know Embrace that but what I'm doing here is I'm just throwing some some different markings together all right you don't have to worry about an eraser you don't have to worry about correcting anything you're putting down that's the other thing when you're drawing in a Sketchbook remember that your Sketchbook is your own Journey it's your own exploration diary I guess you can call it I think one of the things that I struggled with growing up was that everything that I put down on paper I I ended up trying to draw it for somebody else to approve of it versus me achieving a certain level of artistic uh or Artistry okay so instead of me wanting to get better I was as drawing to try to be cool and the thing is when I say that your sketchbooks are a diary it literally is that nobody has to approve of anything that you put in your Sketchbook okay because if you have a 100 page Sketchbook and you start on page one what you're going to end up with on page 100 is probably going to be better than page one and if that's the case then you have achieved more than most people ever will when they draw a Sketchbook okay and this is why I encourage all my students to date all of their work you know it's fun to see progress we all want to see progress we go to the gym we don't see a six-pack right away 3 weeks later we start seeing our ABS it it's like that okay but the initial stages of like starting out it's pretty tough okay so like yes I I've been drawing for years I've been studying animals and everything but what are you going to what am I going to do if I I'm throwing all that away and I'm just trying to invent something that I've never drawn before all right let's get into it so I have a bunch of weird shapes here I don't even know if I'm happy with those okay but that's that's not the point it's okay to not be happy about your drawings this isn't this isn't going to set my mood for the rest of the day what it is going to do is give me some idea on what I can put in this empty space right here all right so let's let's give a hypothetical scenario let's say that some of you are sitting in a cafe right now your phone is in your pocket there's no animals in sight no insects and you have absolutely no idea where to start drawing a creature so you start obsessing about movies you've seen or your pet or something that is around you be like I don't know where to start I have no idea just start throwing lines down okay you got a pen all right let's let's do it lightly I'm just going to start throwing large shapes first why large not small large large because we are going to take care of the body the main silhouette you start large when you're inventing from the fly and then you move in to like the tertiary details instead of starting with the tertiary details and then trying to go wide because whatever you put down first is going to dictate where everything is if you get the whole silhouette of the creatures body in first it's easier to work your way in because you know where not to expand anymore versus if you start off small you don't know where to stop so you just keep going on a drawing and then you end up hating it so this way it gives you some boundary all right this is why in game design when we do concept art characters and creatures and armor whatever you're drawing it's good to have the a strong silhouette first cuz then you can move in to the minute details okay so once we have this I I'm immediately starting to see it's almost like a sea urchin and I didn't I wasn't thinking of a sea urchin I'm just now realizing that and then I'm seeing some crisscrossing patterns here it looks it looks kind of like ribbing so that's kind of cool I I I kind of like that all right let's see where this goes I'm going to push just a little harder so you can see some of these lines on camera that's cool and then I have this like bubbly shape here it's it's an oval I I encourage you to check out my previous lesson uh earlier this mon I believe it was um what the end of March maybe the beginning of April where I was teaching you how to draw a creature using basic spheres it's kind of like the same thing it takes care of the large shape and I encourage you to do that too it's not just about scribbling shapes down that that are Jagged you know do some roundness okay do some ellipses um make sure you're drawing with your shoulder and not your wrist or your your elbow okay now that we got that in there looks kind of cool uh I'm going to start throwing some other shapes together cuz I'm starting to see these sharp areas down here at the bottom okay so again I have no animal in mind I did mention the sea urchin before but it's clearly not a sea urin all right I like that these spiky bits down at the bottom are actually pretty intriguing and that's not the it doesn't mean that this is a deadly creature cuz there are plenty of animals on Earth where they look deadly but they're actually pretty friendly and plants too I mean that's the other thing about creature design is is plants and creatures kind of go hand inand especially if it's on some strange Alien Planet like you there's some weird weird plants out there you got dragon fruit you got stuff from all kinds of countries just looks weird okay now all the stuff in the middle that I drew I was just kind of rounding some areas off I don't know what those can be but I'm starting large remember any kind of new area that I'm drawing in I will start large and work my way small so I I'm getting a comfortable movement in here with my shoulder and how these these ovals are just appearing so so what it looks like now is almost a mixture of something from the sea and an acorn and a jellyfish actually so something aquatic that's kind of cool maybe I'll add tentacles later I don't know that's the that's one of the cool things about drawing tentacles you don't need reference for that you don't you just draw slithering snake likee shapes and you have a tentacle now if you want to do something like an octopus where it has suckers or something like a jellyfish where it's just stringy but you need to know how long each section is yeah looking at reference will definitely help but again if you've made it this far congratulations you still haven't looked at any pictures of any creatures or whatsoever all right and and now if if you're wondering what I'm doing right the second I'm just kind of floating my pen over certain areas just to see what sticks like what what looks good with what shape okay so the other thing I just noticed I did and I did not mean to do it was that there seems to be a hump right here and I I like that and it's also not completely symmetrical so it looks like the back end of this creature is is more bulbous it's fatter than the front part so the the these round shapes I guess you can call them air sacks they're a little smaller in the front I kind of like that so I think I'm going to go with it maybe this is the back and maybe it's because I I drew this tilted so maybe it's moving in this direction okay so that that's good that uh another thing that I forgot to mention is whenever you have a sheet of sketches even if it's thumbnails even if they are thumbnails and even if it's in like the dirty cruddy stage of design it's always good to add some energy to your sketch Pages because believe it or not when you have a portfolio and you're trying to show it to a company they tend to look at your thumbnails way more than your final polished pieces and if your thumbnails don't have any energy to them you don't have anything to bring over from your your sketch stage over to the final stage have you ever notice that like you'll have a really goodlooking sketch but yet when you start to do a finalized colored version of it it gets completely stiff and you lose the energy of it that's what happens this is why this stage is so important you need to capture the movement and if that means showing weight distribution of your creature slightly leaning to the side slightly leaning to one leg you know study how people lean on on their foot when they're waiting at a bus stop just look at them outside of your window when you're driving we all have that that main pivot leg that we turn with and we all have that leg that we uh put all of our weight on when we're just kind of chilling cuz everybody looks at their phone now you you'll see it everywhere okay so what I'm doing now is I'm I'm tilting the pen slightly to the side so again we're not drawing with a pencil okay so we don't have the luxury of correcting what we put down and that's part of the fun about drawing with a pen okay um I'm going over some areas that I actually really like with a with a very very light touch with the pen and it kind of it it Shades well you know the markings that you put down with a ballpoint pen you can't you can't get this anywhere else with any other tool none of the the liquid pens you could probably get it with a micron but I I will say that Micron pens are much better for doing comic inking than they are for drawing you could do some mechanical drawings with the Micron but if you want something totally freeing where you can get good line weight do it with a do it with a ball Point once we get these light markings down and we're starting to like the shape that we're making we can start to look at little areas that are still open and maybe add some really cool things in here so I want to keep the theme of these round shapes going so what if I just make some smaller ones and they're not all the same size and they're just kind of filling the gaps of these Open Spaces all right so that looks kind of cool it's almost like the the top of this creature is going to have some kind of a weird um exos skeleton but it's still it's not an insect it doesn't swim we don't know if it floats we don't know what this is and that's great that's that's the mission for today's lesson all right so I'm just going to fill in some different areas whenever you sketch with a pen take advantage of how dark you can actually get these things right on the Fly okay this is one of the one of the many advantages of drawing with a ball point is that you can go from dark to light instantly and you don't have to sharpen anything it's awesome all right so I'm keeping things relatively light as I move up this strange shape it it probably could be the head but I'm not sure yet the reason I'm keeping it light is because the shapes are getting they're large up here and I don't know if I want to maybe put some more details on there later it's kind of like a I I'm just laying the foundation for what could exist at a later time but I'm going to make some of these round shapes bleed down into the body here and keep those different uh different sizes and then all of a sudden maybe down here at the belly I'll just make it bigger as it wraps down underneath I'm I'm saying belly because I now I'm starting to get a picture of what this can actually look like I guess down here by the legs I guess you can cut I'm you know I don't know if those are legs but maybe this opens and closes and maybe it's like maybe it puffs out air and it shoots forward who knows this is pretty cool I'm I'm I'm pretty hard on myself whenever I invent creatures on the fly if I'm not looking at reference and I have to say I'm actually pretty happy with this usually I'm I'm just very very hard on myself um man back in the day when I was trying to get in the industry I would I would start drawing stuff and if I wasn't happy in the first 10 seconds I would just close the SketchBook open it back up maybe a day later and then try to draw something else wasn't happy about that and then I just wasted two sheets of paper in in my Sketchbook without with no progress you know I had to stop that crap like it was it wasn't good but we all have to go through it part of it's just maturity too so I had to mature as a designer your mind will calm it really will but it at the same time one way to calm your mind is to just draw just don't care about what happens there we go now we're starting to see a pretty gnarly looking thing those of you that are watching right now maybe you're drawing along with me or you just seeing what is about to happen I would love to hear in the comments what you would actually call this thing I don't know that's the fun part right so I'm I'm pretty happy with where these large scale shapes are so what I'm going to do now is do a little trick I like to to do with adding depth without shading and that is any kind of surface or hole where there's no light coming in I'll just make it dark usually when scale shapes dirt rocks they all meet each other in a corner I like to put little dark spots in there that kind of follow the shape so it looks like there's a deep inset crevice it gives depth without without having to worry too much about shading to show the depth all right again we're using a ball point so there's there's not really going to be any shading to this but instead I'm keeping my hand grip very very light on this pen okay you notice like I don't have to worry about smearing this pen nearly as much as I do smearing a pencil okay so I can I can rub my palm across here but but again in the 90% of my lessons I draw with a pencil and I always tell people keep your keep this part off of the page this is the killer when it comes to smearing your graphite it always happens because we're always rubbing this across there so keep your pinky up left hand right hand doesn't matter and this way it'll help train you how to keep things light and and moving okay so now what I'm doing is I these large bulbous shapes that are are poking up here I think what I'll do is show them on the other side very lightly so it's going to wrap around this side remember in the front of this creature they're not going to be as big so maybe just a hint but what I have to do now to show depth is that this head piece I'm going to call it the headpiece cuz I don't know what else to call it I'm going to put a nice outline here so I'm just going to kind of feather in very lightly line or I'm sorry uh light to dark lines all right give a nice little ink outline here you'll seen in my previous lessons that I'll go light to dark really quickly or dark to light or light dark to light okay so anytime I get a new shape in here I'll I'll usually go dark to light fade the line off and then I'll start dark again when the uh shape changes okay but I'm keeping things very loose I'm I'm staying committed to my move movements that's the other thing that are going that's going to help you guys and girls draw is that stay committed to your pencil stroke or your pen stroke a lot of times what we'll do is we'll just kind of we'll get obsessed about a certain area and we'll do what's called hair marks we'll just kind of draw over correct draw over correct draw over correct and there's no smooth looking there's no smoothness to your line work and if you want to truly open your your mind up and draw something without thinking too hard you got to just commit to the whole thing and this is where the you know the fear of Letting Go really comes in but I encourage you guys to again treat your sketches as if you're not going to be showing anybody else for approval there I'm not doing this for validation anymore okay when I was younger I drew yeah I drew because I loved it that was like 99% but I also wanted to be validated like I wanted I wanted to know if I was good and it's hard when nobody tells you you're good so you you question like should I keep doing this I don't know if it's working I don't get a lot of likes like I I don't understand and let me just tell you stay with your journey okay those of you that are drawing along with me right now and you don't you don't think you're good and nobody says you're good and and like you don't you feel like you're not getting the proper training I understand that I understand the frustration you just have to put in the Mage because at the end of the day I could be telling you one thing here on YouTube you could be looking at five six other channels on how to draw you can have a teacher and like your physical Presence at a school teaching you how to draw everybody's Viewpoint is different you're not going to get good unless you just sit down and draw okay you have to learn these movements yourself because no teacher is going to know how your brain operates or your mechanical movements with your arm all right you just have to draw and I think a lot of times when when students want to learn how to be really really good at Art quickly they think there's some Surefire blueprint way to do it like I want to know what to do in Step a I want to KN know what want to do in uh I'm not cutting that out I want to know what to do in Step B and C and it just doesn't work like that you're not going to get Surefire answers that are going to give you top-notch results every single time you just have to draw and you have to suck most of the time I know I it's harsh to hear but you you know you do okay so what I'm going to do now with the and this is different with a pen is that these open areas I'm going to keep super light but the pen offers a nice outline so I'm going to keep my pen going at the same shape as that bulb like it looks like an egg now okay I'm going to do that oh this is so weird looking okay and then I'm going to keep these asymmetrical so they're not going to be perfectly going across here I don't know what the heck is happening guys I don't know what's going on here but I kind of like it those of you that think you kind of know what I'm drawing I would love to hear an idea you know maybe this is something from uh I don't know another galaxy maybe it's like a maybe it's bacteria that we don't know about yet maybe it's from Mars who knows all right there we go we're on the cusp of finding alien life too we're very very very close and I think once we find alien life it's going to change the fundamentals of humanity forever into what we think is going on out there cuz I think a lot of people or are scared to admit that it could exist so they just make excuses for when we discover new things that happens all the time it's like uh yeah you want to call it Clos mindedness but it's like there they're there's going to be a time when you're going to look at stuff and you go yeah I can't deny that now there's actually people out there that believe dinosaurs are fake it's like yeah okay I'm not even going to get into that argument but anyway um now this is really starting to come together and actually it's kind of cool I like it uh still not ready to shade yet but I'm I'm looking at these Shades I'm going to turn this a little bit just so I can look at it cuz I'm drawing with a Sketchbook tilted and I I guess you guys can see it yeah okay kind of looks like a fruit too right some some of the best tasting fruits in the world are scary looking like I mentioned before dragon fruit it just it looks like something Green Goblin would throw at you and it explodes like it's so weird looking kind of like a bitter taste too okay oh another thing that I'm going to do is uh with a pen or pencil whenever you have the light source shining down on the object and you don't want to shade the shadow just be sure to darken the underbelly part so that you can indicate where the shadow could exist underneath and I think I'm going to do that throughout this entire bottom portion of the creature how I'm actually putting the darkness down for the shadow I'm just trying to look at shapes where there's a definitive line I'm going dark to light I'm using these short movements okay these short bursts with the pen it's a little different so you got to be more strategic okay remember once it's down it is down this is going to give you a really good look to your pen drawings it's going to give a nice outline now the other thing to add depth without shading so much is that anything closest to us just give us slightly darker treatment to the outline of it and then you want to fade that off into the background so I I had mentioned in my one of my previous lessons about how outlining isn't good if you want realistic drawings that no it doesn't mean the outlining is horrible and there's nothing wrong with cartoons or anything like that I'm talking about just adding realistic depth to your drawings okay you want to fade that off you want to show some darkness in the front some lighter drawings in and you know the background just so it it looks like there's a depth of field without having to worry too much about details all right so move this over here so these shapes are obviously in the front versus the other bulbous shapes in the back so that's going to get a slightly darker treatment here okay and I'm just I'm walking over some gestal lines these extra lines that I put down as I draw they're more of a guide for me than they are ual functional markings that I need to put down in order to show skin wrinkles scales fur spikes Etc I don't need to do it but it helps me because let's face it when you're drawing with a pen texturing is different than it is with a pencil graphite spreads much farther on paper than ink so that means that texturing is easier with a pencil you can it more space gets taken up more space gets taken up the Tex string is larger and your l sight therefore it looks more finished all right okay so once I do that I'm just going to keep those light in the back I'm not really going to add any Darkness back there per se except for maybe this area where two of the bulbous shapes encircling the back of this creature there's probably no light getting into that spot down there okay and I just want you to be able to see it all right so once we got that we got to finish these two see how I jump around it's okay to jump around no I'm not I'm not going to sing Jump Around okay I'm not going to do that I know you guys know what song I'm talking about but that would be so incredibly corny if I did that on YouTube I'm not going to do it now I can't get the song out of my head oh man okay anyway now that we have that um I actually am going to put a little bit of shading in now and areas where I know that there's a big transition almost like a trench happening and that is right in between here so how would I shade with a pencil all right now before I do this those of you that have been following along with me and you're drawing something that You' have never drawn before and you haven't looked any reference congratulations you you are already on your way of inventing something on the fly without looking at anything now once we're finished with this drawing we can obviously go into Google and just look at real animals and go oh that's wrong that joint's wrong that that doesn't look like anything blah blah blah blah blah and overcorrected yes we could do that but just to be able to come up with something you know it it's open to interpretation which is the fun part about thumbnailing it's the fun part about character design and creature design like you don't know what it is you don't know what it could be for whatever all right um I'm going to tilt my pen to the side here if you have problems at the end of your ball points with blotches of ink that maybe collect at the end of it then you should do two things one wipe it away so just take your pen off to the side turn it and then it gets a it gets the blotch off of it or the blob of ink two buy new pens quit drawing with the same crappy pen that you've been doing for like six months just go get a new pen these are not expensive at all I think you could buy a whole 12pack of Bick for maybe $10 $8 on Amazon I don't know all right turn it slightly to the side now the way I'm holding a pen is a little different than a pencil because that is such a smaller surface area to work with when you shade so you need to hold it closer to the tip and I'm just going to lean it to the side and lightly push and I'm going to hatch my shading okay now I'm not cross-hatching cuz there's nothing Crossing those lines I'm single hatching sometimes I like walking them so I'll I'll do little bursts like this real real Fine Lines uh lightly drawn my palm is resting on the page like this I just turn my fingers down I just kind of walk it as if I'm drawing hair and I keep The Strokes close together okay and then guess what I'm going to turn my page and I'm going to do the same thing now I'm cross-hatching but you start with a single hatching but each time I'm moving up the area I'm going to press lighter and lighter um now you could treat it like a pencil and just kind of stagger them like this and not not letting go of your pen off of the paper you could do that you got to be careful because you will get strokes that are different with a pen than you do with a pencil it's not going to bleed into the other stroke as easily as it does with a pencil graphite upon graphite it it tends to look way better when it's when it's like mixed together tightly with a pen you probably need a lot more passes okay because it's going to look like cross-hatching even if you do six or seven passes like with the graphite or with a pencil it's going to fill the area much easier so I'm just going to show you what you can do here I'm tilting the pen far enough to where the ball point is barely touching the paper and what that means is there's a point where you start to shade with a pen even if you tilt it to the side where it doesn't feel like the ball is actually touching the paper anymore the ink part and there's barely any ink coming out that's actually a good thing because that's going to enable you to sketch lightly so if you look at my drawing up here okay there's there's some areas in here on the skin where I just kind of overlapped I just made some Jagged shapes very lightly and as I crisscrossed and I did some some random patterns it Formed its own texture but it was so light cuz I turned it to the side that you know it kind of took care of the shading for me all right so once I'm over here all right man this thing is looking gnarly I'm going to start to put some very light markings in those little crevices here the great thing well yeah it's great but also the beautiful thing about drawing with a pen is that each single line that you put down is so visible there there's no there's no iffy areas really when you draw with a pen like every single marking has a purpose and that's what you want to remember when you're drawing when you're finalizing a drawing okay when you're coming up with something on the fly like nothing has a purpose yet except for starting with the silhouette remember when we first started this drawing we're just like I don't know where it's going to go but we got to do the body first that's like the only real part where you just you shouldn't care about how it ends up now that I'm doing this um there actually is going to be a core shadow running on the outside here and the way I can achieve that with a pen is just just like running my pen across the edge of it just make sure that you acknowledge the each individual shape that you're putting the shading on top of just so it looks more realistic than just putting a straight line across rounded shapes then it doesn't look good CU you know when a when a shadow hits an egg or hits an orange or something round it's going to follow the roundness okay that's why core Shadows on spheres are so hard to draw there we go I'm really excited to to announce that um I'm currently working on a foundation drawing series that you can actually purchase um you know I'm going to have my my Shopify open soon um the links will be right in my YouTube you Channel where you can purchase individual lessons on how to draw cubes cone cylinders and spheres see in- depth on how I shade those realistically to the point where they look like they're coming off the page and also how to map the Shadows to them if you're going to shine up you know a light on them so everything that I taught in Foundation School uh I'm going to pour all my knowledge into it I'm going to create my own silabus so you can follow along at your own pace um I also encourage you to and encourage you to not only subscribe to my channel if you're new to it but uh join our Discord our creature design Workshop Discord the link is in the description it's free to join um I'm I'm also starting up my May creature design Workshop okay it's going to run four weeks I have a website for that if you want to sign up uh again all the info is also in our Discord it's it's bustling people are entering the Discord every single day we probably get like two three dozen people joining per day and it's just growing it just keeps growing it's just great Word of Mouth More videos I post um it's awesome and I encourage you guys to you know put the link out to my Discord in places that I don't know of you know places that maybe you're that you're a member of and you think people can benefit from learning not just how to draw creatures but just to draw in general okay that's why we're here we're learning how to draw creatures but we're also learning how to dra draw okay and we have a a personal work Channel where people just post their Doodles every day no nobody's there to judge anybody there's awesome feedback like it's it's a it's a fun community so I encourage you guys to join the Discord all right now that we have darkened this area this is like the main area of focus uh the possibilities are endless with this thing maybe it squeez I'm I'm thinking I don't know what it's called but it's it's when you need to add oxygen to a fire in a fireplace and you kind of just blow the air into it whatever that technical name is somebody please mention it in the comments um air blower I don't know fire blow I don't know but uh it's pretty cool it kind of reminds me that maybe it floats like that maybe maybe this thing floats in the atmosphere that's cool okay so I took a little break there and as I was looking at my sketch I realized that there's some really cool opportunities for these strange SL horizontal slashes to actually expand and contract so maybe it breathes that way maybe these are air sacks and it actually does float it's a floating creature I think that'd be kind of cool so in that case I think what I'll do is maybe darken these lines right here in the front and only the outermost crest of the of the round part and maybe they open that way but we really can't see it open it just it's like an implied function so I'm just going to put a darker line there and so what am I doing and and why am I drawing like this you'll notice my hand moving the way it is when it comes to tertiary details this is what I consider a tertiary detail it's it's smaller I can concentrate on a smaller area I've already put in I've already done the heavy lifting okay we got the big silhouette here we got the secondary details which are like these weird movable Spike things and then we have the tertiary details starting out and that is the smaller scales actually you know these larger scales in the head probably could be uh secondary details because they're not they're not super small but they're also not the biggest okay so here I'm just going to I'm I have to pay attention to the roundness of these shapes okay remember they're they're asymmetrical so as it's as it's wrapping around this shape you this is where real comes in I need to Define for myself where that ends so I'm going to end that round shape here so that I know where that wraps around and when it comes to creature design especially if you're doing it for a client and and it'll eventually get modeled the modeling department needs to have a clear design on what your intention is okay cuz remember the modeling Department they're not the concept artist they're just modeling what you concepted so the clearer you are with your design the easier it is for them to model through my years of experience I've I've made mistakes before where I kind of left places ambiguous because I thought well I mean the thing is going to be modeled they could just like finish it and it's not fair to the modeler to do that now yeah sometimes modelers will they can draw too and they're they're good at concepting but you can never just jump into a situation and assume that they'll do that cuz that's not their job okay I'm not really trying to go on a side tangent here I'm trying to help you those of you that maybe are like starting off in the industry or you you don't really have strong Concepts the stronger the concept the more clear it is the the the better chances you have of actually doing More Concept work okay Clarity is key in our in our industry Okay so again the outermost edge here the over here is where we're going to see that Darkness but it's not going to be as dark as the the darker slits here why depth remember we don't have a pencil okay so I can't just shade in atmospheric perspective and mist and you know heat waves or whatever I got a pen to my disposal I have line weight and I have line quality which has been a previous lesson this month also so I encourage you to go back and look at my line weight line quality lessons um sketching things with spheres cones cylinders and cubes okay it all ties together once we get these foundations once we get the foundation of drawing down and we're getting better and better at it I'm this isn't this isn't like pulling your chain or anything you can draw anything in the world anything okay Rockets uh I don't know people plants anything okay the outer part I'm pretty happy with I don't need to do anything over there but what I do need to do is figure out where I want to spend time putting in some actual details and whenever we draw a creature so we invented this from the fly this doesn't look like anything that I can think of there are some things on the planet on planet Earth that it kind of resembles you know know like fruit Strange Fruit strange bacteria uh larvae like I I don't know but that's the fun part that's why I'm doing the lesson today um when we draw creatures we need to have a focal point okay and I have mentioned this before where we have What's called the Sea of sameness and that is from head to toe everything has the same exact amount of detail it's overpowering it punches Us in the face for the wrong reasons and we don't have a focal point so if you're drawing along with me and you're trying to determine okay what is the selling point of the creature that I'm making is it just some random thing that can kill you is it you know does it all look awesome you want to put details everywhere cuz you want to show everything off that's not the point there there's power in what we don't know about something and there's even more power and look at that particular creature and going ah the focus is on the horns in the front or the teeth that is the selling point all right so we need to think about the selling point and I think now that I'm looking at this the selling point is actually these slits and I and that was not the intention this see guys this is the fun part like we're all on this journey together all right so whatever you're drawing right now look down at it and go if I were to put this in a movie what would make it a character or if I were to put this in a game why would it exist in the game am I just drawing something random or does this thing actually have a real function in a real environment that's what you need to think of so as I'm drawing these little slits I think what I'll do is maybe put like a I guess you can call it a chamfer those of you that don't know what a chamfer is it's you see them on cars a lot especially hard-edged cars you see a little instead of having something super hard on the edge you have like a little relief little light catcher it's like a little part of the material that flattens off before it goes down to a new Surface that's like layman's terms of what a champer is all right plus chamfer is just it's fun to say chamfer all right once I have that now I could start thinking of H what's going to happen in between here and the skin well I actually have these secondary details of the scales why not just put really small little circles in here that kind of it ties in all of these bulbous shapes together so it's almost like there are scales in here and that's its skin so maybe it's kind of like the creature's glue I don't know think think about a turtle shell you know like the shells actually are attached to the turtle you can't just take a turtle out of the shell the ribs are attached to the the shell so maybe you can't take these smaller things off so you notice that there's a size differential to show the realism of this thing look how large these shapes are in the very top maybe this actually opens up too in the top that would be really creepy but also cool at the same time okay but maybe they start off large and then they get medium and then they get smaller and smaller and smaller and then as they open up to bigger areas maybe on the underbelly they're going to get large again so I'm just going to start putting in some circles ellipses ovals whatever you want to call them just kind of walking them down the the cracks there I'm not going to worry about these places because quite frankly you can't see that where in perspective the round shapes are going around the creature so you won't be able to see these individual spaces in between but it again we're implying that those that these areas exist on the other parts that's why you have to have a focal point if you have a focal point that explains the majority of the creatures like details or function you don't need to prove to anyone that the other parts have a function we know that okay it's kind of like I'm trying to use an anal not really analogy but another example it's kind of like uh character concept artists if they're just starting out and they put in figure drawing drawing in their portfolios don't do that just draw characters because if your characters look good the art directors are going to know that your Anatomy is good you don't need to prove that you have Anatomy skills by drawing stuff from anatomy class it's kind of like the same thing okay we know what's happening around the other side all right there we go and again I'm just kind of walking some scribbles over just to see what happens now uh again I have to be solid with my design here so if these flaps or little slits open then we need maybe kind of like a membrane at the end of it or some kind of indication that the end of those lines attached to those scales somewhere maybe the scales are the actual skin I'm going to put some more ink in here just kind of round this off you can consider this a core Shadow okay again I'm going to be I'm going to be explaining this in my Foundation series coming out soon core Shadow is essentially if you know on a round object if the light is hitting the round object the core Shadow is where the least amount of light is touching the object before it starts to bend around the other side of it that's the easiest way to explain it everything has a core Shadow your arm has a core Shadow your lips sticks you know animals they all have it there we go I'm just starting to round this stuff off off again with a pen I love just walking over these lines you can see a combination of different types of lines in here very very very faint light gestural lines some secondary darker lines like this and some more harsh lines maybe where the least amount of light is touching and you can layer these with a pen just walk them over again just commit to the shape guys just commit to it and it'll be easier that way there we go now that we're starting to have these cool markings in here you could look at this sketch and go hey guess what I'm done I don't need to draw anything else but let's put some finishing touches on this and if you followed along with me so far drawing what I'm drawing or maybe drawing your own version of it congratulations I mean like you're already a a a better designer than you were when you started out okay now I'm just kind of separating some areas that were ambiguous that didn't really look like they were attached to anything I'm just adding in some darker lines here where they may exist so we'll see yeah like under here where I kind of forgot there we go and also the these sharp shapes um I need to figure out okay uh it looks like some of them are attached to the bulbous shapes and some of them are not that's okay this is more of an asymmetrical random creature so maybe this thing didn't evolve the way we thought it should I'm going to put some edges on here and it could also be like these are are nails but they're not used to hurt you they're just used to crawl so maybe this thing does float in the air however when it lands on surfaces like rocks or whatever maybe it needs it in order to crawl so that'd be that'd be kind of cool and then what I'm going to do is I'm just going to add some some little details here to kind of bring out these areas maybe I'll put in a shape or a line that actually goes down vertically on these to really add some texture to it that'd be kind of cool actually so if if you have a name for this thing of what it is or what kind of species it could be what planet it's from I would love to hear it I love hearing creativity and in the comments some of you name my creatures really funny stuff usually the more outlandish something looks the the more simpler the name like Joe or Nancy it's kind of like dudes that are huge you know like gigantic football players and their name tiny you know that kind of stuff here we go all right I'm kind of proud of myself I didn't put any spikes on anything no bumpy like no spiky alien stuff everything's down here and I'm going to hold myself to that I'm not going to add anything else all right so hopefully you like today's lesson again uh you know rewatch it and and watch my other lessons where I go over the Simplicity of of sketching these things um join our Discord just look at the link in the description uh signups for my creature design Workshop are going on right now you can find it through the Discord and there's actual separ separate link through the the um the description thanks for tuning in everybody and uh can't wait to do my next lesson so thanks for sticking around later

Channel: Draw Sessions

Views: 91,086

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

Id: QdDSyGRvYGw

Length: 51min 20sec (3080 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 27 2024