How To Draw A Stylized Cartoon Face • Digital Art Tutorial

drawing a stylized cartoon face is easier than you think and i'm going to show you exactly how you can do it no matter your skill level hey loan full people it's genevieve and my goal here on this channel is to teach you all about illustration and design so if you're new make sure to subscribe so you don't miss any of the weekly videos and so that you can join our wonderful creative community and with that said grab your drawing tools and let's get started [Music] now i know this might seem a little bit intimidating but trust me if you're able to draw something like this for the guides then you're able to draw the whole face so we're going to do it step by step don't worry at all we can follow along together it's going to be just fine and i'm going to be working in an app on the ipad pro called procreate but you can follow along with any digital art software that you have as long as you have layers and blending modes you're totally okay now one thing that you might want to do first is to set your canvas size so depending on the project you're working on you might want to pick different dimensions these are the dimensions i will be using for this demo it's just the size of my hybrid screen but make sure you find something that works for your own project requirements and if you're not exactly sure how to pick a canvas size i have a video in which i teach you everything you need to know in order to make a decision so i'll link that in description below now one thing that people often ask me as well is how to have the little image on the top it's simply when you go in the range icon menu in the canvas option you get to activate the reference and within the reference you can import an image and set that as your reference image so i will link as well in description below my little character illustration so you can use it as a reference if you want otherwise you know you can definitely just follow with the video and use the video as the reference here you might want to set your background to something else than white i'm going to go with a grayish purple but anything that is kind of gray not too colorful is going to really help you see the contrast better in your piece which is really nice because there is a lot going on in this piece it's not necessarily complicated but there is a lot and if you want to use the exact same colors as i am using throughout this tutorial you can download my color palette it is linked description below it's totally free but as usual i highly recommend you try and pick your own colors because that's good practice for when you create your own illustrations okay so with the background set we're going to start with a super super basic sketch for the guides and for the sketch you can really use any color of your choice at least for the guides you can use any color of your choice i'm going to go with just a neutral gray and we're going to create a new layer that we're going to rename two guides and in this video i'm always going to be suggesting two different brushes one is going to be a free brush that comes with procreate and it's going to allow you to follow along really just fine seriously this video is really really not about the brushes the brushes don't matter at all here but the other option is going to be a brush from my ultimate illustration bundle so these are the brushes that i use every day when i draw children's books they're again not essential but they might help you save some time and get more professional results although honestly in this video i'm probably going to be using just one brush so really doesn't matter here if you're using the free brushes that come with procreate you can pick in the sketching panel the hb pencil it would be a really great brush to sketch or if you have the illustration bundle go ahead and pick the sketching brush of course we're simply going to start by drawing a circle if you're working in procreate you can draw a rough circle hold your pencil on screen and then tap on with a secondary finger which is going to create a perfect circle like this once you have your circle you can draw a rough vertical line pretty much in the middle doesn't have to be super precise and then place a guide for the bottom of the chin now you can really place this guide wherever you want if you have a longer face your character is probably going to look older and if you have a shorter face your character is going to look younger and cuter that's kind of a general guide but basically you can put the chin wherever you want so once you have your guide for the shin all you have to do is connect this bottom part to the circle which is going to create the cheeks and the gel and at this stage it's really okay if you have a bunch of messy lines that's part of sketching don't worry about the eraser right now just draw a bunch of lines and later we're going to refine the sketch once you have your jaw you're going to draw a horizontal line that intersects with the section where the jaw meets the circle so kind of like that and then you're going to draw a rough vertical lines for the neck so here the neck you can really have a thin one which is going to make your character look super cartoony or a thicker one which is going to make your character look maybe a little bit more realistic you can also sketch shoulders if you want so just two slightly slanted lines like that and if you've watched my other cartoon face video which is much more cartoony than this we're basically going to use very similar guides for the face so it's really not more complicated than the other cartoon face we're just gonna add more details so go ahead and draw a horizontal line that touched the bottom of your circle and then the other horizontal line between the two that you already have so you should have three like this right now once you have your three lines you're going to draw the general marks of where the eyes are going to be so that's going to be on the top line you can have big eyes small eyes that's really up to you i like to just mark the corners first because that way i can make sure that they're roughly in the right position before going in with the actual eye shape and again here don't worry about making it pretty it's okay if you have a bunch of lines and everything looks super messy that's totally okay for now so once you have your eyes you can use the inner corner of the eyes as the guide for the nose so the nose is going to be on the middle horizontal line so you can just kind of use that as a reference and i like to draw the nose in very simple shapes so one is going to be a small circle pretty much in the middle of the face like this and then you can draw two slightly curved line on the edges for the side of the nose right now the nose looks absolutely crazy but don't worry about it we're going to make it look good later but that's just basic guides you can also draw a line from the middle of the eyes down to the bottom horizontal line and that's going to help you place the corners of the mouth again those are really rough guides but super helpful for you know when you're just trying to draw a face from nothing and you can really draw any kind of ear you want i like to have super round fairly big ears and a tip here for where to place them on the head the part that connects with the jaw is going to be aligned with the top and middle horizontal line you can also draw lines that start from the corner of the nose and reach both corners of the eyes kind of triangle or like pizza slices like these and these guides are going to help you place the eyebrows so if you made it to this point that was probably the hardest part of the video creating all the guides now we're just going to refine the lines and add some colors within the lines so nothing too crazy first thing i like to do here is change the blending mode of my guide layer to multiply and then load opacity so lowering opacity is going to make it so that guides is not like right in your face but using multiply is going to allow us to still see the lines on darker colors so that's just helpful overall we're also going to create a new layer above the guide layer rename it to sketch we're going to use the blending mode multiply as well for the same reason and we're going to lower opacity for now probably around 70 percent but we can always tweak it later now we are going to see this sketch layer and the final result so for that i recommend you use a neutral gray color it could be pretty light or fairly dark i'm going to go with a neutral basic gray and in terms of brushes here you have a bunch of options if you are working with free brushes you could use again in the sketching panel the hp pencil or the 6b pencil if you are working with the illustration bundle though you can pick if i can find it where is it there you go you can pick the sketching brush still or the outline brush so i'm gonna go with the outline brush it's just a little bit cleaner than the sketching pencil okay so all we're going to do here is we're going to pick a brush that is not too big not too small you can experiment with the size there's not one right or wrong way to do it and we're going to go back and refine the sketch so we're going to make sure there's not 20 billion line for every single element and here you can kind of start and finding which color and which size you need so don't be afraid to test your line and then you know change the size change the color i'm going to go with a pretty dark charcoal for this and a very small brush i like to start refining my lines with the eyes sorry for my hair overlapping the video here a little bit um it's kind of hard filming without my face being over the ipad but anyway so we're going to start by simply refining the shape of the eye i like to start kind of with the middle of the face and then going outwards because that way you can easily expand the face sides but it's harder if you start by cleaning your sketch from the edges of the face because then you're going to have to squish the facial features in i don't know i i just prefer doing it that way and then the sketch i'm not always going to close all the lines you can see for example here the inner corners of the eyes i just let them open so you don't have to fully close everything now for the nose here i'm just going to sketch the bottom part of the smile circle and then flick the sides or the edges of this line to create the nostrils and i'm not going to connect the side corners of the nose or create any kind of side bridge to the nose just leaving them open and just adding some little marks to show that there's a bridge of the nose without fully enjoying it so this is a tip that i'm going to give you for this project in general when you're drawing your sketch don't be afraid to not have lines everywhere we are going to later add some shading and with the shading we're going to do a lot of modeling for the face so here for example the lips same thing you don't have to fully outline your lip i like to just mark the corners of the mat a little line in the middle that is you know not reaching both corners then a little dip at the top of the mouth to mark the cupid's bow i think is that the name of it and then a little line to just show where the bottom lip ends but they're not all connected it's pretty open so with the sketch you could if you wanted you could go ahead and connect everything but it's gonna look really weird when we start adding the color because when you look at a face in real life you know the distinction unless you have very intense lipstick of course but it's distinction the distinction between the lips and the actual skin is not that clear you know it kind of blends a little bit so we're going to recreate that with the color later but that means when we're drawing the lines we need to keep everything open so we're just going to mark the like very very clear distinction between different parts as well as of course the outside of the face so like the ears and the cheeks the chin all those things here you can really experiment and place the lines where you think they should go or if you want to follow along and copy exactly what i'm doing that's totally fine as well because after all it's a tutorial so feel free to take all the information you want from my video but feel free to experiment as well if you want to connect something that i'm not connecting or add a line that i'm not necessarily drawing of course go ahead and do that that's more than encouraged and with that it is time for the secret password so if you've watched this final video please go ahead and leave a comment below with the word cartoon if you're new on channel you might be like what's what's the secret password what's the deal with that well it's a game that we have going on the channel pretty much in every single video we've been doing this for months people seem to really really like it i just had a secret password at one point in the video and it does a few things one of them is it gives me a lot of insight into how to edit and paste my videos better which helps me to create better tutorials for you guys so just a win-win and it's also really cool because you guys know me you see my face in the intro you have my voice throughout the entire video but i have no idea who you guys are so whenever you leave a comment with you know anything in the comments i get to see sometimes your face sometimes your name it's just really great to see who's part of the creative community that we're building here on this channel so just leave a comment below with the word cartoon and then we're gonna keep going we're just gonna keep refining our sketch and for that there's a really cool thing that you can do if you're drawing for example here the eyebrows are really hard to draw probably the eyes might be the same kind of situation you can use the selection tool here at the top sending it to freehand to select a facial feature or something like that and then with the air tool sending it to distort you can just kind of reposition this facial feature distort it a little bit so that it matches what you had in mind better so that's really really helpful for the eyebrows for example because man eyebrows they're quite tricky to draw sometimes and the jaw is quite tricky as well so if you notice that both sides are not you know the same you're not alone i really struggle with drawing but inside the jaw so don't hesitate to go back you know erase one side and just tweak it until you're happy but don't overdo it either because i'm going to show you a tip to kind of tweak everything once we have this sketch for the hair and the eyes as well speaking of the sketch for the hair i personally like to draw it on a separate layer so that if i have to erase something i don't have to erase you know worry about erasing the sketch for the hair uh the hair the head or the face first creating a new layer rename it to hair sketch putting it above the regular sketch layer and changing the blending mode to multiply as well maybe lowering the opacity around 80 but that's kind of going to depend on the color you're using for the sketch so just experiment with that and trust your instinct it should be totally okay and we can always tweak it later so for the hair here i have so many different hair tutorials i have curly hair short hair uh probably something else that i'm forgetting right now but i like to start drawing hair so with with the hair that is overlapping the forehead kind of just mapping that shape out so you could draw whatever kind of hair you want and i'm going to link the other tutorials i have specifically for the hair down below if you want to follow them and once i have the hair that is overlapping the forehead i kind of start mapping out the rough outline shape of just a general hairstyle so i'm not going in worrying about all the individual hair strands right now i'm just pretending that it's kind of either a towel that is dropped on top of the head of the character or you know when you have little lego characters the hair is just a piece of plastic that you can plop on top of the head so that's what i'm doing at the moment i'm just figuring out what the general shape of the hair is going to be and then going back in to add some movement and a little bit of hair strands without drawing all the individual hair one by one that's really not the goal we just want to roughly see you know if there's a hair strand that is flying away or something like that now here at this stage i recommend you use the eraser tool to erase any weirdness so for example on the forehead i had a little strand that was just kind of separated from the rest and it was just cut weird because i don't know so just make sure that all the lines you have here on this sketch layer are exactly how you want them to be because again we're going to see this sketch in a final result which usually on this channel when we draw a sketch layer we don't see it in final result but for this video we are so make sure that you like your sketch now for the same reason that i like drawing the hair on a separate layer as the rest of the sketch we're going to draw the iris so the eyes on the separate layer so just creating a new one we're naming it to ice sketch and i mean here i forgot to set it to multiply but you could set it to multiply i'm going to do that later in the video you're going to see be good go and do it now and for the iris you can really draw any shape you want well i mean if you draw a star shape is going to look strange but you could draw like an oval or a more circle circle so you can really experiment with the width and height of the pupils and iris i'm going to go again with super big ovals and you can place them wherever you want them to be in the eye they don't have to be looking at us you could have your character looking in any direction of your choice and at this page you might want to go ahead and hide the guides layer just so you have a better view of what you're working on and i also like to slightly shade in the iris part of the eyes just so that they i don't know come through a little bit better i don't i'm not sure how to explain that but i just always like to shade the iris although i'm not shading anything else in the sketch i just feel like you get a better feel for what your character is going to look like with the color now here you can always use again these selection tools and i get to freehand to move around stuff like for example the iris on the right was feeling a little bit too small so you can just make sure everything looks right and that's the beauty of drawing the sketch on separate layers if you want it at this stage once you're happy with everything you could merge them so just squishing them with two fingers or you can group them in one big sketch group so to group and procreate you just swipe your layers towards the right with one finger and then click the group option and you can move on to the color right away if you wanted to but i have a very important tip for you and it's just to use the error tool to flip your sketch horizontally once you do that your sketch is probably going to look all wonky and just not quite right so that's the same thing as that happens when you leave a sketch or a drawing for a few days and you don't look at it when you come back to it it just looks so wrong so flipping the sketch is going to allow you to get a fresh look on it and it's going to allow you to fix it without having to wait so if you notice that your sketch is all weird like mine is you can go in the adjustment panel picking the liquify tool at the bottom setting your tool to push and then playing with the side you're going to be able to just move your lines around as you can see here so you won't have to redraw everything you can make sure that everything is where it needs to be you can resize stuff like the eyes play with the shape of the jaw all those things you can tweak them with liquify now be careful though with the liquify tool if you do it too much it's going to start stretching the pixels and you're going to see some loss of quality but for the sketch like this honestly you would have to stretch a lot a lot for it to look bad so don't worry too much about it just keep that in mind in general the liquify tool especially when you have big color shapes don't overdo it because it's going to look crazy weird so once it looks okay you can go back to the area tool to flip horizontally you sketch again and you can go and do this back and forth of flipping and using liquify until your sketch looks fine no matter how wet flipped what orientation it is no matter how many times you flip it basically if you flip it it looks fine either ways so do that and once you're happy we're going to move on to start adding the colors it's going to be much much much easier we're just going to fill in the lines so nothing too crazy there oh and just one little tip as well if you notice that you're not super happy with the proportions of the face super easy to change it now you go back to your selection tool and you select different elements and just move them around in the face to change the proportions for example i felt like my character looked a little bit too old because the facial features were really high up on the face so i just went ahead and lowered the facial features to make my character look younger and cuter so you can experiment with that as well i have a video in which i talk about the age of the character depending on the position of the stuff on the face so i'll link that in description below if you want more information about this topic [Music] so for the color it's going to be pretty simple we're simply going to map out the general areas fill them in and then add some details but very simply so we're going to start by creating a new layer below the sketch group renaming it to face or skin or something like that and here you can really pick any skin tone of your choice now i know i keep referencing other videos but i have a video about skin tones if you want to kind of get more information about that i will link the description below as well but you can pick you know a basic skin color and we can always tweak it later so pick something that resembles skin for now and we can always fix it later now in terms of brushes you have a bunch of options once more here if you want something that doesn't have a whole lot of texture you can go in the airbrushing panel picking the heart brush making sure that the opacity is set back up to 100 if you watch my watercolor videos otherwise if you want something that has some texture you can stick with the hp pencil or the 6b pencil if you have the illustration bundle you could go with the base round brush for a non-textured alternative you could stick with the outlines brush or if you want you can use the everything brush which is what i'm going to use actually for everything else in this video to show you that you don't need a whole lot of fancy brushes to follow along this tutorial so what we're going to do now is just outline everything that is going to be skin later so we're going to outline the ears the face the neck and the shoulders if you have them in your sketch now here it is not super complicated but you need to take the time to do it right because if it's not perfectly outlined it's going to be hard later in the video to make this look right so once more you know not complicated but it's important you take the time now once you have your outlines you can just drag your color onto it to fill it in and if you're using a brush with a texture you're probably going to need to adjust the threshold so to do that just keep your pencil on the screen when you're dropping your color and then move it from left to right until you reach the point right before the color fills in the entire canvas so that way you fill in as much of your texture as possible without filling in everything of course now you can see here i went ahead and sketch well fixed my sketch layer the eye sketch layer and change it to multiply because at this point when we have colors the blending mode are really really going to start shining through so if you've made any mistake you're going to see it now and you can go back and fix it and once that is done if you had any mistake you're just going to go ahead and add the outline for the neck and the shoulders if you have them and then filling them in again adjusting your threshold as needed great so we're going to do the same thing for the hair so just go ahead and create a new layer to draw the hair now this one you could put it above or below the face layer and that depends where the hair is now i mean honestly i always question myself where i should put mine in this case the hair is not necessarily overlapping the neck and the shoulders so i'm gonna put the hair layer below the face layer but if you had a hairstyle that was everywhere over the face and shoulders you would put the hair above the face layer and just like for the skin tone you can pick really any color at this point for the hair just pick something draw and then we're gonna fix it later so that's the beauty of drawing everything on separate layers and just drawing the basic shapes you can roughly map out the shapes and then fix the colors once you actually see what it's looking like so i find it much easier at this stage to just place the basic shapes and then pick a color palette than trying to pick a color palette without seeing it on the character first and we're going to do the same thing here so we're just going to outline the shape of the hair and if your hair layer is below the face there you don't have to outline the neck and everything you can just connect the hair shape behind the character and then you know just fill it in that way so i'm going to stop talking here to let you focus on your outlines for the hair take all the time you need we're going to meet in the next step in which we're going to maybe refine this hair silhouette that we're creating now one of the great things about working with silhouettes like this is you're going to notice that when you have the silhouette you get a better feel for what your illustration is going to look like than when you just have the outlines or the sketch so feel free to go back and adjust shape although it is not necessarily going to follow the sketch that's totally okay you want to make sure that the base shape for the hair looks good because you know that's what makes the biggest part of the illustration is kind of this color element and not just a sketch line now while you have the color of the hair selected you could go and draw the eyebrows now since my hair layer is below the face layer i'm gonna have to create a new one above the face layer for the eyebrows but if you kept your hair above the face you could just draw the eyebrows on the same layer that's totally okay we're gonna use the same technique such as outlining the shape but this time i'm going to manually fill them in so that i can get a little bit of texture within the brows themselves and not just a super solid shape now if you've watched my videos before you know that i like to draw the eyes on separate layers because i like to have this kind of specific little technique here so we're going to create a new layer above the eyebrows above the face above everything we name it two eyes and for the eyes you're gonna pick a super light color but not quite white otherwise you won't be able to add any highlights if you want later so a cream color probably is your best bet so same thing as before with the same brush we're just going to create the outline and then fill it in and since the eyes are super super important in the face that's what we tend to look at first and the longest it is really a good idea to go ahead and hide your sketch group to just make sure that your your shape for the eye is really you know what you want it to be so don't hesitate here to go back with the eraser or the paintbrush or the liquify tool anything you need in order to fix the eye shape until it's exactly how you want it to be now here for the eraser if you have the illustration bundle you can set it to the eraser shape that's you know what i tend to use but otherwise you can use really any brush as long as it erases that's totally fine so you could use into your brushing panel the hard brush you're just going to get you know a pretty standard eraser that way you could draw the iris on the same layer as the eyes but it's not going to allow you to have as much freedom later so i like to create the iris on a separate layer and apply it as a clipping mask so just tapping on the iris and then opening the menu to select clipping mask so now everything we draw on this iris layer is going to stay within the base eye shape that we have below now once more you can pick any color of your choice here i'm going to go with kind of a brownish green and i'm going to manually fill in the shape here so not using the color drop because i do want to have some texture within the iris you could if you want fill it in with color drop i mean that's really you know a personal preference one thing that i really recommend you do though is hide the sketch layer just to check that everything is exactly where you want it to be before moving on and since we have the eyes on a separate layer of the iris slide on the separate layer then the eyes if you want at this stage to just use the error tool or the selection tool and the arrow tool to tweak something you could definitely do it because let's face it drawing irises and placing them in the right position not the easiest so having that freedom to move them after the fact super great and you can also use like just the error tool without selection to move both irises and change the direction in which your character is looking in super quickly so just gives you a lot of freedom using that so once that is done you can also create a new layer above the iris layer rename it to pupil and activating it as a clipping mask as well and here you would just go with a darker version of the main eye color so almost black but with a little tint you could use pure black if you want but i try avoiding pure black administration because just doesn't look as rich and interesting i find but again you could use pure black if you wanted and you can simply go ahead and draw the pupil now pro tip here the bigger the pupil is the cuter your character is going to be in general and the smaller it is kind of the more intense looking the the look is going to be so you can experiment with that that's just one little detail that you can play with i find that in general if you feel like your character is kind of a bit scary just increase the size of pupil probably is going to fix it so we're going to shade everything later but we are going to add the shadows on the eyes just now because we're kind of working on that so create a new layer above the pupil rename it to shadows and apply it as a clipping mask as well for this layer we're going to use the blending mode lunar burn and we're going to lower the opacity around 50 but we can always tweak that later you know that by now and in terms of colors for the shadows the only thing i would recommend is to try avoiding any neutral colors or neutral gray or neutral black that's not good it's going to make your shadows look super muddy so try to add a little bit of color in your gray it's going to look much better usually for shadows i like to go with a slightly cooler tone so like a purplish gray color is what i go for now here what you're going to do is you're going to draw a kind of crescent moon shape on the top part of the eye and that's going to make it look like your eyes are less flat and a little bit more like you know eyeballs so it's a very quick way of yeah just adding a bit of dimension in the eyes without going in and shading them in like a super precise way you can also create a new layer rename it to lights not lots set the blending mode of this one to add and load opacity again you know just lower it a little bit for now apply the layer as a clipping mask and for your lights you're gonna pick a super super bright color i like to go with a bright yellow or bright orange because it feels like the sun but you could go with a bright whatever and you can just draw a little circle on the top of the eye now i know it's not realistic because the highlight is in the shadow but you know what that's fine by me and here actually i'm gonna leave the opacity up to 100 because i really want this to be a highlight and you can see this little detail really brings the character to life so it's kind of a foreshadowing for when we're adding the shadows and the highlights on the character it's really going to make a big difference but for now we're just going to do it on the eyes so once you have all your eyes layer feel free to group them so just swiping them with one layer towards the right and rename this group to eyes so that way our file is a little bit better organized and you could go ahead and merge all of your eyes layer right now if you wanted to if you have you know if you're strapped for layer if you don't have a whole lot available you can merge them but i like to keep them separate just so i can change something later if i need to so we are going to create a new layer within the eye group at the top of everything we're going to rename it to lashes and we're just going to outline the top part of the eye to really put some emphasis on there for that color i like to just color pick somewhere where my sketch is overlapping with the hair color so it's going to give you a super dark version of your hair color and that way you can you know get dark lashes that matches with the rest of the hair on your character so here with the same brush we're just going to outline again the top part of the eye and if you want to have any eyelashes you would draw them there now for my characters i like to just draw whenever i want to make them look feminine kind of a pointy end to the eye so it's not really eyelashes it's kind of like a triangle but that's the way i draw you know feminine characters so you can experiment with that or you could draw individual lashes maybe like three lashes on the outer edge kind of like an animal crossing or something like that so here you really have a lot of freedom but just outlining the top of the eye is going to really make them pop so much more you can see already your character is like looking at you awesome so at this stage we have the main basic shapes we're just going to go back in and add a bit more texture and color variation because right now it's quite flat so for that you could create a new layer above your face shape rename this one to i don't know skin effects or something like that and apply this one as a clipping mask now if you've watched my skin tone video you could follow that technique along it's a bit more i don't want to say realistic but a bit more than that but here i'm going to give you an alternative way to do it it's going to be a bit more cartoonish but that way i'm not going to just repeat myself and repeat the same steps that's another thing that you can do if you want so i like to pick a nice darker red brownish color and honestly the brush you still have a lot of different options if you don't want to have texture in your piece you could use the soft brush from the airbrushing panel or if you do still want to have texture you could still work with the 6b pencil from the sketching panel but making sure that instead of using your pencil from like straight above the screen which creates you know very nice crisp thin line you tilt your pencil that's only going to work if you have an apple pencil of course but yeah if you do have the illustration bundle you could work at this stage with the basic texture brush but like i was saying earlier i'm going to keep working with the everything brush to show you that the brush is really not important in this video and this step is pretty similar to what we did in the other cartoon face video so we're just going to brush with the pencil tilted on the side over the top of the ears the cheeks and the nose so we're just adding a little bit of cuteness i guess to the character but basically we're adding some life to the character because you know these areas of the face are where the skin is thinner it's not really accurate but kind of so we kind of see the blood vessels behind it so yeah it just makes your character look more alive as opposed to just kind of a it being a doll made of plastic or something and it can be pretty rough at this stage because we're going to blend everything with the smudge tool so you can use a 4d smudge tool in the airbrushing panel the soft brush or from the painting panel the stucco brush if you want to have a bit more texture and all you're going to do super simple you're just going to blend everything in so that it doesn't look quite as crazy as it does right now now you don't have to have super smooth blending it doesn't have to be a perfect gradient but definitely not as crazy as what it might have been when you first place your color and if at any point a color that you use is not what you want since we're working on separate layers you can use from the adjustment panel here at the top the hue saturation brightness tool now you're going to see some sliders at the bottom which are going to allow you to change what the color looks like so that's super helpful for both the skin tone the hair color the eye color any color that you're working with that's what i was telling you earlier you know you can just start with something that you think can look good and then fix it later when we're starting to have more colors that interact together you can tweak your color palette that way as opposed to having to figure it out before starting your illustration which is you know quite difficult we're also going to create a new layer for the lips because i like to play with the opacity of the lips layers so that they blend well with the skin so just a new layer rename it to lips putting it above the skin effects and applying it as a clipping mask as well and here you can pick really any color of your choice depending on if you want natural lips or lips with lipsticks or you know whatever and it's gonna look crazy for a second so bear with me here we're going to outline the lips i know i said earlier in a video when we were working on the sketch that it's really rare that the lips look like they're outlined that usually blending with the skin but for now we need to you know draw the shape so we are going to draw a shape of the lip and then when we play with the opacity later it's going gonna look better so just trust me for now we're gonna have to do this it's gonna look weird but it's part of the process and once you have a pretty good idea of the basic shape you can go ahead and lower the opacity so that this layer doesn't look quite as crazy as it does right now so i'm going to lower it you know quite a lot around i don't know 50 60 again depends on the base color you use and how intense you want the lips to be but yeah probably lowering it a lot and once you have the opacity lowered again sorry for my hair it's embarrassing once you have the opacity lowered you can go in with the eraser tool to tweak the shape of the lips and find something that you like [Music] oh shading this step i know scared a lot of people but we're gonna take it one step at a time and we're gonna make it work it's gonna bring this piece to life make it so much more interesting the first thing we're going to do is create a layer below the sketch but above everything else rename it to light source and here we can use any brush because we're just sketching something that we're not going to see in a final result so we're going to sketch a circle that is going to be a light source and then a bunch of rays to mimic like if it was the sun the sun rays or if it's a light bulb the rays from the light bulb but basically this is going to be where the light is hitting our character so we're going to use that as a guide to place the shadows we're going to start by the shadows or we're going to start with the shadows on the hair because it's a bit easier than the face so we're going to create a new layer rename it to shadows put it above the hair apply it as a clipping mask and use the blending mode linear burn for now you might want to load opacity around 70 but we're going to tweak it later and you got to pick a similar color than you use for the shadow on the eyes so in my case a purplish gray now all you have to do here is start from the light source follow the rays and see when they hit something so here for example the hair the ray hits the side of the face which means the face would cast a shadow on the hair so basically we're going to start working with i kind of said it cast shadows we have a few types of shadow but the cast shadows are quite easy to draw so we're going to start with that so whenever there's an object that you know lights hit that object the object what is right behind it is not going to receive any of the light because you know the object hides it so it casts a shadow so that's what we're going to draw now and you might want to lower the opacity of your light source layer so it's not quite as intense but basically all you're doing i i just said it all you're doing is you're following the race and then whenever they hit something like the ears or the side of the face or something like that you go ahead and draw a shadow behind it now for the hair here you can see i'm kind of drawing a little bit more than just you know shadow from the ear because i want it to look like there's some thickness to the hair so i'm basically kind of drawing a hole i guess as well at this stage but you could just skip that if you wanted to and here you can really place your shadows well you can place your light source wherever you want but if you're new to shading you can totally copy exactly what i'm doing that's that's fine you know that's a tutorial and we're here for learning so don't be afraid of copying what i'm doing at this stage so we have basic cast shadows here it's pretty simple on the hair there's not a whole lot so there's around the face behind the ears and just maybe if you have different hair strand you might have cast shadows there but it still looks super super flat and that's because the hair is actually curving away from the light which means although there's nothing hiding like there's not an object in front of this this part of the hair there's still going to be a shadow because it's curving away which means the light just cannot reach that far so this kind of shadow that happens when the shape is curving away from the light source those are called form shadows so oops i don't know what what happened there i just lost my cash out of there i'm just gonna try it again but you're probably going to get on the opposite side from your light source are those form shadows and form shadows tend to be much softer than hard shadows so for now you can just roughly place them we're going to blend them with the smudge tool later feel free at this stage to go back and play with the opacity of your shadow layer so it blends better i'm going to go with somewhere around 50 and once you're happy with the shadows or once you roughly place your shadows i should say on your hair we're going to do the same thing for the face so just creating a new layer above the everything in this face related basically renaming it to shadow using linear brain as well setting it as a clipping mask as well and lowering opacity pretty much around what you did for the hair so in my case around 50 we're going to use the same technique and we're going to start by placing some cast shadows so just following the rays until it hits something and then placing a shadow there so you're going to get a pretty big shadow around the chin and probably even just projecting over the uh neck part shoulder part of your character if you have it in your illustration now here it's going to look bad and that's totally okay whenever i'm drawing my shadows or placing my shadows i should say in my illustrations at this stage i always get quite discouraged because it just looks so bad before blending so if you get discouraged you're you're normal it's going to look terrible at this stage but tough it out a little bit keep placing your shadows and when we start blending trust me it's going to come together really really nice just don't give up yet because it's it's about to look messy and just really bad so once more here if you have the same light source as i do feel free to just copy what i'm doing to kind of get a feel for where to place your shadows otherwise you know the drill you just follow the race and see whenever there is you know ray hitting something you just add a cast shadow there or if you just follow the rays and you see that at one point the face or any facial feature is curving away from the light you would add a form shadow there so something a little bit softer now i do have a few tips that are just universal no matter where your light source is try to not shade the nose too much meaning the shape of the nose around the bridge don't overdo it unless you are in very intense light condition where it's super harsh light which i don't recommend you do that because it's really not splattering don't shade your nose too much just say shade around the eyes instead same for the face when you have the cheeks you might want to go ahead and leave this kind of triangle not shaded but don't really go ahead and draw like the cheekbones and stuff like that it's just gonna look really really weird so if you're used to putting makeup on for example you might be tempted to place your shadows where you would place your bronzer or you know kind of doing your contouring don't do that just don't if you're kind of struggling with knowing where to place the shadows there are a bunch of different kind of shading maps that you can find online or just google you know portrait and you're going to find a bunch of examples that you can use as a reference but yeah just try to avoid over shading nose over shading the lips and also just kind of leaving this light like the triangle of light on the cheek that is in the shadow it's going to make it more plump that if this was all shaded but not quite as crazy as if you went ahead and draw the cheekbone for example so once you've roughly placed your shadows like this this is where it looks crazy you're going to go back to your smudge tool so again if you don't have texture illustration if you want something super smooth you can use the soft brush in the air brushing panel i'm using again the stucco brush from the painting panel and you just go ahead and blend your shadows this is going to make it look so much better than it does right now so once more just take the time you need to place your shadows don't worry it's going to look crazy at this stage with with the blending we're going to blend everything so that it's soft and pleasant to the eye i said blend everything but that's not really true if you remember when i was talking about the different kind of shadows we have the drop shadows and we have the form shadows well the cast shadows and the form shadows the cast shadows you want to keep the edges of them crisp because they're created by an object that is casting a shadow on another one usually these shadows are well they have crisp edges because it comes from something that is close to the shadow it's kind of two advanced theories i'm gonna kind of try and make it super simple and kind of oversimplify it but the closer the object that is creating a shadow is to the object that is receiving the shadow the sharper the edge is going to be so in the case of the face for example the shadow that is created by the hair on top of the forehead is going to be super crisp because the hair is right above the forehead the reason that form shadows are softer is because there is not a clear object casting a shadow so the distance you know is pretty much infinite which means you know that creates a super soft blending i'm gonna keep my shadows on the hair not blended i just like the vibe of it but you could blend them if you want so just making sure that you change the layer to the shadows that are for the hair and blend them there now here i noticed that my eyebrows were above the shadows so i'm just putting them below so that the eyebrows getting some shadows as well and we're going to create some lights i keep typing locked instead of light i don't know why in every single of my videos is always the same but create a new layer above the shadows renaming it two lights using the blending mode ad and using a clipping mask as well we're gonna go back to the color we used for the highlights in the eyes so a super super bright yellow in my case and with the same brush we are going to add some highlights now there are so many different kind of highlights that you can add i have a style that is really not realistic but it's quite easy and i just like it so basically i had a little dots of light and little outlines so a dot on the top of the nose a dot on each cheeks a little bit of a dot on the top of the ears and then i outline my outlines on the side where the light source is so you can see here i'm just adding a very thin light line on the left cheek because my light source is on the left a tiny tiny line on top of the shoulder as well just you know adding some highlight so you can see it really brings the piece to life and it's quite simple don't overdo it though you don't want to add highlights everywhere with this technique because it's going to become overwhelming and i usually try to keep the lips pretty simple but if you wanted you could go ahead and add a highlight like this it would make it look a bit more glossy so maybe a little bit above the lips and maybe want a little highlight on the bottom lip as well one highlight that i really recommend you do that is really really going to make your character pop is towards the inner corner of the eye but once more make sure that you don't overdo it because otherwise it's going to just look super wide like on the left side here you can see it's way too much to just a thin highlight there now this is quite intense so you're probably going to want to lower the opacity of this highlight or light layer i should say so it blends better so for now i don't know you can really experiment and once more it depends on all the different colors they use so for the skin and for the lights themselves that's going to depend on the opacity that you go with i'm going to go around 30 i quite like this you can see that there's light but it's not just like crazy looking we're also going to add lights on the hair but before that you might want to group all of the layers that are related to the face so that our file is a bit better organized so once more just swiping them with one finger towards the right to then create a group now at this stage you could flatten the eye group and the face group if you wanted to if you're running low on layers that's totally okay i'm gonna keep mine open in case i want to change anything in the future at this case at this stage not this case at this stage you can also go ahead and move the eyes if you wanted to i find that when you start adding the shadows and kind of modeling the face you're going to notice if anything is wrong so you could just go back select the groups and the sketch parts that you need to move them around as needed once that is done we're going to create a new layer above the hair shadow layer we're going to make it to lights setting the blending mode to add lowering opacity around what we had for the faceless and applying it as a clipping mask on the hair we're going to use a very similar technique here so just outlining the side of the hair that is facing the light source but we're also going to add a little bit more texture to the hair so i'm not necessarily drawing a bunch of hair texture for this stylized cartoon i'm just using this highlight layer or this light layer i keep calling it highlights just light this light layer to add a few hair strands so we're not trying a bunch it's like you know three or five on either side but just that already makes it look like hair and not just a piece of plastic like we were talking about earlier the lego hairstyle just adding a few lines like this makes a bunch of makes a big difference add some movement and again just a bit of texture now this next step is optional it does look a little bit more manga but i really like it and it's quite simple so we are going to create a new layer above this last layer for highlights so just a new layer rename it to highlights i am going to misspell lights again there you go so for this one we're going to use the blending more color dodge and we are going to set it as a clipping mask for now we're going to leave the opacity at 100 so we can really see them well but we're going to lower later because right now it's going to look crazy but basically you're going to add some horizontal lines that have a slight curve to show the 3dness of your hairstyle and these you're going to focus them mostly on the top of the head at least if your light source is on the top if it's coming from the bottom you would focus your highlights on the bottom of the hairstyle but that would be a bit strange and yeah you're just going to follow the curvature of the hairstyle and you really don't have to overdo it here i would say whenever there's a change in direction you might want to add two three maybe even just one kind of band in that area so really doesn't have to be more complicated or precise than this but make sure that you go back to lower opacity until you get a blending that you like because 100 is going to look quite insane unless your hair is really really light then you might want to use 100 but anyway you'll be the judge of that [Music] okay we're at the final touches if you made it to this part seriously big high five to you i know it's a long tutorial and i'm really sorry about that but these final touches are really gonna bring it home so don't stop this yet here you can play if you want with the color of your hairstyle the skin tone and the eyes until you get a color palette that you like so just selecting any layer and using the adjustment panel um the hue saturation brightness tool but you could also go ahead and add a duo tone effect in your hair or well a gradient effect in your hair not a duotone so using the selection tool to select the base or top of the hair and then feathering your selection the more you feather it the more intense the gradient is going to be and then using the hue saturation brightness tool to change only one section of the hair so that way you can create balayage there we go or kind of a tie-dye effect on the hair so that's a really cool way of adding a lot of personally to your character in just a few seconds seriously just make your selection with the selection tool oh and with the selection tool make sure that the color fill option is deactivated then you can just feather your selection and change the color you can repeat this step as many times as you want for example you could create a super intense gradient from this purple to kind of a bright orange color so you would go to pink first and then create another section on the very bottom of the hair and change that selection to orange so super cool you can do this for the hair you could do it in the eyes as well that could be really cool maybe not the skin that would be kind of strange but yeah and at this stage you can go back to your sketch layer and play with the opacity until you like you know the way it looks sometimes it might be nice to have really intense sketch line especially if you're working with darker skin tones if you're working with a light skin tones you might want to go back and lower the opacity of your sketch and if there's any line on your sketch that doesn't look right that is just like totally out of place you can go ahead and erase it straight on the sketch layer or you can just tap on the sketch layer to create a layer mask now if you erase something on the layer mask as you can see here it doesn't erase the thing on the sketch itself and you can use white with your paint brush to bring the line back now i'm not going to go in more details about layer mask in this video because it's already way too long but it's a super powerful tool so if you want to learn more about that i will link a video in which i explain like all the details about how it works in the description below it's really super helpful for just creating illustrations in general so that's a great tool to have in your illustration toolbox now if you enjoyed this video and want to learn how to draw a cartoon body different cartoon hairstyles and a bunch of cartoon related stuff i highly recommend you check out this playlist in which i'm going to teach you exactly that but before we leave make sure to give this video a like and subscribe to the channel so you don't miss any of the weekly videos i post every tuesday and saturday then click on the link right here and i'll meet you there

Channel: Genevieve's Design Studio

Views: 261,880

Keywords: procreate illustration, cute character drawing in procreate, how to draw cartoon face, how to draw cartoon faces, procreate tutorial cartoon, procreate drawing, how to draw cute, procreate, procreate tutorial, illustration, procreate art, how to draw, drawing tutorial, learn to draw, digital art, illustration tutorial, Cute art, procreate cartoon, how to draw a girl, how to draw pixar, how to draw disney, how to draw stylized face, how to draw a face, digital art tutorial

Id: WTTaUgEIgHA

Length: 54min 31sec (3271 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 28 2021