Speed and motion: illustrating a car in Affinity Designer with Chris Rathbone

[Music] either my name is Chris Rathbone and I'm a freelance illustrator I worked on the end of sports and automotive sectors and I've created work for a range of clients including Formula one the NBA Puma Red Bull and top gear I use affinity designer predominately on both the iPad and the desktop versions and today I'm going to be giving you a tutorial for how I created a piece of work for one of my clients car magazine their focus and emphasis of the video will be showing you how to create an illustration from scratch and show you how to bring a sense of speed and energy motion into your work so I hope you enjoy so before we get started out for you quick glimpse into my studio setups I know quite often there's a lot of questions regarding that kind of thing as you can see I'm a caboose with the MacBook Pro and I'm an external monitor setup here as well I have a Wacom Cintiq Pro and for those who aren't sure what that is it's basically a graphics monitor which enables you to draw directly onto using this pen it really is my go-to tool for most of my work because I like the freedom of flexibility of being able to sketch and draw freehand as well as use of tools that finish designer has to offer whenever I'm at working for clients or if I'm traveling around or if I want to take a break from working in the studio at the iPad pro and Apple pencil the great thing with that is affinity designer is also available on both the desktop and mobile devices so enables you to jump freely between the two and work on your files whenever and wherever you like which is super handy for the purpose of this video only based purely in the studio so I'll be working on the back on and I'll talk you through the tools as I'm using them as we go through the video now here we have our art board which I've set up so the dimensions required for our artwork and over here I start that first layout which is a grid layer as we go through the illustration yours is extremely important to be adding new layers at various points just to keep on top of your artwork and keep it clean and tidy to make your life easier this grid layer is going to be a very basic rough layer and we're going to use this to form the skeleton for our illustration first thing we want to do is create what's called a horizon line so using the pen tool just very simply create a horizontal line across your artwork then this is the horizon line where basically all of our lines would disappear off - what we want to do now is create what's called a vanishing point so if you draw a line across your horizon line this point here where the lines intersect where my cursor is it's basically going to form your vanishing point now what we want to do there's no particular place for where we do T's but just create a series of lines coming in from your artwork it's in that vanishing point and then disappearing back out you can add as many of these as you want and like I said there's no particular place where they have to be it's not an exact science but the more of these lines you create the easier it would be to form your illustration based off of this vanishing point now we have our grid and our vanishing point and all of our lines disappearing off to this single point down here and it just gives us an idea of perspective already in our illustration and we're going to use this to start fleshing our illustration out got our vanishing point grid set up we're going to do now is select all of the lines and group them now the shortcut for doing that on the Mac is command G and what that enables us to do is now they all grouped we can bring the opacity down on those to around 25% it doesn't need to be exact but you should want to bring them down enough so that you can still see them and they're still fairly prominent and you can use them as a guide but it just enables us to draw over and differentiate our drawing lines with the grid lines we stopped another thing I'd like to do is now we've got our grid set up for them to make this a more dynamic composition it's just to rotate this ever so slightly off center now what this does is it just means that our rise on line now it's on a very slight angle and what that's gonna do is make the composition and the illustration just that little bit more exciting to look at and it would give it more of a sense of speed as there's a bit of distortion in it now that we have our grid set up what I'm going to do is just form some very basic shapes which will be positioned work for where our cars will go so what I'm going to do is just create some very basic two angles which disappear off to our vanishing point using it as a guide so what you can see now is we have a rectangle here disappearing off to our vanishing point I'm going to create another one for the roof and what this does you can almost imagine this as a car is your front of the car here's the windscreen and these are our trailing lines off to our vanishing point now we can connect those two lines up which is basically going to be roughly where when it is or will have that's been done with the pencil now I'm going to create the wheels using the ellipse tool what we can do is basically just create these shapes using the tool here's one for our front well duplicate it for our back wheel and our back row is going to be smaller because it's further away but you'll notice that it still follows these vanishing points so if I was to draw lines going back to our vanishing points here you can see that our wheels basically fall along those vanishing points and we can delete those up afterwards so there we have a very basic very crude looking car but you can kind of see how we are using our grid to create the perspective to start putting our car into it now just for speed I've gone through and I've created a second car over here on the right hand side using the exact same principles and process as we did for the first car and what this has done is it just gives us more interesting composition so we've got these two cars almost racing each other you'll see the car on the right-hand side is a little bit smaller and further back so it gives the impression it's just slightly further behind our primary car on the left-hand side now what we can do is we are finished with this layer now so we can lock this layer down just to make sure that we don't interact with it in any way or accidentally move any pieces that we don't need and I've created a new layer above this one called Skitch and this is going to be where we take out cars and just flesh them out and a little bit more detail so again what I'm going to do is I'm just going to decrease the opacity down just a little bit on our grid layer just again so that we can see it but today it's not too and now I'm going to be working into our sketch layer so what I'm going to do is as we can see we've got these rectangle box cars which are not very realistic at all so what we're going to do is just very basically start just using the pen tool or you can use your tablet if you have one to do this by hand just start creating some softer shapes around these boxes they're just a bit more realistic a more representative of how a car would look we can come in here and go around the wheel arches still sort of following the guys that we've created earlier just giving it a bit more of a softer more realistic feel and what we could have here is obviously where our bonnet is going to come in here and then it's going to come up to the side great just really rough construction lines around our illustration to Kate it little bit more of a realistic way [Music] [Music] [Music] so I basically in going around to that in detail on to our cars following the same process that we have been doing previously just to bring into a stage which I'm happy with them so here we can see I mean it's still very rough is very loose line work at this stage but you can see how the cars are starting to take shape and how we started to build these up using our baseline grid that we have previously created so the next thing we're going to do is same as we've done for the other layers is we're going to group these together and then bring the opacity down to around sort of 25-30 percent again it doesn't have to be an exact amount but just so that we can see them there there we can use them subscribe for the next stage but they're not too prominent so our line work stays over the top so we're going to create a new layer on top of these so we can lock our sketch layer because we no longer need that I've created a new layer above the previous two layers called line work now this layer is going to be where we start to really add in defining detail to the cars and ultimately create what will become our line work for the cars now at this stage the cars are fairly rough when you're adding in detail if you're looking to create a specific car so if it's a specific model when these cars need to be accurate then of course you want to be looking at reference photos to be making sure you get the shapes of the lights or the shapes of the grilles or where the wing mirrors sit executor etcetera just to make sure that the cars are accurate and as true to life as they possibly can be however they'll see that's not always essential you model the cars to be a bit more abstract or you might want the cars to not be a specific model or brand of car in which case you can just draw freehand so what we're going to be doing now is I'm gonna be taking our lines and just drawing much cleaner straighter lines and just putting a bit more care into these lines again I'm using the pen tool and the great thing with this is as you click and hold you can start to move these lines and really shake them how you want them to be to get them as accurate as you possibly can again at this stage I'm just using my previous lines that I've created as real sort of rough work but the thing to note here is when you come into intersecting parts for example here where I come down the back of the car and I'm approaching a wing mirror I now want to stop my line because at this stage we would create an actual outline to artwork we don't want to be creating obviously up to this point everything's been quite rough and sketchy and lines of overlapped right now we're focusing in on much more detail so when I get around to this wing mirror for example and I want to bring my line in and I'm going to make sure their butts up to the edge of where these lines were so creates like a solid defined artwork so again for the essence of time I'm going to jump ahead and do this speed it up so that you can see what I'm doing and then we'll come back to it when it's complete [Music] [Music] [Music] though we've got all of our lines drawn now I'm happy of how they look noting the cars that come along nicely I've got a good level of detail in there I mean I need to go too crazy with it and because you get a lot more of the detail come through the shading and color in which we'll see in the later stages but for now I wanted to run for a couple of really cool features in affinity design which I like which are nice little touches to your illustrations so what we're gonna do now is we're going to select all of our line work command a to select all now up to this point we've been using the pen tool and what you'll see is we've got the same thickness to the line here all the lines are exactly the same there's no real variation to it I like giving it some variation to the line work which makes it feel more natural and almost too hand-drawn now you can have a play around there's by default there's loads of brushes and brush presets that are all built into a finitude designer which were really cool I personally don't use them very often while I like to play around with is the stroke tool now it's quite a simple feature but if you select all of your lines and then come over to the pressure bar over here now what you can do is this bar here by default is is a constant all the way across and what you'll see is if you start to drag points around on here so if I drag this one for example this is the middle of the line so basically what it's doing this means that my last my line starts off quite wide and then becomes fighting in the middle and then goes quite wide again if you drag the edges here and what you see if I come all the way down to the extreme you'll see it really feathers those lines out so it's almost as if they they tape her away from nothing to become full thickness in the middle and then taper back out it's a really cool effect and after me personally I don't want to go this far because I think that's it's just a bit too extreme for the style that I'm looking for but if we bring these up to around the 50% mark around the middle what that's done is it's just given a nice sort of taper into these lines so this line here you can see it really well where we've got this full line it just starts off thin it gets a bit thicker in the middle and go spin again and it's just a much more natural brush stroke in my opinion and I think it complements style quite well the next feature I wanted to go through an affinity designer it's a really cool tool and this will come into play a lot later in the illustration as well but it's important to set it up as early as possible I'm gonna select all of our lines here so we've obviously just gone through and done our brushes over here but the next thing we're going to do is assign some colors to these now very simply what you can do is you can click up here which will create these as a new swatch you can see it's added a swatch to my palette here I don't actually want to do that though what I want to do is I want to come up here to the add global color and we're going to create it as a global color now what we do I'll click on here and I'll show you up here you'll see the difference between a regular swatch which comes up here in your recent swatches and a global swatch here the global swatch has this little white triangle on the corner if you can see it and what that means is it means that that swatch is a global swatch so I'm not going to click it to make sure all my line work has become that's watch color now the cool thing with global swatches is if we now double click this it brings up the sliders to change your color which is called we've all seen those before but what we can do now is because it's a global swatch this is effectively a live color so how we affect this now it changes the color of everything that is selected by that global swatch you can do this for fills you can do this for strokes and it would apply it to everything so it's easy it's important to set us up at the early stage because if you get further on down the illustration when you've got lots of fills and lots of shapes and lots of line work it's a bit of a pain to try and select all of those things individually and then change colors whereas if you set these global swatches up very early it gives you so much freedom to so easily just open up and change and amend the colors up here so I'm just gonna controls it back through to these to get this back to the swatch that I wanted but I think global swatches is a really important thing something if you haven't had much experience with those then definitely have a play around with them so require strokes all looking good now I'm pretty happy with those one thing that we're going to do which I think again is a really nice sort of small touch to add to the illustration is I'm going to select some of these strokes not too many of them but basically strokes that form the outside of any particular objects so as you can see here I'm going around outside of the car the sort of defining outside edge to the grill maybe to the lights to the roof and sort of around here as I come across to this car again picking out the roof the side profile lines the bonnet the mirrors again just a few few details you don't have to go too heavy of these now all of the stroke whips have all been exactly the same up to this point as we can see over here what I'm now going to do is I'm going to increase the width of some of these so made to around 1.2 so it's about salt 50% thicker then the other strokes were and what is this done you can see is it's it's added a really nice finishing touch while most giving a bit of a weighted line to the illustration so the aligns around the outside now feel more prominent and it puts a bit more prominence on some of these lines so I'm just going to go in and select a few more because I think that's looking pretty cool so I'm going to select a few more lines again you don't want to go too over the top with this you don't necessarily need to I think just by adding a few defining edge lines it really helps to make the illustration pop so up to this point everything we've been doing has really just been using the stroke we haven't dealt with any fills or blocks of color yet so I'm pretty much there with my line work now I think we can't really do too much else to it so what I'm going to do is I'm going to go ahead and lock this layer and I'm going to add in a new layer above it and I'm going to call this one ink in now basically the inking layer is going to be where we're going to start to fill some of these areas which will be the real sort of heavy shadow areas with a solid fill color the same color as our stroke so for example in here in the grille and to make these fills instead of strokes so what this does is our inking layer is basically add in the first level of shading and blocks of color to our illustration just to give it a bit more depth as you'll see here so again make sure we're selecting our global colors and send it to a fill so that in the same way earlier on when we changed our global colors you can see it affects the spills and the strokes which would be important to the later stages so you can see that I'm starting to add the shading in here what I'm going to do is I'm going to speed up the video and continue adding it in and come back to you when I'm done [Music] now the next stage registration I'm pretty much happy with my line work and we might ink in you can see that I've started to block in quite a few of these areas around the grills and especially around the wheels and tires the real sort of dark areas to the car would it be pretty much hardly any light hitting at all or the actual shadow cast from the car itself so what we're gonna do now is under set a new layer in now it's important that this layer goes below the ink in layers we're going to call this color and the reason this needs to go behind the ink analysis as you see will start to add some block color to this now having it underneath the inking layers means that any color that we add will be below it so you'll still be able to see your illustration line work and inking lines come through on the drawing so what I'm going to do is I'm going to create a new global color up here now for this one I'm just going to go to around us or 50% gray the reason being I don't like to start introducing color until later on in the illustration because I find that you can get yourself quite booked down with clamor of colors that try and complement each other and trying to find colors that are working for your illustration whereas if you just stick to shades of grey early on just until you've got the levels right and the shading and the lighting and everything right that you want you can then start playing around with color now what I'm doing is I'm just going around the shape of this car and again you can be quite rough because you're below the inking layer none of this is going to appear above the incan so for example if I come around here now I'm going to make sure that I select our lighter gray said it will feel rather than a stroke now obviously haven't gone all the way around the car if this layer was above the line work what you see is it completely masks out the car which we don't want so why haven't it behind it means that you now get your line work coming through whilst having the block color in behind the car so what I'm gonna do now is I'm going to continue to do this I'm going to jump head in the video it's quite self-explanatory process I'll come back to you when I've added the blocks of color colouring is all complete now what I've done is I've added in just a few very basic lines as well which you see along here all going off to our if we turn our grid layer back on from earlier disappearing off to our focal point so it's just starting to give a bit of context and a bit of an environment now to where these cars ask that so again it's all just done using the my global color that I've grabbed here just for flat color and what I'm gonna do now is I'm gonna go ahead and lock that layer I'm now gonna set another layer in above the color layer but still working below the inking layer now this layer it's going to be called shadows this is going to perform the darker areas to the cars now what I want to do is select a new global color but I'm going to make it just a bit darker than the gray that we previously had but not quite as dark as my inking lines so maybe around here and again we can tweak it after because that's one of the beauties of these global colors now with the shadows there's no real sort of placement to these it's really up to you it'll mean if you're working from reference photos great but it's really up to you as to how extreme a dramatic you want to go with with these shadows so what I like to do is imagine where your light source is coming from so for me it's coming from up here there's a light off see up in the sky the Sun which is casting a light down on these cars so anything that would be cast in the shadow is what we're going to be now drawing so if you imagine for a very good example of this is where the wing mirror is so where the wing mirror is coming down underneath this car here it would be casting a shadow so we can do is start to draw the shadow in on the underside of this mirror and almost imagine where that shadow would be going so once we set out to our fill we can now see that it's starting to create a very realistic looking shadow now you can pick a few our areas around the car to do this I'm going to jump head in the video or ticks it's quite time-consuming part and I'll come back to you when we're done [Music] [Music] [Music] now I've got my shadows and shaded areas where I want them I've been planning around that for a little while just make sure I had them right and it was looking nice and balanced pretty happy with it and what I've also done is I've added in some more flashes along the same grid that we were using earlier just so we've got a bit of variation in those we've got our really dark area flashes here which is from our inking color then our medium grays and then our lighter grades here as well and again when we pull our own with the global colors at the end of the illustration this is when this will start coming to life so what we're going to do now in exactly the same process that we did for the shadows we're gonna create a new layer above our color layer we're going to call this highlights and what we're going to do is create a new global swatch that is a lighter gray than the bodywork but not full white so what we're going to do now is using the same process if you imagine where your light source is coming from where these areas would be caught by those highlights so for example they're going to be in the opposite places to where the shadows were so you can almost use your shadows as the negatives for where your highlights are going to be so for example if I pick up this area here where the lights gonna hit the edge of this car and bounce off in the same way that our shadow was cast on the underside of this mirror there's gonna be highlights on the top of this mirror so we can create some in here and just go around the car and pick out the details that you think the light would hit bearing in mind that our light is coming from the top so once again I'm just going to go ahead and speed up this video and come back to you when the highlights are done [Music] [Music] my shadows and highlights now I'm really happy for looking I think we've got some nice depth on the car there from the from the highlighted area here all the way through to the darker shade in here and so what I've done is I've added on just a flat color for the background for the sky and also added in a circle up here which is ultimately going to be our light source which is this Sun obviously all of our shadows around the front of the car which suggests that the light source is kind of behind and above salty with Sun being behind the cars and up in the sky if it complements the positioning of our lighting so I mean add some finishing touches on to this but before I do I wanted to play around with the global colors so we've touched on those earlier but this really will show you how we can bring the illustration to life very easily and play around with these colors so the first one I'm going to start looking at is the the darkest color which we've got here which has formed our shadows and our inking outlines now to be honest I think I'm pretty happy with where it is I mean it's obviously needs to be the darkest color in the illustration is it's pretty dark where it is it's like a nice dark blue I don't really like using black too much in my works I find it's quite heavy and also if your work is going in magazines quaff and a really heavy black and caused a lot of issues with the amount of ink that goes down on the page so I've gone here's like a dark blue which I think works well so because I've got that blue tint in the illustration I'm gonna try and carry that through to the cars themselves so I'm gonna work my way down from the colors from the darkest and lightest so the next color I'm going to look at this is basically our color that we've been using through our shadows on the car so I'm gonna take the black out for starters and pump some blue in there because obvious we've got that blue coming through from our inking layers and I'm gonna basically give it like a kind of a teal II turquoisey color which I think would be really nice and you can already see in the areas here where it's contrasting with the dark ink in blue I think that's working well obviously we can go back to these and tweak these but just get all parts of where you want the colors to be to start with and then you can kind of work backwards from there so the next one down again I'm going to bring in a little bit of blue in here just to cut follow that theme through and add in a little bit of yellow just to give it a nice turquoise II feel again I think that's working well and for my final color for the hilar so I want to go for a really contrasted image here so I'm basically going to bring that down to be pretty much white in fact it is white and I think that's giving us a nice balance here from this dark blue for the shadows on our card through to the mid blue for the actual base color of the car and then through to white for the highlights here now having the white Sun in the background as well really gives the impression of those highlights are bouncing off from the Sun up here and I think it's working really well now what I'm going to do is I'm gonna pick out just a couple of these flashes nothing too much I'm gonna add some more in in a little while but basically what I'm going to do is I'm going to add a new global color up here and I want to put in here a kind of a soft pink which will really help to complement the baby blue and turquoise colors that we've got going through here so I'm gonna start my global color and add those in and already you can see that that's starting to to add just a little bit of lift to the illustration now I'm gonna add in it's going to be my final layer up here so I'm going to go to the very top layer which I've got which is line work and adding a layer above now everything we've been doing up to this point has been adding in layers below the line work because we obviously want to align what to sit on top of everything else but with this I'm just going to add in some very subtle details into this above the inking layer just that add some some more sense of speed and energy to the illustration now I want these to sit above the actual inking layer as I said so what we're going to do is follow in our same grid that we set up earlier on going off to the same vanishing point I'm just going to put in a few of these flashes now the colors of these will be dependent on what he's around because I don't want it to fall into the background of the car but what I'm going to do is I don't want these to go all the way through the illustration because it can make it look quite messy so what I'm going to do is I've got my vanishing point here I'm going to use the node tool and just select that node and just follow it up this way a little bit I still follow in that same perspective it's still going off to the same vanishing point but it's not going through the whole illustration so this is quite a nice detail to add to to add a bit of motion to the final stages of the illustration and you can bring these in any colors which you like so I'm gonna bring some in here maybe bring that pink back through as well because I think that's quite a nice accent color so we bring this in again just make them short another thing to remember with this use your no tool to adjust these how you want them it's very front of the car here you don't want them being too long because they wouldn't be going through the car they were almost leading up to the car if that makes sense so you don't want them going through the car too much so try and keep them relatively short in the foreground definitely not going past the car so again I might get a pink one in there and I might get a couple in this top corner up here now this top-left corner sorry top right corner is already looking a bit empty but that's been intentionally done so because I'm going to add some other details in there in a second which we'll see it's just for the finishing touches for this illustration so what I'm going to do is just add in a couple more flashes up here now I think that's pretty much it with the emotion lines because I want to get too busy with it so what I'm going to do now is I'm gonna go back down to my color layer and I'm gonna draw in some really abstract and very simple clouds in this top corner up here just again to add a bit of depth and a bit of variation to the illustration and if it's obviously going to go in behind the car but what you'll see is these are going off to the vanishing point as well so everything goes off to that vanishing point that we created on our grid in the very early stages so what you can see as we've got some nice clouds in there just gonna create some coming in from this side up here as well now again I'm just using the pen tool it's nice to be almost inaccurate on purpose here so it doesn't look too regimented and - to orchestrated so just use your pen tool create some shapes see what works a bit playing around trial and error to see how it works and already there I think we've got some nice depth added in now just for the final final touches on to this I don't want these canals to be flat so I want to add in some accent colors in here just some highlights so again I'm just going to create some shout shapes which follow the same kind of flow as clouds are we created you can use some of the darker colors that we created earlier on or some of the mid blues up here just to add a bit of depth into the clouds and what we want to do is you want to make sure any of that bigger than the cars that come in front we just send them to the back because we don't want them to sit in front of our car because these clouds are behind so you can do that by using your tools up here to send behind or in front or if you know the shortcuts for them which on the Mac is shift command and then use the bracket key to push them in front and behind so I'm just going to go through and add a few details into these clouds up here and then I think we are pretty much done and I think that's it now I'm really happy this illustration now has come out I might carry on just adding a few more details into these clouds but I think we're pretty much finished so I'm going to wrap up the video here in terms of the tutorial side of it and then jump ahead to the final illustration and I hope you've enjoyed this video and I hope you like my work [Music] you

Channel: Affinity

Views: 30,278

Keywords: Car illustration, illustrating a car, how to draw a car, digitally draw a car, using design software, sports art, illustrator, graphic design, digital illustration, vector art, Affinity Designer, design software

Id: iMlJrYE8Xo0

Length: 37min 20sec (2240 seconds)

Published: Tue May 05 2020