This Simple Line Trick Will Transform Your Comic Art!

this video is all about shape language if you're familiar with the concept of shape language it's very likely that you're thinking about something to do with painting as I understand it in painting shape language is all about using brush Strokes to describe form and true Masters at shape language can create paintings that are beautiful not only in their subject matter composition and use of lighting but also in the visible technique in the way that the paint was laid down but in this video we're going to talk about how we can use shape language to bring our line art to the next level so to start with I've gone ahead and drawn two figure examples the first one uses nothing but simple curves and the second one uses nothing but straight lines in the first example you can see you end up with something that while anatomically correct enough it looks very soft and really doesn't have a lot of believability I'm sure you've seen a lot of examples of anatomy drawn this way and it's possible this is something you might have run into in your own work and not known why it ends up looking the way that it does in the second example I've used nothing but straight lines and you can see that I end up with something that looks very very rigid it actually looks somewhat better than the first example I think but it's also a very very limited approach and the second example is why I think that telling people to use a lot of hard edges and to not use curves is maybe a little bit of a mistake and it doesn't really tell the whole picture I've actually given that advice myself and I've really learned that it's a little bit more complex than that I've got a third figure lightly sketched in but before we get there I want to give you a quick overview of the kind of shapes that we're trying to achieve so first I've drawn a simple curve and you can see that it looks fine but it really doesn't have any character to it at all in order to take that curve to The Next Step we're going to use something called a line of beauty this is something that I've talked about quite a bit before but I really want to go in depth into how we actually use it in practice all over a drawing now I'm just going to go ahead and show you the way that I tend to use a line of beauty a little bit more commonly so I'm drawing a simple curve and then going into a hard transition into an opposing curve and then another hard transition back into the original curve it's really just a variation on a softer light of beauty but it's something that I think can give your work a little bit more Edge unfortunately I don't really think that drawing simple lines like this on a piece of paper is an effective way to get this concept across so we're going to go back to our third figure drawing we're going to take this basic shape and we're going to use it all over the figure to give us something that has much more pleasing shape language so I'm going to go ahead and start with my bicep I'm creating a curve going outward and then opposing the curve for the long curve of the bicep and then creating an opposing curve again going the other way for the tricep I'm going to do essentially the same thing an inward curve connecting to an outward curve and then connecting to another inward curve as we go down and it really is just using opposing curves over and over again really over the course of the entire drawing going into our deltoid the same thing again a simple curve a hard transition followed by an opposing curve to give this is the bottom of the deltoid and you can see the difference between that technique and the first drawing where it's just a simple curve all the way through and it really has no character so continuing with the deltoid I'm going along the top and just connecting my curves again making sure to curve create a hard point and then going into an opposing curve and then I'm going down through the elbow curving I'm creating a small line of beauty below the elbow it just describes so much more forms in a much more fluid way coming to the inside of the arm simple opposing curves I've got a hard transition but it's relatively soft and now just continuing those same shapes for this smaller shape here I've actually come out and created a bit of a harder point it's something I can get away with for smaller details on a figure and give it a lot of character but you want to avoid that for some of your larger forms it can get a little bit distracting now I'm going down through the the muscles on my forearm I get a lot asked a lot about how to draw forearms and the truth is that my knowledge of all those little muscles that make up your forearm and your finger extensors is relatively limited I have a basic sense of where they all go but what really makes it work is just using this simple shape language consistently across the form in order to make it work though you need to bear in mind that you're essentially drawing football shapes that connect for your muscles and this is something that I've shown before but just to drive the point home here are some simple shapes that are all connected together and so your muscles actually connect and form a bit of a network if you don't have those connections working your muscles will look like they're just floating in space and will start to just look like lines on paper now for his chest I'm going to go ahead little bit concave and then come around complex let me just accentuate that just a little bit more just like that it isn't really necessary to hit every single form with an opposing curve but I I think when you're learning this is probably a good idea to really think in those terms it is possible to push a concept to the point where it actually starts to become distracting and it can start to take away from the final drawing so you do have to be a little bit careful I'm going to go ahead and draw the edge of his rib cage you can see my first curved example that the ribcage really doesn't have a natural flow at all and it looks a little bit artificial and then the second example it's a little bit better at describing the form but it's very rigid and it still looks very artificial really not interesting looking but it also really look anatomically accurate because the body actually does have a lot of natural line of beauty type fluidity to it so now I'm going to go down in through the stomach and for my first stomach muscle I'm gonna create a simple line of beauty again connected up to the rib cage and another one for the other side and down through the stomach muscles just using that same concept and you can see already that the stomach has a lot more natural flow to it and it looks much more realistic just with a simple line of beauty connecting up all of my serratus and then moving down into the oblique and it's a curve followed by an opposing curve and then coming up to the side of the stomach now getting the other side of the oblique end using the exact same technique connecting it in to make sure that my muscles all work together now just running in the edge of his buttock drawing a curve followed by an opposing curve this time with a hard transition sometimes I'll use a hard transition if I want it to be just a little bit more rigid and sometimes and sometimes I'll go softer if I want a softer form I really feel like I'm saying the same thing over and over again and I am but I strongly recommend that you draw this along with me and you'll very very quickly get a sense of just how much of this you can internalize very very quickly it becomes automatic before you know it and it will just become part of your drawing vocabulary and I think it will make your drawing much much stronger now at this point we're going to go into another aspect of shape language and that is in our shadowing this is a place where we actually will start to cross over into something more akin to what you would imagine shape language to be in painting this is an example of a figure drawing by Jeffrey watts and the shadows in this are incredibly believable but also really artfully produced they have a beautiful confidence and flow and in order to achieve that he's using the same techniques that we'll be using here for our shadows and hopefully you can see how much they naturally build on the shapes that we've already established in our simple line drawing before we get there though I want to go ahead and just start to establish some line weight so I'm lighting this figure from the top left which is really my standard lighting for most of these examples and I have a video that goes into depth on how to use LINE weights I'll add a link to the video in the upper left to right corner right here so you can go check that video out I really recommend if you haven't seen it to take a look at that so you can get a sense of what we're doing here but this is a great intermediary step between your simple Flatline drawing and starting to put in Shadows really for a lot of artists this is as far as you need to take your work and just to quickly recap what we're doing with line weights so you don't have to go watch a whole other video if you wanted to stick with this one right now I'm going to go ahead and draw sphere and light it the same way so it's dark on the opposing side away from the light and so I've gotten thicker with the line I've drawn another sphere behind it I've gotten thicker with that line too and I make sure also to go thicker where I have connection points and that really helps solidify forms in space and just a little bit more and it's almost a form of lighting it really is a form of lighting but it's a great way to help ease your way into the more heavy lighting that we'll do in just a minute all right so now that we have that established it's time to go into our shadows we have our lighting established we have our line weights drawn in and we have our basic forms drawn in a much more natural flowing way and so ideally we want our shadows to continue that theme I've gone ahead and drawn a slight curve from under his chin and then an opposing curve over his neck and and in his eye I'm making sure to delineate my shadow very very clearly I want to make sure that I'm not scribbling things in and things are very clearly defined and I'm creating appealing shapes all the way through under his mouth I've got a shadow so I'm drawing a curve and then a bit of a hard point and opposing that curve the same way that I did with my other forms and when I draw the shadow in to complete that form you can see it's a lot more pleasing that if I than if I was to just draw a straight curve underneath his mouth I'm just going to go ahead and fill this area in under his Peck I already have that kind of defined and so I'm just going to go ahead and use that and fill it in and then I'm going to Shadow underneath his PEC and so I'm drawing a curve followed by an opposing curve underneath his arm I'm going to go ahead and fill that in and the direction of that curve in the opposing curve is something that you can really play with if you want and I'm going to go ahead and do it the opposite way so I'm curving Inward and then curving outward for the bottom part and I think it works just as well there are times that one Curve will work better than another you really want to think about your underlying form but for the most part it's just using a curve and an outside curve to get that effect so now for his deltoid I'm drawing in a nice line of beauty curve and then filling that in I'm going to draw the central head of his deltoid doing the exact same thing a nice line of beauty I'm not drawing a simple curve I'm not drawing something that's just hard edged but it gives me something that is a nice medium between those with a lot of flow I'm going to draw in a bit of a striation beside that muscle and I'm going to use the same thing a bit of a curve a hard point and then an opposing curve and you can see how that gives me a bit of a believable looking smaller muscle in there and it looks very very natural and now the same thing for the back of the the deltoid curve a bit of a hardpoint an opposing curve and that completes out my the shadowing on the back of the deltoid it really is the same kind of technique that I was using for my lines I'm just using that technique to describe shapes that I can then fill in with Shadow now for his chest on on the other side of his body I want to go a little bit more shadowed and so I'm going to go ahead and Define a shadow shape and you can see the same kind of line of beauty the same thing that we've done all the way through this it is so incredibly simple and so effective every single time and so there it is I'm going to draw in some striations the same way that I did on the deltoid really is just a line of beauty but just a little bit more hardened just with a hard transition Point as opposed to a soft curve and that's something that really is up to you as the artist if you want something that's just a little softer or something that's just a little bit more aggressive in your shape I like something that's just a little bit harder so I like those harder transitions but it's it's a choice that you have to make for what's best really for what you're trying to achieve with your work now for a stomach I'm going with a curve an opposing curve and then finishing it out with another opposing curve then just filling that in the exact same thing for the other side of his stomach now I'm going to go ahead and cast a bit of a shadow from that top part onto the central part of his stomach and then just drop the same kind of curve again now for this last bit I want that to be fairly dark we're turning away from the light it's being heavily shadowed from the stomach above and because that's heavily shadowed I'm going to go ahead and Shadow that oblique muscle in beside it so much of my lighting I really do work out in terms of in terms of connecting shapes like this I don't think of lighting an entire picture all at once because it would be incredibly daunting what I do is I take into each individual piece and I Shadow them one after the other I try to bear in mind how far around if it were a sphere how far around that sphere it is away from the light and Shadow it accordingly so if it's up toward the light obviously I don't want Shadow the further away it gets the light the darker it's going to get or the more wide the shadow is going to be across the form so I want to quickly show I've got a small Shadow just along his stomach and it's using a simple hardened line of beauty and then I'm just filling it in from below with Shadow and you can see that I can just connect it fill it in and my natural shapes that I'm using for my line drawing really lend themselves well to creating nice looking Shadow shapes and you can see how much more effective that is than if I was to just draw something that is completely hard edged or soft and so I'm going to just repeat that all the way through all of my serratus the same basic shape it's very very natural and easy to do I really recommend again that you draw this along with me give it a try and it will become automatic before you know it his lats turning away from the light and that whole form is really turning away from the light so you can see I'm going I'm going wider with my shadow I'm covering more of the form with the shadow as I go down through and rounding it up towards the light so it makes it very very simple to take your lighting and make it work over a larger form if you just think about it in those terms put a shadow onto my oblique and then finish the Shadow on my stomach using the same technique again now we're going to go ahead and move into the arm I'm on the I'm working on the deltoid and dropping my shadow in along the shadowed side of the deltoid I'm describing a little bit of a vein in there and so I'm leaving that I'm leaving just a little Notch open so I can start to put that in and I'm just using the very same shape that I've got right there to describe my tricep muscles and I've got a connecting muscle between the bicep and the tricep and you can see if I went round with it or if I went hard with it I can get that in there but it really doesn't look believable and so I'm just going to go ahead and just use the same very simple slightly hardened line of beauty and quickly throw that in and now for the extensors in my forearm I'm going to use the exact same thing that I've been doing this whole time I'm much more worried about creating nice looking shapes with my basic line of beauty that I am about exactly what where every muscle goes and making sure that it's perfectly anatomically correct you will actually make a drawing that's much more believable looking with good shape language than you will with perfect Anatomy now for the tendons along the back of his hand I see this very very often where there's they're just drawn is very simple straight lines and it looks incredibly unrealistic so just using a little bit of shape language makes those lines look so much more organic they actually read is much more believable it's the same basic form but you can see how this takes it so much further it makes it so much more believable I'm going to go ahead and start to draw in some form for his face some of this I'm not really going to want to light but what I want to do is just to start to sketch in some of the planes of my face and show you just how much using the same basic shapes that we've been using gives you such a nice flow along his cheek along his jaw and all around all of the planes of the face and so that's it I've said this a couple of times but I highly highly recommend that you try this one I really don't think this is something you can pick up just by looking at it give the kind of line of beauty that I like to use a try try a simple curved line of beauty and then try a line of beauty that has a bit more of a hard transition in it and then draw this figure or draw your own figure and really try to use it everywhere in your own work and the difference that it will make and the overall quality of what you do thank you so much for watching and I will see you in the next video

Channel: David Finch

Views: 282,509

Keywords: drawing tutorial, how to draw, comic art, inking

Id: rPWa5kSwVGE

Length: 15min 50sec (950 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 11 2023