WPAP FULL TUTORIAL for COMPLETE BEGINNERS - Use Inkscape To Create WPAP Style Artwork

there is a style of art online that's pretty popular and it's called wpap or wpap and it basically involves straight lines and geometric shapes and they're filled with color here's an example of one on etsy where if you look up wpap cat or dog you're going to get a custom pet portrait beautiful looking illustration and what i love about it is it's visually arresting with the colors but it's instantly recognizable because it's obviously somebody's pet so you could pay somebody to make these sort of portraits here's another one little kitty cat here's a pop art portrait in this video i'm going to show you how you can create your own wpap portrait using completely free software and i've also got some tips and tricks on how you can make your wpap picture really stand out and look professional let's go all right i hope all is well let's talk a little wpap today and we're going to be using inkscape which is a completely free vector software that you can use you can download it and it's ad free it's completely free and it's actually quite easy to make these wpaps at least from a technical perspective now i do want to jump in and just mention two minutes of art overview before we jump into inkscape here's a typical wpap and the the deal with these wpaps the reason why they're popular is they're both visually arresting and they're easily recognizable so here for example is muhammad ali and muhammad ali in real life world famous boxer he doesn't have like a big red blotch on his forehead or on his neck but the wpap illustrations does have that so what i would encourage you to do is really take a good hard look at a few wpap photos that you like like these illustrations that look good to you and figure out why there's a couple of things that i'll just mention as far as tips go but we can see this is a nice one it's not too detailed it's got nice big swatches on his forehead his eyes are detailed and white the teeth are visible and they're not some weird color like purple or something so you want to make sure the eyes the nose and the mouth are generally recognizable here's another one robin williams world famous comedian and you can see here this is a little more detailed there's a little more tiny little blotches here in his eyes and on his nose and on his mouth but we can still recognize it's him and on his cheeks and his forehead there's a large big shapes so you don't need to make it overly detailed this is one that's probably not one of my favorites but i did pick it because i wanted to show you this is art and this is subject to your decision as an artist so when you're making these wpap illustrations you can make them more detailed than the previous two that we just saw ali and robin williams this one is very detailed you'll see there's not many large blocks there's a lot of little blocks and the eyes are actually quite black whereas the one before the eyes actually have a lot of color on them i'm again it's personal preference you might look at this one and go that's what i want to make and that's great just be aware that in this one it's more detailed and it is art and you may not necessarily want to have so many of these little tiny blocks all around the face and the nose and the mouth here's jimmy fallon world famous talk show host i like this one a lot because from a technical perspective it's relatively easy to do the teeth are white there's some white on his face the eyes are there's white inside of his eyes and this looks like jimmy fallon it's easily recognizable you'll notice at the farther away you get from the face the less detail there is so for example his forehead has big blocks of color his suit and tie has big blocks of color so i'm going to give you a couple quick tips and then we're going to jump into the inkscape and talk about technically how to draw these so here's some tips typically for the eyes you want to have a dark color notice his eyes although there's different colors in there they're both dark it could be a dark gray a black a dark brown something along those lines from a human brain recognition perspective faces are mostly eyes nose and mouth so if you can get those right the rest of it's just details you usually want to have about a 10 color maximum you can see here on this one although there's lots of different colors just look at the greens for example you'll see there's green here here here here it's kind of spaced out look at the whites there's whites here here here it's spaced out look at the pinks here here it's spaced out you don't want to just have half the face green and half the face pink kind of thing you want to have a 10 color maximum and then use that color palette wisely the colors are typically pastels as well they're not super bright neon colors now you may want to try that you may want to say hey i really want to try a neon wpap yeah that's great go for it but generally speaking wpap designs have some sort of a pastel sort of you know calming you know they're visually arresting but they're not like a black light poster for example don't forget to use white as one of your color palettes and you'll see here eyes teeth shirt those are all white in real life and this artist said let's make them white in the wpap poster too so you know his teeth aren't green for example his eyes aren't bright pink so just remember you probably want to keep these white if you can at least as a baseline when you're starting out and you don't want to get too detailed this one to me is a nice mix of having some tiny spaces like some tiny shapes some large shapes and it's it's a nice mix the teeth of course are well defined but you don't have like just you know it's not like a mosaic right a mosaic would be like tiny little marbles making up an entire picture this is nice big swaths you want to make sure to vary that shape size have some big picture big shapes in there big color swatches really big here on the tie in the shirt and then have some little ones as well the variation makes it really pop which is really nice feature typically you'll have the tiniest shapes around the eyes see how his eyes have all these little tiny shapes especially the eyelids that's a big one eyelids eyebrows the nose especially under the nose and then right around the mouth tiny details around the mouth as well and then look at his forehead it's just one two three four five maybe six shapes make up his entire forehead so the tiniest shapes around the face the eyes the nose and the teeth okay let's get in there and actually start drawing our wpap picture and if you've never heard of inkscape before then today's your lucky day it's completely free you just go to inkscape.org and you can just download this professional vector graphics editor you can create svg files which is you know vectors and we'll get into what a vector is here in just a minute but you can just go to inkscape and download it's an awesome resource download it onto your laptop or your desktop computer and let's get started okay if you log into inkscape for the first time and you open this application and you look at this screen it can be a little bit intimidating there's menus along the left hand side there's menus along the right hand side there's menus along the top and it's like whoa where do i even begin so i'm just going to take 30 seconds and just do a quick overview here on inkscape what we're going to be using today to do this wpap is over on the left hand side and it's this bezier curves and straight lines it's this little pen tool on the left hand side when you click on that there's going to be an option now to draw regular bezier paths spiral paths b spline paths or straight lines okay and we're going to be using sequence of straight line segments if you've ever seen this bezier before it can be a little bit weird because you're like creating these weird curved lines and a lot of people are kind of like freaked out by it and they're like what do i do and then you create this thing and you're like ah what do i do so don't stress too much about the bezier today we're just going to be using the bezier and we want to go up to the top where it says straight lines create a sequence of sequence of straight line segments that's what we want to click on okay from there now the pen will only draw straight lines so when i click and i move i can only move in a straight line so then i click again and now i can only move in a straight line i click again i can only move in a straight line if i go back to the original you'll see it's highlighted when i click it that creates a shape in this case i created a triangle that's what we're going to be doing when we create this wpap now from here because it's selected i can just use my little color palette down at the bottom and i can make it any color i want pretty cool or i can say no color at all and that just leaves it as the little triangle here i can also move the triangle around if i select it there we go and i can move it around as well i can even stretch it i can do all sorts of stuff with it it becomes a vector so you'll see these nodes these are actually vectors they're mathematical formulas that look at each other so we're just going to be creating these shapes and just laying them over top of an existing photograph and then filling them in with color and removing what we call a stroke i'm going to really scroll in on here and to scroll in i'm just going to hold down the mouse wheel and click the control key so control and mouse scroll up see there's a black line on the actual triangle that black line is what we call a stroke and we want to get rid of that stroke okay and i'm going to get rid of that stroke very easily down on the bottom it says fill red stroke black i'm right down on the very very bottom left i'm going to click on that stroke where it says black i'm going to click on it and a little stroke window comes up on the right hand side and now i'm just going to remove the stroke it says no paint flat color linear i'm just going to click no paint and now my stroke is gone now i can still move the shape around but there's no black now inside that it's just literally a red triangle that's it now i can create another one so i'll click the little pen button again and i'll click here here here here here here and here and now i'll fill that in with say blue i'm just picking colors at random here now it's going to have the stroke on it but i can remove that stroke by clicking the little stroke button down on the bottom left and i can just click remove stroke so now i've got a red and a blue the blue now sits on top because i made it second if you want to move it underneath just select whatever item you want and just click page down and it just moves down a layer so now it's behind if i change my mind and i want the red now moved behind i'll click page down and now that moves behind if i change my mind and i want to move the red up page up that's it that's how you create these shapes we're going to create a million billion little shapes and that's going to be our wpap okay so let's actually start drawing a wpap image i'm going to go up to file and i'm going to import and that's going to import into my page if you want to change the page size by the way just go to file document properties and you'll get a little screen that pops up and you can make the page size anything you want and as i click on any of these things it just changes the size of it so let's say you wanted to do like us legal eight and a half by 14 that's what i'll do so i'm just going to click that so i'm going to use eight and a half by 14 just as an example okay now i'm going to go file import and here's my picture i'm going to use it's marilyn monroe it's a public domain photo and i'm just going to move that into my page so the question is how much of this face do we want to use and how much of the rest of the body do we want to use and it's really just an artistic choice i'm going to try to just do the face so i'm going to actually just make this a bit bigger i'm actually going to decrease the opacity of this as well so there's an opacity meter on the bottom left-hand side i'm just going to lower the opacity down to about 50 and that way i can see the underlying page it's like a see-through now and i will just make this picture sort of sit in the page we're going to be tracing over it so i don't really care about the background i don't care about the curtains but i do want her face and her hair in there and we'll use some of her body as well so that looks good to me okay so that's what we're going to be drawing now is this piece here and i don't need to worry about the top i'm just gonna have just a white background okay so there's a couple things we can do here before we start drawing that i think like they're recommended but you don't have to do it so because i've got my little arrow selected i can actually move this picture around and i don't really want to do that so i'll just go undo move and i want to kind of lock this in place because i'm not actually going to be touching the picture so down at the very bottom i'm on layer 1 the only layer i have and i'm going to click this little lock button locks the layer see how the little lock now forms and now i can't move it it's like a wallpaper which is great because i don't want to monkey around and move the picture when i'm halfway through drawing it now i'll go up to layer and i'll click add layer this will be layer 2 and i'm just going to call this layer wpap and it's above current layer and i'll click add so now i'm in a new layer i can just start moving around doing my stuff so i'm going to scroll in and i'll just start with an eyebrow for example so i'm going to click my little pen tool bezier pen tool there we go going to make sure it's not on curves it's on straight and i'm just going to start drawing now what i'm looking for and this is really important what i'm looking for is contrast and contrast is light versus dark so you want to go through and start clicking and i'm using the definitions in my mind of what's light and what's dark so i'm only going to highlight this eyebrow for example there it is done now you have a choice to make you can either put a color in there or you can just leave it as is i like putting a color in there just a gray just to kind of tell me it's done i'm not going to worry about removing the stroke and i'm not going to actually color it just yet so i'm just going to make this whole picture gray it's going to look really awful but then i'm going to recolor it afterwards so right now i'm just making clicking and just outlining shapes that's all i'm going to do i'll do this other eyebrow here done fill we're good looks more like a scary marilyn monroe now now i'm going to go in here and do the the eyes so i'm going to click here here it's a judgment call too okay so i'm going to do that fill that in then i'll click here the nice thing is too you can always change it right now let's say for example i want to come back to this one but you'll see if i do that there's going to be a space above so what i'm going to do is just click in here just to kind of get there so i'm just going to scroll right in i'm just going to scroll just clicking in here and then i'm going to come back around so now it's covered but when i cover it you'll see it's over top i'll just click page down now so it's underneath okay from there i'm now going to probably just scroll right in so now i'm going to go here i'm going to start drawing around the eye so it's nice because you can go underneath right so i can just do that and then i can just go right into here i'll fill it and i'll click page down page down again so now that gives me two so i'll start in here so it is a bit tedious now when you've got all of this covered and you're happy with the way that looks then what you can do is you can just make a bigger shape underneath it right so you could say okay i'm done here let's say i want to just do this you could just make it to there for example cover it and then just go page down and that'll just move it underneath it so i'll just select this one here and just go page down and just move it all the way down to the bottom you won't go underneath the original layer but now we've moved it down now it doesn't look great because we haven't colored it yet but you can see now it's starting to make a shape now let's do like the foreheads for example we'll do something a little bit a little bit easier so from here we can just pick sort of a random area in here where there's a bit of contrast and basically chunk off a large portion now it's going to try if you're out too far it's going to try to link up to one of these so you want to like go in side the actual shape now i've gone in there and nobody will ever see that you so you can you have room to play now when you've got your eyebrows done or whatever again i'm just going to fill this in and i'll do page down so you can see now the eyebrow sits on top of it nobody knows you've drawn the line in behind it right but when we color this with whatever color we choose let's say we're going to color it you'll see the eyebrow will still set up right so you don't need to color we don't need to worry about coloring right now we'll just continue to draw and just remember to do file save as because you'll want to save this as well just in case you know the cat jumps on your keyboard and destroys all your work so you want to make sure as you get going if you've been doing this for an hour you want to make sure you save okay so here i've got marilyn monroe wpap is my inkscape file it's an inkscape sgv which is a vector which is exactly what we want and we'll click save okay i've got my stencil all done and i've pretty much just gone through and made big shapes little shapes i think a really important piece for any wpap is to make sure the eyes are relatively recognizable most humans look right at another person's eyes to recognize the person so that's probably the most important thing i would suggest so i've made my images black for the eyes over the eyes and then the eyebrows i'm not going to monkey with those colors and then i've made the whites of the eyes actually white now if you're not if you if we go through the coloring process and you're not happy with the way something looks you can always just select it and you can actually just move it around so here i've got the black piece i've selected you can also just i'll just undo it edit undo if you move it by accident you can also just select the actual item and you can move it down up that sort of thing so it's it becomes a vector remember you're always working with these vectors and you can individually move a vector if you have to it might be a bit tough to select it but you can do it so i'm just going to move this one down just a tiny bit just like that i'm actually going to move this up just a tiny bit and then i'm just going to make this a bit fatter so again i'm i'm not necessarily just copying what's already there i'm trying to make it look decent as well so you would when i scroll back out i can see this eyeball i'm not real happy with the way this looks so i could make this a bit larger now i could either stretch it or i can just individually move the pieces here as i need to as well so i could make it look like that for example and again you could you could take as much time as you want with any of those individual pieces but just remember you're dealing with individual nodes inside of the shapes okay so let's talk now about actually coloring this there's a huge color palette down at the bottom and you've got black and you've got all these other things so it's really easy to color something so i'll just show you that really quickly you select using the little arrow button at the top left any individual shape that we've made so i'll just select this first one here at the top to change the color of it you simply just select any color down in the color palette so i'll just pick something really bright here just at random it's not the color i'm going to use but just to show you underneath the color palette on the lower left hand side there's a fill and there's a stroke the stroke is the piece around the shape so that black outline that's the stroke so i'm going to change that stroke i'm going to remove it and i just need to click on the black stroke and this little stroke window will come up and at the very top of the stroke window i've got different options and i'm just going to turn it off just as no paint when i do that now the stroke is completely gone so i can change the color just by clicking the color palette and i can change the stroke by going in and changing the type of stroke that i'm using now i want no stroke so that's what i'm selecting is no stroke now if you're wondering about the actual colors to use you're like well that's great i know how to select a color but what color do i select then what i would suggest is going into a website called paluton and paluton is p-a-l-e-t-t-o-n.com and there's these different options you can use right at the top here it's there's one color you see if you pick any color inside this little window i'm just going to move this little ball around you'll see on the right hand side it changes the color palettes there's lights and darks but they're all kind of related then you can select this little button here and it says three colors so as i move this little ball around maybe i'll settle on purple it gives me adjacent colors and opposed colors i can also do a tetrad which is four colors and it gives me different options so i've got four little spheres here the now that i'm playing with and i can move these spheres around and it gives me contrasting and complementary colors there's also freestyle four colors as well i'm going to use this tetrad four colors just to find some sort of palette that that i think works for me from a pastel perspective so i'm just going to settle on these just you know this is as good as anything and i'm going to select any one of these little boxes and that's going to give me the actual hex number which i can use so let's say i wanted to use this one here i can see here it's dc93af that's the name of the color dc93af so now i can just go in to notepad i'll just pop up notepad and i'll just type that in dc 9 3 a f so that's my first color that i'm going to pick and then i would just pick like seven more eight more nine more and i would have all my colors sitting there so now if i want to use that color in inkscape i've got this color selected and then down at the bottom see i can change the color if i want but i don't want to do that instead i'm going to pick this little fill button here at the top and i'm just going to punch in the color that i want right on the right hand side and i can make it the exact color that i want so that'll be the color so you could go through and do that if you like you could also just pick random colors and just see how it likes it's really easy to pick as well so that's an option i'm just going to go through now and just color these a little bit so i've just got everything as gray just as a example here because i didn't want to be distracted by the colors but you would just go in and you would just select your palette color or you would select it off of notepad or you could go into the little triangle and you could monkey around and see what looks good so for example i'm going to pick like that for example maybe i'll pick a green here actually so i'm going to just change the little arrow i'll pick a green and then i'll just change the brightness of it here something like that and then i'll remove the stroke by clicking the stroke button down at the bottom left and i'll remove the stroke and that's it and then you just go through and you recolor all of the shapes removing the stroke and just picking whatever color you think would look good quick little bonus tip i did want to mention that if you're not in the mood to use notepad and make a note of everything i'm just going to pick this color over here and let's just pretend i made it a yellow for example okay i'll remove the stroke so now that's the color i want to use but maybe i want to also use it down here so if i'm not you know instead of making notes in notepad another option you can do is just select the image instead of being in stroke just go back to fill and then there's a little eyedropper tool here and you can just pick the color right from the image and then when i scroll down here i can just pick that same color so i can just go here and that gives me the same color then i can just remove the stroke here so i can match up the image pretty easily i'll do that one more time let's say i wanted to make this color here the same as this color over here so what i'll do is i'll select this image i'll pick the little eyedropper tool and then now whatever image i select it's going to change it now i had it on stroke so i'm just going to remove the stroke i'm going to select fill eyedropper tool select the image and that changes it so you want to make sure your stroke is turned off and you want to make sure that your image is colored somewhat consistently as you go through and paint all the different shapes okay so i've got the last of the coloring done here so this is my picture now if you want to look at the underlying photo at any point down at the bottom there's a little layers tab and you can just select the wpap layer which is the current layer and you can just select a little eyeball and that will just disappear and make everything disappear or reappear as needed i want to point out too that when you're working on the image you may want to use the image for reference but you can always change the colors so i'm certainly not saying that this is the final color palette that i would land on i just colored everything in just to show you technically how you can do it if you're not happy with the color palette and you'd like to change something so let's say for example i missed a couple pieces here like this here i've i'm not happy with the gray let's say so what i'll do is i'll change that all you need to do is just go up here to stroke remove the stroke fill and then pick the eyedropper tool and just pick any other pic color so i'll pick like the pink for example and then here the last of it the stroke i'll remove fill and then i'll pick maybe something that's not adjacent right so i'm just looking to see what am i not touching here so this one here for example so i'll punch that in here's another little piece that i missed stroke i'll remove fill and then i'll pick like blue for example so i'm just picking stuff at random and then i'm looking through and just making sure i've removed all my strokes around my images you can see here i've got a couple that this little black piece has come down and this little piece here i forgot to remove the stroke off of that so you'd have to go through and just double check that you're removing the stroke on everything i've got some overlapping designs here so as i remove the stroke there it is so it was hiding in the background there so you might just have to poke around a little bit to see if the stroke is going to disappear so you can see you know probably if i'm being really self-critical of this first thing i would remove is like i wouldn't look at the underlying photo because it's not supposed to be an exact photograph it's supposed to be art so this is the idea is that you know can we tell this is marilyn monroe i would probably monkey around with the nose a little bit and i would maybe change this and maybe try to make it black for example just as an accent you know you may want to you know have a couple little smaller pieces in there you can always change stuff i guess is my point right if you're not happy with the way it looks you can always just pick a different color and you can just run with that as well right so i hope you found that helpful you can spend hours having fun with the wpap but this was more of a technical walkthrough on how to actually make the baseline here it's easy from here on out if i didn't like this color for example i could simply click it and then i could just click the little eyedropper and just pick any other palette color that i want maybe i wanted to use this gray color here so i could just change that or if i wanted to make it bright pink i'll just select the color pink so you could make it anything you want it's really easy to change once you get going on it so i hope you found that helpful and you know this is a great opportunity now when you remove the underlying layer that you could use this now for a t-shirt you know that sort of thing so i'm going to go to layer 1 and i'm just going to unlock it and then i'm going to select layer 1 and i'm going to delete it so now i've got my wpap picture that i could now put another background in i can save this as an svg i just go to file save as and it will come up now as inkscape sgv that's a vector which means i could make this on the side of a building it's infinite resolution you can see here as i scroll in it's all individual colors oh there's a couple other little pieces here i've got to remove stroke remove and stroke remove so it can be a little bit tedious here but you know i would recommend you know going through and just making sure you know cleaning up the image that's a big piece of art that can be a little bit tedious at times you know going through and just removing images like strokes around the images that sort of thing if you're using white as your background it can be a bit tough to see if you're using white in the actual image as well so you can make the background a clear color a transparent and you just go into file document properties and then you'll get the document properties tab show showing up just down near the bottom it says background checkerboard background and i think that's helpful because now i can see this piece here i would need to move it a tiny bit in but i wouldn't notice that if the background was white so there's my wpap picture i'm pretty happy with that you know i'll probably spend some time just cleaning up the nose a little bit maybe adding a couple little accent tiny little you know shapes just to maybe make it a bit more detailed if i want otherwise it's good to go and i'll just use that on a t-shirt or a coffee mug so i hope you found that helpful as always please feel free to like subscribe comment on the videos love to hear from you guys thank you so so much [Music] you

Channel: Crafty Stax

Views: 7,203

Keywords: inkscape, inkscape tutorial, wpap, how to draw a wpap, how to draw in inkscape, how to draw a wpap portrait, wpap portrait drawing, wpap portrait inkscape, inkscape for beginners, learn inkscape, crafty stax, pop art, pop art design, inkscape pop art, WPAP, Wedha Pop Art Portrait, Photo Illustration, Vector Face, Face Design, Face Design Illustration, trace inkscape, bitmap vector, photo illustration, how to trace photo, how to trace photo in inkscape, inkscape vector design

Id: ocJwnmRpwfU

Length: 34min 15sec (2055 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 11 2021