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so you find yourself sketching away at characters and you could use some help maybe you get an amount of block or your drawings just aren't coming out the way that you hope so we both know that you like when the videos are numerically organized like this so sit back get some help from it and enjoy [Music] number one is adding constructive lines too quickly so the use of gestural shapes and lines up front will lead to a livelier and more exciting drawing and construction can act as a corrective restrictive measure that can stiffen your characters up too quickly if you're not careful it can be like a dam that blocks the creative waters from flowing it also takes you away again possibly too quickly from the exploratory phase it's so vital to try different options even if the first thing you tried is what you end up going for starting to add rigid structures to a drawing too early is like moving immediately to the shading on the upper lip before you've even given yourself a chance to iterate however once you have some really interesting shapes and a good vague idea then is a good time to come in and refine your sketch with constructed shapes to make sure that it makes sense the great thing about digital sketching is that this can all be done in another layer and can be completely non-destructive to your main drawing you can simply use it as a guide to inform number two is subject matter tracing this falls in line with a lot of the advice on reference we've used in the past but it's worth pulling up some reference images that are relevant to your subject matter and even tracing these images as an opportunity to learn something about them tracing not because you're going to use something traced in your image but as a way to study something and digest it mentally artists will do this to understand another artist's style to understand human or creature anatomy or to measure out proportions remember that the purpose for this is educating yourself and not plagiarizing and you'll stay ethically in the clear some point to this one while it's great practice to gather reference for something if you're just doing blue sky sketching without a specific purpose in mind it is possible to have too many pieces of reference in front of you more than three or so images might be enough to overwhelm you your mileage may vary but if this rings true for you try it out number three you're probably familiar with the idea of a strong silhouette that having a clear readable exciting overall shape helps the character itself well in checking the silhouette you can try this process digitally this can be non-destructive on another layer fill your character in with a solid color so that the whole sketch is solid from here you can make adjustments you can cut away shapes to make it look better and now you can come back over the new shapes with a white brush to add interior details this is just a cool way to make new ideas and maybe pull you out of the comfort zone of only using lines and relying too much on that process it's even fun to do this from the start the white lines end up being a really high contrast to the silhouettes and so you kind of end up getting the best of both worlds number four when is your sketch actually done well unless you have clear plans to do something specific with your sketch like turning it into a digital painting or trying to specifically create inked comic art with it there's a good chance that you don't necessarily need to abandon or hide what you've already made not only can inking or redrawing over top of an original image be incredibly time consuming it can sterilize or wash away the personality and texture really the life of our image but we do it because we're sort of self-conscious about either how messy or unfinished our sketch might look so instead try to clean the sketch up to a certain degree add some color or brief rendering if you'd like and then allow the sketch to exist organically the way that it is chances are your audience or someone looking at it will actually appreciate a cleaned sketch with all of the life still in it more than a finished piece that you spent hours longer on just for it to be over polished not a hard and fast rule just something to try number five a lot of times the very reason that we begin rendering and fixing is because there's something about the sketch that we aren't really happy with and instead of fixing it now we hope that the next step will help until we're at the end and it's basically too late the amount of time that it will take to do another pass to reiterate or draw the same thing that we just drew a little bit differently while you're still in the sketching phase will be so much less than the time spent inking and rendering and simply hoping for the best it will always be better to learn something and fail faster to recognize the places that you went wrong and then be better next time this is a great thing about being an artist like the greatest artist ever is so much different from i guess the greatest fighter pilot that ever lived that's just the person with the longest streak in a way before something went wrong with art you can fail over and over and use that failure to grow stronger it just means being okay with the frustration that might come with it all right so you've been great i think maybe i don't know here's two bonus tips number six take some time to try drawing with a different sized brush than you currently are for me that might mean that i start with a thick brush for shapes and then go much thinner for details sometimes i get so stuck in with a certain medium sized brush or pencil that it feels like there's bandwidth or resolution that i'm missing out on while i'm drawing so maybe that rings true for you that's when it's been really helpful to size down and really any kind of brush change or tool change can help break you out of a rut but this specifically has helped when i'm struggling number seven a lot of times we get really precious about this sketch that we're working on right now and we might be hesitant to iterate or experiment on something that we drew really well and don't want to erase so digitally you can simply duplicate a layer and work with save states as it were that way you can always go back to an old version and we don't lose it this can help a ton with being over precious with something i hope that gives you some better sketches in the short term and some better art in the long term speaking of this month's biko's backpack for february looks like this i'm very happy with it and you've seen some of the time lapse of those pieces over the course of this video you can get that at patreon.com bagel denizen where we also just released the first vlog for a january first vlog of this year that's a new thing that we're doing and gives you a little bit of insight into the storm fellers project really cool behind the scenes stuff that i'm very excited about you can also get my course learn character design at learncharacterdesign.com it's over 18 hours of a comprehensive character design curriculum you can follow me at bageldenison on instagram twitter twitch and tiktok thank you so much for watching and have fun creating [Music]