Learning to Sketch from Imagination

hey guys this is a premium video that I am releasing for free this is a project demonstration from the drawing for imagination lesson the projects are mostly premium that's what people get when they buy the premium course so if you want access to all the projects and the critiques that's over at broker.com drawing but right now I want to give you a little taste of what the projects are like so I'm going to take you through a little character design project where I'll do some research I'll do some sketches get familiarized with the character and

then at the end do a full page sketch still I'm Not Really Gonna develop the character completely but but the whole purpose of this project is actually to practice our line quality this is in the line section of the course and so the whole time I'm going to be trying to use loose confidence Strokes tapered strokes and not use any kind of scared timid scratchy lines that's the purpose of this exercise while also doing something fun okay so if you like this video remember the full courses at program.com drawing and let's begin okay so as

I just start exploring the images I am trying to look for things that Excite Me Maybe specific shapes specific body parts I'm just trying to familiarize myself with this creature this animal even if I heavily cartoonize it simplify it down to like a ball you can still make something look like a pig or a cow in a very basic shape if you keep some very key characteristics from it so one thing I've seen that I really like is one their their facial expression their mouth is just like like this guy so like that's the sound

I make sure the other thing is I kind of like some of these legs like look at that they're so so simple it doesn't just look like a human arm with different proportions like some animals this one just looks like sticks with little mittens on the bottom what I like about this arm is that it almost feels like it's getting a little thicker as it gets towards the hand just a little bit it's still mostly like a little stick and then this leg is coming up and trying to grab on try not to fall over

I like this yeah okay I'm gonna do a little sketch a little stick I liked how it was getting thicker at the bottom so maybe exaggerate that a little bit see if that works and then yeah they do just kind of have little mittens a little little thumb over here okay and then there's like a stick that he's sitting on so let's get that in there and then the other leg is like just grabbing on kind of like that notice I'm not necessarily trying to just like draw a good picture if I was if I

was just trying to like replicate what I'm seeing I would have started with the body shape right that like big to small it's kind of a general good guideline that helps you get things accurate but that's not what I'm doing here I'm just trying things I like the shapes of the legs so I'm just going right into that and just seeing how that looks does that translate well on paper and it's like yeah I kind of like that I like these legs let's put a body shape in there though see you got head the body

is kind of sitting on the stick and then the very very arched back and then the tail kind of just curves I don't know what is it doing there in the shadow it doesn't really matter okay so one thing I want to try to observe or study here is actually just the way it's like grabbing on this one is like leaning on the stick is like standing and this one's kind of holding it from the bottom okay as I mentioned one of the things I like about them is like the mouth I was just like

so let's get that all the way across here yeah that's what it is the length matters [Music] and then the nose kind of projects forward beyond the bottom jaw so you can see this stage is not really drawing for imagination this is research this is study because you know this project isn't completely drawing from imagination this is we're just starting to dabble in it we're getting our feet wet big eyes man okay that's one thing I didn't notice until now just like what is that is there even an eyeball this seems like he's got like

seven eyelids okay one might need to do a Google search figure out what's going on there but let's just see if I just draw kind of like what I'm seeing gets me anywhere it's like almost like a camera lens where you got like these overlapping different angled arcs I guess it kind of works and he's got a bunch of spikes across the back like a you know the teeth on a blade but you know I'm not gonna draw I'm trying to cartoonize this so I I know I'm definitely not gonna do that in my final

version so in my exploration I'm not gonna even get into that kind of detail it's a characteristic that I think might be important to capture in some way but these got the spiky back and they get bigger towards this middle area and then smaller again as they go back towards the tail and then just maybe a little bit of like what kind of pattern do I want I like the round things on on this cheek it's an opportunity to add some detail around the head as well bring the attention to this area but he's got

him on the body as well maybe just a few I don't know okay some spots basically okay next on to the next study okay what else do I want to see okay here's a very Dynamic angle okay so let's play around with these shapes see what's going on familiarize our brain all right so the head here is more like a triangle this way and then he's got that spiky thing at the top so I'm learning that it's definitely a triangle up here but it's a little wobbly and it's rounded this one made it feel like

it's very sharp but this guy looks like it's rounded so if I want to play around with that later that's a note but for now I actually kind of like the sharp so I'm gonna include that in the sketch kind of a center line from here and then this this is his mouth he's kind of smiling in this one I I want to see if I could make him feel more like that and this guy definitely also has a a bigger bottom jaw area he even almost kind of has an underbite so totally different shapes

than this one so actually I'm gonna give this one a bigger underbite kind of like the asymmetry that accidentally happened here looks like he's gone underbite and also off-center jaw okay so the giant eyes are just such a key feature here and wow okay so we could see this one a little bit better it looks like yeah most of it is just a bunch of eyelids and then a very tiny hole where our pupil is so they don't have the white of the eye like the eyeball they just have an opening in eyelids that is

the pupil that's crazy oh my God we could play with that actually later like these extra droopy eyelids will go with that expression of them and then on this side looks like okay that that there's a ball eyeball there too almost feels like a brow Ridge over here and then the body shape very very or shortened that's a concept that we will get into later but essentially as something that is long starts to Point At You it gets shorter and shorter until all you see is the point same thing with the body you know on

the side view you're seeing the entire length but as we rotate that chameleon towards us we're seeing much less of that length it's being shortened because it's going off into the distance and this gives us a really nice view into the structure of all these spikes they're really tall and then the body is kind of under it and it's got It's pretty much just a round belly it's like like a beanie bag this arm is not as simple as the other ones this one I'm like seeing little muscles or maybe that's just the skin but

very similar pose just got like these cylindrical forms going up elbow down and then it grabs on but there you go and then the big stick that it's sitting on is right there oh and wow interesting this guy's got spikes along the bottom well that makes them look much tougher that's kind of cool okay I like it I like it and you might notice sometimes I'm doing these cross Contours I mentioned in the intro to line episode cross Contours they're a type of line that indicate the form you imagine a rubber band around something like

a rubber band around the stick would just be kind of a circle right and so I'm drawing that rubber band around it same way here drawing the rubber band around the body and it's just a very quick way in a sketch to show some volume when I do this in a sketch I'm not trying to be perfect with my perspective I'm just trying to show an impression of volume and really any kind of ellipse in the right direction is going to do that if you're seeing the top of it then you put that Arc along

the Top If I were looking at it the other way where this branch is going this way where I'm seeing this part closer and this is going away from us then we're seeing the bottom and so we're going to put the arc along the bottom okay so that's another sketch I'm going to scroll through the pictures one more time see if there's anything else and then I'm going to move on to just one my own explorations of shapes more from imagination yeah something I'm not completely clear on right now is the tail so I'm seeing

sometimes we have a tail like this where it's like perfect spiral which is kind of cool I mean that's like the stereo typical tail that you'd see in a drawing of a chameleon here's another one it looks like this guy is probably using his tail to balance whereas if they're sitting still they'll probably just let it hang down and they're they'll curl up like this guy he's not balancing he's he's sleeping without that is so cute that is exciting okay I'm gonna draw this one I love that he's sleeping okay so first of all he

doesn't look as skinny as these other guys like even his legs I feel like they've got a lot more mass on them I mean he's he feels soft and all of that weight I could just feel it as it's like drooping down onto the stick that's kind of cool now I don't know if my final sketch is going to be of one of these sleeping but this is exciting to me right now and I'm so I'm just gonna explore that I do like that it's the stick is pointing down this way and then kind of

big shape there's the head now Everything feels like it's compressing against something else feels like he's not fitting you're just gonna have a lot of little overlaps it's almost looking like a pig or something right here which is not bad like some of those same characteristics I might want to inject into this drooping shape here and then even the elbow I'm just gonna round it out a little bit and then that hand is super relaxed and even this little hand it's a detail but it's just such a fun one where you can see his hand

is under his belly and his thumb is holding on so the branch but then these fingers have let go and they're just dangling that's fun okay now the whole point of this was the tail it almost reminds me of like the golden mean you got this Arc and then it keeps just twisting into itself and I think one important characteristic to capture with the tail is that it just progressively gets thinner and thinner all right now let's see what what about this face do I like okay so hey he's got more of a c curve

like that he almost has like little clown lips let me try it and see what happens I don't know it's fun it's not the same meh feeling that just this gives me but it's cool yeah I don't really see all the eyelids very just one down there making it look like it's closed and while the little little spikes cool I think I'm good I I understand this guy if I wanted to simplify him down to a cartoon character I feel like I can do it right away I wanted to start making it a little more

cute I just that's that's kind of like the goal of this one for me don't necessarily have to do that in your project and so what it usually means to me to make something more cute and cartoony is to make the the head bigger the body smaller the limbs per usually shorter so let's just start trying that it would help to see my previous drawings to face them off of but it's okay I'm gonna attempt to just go from what I've captured from those sketches okay so I know that we have this kind of golden

mean shape right small body I'm gonna give him a big head and I definitely like the spike at the top oh I like this little thing that happened I'm gonna go with it and then really big eyes from this angle you're going to see a little bit of the other one when it's that big and then I remember the brow Ridge that I liked I'm gonna explore that shape let's go with some droopy droopiness that feels cool maybe that's not simple enough though but whatever it's okay maybe in another sketch I'll try something else but

I might also just humanize it a little bit and not do only a bunch of lids is very common to just add human elements to animals to make them more relatable to us okay body so it's gonna be hard to fit those legs in here because it's so small but I can make them shorter a little more like a little more stubby something like that there's a stick and then he's grabbing on remember that but then what's this leg doing grabbing on and then his leg was like yeah it's like that I created this little

Gap in here and it almost feels like his other hand should be visible coming in and grabbing on mitten there okay so that's cool I kind of like this let's do another one I feel like I stayed really safe with this one I didn't really explore too much variety I just made it cute proportions which is totally fine right you can slip progressively get more and more risky with your exploration one thing I I'm noticing on this one though is he looks kind of mad though he's just like yeah he looks mad and it's probably

these two shapes and his brow and maybe not straight enough oh actually yeah that that helps adding a little bit of that clown lip on this guy I wonder if the spikes help spectacular note to self this shape in the brow probably not what I'm looking for I kind of want a matte feeling not a ER feeling one thing that you could do to start experimenting a little more is starting with a different shape this one I started with pretty much what I saw was like that golden ratio now I'm going to start with just

something else that is different from this maybe like the opposite way like this way and see if what can I do something with this is it still gonna look like chameleon I could definitely put a a bigger head on it when it's this way will it still have that same feeling let's just try it I might fail that's totally fine you have to approach this with the mentality that it's totally fine to try something and it not working out and then you just try something else there's a shape I'm going for there's like a head

there's a body and then I mean I do need a tail though and I will stick to this this tail okay so I want to make sure I have at least some indication of that pointy back part ooh and I'm gonna have this one have be like the nose all the way at the bottom see how how much I can exaggerate that meh mouth let's try a more a longer eyeball on this one and let's just try two eyelids maybe one at the bottom actually maybe another like more droopy one exploring going a little bit

away from a safe shape okay yeah exaggerating that idea of like this big ball and then you got this tiny black dot right in the middle with all these eyelids this actually just feels like a bag under his eye which I kind of like adds to that droopiness I feel like if I don't add some kind of Arc in here he's not gonna feel like a chameleon I mean looking at some of these other ones like not all of them have a really crazy tall Arch some of them are a little more flat and then

you do have this one that kind of actually looks like he could Arch his back backwards this one's a little bit longer and skinnier though so if I'm going for that kind of shape I would probably have longer legs long skinny legs and actually this guy I'm drawing is he looks like he's kind of walking so he might use that balancing tail instead of a curved tail this guy's an athlete right okay and then along his back let's try something different let's do some really spiky spikes a little more variety in the spikes that's pretty

cool now I didn't know if it would work but it works I like the square shape of this head because it's a it's kind of unique it's very simple in a very simple way it captures a lot of what I like about the chameleons I saw it has a little bit of this triangle in the back it has a very flat bottom which is great for that mouth shape and the emotion I'm going for and then it's just got this really large space in the middle for this big eye in some of the bag so

I like that shape I don't like the athletic pose the kind of energetic pose because it doesn't match the laziness of the facial expression so I definitely want to go back towards the hunched back and maybe even borrow some of the sleeping pose how he's actually resting his head on the branch and maybe even some of the really compressed forms and I also like this idea of he was grabbing on and then his hand got relaxed and so I was thinking I could maybe do one where his arm is kind of dangling down the back

arm because I haven't really figured out what to do with that back arm so I'm just doing a very very small sketch just to show you guys what I'm I got in my head right now so it's got big head hunched back and then his back arm is dangling and it's loose like that and then maybe even his tail instead of being crunched up maybe that is loose as well I haven't tried that but like it's loose and then just curls a little bit at the end like that so just a very quick little thumbnail

sketch or a little idea dump in here just a doodle I guess so now let's actually try that out see if there's anything else I might be missing gotta make sure I leave space for the dangling hand or dangling arm I think instead of looking at us which is kind of active I think maybe what if his eyes just kind of looking down oh and I also really like the spikes I just don't like the body shape in here so maybe see if I could add more of the real just the vertical spikes on this

body shape one thing I like about this is just there's two big ones and then a bunch of little ones maybe this just has too many of the big ones there you go yeah the variety is what makes that interesting okay big head small body big spikes and then let's try to get some laziness in the way that this the legs all flow so this was kind of compressed his wrist up against his body I kind of like that so the wrist over here instead of grabbing on to the pole which is kind of active

he's just kind of resting not really grabbing anything maybe maybe the back leg we can make it actually holding on okay yeah this definitely captures the energy especially this sweeping arm and the the jaw resting up against the branch so I tried this kind of relaxed tail but I feel like it's not true to what they actually do when they're resting they're resting tail pose is actually curled I'll probably go back to that and also this kind of competes with two dangling things if I curl it then the arm goes lower than the tail and

so the dangling arm actually becomes more expressive okay so I'm gonna now just do my final sketch I'm gonna do a full page sketch on here I do want to see this though so I'm going to take a picture all right so a branch going upward a little bit you know I'm a lot more confident with the shapes I want to put down because I just did all these studies and I know exactly what my character looks like now I'm just doing a bigger sketch of the same thing and so by doing little studies where

I was allowing myself to be more messy now I can do a drawing where I'm still being sketchy with it these are not like final clean lines but I can have more confident lines foreign and by the way even in this stage you could still play around with some stuff because now you're kind of changing the scale things are bigger and you might come across things where now with more scale you can explore the shapes a little better like the fingers at a small scale you can't really do much but now when they're three times

bigger you might be thinking oh what's this actual shape of this finger maybe not necessarily but just saying scale sometimes does create new issues for you it reveals things that you didn't know you didn't haven't solved yet thank you that's a little too small considering this hand is so big scale is not working maybe I could make this leg bigger and this obviously and I'm bringing back those spots kind of liked them in my first few sketches just a little bit of a texture detail it adds complexity to it without really being that complex okay

I think this is almost done let me just go back through my sketches real quick and see if there's anything that I kind of forgot about there's these bottom spikes but I have his jaw resting on the branch so this won't work I'm pretty happy with this if I were to take this into digital and try to clean it up I think one thing that I would fix the proportions of is just this arm I think it's just a little too big but like I would probably bring it in a little bit kind of just

looking at where this body ends and where that shoulder would be I would bring it in and put it like right in here actually let me just fix that so the hand needs to be a little bit smaller to match this the arm needs to be shorter shoulder needs to be brought in [Music] there you go that's actually much better okay now that works okay well that was really fun I hope you guys learned something about sketching and line quality and if you want to get the critiques for this project and get the projects for

the rest of the course head over to parker.com drawing we're going to continue improving our line quality then move on to shapes get your shape design work and move over to perspective and start learning about 3D forms and so you could intuitively get things in perspective in your drawings and then learn about values and edges so you can start shading your drawings and the whole course is a balance of drawing from observation and drawing from imagination so that we can be well-rounded artists from the very beginning cool thank you guys that's over at program.com drawing

I'll see you in the next one