Hi everyone! Chiken here.
In the last lesson, we covered some composition rules
and techniques for creating more depth in our painting.
In this lesson, we will be starting
with finding good references, and using them
to create a few character sketches.
I like to use Pinterest to gather
most of my references and inspiration.
I have a board for people references, and nice
art, and now my feed is mostly curated to
the kind of pictures that I like already.
But if you are just starting
out, I recommend searching keywords like
"people photography", "aesthetic" and "fantasy".
You can start a Pinterest board and expand your
reference Gallery slowly. Like art styles or studying,
a great way to use references is to take little
elements from many different pictures to use in your painting.
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For example, you can use the perspective and
camera angle from one reference, and change up
the pose, the mood, or the setting.
You can see how I took elements
from many references to create this illustration.
For the demo today, all I knew was what character
I wanted to draw, so I headed to Pinterest and
within my pins, I found this really nice reference.
It kind of sparked the idea to have my
character picking flowers with a basket like that.
So, now that I have my general idea, I
can go back to Pinterest, and start looking for
other references that can accommodate my idea.
For example, because I knew I wanted my character
to be holding that basket of flowers, I was
looking for references where the model is holding something
or interacting with some flowery elements.
I was also looking out for references for the background,
so I found a few of some flower gardens.
Usually, you can find quite a lot of good female
references from searching the term "girl photography", or you can
even include the term "Weibo" in your search and
you'll get lots of pictures of Asian models in really
aesthetic and kind of fantasy settings.
After I gathered all my references,
I put them in a collage.
I use this app called "Vizref", which is made for artists
and it's really useful, but it needs to be purchased.
If you don't want to make that purchase, you
can always just open all the pictures up in
Procreate, and save the image to use as reference.
With the iPad split screen function. Just select all your
images, drag it to Procreate, and it will import in.
Then, you can arrange them as a collage. and we can
And we can save this and use it as reference while we draw.
Now, I'll just demonstrate how I'll use these
references to create four different thumbnail sketches.
I'll create a few frames here, and I'll
and I'll create a clipping mask layer so that we
can only draw within the frames.
I'll start with the first reference that gave
me the idea, and I'll start sketching.
I really like the overall pose, so I'm going
to go with something similar to that.
And I'll keep the camera angle kind of the same, too.
We don't have to go into too much detail.
You can see here I drew the face really simply.
I really like that hair ribbon thing from the model, so
I decided to add that to my character as well.
And I don't spend too much time on each one.
Maybe over three minutes, but you can take your time.
Just don't go into too much detail,
as for now, we are
just planning the overall composition.
I always like to change up at least one element
of the post, just so we can create something new.
In this sketch, I kind of just adjust the hand position
a little bit, but if you don't feel comfortable with that,
you can always just stick to the original pose.
That's completely fine, too.
Here, I am just going to draw in the foreground
element, so she's kinda leaning over to take the
flower from this bush, and very simply, I just outline
the shape of the background, and I think I'm going
to have that in some flowery bushes.
Referencing the previous lesson, you can see that I put
most of the high elements of the background at the
side, and the lower elements at where my character is
so that we can distribute the visual weight better.
And I think I'm ready to move on.
So, for the second sketch, I'll find another pose.
Similarly, I'm gonna follow this pose pretty closely.
I like how she's clutching the basket.
Again, I'm not putting in too much
effort to make the face pretty.
It's just a plan.
And later we can spend
more time to beautify everything.
I really liked how the hair ribbon looked in the
previous sketch, so I'm bringing it into this one too.
In the background of my reference, there's
that curved circular element that branch makes,
and I really like that.
So I'm going to try to add
in some shape in my background, too.
And it just so happened that the other reference that
I saved, the one for the background, had some wooden
cross fence that I thought was really pretty.
So, I included that into my sketch too.
And for the third sketch, I found this reference, and
I thought it would be cute if she was looking
at her chicken. Cos I wanted to include the chicken
in all the sketches.
And same for the fourth one, I'll be following the pose pretty similarly.
So, I kind of realized that the pose wasn't
really working for me, so I just started over.
I used the model in
the background reference as inspiration.
I was thinking maybe a back view could look nice too.
Even though these are just rough sketches, we
still want each of them to hold its
own in terms of the composition.
And already, I like this a lot better, so
I'm just going to go with it.
Again, I push the visual weight of the background to the
sides and I also included that cross wooden fence.
So, from just one initial reference and idea
we created four different thumbnails. For the mission,
create a collage of references, and use them
to create 4 different thumbnail sketches.
You can include a little description
about what your idea is.
In this lesson, we used various references to create
a new idea, and sketched out some thumbnails.
In the next lesson, we will move on to
detailing our thumbnail sketch to prepare for painting.