Digital Painting for Cartoon Characters

In this lecture we cover the basics of shading a ball which we will later use to apply shadows and highlights to characters. If you want to practice this technique, I have included the Photoshop PSD file which has both the completed ball, and one you can work on.

Starting from a basic line drawing, we begin the process of blocking out all the basic colours and slowly applying shadow and light in the same way we did with the ball.

Now we begin the clean up process and finalizing the image. Its a back a forth process, so feel free to follow along, or watch the video to the end and try it yourself in the Photoshop PSD file.

In the file you will have a completed image, and the basic line drawing to try the excercise yourself.

Now we move on to a different technie where we paint in grey scale and apply colour afterwards. Using this method is really good for focusing only on the shapes and tones of any figure you are painting, adding more detail and definition as you go along. I highly recommend this technique for anyone who wants to get serious about digital painting.

Also, you can try it yourself in the Photoshop PSD file which has both a completed ball, and one to try out yourself.

In this video we will take the same principles we talked about in the last lecture and apply it to a cartoon girl face. Things get a bit trickier here, so the videos are split into different stages to simplify the process.

Now we start the clean up process and start making a few changes.

The next step is adding the colour. We use the same methods in the ball shading video, but play around with different colours to get the right hue for the character.

Lastly we begin the clean up process, making necessary changes as we go along.

You can try this excercise using the Photoshop PSD file, which has both the completed character, and a basic line drawing where you can apply what you have learned.

Here we go over a few techniques to enhance the illustration using filters and layer blending modes.

Quick wrap up of what we have covered. If you have any questions, please leave a comment and I will make sure to get back to you as soon as possible. Keep an eye out for course updates!

lets take a look at what were going to cover in these lectures, with a few notes on what to look out for and what to avoid

After we pick our source photo to work from, we start to analyse the image and look for ways to make a quick cartoon sketch before we start our painting.

The next step is to clean up our sketch and draw our lines as clean as possible. Remember its not that we are trying to get perfect lines, because we will eventually remove the ink work we have done in this stage later on. Its just important to know what our painting will look like so we dont have to make a lot of guess work at a later stage. Its ok to change the image as we start to paint, but try to get a nice clean drawing early on to make the first part of painting a lot easier.

Now that we have our clean drawing, we start to apply our main bold shadows and highlights. we arent going for any detail just yet, and our focus is on the main shapes and over all values that exist in the original source photo. work loose and keep refering to the small thumbnail image on the navigator view to see how your painting is coming along.

This is a fun but crucial part of the painting. Now we can start to focus on details, adding more dark shadows and brighter highlights. go in close, add smaller details to eyes, lips, and other finer details that help your image pop out. This is the final stage of grey scale painting, so try to get your shadows and highlights as close as possible to the final look you are going for as we will be applying colour in the next video.

When applying colour, dont just look at the source image and pick colours straight out. Try to guess what the colour you are looking at is, without any picking. You think that flesh colour is a light brown/red colour? keep looking. It might have a hint of blue, green, pink, orange, etc. Keep adding more colours until you are satisfied with the hue you are getting. dont worry about edges too much, just colour!

Once we're satisfied with our colour base, we can now add a new layer of colouring straight on to the painting. Just like we were rendering out the grey scale image, the idea here is to get into details and help pop out the image even further. Dont be afraid to deviate away from the source photo and add you own interpretation of light and shadow. Remember we arent going for an exact likeness, but a feeling and mood that is similar to the original.

As always, its fun to play around with some layer blending modes and filters. Experiment with different tools in photoshop and don't stick to what I have done. try to make your own tweaks and see what results you get!

Download the Photoshop file to practice.

In this lecture we introduce the concept of sketching silhouettes by creating abstract shapes which we then use to make out shapes and slowly build a character face. This is a very useful method for creative sketching and coming up with concepts that you probably would not come up with otherwise.

Now with this approach we can start to sketch out some characters. The idea is to be as different as possible when coming up with the different silhouettes so you can give yourself more "randomness" and a variety of shapes to work off of. It can be a little hard at first as you are still focused on trying to make sense of the shapes, but it helps if you give yourself a vague description of what your sketching in the silhouettes. For instance, instead of saying "I'm going to sketch a short stumpy guy" you can say "This character is bulky and blocky". Do not force yourself to create arms, faces, heads, or anything particular, and focus more on "shapes".

Now we narrow down our characters to the ones we want to work with. We focus on the ones that are the most diverse and provide more opportunity for variance. If two silhouettes appear to be very similar, then its better to go for the ones that offer the most difference. We then take our silhouettes and use the sketch the same way we did the face to make a character. You will notice how the character is created on the spot, and a lot of creativity goes into making sense of the shapes presented. Have fun with this stage, its a lot of fun if you just let yourself go!

Now in this sped up video, you will see the creation of the other characters, and how different they all look compared to one another.

Now that we have created some sketches with more detail, its time to choose one in particular and take it a step further. We added more details, and duplicated the character to create even more versions of the original sketch, adding some colour, and finally the option to expand and create a full illustration at the right scale.