Beginning a Pet Portrait - Outline & Planning Tones/ Colours

Hi guys and welcome to another video today. I'm going to be showing you how I start off my drawings so like you know the outline and how to judge tones and colours and some good tips to help you out. And I thought my next commission here was an ideal candidate because he's like a Jack Russell breed. He's got white tummy, white chest and a white stripe down the middle and then he has like beige brownie orangey fur on the outside. Now the first tip I'm going to give you is the paper that you're going to use and the colour. It can be really difficult with light coloured dogs to spot the tones within it so you know the lights and the darks and the mid-tones can be rude because our eyes just see like oh it's a light dog you know let's just draw with light colours but that can end up looking really flat if you don't have a clear source of light and the shadows to match that sort of light. It's going to give it much more of an impact but yeah this grey toned paper I think it's a dark grey by Pastelmat. It just gives you a really nice mid-tone colour to compare your colours to rather than comparing it to the white colour next to it which is going to make everything really difficult to judge. Right second tip is how I get down my initial outline. Let me just get my laptop. So this is my Microsoft Surface Book laptop. It's the second edition. It's really good for doing your outlines digitally. The reason I do it digitally is because you've got a really good comparison to your reference picture as you can see it's actually a laptop and you can like detach the screen and turn it around and stuff like that. It's a perfect laptop if you're looking for a new one and you want to do this kind of because there's another edition that's coming out now and it's for the price of this one you can get it second hand for really cheap now. Well not really cheap but it is an investment. I don't know what I'd do without this now. I use my pen on Photoshop and I just create an outline like this and the pros to doing it this way you're not having to you know rub out all the lines and if you were to take a graphite pencil for example go straight onto your pastel map it's not going to work because every time you make like an indent or you have to rub something out you're just damaging the tooth of that paper and the texture of pastel map. So yeah so we've got the line drawing here. This is what I do for example and I've purposely just included the details that I want to include in the drawing so the bits I know I'll get stuck on like this fur direction I've included lots of detail there so that you don't you just don't panic when it comes to actually drawing it. You've got that information there and ready to go and once I have done that I tape it to one of these trace down papers. These are a really good brand. They're a white colour so they show up really well on the dark pastel map and the reason I would suggest using these rather than the darker ones is when you're drawing like light coloured fur I used to do I used to just use the dark coloured one but I found that sometimes it would just smudge with the darker colour and it would look quite muddy and you just don't want that really. So I started using the white one for light coloured dogs and it's so much easier now. So yeah I will insert the process of transferring the outline here. So as you can see here I'm just using a purple coloured biro. It's handy to use a pen that is a different colour to your lines just so you can see which bits you've done and which bits you haven't. You'll see me occasionally lifting this up as well just to check that it's being transferred clearly and I was pretty happy with the outcome. Here is my lovely reference picture but I'll just include this in case you're relatively new to drawing or seeing tones. Human eye sees like something like a million tones and as artists we have to take it down to just well I like to use the 10 value system some artists use less or more um but this is really handy if you're starting out and you're just getting used to seeing tones and stuff especially in white dogs it can be hard. So let me just get my printed off this second line drawing for you and what we're going to do so in photoshop you can always mess with the the levels here so you can take it it's basically just um brightness and contrast so we want the shadows to be visible but not too dark and in the whites we need some information presence so don't blow out the white so much where you can't see any of the fur direction so I think that is a good some good levels and then what we do is make it black and white so the tones are easier to see that's image adjustments new saturation and then just turn that saturation all the way down so now we have our black and white image and being black and white is going to make it very much easier very much easier a lot easier to see where our tones are and here we can use our value scale really hard to do on the laptop and in real life because obviously whichever direction you point it's going to look a bit different but we're just going to do it roundabouts and I've got a pen here I'm going to write on my drawing which number is in which area just a bit of pre-planning you can do you don't have to do this at all but it can just help inform the process as you go along so in these white bits here I would say that they are obviously it doesn't look like this on camera because it's going to look different color but this is yeah I would say between two and one between the lightest and the second lightest so in my drawing here I'm just going to put two slash one and that is one of the lightest areas so that is going to be the bright whites if you have any in your drawing um right so these eyes now I'd say they're definitely the darkest part as well as the nose in this drawing so maybe yeah I reckon a nine because it's not quite the darkest there's some shadows within them so I reckon it's a nine and a ten in the shadow areas so here we take this pen and we put nine slash ten now let's do some of the shadows in the white fur on his chest so I would say really helps to squint your eyes when you're doing this as well so if you squint your eyes as you're watching this you'll probably make what I'm doing make more sense squint your eyes to see the tone and open them to see the color is what I plan so I actually think that's around a seven I think around a six or a seven in those shadows so I'm just going to write on the chest in the shadow pick up the right pencil in the shadows areas a six slash seven and then in those areas around that shadow probably around a four and then you've got the highlights on top in around a three or two so four highlights three slash two and we have this nose area and that nose is going to be dark nine and then it's got some shadows within that darkness so it's going to be nine and ten again one of the things I really struggle with is not going overboard on the nose um reflection because it's like a really detailed area you want to get all your skills in there but in actual fact it's really not that much lighter than the rest of the nose usually unless it's really wet and the sun's shining on it then you can go to town with the details but nose is like this the highlight is probably about an eight so only a tone dark a tone lighter I'll say eight or seven so the highlight eight slash seven and on these ears say they're nowhere near the darkness of the eyes so probably gonna be a seven maybe an eight seven now I think around seven for the edge of those ears that are in shadow so seven slash eight in those shadowed ears and for the side of the face so we've got this side which is more in the light and this side which is in the dark so these this fur is going to be darker than this fur even though our brain kind of says it's the same color so I say that's an eight on that side eight and on this side it's gonna be around a six so that's two shades lighter on this side so let's check those highlights in the eye they're not bright white as you can see they're actually a little bit darker than that fur so I'm going to say four or three or four of those highlights three slash four and last of all we're going to do this mouth area slightly lighter than the nose so we're going to say eight for that although this bit's meant to be eight so okay maybe that bit is actually more of a seven yeah we'll change that bit to seven and here is an eight and the darkness around the mouth area so this side has to be a little bit lighter I think the top here is a five and then maybe that's a four I think that's between like a four and a five we'll go with five and we can we can always change it when we go to draw it but we need to just make sure that that area is definitely darker than that area otherwise it's just going to look flat and we don't want that all right last things last is here these shadows here which show the structure of his face and I think these are around not quite as dark of this area here which is a seven so go to seven here and it's probably going to be I think the light areas here are five and then the shadows within that light area is a six so that's the same as that so five and six in the shadowed areas and I think that's all we can do for now and what I mean by squint to see the values and then open your eyes to see the colors um right let's go back just undo that black and white filter so now we can open our eyes again we can stop squinting if you still will and now we can kind of gauge which kind of colors we're going to be using so let's open the color swatch tool and here I've got the color picker selected and I think we probably know what that looks like I can't really move the camera though and we're going to so this was a an area there was seven seven tone and as we can see here it is kind of in the darkest section so that was pretty accurate so here's like zero to five and here's like five to ten in the darkness so yeah it's pretty accurate and that is a deep brown color it's very warm very red what we can do now is get our paintbrush tool and we can just pull that color out there's a deep reddish brown so let's pull that color out and then we can make a little swatch oh quite a bit crazy there because I wasn't looking um so yeah that just gives us a clearer image of what the color actually is because when it's next to all the other colors it can be really hard to judge and let's just do that again on the top of this ear I think this is going to be more of an orange yep here we go so it's kind of the same range of color but it's a few shades lighter as we expected so let's draw that bit out and now for the bit that's quite hard it's the color inside these ears because it looks quite pink but I think it's actually going to be more of let's have a look oh so it's on the red the red top side of the scale so I can really light flesh color so select that and pull that one out now let's do some bits up top let's try this color here that's weird it's quite similar to the ear actually it looks really cool to me so let's just try and select a different area this shadow here are you cool or are you warm okay so the bit that's up a bit is a bit cooler but it's still on the warm side so let's drag that out that's more of a pure gray I suppose but the shadow next to it down here is more flesh toned and beige now let's do this side and here's the top of his head and that is much more light orangey yellow but as you can see none of these are really that saturated they're all quite muted now let's get right in the bottom of that ear because that looks quite dark but in actual fact it's just a shade lighter than that one now let's go for some of the darker areas so in his eye here let's open this and this is surprisingly almost black it's got some very slight deep brown and red tones now let's do these highlights because we want to paint him white sometimes but in actual fact they are light blue now let's check the other side because that might be a bit darker it's quite hard for leptin when using that so yeah actually I'm near a fraction darker than the other side so that will make all the difference and here on this side of the ear put on more dark brown and let's check the highlight a bit and you can just keep going like this throughout your whole drawing and if you can have this nearby you just to check for reference as you go can be really helpful because you can get lost in which colors are where how light or dark they are doing both these things can really help you if you're just getting used to the process pretty much black there this is like a um the actual nose itself is kind of like a sorry guys I think my um camera must have cut out there but I think you've got a general gist of what I was doing and where I was going with that um I basically then just have that piece of paper with the numbers on it next to where I'm working as you can see here I'm just using it to um lean my hand on so I don't get the sponges on the paper um but yeah I hope you got something from this video the footage I'm showing now is from my previous video of the same drawing which shows you how I use um solvents with color pencils in order to achieve a kind of smooth and layered appearance on these ears so go check that video out if you haven't seen it already um and thank you so much just want to say to all my new subscribers I didn't think I'd get any on YouTube to be honest so 272 is good for me um have a lovely day everyone and I'll see you in the next video