How to Draw With Silhouettes: Cartooning 101 #14

I would say the most commonly asked question I get from new artists starting out is how can they draw from their imagination? How can they get what they see up here in their brain to translate to their hand so they can get it out onto the paper or the canvas? And that's the topic of today's video. I'm going to use silhouettes as a starting point for the design. Instead of starting out with a sketch, the silhouette process is going to help us establish our character design, our form, and our anatomy. Starting with that silhouette really lets us visualize that character to see the big important parts, the basic shape, which then allows us to actually go in, sketch on top of it, to add all the details, and really fine tune everything. So that's the topic of today's video. Let's go ahead and jump into it. All right, so let's go ahead and dive into today's tutorial. Now, this isn't necessarily a digital tutorial. It's not necessarily a Procreate tutorial, even though I'm using Procreate and an iPad. You can use any digital art program for this, or you can even use just regular pencils and paper and markers. So we'll talk more about that when we get to it. So let's go ahead and begin. For this, I'm going to use my creator set for Procreate. But honestly, with this, you can use any brushes that you want to. This one's linked down in the description below, though, if you feel like you need this one. So I'm going to begin with color blocking brush here just to kind of start to get some big areas filled in. So this is really beneficial if you don't know how to get what you're seeing in your head out onto the paper or onto the canvas. And I just start out with some big shapes here. We're just going to start out with an oval to begin the head here of this mouse design. And then from here, we're just going to move on and block out the body. So we're just worrying about the big shapes right now. We're not worrying about details. We're just trying to get the overall shape of our design out of our what we're seeing up there and out into the real world. So I'm just going to start to follow these lines down and work out a leg here in the back. You'll see I'm just doing this pretty quick. This is just a technique that I use from time to time when I need to kind of help visualize things a little bit better. Helps to get the overall shape of your design worked out. It'll help with anatomy. It'll help you kind of see problems before they pop up later on in your creative process. So it does save some time later on and some headaches. Then you'll see as I do this, I'm just kind of starting to fine tune the shapes a little bit more, which we'll continue here in a little bit as well. So I'm going to start some arms here with some fairly big shapes. Once again, you'll see this brush just lays down some areas really quick. So I'm using just some ovals there to represent where the hands go and then from there I can just get the fingers in there. Get the thumb and then the fingers back here. All right, now we can start working on the head a little bit more. So I'm going to begin here with the ears so we can just start to work in some shapes for those and the one here on the right. You'll see the idea is just to get the overall kind of amount of space that it takes up and then fine tune it from there. So once we get that done we can start to kind of clean up those lines around there. All right, then from here maybe throw in some tufts of hair up at the top and using a silhouette really helps you see any problems with the design too. If something looks a little bit off or it doesn't look like it lines up from one side to the next, you'll be able to spot that a lot easier than if you just hop in here and start doing outlines for everything. All right, now that we've got that I'm going to drop my brush size just a little bit so I can fine tune a little bit more here. I think that looks pretty good. Give him a tail here in the back and then I'm going to move him over just a little bit so we've got him a little bit more centered. So there we go. Our silhouette's done. As you can see it's pretty fast, pretty easy. It helps us visualize like I said what we've got in our head that we might not be able to know how to get it out onto paper or onto the canvas. So from here then we're ready to move on to actually do a sketch on top of this using this as a basis. So if you're following along now with digital what we'll want to do is make a new layer on top of our silhouette layer and then I'm going to drop the opacity of the silhouette layer. We want to see it, we don't want it to be too dark. This is also the point in the tutorial if you're using pencils and paper this you'll want to do with markers have it fairly dark and on a separate piece of paper and then you can put another piece of paper on top of your original one and then you can draw on top of that and you don't have to worry about the the silhouette being on the same piece. So now that we've got that done I'm going to go ahead and switch to black for my color and then for my brush I'm going to switch over to this brainstorm sketch brush. Alright and then I'm going to zoom in here a little bit and I'm going to start to add in some guidelines here just so you can kind of visualize. I've got a three-quarters perspective going on so we can put in some guidelines here for that center for the the eyes there maybe where the nose goes here down here where the mouth is and then moving on down to the belly we can kind of do a center line there just kind of like I said help us visualize everything. Alright now moving back up is where I'll start to just kind of start sketching on top of here and this is where I start adding in the details and once again here I'm not using the silhouette to be a perfect item that I have to trace and have everything exact. If you go a little bit outside the lines that's okay not a huge deal it's just supposed to be a guide to to help you see where you want everything at we can just kind of continue this process down and around. See here I'm just following those lines and then adding details as I go I'm just building on what I've already got done. Now this hair piece here you see it kind of overlaps the ear and I want that not to do that I don't want any tangents there so I'm just going to pull that down a little bit further just like that get the nose kind of knocked in here like so and we'll get the mouth in here next once again I've got the line here to kind of use as a guide some big front teeth in there all right nose up here in the bridge around and kind of knock in where these eyes are going to go so you see we're still doing a sketch but it really helps using that silhouette to begin with gives us a great jumping off point and it makes the sketch process so much easier this is really a technique that I recommend if you are starting out drawing and like I said you can't get the ideas just out of your head and you can see them perfectly but maybe you know once you lay them down they don't turn out I have a lot of people constantly ask me how do I draw what I'm seeing I can't do it and I think that this is one of those techniques that really will kind of guide you along the way even if you're not starting out if you're you know a artist with some experience under your belt you can also use this too just to maybe speed up your workflow see if it helps and kind of go from there fine tune these a little bit bringing everything in a little bit darker all right and then continuing down here twist my canvas just a little bit bring the arms in here I'm gonna bring that up into a shoulder a little bit more here just like that you'll see once again I went a little bit off of where I had the silhouette but that's okay once again the silhouette should be kind of a guide shouldn't be the be-all end-all so feel free to make changes as you go looks good and you'll see here as I'm going down to just adding that fur didn't add that in to the silhouette that's something that you can add in later as you add more details the silhouette should just be a really basic shape to get you started kind of frees you up from wanting to add in too many details frees you up from worrying about the small things that is really what kind of negatively affects a design when you're trying to get it out of your head and onto the the canvas I feel a lot of new artists really you know kind of focus on all the the little details when they're beginning to the design and that's really what hinders their their artwork and their process worrying about the basic shapes is the most important thing and this is really the the technique that kind of frees you up from having that issue all right and then finally the arm and hand over here get a little bit more of a fur texture in there and pulling back out you can kind of see what we're left with here so from here if you want to you can go ahead and make a layer on top of this drop down the opacity of your sketch layer and then draw in harder on top so you've got a little bit darker lines to work with totally up to you if you want to do that in this tutorial I'm not going to finish this design it's basically just showing you the sketch process and the silhouette process so hopefully you can use this technique in your own artwork the thing about this too is using a silhouette really helps you establish some dynamic poses so with this if we turn off our sketch here and we're just left with the silhouette you can see the impact that this has you can tell exactly what this character is you can see all the limbs here and it really helps to make like I said that dynamic pose when you have areas where the arms would be crossed or there's parts here in the center that's where it muddies up the design and it's not as dynamic it's not as action-packed so this will also help with those dynamic poses so use this in your own artwork if you already do use this let me know down in the comments how's it working out for you do you like this technique more than just sketching out a regular design like I do in my regular videos so let me know down there so that's it for today's tutorial it's a quick one but hopefully this gives you a new tool in your arsenal to draw what you're seeing up top in that noggin and get it out down here so thanks for watching if you like today's video do me a favor make sure you give it a thumbs up subscribe to the channel if you haven't already and hit that bell for notifications so you can get alerted when I post new videos like this one as for me I can be found online bjdell.com as well as on instagram and twitter at bjdell if you follow along with any of my video tutorials post your artwork on either of those sites and definitely tag me at bjdell so I can check them out love seeing your guys work so that is it for today's video until next time keep creating