hello everyone and welcome back to my channel I have an exciting lesson today and it's all about character design for humanoid creatures and we're going to make these characters pretty horrific looking one because drawing scary stuff is my specialty and I have a bias towards it but two some artists well a lot of artists want to know how to shift from the cartoony friendly over to the dark side if you're wondering how to do that I'm going to show you exactly how and I'm going to sprinkle in a little bit of information about the kind of briefs that we get as concept artists in the video game industry and the visual effects industry or movies but before I do that I I just want to ask you are you all trying to get better at something are you trying to get better at you know different kinds of arts and crafts and are you trying to get better at just being creative in general well I have something something exciting for you all and that is today's sponsor crafty you're probably wondering 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advantage of them not knowing what they want and simply this you're the concept artist you have total creative freedom and coming up with some pretty crazy stuff and that could be one of the most fulfilling and rewarding ways to design for a game or a movie other times when you have very tight constraints you might need to design something specifically and you can't really stray off course from it that's when you really have to pay attention to the brief because a lot of times when when new IPS are started off and and a game company starts to you know staff up on their on their concept artists and their environment artists and all these different people that are going to be helping you for the next year or maybe two years or 6 months they they like to compile all these artists and then just let them go what I mean by let them go is let them run wild with you know all their ideas that they can have all right so what I'm doing here is I'm getting a very rough idea of what I want out of this human creature humanoid creature's face kind of reminds me of scarecrow actually from uh Batman Begins but if you haven't seen that yet and cyan Murphy plays scarecrow and actually they did a pretty good job on on the concept for that very dark okay so I'm I kind of like this pronounced jaw nothing is set in stone yet so I I encourage everybody right now to take out your sketchbooks and just start doodling do some sketches of different types of faces different sizes different lengths and let's just see what you guys can come up with okay so here I'm I'm making sure that as I go down the concept you know the lineup I'm making sure that each new one is different So the plan is we're going to have some head designs here heads okay and then we're going to pick a couple and then we're going to refine them so some of these are going to be pretty scary I'm going to mix some Machinery in with them maybe a couple extra eyeballs we're really not I'm not holding back on this I'm just going to start designing stuff that that I feel would be weird weird Eerie scary because let's be honest scary tends to impress more than happy and cuddly right no offense to you all out there listening to this right now that draws cute and fuzzy things I will be the first to admit that I'm not good at that and you would absolutely destroy me in that department I'm trying to draw or learn to draw cute things but for the time being I'm going to stick to nightmare fuel so if you're drawing along with me hopefully you're doodling and just remember uh Food For Thought every single scribble and line that I put down I'm not overthinking it to the point where I'm trying to perfect it it's not connecting anywhere all I'm worried about is getting a rough idea of what could exist versus what should be and me drawing it perfectly I think that's what holds a lot of artists back it's it's that we think that every line has to be perfected and what that does is it it forces us to overthink and then what does overthinking cause us to do it causes us to forget how to have fun let me let me just let me put it bluntly when we're drawing and we're trying to overthink everything or just not trying to but overthinking in general drawing becomes a chore and of freedom and if you really love drawing you want this this Knack or this skill to set you free versus hold you back if if drawing is holding you back right now you need to really sit down and ask yourself why is it doing that and it's probably some kind of underlying Factor like maybe you're worried about what other people are going to think or maybe you really don't know where to begin and and I just want to say that you're not alone everybody goes through this I don't know what is going on with this character but I like it now that I'm putting more details on this face it kind of reminds me of Jason Vorhees you know the earlier Friday the 13th movies where it showed his face even as a child if you saw the very first Friday the 13th I feel so old for saying that but a lot of people have never seen the very first one they just know who Jason is because of Freddy vers Jason okay and then you can see my technique here so I'm just taking a standard bck ballpoint pen so this is the big Ultra round stick grip and I'm layering primary secondary and tertiary lines here primary being heaviest secondary being lighter tertiary me small divots and details and things that will eventually fill up the space and also add texture at the same time so you can see me whip around these drawings here and by all these scribbles crisscrossing it's forming its own texture which is the beautiful thing about doing Concepts okay so right now this is how a character portrait sheet would work for me while doing games not much more detailed than this and of of course these would take probably a day or two uh maybe more depending on the complexity of the character but in reality it's usually a day or two because they just want to see something if they can just see something then it can get it can form a narrative in their head like okay well that's what I don't want and this is what I do want so this thing also looks like Thanos totally unintentional here maybe I should draw Thanos sometime give a a comment below if you want to see me draw Thanos you know what I would probably draw doomsday quicker than Thanos maybe even Abomination because you can get away with drawing some really creepy stuff for that the thing about it is if if somebody put me in charge of Marvel half these stories would be really scary like I would I wouldn't sugarcoat anything CU a lot of those creatures are are not nice and you know how they say uh DC is a lot darker than Marvel which it it's true but there's also some dark stuff that happens in Marvel but anyway I mean when you look at DC and you look at characters like you know dark side and all this awesome really horrific looking beasts and you're wondering it's like man I would love to see Superman or not Superman but uh maybe like Ant-Man versus one of them or like Hulk versus one of them I don't know okay so now we can start to see some scribbles so those of you viewing this from your mobile device or your desktop hopefully you can still see all these little crisscrosses in here and and I'm probably going to go back over these at some point but what I'm doing now is I'm accentuating the areas that I want to show off or that I think could be a selling point so for example the selling point for this one in number one would be the eyes and then the mouth it's almost like that that Deadpool mouth the original one that that uh Ryan Reynolds showed up in not the newer ones the older one where he just had that you know that weird mouth and then this one probably this super pronounced forehead that brow Ridge I guess you could say let's put some little lumps on here that'd be kind of cool this another thing that I love about pens is that you can get dark instantly over top of lighter lines and it will show up oh it looks like he's missing some of his nostrils that's fine should say it's nostrils I don't even know if this is a dude some other some other being I don't know okay let's move on to three oh and then also we got to number these two so two I like to keep my my sketch Pages nice and tidy you don't have to but if you're sketching along with me try to give at least some space in between each sketch to have the eyes rest so let's those of you that are in school right now you you might be doing some like thesis work or or class assignments and you're putting together um you know some concept sheets even though at this early of a stage you're probably thinking well these aren't final renders they don't have to be all all perfect and nice you're right they don't have to be but it's nice to have these orderly too because it just shows your organizational skills and also your presentation skills because you want to put your best foot forward regardless of what you're drawing and what you're showing too and I say even at the earliest stages uh the the cruddy thumbnails actually look the best because we're not bombarded with details that we that we're forced to know are there and when you see a final render you know it that's it nobody can imagine anything else happening with the creature but with these it's like oh man I think I think we really got something here there we go okay so what I'm doing now is I'm just opening up the mouth showing some pretty gnarly teeth uh maybe an exposed gum up here some wrinkles to show the mouth moving backwards the face on this thing is I I can't even tell you what's going on it's like a a combination of the demagorgon and a flower or a plant exotic plant and maybe a little bit of The Last of Us okay so we won't see much of that chin at all it's because it's open you see here how we know that there are inner workings in the anatomy of the jaw when it opens up but I am not worried about being perfect with the the jaw hinges okay all I'm worried about is to quickly convey what I want the creature to be doing and that is it is screaming at us it's roaring at us and the feature on this one is the head so the focus is the head and also if you want to learn how to draw horrific creatures don't put eyes on it a lot of times alien stuff too like if you're doing something extraterrestrial or creature from some far off land having no eyes tends to be the scariest all right so what I'll do is I'll just really color in the back of the throat to let you know that there's a hole okay there's the tongue it's pretty gross actually so I don't want all these markings to get mixed up too much I got to be careful with that okay so we're going to na number that three and I'll probably come back and put in a little bit more detail on this but again this is the concepting phase okay so a lot of times when I get a brief I will compile a mood board and if you're not familiar with what a mood board is it's just a collection of reference images and artwork goals you know like a benchmark of how you want your creature to to look once it's all polished I collect all these images a lot of times it's half a day maybe even a full day and Studios understand that cuz again depending on the complexity of what you're designing it's going to take a lot of reference Gathering and I just want to point out something about reference Gathering there there seems to be this belief among young artists that Gathering reference is cheating because you're copying off stuff and it's quite the opposite if you want to have something truly believable you have to have reference and if you're making something up from your head those images that you see in your head are coming from you subconsciously because of the things that you observed in the real world video games movies walking down the street dreams whatever okay that that's all your conscience is is what you've seen and yes you can make stuff up but what it does is it compile it compiles what you've seen into something new that's where the creativity comes on comes up comes on see I try to get all these words out I have no idea if I'm going too fast or not but I'm not stopping I'm just going to keep going all right so again I don't want to put anything more more on that one let's jump down to number four okay so we have this weird Deadpool looking creature we have this Hills Have Eyes SL Thanos looking thing and then we have uh Last of Us zombie is hybrid see I I can't even name them but just for just for Giggles let's do um Phil and let's do uh Bert and then over here is Todd anybody listening right now and watching if your name is Phil Bert or Todd you know congratulations I hope that you do not look like this if you do that's okay you can comment below and tell me okay let's go to number four again we got to oh you know what another thing that I forgot to say thumbnail stage when you're you're doing this stuff give the sketches a nice outline and only the outline okay so thick to thin lines short controlled bursts what this does is it lets the client know that you have finished off the sketch and also lets yourself know it shows up better when you scan it in and if you're doing it digitally it shows up better wherever you put it online and you want stuff to show up well okay so again this one got that Beast of a neck maybe I'll point the ears here see how I go back this is kind of ambiguous on the side I don't really want it to be ambiguous anymore so I'm just going to put a little bit more character on the head there we go and then over here with our friend Phil got that all right okay so we got Phil Burt and Todd maybe they're all brothers who knows let's jump down here let's see if we can do a female horrific creature humanoid thing I don't know how this is going to go but we haven't done a female yet so might as well maybe we can put some makeup on her but not really because she's supposed to be scary she could be a siren or she could be a kelpy you know like those the old Cryptids but let let's see what happens happens so maybe this is why I always love looking at uh like Molina off Mortal Kombat cuz Molina she puts the mask on she's beautiful she takes the mask off those of you that have played Mortal Kombat you know what her mouth looks like that that hidden Terror that's pretty cool all right so I'm just having a lot of fun here I'm just playing with the hair maybe she's a witch that would be kind of cool so I if if she's a witch then maybe I I'll go easy on her face just a little bit but if I do that I need to be careful because uh we might lose the harder aspect so maybe the eyes are outlined in black and then there's no pupil okay so that could be kind of scary in itself and then what I'll do is I'll just hint at uh some normal eyelashes so nothing you know nothing major there we go like a pointy nose just a little bit sinus cavities are showing I got to put that ear back there and then um oh you know what maybe we can thicken her hair in some parts to give her some dreads she's like a banshee or or witch or something that haunts a bridge maybe uh maybe it's the Blair Witch I don't know I don't know I I love the Blair Witch project a lot of people don't like it a lot of people do like it I love that movie the first one the Book of Shadows was awful movie and then they made that newer one The Blair Witch uh I thought that was pretty good those of you that haven't seen it I'm not going to spoil anything but you do see the witch in that one and it's it's pretty creepy it kind of takes away from the fun you know you like you want to hide that stuff that's why the first alien worked so well cuz we didn't see the xenom more till the end okay so I'm not going to go overboard with with her face but I am going to give her a strong jaw okay maybe she's maybe she's leaning forward about to attack I'm going to deform her face just a little I I'll give her that chin you know you want to give her those big lips and then maybe she's got some scars so maybe it's right down here maybe down her her face and then I'm going to put my pen to the side because what that does is it allows me to shade with it very very subtly so it can mimic eyes Shadow but it's really not it's just her eyes sunken in maybe some a pretty mean face okay there we go maybe maybe some hair sticks up so when you're doing horror characters you want to again focus on the eyes and ask yourself what would make you afraid to look at them all right think about the the nightmares that you have had in the past with you know movies that you've seen then you went to bed and you couldn't sleep or just some really weird dreams we've all had those weird dreams I've had weird dreams I like dreams where I can fly you know what I would you know what I could do on that maybe maybe I can put some symbols on her face there we go something like that it's almost like uh the The Mummy with Tom Cruz you know a lot of people don't like that movie I actually did enjoy it but you can't beat Brennan Frasier's version in the '90s you just can't and you know like come on Rachel wise was in it it's it's those were Classics as cheesy as they were the original mummies were good okay there we go she's definitely disheveled so we want to we want to show that um you know if she has like bones in her hair holding it together maybe there's some some spikes that are used as hair pins or she just had a really rough morning I don't know there we go maybe maybe some some big earrings of like bones I have no idea what's going on in that ear we'll see okay so this is number four okay we did our female uh this is going to be fun one it's it's not going to be anything I have no idea what's going to happen so draw along with me to see if you could draw something totally crazy too but this is going to be horror so if you want to come up with character design for horror you got two places to focus on that'll really bring it out the mouth and the eyes Okay so let's get crazy and let's get some big eyes in here okay I'm always saying you should do small eyes or no eyes at all what if we did something really really crazy here if you do not like extraterrestrials and Little Green Men then you should probably turn away if you do like them then this might be your thing I don't know how this is going to be but for this particular creature I have not well I haven't give anything a a big mouth yet so let's see what'll happen let's just indicate some very very asymmetrical IAL sharp teeth it's can almost be like a bug but not quite and let's make them very sharp and some of them may be blunt or broken off this is where discipline comes in on your thumbnails so you notice I'm still scribbling the shapes in there there we go makes me want to direct a found footage movie I'm a huge fan of found footage I like it comment below if you like found footage films some don't and you're entitled to your opinion that's fine I just I personally love them if they're done right some of them are awful and I'm I'm not going to name off the ones that I think are awful I think you know everybody's is entitled to their opinion oh yeah we got something scary here okay oh my gosh look at those eyes I don't even think I'm going to draw eyebrows I don't even know what's happening since I don't know what's happening with this creature the the fun part is going to be trying to put some character in it okay so what that means is we can all sit here and draw crazy scary things more cute things adventurous things doesn't matter and they they might be characters and you might be putting them in your portfolio but all of a sudden they they they don't have any life to them they don't have any reason that you would want to get to know them or be scared of them and it just looks like you drew them just to draw them okay so what we want to do is we want to start putting some character on each one make them more interesting and and you can do that even at this stage the the cruddy thumbnail stage I whoa okay see I'm just playing along here do some foreshortening here of the the teeth in the front oh man it's like the kind of like the Predator but not really maybe there's like secondary jaw a third jaw in there who knows what's happening but the one thing that we have to do is account for where these teeth are going to go if it bites down so I I think I just messed up uh this is where thumbnailing is going to come into play and I just want you all to know that it it's okay like if the brief says just start drawing some some crazy heads you're going to get some crazy heads where it doesn't work out too well there is no functionality with that mouth I think I just messed up because the teeth up here at the top are pointing straight down so when you open your bottom jaw okay okay it the bottom jaw doesn't open straight down either it kind of bends back towards your neck well the problem is I just drew these huge mandibles and if it bit down some of these sharp mandibles would or these teeth would bite right into that unless they moved out of the way ah you know what let's do that let's say that there is some are some teeth down below underneath the mandibles and the mandibles come out as secondary uh I guess weapons you could call it okay so let's put a little arrow down here be like they come out this way and also little notes like this helps you realize what you just drew cuz a lot of times we'll come back like I'll do that if I'm doing something for a game and the the art directors asked me like what what were you intending here and then my little notes will let me know because they've they've saved me from in the past from you know trying to explain away some really crazy stuff and I forgot what the functionality was again I I still want to focus on these eyes so maybe I'll put I'll leave a little bit of the white of the paper to show some reflection here but I don't want to be symmetrical with it so it's going to be a little off Center over here and then maybe we'll put in some more reflection there we go you can get a lot of depth even with a pen so you don't have to do everything with a pencil okay that bottom jaw so what's happening is these mandibles are actually on top of that bottom set of teeth so these would actually have to be darker to show depth again another great reason why I love using ball point in the thumbnail stage there we go so I can really darken the teeth out and they can they can show up now because these bottom teeth this bottom jaw is rather hidden I'm not going to add any more detail than that because the darkness of these mandibles the outline it's going to bleed into to what I will like I would make darker for these bottom teeth and you don't want that you don't want a sea of sameness in your in your work so this is why I tell Young Artists to practice thick to thin lines all the time what I mean by that is if you're just starting out and you're drawing just take your sketch pad and draw 500 of these just 500 okay over and over and over again practice thick to thin pushing harder letting go of that pressure so what that does is it directly translates to your ability to put depth in your drawings because all of this line weight that you see here is displayed in each one of these thumbnails creating depth that's that's what's so powerful about it so I think okay so here's what I'll do I'm going to put some real real dark dark right behind those teeth I mean let's face it the whole top jaw the whole top of the head is creating a cast Shadow inside that mouth but we're not going to add so much ink in there it's just going to get out of hand instead I'll just play with what's happening on the head maybe there's some asymmetrical wrinkles going here to show you that this thing is screaming at the player before it busts out a giant rifle and you destroy its head hopefully you destroy its head okay we're going to number this five uh haven't named these characters yet if you have some cool names for them name four she's she's like a female witch and then name five it's a demon from somewhere I don't know but we got Phil Burton Todd up here maybe five is a female also maybe three is a female I don't know see how I'm kind of going back getting some more ideas on what I could put down I'm adding some really dark darks right inside the lip to show you the the full mouth opening and there's also going to be some P Shadows here and these aren't these aren't refinement stages no this is just to show you how you can do some horror characters okay and now if you wanted to do something full bodied you would approach it the same way but when you do something full bodied you got to get that gesture in here first okay now this is just a little little extra for the lesson okay so the lesson is human oid creatures so what we'll do is we'll make it humanoid okay maybe maybe we'll put like a big gut on it and then forearm we got a forearm there there we go all right so if if you've had figure drawing classes before this is where gesture sketching really pays off for a second there I thought I was accidentally creating M Magneto's helmet I definitely don't want to do that because that is not Magneto all right got that this thing is almost like a I don't know I don't know what it is I don't know what it is like a two-legged goat man okay and then very quickly put in those finger gestures make sure those pop off you want to put a lot of life into your the hands okay make sure you put some spheres in there where all the major joints are maybe there's like a big hunch back maybe there's some spikes and you can start to see the shape taking place now I'm going to put a face in and maybe the face is caved in a little bit or maybe it's just like a really disgusting looking skull maybe the teeth show up and it's got a big smile underneath everything but this is definitely a creature that you don't want to mess with or maybe it it's summoned because somebody was playing the Ouija board I don't know but you could see how quickly I'm going about this okay and this is how you would draw well this is an example of how you draw humanoid characters for game there's so many possibilities with making things humanoid okay they don't have to look like straight up people but they need human aspects you know like shoulder joints uh fingers maybe how they stand you know the pectoral region abdominal region you just want to tease it that human that human aspect so that can start connecting some skin on the side maybe put some bumps in here and now all the dark lines and the medium lines and the the light ones it's it's really paying off cuz I'm seeing a lot of death happening and this is just on the arm now why am I putting all the detail on the arm well think about think about the The foreshortening Happening or the um atmospheric perspective and also what body part is closest to us okay we got the arm poking out with the deltoids but at the same time we have this face so we also want to focus on the face I don't know if the the uh resolution is good when I'm drawing this far up on the page so hopefully it is there we go and you just want to throw a bunch of lines together until you get something that you really like again folks this isn't fancy it's just the thumbnail stage drawing characters and if you are in enjoying this lesson I definitely encourage you to watch my previous lesson about um you know just drawing characters and exploration mode okay full body and then you can pick and choose from there what you want to go with if you enjoyed today's lesson I encourage you to uh check out the links in the description below about our creature design Workshop Discord it's a bustling Community where everybody is joining and I also want to take the time again to thank uh crafty for sponsoring today's video thanks again everybody and I'll see yall next time later