TIGSource Forums

This is a tutorial of sorts covering how I generally go about doing concept art for my games and
comic ideas. Though the characters featured here are all human-like, these methods work for
animals and other non-human characters as well. Anyways, I hope some of you find it useful.

Before you start it is very important that you understand that
the goal of these excercises is not to create detailed concept art!
The goal is to create brief visual descriptions of characters!


STEP ONE: THE FLOUR SACK
Ok, with that being said before you get to concepting there is an important tool you need
to add to your drawing arsenal: the flour sack. These flour sacks have a very malleable
shape and can bend and twist in many directions. They also have a fairly square shape that
is fairly easy to imagine in pseudo-perspective. Take some time to practice drawing them
in many different positions and from many different angles, and be sure to add the little
nubs of cloth at the four corners. Once you've gotten comfortable with drawing them you can
move on to the next step.
(http://i52.tinypic.com/rm4inp.jpg)

STEP TWO: THE FIGURE
Now that you are comfortable with the flour sack this next step should be pretty easy. Attach
some arms to the upper two nubs, legs to the lower two, and a neck and head to the upper
middle of the flour sack. The limbs should follow along with the movements of the flour
sack body. Practice drawing different poses and see what you new poses you can come up
with by bending and twisting the flour sack body. After a while these will come naturally
to you and you will be able to draw tons of them in no time at all.
(http://i56.tinypic.com/2vs0rop.jpg)

STEP THREE: THE SILHOUETTE
At this stage of character development I like to throw together a palette of 3 to 5 colors
(ColourLovers.com (http://www.colourlovers.com/) is a good resource for this) and then choose one (usually the darkest) to
create a silhouette over the flour sack figure framework. Remember, this is not about details
or artistic quality, it is about describing an idea. Don't sweat it if things aren't looking perfect
you're just trying to get a basic idea of the character's form here, that's all. For now just stay
focused on quantity, not quality.
(http://i56.tinypic.com/313ham8.jpg)

STEP FOUR: COLORS
Once you have your silhouette it is time to start blocking in the other colors. At this stage you
should not be focusing on lighting or little details, your only focus should be creating a
general visual description of the character's costume. Try to look at it more like you are
arranging a pattern of colors rather than actually creating a costume. Patterns that are
pleasing to the eye equal costumes that are pleasing to the eye. The colors and arrangements
can really help describe what a character is all about and you'll find at this stage you'll start
to get a feel for what the character's theme and behavior might be like.
(http://i52.tinypic.com/141tyew.jpg)

STEP FIVE: ACTIONS
Once you have a general feel for what kind of character you are creating it is time to put them
into action. Again, the goal here is describing the character not creating detailed art. In this
step you really need to relax and just let the ideas flow. Keep the drawings small and quick.
A character's actions say a lot about who they are. A character that fights dirty will feel
very different from a character that fights honorably. Agile characters will jump very differently
than a character who is massive and heavy. The character's actions need to describe the
character.
(http://i52.tinypic.com/ac634z.jpg)

STEP SIX: POWERS (OPTIONAL)
This step is optional. If your character has some "super power" or other special effect you
should be using it to further describe the character. A hero would use the power to throw
lightning bolts much differently than a villain would, for example. Of the whole process, this is
probably my most favorite step. I usually have a lot of fun with it.
(http://i54.tinypic.com/1zb47jn.jpg)

STEP SEVEN: ELABORATION
The last step before actually doing any "real" drawings of the character is to start elaborating
on some of the character's costume details and other important bits of visual information
that describe the character. Even at this stage of development you still don't want to be
focusing on any more details than necessary to describe the idea. Don't worry about perfection,
keep any shading or small details down to a minimum. You want to leave yourself room for
making quick easy changes and you should be rapidly drawing out as many descriptive ideas
you can about the character. Quantity over quality. I can fill up pages of hundreds of little
doodles of different characters in the span of an hour or two.
(http://i54.tinypic.com/1z1v3gn.jpg)

I love the flower sack idea. I'm definitely going to try this out. Thanks for the tutorial!

This is great.  I always find my ideation sessions devolve into me getting hung up on anatomy and losing all my creative steam.  The flour sack approach sounds like the perfect approach for me; can't wait to try it out.  Thanks for sharing!

Thank you. :) I read a book on cartoon animation where they represented the cartoon characters bodies as flour sacks, erasers, and other square-like objects and it really opened up my mind to the idea that maybe the best way to draw (for me) isn't using the conventional methods. I started toying around with the concept more and more and now I pretty much draw everything by relating what I am drawing to objects I am more familiar with (and can easily visualize).

That is exactly what had happened to me years back. I got so caught up with the "rules" of "proper drawing" that it really started to make art a source of frustration for me. I had to step back and pretty much unlearn everything so that I could focus on developing methods that were most comfortable for me.


EXTRA STEP: PLAYING WITH YOUR SACK
There is a lot more you can do with your flour sack and it is not the only object that can be used to visualize a body in motion. You can attach weights to it for swinging limbs, poles to it for rigid limbs, cords to it for limbs making whip-like motions (with speed trails), etc. Any means you can use to make sense of the world is a tool in your drawing arsenal (and these are just a few of mine).
(http://i56.tinypic.com/2cy18yh.jpg)

This thread is pretty fuckin' awesome.  :gentleman:

This is so awesome! Makes me want to see a video game with a flour sack as the main character...

Wow I suck making art, but this method makes it seem so much simpler. It probably won't come close to what you can draw, but the method looks pretty cool. Thanks! :D

BEHOLD! THE M OF POWER!!

So a year or two back I read this book on drawing movement in the body, and in it it stated that all biological motion in life happens in a skiing-like manner. One side of the body shifts in the opposite of another to carry the weight of another side that shifts to counter that weight and so on. There is a lot to it but I've broken it down for myself in a sort of quick-to-grasp notion that some of you may find useful as well when it comes to getting very natural-looking poses.

The idea is that you lay the body out across a side-ways M (which can face left or right) and at each convex of the M the body bulges outward to counter the weight of the parts of the body above it (to maintain balance). Hopefully this will make more sense in the following image. You can see that virtually any pose follows this natural rhythm, whether the character is sitting, standing, jumping, or otherwise moving around (or not). It is how we, as human beings, defy gravity.
(http://i55.tinypic.com/i29gqt.jpg)

I :tearsofjoy: this thread. I look forward to trying this at home.

Animating is a bitch-and-a-half but like most artistic processes I've found an easy way to dumb it down so that I can make sense of it. I am not sure this method is technically correct as it is one I came up with on my own (i.e. I didn't learn it anywhere), but it works (at least for me). Hopefully it can helps some of you out when it comes to animating your sacks. Er... flour sacks, that is.

Anyways, the basic idea is to start with a "leading arc" that rotates on a centerline. All biological motion happens in arcs (look at the arms and legs in a walk cycle, for example). The arc should be propelled by a coiling motion, like a spring, that spins the arc. I usually represent the coil as a triangle that stretches as the arc moves forward and flattens as the arc is pulled back downward. Hopefully you can see what I mean in the following image:

(http://i52.tinypic.com/2gvk7kp.jpg)

EDIT: Sometimes I will use two triangles or two arcs depending on the exact nature of the motion. Triangles tend to be better for movements happening side-to-side while arcs are better for movements happening in perspective or circular rotation. I whipped up a quick example of a common motion to give you an idea of what I mean:

(http://i55.tinypic.com/4vnu4x.jpg)

A few more examples done in MSPaint:
(http://i55.tinypic.com/n71ylt.jpg)


P.S. These methods works nicely for laying out sprite animations.

I've not come across any of these techniques before but they look really cool.  I'm definitely going to try them out next time I have a pen in my hand.

cool stuff here, I haven't heard of alot of these methods, gotta try 'em sometime.

 :monoclepop:

This is like drawing Kung Fu!

You make it look so EASY!

ooh i've found some good thread here!! watch watch watch  :blink:
Thanks a lot, it's true we often forget the essentials of a movement and get lost in the details. I'll definitively try the exercises!
I'm an animation student, so every one of these exercise should be very helpful.

A few more things worth keeping in mind...
(http://i54.tinypic.com/2me8ivn.jpg)

P.S. Thanks for all the kind words, everyone. I hope that I am able to help some of you out with these (and I'd love to see what you have created using these techniques). I will post more as they come to mind (a lot of methods I use I don't generally think about because I've been doing them for so long they are just an automated process for me).

This is awesome!  :-*

Thanks a lot! :)

As I was doing concepts for my game I just realized the technique I picked up for visualizing muscle composition might be useful to some of you out there struggling with anatomy. Previously in this topic I discussed how I'd learned the body has a skiing motion to its movements, well this is largely due to how the muscle systems in most living creatures operate. Muscles do not push and pull, they only contract (bunch up) which pulls other muscles and the muscles themselves are tied into each other (and into our bones) which means when one series of muscles contract and pull neighboring muscles it moves our bones and whatnot too, which is why we can move our limbs in the first place.

When muscle groups bunch and pull you get a series of D shapes happening, where the curve of the D is the muscles bunching and the line of the D is muscles being pulled due to the bunching of their neighboring muscles. There are a lot more specifics to it that I am still pretty fuzzy on but the gist of it is very useful for getting good looking figures. Here are a few quick (and pretty exaggerated) doodles I did to give you an idea of what I am talking about (I hope).

(http://i56.tinypic.com/eis2ah.jpg)

This is some great information. The analogy of a human form as a sack of flour is genius, especially the part about attaching weights.

Bravo! :gentleman:

Thanks! :)

Going through the steps I was able to put this together in under 4 minutes (a good portion of which was copying/pasting to show the individual steps). It's nothing fancy but you can see that you can stay fast and loose and get your ideas out quickly. Developing quick sketching skills to describe your ideas is really handy when you are doing concept work, I can fill pages with hundreds of different variations of the same idea in half an hour. When I first started gesture sketching it took me much much longer to even just fill one page so don't let yourself get discouraged if it doesn't catch on quickly for you, it is a skill you have to develop.
(http://i55.tinypic.com/29fbfnq.jpg)

pretty good advice! The D muscle also help giving direction and volume.

I made these for Melly but maybe some of you will find them useful too.

(http://i56.tinypic.com/2n078co.jpg)
(http://i51.tinypic.com/35chh7r.jpg)
(http://i52.tinypic.com/3310nlj.jpg)

I am going to change the topic from "Character Concepts" to "JWK5's Drawing Tips" since I've pretty much just been dumping in random drawing tips that hit my brain now and again. Anyways, below is something I posted in the Great Games with Terrible Boxart (http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=17805.0) topic but I think the information is also pretty useful when designing title screens, etc. Below that was a post I made in the Game Zebo ads  post mortem (http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=17736.msg507734#msg507734) topic that I think can be equally useful in similar situations or with creating ad images (which was the subject of the post). I figured I'd repost them here so that they are easier to find for people specifically looking for drawing tips.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------

Aside from the fact that Wizardry: Heart of the Maelstrom is a fucking awesome game and should be played as a rite of passage into manhood, I always thought it had some of the most interesting box art of any SNES game I ever owned (which was quite a few).

Looking at it know, with a little more technical knowledge about the visual effects of art, I'd say the only thing bad about it is the composition (i.e. the arrangements of the words and images on the box). I browsed around Google to see if I could figure out why they chose that specific composition and from the looks of things it may have been required by Nintendo that the game boxes have that specific logo placement (the gaudy red Super Nintendo Entertainment System at the bottom, the red bar at the top, the Licensed by Nintendo on the right, etc.).

If so, whoever at Nintendo who decided that needs to be slapped cross-eyed. The heavily saturated (intense) red "Super Nintendo Entertainment System" at the bottom and the red bar directly above it pretty much cripple any hope for a decent composition as they will draw attention away from just about anything that isn't also strongly saturated. Their near-center placement is also pretty damaging as well because it pretty much forces the space between them to become a visual hot spot and the red "Licensed by Nintendo" and "Capcom" aren't helping things either.

I think the best the artist doing Wizardry's box art here could have hoped for would be to condense the Wizardry logo text into the main design image so that it becomes one cohesive visual element and then utilize the hot spot space created by the red saturated logo elements. A gold border(because red would be too potent and another color would break the color harmony) could be used to "rein in" the viewer's view and direct it towards the central elements (i.e. the Wizardry logo).

Anyways, this was just a random observation and a bout of curiosity. You can see an example of what I was thinking below.

The Original:
(http://i55.tinypic.com/jb0ewi.jpg)









My Edit:
(http://i52.tinypic.com/ehj1b5.jpg)

--------------------------------------------------------------------------


Your style is nice, real colorful and crisp, it is the arrangement and balance in the image that is bad. There are a lot of things to consider when making an ad image but I can give you a few basic ideas based on the one you posted.

(http://i55.tinypic.com/9943s0.jpg)
If you blur your add image really well you can see that the most potent color groups in the image aren't the text and the girl's defining features (which should be the focus of the add) but instead it is the green of the ball, the orange of the hat, and the bright lighting on her face. This is largely due to saturation and hue contrasting (highly saturated colors against dull colors and orange over its blue complement). It is really important that you manage your hue (the spectrum color) and saturation (the color intensity) levels so that the most important aspects of your image give off the greatest degree of contrast. It is also best to try for some sort of color harmony (researching color theory will pay off there), a random mishmash of color really creates a lot of visual chaos.

(http://i51.tinypic.com/2lnyb8h.jpg)
The next issue is the values (black, white, and the grays in between). If you desaturate the image you can see there is no real balance in value, rather than nice defined blocks of lights and darks you've kind of got this swirl of contrasts that really makes it hard to pick out any visual landmarks. This is especially bad for advertising because this means nothing in the ad is jumping out at the viewer and grabbing their attention.

(http://i55.tinypic.com/262b3vq.jpg)
If you up the contrast and brightness you can see that although the words are now a little more readable you have hard lines going every which way, there is no real flow. Rather than a nice contour leading the viewer to the point of the advertisement it is more like a maze, and when you've only got a brief glance's worth of time to snare your viewer's attention that is a very bad thing.

(http://i56.tinypic.com/4hdt7r.jpg)
This last image here insn't a fantastic example, but hopefully you get the gist of it. You can see how careful value balance has allowed me to control which elements of the picture stand out the most (in a sort of visual hierarchy). Color saturation and warmth balances in a similar manner. I've used the dark "letter box" bordering to sort of corral the viewer's attention and narrow the focus to the girl and the text and to help the edge flow. There are lots of other things you do, even just a little bit of research will go a long ways, but hopefully this at least gives you an idea of where to start.

Never ever desaturate!

Go grayscale! or use luminosity "blending layer" to extract luminosity information!

I had this trouble before. Desaturation actually flatten the luminosity.

Never ever desaturate, that's evil.

Even if you use "desaturate" you're still going to see the contrasts in the high and low value ranges and the "blocks" of lights and darks, which is what you are looking for in this case. You are right that "desaturate" isn't good if you're intending to actually convert the image to black and white monochrome, though. In that case "gradient map" with white and black selected (one at each end of the gradient) preserves the luminosity and works really well.

I need to try this one. Thanks :)

I use gradiant mostly to color the shadow and the light correctly (adding some color, generally yellow and blue), and to apply saturation map too (through a transformation into saturation ramp then saturation blending). I always work in a "HSL fashion" with multiple layer, I'm no good at color so I better stick to rules whenever I can.

But I'm not sure BW gradient preserve the luminosity component correctly, I need to do some experience, the closer to "real luminosity" is Lab actually, I think grayscale preserve the L by making a conversion into Lab first. Grayscale have the same effect as luminosity blending.

(http://i54.tinypic.com/2cxzzpe.jpg)
You can see that "desaturate" has the poorest range but the contrasts are still pretty visible. The advantage to desaturating an image is that because it has such poor ranges you can identify the most heavily contrasted items more easily (you'll notice that the purple and blue-green bottles stand out much more in the desaturated image than the gradient mapped image or the luminosity layer image). This makes it ideal for picking out strong value blocks (such as in an ad image). If you find your image blending together after a desaturation then you know the contrasts are not strong enough.

Gradient mapping it black and white doesn't preserve the luminosity 100% but it preserves it fairly accurately for the most part. The advantage it has over a luminosity layer is the extreme lights and darks tend to be just a touch lighter and darker than they would be in a luminosity layer which gives you a little better edge detection when you are working with very subtle contrasts.

The luminosity layer is of course better for 100% exact luminosity information but it can sometimes cause you to miss very subtle features. A good example of what I mean is the orange bottle (4th from the left) in the luminosity layer has its interior ring (i.e. the bottom of the glass that is visible through it) barely visible while in the gradient map it stands out better. If you actually look at the original image that interior ring on the orange bottle looks closer to the gradient map than the luminosity layer. Just because the luminosity is 100% accurate doesn't mean your eye sees it that way.

 :handthumbsupL: ;D

I'm not seeing any difference with gradient however, I need some calibration I guess, but your point is made.

Look at the light green bottle (between yellow and green) in the Luminosity vs. the Gradient. See where they overlap? Less detail in Gradient. Likewise with other overlaps.

I see!

misc. musings on poses and body rhythm... MS Paint for the win!

(http://i204.photobucket.com/albums/bb320/jwkv/push-bend.jpg)

All of this is rather excellent.

I haven't read it all yet, but I am compelled to let you know that your work is appreciated.

Thanks a lot! :) I am just throwing ideas as they come to mind or as I happen upon them.
(http://i53.tinypic.com/30136kn.jpg)

(http://i52.tinypic.com/11kujj5.jpg)

On top of being endlessly enriching, this thread also makes me wonder what an illustration program would be like, if one actually factored and incorporated artistic principles like that into it's design.

I always wondered that Bacon
The closest is spore creature creator

I was inspired to play with the floursack technique some weeks ago and realized that something else was missing from my techniques, something which I've never seen explained  very explicitly by any art tutorial. Fortunately, I figured it out, and it's been astonishingly good for my figure drawing since then, so I'll share it!

(http://dl.dropbox.com/u/254701/blog/drawing_techniques/spacing.png)
(http://dl.dropbox.com/u/254701/blog/drawing_techniques/mannequin.png)
(http://dl.dropbox.com/u/254701/blog/drawing_techniques/outline.png)

The main new idea here is the first picture. Yes, the boring one with the polygon. It seems silly, but what I'm doing is blocking out the entire bulk of the figure before I draw it. This way I find space and proportion in the roughest terms possible, before we ever get into consideration of "heads height" or mannequin creation. I tend to let at least one side hang loose so that there's "give" as the figure is built - so in this one the left side hangs out, but I stay pretty close along the right side. To motivate the later parts of the figure I will sometimes also add additional lines that cut across the poly - some to indicate position(height of head, torso, etc.), others to indicate pose(e.g. spread of legs, or a line of action if I'm going for dynamic figures). The "M of power"  would fit in great here. But the poly comes first: different poly, different pose. So typical standing figures will look trapezodal, as in my example, but experimenting with weird ones leads me to interesting, dynamic poses, and sometimes to perspective, even when I wasn't looking for it!

So why is this poly such a big deal for me? The edges literally stop me from, e.g. making the torso too long, the shoulders too wide, the feet tilted, etc. I use the edges of the polygon as the anchor points of the mannequin - the top of the head, the bottom of the feet, rough positioning of the hands, etc. It turns out that it doesn't matter what type of mannequin I'm using, all I have to do is find a way to space it properly once I've set up the edges.

After working with this technique for a while, I was able to reasonably conquer the "1 to 9 heads tall" meme that's been around art sites for a while, one which flummoxed me before, as after around 6 heads, I would get far too much distortion to fix it just by hacking away. Being able to do extreme proportions reliably, in turn, gives me more options for conveying the character - e.g. a 9-head+ figure with huge muscles looks larger-than-life strong, but not "musclebound" either. Even the smaller, simpler figures I could do before feel more "solid" now.

It also has the benefit of making it possible to visualize complex scenes with many characters interacting - just block the characters as polygons first. Then build from the points where you plan for them to touch. I tend to do shapes for the feet, lower torso, head, and wrists first and then work my way through the others.

Last of all, it's another tool to make the creative process more fluid. You can start with no ideas at all - just doodle a shape and then start cramming the body parts in it somehow.

This needs bump'd.

Thanks, jwk5. You are awesome.

Yeah, this was a good one.

...but...

The bit about the head line and the horizon in the last tutorial post is wrong.  It's not that all the (same height) figures' heads will meet at the same line, it's that the horizon will bisect all of the (same height) figures at the exact same point in each of them, whether this is something like their necks (looking down at them from above), or the ankles (looking up from below).

I have never been good at drawing :(  But sometimes, i guess you need to do these things, depends on the external help you have.

Wow, this topic is fantastic. Thanks a lot jwk5. I now believe in the power of the flower sack :gentleman:

following your flour sack exercises
(http://media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lv9avptKD71r2bnzm.png)
serious loads of help.
Do you have any tips/exercise for working with environments?  I'm having trouble coming up with a bigger picture of the setting.  ooh old thread.  I have  :handmoneyL:

edit: no I don't

Wow, this helped me a ton! Thanks bud, just try to make a more attracting title next time :)