Discover how to refine the details in a digital figure, including the process of shaping the shoulder, creating shadows, and adding a pen to the figure's hand. This content provides a step-by-step guide on how to enhance the realism of your digital artwork using different tools and techniques.
Key Insights
- The article provides detailed instructions on how to fix the shape of a character's shoulder by removing unnecessary anchor points and manipulating the remaining ones to achieve a more natural look.
- The article also details how to create shadows using the pen tool, changing the fill color and matching the outline. The content emphasizes the importance of managing shapes and colors for more realistic effects.
- The creation of accessories, such as a pen in the character's hand, is also outlined in this content, demonstrating the use of the rounded rectangle tool to simulate the pen and manipulate its size, position, and layer order in relation to the character.
Note: These materials are provided to give prospective students a sense of how we structure our class exercises and supplementary materials. During the course, you will get access to the accompanying class files, live instructor demonstrations, and hands-on instruction.
In this video we'll continue working on our recruiter. Let's start by fixing this top right shoulder.
If we zoom in we can remove one of the anchor points using A and let's remove this anchor point. We can do this in the control bar and remove it and next let's also remove this second anchor point. I'm going to remove anchor point this way we can simply work with this one handle and round out the shoulder a little bit more clicking and dragging it so that it matches more of our right shoulder.
We leave it about there. This looks a little more natural. Next let's create our shadows.
To do this we'll use the pen tool and let's change our fill color from yellow to a little bit darker yellow so that it looks like the shadow of the jacket. We'll leave it right about there and click okay and we'll simply recreate this shadow look. We'll click and roughly match the outline that's been given already.
Next let's create our bottom shape by clicking and I'll drag up and down and over to create our other shadow. I'll then hit V and next we'll select this new object in the shape that we've drawn and holding shift we'll also select the top shadow. We'll then hit CTRL C to copy it and next let's delete them for now.
We'll hit the delete key but remember they're still within our clipboard. We're now going to want to remove these shapes from the center. To do this we'll drag a selection box using V selecting all of our internal shapes and now with the shape builder tool shift m on the keyboard we can absorb all of these into one total shape.
We'll click and add all the small shapes here and if we zoom in we can also add this anchor point. Now zooming out we'll hit CTRL shift a to deselect and then hit V and hit I selecting the color the jacket from the other side. We can see right here we missed one small path so I'll hit the delete key.
Let's zoom in and I'll delete these other two and delete this anchor and there we go. We now have a clean jacket space. Now let's hit CTRL shift v to paste the two shadows that we had in our clipboard into the exact same place.
Holding shift we'll also select the jacket and use the shape builder tool to create two shapes here for our shadows. Let's hit CTRL shift a to deselect all and we've now fixed our shadows. Let's next work on creating our pen in her hand.
If we scroll to the right we can see that she has a pen in her hand here so we can recreate this by using the rounded rectangle tool in our shapes in our toolbar. We'll select rounded rectangle tool. We'll then click and drag something about the size of a pen and release and I'll hit I on the keyboard to copy the color of our clipboard.
We'll then hit v and select our pen and let's increase the size a little bit by zooming in and dragging out the edge of the pen. Drag it back a little bit and next we'll rotate it so that it fits nicely within her hand and finally we'll use CTRL open brackets to put the hand in front of our pen and we'll select our jacket and use CTRL shift open bracket to move the jacket to the back. We'll then zoom out as we can see she now has her pen in her hand with a clipboard.
Let's hit CTRL S on the keyboard to save our work and in the next video we'll be finishing up our recruiter. See you there!