– [Karen] Today's YouTube video is all on how to paint glasses onyour mixed media girls.
Now there's a lot of references out there, and there's a lot ofillustrators who do glasses in different ways andthey make the reflection look a different way, andtoday the reference I'm using, I started out with thisillustration by Laovaan.
And then I tracked downthe original inspiration, which was actually aphotograph from Vogue Japan.
I am filming this during the Coronavirus, and I'm not really intomakeup and showering (laughs) as frequently, I should just say makeup, so this is me, my name's Karen Campbell.
If this is the first visit to my channel, I like to make art super easy for you, drawing in mixed media, so that you can just relax and have fun while you'remaking your projects.
So onto the project.
So I have both the Laovaan'sdigital illustration in front of me, as well as the photograph from the magazine.
Which again, is from Vogue from Japan.
Oh, and before I forget, shoutout to Amanda Spence, who is my patron onPatreon who recommended I do this video today.
She brought up the, well, she suggested this to me just two days ago, and I'vebeen really kinda lacking in inspiration lately, and as soon as she said very, very, politely over email, would you mind maybe somedaydoing a girl with glasses, I was like, yes I can.
That's a great idea.
And I've been meaning to do this forever, so I'm super glad she suggested it.
And I'm really happy tobring this little demo to you today.
Now, I'm time-lapsingthe original sketching and the first phases of the girl, but then I'm going toput this in real-time when it gets to actuallydoing the glasses part so that I'm not cheating you out of the lesson portion of this.
That's my cat, Tippy.
She likes to cuddle with me.
She's my nicest and mymeanest cat of all three cats.
So she's the snuggliest, but she's also like, she's a little bit of a biter, so when I tried to move her, right here, she snapped atme, little jerk.
(laughs) So we had a nice snuggleand then she had to go.
So yeah, so it took a whileto get the perspective of all of the pieces of this drawing to be something I was satisfied with, because you don't have, both the top of the head and the chin are cropped, you lose the guidelines that I would normally use for a face, a full face, when you'redoing a full oval, you can't do that.
And also, the hands.
Now, I've just finishedpublishing an entire book on how to draw hands, so hands scare me no more.
I also have 31 hand full-length lessons in my Fun Fab Drawing Club.
So I, for once, now thatI have all those hands under my belt, I really am not afraid to tackle them in anyposition and in any piece.
That being said, proportionsare always tricky, no matter what body part you're drawing and especially if youhave hands near a face, you need to make sure thatthe proportions are correct.
So that's the biggest struggle, more so than the drawing of them isactually drawing them well.
But also, drawing themwell proportionally.
So if you followed me for a long time, you know I am definitelya mixed media artist.
Today I wanted to play aroundwith some new materials and combine them in new ways, so I'm using Noodler's Ink, which is fountain pen ink.
I have been having a growing obsession and collection with these, and I decided to mix and match themwith my Windsor Newton watercolor markers with mixed success.
I wasn't loving how the markers were reacting, so I end up kinda giving up on the markers and justgoing straight for my inks, which is kinda what Iwanted to do anyways.
I also found the perfect skincolor of fountain pen ink, which is called Nude, and it'slike a French manufacturer.
Very fancy.
It took an entire month to get here, but it's the most perfectCaucasian skin color.
And then what I did is I mixed that with half and half of that Nude color with Noodler's Ink in Golden Brown, and then that's the shading portion that you're looking at there.
So the hair is straight-up Golden Brown and the skin color was straight-up Nude, and when you put them together, you get that in-between tone right there, which I was super happy with.
I use them straight-up from the bottle.
I don't tend to mix things, other than what you saw me mixing here.
Oh, I should've showed you, Idropped this entire ink bottle filled, three ounces of permanent ink.
That's the eye color that you see there.
That's 54th Massachusetts, that is the Noodler's Ink, and yeah, I spilled it allover my foot and my hands, which is now why my hands are blue.
Yeah, all over my carpet.
But I honestly just kept rolling, 'cause I was super into mygirl and I was like, whatever.
That disaster, it is what it is, and it's too late now.
So I've also put a littlebit of my Noodler's black ink into that water brush so thatI could have some fine control over the parts of the eye, the eyelashes, and the pupils, and the little eye crease.
And I'm a doodler.
I love to draw as much as I love to paint, so I always have sort of both going on in all my mixed media projects.
So this was super fun.
I decided to change itup a little, my goodness.
I'm pretty much, everythingelse is staying the same, so I thought the least I could do was give this girl a differentsweater color, right? So that's Noodler'sInk in Purple's Martin, which is my very first inkcolor that I ever bought.
So we're almost gettingready for the eyes.
Not that much longer.
I'm sorry, glasses, I should say.
This is a Copic acrylicink that I just bought, and I'm obsessed.
It's so opaque.
It was recommended tome by another YouTuber and it's amazing.
It's better than all my art markers, all the paint pens.
It's just straight-up white paint.
I've got a little tinytube of it and I love it.
So, okay, fantastic.
We are getting to the fun part, which is actually puttingthe glasses on the girl.
So I went through a couplerenditions of doing this with different-sized circles.
The cool thing about inkis if you use a pencil and draw on top of it, youcan erase it completely underneath it, which you couldn't do if this was in acrylics, so love that.
So I just sketched out the size that I think would be good, and then once I had it, I used a paint pen byARTEZA, that ARTEZA sent me.
I love these paint pens.
They're just as goodas Poscas and they all have a big, nice, juicynib, which is exactly what I needed for doingthe glasses on her, since in the originalreference, it's very bold.
They're actually black, so this one I'm doing in like a dark gray, 'cause I didn't want to be super crazy, crazybold, but still dark.
And they were a little bit big, so I was trying to figure out how to kinda work that in away that I was happy with, and I decided to make them better, After I put the little eye pieces on, by making them a double thickness.
So I just did another layer.
And then that made themappear not quite as large.
But the biggest trick, Amanda Spence, since you asked, to doingglasses on your mixed media girls is to do your girls 100%.
Go all the way and finish them off, and then you're literallypainting the glasses right on top.
Now, it's scary, I'm not gonna lie.
When you have something thatcould be considered finished and then all of a sudden, you're diving back in and drawing a design of glasses on top, like, what if it doesn't look good? What if you screw up? What if, there's a lot of what ifs.
So I'm not gonna lie, ittakes a lot of courage and you have to be a little brave to go ahead and juststart painting circles on top of like abeautifully finished girl.
So here's my advice to you.
Just go for it.
Just remember, we only live once.
If the worst that's gonna happen is you do make a mistake, whatever.
You can always make thesesunglasses or something, right? So after I did like a double thickness, and then I decided, I'm kindagoing off the grid, here, and I decided it would look cooler if I had a little bit of reflection going on in the frames.
So I'm taking that white acrylic paint and I'm just very slightlyadding a little reflection.
So this is making it alittle bit more my own.
And then I decided for some crazy reason, no, I'm just kidding.
I needed to add, the biggestway to make your glasses look realistic or look, going one step further than just painting themon, is making sure you are depicting the shadows that are created by the glasses onto the face.
So you wanna take a really quick peek and a deep look at wherethe shadows are showing up.
So you have under the glassframes on either side, is number one.
You also have 'em on that left-hand side and you also have them on the nose bridge where that metal piecemeets the nose bridge.
So you have to make sure yougo back to your reference, and always use a reference foryour most successful pieces.
It will help you so much.
And then you can very painstakingly go and try to recreate theshadows that you see.
So I'm using a watered-down gray.
It's actually LexingtonGray, it's a Noodler's Ink, and I just filled it.
This pen is filled withhalf gray, half water.
I didn't want like super dark, but I wanted just enough, see, it's like just enough of a, it's so, so, subtle.
The shadows are much scarierthan the actual glasses, 'cause it's such a light line.
But can you see by puttingthat little line down there how all of a sudden, those glasses go from 2-D to 3-D, just by having thoselittle shadow lines in there? And I'm not making up where they go.
I'm just looking at the photograph and I'm having the photographinform all of my decisions in where all these things are gonna go.
So just remember thatalways use a reference and always just try to recreate what it is that you see.
You don't have to go rogue, here.
You can just duplicate whatyou see the best you can.
And then if you wanna add onand do some special things like this, you can.
So I decided, huh, itmight look cool for this if they would stick out fromher face a little bit more.
Maybe I outlined 'em a little.
So like, you can still get creative, sorry about my big head, and add in a little extra touch.
I like outlining 'em just a touch because it makes themlook more illustrative.
They were looking very like robotic, 'cause they were so perfect because I used the glass andeverything else was hand-drawn.
So this adds actual wonky lines that I actually kind of wantto look wonky on purpose because it ties in with the style better than what I had going before.
So it's not a continuousline all the way across.
So again, I'm gonna look right back now.
I'm looking at the shading, that was giving a quick look at the nose.
It's like, okay, my glasses look good.
Now what else can I do? I noticed that nosewas a little bit darker in the reference thanit was on my picture, so I'm just gonna go backwith that diluted gray and just punch up a few places that I thought could havea little bit more shading.
That's all I'm doing.
These are very subtle, justa little bit of light gray, and add a wash and kindasee what the effect was.
And I like it because it's a cool tone, and the orange under itis really, really warm.
So it kinda cools it down and offsets some of that orangeness that you're seeing everywhere.
So I'm also noticingthere's a lot more shading up in that area by the eye.
So I'm again saying, all right, well, I know that needs to be darker, so I'm gonna go back in with that gray and I'm gonna add in the shading.
Again, exactly whereI see it on the photo.
I'm not like makingthis up out of thin air.
All the information is there for me.
It's also a little bitdarker on this side.
So I'm adding a little bitof that gray there, as well.
And then a really interestingthing started to happen that I started to notice, which was as I was putting in this cool tone, it wassort of the opposite effect that I saw in this digital photo.
There's like white highlights.
What I was creating was morelike these shadows here, where the shadows of the glasses are reflected onto the face.
So that's what I decided.
It was like, oh, that really looks cool.
I should add a littlebit more of this gray and kind of that's what this.
I am going a little rogue here, but again, I was usingdifferent references to inform my decision.
Like, oh, I like how it looks, like the glasses frames arereflected onto the face.
I'm gonna try that.
So if you like this video, I would love it if you'd give it a thumbs up.
If you wanna subscribe and ring the bell to get notifications, you will get notified every time I post new videos, which is every Friday morning.
I love this project so much, I'm gonna do anotherglasses one next week.
So I will see you here next week.
In the meantime, enjoy this next video, and I'll see you there.
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