HOW TO DRAW 2D CHARACTERS IN PS (10 MINUTE TUTORIAL)

I can almost guarantee that if you stick around to the end of this tutorial, just this 10-minute tutorial, it's not a lot of time, your skills are going to grow exponentially. I think you're going to be surprised at what you can achieve, whether you're talented or not, whether you know anything about 2D art or not. You're going to be very surprised at the end of this tutorial cuz I have a few tricks that I've learned over the last decade of being a full-time game developer and making indie games. So, let's jump inside of Photoshop and get started. We're going to start with a 1920x 1080 canvas, but we're actually going to flip that into portrait mode. So, 1080 by 1920. This is just 1080p flipped on its side. And we're actually going to eventually make this basically a square. But let's let's start with this tall 1080p canvas. And by the way, guys, as I search Google for a reference image, by the way, that's totally fine. We're going to do a T-pose reference image. I think I might use something like this. And you could definitely do the same. Just go to Google and search a tea pose for a cartoon character. Throwing in reference and front view is

going to help you in finding a character that you think might look like yours. You'll notice his hands are going outside the frame. That's totally fine. I'm going to go to the canvas size here and I'm just going going to stretch the width to about 140%. Maybe a little bit bigger. You can do another 20%. There we go. So, we have our reference image here. I'm going to crop it and I'm going to simply set the opacity to be really low. I'm going to scale up the white in the background. And then I'm going to lock that layer. All right. I'm going to create a new layer and we're going to use simple shapes to mimic again just the reference here. Just mimic the size of the arms and the legs. This is really, really important that you mimic an illustration that you really like because honestly, you're going to otherwise have to guess and check the right size of everything. And for me, I'm really bad at that. So, I like to just take very simplistic

shapes. In this case, a circle. And I'm going to take the size of this head here. For the body, for the arms, for the neck, I'm actually going to use the rounded rectangle vector tool here. I'm going to set the radius to something like 60. And you'll see now we have more rounded of a rectangle here. The reason I want to do that is so that if the arms are moving and rotating, we don't get any edges clipping out of the character's body. [Music] So before we are okay with the shape of our character, the general outline, we need to just zoom out. If you zoom out and things feel good, if your mind's eye

feels like this looks kind of almost like a real human being or maybe a child, then you're on the right track. If you zoom out and it doesn't look right, if certain things feel long or maybe too short or too fat, then you need to try again. For me, it looks perfect. I love the way this looks. Okay, let's save our Photoshop file. I'm just going to name this player. I want to know what colors to use. I also want to know how this character looks in the context of my art because I actually want to use the level art as the context for determining how the character is going to look. I like to just bring it up about like that. Doesn't have to be perfectly sized. This is just a reference image. That's all we're doing here. I just need a reference of all the different colors. And I like to just blur it just a little bit so it doesn't distract as I'm working. But those are the colors. So what this means is we can actually figure out how the character looks in

the context of the world so that they pop. And you definitely want them to pop. You want them to have contrast. We're going to make his clothing orange and maybe make his face sort of a pale pink. So let's lock the background. And before we get started, I want to go ahead and rasterize all of our limbs and our head. I'm going to start with the chest. I'm going to start with the most vibrant color and then sort of work my way out. I'm going to create a new layer. I'm going to mask it over top and I'm going to put that orange. Let's do the same with uh well his arm. I think that's fine. I'm going to just fill that in and cut it. So now we have just a short sleeve shirt. Pretty cool. Same over here. If you want, you can just duplicate the left arm when you're finished with it. But because this is so simplistic, I don't mind just doing the work here and just making the right match the left and vice versa. [Music]

[Music] I'm leaving you. [Music] I'm actually going to create a shape of the general shape of his hair. So, something like that. And then I'm just going to rasterize this. I'm going to select that shape and actually go to

select inverse and I'm going to just fill in right here. So, I'm actually going to take the rounded rectangle and it's going to be something like this. The general shape, the general colors. We need to think of one thing. One thing that will make this character really stand out. What is that one thing that will make us identify with this player or this character a little bit more? In my case, I'm actually just going to give him a backpack. All right. Now that we know that the player looks great in the context of the scene, we can start adding shading. Let's just start with the chest. So the light is

coming from the top leftand corner. So in this case, I'm just going to add using black here, just a subtle gradient to the right side here. Now let's create another layer and just do a little bit more of a subtle shade like that. drop it down. And we're just going to slowly add these gradients to every portion of the right side of the character's body. Uh the way you do this, this just takes practice here, um is just think about where the light is coming from. Again, it's coming from the top left hand corner. So, for the most part, all the gradients are going to be on the right side of the player. However, for things like the ears, because those are sort of embedded inside of that circle, the shadow is actually going to come from the left side. Anytime something is sort of embedded and hiding from the light, you actually just invert the shadow. That's about it. Now, here I'm using the same principles as the shadow, but in this case, it's a highlight. And so, it's on the left side of the character. We're going to use a white gradient, and we're

going to set the blend mode to overlay. And that's all it's going to do is just going to make the light sort of saturate the color below it and it makes it look a little bit more interesting and also a little bit more realistic. All right, you have the backpack, you've got the head, you've got the eye, and then another eye. You've got the mouth, you've got the hands, hands/armms, and then also the feet slashcalves, and then your thighs, right? And then the body. So, those are our objects. So, now we're ready to just well name them properly. So, I'm going to go ahead and name the layers. This is going to be the mouth. It's going to be I left. I right. I'm just using the letter R and the letter L. This is going to be hand right. This is going to be foot left. This is going to be foot right. This is going to be hand left.

Arm left. This is going to be body. This is going to be arm right. This is going to be leg left. And this is going to be leg right. This is our head. And this is our neck and our backpack. Very good. We don't need this layer anymore down here. So, I'm going to unlock it and delete it. We don't need this reference image here. Delete it. And we don't even need the background. So, now we have our character to pose. I'm going to nudge him into the center just to be nice and perfect and clean here. I'm going to save him out. And there we have it. [Music] All right, guys. Thanks for watching. It really means a lot that you stuck around and tried out this tutorial. If you like this video, be sure to like, subscribe

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