Hi everyone, and welcome back to the flat vector character class. In this lesson, we're going to learn how to create our character, starting with how to make the heads. Now before we begin to draw our character, we want to keep in mind what sorts of character we want to create, what sorts of body type, male or female, young or old skin color, etc. different characters may require different creative approaches. So the aim at the end of these lessons is to learn how to create these three distinctly different body types. So let's get started by creating a new document.

So go to File and New. And I usually like to use a screen resolution like 1080 by 720, but you can use whichever dimensions you prefer. Click Create. And next we want to set the color to use for the skin tone of a character. So let's go over here first of all, now he wants to remove The black from a color from the strokes that's just clicked to none. And then for our color, let's go ahead and double click on the fill here.

And you can choose whichever sorts of skin tone or the character you want to create. So let's go ahead and or if you already know what color you want to use, so let's go ahead and input a color here, like so. And then click OK. But feel free to use whichever sort of color you want. And then one of the easiest and quickest ways to creating a simple flat character is by using simple geometric forms. And we can access most of these shapes from the button over here the rectangle tool.

Now, what you need to do is you need to go ahead and select this tool. If you just click you can make a square or rectangle live So by clicking dragging on the board, if you want to go ahead and select more shapes, click and hold the rectangle tool button here and it will bring up some new options to choose from. So let's go ahead and choose the rounded rectangle tool for now as this is what we'll be using for the majority of this course. And the easiest way to use this tool again is to simply click and drag like so. Now in order to control the amount of curve you have on the corners here, all you have to do is click and drag with the tool so that you can see the outline that the shape and before you let go of the mouse button, just simply press the up key to make the corners rounder, or the down arrow key to make the corners a little bit sharper like so.

And you can see at the on the bottom right hand corner Now all of our shape, the AR is increasing in value to represent how curved the roundness of the corners are, or decreasing in value. Awesome. So you can just release the button to create your shape. Now we're just going to start off with a simple rat round rectangle. So let's go ahead and draw a simple rectangle for the head and then the straw a another smaller one for the ear. Now I'm just going to select the selection tool or press V on the keyboard, and you can go ahead and copy this so copy and then paste so Ctrl C to copy Ctrl V to paste.

We're just going to place these ears on our head, like so. Now what I like to do is I like to use the alignment tools so you can find the alignment So here, and once I select both of these is here, I can make sure that they're vertically aligned by clicking this. Also, you want to make sure that you're not aligned to the artboards, you want to align it to the selection. So if I just quickly grab this out here, like so. So you can see, if I click align suit, you can select a line selection, or align to artboard. So if you align it to the artboard, it will center it to this white artboard here, but I just want to align it to while I've been selecting, so let's click align to selection.

Click vertically aligned like so. And then what you can do from here is you can group these two is by pressing Ctrl and G on the keyboard. And then let's move this to our head like so. And then from here, you can make sure that they're also aligned to the center by selecting everything here by clicking and dragging with the mouse and then pressing the Home Horizontal align center bottom, like so, just to make sure that everything is aligned to the center. We're just going to click and drag this back into the toolbar, like so. Awesome.

Next thing we want to do is we want to create the eyes. Now let's do this by using the Ellipse tool. So let's click and hold on the rounded rectangle tool button here and select the Ellipse tool. And now let's go ahead and zoom into our face here by pressing Ctrl and the plus key on the keyboard. So just do that a few times so we can zoom in on the face, I'm just going to go ahead and draw our first eye. So again, by clicking and dragging, like so.

And release once you're happy with the overall size and shape of the eye, now we also wants to change the color so making sure that the shape is still selected. Let's go ahead and go into the color box here. Double click And let's go ahead and choose a suitable color for the eyes. So you can go ahead and select a color here. Or if you already know the number for your color, you can go ahead and input that. I'm just going to input the color for my eye, like so.

Click ok. Once you've got that color and you'll see straight away the color of the shape has changed. Now using the selection tool again, make sure that the I selected Ctrl C to copy Ctrl V to paste. And now we just want to place our eyes where you want them on the face. And this exactly the same thing as what we did is we just going to make sure that these are aligned properly, group them and then select everything and then use the Horizontal align center tool to make sure that it is all centered Yo, I just rearrange these like so. You'll see now if I select everything here, and I click the Horizontal align center top, everything now snaps into place. Awesome.

I'm just going to move these down a little bit, like so. Cool. Now remember, this only works for things that are perfectly symmetrical. So you can see here we've got two, two is two eyes, and obviously our faces symmetrical as well. So that's why the alignment tool works. Now let's go ahead and select the pencil here, which is P on the keyboard, and we're just going to use this tool to draw the eyebrows.

So I'm just going to zoom into the face here a little bit more so that we can see what we're doing. Now let's change the fill icon here and swap this to. So you see I had the face selected. So make sure you don't have any of your Your shapes selected when you do this, I'm just going to change this back to Phil. So using the selection tool, click out that I want to change this into a stroke. I want to choose the right color.

So if I if you click on the eyes here, you'll see that I've changed the color of the color of the, the filter to the eyes. So I'm just going to swap this back into a stroke. Going to use the pencil here. I'm just going to click to create a one point. And now I'm going to click and drag to create our second point. Now when you drag with the pencil, you'll see that I'm creating these handles here, which can curve our stroke, like so.

So once I've released it, you'll see now that I've created an eyebrow. I'm just going to click or press escape on the keyboard to make sure So that we're out of that tool selection tool again. Now over the top here, I select the, the stroke. Over to the top here, you'll see that we have our stroke options. So let's click on stroke to open up our stroke panel. And you can change the way that line behaves, such as giving it rounded ends.

So rounded cap, zoom into the stroke can make the stroke a little bit bigger. So you can see now previously, it was just a butt cap, which is a straight, straight ends, but I can round that up like so. And just like what you saw me do here you can also make the stroke weight thinner or thicker, like so. We can also change the shape of the line by clicking on the profile says you can experiment with all these different types of lines. I'm just going to choose This protocol HIF. And now let's create our eyebrow shape.

Awesome. So let's go ahead and do that i'm just going to zoom out. So we can see our whole face again, you can just sort of adjust the line like so, I just want to copy this so copies Ctrl C, and you can also copy and paste this into place by pressing Ctrl Shift and V, and that will copy any shape or any line into the exact same place as the previous shape. So once you've done that, I'm just going to right click on the line, I'm going to go to transform. So just go to transform, and you want to select reflect. Let's move over here so you can see so right click on the line, transform and select reflect and you want to start Let's vertical, okay, and you'll see now is swapped the line, but it's also swapped the, the line on this slide as well.

So from top to bottom, so we can change that by going to stroke. And then we can flip, use the flip across button here, like so. Awesome. And then because both the eyebrows are symmetrical, we can go ahead and group these. And let's align everything to the center, like so. Excellent.

So now that we have the general shape of the head, the ears and the eyes. In the next lesson, we'll go through how to create the hair and the mouth of our character. see you all there.