Drawing with a graphic tablet in SketchBook

- [Instructor] To create story boards you don't have to be able to draw them. You can create them using stock images or found images, or even your own photographs. You can also create them using preset templates on online services, which we'll have a look at later. But if you do want to draw your own storyboards, I'm going to show you some of the best drawing applications and equipment that I think are essential for drawing. I'm going to start by having a look at Autodesk Sketchbook. This is my favorite drawing application. I've tried quite a few drawing applications, and I found that that this one is one is the closest to feeling like drawing with a real pencil. I don't know how they do it, but it really does feel like you're drawing with real pens and pencils when you use it. It's available on the desktop, so you've got the desktop version. There's also a mobile version. And you can go onto the website and download a free trial and try it out. What I'm going to do is just quickly show you the desktop version, and on the desktop version, I'm using a Wacom Intuos Pro, which is my favorite graphics tablet. And here's a little tip for you. If you're using the Intuos tablet, included with your Wacom tablet is a pen stand. If you look inside the pen stand, you'll see that it has spare nibs in there. And the nibs are all different. You see these white ones here. They've got more of a kind of graphite feel and a bit more resistance. So if you change your nib to one of these, you'll find that it's much easier to draw on your tablet. If you need even more resistance, you can even lay a piece of paper over the tablet so that when you draw, you get the resistance of a real piece of paper. Sometimes I take a piece of thick cartridge paper and I just stick it on using a bit of masking tape at each corner, and it really makes it feel like I'm drawing on real paper. So let's take a look at the Sketchbook application. Now I've got the free trial open here just so that you can see what's available in the free trial. When you open the free trial, you will get an option to subscribe. And if you try the seven-day free trial of the pro version, you'll get more features. And so you have to give your details to do that though, so if you don't want to give your details, you can use the free trial, and I think that's free for seven days as well. So what I'm going to do, instead of just starting to draw with the tools, I'm going to open a file as a kind of template. So I'm going to go to file open. And depending on your subscription, if you have access to the exercise files, you can open this file along with me. And inside the reference images folder, you should find this file here called wide seven sisters template PNG. So if I select that, I can open it up. So here I have a photograph that I've taken of the Seven Sisters Cliffs. There's seven of them. That's why they're called the Seven Sisters. They're very close to the creative cabin and I like to use them as a kind of backdrop for the creative cabin. And I've got the pencil tool selected. So let's go to our layer editor, which I access through the window menu. And in here you'll see that my template layer has the photograph on it. What I'm going to do is bring down the opacity so that I've got about 50% opacity. And I'm going to rename the layer. I'm going to call it template. Incidentally, if you want to learn Sketchbook Pro or any of the other applications that I'm going to show you there are Lynda.com tutorials for each of the applications that will go into more detail than I have here. I've actually included a pdf with links to some of these tutorials, and that's in the exercise files folder. Okay once I've done that I'm going to lock the layer. So I'll just choose lock layer. And then I'll add a new layer to draw on. I'm going to rename this as well. I'm going to call this sketch layer. And I'm going to pick up my pencil tool, and I'm just going to start sketching. So let's start by sketching in these cliffs here. And I'm going to start by putting in this. All right, it doesn't have to be precise. This is just a storyboard. So I'm going to do it quite roughly. Now I'm going to use the ruler to basically choose the angle of rule and just literally draw along the edge of the ruler. Now I'm going to add some more cliff tops in here. I'm going to make some of this up though. So let's start this one down here. And once I've done that I can just switch off that layer, the template layer, and then I can start to draw in my other elements. Now Sketchbook does have some limitations. If you really want a fully fledged drawing program, the best thing to do is upgrade to Sketchbook Pro. Now I've got an older version of Sketchbook Pro that I'm using here. And you'll see that even the older version has lots more tools than the free Sketchbook application. One of the things it has are these lovely Copic markers and Copic colors. And these match up with markers that you can buy. So if you're doing some of your drawing with markers, you can match up the colors so that they match. And you can see here we've got a flood fill tool. We've also got a flood fill all visible layers tool. And what that allows me to do is add another layer. So I'm going to call this one color, and I've already added it. I'm going to lock my sketch layer so I don't accidentally paint on that, and I'm going to do all my coloring on this color layer. And then let's start by filling in the area of the sea. So I'm going to choose a nice color for the sea. So let's choose this like aquamarine here. If I choose the fill all layers, it will just fill in that area there. And then I'm going to go and choose a color for the sky. So let's choose a nice light blue color for the sky. I'm going to make the clouds a slightly bluey white. I don't want them to be pure white, and then I'm going to actually choose this one, slightly more neutral. And then for the cliffs I'm going to choose like a gray, so they're not quite white. And then we'll choose some greens for the cliff tops. So I'm going to choose this green here. Actually that's a bit too bright. So let's choose a duller green. And then we'll choose this for the ones in the background. I also have tolerance settings. So if I double click the tool and let's zoom in, and you see I've got this nice little gimble for zooming in and moving around my image. Okay so let's bring that tolerance down even further. And we can just fill in these little areas here. So that's a little tour of Sketchbook Pro. I really recommend that you have a look at Sketchbook and Sketchbook Pro. They're really great applications for this kind of work.