Okay, as we navigate this question of objective, trying to find it, and trying to clarify it using questions like, what's my Why? What's the reason that I'm doing this using art direction to help us? Well, line quality is one of those drawing techniques that is so easy, but it's so impactful because at least graphically, it can make something pop up the page. But as far as character, emotion, or character personality, it can also be something very effective to to make a statement, or to make the statement you want to make about a character. So let's get into that. Now, I want to talk about a couple different kinds of lines, basically, the straight line the seeker The S curve.

Now these lines are bold. They're the same with from top to bottom. So that's what I want you to notice about these. And how can you use them? Well, in the top two drawings, you've got one of the Ramones on the right, and then a character drawing, I did have one of my friends on the left, you can see the line is pretty bold, that outlines the contour. Also j Mark studio, great artists on Instagram.

He's doing that with a white line. So you can do it with a black line. You can do it with a white line. And you can see these drawings right at scale, right so they're not as thick as the lines I laid down on the left. So But nevertheless, you can see that nice thick line that makes the character break away. From the background, so you have this foreground figure ground relationship.

And so we're breaking the figure away from the ground. That background is the ground this stuff here. And this part, right, obviously, that's the figure. So a thick, even lying around a character can suggest that the character is very approachable. It can break again, the character off the page in a very graphic and strong way. So it contains something.

It can be a good container. It's solid, let's say and hear that famous Hello Kitty character. Looks like a cute, approachable, sweet character with that solid black line around it containing it. Let's look at tapered dynamic lines. So what do I mean by tapered? You've got tapered from thin to thick thin so it's tapered at the edges thick in the middle, right?

Tapered at the edges thick in the middle, or we've got thick too thin or thick, too thin or thin to thick, whatever. Those are the two kinds of lines that we're going to look there. They tend to be dynamic. And let's take a look at some examples. Right in the middle is Alphonse mukha. In the late 19th century, this guy was a master draw or draftsman painter.

He did huge murals. He did beautiful portraits. elion quality is so sensitive. It's so thick and thin and it's so varied. You can see this nice, delicate line work here and then he does what we didn't. That first line that we looked at that bold, even line contains a bit You're so beautifully in that makes it pop off the page.

And then we have some nice, tapered lines just like tapered and dynamic like we're looking at now in the hands, right? And that wrist to that forearm, and even in here, so he's got a lot of line variation here happening and it all constantly eats into just a beautiful thing to look at, in my opinion. Then moving right top we have Patrick Nagel, and his stuff was still popular in the 80s. His stuff was all over it being college dorms and being friends apartments and just saturated the market. And what's really sad is he died in his early 30s have a heart attack, and he's got that tapered kind of life that he did so well in the eyes in the hair, The eyes will get the hair. And he's even got kind of that even line that he uses to contain things and separate out the face from this ground of sort of Marv purple and muted, blue green right there.

So he's breaking things away and playing the organic shape of the head against the geometric shapes that are part of the background and foreground. He's got the thick to thin here. Right? He's got everything going. Great stuff. And then here's a little character design I did down here.

I've got a very thick to thin but overall thick line, breaking the character away from the ground, right? Creating a nice silhouette. That's one of the design things that I'm concerned about. And then inside is a lot of thick to thin lines in the hair and parts of the anatomy in how I model the cheekbone forehead, neck and all that stuff. So using you know two or three kinds of lines in certain places that hopefully pop it off the page and make it look interesting, but it's combined with silhouette as well as a design element. The next lines are broken lines.

Let's check out some broken lines. That's basically this just what it sounds like broken line. With that good for we'll check out Egon shield again late 19th century and Gustav Klimt two masters that I love. I don't know if you're familiar with their work, but Egon Sheila or shine I don't know how to pronounce his his name, but his figures were awesome. They're very designing and distorted. But just the point here is that broken kind of scratchy line that can make someone look uneasy and erratic.

So if you want a character and you have one that's you want to convey that they're erratic, they're scattered, right? I think a movie characters like that. You want that broken kind of broken up line, okay, their mind is jumping around, it's broken. It's not smooth, logical and consistent. Here with Gustaf clipped on the right, he's gonna kind of, you know, a wavy kind of broken line. It's a lot more gentle, but still, it's a little bit.

There's lines together. It's not just one line. So it's little nervous, maybe it's transitory. Maybe they're mature Mercurial in their personality, their mind changes a lot. And it's showing up in that line quality of really kind of they're and then they're not there, they keep moving. That line quality can show a character like that.

Okay, let's keep on moving here. So let's say you have one line, I want to talk to you about atmospheric perspective, because you can take that one line and just do a couple things with it. One, you can make it a little bit thinner and smaller. And you can make it lighter so you can step the value range. And as you do that, look what happens. That big, thick black line looks like advancing the middle gray line looks like it's behind the big line on the left, it's just a little bit behind it.

And then that thin light line look like it's way in the distance. So just by line weight, right the line weight and the value contrast. Value contrast gives that sense of atmosphere. So they call it at most pyrrhic perspective is one of the easiest ways to perspective one of the easiest ways to convey depth in space in depth is one of the elements of design. The other way to do it is linear perspective. And that's kind of mathematical and harder to do.

So the atmospheric, this one, they also call it the laws of diminishing contrasts. So contrast comes into play. And you can have your value contrast diminish, so we go from dark to middle, to light, and that atmosphere that's in between you and let's say this furthest one, there's a lot of atmosphere you're looking through a lot of particles, dust, and so on, and it just loses contrast. It also loses or the diminishing contrast is edge quality edge crispness, so you could lose contrast in your edges and you'll go from a crisp, hard edge to lift Say, you know, a soft or last edge, and that can make something appear to be further away it creates depth. Another one is color contrast, you lose color colors get less saturated as they go away from you. The closer they are, the more saturated and the farther away the more gray they get.

Okay, so let's keep moving here and show you an example of toolkit on Instagram. Think toolkit may have heard of this person. I think they're in Singapore. They're on Instagram. And it's really nice how they've done this With some of that sort of diminishing contrast and creating the depth. So you've got the dark and thicker lines in the front of the face, and you've got the thin, wispy broken, lighter value lines.

And, of course, we look here first, because that's where all the contrast is. So the contrast value is high on the left side of the face, and the contrast value is low on the right side of the face. And so we notice on the left before we notice the right side of the head, pretty simple, but pretty effective. Right? Okay, couple more quick examples. Casey bar, one of my favorite portrait artists, again, that knows who's the closest thing to us.

So they have the crisp lines, the greatest value contrast your that left nostril. Then the things, the eye sockets, a little bit less crispness of line or of edge, a little bit less, a little bit less value contrast. And then it goes back even more. And you can see that atmosphere, that sense of atmosphere that's he's playing around with creating drama, mood and depth. And then we've got Jay Martin studio again, and he's got on the right side, all the contrast of value, contrast of line, thick and thin, and contrast of detail. All on that right side of the figure, especially in the face.

So that's what you see first, and you see the left side of the figure second. So these are all toolkit Casey Bob J. Martin studio using the laws of diminishing contrast, but I wanted to Focusing on that line quality of thick and thin and dark, medium light and the edges of hard and soft and how just those simple tools there like the dough rate me on a scale. If you can put those together you can form chords and make music. If you put these few of these tools together with just line quality, you can do amazing things. Alright, that's it for line quality and I'll see you in the next video.