Howdy, I'm Arty Aliens and welcome, I am Paul Yeatman, I draw stuff. In today's hashtag HIGGETCHELLENGE VIDEO, I will be showing you some of the base elements I like to use when drawing in a biomechanical style. These will mostly involve drawing things such as pipes and body parts. I'll explain a little about what can be used where and at the end of this video present another primer page and also what you can accomplish using a program such as Photoshop. Firstly, when drawing biomechanical environments or creatures, I like to use the following two design elements. The oval element represents exposed muscle while the second one is good for detailing edges of surfaces, binds, tails and limbs. I will tend to shade one side of the oval in the muscle darker than the other. I will also detail the lines so they appear to be tubes with a circle across section. If I was to zoom in on the tube or draw them on their own, you would get the tube or pipe that I drew below these. The top oval is a variant on the muscle where rather than pipes, there's styrations that detailed with little arcs, so they are not so much pipes as ripples. Here you may elect to merge the muscle into the excess skeleton as I have done with more pipes. A variant of the limb detail are these two where you add lines which curve around the surface you are detailing. This gives form and also can indicate tendons, membranes or bony segmentation depending on how you shade. The in-set muscle styrations can either be perpendicular or parallel to the limb's orientation. To give large surfaces some detail with not much effort, I make use of this sort of a texture which is meant to show either pipes, membranes, muscles or dried goop. Next I am drawing a more detailed element, one you might find on a shoulder joint. Here I have rifted on some of the previously described star as two elements to show you what can be done with them. The exposed muscle is a slight variant on what I have shown and you can see how I have included ridges and overlapping lines to build up the shape. The next drawing is meant to show how you might indicate external bones and is similar to how the ribcage is represented in Gage's Geegas Alien. This is how I drew the ribcage for a dog in this style. After I name it Gelament, you can see how effective it is just to add a lot of parallel lines to an object to create texture. The eye I am drawing has a reptilian field to it. With my biomechanical style, I draw inspiration for the exoskeletons from lizards and insects when not directly referencing Gage's work. That gives us the style of the eye. To finish off the primer, I am drawing a few terminations for either toes, fingers, tails or possibly even tongues. Here you can go pretty much from that so if you are imagination, if you want to imply a sexual aspect, even better. The semi-circle cutouts are used a lot on pipes and surfaces. They can be used to show entrances or exposed muscle or perhaps where hairs may or may not protrude. This element is a blending of Gage's style and details of insect carapaces. For a wall, you might use an element such as this one and repeat it. Here what I am going for is a bony structure linked by either more bones or perhaps muscle or membrane. The next element shows some bony protrusions which as you can see in the praying mantis I flip to can be used to great effect. The final element is a curved pipe on which it is a translucent membrane. This is pretty much what you see sitting above the shoulder of Gage's alien. Here are all the elements shown clearly after being scanned in. A good mix is shown of pipes, textures and bones. You could chop these out in Photoshop and then copy them into a bionic anvil canvas. This is a good example of how to make a bony structure. Here are all the elements shown clearly after being scanned in. A good mix is shown of pipes, textures and bones. You could chop these out in Photoshop and then copy them into a bionic anvil canvas. I find this works best with tracing paper which is what I drew the next set of elements on. After scanning this in, using Photoshop's pen tool to chop out the components can lead to pretty good layering of fix as a tracing paper has a nice texture to it that you tend not to get from the scan of the sketchpad. For example, this first image was created mainly from elements drawn on a sketchpad. Overall the work is very clean. The two tracing pad components being the needle and the skull you will observe have a little bit more texture. Taking this further, this image I made in Photoshop from elements from the tracing paper scan I showed you. It is very much a copy and paste, rinse and repeat job, where the uppermost layer is brown and set to soft light. That gives the tracing paper a brown human spots and really helps with the texture of the circles, tubes and muscle. The skulls look a bit muddy as I also use a mulch and pie layer on a duplicate for those. Have a go at the Bion Mechanical Store yourself and share your efforts with me in the comments or via one of my social media accounts. Anywho, if you found this interesting informative and detaining, you are inspired to draw on your own sketchbook or journal etc or even do a video like this. Subscribe, like and share. Until next time you have been watching drawing stuff with me, Paul Yateman, Ciao and until next time, take care.