3-D Illustration: Space, Color & Texture

1. Trailer: Hey, everybody. My name is Craig Henry, a designer and illustrator from Boston, Massachusetts. I'm super excited to be doing my first ever Skillshare course on digital illustration. In this course, we'll discuss the increasingly popular world, modern illustration. Today, digital artists are more and more in demand, and whether it be for editorial use, concepting, gaming, or even just a personal passion, illustrators are used to tell stories and create visual impact. In this class, we're also going to discuss my process from paper to the desktop. We'll even go over some techniques for creating compelling visual images, including color, texture, and working within 3D space. I'm confident this course will give you everything you need to hit the ground running with your own unique visual style. We'll also discuss the best ways of getting recognized by your peers, art reps during picking up a little bit of freelancing on the side. Thank you very much for watching this video and I look forward to working with you guys in the class. 2. Quick Welcome!: Hey, what's up guys? Just wanted to say a quick hello. I'm very excited that you've decided to join me in the course. Just want to point out a few things if you have any questions throughout the course of the tutorials, please email me at craig@hellocraig.com. I'm very happy to help, I don't want anyone to feel stuck or if I wasn't clear, that's not good. So, definitely reach out. Also, I've attached this sketch to the first part of the tutorial. Feel free to use it if you want. Also, I'd love it if you guys adapted on it or did your own thing took a little further, totally different concept. The course is designed in a way so that you guys can really kind of do whatever you want. I'm looking forward to seeing what you guys do come up with. That said, again, I appreciate it, I'm really pumped about this. Grab your coke zeros, your pencils, your brains, let's do this. 3. Create Your Very Own Slice of Heaven: Okay, everybody. So, hopefully, by now everybody has downloaded this sketch that I provided. If not, like I said, definitely feel free to do your own, but use that as a reference because we're going to follow it pretty closely. A lot of times what I'll do is, I'll be out and I'll have an idea or a concept, and I'll just doodle it on a napkin or a piece of paper, and then when I get back to the office or at home, I'll take it to the next level, I'll doodle it a little bit more detailed. That said, I think it's just really important to have a concept or a story to base your illustration on. So, that's why, like I said, I think it's good to keep it handy and make sure you're go on track. Before we get started, we're going to be doing a little bit of modeling. So, everyone should have Cinema 4D, and you can get that at maxon.net, and Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator. So, hopefully, you guys will have that. Like I said, any questions, please feel free to reach out to me at craig@hellocraig.com. I say, we get started doing some modeling. Let's do this. All right, guys. So, this is Cinema 4D. So, hopefully, you guys are a little bit familiar with it, but it's definitely not necessary. Looking at the illustration I provided, we are creating like a little bit of an island in the middle, which is cool, and you can have a lot of fun with it. Cinema 4D makes creating terrain and certain objects a little bit easier. So, I definitely recommend it. It will help increase your workflow, especially as you guys get into some more serious work, like freelance work. So, that's just a basic little introduction. Holding Alt and left-clicking is going to allow you to rotate your objects, and right-click, and left to right, it is going to let you zoom in and out, top and bottom, either way. I think that's about it. Middle-click is going to allow you to see your different angles. So, it'd be a top view of your object, front view, right view, and a perspective view. We're actually going to spend most of the time in perspective view, so don't worry too much about that. Like I said, this is going to be a very basic start, but It will be a extremely important part of the illustrations. So, that said, here's our horizon line, and just as you're modeling, keep that as a reference point in correlation with your illustration. So, to get started, let's come up here to our objects, and we're going to select the landscape object. What that's going to do is create the default landscape object that Cinema 4D gives you. It's actually very powerful. As you guys will see, you've got these little nodes here, and you can lift them up and down to change the height of your object, and you can actually adjust the width as well, and the length. So, over on the right here, you have some of the object properties. Different things allow you to change what you've got set up. This'll be just adjusting our height, which is similar to selecting this top node here. You can also adjust the number of faces that your polygon has by the number of segments. So, if you want to make a simpler object, you can easily adjust the number that you're using. At the same time, adjust the number of rough furrows or bellies and the fine furrows as well, so a bit more detailed edges. The scale of it in sea level, we probably won't be using too much, but definitely clear out those because you can really see the way it opens up your terrain object. Multifractal and Seed, Seed is actually really cool because, again, it gives you some presets, and I definitely recommend you guys go through here and find one that you like. A lot of times, I'll go find one that I like and then move it around to make it look exactly how I think will fit the scene. Borders at sea level here, we'll just remove the edging, the flat edging that you get in that terrain initially, which is great. Sometimes you might want to model not a terrain, not a mountain, maybe some water, or some cool organic surface, and that'll allow you to do that. So, we're going to turn that back on. There is also a spherical ability with it, which actually turns out objects and if you adjust this, you can see a little better how that changes the spikiness of the terrain in a spherical view. So, let's start with it just like this, and I'm actually going to adjust this to be a little bit more square because again, we're creating an island here. I want to make it a little bit more deeper. If I haven't mentioned these little arrows here, allow you to move your object on the different axises, axi, however you want to say that. So, we'll keep that there and again, just keeping this horizon line in check throughout because that's really what we want to use as our reference as the rest of our illustration will be used based on that. So, I'm actually going to change the shape here, try one of these, little bit more. Yeah, I think I like that one. So, I'm using 665, the Seed 665 for the terrain object. You guys can see, it creates this nice little dip here, and I can see, based on our illustration, that our little house here, our modern home, or little hideout will look pretty cool staying up there. Little spot around here for the boat, I could see a little trail up here for our dock, and some great spots for some lighting. So, I think I'm going to start here. So, as you can see, this right now, looks very smooth, probably not going to be perfect for our look because we want to do a little bit more of a little poly look. So, what you want to do is come up here to this Phong Tag. What the Phong Tag does is, it really changes the smoothing, the way light bounces on the edging, and adjust the smoothing of the object. So, right now, we've got an 80 degree phong angle limit, and if you just change that to 20, you'll start to see some of these ridges come in here. So, we're starting to see a little bit more of that polygonal look. So, you're going to play around with this quite a bit, but to get started, we really want to simplify the terrain. Keeping this basic shape, but simplifying it and reducing the number of polygons. So, that having been said, you guys are going to want to come up here to your object deformers, and we're going to use a polygon reduction, and what you'll want to do, is move the polygon production as a child, you want to make it as a child of the landscape objects. So, if it's looking like this, or probably started like this, you'll just want to move it down to be a child for landscape, and you'll see how that shifts it, simplifizes the terrain object. Clicking on it, you will be able to make an adjustment to the amount of strength in the reduction it does. So, if you don't want to be super smooth like that, you can start at around 60 percent and move up from there. I'm probably going keep it around 90 because I do like the simpler look. But you can still see there's a lot of smoothing in here. So, I'm going to come back up to my Phong Tag and we're going to reduce it a little bit more to about 15, and I think that's good. I think that makes sense as some nice little ridges here. You can really see the way the default lighting is hitting it, and I think it'll be a nice view for it. It's a pretty cool looking shape. There's still a little bit of smoothness in here, but it doesn't bother me too much because remember, we are looking at it from this angle. So, let's select our object again. I'm actually going to make it a little bit bigger. So, if you guys actually just hit the Tiki, it's going to put you in scale mode and you can actually just click anywhere and make your object bigger. Again, you can use these as well but I'm just doing more of a universal scale. So again, just hit that Tiki, you'll see that gets chosen and then you guys can scale it universally. So, looking at my sketch here, it looks like our horizon line is going to be just a little bit, just right around there and want to make sure that we'd like that angle. I think that looks pretty good. I want to see a little bit more of the top. So, I'm actually going to hit the R key now, and that'll actually select your Rotation Tool here, and I'm going to just rotate it just a tiny bit because I want to see a little bit more of the top of there, the surface. Again, just following with that horizon line, so you guys can get a sense of that depth. So, once we do finally get into doing some of the Photoshop work in the posts, we're going to actually have our terrain landscape, mountain landscape falling behind here, so you can just see how that will balance. So, having done that, I think we should add some lighting. So, in the sketch that I did and again, yours maybe different, I have the sun coming from the back left. So, let's pull in our light object here and by default, it's going to start at the center of your scene. So hit E and E key is just going to bring you back to the Move Tool, and from there, you can actually move your lights around and you can see the light is rising. So, we want to take it back a little bit and we're going to set it back here on the Z-index a little bit, just to get a little bit further away in the distance and bring it up and you can see that you get this light coming from behind it. If you want to fill more of this area, you can, but I want to try to keep it to be pretty bright light. So, I'm actually going to click on this light object now and adjust the light to be a little bit more, I decided we're not going to do a sun, we're going to do a moon here. Let's do a moon, because they do have stars on my illustration and I should stick to that, talking crazy here. So, let's make our moonlight have a little bit of a blue to it. You can adjust the RGB values. I want to make it a little bit brighter. So, by default, your intensity will be set at 100 percent. I'm actually going to set it to 200, and actually I think I want to be a little bit brighter, I'm going to do 300. It's too bright. Let's see 240, that looks good. So, keep your light about where you're going to want it. Even though our sun is essentially going to be down here, I want to hit a little bit more the surface area in the front, so that's why adjusting it up a little. So, we're losing a lot of detailing because we don't have any light on this side of the island. So, I'm going to click on the light object here, hit Command Z or Control C, if you're on PC and Command V to copy and we basically made a duplicate in that spot of that light. What I'm going to do now is move this closer forward, and you'll see that we're going to start to pull back in some of those details. So, little bright still. So I want to set it lower than 100 percent intensity because I don't want to pull in too much detail that I'm going to lose the dramatic effect of the moonlight in the background. So, let's set it to 70 percent and you can see now, we've got a really nice kind of wrap around, the terrain still got a little bit light peeking through over here. I don't want too much light there because the moon really is going to be behind it. So, I'm going to adjust a little bit more now that I've got it maybe just to 280. I think that looks really good. So, that's how inconvenient where you guys want, you might want to add some cool lighting. I'm actually going to take this moonlighting again Command C, Command V and have another light source coming over here, maybe it's the sun setting. We're going to adjust the lighting colors here, add a little bit of pinkish orange, I'm thinking. I'm not loving that. Let's go a little bit more purple. I think that looks a little nicer. So, we're actually going to move this one up a little bit closer, and see here, let's find the right light levels. I mean definitely, I had fun with the play around, but you guys can do whatever coloring you want. This is totally your creation. So, I'm going to set this to, let's see 150, and then let's just bring it up here. So, that's cool. It's bouncing on a few of these areas. We're still keeping most of our shading properties and we've got this strong light back here from the moon. I'm going to say that's probably not strong enough still. So, I'm going to actually just pump it up a little bit more. I think that looks pretty good, great. So, one you guys have the look of the lighting that you want, we'll just have a little blue in this. We're ready for the next step. So, at any point during your modeling, you can actually hit up here. There's two ways you can render your scenes. You can render straight here within the window and see what it's going to look like or you can render out a separate window, a picture viewer which is kind of cool because you can keep track of your renders and go back and see how you've been moving along here. I still think we need a few more ridges in here. Again, later we can we can add those on imposed but if you want to come over here, and maybe set this to 12, add a few more of those. That looks pretty good, try 13, no, 12. Cool. So, I think that looks pretty good. So, if you look back at the illustration, you'll notice that we have a few things like tiny little cave entrances here. There's one over here and of course, we have the cut-out around where the water is but we're actually not going to do any of that in here. We're going to stick mostly to this. But the next part is going to be the actual home, the modeling of modern house that you'll be building. So, we will tackle that in the next video but if you guys do have any questions like I said, about this part, it can get a little confusing. Don't get too overwhelmed by the interface. We'll just focus on these certain areas and reach out here for any problems. So, I will see you guys in the next video. 4. Design Your Hangout: All right, guys. Welcome back. Next, we're going to start building out our little home, our little modern hideout, house hangout, whatever you want to call it. This is probably fun. Again, just rotating on your scene, you can see where the lights hitting the surface here. I think it's going to actually create a really nice contrast for the background, the water, the house, and a little details we'll add in afterwards. So, just referencing back at the sketch, we're going to start here by grabbing our cube object, just having that. If it's not already pre-selected here, you guys can just grab from the drop-down period here. While I have this open, I should just point out any of these you guys want to play around with, feel free to do it. I'm going stick with the cube object just because I want to stick with that low polygon look and not to say, you can't get those with these other ones, but this will make a little bit easier and cover the basics. So, definitely, you can feel free to go nuts, but I'm going to stick with this for now. So, I'm going to pull this up here a little bit and just like the terrain until you guys can adjust this accordingly. I think that looks pretty good, and I'm going to move this up and down a little bit, so I can see where it's landing. T to transform, E to move it around, and I'll put it a little taller than I had it in the sketches because I think it could be a cool little higher up. I hit command C, command V or control C, control V if you guys are on a PC, and move that up over there. That looks good. We're going to do it again. At this time, move in a little bit and we're going to pull it up. Just enough, so we can rest there and then we're going to move it over a little bit. That looks pretty good. So, next, we're going to build out our porch and we're just going to do a basic adjustment here to build out the railing. We'll just pull this in, move it over a little bit, push it down, smaller to about right there. That looks good. Command C and command V, and then hit R to rotate, hold Shift. If you look at in the middle, there you guys will see the degree rotation that we're using. We're going to just make sure we're at 90. We'll move this around to connect, join those in. That looks pretty good. So, it has taken off a little bit here on the end, so I'm going to pull that back in. That's good. Let's do it again. This time, pull it back and that looks pretty good. Again, just referencing the illustration, looks like we're going to need a little sloped roof here. So, command C, command V, rotate to whatever you think is comfortable, and it probably going to take around 20 degrees there, and that looks good. You move that down to where I think it looks, it's in a good spot. I think that looks good. Okay. So, let's grab this piece again, command C, command V. This time, we're going to change up a little bit, so we want to add a little kind of glass room area at the top of this hangout. So, I'm going to extend it up and then move in a little bit, so you can see that this is where it'll be angled. But our problem here obviously is that we've got a cube object and we're going to need to actually transform enough, so it fits within the slope. So, what we're going to want to do is because this is a cube object, we can't really not do any transformation except for deformers. We're going to make it editable and then we're going to want to use this polygon face tool, which allows you to select any one of these sides. So, we want to select here, hit command T again, and transform, N. If I can do that, you guys will see you can do it from either side. So, again, feel free to out from that transform it away. Then, do that, and switch the move tool, bring it down a little bit, and then slide it in, add a little more to fit within that roof. Because it's so flush, I'm actually going to hit T again to transform and just bring in a little bit. Actually, where you want to head back to our modeling tool and then do it. That way, we're just in the whole thing. So, I just move that in and out. You'll see how it kind of slides the edges in towards the home. Cool. I think that was pretty good. So, I don't have my sketch, but I think we need a little chimney here. So, let's add one, cube tool, and bring it up, transform out. This is how we think you look at, the problem is just put it in the back of the house in a corner. That looks good. So, what's next? So, we have little details. Again, if you look at the illustration, we have some doors, and some lining here on the porch, and some lights, and a few other little objects that we're actually going to illustrate in afterwards in photoshop. So, we have one less thing to do and that's get some legs on this house. So, let's duplicate this again. Command T, make it longer, taller, pull it down. You get your placement, so it looks like we need to come in a little bit more here. Before it is zoom and guessing. Check out some of those details. Second when I come over a little bit more, and I think that looks nice and well duplicated. Another version of it here. I take both of those. Select them, hold Shift, click them, command C, command V, and you can move those duplicate objects over as well. There you have it. We've got Liska. So, again, look at your scene, adjust your lighting accordingly. I've got this purplish the side and I think that actually is really nice because from the side, you can really see some dimension, this object and from the side, obviously, because the moon, you can see a lot of it too. But again, I think that creates a really nice contrast against the rest of the scene. While we are probably going to be angling it around here for our perspective, you can still see your pulling in this really nice detail on the edge of the mountain. I think that looks pretty good. So, in the next tutorial, what we're going to do is we're going to add a little bit of color to the scene, and play around with a little bit with the textures materials, and then we're going to export this out, and really getting into the nitty gritty of the detailing, and making the whole scene come to life in photoshop. So, of course, see you guys in the next lesson. 5. Final C4D Touches: Hi guys, welcome back. Next, we're going to do a little bit of colorizing of our scene. We're going to add some materials and play a little bit with the way the light hits the object, so we can smooth things out. As you can see right now, everything is kind of the same basic gray that's seen before the defaults tools. So, when I did the scene, I imagined this being a rocky surface, but also maybe is green, some grass, and this thing like a wood texture to it with a little bit of some window areas. So, we're going to create that look for these, but as I keep saying, definitely use whichever collage you like. I'm really interested in seeing what you guys come up with. So, you're free to be as unique as you'd like. So, down here is actually your material area, and as you can see there are no materials. So, if you double click, you will create one. We're actually going to double click again on this material, so we can bring up the material editor. I'm going to start by creating the brown color texture we're going to use here. So, again, by adjusting your RGB values similar to what we were doing with the lighting earlier, find a color that fits the look you're going for. I think for me, is probably have a little bit more red to it, and get a little darker. I think that's good. Coming out here, there's lots of different option variables you can add to the material, but we're going to stick to keeping this pretty basic for now. But different and play around those, and see what you think you can add some transparency and things like that. The specular is the way the light is hitting the object. So, as you can see right here we're defaulted to a plastic balance on the lighting. So, if you adjust the width, the spread essentially of how the light is wrapping the object, you can see it gets pretty wide here. We don't want to be too wide, but we also don't want to be too thin. Otherwise, it starts to really look plastic. As you can see here, this sharpens the fall off rate. So, we're going to bring it in a little bit here, so it's a little softer. Again, you can play around with ideas that you think look good. But I think that's a nice softness, and I imagine when light hits this wood texture essentially, it's not going to really be that white. So, I'm going to add a little bit of yellowy orange to it. Just enough so that it doesn't seem too awkward. I think that looks really nice and soft. So, why don't we start with that, close out, and now you can materially, you can actually apply to your scene. It's really a matter of just simply dragging, dropping, and on. So, you'll see here as we're doing that, we're applying the color to it. There are other ways to do that by selecting here, and dragging them over but as eventually you guys the way you can simply create colors, and move around, and add them to different objects. Long way sloppy way, but it's fun. So, you guys can hold command or control I believe for you guys on windows and duplicate that. I'm going to make another variant of this color as well. So, probably going to copy here to color again, make this a little darker, come down here and make the specular a little less bright, but just in the height of it. I'm going to use this darker color on the legs. That's looks pretty good. So, now we're going to create a new material here for the glass. The glass is going to have a little bit of bluish color to it, but nothing too crazy, the color is good. Again, you want to do your color first, and then probably address your specular, I did that backwards. Looks nice, and then when it comes out here, are transparency, and choose that, and by default you're going to have a full transparency. So, you'll want to adjust the amount of transparency. Drag and keep it around here for now. That works. So, let's take that and apply that to our window here. You can see here, it's showing the transparency level, but you go and run your steam within the window.Just try to see a little of it coming through and then you get a little more transparent. So, it's obvious. Yes, you starting to see the front of the face. It's probably very rare. Good for you guys, but if I turn here you can see we're tuning. Go ahead and actually make that a little darker to the floor and showing through there. I think that's good. Again, what we're going to be doing it from this angle, you'll see a little bit of the roof in there, which is just cool look, and you can start to see a little bit of the sighting. The front face there that's being hit by the moonlight. So, next we want to add a little bit of color down here in our terrain. Again, I'm thinking a little bit glass here, look, so you can duplicate these other ones if you want, or just double click here to make a new one. Then we're going to select more of a greenish color like that. Will probably go a little more yellow, a little bit more height to this you can always see that change there. Apply it. Now right away I can tell you right now that is a terrible green. So, we're going to darken it a little bit. As you can see we're getting a live update there. So, it shows you and again we've got that purple light that we created earlier. Which is adding a little bit of a different hue shift which I'm liking. You can play around with that as well. I think that looks good. A more green into it, great. Now, we come back down here the specular. You can see here playing with the height of the light and the fall off levels. How dramatic the light wrapping around the object is, just find a balance that works good for your scene. I like that. That looks good. So, come up here, do a quick render, that looks good. Actually brightened up our wood texture. Color here a little bit. Is it a little more pop? It stands all my side. Okay. Cool. Again feel free if you don't like the contrast that's being created here. You can adjust your light settings. The blue might be a little rough with the red. But what if you think reduce the brightness a little bit. Reduce this light over a little bit. A little brighter. Certain get a nice look here with the light sides. Something out here. Here's our purple light move down a little bit. Click on "Add" a more red to it. Reduce the brightness. See how that looks. Everything it looks pretty good. All right. So, now we get some colors applied here. Well, it may seem like a lot as you guys do this more and more often it will become very quick. You've got a really nice structure to base your final digital illustration on. So, what I'm going to do now is save this out as a transparent PNG. I'm going to get imported into photoshop and then just have fun with it. Do some really cool things with texture and add details to the scene. So, the important thing first is to get your horizon line lined up. To whatever you like. We had it kept around here. It's give me a great reference point. Once you start adding another object. So, I'm going to keep it probably right around here. I think that looks pretty good. Maybe will a little bit more an angle there. If you like it from the front. I think that looks totally cool to try that. Bare in mind as if you're not going to just use that bright moonlight as a contrasting element on the back and you want to use it as more of the source of your illustration. You're going to want to adjust it to it's not so bright. Obviously, share some details to work with that. That side I'm probably going to actually just keep it from here. Pull this up a little bit more. Make you get the light just how you want it. To on a test, we'regreat. Here we go, I think that looks pretty nice. Once you have your final adjustments, spring it up here to your settings here, your render settings as the third button. We're going to make a few changes. So, first of all you want to look where you want to see it. So. I actually have a screen chervil that I have created. So, I'm going to make an output folder and save it as render. From here we're going to want to select PNG. You want to make sure you output your over the channel. Aliasing it is right now geometry and you could see that in your preview of the anti-aliasing along the edges, the smoothness of those rigid lines was a little rh. So, excuse me, if you select best you'll get a nice Delias edge to those. Finally, you come to output. We're going to want to select a high resize. These presets are all screen sizes. So, you're going to want to make something a little bit larger than that? So, I'm just going to lock the ratio as it is and do something. Totally nuts and do a three thousand by 2050 resolution output here. You keep everything else the same. Okay, and so now as long as you're happy with where it's at just again make sure you lamp that horizon line, probably keep in line. We are right there. Go ahead and render the picture viewer as long as you're happy with your lighting, everything I think you're going to go. This black area here is actually going to be rendered out as transparent by Cinema 4D. So, when we pull it into photoshop afterwards we'll be able to build around it. We've an actual blank canvas that we can build items in front of and behind. So, in the next lesson we're going to do that. We're going to start adding in some of the textures and colors and do some more things with lighting. To smooth things out and really make the scene come to life. So, we will do that in the next video. See you there. 6. Creating Your Environment: All right, guys. So, I've got my rendered out PNG here in Photoshop. What we're going to want to do now is set this up so that our final product can actually be used for print later on. So, if you guys ever want to throw it on Society6 or on DeviantArt, or any of the other print production companies, websites, you guys can do that, you'll have plenty of different sizing options and you can sell everything from iPhone cases to posters. So, I'm going to come up here to Image and we're going to adjust the image size. Right now, as you saw for the render, it's at 3,000 by 2,250 at 72 DPI, that's definitely, not good enough for printing press, so we're going to set that to 300 DPI. Coming on here to our size and adjust that accordingly to, yeah, we'll do 10 and 7.5, and that works pretty good. I'm actually going to come back in here now and just adjust the canvas size. You want to think ahead of time of typical print sizes, and I generally do all my work at 8 by 10, and depending on the final output size, I'll just up the DPI from 300 to 600 or 650 in some cases, depending on where you're going to be using it. So, our canvas size is, right now, 10 by 7.5, so I'm just going to 10 by 8, and I'll just adjust the top more a little bit. There we go. So, we can get started. I think the first thing just to help you guys see where we're at is creating a new layer, we double-click to label them. On this new layer, we're going to want to do a black background, although I'm probably going to use more of a dark blue. So, we'll base our sky mostly on that, darken a little bit more. I'm going to pull my guides, if you guys want to have your rulers turned on up here, you can hit Command or Return to turn on and off and then just drag down to where your horizon was going to be, just as a reference point. You can hit Command + Semicolon to turn it on and off. I'm going to leave it on for right now and create a new layer, and we're going to call this Water and I'm going to hit M or come up here and you are going to select your rectangular marquee tool. Select out that area during a select a color for our water, so I'm going to do a purplish blue color here. Fill that in. A little bright. So, I'll adjust it. Turn off that references because we don't need that anymore. So now what we wanna do is we want to create our islands. So, this little basis is going to be essentially floating in the water. So we're going to want to crop these out so it looks a little bit more like it's resting there. So coming back to your Render layer, let's zoom in a little bit, and there's a few ways you can select the objects within this layer but I tend to just stick with the polygon lasso tool because it fits the look and feel of the image here. So, we're going to come in, and just always keeping in mind the shape of the actual Island, all these little areas that show depth, we're going to wrap our cuts around that. So, as you can see here it's going to start to get darker. So, we're going to assume that this goes in a little bit. You'll hold Space Bar time to move your document, again, following these lines. As it gets dark, you'll probably move it in a little bit. Again, realizing that as you come back further you're getting further away from the viewer. So, you're going to want to start to keep that in mind as you're cutting your edges here. I'm actually going to keep a little bit is back here. So, then will come back around here, clip that real quick, hit Delete, and get kind of a nice little island sitting there, but we don't want a boring island, so we're going to have a little bit of a fall off here. So, what I'm going to do is create another layer here and we'll just call it island_fall_off. Again using our polygon Lasso Tool, come in real close to these edges here, we're gonna create this fall off feel almost like a tiny little cliff. Just remember as you're building this in, you're going to want to, since that the cuts are similar to the ones that you set before, try to only create points in your selection where you're going to need it. Again realizing that as you get further away from the user, the viewer, now you'll probably lose these areas. So here the island wraps around, so you wouldn't keep it going there. You'd want to assume that we're continuing in. There's something around that area. So, I actually think I went a little thick on this spot, so I'm going to hold Alt, again, keeping those spots with cuts in mind. We're going to trim that out. Cut this in a little bit and there you go. So now I'm going to select the darkest point since, the moon is essentially going to be back here we're going to assume that most of this is going to be pretty shaded. So, let's fill that area. Again, using your polygon Lasso Tool, let's select, starting from the left or in the area that's closest to the light, just cut right around it and then if you hold Command + Alt + Shift, literally Control + Shift for you guys on PC, tease that little X, click it, and it's going to wrap it to that, wrap the selection multiply it to that size. So again, I'm going to pick a color around here, create a new layer, hit B for your brush tool and then just kinda tap it. We're gonna do that again here. But this time I'm going to put the brush a little further away just so it's not tapping it so much. Again, assuming all these areas here will be dark, you probably want to leave that. Here's a little bit of a turn. A little too bright. So, this is the back of the island. Again, you don't want to go too bright otherwise it will feel out of place. Again, don't worry at this point about things being geometrically correct. I think that the cool thing about doing our illustrations is having fun deforming certain parts of it and playing around the shape. So, that should be your main concern. I think that's pretty good and this area back here, though it's not likely, there's too much light hitting it, I think a little bit it is going to hurt. Identifying those kind of turns, again if you've found that you're brushing off at any point, select that island_fall_off, take command + shift + I and hit Delete. It'll delete anything outside that area. That looks pretty cool. I think, overall, I'll probably lower the brightness of this, and this island fall off layer, I'm going to actually just brighten it a little, just hit Command U, up your lightness, up the saturation a little bit. I think that one's a little nicer. So, now we've got that drawn in. All right, the next portion, I'm just going to be adding a little bit of depth to this water. So, I'm going to create a new layer selecting this water one. I'm going to choose our background color here. Go back to the Brush Tool by hitting B and if you hold Shift and click from here, you can see we've created a little bit of a dark gradation to the back there. I'm going to actually erase a little bit here so it's not so gradual. I like that. Okay, so now, let's go back to the background. I'm going to create another new layer. We're going to call this background light. I'm going to select this color by hitting I, the Eyedropper Tool, coming here and then we're just going to move it up a little bit, probably to one of these brighter colors. Hold B, brush again, this time remember it can be behind the water, so don't worry about that. At this point, we want to probably get our light source in there, should be our moon. So, let's hold Shift, choose a spot you want it, click here to set to defaults, Alt Delete to fill or you can use your Fill Tool. There you can see we've got a nice little moon there. Now, from here you can start to play around with some light. So, what I'm going to do is create another new layer. Label our moon here. I'm going to call this Moonlight. Again, keeping on white, hit B for Brush Tool. I'm going to start by clicking it a couple times here. You can use the Bracket, left and right Brackets to make your brush size bigger by be a real life saver. Add that in there, and I'm going to actually set this layer to overlay. So, if you guys have new layers, come here and this is just a layer blending mode. You can see what that does there as it creates a sheen and saturation and lightness around that area. I'm actually going to make another moonlight layer. This will be a halo and again, using a smaller brush because it will affect a little bit outside of your range there, and that was good. So then, let's grab our moon, you can hit Command Shift N if you want create new layer but we're going to create a new group, and you can do the same thing Command Alt Shift G. I'm just going to group this into a moon that where we have it. So here, you can see how our moon light is actually matching the light source in our scene even though we added in some lighting over here, which we can add in later on. I think for right now, just getting that major light sources, it's going to help us really enhance the scene. So, what I'm going to do is select the entire render layer, create a new layer on top of it, and I'm going to just call this Light Enhance. Excuse me. I'm going to hit B again, I'm just going to tap these areas where the light's hitting, with that layer selected and we were carefully just adding a little bit of light to the areas we want to. I'm going to set that again to overlay and you can see we're creating a nice little smooth light there and erase a little bit of it up here. There we go, looks nice. So, next we're going to start adding in our mountain ranges back here, add a little bit more depth. So, let's come to the water on top of it. Again, I like to use the Polygon Lasso Tool. Most people think I'm absolutely crazy for doing that, you guys can do whatever the hell you want. You can use the Regular Lasso Tool and just freehand it. You can use the Pen Tool and then convert it to a selection, whatever you like. Again, I like Polygonal Lasso Tool because it gives those sharp edges that you want. So, what I'm going to do here is to start to cut in our mountain range and feel free to go crazy. I mean, if you want really high peaks and low valleys, you can do that. If you want to keep it smooth, keep it all really low, you can do that as well. Don't worry about going in front of your moon here. Actually use that to your advantage to create some cool dramatic light later on. We're not to worried about light right now. I don't like that so let's grab one our mid colors here. We can use the Eye Tool and delete. All right, so you can see, it's in the distance, we're assuming there's a little bit of fog here, so it's not completely black even though the sun's not directly facing it from this angle. But we don't want this sharp edge here, so coming back to your water layer, let's hit V for our eraser, zoom out a little bit so you can see the whole thing. I will go pretty small on that, you may want to crop up here and just the hardness a little bit so it's not too much or gradual fade. Brush this area out. Don't forget we added that dark radiation to the back, so you're actually going to want to make sure you're going to merge those together via hold Shift and merge that with your water. You can actually hit Command E and that merges them. I'll just change this to new water. I will go ahead and brush that out again. All right, that was pretty good, I'm going to hit Command T and transform this up a little bit, make sure this is in front of your mountain there, put this mountain down a little bit more and selecting your mountain. I'm going to click it, Eyedropper Tool, select this darker color back here, hit B and then let's brush along path of the mountain a little bit, so it fades a little bit more. I'm going to go a little darker, yeah like that. So now, we're starting to get a little bit of the mountain range in there. Again, we're not going to focus on light or anything like that as of yet but you can see out it's starting to take shape. So, in the next lesson, what we're going to do is we're going to start adding in some of those details like the lighting and the textures but I think first of all, we should focus on really pulling out some of the features of this. So, maybe a reflection of the moon, some rays, some star trails, and then we'll focus on adding a little bit of details et cetera. So, I look forward to doing that in the next lesson with you. Thanks. 7. Mood, Reflections, Stars and More...: Okay guys. I think now we can start playing with some more of the lighting. I think it would be cool to get a reflection of the mountains here in the water, and kind of show how the light is going to bounce off that area. So, let's first make sure we label our layers, so we don't get confused here. We are just going to merge these two. Perfect. So, let's grab our moon here, and I'm actually going to shift it over a little bit more because as you can see this light is really hitting right here, and this kind of a shaded dip here, but then the light strikes a little more, so I think it makes more sense to be up this side. So, what we're going to do first is we're going to take our mountains, and we're going to duplicate them so you can hit command J, and we're going to put it here above the water. Then hit command T, grab this top node here and we're going to dip it down like that. Next, we're going to take our moon, we duplicate that as well. We want to just find that up right about there, so that this point right here, this horizon line, it's going to line up pretty evenly between the two. I'm actually going to take my rectangular marquee tool here, delete that area. Hit E here, we are going to erase this a little bit, come and fade the light out a little. A little too much here. Set opacity down, that looks good. In case you didn't realize it, you can just use for a quick key any of the number keys across the top or near if you have num keypad you can use that as well. So, I've just hit four there. The mountains I'm actually going to make a little darker. I might probably set the transparency to about seven here, but now you want to select it. We'll command, select your mountains, and then we'll delete that little chunk from the moon, copy that way it still looks pretty much like a reflection there. Then lastly, I want to brush the mountain reflection here a little bit across the top so it blends better with that background. If you want to, you can grab both of those and move them around as you see fit. It's good. Move the mountains up probably up a little bit, now it's a good start. So, now we want to get some of this light here so let's make a new layer above water. Hit B for your brush tool. We'll use a white, so if you hit D to set your defaults back right here, and then hit X it'll switch them. Brush those in. We can delete that. Maybe set to overlay see what that looks like. It's pretty good. We'll probably duplicate it, hit command J. Create a copy of it, and maybe brush it out a little bit here so it's not super bright at the front, more of a gradual fade. I think that was good. So, now you can see we've got this nice foggy halo the light's created from bouncing off the water. It does look good although it's a little sharp. So, I'm going to create a new layer, select that color, hit B for the brush tool. Use the bracket key to shrink it down a little bit, brush it a couple of times if you hit command T and just stretch it out, it creates a nice little fade there. We're probably going to extend that a little bit over. Zooming out light, dances across the water I guess. You guys notice I started to sound more and more like Bob Ross as we go through these tutorials, so I apologize. I'm going to save this out because I have been an idiot and haven't done that yet. So, make sure you do that guys, every time you make big changes. Definitely save your work. All right. So, I think that looks nice. I'm going to make a little bit more of the lighting come across the water here. I'm sorry. This sky here behind the mountains. So let's select our water again, hit B. I actually put it behind the water, and behind the mountain, lighten up a little bit. Set that to overlay. Turn that off in order to see, once you get there you want to brighten it up a little bit. Yes, looks good. So, now you guys can see you get a nice atmosphere in the background. If you want to, you can actually take that fogginess and lighten it up back here, but these are all the details that you guys can add in as you move along. Over here you notice that I'm losing a little bit of the reflection, so I'm actually going take my burn tool on mid tones up here. We'll just darken up that a little bit by brushing over it soon it gets darker, just a little bit at the tops. There we go. Now, our island here, we're going to know, as we move forward here, it's start to add in some details like a little cave and we will add some lighting in the dark. We're going to add some space for the ladder here and the rails and do some texturing. But in the meantime, we really just want to focus on making sure those items pop and the lighting makes sense. So, this light that's coming from the moon here even though it's got a little bright side here that I think looks nice I think, what I like to do is geometrize it a little bit. So, I'm going to actually duplicate our render layer and we're going to call it render light. I'm going to hold shift and hit up arrow, left arrow so you can see it a little. I'm going to make it bright, very bright white. We're going to hit it back, and then I'm just going to tweak it a little bit. One or two pixels is usually good, and that creates kind of a cool pop out of the light creates as it hits the edging. So, I'm going to take our research tool hit E, I assume it's not really hitting the back edges here although it might a little. But I think as it goes back it'll fade a little bit because the light is bright as over here. Then we'll kind of fade it off over there too. So that looks good even though it might be a little bright you could actually hit command U, set to colorize, move your lightness down since you can't really colorize white, and then you can adjust your color that's highlighting it. So I'm going to actually stick with more of a blue. Saturate a little bit, darken a bit more. That looks good. If you want to take your dodge tool and brighten up the front side a little bit, make it pop, set to mid-tones. Brush away some of these details here. Put some more hit the edging too much. So, even though we have nice lighting along these points, we're not really, because we just nudged up one and over one, we're not getting any of the nice light sheen there. So, while still on that layer, use your eye picker to select that color, hit U, make sure you're on the right tool as I am not, line tool. We'll just continue it down here, and you noticed it moved in towards the end, just assuming it shows off a little bit, not too much. Use your eraser tool if any of it looks a little too crazy. Now, a little bit here. Accentuate it here. There we go. Yes, that looks nice, and you can really see way the lights are kind of reflecting on just on the glass but also along the edges. So next, I think that we should probably start adding a little bit more of the details like the star trail. So, what I'm going to do is actually, normally, I'll do it in Illustrator just so I have like a vector-based star trail that I can use and transform as needed. But I think in here we can just actually use our brush tool. But, I do recommend anyone moving forward that wants to pretty often use stars or a moon or any of those type of shapes to make a library in Illustrator or Photoshop that you can access. So, let's zoom in a little bit and set our brush size to around 12 and we''ll set the hardness to 100. Use your bracket tool to get the right size you want and we'll just start to draw the stars. We go a little smaller, we add some little clusters in here, break it out a couple off to the side, and just draw them around in a way that looks nice, bounces it. There, now it looks good. Probably make one larger one here. We've got a strong left balance here to our illustration so I think it's always good as you go to detail and focus on composition to think of other ways to balance the artwork out. So, I'm actually going to add a big star right there. So, we got our stars layer and actually create stars, call it starburst, it can start starburst. Hit B again, reduce the hardness back to zero, and we'll just create a little bit of a light spot around a couple of these. They are obviously too bright so we are going to set our opacity by hitting three. If any of that seems a little too bright so you can erase certain ones if you want, so it's not too crazy. Last but not least, let's actually go back to our star trail, our stars here and hit E and maybe fade out a few of these not all the stars are going to be super bright so it's good to erase some of them and lighten them up. All right. I think that was pretty good. We're starting to have a really nice sky coming in here. So, why don't we do this. In the next tutorial, we'll talk about ways that we can create some kind of light trails in the back and we'll also start adding some of the details like the cave door, and then maybe get into a little texturing. So, I'll see you guys in the next set. 8. Rays of Light, Cave Doors, and Angling: All right guys. Let's now focus on some of these background details and do a little bit line work. As you guys saw when we did our lighting, there's this red maybe sunset light coming from over here. So I want to make sure we add that in. I'm going to come back here, I'll just call this sunset. You'll be creating tons of layers as you come through here, and sometimes you have to go back and organize into folders and label them, but don't worry too much about that as long as you guys can keep track of what you're doing. I'm going to select this color, so I'm somewhere within this hue range around here maybe make it a little. Hit B for a brush tool, and want to start to add in some of that color here. You can imagine it's probably some brighter light sauce coming out through write hear that's hitting and, reflecting on this. Want to make sure we also add a little bit of that to the water, so I'm going to select the Water layer, New layer above it. You need the brush tool again. Looks good. I think we'll probably want to adjust the hue on this mountain, so I'm going to select it command. We get a new layer above it, use our brush tool again, little bit of it there. I'm actually going to set this layer mode now to color just to give a little bit of a shift. It's a little too saturated, so I'm going to reduce that to the opacity to about 50, 60. It's good. Now you set this opacity around there. It's nice, it's subtle, but it's a little detail and balances our competition out a little bit. Again it's cool because we did brush out this mountain here, but it's really creating a nice foggy light across the back, and like I said before, feel free to enhance as much as you'd like. Reduce the brightness and just move a bit. Press that a little, there you go. I think now it would be fun to add sum light rays coming from the moon. If you haven't already, you should open up your illustrator now. I'm actually going to head on in now, and we're not going to get too crazy this isn't a full on illustrator tutorial, but I think it's nice to have a full set of tools to your disposal, especially as you create objects and you're going to reuse them in your illustrations. Having something that is vector allows them to be fully scalable, without losing any quality. Meaning it's ideally edges. It's just good to have. We're going to create a circle here, and make sure you are going to set your fill to none, set your stroke two black, and I'm hit Command C and Command Shift V, to create a copy in place. That's Command Shift V, I believe control shift V, for you guys on PC, but we're going to start to make these little rays coming out. We're going to duplicate that quite a bit. As it gets out further, I'm actually going to reduce this to about 0.5. We want to make sure that our weights are shifting as you're moving closer. But also create these clusters of lines that meet together and create this cool effect. Guessing go as crazy as you want on this. I'm probably just going to stop pretty soon here. Let's make this one a little bit thicker. Use that 1.6 and you can see this will probably be where your Moon sits. Copy this. I think these are a little too close and too uniform, so I'm going to spread those out a little. Put this won in. I think that's good. I think we'll grab this now, we'll command C and because you can move objects between the different Adobe apps, I'm going to go tab back for auto Photoshop here. Make sure you have your moon layer. Then hit Command V. What you'll want to do to start is keep it as a smart object, that weigh if you do need to make any adjustments, you can do so pretty quickly. But there, I think that actually looks pretty good. You want to just make sure your spacing between the edges of the moon and your beams are fairly even. I think I'll just go in, I'm actually going to convert it now. Actually ewe known what? We're going to keep it as a smart layer I'm actually going to do a layer. stile this with the color overlay to white. There you go. Then we'll set this to overlay. You can adjust the opacity a little bit till you get a nice look. I think I want it to be a little bit more saturated. I'm actually going to create a new layer above this, hold shift and select the underneath it, hit Command E to flatten it. It's no longer a vector-based smart object, but we don't really need one at this point anymore. Let's set that to overlay and dupe it a couple times. You can seen it's creating like a nice saturated light there. Brush at the sides here a little bit so it's not too crazy. If you want to do, you can dupe it again. Because we're such a high res here, you can actually expand it a little bit without worrying about it being to crazy. But there, that looks pretty good. Sometimes what I'll do is I'll select a couple of these. Hit Command and select your layer. Don't worry about that. You're still selecting even though it's saying that just saying it's not a full amount, create a new layer. Let's make sure we using white. You can actually see that you're starting to brush in some light points in here. We'll go a little crazy so you guys can really see it, but I don't want it to be that bright. But like I said, that it roughens up a little bit, but it still looks nice. I'm actually going to adjust the opacity, it will bee 33 percent. Looks good. Definitely around the textures and then the cool thing about illustrator is that you can have fun with this, you guys will not apply a filter to it, you can make it wavy. You can add a distorted edge to it. You can keep going with the rays or you can keep them just close here, whatever you think looks good. Here we go. I think that looks good. If you want to also, you can select these layers and do bit. I'm going to actually bring it above here, the water. We'll just transform it this way. After that we start to see it down here in the water and you can have a few little rays down there as well. You want to move it a little bit to get it just right. Once you do find the spot you want it, you want to make sure you erase anything that's hanging over the top here. As you can see I get some on the horizon line. Here you go. You have a nice reflection from your moon and a nice beam there. If you actually want to paste it again, I'm just going to go straight, [inaudible] one. Get it close in place. We'll put one there. I'm going to select my moon layer, pick Command Shift I to invert the selection, and we'll delete. Then we're going to set that to 20 percent of passing, see a little bit of texture to the moon coming in there as well. I think next we should add some light trails in the sky. Maybe the follow the stars. Add some little beams, chilling out from the moon. I'm going to come back down here into my moon layer. Between lessons, clean up our layers, but I think for now is this fine. Let's select our brush tool. I'm going to start by creating a couple spots here of light. They're coming off the moon. Once you've got a nice array of light around the moon, we'll select our smudge tool. Using our bracket and just like with the brush tool, we can make it larger or smaller. I'm going to start by grabbing these spots and you'll want to slowly start moving it over to get strength, the more of a dramatic pull you'll get. You may notice on your machines that takes a little while to pull those lights, but just be patient. You'll start to get some nice results, and just pull them off lightly, not too go too crazy, just enough to shows that it's chilling off. Maybe hitting some clouds, some fog in the sky, I'm going to take my ratio tool, make sure it fits out nicely. It looks good and then we'll create a new layer. I shan't take it satisfy the moon layer since all part of the sky. I want to select this blue, and probably write around here, we'll brush it on there and transform it a little bit two bug that, rotate, and we're going to smudge this blew line to just trail over here. Just give it a second, very processor or intensive, but you'll seen it's slowly starting to move over here. Clearly I have far too many applications open right now. There you go. If you use a smaller smudge tool, you can actually deep it out a little bit easier. We're going to trail this way, looks good. We'll use eraser and fill it a little. Grab your smudge tool again and make sure it comes off the edge or canvas here. Then what you guys have, a light that you like and reduce it to Apple, 40 percent. Fit it all a little bit more, get a little bit uneven. Looks good. Then we'll create another one over here, and again, let's smudge it in, so it meets these other lines of light that we created. Erase. See that line, looks good. You can see we've emanating from the moon but we also get these light sources further up in the sky as well. I like that. I still think I love to see some more dramatic lighting on the edge of the mountains here, so right behind the mountain we'll create a new layer. We'll select white again. Use our brush tool and will come in a little bit finer detail now, and again we said that the overlay, so you don't want to be to bright, maybe set the opacity to 50. Of course there's points out, so it's not to much there. That looks good. I think the only problem we have now is that it's not exactly equal here on the water, so pushing a little bit more light there says the overlay. We'll make sure we cut out from here so it's not too crazy. Since the moon is directly behind this portion of the mountains, you will probably get a little bit of direct light hitting that fog that's also on the water, I'm going to come in here and just lighten up that spot a little bit. Let's select our mountains. Make a new layer and call it a Mountain Ace and we'll just brush in that light here, and maybe set that opacity to 40. You can really see the lights escaping and hitting the water on that area and maybe even create another and then fog light there and bring it up a little more than I want to have it on top of this other, stretch it out, and we set the opacity to 30 or 40. That was pretty good. This light layer that we created on the water could probably be a little brighter right here, so make sure you cut that out and play out the two you get something that looks nice and it seems balanced with the position of the moon or sound that you're having you're seeing. So now that we've got a pretty good light source in here, I'm actually going to come in and make some quick adjustments. Guys can just right-click anywhere on the Canvas when you're in your Selection tool to pick the layers and make adjustments. Select our mountain again, maybe faded out a little bit. Again, that light's really hitting the water here. Let's select our water. Rush that spot. Now we're going to come in and we're going to do some other details and encourage you to start by adding in our little cave that's coming out from the side of the landscape. Above your render layer, let's create a new one and we'll just call it cave entry. Do whatever you want here. I mean, I think we can stick with the shape that came out of our render or you can create something completely unique. But I think I'm going to go fairly simple here. May be we'll have it too off there, cool little entryway. Maybe not completely even. We'll select a darker color here and fill that in. Now this is a fairly complex shape. I mean, if you guys wanted to come back after and maybe just reduce the number of angles. You can do that. But I still think a little angling is definitely good for making it look more realistic. Now what we're going to do is we're going to add a little bit late here. It does look like we're headed into the cave here. We want to assume that our ground level starts around here and that we're moving into the center. You'd imagine someone walking through the cave at this point. I'm going to actually select this area. As we did before, if you have your area selected and while you're still in that cave entry layer and you hold Command Alt Shift, you'll get that multiply selection. Just click and that'll snap it to the edges of that object. Now we're going to create a new layer on top of it. Select that layer color and just tap that on there. That looks good. You can see how we create this little edge that you can walk into. You can take it further if you wanted to create some other little angle in there. That's totally cool. I'm probably going to create one more angle here. My little light get in that spot. This one's still needs to be brighter. I'm going to just duplicate that layer. Maybe not that much, yeah. We'll merge those two. There you can see that there's like a point that you would walk into. After the fact, I mean, as long as you have your starting point, you can actually hit Command T and make adjustments as you'd like. Select them both and move them if you want to be down more. Just make sure if when you do that, you select your cave entry layer Command Shift I, and then you delete that light coming out there. You also probably just brush it out. That's cool. Then we'll make it, it seems a little just flat here. We probably want some polygon edges coming out from there that will meet with these other edges. So now we'll create a couple spots here. I'm just come out here which would create a little deep. That point may be hold shift and keep adding on to it. Then behind that cave entry and make a new layer will select this color again. Then we'll brush these in. You can see how we joined in with the rest of the layout. Now it looks cool. I can see this cave entryway is competing with this dark spot over here. I'm actually going to come over here and just balance this a little bit. Let's select this color. This little. Grab some of that color. That looks pretty good, dramatically reduce that a little that edge. Just look at that edge. Great. This spot here again, definitely trail off as much as you want. I think it's great to add your own edges. The point of being an illustrator is starting from somewhere and expanding from it. Really making it work with this scene however you want, so whether it be through line worker, adding these edges and they can really make the the seen work for you. Careful with that light, nothing to crazy. Just tap it.a little. May be put a little dark line here. I'll brush those and there you go. You get that nice polygon entry away. Didn't notice here that we're getting a little edging from our light source earlier. I'm just going to brush that light out. I think that looks nice. I think in the next tutorial, what we should do is start adding in some of the details. Some of the textures will really want to make this house pop out. Get some of the details like the laddering in the door, and the railing posts, and those what I think so. It's looking good. Again, I can't waited to see what you guys are coming up with. But let's start adding some details. See you guys in the next lesson. 9. Lines and Textures: Okay guys, so as you can see here on the side I've cleaned up my layers a little bit. I think it's important to keep your document fairly organized, obviously, because you want to be able to search out things as you're moving around or making changes. Again, oftentimes as you figure out where things are located you can just grab your Move Tool and right-click and grab things that way, it's a little quicker than having to scroll through a bunch of layer folders. So now we're going to have some fun, we're going to actually play around with some texture here in the water and then start detailing in some of the house. So I'm actually going to head on over to Illustrator again and don't need that anymore but I'm actually just going to move it up to the edge. So first off, what I'm going to do is grab my pen tool and just click anywhere here off to the left and create your first node, and then click again and you'll see as you kind of move your mouse right here, you can change the curvature of the line you're making. So I'm actually going to curve there. I'm going to hold Alt and select this turn here and create another one, and then hold Alt again and create another one and there we're going to create like a little dip in here and have that go there and I'm going to come back in here, maybe we'll come up a little and have that go to there. So I'm going to deselect that so you can kind of see, so there's kind of a cool little waviness here almost looks like wood grain but we'll use that first one to kind of create the lines that'll go underneath here. So I'm going to do is start here, this time we'll bring it there, once you've got your spot hold Alt and come back again to this point, maybe we'll go up like this, Alt. Alt, looks pretty good. Here we'll have the lines become a little tighter because this is actually going to be the lines that we have in our water, so as it gets further away you can imagine these lines will, these kind of ripples in the water, will start to tighten up because it's further away in the distance. Let's select those, my stroke weight over here is one so I'm going to set to 0.7, it's good. I think I'll select this and Command C, Command V, sorry, Command Shift V, so pace in place and then we'll bring it up again but we'll make it a little tighter again, so it's kind of, really kind of see that tipping away. You go to your Direct Selection Tool here, you have your selection, Direct Selection. Direct Selection can actually allow you to not just select that whole line but also different points here, so I'm actually going to select a point up top and ditch these first few lines. Okay it's a little bit of an unevenness, that one across, that one across, and we'll do a few more points here but we're not going to go too crazy, we'll maybe go like that, looks good. The last one will be right here. Cool! I like that and then we'll do just a little bit of a ripple right here and these kind of meet together. You can actually take this now and maybe duplicate in a few other spots maybe it meets with that line there going to tilt a little, okay another one. I'm holding Alt and transforming it equally from both sides, this one will kind of have come off to the edge here. So I think that was pretty good. So let's grab this, come and see, come back over the Photoshop and we're going to our water layer here, folder, and we're going to paste it. I'm going to do pixels, I'm going to stretch this across a little and we'll tighten it up just a little bit right here, build that spot and hit enter. So now we're going to Command I to invert that to white. So you see here we're already getting some really nice lines as it goes into the distance. So we're going to set that to overlay mode, it's good. Take our eraser tool, kind of fade it out a little bit here on the edges, I imagine those ripples would really stand out in front of the moon, more than it would off the edges so we'll lighten it as it comes off to the side here. I'm actually going to expand this down a little bit because it's not super tight to the edges, I'll erase this line here and let's set our opacity to 70. So there you go, you have a really nice texture along the back there, and like I said if you want to hold command now and select that you can really enhance it in the front of here so hit V again, let's select the white, just click in these areas, click and deselect and turn that off and now you can see you've got some brighter spots there, pretty good. In my layers. So, now we've got a little bit of space up here, which the front surface of the water with ripples might be, would still not be affected probably little bit by light, but I imagine at this point, we probably see a little more shading, as you get further away. So, I'm actually just going to paste. Actually, before I do that, let's come back. Since they are closer to us at this point, I'm going to duplicate this, and get rid of these tire lines. Then, we're going to set the stroke to 1.1. Copy that, paste it again, just do as pixels. Looks good. We'll set this mode to overlay. Maybe have it solely joining up to the front here. Actually, I think these might be a little thick, but let's see here as we, yeah, I think it's a little thick, let me come back, and actually set it to 0.7. Yeah, that looks good. Overlay, set this to about 20, which we're going to tighten it up a little bit, and do another one in front. Maybe erase the edging, so it runs a little nicer. That other one, maybe, so I think again we can, since we have the shaded ripples here, spill ripples correctly, close enough. Then, we'll grab these two again, let's select them, hold Command click, Command-Shift to select another one, and make a new layer on top. We'll select our weight again, link some of those white lines in there again. Set that to overlay and you can see it get a little bit more that light ending towards the front. I think that looks good. I think next we might want to add a few lines up here. Again, I think we have to go too nuts, but I think if we use some of these existing lines we have, can duplicate them, bring up here. Let's set this one go more cross, so these shapes are a little bit more unique. All right, and we're going to set these to be quite a bit thicker here. Let's set to about that, and what we want to do now is affect our meter limit, and what that's going to do is allow these points to meet at a sharp edge. So, little you might find some of them are meeting a little too closely, so just move them around till you find something that looks good. Actually, I'm going to use that one, so that's this one. I can probably ditch this too as well. You don't need that line. There we go, so let's take this now, Command-C, bring it back over here, and in our background enhance layer, to name that one, paste it, and I have these thicker lines here, and rotate it a little to see something you like. Again, let's set this to we'll try soft light this time. Yeah, it does good, and then we'll brush these out just further away. I'll think these have to be too dramatic. We'll set this to maybe 50 percent just enough to get a cool effect back there, and maybe duplicate it. If you want to you can transform it. If you want to fade off as it goes up there. Cool, and sometimes you might want to even grab these since we do have a cool almost cloudy texture in here, and you create a new layer and we'll just try this. We'll maybe add a little bit of it up to the edges where it meets and that creates a little bit more of a nice blend, maybe duplicated a few times. Yeah, blend it. I think we probably could use a little bit more on this side, so we'll add a little bit of white in here. There you go. Great, so now, you've got a cool texture leading up to the sky. As we did in the last lesson, I mean I think you guys can add more of these sort of light sources as you want, a kind of messiness, and you can get a really cool effect up there. So, that looks good. I was hoping to start getting into the texturing of the house this one, but I think we should probably stop there, that way you guys can get some time to catch up with this, make sure you get some nice lines in here. I'll do a little cleanup, and the next one we'll really start baking in some of these details. Start the ladder and then do some actual texturing on the house. So, I'll see you guys in the next lessons. 10. Using Lines for Objects or Surfaces: All right. So, next we're going to focus on adding some texture, and detail, and a little line work into this part of the house. I also want to add in a little bit of a glass surrounding here, which I think will actually help, and then I save that arrow over there. So, why don't we start by coming up to our render layer, actually, I'm going to create a new layer above that, and we're going to call this line work. So, I'm going to start by selecting this area here, we going to use white and pick our line tool and we're going to start from this edge here and we're going to kind of draw a line here, just to kind of close off where that roof area meets the base. So keep on there, and I think for this one we're probably going to have some wood slats maybe coming down this, but I think before we get too far into that we should just add the detailing from here up that we might want. So, I may do one there, probably I can add another one here, and really not tone of rhyme or reason to this part but we want to give it the look of wood and almost a little bit of rigidness to that point. Maybe this point here continues off to there, clean up your edges, could probably continue over here. That was good. I'm going to set this to soft light, and set it to about 20 percent to 35 percent. Create a new layer, and this is going to be our window, so, let's select maybe from here to here, cut hat edge, we will use this blue color we have in this area here, and one thing you want to make sure of is that your lines are kind of staying, shared across. If you use this as your reference point and just draw a line across, you'll notice that's pretty straight so, you want to stick with that. On the same layer, will do bit here add another line, kind of winging this point but it looks like I'm actually a little off there. So, again if you follow this line you see that I probably need to come down to about there, to just keep it consistent with that angle. Select that again, I'm going probably go little lighter, since we do with that light source coming up from the side here, because you've got good glass room there. I don't want to be as high, so I'm going to cut off a little bit of the edges here, and just make sure you're watching your perspective lines, and we'll delete that. Great. I'm going to set the opacity to about 70. Next we're going to come back to our line layer here, the line work, so, let me just label this line work, again bring it back to white, use your line tool, and we're going to carry another white line here to there. Follow this line here and then add that edge around there, you can see we're creating some good detail, I'm actually making these kind of areas that are popping out stand out a little more. So, we have our lines here, I'm actually going to come in now and I do a little bit of that with texturing. So, we'll create another new layer, texture wood, and we'll add a few more lines here, now because this is going to be more of a wood grain it doesn't need to be perfect. So, I'm going to do that on there and kind of figure that out, maybe create another one coming out from there, and if you want just use your polygon lasso tool, select that area and then you can work with each line individually. Do another one here, maybe this one will be kind of a box look, and we have one here, can you follow that line? Select that one too and just kind of up lift it a little bit, and maybe we'll do a little box here. Again, you want to make sure this is pretty even, but don't go too crazy, because again, I think those little imperfections will kind of actually make it a little more organic, and we set that one to overlay maybe 40 percent. Turn another line up here, here goes, now starting to get some nice line work in there. So, the window now, I want to add a little bit of depth behind it, so you can kind of see into the room kind of. So, select here, and again assuming this area here is duplicated over here, you're probably having your room face stop right around there, we are not coming all the way, and I just want to create enough of a depth here that seems like you're peeking in to this cool little hut. Select around it and do the selection multiply on that layer, black, reset that opacity, now we're going to move it down a couple to give that a little depth, and we duplicate it, is a longer one. I imagine, as it gets closer to the front, okay, it's out of the way. Drawing that edge. It works. So now, we're going to grab our window again, I'm now just going to create some little light sheens here, little reflections. You can make this look like anything you want. Sheen, clicked that a few times. Clean those edges, and we'll create another sheen for the side, and this'll probably a simpler sheen. There is really not a lot of light over here, but we still want it to have a little bit of a reflective feel to it. So, you can do a swipe there. I'm actually going to try to keep it pretty much in line with this one here. So, I now start around here, yeah. Over there, and one here, and brush that in slightly. We're starting to get a nice reflection there. You can fade this out if you want to just so it seems a little more gradual, nicely faded in. There we go. So, I pretend there's a little bit of a light source in here, so we're going to select the window, get a new layer on top, inside_light. Man, and then, select [inaudible] again, and you guys will find that overlay. Just using the Soft Light or Hard Light or even the Multiple Layers, this would be your best friend and really making sure that you're keeping the same gradation of color. Even though you're darkening, you're lighting it. It will all feel cohesive in that sense. We're going to add a little light there. Like I said, we'll do overlay, maybe brighten it up a little bit more. Okay, great. So next, I think we want to maybe duplicate the sheen. I'll carry up to this window portion. I will just select out the slide just because assuming that sources is carried out. So, that separate panel glass, it may need to be just a little bit, wherever you think looks good. Maybe add a couple little lines in here. I'll just duplicate that on one. I just want to keep it consistent. Delete those, fade them out a little. What I'm actually doing is action details. So, now, we're going to create our ladder. Let's come on over to Illustrator. I don't need these guys anymore so I'm going to click over here. I'm going to create two lines. If you grab your Line tool or your Pen tool, hold Shift, create a straight line there. Go back to your Selection tool, Command C, Command V. Remember what I said before, Command Shift V, and hold Shift and you can move it along in increments, and maybe move a little closer, because we have a pretty long ladder we need to make. So next, we'll create our steps. Make our first step here, that's good. Command C, Command Shift V, Command Shift V. Yes, it's tedious, but you're going to get results. If you hold to those shifts and move them incrementally, you'll be able to do it a little quicker. One, two, three, four. I'm just going to grab that one. Command C, Command Shift V, it should move it down, and you'll see that the steps are a little bit tight here but it doesn't bother me because it's vector, we can stretch and skew it as much as you want. That looks good, we'll move this one up, and let's grab this. So, actually, I make it four. Cool. So, let's copy this, bring it over to Photoshop. So again, you're want to keep in mind this perspective. Our ladder is probably going to be starting around here and coming out to the edge. So, we'll actually start right here and paste that, and we're up. Pace this pixel again because we're going to need to do some transforming in here. So, keep it fairly large when you first bring it in because, as you skew it, it's going to lose a little bit of detail. So, let's make this black. All right. So, let's do Command T. We'll bring that in here. So, if you want to move it over to this edge here, and hold alt, and select this, you can actually move this and to be at the correct perspective of the side of the house. What we're going to do from here is just hold alt again at this point, and we'll move it in. Same here, we'll grab this point, and we'll probably stop it right around there. Maybe bring it down a little bit more because these lines following a different perspective line. Just watch it and just adjust it accordingly, so that these lines will essentially, eventually, meet at the same point. So, you'll see this line would follow to here, and then these should all be at the same point at the same spot. Hopefully, that makes sense. If not, like I said guys, shoot me an email. We can go through it. But by holding Alt, you can adjust any of these nodes as you want to. So, you'll have more of the line up here and then you can have it curved the other way at this edge. So, nice line, contoured there, follows out, and slowly, we'll start to meet at that point. Let's hit Enter on that. So, I have a cool ladder, lots of steps. I wouldn't want to take that trip but if you want to do at this point, you can stretch it a little. Again, we're doing this at such a high resolution that really isn't such a big deal to lose that detail there. Okay, guys. So, actually, what I want to do is just add a little bit of a light source from underneath, be a little entryway to the hut. Let's come down to our render layer again. These are polygonal lasso tool again, and we'll create a little area of this width. You want to make sure you're keeping with the perspective. We'll select this color up here. Grab our ladder here, assume it goes up. Correct the inside light. All right. Maybe select this corner of it, so you can add a little bit of an angling to it. It kind of seems it's actually headed up there. Let's select it and then let's make a new layer. A little bit of light coming from there. Now, what we want to do is create a new layer, and we're going to assume there are lights beaming out a little bit from that point. Select that light again. Tap a few times. You can skew it if you want to make it a little lighter. It gets a little drastic. There we go. Now, we just want to move our ladder a little bit here. I'm going to mask this pole that's actually in front of it, in front of the ladder so we don't have to see that. But don't worry about this one because it's actually gone between them. So, if you come in here and just click your mask tool based on that selection, and then hit Command I to inverted, it'll be in good shape. So, you can see it cuts right behind it. We're going to duplicate our ladder layer, and we'll go down a bit, hit Command I because again, we might get that light hitting the moon. So, let's colorize it like we did earlier, and you can use this one as a reference to make sure your light's pretty close. I reduce the opacity a little bit, and then fade out these parts up here that are probably not getting as affected by the light, especially down this way. I'm also going to select our ladder here and assume that it's just coming over that tip. So, just fill that in with blacks. Same right here. That'll hide it, and you can see that's your starting point for it. Great. So, one of the thing I'm noticing is this light here isn't actually following up on this side. So, I'm actually going to come back to this render light. Make a new layer above it just like that. Just again, fade it out so the light's not fully hitting it. So, we're almost done in this portion. I think we just need to add a post here. So, let's come back up. We'll grab this darker color here. We'll do. I've got it set at about two pixels right now, probably I want to go a little thicker than before. Command J. You guys can just duplicate that over. That's good. Group those together. Hit Command T, hold Alt and let's just drag it and make sure it's in line. Looks nice. So, I'm actually going to select all of them, go over a couple. Command+Alt+Shift to multiply the selection to that current layer. Let's grab this light brown here and fill it. Command Delete. Maybe a little much there. So, we can undo layers, and we can adjust the opacity, and we'll merge those together. That looks good. You can actually come in here and do those ends over here pretty easily. This one, if you want to duplicate that hold Command T, and you can actually just move that one in pulling all this skewing in. That way, it's following the front of the porch there, the railing. Of course, feel free to come in here and clean these up. There we go. So, guys, definitely feel free to come here and play around with any of these colors. We may want to saturate this a little bit more, a little more purple to it. Take this inside light and duplicate it if you want to really add some dramatic effect there. You can even come down to this light that we made from the door. Grab this color. Brush in a little bit more that gene there, that color there, and really creating a bright light source there. Set that to screen. Saturate it a little bit more. That looks good. So, I think in the final lesson here, we're going to really wrap things up. I'm going to add the boat in, add a light source in here, and then we're going to do a little post effects to this, and really make it pop. So, I'll see you guys in the next lesson. 11. Smoke, Lights, Boats and Pipes.: All right, guys. I think we're looking good here. I think at this point, we can really focus on polishing up, a little bit of vignetting here. I want to add in the boat, maybe add a little smoke and get some little points of light around the island. Let's actually start there. Just around here, we can have some light source coming from out of the cave. Maybe what we'll do is start with doing a few little sticks or lanterns of light that are posted around the island here. Let's zoom in, use our polygonal lasso tool. Don't worry, just imagine these are kind of sticks there we're just ramming to the ground. Another one here. Good spots there. Add a couple over here. One on this side. Great. Maybe just one more back here. Great. Now it's good so let's use black, alt delete to fill. Now we've got those spots. Just looking at kind of the overall sizing of things, you probably want to make sure it's fairly realistic. This look pretty tall actually, so you might want to trim them down a tiny bit. Again, don't worry too much about making it perfect. There we go. Let's label this Lantern Poles, so we'll make a new one. This is going to be the source, so I'm just going to copy again. Let's set the hardness to a 100, bit zero, make sure it's 100 percent. We'll come in and we'll just tap little points of light. It's a little big. Don't worry about getting to close. I think it's a little nicer to have them hovering a little bit off of the sticks. Create one there, one there. Those look good. Then we'll create a new layer behind that. Command Shift N by the way guys to make a new layer. You can label it there if you'd like. Add luminance here to the lights. Let's again use something within that spectrum, probably use this color. Hit B again for the brush tool, the hardness is zero this time. Right behind these, we'll just tap those in, try to keep it centered. Looks good with me. Set the opacity to 60. Actually, on the ground, let's call it Surface Lantern Light. Grab another one here and we'll tap that a little bit. Just set that opacity to about, I don't know,15. You can just duplicate that. Hit Command J, that one there. Actually, I'm going to move this light up a little bit. Just it. Duplicate again, I'm going to move it over towards this side. You can transform it, make sure it's going along with the surface here. Skew it a little, rotate it. Looks good. These are pretty pointed lights. I think maybe they could be a little bit more radiant, but that's not a big deal. Create a new layer, and maybe we'll set it a little bit darker, the red now. We'll hit B, and then brush those in. Yes, they're pretty dramatic right now, but we'll fix that in a second. Great, and we'll set that to maybe two. Then let's reduce the luminance on this maybe to 40. There you go. Especially over here in the shaded areas, you can see there's some nice reflective light being added. We're really starting to bring in some of that red into the scene and that looks good. Maybe, if you guys want to select your render layer again, select it and grab this rose color, just brush it in here a little bit, just to kind of show that it's treating this area with that red light. Maybe set to soft light and you can see that kind of blend in a little nicely. We can boost it up a little bit and saturate it. Maybe set the opacity to six. Now we can kind of see it carries that light a little bit in this area. Same over here, I think we've got a nice light already being created, but if you want to emphasize it again more, you could. Move that there. All right, great. Why don't we now add a little chimney smoke to our scene? Created this chimney in ART render, but I'm actually going to select it here, maybe only select the back half, and we'll just reduce the lightness. Command U to bring that up, though a little darker. Great. Let's create a new layer called Smoke Behind the House, and we're just going to use the polygonal lasso tool and create a little trail here. I like to use triangles and diamonds and kind of skew them off a little bit, but feel free to do whatever you'd like there. Set that opacity to 20. You can create new layers if you want. I'm probably going to just go with it with this one. I'm actually going to use the brush tool now, brush that in. Now maybe add another one up here. Works. Then if you'd like to, you can do another one here. Like that. If you want to, you could really make it kind of go from light to dark. If you want to have a lighter spot in here, you could create a new Smoke Layer and reduce the lightness a little bit. Maybe take the Dodge tool and make it a little brighter just there. I think also, we probably want to fade it off a little bit more, have it trail this way. Whatever you guys like, [inaudible] that part. All right, there. That looks great. Next, I think we should add our boat in. Let's go up here, make our boat. Kind of keep it along the course of this and kind of assume we docked it in this spot. You can make the boat any shape you want, be a canoe or rowboat. I'd go with something along these lines. Probably grab this color here, make a new layer, this would be the back rowboat. It's kind of coming in actually, something along those lines. Just try to think of it as a 3D object, kind of match them with your scene. I'm just creating the back edge. In this side here, it's also facing the back. This would all be pretty dark. Actually, I'm going to grab that again, maybe lighten this boat layer up a tiny bit. I think that's done. Again, imagine it's coming in so you can see the inside of the boat. I'm going to clean this up. More darker color here, select, multiply off that boat layer, create a new layer, and we'll just add a little shading on the inside. Again, spring the front the boat area. Use a dark black for that. Then finally, just the edging. We want to make it not seem so flat like paper. So, I'm just going to select around this area here, which would be the top of the frame here. Create a new layer on top of these. Let's grab this light up here, so it's got to be the most obvious source hitting it. Then, we're going to just cut out from this side, hit delete. So there go, you got a nice top to your boat. Looks good. Probably a little bright. Just the lightness. Let's grab the boat, and then here, we have a dark tray next to it, maybe a little bit later there you can mess around with it, transform it. How about fit your screen, how do you want? Again, that's going to be perfect. Perhaps you want to even have a little spot and you can dock the boat here, so we could create another little stick here. Imagine a little bit of that light is hitting here, so select multiply, select that layer, grab this color. Just tap that on there a little bit. Get a little bit of that light. Then, doesn't have to be anything crazy. We'll just add a little rope here. If you want to use the pen tool, you can probably do something smoother, but for this sample, I don't think it matters too much. Go anywhere with the black, you got a nice little spot for your boat if you dock that. Now, just looking again at the scale, but it's probably a little big, it's not a huge deal, but we can just select all that and adjust. That is why good thing's good. That's pretty good. I Imagine 3D flying out there. So if you want to, you can also just imagine a little bit of ripples being created by the boat so, good. Add some lighting here. Choose a layer, just like this blue here, we got to go over pull there. There you go. So now, let's add that vignetting around the edge. There's a few ways you can do that. If you want to do a full vignette, simple as just filling the layer and erasing if you want to. That way you can get the exact width you want. But we don't, we're not going to do a full one. I'm just going to cut this out. Hit E. Make sure you're at zero percent. Use your Eraser tool, and then we'll just gradually pick away from there. I'm going to set this to overlay, so to about 30 percent, would be again, and use less of a traffic erase. It's [inaudible] like a nice frame around it. There we go. So like I said, if you want to guys, you can add light coming out from the cave, you can have another cave door over here. Do what you want. Add tons of light sources. Add some up here. In fact, if I want to, I could just grab this lantern light now, duplicate it, and I grab them both, grab them all and I'm actually just, click that. I delete, and then we'll just have a little line coming down from there, and play around with that. We have a little bit of blue hitting it so colorize it. Then, the yellow light up there on the top of the surface as well. So, you see, I love little details. I'm not going to make you guys watch me fill these in, but I'm going to probably carry this light above as that would probably still have the reflection on the moon. Maybe add little more ambiance in here, but I'm going to do that now. Nothing too crazy and then on the next one, we're going to add some kind of final post effects to this and you guys can really see how we emphasize the scene. So, we'll do that next, and then we'll be wrapping things up. 12. Blending Modes, Dodging, and Finishing Touches: All right guys, I think it's time to put the finishing touches on this. I'm going to talk to you a little bit about color. One of the nice things about working in Photoshop and having an illustration, a digital illustration that you can move things around with adjust lighting, is you can really have fun with it and create different effects. So, one of the things I want to talk to you guys more specifically, is blending modes. If you try different colors, so if you want to come in here maybe try something in this range, you could apply these overlay modes. You can try different settings. You can do a screen mode, if you want to give it a little bit of a fogginess. Do an overlay, because we've used quite a bit in here, if you want to really make the lighter colors pop, but add more of that saturated burn look to the darker colors. But, you can see, if you're coming here and lighting that, you can make some nice dramatic changes. Up your saturation, maybe I want it to be a little more blue, not so bright. If you turn that on and off, you can see the way it's adding a pop of the blues within there. Also, from there, you can create another layer if you want, and sometimes what I'll do is I'll create a dodge layer. What this does is allows me to brush in some lighter areas to make certain things pop more than they currently are. So, you might want to set your opacity to 50, and you could brush in something here, maybe a little over here and erase it. Maybe you want these lights over here to pop a little more. If you set that to overlay, or to color dodge, or to lighter color, linear dodge, you can see you'll start to get that boost to lighten those areas, which is nice because you can add some drama to certain areas that might have been lacking it earlier. Perhaps, the boat needs to stand a little more. Even up here, if you want to blend this light out a little more, you add a little more light there. Really, all you're doing is bringing out details that are otherwise too dark to notice. But, play around with it and you can get some really cool effects. You can select this and go completely dramatic. You can add more reds, more greens, whatever you think. Green's cool, maybe like that, but you can really see the difference it's making. So, even if you liked the way this brown color is working around here, you can create a new layer and even pull in some blues again, if you're missing that from this side. So, just maybe brush that in over here, maybe you'll set this to overlay. Just a little brighter color up here. You can see if I turn these two off, we'd emphasize the red here, and we also emphasize the brown in the house there, but we've also balanced this out by adding in these blues and reds across the terrain. So, it creates a nice look. You can go crazy too, if you want to. When you're all done, you're happy with it, you're lighting looks good, command, Alt, Shift, E will create a copy of the entire thing. You can come in here play with the shadows and highlights if you want. So, this will make your shadows a little brighter, make your highlights a little darker, if you want. You can even the tone here across a little. We're not going to do that, but maybe we'll come in here, do adjustments, do a little black and white. Oftentimes I'll do something and I may not to be entirely happy with the colors, but you can play around with the black and white, and even do some crazy techniques to it. But, if you are in black and white mode, you can pull out those browns and reds that we created. Sorry, those yellows and reds, and really make this portion of the house stand out. That's a cool look as well. Often times, in print or even for the web, if you want to make a piece for editorial work, sometimes they'll ask for something that's not super contrasting, especially with the content they're trying to present. But if you come in here and choose colors like this, let me set that to screen. We could duplicate that and the one behind it, set to multiply. We'll reduce this one a little bit. Maybe if I do something along these lines. Spell hello correctly, spell everyone correctly. Even for your own personal use, on your website or something as a background. You can start to have fun with your layering and maybe create a navigation here, whatever you want, have fun with it. Nothing you really can't do from this point, because you have all these layers and light sources that you can now move around, and again, you get that nice balance. So, what we're going to do now is actually just duplicate the entire thing again. I'm going to come in here and add a little noise. You guys will see this graining in a lot of my work, but I try not to go too crazy with it. But, what I do like to do is, after I add the grain, add a little bit of a blur to it, which will soften the edges and, in general, almost add a printed feel to it, like you're almost looking at it on a piece of paper. We should come in around 0.3. You see how it softens it in there? We're going to set the opacity to about 50, 60 percent. That way, there's a little bit of grain, but nothing too crazy. If you want to, you could even duplicate it again and add sharpen. You can do a sharpen edges on things, go crazy. You can even just come in here, do a high-pass treatment to it, which is used quite often in photography for making certain objects pop up more in a photo, or to pull out details. Looks pretty good. Actually, I'm going to duplicate that just so you guys can see the effect it has. A little bit more dramatically. There we go. Now, we set this layer to Overlay. If I turn this on and off, you can see the way it's really making those edges pop, but more so, it's really pulling out those details you worked on. Now, again, this is a little extreme to what I would normally do, but you can see it does create a nice effect. So, I'm going to do that again, and probably set to 1.5. Again, set to overlay, we do it 50, 60 percent. If you want to, you've got a flattened layer that's set at 60 percent. You could still come in here, using Dodge, brush in some more of these lights. That looks good. So, I think once you're done, if you're at this point, obviously, you want to try not to have to flatten your document too much, but the important thing is to look at any details you may want to add before you have a final piece. So, I'm probably going to come in here and add a little shading in here, before I post it for you guys. Maybe add a little bit of a reflection, but nothing crazy, and maybe do a little bit more detailing up here. But, I think this looks really good. So, I'm really, really excited to see what you guys come up with. I'm very pumped you've decided to join me and go through my process with me. Again, I know I keep saying this, but craig@hellocraig.com. Any questions at all, I want to help you guys out. I'm just really excited to see what you guys put up on Skillshare. So, I'm going to do one more video, talk a little bit about process of posting your work and maybe pulling a little freelance work. That'll be it. Thanks guys. 13. Cool Sites and Goodbye's...: All right guys. Well, I think we're in good shape. I want to thank you again for doing the course with me. Real quick, I want to show you where I ended up. Nothing too crazy from where we left off, add a little more shading, reflection here and the boat this post, add a few more light details in here, a little trim lighting from these little light in the water. But there it is and I think it came out nice, and again, very excited to see what you guys come up with, can't emphasize enough, email me if you guys have any questions, craig@hellocraig.com. In closing, I just wanted to talk to you guys real quick about your work and how to promote it. I have a site, hellocraig.com where I post most of my work and I definitely recommend that everyone sets up a free site on WordPress and wordpress.com, I'm using a system called KOKEN, K-O-K-E-N and plugged right into your existing site. So, if you guys can get a domain name even if you can do a free one, you go on, I use name.com grab one and set it up. Set up some hosting and you'll be in good shape. So, this is what I have, I just use a backend system, upload my images, allows people to come here, they can share if they want to learn a little bit about myself, and of course, contact me if they want to. Lastly, I want to talk about promoting your work. So outside of your site, I think one of the best things you can do is get your work in front of your peers and people with the same interests as you, I use behance a lot. I also sometimes use Deviant Art. You'll find Deviant Art is just a huge crazy community, there's tons of people on here of varying skills and skill levels, but you can really find a lot of inspiration on here and people are pretty open to feedback which is nice. Also guys, I just want to quickly show you dribble.com. Some of you may have found my class through dribble or see my work on there before, but if you don't have account and you can get one I definitely recommend it. It's fantastic, it's such a nice community of people, it's really quality work and their feedback is always really, really helpful and it makes it super easy for you to post your work, post multiple photos of your work and link off to more details about it, and it's great. I got to tell you, I think probably 75-80 percent of my work I'm doing right now is all from referrals on dribble, so there are a lot of great scouts on here looking for talented people like yourself to help them out with the project. So, I definitely recommend that. Lastly, I just want to talk about society6. There are actually a bunch of sites like this, but I like society6 because they make it really simple for you to take your high-res work and scale it down to multiple products. One of the great things about being an artist is that you can share it with people and you can see you're working in people's homes or their office and at the same time you can make a little money while you're doing it. As you can see as you scroll down here I mean, they've got everything from frame prints to canvasses, you can get your artwork on iPhone cases, laptop cases, cards, you name it. Now, there's a huge range of options there and better yet you can set your own pricing levels tears for your work, so they have a base price for things that they have set and anything above that that you'd like to earn for your work is all yours. I think that's about it guys, again, please reach out if you have any questions. Thank you so much for doing the class with me, I'm really excited to see what you guys post. Please push your work even if it's work in progress in the student projects section and I will stay as active as I can and try to help you guys out, and I appreciate it. So, thank you again very much, and I'll see you guys online. 14. Explore Design on Skillshare: way.