12-Minute class in Procreate - Composition Breakdown

1. Presentation: Hi, my name is Marissa Angeles and I'm an illustrator based in London. In these 12 minutes class, we're going to learn a fundamental concept and understand how to break down any subject into small and simple painting steps. If you already funded my courses, you probably know that I normally teach you how to paint or blend colors together, which is really my thing. But this class is more about learning a principle, a method that you can use to paint everything. If you ever wondered why we started two pages in this 12 minutes class, I'll show you how so without any further ado, let's dive into it. 2. Workflow Explained: Before diving into the actual painting process is good to have an understanding of the approach that we're going to use. You can use the method that I'm about to explain in a second for painting any subjects from steel life to portrait, to characters and everything else. Here's the workflow. The first thing that we want to do is to start from a mid tone color. The second step is to go darker. Then you go lighter. Then you switch to the darkest color you add in your palette. You are the lightest color, the highlights. And lastly, it's time for some surface cosmology cheetahs and finish your illustration with some cleanup. So put this down on paper as the steps are. Meat don't darker color, lighter color, darkest color, lightest color, highlights, details and cleanup. Let's put these concepts into practice. 3. Step 1 - Midtone: Let's imagine that you want to pay these composition on the left and you are at drawing already done, what would you start from? The first thing that we want to do is to identify what is the mid-tone color. Mid-tone is something in-between a dark and a light color that leaves in this area of the spectrum. The way I would approach the illustration is to look at this pair and asked myself, what is the dominant color here? In this case it's green. I want to select a green color that roughly corresponds to the green in the reference picture. Something like this. I'm going to put down this first color on a separate layer that I've renamed into palette. At this point, I can switch to a solid brush and I'm normally use the calligraphy script. I reset the brush to its default settings. And I adjust the size according to what I need to do. I create a new layer and throw the aperiodic. I make sure I close the shape and make it watertight. Since the shape is now closed, I can drag and drop this color into the perimeter. And if I lie to the right and big, I cannot activate the color drop threshold. This is going to be the base our starting point. Let's move to the second step and art a darker color. 4. Step 2 - Darker Colour: Now I want to choose a darker color. So again, I'll move along this curve here and choose a darker version of this stone, something around this area. I'll create a new layer and also a clipping mask. You can identify if a layer is clipped by this arrow pointing down. So if you paint on this layer now, you won't be able to paint outside the boundaries given by delay and below. In fact, if you unclip the mask, you can see the actual painting. This is an extremely powerful function that I use school design. Now you want to move the Pence withdrawal ring on top of the layer stack, change the mode to multiply and lock the layer. In this way, you can see through the drawing. At this point, we want to use the dark color that we just created and choose a painting brush. Procreate has got tons of brushes available and that can be quite intimidating. But for this demonstration, we want to use a pretty simple brush that has a bit of a twist. And I'm referring to the heart blend airbrush. Generally speaking, there are two main ways. If you want to blend colors together, you can pay in first and then blend using this matching tool. You can use a brush with these two functions are combined together, which is the case of the heart blend brush. If you want to understand more about these two techniques, I publish a course called digital painting for beginners, and you can watch less than nine for the soft blending technique. And let's intend for the heart blending technique. I'm going to choose the heart blend brush, but I want to reset the settings first. I reduce the opacity slightly and I'm going to paint using this new darker color. The secret here is to press against the tablet to allow the paint to flow in and gradually release to activate the blending function. It's all about finding the right amount of pressure. You can get used to it pretty easily. If my goal is to reproduce a subject, like in this case, I want to make sure to resemble the features of the subject accurately. I will apply this color along the side of the path. And then I release the pressure to smooth this out. That this is done. It's time to add in the following step, a lighter color. 5. Step 3 - Lighter Colour: Now that we put down a meat tiring and a darker color, we can paint the lighter parts of the subject. I'll create a new layer and a clipping mask as we learned in the previous step. And I want this layer to be underneath the dark and layer. I'm going to choose a lighter color, something around this area, but not too bright. I'm going to approach these area in the same way I did for the darker counterpart. So I'm going to paint the lighter areas in this way. You can see already that the illustration is taking shape. We can perceive a darker part, a lighter part, the color coming from the meet time and base. What we experience here is an optical illusion of volume. And this is given by the relationship that we managed to create between these three colors. Now in the next step we're going to add the fourth color, the darkest one, and you will see how an additional element can make a big difference. Let's move to step four. 6. Step 4 - Darkest Colour: This is a good base to start from. You can see that the composition is pretty balanced in terms of colors. Now we want to go dark CAG n and clearly has to be darker than before. And on a new clipping mask layer, we're going to add the darkest area of our subject, which most of the times corresponds to the darkest shadows. Same approach as before. I'm going to focus on the darkest areas. Will also have to reduce the field of action because the darkest areas are smaller and less set than the darker ones. You can see now that adding a quiet dark color and intensify the shadows, the image looks much more dramatic, and this is the power of lights and shadows in the traditional arts. What is a better example than Caravaggio? His ability to drive out in motion so profoundly through the use of light and shadow. Next step is now done. In the next one, we're going to add the lightest color. 7. Step 5 - Lightest Colour: After adding the darkest color skylights, time to add the lightest stone. So we're going to choose a brighter color. We're also going to create a new layer that we rename into lightest color. Following the same procedure as before, we're going to add this new color in the most illuminated area of our pair, releasing the pressure in order to blend the colors together. Obviously, this is a very quick demonstration to explain the breakdown process. But if you wanted to spend more time for each step, so you can be sure that you're going to get a very convincing shading. And if you after realism, this is the way to go. Now we can add this lightest color to our palette and we're ready for the next step, which is about adding the highlights. 8. Step 6 - Highlights: Once we happy with the amount of lights and shadows implemented, we want to add the highlights. For this. We want to choose a very light color. If my goal is to create something realistic, I will not choose a 100% wide as this pure color is not present in nature, but only in the magical world of computer graphics. Something bright but not white. And I make sure to use this lightest color moderately and only in areas hit by direct light. You don't want to overdo with this color. And I knew that it might be tempting, but we have to be in control of the composition just a few spots here and there in order to recreate the effect of reflected light. This is a no more than this. At this point and illustration can be completed. But most of the time you might want to fix some bits or at some surface details. So let's have a look at the last final step. 9. Step 7 - Details: When an illustration is done, you can now add some smaller details and reinforce some areas that needs some adjustment. This is an optional step, but rather important because now it's the time to deal with surface details. All the previous steps were mainly about building up the volumes, the shading, making sure the shape was correct and convincing. But now it's about to describe the outer shell, the outlook. Maybe you want to add some noise in order to break the uniformity of the shading or at some patterns. Or maybe you just want to reinforce some areas and answering some shadows area or maybe better We find some bits and bobs. So this step is sort of bond making is sharper, cleaner and cleaner. From this point onwards, you can go back and forth between the steps as many times as you like. Last step is to clean up your illustration. There'll be some spots needs to be adjusted or even erased, and the illustration is now finalized. 10. Conclusion: That was a brief overview of the painting workflow that I use oldest time. Following this method, you can create any illustrations and compositions from portraits to plants and also steam lives and landscapes. This is a fundamental concept is the traditional way, the old masters useful date masterpieces. And if your goal is to learn the basics of painting, these methods will give you the power to unlock and break down every subject into easy to paint steps. I hope you enjoyed this class and see you next time for a new one. Thank you for watching and goodbye.