Character Painting - Design and Render Like a Pro

1. Trailer: welcome to character painting. My name is Hardy Fowler, and I'm a professional illustrator and concept artist. I'm calling on all artists out there with a passion for creating cool looking characters. If you've ever dreamed of making a career out of this, I'm here to tell you that the dream is really you could make a living doing this. All you need is a killer portfolio to launch you into a fund and rewarding career. This course could get you there. I'll show you all of my professional level techniques and tricks that will demystify the entire process of creating character art With Adobe Photoshopped in an easy to grasp, step by step process, you'll learn digital painting techniques that will have you amazed, but how beautiful, realistic and full of personality your character art has become. But this course is so much more than just a painting demonstration. We'll teach you everything you need to know, to start thinking like a character concept designer to tie it all Together, we offer responsive support and loads of other course resource is to make sure that every student can take their work to new heights. You can do this, don't miss out on the chance to turn your character are into a professional level product. It just might lead to a dream career so enrolled today. Grab your stylists and let's paint cool stuff. 2. Intro: Hi, everyone. This is Hardy and welcome to the character painting course. Before we get started, let's take a look at some essential prerequisites for this course. You need to have completed the art fundamentals and Photoshopped fundamentals course. Before getting to this point, I would also strongly recommend completing the painting faces and more importantly, the painting figures courses as well. Solid figure painting skills are the foundation of good character design and rendering. So certainly check that course out. If you haven't already, we are getting more advanced in this course, I would say into the Level six or even seven range, but we will start with some simple stuff, so certainly don't be intimidated. You've got this character painting is a Superfund creative outlet. In fact, I'm willing to bet that most of you have done at least some character art on your own before coming to the scores. We've all been inspired by the awesome characters that we see in movies and video games and have taken a crack and inventing our own, or at least sketching one that we've already seen. I'm sure I can find a 20 year old school notebook filled with Wolverine sketches, character artists just cool. Fortunately, the market for professional original character art is stronger than ever. The entertainment industry continues to skyrocket in the demand for skilled artists who can design and render characters that will appeal to a wide audience has never been higher. In this course, we will take you through a step by step process to render a wide variety of characters to arrive at a beautiful and compelling finished product. This technique will demystify the process and give you predictable, reliably good results. But just as importantly, we will learn how to think like a character designer, how to take a vague idea and mold it into a concept that will be complex, interesting and memorable. So let's take a look at our course outline. We will start with an overview of character design. Then we will discuss shape, language, character archetypes, designing and rendering clothing and finally, a handy list of character designed best practices. Whether you have enrolled in this course with the goal of becoming a professional character designer or if you just want your own personal character, are to be better, I know you're gonna find the lessons in projects that will explore very valuable and worthwhile. So grab your stylists and let's do some awesome character art 3. Character Painting Overview: Oh, hi, everyone, This is Hardy. In this lecture, we will take a broad look at the art of character design and discuss some key guiding principles. Character art has several commercial applications, but is most commonly used. Is either concept, art or promotional illustration for movies, video games or tabletop games, just to name a few big ones. First, let's discuss concept art character concept. Art focuses Mawr on ideation. As a concept artist, you are the first part of a production pipeline, and your artwork will often be used as a reference for a three D artists downstream. Concept or work can be a little less polished, since it's never viewed by the customer, but it still has to be a very solid and very clear idea. This is often accomplished with rigid Ortho graphic views or modeling sheets. On the other hand, character promotional illustration is when your artwork is the finished product. It has to look as polished and as cool as possible because its purpose is to make the viewer want to buy a game where a ticket to see more of that character, the single governing purpose of all character artwork, is to look cool. We need our character, our to have a powerful appeal to viewers to get their imaginations running. So how do we achieve coolness as it applies to character art? Well, we do this by keeping a checklist in mind for every character we design. Cool character art focuses on the following storytelling. Character art should tell a clear and compelling back story. When we look at a character, we should instantly be able to tell a lot about the world that they live in, what their job or purposes with their personality or temperament is like. What have they been through all of the details that we, including a character painting, every fashion choice, every bit of gear, every facial expression should tell us a cool and fascinating story connection with the viewer Character art should resonate at an aesthetic and even emotional level. Viewers should be able to identify with and latch onto every personality, flaw, every attitude in every detail, the more story complexity in dimension. We can add to a character through visuals, the better. Simply put, people need to like your character on many levels. Good rendering. No, it is a hard truth, But even the coolest character idea in the world will not inspire anyone if it is rendered poorly. A good figure drawing lies at the core of every good character painting, so feel free to brush up in the figure painting course if needed. Character art needs to be beautifully and compellingly rendered in order to keep the viewers attention and trust long enough for all of the story details. To get across creativity now, you don't have to reinvent the wheel every time you set out to do a character design, but your own creativity and uniqueness should shine through. We each keep a huge volume of unique visual memories, and you should use your own unique experiences to inform your artwork. Every book, movie or video game that you've ever experienced will be the well that you draw upon when reaching for visual ideas. One or two small creative details can make a character painting shine, so always look for that one clever creative angle to push your designs to the next level. So keep these guiding principles in mind as we move forward 4. Shape Language: Hi, everyone. This is Hardy. In this lecture, we will take a look at shape language. Shape. Language is the use of geometric shape elements in artwork to achieve a desired visual impression. So, basically, if we know how certain shapes communicate certain ideas, we can use shape language to make our viewers feel a certain way about our artwork. This could be incredibly useful in character, creature and machine design. Let's stick with three primary shapes for our discussion Circle, square and triangle. Each of these shapes can be associating with certain attributes. Circles seem friendly and approachable. They are non threatening and trustworthy. There are no sharp edges, and everything has an easy, smooth curve to it. Circles can also imply feminine squares are dependable, stable and solid. They seem static and sturdy or even boring. Squares can also imply masculine triangles are aggressive, dangerous or threatening. The sharp edges imply both motion and speed. Let's take a look at some sketches that make heavy use of each of these primary shapes For its shape. Let's take a look at a cartoony face, a machine and an animal first. Let's take a look at a sketch of a very circular human face. Now these air exaggerated, but you can see almost every element of the face is based on a circle. It gives him a very friendly, non threatening quality. It also reminds us of around baby's face, which almost everyone will associate with harmlessness. For a circular vehicle, let's check out the Volkswagen Beetle. It is perhaps the most circle heavy design ever for a car, and it certainly seems friendly and harmless. Just about every element of the design is a circle or a curved line for our circular animal . Let's check out this hedgehog now. This one is a bit of a contradiction, but I included it because I wanted you to see how powerful the visual effect of the circle can be. This animal is covered in spikes. By all logic. We should be afraid of it or repulsed by it. But almost everyone who sees one of these things wants to pick it up and give it a hug. They're just adorable to us, practically solely because they're just one big circle their entire body shape, their eyes, ears, nose, all circles and our trust of circular shapes will make us pick up something that will probably poke our hands next. Let's take a look at some square designs. I've sketched a very square human face. This guy seems very sturdy, masculine and perhaps dependable. He's also quite static. There is no movement and nothing much going on with him, predictable and even boring, but enjoyable nonetheless. Next, let's check out this semi truck. It is designed almost entirely out of squares and rectangles. It seems very heavy and utilitarian, a dependable and sturdy machine that performs an important but unglamorous tasks for our square animal. Let's take a look. A cow. Another sketches, an exaggeration, but it really captures the essence of a cow. It is heavy, slow and somewhat boring. It's sturdy and dependable, but again performing an unglamorous task. Finally, let's examine some triangular designs This triangle based cartoon face shows have the aggressive, pointy sides of a triangle can make a face seem dangerous, evil and villainous. You can find heavy use of triangles in almost every Disney villain for our triangular vehicle. Let's take a look at this fighter jet. Everything about this machine screams fast, aggressive and dangerous. Triangular shapes imply movement and sharpness, and this machine really communicates both triangles. Air very useful when you're designing a machine or a creature that needs to look deadly sleek and fast, take a look at this shark, for example. It is composed almost entirely of triangles, its nose fins and, most importantly, teeth are all triangle shaped. We're hardwired to recognize pointy shapes like teeth or blades as a potential danger. So remember that whenever you're designing something that needs to be scary or dangerous now that we discussed each shape in some detail, let me show you a few pieces of my own artwork that have made heavy use of these shapes. Some of the shape language is a bit more subtle than others, but it's there if you know where to look as a bit of homework, start trying to see shaped language in some of the artwork or images that you see in media or advertisements. It could be really eye opening in a valuable exercise to a character artist 5. Character Archetypes: Hi, everyone. This is Hardy. In this lecture, we will take a look at character archetypes. Since it is our job to invent cool and interesting characters, it could be useful to take a close look. It's, um, classic character archetypes. These air the broad categories that many characters fit into while I encourage you to be his original is you can keep these archetypes in mind is a framework or foundation. Now there's a whole universe of variation, but I've found that most characters have roots in one of the following archetypes. Hero, villain, brute, special skill or support. Let's talk about the visual attributes of each and check out some examples. First up is the hero. Heroes are most commonly handsome or beautiful, although they often have flaws and the flaws or what makes them interesting. They are idealized in appearance and represent virtues such as courage and justice heroes, air smart and often the leaders in a group in terms of Poe's heroes, air often depicted from a slightly low angle, as if we were looking up at them in reverence. In fact, this angle is often called the hero shot. They're poses as well as their facial expressions are confident and resolute. Next, let's take a look at the villain. Villains in many ways are the opposite of heroes, and that may seem obvious. But let's take a look at some of the visual attributes so that you'll know how to make your characters seem villainous when needed. Villains are often disfigured or deformed in some way. They can't be big and strong, but look for some kind of skewed proportion that makes him seem wretched in some way. In terms of pose and expression. Villains should look angry, crazy or otherwise unpleasant. Ah, hunched over pose or some other aggressive posture is often a good way to go to give your villains some depth try and show some kind of painful back story that viewers can really identify with now. One of my favorite archetypes is the brute. Fruits are big, sometimes really, really big. They are strong and powerful, but not smart. They are the big, dumb muscle in the group. Proportionally, brutes often have larger hands, but smaller heads than normal brutes can be lovable, like big teddy bears. Or they can seem like huge, hulking monsters. Depending on the details that you choose. These are always a really fun designed and refreshingly uncomplicated. Next, let's take a look at special skill. This one is a bit of a wide net to cast. It covers a wide range of sub categories, but essentially, this is the member of the group who has some special function to perform, often with superhuman talents or abilities. This archetype includes wizards, snipers, explosives experts or mechanically augmented humans, just to name a few. Visually, the guidelines air wide open on these characters, but if they're in a group, try to make them look very different from your hero. Finally, let's discuss the humble support archetype. Support characters often play a secondary role and exist to buttress the hero. These include sidekicks, which are often just smaller, lesser versions of the heroes themselves. However, a support character doesn't necessarily have to just be the little buddy character. They can feel any number of support roles. The bartender, the mechanic, the weapons dealer, since their motivations can often be so nuanced. You have a ton of freedom here, and these can often be some of the most interesting characters to design. I hope you found this look at character archetypes useful again these air only the most basic foundations, and I would encourage you to get his creative as you can. Keeping these in mind on Leah's A framework. I look forward to seeing you in the next lecture. 6. Rendering Clothing: Oh, hi, everyone. This is Hardy in this lecture, we're going to take a look at how to design and render clothing for our character art. First, let's talk about designing clothing now. I'm certainly not aiming to make you into fashion designers. We are trying to create new types of clothing for people aware. But in order to create cool looking characters, we do need to be able to come up with interesting, sharp looking and period appropriate clothes to help tell our characters visual story. As an example, let's say we're designing a steampunk character. We immediately think of Victorian era clothing with ornate stitch work, long flowing dresses for women in maybe formal suits. For men, doing a quick Google search is a great way to get inspired. But use this resource sparingly. If you shop online for image ideas too much soon you lose sight of your own visual memories . In any original ideas. It might have popped up, could get drowned out by what you see online. My suggestion for avoiding this is to only use Google images to get small details right, like maybe a collar or a buckle. But don't use it to inform entire articles of clothing. Remember, is a character artist. Part of what you're selling to your clients is your own original ideas. Once you have your period determined and researched, it becomes a pure design principles exercise. Feel free to refer back to the design principles, lecture and art fundamentals. If you need a refresher, all of the lines and forms of the clothing you design should serve to reinforce the look, feel and personality of the character and should heighten the natural appeal of the human figure. In fact, it's often useful to have at least a rough figure sketch finished before starting to add clothing. This will make sure that your proportions and pose are just right. Before you commit to any clothing designs. Feel free to use one of our character posed templates like I'm doing here. Clothing design can add Aton of visual information that determines the character's back story. Try to include details that communicate the characters world job and personality. Subtle details like an accessory or piece of gear can really change the narrative, So give these small details. Some thought it could really help out your overall design. So now that we've discussed the design aspect of character clothing. Let me show you a really easy to grasp technique for rendering convincing clothing. It can be done with just two basic mark types. First are the Z strokes. We simply makes Z shaped marks back and forth, wherever closed, bunch up or wrinkle. This could be seen most clearly it joints such as elbows, shoulders and knees. Once we have some Z shaped marks put in, we do some smudging to blend them in. And just like that, we have some very convincing cloth without much work at all. The other main type of mark that I used to render cloth is the long stroke. These air, simply long flowing, marks that tape or roughly to a common point. These marks are much smoother and less visually active than the Z strokes, so it makes a nice contrast. Long strokes most clearly occur on relatively flat areas of clothing, like the front of a shirt or a jacket, or perhaps a Kate or even the thigh or calf part of pants. So let's use this sketch that I've worked up is our demo. I've now got it blocked in and ready to add in some tones. So I'm gonna use my basic chalk brush that I usually use for value paintings. And we'll just start dropping in some values, going to start with a zigzag stroke here around this elbow fold and you'll see I'll just repeat that basic brushstroke throughout. Also, some long strokes here kind of on the bottom part of the coat near the waist, some long, long flowing strokes and smoother areas up near the shoulder. But that's basically it. Just those two basic brushstrokes, the sea strokes and the long strokes are just about all you need to rent her cloth. After that, All it is is a matter of keeping your lights or straight and deciding what kind of level of shiny nous you want for your cloth. I'm going for a leather jacket and maybe leather pants just because that's a shiny or material, and it really shows the type of brush marks that I want to show you guys here. But this technique works for any kind of cloth. It just is especially obvious on leather, so same type of treatment down on the pants, just a combination of Z strokes, zigzag back and forth wherever the cloth kind of folds or Bunches up, and then smoother long strokes on the other areas. So you can city. I just switch back and forth with legs and cafs are long, smooth areas, and the knees and waste are folded and would be those e strokes. So now I'm going to do a bit of smudging, and you'll see this is when it really starts to look. Riel. You sort of matched the brush strokes so zigzag back and forth over those Z strokes, and that will really make it nice and smooth and realistic looking. And we can also clean up some of these edges a little bit. But you're kind of pulling that tone back and forth to make those little Z shapes. And that's what makes it look realistically folded in very natural cloth like appearance. So I think you'll find that very useful. And you can see this has just been a few seconds, and this is a fairly realistic looking set of clothes here without much effort at all, so I hope you find that useful after I've got the tones marked in. I like to make my brush much smaller and do a bit of fine line work just to define Cem edges so that it's not all just smooth flowing strokes, just to give the texture a little more realism. Those different kinds of marks really make it more believable. But with that, that's just about all there is to it. For this technique. In making realistic close, I'm gonna add a little more shiny light source of higher key light source to a few areas just for Pop. But that's a basic idea. Hope you find that really helpful. 7. Best Practices: Oh, hi, everyone, This is Hardy. In this lecture, we will discuss some general best practices and tricks of the trade that I've picked up over the years. These are things that I wish someone had told me when I was first getting started, so I hope you'll find these to be a valuable leg up. We will discuss the 80 20 rule silhouettes, instant drama and also gear and belts. First, let's check out the 80 20 rule, which is one of my favorite guiding principles of character design. Essentially, this is a guideline for how much of your character should be familiar versus how much should be new and creative. While it's not quite as mathematics is, 80 20 makes it sound. I've found that roughly 80% of your character should be familiar and 20% should be new and creative. Now, this may come as a surprise, since one would think that character art should be 100% creative and new. However, all character designs need to have solid roots in something familiar. In order for the viewer to be able to relate to it, it's entirely possible to be too creative and end up confusing the viewer. On the other hand, if your design is too familiar or two generic, it won't capture anyone's attention, and it will quickly be dismissed. Is unoriginal 80 20 seems to be just about the right balance, so let's take a look at a few examples. Here we see an angry mob boss type character immediately. His 80% familiarity comes through. We can instantly tell from his face, clothes, hair cut and demeanor that he is a mob boss type character. Just based on that, the viewer can correctly assume all kinds of information about his world in his personality . Essentially, the artist gets all of the details built in because they can rely on the assumptions that the viewer will make. Because this kind of character is very familiar now, adding in the 20% creative details, and suddenly this character is much more complex and interesting. He has a futuristic mechanical arm in a futuristic gun, with those minor details added in the characters, world is completely changed from perhaps 19 twenties era gangster to some kind of futuristic crime syndicates. Setting the viewer has a solid foundation of familiarity, but also enough creative details to keep their interest and get their imagination sparked. Here is another fun example. Upon initial glance, we see a man in Victorian era clothing we can immediately place his period and setting. We can tell a lot about his personality based on his facial expression and posture. This type of Victorian gentleman is something that we've all seen before, and we can correctly imagine lots of details about his world. Now let's take a look at his 20% creative details. We see all kinds of steampunk tech that makes him way more interesting. The mechanical I, the Edison bulb on his back and even the cool steampunk pistol in his belt all hint at an interesting back story that make us want to know more about this character. But it is all rooted in the 80% familiarity that all characters must have is a basis. In a broader sense. I would consider the entire steampunk genre to be a good use of the 80 20 rule. It's 80% based on quasi historical details of the late 19th century, but all of the steam tech creates an entire new universe of possibilities for the imagination. Now let's talk about silhouettes. The silhouette that a character occupies is an incredibly important and useful part of its design. Before getting too far, along with any character, block it in and take a hard look at its silhouette. It should be dynamic and powerful and should convey a lot of information all on its own. Taking a look at the silhouette can also help highlight any design weaknesses, like a boring pose or a proportional issue. Another great thing that silhouettes to force is allows toe ed in details without much work at all. Load up your characters outer perimeter with silhouetted embellishments. It only takes a few seconds and can make the character much more interesting. Moving on to instant drama Over the years, I've come across a few tricks that seem to easily add instant drama and interest to almost any character. The first is using your brightest values to add pop before finishing a character, selectively brighten up a few areas that you want the viewer to pay attention to. This makes the characters seem much more rich and interesting, and it helps guide the viewer's eye. My other favorite instant drama trick is add wind for some reason, all characters seem more dramatic and epic. If they are standing in a breeze, Hair, cloth or straps can all blow in the wind and just make things look cooler. You'll be amazed by the instant drama that this will add. My final trick of the trade is adding gear. Basically, if a character seems boring or stale, try adding gear. Straps and belts with weapons or equipment seemed to almost always make a character work better. The lines that belts and straps make are a nice opportunity to lead the viewer's eye around the page. Gear is also a really nice way to add back story to a character. So now that you know all of my secret tricks, let's put these to good use in our character project. 8. Project Briefs: Oh, hi, everyone, This is Hardy. In this lecture, we will discuss character art briefs. As a character artist, you first need to thoroughly understand the finished product that your clients want. Good communication is key, and this often comes in the form of a document called a Project Brief. This is just a set of instructions and Web image visual references outlining the character that they want you to create. Briefs can be many pages long or just a few quick sentences. Depending on how much creativity the client is leaving up to you. They need to communicate the general ideas like character type and setting. But they also need to give you an idea of the personality and attitude that the character is to convey to get you all familiar with this process. I've worked up three quick project briefs as a starting point for our three main character project, so let's check those out. Are three projects will cover three concept art mainstays, steampunk, scifi and fantasy. Check out the descriptions and references below and see what kind of ideas start coming to mind. Do a Web search to start gathering your own visual references. His inspiration but not for copying. Don't let Web images influence you too much. We need to make sure the work within these guidelines. So read carefully and always feel free to ask your client to elaborate or get more specific . If anything is unclear. Now that we have, our project breathes and we've already discussed all of the elements of successful character art. It's time to start our first project, so grab your stylists and let's dive in. 9. Project 1 - Steampunk General - Sketch & Ink: Oh, hi, everyone. This is Hardy and welcome to the steampunk General Character Art project. In this video we will be doing the sketch in ink steps. So let's get started diving in. We've got the blank canvas, so always best to just jump right in and start making marks. So I'll start working up some general pose shapes here just to get the characters general gesture and feel right. So starting at the head as I usually do and let that sort of define everything else proportionally. So it this step, I'm really just trying to keep in mind very broad ideas. How do I want to feel about this character? So a general brief is this guy's gonna be a steampunk typesetting generals. I want him to look very grand in sort of hero esque. I want him to look very proper and straight laced like a very disciplined, military type personality. So I'm gonna have him standing at attention, kind of like you see in very old fashioned military officer oil portrait. It's that sort of the type of pose and feeling that I want to evoke, but with a lot of fun. Steampunk details added in just for interest. So in a broad sense, that's what I'm after here. I'm gonna make this guy seem like a kind of, ah grand old officer and want him to look very hero esque and straight laced in military. So that's what I'm going for here. His pose might be a little bit stiff, but in a way, that it works for what we're doing here. So with that hero angle in mind noticed that I'm establishing perspective to where we're looking up at his face just a little bit. That always makes ah character Seymour grand and, you know, seem revered in the pose you pick. So going for that definitely want to be looking up at him a little bit, the hero shot and just sort of defining in all of his his rough features. I've decided I'm gonna go for a steampunk tech mechanical arm for that far side arm and I'm gonna gonna have that hidden under some cloak type stuff. But just going for ah military type uniform, one of those long coats that sort of goes past the waste that that would be kind of a cool clothing choice and all of that nice, detailed intricate cloth work. I think the piping is what it's called around the just part and around the collar as well. All these nice little details that you can come across just by checking out some Web references. And again, don't take too heavily from any one resource. But certainly check out Google images or whatever. Pinterest if you want some quick inspiration before getting started. So that's what I've done before getting to this phase just to get some ideas stored up visual memory sparking so that we can come up with some interesting features here at our early step and adding just a tiny bit of wind blowing this part of his coat out. It's not much, and his hair will be very, very coughed up and all in place so his hair won't be blowing because I want him to look very clean cut in military. But there's always some room to add some wind in and remember that's one of our great guiding principles. To add instant drama is to add a bit of wind, so that's why I've made those coattails. Flipping out a little bit is if they're carrying on a breeze and I think that looks nice. So we've got a pretty good general pose established here. That's exactly the feel and attitude I was going for his poses pretty stiff but still just a bit relaxed so that it's It's not boring visually, and the perspective that we've established has this kind of looking up at our character. So it makes him seem very important and grandiose, and that's exactly what I want to do here. So some fun stuff, and it should really be a cool finished product. Now that I've got that perspective established, it makes adding, in our facial features a little bit easier. That could be a trick sometimes to get the face match up with the rest of the perspective lines, the three dimensional spaces that you've established with the rest of the pose. So always a good time toe slow down a bit and really get thes details. Right Since, of course, this is our foundation, and everything we do here will carry forward to the later project steps, just trying to make sure his eyes and nose they work in the same perspective plane that we've established with his shoulders and hands, knees all the other parallel parts of the body, and I thought a big old Victorian mustache would fit well here. Just doing a bit of liquefied. Teoh slightly change the angle of his face and some of the features. I want him to be a relatively squared off character in terms of shape language. So I'm giving him a very square jaw just to make him seem masculine and dependable. And also even the lines of his hair cut his cheek bones, even the mustache and his nose, all of those air, pretty angular square shapes makes him seem very masculine and also sturdy. Independent Will all of those good things that the square shape does for us, that that really fits with what I'm going for here, a little bit of erasing away and refinement as we G O. And this is starting to come together pretty well. I think the general facial features fit beautifully with the rest of his his pose. So this is certainly the feeling I was going for gonna shrink down his head a little bit. What? That this sort of taper off since, uh, the perspective dictates that that would be getting a bit smaller as we're looking up at him, but also if we make his jaw larger relative to the rest of his head, it makes him seem more masculine and and sturdy and just adding in a detail. There thought an eye patch would be a cool detail, starting to think about his back story. Now all of these little details, like injuries he sustained in battle or these metals I'm adding to his chest. They tell you a lot about this guy. He's a decorated soldier, some kind of iconography and emblems on his on his shoulder there to signify his rank. I'm kind of making this up, and actually, when you're creating something new, especially military like this, I was found. It's best to completely make it up. Don't try to research what an actual general or any rank would be because you never know who you might end up offending. Actually, if if you get that wrong, so best to keep it pure fantasy and just make up some iconography. If you want to add in embellishments like that, I always want to be conscious of any cultural sensitivities that that may occur in your audience and that's a good way to avoid that. But this is pretty safe stuff. So not to worry. Just a little bit of refinement. And those details are really starting to come together nicely, erasing away his belt. Remember, belts and straps always seem to make a character work a little bit better and certainly got plenty of that going on here. That belt that's crossing over from his robotic side arms sort of leads. Are I up and over to the right corner in a really nice way? Thought I'd add in a sword, kind of like a general sabre. But I'm thinking that would work much better. Loosely hanging from his waist, I usually find that saber that's really just a ceremonial weapon, hangs from from the side. So made that change and added another strap in there, which I think just further enhances the design. And now we'll just add a little bit of detail to the bottom bottom half here of boots. Military boots will have those probably nice and shiny and polished up, swinging his arm out just a little bit here, trying to broaden his shoulders just a bit, make him seeing even more masculine and grandiose. You don't want to take that too far. He'll look like he's posing more than he. He should be just I think he should be sort of, ah, stuffy type type of personality. Who homeless seems like he's impatient that he has to stand and have his picture taken or whatever is going on here. So that's why there's a slight scowl and some resentment in his face. I think that all fits with the type of personality one would imagine for this aging military officer. He's just doesn't have any time for any foolishness. A very no nonsense kind of character, and everything about him is very buttoned up in strait laced, just military precision is what we're trying to communicate here. Along those lines, I thought I would go ahead and close off that hand into Ah, pretty rigid fist. I was experimenting with some more relaxed poses, but the more I think about it, the more this guy would probably have everything clenched in and buttoned up to have his likeness captured and can't seem to shake the idea that this is a portrait that he's posing for. Think that fits well with the personality and, uh, always makes make sure our work a little more fun Thinking ahead of bed. I thought this character could use some different materials, so I thought adding in some metal work would be well, would would be a welcome addition as well. So doing that on the far shoulder, maybe to tie that in with his mechanical steampunk tech arm, and I think that would actually work down below with his knees. So maybe even some slightly reminiscent of medieval knight type armor. I think that would be a cool mix, sort of a genre crosser with the Victorian proper clothing that he's got for his military uniform. So just a wayto added Interesting. I had some interesting elements there, making his arms a little bit a little bit larger and broader and shrinking that far. Arm just toe. Do some little corrections here to fix perspective and proportions, puffing his chest out just a little bit to make him seem like he's bulging out, posing for his picture like one would expect. And I think those bottom legs got a little too long on me, so I'm fixing that as well. But just like everything else, we do in this technique, it's all just feel your way through and refine as much as you need to. As you can see, I certainly haven't gotten everything right the first time. There's been a ton of work and rework, but that's just part of the magic of photo Shop is you're not bound by anything. You don't even have to crumple of a piece of paper to start over. You just erases many times as you need to until it looks just right. So a really, really fun and liberating way to create create artwork, hope you found that is exciting, as I do still a blast for me at this point, just sort of getting some details right, making sure all the proportions air correct that raising that arm up would make his pose a little more proper and fit with the attitude that we've got going here. I think that fits just right. Just need to get this far foot rendered in. Sometimes that foot angle to make it work in perspective can be a little bit tricky, but got his heels clicked together here, standing in attention. I think that fits perfectly with with the spirit of the character that we're establishing here need to define the detail on this mechanical arm just a little more clearly before we can start thinking that in. It's still pretty sketchy, and this is the place toe to do these adjustments before we start thinking and making his head just a tiny bit smaller. Even if this doesn't exactly fit that seven head proportion rule that we learned in figure painting. That's okay. We can exaggerate this just a touch. And I think making his shoulders and chest seem huge would would fit with the personality we're trying to establish here. So that's why it's OK to make his head just a little smaller than perhaps it should be in realistic proportions, always looking for fun. Ways to style, eyes things and make them interesting are rendering will be realistic enough that we can get away with these little kind of cartoony embellishments without it seeming strange and just a little more erasing and refining, adding some buckles and straps again some some great ways to add interest to any character . And I think with that, this sketch is almost ready to start inking going to do a little bit more liquefying just to adjust. Some proportions make thes knees fit a little bit better, narrowing the waste and kind of last minute checks. But I think that looks great up next. We will do our thinking step, so I'll start a new layer name that ink Got my brush ready to G O. And I'll drop the opacity way back on that sketch layer so that I can still see it. But I don't want it to become a distraction and just clone stamping in some of those parallel lines. Always a handy use of the clone stamp if you need two lines to be perfectly parallel, especially on something man made like that overlapping armor on the shoulder that's a great use of the clone stamp tool because it'll make an exact copy of the line at the same angle . Works very well. So just while I think in some facial features, let's kind of go over the checklist of our character design. I think he's making good use of the 80 20 rule. I think he's 80% familiar. Certainly we've all seen a grand looking military general type character, even the sort of oil portrait's that I'm trying to evoke. So that's certainly familiar. And as for our 20% new and creative, I think all of the steampunk tack, the sword, the mechanical arm and even that armor that echoes steampunk design that that all gives it enough creativity and originality to make it something worth paying attention to. So I think we've got that checked off pretty well. It's got a little bit of wind going with it. Teoh add Cem dynamism and drama to the pose, along with all of the straps and belts it lead our I sort of separate things. Ah, lot of good tips that I try to bring tea, every character illustration. I sort of just mentally check those off the list it each step here. So while I think in, which is sort of an automatic process that we've done together many times now thought we could just discuss that. But it the step really just refining things, making the line work much more clean and crisp so that we could present the design to a client at this phase, give them something presentable and clean to work with. But really, once we have the sketch nailed down. We've got our idea just about at 100% and ready to start thinking about a painting. This one's gonna be a ton of fun to render. We've got a portrait to do for his face. So some fun skin tone work, but then a lot of great clothing and other materials to render is well, and it should make for a really dynamic finished products. So this should be a great project, especially a good one to start with, rendering in those belts and straps. Some of this detail work like all of his medals and military decorations used to give him some interesting backstory. Always a great thing to include in that piping those little ridges of cloth like it is shoulder where his shoulder and his arm meat and around his collar. That gives us a nice opportunity for some color pop. You don't want your characters to be too monochromatic, often a great place to add in just a little accident color. So that's that's what I'll keep in mind for that piping we've got on his coat jacket there . So just adding in some detail with line work here for these metals. But Of course, we'll end up going over the top of that with paint anyway. So no need to get super detailed or kind of just solidifying our idea and making everything clear enough for a client to understand what we're going for with this ink step. And also remember, we needed to be a solid line all the way around the outside of the perimeter, because we're gonna end up using our magic wand tool to make our selection and block it in in our painting steps up next. So try not to leave any broken lines. That's something I always end up having to go back and check for. If the magic wand selection doesn't quite work, a little bit of metal work here on these metal knee pads, and I just copied and pasted it. Sort of a quick cheat just toe. Get that other one established. The shapes are similar enough that I can use some parts of of one to describe the other and then add detail accordingly. And broad shapes like his pants can be defined with just a few lines. No need toe over describe things with too much line work. In fact, if you end up doing too much line working, you get too many lines showing under your painting anyway. So, as you know, I always try to be very sparse with my line. Were kind of a very economic use of the lines, just enough to get the point across, communicate the material and shape and form, but not anything used to heavily to describe a rendering or anything just enough to get the idea across. And then we'll let the painting do the rendering for us in later steps coming along well, that we've got him just about rendered from head to toe and he's coming together nicely. Should make a very dynamic, finished product. So I've just cloned in these little circular rivets. Gonna add these selectively around his jacket and clothing and some of the metal work Always a nice way to add some different materials just for a little variety. So that's what those rivets air good for, and they're always welcome in any steampunk design. Rivets belong very well in steampunk, so good thing to keep in mind if your character seems too boring in a steampunk setting at a ton of rivets, and I bet it will make it more exciting. There we go, making the sword seem kind of steampunk little bolts and rivets and pipes in a little bit more interior detail work. And with that, this guy's looking pretty well polished up and ready. I think he's ready to block in and we'll start painting him in next. 10. Project 1 - Steampunk General - Skin & Leather: Hi, everyone. This is Hardy in this lecture, we will add in skin tones and hair to our character and will also begin the clothing rendering. So let's get started off camera. I've added in a splash background, and you can see that on a layer here have also created a silhouette layer. We're going to use this to block in our character. So selecting the ink layer, I'll grab the magic wand tool and select the outside and also any hollow shapes on the interior. And then we go to select inverse that will sort of flip things, and we can fill in the silhouette with that science background color. I'm gonna make a copy of the ink layer and then merge that with silhouette. So I've got a nice blocked in shape upon which to begin my value painting. That's what I'm gonna do now, grabbing my chalk brush in this bright orange color that I always use for value paintings, and we'll get started if you haven't already. Certainly check out the painting faces and figure painting courses there prerequisites before this one. But I should especially mention that at this point, because we're really using those skills at this step to make this guy's face look interesting and realistic, and we go into a ton of detail in those courses. So by all means check those out before getting to this point if if you don't feel super comfortable with your face or figure entering skills. But basically we're just imagining how light would hit this character's face in a three dimensional form, trying to make his facing very three dimensional and realistic. And, of course, we do that with value. The planes that are facing towards the light source get are higher values, and the planes that are facing away are left darker, and Maurin shadows a very basic, three dimensional arrested, two dimensional rendering principles. There it is worth repeating, though that addition to those simple light and dark parts of value painting we need to remember to keep value edges is a primary part of our rendering. Basically, what I'm trying to say is it values and on top of needing to be correct in terms of light and dark, they also have to have the correct edge, and we need a variety of edges in our value painting in order for it to seem realistic. We need to have areas where they're soft gradations between high and low values. But we also need areas where there are dramatic cuts between light and dark, and those two need to work together the hard edges and the soft edges. We need both, or else it won't look realistic. So notice areas where I've got very hard edge is kind of like the corner of the eye under the eyebrow. And then there are areas where it blends out much more softly kind of out towards the side of the head and on the darker side of the chin. So those two types of edges, soft and hard, work together to really make your form seem organic. This is especially true when you're rendering living things, of course, like the human face. It's also true of creature design as well that mix of hard and soft edges. It really could be your best friend with this type of rendering, so use that blender brush Teoh to soften things out. But don't forget to have some very hard cuts is well, otherwise your value rendering could look a little too soft and airbrush e, and you'll lose that painterly quality that we really try to go for here. But I think this is coming along nicely. He certainly looks three dimensional. He's got exactly the attitude that I was hoping to capture. A very stern, prim, improper, straight laced kind of military officer tight. So I think that fits perfectly with the concept, and our rendering is, is carrying that through very nicely. So a few more last minute refinements here to the value step, and I'll unify with Cem broader brush strokes as well, taking a look here, and I think he's just about ready to convert to a value painting. So what I'll do is do a hue saturation shift A lighten it and shift the hue to where it's a bright white off white color have created a new layer underneath the value painting called skin mod. And here is where we paint in some red areas underneath the value painting, and we only do this on certain areas of the face. We want the nose, ears, cheeks and lips to seem red, especially compared with areas that have hair like the jaw and the sides of the scalp. That air cut short for this particular guy. So that difference the modulation where we have the two different kinds of skin tones, or what make this guy look realistic. It makes it look fleshy and, like really, skin tones is supposed to just, you know, flat value mannequin type thing. So I've merged those together. Now that we have that nice value modulation and I've switched my brush, I'm using this flattened circle. Just Teoh give a different kind of painterly quality. I use that on one of our face rendering projects in the face course, and I really like that effect. So this squashed circle kind of chiseled tipped brush. It's just something I'm using the to shake it up. Feel free to stick with any brush you want throughout, but it this part of, ah, face rendering. It's just a refinement step. We've got our skin tones merged on the one layer, and I'm just picking up tones with the medicine dropper tool and dropping them back in. Remember, while you're using your brush, if you hit Ault on the keyboard, it will switch your brush to the medicine dropper tool. So that's a super easy way to just jump all over the page and kind of pick up tones and drop them right back in without having to switch tools. Very easy. You can just keep your finger over that all key and jump around. I'm adding a suggestion of scarring over by that eye patch of figured. That would be a an important detail, and I have grabbed a super bright color, and I'm just adding in some shyness. You can see that on the tip of the nose forehead, just some some brightest values just to stretch out that value range and make it as dynamic as possible. Always a nice nice feature to include again bringing that shine back in so that we can really focus on the tip of his nose. And I've really made those cartilage shapes of his nose pretty exaggerated. I want everything to be really gnarly and angular for this guy. Even though he is certainly classically handsome. I want him to look very heroic and classically handsome, but also very angular and tough just to make him seem very masculine and like he's been through ah lot so very over described facial features. Certainly if we were rendering a female character a child, we would treat things much more softly. But with this guy, just go is angular and is craggy with the rendering is you want. And it'll really just help to back up the the attitude that we're trying to put forward here, a little more blending, and this is starting to come together nicely. I'm actually smudging out some little hairlines, some little wispy lines kind of going in so that we can get a hint of where the hair meets the head. Little details like that can add a ton of realism, and now I've got my race tool just to a race away. Some of this taint that it got over the mustache area, and once you're done with your skin rendering, that's always a good time to sort of cut out anywhere where the skin paint might have gone outside of the lines, so to speak, making his nostril a little bit darker there again just to stretch out that skin value range. But I think this looks great checking Ah, color balance just to see if I like anything better doing some color shifts, and actually I think I liked it the way it was better, so we'll move on to the eyes Now. I've just grabbed one of these skin colors. Teoh render in a steer for the globe of his eye. Then I'll grab that dark scion to describe his eyes. Iris. This is where we decide what direction he's looking in and in that white highlight in a little bit of color to the iris. And just like that, he's got a realistic I. Fortunately, only one eye to worry about here, so we don't have to worry too much about the eyes facing the same direction as you usually do. But it's perfect. We've got him kind of looking heroically off in the distance with that raised eyebrow, perfect for the attitude and spirit of the character that I'm after. So I'm gonna render in some hair. I've got a new layer, and I'm just sort of blocking things in trying to describe that hairline a little more clearly, just like we described earlier. Excuse me and gonna add in some highlights is well, I want this guy's hair to seem kind of slicked back with whatever kind of hair product they used back in this theoretical time period. Feel like everybody looked very slicked back and proper in these military photos on going for that super combed and not a hair out of place. Look for this guy. I think it fits pretty well and just a little smudging. And that's all. It takes just a few highlights, and it's in pretty realistic looking hair. Came back with some more just to make it look extra shiny, like his hair is dark with that cause I wet look to it. Whatever kind of hair product would would give it That shine and a few little highlights here for the mustache is well, and I think that's just about all we need. No need to over render these things. He looks kind of late thirties early forties here, so I think I might end up adding a little more gray. So I've made a new layer here, and I'm gonna kind of go overboard with this and then probably reel it back in. Just want to see how much how much gray I want to add in. You can do that kind of sultan pepper look. Words on Lee Gray on the sides play around with this, and it's on a layer so you can dial it back as much as you want. But I think kind of late fifties ages is just about where I like this guy to be. So this might be a little too grey. Actually, I might come back and die a list down a little, but ah, fun thing to play with. Just smudging out some of these little wisps of hair that I've rendered and, yeah, checking things out, See how that's working, uh, dialing back the opacity and I'm even getting a a race away a little bit. And I think that's perfect. Little hints of gray on the temples, but not so much that he looks too old to still be serving. And I think that works very well. I'm gonna cut out these lines where the skin sort of overlap the collar. And with that, I think our skin, hair and eyes portion is done. A little cash shadow here under the chin. And that looks great. I think we're ready to move on to clothing, so we will add in a new layer. And I'm gonna name that leather. We're gonna take care of all of the leather material in this painting. First when ah, character, that sort of complex like this and has multiple different kinds of clothing and different materials on it. I like to have each layer on its own. Each kind of clothing material on its own layer really helps. You keep things organized, and if you end up wanting to change colors, you can do so with each independently of one another. So first we're just going to do leather. It's gonna be kind of an accent color. Those nice browns and I have blue in mind for the main body of the uniforms of those blues and oranges colors would be nice compliments so should look well together. So jumping all over here, I'm just sort of doing Cem thin brushwork to define the edges of these leather straps. Anything on this page that's gonna be leather. I'm gonna first give it a little line, work around the edges just to make those edges of the material pop up a little bit. You could do this at the end of the material rendering as well, but for this one, I'm gonna do it first. Just toe kind of define things and make it all easy for us to follow. So anywhere where there would be a hard edge on the leather parts of this guy's uniform just go over it with a little bit of line work. And it'll help keep things kind of defined and oriented later on. It'll it'll really pay off, sort of a way to color inside the lines and give everything some nice detail and pop. But it's really just a simple matter of tracing around the line work that you've already got established there. And now I'm gonna make my brush larger and start dropping in some tones we're trying to keep. This looked pretty three to mention. Also using the facial lighting scheme is a reference we want our lightest values to be where that light sources shining. But with leather, you can keep things kind of splotchy. This is hard. Leather doesn't have many folds to it. Thes leather straps are actually pretty rigid, so I'm just text during my brush strokes, overlapping them, tapping a lot so that they stay nice and modelled in choppy looking makes a nice, realistic leathers. You can see on that belt and the straps works pretty well. We talked about the Z strokes and long strokes for clothing rendering. But for rigid leather straps, it's essentially just a basic value rendering exercise. There aren't really any folds to speak of, and it'll look like realistic, rigid leather without it. But now we will do some Z strokes over on this glove. What that folded over part to have some realistic folds. So they're those e strokes that we did in our clothing rendering exercise. We're gonna carry that down over the rest of the hand, but you can see right there at the wrist I've got a nice Z mark just to show that that part of that leather material folds gives it a really realistic quality. Same thing between the thumb and the rest of the fingers. You can see some nice Z marks there, and with leather, you don't have to render that much. Actually, just put some tone on the brightest part closest to the light source and then just quickly let it fade out too dark, and it'll look very realistic. So with a little bit of smudging, essentially, those Z marks have have done the job for us. That's just about all we need to do to make pretty realistic looking. Brown leather is a nice accent color. This will also be a good pivot point for the rest of our color scheme. This will sort of set the tone, and I'm a racing away a little bit of line work just to make some little stitching. Where there's kind of a seam in the leather just is a little extra realism, a detail for cloth that we can add. So I certainly encourage you to explore little line work like that. What kind of using line work and those those clothing brushstrokes together to make things look, really, It's sort of like value edges you need. You need different kinds of edges and material looks to make something look realistic. If it all looks soft and and to to soft edged, it really won't seem realistic. So make sure you have a variety of edge types in your painting, in each material skin, clothing, whatever and that will really help the realism. But bringing some of that same treatment down to the boots below this toe would probably be sticking out farthest into the light source. So want that tip of the toe to be pretty bright, and I would think this got polishes his boots every day. So one of those to look nice and shiny and I think that's just about right. I considered black boots. It seemed a little more appropriate for a military uniform, but it didn't seem quite as steampunk and, ah, I think the color scheme will work nicer if we stick with that brown leather. So that's what I'm doing here and a little bit of rendering on this far boot. But it's a little more in shadow, so it'll actually help our three dimensional look if we keep that rendering a little more subdued in subtle. So a little bit of detail going back there. But I want to keep those values a good bit more subtle than the ones in the foreground foot . So that that one seems like it's sticking forward and the other one is receding back into shadow as it should be. And I think that's looking very nice, doing a little bit of blending, and this is coming together pretty well, a good, good base point for us to start our clothing rendering, and it'll be sort of the pivot point for our color scheme, as I mentioned elsewhere. So I've got these little leather Kneepads straps that I need to add a little bit of rendering because that's gonna be a metal knee pad there. But it's gotta have something holding it to the rest of the uniform. So just a very light rendering there. I want to put a little detail on this handle. If it's a wrapped handle like this, you really just have to render one of the wraps and then I'll use the clone stamp. And just like that, you have that repeating shape over and over again makes it look like a realistic repeated texture. And I think that's working pretty well. Going to define this little hanging cloth sash, uh, thing underneath underneath his arm and ah, a little bit of Z Z stroke work under there. And that's about all it needs that things so far in shadow that it doesn't need a ton of detail, but just enough to make it seem like folding leather. And with that, I think are leather material is just about finished. Our face in leather are looking good, so we'll take this to the next step in our next lecture 11. Project 1 - Steampunk General - Uniform: Oh, hi, everyone. This is hardy. In the sexual, we will continue rendering close. So let's get started. We're gonna pick things up by rendering the coat of this guy's uniforms. So I'm going to create a new layer. Call it coat, and I'm gonna pick kind of a blue gray color, give you a look at the color picker there. If you ever wanna grab the exact colors that I'm using, you can just see those numeric values on the color picker. So Paul Zehr rewind if if you want to find that exact color. But basically I'm just thinking that a bluish gray would work well with that subdued brown . Brown has some hints of orange in it, and if if you remember, blue and orange are color compliments, so they tend to look pretty good together. But I've got all of these clothing materials on their own individual layers so we can do some hue saturation shifts. Once we've got everything rendered in and we can change things however we want. It's kind of nice to be able tow to switch things around later in the project if if you find something that will work better but just basically giving you my my color color concept thoughts there. As I'm working here on, you'll see plenty of Z strokes and long strokes, just like we discussed in the color clothing rendering video. That's basically all I've got going on here, wherever the close sort of wrinkle and fold up, like the elbow and around his waist. There, I've got some nice, easy strokes going on, but for the rest of it, this is a pretty stiff kind of wool coat that I'm using, so I don't want it to look like very soft drapery. I wanted to be fairly rigid, especially around the shoulders and that nice squared off shoulder just to give him that masculine look and also make his uniform seem formal and grandiose. Kind of like the rest of the regalia we're trying to add in here. Just toe. Give him some awesome presence and make him seem like an important guy kind of going with the rest of the theme. So I've got a lot of my marks in place on that top part, just did a little refinement, and that will add this bottom coattail kind of part, and it's really just a matter of getting all of the marks in, filling everything in and making it all work with your light sores. Doing a little bit of smudging, kind of smudging at a few little Z shapes around the midsection just to make it seem like that belt is sort of applying some pressure, maybe wrinkling the close just a little bit. Make it seem realistic, given Tsum TsUM presence in a little bit of fine line work around some of these edges of the material and did some up with collar and down here on the coat tails as well and a little smudging to refine that as well, making some of these e shapes a little more pronounced, and that looks cool. It's always one of my favorite parts of rendering closes when you smudge those e shapes. It's always one of those moments when simple marks of paint starts seeming like something realistic. That's really one of my favorite parts, so I just selected the in Claire by command, clicking the ink layer so that I could have a selection of all that line work. I erased away a little bit of the coat so that I could see those medals on his chest underneath cause I'm gonna come over the top of those with Cem metal material and just refining things a little bit, giving a little bit of a shadow under that armpit and smudging in a few more Z shapes. But I think that looks great. The code is just about where I want it. So with a little more smudging, I think we're ready to move on. I'm gonna work on his pants next, and just as a starting point, I'm going to grab that same color that we used for leather. I sort of like the way the Browns and Blues air working together. I don't think I wanted to be exactly the same is the leather on his gloves and the other straps. But I'm just gonna render it in with this and then do a hue saturation adjustment to change it later. If if I decide, but basically just rendering Mawr Z strokes in long strokes just to make that work, leaving a bit of a shadow underneath the coat tail just to make that seem realistic, like there's just a little bit of distance between the pants and the coat and using some nice value edges to make certain parts of the legs seem like they're sticking out a little bit more. I want that foreground leg to seem like it's coming towards us just a bit. So I added some strong value right at the junction of the leg and the waste. And then, of course, those Z strokes Justo make it seem realistic. A little line work on some of these seems certainly gives it a lot more realism. I think that works pretty well racing a little bit of a shadow over on that seem, and I think that works nicely. I think I'm going to refine the code a little bit more. I'm also smudging some of the the underlying silhouette layer just because that line work was showing through a little too prominently and noticing a few things I want to fix up here. So feel free to jump around. You don't have to do this in one linear step, but I think we're ready for our metal texture. So I'm grabbing a pale greyish green and notice I've changed my brush mode to color dodge. That's very important with color dodge as you'll notice I'm tapping in some values, but every time you tap again, it makes it much brighter and more saturated. That works really well for metal textures, cause metal is so shiny that the values can change very quickly and dynamically. Color dodges just perfect for that. So play around with that brush mode a little bit. We go into a ton of detail on this in our machine painting course, and I have an entire lecture just on how to render metal. So if you want some more details on that, I certainly encourage you to check out that course. But for the simple stuff that we're doing here, I think that that explanations probably adequate but color dodge that's the key is to make sure that brush mode is the same or your marks won't look the same is this. And with just a little smudging and basically keeping just a sphere shape in mind, that's all there is to rendering these knee pads, adding in a few little scratches just to make it seem like it's got some some wear and tear and I'm gonna dark in and maybe change the hue of that reflected light a little bit so that it doesn't seem quite so one note. And I'm now doing a bit of, ah, color balance adjustment. I'm trying to add a little more warmer tone to this metal, so it seems a little more brassy than, UH then just straight up, chrome looking metallic. So trying to add a little bit of complexity to this metallic color. And now that I like that, I just grabbed it and I'm moving it up to the shoulder to keep it consistent, you can start kind of cutting and pasting with metal text during a great time saver, and also a way to guarantee that your colors air consistent is but just copying and pasting things. It seems like a a lazy shortcut, but you'd be surprised. It's it's very difficult to notice that that's what happened. So don't worry about anybody calling you out on taking a shortcut or anything. And honestly, in my experience, it it ends up being the correct thing to do, because it it makes things look nice and consistent as they should, so certainly don't feel bad about using using the software to make life easier. There there times when you need to take your time and do things in a traditional way. But certainly it feel free to take advantage of all of these, these advantages that the software can provide. So I'm erasing away some little vent holes just to get some detail, kind of evoking a medieval knight armor kind of thing going on there. Think it's a cool fit with the whole steampunk vibe we've got going on, and I think that's working pretty well. So I've added a layer mask to the coat because I want to erase away. Well, I guess mask away some of these little, uh, military decorations on his coat. I didn't want to erase that away with the erase tool, because if you do that, then you can't bring it back later. So adding a mask and just painting out masking things out is a good way to to take away pixels. But you you can come back and add them back in later if you want to. So, using the clone stamp, I'm grabbing some of that metallic color from the shoulder pad, and I'm just rendering in a little bit of detail on these little metal military decorations and actually just kind of scribbling things around, making it look like little finite. They're fine metal detail ing Cem patterning going on. But that's basically it. This will be sort of a visually active little area, so everything will kind of get lost in the details very visually loud, if that makes sense. So no need Teoh get super close and detail it every pixel but adding in just a little bit of detail in here to make that seem nice and detailed and complex. And I think that's working very well. Can I add a little bit of, ah, rim to this metallic area where that shoulder pad is harnessed to the rest of his coat? And maybe even the robotic arm has something to do with that as well. Gonna copy this knee pad down below and bring it over to the other name again? Ah, making life easy with the software. Always a good way to go But I do need to change it a little bit. So doing a bit of warping. Some are racing away to make it fit the shape and also don't want it to be quite a bright. So I'm gonna knock that back a little bit with the erase tool and refined things. Just a touch here to make that far Kneepads seem unique and give it a different kind of ah machine going on there just to give it some interest. Metallic textures are always a great opportunity to add a little interesting different kinds of shine and luster. Justo, make your character pop. It's great to have different kinds of materials on a character's uniform like we see here. The super shiny metal really is a nice juxtaposition with the relatively soft cloth values . So that works nicely, rendering in some of this sword hilt here just to make make that detailed. I'm probably gonna end up knocking this back a good bit once we're done. But do you needed to have some kind of detail ing so that we know what that is? And it's also a nice little steampunk device to toe to really drive home the setting that we're going for here. So I want to spend a little bit of time to get that right as well, just adding in some little metallic cylindrical shapes and cloning some of those little circular sort of screw housings that we have going on in several different places, and that's really just it. A little bit of metallic detail ng work, and we can leave the rest dark and is a suggestion, and it all works well. You can really count on your your audiences imagination to fill in gaps on a lot of things . You don't need to render everything to death. So now we are ready to render in this metallic arm. I'm using some of the same colors that we've used on the shoulder and knee pads because I want that to be consistent, like it's made out of the same kind of metal. And the first thing I'm doing is just outlining some of these joints and want them to look like hard edges. So notice I'm still in color dodge mode. Been doing that for this entire metallic rendering process, but we just pick out some details and really refined those edges so that we can see where the metal edges come together. And using a lot of the clone stamp is you can see to repeat some of those little knuckle joints inside. Just make it all seem like machinery. Clone stamp is is your friend when rendering manmade machine type objects, because there are a lot of repeating things that air exactly the same in machinery, so you can get away with that with the clone stamp. Just make things look exactly the same as they would in real life, rendering in these little digits and making them shiny. And what that center one to be the shiniest is if it's facing directly towards the light source than the rest of the fingers are a little bit less bright. It kind of gives things that three dimensional feel and just rendering things out here, adding some bright kind of spiritual treatment to this elbow joint, airy area and blending things out just a bit. But keeping those brush strokes modeled and textured, it seems kind of like a hammered metal kind of texture really works well, so those model brushstrokes can really, really work for you. There are so many different ways to treat metal. It can be super smooth and shiny, just like a steel ball bearing, or you can add all kinds of texture. There really can't go wrong with that. It it all looks pretty cool as long as you have a very dynamic value range with with very bright brights next to dark darks that that will usually give it a very good dynamic value range and a realistic metallic feel to it. I think that's the biggest single thing that makes a material seen. Metallic is, Ah, very dynamic value range and just adding a little more shine here to some of these mechanical parts that fingers. This is coming together pretty well. Think that's got a nice steampunk attitude to it. It certainly fits with the rest of what we've doing color wise. And it is probably one of our biggest interest points in this piece, probably the 20% part of the 80 20 rule that fits here. So I think that works well, erasing away a little spot to create a button here on his pants. And what I'm gonna do now is changed my clone stamp mode to all layers. And once I do that, it will sample everything on the page, every layer, and I'm just gonna clone stamp in a bunch of little rivets all over the pages. Leadsom some great visual interest just to make things a little more visually active and some nice little accents here and there. And you can see how quickly you can just run through this. Once you got one rivet rendered, you can just repeat it over and over again. And it adds some nice little highlight. Great little areas of pop. And you can add add detail anywhere coat, buttons, rivets it. It all looks the same. Pretty much so. That that works really well. Added a ton of visual interest with just a few clicks on that one. And I think that works very well. I don't think I need this button on the bottom, so I'm gonna lose that. I think we're in good shape up next. I'm gonna make a pattern. I'll show you how to do this with the marquee tool. First, we're gonna make a rectangle shape and fill that in. Then I'm gonna use the perspective warped just to flare out. Thes bottom edge is kind of a wedge shaped shrink. That a little bit now. I'll copy it. Bring one down below and flip that vertically. So now I've got two identical things happening opposite each other. I'm gonna copy that layer, hold down the shift key and rotate that 90 degrees. Then I merge the's a give and I rotate that a little bit. So you keep repeating this process. And as you can see, we've come up with a radio Lee symmetrical pattern here. I'm going for kind of a gear logo. So with the circular Marquis, I am going to fill in perfectly round circle, holding down shift, and that looks like a gear. I'm gonna make this hollow, though, so I'm going to do another marquee selection and delete away this center here and just like that, with some simple uses of the marquee tool and filling and transforming. We've got a simple gear logo and I'm gonna use this in several places just to give this guy some cool iconography at a little interest to his uniform. Give him some logo Icahn stuff. Always a cool thing to include on your piece. So picking out a few places on his uniform that I'd like Teoh include that and I think that works. You don't overuse something or it can become obvious. That it was repeated is you can see I'm adding some subtle changes to the one on his shoulder and I want to add in these stripes as well. There we go. I think that adds a ton of interest. Decal ing is another word for it, and it really makes your image pop. So I've got that on its own layer. Just a little bit of refinement to that. And now that it's on its own layer, what we can do is use it as a selection, adding in just a little more detail in here before I get to that so command clicking the patterns layer you can see I have that as a selection. So on my metal layer, I've painted in some metallic, so it looks like that gear logo is a metal shape over on that. That area where the strap comes together with the shoulder pad, cool detail looks like it took a lot of work to get that perfectly round and in perspective . But, as you can see with the simple use of a pattern, makes very quick work of that and just kind of jumping around, checking a few things here before we move along. Now that I've got that done, I've created a new layer, and I've changed it to multiply mode, creating sort of a dark blue, which I'm gonna reveal some of these logo patterns. So just using some masks here basically to reveal that multiply layer. And I'm also doing a little bit of that piping that we discussed earlier just to give his uniform a little more detail ing and I think that works well. Just want that to have a little bit of detail, some sort of fine stitch work to make that seem more realistic parallel lines and things like that just to make it seem like ah, very, very finely crafted military uniform. But we're getting all of that done with that multiply layer that I just filled in that darker blue color, and we're just revealing it out with the mask. So a little bit more refinement to the coat and other materials. But I I think this is good. Gonna make his pants darker, sort of a darker chocolate brown, just to set them apart from the leather texture trying a few other colors. But I think for the most part I'm going to stick with what we had. I think this is good. We'll add some final polish in our next step 12. Artfully Adding Photo Textures: Oh, how everyone This is hardy. In this lecture, we will take a quick look at how to use photo textures to enhance your paintings First, a quick word of caution. Photoshopped makes using photo textures so fun and easy that an artist can really get carried away and end up way over doing it. Don't fall into this amateur trap. Remember that we're using photos on Leah's a subtle texture in order to enhance our paintings. Don't rely on photos too heavily. Okay, with that being said, let's check out this really cool technique. Once again, I have our humble sphere rendering exercise from art fundamentals. I've given it just a bit of color so that you can see how photo textures interact with the color painting beneath. This is a very simplified example, but when using photo textures in a real project, at this point you would have your painting very nearly finished design is complete and it's fully rendered in color. All that remains is final polished, and that's where photos come in. Check out this layer group called photos I've pasted in to cool texture photos for my library. One is a crack sidewalk in the others and old brick covered in little green bits of algae or something. We're gonna use these two photos to punch up our sphere and make it more interesting, colorful and rich. So I'm going to make a copy of this entire layer group, and I'll rename the copy photo textures. Next, we're going to mask out this entire photo texture layer group so that the photos can only be seen within the silhouette of the sphere. We do that by command, clicking on the sphere layer over here, which creates a selection. We then go over to the layer mask icon and click it as you can see now, the photos in the photo Texture Layer group are Onley visible inside. The sphere will never have to worry about any of these photos going outside of the seers shape up. Next is the important part, so pay close attention to this step with the photo texture Layer group selected. We go to this drop down menu, which changes the layer blending mode. We then go down to soft light as you can see. Suddenly the photos interact with the sphere layer below in a whole different way. We can see the color and rendering form of this fear below, but we're still getting all of this cool texture from the photo. Pretty cool, right? Let's do that one more time just to make sure that you've got it so jumping back to normal blending mode and then once again we select soft light to achieve the desired effect. Now you certainly noticed that there are quite a few different blending modes. But with very few exceptions, this is the only one that I really use very regularly. Once we have soft lights set for this entire layer group, we can start to manipulate the photos themselves to fit the shape. Better for this exercise will transform them to seem to fit this spherical shape more naturally. So I do that by hitting command T to bring up the free transform function. If I hold down control and click, it brings up all of these other great transform options for this one. Let's use my favorite the warp function. As you can see, it divides to transform into nine subsections that weaken, bend and manipulate with lots of control. They make this flat photo seems spherical. Let's just bend the corners to kind of wrap it around. After we're done with all four corners, weaken. Do some subtle bending to the interior lines as well, whatever you need to do, really, to make the texture fit the underlying shape. And as you can see, once things start to fit together, they start to look really realistic. So let's try this again with this mouldy brick photo. We just hit Command T to bring up the transform function. We then control Click to bring up the other, transform options and select warp. From there, it's just a matter of bending things around to fit the underlying shape, and we're left with a pretty realistic looking finished product. This technique is applications across the board on just about every course that we teach here. Characters, creatures, environments, machines just about anything convey a fit from the punch that an artfully placed photo texture can provide. I hope you found this useful. Now let's put it to good use back in our project. 13. Project 1 - Steampunk General - Final Polish: Oh, hi, everyone, This is Hardy. In this lecture, we will lead final Polish to our character. So let's get started. The first thing I want to dio really? So I sort of forgot to fill in that gear icon on the knee pads. So one more use of that I've revealed it with the layer mask. And now I'm just masking away. Some little chip in scratch marks is to make it look a little more realistic, and I think that's good to go. So next we will add secondary light sources. This is also always a Superfund part of the process, So I've grabbed a gray color similar to the background, but just a little bit lighter. Maybe a tiny bit cooler is well, and I'm gonna have some reflected lights coming from his right sort of below and a little bit above is, well, Justo, round out that far edge, give it a little bit of coolness to the skin tone and really enhances the three dimensional feel. And let's just describe the face with just a little more form, rendering. So always a really cool way. Teoh at a finishing touch, and it just really looks nice gives it a nice painterly feel makes us look like that oil portrait style that we were trying toe evoke with this character anyway. So a really nice fit. And I think that adds a tremendous amount of information and just makes it charming. So adding that light wherever it would be bouncing on that side, rounding out the mechanical arm here a little bit too some on the metal shoulder pads. But I don't want to get too carried away with this. In fact, I rarely do much of it past the mid torso. Just cause I wanted toe be a focal point of the face, and that's about it. For that, I'm gonna do a very bright, almost white highlight coming from above sort of, ah, thin pin light around just the back of the head again just to bring focus to the face you can see I'm adding some little hair outlines on the side just to add further information to that perimeter and put a little of this light on his cheek bones. Just a highlight. That angular, strong jaw that we're trying to highlight. I think that works really nicely, adds a nice, bright focal point increases our value. Range two makes it a more dynamic range and had some really nice accent to the character. So a great last step just smoothing those out a little bit refining things. But with that, I think are secondary light. Sources really add a lot you can see before and after a while. What a difference. So I'm now gonna group everything, make a copy of the group and then merge everything by hitting Command E. So I've got it all on one layer now, and I'm going to switch to my brush tool and just go around the entire outside perimeter of the character and just smudged things very lightly. You can see it's just about 15% strength because I don't want to move pixels around too much. I just wanna soften and blur things just a bit, because if the edges air too hard or even pixelated, it can really kill the three dimensionality that that we've worked so hard to achieve. So treating our edges is a great step to do at or near the end. I'm doing a little bit of liquefy. I thought that jaw it was just a little too prominent it. I wanted it to be very strong, but it was sticking out so far that it looked just a little bit silly. So with that will do a little bit of photo texturizing. I've got two photos on a layer group just ah, shirt and an old bucket. I'm gonna show you what we're gonna do with ease. I've got him in a group and have marked them photo textures. So if we command click our character and then hit mask, it masks out that layer. Groups of these two photos are inside of that mass layer group and you'll see we can move the photos around inside of the mask, so it'll never put any any of that photo outside. Now I'm switching the layer group too soft light that will make all of the photos inside of that group and soft, light blending mode. So that's a key key feature. Have to switch that photo textures, layer group too soft light. And with that, you can see those photos sort of blend in with the paint underneath, and they just add a really beautiful, subtle amount of texture. And if you do some adjustments, you can see I warped and transform them into place and change the brightness just a little bit. It adds a really nice change in texture to the middle of his coat. A little bit of embellishment, just a little added. Visual interest is well, and I think that works beautifully. You never know where these great textures are going to come from. So with cell phone cameras now, you can always be snapping things. I've just turned on the bucket Layer group now. Obviously, I don't want this guy. There's no bucket that we wanted to look like. But there's a really cool, grainy texture in this metal that I like, and I use this bucket image for all kinds of things. Clone, stamping it around. You can see it just adds a little grainy, pebbly texture that works well for really all kinds of things. Cloth, metallic textures. It just adds a nice bit of modulation. A little bit of tooth makes it look not quite so cold and digital. It gives it a lot of nice get really brings. It, brings it to life. So with that, I think will group that again and make one more emerged layer just so that I can liquefy this together. I thought his shoulder looked just a little bit too prominent. So doing some last minute corrections? Never too late, Teoh. To change things, of course. So now I'm going to switch my brush to color Dodge mode and we're gonna brighten things a little bit. Just add a little bit of value, pop. So the first thing I'm gonna do is make that secondary light source really shine near his head. I want that to be a real draw on a focal point and just pick out a few other areas that you think might catch the light just a little bit more great way to lead the eye around the page. You can see sort of a before and after really just punches it up a little. Adds a nice final touch. Now I think this guy could use a cast shadow to stand on. So switch my brush back to normal and created a new layer. Notice the layers on multiply mode, which is just going to darken it. And after doing a few marks, I just did a motion blur and just like that, a very easy instant shadow. Next, we'll just do a soft off white glow behind him. And with that, I think we've just about got a finished character. Congratulations on completing the Steampunk General Project. Let's take a look back at all of the steps to see how far we've come. We started with a simple sketch to define our character with an ink things in to clean things up. After that, we blocked in our silhouette and added skin tones and hair way, then rendered in his clothing and finally added metal and final polish for a great looking finished product. All in all, we went from a blank canvas to a finished product that we could be proud of. Hope you really enjoy this project, and I look forward to seeing you in future courses. 14. Project 2 - Female Space Hero - Sketch & Ink: Oh, hi, everyone. This is Hardy and welcome to the female space here of Project. In this sexual, we're going to do our sketch and ink face. So let's get started for this one. We're going to do something just a little bit different instead of starting from scratch. I've got a figure template here, just a very basic figure pose here. But it's just about the attitude and pose and proportions that I want for this character. And these templates are really helpful because we're gonna be designing Cem futuristic space armour. So we're gonna have to focus a lot on all of the armor shapes and a lot of design elements . So it's really nice to be able to just trace over this figure that I already know. I like the proportions and the pose for it. So we won't have to think of those two things that just wants one. Have to juggle so many things in our mind, and we can just focus on the fun stuff, just designing all of these cool armor shape. So there are tons of these available for you to download and just put him on a layer and trace over them like I'm doing here. And it It'll take all of those considerations off your plate and just let you focus on designing some cool looking armor. So ah, good leg up to use sometimes, Of course, if you're just starting, I'd certainly encourage you to try Teoh, do your own figure renderings, but these air a nice little step up if you need a little boost. So have added, if you like there tons of poses to choose from and everything's available here on the site . So, as you can see, I've just started drawing in some basic armor shapes. General considerations. I'm sort of thinking of, ah, futuristic typesetting, designing something that would fit well in a game like mass effect or maybe destiny. But certainly Star Wars, anything like that would work Well, I want the armor to sort of echo a lot of human figure shapes, So notice I tend to follow the basic lines of the human form right now, even I'm sort of echoing a rib cage type shape for that torso, armor, peace and on her arms, we've got plates covering the major muscle groups. So it it in good armor design. I find it sort of echoes the human figure in certain ways that tend to be pleasing. And it also has to kind of make sense, be practical. So all these pieces of armor need to have joints that work together so that she can move. I don't want this to be a big, clunky thing. I wanted to be pretty light in form fitting, but obviously, especially with female characters, this can be way over done. And I'm sure we've all seen tons of female quote unquote armor that doesn't seem to have much practical purpose and just highlight certain parts of their anatomy. I'm I'm sure you all know what I'm talking about, so leave it at that. But I want something to be much more practical and sort of ah, realistic. Although this is a purely science fiction type of setting. Were working in here, wanted to see more practical and plausible kind of gives you designed more credibility if it works that way. So that's what I'm working on here and just sort of getting general shapes in and will come back later in detail it more. But in terms of shape language, I'm actually letting the underlying figure shapes dictate a lot of that. A lot of nice, smooth, flowing curves that give the armor a nice feminine look. But within that, there's some more subtlety. I'm using plenty of triangle shapes to try and give her a sleek and quick kind of predatory feel. Want her to seem, you know, kind of ah, kind of formidable and dangerous even wanted to be kind of a good guy, not villainous or anything. But all of those little triangle shapes. Makers seem sleek and quick and a few little squares in here just to add Cem solid nous and dependability and all that sort of contrast with the the lighter, curvy shapes of the female figure itself. So, ah, lot of things working together to create this is feel that I'm going for. And it's It's certainly, ah, time tested formula of sleek looking, especially female armor and tried experimenting with some little wing like shapes on the shoulder armor. But I ended up deleting that away, just thinking that that was a little over the top. But as you can see, I'm just sort of adding things in experimenting and then erasing away if they're not working, Gonna try some kind of ah backpack type thing here, sort of over her shoulder. But I don't think that's really working. So I'm just gonna lose that. I think like I like just the standalone armor look well enough without it. And drawing in a little Kirby place where the shoulder and the torso armour meat. Now I'm starting to add in some interior detail, uh, jumping around a bit because, as you can see, I haven't even gone head to toe yet. So just sort of is the ideas occur. I'm jotting them down, and we'll just refine things as we go. And, of course, once we get our sketch in place will come back over the top in doing doing inking pass just to make it much more solid and more defined. So this is, ah, Major, feel your way through kind of approach again. We don't have to worry about the proportions or the post so much because we're just following that template so you can just focus more on your armor design, making sure that it fits in the perspective of the underlying figure and everything will pretty much it's almost guaranteed to work out if you just follow that template underneath . So, as you can see, I'm adding quite a bit of detail up top on the shoulder arms. So some little Vince and lines and I think I want her midsection to Seymour flexible. So I'm gonna have that be some kind of maybe not such a rigid metal type material, but some kind of darker plastic type thing. You often see that in joints, maybe around the elbow. And the knees is, well, I'll echo this material and planning ahead a little bit. That gives us, um, cool opportunities for some color contrast. If you have multiple types of materials, you can you can have maybe one be very dark and the other very light just to give its, um, a cool, dynamic value range. So things to be considering thinking way ahead to color, even at this very early phase. But just adding some little lines on the armor just to imply changing plane shapes, little vents and things like that all seemed to fit very well and SciFi type universes like this. So there's a certain design language that that we're going to try and stick with. Don't want to do too many conflicting types of styles wanted to all have one nice, cohesive look, and I think it's working very well. A nice mix of curvy and angular, a nice contrast. So defining some little knee pad shapes here. Another thing. Remember, In our principles of design, there is the balance step. We need areas of high visual activity. So I'd say her midsection certainly has a lot of a lot of visual activity, lots of lines in overlapping shapes. So I'm trying to balance that out with some broad sort of empty areas, like on her legs and her chest area, just to give the I somewhere to rest. If there's just so much going on on every part of the page, it almost gets a little exhausting. It's tough to look at. So have some areas where there are some large empty shapes, and that'll that'll really work to balance it out nicely. So at this point, we're really starting to put together all of these building block things that we learned in earlier, more basic courses and making them work for us here. So incorporating a lot of things figure figure, drawing, character design, fundamental design principles and, of course, art fundamentals as well. It's all coming together here. So I certainly hope you've Ah, you've gotten up to speed thus far and you feel comfortable toe to follow along with what I'm doing here. Because everything I'm doing it has been laid out and prior lectures. And, ah, with a little practice, you should be right here with me. It's sort of a step by step process, and we're just feeling our way through. So just just give it a little practice and you can do exactly this, especially with a template to follow, makes it on even easier, less risky activity. So go for it. Can't wait to see what you guys come up with and just to finding Cem some shoe kind of boot areas at the bottom. But, uh, overall, I'm making her legs a little bit less visually active in her midsection. Just toe. Give the I an area to rest. But what those design elements that we're using on her top half to be consistent with what we've got going on at the bottom is well so that it all seems like one cohesive look, and I think that's working Well, uh, notice is always I'm flipping the canvas very often. I've got a keyboard shortcut set up, but I had to do that myself. There's no default Photoshopped keyboard shortcut to flip the canvas, but I strongly recommend setting one up. It's pretty easy to do, and it makes it so easy to flip the canvas back and forth. As I've described in many lectures before, that has a great way of making the canvas seem fresh and new. So do that. Often I'm actually just gonna copy the template and paste it onto my sketch layer here. I think that face is just about right on the money. So I'm going to just sort of go with that at in a different hairstyle and make it something new. But no need to reinvent the wheel on that when I think that face is just about the attitude that I would like to go with. So we'll just sort of dress that up a little bit in just adding in a general hairstyle, I think kind of ah, short, close cropped hair cut would fit well. I wanted to seem like kind of a soldier or maybe a more independent mercenary type character. And I think this is just about this style that I'd like to add. I can't resist. I'm adding some piercings just to give her a little bit of, ah, punk style, a little added personality, just to make her seem more interesting and experimenting, maybe with some neck and chin armor. But I'm not sure if that works too well. Looks a little bit too much like a beard, so I'm getting rid of that. Just ending the armor at her neck, they noticed there's sort of a collar shape around her shoulders just to imply that we could add in a helmet to this later. I tend to like seeing a character's face in a character painting, but, of course, is a concept artist or an illustrator. You're often asked to design a helmet for your character as well. It's sort of part of the armor, so leave room for that to articulate in, and that's what I've done with that collar. But, uh, like your heads a little too far next to high. So I'm bringing that down just a tad with the lasso tool in just moving it with the arrow keys, but, uh, yeah, I wanna leave room to add in a helmet if we want to. And of course, Ah, I should have mentioned it. It's obvious she's acting like she's holding a gun, but we're not going to design the gun in this one of actually fully designed and rendered a gun in the rendering and painting machines. Course. So if you wanna have a look at how we paint the gun that she's gonna be holding in the final product, definitely check out that course. We go into a ton of detail about rendering mechanical things and weapons, so feel free to check that out. But but this one, we're just gonna focus on character, and we're gonna leave her hands empty. But certainly there's room for that gun to just be dropped in. So they added a Kate just a little bit of drapery to have some cool blowing in the wind effect to match her hair. That's also blowing in the wind, and I have got it sort of draped up around her shoulders just to give it a nice cloth texture. I'm experimenting with adding in a gun belt, but I don't think that's working. I'm gonna leave that alone. Go back in my history panel. With that, I think we're ready to ink. So just like always, we just start a new layer. And I'm actually just copying my face from the sketch layer, cause that was already pretty well refined because we just copied it from the template. So to start my ankle air, I just pasted that in. And now, of course, just, like always were just going over the top of everything, just tracing and making our lines more crisp and deliberate, just trying to make things look clean and presentable. Because it this phase, we got our idea pretty firm down. And this will be something that we could submit to a client or a teacher. If this was student work for approval before going to a final painting phase, you always want to kind of limit the amount of work you invest in something in until you're sure that it's gonna be approved. So submitting sketches for review before getting too far is a great way to make sure you don't get to a final product that that somebody just says no, This is not right. So always since Sketches is a professional. So just just going around everything that we've done really with more deliberate in Chris bold line work, and I'll pretty much just go head to toe on this. I, like Teoh, vary the line. Wait a little bit, make the the general large shapes, like her torso or the shoulder pads. Things like that make that line work fairly bold, and then we'll come back into the interior and do some more subtle line work. And I'll use the clone stamp a good bit here, especially with machine made things like armor, because there are some lines that look better when they're perfectly parallel like we see around her collar there. So the clone stamp is a great way to perfectly mirror a nearby line. Makes things look perfectly parallel and nice and perfect machine made, but just just going around all of these general shapes, leaving those interior detail lines for later. I'll sort of do a second pass with a smaller brush size just to do that finer line work. But for now, just just laying in these bold shapes, adding in some little dense around the perimeter. Sometimes those outer edges can have a ton of information, so just there's a little dense I put on her, her hip area that tells you a lot about the material that that midsection armor is made out of. So take advantage of those little cues. You can leave on the outer perimeter and doing a little bit more work here with her fingers , just toe add a little bit more visual activity. Want that to be kind of an attention grabbing area? That trigger finger is something that the viewer could potentially pay a good bit of attention to and get your imagination working about her weapon or what kind of job she does . So little visual cues like that can really go a long way. But for the most part we're just tracing over what we've got here. It's kind of, ah, mindless part of this. You just let your hand do the work for you and just go head to toe with some some nice, crisp, bold line work. And then we'll add a little bit more interior detail for this phase, and we'll have a nice clean line image to work with to submit and assuming that's approved for the next phase. We have a nice solid line drawing that we can make our silhouette from to start blocking in and doing our value painting. So that's gonna be a really fun step coming up. Next. We'll do the face in skin first and then, uh, will go into armor rendering, which is a whole different ballgame. I think you're gonna enjoy some of the techniques I have to share about that and tracing all of these elements, adding a little bit of tread to the bottom of these shoes just for a little extra detail, you'll line The X Step is a great place to do that. Come up with new little embellishments just to finish rounding out your character and making it a more complete in interesting image. I think we've basically gone head to toe. So now I'm just gonna come back and start filling in some of these interior details. No, I gotta do this. Cape is well, nice to have some drapery to contrast with. All of this hard metal. A soft cloth texture will work well. And of course, there will be some opportunities for a different kind of, uh, of color. Contrast is well, so I just used the marquee tool to make a perfect oval shape for that little hatch type thing and time to just make a ah smaller brush shape. And we'll just add in some some line work to these interior shapes just to make it seem more. Give it some more, for my guess, make it seem more tangible and define some of these shapes a little bit better. But we're just about to the point where we can turn off the underlying sketch, because this, this should be ableto stand up on its own pretty soon without much help. Some fine line work for these flexible metal parts and the joints like the shoulder and the neck in little details, like this little air vent on the top of her torso. Little bolt type things around the shoulder armor. But all kinds of cool, little repeating details that you can add to this futuristic science fiction type of design language. So many great references to draw from. Sure, we've all seen hundreds of different SciFi movies over the years and so many great armor designs and different types of design language that you can you can draw upon so that that huge volume of visual memories that you have in your mind this is where you put it to use every every cool design you've ever seen. Just let let that inspire you and draw upon that as a reference. But a few little interior details and some little line worked to make it seem metallic intangible. And we'll just about be ready to G o. Got to go head to toe. It takes a little bit of patients to make sure that everything's working right, but you can see I switched off the sketch layer and it's standing up very well on its own without it. And it looks nice and clean and crisp like I had hoped. So just a little more detail work. And I think this is just about ready to block in, adding some little vent holes just to make her armor seem a little cooler and in detail. These little functional things can add some interest, but I think this is good to go up next. We'll block it in, and we'll start our painting 15. Project 2 - Female Space Hero - Skin, Eyes & Hair: Oh, hi, everyone. This is Hardy. In this section, we will block in our line drawing and start our face pain. So let's get started. As you can see, we've got our finished ink drawing here, but I've also pasted in the splash background. You can see that on a layer. It's the exact same one that we used in the Steampunk General Project. So I just dragged that in from that document and that will block this in. So I've got my magic wand tool and on the ink layer of selected the outside and also that little negative shape that her arm creates. And then I select the inverse, so that gives me a selection of her silhouette that I can then fill in on a new layer. I'll name that silhouette and fill in with this nice, dark scion color that I always use as a base. So now we've got a blocked in silhouette. I'll make a copy of my ink layer so that I could merge those two together. So there we go. We've got a blocked in shape with our Leinart visible and a great way to start our value painting. So I've created a new layer for the value of her face. We're gonna take care of skin tones first before we do any kind of armor rendering. And again, I would certainly encourage you to have the painting faces course complete up to this point because we're drawing on all of the skills we learned in that course to get this step done . And, of course, the face is a huge part of the personality of the character that you're creating. So this we want to be, ah, really shining high point of our character, even if you design some awesome armor. If the face looks weird or unrealistic, that's kind of the only thing anyone will see so thes skills, air really important for good character drawing. But just to sort of touch on the stuff that we learn in the painting faces course, I'm basically just considering this. A three dimensional form is if we're rendering a simple sphere. So I've got my light source from the upper left corner right now, and we're just imagining how light would hit all of the three dimensional forms of the face . The planes that are facing towards the light source have a higher value in the plains that face away have a darker value. So it really is just about a simple is that in terms of light and dark? But the other key element to keep in mind is value edges. We want a good mix of soft edges where the skin sort of softly fades from light to shadow. But we also want hard edges, areas where it sharply turns from light to dark. You can see that right under the nostril. There, even where the lips come together, those really stark lines that create nice, sharp, great Asians from light to dark, those air a really key. You need both. You need the soft ones and the hard ones a good mix of value edges to create realistic looking skin. And, of course, their supplies Teoh creature rendering as well in other courses. So keeping that in mind, I've got my basic values in place here, and I'm just doing some smudging to make her skin seem a little bit smoother. Don't want to seem seeming overly textured, especially on a female character. It's good to kind of smooth things out maybe a little more than you would on a male character. It gives the skin a nice, idealized quality that it always seems to look nice on a female character. So just doing a little bit of touching up, unifying a few things and carving out another nice stark value edge in the corner of the eye. That's always a nice place to include a high value, great Asian. Ah, nice sharp edge is in the corner of the eye and just subtly adjusting values around the corners of the mouth. In this stuff, it's it's incredible how powerful it is, because just a few marks, one way or the other, and you can totally change the characters attitude. So I wanted her to remain mostly neutral, maybe a slightly stern, sober face. But I don't want any kind of smirk, or I don't want her to look angry, particularly just sort of purposeful and resolute. So mostly neutral here. No particular expression were going for a few places. I wanna make shine are the tip of the nose, the cheekbone on the lighter side and also a few areas of the forehead, like right above the eyebrow and in the center of the forehead, right below the hairline, as you can see there. So savior, your brightest brights for those areas, it really gives the skin just the right level of shyness to make it seem realistic. And, of course, don't forget the ears. We always need to include some rendering there, but I think this is coming together nicely. She certainly looks three dimensional. We got a general lighter side on the right side of the page now, and it sort of goes to some darker tones on the left side of the page so that that gentle, great Asian, from light to dark overall gives her entire face kind of a three dimensional roundness. That's really nice and helps sell. It is something realistic and just adding a little bit of paint into her hairline area, and I'm gonna smudge that out. But I think this is looking really nice. We're gonna do a hue saturation adjustment to change that bright orange color into a very bright off white. And here's where we'll do our skin tone modulation. So notice I've made another layer beneath the value painting, and on this layer I am painting in some reds in certain areas of the face, so the nose, lips, ears and cheeks. I'm gonna be very heavy with that red. I want those parts of the face to seem much more red in Q than the other parts of the face . The scalp and jaw and chin can be left with a little more of that science showing through. Now. If this was a man, we would let a lot of that show through, and it would look like shaving beard area. But for for a female character, obviously you don't want to look like she has a five oclock shadow, so a little more red than we normally would. But that little modulation right there really helps it seem realistic. So I've merged those two layers together, and now I'm just adding in some shadows, and I'll start refining things a little bit again, making that darker side of her face a little bit darker, just around things out at a lot of realism and fine tuning the nose here, sort of defining that other nostril a little bit better, but don't want her nose to get to pinched looking. Don't want her to look like Michael Jackson or anything late. Michael Jackson, Um, adding a little more red to the cheeks just for that skin tone modulation and just sort of sampling colors by hitting Ault or option on the keyboard and then painting them back in. It sort of has a unifying effect. If you just sort of pick up colors and then lay them down again. It brings it all together nicely and you'll notice I'm switching from the brush tool to the smudge tool. A good bed all kind of laid down some paint and then smeared around with this smudge tool just to give everything a nice blended outlook. And when you're using, that's much to let you preserve your hard edges as well. So you can keep that nice combination of soft edges and hard edges that that help our value painting seem convincing and notice. I'll jump back in the history panel if I go down the wrong path or anything, so that's always available to you. If you do something you don't like, just go back in history, and I grabbed a very bright, almost white, off white color just to add some really bright highlights to the lips here and the tip of the nose. The corner of the near I in the forehead as well, just to give the skin a little extra shine. You don't want to seem too shiny, or it'll look a greasy, your wet or something. But a little bit of highlight on the skin really makes it seem authentic as skin. And this is coming together pretty well, just, ah, sort of averaging out a few tones here by picking up and laying down paint just so that it doesn't seem anything. You don't want anything to be too modeled or blotchy, doing a little bit of a color balance adjustment here to see if I like a different kind of quality. And adjusting the brightness is well, I think that is an improvement, so I'm going to stick with that. I shifted it a little more towards Scion, and I brighten things up just a little bit, and I think that it works well. Kind of gives it a feel that she's in sort of a colder, scifi type. Sterile environment works better, I think, than that warmer set of tones that we had beforehand and just a little bit more smudging here just to get everything looking just right on her face before we move on to our next step. And with that, I think we're good to go. I'm going to just paint in some whites of her eyes right here on the skin layer, just trying to make it look like three dimensional spears inside of her eyes. And if you leave a little bit of room some of that blackness around the edges, it's sort of automatically makes it look like eyelashes. And there you go. I'm just sampling some of that dark color to paint in her pupils, and you got to make sure that they're both looking in the same direction so she doesn't look cross eyed or anything. So it takes me a few tries to get that just right, but got her sort of resolutely looking off into the distance. I think that's just right for the attitude I'm looking for. Looks looking great. I love it. So the darkening the top of her eyes a little bit just to make them seem sort of set back in their sockets. Although the whites of the eyes are pretty light, it always seems to work better if you make them seem just about is high value is the skin. In other words, don't make them too white or they'll seem just radiant and fake looking. So what the whites of the eyes to to really not be all that bright are they end up looking sake? I think that's working well. Gonna do a little bit of fine tuning here to the cheeks in the forehead, just ah, when you start rendering the eyes, you can sort of notice some of the surrounding skin might need some touching up. And that's what I'm doing here. Just a fixed things up. Make it all work together, dark in this ear, up just a little bit just to bring some focus to her eyes in the foreground. Make that far side I a little bit darker and even a few things out over here. Even though it's on the shadow side, we still wanted to all work correctly. I think that's just working pretty well, so I'm gonna sample a little bit of that color and make this area under her eyebrow a little bit darker. I don't want it to look like she has super heavy makeup or anything, but, uh, kind of a little eye. Shadow treatment, I guess, is what I'm doing here. Taking a look at trying to liquefy this Just this I looks a little bit out of place, so it looks weird when you see only the skin layer and liquefy. But if you can use your imagination a little bit, you can you can still get that done. I think that fix that. I just right. They seem to be looking in the same direction. Everything looks straight and correct. So we're good to go there just polishing up this side of the face where changes from light to dark and putting that bright white highlight in the center of the eye and bouncing a little bit of color in here to give her some lighter irises. Oh, man, those were great. I like like that always just seems to bring the character toe life right when you do that makes your eyes seem very fierce and alive. So that's just what I was going for. Racing out some skin tones here, but I think this step is just about good. To go up next will start rendering some hair, so I'm erasing away a few of these little metal hearing pieces before we move on to our next step. Now that we're ready to do that, I've created a new layer called Hair, and I'll grab my chalk brush once again, And I think I'm gonna try some really wild red hair. So I'm just going to start blocking in some some big clumps of hair here, some some chunks and I'm not really worried about individuals strands yet. I just want to sort of set a nice base for this really bright, fiery red hair that I have in mind, and it's obviously beyond the range of any kind of natural hair, but I thought just sort of spiky, fiery red hair might be a cool thing to try and looks pretty cool. I might end up toning that down in a later step, but for now, I think I'm gonna go with this pretty neat looking so notice I've got kind of, ah, a set of peaks of hair at the top where it sort of changes from light to dark. Help sort of define that spiky nature, and it makes the hair seem three dimensional. If you have that that nice peek at the top where goes from light to dark. So I grabbed a lighter version of this color, and I'm just painting in some highlights, kind of getting down to some individual strands now to make it seem like the hair has some some strands that are sort of shining in the light source. Give it some more three dimensionality, and I think that looks good. Flipping things constantly is always just to keep it fresh, adding a little bit of a shadow underneath where it it casts against the forehead. And now, for some more highlights, even brighter this time just to make it seem shiny, the way hair can be shiny. And now I'm smudging things out just to, ah, to pick out some individual strands and blend things out, give it a nice, soft, great Asian and make those individual wisps of hair seem more naturalistic. And just like that very simple technique for creating some very realistic hair. And I think we're about good there. Up next will start rendering her armor 16. Project 2 - Female Space Hero - Armor: Oh, hi, everyone. This is Hardy. In this section, we will begin painting in our characters armor. So let's get started. So, as you can see, we've got our skin and hair all painted in, so I'll start a new layer and we will start painting armor. Now, I'm gonna grab a kind of off white, greenish yellow color, and I'm just going to start rendering some basic cylindrical shapes. And I've got a really labor saving technique of getting this done as we sort of make one cylindrical shape. And then I'll just grab that and copy it all around the character and create all of her her various forms of armor just by copying that one basic shape. As you can see, I'm using all of the warp tools Teoh to make it fit, flipping things around until it fits the various large armor sections. And that's a really great quick way to to block in the majority of the tone that will need for this armor. And then we'll just come back in and in detail in things cleanups, um, edges and what not, But this is a great way to get the majority of the armor material down on the page, and then and then you you can just sort of take it from there. So a lot of copying and warping is a keyboard shortcut. I select the arrow tool by hitting V, and then if you hold down Ault and Shift, and if you move the layer, it automatically makes a copy of that on a new layer. So with the air a tool selected, I'm just holding down Ault and Shift and then moving that layer. That's how I'm sort of grabbing those layers and making copies so quickly something kind of off camera. I wanted to explain and merging all of those copies together and then selecting the inverse to delete everything that sort of went outside of the character silhouette. And now I've drop the opacity back on that layer just a little bit so that I can see the underlying Leinart. And I'm just a racing away, sort of trimming away where I don't want that armor material to be starting with a very high value material. I wanted to be not metallic armor, but sort of ah composite sort of hard plastic type thing that you see a lot of these scifi suits of armor made out of So that's what I'm going for here. Don't want it to be too shiny, just the right shining is for something like this. So just trying to define these little individual armor plates a little bit here and what's erased over there by accident. And now I'm just sort of cutting things out, making some hard lines that look cool. Next, all those soft gradations of those cylindrical shapes there. So that's basically what we do is easily drop in a lot of these cylinder shapes and then come back and sort of clean things up and cut them out so that they fit. And that's a great way to go here. So moving on to the feet, I had a little more rendering down here. I want to give it a similar treatment just about all over, and this is just a first step. I sort of want to give her entire suit 11 pass with this white color, and then we'll go back in and out at all kinds of details. So we're not so worried about color design or making it interesting or anything like that. We're just sort of defining all of these shapes, and then we'll add in some of that color interest later. So this is round two, more or less of the same process. I just wanted to do this on a couple of different layers just so that I could keep things a little bit separated. Not have everything bleed together so much, but same sort of thing. I made a simple cylinder shape, and I just copy it, transform it and then a race away to make it fit its shape much easier than just re rendering every every area. I found that to be true. If if you just copy it and transform it, everything looks kind of nice and uniform like you would want it to. And you don't spend all of your time painting and smudging. You can just get right down Teoh, making it more realistic looking. Get down to your design and the fun stuff. After all, although this stuff has to stay fun, I think fun artwork is is always when you do your best, so anything you can do to keep things light and breezy and keep yourself from getting bogged down. It's a great way to go a little more trimming out here and feeling in some of these other men. Armor plates on the far side. No need to copy and paste over there When it's a really small shape, I'll just paint it in by hand. Easy enough just to take care of that same thing with these knee pads down here have got that one plane facing up towards the light source so wanted that to be very bright. But the rest of this knee pad kind of curves down and away. So a little bit darker value there and want to make sure that it looks symmetrical so that the knee pad on the other side matches the one on the near side, etcetera and erasing away a little bit of the armor on this dark the farther side. Just to make things over all round out towards the far side. Give it a nice three dimensional look, and I think that's working well. I'm gonna start a racing away. Some shadow shapes at planes that are facing away from the light source, like here on the chest plate, erasing the underside so that it makes it seem like part of that armor is facing up towards the light and part is facing down towards the shadow. So adding a little second level detail in here to the armor by a racing away and just boosting some values where it needs to be. So we render the gross form the general form first and then come back in and add these more subtle form details that make it all work and just jumping back from a race tool to brush, tool back and forth, back and forth, just defining things, cutting out some little hard edges that make make it seem like this armor has hard lines to it again, adding Cem angular kind of triangle shapes just to go along with the nice, curvy, feminine qualities that we have already. That contrast is really what makes it interesting, and I'm realizing how much this is looking like a stormtrooper to begin with. But don't worry. We're gonna add a lot more detail later on and in color toe, get it far away from that, but certainly is looking like she is, ah, stormtrooper to begin with. So that was unintentional. But I know I can fix that just rendering and smudging gonna race away a little bit of the line work. So that's one of the reasons we keep our ink layer on its own layer. You can command click the ink layer and get a selection for all of those lines you have under There's actually made a selection and erased away a little bit so that some of those lines could show through. I'm doing just a little bit of fine line work around. Some of these border shapes have turned off shape dynamics that I can shift, collect and do some straight lines if I need to, using the clone stamp there to make some perfectly parallel lines. So now I'm holding down shift. To make those perfectly straight lines really heightens this sense of angularity of that shoulder armor pad in particular. But when you add that bright highlight along the edge, it makes it seem sharp, like the edge of that metal pieces catching more light than the rest of it cause it's sharp , so that's a cool way to make your metal plates or composite metal. Whatever we're saying, this is more realistic. In Believable is a nice bright highlight near the edge, and you can see him starting to use quite a few layers, just things that seem to be easier to be kept separate. Like these highlights, for example, separating those out from the the armour underneath just because I may want to smudge something or a race away, one independently of the other, so feel free to use as many layers as you need, especially in these early construction phase is I tend to merge them together later once I'm happy with the way they've come together just because I like working on single layers whenever possible. But of course, when you're in this early exploring part of the project in terms of rendering, feel free to use as many layers as you want, nobody's gonna be seeing these files but you. So it's OK if if they're a total mess, just just as long as it works for you. Don't worry about it, adding a little bit of treatment to the knee pads here. But I was looking a little messy, going to try to clean those up with some erasing, give it a nice cast shadow, make it all seem to add up a little bit better and really want to echo those forms on both sides. Want to make sure that it adds up, made a little selections that I could erase away. Some of that leg armour make it seem to kind of disappear behind that knee pat. Give it a little more three dimensionality. I think that's an improvement jumping all around here, gonna erase away that little hatch looking thing on the side. I think I'll add sort of a shiny metal access panel or something to that later. But for now, I just wanna put a little highlight around that edge and jumping back down here to the knees. I'm sure I seem a little scatterbrained with how much I'm all over the page, but I find that's a good way to keep things fresh in your minds eye. You get too caught up in detail ing one certain part of a character. You sort of lose track of the big picture, and you can find yourself looking at something that you don't really like in terms of a big picture or a certain part of the character just won't work with the rest of it so it can. It can end up. You've spent hours going down the wrong path, so jumping around is a good way to keep things fresh in your minds eye and make sure you don't get too bogged down on any certain part. So I'm using the clone stamp tool. Here. Just toe echoes some of those shapes and creates an easy repeating forms is to make that repeating layered looking armor around the ankles and boots air Pretty nice, easy way toe, copy a shape and make it work and cutting out some hard edges to on that leg armor just to give it a more angular looks and nice, sleek, sharp lines. Just to give that whole quick, sleek, predatory feel that we're trying to capture here go along with the cool attitude that we managed to capture with her face and hair. So I've selected that ink layer once again, and I'm a racing away some of this armor so that we can see the line work underneath. That's exactly why I saved the ink layer so that I could selectively erase away some of this stuff. But now that I've got that done, I've actually made a new layer, and I'm using some black lines. We're not black, but the dark, sighing in color toe actually add in some line work. On top of this, I want to actually see some little lines where panels of the armor meet together. I want them all to be pretty thin. Lines like everything fits together very tightly, like it was all made T fit together. But these little lines air cool. They had a lot of detail and make it seem like something that was really construct. It gives it a lot of tangible riel riel quality to it. So that's what those little dark lines do. Forest. Give it some neat little articulations in all kinds of access panels. Things that you expect to see in any kind of sci fi technology also managed to add in that little vent on top of the chest plate. I really like that detail in these little joint here. Down in the middle of the leg, these little seems I guess we could call them seems Ah, give you a nice opportunity. Teoh change color to We'll change color later on, but you can often change from one color to another. Along one of those same lines and it seems like a realistic fit. So that's what all those little dark lines do for. Just give us some detail and give us, um, some hard edges for our color choices to hand John later. So it's sort of like you have to do your X step twice, But, uh, that's sort of ah, what we do here. So I've copied merged. There's that part of the hip that I really like, the shapes that it's creating. I thought I could steal that and repeat it for this top armor piece of this glove that's holding the trigger of her gun. So once I made that selection, I hit command shift, see? And that does copy, merge it. Cops copies every layer. And then when you paste it, it gives you everything. Not just that armour layer, but everything down below as well. And now, just making some good use of that. I like the way it worked. Here we go, going to select it and command shift, see to copy, merged and pay. So you see, it grabbed all layers. They're not just that armour layer, and I like that shape so much I'm gonna repeat it in a few other places. I know this seems kind of like cheating, like you're just copying something, But in reality, a suit of armor would probably have repeating elements like this. So I think it's a good fit, and it certainly makes life easier for use an artist to get those shapes that you like in his many places as they worked. Of course, you can take this too far and just have something repeating way too much. But it's a nice trick here, so I think we're just about done with that composite material. I'm going to do a darker material for the Let's call it under armour for the stuff in her midsection and it all of her joints or elbow and trying a cool color here and want this to be darker overall. Just a contrast with the white ish armor and not quite sure what I want this material to be . When I started sort of experimenting with some cloth type looks, but I think I'm gonna make it look a little bit shiny, er, kind of like that rubbery material you see sometimes in mid section. So here in the mid section, I want to make it look a little shiny or make some of these little rib like effects a little more prominent. I think that's cool. That that looks a lot more scifi. I like the way that's coming together, and we'll add some texture later. But I think that works well and let me try a different color. I think I want something a little warmer, maybe kind of a brown, But, um, I want this to be a pretty subtle presence. Overall, I wanted to just be there to sort of contrast with the white armor and erasing away some of those little lines just to give it some detail. And that works really well. It fits nicely with the lighter colored armor, and it's a good fit. It it's Ah, nice, nice blend of colors. So I'm doing another copy merged. I like the way that little area around her ribs looks a lot, so I'm just going to let's say, borrow that and use it on her far arm over here and let's see if it'll work on the near Armas. Well, perfect. And we've saved a lot of work, but not having to redo that. So I might be pushing my luck here, but let me see if I can make it work for her neck to. That's not bad. I'll race it away to make it fit. And, yeah, that'll work will darken that a little. I don't want it to be 22 loud of a presence, just something that's there for the rest of the armor to sort of sit on. I think that works nicely. So next out darkened things. I'm gonna fill the entire figure in with a color, and I've said it to multiply so you can see the entire figure is sort of darkened. And I'm asked that that whole layer out, but I'm just revealing it by painting white in certain places. I just want to have a little accent color on some of this white armor. So just a few areas sort of like a trim color to make it seem a little more interesting. Not quite so. One note. Just bright white everywhere but little border areas like around her torso in her hips. It's nice to have just a tiny, subtle bit of color variation to make that seem a little more interesting. That's all we're doing there with that darken layer. Gonna copy this midsection one more time to see if I could make that work is part of the leg, cause that's looking a little plane down there. I'm not sure if I like how that's working. I don't think that does work. So I might go back to the this little piece of armor around the hip that I liked earlier to see if I can repeat that a few times, make sort of an interesting repeating pattern. So warping that into place and I'm gonna trim the shape just a little bit. Blend that in and what I'll do is make a little white highlight. And then I'm going to start copying that layer toe layers beneath. And I'll just repeat that over and over again until we've got this layered, articulating looking pattern of armor. So really, I'm just repeating that same shape but sliding it underneath the layer above it and just repeating that process over and over again until we get this cool, segmented looking, kind of caterpillar looking thing on her leg. But I think that's a lot more interesting than what was there. I think that works well, taking a look zooming back here, I think I'm going to stick with that. So I'll copy that over to the other leg to make it symmetrical, work things in place a little bit. And I think that'll work for us. Gonna brighten things a little. It looked a little dark down there, a little bit of shadowing just to make it a little different. I didn't want it to look so similar to the knee pad above it. So just some subtle changes here to make it fit. And just like that, we've improved. I think that shin armor quite a good bit. So adjusting things just to make it fit, making it darker since it's on a shadow side over there. And that looks good, pretty three dimensional. So I'm starting to merge certain layers together just to sort of start consolidating things . This is working pretty well for me overall so we can start thinking about consolidating. I made a circle shape, and I'm now subtracting out a different circle shape. And what I'm using here is some selection tools just to create a little metal flanges looking piece. So with some color dodge paint I made a really shiny looking metal piece that we're just going to drop right into that little hatch opening that we left earlier. So it looks like some kind of little handle that you can twist. Maybe that's how you get the armor off is by by doing that, So that looks cool. I'm going to copy. Merge that and see if I can use that little assembly elsewhere, maybe other places where armor can be popped off. It's a little functionality. Things to keep in mind. Cool little details. I've got this metallic layer going, and I just want a few little areas of really shiny metal. For the most part, the composite white armor is is pretty mad. It's not very shiny, so just for some contrast, I want some really shiny areas. So with my brush tool, I've got it sent Teoh Color Dodge, and that's how you make that really shine. Equality Color Dodge makes metal textures really well because every brush stroke that you make it makes the color brighter and more saturated, so it quickly goes from dark to very shiny, which is what you want when creating metal. So on that layer I'm taking care of those piercings as well, just to make those shiny. And that looks cool, toning down the neck armor just a little bit and want it quite so loud and just renaming that one so that it's all nicely organized and grabbing that little hatch opening thing one more time at work here on this thigh area on the shadow side. And I think it does. So now this is one of my favorite tricks. I'm just filling in a circle on a new layer, and I'm making another circle inside, and I'm gonna stroke that by going to edit stroke. And it just creates a little outline. A racing away some of the midsection so that it looks like sort of a little rivet counter sunk into, Ah, a little hole there. And that's his cool little bit of machining that you can then use the clone stamp to repeat all over the place, and I tend to get a little carried away with these things. But I just love that effect. A little counter sunk rivet. And of course, you can take this way too far, and I probably do. But it's such a need effect, and it's just so easy to stamp these all over the place. It makes the armor look really cool, like it was machined in mechanical, even copied it and squashed one sideways. A little suit. It would fit the perspective a little bit better, but with very little manipulation, you barely even need to change these things. And they seem to fit in the perspective. So a really cool, easy way to add Cem realism and detail without much work at all. So I hope you find that really interesting. I use that for rivets on all kinds of machines or suits of armor, anything that has little bolts that need to make it look like it was machine. That's a really great trick. So I'm doing something similar on this midsection armor. I've copied that same shape from the hip, and I'm just copying it and making a little segmented, repeating pattern of it. I just saw her midsection needed something a little more interesting going on. So now that I've got that segmented Siris of repeating shapes together, I'm warping that into place, and then I'll erase it away so that it's not covering the hand and I think that looks much cooler. Something more interesting than just that flat area in the middle. I think that works much better. Definitely more interesting. And it it fits with the rest of the under armour is well, gonna shadow things up a little bit. I'm just taking a step back, Teoh. Kind of look at things and see if I like how it's all working. So just about the only thing left to render is this cloak. I'm gonna try this bright red like we have with her hair just to try and get a little unity with my color scheme. And it looks pretty cool. I think I might change it later on. But just for rendering the drapery. Remember those Z shaped strokes that we learned about in our color rendering lecture? And that's just about all there is to it here, a lot of z shaping wherever it wrinkles around this bunched up part around her, her head and neck and then down at this flowing part of the cape. Just those long strokes that we talked about as well. And that's really all there is to it. I think that looks pretty good and Our next lecture will add all kinds of final finishing touches and polished, but this is looking great. I'll see in the next lecture. 17. Project 2 - Female Space Hero - Final Polish: Oh, uh, everyone, this is Hardy. In this lecture, we will add final Polish to our character. So let's get started after about a five minute break of come back to this and I'm thinking that this cape is a little too Red Riding Hood, so I'm going to change the color on that. But after all, this is why we keep things on layers so that we can easily do a hue saturation adjustment like I'm doing here and easily change that. Something in a cooler color might work a little bit better, especially when paired with that really bright orange hair. Although I make change, that is well, so I'm thinking, sort of ah, blue issue and a lot less saturated, kind of a darker gray, and I like that much better. So up next, we're gonna add some paint to her armor. So I've made a selection of the whole character and filled it in with an orange color, and I've said it to multiply so you could see the entire character was darkened with that orangish color. I then mask the whole thing out so that I can paint on the layer mask and reveal it like I'm doing here. Basically, it's just a good organized way to set up your color on an adjustment that you can just paint in and reveal it with that mask. So I'm just sort of splashing in this cool copper orange color around to see where I want tohave. Parts of her armor be colored in and in which parts I want to leave white, and I think that's coming along well. You can see right away how much interest it adds, always love this part of armor design. It's sort of like we've built a really cool race car, and now we get to give it a slick paint job. So that's what I'm doing here, just sort of figuring out which parts of the armor I want this great orange color to be applied to. And now I'm just sort of cutting out some edges, making it fit along. Some of those seems that we made earlier, and I think that works really well and that orange goes great with that orange Kate. I mean, the blue cape in her hair is well, I really like how this is coming together, so just picking spots to do that nice accident color, and I think I might actually leave the knee pads white. It was looking a little too covered up down, down on the bottom half, so I think that works well. And looking at this, I think I am going to change your hair color. After all, it's just so saturated. They got my dark, innit? Goto kind of, ah, Chestnut Brown, adding a little bit more scion just to cool things. Often that is perfect, that that works great with the the Cape color and that nice orange feature color that we've included on her armor. Now let me see if there's a color that might work better for the under armour layer as well . But overall, I think this is coming together very nicely. We've got that nice, complimentary color scheme of the orange and blue issues. Working together really nicely goes well with her skin tone and even the background. So I think this works well, refining things a little bit. Just making sure that all those edges where the paint color adds up doesn't doesn't go over the line anywhere, so I got a color within the lines, just like a coloring book when you were a kid. So now what I'm gonna do is paint in some little chip marks. I'm just masking it out. So I'm painting with black on the layer mask and just sort of scratching out some little chip marks just to give. Give her armor a little extra detail, make it seem like she's been in some battles and there's a little wear and tear on her armor. Really great detail. So just tiny little tick marks here and there really gonna pull off this effect? It also lets some of that that cool white armor colors shine through just a great detail and adds a lot of realism and back story, something that's always a lot of fun down below, just sick anywhere where there's kind of a sharp angle of the armor. That's sort of the highest point that's most likely to bump into anything. So that's why being a little heavy handed with those scratch marks on those edges. One last look at the Cape here just to see if there's a color that might work slightly better. And that's just about perfect. So know what I'd like to do is a little bit of decal ing just to add a logo type thing that I think will go well on her shoulder pad. And maybe her cape is well, so I'm just using some marquee tools. I'm just sort of making this up as I go to make some kind of thinking like a triangle design. So a little bit of very quick graphic design here. Just making this up with selection tools and transforming. Oftentimes, if you're hired to create a character like this, you'll be provided with some kind of a logo or an icon that your client wants to include on the character, just to show what what team they're honor, what what faction or what have you for a video game or a movie? So I'm making this up this time. But this is often something that's provided to you, but it could be fun to play with and make up. But honestly, you could see just, ah, a lot of repeating shapes. I'm gonna merge these together, contract the selection and then delete the inside just to make it an outline rather than solid shapes about 19 pixels in. He used to lead it away, and that kind of Hollows out your shape, and I think that works well. So making a copy of it, I'm going to start putting this logo on this shoulder here, distorting that into place. That's a good fit. It goes well with the triangular shape of her shoulder pad, and I'm also gonna put it on the cape. Here is Well, so it's just solid black in these two places now, But we're gonna use those shapes as a selection to do some other stuff. So just warping that into place. Kinda looks like a print part of ah. Of her cape trying it out down here on the leg. Uh, not sure if we need that. I think it's good in the other two places, but that might be overkill. So with those two, emerge those together and I just trimmed away the outside by selecting the inverse. And I'm just gonna go back to my paint layer and sort of erase away the orange paint on her shoulder. In the shape of that logo I had it is a selection, so it looks like a stencil was there when it was painted around. Now for the cape, I'm gonna paint in some white that's so bright I'm gonna set it to overlay to let some of the color in. So it's It's a lot more more subtle on overlay and perfect. It looks like she's got a nice print of that logo on her cape. So with those details added, Now we'll move to secondary light, another favorite part of mine. So grabbing a great color similar to the background. We're gonna just bounce in some edge lighting here on this side of her face. It's sort of in the shadows. I love this part. It it really makes it more three dimensional and adds a ton of information about her environment as well, really makes it look beautiful and painterly, Always a fun part of the process. So bouncing a little bit of that light on that dark side of the face, the ear just keep your surfaces in mind and make it consistent with that light source hitting all of those different places. But that had so much realism and drama and just really make it seem space in SciFi. All the good things we're trying toe get across here. Think that works beautifully, so bouncing that light around a little bit, getting it into the folds of the cape a little, maybe even a little bit down on her hip here, adding a little bit of shiny nous in some detail. But for the most part of just stick to the head now for a very bright kind of spotlight. Light sores. I've got an almost white, off white yellow color that I'm using to make these very bright edge lights on the other side. So sort of, ah, cooler reflected light on one side of the face in a really bright spotlight shining from above on the other side. This sort of makes your seem important having the spotlight honor like that. And it also does all those great three dimensional cues that we Likas well. But you can see how much drama that adds and what a nice, painterly look that gives it. So we're starting to get close to a finished product here, a little bit of refinement, and I think up next so we need to do is add some photo textures and we're good to go. So I've grabbed a photo of this skirt with this interesting print pattern and strangely, this works for all kinds of things. We don't want it to look like leopard pattern, but this tends to have this really cool, grainy texture. So I've got that in a photo textures group. And if I make a selection clicking on the silhouette and then hit layer mask, it cuts out everything so that the photo is on. Lee revealed inside of our characters silhouette. You see, we can move it around inside of there, and it works perfectly. So this is a great set up for doing photo text oring. So if we grab our photo texture layer group and switch it to soft light blending mode very important soft light, you can see it changes. We can see through the texture. It just lets a little bit of it through. Gives us all the texture we want, but it doesn't obscure are painting eso I'm doing a little bit of brightness and contrast. Adjustment was looking a little dark, and then I think I'm gonna make this bigger as well. Tried inverting it, but I like it regular, So I'm gonna make it bigger just to make the scale of that leopard pattern a little bit different, taking some of the saturation down as well and reducing the opacity. And as you can see, it just gives a cool kind of modeled look to the armor. And I'm gonna clone stamp around a little bit, just toe splash that texture around just to get a little bit of graininess in tooth. But that's about all we need for this one. Just some nice metal texture ring to make things look a little more interesting. Not quite as flat as they did. And I think that that's just about all we need. So I've grouped everything together and made a copy. And now I've got emerged version and I'm just gonna go around the entire edge and do a little bit of very light smudging just to blend things together, treating the edges as we call it, just so that you don't have any to sharp or pixelated edges that can really kill that sense of roundness and three dimensionality that we've worked so hard to achieve. So that's all I'm doing here is just some very light smudging and blending around the outside perimeter and a little bit harder on this cape. We wanted to look just a little bit more blurry on the edges cause it's moving, blowing in the wind and that far foot looks a little dark. So I'm just gonna copy the foreground foot and, ah, warp it into place so that it fits. And that works great. Trimming the outside. I think that's just the right amount of detail. Didn't want it to be too active, but that works very well. A little more blending on the hair again. It's moving in the wind as well. So that could be just a little bit blurrier and a little bit of last minute refinement. Taking a look at everything, seeing if, if anything, needs more smudging and I think that looks well, those edges work very nicely. So I'm gonna grab a round brush and switched to color Dodge mode and do a little bit of bright ning here. If you do this, it has a lot of nice value, pop. You can see just a few areas like the shoulder in the chest plate, that I want to add a nice, nice visual pop, too. So in Brighton, some of that background ah, background reflected light is well, just toe makesem areas shine be really eye catching. I think that works well that that nice orange copper color is really showing through, like how that works and just a little bit more detail ing in the hair, just kind of finishing touches wherever they seem to be needed here. Wanted to pick out a few individual wisps of hair and there and noticing a little issue on the jaw line that I want to refine a little bit of smoothing out here and I think we're good. I'm gonna add a little cash shadow, just a sort of ground her in the environment, a new layer on multiply mode and we just pain in some vague shadow underneath her feet. Do a motion blur on our filters just to sort of pull that out to the edges. And there we go on instant cash shadow with practically no work at all. After that, a little bit of a glow behind her just to make her pop. And I think we've just about got a finished painting. Congratulations on completing the female space Year of Project. Let's take a look back at our project steps to see how far we've come. We started with a rough sketch based off of a figure template to get our general armor design in place. We then inked in the design to clean things up. After that, we blocked the character in an edit skin tones and hair We then rendered in the main armor and cloth materials. Finally, we added paint decals and secondary light sources for a polished final product. All in all, we went from a very row sketch to a finished product that we could be proud of for a detailed look. It how to design and render the gun that I paired with this character. Please check out the painting machines course. I hope you've really enjoyed this project. I look forward to seeing you for the next one. 18. Project 3 - Warrior - Sketch & Ink: everyone. This is Hardy and welcome to the warrior character project in this section, we're going to do this sketch and ink phases. So let's get started. I've got a blank canvas set up, and I'm just gonna get my brush set up here. It's the usual default chock brush. And I've created a new layer called Sketch. And I've got that set on about 30% opacity just to kind of simulate a pencil style mark making but bacon basic stuff here. Just the same stuff we've done for our other character projects and really, the way I get just about every project started, and I'm just going to start blocking in the rough forms of his figure just to try and get opposed down. So it this phase, we want to keep our our general project brief in mind and try and check all the boxes we need to for this guy. So I want to make a large fantasy kind of Viking style warrior gonna have him holding a big battle axe. I want to make sure and incorporate that into the pose. I'll have his hands holding it, so I want to make sure to position them correctly and just getting all the main parts of the body roughed in here and try and give him the kind of pose that I want starting to think about some some clothing and costuming, stuck type stuff. So just thinking, playing around with the idea of that shoulder pad on this far shoulder. And I think that looks pretty cool. But, uh, got his pose sort of aggressive. He's kind of hunched forward a little bit. Most of his weight on that front leg, just like he's leaning towards us a little bit. Sort of an aggressive, very, very intimidating pose. Because I want this guy to look pretty imposing. He's gonna be really Ah, muscle. A big guy, you know, look like a scary warrior. All kinds of a little details were gonna include to make him seem or imposing and formidable looking. So starting to get a little more detailed with the musculature figured we'd leave this guy shirtless. Just, uh, Teoh use some of that knowledge we learned in the figure painting course. Give him some big muscles. Always fun to paint. Always looks cool in a finished product. So gonna have this guy really really built. And I'm thinking he needs that big braided beard that we discussed in the project brief for this one. Just toe. Give him that. That Viking style that we're after, maybe some piercings as well. So it's starting to think about details like that to bring in some storytelling and and settle him into his his universe and setting that we're trying to sell here. So sort of shaved head on the side kind of Viking Mohawk style thing here looking pretty cool. And I think I'll even put a sword on his back. Kind of a secondary backup weapon in cases, acts gets knocked out of his hand. I think that would be a cool detail. And I'm gonna give him one of those killed style garments that the warriors of this kind of setting often have It sort of just a bunch of leather straps that hang down and sort of like a killed. I'm not sure what the technical name for that, but it fits with sort of a medieval armor kind of theme, and that'll work perfectly for the style and setting that we're going for here. So I think that's a good fit China include some details on this far shoulder Wondered about maybe animal for underneath there, but I'm not sure about that. Uh, remember, at this point, everything's just wide open. We're just settling on rough, rough ideas in pose and just feeling our way through like we do with every every project, really erasing and changing things as we go just to make it more refined and just feeling our way through until something looks right and stumbling across all kinds of happy accidents. You never know what you're gonna arrive at when you just sort of a race and add back in and fine tune can see I'm liquefying a little bit here. Want to make his upper body a little bit bigger? Uh, take this really kind of over the top on what? This guy that just look savage. And I think that's pretty good. Much better. You can see it before and after. And he's pretty big and barrel chested really fits with the personality we're going for. I don't want to go all the way to have him just full on Barbaric Savage. I want him to have some intelligence on not having him screaming or drooling or anything like that don't want him to be a villain, necessarily, but just an intimidating presence. And I think we're doing that pretty well. Notice I've got his hair and his beard and even the little kilt strap things sort of blowing in the wind. Remember, that's one of our ways to add Instant dramas have those little loose hanging parts of the character blowing in the wind. A really cool way to add some drama. So thinking about things like that as we go, remember that check list of ways to make a character look cool. Keep those in mind at every step and saying about this knee pad here, maybe sort of a square triangle combination shape with some spikes, maybe soon. Animal for just trying toe. Get that pose nailed down and make sure this all adds up in the right perspective. So things that air symmetrical on both sides, like his knees or his shoulders, need toe line up in the correct perspective plane. So make sure you keep that in mind when doing these full body characters, adding a little bit of detail here in there to this hand sort of refining that I want to make these hands look like they just really have a death grip on the on. This acts that they'll be holding and will design and paint the acts separately. That's in our painting machines. Course. It's part of the weaponry parts. If you want a detailed look, it have to concept out and render a really awesome battle acts. Be sure to check out that course, but for our character here will just leave him holding. Nothing will sort of just imagine the acts. And now that I know that a straight line will work between those, I don't have to worry about the pose not working later. So jumping around and just adding detail as we g o making things a little more interesting and refined, adding Cem layered kind of armor pieces here just to make his midsection look a little cooler that goes back to that design tip. Just toe add gear. The more stuff we can add to a character, the more interesting his background story is, and it just looks cool. For some reason, lots of little objects strapped onto a character just makes him look cool. So I'm actually repeating that hand. I liked his near hands. I'm going to just copy that and flip it and rotate it to fit with the other. And as you can see, that that works just about perfectly. I'm considering giving him, like, a bird motif. Maybe add some feathers to him like he's his people worship the crow or something. But I'm not sure if I'm gonna keep that at this point. Just messing with an idea to see if that that takes hold for me. But not committing to anything at this point, bringing this armed guard down a little so we can see more of those cool arm muscles. I think that's certainly gonna be, ah, memorable selling point for this character. So trying some feathers on his head to But, uh, I'm starting to cool on that idea. I don't think that quite fits with everything else. I think we could make that work with a Viking theme, but just not quite digging it for this guy. So we get rid of it just as easy as that. So just to finish the character out here, go head to toe, gotta get thes feet planted so that he fits in his environment and again keeping perspective in mind. Want those feet toe add up to the same perspective? Plane is his knees, hips and shoulders, all of those parts of the body that are the same on both sides. Those were what defined the perspective plane and warping things around. Just toe change the way his feet are set here just to change his pose. It's just Azizi is that if he seems like it's poses, just not quite right or a little awkward on we have to do. Is, is some adjustments with all of the transform tools that photo shop has, and you can correct it just as easily. These that can't imagine what we all used to do with pen and paper if if we didn't like opposed suppose you just have to start over. But that's a great part of the digital medium. You never have to worry just a race, feel your way through and keep on refining. And I think this is coming along pretty well defining some of this leg armor. They're coming in large him a little bit to fill out the canvas and just doing a check to see how he fills the space even once we do add, that acts in so you can see I sketched in a little rough shape toe to suggest the acts. But I think that's gonna work perfectly. Not too worried about that. So all kinds of little details to add in here. I've got some little hanging tassel things from his strap going across his chest, some little rivet stud looking things on his arm, guards thinking about maybe some little hanging jewelry here and there, but not too sure about that. So just going to refine his hair what it is here to be mostly short cropped, but a few longer wisps in the back on. And also that ponytail kind of blowing in the wind, too. You can, she see earlier added, That shield is well just to have more gear strapped to his back. Think that looks really cool? Maybe some little some little tied wrap. Things sort of blowing in the wind to You can take that too far sometimes, and I think I'm getting close, but I like it. I think all of these things blowing in the wind are cool. Also, be sure that you're consistent with your wind direction of got to the end of a project and realized that I had hair blowing in one direction and in a cape blowing in the other. So keep an eye on that. It's Ah, it's an easy thing to overlook, believe it or not. So I'm going to refine this armor a little bit. I think I wanted to be more of a layered, repeating thing going down his arm. Remember our fundamentals of design? We would like to have repetition where we can has a nice little segment it Look, I think I'm gonna do something similar here on the legs, sort of a segmented, layered type of armor covering his shins. Maybe working some kind of Celtic designs on these. A little bit later, we'll go into depth about how to create some really cool repeating patterns that could make your characters clothing look so much more interesting with just a little bit of work. So storing these little ideas away for later that they can come up while you're doing your sketch. But I think this is coming together very well. I like his poses, attitude, a lot of cool details. Think his musculature is just right and at this point of just sort of doing a little trial and error to see what kind of details I might like toe include in the later finished product. We want to get this far knee consistent with the near near one is well, make sure those legs air the same on both sides want to be consistent there. And I think that's looking pretty nice, just adding in a little more detail. But we will be inking this guy up in our next step. I think for the most part, the broad strokes are in place, adding a little bit of details of embellishment just to add interest. But at this point, it's just sort of figuring things out for myself. This is where you explore all of these options and sort of keep the ones you like and trash that ones that you don't before taking it to the next level of refinement, making this armband a little more detailed, sort of fine tuning things around his head and his his upper body. Just making sure all these lines are pretty stark where we've got him refining things down on his leg here is well, erasing away extraneous marks that were confusing things just to sharpen it up a little bit more. But that's what the ink step is. Four, for the most part, is is the refinement fades a little bit more polished on his hands, and I think I'm about ready to call this a Finnish sketch up next Will will start taking him in and give him a little more polished. So just like in all our projects, I've created a new ink layer, and on this past, we're just gonna go over the sketch that we've already made. But add just a little more refinement. We're gonna be a little more crisp and deliberate with our brush strokes not quite so loose and expressive and sketchy, but a little more deliberate here. We want this to be a a crisp and clean line illustration before we get past this point. So really, it's just ah matter of patiently tracing everything but being a little bit more Chris with your line work a little more deliberate, and you can also refine some details if there's something you weren't quite sure of or something you didn't describe quite fully in the sketch This is a great place to do it and kind of inform some of these details that you'll need to nail down before painting things in. So just just doing his face and beard here decided to keep it a goatee. So he's got a shaved jaw line. Just the beard on the and I think that looks pretty cool. Makes him look a little little more mean and intimidating. But we're walking that fine line between savage and intelligence that that I was hoping to hit. Think it's a good balance, making those neck muscles really prominent, starting to define some of this shoulder armor heading a little bit of detail. Some of that metal work can be kind of refined and interesting. So adding some of those little scallop patterns just to give that armor a little bit more interest in detail. And that's what the ink phases for. You've got your general shape to find already, so you just come back over it and then add a little bit more embellishment, make it more interesting and again what this hand look like. It's gripping that acts really tightly, So God got some crease lines. They're just toe to make it look like there's some tension that his hand is holding. I think that's working well to find some of these midsection muscles, that barrel chested look that we're going for and these Ah, really built upper body muscles as well. But it's gonna be a very cool painting that we're going to do it. A nice figure exercise to all this cool musculature that we get to render should look really cool in the finished product. It's part of the reasons why comic book heroes they're practically nothing but but muscle studies, even even the most ah built superhero. Their costume is practically nothing but but skin. They're all practically skin tight just so that the cool muscle forms could be shown through. So that's just something that people are hardwired toe to think. Looks cool, is really built, human muscles, male and female, and it works really well. So that's ah why it's often a cool thing to include in a character design and why it's ah, subject worth studying in the figure painting course to know your muscle anatomy so that you can use these really cool forms to your advantage and make your character ideas cooler . So I've got a bit of a different way in his midsection. I thought it was a little too complicated with too many layered things going on. So I started just reducing that to some simple triangle forms and that as another advantage . If you'll remember the shape language lecture that we talked about, triangles communicate aggressive and dangerousness. I thought those would fit with this imposing, kind of predatory looking character that we've got going here. So when went on that one, I think that's ah much better. It simplifies things and also adds that extra benefit of that design elements that that was behind that decision there, adding some some other little hanging things blowing in the wind, just toe give some or instant drama. But really, we're just sort of going around the entire project in refining this line work, making it all look nice and crisp and presentable so that after this phase we could submit it to a client, theoretically or a teacher and get it approved. That way, we know that everybody's on the same page before going to a final painting, because the last thing that you want to do is start and finish an entire painting without ever getting it approved by whoever you're doing it for. So this is a good place to take a break and just make sure that you are on the right track and that what you're coming up with so far works for your client or teacher. If if this is student work and adding a little bit of secondary interior detail these lines I've reduced my brush size so that the lines aren't nearly as bold as those larger general form lines, but details little metal detail, ing some scratches and making this leather texture a little more interesting. Adding Cem details, Maybe I'll do some stitch work looking things. I'm even copying this little triangular buckle. Gonna repeat that in a few places. Always nice when you can copy and repeat something like you get all that work for free. But maybe some little braided things going on on this strap that always really reinforces that Celtic or Norse look that we're trying to go for here, and I'm even starting to think about the war. Paint that I'd like his face toe have so made a few little indications over his eye there. But what will deal with that mainly in the painting phase? Probably even wait till the final polish phase. But that's gonna be a super cool part. You guys we're really gonna enjoy and just making his little armor plates a little more detailed Clone stamping in some rivets. Now that I've painted one, all I need to do is just copy that little circular shape over and over again. That what you're not just retracing little circles over and over again. Just let Photoshopped do the work for you and just copy them. Maybe some little details here on the leg armor. Be careful not to forget to detail legs. I tend to work from the top down, head and upper body. And sometimes I'm just sort of tired by the time I get to the legs and I've found that they look too plain compared to everything else. So be sure to take a balanced approach and make sure that everything's detailed appropriately from head to toe. So that's just what I'm doing here to finish this guy off, but gonna clone in a few more of those buckles. But I think we're in good shape before moving on. I want to just make sure that his proportions are correct. So I'm gonna copy his head and make sure that it fits with that 7.5 rule. And look at that. A nailed it. So that's kind of lucky. But he fits great up next will block him in and begin our value painting. 19. Project 3 - Warrior - Skin & Hair: Oh, hi, everyone, This is hard. In this lecture, we will add skin and hair to our warrior character. So let's get started. A few things I've done off camera here. First of all, I've pasted in a splash background on a layer underneath the ink layer. It's the same one from the other. Characters just pasted that, and I've also got a test rectangle just to make sure that that acts will fit in his hand. So that's all I've done. There were not going to use our ink layer and the magic wand tool to block in our characters silhouette. So I'm just selecting the outside and those interior shapes. And then I select in verse. And now I've got a selection that I can fill in with that dark scion color that I always use, and there we go. Next. I'll just make a copy of this ink layer so that I can merge Inc and silhouette together, and now that's ready to do our value painting. I'll just rename this silhouette, and we're just about good to go and noticing a few little straight marks that it sort of got caught when I use the magic wand tool, so I'm just going to use my eraser tool to trim away. Those also missed this little negative shape that I need to cut out to make those little wraps blowing in the wind correctly. But I think that's just about right, so I'll create a new layer. I'll just call that skin value and we'll get started with our value. Panting. Make this guy look three dimensional and I'm using the chalk brush once again is always and selecting that bright orange color that seems to work well, value wise with the scion. But again use whatever color you want cause over worried about his value at this point. So this is always a really fun step, kind of where we start to breathe life and personality into this character make him really seem alive. So we're just thinking three dimensionally imagining our our light source shining down and just keeping it consistent. The planes of the face that air facing up towards the light source. Those have a higher value in the planes of the face that air facing away from that light source have a darker value. In many ways, it's just a simple is that we need higher value, where it's facing the light source and darker where it's not just light in shadow. So I've noticed his head looks a little bit too tall, and I were kind of looking down on it, but just looked a little too tall. They're so I've made a little correction to my silhouette and trimmed away some stray marks outside. But that looks much better. I think we're good to go now. He doesn't have that tall, peanut shaped head that he sort of had. Sometimes you don't really notice these things until you started value painting. But great part about photo shop is you can make any adjustments you need to it practically any face. So no worries. Just fix something if it looks weird and keep rolling. So remember, other than just light source considerations, where we have light and dark facing towards, in a way, the light source. We also need to keep value edges in mind, and I know I talk about the same things during this step for all of these character project , but it's incredibly important to remember value edges. They play such a huge role in making realistic skin tones for humans and creatures. It's something to keep in mind for all kinds of projects at this phase, especially so we want to have smooth gradations in some places and really sharp delineations between light and dark and others. So it's that mixture of different edge type soft edges and hard edges that really make this seem like a living, breathing organic thing, and not just, ah flat, inanimate object. So I hope hope that point is something you really take away from this course. Ah, very important key to doing realistic value paintings and really one of the keys toe to two dimensional art, the illusion of creating three dimensions, even though we're working in a flat surface using light and dark. So I hope hope that something you guys really take away from this I've saved some of my brightest brights for a few areas that I want to have some extra pop, so that little knobby part of the forehead, right by the hairline really added some shine to that. I also always like to make that corner of the eye right in the corner of the eye and the nose really bright. So I think his face is looking good, so we're going to start adding in some musculature and again, this is where we use those that mix of hard edges between light and dark and soft edges. So notice I'm just making some really strong cut lines where I want those muscles toe have more definition, and that's really how we do realistic musculature. We just have soft gradations of the large muscle masses, and then you just sort of come back and cut in some harder edges to make it look like cut defined muscles. And then, of course, we'll come back over the top a little bit later and sort of unified these together with a large brush like I'm doing here, just adding some light tone over the top. It's almost like you create the muscles first and then wrap them in skin later. I know that sounds a little weird, but that's, ah, an accurate way to think about it. You define everything out, make it all look realistic and super defined and cut, and then you just come back and unify that with value. It's sort of like you're adding the skin over the top in it, sort of unifies it all together. That's when it always starts looking really to May. That's one of my favorite parts of any illustration or project like this is that moment when those brush strokes on the page, those brush marks really start tricking your eye and looking like something riel that's always just one of the most satisfying parts of being an artist is seeing your creation come to life. So I hope you guys were experiencing that. Hopefully, these techniques that I'm teaching you will help you make that jump where where your work on the canvas stops looking like marks and pixels and really starts turning into something realistic. That's it's almost tricking your own eye of really exciting thing, something that ah still keeps me excited to come to work every day. So I hope you guys air enjoying that as well, doing a little bit of smudging just to define some of those areas. But I don't want this to get super blended with this male character and especially a guy wanna look really tough in world weary kind of battle tested. I'm gonna leave my rendering pretty choppy and modeled. I want a lot of those overlapping, modeled brushstrokes to come through. Even in the finished product, it actually makes him look a little rough skin. And like he has some grime and dirt on him. If we leave that brushwork pretty modeled a little bit of smoothing here and there maybe, but mostly I'm just trying to move tones around to make the forms work. When I do smudging here, for the most part, I just want everything to stay angular and really choppy because that that really fits with the type of guide and his personality that we're trying to show here. So just light use of this smudge tool for this one. We're gonna leave a lot of that overlapping, semi opaque brushwork that we've been using to build up. These values were gonna leave that in place, adding a little more cuts between that big chest muscle and those rib shaped muscles underneath. That's a great place to put a really sharp cut because those are two pretty big muscle mass is coming together. And, uh, that's a good way for them to interact. So a little bit of value work down here on the hand again. I want this hand to look like it's cliched, really tightly. So I'm making all those tendons in things sort of pop out on his hand. That'll make it seem like there's a lot of tension like it's really grasping tightly. And that's exactly what we want here. Defining those knuckles a little more and there's sort of a plane change when his fingers been down. So those fingers, air, arm or in shadow than the top of his hand, I think that, ah, that works well. So similarly, on this other hand, those fingers that are facing us, they're gonna be sort of in shadow. But the ones facing up towards his face are gonna have, ah, brighter light source shining on them. So that should work pretty well. And that's Ah pretty convincing on the far side that hand raised that I'm working on here, that that's gonna be kept Maurin Shadow. So I actually don't need to do quite a much detail, because I'm gonna make this a good bit darker. That'll make it seem three dimensional. If we make things on that far side a little bit darker overall, that will fit really well. But these values air coming together nicely. He's already got a pretty convincing, three dimensional quality. All of the personality that we had in the sketch in ink phases. We haven't lost any of that. So I think we can go ahead and convert our values to skin tones. So just like always, I convert that to a light off white with a hue saturation adjustment. And then I've created another layer underneath, and this is where we'll do our at in our reds to make the skin seem modulated. So I have changed my brush to a soft round brush just to make this a smooth application of this red. And I'm just sort of going all around his hands and torso. Teoh, add in these reds on the face. We have to be a little more careful, Remember, just like always. We want the cheeks, nose, lips and ears to be a good bit more red, but we leave the beard and scalp area with no read that. Let's more of that scion through, and it really makes it look like ah scalp in beard area. So it's that that really cool modulation and skin tone, it suddenly makes him look alive like he's Ah, it's human skin and not just a flat value painting. So that's such a quick step. And it adds such a amazingly realistic effect. I hope you guys really enjoy that one. Kind of one of my main takeaways from the faces and figure painting course is kind of Ah, nice, formulaic way. I've come up with Teoh, have really predictable and reliably realistic looking skin tones, and it's just such an easy conversion. So I've merged those two skin layers together, and now I'm just gonna kind of refine things I'm gonna add in some shadows here. Feel like that arm would be casting more of a shadow over those rib area muscles. So just adding some universal darks here, where things need to sort of recede away, kind of rounds things out, even on his face here, going to darken that far side and actually makes him look a little more menacing. So that's kind of cool dark in that shadowy side of the face. And, uh, that works really well with the the personality we're going for here. So I like that a lot, smoothing things out just a little bit, but don't want to get carried away with that again. Want to preserve that cool texture brushwork that we've been working so hard to achieve here, And that's coming together pretty well, Going to smooth things out, just a little bit. Unify something's on his face here so that it's not quite so modeled and make those ears recede back a little bit so that those brighter parts of his face really pop. I'm coming back and adding a little more red to the tip of his nose there just to make that stand out, but took that a little too far, so dialing it back once again, just infinitely re workable. So you can see I don't get it right the first time, either. But that's the beauty of the digital medium. I've grabbed a very bright version of this skin tone. It's almost white, and I'm just adding some very bright highlights to a few places, just areas I want. A pop tip of his nose, his forehead and some of these larger muscle mass Is that air really facing directly at this light source that we've established. So it has a little bit of a sheen, do his muscles and really makes them pop looks looks pretty cool. So what I'm gonna do now is cut out thes skin tones. I've drop the opacity on this entire skin layer back to 80%. And that's just so that I can see that sketch coming through so that I know where to a race away. I'm gonna bring it back to 100% once I'm done cutting these skin areas out. But for now, it's good to be able to see those lines underneath and let you do your cutting out, making sure you're following the original sketch. So that's what I'm doing here. Just using my erase tool. Teoh, trim away some some lines here where I just sort of loosely let the skin color outside the lines because, uh, I had planned on doing this coming back and cutting those edges out. And that's looking pretty good, cutting out those little piercings as well, making this hand pop out from the clothing beneath. And now that I've got those sharp lines, I'm coming back with a larger brush and just chopping out those larger areas altogether. And that looks pretty good. I forgot about this armband, so coming back and taking care of that one more time. And I like that. I think that's always a step when it starts looking realistic to I forgot about these little hanging tassel looking things off of is his strap here Gonna smudge those out, make some little wispy things coming off of those Quite sure what those their supposed to be exactly. But they look cool, so I'm not gonna worry about it and erasing away some very dark shadow kind of back here in his armpit. Just thought that was still a little too high in value. But I have locked the skin layer and I'm gonna add some darks underneath where these shadows are off first will do a little hue saturation. See if, ah, if I like a different skin tone better and that's pretty cool. I think I'll roll with that. I shifted it slightly towards Scion, and I think that's pretty nice. So I've locked the skin layer again, and I'm painting some little cast shadows underneath E straps that will give it a lot of realism look like they're really on there and I love it. What a great effect. It really makes it seem like they're in place. So a little bit more refinement here on the fingers. But with that, I think we're ready to go do some detail work on the face. I'm going to give him some eyes. So I've grabbed that skin tone of his lower eyelid, really just the same color. And I'm giving him some whites of his eyes, sort of blending that together a little bit. I don't want his eyes to be to defined, like he has mascara or anything. So you can sort of let the boundary between white of his eye and eyelid blend together a little bit. That that usually works well for a male character, adding a little more rendering to make those seem like spears sitting in his eye sockets. But then we'll grab a dark value and paint in those those irises. So this is the part where you decide where he is looking. I thought I'd have him just looking directly at the camera, and you can see I need a few tries to make these Iris is consistent with one another because you don't want him looking cross eyed or lazy eyed. So take your time on that step and make sure you get it right. So adding some light color to the bottom half of the iris and then will add a very bright highlight to almost the centre right where the pupil in the iris overlap. So check out the painting faces course if you want some more detail on that. But that's, ah, super easy way to make some really soulful and believable eyes. And, well, he's really come to life with that step. I think it looks like he's really looking out at it. So, uh, happy with that? He looks pretty intimidating and intense. Everything we were going for, So after a little more refinement, just spotting some things to touch up, I'm gonna create a new layer. We're gonna give this guy some hair. I don't know about you guys, but I'm getting a riel zang beef from street fighter vibe with that dark hair. So I'm gonna make this guy's hair much lighter grabbing kind of an orangish color just to make him sort of redhead. Maybe I'm not sure if I'm gonna keep that, but that would certainly fit with the Norse and Celtic vibe. I'm going for here, but just for my hair rendering just doing some choppy hair. Ah, hairstyle on his top like his hair is pretty short but has a few little thin wisps hanging off the back of some longer hair now for his beard. Ah, it's tough to see cause it's pretty small, small area. I'm working in here, but I'm just doing those long, exaggerated, X shaped brush strokes. That's really how I do long hair, and we'll get into a little more detail with that braided part of his beard. But for for the rough parts of his beard, it's just overlapping X shapes. So here we go. I'm gonna do some Cem parallel braid areas where those strands of hair came together and just little X shapes where they're folded over one another. So a cool little detail certainly backs up the whole Viking Celtic vibe that they were going for here. And that looks awesome. And we had certainly gotten rid of the unfortunate Zang give Look that I was hoping we would, and this is looking great, coming together nicely. So I've created ah, brighter color and I'm coming back for one more round of of hair rendering here, adding into more of those X shaped strokes just to make it seem more realistic. And I think that's working better. Start shifting this hair a little more towards blonde. Not quite. So read a little bit of this red flavor. I think I'll keep. But, uh, I want him to be pretty fair skin look look like he's of Norse ancestry to fit with the rest of the character brief. So I'm actually even shift this entire layer a little bit just to make it a little more blonde after I do some more rendering here, make these individual hairs stand out so little hue, saturation adjustment. You can take that as far as you think is necessary, but messing with the colors a little bit here, even the brightness. And that's certainly much closer to Blonde. I think that's working a good bit better looking at the before and after. I think that's a lot better taking the saturation down a notch, too, but I like the way this is going up. Next. We'll do clothing and armor. I think you'll enjoy that step. So see there 20. Project 3 - Warrior - Leather & Metal: everyone. This is hardy. In this section, we will add clothing and armor to our character. So let's get started. I think overall, I'm gonna keep things pretty muted. Mostly leather and some metal materials for this guy because I want his bright colors to come from the war paint in tattoos that we're gonna add. So I've made a new layer. I'm just gonna call it leather one because I think I'm actually gonna have two different types of leather. Justo, give it a little more interest so that it doesn't all seem to one note or un interesting. So I'm just starting picking out kind of half of the leather materials on this guy, and we're gonna color it in with this first brown color. I'm doing kind of a cool, braided texture that I'm just gonna repeat with the clone stamp here to give a neat kind of grip on this sword on his back that they be a interesting detail. But for the most part, we're just doing splotchy, overlapping brushstrokes to give it that model leather look that usually works pretty well . A nice, layered, textured look makes it look authentic is leather and then once I have that done. As you can see, I add a little line, work around the edges, just toe, give it a little bit of pop, give that leather strap in edge and maybe even some some little scratch marks to make it seem or more worn and a little too used. It makes it a little more interesting. So that's that's what I'm up to here. I like that braided pattern so much, I think I'm gonna copy it and repeat it in a few other places. It just really fits with the whole Celtic or Norse theme that we're going for here. That braided look really works with that. So I'm going to repeat that down on this chest strap. Think that looks cool, you know, just that just a little bit. It was a little out of sync with the angle of the strap, but Photoshopped makes that super easy, of course, and that's looking pretty good. Just a little more highlight and just splashing this color around wherever it seems to fit . I figured this could be leather. I'm leaving this kind of nondescript this ah, dark area under that shoulder pad, but I want to do just a little bit of rendering so that it's not just left is blank sketch showing through the area. So maybe a little leather under pad to this metal armor that he's wearing. I think I'll do a little rendering on this armed guard here. Gonna make a little shine in the middle, sort of defined that cylindrical shape that the overall form has. But then I'm gonna erase away and make that little arrow shape sort of a little interior detail just to make this a little more interesting. So I'm gonna cut out what I painted in. Do a little bit of line work to make that pop out easy. Is that and then a little more rendering up top. Remember to use the clone stamp whenever you need to lines to be perfectly parallel. And I'm even copying that down below it on either sides of the the arm there. So letting those Photoshopped tools really make life easier for us and just like that, with a little bit of line work and some splotchy rendering, that's a pretty convincing leather armed guard. And once we get to our metal material rendering phase will render at all of these little buckles and metal bits, and it will give it a nice a nice effect. Some good contrast. Sort of a similar treatment on this arm on the other side. Clone stamping those little repeated curved lines that defined those wrist straps and then a little bit of detail on this sort of aero shaped detail that we've got on the on the risk there. I think that's working well, I'm gonna make the lights of us a little more prominent on the side that's facing up towards his face. I feel like that light source would be sort of shining down over there, and it helps round out that forearm. I think that's a good treatment there. So how to keep our light source consistent from material to material when we move from skin to metal to letter or whatever, got to make sure it all adds up and fits with each other. So I'm gonna start some work on this belt down below, but not going to do all of them, cause remember, I'm sort of just trying to pick out half of the materials here cause we're gonna do a second leather material just to give it some very subtle color variation. We don't want it to be too one note or boring. So sort of skipping a few things here and there so that I can come back and use a slightly different color to make it more interesting. Give it some variety, but so far so good. I think this is some convincing Leather will move on to leather too. And I've got a new layer there. I've actually stuck with same color, so it looks the same now. But once I'm done rendering all of this end doing my painting, I'm gonna just do a simple command. You hue saturation adjustment and just do a slight shift on that. So coming back to do that belt on his hips and these little straps down near his his hips as well, just to make that give that some variety. And that looks cool. There's little repeating lines that you do with the clone Stamp really makes it look nice and neat and like you spend a ton of time carefully tracing. But as you can see, it's so easy to just grab that clone stamp, and it'll perfectly repeat the curve of that line so that they look nice and parallel. And, um, that really ends up having a nice clean look. So ah, cool trick toe use when rendering clothing. And it works especially well with with leather like we're doing here. So time to render these little layered boot segments here. I figured I wanted those to be leather. I considered making them metal shin guards. But I think I want this guy to mostly be leather. I think that fits with the fantasy type period, quote unquote in the setting that we're trying to give this guy. So I think that fits pretty well at a little more detail ing here, render in his boots and remember, from our clothing rendering demonstration, we do those e straight shape strokes whenever we wanna have bunched up looking cloth. And that works especially well with leather. So plenty of Z marks on the boot toe here and on his thigh as well. All those places where the cloth needs to look like it's bunching up in and folding over itself. So a little bit of definition on these little boots segments from one to the other figure those could use a little bit of ornamentation. So this almost looks like Cem ornamental stitch work or something like that. I think that works well. So I've got sort of a little detail on that peak, and I'm just going to repeat this clone stamp just to bring it down to these other segments so that it looks like a nice, perfectly repeating pattern, and that works really nicely. I like the way repeats gives it a little detail and always worry about leaving my legs a little too boring, since I usually tend to put so much time in on the face and upper body so good to have an early detail there and I just copy that over to the far leg. I'm gonna erase at away a little bit since I want that to be a little more in shadow and also refining things just a bit to make it fit the sketch in the perspective of what we have over there and even show this little interior of the leg. Curvy detail I included in the sketch as well, that looks pretty cool. It's looking a little too selfish, Lord of the Rings. So I'm gonna dial that back, and I'll probably cover that with something else later, but always okay to sort of layer those effect and looking cool for the most part, adding a little more rendering just a highlight. Things on this boot. And then we'll add in the boot rendering on this side a little Z stroke where that that toe kind of folds up. That works very nicely. Let's render in these little hanging killed straps, and I'm pretty much doing a rough Renger rendering. And then I'll cut that out, and I'll sort of repeat that on another one, just making them a little varied. You want the highlights to appear different places on it that makes him seem like they're undulating, folding little straps sort of layered on top of one another. So with just a little bit of careful folding and remembering to keep those straps rendered a little differently suddenly it's a very visually active, under undulating folds of leather type effect that we have there, and that's perfect with what we need. They really look like they're blowing in the breeze, and all this little Leinart on the edges really makes them pop out from one another and a very easy bit of rendering to get really cool effect. So now we will do a little shift. I'm just gonna de saturate and play with lightness on this, but you can see what a nice variety we get with that subtle change in hue and saturation that we have two very different looking leather types. It's very subtle, but works well. So are leathers looking good. Let's do our metal rendering. So now that I have made a new layer, I'm gonna set my brush mode to color dodge. We talk about this in detail in the painting machines course, but color dodge is a really great mode for painting metal because with every brush stroke, the color gets way brighter and more saturated, so you can quickly build up very bright, shiny values in tones with just a few brushstrokes. So it gives us that bright highlight that metallic shiny objects have without much work, and it also increases the saturation. It just tends to make things work well and really lends itself to rendering metals. So check out the detailed description of that and the painting machines course if you want , but this is sort of Ah, quick demonstration of that I'm not gonna do. There's not a ton of metal on this character, but, uh, this is a great technique for that. So just remember color dodge when you want to use metal. And I've just got a nearly flat gray, maybe a hint of green flavor to my color. But that's all you really need. Metal is mostly a grey thing. It picks up some of the reflections of of the surrounding environment. So something to keep in mind there. But just doing some little edge renderings and using the clone stamp again to make that a nice repeating parallel machine. Look there and will repeat that to this far side of this armed guard. And those little shiny parts just really make it look nice. And ah, and Metallica, Nice shiny lustre, just like what we're after. So I'm gonna render in some of this little turned up lip of this shoulder pad the part that's facing the light sores and repeating some of these little edge structures here just to make this seem nice and shiny and machines just like we would want a a metal piece of armor toe Look in real life, and I think that's coming along pretty well. So repeating this first segment down below with a little more clone stamping just to have that nice repeating design element. I like the way that works a lot, and it's super easy because you just copy it, practically get it for free. So I'm gonna render the spherical shape of this main piece of metal of the shoulder pad and again, with color dodging. It builds up so quickly to a nice, bright, shiny center that ah really looks metallic without many brushstrokes at all. You do have to be a little bit careful and restrained with the color dodge mode, because if you take it too far, it starts to just totally blow out the colors and make things look just to white. So takes a little practice to to get that restraint that you need to use that that mood properly. But it's super handy and give some really nice metallic effect with a little bit of practice. So check out that other course for some more details on that, and it it applies well here. That's looking pretty good, just zooming out to take a little look adding in a few little details here, Just a little scene where this this edge of this buckle comes in and bolts down that shoulder pad to the strap. I think that looks well. I've got this main triangular shaped kind of belt buckle thing that I'm gonna render in here with Cem metallic treatment and just going around the outside edge, making some little highlights here and there to make it look shiny and kind of sharp. Remember, the triangle shape signifies all of those great, predatory, aggressive things that we want to show here. And ah, that's really working well for us, A little bit of rendering on the interior just to give it give it some more dimension and maybe gonna render in, make it a solid shape in the middle here. I'm probably gonna have some photo text during that to this. Give it some ornate metal work, but I think that's ah, cool. Look for sure. So just blending things out, making it look a little more refined. And, uh, we got that highlight right about where we want it, adding in some little scratches here and there for details. And I think that's good to go so similar treatment on this belt buckle. I wanted to have a little dimension, so I'm making that that upper edge pointing towards the lights. Or so it's shiny er and the bottom edge is darker, obviously, and I'm going to repeat that just coffee and bring it over to the other side and transform it a little bit. And just using the history brush to erase that away without affecting that main belt buckles shape, adding in some little details to these little parts sort of hanging off the belt buckle. They're kind of nondescript, but they don't have to be super detailed. Just just some cool little effects just to have all those little highlights kind of dancing around. I'm copying this triangular belt buckle, and I'm gonna reuse this when a lot it it occurs in the sketch. In a few places. One all of these armed guards and part of the legs shin guards to have some little buckle straps just makes him look cool, and it makes sense that these these parts of the armor would would have buckles. So that's that's how you get them on and keep them in place I actually have an idea. Might repeat this over and over again. Maybe try some kind of a little chain mail effect. It looks kind of cool. I'll see if that'll work, I'm gonna warp it to fit the curve of his shoulder a little bit more and trying different sizes, maybe erasing a way to make it look a little more round. And that's pretty cool. I might make it kind of subtle, but I like that. I think I'll see if I can make that work. Knocking it back a little, but, uh, cool effect. And it I wasn't quite sure what to do with that part of his costuming, so I think that works well. Good solution. Looking good. Just zooming back to sort of take a look at the big picture every once in a while and jumping around a different parts. So we're gonna render the edge of this shield up here and see if we can make that look cool and round. I don't want us to be a huge attention getter, since ah, we want most of the attention to be on his face and upper body, but, uh, certainly need to need some rendering to make it fit with everything else. So I'll jump back down here to the legs, render in these little hip guard parts of the metal armor and again just doing those edges and then cloning that repeating shape to make it look layered and machine. Those perfectly parallel lines air really a great way to make something look like a man made metallic objects. So that's working really well for me and once again kind of cheating here, just grabbing something I've done on one side and copying it over to the other. And with a little bit of warping getting into fit in place, that works just about perfectly so adding a little bit of highlight to these edges that are sort of turned up towards the light source. And I think that's looking cool, doing a little bit of splotchy metallic work inside here just to render in this metal. But I'm gonna leave that kind of dark. Don't want that to be a huge, bright, shiny object, because that axe handle will be covering it eventually but just a little bit of rendering to make it all work. I think that's just about all we need gonna do a little bit of rendering on this side of the hip armor that will be more visible since it won't have a handle covering it. So what, that to look cool as well. But also, remember, it's on this shadow side, so we've got to keep things a little more subdued back there. And I think that's working well, just a little bit of rendering on this main metal plate part of it. And I think we're in good shape there, looking good. So jumping back down here to the knee, I'm going to start. I'm gonna finish the rendering of thes metallic edges of this kind of pointy hexagon shape that I've got going here. I think that's working pretty well, but is you can see I sort of just used the same kind of process. I do some bright edges, and then I repeat them parallel either with the clone stamp or by copying and re sizing, as I just did there and then just a little bit of rendering on the interior to make it seem Spiric als in shape. And that's just about all there is to it to rendering armor the color dodge mode does a lot of the work for you, as long as you just render those general shapes and keep the brushwork kind of splotchy. It really ends up looking metallic and well, that photo textures laid later, and you can even add some little scratch marks here and there to make it look even more realistic. But is your foundation that's that's really just about all that it takes to make some pretty realistic looking metal, and I think that's working beautifully. A copy this and bring it over to the other side. Make it fit, doing a little bit of warping here to sort of make it work with the sketch. And that looks pretty good dialing that back a bit. And I have toe cut out this piece of the kilt strap that's covering it so that it all adds up. You can add some more of these little metal buckles down to this leg armor down below, keeping that kind of subdued, though, including in a few more on these other segments, and I think this is coming together pretty nicely. Gonna do some rivets. Now is a final step for this lecture, so we really have to do is render one just a metallic sphere. And then with the clone stamp set toe all layers weaken. Just stamp this single rivet that we've made all over the place. And it instantly are almost instantly as a ton of visual interest. And really, with just a little single clicks of the stylist, you are adding all kinds of neat detail ing that looks like it takes hours to complete. So don't get too carried away with this because it is so easy. But certainly a cool way to add lots of visual interest without ah whole lot of work. So that's about it for our clothing rendering lecture up. Next, we're gonna add a ton of fun final polishing detail ing. So I look forward to seeing you in the next one. 21. Project 3 - Warrior - Final Polish: everyone. This is Hardy. In this lecture, we will add final polish to our character before we get too far along. I wanted to take a quick sidebar and show you gonna some really neat ways to make patterns using simple photo shop tools. Basically, we're just gonna make simple shapes and then transform them and repeat them over and over again until we can make a pattern. So let's do a quick example. I'll create a new layer and using my rectangular marquee tool, I'm just gonna make a simple rectangle shape. So I'll fill that in by hitting option delete and then command t just do a transform and just rotated a little bit. So I've got a basic angle shaped rectangle. Simple Iskan Be Now I'm gonna make a copy of this, and I have a really quick keyboard shortcut to do that that I'm gonna be using a lot. So I've hit the on my keyboard to select this aero tool. Now with the selected hold down Ault in shift and just pull that aside. And as you can see, it's created a new layer over on the side. So now I have to separate rectangle shapes both on their own layer. I'm gonna merge these together to make it one layer by selecting the two and hitting command E to merge the layers. So now I've got two shapes. What I'm going to do now is just repeat the process so you can see we've gone very quickly from one shape to four shapes emerged that again, and now it's eight shapes. So you see how very quickly, just by multiplying these shapes quickly and repeating it it it can add up to, ah, long pattern of the same shape. Now we've got a long line of the same shape, so let's add a slight twist on it. I'm going to transform the new copy upside down. And just like that, we've got this kind of wicker lattice pattern that we just made from a simple rectangular shape. So ah, pretty need example there. So, applying this concept back to our main project, I am going to just draw sort of, ah, rectangular pattern. I'm trying to come up with something that will look like a cool Celtic knot kind of pattern . So I just have this idea of ah rectangular outline or three sides of a rectangle here that I'm going to just start repeating. So I've got my basic shape made, just sort of three sides of a rectangle adjusting that a little bit. And I'm gonna flip it so that it becomes this sort of Ah ah, stylized braid kind of graphic that you see a lot of these Celtic in North Norse culture motif. So that's what I'm going for here. Just fine tuning a little bit. I wanted to give it a little more of a flared edge, make that sort of a sharper blade make it look a little bit meaner, getting into some hardcore graphic design here. But it's just a a very basic repeating shape that we just do over and over again to come up with these patterns. So I thought that would be a worthwhile sidebar to show you guys. And here we're putting it into action on our project ends up being a really cool effect. So just fine tuning a little bit because we're gonna repeat thes shapes over and over again . Now that I've got it all set, I'm just starting to copy them. Remember, you just copy and then merge them together and then just repeat over and over again. And suddenly what was one shape turns into an entire pattern of shapes. And that looks just like what I wanted. Sort of a cool, overlapping, Celtic Braid type graphic. So I've saved the original that I've made, and I'm just making copies of it. And I'm sort of re sizing that, putting it in a few places where I just want to give some of this leather work a little bit of extra interest. It'll look like some ornate stitching or some other kind of patterning. So I thought that armband could use a little more interest. I thought one of these killed strap things could ah, could get a little embellishment as well. So just warping things into place to sort of fit on the surface is that they're there to help. I think that looks really cool. Maybe some down on the boots here. I didn't like that, Really, Elfi, Lord of the Rings pattern that I had going on. So I think this works better, looks a little more hard core and tough Norse Viking kind of vibe that I'm going for not quite so ornate and delicate as those healthy looking shapes, so I think that's a great fit. Ah, nice use of pattern here and they're all black right now and they're too dark to see pretty much. But all we're doing is making these into a selection. So you remember. If you command click a layer, it creates a selection of all those pixels. So I've hidden the layer and just command clicked. It's and I have a hidden selection that I can just paint in. So I'm grabbing a brighter sort of gold color, and I'm just painting in inside of that selection of the pattern that I've made. It sort of looks like some gold thread that was stitched in, and it's a much more subtle use of the pattern, really looks nice and fits well, one of those nice details you have to look pretty closely to find. But that's a basic idea of using repeating photo shop shapes to make a nice pattern. Hope you like that. So up next we'll add some photo textures to give this guy a little more grit and realism. So I've got a few photos pasted in here just got those on their own layers, so I'm going to group them together, name that group, photo textures. And what we're gonna do is select this silhouette to make a selection of our character here and mask out this photo group so that the photos on Lee appear inside of his shape. So we've kind of cut them out there. I've got that shotgun image there for sort of that cool, ornate metal work. And the good old bucket gives us a nice, gritty feel that will work just about anywhere. So we're gonna set this entire layer group too soft, light, blending mode and just like magic it. Let's all of our rendering underneath show. But it just just takes the texture away from these photos that I've selected. So we have to do now is sort of warped things around. Copy them in a few places. I sort of like that repeating ribbed metal look that works nicely on the knee pads there as a little interest. And it also has that nice, rough, grainy metallic texture that works just about anywhere, even even on his skin a little bit. That looks kind of cool. So I'm just re sizing things, copying them doing a good bit of clone stamping just to grab some of these interesting little texture features. It also provides a tiny bit of subtle color modulation, just so that things don't look quite so flat and one dimensional. It makes make sure colors very slightly modulated, and that adds a ton of realism. It's very subtle, but ah, great thing to include if you can and that's that's a good thing that photo texture ring on soft light blend mode does forest. So I'm just clone stamping around an area of that texture that I like particularly. And I'm saying, if I like the way that ribbed metal texture looks on the shoulder pad, kind of cool doing some adjustments here, you see if I could make that work for us and ah, that looks kind of nice gonna race away outside of it to see if thats a keeper looking pretty cool and doing some sort of on switching those layer groups on and off just to see how they look. Gonna take that rib metal and put it on his belt buckle is well, I think that really fits with the the rest of the style we've got going on there too, trying it here on the leg. But that might be once too many. If if you copy these things too many times, they start toe lose their impact. So I think that's good. I'm gonna leave it at that. Next. Let's grab this. Ah, cool shotgun. The ornate metal work part. So I'm just going to select that, copy it and then go back into my soft light photo texture group and paste that in, and I'm gonna find a few places where that that will work for me. I think this belt buckle is a particularly good spot, and I think that's cool. It was really nice patterns that that that shotgun had on it seemed to fit pretty well. I don't want to take this too far. Don't want his entire suit of armor to be super ornate like that shotgun. But I think a few places to have that kind of level of ornate nous is pretty cool. That fits with our character, and it certainly adds a lot of interesting texture interest. So I've merged all of our photo textures together, doing a little bit of ah color balance on that metal layer was starting to look a little bit green. So jumping back down to that and just doing some subtle manipulations of my colors. But overall, I think that's working really, really well. So nice modulation of the color and a lot of texture interests. Next, we're going to add some war paint. This is a super cool step. I've just got a photo of this Asian tapestry that I took, and it's got this really cool dragon type design in the middle, and that's what I'm gonna use. So I'm gonna hit command I to invert this image and it turns all of the colors to their opposite. So all of those yellows turned blue, and that's what I'm after. So I'm gonna change this to multiply mode and check it out. Just like that. It makes all of the colors fit perfectly over the rendering. We've already done so just with a little subtle brightening, we've got practically an instant, super complex tattoo on his skin. And man that looks so awesome just immediately had so much interest. So I've masked out that layer so that I can move this photo around inside and make sure I like its placement do a little subtle manipulation. So I'm asked that out completely, and I'm just going to reveal in the tattoo where I want it to be. Don't want it to be on his arm band, obviously or any of the other materials. So that's why I'm doing this. Slightly more careful treatment cutting things out. Oops. Looks like some of it got outside of him. So no problem. I'll just select the silhouette and trim that away. But that's so much instant impact. And I think I'm gonna add a little war pain. I wanted to grab that same blue color, so I'm gonna create a new multiply layer and do that same kind of treatment just to give him a cool little bit of war paint on his. I kind of an angular design seems to fit with the whole Viking thing and certainly goes really well with that awesome tattoo from that that photograph that I took and I'll make sure that that photos available if anybody wants to download it and use it in their work, you're more than welcome to. But although it's an Asian design, it somehow seems to really fit with with the Norse Celtic Look that we're going for here. So after that, we're gonna add some secondary lights have created a new layer, and I've grabbed a color that's pretty much the same is the background, but slightly brighter. And I'm gonna start adding just a little bit of bounced reflected light here on the dark side of his face. This helps just round things out a little bit. It also adds a ton of nice, moody atmosphere to the character, certainly makes him seem more three dimensional and just gives everything a really nice, charming, painterly quality. So this is always a really fun step. In fact, this entire video is really kind of my favorite part of the project. It's kind of like we've been doing all this work to build this really interesting character , and now we just get to decorate him with all these cool bells and whistles. So don't run out of steam at the end. Make sure you save some energy or take a break and come back and make sure you're ready to finish strong because it's a shame toe to miss on these final steps, sort of the last 5% of the project sometimes can make a huge difference. So stick with it. Make sure you save your best your best tricks for last. But I think that's really working, adding a lot of atmospheric light coming from down and below. So I'm just doing a little bit of fine tuning and smudging just to make that work a little bit better, finding a few places where there might be some bounced light. But for the most part, I want to leave these areas pretty dark. I think it it adds a lot of sort of moodiness. Justo let those areas stay is dark as they are, but he's looking nice in three dimensional. I think that works well, so I'm gonna add another secondary light source. Next. I've grabbed a really bright off white, just a hint of yellow but practically white, and I want to really bright light source almost a spotlight above and behind. If you've been paying close attention, you probably notice I do practically the same lighting scheme. For all of my character project, it's ah, it's a kind of a time tested formula that I use, and you're welcome to copy it exactly in fact, that's what I'd recommend sort of a subdued, reflected light on the dark side and then have a really bright, brilliant spotlight shining on the on the back of them. Just toe really makes him seem like their importance, literally shining a light on them toe to bring your I to the most important parts of the page. And it just looks cool and makes aims. Things seem more three dimensional, so I really like the way that it's looking gonna add a little bit of dirt and grit. So I've made another a new layer and set it to multiply. And I'm just kind of speckle ing around little marks just to make this guy seem kind of dirty, like he's just come off the battlefield and he's covered in mud. Don't want to go overboard with this because we don't want to cover all of the cool details we've created. But just a little bit of grit spattered on him makes him look even more menacing and imposing than he did before. But we've come a long way in this Steptoe to take him over the top, so I've put everything in a group and copied the group so that I can have a single merged layer. And now that I've got that, I'm going around the entire perimeter of the character in doing some very light smudging. My my smudge tool is set on 15% strength, and that's just a blur. These edges, ever so slightly you want to treat the edges is one of your final steps to make sure that nothing looks too stark and cut out and pixelated. That can really kill that three dimensional effect that we worked really hard to achieve here. So this is a really nice final are almost final step just to treat those edges. Make sure that everything looks nice and polished. Since you've come this far, just checking out my colors, making sure I like where I am in terms of color balance. I think we're pretty close. Very subtle Variation is needed it if any. I'm now going to grab a soft round brush and do just a little bit of color Dodge work to really brighten up some areas, give them some pop. Say this for just a few areas that you want to give a little bit of extra special attention to Maybe on those new reflected lights are areas that are really, really burning on that bright, sort light source that can add a lot of a lot of extra interest in pop. But these are just our final steps to give this guy a little more treatment before we consider him finish. So take your time and get all this stuff right, doing a little bit of liquefied just toe. Maybe take that hair and just to touch a Justin proportions around his face. If there's anything that's been kind of bothering you throughout the rendering, for example, I think his hands may have been a little large. This is a great time to just do some liquefy toe. Correct those issues. I think I like his hair longer after all. So I just used the history brush to back out of that. Now we're gonna add a shadow to ground him in his environment again, a multiply layer, a little bit of motion blur and boom instant shadow. Just as easy as that. I'm finally gonna add a light glow behind him on this new layer. And with that, I think we just about have a finished painting. Congratulations on completing the warrior project. Let's take a look back at our project steps to see how far we've come. We started with a rough sketch to get the general pose and look for our character. We then inked him in to refine things. After that, we blocked in the silhouette, netted skin tones and hair. We then added leather and metal clothing. Finally, we added photo textures, war paint and some final polish to arrive at a finished product. All in all, we went from a blank Candace to a finished product that we could be proud of for a detailed look at how to design and render the battle acts that I've paired with this character. Please check out the painting machines course will cover weaponry yard and a whole lot more . I really got a kick out of this project, and I hope you did, too. I look forward to seeing you in the next lecture 22. Course Recap: congratulations on completing the character painting course. We done a character design, overview, discuss shaped language, character archetypes, clothing and best practices. We then put these lessons in action over three awesome character art projects. Steampunk, general Female, space hero and warrior. Post some of your work so that the entire course community can see your rock star skills. If you want to continue creating character art and keep the course going, check out this page of new character briefs that I've put together to give you a good starting point. These air similar to the assignments you might receive from a real world client. So they're great practice. Character art is a fun and worthwhile skill to pursue, so I hope this course has been a step towards a lifelong passion for all of you. Keep at it, do awesome work. That's it for the character painting course. I hope to see you again in future lessons where we'll build on everything that we've learned here