Digital Inking for Comics - A Futuristic Scene

1. Introduction Video: love one and welcome to my class. Digital inking for comics of futuristic seen Hello, my name is Robert Marcelo and I've been drawing an Incan comics for over 20 years. I'm very excited to be sharing my experiences with you through these lessons. In this course, you'll learn how to create crisp, clean Leinart with confidence, thinking the work is not tracing but rather adding another level of refinement and creativity. You'll learn techniques that I've used for many years to make expressive and dynamic illustrations. We'll be using clips, studio pain, speaking about the digital tools while completing these projects. But please keep in mind these techniques can and will apply to traditional art. Digital told, will not make your better artists be using them effectively. Can't afford your a lot of opportunities First, what applies to digital are you'll learn how to save time by digital ink. In your illustrations. We'll talk about the benefits of layers and selections, transits of brushes, distortions and the ability to undo the strokes. Then what applies to digital and traditional? You'll learn about line waits, focal points, shapes of shadows, cross hatching textures stylized in your lines and the basic thought process that makes all this work in a coherent manner. So take the artwork that I supply two U Inc along, and I'd love to see the project body completed the end. Keep in mind, this also ties into another class. I'm 18 faces, so be sure to check that out as well. And I'm here if you have any questions. And thank you so much for viewing this class as always. Good luck with the art and I will talk to you soon. 2. L1 Keeping the Light Source in Mind: Welcome back, everyone. So now what I want to talk to you about before we start rendering Ah, little bit of, ah, practice activity. Basically, I want to show you kind of the thought process that goes behind it. So bear with me with my pretty little cheesy diagram here, but hopefully this will help you understand the thought process before jumping into the rendering stage. So, for instance, as we look at this diagram on the left, just call it number one. And basically it's just a straight on shot. And then you got number two, which is a top view. Okay, so it's the same sphere or circle at this point, but it's gonna be a sphere. So what I want you to think about is we have this X right in the front. This is where our line of sight field of view, our focal point, lots ways, that kind of interpret that. But this is where I level is, and that's why there's a rise in line right here. So a lot of this works off basic perspective. Pretty much everything you're going to draw works out basic perspective. So we're looking there now are light sores will say it's a son, but it could be a light ball, but could be anything. Just keep in mind. When you are doing something like the sun, you typically are going to get more bounce light because the son is so Ambien and it's so powerful. So you're gonna get more bounce light from the sun, my personal light bulb. But it light bounces off of everything. So as it comes down, its sincerity cities, dotted lines, it catches the edge is based upon perspective. But you want to also be aware that if the light sources bright enough, it does bounce off a ground plane and hit the sides and things like that. But we're not gonna worry too much about that. I just want you to understand that light is ah, you Ambien nature and should, you know, pretty much bounces off of everything, effects everything in the scene. So what we have here is you know, we're trying to define where the placement of this light sources so we could say it looks like it's beside or slightly behind the circle our sphere. And then from the top view, you can see it is behind it. So eso here's our camera or person or whoever are person looking at the object. There's that little extra on the front of it and you see over here that the light source is behind it. And again, perspectively it would affect this area. So if you were to think about this in a M in a shape of shadow or a definitive line of light and dark, you could make the argument that the shape would be something that you would get this moon like. The fact now the mawr, this sun or light bulb or whatever passes over the object in this way. So it kind of circles around it, the more this shape is going to turn from this to this. OK, so it's just the relationship of where the lights were says so again, Based on the top view in the front view, we can pretty much discern that it's something like this. OK, so Light is gonna wrap around, but at a certain point it's gonna great. Eight are you know there's gonna be a great Ian fade and it's gonna fade off, and it's go lose intensity. Now if this is a very speculative object like a chrome ball, our sphere. Then it's gonna be very abrupt or a lot more abrupt. But if it's something that's ah, disperses light like like fabric, like pretty much anything bought a really hard service is going toe, you know, it's gonna have a great Asian, and that's what we're going to do. As we start to think this example, we're gonna go more of a Grady int effect, something that has a dispersed light. But again, I want you to just see this in a diagram and kind of, you know, think about this. You should always be very aware of where your light source says what your You know, you want to have an idea going into this concept because if not, if you're just sitting here and you just start doodling whatever comes to mind over top, then you know, maybe you get something cool. Maybe you don't maybe learn. Maybe you don't learn as much as you could. But going in with a focal point with an idea indefinitely always know where your light sources where your line of sight is. You know where the viewer is. All those things are gonna kind of matter, so, you know, grown playing things like that. So just keep in mind this is our This is our grown plane right here. So what we're gonna do now is we're going to Inc. One of these circles, and we're going to take a two d circle and turn it into a sphere by adding rendering. So with that, let's move on to our next lesson and jump on in. 3. L2 Practice Activity Shading a Sphere: All right, so now we're gonna implement what we just talked about. So again, our light sources back here somewhere, we're going to create a shape like this for just kind of, ah, like two dark area. But again, it's gonna have a Grady in across this area. Or maybe it starts. I think it makes sense. Have it light in this area, then began to have a Grady int or fade this way. So now, when doing rendering really anything goes, At least that's the way I tend to look at it. I don't tend to render everything the same way. I think that you want to create lots of variation within the scene. You want lots of different line clarity and quality. So some people, I think we'll Hendra themselves and say, Well, I just can't make clean lines yet and that's fine. I mean, you definitely want to strive to make better and better lines. But if you are working visually, keep in mind. A big part of this is get rid of that circular. A big part of this is mechanics. So, like, you notice I'm zooming back here for the first kind of past that I want to dio mainly because it makes this circle. So in the B s fear about two inches on my screen, so it makes it a lot easier for me to generate these lines. Now, the other thing is, if I go like this and may or may not get that shape that I want right there so again to kind of aid myself in that process. And you could do this with a pencil if you're working. Traditionally, uh, just draw a light line to give you that guide. Now, if you're working digitally can do this on a separate layer, Not gonna worry too much about it and not getting the right there. Okay, so now when I go to draw these lines, it's gonna be a lot easier. Uh, you know, and I will do will do a separate layer just on top of the the sphere. So something like, See, I'm just kind of redoing it until I get what I want there and senala drawl right through that. So now what happens is I don't have to focus so much on my starting and ending point and, you know, keep in mind, always get people say, Well, I can't do that because I'm working traditionally, anything you can do digitally, you can do traditional almost anything. I better not put a blanket statement on that. But for instance, one of the things that you do to do this exact same effect is used brisket or, you know, I've seen people even mask it off of paper. Some people even get good at cutting a slice of paper and then maneuvering it around eso they could just do those quick, sweeping pulls. Because generally what's gonna happen is if you call like this real slow, you know, you might get a decent line. Over time, you get better and better at it. I know doing this line side to side will be even bumpier. But if I shoot this line quicker in in succession and believe me, I practiced making those types of lines quite a bit to even get him this straight s. So just keep that in mind. Speed the mechanics and the distance in which you work. So, working from your wrist, your shoulder to the movement, a arm, the pivot, your elbow, things like that. All those things factor and so you have to really play with those. But since we do have a separate layer here, we can easily just go over here, clean this up and just add to it. And really dont even have to worry about it yet must bugs you. You could kind of do this at the end. You could get rid of this line if that bothers you so you could erase that back. And you just wanted that initial shape. Really? To have the, uh you know that that fading. I mean, look how even those Those simple basic lines immediately add curvature. Not much, but it's starting to work. So then what you want to do here is just say, Well, what if I crisscross? He's ah, little bit. I'm not gonna worry about line weight yet because I want to really focus on what I can do with these basic lines. Now, keep in mind, you can make this fade in the shadow darker by simply bringing these lines closer together . In fact, a big, uh, kind of amateurish mistake and we're all guilty of it. I don't like to really say amateurish too much, but but we're all guilty of it is it? Sometimes we just don't bring the lines tight enough together to have convincing shadows in the right areas. So play around with the distance that these lines, you know, are from one another, and you'll get a nicer range to your a bladed to generate shadows. So it's going to tighten up on this a little bit more, and I probably could have brought those even closer together. But notice now, I've got basically three levels. I've got the highlight mid tone in the shadow, but I want this to be dark. I wanted to be a lot darker through here. So what I'm kind of imagining is that I want a nice, heavy shadow not to black, but almost to about right there. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna rotate the screen. It's like rotating your paper. I'm gonna tighten up even more, and I'm going to bring these lines in. And I want these to be a little bit tighter in succession in a little bit heavier line. Wait, not much, but I'm actually putting a little bit of pressure as I shoot these lines over. Now, you could probably notice I'm almost curving these lines trying to be too dramatic about it because the initial ones aren't that curved. I don't wanna really change up my process too much yet, But curving lines is another great way to convey, you know, rounded nous and in depth to the form. So it works Really Wealth anatomy. Obviously, we're working with the sphere here, so it makes sense using here. Um, I didn't want to start with that because I also want to let you know that if you're not good at curving these lines do not worry about it. Don't beat yourself up over it and just slowly let yourself get a comfort zone. With that, you can do some amazing illustrations with a series of straight lines. In fact, you can get pretty creative with straight lines and actually make the illusion of curvature and things like that. So, um, just the main thing is that you're thinking Maura about great Asian in ah, value and creating depth here than worrying about line clarity and when to put in a curve line a straight line, just, you know, think about the great Asian. That's all we want to focus on at this point. Okay, so now we've got a darker tone here. Got a another mid tone here. A lighter, mid tone in the highlight s. So what if I wanted to introduce another? Ah, a bit of shadow right there. Here. I feel like there's too much of this mid tone. Like it wouldn't be that light. We'll call that a 50% or something. Um, it just wouldn't be that light there to me. There needs to be another little transition right there. So how would I do that? I could simply try to pick a different angle than what I've got here. Um, or just some very tight, you know, actually go with lines that air straight up and down, and I'll bring him in tighter. But I'm gonna make sure to go from here all the way through the rest of the work. Now, why am I doing that? Because it's going to darken everything with this next tone. So it's like just having a layer, in a sense. But again, this doesn't apply to just traditional or just digital. It works the same way, but for the part that I am gonna make it a bit easier for digital. I'm gonna add this extra layer, and I'm going to draw through this just again. You could do this with the pencil, though. So if you're working, traditionally, just draw a line right through there and then if you need the comfort of not stopping at the line, then you just I had some fresh kid or whatever Mask it off. So what I'm gonna do now is drawn right through here and just try to add this next level actually need to be a little bit further back for the comfort of my hand here. So so panting back is a double it short, too, because what I tend to notice is it becomes harder for me to do tighter lines and succession. But that's where you just have to go for it. He sees there actually lining up with those bottom line, so I probably should have picked a slightly different angle. But it's not necessarily a big deal if they go inside. No, I don't take any ways. Tends to look a little bit messier, but again, I don't want you to be too worried about this idea of of intense line clarity and refinement. At this point, I just want you to keep shading until you get the depth that you want. I'm gonna race back that starting point line almost like we're racing back a pencil line and you see right there we've got even more shading, and I really just keep carrying on to this concept and trying to get something that feels dimensional. Now. The other thing in I like to do is like pan back really far and look at it almost like it's a just a airbrushed fade. Try to perceive it that way. If you pull back far enough, it'll generally look like that. So so now what I want to do is add a little bit more. Let's say Just go this way. I'm just gonna draw right over this. It means a little bit heavier line Wait, mainly because I'm trying to kind of get to the end result a little faster. So just like that, you see it darkened up that on edge just where wanted race back. Some of these lines look around. That's starting to appear with just lines and and not, you know, nothing. Designs are very well done. I mean, they might be pretty clean left to right or something or parallel to one another. But there's definitely some inconsistencies there. So perfection is not something. You should hold yourself accountable to this. Let's go and stop here. We're gonna head over to the next lesson and continue to make this more dimensional. We're gonna actually add a drop shadow. No. So what? That Let's move on to our next lesson. 4. L3 Adding a Drop Shadow: All right, so now we'll add a drop shadow to this. But we're gonna also keep in mind our initial diagram. Basically so remember, we had a rise in line that was somewhere through there, and this won't be entirely straight. So forgive me for that. And we had a light source that would go up from there, be somewhere up here. And from there we could use perspective too. Find a approximation. Probably not. Even I don't even know if approximation would be the right word. Because if you do this correctly, it's gonna be you know where it is. Perspective is exactly how light source will work within the scene. So if we go like this, you see that based on where we're at, we get a very large shadows or girl Plan is going to sit, you know, somewhere like that. Now I feel like that shadow is way too elongated. But then again, I started with light source. It's probably a lot shorter within a scene for you know, if this was a large sphere in like a street or something like that or a park, then it's going toe. One being a street right, and it will stay in a park, then it's probably going to have the light source a lot higher up. But, you know, the sun could be setting. It's coming down. As that happens, the shadow is going toe a long gait. But the other thing to think about is that the shadow isn't necessarily going to be definitely isn't gonna be a solid. So as it comes this way, it's gonna dissipate. It's gonna fade off. So even if we do decide to do this kind of large drop shadow, we also want to think about how this might blend off to the edges, to the distance, away from the light source, things like that. So what we're gonna do is just kind of imagines I wanted you to at least understand the principles eso again. That would be if we were developing a scene and everything was relating back to the initial perspective in this case, actually want to just kind of imagine the way that shadow will look, So I'm just gonna draw this out, become a base shape. So I'm just thinking about this cash shadow of the sphere. It will say something like that, and I want around this out. So this is basically just in the lips and this is just our container. This is just, ah, perimeter shape to get us started now, I could have just generated a ah lips just like I did with sphere of a circle from the start. But, um, I think it's good to always challenge yourself and try to draw things. You know, I didn't draw the circle, but eso just straightening that out a bit, so it looks a little bit more like it's attached to a ground plane. So now with this, I'm just going to tone this back a little bit and I'm gonna add another layer over top. And so now what I want to think about is, you know, one of the darkest points that I want to see in this now, generally the way it's gonna happen is you're gonna have this darker shadow closer to the object. So we have to perceive that the light is pushing that shadow, and it's very a parent closer to the object. But then, as it works its way out here, it's gonna fade off. So let's just start right here, and I'm gonna purposely start with them heavier lines. And I'm also going to bring these in, either either tighter or heavier as we get closer to the object either one will convey. Ah, a darker shadow. Just This is where you play around with these concepts. You know, you start to get good with developing your lions relatively straight, so you start to play around with lie in wait and intensity, and we'll talk more about tapering lines. I'm getting some taper here, but it's really just me trying to implement pressure more than the Taper. It's just kind of the way this particular brush works generally gonna get more of a taper. So this is gonna be your results will vary based upon what you're using if using Micron Pan or if using a different software, um, they all very right. So So now we've got a little bit darker effect, and I really feel like closer to this, I want I want to be even darker now. One of the reasons I'm purposely using heavier line wait for one. It is faster for me to get the the, uh value that I want the darker value, but also it helps to not conflict with lines that I have in the sphere. So you just have to be aware that that sometimes you make the lines different just to, you know, convey your depth and your, ah, your various materials more effectively. So now we've got a little bit of our starting point for the darker area there. So now what I want to do is actually go right through this entire area. And although it's a little bit lighter, line member of speed will generally help you get a cleaner line, and we can always go back and clean up the edges. But I'm using this Ah, container. But I drew out just to kind of keep me on point here. Keep in mind to him also a distance away from my canvas, where it's easy for me to pull this while resting my hand on the screen. So again, thinking about the mechanics and the way that you create it can be very important, actually, should have just went straight up and down with ease to keep Thea the lines less conflicting. Well, just like that, we have our next little bit of tone and could almost probably do away with this now, but I'm gonna keep it a little bit longer. Eso No. I want to bring some lines in the opposite direction. Still relatively light, though, but I'm gonna pass through everything else. So again, I'm thinking about darkening everything at once. I don't want to just kind of stopped. And if I do stop actually stopped a little bit to the middle here. I need to pick back up over here so that I keep this kind of uniform shading going on as I passed through certain areas again, It's not real pretty. It's not real pristine or anything like that. Let go of any concept of perfection. But I am trying to keep a little bit of thought process end of us as I as I keep dark ing this. So now I feel like this shadow needs to still be darker, and I feel like it needs to shade to about here. I actually wanted to be a little bit darker all the way to about right there, and I also want a curve it as I do that I'm gonna think about a shape like that. I'm gonna pick another beings all we need to try to Rome that out of bed. And most were gonna press a little bit harder because I really wanted dark in this area up . So I compress harder and I can also bring those together. You see, it's getting pretty messy there, but that's okay. Nothing wrong with that. Like you fade that off. It could go past that edge. If I want to soften up that now, I can soften up my edges. You know, there's lots of things I could do actually want a little bit more of a crisp edge to this. But the other thing to think about is after you get this, I'm just gonna kind of throw in some random lines here and kind of sculpt besides of this. And I want this bottom right under the sphere to be really dark. So I'm actually just pushing some more lions from the middle out. It's like Pam starting from the darkest point fading out. Okay, so now I've got the shading that I want here, and I'm gonna get rid of that initial line from the base double click this So it straightens it out and pan back and you see Now we've got, you know, a pretty decent shadow there. So, uh, the other thing that think about is I can also go back to this now and say that these lines here a little too solid for me. I can come back in the other direction with the translucent brush, and I can fade that out as well. So it starts off. The lines are a bit tighter and succession. And then I fade those out as I go into the area that I want to retain that dark era. And I can do this all throughout the design so I can go back to the the sphere. It's quite emerges together, and I could do that. They're here. So these lines are a bit too abrupt for me. It's actually make this. Ah, but larger second see it better. And I can really break thes up. So you really take advantage of everything that you can dio I could go back here. I could dues this to incorporate some bounce light. So if I wanted to put a highlight on the bottom of this because we've got to remember, the light can hit off the ground plane and it can bounce back up. That's what gives us reflected lighter bounce. Like I'm not gonna do that in this example. But I just want you to think about all these things. And then the other thing that's gonna make actually show you one more thing that the translucent. I don't like how this line is so solid, mainly because it was computer generated. I really should have drew that in. But you can also erase this back and again. You can have a more solid area, and as it goes around this way, they get wider and you can generally convey light source that way by thinning up the line weight to the side with the the light source. So just began to keep that in mind. And then, lastly, you could really make this look more dimensional by adding some atmospheric effects. So we know that our horizon line was something like this. And we could say that, you know, maybe there's some some tone back here. We want to implement that. You know whether you're not you. Ah, you hatchet or cross hatchet or stippling or texture it. What if you want to dio just to again think about the value and the shift and look how just that little bit makes it a lot more dimensional. So that's the basics of what we're going to be discussing and implementing into the scene creation. But I wanted to give you some ways to practice and think of this like you should always practice with primitives anyway. Spears, pyramids, rectangular shapes, everything that you draw breaks down into these primitive shapes in one way or another. Yes, it seems boring sometimes and like well, I'm just may be a lot better artists in that I don't need that you will always need that. So always if you ever find yourself doing on the page and not knowing what to do and how to improve your back to the basics, try some of these practice activities and it's always a good thing. So let's wrap up right here and head over to our next lesson. 5. L4 Inking Our Scene Silhouettes First: All right, So now we're gonna think this scene and I'll make sure you got access to this artwork. This is something I drew in this very program took a few hours to do, but just kind of a fun scene on, really Just practice. This was wasn't for a comic or anything like that, but I thought I'd be a great example for you to ink with eso. It's got some inconsistencies which I think is important to deal with because you want to realize that not every scene is gonna fall into exact perspective when you're thinking it. And sometimes you're just gonna kind of banquets there. Other times, you're going to correct a little bit eso we'll talk about that. But whenever I do this, the first thing I want to do is think about where is the perspective. So, for instance, I drew this one's I know what that. But if this was handed off to me by another artist that I might need to we're a little bit more about you know where this perspective might fall. It's pretty easy to find, especially, you tell by looking at this is a one point or a single point perspective on again. I've already defined it here because I did, as I was drawing. Seen in this program Supports. Ah, um you know, perspective, religious, go layer ruler, create perspective, ruler. We'll just go and do it. And one point perspective had okay. And then what you want to do is you're gonna move this around so we're gonna use thesis election tool here, select it and move it around, and then you're gonna grab these little law circles here and that kind of hard to see, But you're gonna move those around, kind of figure out. You know where this could go now, the other way to do it is you can grab the plus sign, and you can actually force the vanishing point to move. So you could just position these on a couple of the more paramount areas within the work. I would say this line's pretty much where the vanishing point resides. We want to be careful not to pick the wrong thing. So, for instance, you could pick one of the computer screens and it could very well be incorrect. Now, the other thing is this the panel is tilted, so this needs to be tilted as well. So pick one of the straight lines or horizontal lines within the scene. You know, this happens a lot, right? You get a scene that they want to add a little bit more drama or a dynamic vibe to, and they tilt it. So it's a little bit more intense than that. So, you know, so plain or whatever, but eso you just kind of player out this and get these tow line up and they're not gonna line up to everything, especially if you're working with, you know, maybe an artist. It isn't. It is comfortable of perspective and they do a little bit of faking. You know, that happens a lot in comics, you kind of fake perspective. Um, you know, some people are very adamant about getting correct perspective on every scene, and other people just kind of throw building here and there. So you gotta be careful. It's where you try to guide yourself. You want to find the most correctness within the scene, say I'm having a hard time and it's my own seeing It's pretty crazy, but, uh, I could easily just go for lines that I know are in perspective would be this one, this one here, and it's probably a little bit of that tilt, but I got to get right. I think you can also pull. Once you grab the plus sign. Just keep in mind. If you work in this program, you can pull out as far as you need to. So what happens is, if you grab too tightly near the plus signs, you're going to get this quick jolt. But if you pull away while clicking on the screen, you can still maneuver this and have a little bit more control. So let's say something like that. Let's check a few more of these. I'm not gonna worry about the computer screens because I know I free handed a lot of those end and again. That's kind of what you're gonna want to think about when inking over somebody else's work . While some of that stuff looks like they just kind of winged it, you know, they just kind of went with it. So go for them or, uh, you know, the bigger lines basically things that you know that probably should be in perspective, like these windows with the bottom almost seems like this needs to come up a little bit higher. Let's do this. Let's check it with one that I originally defiance. Have it lower there. So it's It's double. Check that right here. Grab one of these. Remember, Grabbed the circle if you don't want to distort it and then grabbed the plus signs. If you do want to move your vanishing point, so just like that, So you're gonna initially start with that now, the other way to do this is really going to get rid of this one, so it doesn't get confusing here. The other way to do this is just if you're working, this program even is shift click, so you can create straight lines that way. And obviously that's the one that's the most resemblance of traditional Ira. You just put a ruler on it and you start going to town on, and I could really do this entire scene that way. But I want to show you a variety of ways. I don't want to show you one way because we all create very differently. So let's jump in here and start thinking I'm gonna turn that perspective roller off for now , our perspective, layer. And when I zoom in here, one of the things I like to do in doing a scene like this is first spot in the blacks. So I'm going to just take my jeep in. Remember, this is just a solid brush. I think that then, Ah, you know nothing to groundbreaking. But you always want A in my opinion, always want he's a brush. It gives you a variation. Now, with this particular software, I could just hold shift click, and I could go around some of these shapes pretty quickly. I might need to go back and touch him up. The shift click method on this one doesn't work his wallahs. I found out some other programs, but it still works, so you could just get your base kind of shapes and place. Remember, you could do this with the poly line tool as well. So whatever you like, just kind of bring that line back together, try a flood fill just like that. You've got your starting point and you can always get in here, nudge these corners around over some edges. So if you feel like it just doesn't looks too blocky, you know around in some of these edges round over some of this at a little detail here and there. Some buttons, you know, add to the silhouette. Silhouettes are always fun and interesting, and it's a great way to encapsulate Thea Scene. So it immediately puts the viewer further back behind some. Some other objects in the distance always, always like using this effect. And then again, same thing over here. You don't have to shift Click. You could just draw this out. This is typically probably what I do for most things, but seeing how it is a pretty techie, futuristic seen, then the shift click is great for getting those very, you know, those very straight computer object type lions. So just make sure your edges air filled in, and obviously you gotta love the the flood villages so quick and easy and then jump in here and add some of these cables and wires. These were easy to do and again at another kind of neat dynamic to the scene. I was like playing around these concepts, so try to vary these up a bit. You can even ah, you know, make some dinner, makes make some thicker. Make some wrap around the other one, and you can also get in there with some negative lines. And you could do, like, little little divides to make it look more detailed and segmented and so on. Just like that, we've got a little bit of our foreground element and we should probably get a frame in here , So really probably the first up. I'm just gonna call this thanks and probably the first step is add an importer. So just grab this rectangle tool, hold shift, and that's gonna give you a square, like go a shift That's going to be a rectangle, more or less. What I need to do, though, is get the thickness up. So if you pay attention to down here, the brush side is gonna directly relate to the border. So the thicker we make that and think of the border, we get tested out. It's almost a little too heavy for what I want. Like that down just a little bit. Remember, you can use your bracket keys on the keyboard. Left bracket is smaller, right bracket is larger or thicker and something right about their command Z. And then I'm just gonna roughly throw it in. It doesn't need to match, because what I'm gonna do is hit command T. I'm gonna rotate it in the place. See? You know what? That's unfortunate, Command. See, a couple times I need to add a layer was double click here, call this frame, and now draw that out. Gonna be back on this tool, draw that out. And really, we just hit command. Shifty. So I'm just gonna distort this right toe where it goes, it'll be faster. So command shifty is your distort. Uh, command T is your, ah, transform and scale. See how easy that is. So it's just Let's just go with what's easiest train and fastest. So there's that. We've got our frame now. We can kind of contain all larynx inside there. We've got a little bit of our silhouette going weaken jumped back over to here, and we can work on this part. So again kind of draw in this shape. Now, the only thing is, since our frame is floating above, remember to draw across, so just fill in the top on the bottom, encapsulate those inks, flood, fill, touch up and move onto the next one. So again, these little wires always find you See, I'm trying to make something that are noticeably thicker. This one here actually, try to be creative and put like a little harbor clip of some kind. Just sort read civilians. So basically taking a thicker wire, a little clip and then a thinner wire, Just little ideas like that. Nothing too groundbreaking. But I think it's important to just, you know, experiment where you can so that when you start to make a scene that's more detailed or you wanted to read more detailed, uh, you have more variation in those details. They don't have to be much eso again. We could do some of these little half moon lines to convey segmentation. You know, you could take this a bit further as well. You could probably get in here and detail each one of these little pieces, so it depends on what you're really trying to accomplish. I'm gonna go with less, is more right there. And just like that, double click here to straighten out your canvas. And just like that, we've got our frame and we've got some silhouettes to again kind of encapsulate the screen are seeing, I should say and give us a bit more depth. So let's go to wrap up here, head over to the next lesson and start to refine the scene a bit more. 6. L5 Adding in Some Perspective Lines: All right, so we're gonna start thinking into the scene and what want to do here is think about the perspective. But again, I can already tell, you know, I don't know what I was thinking when I illustrated this, but I'm actually glad it wasn't in perspective because it gives us a unique opportunity to explain in a way where it's like we're handing it off from another artist. So I guess there's gonna be times when even your own art might not have been what you expected. So although I thought I kept perspective in mind enough, these windows up top are actually really out of perspective. So based on the one point perspective that I haven't placed there, I'm on a new layer. And I'll just call these, you know, into perspective or something like that, which I'm probably gonna add a lot more of the details of this one. But let's go ahead and spell that correctly. There we go. So now anything that we drawn, this one will confined to the perspective grid because it's on or perspective ruler. So what I want to do here is just, you know, kind of checked the work So if I go right here, you see that that line is close. It's not completely on, though. So if I go from here back and actually we got to be very careful because as you get towards the metal, it'll accidentally snapped to that middle of mine there. So based on the perspective going to this vanishing point, these lines are correct. So we're gonna grab food and keep in mind, too. He also want to use line weight to your advantage to convey this. And I'm gonna draw right outside of the frame because I can raise this back easily enough. But I want to have a thicker line that converges down to a thinner line to try that from the other direction because this helps to convey a sense of depth within the scene almost instantly. So just be aware that that's a good use of a tapered line because of what it does for the perspective. And you can really do that throughout, But I think I'm gonna keep it in the most predominant on that centerpiece. That's just preference. So now, as I do this, I want to, you know, keep checking these lines, but Like I said, I already know that when I get to the point of the, uh, the bottom of the windows, I'm going to see a big variation on a mistake. Basically. So I guess this really depends on you know who you're working with. If you really have leniency to change is the work, or if you just want to try to think over top of it. And that's really what I'm gonna do here. So if you notice if I check a lot of these lines, a lot of the screens air off. You know that bottom portions pretty good. So I'll grab what lines I can. I don't know if I like that line. Maybe something starting line. See, this line is actually pretty accurate over with that one. And you can really notice some that have been pulled. Perspectively, he's right here. So what I'm gonna do is actually utilize the ones that are in correct perspective and hopefully kind of rain some of this end. But I'm actually gonna let the windows be outside of quite perspective. So these lights are fine. Get those in there, so I'll just start with the edges Now the beauty of layers is you really can just draw through a lot of this, get the shapes that you want and then race back. So I'll do a little bit of that, Not a big deal. So you say are vertical lines for the door wear about where they need to be so more of the horizontal. So a lot of this is Ah, you know, well, it'll work out to use, um, the perspective ruler. But then there's gonna be things that just do not use it at all. And that's gonna be like the screen on an angle. You know, lots of these screens because they're tilted things like that. So we're just gonna get some of this base information in place. And then, like I said, once we get to hear, we're gonna actually fake the perspective more because of not we're gonna have to shift all this artwork down on really change it quite a bit on That might go against, you know, working with another artist and what they really want you to do. So, um, and I think that for the most part, it doesn't look visually off too much. Maybe because it's such a busy scene s. So what I'm gonna do now is tighten up on the work and again I can clean up What's here? Eso I don't get too far ahead of myself so I could take the translucent brush, just race back some of these lines and really a couple ways to do this. So if you don't like racing back these lines, maybe you get some weird artifacts to the edges and things like that. You know, if you zoom up, you see, I didn't catch every bit of that line. The other way is just to incorporate the layer, throw that bit of information in and then merge it down with command E. So I'll find myself doing that a lot as well. So there's no lines here, so get rid of these guys, okay? And another way to do is probably quicker for straight edges is just grabbed. The poly line tool Select breakthrough here, shoot over to here. Probably tell I don't use this one as much as I should a little bit shaky with it, but, uh, sometimes it's, you know, just quicker. Better to dio. The other thing is this software actually supports vectors and you can use the vectors to cleanup overlaps really quickly like this. But I'll be honest. I don't use that either. So I just want to show you exactly how I go about my work. And this would be it, maybe a little bit more painstakingly, but it's the method I prefer. So just like that, we got those cleaning up and I'm assuming clean up the border row easy at the end. So let me just show you what I'm gonna do over here to kind of correct us. So again, it may look like it's gonna be a lot of extra work, or it should be less work to really correct it because we're not going to shift all the artwork around. But essentially, what I want to do is just give myself guides based upon what's here. So I'm gonna click through here, give myself bad perspective that I'm already seeing here, even though it's not correct. And then I'm going to rotate this a bit, and I'm just going to think through this, just basically drawing through it. But what I want to do here is think about you know where these windows were gonna end up on my going to use this top line here. So even though I'm pretty close to what's here, I need to think about how this might distort by the time I get over here. So I think I'm gonna go with the first window being right here. So I'm gonna shorten the artwork just a little bit and drop this first window. Some drag it this curve in place, and then we're looking up into the scenes. We're going to see the inside edge of the top of the window. So, like that and the news are translucent brushed to, ah, race back some of those detail and clean up this little area and then clean up the divide. So that's kind of home. And do each one of these windows. I know be honest. It's really easy to do one window and copy and paste it. But I'm not gonna do that because it's just not really necessary here. The artworks in place and again I want to kind of approach is a little bit more traditionally because I don't want to get in the habit of changing the artwork again. You got to think about working with other people. You know, again, this is my own artwork. So I really have, uh, the final say in this matter. But I still try to work in a way where I'm ready to work with somebody else if I need to. Now, the other thing to think about it as you work back in this direction, you know, keep in mind this is ah, a little bit of an incorrect perspective, but we still can use the line that we've established here toe work back into this area, so we could still use kind of the rule of perspective to ah eight us. But the other thing is, you want to beef up these lines as you get further back. Now, a lot of this is gonna be filled in, so let's see if that's all in one layer. Yeah, so I can go and just fill that and now like them. And I'm gonna come back with, like, some negative lines and make you know the space and stuff like that. But what I want to do is get a little bit heavier line weight as I go back to again, convey like this feeling of depth just like path of that end. So it's over, Fourth race is back and you see him. E could get in there and I could start detail ing all this and adding some shading. But I'm not worried about that. Yes, In fact, what I want to do is make sure that I can illustrate the main shapes all the way back here and get some kind of continuity going S. So I think what happens is it's a little bit easier on the old brain box if you itemize the work and you do things in a consistent way. I think that's really important with thinking, because it's very easy to just bounce all over the place. Now. There is a different way to look at that. Probably a lot of ways to look at everything, right, So one way is, are you really inspired to be working on whatever you're doing at that very moment? So in that case, I find this more with characters than I do with the backgrounds anyways. So if there's something that I'm inspired to do, like I'm feeling really great about the characters, then I may purposely ignore what I just said, and work all across the board on the character. But I may just still keep it to at least just characters. So then I kind of play into my strength at the moment. Um, that's anyways, that's how I do it. I really don't know that there's, ah, set way that you should go about that. But I do feel like if you're doing something right, you should really utilize that for speed and consistency in the work. So get all of that. It's also like if you're fighting an uphill battle and you're not getting your your gadgetry, your techie stuff toe look right in the scene. You know what makes more sense to bounce around to another area, something you might be doing well Ah, and do while with that or fight an uphill battle and possibly do a lesser quality of work. Now, if you don't have any time left in this certain aspect of your work, that has to be done, and that's just the way it is. But like I said, if you do have that leniency and you can jump over to something that you're a little bit more excited about, you seem to be, um, effectively doing better at that moment than utilize that to your advantage. So, you see, I'm free. Hand a lot of these lines in here. I could obviously be using the shift click method eso I could even check my work. I could shift, click this way and see how well I did or how not so well, I did. But I think it's good enough, so I'm just going to continue on. I'm furthering the line a little bit, but I'm ultimately trying to get only doing that because it's a curve. I'm ultimately trying to get a, um, a smooth, consistent line. And then, just like that, noticed to him I'm using a thicker line, even though is gonna get filled in. But you are going to see this heavier line on the Iraqi side of this moon shape or whatever . So you know, as we start to illustrate this, it will expose some of the heavier lines that I'm trying to introduce to convey some depth . Remember that this is a floating frame, so we need to fill this in before we drop in the bucket tool. So just like that, it's going to fill this in and we got to get rid of some of the lines here. Double click here and straighten it out and see what we got. So I want to check it from a distance, and I feel like those Windows shapes are pretty accurate now. They're not perfect. We know that they're not in perspective, correct perspective. And we also know that I didn't check center to each one and divide it and then try to figure out the divides off the separating metal pieces there. So I just went with a visual interpretation and obviously the use of the line work that was already there. So I just wanted to see that the lines were nudged. No, that's not generally gonna happen. For the most part, it really just gonna go right over top of whatever you're given, and that's OK. Again, it's this kind of symbiosis with you and somebody else. In this case, it's my own work, but the same time you have to realize you know what is acceptable to change. Ask lots of questions and, you know, see, see what they really want out of the end result. If you find something correct in a nice way, you know? Hey, the perspectives Little awful. What should we do here? Some styles are really going to throw that to the wind and just do what they want. And I think this one really could have just been inked exactly over top. But I did want to try to show you that you know these ways to kind of think about correcting as well. So let's go and wrap up here, head over to the next lesson and continue to think the work. 7. L6 Inking the Tech: Let's continue under this other side. Now, using perspective, you really can map over the windows. These look like a symmetrical kind of thing. Right? So you could really just implement your perspective. Make sure maybe on a floating layer or something like that Will just couldn't add another layer. Here, let's call it. Ah, you know, Windows on the left or something. And you could just map out by going right over with the perspective. Grid rulers are always cigarette here. Uh, and then you confined the general placement of each window. Remember, it's gonna relate to this top line. So where those two meet, that's the placement of the window. Then you're gonna have to draw your curvature down. Now, you can also find the bottom, but notice how it's kind of covered by this piece. And again, it's out of perspective. But what I'm gonna dio is just throwing a line because I'm actually gonna keep this piece. This could even be something that's just, you know, misshapen in the scene. But it's really not. It's just ah, improper use of perspective. But that's all right. We're gonna throw that line in there so you could almost make the argument. These windows are a bit more covered, so that could be one way to kind of look at this. They go to the next one. This gives you your divide next one so you could easily map out at least the starting point . And generally that's going to do a lot for you. And keep in mind, you could do this with another layer and then light in the layer. Opacity is they don't end up with all this clean up that you have to do. But I'm probably not going to use this. I just want to show you again. There's multiple ways to do each thing, so from this point you would turn off your perspective roller. And then again, you would get your curved edges in there. You know you're gonna roam these corners out. You're going to utilize what's here to kind of guide you. So even though I'm not hitting that artwork, I am still using it as a You know the concept. I'm still using the curvature. It's still aiding me a little bit in the process, and you see that shifts are pretty dramatic, but this gives me aligned windows now, the other way to do this is you can ignore it again like we've kind of talked about. But you can go and delete this out. Let's go and find the initial window shapes. Where they here, Right there. So we could take this and being that we're working digitally, we can take advantage of that. And let's get our Pilon tool. Let's select all these windows. Birth Command C Command V will give us a copy Mandy to De Select, and we could grab our move tool. We could bring these over. We can get at it. Transform, flip, horizontal hit, enter And we can maneuver these right over top like See, it kind of exposes even mawr of the perspective problem at this point, But we can still kind of work around that. So we know our first window lines up to about here we see the distortion there. Let's hit command shift T and let's kind of play around with these nodes or control points and kind of been this around a little bit and again, we are thinking about the idea that some of the bottom of the windows are probably getting hidden by this additional. You know, techie gadgetry, whatever this control panel so well, think a little bit about that. But the main thing is, we're looking for, you know, big eyesores, things that are going to really expose it like the top edge, being way too thin by comparison to this. So that's actually what I'm going for right now. Remember that by condensing these inward, you're basically shifting the perspective of the windows and therefore change in the size of them. So what kind of pull these in one of the time I can drop this down because again, remember, we talked about the bottoms potentially being behind this This bridge, which I think makes probably the most sense at this point, distort that around. And once we got something close will say it right about Well, there's that line, that guide. So we'll go with that right about there. Will hit, enter. I see. It's still pretty far off. We take this in a race race back this extra area here. You know, it's kind of messy here, like, you know what? We What do we need to keep to make this read? What we can do is just kind of tireless on and off. And really, what I would generally do is turn back heel pass to be like this, and then I'm gonna get in here and work. Ah, at full capacity, and I'm gonna fix things. So we got the edge of the window right here. This is actually gonna be the planet at that point. So this could be, ah, raced back to about here. You want to follow if we're going to use the same planet shape, So we're gonna follow through there and let's see, so some of this is gonna be race back. But then the main thing is, I want to kind of highlight each side of this, uh, these wires, They don't want to lose those. So I'm just going to Here's the negative brush. I could erase back one side. I'll start with both because I can always put the line bag fight. I feel like it's too much. Generally, you can just, you know, highlight the light source, and then you could do one side. That's heavier ones. I that just has a couple little line breaks, but I think I want to see all of this in pretty plain sight and then we'll get in here. We'll work on the planet next. But first I want to correct everything else. I'm gonna turn that back. Oh, and actually need to drop the visibility through the middle cause it's eating up those lines that we established. Let's try them a little bit better. Think it needs this line right through there so we can keep adding and playing around that , make sure we don't lose that bit of information. So it's starting to read right there and just like that, you know, I would say that's probably quicker method and then we've got windows that are somewhat consistent. They're probably not perfect from side to side, but they're close. And as we start toe overlay more and more this information, I think it will read just fine. So the other thing want to do is make sure that we clean up certain lines as we go, especially in case we decide to merge anything down. So this particular line needs to be taken out of there now. So this was, ah, just a guide. Get that right out of there And you know, your layers can start to get pretty messy. So it's good to be careful this as you go. But, um, I think I'm gonna work off this layer, and that will help me. So if I look at the majority of these two layers, it's primarily all my ink. So I like to work off just a couple because there's so many ways to add it. You really don't have to use any more than that. Eso Now what I would like to dio is work on some of the trim work around it. So at this point, I'm actually going to use a lot more of what's there in front of me and not worried too much about correcting things. I still feel like this scene. If I just would have inked over the initial concept, it would have still worked out. It may have not been entirely correct as it's not, but ah, again, I see a lot of comic work that I'm a fan of that I did admire, and it's not always entirely correct. In fact, it seems like the more and study it. A lot of it's not correct, but it has the foundations and principles at work of perspective and mainly just really like good use of lie in wait and direction. Focal points. So our focal point in this scene is really the characters in the reaction everything. It's not all these details, but the details help tell us where we're at helps push the narrative. So I'm also going to use, like, skill down the brush use like shift click. What kind of make sure that this line I'll pull it from the very edge this way back. And I think what I was originally going for Let's go do that again was that this part ends right here. It's got a slight round over this part, hides behind there. So just those little overlaps or what helps to convey that. And then as I start to work in these screens, I'm definitely gonna let some of these be, uh, out of perspective, because again, not everything is going to fall in perspective. When you're drawn like you know, a city with like street signs and cars and everything else in that scene, you really want to let some things just kind of be on an angle and falling off the side of the building and whatever else now, this being Atmore high tech are semi high tech. I don't think it looks too high tech, but almost like a NASA space station kind of thing. Um, so futuristic, but not, you know, modern, but not entirely futuristic. If we, uh, we think about that, a lot of things were going to be a lot more rigid to the rules of perspective. But again, it could just be your interpretation of it. So you could let it go. Let the chips fall where they may. So I'm just going to kind of try toe, illustrate some depth on some of these edges and then get in some little details here. So now I'm gonna use a lot more lying. What? You see, it intentionally allowed that to be crooked. They didn't worry about fixing it, But what I am thinking about is, you know, a little bit cleaner lines a little bit cleaner, read hopefully what we have here. And I also want some of these shapes to be just different from the previous shape. So, for instance, instead of just repeating all these boxy rectangular shapes purposely gonna throw in like a random, you know, smaller, thinner shape with some side. Ah, little slides here. So just trying to think of, like, little ways to put variation in there, because if they're all the same, it just really gets boring and kind of kills the creative vibe that it has. I want to try to play around with that. No, Likewise. I could jump in here and start dropping in little bits of detail and shadow. This is almost like texture. But see that if I do that, it makes these shapes pop out of it better then if I was to just leave that all white Now, one of the things I do think about when doing little things like that and like I'm just gonna add a little clear on the front of them is that, you know, is this gonna be a black and white comic? Is this gonna be colored if it's gonna be black and white that I doom or of this type of stuff where I throw in a little loose rendering and shadows to kind of fill up all the white space so again, that's gonna really be determined based upon your end result and what you're looking to achieve with your inks. You know, if it's a it's called comic, then really, you can a lot of this stuff in and what the color do the work. But for black and white comic, even though you know black white comics aren't as prevalent as they once were, there still out there and to give you an opportunity to do a lot more creative things with the NX, So you're almost you're almost a colorist at the same time, but you're basically just trying to illustrate all those different values with your line work. And just remember, you have cross hatching, and you obviously can express a lot of ranges of value with cross hatching. But you have texture. You have stippling in. A lot of artists want to get more confident. They start using more stylized lines for areas that would basically just be maybe a straight line, so they'll use hook lines or double lines with a little bit of stippling. And again, they stylized that line, work to make their work appear more expressive. So again, trying to convey a little bit of ah, depth these areas, you'll see me also throw in like little bits and pieces. So, like right here, I feel like this could look a bit more detailed. So add in a little a little separation there something, maybe some buttons off to the side. But actually, I'll come back into that because really, what I want to try to do is create a lot of this information and passes and then come back and detailed the work. I could probably rotate this. Make this land a little easier, obvious, like abusing shift click. But it gives you a little bit more of a boring line. I kind of like connecting these weighted lines a little bit more and again. I can always. So I can always go back and clean it up with, uh, some shift clicks or Polly line adjustments, whatever. But at this point, I'll just kind of draw these in so more shape, a shadow here, and just fill that in real quick are for rotate. You can also do these, like little divides in between the screens, and it makes it look like you know, connectors or something like that again, all these little texturally kind of things that throw in there another little wire back here, a couple wears. Okay, so let's go ahead and stop right here. And you know, you can zoom back and see where we're at. Let's stop right here and head over to the next lesson and continue to refine this. So what? That let's move on. 8. L7 Adding Straight Lines to the Work: zoom back and air continued ing. So you just keep in mind. You do want always kind of pan back. I like Theo in closer just so I can watch the line clarity. But you got to be very aware of your distance. You know, another good way to do this is actually amused. Maybe a navigation window. Make sure that real quick you can go window. Uh, you know, uses as much as I should new. And you can actually set this window off to the side if you want from the other window. And let's see. I gotta be able to see the side of this windows. We gotta move that over this one over, kind of play around with him here just to get to the side of it. You can really drag it anywhere, though. You probably sandwich it over to the top is well, but this is generally how will do it. So I'll bring it over and aside this middle portion over. And so I want to keep one small one large like this. So now what happens is I can get this just to the reduction size that I'm thinking about, and then over here, I can work a full scale. It's kind of neat. You know, some people might find this to be distracting, so I just wanted to show you how to do it. You can also even flip this window independently, which I think is pretty, pretty neat and pretty exclusive to this program. So what you dio is go to the window navigation. Where is that? Don't smart navigator. And through the navigator, which is now over here. It's another window trying not to confuse you here. But what happens is it will flip just the one window. So these little buttons right here, you can flip them up and down, which I don't use that, but horizontally. So I decided notice it didn't flip the other window. So and you could place this one in a smaller sub categories. Windows. Well, so what do you need that? But I don't have too many windows here. It just want to show you there's lots of options. I'll leave it back on the layer property. So now what happens is is I'm working over here. You'll see it's gonna add that line. Sometimes it takes a second, but adds that line over to the other side. So generally I'll do this for not really thinking so much more, drawing as faras the flip the window that you see there also, you remember you can skilled on your bracket. And if you got a longer line that you wanna drop in first with a shift, click some holding shift, some pressing on the screen where I want to start. Hold shift. I could drag that line wherever I want and let go. And as I mentioned in the previous lesson, I actually like to draw these lines more. But it could be a nice way to kind of check perspective and start with an initial line so I can go all the way to here. I can pay attention to where that line ends up, and then Aiken hover my curse over Topic Command Z, click and then finish that line. You could do it any number of ways back and forth, but then you could check that and make sure that it did line up. See, it did so. There's lots of neat little ways you can use shift click to help you perspectively, and even though I'm gonna drop in that what I consider boring line. I can go back over top and I could kind of re sculpted a little bit with a bigger brush so I could make it look a bit more like a hand drawn line. But I know that I've kind of checked my perspective first, you know, because there's lots of things where it's really easy. Teoh get too caught up on drawn everything by him, which I'm gonna keep saying I actually prefer that look I prefer when it is all hand done. Uh, but there's just those times when you're doing something you really want toe. I feel better about it. So alleviate that bit of stress on yourself and just kind of use some of these tools to aging that process. See, right there, it actually looks too thick because I started with a line known here, But again, I can also use this to build up the line. So what I'm doing here is it makes your starting a little bit wider on each point. But I'm converging down to the center of this point, so it gives me this Taper line. So again, using that shift, click in a different way to kind of evening, that process of a more hand drawn feel, a tapered line which in turn helps with perspective. So, like I mentioned in the very beginning, when we did the centerpiece to the ceiling by tapering these lines along with perspective, you can really convey more death. So I really need to be using a bigger brush instead of redrawn this line too many times. Because if you don't have good hand control, you'll generally make the line a little bit more widely by passing over it too many times. But it really depends on where you're at is an artist. Some people have amazing hand control and redrawing the line on Lee improves it and just again depends on what type artist You're where you're at now. Remember, every time we're above the rise in line. So let me put the perspective back in place were only slightly above the rising land. The rise in line is this middle blue one that's kind of on an angle generates going straight. But remember, we tilted the panel. So since we are above that, we're looking up into the screen. Okay, So when you're above the rise in line, you're gonna look up into a recessed area, but again, it's gonna be more slight. So if you wanted to be more convincing, the distance here is gonna be more narrow than the distance on the side of this panel. If not, if it reads the same all the way around, it's just not going t o be accurate, for it would basically say that the top is a thicker material because of it reads the same as a side than the top would have to have a bigger inside to make that make sense. So it's a lot of judgment calls, and then really, this side right here, you're not going to see that side. So this line is gonna disappear behind here. You're gonna get a little bit of the angle from the connection point there. So it's gonna look more like that. So little little details like this are what kind of makeup you know, the panel read a little bit more coherently. Um, I don't know that it's it's a must that everything is perfection in that regard, but but it's good to pay attention to it and try to think about Okay. What? Ej, what I see and why? And really analyze it. You see, I could be going a lot quicker with, like, the shift click method. So if time is the issue for you on a panel like this, then by all means, you know, use whatever the method saves you that amount of time and gets the job done. And I actually don't want this flip some to go back to our navigator. Flip that one more time. I like seeing it exactly what it is. And then I might zoom up a little bit tighter like that? Yeah. And I can I can see some of the imperfections, the, you know, kind of weird shape of the screen itself. That this centerpiece, what I consider to be a centerpiece isn't exactly centered. I can definitely see it there. Now, remember, I'm not gonna correct this one. I'm not too worried about it, But if you are and you wanted something like that corrected, remember that your crisscrossing give you your center in perspective. So look how far off that is, while pretty bad. But again, I'm not gonna worry too much about it. Maybe I'll go back and show you a way to edit it. Because really, after this is all inked, you can make changes pretty significantly by selecting and shifting and reconnected line. So maybe we'll use that as an example. But again, I'm not that awfully concerned with it. But I did notice it Mawr in the smaller thumbnail. Then I noticed that full size. So just try that out. That may or may not work for you, but I typically think that viewing the work smaller exposes. Ah, certain flaws. Just like flipping it exposes another series of flaws. Generally flipping it for me exposes. Ah, symmetry hers. Okay, so again, I'm gonna just kind of jump through here with shift click and then re sculpt line a little better. And so, you know, this is further up from the rising, so we're going to see more of the inset to that material. He's in command z to go back, do something like best Mary thinner, line up top in that little curve there and finish it down this way. Now, this one I gotta looking like it's a lot more has a lot more depth than the other screens I wanted there to be that variation where some things look more, you know, have more depth, more inside, and that also gives me the opportunity to do more little detail ing. You see that I basically just did a very simplified approach, and that's like a shadow here and some lines. So again, this is one of those things of like, how much time do I have? Do I have time to go back and keep adding in these little bits of detail? But some of the details I'll try to do in between these like I kind of mentioned or is this some of us like little circuitry looking stuff? It doesn't take an absorbent amount of time to do this, and you can really be ultra creative with this. Like you can put like these little rained wires going up through here and definitely areas where it gets larger. I'll illustrate that more detail and show you, but it it's kind of neat because you see over there, it just adds a little bit more fell to those lows white areas, those plain jane areas. So it just sort of texture. Remember to you can also use the shift click method with translucent. So as I get some of this in place and saying missing area Sago, you know, I've got this lying close, but I make it to wide like this. I can go back with this in a translucent brush, hold, shift, click and drag. And I can clean that up pretty quickly. Just be aware there's lots of ways Teoh utilize that method. If you're working with this particular program and most of them support translucent versions of every brush at this point, so again, I'm gonna pass through here. But I gotta be careful that I don't eliminate that silhouette shape that we created in the beginning. I think so far it's pretty good. But I do want to keep an eye on it. And I'm just I'm using this a little bit more because it's just so so fast and easy again. I want to think about the depth that I'm going to see here we are above the rising lines. I think we'll see some of this side edge here, but it would probably make sense that it's gonna be more narrows. I'm gonna bring this line down, and I'm gonna try to make this one a bit more narrow and view and them widen it back out. So what that means to me is just a based on the perspective, you know, where our levels a little bit lower. So we're just seeing the side a little bit more. And it's actually right on the edge where we might see a little bit of this bottom edge because sail close, we're getting to the rise in line were on it, so at that point, he probably still wouldn't see it. But just be aware that as you start to pass below that, you're gonna start to see the bottom ridge of these other screens. So if I was to move this over and draw through this perspectively, it's that perspectives off some new shift click, we're gonna start to see the bottom inset of the screen just like that. And really, this line itself needs to be shifted because because it is perspective it shouldn't be the same with has to be a noticeable with increase as it gets closer to the viewer more like that. So just little things to pay attention to. Let's go and wrap it up here, head over to the next lesson and continue to detail this work. So with that, let's move on 9. L8 Adding in More Details: All right, let's continue on. So nothing I'm gonna try to do a little bit is drop in a few of these lines real thin just to kind of aid in the process and speed this up. So what I'm gonna dio this one actually is a small boat to it. That's another thing. I think that's kind of helpful to do. You see, I started to do that more with these bottom screens, mainly because he started to feel a little bit boring. So I was kind of in the middle of how advanced. I wanted this information to look, Is this futuristic, or is it just pretty modern for where we're at? Um, that's always Ah, you know, a tricky thing toe to figure out like it's really based on the narrative. So you have to really read into the story and see OK, we're in what year is this and where we at with our technological advancements in that kind of thing? But I think in this case, I wanted to read like, pretty current. But it's hard because even, you know, these days, we have a very, you know, a lot of screams that air flat screen and don't even have a basil to him. Um, and even with, like a wall of computers, it's like how much is really you know, buttons and how much is just like voice command. This is always choices to make when designing this stuff. So that's kind of what led me to start changing things a bit. I just felt like, Well, it's a little too boring if I make everything square need, you know, throwing some different shapes to the computers. That's why added the different angles on the sides and different shapes. As I started, I think I started here and went over, and that's why I feel like the right side is a little bit mawr. I don't know about advance, but it just has a bit more creativeness in the shapes. So with that just kind of fixing some of these bad lines and picking some Harris in the work, I feel like that one needs to be moved over. Now. Keep in mind to you can movies over by adding your shadow to the one side like this. Then again, like I mentioned, switching to translucent and you're basically nudging the line over instead of council erasing and redrawing. You start to get pretty creative at just kind of moving lines now, obviously work individually. You could just select and move the line, which makes you faster. But I just kind of like to do that every now and then where I draw the one side than a race to the other and do that a lot with faces, because I feel like there's a lot of lines I get really close to the face are the correctness that I want. And instead of totally redrawing the line, I can save time. But just again nudging the line. It works really well. Things like eyes and noses, where the details are a lot smaller and again, you can be pretty close. So what you're after, so there's really not always a need to erase everything back. Okay, so now what? This is I work over to this. I want to try to retain that silhouette of shape, and I think that's on a different layer. Yes, we're good anyways, because I could fill this all in to my heart's content, and I could go back with a light silhouette line or, um uh like gap. Wait, uh, kind of like a white out effect white pen and add a line back around that, some kind of perceiving that she's on this, like, you keyboard thing, that she's doing controls, and that's where hands are up on it. I'm just gonna fill in some of these lions, and I'll probably do some separate divides here and there. So you see, some of this information isn't there. I just kind of led up to it, Not primarily because I know I'm the one that's gonna be inking it anyways, because I think most of my own work, but at the same time, you know, there's gonna be you're gonna take liberty with that sometimes there's gonna be things that are missed in a artistas depiction. And again, you might want to verbalize and say, Well, I just think it would look better with some buttons here, some wires here and most artists I think you're just going to say, Go for it. Um, just make it better. You know, I think one of the neat things about working digitally is it's very liberating in the sense that you can add things. And if they don't like it. It's pretty easy to add it. Um, maybe that's a bad thing at times, too. Because then it's like, you know, your clients probably start to realize or editors over your work with Hey, isn't it pretty easy at a test since digital? Can you make this change? This teams that change, So maybe it's a double edged sword. But at the end of the day, if it gets you the best product, that's that should always beer your goal. So don't get too ah to upset over changes because it will actually hinder you in a lot of professional environments, probably all of them, because every everything is going to require some changes. And again, I think that's what the rope our digital is because changes air so much faster to make. Okay, so now what's get the edge of this one just a little bit. As over here, you say, I've got some bumpy lines in there. I want to kind of fight the urge to fix every little thing because every time you do that, you're trading this idea and thought of clarity in the work for and absorbing amount of time, and so you just have to be aware of what it's taken you to make these changes. And are they really necessary? How much can you really just fixed by rendering over top? Now, the other thing is this If you find that this stuff is taking you too long and you want to speed up, another way to do that is just work with a larger brush. So the larger brushes gonna kind of force you to makes him different decisions? I think so. Let's see if I skill this brush up and I start using bolder lines, Um, they're gonna read more quickly, which is nice, you know, they're thicker, more aggressive line. Um but also, it's gonna be I'm gonna be a little bit less inclined to Ted and all these tiny details and see if you notice even if I barely pushed down, I get a pretty heavy line here, and there s so I think that that leads me. Person. I would say it leads to making decisions quicker, and, uh, you know, definitely makes a more readable line more quickly, which typically is what you're after, right? So he want these lines to be pronounced so that you don't have to cancel. Go back and you see here they're very thin. And since this is up close to the viewer, these should be nice, heavy lines. So if you get good at implementing heavy lines early on the work, then it's going to save you some time. But it's gonna cost you a little bit of year. You know your detail. So you have to like, make thes judgment calls on, you know, looking style year after. And you know what compromises you're making in the sake of getting it done in time. So it's very easy to just sit here and want a doodle and have fun with it. But I think a big part of banking and a big part of, you know comic art in general is, you know, just really simplifying no one to simplify something, how to simplify something, make it read effectively and quickly. Uh, that's probably the hardest part. That's the part that I think most people are going to struggle with because it's I think anybody, if they put their mind to it, can draw something pretty neat once in a while. But it takes a lot more to be able to constantly turnout storytelling on a timely basis. And that's where you know, learning these techniques. He's time saving techniques And these shorthand, um, kind of interpretation. You know, simplification of work is so important, so little things like, you know, shadow on one side, a thinner line on the other to kind of quickly convey, you know, depth on something and a ridge. And you kind of see, I'm really drawing every line, and that's probably a mistake on my part. Just want to be honest, because it's really it really kind of helps the art when you get good at defining some of the lines some of the top surfaces by just implementing shadows for this particular style. I don't really want to do that, but I do want to make you aware of it that there's lots of styles where people just get insanely good at filling in the shadows. And these a lot of these lines become almost not as necessary because the shadows do you know, majority lifting. You have to fill in some lines. It's gotta read, but you got to remember that wherever light sources generally, you're gonna have less lines just kind of bleaches out the line that we talked about that in the other lessons, and you want to use that to your advantage Now for something like this, I feel like I need to kind of illustrate this a little bit and more focus in detail. But again, that could just be me in my perception of what something like this needs to look like. You know, we all have very different ideas of what seem like this would consist of. Get a shadow on this one side to make it look recessed. And then these buttons. I think it's also kind of helpful to do somewhere. You know, some of these buttons where there's a line on each side somewhere. It's a thicker line, basically. Just think about variation. Don't go through this entire illustration to make all these buttons the same. All these marks the same cause. It'll just it'll take away from the flavor of it in the interest. Okay, so what else? We got some little noodling back here to do is throw on some lines. You can kind of like fake detail as well, by just having lines that are parallel and a variety of, um, so again, that variation that you get. But notice how, just by overlapping lines from a distance that it almost looks like detail when they're really just kind of haphazardly thrown in there. So play around with that, too, you know, sometimes. Just think mawr textural even about something like this, which is definitely more designed than throwing in random textures. But you can kind of convey that, like, the main thing I think is is, as long as the lines are horizontal or parallel to the back of the screens, it's just gonna look like at a detail. Now, if I just started to scribble in here, that's probably gonna read. Unless it was some kind of alien ship. You know, I could probably get away with that even. But as long as they're like little parallel and angled lines that can kind of go in any direction, they can connect to other shapes. Whatever you can probably just get, that's all read. Has ah has more detail? No, really, we could be filling in shadows back here, so I'll do that after we get the bulk of us end. I'll go back and just had some Well, shadows again. This little circuitry tape stuff. They're lying here for the next and a set of panels make this line growth in my skilling it down with the bracket keys and I will just have it. I kind of have a hide behind this screen because if I bring it all the way down, you see, it kind of exposes the the difference of the two shapes. So that kind of cheat that I'm gonna make sure toe have it highball below his other screen . I think it still shows the the tilt on that other screen, but I don't think it has bad and rotate the screen. I'll keep in mind if this is hard for you to get these lines all straight from one another and kind of mimicking this angle that you get. You could draw all of these straight on a layer and then tilt the layer and then erase it back. So just remember, layers will really make stuff like this lot easier again. I'm trying to just do this freehand because it like it teaches me more. I want a constant challenge myself to draws much of this free hand as I can model details here. I don't know if I like that. It looks like a envelope or something. Let's just go with that for now, OK? So let's go ahead and wrap up this lesson here. I'm gonna probably time lapse a little bit of this just because it's overly redundant. What I'm gonna do is actually fill in the detail to the other side, like we've done here. I'll talk about the process and then I'll stop briefly and will detail some of the little in between areas. But again, it's gonna be some of the same stuff we've talked about using shift click drawing in some of the lines, making sure that lines are more bold as they become closer to the viewer, which I still haven't implemented enough of that yet. But as these things get closer and closer to the viewer, they're gonna be You may use a lot heftier and thicker lines to convey that. So with that, let's move on to our next lesson. 10. L9 Lines Lines and More Lines Time Lapse Part 1: Okay, so now we'll just jump in here and continue to refine this. So one thing I did notice with this side of the illustration is I did start to use the shift click method a lot more. You'll notice that when the line's bouncing back and forth through this time lapse, it's me sculpting the line and trying to draw FREEHAND. And then if it just snaps into place. Obviously I'm using Shift Click, and I started to kind of give into that a little bit more because it just noticed it being a lot faster. So whenever you doing seems like this, I think what happens is you start off doing what feels the most comfortable, and then as you get through it, you warm up. You also find things at work a little bit better. Obviously, some of these screens are curved, so I'm going to free hand those lines a lot more, and I'm also going to FREEHAND lines that are a lot shorter by comparison. So, for instance, if it's a straight line and it's very small versus that large screen in front of the main characters face or the guy looking up, then I'm going to use FREEHAND method For those short lines. It's just quicker. It just feels more natural. Ah, and I very much draw from my wrists. So for me, those air easy to dio. But if it's a longer, more straight line that I'm going to use that shift click methods. So again, as you start to work for these scenes, you just pick up on what makes more sense and why. And again you warm up, you start to feel a little more comfortable with their thinking process. Um so always kind of keep that in mind. So when you start a scene, if the very beginning of it isn't feeling right and you're feeling a little bit apprehensive about it, just take solace in the idea that as you warm up as you get through the scene, the nice work comes out at the end a lot of time. So in the very beginning, with a lot of our it's rough and, you know we're still kind of figuring it out. There's some mistakes there, but as you will find it as you get warmed up, uh, Aziz, you finish off the work. You can really make it look pretty polished. So just again a lot of yourself to make mistakes. I know that's so hard for most artists that wrap their head around and, you know, we're so caught up in the idea of trying to get better and tryingto do our best work. But the main thing is that you just keep producing work. You get better through that process. Not that every piece has to be great, that every piece has to be your next best are so just just allow yourself to grow through, completing more work on. I very much feel that way with inking a scene like this that in the beginning I don't know if I like bizarre. Better change that. And then by the end of it I start to feel more comfortable, mainly because you start to realize the direction that you want to take with it, and all the ideas start to flourish through that process. Eso again. This is roll repetitive, just a lot of different line weights. I am trying to make lines that are closer to the camera, a little bit more pronounced and thicker. I will generally go back at the very end and do that even more so if I feel the scene needs it and remember those small little bits of shadow. Even though there's not a lot of shadows in this scene, they help separate those shapes. So just remember that, you know, a shadow behind an object is gonna propel the next object, especially with light source forward. So if you put a drop shadow or cash shadow than that, next shape is gonna push forward. And you just have to be creative in the way that you do that. I probably could have used a lot more shadows of a scene like this and really made those screens sit away from the background notice to there I took the blue line. Now, just to check the work. I really recommend that you do that a lot because as you're implementing all these lines, ah, big problem that I have is that I won't make them thick enough dark enough, and then I always go back and do a final touch up. You'll see by the end of the course here how I approach that. But just remember that. Have your line wait often times will do you justice that You just need to go ahead and be bold with your lines and place a man. And if you're someone like me and you can self identify and go, wow, I always seem to have to make maybe your on the opposite end of the spectrum. I always have to lighten up my lines always have to shift these lines or whatever. Then, you know, go into that with the next scene and be aware that in, Like I said, For me, it's like I really have to just start using bolder lines because at the end of every project, I have to always thinking them up. So for whatever reason, I tend to err on the side of lighter lines, and I think it's because I'm trying to incorporate details. So I'm thinking mawr about details and thinner lines. But, you know, for comics, for for reproduction and just for clear visibility of what's going on, you need to think more about shadows and lines. A lot of times now, it's tough on a scene like this because it's a techie scene. There's a lot of lines, but the shadows or what? Propel that are forward on and give it a solid feel. So you noticed that the stuff up front with that silhouette on the screen that's gonna read really well because it's surrounded by some good shapes of shadows and in turn makes it more pronounced. But I do love details. I do love rendering. You just have to be careful that it doesn't kind of consume the peace and then ultimately makes it harder to read unless effective now. Another thing is, just keep in mind that you're not always going to detail every square inch of a singing. I feel like this one's pretty busy as it is on, and it was really going for that. But hopefully I was able to still convey contrast by using different types of rendering. So I've got straight lines and small bits of shadow for the computer screens. I've got shapes of shadows and silhouettes, texture on the planets outside of the windows and on the screen in front of the character. So these different things that hopefully make it read individually and separated from one aspect to another. So one of things I noticed was some art that could otherwise be really amazing is you'll see people kind of latch onto a specific type of shading, and they use that all throughout everything they dio. So every piece, every character, every background has the same kind of cross hatching. And I would say to really be careful of that. It's not so much that it has to be this perfect idea of cross hatching or shading, but it's utilizing these different versions of texture and rendering throughout. So I've seen illustrations that the shading isn't so well constructed and kind of messy, but they used in such a way we're still made this very dynamic in depth. E seen eso again. It's kind of that idea that we just have this to tea service, this very flat object that we're trying to make look dimensional, and we have to employ all these different techniques to make that happen. But it's it's easier if you have more tools in your toolbox and mawr technique, and it doesn't have to be pretty and pristine. It could just be a nice variety, so practice straight lines, which would be called hatching, cross hatching it different angles, you know, she different shapes of shadows and the way that you use those and stippling. All these different things practice a lot of, um, just a blank white piece of paper, a digital canvas or sketchbook and really log in lots of hours just doing that. So then when you go to your seen creation, you have lots of ideas and lots of ways that you can render some surfaces. I think that'll really help. So eso that'll bring this lesson to a close. We'll jump back into real time now and continue to detail this scene. Eso with that, let's move forward. 11. L10 Inking the Planets and Stars: All right, So now let's go in texture of the moon and and kind of fill in the space up top. So what I'm perceiving, as you could probably tell is that the, you know, we're looking out some windows here and we could see space. So, you see, I've just got a rough kind of moon with some broken up texture there. I'm gonna add a layer over top and really just gonna emerges down pretty quickly. But I want to show you sometimes it's nice that they're on that that layer and just a lie yourself, Teoh. Feel like you got a little more freedom, even though again, I really want to stress that there's lots of ways to edit, even traditionally, especially digitally, when you're doing this type of stuff. So once you learn more ways to edit, you really start to feel like you're not backed into a corner anyways, that anything you put down on the page is a good thing. So even if it's the wrong decision to get you a little bit closer to the right decision, eso yeah, never, never be afraid to make marks and just play around with it. So what I like about doing something like this in this type of scene. I was glad I was ableto, you know, incorporate some windows or something like that and made sense And uh, maybe makes that see or maybe a dozen. I don't know, but to me it does. And what's nice about this is it gives me an ability to apply more texture. So I really like again kind of variation. So if you notice I'm just kind of sporadically, you know, doing thick them lines, I'm making sure to skip around so that it reads as detail and not just, you know, scribbles, I guess. But ultimately, if I just repeat the process of throwing in some little half moon shapes, no pun intended or basically ellipses and then are all those legacy, I should say And then, um, and then detail in those by adding some shading to one side. So here's an insect shadow. Do a little bit of rendering right here. So just can using these tight, tapered lines to convey a pretty dark shadow to that one side, and hopefully you can see that it really raises up the edge of this crater by doing that. And it gives variation, in fact, taken texture inside of a crater, all kinds of stuff. No, I really don't need to go to offer crazy because this isn't a focal point. And you know, sometimes that you can actually create distractions by over doing, you know, a certain area that doesn't really need the details. So again, think about your focal points in what the main narrative is here. But if it doesn't hurt the scene and you're like me and you like to Brenda, you like to doodle, and this is Ah, this is kind of fun stuff to do so But again, it gives that variation on the scene from the other materials. Because otherwise the scene so far has been, you know, pretty clean lines and a lot of perspective kind of concepts there, all that, you know, interior, metal of the ship. So when you incorporate something like this is very, you know, random and texture rise, it gives mawr feeling to the scene. It makes the scene more interesting. It also shows that you can illustrate different things like you're not just a one trick pony, and you can only do clean techie stuff or people or, you know, you gotta be ableto render a variety of materials. That's also why did the little cross hatching that you'll see here shortly appear, uh, it had been really easy to just leave that as a square and then run like a glare line through it. But it gives me another opportunity to add just a little bit of texture and not much, but every little bit helps you see what this moon shape. It's It's just scribble, really. But I'm just going kind of around. I'm thinking satirically as I do it. Hopefully that's come coming through. And then I'm also trying to ah, randomize the edges of like this crater. I mean, could have like a big dividend. One side of it doesn't really matter. You got a lot of freedom. Here is what I'm trying to say, So you want to play around with us and again because you are working digitally. If you are working diligently following along, your ability to just switch to a translucent version of any brush and start cutting back into these shapes is pretty powerful. Now, if you're working traditionally, that again just means a white out pan or maybe dependent on the method you're using. I've seen some people that get away with a powerful electrical race, so they do some pretty need effects. I think that's more for watercolor thinking, but, you know, just do research. But there's journal in lots of ways to fix whatever you're doing. Once you figure those out, ideas start to flourish. I think because you're not so concerned with making the wrong marks again, I think that any marks on the page, uh, ultimately or good marks like they one of the things I hear a lot now that I really identify with is fail faster. So you're gonna fail when you do stuff. Anything in life inking comic are especially, you know, whatever. But it's OK. You learn so much to that process that you actually just want to be OK with that and fail faster because you learn faster. It's kind of a hard pill to swallow for some people, and I know at first I definitely didn't identify with that kind of thinking as much. But now I do because again I really feel like every bad decision catapult you closer to knowing what The good decision in the right decision is, and that's just to me, that's just life. It's how we learn. That's how we grow. But okay, so now the other thing I might do and I want to be careful not to overlap these lessons. But I would also add a little bit of rendering to round out the moon shape. So again, using these tapered lines where I'm feathering the line, I'm actually passing over a couple times to make the line and then finally kind of pulling a more elongated version at the very end. So that's how I get these dinner kind of tapered lines and they take practice. But there, highly effective and, you know, they add a nice variation and notice that I'm going against the grain of the the moon texture. It's not a big deal. So just like that, and get across there and I could just have a little bit of variation there. Okay, so now for the stars, I'm actually just gonna merges down because, like I said before, I just want to have a little bit of I'm easy going by going into it. I really don't want to use a secondary layer, except for that. So now what? This. I'm going to go around and make sure looking at the art one more time. I might add that planet back and forget all about that. So what I might do there? He's do a bit of a cheat. So I'm gonna turn this back, and I'm actually just going to at a selection through their old shift and move this selection into place. Seem minds more of an oval than sphere, which would be incorrect since, uh, um, planets always spherical the sphere from any side is a sphere. So let's go ahead. And they can transform the selection, but maybe not transform selection. Where is it was Just call it this, uh, scale up and down hold shift. Oh, no. It's gonna grab my artwork there. So as long as I'm on a different layer, I think it would work. But I'll just do this again, Tomie de select this draw a bigger sphere moving into place, something like that. And then what I'm gonna do is actually just to race back parts that so you can see that, You know, that's really just ink. That's not that was never put into place. So but what I have to do is I don't want to lose my window shapes here, so I'll take it translucent version of the G pan and I will just a race back. It's a little bit darker saying, See this? But easier and then I'll just a race back. But try to keep the in the window shapes. Was I get to this edge, I could go right to the edge. Um, but even as they get down to the bottom, I want to retain this edge of the window seal or whatever. This is metal from the wind alleging on again, Go right to the very edge here, kind of fly right through that because it doesn't matter and then get over to the edge. Be a little bit more careful, and I really could just quickly do this and then go back. And he was always I have the lines for reference and go back and clean this up. But I'm I try to just clean it up Almir a little bit anyways. And as you see over here, it actually reverses, right? So here we can use the white. That's already there. So that's good. But you see it, This edge, it needs a little bit of black to those side. Someone had command shift. I I'm gonna hit hex on my keyboard and get back to black here, And I'm just gonna fill the sand while I'm here. So just always think about that, that you want to utilize your selections rather quickly and effectively and inverting your selections can save you a lot of time. Someone had commanded to de select their pan back and see if that looks good. I think I like it Just makes it look like they're flying in between two planets, which is kind of need plus already had in the sketch. I feel a little bit guilty upon it and use it. So there's that. And now let's go ahead and get some stars in here and want to make sure we're back on the main layer, which we are. And this is real simple. You just go to translucent and then start to kind of just dab. So there's lots of ways to do this. You could actually paint white onto a layer, and you could spend your time to get the you know, the stars exactly the way that you like and do like this big page of stars, and then you just copy and move them around as needed. I always feel like this doesn't take too much time anyways. I mean, it's it's always smart to save more time, you know, not unnecessarily wasted. But I think this is fine. And I also want to make sure that I incorporated feel the little things that I added, like these little Starburst kind of just think of it like the North Star kind of thing. So you just do this little if you look real close, that's just basically me starting heavier and then lightening up as a move outward. I used to do a couple of these. I'm kind of a big fan of these little guys again. They had a little bit of variation to the star patterns, star fields, whatever calm little bats. We just kind of very him up every now and then thrown a bigger one like that. An insult to Big. That's fine, just floating mass rock of some kind. Pluto's one of those little drawer of planets just, you know, buried up little Babs here and there goes crazy as you want to. I think more is usually better with stars. Here's where and then I like the cluster still moment together and then kind of span out from there. So to me, I like that look better than just putting them all, even across the entire canvas or whatever. It's the same thing over here. Repeat this effect. Let's check and make sure there's nothing else. I did have a little starburst over years. I'll throw that in same concept. It's just basically a pick the thin Paul using the really the brushes taper. At this point, I'm not really feathering this a whole lot. I just do a kind of a quick, sweeping pass. That way you get some nice clean lines, and I'm basically doing it like perspective. I'm starting with this single point and then just fanning out from there begin just kind of tab around. Obviously, you can also make custom brushes that do this really fast as well. I just don't know me personally. I kind of like I feel like I'm doing it by hand, but if you're going to be doing a lot of space scenes than a custom brush is gonna be the way to go. Oregon Savior Layer with lots of little stars on it and move it around. Okay, that's it. This is kind of one of those things. Like you never know when to stop. Okay, so there we go. It gets from stars. We got some planets on. One more thing. Let's add some little landmasses. Just kind of what I like doing here is just pulling the breast in and out. Victor Family? That way it doesn't know. Look, it looks like one kind of similar landmass. It looks like it's got a little bit of variation, and there we go. All right, so let's go and wrap it up right here. We'll head over to the next lesson and continue to detail are seen. 12. L11 Adding in Additional Shadows: Okay, so here I want to talk to you about adding more shadows. So if you notice if I toggle off this blue line, there's our ain't seen and it's not reading too poorly, but the lines are a little faint in certain areas. S I like to be aware of that. So it's a good idea to kind of just look your inks without, uh, sketch lines to see where you're really at. And that's why you also want to get in here and not really used to many thin lines, even with something that's got more detail like this. Remember, you want the thicker lines up close like we got here. Implement more of that. But also you just want to use some shapes of shadows throughout. So one of things I like to do is actually draw in, you know, some shapes of shadows. So I might first sketch the line and might think, uh, that, you know, maybe this has, ah, shadow over the top on the side. Anyway, I think we'll generally shadows on the bottom, and that's true. But since this is a very heavily lit scene from the bottom up, you could really play around that concept, You could make your shadows shadows almost always gonna be in the recessed areas of objects like this. But then I just feel like with all the screens that I could really bringing light source from the bottom up. Now I also like the term back capacity on and mainly the reason why is I just feel like I could see into the work a little bit more and play around concepts. I might do something like this. Get into the shadows now. The thing I'm trying to do, too is, is propel certain parts of this illustration off the off the edges. So, for instance, as these things overlap, I feel like if I doom or of the little bits of information in between, and shadows like here, a little bit back here again, kind of start from the top of this show some of the segmentation of the gadgetry or whatever. But I feel like each time I do this, I'm going to pushed us further. So, for instance, if I bring that to full visibility, see, it's real messy. I've got to clean it up, but it reads a bit more parent from a distance. So yeah, with him without so just player out that concept, it really does. I have a pretty good size impact. Another way I like to do. This is what the, um, the blue line method like this. I don't know why. It just seems toe look kind of neat to meet visually and then a zai add to this, I could just I could see through it a bit better, so I just like it and then, you know, right there, if I put that shadow there, it basically propels this piece of machinery for Okay, so that's really the basis of it. So I put a drop shadow here. It's gonna make this area raised, and actually, I wouldn't even a drop shadow on a pig. But again, if I put a shadow here, it's gonna raise this area. Put a shadow here is gonna push us up. Now you don't You don't simply just want to put shadows randomly wherever, because you're trying to propel certain things off the page. I mean, sometimes you will, but really, you're just trying to think about where they would really go. You know, keep your light source of mind. Um, by other times, you do just do things because they look cool. That's that's just comics. Okay, so now it's like a little bit of shading inside of here again to kind of make that look more depth. E drop, shadow blow here. Now, these I would consider drop shadows or cash shadows from these these bits of machinery or whatever. And I can also do that with things in the back here So I could texturizing put like these little darker wires and circuit trees and cables and things like that back there. I can also change the silhouette or edging of some of this stuff by bringing it over, and now it looks like connects to It's probably a little tired to show you that, but I can do some stuff where it comes, and it now looks like connects this side of it so I can keep detail ing with this effect if I want. I really don't want to do too much of that since trying to kind of do this in a reasonable amount of time. But and the other thing is, I'm really beef up these lines for the things that are closer to our viewer, so just keep that in mind. If some of these lines are to faint, they should start thinner over here near the door. And as you get closer to the frame here, they should be a lot heavier. So I want to make sure that by 10 were done inking that that shows. So let's go ahead and just more of these shadows over here. You see on this side, it kind of started implement more of what I'm talking about now. But there's still a few areas like I would add some right here. Keep in mind to the same shadows we're talking about are also great for focal points. So you can you want to think about lots of different ways to director viewer, and it could be more detail in a certain area. It could be heavier shadows. It could be a a different style of rendering than the rest of the scene, so there's lots of ways to really pull the viewer like, for instance, if you work on a dark scene and you add in white highlights or really colorful scene and there's just a few white highlights, then that's gonna drive your focal point, and that's the same thing with you. Want to think of that in terms of thinking as well? You might black this out. Yes, I'm like, bad. We put a shadow in the well, there's already kind of shadow there. So shadow and then some line breaks. We're gonna talk about the rendering next, a little cross hatching and details throughout the scene. But let's go and clean this up. No. So what? I like to dio you could probably if you're pretty good at this, you could really just go through with what's here and get one more time over top of the same layer. I like to just tone that layer back, and I could jump over to the Main Inc Slayer now, or just add one more layer than merging together after I'm done. But I just feel like this helps me to get a little bit cleaner representation of what I'm looking for now. The other thing I like to do here is I'll sculpt the inks by drawing them in fill in this shape. So, for instance, if I just make sure all my edges air connected, remember this the floating layer. We gotta be careful that and then when we get home, probably just get all of this shape of this one device. You know what I'm talking about here. So what do you call this in? And I like to draw these shapes. Now, at this point, if you notice when I first place these I was I was kind of scribbling Women are or, you know, just blocking him in there. But as I come back, I like to draw the perimeter shape first. And I feel like that gives me a cleaner representation. I also feel like it helps me study the the shapes that I'm implementing and therefore kind of make more consistent. So I feel like I want to see this whole edge over here in shadow again. I just feel like it. That's more depth. So another thing I want to make sure to mention these lessons don't be afraid to really alter the artwork and especially if it's your own, that's should go without saying. But you really want to experiment in alter things at this stage of the work. You know, inking is not tracing, hopeful have said that throat These lessons but it's not. It's so not tracing its, it's Ah adding another level of creative style in interpretation to it. So make sure to play around with these concepts and really stretch what you've put down, you know, don't know. Just make the bad mistake of, um, you know, just copying what's in front of you and calling it done when you can add so much more to it . In this process, I think I'll put a shadow here is they see I'm just kind of pinballed around. I think some of this I might be adding, but I think that was kind of already in this area. Look at all these little shapes Now. If I put these old shapes on the side right here, it raises up that area next to it. It's again kind of draw this shape and then fill it in, but here and there, and I think I'll leave like a small light gap right there to make it look like you can see the edge of that next material. But then as we get down here, we'll have it feed off. You do a little bit of rendering there in the next lesson, again. Like I said, here you can change the shape a little bit and smooth additional details make it look like all this stuff is kind of connected together. And then I can turn this opacity back a little bit, and I could go back with a translucent brush, and I can try to figure out where there would be a little bit of light source hitting some of these parts of the gadgetry or whatever little tech lines that I liked overdue. But just like that, you can make this a bit more interesting. Put that to full capacity, and it just has a little bit more detail of that, the same thing. Every time I add a little bit of, ah, shape of shadow here, it's gonna push that next object forward, all right, and let's go and wrap up right here. We'll go to the next lesson. Continue to add in our shadows and, uh, again make this scene a bit more vibrant by doing so. So with that, let's move on 13. L12 Adding More Shadows: all right. So more shadows on this side, and then we will get into the rendering. You see, these aren't all in the exact place that should be. I'm kind of perceiving that, you know, Light is bouncing around this scene pretty well, so it doesn't need to all be uniformly lit, I guess, since there's definitely more than one light source, it's just like when you move multiple lights around the scene, you actually get multiple shadows you'll generally have, or you'll probably always have one predominant light source and therefore some stronger shadows off of one. But you can get multiple shadows. So I could say, Well, maybe the There's a pretty strong light source hitting the front of the screen and even casting a shadow on this next piece right there and still another shadow down here. No, to be correct would probably have to make one of these 1/2 tone, but I'm actually just going to go with what I think. Busy looks cool, so I just think that I don't know that propels those and pushes him off the surface. I don't want this to appear flattened and interesting so again we can drop in some little textures back here. Tiny little details that really don't have to read, um, to specifically, that's kind of the beauty of texture. Just, uh, just good to put in there. Even if it's not as concise of a concept, it might still do the trick. Like, for instance, if these were just I think as long as they're they're basically lines and, you know, maybe even dots or small circles, then it's gonna read as something that belongs in the scene. So I don't mean just a scribble in the background unless, you know, try it. If it looks good, then been roll with it. Okay, so I think that's majority the shadows there. I guess we could put another one right here. Makes sense because we're closer to the edge of the scene. We want some pretty strong contrast right up here, so we'll probably add some shading a pair that I can. I think it looks a bit more like it would be in focus, like you can see everything that's going on here. So as things get closer to the camera, they should read more effectively. All right, so let's go over here. No, same thing you see here. I'm just drawn them in this time, I'm not worried about going back with a translucent pen. If I make any horrendous mistakes, I'll do that. But if you haven't noticed by watching these lessons abouts around a bit and I think it keeps me interested in the way that I'm creating and a lot of times I try to do things by hand as much as possible. Um, but I will bounce back and forth from what I consider doing it by hand to using the digital methods performing, Uh, I don't know what it is. I think you just get a little bit bored if do everything the exact same way and again, like I probably said multiple times. The variation adds to the flavour for May. So if everything is rendered the exact same way, like if I was to use that shift click method all the way through this entire illustration, I probably wouldn't like it me personally. Anyways, it would probably be a lot more concise, and the perspective would be, ah, a lot more correct. But it just it would be more boring to me. So that's why I kind of mixed things up. Why do some of it by? You have been more freehand and some of it, you know what the the tools afforded to us in this digital program. Okay, so now let's see if there's me here is I can embellish upon Well, let's do this. Let's pan back a bit and again we want always check it by tackling the visibility off and then also was titled Visibility off the addition so I could see the areas I missed because the blue stands right out now. So let's just do that. I'll and I also feel like the left side still needs mawr, mainly in the area of line. Wait. So from back here, the thing I'm seeing the most is that this area up here really needs to be separated from the top edge. You see it more apparently over there, even over there, it could use some more, but it definitely needs it over here. In fact, just think about this. You could actually go around each of these main screens, and I had a hefty airline, and it's going to read a lot better now. One of the reasons for that I plan on talking about this a little bit more, and we did. The characters is You generally want to use your heaviest line, wait around the edge of any primary things like characters or again, a focal point, whatever. But in this case, this, uh, this techie kind of stuff or whatever. You know, screens. And it's all gonna read better if there's a heavier line on the outside and then thinner lines on the inside. So that works in a lot of different areas. So the main thing is that would make sure toe have that again. I'm kind of the bigger screens that's gonna push them forward, and it's gonna make them. You're kind of giving a hierarchy to the way things reading the scene by doing that. This works really well for shortening. So whenever you're doing a foreshortened character or weapon or whatever it is, you have to make sure to really put a nice, heavy line around that thing that's coming out towards camera. So again, if you want the smaller details to read eyes being smaller than put that have to your line around the the larger, more imposing shapes, I think it's you have to play around with doing it from a distance as well, because it's easy to get too close to this, and then it just doesn't work. You keep zooming in and zooming back out. It's like the double edged sword of working digitally that's you consume and too much on. Uh, you really need to read this information from a distance. But then what tends to happen is your little shake here or your, um, your quality of wine is going very very because you're gonna be further back from the scene . You're not gonna have the same control, but that's all right. I think control is overrated for a lot of this stuff. You gotta really just have fun with this again. There's so many ways you could fix it at the end anyways that, you know, kind of like like go of that idea control In the beginning, sometimes messy is good. I don't want to put us into that shadow on all these, but I just feel like it needs is going to go with it. Also, I needed roll tape does because I keep getting a skipped line off to the edge in general That's because I need to rotate this to be in the most comfortable position for drawing this line. It's like, Okay, so now it's pan bag. Check that one more time. I've got a few spots over here and again, something like this. I'm gonna add a nice, heavy line around the screen that's closer. I really want this to feel like it's popping off the page a bit more. You can actually go pretty extreme with this effect, often times. Oh, look, another work that I admire and pay attention to how, how thick They made some of those lines. Does it come towards camera? And some of them are just massive by comparison. So they have these tiny little thin lines towards areas back here back in the distance and then just this huge line around. Some object up close, and that's what makes it work. That's what gives it this kind of illusion of for shortening or perspective and also doesn't have to be traced around everything. So play around with that concept off. For instance, on this one, I'm just gonna put it thicker on this top corner, so I'm gonna put a thick line there and then a tapered line right there in the same thing Here. I'll put a thicker line here, but have a taper and blend in to that perspective line. Basically, just little things like that just play around different ways of implementing this effect. Okay, so now what? We're going to dio we'll drop our line, work back in, and we're gonna head over to the next lesson and we're gonna add some renderings, a little bit of this cross hatching and detail work, shading work. So with that, let's move on to our next lesson. 14. L13 Cross Hatching Part 1: add another layer and we'll just call this cross hatching or shading texture, ring any of the things you might think about one doing this. Okay, so there's not a whole lot in the scene. I kept this pretty light because it was gonna be so much felon in various lion work with the computer equipment. But there are some areas. So you say you some tapered lines on the top of the screen on the face of the screen, and here it's really the same thing. But I'm just gonna crosshatch sees someone hold our rotate the canvas toe where it feels the most comfortable for me to do these. And I'm just going to do, you know, some thicker lines. It takes me a little bit to warm up here, so you always kind of practice off to the side. You get the kind of looked lines that you're thinking about. I feel out whether or not these airlines that you have to feather, which that's what I'm doing here, Maxie passing over each one of these few times. They don't all have to be the same. But I do want that tapered kind of look. So I feel like it will love. Help me this differentiate from the other lines in this design that are more straightened, less tapered. So again, it's all about creating as many variations as you can. Not so much where it becomes distracting but enough where you have some range on what you can render and then ultimately, what you can kind of convey with your line work. So now I've got all those pretty evenly spaced out. There's a little bit of, uh, them kind of bulking up down here, and then I'm just gonna cross hatch roughly at no, no, if you call that a 45 degree but just a slight angle in the same thing I could start to vary these out a bit more. You see, the diamond pattern gets wider. Yeah, I think I like that. So let me double click here and kind of look at it real quick from a distance. So it's just giving me a variation on a Grady. Um, um, there they intend to do is if I don't like it kind of wish that would have been a little bit more condensed. So play around with the way in which you tighten up your line work. I think that if these were tighter together, this would have made a nice Urgh! Radiant doesn't quite do the job. So let me do that. Let me go ahead. And first, let me show you another way. You might do it. You could also rotate this and you could just introduce another Siris of lines chicken from a distance. You see, that just darkened it down. So I think it's important Teoh play around those concepts like not necessarily just always be in the habit of redoing everything. I'll be honest, even like that right there. I don't mind that. I just think it could be a little bit better. So let's try to do one quick variation of that because we're working digitally. We could also do this on a separate layer altogether and save it and then bring it in that way. But what I want to do here want to keep the same kind of tapered effect. But I want these to be much tighter together, so I'm paying attention to the the gap between the taper lines. You see, I got a pretty heavy one right there, about three of those back, but I'm not too worried about that. But as I start to separate these same kind of fighting the urge to separate these as much early on like I did, the other set that I just into whatever but that Bring these out. I'm gonna make sure they stay. It is probably is wide because I'm in a lot of these to get from one another, pulling a little bit tighter here. Now the other thing to think about is I could keep these the same distance, but I could just make thinner lines. Try that. So again, these are roughly the same distance apart. But I'm going a lot thinner with line now, which obviously is going to give a different variation, different effect from the way I started this, something like that. And let's check that before we had to cross hatching. They already like that better. It just it reads differently. It just has more of a Grady in type feel already. Even without the cross hatching, let me rotate this and again, start very tight, pay attention to the diamond pattern that we're getting the overlap and then start to separate it because we do want a little bit of a Grady in kind of effect, but again, I'm not going to separate him too far like before. In fact, this will probably be the max amount that I separate it. And I'm just going to throw in these last few with a quick pass. So less waited kind of wine like them and I could go back, touch these up, find me too. Double click here, check it from a distance. And yeah, I definitely like that better than the first attempt. So if we get rid of that line work, you could see it. It has a pretty decent Grady into it. Pretty good shadow there. There's other things we could do. We could come back with the negative brush and we could draw back the other way, and so we could really control. If you want there to be a little bit more light source And what's neat about doing this, you can You can do all these little adjustments, that one layer and then merging together, which is exactly what I think I'm gonna do. So now that I've got that in place, I can simply merge it into this previous layer, but let's go ahead and finish cross hatching any other areas before we do that. So let's try this little area right here, but the land work back in place. So again, start very tight with lines and then have those fan out. You see, I'm not worried about those being tapered, just worrying more about the Grady int that they provide just like them. Give me some from back here. This is another way to propel things forward in the scene because the more I shade just like adding shadows, the more ashamed behind something like, for instance, I could add some very light kind of lines right here. Then it's going to propel the other information for the wires. I think get a little bit lost, but it makes that screen stand out more, especially to of the line. Work is different from here to here. It shows that it's two different surfaces and therefore allows it to kind of read independently. So let's go and wrap up right here. We'll head over to the next lesson and continue to add in some more shading 15. L14 Cross Hatching Part 2: Okay, So another area I would like to see shaded down is the side of this chair and what I thought might be helpful here is well versed to find the shape, obviously. So we'll draw in our perimeter shape of this chair at least the perimeter of the side. It was just something like that awaited line to the bag. And with this I just want to shade over the top of this. And I kind of want to do two things here. I want thes angled or diagonal lines to go across here. If anything, I want them to weight to the back. So have a little bit more weight to the back like this. But the other thing I'm thinking about one a crosshatch these and I'm thinking I want to have a shadow that goes like this. So the reason why I'm illustrating it this way is I want to show you that we very much want to go into it with a thought process so we could do something like that. Almost looks like a son kind of ray effect, but just additional shadow there. We could also just add in the shading with the debt, diagonal lines. And then we could cross hatch from the bottom up. And that actually makes more sense. Such a generally light is coming from the top. So it's going to do that. It'll just should read a bit better. Eso again. I'm going to We go and merge this down. So that's our cross hatching. Um, are you know, better yet, I'm gonna do it this way. I'm gonna take just this area that I draw in here. Command X command v. So I'm basically separating it from the cross hatching wear. I'm gonna get command e merge it together. So now I can I can draw on this cross, actually, er, without hitting the edges there. So just something makes it a little bit more forgiving. Also, I want to zoom back to where To me. I get straighter lines. If I were about passing through these edges where I basically don't worry about it, I just do it because if I try to stop, I'm gonna get line gaps here and there. I'm gonna get a little bit more inconsistency with my line creation because I'm a little bit more worried about it. Um actually want the weight to the back of it. So I'm gonna turn this in a way where it's easier for me to do that. I'm gonna press into this area and again, I just want to doing away where it's comfortable. So I want to get the brush to just the right size torn, barely putting any pressure to get this line. And I might even practice it a couple times. I don't think that's bad, but it's just not as because I want. It's all just I can't believe that because of the other information we hold Command Z a few times. Go back. Try that one more time. You know, Just keep in mind. You're just only going to get better the more these lines you create. So just to say, you know, just to explain the mechanics of what I'm doing, my hand is resting on the sea antique that I'm using, and I'm drawing through this with just risk motion. So I'm pivoting off the back of my hand, and I'm just drawing through this quickly with a sweeping passing my my risk pivoting not any armed movement or anything like that. So just hopefully make that I understand. Be a little bit more understood for you as to the type of motion I'm creating, you know? And if I want to go back and try to clean up little inconsistencies like that line right there, it's not a big deal. Sometimes leaving little things like that kind of add flavor to it. So the other thing is, I want to add some cross hatching now from the bottom up, and I also want these lines to read a little bit differently. So this is just a personal preference. I could obviously just go right through this with these types of lines. A little bit more weight. You see, it's pretty quick, pretty easy to dio. Other times I will try to purposely make lines noticeably different from the ones across edged against. It really depends on, I guess, what your goal is for style. So what I'm doing is I'm starting off a little bit thinner, and then I'm going to purposely make these a bit thicker to the one side. You see, it provides a little bit different of a look. Not much, but I think it's always important. Teoh experiment with the way that you create these so they don't fall into creating the same type of lines over and over again and ultimately end up with something more boring. So again, it just basically provides a Grady int, but of shading right there. Also, we can I'll tell you the truth, actually killed once we go back. So sometimes you are going to change something and then say, Well, you know what? I was wrong, and I like the first attempt better. Let's try that again. So I'm just gonna fly through here. You can also think about the fact that generally when you make quicker lines like we're doing right here, you're generally going to get more confident lines. Something about the speed just kind of helps that. Yeah, I like that better. I think the side of a chair you wanted to read pretty, pretty light air. You don't want a whole lot of intense rendering now. The other thing is, I feel like the top could still be a little bit later. We could play around with cross hatching with some negative lines. Rule two. Yeah, I like that. Look better. So again, it's just trying these different things and seeing what works. So now worlds, We've got some lines on the back of the the back wall here. So here, again, the beauty of having this floating layer as Aiken just draw right through these. I don't have to worry about hitting these edges. I can just focus on the bottom line that I might be getting some like, Damn, now another kind of neat thing you could do for something like this. If you want something that's cleaner. It was a couple ways really demonstrate the first where we go back command, why to go forward, put their translucent brush races back. And we could obviously race like that on a line. So basically, it gives us that a nice arc, that kind of perfect shading or shadow. It looks more like even Grady int. It was like a spotlight on that back wall. So that's one way to do it. Another way is if you're really going into that area and you know that's the affect, er, after you congenital eight. A selection first. So let's just say that we want to put you know, a bit of a narc off this back walls will move the selection into place like this. And then we'll have command shift I, which obviously inverts the selection. And you could really go through here and, you know, make the selection just perfect since we have the layer to not a big deal. So I'm just going to draw through here. Now again, I want to shoot past the edges so that I can just focus on clean lines and not worry about the stop and go. So it was kind of racing through their in a sense. Little with a little bit of randomness of the lines isn't a big deal, but I want a little bit more of a clean look. I command you to de select, go back to the translucent brush and just to race it back from anything in the foreground or any of the overlaps that I don't want to see. It's pretty easy to get this effect. You can even use this opportunity to do little highlights on the raised areas of whatever the metal or or whatever. You could do a little highlight off to the one side of these wires, so this is a little bit more impressive if it's ah pretty significant area in the design. I don't think that this area, you're going to see that a whole lot, but I just wanted to be aware of that kind of thought process. And again, if you like this effect of racing back which I dio, you can just kind of put these negative lines in there. Always think those air kind of fun to create and they're just so simple to do so that's really it. Likas faras cross hatching goes, we're gonna texturizing some other things. Like, you know, these aren't really crosshatched lines, but they're great for texture. So I'm just gonna kind of throw these in there. I almost picture these is like a little bit of a glare against the metal. Go back and try it one more time. So not really tapering the lines, just kind of going with this curve that I've implemented with the sketch. Same thing over here and those are almost more like texture than anything. Um, and that's is there any more? A little bit of that kind of line work here, So these are nice because they just basically show the separation from the floor to the computer panel there. Same thing over here. Grouper Just kind of showing that dividing that separation. And you can obviously go through this kind of add little bits of shading everywhere. Eso if you want that kind of, you know, very detailed. Look where you show a lot of the plane changes, you might go to the side of the computer screens and add, uh, some shaving like this here and there. The main thing, I think, is that you practice doing a variety of lines, so you do some that are like this and, you know, some that air, they start tighter together, and then they fade off. But you know, you want to use them consistently, I think. But it's important that you try a variety of different lines so that when you go to render out these scenes, everything doesn't just kind of blend together. You get a nice variety and tone, and you're essentially not a one trick pony. You can do all sorts of neat things with your line work, so let's head over to the next lesson. Let's go in texture rise thes panels up top, get some of the other additional inclines in place and continue to refine the scene. And then we'll start thinking our characters. So what? That let's move on 16. L15 Inking the Girl Character: We're gonna go ahead and start thinking the characters now. So the main thing here is that we think about the difference. So with a lot of the technical kind of stuff, everything was a lot more straight lines. There's some tapered lines, but not much. And there's definitely not a whole lot of curve lines. Eso That's kind of the neat thing about the contrast ing elements off something techie or computer generated. And then with the, you know, the human characters and cloth and things like that, you're going to use a lot more curved lines, a lot more line variation as faras wait overlaps and things like that. So I'm just gonna kind of start thinking over this, and I'm gonna be very at ease with throwing in weighted lines. I feel like it adds a lot more character and, uh, helps tell the story. So again, the line variation is so important, from background elements to the character you see trying to get these ah tapered lines. Ah, you occasionally see me throw in little bits of rendering. That's not really there. Just because it's more of a style choice. It's just more of like working on the fly, which I think is another important thing to practice so that your your council getting the best out of your work, and I just simply going over what you see. But figuring out better ways to refine your work as you go thinking is you know another artistic decision. You know, it's not just simply going over what's there, So can you see? I've got some pretty messy lines that I need to clean up is I do this. So I'm trying to take that opportunity to do that as I because I do go over the work. So the thing is like adding little bits of depth. So, for instance, is part of the shirt it just looked kind of flat against, you know, the breastplate here. So what I'm doing is that in just that little bit of raised area, just to show that it is a material same thing with the arms this land, right? Same thing with the arms here. Instead of bringing that line even to the top, it's probably easy to say, Well, just this line connects right here to there on. If you do that, if you put the next line to close. Like, for instance, if you just want like this, then the material a sudden doesn't look real. I don't know. Little looks real anyways, right? It's a comic, but you want to show that little bit of separation. Just that little shift in line work makes a big difference. So it's paying attention to those little details that help you to, uh, you know, illustrate materials that read, uh, like they've got some depth there. Yes. Now the form. It's a little bit more of a loose, almost animated style so I could get away with, you know, some kind of thicker lines and some, you know, some anatomy that's not entirely correct. But try to get up to look as good as I can because I produces so same thing, like right here it can have this little bit of edging. It almost looks like the material has raised area there. The seam, so little relapse for folds. You see, some of it is just just thrown in there. Not all. Not every line has to make makes sense, I guess. I mean, it's nice if it does, and if it's a distraction and get it out of there, but I just feel like some lines congest be because you think they look cooler because you want him in there. Can we call that style? You see, these fingers are pretty animated, just paying attention to certain things, like trying to make sure they taper a little bit. I feel like the middle fingers too consistently wide. So what kind of not just lying over as I think it try to get a little bit more point to fingertip? They noticed two for the fingernails. I just made sure to use a little bit thinner line. Not a significant difference, but enough of a difference so that it reads a little bit better than if I use the same with line for the outline of the arm and the fingernails. Then it would. It just wouldn't have is I wouldn't read like a detail. It would read like a consistent line. But when you shift them from one being thicker, one being thinner, uh, basically gives it a hierarchy. That's what you're looking for. You wanna help explain the story to the viewer in every way that you can, and thick to thin lines and different rendering types. All those things kind of convey that so lines lines can tell a story. Basically, curves are a bit tougher for me. One of things that might need to do is rotate the screen so I'll generally practice a curve like this a couple times. You see him going in the opposite direction now, but if I can't get it, I will. I will rotate the screen to something that feels a little more comfortable, and it will also cover the line like it did on my cross hatching. And then ultimately, if I can't get it right, I'll do one of two things that will either draw it on a new layer to get it right. Or I can use Thea circular tools here and I'll get something very, very perfect, but a little too perfect. Okay, so now for the characters face, which really, I would probably know my start here because it's always the most important part of the character. But I actually wanted to warm up on the other part of the character and finish here because this would be again the most important part of the character. So, like to warm up my hand for whatever type of rendering I'm doing. Sometimes I'll even illustrate, Ah, face off to the side on a different sheet just to really know that I'm kind of in the zone for faces. For me personally, I feel like faces are probably the most difficult to get right, and I definitely have to practice them all the time so I can really get out of the out of the zone. In a sense, for illustrating paces. Well, even inking, Um, it's the same kind of thing for me. It's something about, you know, if I don't draw faces for a while, which is never too long of a while, since I use my pictures to tell a story and you can't really tell a story with faces. But there are times when I might be practice in other areas of the work more and then all sudden, I come back to faces and they feel a little awkward. Eso if that happens to you, just take time to practice and study. Uh, don't don't let a body it happens to the I've read about a lot of artists, you know, experiencing things like that happens. All of us again, just kind of playing around these lions different taper. I want to get that expression of, you know, fear or, you know, kind of surprise simplified version of an ear. You see, I'm not really we're too much about detailing that. And then for the hair, it's just really these kind of ribbon like shapes. So sometimes it will even use a different layer just to focus on the hair. But the main thing that I tend to do here is a quick, sweeping poll usually will get a better representation of this. If I do that, you see, I'm just kind of going right to the point or tip of the hair and then trying to connect those something like that. And since I picture this character having lighter hair, I let the I keep the rendering light. So if this was a character with dark hair, I would fill this and more. And then maybe this glare line right here would be light. But since it's more like what, have a picture? Blond hair, light hair? Uh, this glare line will still be here, but it's not going to be filled in to the edge of it. just gonna be here for representation, for the color and process. So that's just the way I render different colors. So whenever the color is darker, then I'm going to fill in more black. And whenever it's later, I'm going to use more weighted line work and let that kind of tell the story. So have your line on the back of a hair here to, ah, again kind of defined the perimeter shape. Rotate this by holding our and with hair. I feel like you need to get these little flips at the end to make it feel softer to make it feel like it's flipping and rotating around. If they all just come off to a straight point like this, it's gonna feel very sharp and stiff. So what I try to do is go past what I have here, and then add these little curves as I finished the work, even if it's ever so slight and just kind of helps so again, little heavier line Wait up here. No flip flip of hair right here. You see, I do a lot of this command Z going back until I get the look that I want sometimes I get the, you know, an accidental shape, and it looks better than what I expected. On other times, I'm just kind of fighting to find, uh, look, that I was after a thicker kind of the back couple thinner lines on the inside. You see, I'm adding little bits of, ah, line work and texture. As I passed through this area doesn't all have to be exactly what was there in the sketch. I'm gonna go and hit command eat emerges in. I'm gonna add a new layer, and I just want to show you If this is tricky for you to get these kind of curves again, use layers to your advantage as much and as often as you need to just merging together as you complete the work. Let's see, it becomes a little bit easier for me to focus on this and get these curves. And because I'm not worried about them flowing into the other shape of hair, it's still not a big deal because it's pretty easy to a race is back. But I just want to show anybody that's a little bit more of a novice, that little things like that can alleviate your Ah, you know, your anxiety for this type of work. Something like that. Double quick here. Yeah, and I think that's good. So just like that, more minus the side patch will get that filled. Then, um, we've got this character ain't so pretty easy to dio We're gonna go and move on to the other character now, and, uh, it's kind of the same process a little bit more angles. Whenever it was trading, the male character bottling has said, for the most part, it's an identical process. Um, so let's get this little moon shape or Saturn shape in there, struggled circles. There we go. And just like that, we got it. So now let's head over to the next lesson and think the other character 17. L16 Inking the Male Character Part 1: now what's going Inc This character and same thing. We're just going to try to make sure that there's a little bit of variation from the other types of lines and make so his lines would be similar to hers, You know, thick to thin kind of a fact. Remember, you can use line breaks here and there to kind of make things appear more interesting, or at least a little bit different from surrounding areas. Kind of rotate. And then also, I'm working off. Another layer means here it there. Another thing that's helpful is if you can't get a cleaning of line, just shoot past online and then connected with the next line. It's hard because it actually hits the computer screen there to read. But you basically race back and you get a really neat like, um, chiseled corners basically, by doing that, and it's pretty quick. There's a lot of artists that I admire that I watch and see that in their work a lot, it's kind of different than if you just go around the entire perimeter of this character and you keep going thick that then think that then it'll get a little bit boring and repetitive. So just keep that in mind that you can kind of mix up that that effect, where you draw over the lines, quickly race back and again. It gives you just a little bit different feel and vibe to the work, so you seem kind of adding in little lines. Make sure not to make every line identical. No, some are a little bit thicker summer thinner, just kind of bouncing back and forth and trying to make the lines look and feel interesting versus again doing this repetitive kind of overpass to the entire work. Now. Another thing you could do is you can really separate the character from the background by being strategic with your shadows. So it's line weight and shadows that basically allow you to do that. Eso, for instance. You know, you see, there's a bit of a shadow under the hand. I could even get this in right now before we get to the hand. Well, it doesn't matter. That's kind of the beauty of digital Anqing. You can kind of approach this in any way that you want, but just by adding these little bit of tapered lines, we can show the separation and show how the hand is. Ah, raised on away from the computer surface here. So what I'll do is just get those in place. I could cross hatch whatever design I happen to see their go back to my translucent brush. And I could even make this a little bit lighter so I could see exactly where the hand is, and I could reset back, exposed that hand. Put that back to a full visibility, and I'll just quite emerged that. And now also, actually, no, it's no what's keeps character separated. I was thinking that was a different layer to merge into the character. Alright, somebody would rotate this now and noticed to What I'm kind of thinking about are doing implementing is I'm going with, like, a steady speed into the next transition area. So what I mean by that is, for instance, if I'm doing a segment to the finger, then I'm going to pass from breaking point to breaking point of that segment so he could probably see if you're watching pretty closely home doing this. But I'm I'm making sure not to kind of stop in other areas. When I did the arm here. I went from this point to this point in one pass. So you know, you again, you could probably see that throughout the work. But what that does, I think, is it gives you a little bit more confident line? Uh, no. If I was sculpting the line all the way through, I'm not saying you can't get good at it, because I've definitely done that for parts of my work and different styles. I may tend to do that, but if I want a cleaner, concise kind of line. Then again, I'm thinking about this point and maybe past this point, I'm gonna try to shoot that line out with one quick poll and maybe a couple attempts at it . And that will generally give me a nice clean line. Something that I I feel looks, uh, has some good clarity to it anyways. And I really like to Syria how the knee is ah, bit thicker like that. And then maybe thinner here. And then it gets a bit wider as it comes down dinner than wider. So I heard it referred to one time is keep the line moving. And I like that because it helps reinforce my thought process of, you know, you want to keep this energy to the lions. So if the lines are moving back and forth and think that, then you know you're gonna retain that energy, you also going to start learning what works Well, because obviously not just simply putting pick depend minds everywhere is the entire battle . Like there's certain areas where a thicker line makes more sense. The bottom of a shaded area, something that you're trying to convey a larger fold, more depth. But if you're constantly experimenting with Victor thin lines, then you're gonna eventually pick up on that. And that's how you again determine your style. We're going toe deem something, you know, kind of, ah, as a good choice within your work and then eventually that just it becomes an everyday occurrence until you latch on to something better. So, like this, I might make this line heavier, kind of playing around with the thickness that I want to see there and what that does. Uh, what I'm thinking anyways is that makes this leg look like it's coming out towards can camera, but more out towards the viewer. So again, That's another reason to use thicker lines to convey for shortening and depth and perspective. You see a few of these I'm throwing in two lines here, just kind of trying to style ISAT shifting the angles as I go just a little bit, incorporating some line breaks, little dots. It's all just ah style choices. And it's like whatever you see at the moment and you think might, uh, look good, throw it in there, kind of test it. You know, the beauty of digital is if we don't like it, we can easily get that out of there. You see, those lines weren't in there at all, but I just feel like the knee needs to look a bit more rounded. So just throwing a little couple of rendering lines like that and then, obviously the shadow to the chair eyes nice because it's going to again push the character out a little bit more. Show a transition of ah, a little bit of depth. So by filling in the shadow, it makes the leg pop out a bit more. And that's really something you want to think about all the way through this scene. Probably could ADM. or, um, we'll play shadows to reinforce what I'm talking about here. But I wanted this to appear a little bit more lighten, airy in the way that it was rendered s so that we could focus online clarity, but more. But shadows are a great way to push areas of the work around. So, for instance, if we want this female character look like she's away from the chair, but more having a shadow right back here is gonna help us to do that. A little bit of a drop shadow there. So let's go and wrap up right here. We're gonna continue to render this character and talk about that. So with that, let's move on. 18. L17 Inking the Male Character Part 2: all right, let's jump back in here and continue to think this character. So again, just throwing in little bits of rendering lines here and there. Kind of texturizing, in a sense. So I do recommend, you know, again can keep that outer line thicker and then generating some interior lines and some rendering that vary it up. That helped to convey some of these forms. So, you know, some little line break some little thinner lines and things like that just a little bit of rendering. So it's going to get the shoe here, are under and hold our to rotate the screen. Could it just right again, I'll kind of repeat this process of stopping at each connection point just to get the shapes in place are Perotti. I'm also passing through these areas with, you know, bit of speed. Some always gonna kind of reiterate that that I think really learning what speed versus the distance you are away from your canvas is very important. So I call it the mechanics. I don't know if it would be better classified as almost ergonomics or something based upon your relationship to the screen, but I really feel like That's one of things that allowed me to start getting better at this stuff that I had to very up the speed intensity in which I create certain lines so you could see I struggle with this curve. It's more than where the aware of it, like where I stopped versus trying to connect that. And sometimes I have to make compromises when doing things like that. Like if I can't create that line that I have to generate it some other way, have to rotate around, get a better angle, some constant moving screen around, trying to figure that out. Let's go up here now, right? Like the blind color of assures again. And also, I don't pull lines side to side really well, So that's why you're gonna always see me rotate the screen. Basically where I'm pulling a little a little bit more vertically, are quite a bit more vertically on the canvas networks with paper as well. So when I'm making on paper, I'm constantly rotating my my page. And that's one of the reasons why, when I started digital thinking, I really had to follow the programs that have rotation. In the beginning, they didn't all support it. So it really dictated which program I would use. Okay, so it zoom in here, But now with the face again, I want this kind of, you know, clean readability to the face So very little to no rendering. One thing I will say to because this is a common question with people trying to ink faces. You know, I'm always gonna say less is more for one, so think stylized. And but also, as you get further away from the face of the character, you have to simplify more. You have to start using shadows more or lie in wait, you know, and or I guess, But the main thing is that you don't try to get in here, friends, that you're not gonna get in here in detail, and I you're gonna just draw the top shadow to the eye top line very little to the bottom of the I and then a pupil. So it's gonna become more stylized. And the further you get away from the character, the more that happens to wear a face from a distance becomes just very basic lines a shadow into the nose, a line for the mild maybe eyebrows, you know, kind of the same here because this is a simplified face. And then if this was a face that was very close, like a cover shot, then obviously you can get in here and you can start detail ing away and doing all this fancy rendering and detail work. But again, remember that if it's further away, you're going to simplify and they're going to start to group things together based upon shadow or lie in wait. So, for instance, to define this knows I'm just going to get the shadow under the nose, almost not even drawing A knows. It's just the reaction of the shadow. Very simplified. Here it's the shadow under the lip, not the lip itself, the teeth in the shadow in the mouth. So again, this is a a simplified, almost cartooning type approach to get the information to read and then not overthink the process and also really speed you up because, you know, we tend to, like, try toe overdraw everything, and it slows us down and actually hurts the work a lot of times. So you have toe try to think about it and go. You know what what would breed this or what would convey this message in the least amount of lines in the least amount of shapes, The more you can do that, I think the more proficient you become. And, uh, it really takes the stress out of trying to render all this stuff again over drawing things that really takes an absorbing amount of time ultimately hurts the work Now for darker here . I would fill in more of this to get kind of alluded to that when I I started thinking the girl's hair, she has more what I would consider lighter, fair hair in this, this one. But if we wanted this character to have darker hair than one good way to do that is just filling more of it kind of makes the coloring process easier as well. It's just basically shows the color us that it's dark hair, because if it was all, um, open lines, then it would usually read as a later let her hear color. But obviously, coloring can really take care of that as well, so you can really convey dark hair with just a few shapes, but generally you're gonna feeling more of it. like this. And the neat thing about this is you can really convey a neat light source by doing this. So you see, I'm shading from the bottom. I'm kind of perceiving that there's this highlighting the top of the head. I could really get in here, and I could do all sorts of things. I could show more of the separation of the hair. I could get us creative as I want to right there. I think I'll just go with this and maybe a few little lines here and there, because if you all just shapes than he really don't convey Ah, the separation in the hair. But again, sometimes less is more so start with less and then maybe just add a couple little rendering lines. Okay, let's double quick, Damn straight out canvas. So again, you know, you could see there's not very much rendering to that face. And that hair even actually don't like that shapes. I'm gonna bring that together like that, Um, but it gets the message across. So now let's see what else? We got A character here. We got that little Saturn shape shows his ah, astronaut of some kind circles I think I've already mentioned it's really easy to just generate circles with digital art. I still do my best to create them by hand, but you see, I'm struggling pretty bad. But the other thing is getting in closer should help, sometimes ghosting over it and also changing the brush size. That one's a bit better right there. My family and we can put the shadow under the foot here. That kind of connects the character to the ground. It also pushes the hell away from the ground. So if we start the shadow tighter here, my bad. But then as it gets back here, it turns on the line work. It shows that his heel is raised off the ground. So again, this is where it kind of mentioned. Like. Shadows can really propel areas of the work off the page. It's very important to kind of play around with ease. Even if you're not into shadow heavy type artwork, it's still very important to practice because it, um, teaches you about depth, creating the illusion of depth on the page. I noticed I'm tapering these lines thinner as they fade off, so pretty much a zai would perceive ingredient to occur like this. I am veering off the character, so I gotta be aware of that. But I'm gonna merge this together anyways. But again, whatever you start to do this, you have to remember that because if you start bouncing around from the background to the character to another character on your working off layers, it can get a little bit messy. Just make mental notes of when you decide to jump off one area of the work to another and actually recommend that you do work on a certain area to finality. So, like, you know, whether it be the characters of the background, hopefully the way that I've kind of showed you throughout the process, because what happens is it really allows you to gauge how much time your spending on a certain area and ultimately that will allow you to figure out where you need to improve what you need to focus on as you press forward. So you may be really quick thinking the backgrounds, but characters take you forever, constantly and doubt about the way the characters read things like that. But But if you time yourself, if you're aware of it, then you might be able to analyze it a little bit better. And sometimes it's just a matter off, not dwelling over something too much, allowing yourself to kind of draw through it and be okay with mistakes. Sometimes I actually get really good work that way, but it's it's hard to tell ourselves that in the beginning, because we're so concerned with being better. Okay, so now if we take this and title that off, you can see we've got the character. I think there we can hit Command E merge them into the predominant area of this. We've still got little things like the thanks against the screen stuff like that. So these air just kind of swirling lines. So I just vary up the pressure. So push a little harder, a little softer and kind of float through these areas, I think kind of like a a chrome or a swirling, swirling kind of glare through the middle of it. And you can really put these anywhere on a design like this. It could be half moon shapes like back here we could do a little half moon line syrup, all sorts of neat little things we got some rendering back here we can add to the door. So this is really the point where I just kind of do a final pass and, you know, just touch up things I might have missed. Start toddling off me to create that line there, start toddling off the visibility to this line, work here and then ultimately go back through and do one more past Teoh picking up the lines. So let's go ahead and wrap up right here. We'll head over to the next lesson and will do just that. We will go ahead and toggle is off and we'll do our final cleanup of the inks that we have here. So what? That let's move on. 19. L18 Finishing Touches: Okay, so now we're gonna give us kind of a final pass. So one of things you could do, you assert to tone back the blue line here and or just turn it all the way off because you're basically just trying to see what the inks look like. Independently. Without the sketch, you could see it lightens up quite a bit. I do like to turn it back just a little bit and slowly work into this. There's still a few little details missings. I want to make sure to add those. And so, basically, like these little kind of lines for the character to look surprised. Just something kind of overly animated. But I kind of like it's all leave those in there. You see, I missed some of the little techie line. So this final layer, I just go through and kind of pick at it and say, Okay. What did I miss that was important to this design. What can I add? What can I finish off little things like that? Um, are there missing lines? Are there little shadows that could be added? Maybe a small shadow under the neck here of the character a couple of lines here, so just little things if I see fit, you know, I've got, like, this glared with lips. I miss that in the original illustration. I have all this information kind of filled in, so I kind of missed that. So I'll just make sure that's in there. Some of it, uh, you can see kind of nudging things around and saying, Well, does that even work? Is that even? Does it even look correct? You know, maybe it does. Maybe doesn't. So can I go back a couple steps here to about right there, Get something like that, Maybe a little bit of the iris of the eye. So again, I will just add little tiny details I need to. Some of this control panel stuff looks just a bit too basic, so I could throw in some rendering to kind of, you know, cover that up a little bit. Still easy enough to kind of use what's here. And you can also use a lot of like little line breaks for details like this. So, for instance, I might want toe make it look like there's two more detail here. But instead of filling in every single line and going for clarity. I could just kind of texturizing these areas a little bit. Just little things like this. So it kind of looks like there's a bit more information in there, but I'm not going to sit here and maybe detail every little ah square inch of it. So again, kind of fill in some of the missing line gaps here, shadow onto the arm. You know, whatever and living is I can get in here and say, Well, maybe I want to see a little bit mawr Great Asian to some of these areas. We don't want a little bit more shading so I can get in here and do that relatively quick and easy. They don't have to be the same direction of shading, either. I can mix that up a little bit, but I always feel like these tiny line just ADM or area of interest. I could put in some dividing lines for the corners here. I think that looks a little bit better than just the smooth corner like that. So you see, all the major lifting is in place, and now it's just kind of pulling it all together. global two shading to this top ledge. Same thing over here tells them doing is adding these very faint lines trying to make him very light by comparison. Let's see, what else is double click here paying back. And as I had more of this in, I can keep toning back the Slayer or take it right off. Okay, so now what I want to do is actually merge all this together. So I'm pretty confident and look that I'm after and everything that's kind of here. What I'm gonna do is make sure that the frame is at the very top and then everything else I'm gonna hit command e all the way down to the main inks. So actually gonna put that above just keep in mind is legend. Merge everything down into the name Blair. It'll retain the name. So just a nice thing that to keep my end up so you don't have to keep renaming that that layer. So something else I feel like it's missing is, um, some of the shading on the character. So then thing to think about is once you get to this level and I did have some cross hatching in the saw these light areas. So this is something I would probably generate more, you know, with a pattern and then just kind of merged into this area in a race it back. But I'm just gonna go and draw it in just just a show that there's a pretty easy way to do it. I can put like a glare line right through the metal like this kind of looks like a little bit more like lights when you do something like that. But, you know, keep in mind, you could save yourself some time by just simply dragging it over, flipping it. And I'm putting in the other area scaling it and racing bag. So, you know, obviously, with digital, there's lots of ways to alleviate the process and save yourself a tremendous amount of time . Then hit command e Same thing. I'll repeat that process of command emerged into the main layers. Make another copy. I'm gonna make sure to make these ones more condensed. Since they're further away in perspective, it's kind of crisscrossing these. I'm actually gonna go back to that cap because I am in a reuses. So you don't want this a kind of resemble. You don't want any lines that stand out too much independently. In fact, it probably makes more sense to flip this first. So you noticed that I added the glare before flipping it. So it makes that other ones stand out a little bit more independently, which is kind of something you don't want when you're reusing patterns. So what we'll do here? It's head ult. Drag it over. I noticed, and actually was holding Ault with the move tool to get a copy of the other way is just to right. Click over here and go to duplicate layer, so it's just a shortcut command of that. Go edit transformed flip horizontal rotate that in the place may be scaled a little bit. Inner race back the trains Will some brush command eat emerges together, Go back to race and again, just kind of throwing these little glare lines. But now you can make him read independently from one another. Or you could have you know, all the clear lines on one side, you know, like his traditional of most things declare is going to reside on one side and then command eat emergent down. I also want to fix this little mistake right there and again, just kind of picking at it. Now, the other thing that you kind of do is a final passes. Make sure that things that are the focal point of reading in this case, the focal point is really the characters in their expression. So I would ADM or dark or thicker lines around them to help influence that, Um, So you just basically keep picking at it and think of, you know, where can you add more shadows? Uh, you know, maybe some detail to the chair, Just anything you can to kind of direct the viewer mawr to this area of the illustration. Now it's a pretty busy illustration. A zit is so you've got to be pretty, um, creative with that. But again, one way to always do this is to add another layer over top, so I'll just kind of illustrate that's real quick or a thicker of series of lines. So for absence, we could really beef up these lines around the girl here, have your line weight on the back of the hair without making it too overly obvious. It's gonna be somewhat obvious but not he don't want it to be just extreme, but I don't know. Line weight is pretty heavily used in a lot of our styles, And it can be. I've seen some pretty heavy line weight on Really amazing are it just depends on I use it. You just don't want Teoh. They put one singular, boring line around the whole thing, but just remember like it resides on shadows. It resides on curves, four shortening, obviously focal points like we're talking about here, so we feel like try to separate her from the background. So, for instance, if the line from the top of her hair is equal to the guy's shirt here, then obviously that's gonna blend. But as soon as we start to give her thicker lines, she now propels off the background a little bit more, a little bit here and there. Same thing with her hand against these computer screens. A couple ways we can do that really line with the easiest, uh, the other way would be to add some shadows from the screens behind her arm, and that's gonna make her arm pop off the canvas as well. So maybe even some little little shading under the arms like this. Some real light feathered lines kind of connects her to the It connects her to the background, but also shows that Shies away from the background a little bit, by the way, that we implement that shading. But now if we pan bag and we toggle that on and off, hopefully you can see how it slowly separates her from that background. And I think it's a good addition. So hit command e there, and you really just want to kind of keep repeating that process. Um, in slowly adding to its we're gonna add more shading and areas that you I feel like we look a little bit flat. You're going to, uh, as shapes of shadow to push certain areas around. And you're going to use your line. Wait to really, um, you know Dr Things to the foreground and help explain focal points sharing into the character. They're still feel like he could use a little bit of, ah, lie in wait around him as well. I just want to separate him were from that background a little bit more, you see, it generally will make sense on the lower side of his arm here, but it's just not an always type thing. You can start very heavily up here by the sleeve and have it tapered down into the wrist. I think that helps match the the anatomy a little bit more. Yeah, let's see. I think there's a missing. There's the lines going to his finger there. Get rid of that again. We can add a shadow here on the bottom of the arm. It hopes, Ah, describe that form a little bit better. And I think the seat would read a little bit better if we pick it up the line back here. So at this point, it's just kind of picking at it in going around and trying to make the most out of what's here. Um, but I think it's really a matter off utilizing everything we've talked about in these lessons and then varying it up. So really practice lots of different types of lines. Don't be afraid to go against the grain as faras the lines you create. So in an experiment, often so it's kind of the beauty of digital because experimentation is so much easier. You don't ever feel like you're wasting a piece of our, um, you probably have to be careful that you don't experiment to awfully much and you actually consistently produce some work. But that's really it's so now the last thing I'll do to kind of finish this up as I'll take a copy of this and by just simply making a copy. It darkens it by itself. But I will also do like a small blur. You see, that's probably a little much, but this is keep in mind, this is gonna relate to what your canvas sizes. So let's go and pack that down to about four and had dinner because I don't want it to wash away too much detail. So again, this is gonna be subjective to what you're in. Results are. You can even do other tests, like printed out, but also back down the opacity, So notice what it does. It kind of softens up those digital inclines. So, to me, that feels a little bit more reminiscent of the natural work. But you might have to erase certain areas of that layer so you don't lose your stars and your finer detail, so just play around with it. But that's something I like to do at the very end of the work, and I feel like it makes things look a little bit more natural and bold. Eso we're going and wrap up right here. Let's head over to the next lesson and continue on. 20. L19 Making Adjustments: one last thing I want to share with you when you're kind of done with your scene creation. One of the real powerful things about digital is ability to add it. So, for instance, with this 11 of things that was kind of noticing, as I was illustrating it is I didn't really like the thickness of the girls neck from her back. So the wear hairs folded in in the disappearance of the line here really shows how incorrect this whole area is. You see, the with from the neckline of the the back is just way too wide. Even the position of the neck is kind of weird. Now I could just say that Hey, that's my vision, and this is my style or I could fix it. So what I want to show you is that one of the neat things about digital is that if you go to like an area like this knows I can't draw on, it's giving me like a little no smoking symbol. But at the same time, one of the powerful things about the way clip studio handles its groups and layers is I can edit all of this at once. Now the reason this is important is because we already applied a little bit of a filter that blurt spoke about. So it's not a big deal. I could just go back to the original air, make edit, reapply the blur. But if you've introduced a few other maybe effects and different things that you've done, you can actually work off the group and you can still select areas. This line work. So let's take you to kind of be strategic about this. But I'm gonna take this area here, and I'm gonna go to about actually crop all this hair right here now I could cutting paces , or I could just hit command shift T. It's going to give me the ability to select and move and also distort. And I could just pull this back a little bit. So it's kind of like skewing a font or something. You just stretching it back. You can play around the busy handles and move stuff around now, obviously, probably look a little bit better if I not only push this information back, but I changed the connection point under the jaw just looks weird that there's a line going right up under the jaw there, so I'm not gonna make a dramatic change. But I just want to show you how you could do this now to implement new lines. Like I just pointed out, You can't draw right there. So you do have to go back to the main copy there. Uh, you're not gonna want to use the one that's tone back. Someone extra just got emerges together. Command be. And I'm going to just kind of connect the dots. Now again, If I wanted this to be entirely correct, I would do this on the the beginning, layer the before emerged it and add my blur and everything like that. But I'm to the end of the work, so I just want to kind of go ahead and finish this off. But again, that's really the power of digital is that you can just make edits wherever you need to, And you never really backed into a corner. There's really just lots of ways that you can fix this work and keep on moving forward. Let's get some of us cleaned up here, and I also don't like the back lines. I'm gonna move that as Well, I'm just gonna race that back with the translucent brush. Try to fix that. You remember to kind of draw through, Imagine where her neck would really be. So if you went from the back of the head back of the neck, they're back would probably be It was a pretty skinny night. Probably be somewhere over here. Um, and I think the curve to is what was throwing the design off. So when we go back to here and change the the curve so a little bit of, ah, over a sharper angle here, sharper curve, and then we'll connect the chair back. And by doing this, we also expose a little bit more of the other characters leg. So we'll get that in there, and we have to imagine that we're probably going to see some of that seat. So let's do this. Let's, uh, move this line over to here can always draw three or work to kind of figure out where at. And I think it will just make sense to shade this back so we'll put a shadow and just a little rendering lines. Yeah, let's pan backed. If that makes sense, and I think that's a little bit better. So again, I just want to show you there's lots of ways to think about editing and the fact that you can select your line work and you can manipulate it. Now you can manipulate it with the transform. Uh, you can cut and paste it and transform it, which makes it a little bit easier. Um, and then also you have mess transformation. Now, I don't use this one as much, but at least want to show it to you. So, for instance, say you wanted to grab this arm area and you wanted to modify this in some way and go to edit, transform, mess, transformation. You can actually control the amount of busy handles by these little points over here on. Then you can maneuver parts of this illustration around. So for me, the one I just showed you is highly effective for what I do. But this can also probably serve some purpose, is so play around with that. But again, just remember, with digital art, there's so many ways to add it that you can truly just keep adjusting it to you, get it right. So hopefully these lessons are beneficial to you. I've got some more practice activities will be heading over to next, so let's stop here and head over to the next lesson. 21. L20 Practice Activity 001: Okay, So for a practice activity, I'm gonna supply you with this. And I'd like you to work over top of it. So each one's name, but we're just gonna work over a layer over top is practice, and only to try just a Siris of lines so you can start off pretty basic. So, for instance, you know, skill back toe where you're comfortable with size against the canvas and maybe try to create lines that are nice and evenly the spurs. Now, keep in mind with this, I'm actually pivoting off the back of my hand. You see, towards the middle, I lose control a little bit, but down towards the sides, I gained control and I get a lot more even lines. So that right there tells me that I'm a little bit too close to the work, so I'll skill us back even further to again where my hand feels more comfortable Now I may lose control edged edge. So that's where the layer benefits me and I'll just go ahead, still feel a little loss of control in the metal, but not as much. And I wanted to shoot passos edges if I need to so all of us are gonna be different. You may be very confident a to this process and not need to scale back or whatever, but you have to test yourself. You have to try this now. I'm just gonna race back the edges of this before I commit to it. So this is just one of things that helps me get to the end result that I want. And then I might try to cross hatches. So I'm gonna rotate the canvas toe. What's more comfortable for my way of creating again? I'm going to scale back Now. We know that we could just simply take this, drag it, flip it horizontally, and there we have cross hatching really quick and easy, right? So that's the beauty of digital. But make sure gonna force myself to just practice. So, uh, that's kind of the, you know, the weird and neat thing about digital art that some of this is so easy to dio without doing the work. You know that you just copy and paste and scale on all this stuff, but there's other times you really need to force yourself to just practice. Ultimately, that's how you're going to get better. And a lot of people seem to think that when you work digitally, you're not doing the work. And that's not true. In fact, if you can't work traditionally, well, in your digital work isn't gonna be as effective as it could be, and vice versa. They are very much the same skill set, But, uh, it's very easy for people to say, while there's so many tools and digital that you know, you're not as good as a traditional artist and that's just not true. But you do have to make time to force yourself to do the training. So in this sense there's our crosshatch nothing too amazing. And you see, even though I was going for consistent lines, that I wasn't really going for more interesting lines or tapered lines, they still happened that way because they're free hand. So they have a nice, interesting crosshatch too many ways. Now that's just one style that you might practice. You might say, Let's try adding some other lines over here, and we're gonna make thes appear lighter by comparison, and we could do that by not cross hatching them and then maybe on the top we do some that are kind of half moon. So maybe the light is just kind of, you know, hitting that top a little less things like that. And then for the back here, we could say we want this a little bit darker, So bring some that are going just vertically. It's like that. So you see that this is a great way to practice and really, you want to do this often? It's very easy to get caught up in the work and not take time to do things like this. They're gonna race in these lines back, but you can create some really need effects. And you can learn a lot by this because it's the same. All these basic shapes will apply to your more advanced work. You have to learn to start thinking about your work in that way. So for this sphere, I'm gonna actually try to shade it through here right about like that. And then I want to give some variation in the this Grady int that I want to bring up and over like this. So what I'm gonna do is keep that shape in mine, and I'm also going to try to round these tapered lines. So I consider this a little bit more of an advance kind of method that that particular easy for a lot of people that start out. I don't know. That's particular easy for me. I usually have to warm up to it, but it's it's very interesting looking and it's Ah, it's highly versatile. It helps to really push the feeling of a rounded form because you're doing a couple things here. You're rounding with shape, okay? And then you're also tapering a line, and then you're also adding variation in the way that these lines were created because they're so independently and created, so it it has a very interesting look to the work. Now, I didn't quite get the shape that I want yet, but I also planned on cross fatuous. So what I do now is I'm actually gonna add a layer. I'm gonna draw this shape like this. I'm actually a little lower like that like that. Then I'm gonna go back to this, gonna rotate this and the way that it's most comfortable for me to create these types of lines. I would say something like this and then Now I want to do it again, and I'm actually gonna go right through the shape itself. So I'm gonna make it a little bit easier on myself. I also want to make sure to bring these pretty tight together. We get that nice little diamond shape that I'm after. It's kind of harder for me to focus on curving this, but it's very, very important to try to do this. I think the more you do it specially is your rendering forms that you're used to rendering , say, ah, characters, arm or something that you perceive is being very rounded. Then it becomes easier to round these shapes over. Um and I think it was just a little bit rusty. But that's where stuff like this is so important to practice. I think that a lot of artists assume that we just we get really good or somebody is really good, and they don't need to practice anymore. And I totally have to say that's the wrong way to think about it. Like the more you practice, the better you get, not the other way around. No, no. If you're completing work all the time, then I guess you could kind of just chalk that up is your practice. But I still try to make time Teoh to practice to experiment. Even though I work professionally, I still make time to try to re study and learn, primarily because I just want my work to always be a more impressive each. You know, here on end. Let's rotate this around now. I'm just a racing back with the translucent brush. I'll get rid of that line I used for reference, he said. I've got a nice like great Asian there. Fade again. I'm a big fan of, like using this negative Ah, negative line. I couldn't really see it. See it there, but it's showing up. Make it a little bit bigger. Kind of like that. Look double click here to straighten out canvas. And so you see now it's a pretty interesting look, and I can keep embellishing and improving upon that. Let's do the same thing over here with cylinder, and with this one I want to try a different series of lines, so I want to kind of challenge myself. I still want to do a curved line. I still want a shadow that goes through here something like that. Let's do so. Let's almost think about a way that chrome shades so chrome, you know, typically have this kind of pick the thin, swirling pattern like this. It starts off like this, and I'll just kind of be messy. I always think it looks better if you're a little bit messy with it at first anyways, so it starts thicker. And then you get these little love. Any line breaks. 10 year swirls. They kind of very up a bit, probably start off a little better. Five a sketch and then some tiny little lines up here like that. And then now some Grady int lines at the bottom. So what I want to do here is its first race backer Edges like this too much there and Sonam going to have a Grady it from here down like this. I'm here. Ah, little bit later in the middle. So just so you know, generally what you're emulating here is there's a reflection in the chrome object in the reflection is really just ah, horizon or buildings in the distance or whatever you you assume, is reflecting in there. But it's generally distorted, and that's why you go with swirl in the you know, this kind of effect here. But the thing that I think is helpful to practice here is that the line start tighter and succession and then they fade off like those same thing here. You could start tighter in succession and then fade off. It's generally going to kind of give you this crummy look. Another thing you can dio is you can do a glare line up top, kind of a starburst. This is more probably style choice that I like to do. But it kind of helps look like, you know, the hottest point, the highest point, cause we got to remember that spherical it's rounding over. That's why we're getting some shading to the bottom and then also maybe some little cross action here with the same idea in that it starts tighter and then it fades off. It looks pretty plain without something on the side here. So let's say that you know this I just shaded like this so on and so forth. So we could you see, I'm not tapering these lines. I'm just throwing those in with a singular passed almost like the first example. But you see how to me anyway is based upon the style I like. Really. The most interesting one to me is the middle. I just really like those types of lines, so it's probably more of a style preference. So be sure to try this practice activity. Keep in mind if you want me to view any of the work, whether it be this lesson or any of the other lessons we talked about, be sure to share the work. I'd love to see it, and I'll give you any feedback that I can and keep in mind, I'm here to answer any questions you might have, so just let me know. And, as always, keep drawn. Keep em fund and I will talk to you Assume.