Digital Painting in Manga Studio 5 - Character Design

1. Introduction to this Class: Welcome back everyone. My name is Robert Marzullo and I'll be your instructor for this class, Digital Painting in Manga Studio 5, Character Design, also known as Clip Studio Paint. In this course, you're going to learn how to draw and refine the line work to your character concept. You're going to learn how to make incremental changes to the work and keep propelling yourself forward through the design process. In this course, I'm going to show you a series of techniques for adjusting the artwork. We're going to use things like selections and transformation tools, the distortion feature, the mesh transformation. There's all sorts of neat ways to adjust the line work and get the idea that you're thinking of without giving up, getting frustrating and trying something else. That's really the main focus of this course is to walk you through the entire process of this illustration and show you all the ways to get through the more complex areas of this type of artwork. Once we've got the line work to our liking, we then take that and I'm going to show you how to create a series of selections. These selections and the layers that we're going to generate from them will allow you to slowly build up the paint work, apply textures using the combine modes and really try a series of effects, it will really allow you to experiment with your work and slowly see the process and the paint work build up so that you can gauge the direction that you're heading and make sure that you get the best out of your artwork. I'll also be showing you some ways to correct your work even after much of the paint work is already in place. You'll also learn how to use the mirrored windows to check and spot flaws in the work. We'll discuss how to create contrast and highlights and areas of the painting, how to adjust saturation, so on the post-processing, you're going to learn how to really manipulate the artwork at the very end to get the most out of it. There's lots of great features inside of this program for that as well. I'm very excited and honored to be able to teach you this course and I have no doubt you'll be coming up with some amazing character designs of your own. Let's get started. 2. The Initial Rough Sketch: Now we're going to work on some character design and digitally painting a character. First, we got to sketch out an idea. I'll walk you through that process. Let's first create a new file, File, New. In this particular instance, I want to work with 8.5 by 11 at 600 DPI. It's going to be 8.5 wide by 11 tall, and 600 DPI will just give you plenty of information for a raster file like this. I prefer the type of design that we're going to do in this case to be a little bit more of an 8.5 by 11 than 11 by 17. Eleven by 17, I generally will work at 300 DPI and that will be more than adequate. Just keep in mind, 300 DPI is more than adequate for most instances as well. It really just depends on what your overall needs are and what your system can handle. What we're going to first do is I'm going to start with a regular pencil tool, and you can use either one of these. I'll make sure that brushes are included or accessible for the work that you're doing here. What I want to do is first designate an idea. The idea I have in mind is that I want an Elvin warrior princess type girl fantasy art, where she's holding up a sword. For that design, I'm going to have one arm up a little bit. I start off with usually this very basic rudimentary series of shapes. I do something for the upper abdomen and I start to try to picture the tilt that you get in there. Notice that I've got the neck going back, the chest going forward like that, and then the spine would go curved like this, and then for the pelvis I would do something like, I'll generally draw the openings for the legs like this. Simple as just some dish shapes. Really early on I'm trying to get that bend in there. Even though this is going to be a pretty basic pose, I still want to make sure that I have a bit of dynamic flow to the body pose, if not, it can come out very boring and very static. Even the pose is just a standing pose, I want a little bit of a dynamic feel to it. I'm going to put some foreshortening there as well. A lot of times when I do foreshortening like this, I'll put these openings for the wrist and where the arms connect and intersect and things like that. Then I'll quickly just get a hand in there. In this case, it's going to be a fist holding a weapon. I'll put that in there just rather crudely. It's nothing that's going to make it to the end result. A lot of times when I do this, I'm not worried too much about it looking perfect because there's going to be a lot of refinement from here to the end result. I think too if you really train yourself to think about that, you don't beat yourself up when things don't immediately look right, and you just continue to press forward and work through their artwork. I want to have the curvature to the waist, and there I want to have this be in the weight-bearing leg. I guess I should draw that as a forward curve like this. Then one off to the side a little bit. I can then go on top of this and start adding in some cylinder shapes just to flesh it out a bit and see if this is working. I'm going to have the other arm held back like this and holding a shield. Let me get that in there real quick. Just, again, a series of basic shapes, nothing too pretty and too correct, just get the information going. It will have some shield off to hear like this. Now I want to give the impression that she's looking up just a little bit. Not too much, but enough to just not make it a straight-on shot to the face. What I try to do there whenever I design these characters is I try to just change little things. Make little things look a little bit more interesting than just a plain Jane. For instance, if you get in the habit of drawing forward-facing shots all the time, the characters, no matter how cool the bodies look, they'll just tend to look repetitious, for one, but then also just plain; just very lackluster and not alive. To make characters look alive, you want the curvature of the spine, you want tilts from the head to the shoulder to the pelvis all to be a little bit different orientation. You want some foreshortening, you want some overlapping of forms. We don't have much of that here, but we'll get a little bit of that with the sword, probably something like this. All these things kind of go together, and even though this is just that basic pose, by the time we do all these things, it will make it look more interesting. It'll make it look a little bit more well-thought-out. If you notice, I'm just putting that cross-section tilting up to immediately define the upshot of the face. I'm not so entirely consumed with the proportions. I am trying to get some general proportions in place and definitely trying not to make it not make sense, but I know that with digital, one of the really neat things is that I can adjust proportions really quickly. Just getting in all the main ingredients and all the main parts to the picture right now. Like I said, this is going to be an Elvish character, so I'll give it pointed ears. She's going to have some shoulder armor. I can already tell I need to widen out the shoulders and adjust some proportions as we go here. Generally, when I draw like this, one of the first things I tend to do is fix the biggest problem first. One of the things that's sticking out like a sore thumb to me is this arm. It doesn't have the feeling that I'm shooting for. What I'm going to do is try to adjust that first. Foreshortening, I generally have to draw things a couple of times. Not always, but more times than not, I end up having to do that. I always tell people, foreshortening is one of those things that takes years to get the hang of, and it's really not something we're used to seeing as much as all the other stuff that we tend to draw. That's why we have a little bit harder time grasping exactly what we're after. We can imagine it and we've got a very good depiction in our imagination of what we're after, but putting that on paper sometimes can be a bit more cumbersome. But not to worry, we will get there. I think I want the fist a little more straight on. If you notice, even with the fist, I just draw it as a series of basic blocked shapes, just to really get the information in there rather quickly and figure it all out. That's why I tend to stay in the rough sketch stage as long as possible to really work out as many details that I can see going on here. Let's go ahead and hit Command T and scale this up. I want it to really take up a lot of the page here. In fact, I actually want parts of the weapon and her going off the page to add a little bit more feeling of presence to the character. I feel like if you put everything from the character on the page, it tends to make the character look a little bit less powerful and less dominant. Let's get this in here. If you notice, I'm just tweaking little things as I go. I'll start to soft-erase as well. One of the really neat things about soft-erasing is that you're basically building up more and more information as you go. If you do it just right, and I try to leave as much of that information on the page for as long as possible, you can really flesh out things and sculpt the artwork, which is always what I'm shooting for. I'm always trying to think like I'm sculpting a piece of clay more than I'm drawing on a piece of paper. Now another thing I like to do, and this is probably about time to do it, I'll name this over here by double-clicking on the layer, call it Step 1, and I'm just going to copy that by dragging it here. There's our copy. Double-click here, backspace, and Step 2. I like to just show progression in my work as I work up through my sketch. I really like to do it as much through the entire piece as possible, but through the sketch, I find it to be very beneficial. It helps me to really see the direction I took with the piece and what things may have been positive choices and where I may have made some mistakes in my choices, things like that. But I try to think about it with every new movement and thing that I change in the artwork. I'm still getting closer to the end result even if it's a mistake because it's teaching me what not to do within the artwork, so it's all good stuff. It's never bad. Any of these choices you make and any of these things that you put down are all still good bits of information. Figuring out the shape of the hilt here, like that. Again, just keep the rough sketch rough and really let the ideas flourish in that process. Don't worry about your line making being so precise at this point because even these scribbles, sometimes I'll just scribble, especially with textures and things, but even with just design elements or even anatomy at times. Because as I soft-erase, and I'll show that here in a bit, and start to build up over top, sometimes those little scribbles can give you ideas. It's all good information. I try to leave as much on that page as possible until I'm really sure about what I want in the overall effect of the painting. We're probably going to put some ice mountains in the background there. Then also she's going to have a flowing cloak or cape or something like that. I like doing stuff like this because it allows me to bring in some other dynamics to the scene. I could do little things like bring it up here and show the flip of the material. You could do all kinds of things, and it shows good motion because of the billowing effect that you're able to get in there. We'll try something like that. For the background, like I said, we'll do these spiky ice mountains, which should give us some neat things to paint as well. I'm thinking about composition, but mainly in the sense of the layering right at this point. The direction that she's facing, I really just want that up-shot like she's looking over camera. Then as far as the overlap, the overlaps that are created from each element is more what I'm focusing on. There's not a whole lot of great composition here, but it should still direct the viewer to about right here. That's ultimately what I'm shooting for in the way that I'm layering the pieces to this. There's our beginning rough sketch right there. We're going to keep progressing on from here and refine this and get it closer and closer to the end pencil result that we're going to need for paint. 3. Adjustments to the Sketch: Okay, so now I want to show you that by soft erasing, you can look into that work a bit further, keep adding new bits of information. Soft erasing really is just like when you draw on paper and use a kneaded eraser but it's really, I think the best way to do it. A lot of people ask me whether or not they should use layers to do this and you can use the layer system over here. But with soft erase, you can really control just certain elements of it and you can do that with mass down here and we're going to be using those later in the course. But there's just a lot of reasons why the soft erase this way is highly effective. One of the reasons I really enjoy is because, since you are working like you would traditionally anyways, you're really not forcing yourself to only work in that one regard. You can always go back to traditional, you can be very used to building up the sketch in that same process. So I try to always make digital tools work as much as traditional tools as I can possibly get away with. Okay. So now I want to get in here a bit more, finalize some things, but I'm still very much into the design phase of this, not committing to any one idea just yet. So I just want to work through this and this. Typically I'll still throw in lines and when I say throw in lines, I really do mean that as far as quick line making goes. I'm doing quick sketch lines that are more expressive and a little bit less, again, committed to any one specific idea. I just really want to allow myself to keep changing things at the stage. I'm still not entirely happy with the way the arm is coming out. It's getting closer, but it needs to be a bit more dimensional and as for the foreshortening a lot of times it's really important to get just the right size relationship of the objects. So I think that's what still needs a little bit more work here, but I'll just keep pressing on and see what what comes of it. One of the things that I tend to do is if I'm not getting something exactly the way that I want, I move to different parts of the illustration and come back to it. I feel if you're really forcing yourself to keep drawing over something and you're not getting it. You're wasting time and you can actually get into a bit of frustration with that. Where if you move to something else, especially something that you're maybe a little more confident to in the illustration and then come back, you might mentally jog something loose and be able to work pass it, at least that's what tends to work for me anyways. I'm going to start hinting towards placement of the eyes and the mouth, all that, but still not really ready for that just throwing in a little bit of detail as I move forward. All right, so let's see here. Now one of the really neat things about digital obviously is there's the ability to grab certain components of the artwork and move it so quickly and use things like mesh transformation inside of Mongo Studio here. But just simply being able to grab and scale things can save just a tremendous amount of time and we'll be doing that as well, I'll soon here. So I try to change as much as I can by just nudging the lines and when I say nudging them, I mean basically just drawing to either side of the line, pushing it back and forth and then using the soft erase to restart the the process over and over again until I get it right. Again, just using rural rudimentary shapes to fill things out. Show some segments in the armor there. So I want this very detailed armor with lots of little segments, lots of cool areas to add digital paint effects too. So that's what you see me doing here when I'm drawing these little breaks. I'm trying to figure out where the armor would go, where it's going to segment, things like that. How many will overlap. So I might want for any given part of the armor. Also trying to think about perspective and how something might look to one side versus the other. So I'm always trying to condense down certain parts of it to make it look like it's receding into space. I want to figure out where the hair is going to be going. Probably have just a little bit of it coming in front of the neck. So again, like what I was saying about overlapping shapes, you really want to do as much of that as possible without it looking forced and actually the hair wouldn't be on the side of the cape because those small bits of overlap really do a lot for pushing some depth into the illustration. Whenever we're in some centerpiece probably a jammer some in there. I think I want the head just a little bit bigger. So again, this is where just grabbing parts the illustration and using Command T or Command Shift T, but Command T will give you a skilled proportion. I also want to move the neck around like that, play with the tilt. Just constantly editing things like this, especially in the early stage like this. So now let's take this and scale it down, push it down just a little bit and I want to go ahead and I feel like the arm is too far up for the perspective I'm looking at. So I'm actually going to just soft erase this or erase it all back. Maybe even altogether and just start fresh. I'll do that as well obviously, if there's something I just cannot save and it's not looking right, I'll just start fresh. So I want the arm to come out and on up. A lot of times you got to think to whenever you place things like armor in that on the way, you got to think about what the body looks like under there and that can be tricky to do and I think that's a little bit of what I'm facing here but again, I'll just keep paint balling around till I get it. So it's never an issue of not getting it. It may be an issue of how well do I get it to convert to what I'm looking for. But one of the things is once you start doing more and more professional illustrations for client work, is you realize that you can't just simply walk away from it. Not if you expect to get paid and make a living, obviously. So what happens is you just really force yourself to think about and go, "Okay, I got to get it done. So what do I do here?" Where if you're just drawing your own stuff, it becomes very easy to not think that way and just say, "Why? I really don't want to draw this anyways today. " Then move on to something else and you really have to not do that, especially if you're going to work in any type of capacity, you have to really nip that concept in the board because it can definitely hurt you. That works a little better. Looks a little better, I think. The previous step now, this is where it's nice because you can tag a one-off, one on and the arm just looked a bit awkward right there, too far out and then maybe a bit too large. So now we're to here where it looks a little bit better in a foreshortened pose. I still feel like something is off by comparison, maybe this arm.Maybe just the arm itself. Let me grab just this, tilt it and bring it down. Enter and Command D to deselect. A big thing with getting the face right. We'll talk about this later as we [inaudible] but it's really just making everything look as if it's pointing upward. So sometimes the jaw line can just be as simple as making a bit more flattened out on the bottom line and even less of a line, has it does this? But it's getting the features to look like they're pointing up and then moving them up under the face a little bit higher. Seems to be the real trick with this type of pose and I think we're almost there. We got the foundational information a lot closer. It's lot more in place. So now we'll just go ahead and make another version of this step right here.We'll drag this down, call this Step 3 and I should probably time the amount of time that I go in between each one of these steps but I really just think as long as you're doing it and you can see a good amount of change from piece to piece. You can really see the work progress and you can really learn from that experience quite a bit. All right, so that'll complete this lesson. Let's move on to the next. 4. Adjusting Proportions: Let's continue on to keep adjusting things and again, I'm always trying to figure out proportion to the stage. I think that's probably the biggest and most important thing, as well as alignment of body parts. I really want to get just the right alignment to convey the mood, to convey the posture and body language essentially. Certain things I'll look for like, maybe this waist is a little too constricted. Maybe I can bring this down just a bit further. Make small selections with the Marquee Tool. Remember that you can get to the Marquee Tool. Well, first off, you can usually find the shortcut command to each one of these by hovering over top. In this case it's M, so you can hit that real quick on the keyboard and get to that rather fast. I think it's P for pencil, but with this one, you have to hit P a couple times usually because it'll start off on the G pen or the ink pen and then hit P again and it'll cycle down to the pencil. I generally will try to do that and save myself some time as I'm drawing here. Oh, and actually I switched to a color. Let's go back to black there. Yeah, so giving in little details of the suit, changing proportions and alignment of certain things. Really just trying to figure out exactly how I want to see this in the piece here. I think I want to bring the sword down I want a little bit of an overlap to the head here just to create another level of depth. I think I mentioned this before already, but I try to always think about these small overlaps. It's really a compositional thing, but essentially when things just slightly overlap, they tend to look a bit more interesting and dimensional. Even though there's not much obviously to it, not any real difference than if they didn't overlap. You're not really having to draw it in any other way other than moving things around. But it can offer a little bit more effect and dynamics so, I tried to get a little bit of that in there. In fact, by the time I'm going to do this spear looking thing onto the sword just to make a little bit different sword look and design. Always trying to make things a little bit more interesting by deciding shapes and little things that I can say are just a quick idea. I might do some like scroll work in the handle and things like that. Generally when I'm painting, I'll just throw this stuff and very loosely and I'll adjust that later. For instance, I want to do this chain mail thing on the legs, and I'm just going to define the shape of this edging that it's going to have. Then I'm not going to worry about trying to illustrate every little bit of train mail right now, rather I'm just going to scribble and give myself a clue to what I'm going to do later. It's really up to you. I'm also going to be showing you how to quickly texture this as we progress through these lessons but at this stage, I would really just get some scribbles and their art basically. Just to hint to the idea and not worry too much about refinement. That could be said for a lot of things, but it's really helpful for textures. Again, just showing the direction of the legs by illustrating this point. Little landmarks like these can be very helpful for conveying depth in your illustration especially when you're just doing line work. Because something like this can immediately show, okay, this leg is tilted a little bit further, this one's coming towards the camera a bit more where before that, maybe it wasn't so evident. These little bits of armor can be a really quick way to illustrate that. Now let's see, I like this arms a bit small back here and if you notice to all, I'll grab just certain components. Sometimes I'll grab like the whole thing, like it might grab the arm and the shield, but in this case I can just get away with just the arm right there. I'm constantly doing that so if I want to increase the size of any area of the work, just simply grab it, tilt it. Now, even like right here, to convey a bit more depth through the upper torso, I can tilt this, should be tilted because her one arm's up. Little things like that as well, go along way into showing that it's a little bit more thought out. If you have the one arm up, then obviously this whole upper body is going to tilt more. You might get in here and grab the shoulders, the whole upper chest plate here, and you might play around with just adding just a little bit more tilt before you get too far into the illustration. I think I want to overall widen up the body. She just looks a little bit too slender to the middle. What I'm going to do is grab everything that would be moved over. I want to leave the arm, I think that's about the right scale and possibly even the legs, but I might need to grab the legs we'll see. I'm going to try to grab and just solve this information right now. Hit Command Shift T, and that's actually a distort. It looks like the same transform tool, but you can pull just in one direction. There's a lot of ways that you can do some pretty cool edits with this. Notice I'm just doing small changes, so I'm really keen on doing that where I just slowly make changes to the work. Again, making the layers over here so that I can see those changes, and then slowly working up to what I'm after. Pretty soon I'll do another soft arrays because it's getting a little messy there. Let's just keep working through those. Then I may want to bring this chest plate down a bit further. I also want some pretty neat little, I don't know, like little patterns off to the side. Again, always trying to think of ways to add a bit more design into the work, so it's not so boring. Let's go into soft arrays now. Again, with the soft arrays, I'm really just trying to push the information back on the canvas as the way that I look at it. Get out some of the obstructive information. All those lighter lines that you see will now push back and allow me to focus a little bit more on the direction I'm taking with the sketch and that's really it. I just go through and if there's a line I know its not needed like this and I completely wash it away. But if there's information I'm still deciding on, then I leave that obviously still in the sketch here. I'll just push it all back, still trying to figure out the face. Now, the one main thing that I can see, the incorrectness with the face that I have to start thinking about getting a place. I really need those eyes to be up on a ridge like this, higher up on the cranial mass or whatever the head. Essentially, I have to keep thinking about that because if not, I'll fall victim to drawing a straight on face. It's like a force of habit thing for me, and if you're relatively new to creating your artwork then you'll probably relate. Basically, it's something that we fight as artists to not do the same thing over and over again. It's real easy to fall into our comfort zone and just do what we're good at. What I have to be aware of is certain charts like this that are a little bit more difficult for me to accomplish, that I don't fall into that trap, that I don't just draw straight on shot because it's so much easier and quicker for me to accomplish. That's why I'm constantly making mental notes about that as I sketch through this. With the nose, we're going to be looking up at it a bit more. I want to hurry up and get in some definition to that. It doesn't have to be refined at this stage but I just want to keep, as I add these layers in, I want to keep thinking about that so that I make sure to get that at up-shot and they're even ever so slightly. One of the tricky things about an up-shot like this is really the jaw line, the way that it connects and joined up from a slightly upward angle, you start to get more of the underneath of the jaw right here and the jaw line, instead of being a line, is a nice subtle curvature. It's a little bit tricky to get just right, but we'll keep working on that as we go here. For the helmet piece I want to probably come down and do something like this. The centerpiece I want to have like a jewel, maybe a bit of a diamond right here. Well, we're not going to detail too much yet because we're still working out proportions. But I like to slowly get in bits of information mainly to check and see if it's working. I don't want to get too far into the sketch and realize that my details aren't going to work at all because there's some underlying problem with the drawing. I'm trying to figure out this shoulder piece here, we want it to be segmented so that it looks like it can rotate and go up with the arm. But then I need it to look proper prospectively as it's going back. These segments generally will overlap and move so I want it to be a little bit higher and those sag way down like that, and I'm going to have some bend right there, so we'll figure that out as well. But another tricky thing too here at the arm is, I have to make sure that by the time the collarbone or clavicle comes over here connects to the shoulder somewhere back here. I've to just draw through that and imagine that, really make sure that this arm would connect in a way that makes sense right there. It's a little low I can bring that up a bit more. One nice thing about armor though, is you generally can fake a few more areas than you normally would like if you're just drawing a character that was skin tight suit, then you're going to have to be a lot more correct with anatomy. But you still want to draw through as much anatomy as possible so that people with a good eye don't look at the work and go, "Okay, there's some real glaring mistakes there." Hopefully there's a little mistakes as possible. This isn't really a clean-up sketch, it's just still trying to refine things and place things. Notice I almost always throw out a moving lens around. Just re-check in the work and I can make something better. I'm definitely going to try. I have to start thinking about the armor from different perspectives and how it would overlap the other pieces and how it would look from certain angles and start to get into some of that information. I want this piece to come back more this way. I also want a pretty cool ridge at the top here, it might do something where it picks right there and then comes back in. Now hopefully we can see a little bit more difference from step two to step three. Let's go and check it. There's our step two, there's our step three. You can see it's really starting to change as it progresses and we're still not done, we still want to refine this a bit more. I would say another level of a rough sketch and then we start laying in some details and then we're going to clean up the line work and make it ready for paint. There are some shortcut things to keep in mind as well, like I said about the texturing of the leg here. You want to do that also that cape so, certain things I feel more comfortable just painting than really drawing. Sometimes a cape can be one of those things. It really depends on my level of creation process that day sometimes, but if I feel more comfortable doing something flowing and breezing like the hair, the cap, something billowing like that, I may just throw in a few quick lines and then immediately go to paint. I feel like the cape is one of those things, hair's definitely one of those things where I don't need it as much information in place to really paint it well, and sometimes I paint it better even without that information. You'll learn that about your own art style and what things that you just can naturally paint better than you can maybe draw. In turn, you're going to save yourself time because you're just going to go "Well, I'm going to head towards that and come back and paint that later." That's always nice when you figure that out about your art style and your process. Let's go on to the next lesson and continue on detailing our character. 5. Final Adjustments to the Sketch: Let's go and make another copy by dragging this. Remember too, that you can drag it here and get a copy. This is raster, this vector. You can also right-click here and go, Duplicate Layer and double-click here, backspace, Step 4. Now one of the things, each time I'm doing this, I'm really trying to take mental notes before I jump back into the sketch. One of the things that I'm not particularly fond of is the alignment of the upper body, even the proportion of the upper body to the lower body. What I want to do there to correct that, first I want to fix the alignment and I feel like all this information needs to go back. What I'm going to do here is select everything on the top here, probably about to here or may be lower, and I'm going to tilt this and move it back. I mean, I probably should have grabbed the mid-section too. Move in the selection and go back to here, the move tool. We really want to arch the back a bit more and hopefully add a little bit more dynamic feel to what's going on here. I'm going to have to adjust the mid-section, but I think it looks better to have this nice line work, or not line work, but flow going downward and it's like protruding out this way. We'll see how this works, but then I grab the mid section here, and notice that I could be softer racing and redrawing all this quite easily, but I just find it more comfortable or quicker to grab it and resize it like this and adjust it that way. Actually I feel like all these waste is a little bit too thin as well, and the lower body needs to be a bit thicker or larger by comparison. So I'm going to grab this, just skill at all up a little bit more, and each time just doing small changes, to hopefully spot any errors that I can fix as I do it. To me, it's like if you make small changes, you're a lot more likely to see these things and figure them out. But if you make these huge jumps in the work, then you might miss him. So at least that's what I find with my my workflow. Given some of his hair shape and there again, and don't have to overlay detail this. I may or may not, but it's something that I feel pretty confident painting. I'll definitely draws as much information as needed to convey the hair shape and forms, but then I'll probably just paint right through it. Now I want to, I think the breast plate, all this looks too high. Let's bring this down a bit more, and again, tilt it, but I do want the one side up a little higher. Let's try that. The other thing that's highly important, probably should be doing it even earlier than now, is really flipping the work. Let's try that. You do want to do this as much as possible and early on as possible. Because if you don't, you can tend to miss huge flaws that you could have fixed early on. Again, that hope process of catching mistakes early is really good. I don't see a whole lot that jumped out from that, which is good. Generally it will be a pretty glaring mistake when it does happen, but luckily, with an angled shot, you tend to get a little bit less of the problematic areas. I definitely still see some problem areas with the jaw line and things like that that need to be fixed. But already knew that, because I wasn't to a level of refinement there yet. The thing is about doing this, is that if you're doing a straight on shot, and you have a problem with cemetery, it'll definitely expose some real trouble areas. It's highly effective to do, and you should probably do it as much as possible. Constantly get in the habit of flipping the work. Now let's detail some of this arm and try to fix anything with, because this right here can be a tricky area, especially with the foreshortening. Let's go ahead and solve to raise here, again back all this information. Could it really light so that we can draw through it and try to fix some things. Now at this level, I'll start to draw it a little bit more detail and I'll start to try to imagine what some of these shapes really look like, a little bit more refined version. Still trying to figure out what I want to see here for the health of the sword here. Again, we want this in front of the character's head. Now another thing you can do for alignment, it's probably really good do really early on to is, just hold Shift, and if you click and hold Shift, you'll get a nice line there, and that's great for alignment. Except lines are pretty heavy though, so what I want to do, I'm going to actually add a layer, hold Shift, drop that line in, drop the opacity of layer quite a bit, and then hit Command E to merge it down. That way it is still part of my sketch, so I don't have to worry about another layer, but I didn't want it so visually obstructive, as I soft erase that will obviously disappear. But for right now I just want something there to make sure my alignment is somewhat correct. That shift click method is really, really great inside of this program. Save you a lot of time with a variety of things. Now I got to figure out if we're going to see any of the bottom of this hand, I would think we would, but for now I'll just throw it in there and we'll see as we progress through it. A lot of times I'll draw things in and then they may, or may not stay, because as I refine this, I may realize that, now from that angle you're not going to see the bottom of the hand. But for now I think we will, also put that in there. Just trying to figure out these shapes, I want to get as much of this depth going from the fore-shortening as I can. A lot of times as a foreshortened pose like this, it's all about getting just the right overlap. So I have to think about how far this piece of the letter on plate would come out. I was just given some segments there, but then I got a picture that the arm is going to be recessed back because there's going to be a thicker, heavier piece, so that arm's going to be back here a little bit. But then I immediately have to think about what it's going to look like as it picture, and that this would be the tricep, the bottom part of the arm. It's going to bend down a little bit and then connect inside here of the shoulder plate. I have to try to guess, figure all that information out. Like I said before, when you're in doubt, just put something on the page because it allows you to step back and analyze it, go cure that work so that it doesn't work. There's a lot of times and imaginative drawing where that's really your only guide. Unless of course you can find some really great reference and/or just take your own reference shots. Sometimes that can be a lifesaver as well. Hopefully you can find this exact outfit, which I think would be next to impossible, but that's where your imagination kicks in, and you just have to use a good old imagination to work through it. Now the other thing that's good to do, I'll sometimes do this even without there being any armor, but this is actually going to be a part of our armor. When I draw like a little dish shaped like because, now I'm half these shape I guess, her oval, it's basically like I said in this case, it's going to be part of our armor. I'm going to do like some cool texture right here, so I'll drawn some ovals, squiggles. But sometimes it's good to do this just when you're trying to figure out fore-shortening. You're just trying to figure out an arm poles, or leg poles, or whatever it is. It doesn't have to be that there's going to be anything there. Is simply something for you to like flash out the 3D form of it. If I'm really struggling, I might even get in there and draw like all these little 3D lines, like you're doing Spiderman suit or something, and just really get in there and do all those little details like a 3D render. It will sometimes allow you to see into a mistake and fix a problem area. Some of that for the shoulder now pan back, and I'll flip the work again. I think that looks correct. May or may not be wrong, depending on how we progress through it. Now go ahead and flip that again, and make sure you flip the canvas, not the layer. Just so your layers stay of tags for what we're doing here. I think that looks pretty good, pretty close anyways, and I'll keep adjusting it. I may want to adjust the alignment here, and then the spacing from the arm to the shoulder plate. But I could probably get away with just taking a shoulder plate here like this, maybe, and pull it this way and tilting it a bit more. Again, I'm having to try to imagine the way it would react as her arms lifting up, and how much of the arm we want to see from this perspective to give that fore-shortened effect that we're looking for. I also want to start thinking about the way it segments here, and the overlap that are most going to create from those segments. I still feel like this shoulder piece needs to be a little bit more larger by comparison, I'm just going to grab the crystal size, and this is going to be a weird shape that I'm going to have to battle right there because it's something I'm not envisioning as well as I hoped. What I might do is just come over here and draw this one, and if these are going to be a symmetrical shoulder blade, then I can sometimes use a profile shot to help me envision the dimensional shot that's over there. That's another thing I'll do is just go back and forth from side to side, and redraw it until hopefully something seems a little bit more clearer to me, and the process that I'm trying to draw it and or the way I'm trying to create it. So oftentimes, I just find myself bouncing around. I won't for something for too long on any given area of the painting just because we're drawing it, this process or point against because I feel like some of that's inspiration, some of that's striking, that creative moment or whatever. So if I just sit there and struggle through it, I may get something less than desirable but sometimes we have to do that as well as working professionals because of looming deadlines. So that's always a case as well. Sometimes have to do that and have to work through unknown inspired moment. So I'm going to figure out the way these Trump pieces come down. Actually think I want to do a double trimmed piece right through here like that and if you notice I'm putting these little bumps on there, I'm just trying to add a little bit more design than just a smooth line piece there. Well, that's obviously all preference. I also want this nice peak to the chess player a here and something like this. This is picking and choosing what lines I want to keep in the work, and I'm also going to be a really cool equal necklace design, emulate something. So I'd like to throw in lots of fun little details and there as I progress through this, now we're really going to get the impression that she's looking up. So one thing I will say about this, because this is always to me at a tough face shot to get right. I immediately will throw the eyes in there, and I will do this kind of thing where I make sure the eyes are looking up like this. Now obviously that's a pretty cartoony basic rendition that won't look like that. But, this is what I'm thinking is essentially a song in a basic way to make sure to quickly illustrate that the eye is looking up like that, even in this rough sketch phase, before I refine the face and I got to move his eyes over. So they're a little closer to the side of the face there. But just be aware of that that. You're not going to like when the eyes are up even that bottom line of the eyelid is going to appear to be a little bit further up it. It often times will still bend downward, but it's going to be a lot more subtle of a downward bend, then Australia down look, and I know that sounds a little weird, of course that's the way it is, but it's funny how when you go to draw this stuff, and again, that force a habit will bring you back to, you might draw just an eye looking straight on or my fucking straight on, and you wonder why the poles doesn't look right. It's oftentimes something as simple as that. That just one component of it is actually drawn to straight on when the rest is drawn, maybe correctly or vice versa. So again, we've got to look up to that top lip, and then for the bottom lip, that's going to be a little bit of an open mouth poles, put that bottom-up needs to appear that it's a little bit straighter than it normally would because normally it would be a downslope. That's a pretty awkward looking malt there. I think it's maybe the positioning to overall, we're going to get some of the underneath of the nose and we'll be able to see perfectly under the brow area. So it could be said that you're going to get a lot of that information so those can be highly visible, and I'll just continue to sculpt the phase here because it will allow. It's oftentimes something a bit trickier for me to get right from this type of shot. So I'll just kind of keep picking at it as we progress through it. So again, that kind of thing where I go back and forth to different areas of the illustration. Hair oftentimes think of it as flowing ribbons and overlapping shapes. I also tried to take the hair and put it in front of parts of the character as much as possible. So again, that overlap, that creates depth, and these little angles are referred to I think as beauty lines. There had been a member here where her that, but they do that a lot more attractiveness to the hair if you put these tiny little flips angles at the very end, I try to throw some of those in there, and another thing I do to check the work, especially on faces, is I will draw a line down the middle like this. So like what I did with the sword, but instead of it being straight, I'll actually draw the bend so at least what I envision all of these curves to be doing, maybe even do some across the faces very lightly. Just to check placement, check alignment, symmetry, all these things aligned right down the middle immediately showed me that I have the centerpiece which I knew it was I could already tell it was off, but I wanted to show you that visually by doing that line down the middle. So little tricks like that go long ways and to, again, finding these problem areas before they become too much of a problem. So this needs to be way over here. I'm still trying to figure out the shape. I want to see that I know it's going to be a diamond shape. I'm not entirely sure what it's going to look like. So move all those details right over. Again, let's check that from a distance. So a lot of times I can usually spot something from a distance, any real big flaws but so that combined with flipping the Canvas, there's usually the best way to see that. So now let's check our progression. So there's step 3, step 4. You see each time it's just getting a little bit more detail, a little bit more refined. So with that, let's move on to the next lesson. 6. Using Mesh Transformation: For this next part, I'm going to go ahead and take the sketch that we have here, keep cleaning it up. So I'm really just going to keep reusing the same steps of soft erase, making selections, "Command T" or "Command Shift T" to distort things into place, maybe use a little bit of mass transformation, and just so you're fully aware of how that works. If you basically take a certain area in the illustration, let's say that we wanted to reshape the thigh here, at least I don't want to do a lot of rework in these areas. But if I was just to select this area, there's a lot you can get away with. We are just going to edit, transform, mesh transformation, and you can just move these around and re-scale the line work interactively. So if you grab more to the middle, then obviously the area of influence is just there, if you grab just the edge. You can also designate more overall areas of selection within the sub tools. So let's see, we need to go to, I believe here. Let's do it again, "Edit", "Transform", "Mesh Transformation". Right here if you notice, you can add vertices basically, so segments within this area. Now, I'll be honest, I don't like that because it seems to get a little too complex, but I'm sure there's definitely areas within your work where you could utilize this function so that you can really narrow down the specific general area. So basically, I guess what happens here is once you start to maneuver these, these get grayed out. To reactivate these, you'd hit "Enter" to apply the effect, and then go back to "Edit", "Transform", "Mesh Transformation" and you can redefine your number of vertices or cross-sections. Just so you know, if you see me do that, that's the tool I'm using there. Now what I'll do is when time-lapse and narrate over the next portion, and we'll speed through the refinement since I will just be repeating steps. Well, let's go ahead and move forward. We're going to get in there and clean it up even further and predominantly we are going to use a soft erase and redraw method. Later on we are going to mesh transformation, but for right now we're just going to predominantly use the soft erase and pencil back over that. A lot can be done with that, in fact that's majority of what I do throughout the entire drawing process. So it's just changing little lines, soft erasing down all that sketch work, all that rough stuff and then really trying to clean it up. There's different levels in degrees I guess, into which you want to clean this up and reasons for that. When you're new to digital painting, I think it's helpful to create more line work if you're good at drawing, if you like drawing. But if you're more experienced digital painter, you'll tend to forego some of the line work because you know you can accomplish it so much quicker in digital paint and you really just don't want to repeat steps. That comes later, so don't rush yourself into that, that will actually occur naturally. For now, if you do feel yourself needing a little bit more guidance to the paint process or through the paint process, then you can get that with adding more line work. So the line work becomes a paint by number process and it really allows you to not have to worry so much or think about where certain things might go. You're basically working down all the ideas in this stage and then once you get to the paint process, you can think more about just dynamic lighting, and where shadows fall, what textures may be needed to bring things out and all that stuff. There's still plenty to worry about. But one of the thing I will say, is that when working with a more detailed piece like this, for there's a lot of little segments, to me it makes more sense to refine the line work a bit further because there's so much going on. Now if it's just a face, for instance a portrait, I almost do little to no line work. Depends on how I'm feeling that day really but if I still feel like I need a little more assistance, I'll do a draw of the face and I'll map out proportions like I'm doing here with this face. But if I feel more confident in my paint process, I can really just paint things and maneuver them as I go. You'll see a lot more experience painters do that. It really just depends on where you're at. Again, don't force it, don't push it, just keep producing your art and you'll slowly get to that. Now you see here with the face, I didn't put down enough construction lines as I probably showed up. Again, that's effect where able to rely more heavily on the editing tools inside a Manga studio here, so I can easily grab something and move it around, I can do a mesh transformation, I can flip it, turn it, whatever. Sometimes I rely on that because it's so effective. But if you find yourself struggling, even with those, then you want to put down more your construction lines and really help to map out the forms. We can see there I go to a mess transformation and try to adjust the jaw line. Not really necessary in that particular spot, but I just tried it anyways, I'm constantly trying new things and really experimenting with the tools that are here in different ways. They're assuming nudge thing is over and I'm zooming in and out of the artwork at this point because the face is still a little off and I'll probably do some repair work to it in the paint process, but I can generally spot flaws better on faces from a distance for some reason. I'm not exactly sure why that is, but it seems to really stand out more to me from a distance. Likewise, flipping the canvas and things like that. Here I start to get a little bit more of it in place and feel a little bit more comfortable with it. Still not entirely as good as it could be, but again I'm also thinking about what I can accomplish by painting. Always moving things around to try to get that perspective that she's on a slight angle from the camera. So that's why you see me grabbing little sections and moving it back, not generate over. Just remember you can just create the selection that move to pop-up. You click on the "Move" icon and then you can just hit your "Arrow" keys or you can grab it with the move tool. But I predominantly was just using the arrow keys right there. I'll still check in the work and if you notice, I just flipped it layers there again. I'm trying to analyze everything as a whole. Here I start to realize that she would look a little bit better with a higher or more area in the midsection and adjusting the pelvis height just as seem to squatting and squeeze down. Just again, continually changing proportions. I'm changing the proportion of the head, a slight tilt. I really feel like by doing that, by making those incremental changes and then stopping and analyzing the work, even taking that time to get up, walk away, and come back with fresh eyes, use those layers to cycle through to note the changes. All of that is just so important to really getting the best out of your artwork. I guess just not settling on the very first thing that you draw by any means, and then also just experimentation is always the key to success, the key to invention obviously. You have to think like you are inventing things, you're inventing your artwork and your style and this concept that has not been made before. You have to experiment to find the best in it and to get the best out of it I guess. Here just doing some detailed work on the sword. I really like doing stuff like these because I can really just be truly imaginative about it. Like for instance, you can do that with the face, but there is only so much you can do with the face before it just does not look like a face. Weapons are kind of the same way. This stuffs look like weapons, but at the same time, you can really play around with the concepts there and just kind of anything goes really. That's truly why I enjoy drawing this type of fantasy art anyway is because I can just be entirely creative with it. For the sword, I'm clicking holding Shift, and that gives you the straight line feature, highly effective, and remember, if you need to straighten something out you can use the layers to create a straight line through the entire artwork, tone it down. That's that line that you see right down the middle of a sword from the heft to the area where it goes off the page. But I'm using that Shift click method, and I'm still trying to get the right design for the sword, and the reason I'm rotating the canvas there is because I'm trying to check the alignment of all that information likewise while drawing those little sketch lines. Remember to rotate the canvas, you simply can hold R, and that's a Snap To feature. If you hold R, move the canvas, and let go, it will go back to the original tool. Manga Studio works that way with almost any tool as far as I'm aware. So if you hold the key in the shortcut command, it will snap to and back to the original tool you are using. So it's really quick process. Here just still nipping and tucking, and hopefully you can see by now that a lot of the changes I'm making are very much smaller and more incremental than there were initially. At first, you are doing these big large changes, dramatic changes to the work, and then as you start to get to what you feel is more your vision or your finished work, you tend to make these smaller, not so dramatic changes. Here I'm tilting the character just to hopefully add a little bit more of a not so static feel even though it's a static pause but a little bit of interesting look to it. By making those really small incremental changes at the end, I think you really fine tune and get the artwork to shine. Now, another thing that you can do inside of Manga Studio here is Command Z to go back, Command Y to go forward. Remember, I'm using a Mac, so when I say command, it's control on a PC. But it's really neat that you can jump forward and back so quickly inside this program because it helps you. Again, another way to check your work. Test things out and toggle back and forth and see if you really like the change that you made. Some final details. I'm hinting towards the texture, but I'm actually going to show you in the next lesson how we are going to create textures for the chainmail effect that she is wearing on her legs and that little bit on the arm. So really just playing with ideas as I start to finalize this and draw the stuff in, I add little details and again, some of the stuff won't make it to the final edit or the final painting, but when it comes to line work, I'm a little bit more at home with the line work process, so I'll throw in extra ideas I guess and then if I use them, great. If not, it's not that big of a deal. It's not very time intensive. Here still messing with the eyes. The eyes are always very important to me and very easy to get wrong. The reason I believe that is because I think it's the area that we identify the most, the area that we look at the most on any person so it's very noticeable when they are not right and that is also why you should probably spend the majority of your time on the character's face and getting good at the face, the facial expressions because that's where people identify with the most. Next, I would say body gestures, and hand gestures, and a nice variety of poses there, and then of course the list goes on and on. But I try to think about those areas being the most important. Now, here I actually grabbed just a section of that sword, straightened it out on the canvas, and then as a new layer, and flipped that layer. Here I'm grabbing just the sword in the hand and then twisting it because I want it to look a little more imposing, but basically a little more up close to the viewer. I also wanted it to come in front of the character's head just a little bit to hopefully create a little bit more depth from the scene. I'm really trying to push that foreshortening a bit further by doing that. Just looking at the artwork. When you see me pause there for a bit, I'm really just studying the work. I do really recommend that. I'm just trying to spot any glaring flaws at this point, anything I can fix. Like her bellybutton was too low, and the shape of the leg still looks a bit weird, and the thickness from leg to leg still seems a bit off. Now, these are things that I can still rectifying in the paint work, so I don't have to be so overly critical here, but for the sake of a course, I want to fix as much stuff in the line work in case there are more beginner painters that may need that assistance. In here trying a little bit more of a design change to the helmet, but I ultimately just settle on what we already have. There it is. This is the finished artwork for this stage. Now what will do is I want to take into the next lesson. I want to show you how to create some textures really quickly for the legs and the arm area. Let's move on. 7. Creating the Chain Mail Texture: Now in this lesson, I want to show you how to create some textures. I still need to fix some of the legs line work, but I'm going to probably fix that and paint. But what I want to show you here is we've got a new layer and I'm just going to draw something for one little overlap of the chain mail. What I want to do there is first, make sure I'm on a dark on new layer here. I just want to draw one little piece of this chain mail, something like this. I'm going to delete half of it like that. This should work. What I want to do, I've gotten on a separate layer and I'm purposely making a little bit larger than it's going to end up. This is a good thing to do in case you're going to use this for something else later. This is actually just going to be used for this. I actually have a chain mail brush, but it really wouldn't work as well for what we're going do here. When you want to create a texture, this can be a helpful way to do it, just hold "Alt" on the keyboard, drag it over with the Move tool, put it next to each other like this, hit Command E, hold "Alt," drag it over, wind up, hit Command E. Now, I don't know if you notice in the last lesson, when I was trying to align [inaudible] , I drag it over to the side like this. We can use this as a ruler and now we can just really get rulers by going View Ruler, and dragging these perspective Ruler Guides out like this, so we can use those as well. I really just find it easier just to do this. I'm going to toggle that back off, and you can see the shortcut command was Command R. Then I can take this one add up to here, if I want to be very critical, which I don't need to be but if I want to I just zoom in further, Command T, rotate into place, and just bring it over to here. Go back to the Move tool, hold "Alt", drag it over. You see it takes us second to get it going. But then after you get that initial pattern started, it becomes really quick. Perhaps you've duplicated a few times. I'll go to here, so I need to rotate it a little bit more, so every little thing that's off incrementally gets worse as it progresses down. Command E, hold "Alt", drag it up. Now I want to stag these like this. That's pretty much our pattern right there. That's what I was looking for, Command E, hold "Alt". Again, it picks up speed rather quickly. Command E, hold alt drag a copy. Within no time you got plenty of these little guys. There's other ways to do it, you can make tiable patterns inside this program. I'm not going to get into all that because I want this to be rather basic, something that you can do really quickly and with almost anything, that's how I see this effect. It's just a very quick and easy method. Once you get enough of these, you can start to get a little bit more into scale. What oftentimes do is I'll put it to the side. I'll drag a copy that I'm going to use to scale down so that the original size is a bit larger. I want to make sure that there are actually a little bit past each edge and I'll show you why here shortly. Let me zoom back. If you don't know get them relatively close, so you'll end up with a bit of unnoticeable line, Command E. There we go. That's probably enough right there. This is going to be the biggest area of this part of the leg. Now what I'll do is, I'll use a couple of things. I'll use Command Shift T. Again, one last thing, we're going to use a different copy because we're going to distort this one, which will probably still work on that other leg piece in the arm, but just in case. Command Shift T, we're going to distort it first to go with the direction of the leg, so I'll just pull this around. I would say actually learn more towards over distorting it than under, because if you over distort it, it's going to look more realistic. If you under distort it, it's going to look too much like a pattern that was made in the way that we did it. We really want to eliminate that look. Then you want to go to Edit, Transform, Math Transformation. Whoops, must hit the wrong one. Edit, Transform, Math Transformation. Now, the way I like to do this is bring the middle up higher and on the sides, really start to squeeze this and try to envision what it would look like if it was to a wrap around a dimensional surface, in this case a leg. If you really want to make this look amazing and totally accurate, you could probably get in here with more of these segments, so I'm going and hit "Enter" there, zoom a bit further because you see it still looks rather flattened to evenly distributed. Let's go Edit, Transform, Math Transformation. Let's go ahead up there, I call them vertices. But they're probably just segments so seven. I like that number. Now, we can get in here and really try to mix them up a bit, moving around. We will still want to have some idea of what we're shooting for. But we've got a lot of control to be able to really sculpt them around the leg now. Pull them out this way a bit. I think by maneuvering this a bit more, you get a little bit more randomness, which you would see in something like this and for the most part they're going to be somewhat even, but there is going to be the occasional randomness and a pattern like this. But primarily, the condensing down the edges so that you get that dimensional effect that it's wrapping around the leg. To do that we could probably bring these ones tighter together on the very end. Okay, let's hit Enter, so it does looks like. Then now what you can do is just, I like to take the G-pen like this, set it to transparent because you can make any pen transparent, which is really a nice feature and then just get in here and basically erase it. This is where we made the copy on the previous step so that we've got a backup of this. We don't have to worry about eliminating it. I actually want that top trim piece to be painted a different way. I'm going to erase it back from there. Now, probably a good way to see this a bit better, you can go to Step 8 or whatever your artwork is. Toggle that on the blue right there, go back to this layer that we're working on and now we can see a little bit better towards that ends up. Let's get rid of any little remnants you see. Okay, let's pan back and see if that looks accurate. Yeah, and it's got a nice dimensional feel going around the leg, so that's what we're after. You can go back here, click this icon again, we go back to black and then we're going to repeat the process for the other leg. Okay, so now we've already got this pattern. We'll just call this one a texture right leg. We could actually just makes shovel right leg texture. We could actually just merge that down into our artwork but just in case I'll save it as a separate right leg and let's just go dash T for texture. Okay, so here's our original. Again, we'll grab the move tool hold Alt, drag that into place. We'll start off with Command T to rotate. Then we'll hit Enter. We'll do Command Shift T to distort just a little bit. Again, I really feel more distortion rather than less is highly important to get these effects right, plus you just tend to by experimenting more like this, like anything else you're just going to get better at it and avoid it looking too flat. Let's look add it. Transform, Mesh Transformation. Again, we're going to pull the middle ones up. We're going to start to condense down the edges and let's actually get in there a bit tighter with more control points. We'll zoom in and edit, Transform, Mesh Transformation. Let's go back up to seven on each direction. Again, let's try to start condensing down the edges and then also rotate them around the leg. We're going to pull this down and you see the ones furthest away had no effect whatsoever. But you need to pull those in to get the maximum control once you get these other ones pulled down. But in general, it just works with the one that's closest to the artwork will have the peer influence. Again, pulling all these tighter, basically tighter and then down, so closer inward to the middle and then also down vertically. Try to get those look like they wrapping around the leg. Something like this seems it takes a little bit of time to do but I guess the thing that I see is I would have had to draw all these into place or paint all these into place before, which I'll still have to paint some effects over them and add to them to get them away that I want them to look, but considerable amount of time saving here, just huge. Not to mention, the more that you do this, the more that you start to catalog these types of textures and then you really start to save yourself a tremendous amount of time. I would imagine if you have a character that you have to do for a book and they have this effect in their suit. You'll have to do that over and over again so this is really great time saver for that. It's the greatest time saving. It's not cheating at all because it's your artwork. That's the part I love the most about it. Then you can take it a step further and you can actually share this with fellow artists, fellow creators and they'll definitely appreciate that if you do so. Let's say we're right about there. This should be good. I can obviously keep going with this all day but I'm also picturing that I'm going to end up shading the leg and eliminating a lot of the visibility on some of this, so let's see how this works out here. Again, we can go to Step 8. We can blue line it, find that to be a little bit more effective ideal and then back to transparency. You can actually drag this right behind the blue line as well. That's really the beauty of layers. There's just so many ways to accomplish what you're trying to do with this stuff. Okay, and you necessarily don't have to be so critical on the placement of this because we will be painting through it but I'll try to stay within the lines nevertheless. Okay, so something like that. I'll go back to, I can see that feels really nice. Okay, so now let's go back to our original texture up here. Do it one more time for the arm and we'll be good to go. Here I'm actually even going to scale this down just a little bit, so Command T, scale it down, rotate it. Command Shift T and actually I think I want these to be going with the direction of the arm. Strive this way. Just rotate those on place. Let's go right to the mesh transformation this time and let's go right to more vertices. I'm actually going to go a bit higher to the smaller overall area and make sure not to hit Enter because it totally defeats the purpose, okay? Now again, you can see I'm just trying to get this small area here. It's really not that imperative that I get this as accurate, but I would like it to still have a bit of dimension to itself. Notice if you don't grab any of the points that will move the entire texture. I'm still trying to see into this. Probably the only difficult part is that since there are so many of them, it gets a little bit tricky to see through the work as well as you might like to position these, but I think you get more and more used to it like anything else, okay? Let's hit Enter there. Transparency brush again and I'm going to blue line it and I can see pretty well where it's at, so we'll stop here. I want this trapeze piece up there to be a trapeze. I guess I already said that, so there we go. Again, just go in, another way you could do this obviously is just use your selection tool. You'll probably be quicker so you could just draw a selection depends on how comfortable you are with the drawing process of the selection tool. Hit Delete. Command D to select and there we have it. Now we've got that effect on all three of those areas like we wanted. We can save these textures. I could just simply put T for texture. Actually, I probably should be a bit more descriptive. Chain Mail, T for texture and that's what I'm going to need, so I'm going to take this one, delete it. Now, what happens is once you start to get a few different things going on here, I really recommend making some groups. Here we're going to take all our sketches and put them into this group. We're going to drag this up. Let's see, our final drawing was this one, we even want a copy of that in there so what I'll do because I'm going to drag them all. Hold Shift, click on the first one, hold Shift, drag them onto this group and you'll see a hierarchy over, it's like we are over to know that they're all in the group here. What I want to do is I want just a copy of Step 8 to be by itself, so I'll duplicate that, hit Okay. I don't think it needs a different name, but we'll just call this final drawing and we'll drag that up here. But we know that we've got a backup in our sketches. There's our sketches folder. Let's also go ahead and make a Textures folder because as we progress through, we'll probably need more textures and let's take the chain mail texture and if you really get in the habit of doing this, you just always have the ability to save your work. You can toggle the visibility of each one. It's really just a great way to work. Now what do we got? We got final drawing, we can go ahead and take all these. We could really just combine them together. In fact, that's what I'm going to do instead of segmenting them per arm, leg, whatever, you really don't need to because they don't touch. If you start to think about things like that, as long as they don't touch, you can do everything you need to and access each one of them. Then you can keep them on the same layer so now we can just call this Chain Mail textures. I know it's all of them. We've got our backup in here and we've got our one that we're going to work with what the line work here. Now we're ready to go. Let's move on to the next lesson. 8. Understanding the Layer Mask: All right, so now in this lesson we're going to talk about creating selection. We pretty much prepared the line work and readied it for paint. We could take this a step further. Now keep in mind that if you wanted to create selections from your line work, then you will refine this with a very thin line all throughout. That's one way of doing it. That's actually not the way we're going to do it here. I'm going to show you how to use this existing line work and then use a mask on the line work. You can create a mask right here. We'll drop that on the existing line work. Remember this is a backup copy, so we're pretty safe guarded nonetheless. But this safe guards us even further and I'll show you why. If we go to a soft brush, can be any of these airbrush and these are all the four brushes by the way, come with Mongo studio. So if you use it as an erase and I want to see if it works with transparency, I believe it does. Let's try it. Yeah, so it works both with transparency and with the general erase tool. So you could use the erase tool here at the soft brush, hard edge, whatever you want to use. But for instance, if you were to sit here and erase part of this, and then you go to work through it and you all I really needed that back. You can simply draw it back because it's actually a mask over top of it. So you draw that back by selecting a dark and just brushing that back in. So that's a very non-destructive approach to being able to hide your line work as you paint and bring it back as needed. So now what that mass can place at afford this a lot opportunity to push this information back and paint behind and in front of it, which is what we'll probably end up doing. Now, the other thing that you can think about, if you did want to tighten it up another level, you could do that just by blue lining each one of these areas, creating another layer over top and then you just go through here with something like the G pen and you would just use a really thin line but inaccurate line and a very connected line to tighten everything up. Then you're going to be able to make selections in an throughout your artwork. So that's definitely a way to do it. That's not the way that we're going to do it for this lesson. But I just want you to be aware of all the different ways. So it does take a little bit of time, but you just go through and you want to ignore, like I said, line weight. You really just want to make sure that lines are connected and clean and you could actually even skip some lines. You don't really need every single line. You just want to think about it in regards to what exactly you do need for your paint process. So that's another way to do it. The way I'm going to show you is to utilize the lines that we already have here, and we're going to paint behind those. Because this is a pretty tight drawing for a painting anyways, we're pretty good to go. But what I need is a perimeter selection to start with. So what I'm going to do is take the G-pen and we're going to do that same thing that I talked about, but we're actually just going to go around the perimeter. Certain things don't have to be entirely accurate, like I mentioned a couple times now, there's ways to get around it with just the pain process. So what we'll do is just get our, edging going and this is actually going to help us generate a selection as well as refine the edge just a little bit more. Remember that you can hold our press against the screen, move it around, hold space bar to move the screen into place, and it will zoom in here. We'll go ahead and start getting that edging that we want perimeter line weight. Now the hair, I could actually really skip through this part because generally when I paint hair, I will actually paint these little flips separately at the very end. So I really don't need as accurate of a selection or here, I'll just do it as if I did. So try to get each little strand the right way. But like I said, it's really not that important for the way that I'm going to paint it later. So hold and likewise with any of this, you really don't have to think about all these edges be imperfect. I would say the main thing that you want to focus on right here, if you can get some quick, clean lines, great it's always better. But really just don't leave any open ends because we want to create that selection from here and we want to eliminate having to go back and find any open areas. So that's first and foremost and then just remember to get smooth lines. Generally a quicker pole will help you to do that, as well as rotating the canvas and having it set up accurately for the mechanics of your hand. So we all create very differently, but for me it's always a downward pull is more consistent, then pulling sideways across the screen. So you'll see me rotate the Canvas to give myself more accuracy in that regard. So little space bar to move that around. So right now I'm just focusing on getting my perimeter shapes. Now you can also do this with the less tool, but I don't like the the inaccuracy that I get with that. So I tend to do everything like the one I want to be more accurate. I use the G-pen those going to around this. Now another way to do this as well, if you don't feel as confident withdrawing the line because I'm literally using the pressure sensitivity in drawing the line out. If you don't feel as confident doing this, you can actually just use the Shift Click method with a very thin line. Now the thing that you have to watch out for that is that when you get to certain parts of the artwork where you need to make a nice curvature. That line will tend to look a bit clunky. Unless you just really condensed the pulls down. I'll show you here in a second. We're going to get through this part here like this. I'm trying to avoid line way. I'm going to get a little bit of line weight in there, but I really don't need it for what we're doing here. Okay, so I would take the brush way down and I would do a series of clicks like this. Whenever I get a nice straight away, I would just go with that. Now, you see it staggers at a bit. So you got to watch it and clean them up. Again, these lines don't have to be perfect. Now another way to do this, there's a really great feature inside of Mongo studio here with a curved tool and a series of polylines. But this curve tool is really nice because you can actually click drag. So that's all one motion I'm clicking and holding. I haven't let off the screen the at all. I Let go at the end point and then as I let go, I've got one more ability. So my, cursor or my digital pen is hovering off the canvas and I click one more time. So let me explain that again because I know it sounds a bit tricky. I'm clicking once on the canvas, I'm dragging on one motion. I have now released off the canvas, I'm hovering over the area. Then I go right, I drag it to an area, and I click one more time. So this is another great way to generate that type of line rather quickly, and like anything else, you can toggle the size of the line down and you can get really quick with this tool. The nice thing is too you can really go in either direction with it. So you can do these series of bumps the other way. You still have to be aware of that it can skip a little bit. So you got to be mindful of that. I generally just draw it all in with the G-pen, but I just want to give you a few different options. So those tools can be highly effective for that same reason. So I'm going to go back to the G-pen because again, that's the one that I feel most comfortable with. It's not that this line, I'm just going to stress this has to be perfect it doesn't. There's lots of ways to edit the work as you go. Now, isn't going to give you a better selection if it's perfect then of course, but perfect, soft and overrated when it comes to our work and digital painting. So again, if I need a quick line I might do a couple things. I could pull through it and erase back that line. Just so you know, the line that I'm really after as I do this is the exterior of the line. So I could be a little bit less focused on the interior of this line and only focus on the exterior of the line because I'm using it to create a selection spacebar to move that part looks a little fence. I'll go back and put that then there's our final line for this segment. So let's zoom back. Because I know this seems time-intensive, but it's really not that bad. We're almost a quarter of the way done related because the sword will be relatively quick because of the straightaway. So once we get down to here, we get this part of the Cape. So it'll move rather quickly here. It's, highly effective for what we're going to do in our paint work. We're going to get these little bumps on there. So this is an opportunity to clean up the perimeter edge of the artwork as well as generate our selection. That's really the main focus of what we're doing here. Keep in mind when you're doing this, if you're not getting the right kind of line, especially if you're not getting a nice thick that then the way that you are trying to put it down, definitely be very aware of your driver settings. That's something I can't stress enough, I will generally change my driver settings based upon whatever it is I'm doing if I'm penciling versus inking. But if you're not getting a similar effect to what I'm getting here and you find yourself struggling to get any good range and your pressure sensitivity of your line. You really want to spend more time examining your driver settings, trying to get a smooth line through there. Sometimes you can get a smooth line by a nice consistent pole as well. So that's not as smooth as I would like it, but I like that. Again, I got to remember not to go for to perfect of a thing, especially right here because I'll, probably paint through a lot of this. That's about the end of the selection right there. This is all to the edge of the canvas, so we're good there. This is actually part of the Cape, so we don't have to worry about any of that and we can jump all the way over to here. Here's a good spot for that curvatures tool so going to try that again. We'll see how you can, if you'd been at just right, you can make some really interesting curves and save a huge amount of time trying to pull that line so there's that. So now here I'm going to rotate this again by holding our and dragging on the canvas. Here I could really forgo a lot of this because I'm going to end up painting that in anyways. So I'm just going to speed through this, may actually rotate this way. So again, getting it right for the mechanics that I'm used to all right. Let's go and stop right here, and then we'll head over to the next lesson and finish this up. 9. Using the Selection Layer Feature: Now, let's continue to finish drawing our selection here. Now, if this was a comic style drawing, I would make sure each one of these is exactly the way I want to see it and if I was going to ink it, that would be the way I'd ink it. But for painting, I know that I'm probably going to go back and edit this more than make it look identical to what you're seeing here. That's why I really could just forego all of this area but let me try to get most of it in place just because I feel I don't want to cheat anybody that's wondering how I would do this, this particular way. I'm just trying to get some of these lines in there and sometimes you can just do a quick flick of the pen and get a better line for this type of spot as well as I converge it this way and erase it back when I really need to erase it back. Notice I'll try to pull these lines a couple of different ways. If something is not working, I'm quick to change the game plan and go at it from a different direction and sometimes that's all it takes to get passed a problem area. We're using the Command Z to go back and redraw the line. A lot of times when you see a time-lapse and somebody is doing this, you'll see this staggering of a line like it looks like it's skipping around and that's really what you see when you seeing him. Hit Command Z and keep trying that line. You're fighting the process sometimes but trying to get that line that they're envisioning, that I can't seem to get right here. Right there, I can't get it under multiple tries. Rotate the Canvas. Trying to get it from a different angle. Generally you'll find that once you do that, you almost get it the first or second time. It really shows you that you can just fight in yourself in a sense or what you're comfortable doing. But again, I've probably taken too much time doing this because I'm really going to be able to paint through all of this. Let's just go and wrap this up and just make a couple of lines that connect here. Again, we just need that outside shape. Since one of those are connected, we're good. Double-click here and that'll snap it back to the upright position. Let's get through here and finish this out. Again, I'm just focusing on what I need for the exterior edge of this line. Now, one thing I will say that if you're doing this for a selection, this is pretty tight and I've got a lot of resolution. I could've also came here and toggled this on where there's no soft edge or anti-aliasing, but it's really not necessary. But just keep it in mind if you get a bit of an edge that you're not happy with, that that could be part of the problem. That combined with your resolution since zero will erase files. Well, you said, I'm not too concerned with it. From this distance it looks fine and that's really what I'm going up, more of a visual correctness I guess. If it looks good from this distance I'm happy with it. Resolution is always going to be dependent upon what your end result is. How close is a viewer going to be to your work, how large is the work going to be reproduced if at all, things like that. How big is it going to be viewed on a portfolio, site, whatever it is. That's all you have to really think about when it comes to resolution. That coupled with how well does your system handle what you're doing and does it allow you to get it done in a reasonable amount of time based on what your system is doing. I found that this program actually runs pretty solid on most mediocre systems but there can be exceptions to that. Now, as we get to this part, I could probably use the curve tool right here again, or I could try to just throw in some quick lines to get a smooth curvature. I really don't have to worry about the overlap on the inside at all. That's another thing to think about when you're doing this. If you get good at throwing a line and making the segments of the overlaps on the inside since we're just worried about the selection we're creating, you can go past an area like this and then bring the line up here and that's not going to hurt what you're doing. Quickly throw these in there, like this. Space bar to move, click "Hold Shift." Get the straight edge to the sword there. Click here, I can even just add a little bit, I want that little pick right there. I can add that for the selection and I don't have to worry about the stuff on the inside. Now, right here, I'll probably just draw through this, like this. But obviously it's going to connect all right there with the selection. Now, the other thing to think about is if you did want to go through, it's the same process that I mentioned earlier for creating a selection for everything. But since I still feel like you got to do all that and you got to fill in and color it, we're going to do it away where we actually generate our selections after this first initial one by selecting components within the main selection. I now should be showing it here shortly and then also using color to create the selection. I'm getting a little sidetracked because I just realized my blade ends are different but I might fix that in the digital paint if it keeps bothering me like it does now. Almost there. Again, since we're just looking for that permanent selection we really could draw right through. I'm not going to on that and since I don't want the line work to look messy in case, say in the weird case that I decide to use this but I won't be using more line work. At this stage and at this point, my decision-making, hand rotate, space bar to move once again, get some of this hair shape. Now for the hilt of the sword handle. You see I rotate the screen a lot. Anything that requires more precision, I end up rotating the screen a lot. Now, if it's something that I can do a little more effectively without precision then I won't rotate and I'll just work away with a straight Canvas which generally will speed your rate up. But if you ever find yourself struggling to rotate feature inside of this program is fantastic. In fact, it's actually what led me to first find this program and start using it years ago. I didn't like how a lot of the art programs didn't allow you to rotate your Canvas to draw. I thought that was productive and now I thought out. Now most of them I do, I would say almost all but at the time when I got into digital art, they didn't. We're almost there. Forgive me for ranting, I'm just trying to make small talk and I think we're there. Let's double-click here and zoom back. Now we have to test it. Here's the moment of truth. We take the Magic Wand Tool, we select each area, you can hold Shift to add the selection, hold Alt to subtract from selection. Hold Shift with that little plus sign, I want to select there and there so far so good. No whammies. Yeah, we're looking good. Every now and then I get lucky and do something right. Then I'll select and find, we don't have to select down there because that's part of the cape. What it has done, because we use the nice tight line work and we've got a good resolution to work from, we've got a pretty good selection. If you notice, you got to get really close for it to start looking pixelated. Now, we take this selection, hit Command Shift I. I just saw you get to most selection tools right there in the selected area. Now, we've taken that selection, we've then inverted it so we're pretty much right to that edge. That's good for us, maybe condense it down if you wanted a bit. You can do that by going to right here I believe. Shrink selected area and then you plug in a value. You can change the value slider here as well. We're going to just go with this, it should be fine because we did a nice tight version of that line work. Now, if I fill this, I'm going to do a couple of things. I want to show you first how to save the selection which really by filling it you will as well. But I just want to give you many different ways to do this. If you convert this through a selection layer, it's going to turn it to this weird green color, I'm not sure why but we'll double-click there and we'll call this character edge and then we're going to put dash S for selection. Now, the beauty of this type of layer is this; you can toggle the visibility off right there, you don't see it obviously. You can double-click right there and there's your selection as quick as that. So very effective. You can literally just go through the entire piece, create all your selections and we're going to do that for specific areas of the painting. But also when you create a layer and we call this character edge, I'm going to do P for paint. Then we're just going to drop in a color. Let's just pick something that's in the range of a medium of the skin tone or we're going to do or something like that. You can really pick any color you want at this point, it really doesn't matter. We're going to go ahead and fill that in. We're going to drop that behind the line work, like that. We're going to take our line work from being a blue line back to regular just by clicking on that, so back to dark. Now, what we've done, we can hit Command D to de-select. We've created a fill of the overall character. We can use the mask to slowly get rid of the visibility of the line work and we can also still generate a selection from this. It almost seems like creating the fill like this in the selection layer here is a bit redundant, but it can still have some really good value to it. Like for instance, here you're going to have to click on it, right-click, put select from layer, create selection. Not a big deal, just a couple of little quick button clicks you got to do there but you can simply go to this one and double-click and you're there. There's a lot to be said for small savings of time there. I really like the way that generating a selection layer does for you. Also as you start to paint on this, you may paint in a way that you maybe change your selection. This isn't going to work that way. This is always going to remain in selection. Then what I'll do here is as we create selection layers, we'll just create another folder and call this selections, just like that. Click and drag that into there, head or stagger over so you know what is in there and you condense it down when you're not using it. I usually drag these to the bottom, something like that. Pretty effective, if you don't mind I said, you can open, double-click there and there's your selection really quick. That'll complete this lesson, next we'll press on and start creating more selections for painting. 10. Drawing Out More Selections: I'm going to show you how to create some more selections within the character, so let's start with the cape, and really we would generally work from the forward back because a lot of times, if you get some of these front pieces covered, then you can do flood fills behind other areas. But I actually want to show you the cape just to get started. That'll be a nice, easy way to illustrate the way of selections that I like to create. What we've got to think about is if we take this base selection that we created, and we lacked transparency, whatever we paint is going to stay within the confinements of that edge, that's very powerful. Let's go ahead and take a color with the G-pen, and also keep in mind that before the G-pen was set to this anti aliasing, I want to show you something real quick. If you were to draw a circle on this area, and then flood fill it, it looks good from a distance. But if you zoom in, there's a small line of artifacts which isn't very noticeable and probably wouldn't kill your painting anyways. But just so you're aware, if you take the time to just change that setting right here. Now when you do it, and flood fill up, it's going to eliminate that artifact edge because it's based, it's also going to be a little bit more of a rigid edge, but there's no blending occurring right there. For what we're going to do here, we want that. I'm going to go and get rid of that now. Go back to that and make sure anti aliasing is taken off, and what I want to do is just jump in here, I'm going to actually take the line art layer, and bumped down the opacity just a little bit so we can see a little bit more clearly. I wanted to basically define the edge while cleaning up the artwork once again, just a bit because we're going to paint through a lot of this anyways. It doesn't matter if this particular edges as clean as you might think. But we're going to just draw through those real quick. Again, we're actually generating a selection from this. There are some opportunities to fix the artwork, so be it. But chances are we'll have to paint these edges back and forth a little bit as we finalize the art, then rotate it a little bit easier for the mechanics, the way that we draw. I'm actually so close to the art. I really don't know specifically what this edge should be. But again, it's not going to be a make or break you type thing at this point. We just want that selection, you can feel free to use any of the other curvature tools at this part if you feel more comfortable with those. But you can see that just that quickly, we've now got this entire shape drawn, and you'd think if I painted here, maybe it would bleed outside the edge. But it's actually just giving me a container this line, and the large transparency over here for this line, so now when I go to fill, it should just fill that area, real quick way to isolate an area and color, we're going to continue on with that. It's going to get this area here. Again, General, I probably do the legs first just because if we added the legs, we could end up with a gap of line work here, but it won't be that difficult to fix regardless, we would just bleed the cape color behind it at that point, again, isolating that area, in this case we have the container of the edge of the canvas, that's done right through here. Again, we could do shift click and very small bends. We'd end up with a little bit of a hard edge here and there are angle but not a big deal, and fill this area. Hopefully you see that that was really quick. We'll just put them that short amount of time we isolated the cape. The other thing is we still want to selection of this and we still want it to be on its own layer if need be, we'll just use the magic one tool, hold Shift. Remember it's going to ignore the line work because a line works floating on another layer above, and we've isolated that area, we're going to hit Command C, Command V. I could cut that right off of this layer, but I'm going to give it its own layer and actually been transferred the lock transparent you parents which is great because we'll be using that, and now I can hit command D to select or I can even go on, let's just create a selection layer while we're here, convert the selection layer, double-click here, call this cape. Think we were doing dash S for selection, and drop that into our selections folder. There we go. We've isolated that. Now if I get rid of the line work and we zoom up, you know, you can see it's a pretty clean effect over here it's a little bit jagged from the way that I had to draw it out, but not much. That's very clean, now we can get rid of the actual line work to see it a bit further. Very clean line, exactly what we need, definitely more translator that we're going to need for the paint work that we're going do. Actually let's call this perimeter line or just outline will be easier. Just like that. We're just going to repeat this process and we're going to isolate a few more areas within the painting, and we've already started with the base colors or skin tone, so we'll leave that for now, and we'll do the armor next. Now we're going to do is selection of the armor plate. I'm going to drag a copy of this, so when in doubt and you might do something destructive, just drag a copy. There's no need, but I just want to safeguard myself. What I want to do here is pick a color for the armor. This color doesn't really have any true bearing because we can change it so quickly with all the live transparency features, but I want something that's noticeably different from the next corresponding colors. I'm just going to pick a purplish, even some a little bit brighter just so I could see it a bit better, and we're going to go ahead and select this. Remember that this blue, probably toggle that off or paint the original back. But, I do like seeing where the existing line was where they bumped up, so I'm going to try my best to just stay right on that edge, it doesn't matter if I go over a little bit because we're going to paint through this as we go more or less. I'm just defining a bit of a container for the selection and the paint that I'm going to designate. I'm going to get the side pieces here, the [inaudible] armor while we're here. Let me go and draw through these real quick, simply sketching through this, trying to get a little bit more of a clean transition. I could probably pick something that is even a bit easier to see. It's not too bad. Hopefully you can see it, but it really doesn't matter, I could have picked something very bright like a lime green. Because again, it's easy to change colors from a solid fill like this, through here, rotate, and that being too overly critical. It's not that big of a deal. If it's cleaner than the existing, then that's great. But if it's not, I can easily fix it. This is probably one of the trickier areas just because there's so many shapes connecting this together. But once this perimeter shape's done, it'll become rather quick and a lot easier to paint once you've got all this designated. Obviously I'm going to go right through to the arm here. I don't have to really define this area because it's an edge against the Canvas, not against another part, but I'll just draw right through to here. Make sure to pass over that a little bit. Then the other thing to think about too, is you can actually draw under areas that you know you're going to create another shape over top of. For instance, when you get to this area right here and she's got these what I perceived to be like these leather straps, metal strap or whatever it is that allows her to hold onto the shield, that's going to be painted over. I really could just go right through that since I'm going to be going back with another shape. But really it's not that big of a deal either way so I'm just going to draw it to the edge of it like this. But just be aware that some of this will be how you plan to execute the work. In this case, I don't think it's going to matter either way, so I'm just going to draw around it like this. You see my line work from this close-up view was still pretty rough. But in all actuality, there's a lot of paintings that I've done where the line work was a lot rougher than what you see here and there's a lot of painters that barely even refine the line work and some that don't even use line work at all. They go right straight to paint because they've gotten so confident at the painting process. Rotate this, draw down through here, and I should have picked a little bit more contrast in color. Hindsight is 20-20. Let's go through here, get to fill these shapes in and the hair flips in front of there, but I'm not going to worry about that. It's pretty insignificant. Now this all goes to a floating edge or against the Canvas, so I don't have to worry about that. I just pick up the line right through here, and I just want to make sure to segment where it hits the skin. Keep in mind you can erase back any of these lines will, if need be. Also if you ever see that happen, rotate, when you go to rotate your holding R, grab on the outside of a Canvas, the further on the inside you hit, is going to be more dramatic of a rotation just so you know. See how we can take this g-pen, turn it to transparent. I'm sorry, we can't, we're painting on that layer. What I could do is actually hold Alt, pickup that other color, and then paint back, and then hold Alt again, pick up that purple and paint back the other way. Just to make sure this is going well. We're almost there and we're probably going to want to bring the color right through here against the arm. That's all going to be like the drop shadow or the shadow color of that armor. Like that, pick up the line right through here, and let's test. Let's test the part of this. If you draw a line through there, I should be able to fill this with no problem. Let's just check the work. A lot of times when you go too far into it, I like to segment part of it and make sure so right there, it bled over into the shield right here. I should have caught that, but we'll just do a little divider piece and that should fix that. That's what I mean by checking the work. It's good to, because it gets a bit confusing as it's passing through all these areas. But simply, you could just draw a line through, isolate an area, say right there, and because we made sure to take off the anti aliasing, we shouldn't get a noticeable fade line in there. We should be good. We just got to finish this area right here. This may seem like it's taking a little bit of work, but it's really worth it. It's going to save us so much time as we progress through the painting. A lot of digital painting, at least in this way, is setup and getting it just right, but then when you jump into the work, you save yourself a tremendous amount of time. I'll just isolating some of those areas just to be on the safe side. I apparently missed something through the waste there. I think it's right here by the gauntlet. Yeah. There. It's funny how it becomes a bit of a puzzle. Try again. I think we're good there, and we go there. We're almost there. Let's see, can we do that? Yeah. That's good. We've got these little need plates down here that'll probably be the same, and just remember you can really save yourself space when it comes to the layers and things. These don't have to be all the same color. They're probably going to have some of the same properties and maybe even the same color, but as long as we're not touching, you could really compile some things together. That's good enough right there. Let's give the other gauntlet here. Now remember too, that you could really just draw N selections as well. Pick this and isolate some areas so you can go through here. But this is really if you feel as comfortable drawing with the selection tool and the marquee tool. I don't feel as good about it. I always seem to veer off then I got to go back to clean it up. Me personally, I rather just draw them with the g-pen so it's up to you and your comfort level with that particular tool. But to me it makes more sense just to draw through like this, like this. Let's space-bar, move that around, get this bar here. Again, you don't have to be so clumsy, so specific with the line. You'll see in a lot of ways we're going to paint through a lot of this stuff. That should be that one. Double-click here, space bar to move and then paint bucket. Remember you can hover over that. You should be able to get the shortcut command. Of course, I'm doing it right now for some reason. Here there's not a Shortcut set to that one. Well, generally again. Let's fill that. Trying to find the, for some strange reason, it's not giving us the shortcut. Generally, you can hover over these and get your shortcut command. But in this particular instance it's not working. Strange. Well, just simply click on it. We should not worry at that. I want to say it's G but no, that's gradient. G twice. If you hit G once, you're going to get your gradients. You hit G again, you're going to get your fill tool. Now we've designated the armor and that's good enough. I guess we can get part of the head plate here as well. Since we're down this layer and they're not touching, this was going to do that. Let's take and draw through here. Actually I don't want that, I guess I do. That drop shadow, that's going to have to face there just a little bit. That's what that piece is, so area there. I want to separate it from the ear, obviously, separate it from the ear over here, and the part that comes down the face curve right there. You'll get a lot faster with this as you get the hang of it and get a feel for it. But it's definitely one of the quickest ways I think we can hold Shift here and across to isolate this stuff. Then what happens is, as you get more of the pieces in place, you have a lot less to work through. Right now we've got the skin here. We've got some parts of the armor plate, we'll probably color these and silver as a base. The hair, some separate features for the face, but that's pretty much it. The shield could almost be said to be one entire piece. Rather quickly we've been able to isolate these parts. Again, it's going to save us a tremendous amount of time as we started to paint this in. That'll wrap up this lesson. Next we'll head over to the next lesson where we start to make our final selections and then we get everything ready for our paint. Let's press on. 11. Creating and Saving Our Selections: Now before we move on to creating the final selections, we need to isolate the armor. I'll just go ahead and select each one of these areas with the magic wand tool holding shift to add to the selection. Let's hit "Command C", "Command V" and that'll give us armor, P for paint. I want to make want to make sure this is named Cape. You've got both of those surprises. Toggle this off. We've got each one of these isolated, we're going to go ahead and use that for our selections. Now, don't worry about creating a selection for that immediately unless I find myself needing to go back and regrab that selection quite a bit. Let's go ahead and do the leg armor here, the chain mail area. What we want to do here is go back to this, make sure large transparency is set right there. Grab G-pen, plus I will also make sure that the anti-aliasing or aliasing, not sure all it's really said, but either way, hopefully you know what I mean there. Make sure that's toggled on so we know that we've got a very crisp edge as we do this. Remember you can go to the edge and then you cut over just a little bit to isolate the edge from bleeding into that next leg. Sometimes you can do a nice smooth pole like that as well. Just really depends on what you're most comfortable with. This is usually a good way to get a nice clean line. The best way I've found to get a clean line, because I get this question a lot, is either a quick pole or a nice steady slow pole. Then using Command Z to go back and do it multiple times until you get it right because like everything else with art, the repetition is essential to perfection. We'll fill those in like that. We're also going to need that little bit of area up here on the arm. Let's get up here and isolate that. Try to do a nice sweeping pole; steady, slow, and confident. I believe we're going to have to grab it here because we don't want to make the mistake of the purple not grabbing, but it might list. Let's just test it real quick. It does grabbed just that areas, so I think we'll be fine. Let's fill that area. We're good. It did stop at that purple. That's the other thing you can use the transitional colors as long as there's enough contrast there and it's going to work. There's our chain mails. We don't see them on the other arm. Which I like to have some pretty asymmetrical values anyways, I don't know that I would have had it on the alarm, but so there's our chain mail. I hit "Command C", "Command V". Remember the texture is on a different layer itself. We just want to isolate the underlying plain area right now. We're going to call this chain mail. It's keeping that live transparency, which is cool too, because it saves a step. Command D to deselect. We have the skin. We've got parts of the shield, the sword. Let's go and do the hair real quick. The hair, does it touched the arm? There it does. We're going to use a different color. I'm thinking about giving her a silverish white hair. Apparently I'm on the wrong layer. Always be aware of your layers, of course, through here. Again, since we know now that it's going to bumped up to that purple. Remember if it doesn't and it bleeds past as you do this, it's because you probably cut away the purple layer and you might be looking at the floating purple armor layer. You got to be really aware of these layers as you do this. But again, it's bumping up that edge pretty well. Let's get over to here. The hair is coming in front of them neck like this. I'm going to draw it through that. We should have this edge to guide us, to protect us, right there. Lets try to fill that now. No Problem. You see how it really starts to become even quicker if you lay out the work just well enough. For instance, we should only have to fill right across here now. This should select just fine or fill just fine. The film, the selector pretty much working in the same regard. We'll do the selection of the hair, hold "Shift", grab the chariot "Command C", "Command V". This will be hair, paper paved. Command D to deselect. If we toggle this off we've got the hair, we've got the chain mail which currently see that because it's coloring into light right there. We can start to work on the shield and the sword now. I think for these, I may do a perimeter edge. But that's about it. I'm not going to worry too much about anything else about the shield. Even these little arm bands that go on there are going to be pretty easy to paint through. Let's pick more of a brownish red for the shield. Make sure we're back on this layer. I'm just going to go right through this area here. I just want to make this small separation from these parts, if we rotate. Then right here, because the colors are the same, we've got to separate that. That should be good. Let's test it right there. Probably not because we got to separate the other part here. Let's bring this line over to here. Let's fill this. Basically, we want to separate the metal from the outer edge. That should have done that, lets check it. When we visualize, it may grab right, and that there should be good. So that's the middle shield area that I wanted. Select that Command C, Command V. Let's call it inner shield, and Deselect now, this next part should grab, since this color doesn't seem to head right there. Let's get a little closer. Make sure just to be on the safe side. We're going to do this more of a grayish silver or something like that. I'm still not entirely sure at this point. I want to show how we're going to go back to the slide. I want to show how, you won't need to really worry about that. I mean, it's always good to know what colors you're going to use. You want to define some palette before you get started for maximum efficiency and quality of the work. But it's just so easy to change the colors as you progress through here that you really don't have to worry too much about it. Okay, so there's the outer part of the shield Command C, Command V and outer shield P for pain. Okay, now we're pretty much there, we're getting really close. Again, you could just jump right in and start painting. This is just being a little bit more meticulous. But the reason why I like doing this, and I think it's so important is it allows you to really itemize the work and really allows you to just focus on the paint work. Don't do this, you just have to be a lot more aware of your edges and methods for painting through the work and things like that. But it's really just dependent upon what style you prefer. I think for right here, let's just go ahead and take this just to show you there are lots of ways to create these selections. I could just draw through here rather quickly. Select this whole area. Hold shield, really, I could fill this. I'll show you another way you could do this. You could just fill this. Make sure back on that original layer. It's only going to the edge. So the selection just allowed us to contain in this area. This lack transparency contain the other area. Hit Command D to Deselect. We can pretty much fill this whole middle area now. Without regard to or you don't want the line looks like it's there, the outline, but it's not too that. So all we have to do there real quick is just fill this area right about there. Then that should contain the rest of this edge just check it again. It's just good to think about all these different things so that you can really maximize the way that you create your selections and your fills. Obviously you can just jump right in here and paint this. There's that part of the sword rather quickly. Let's see, for the hilt, I'll probably just have this all as one other layer. Let's just do a darker by comparison to almost it's considerably darker. It should select fine. So let's go ahead and fill this and this. Then we'll go ahead and separate these. Now, since there is a dark enough comparison, you see it was real easy to select these independently. You really could even say, make the argument they could be on the same layer. But if you don't want them to be just again, Command C, Command V. I'll just call this blade. Try to keep the words short so that you can see them all without having to stretch out the layers and take up more of the space. Just remember that you can move each one of these like this. You can also drag them independently you can drop them wherever you want next to each other. Actually the way they were. Something like that anyway. Now let's go ahead and we've got the blade there, Command D to D select. Let's grab the handle. Like that Command C, Command V, and just call it a handle. There we go. Now I've got the character completely separated. We could really get in there and say we want to separate the eyes, lips and we can actually do that as we paint. We can just paint new layers on top of these because sometimes it has been official to paint the eyes on a separate layer and the lips. You can add it in certain ways and I'll show you that. Then pass that. We just take the background. We should be able to drop out. I guess we still have to isolate the skin. Let's go and do that real quick. We should be able to just grab the skin now independently since there's so many other separations of color. Yeah, grabbed up pretty easily and just need that top part of the ear right here. Let's shift. It was then that I can grab as well as I hoped. But we can edit that. So I'm going ahead and go with that. Then I'll just zoom in here. Take the selection MAC key they're for rotate, and just clean this up real quick. So hold ALT. I'll just grab right through here. Should be odds work there. Okay, most of us select appropriately. Hold all, get rid of these little artifacts and if you go too far over like I did right there, you will hold shift and go back the other direction. Okay, double-click here to straighten out the canvas. Now we can hit Command C, Command V and we'll just call that skin. There we go. So now if we take the visibility off that background, that's our original layer to safeguard us. You can see we have some edge work that's missing basically from the outline and the original sketch. Things like that. But this will be real easy to fix in anyways. In fact, we're going to have to paint through a lot of that regardless and a lot of this is like just from the way we've drawn through and bonded up edges. But we'll see that'll be a pretty easy fix. For now we can leave that background layer in place. We can drop one more layer back here. Just call this Background sky. Let's just take a little bit of purplish tone, a little bit darker, and a bit different from what's already there. Let's drop that in, and that gives us our flattened version ready to go. Now we're going to start learning some pain affects. So let's head to the next lesson where we start to bring this to life. 12. Using Multiple Selections: Now before we get into painting parts of the armor and things like that. I want to show you one more quick tip about mesh transformation and really about editing multiple objects in the scene. We've got all these layers and most programs are only going to be able to grab one specific layer and work from that. I've only found this to work in this program, which it's a fantastic feature. Let's see, we need to change something. One of the things that's bother me is really the shape of the lower plate here, it just doesn't look as dimensional as a code. One of the things I want to show you is if I go to select an area. Now previously in most programs out have to select an area, move it. I'll have to worry about it not moving the line work with it. I'd have to edit the line work first maybe and then paint throw it again. Not a huge reduction in time or [inaudible] time-intensive thing, but it can take time to do that. But what's really neat is you can actually adjust multiple layers here. What I'm going to do is isolate just this area. It's probably a good idea to do this while you're still relatively in the flat stage, if not and by flats I mean solid colors there. But if not, it's still doable you just have to use more of a quick mask and we'll talk about that later. I want to bend this down, I want more of a band here and I want this one side up higher, but I'm going to do each section at a time. What I want to do is grab this layer and everything above by holding Shift and clicking the top. Now it's going to affect every layer in there. I go to Edit, Transform, Mesh Transformation and I'll probably just start with a couple of vertices and see if I can get this to do what I'm looking for. I want to bend this down maybe a little bit over. I really want to put some curve in this and also try to push the effect that it's rounded around the character not to look too flat. I'm just trying to adjust that. Really to minimize the split that you see there, work on the inside handles as much as possible. It's just going to split on the very edges. Now if I was to pull down here, it shouldn't split because it's going to overlap the existing color. You start to get more aware of what this is going to do before it happens, but like anything else by practicing. If I move over here, I might also tilt it a bit to keep that line going. But it's really not that big of a deal and I'll show you why in a second as I get this more to what I'm thinking. I'm thinking it's something like this, a little bit more dimensional through here, so it a curvature there. Hit Enter, it's going to take a second because it's actually affecting all the layers. Now what's happened is it's moved everything down, I put this little line here. But that's really easy to fix I go back to the skin layer, toggle off the light transparency, grab the G pin, hold Alt to get the same skin color and I just fill that in, simple as that. Even if it doesn't a couple areas, you're just going to go back to each layer, fill it in and jumped right back to it. But what it's done, it's moved the line work with it. It kept everything together, all the way to even the background layer. You can see right there if toggle that off, the background layer needs to be fixed as well. But really just that scene that it created so that's really easy to fix and then light transparency again and we're good to go. I really recommend getting used to that tool because there's lots of ways to edit your work and save things. The more that you figured things out like this then you can stop something that's heading in the wrong direction and fix it. The better your painting would come out and less frustrated you'll get throughout the process of it. You won't sit there and look at something and go, "Oh my goodness, I made this huge error." Then it takes you out of the zone of wanting to finish the painting. But with digital art there's lots ways edit, so really employ the mesh transformation. Remember that you can really work through all these layers and make edits rather quickly. While we're here, I want to show you another cool thing a way to edit through the multiple layers so you can see they're all still selected. Let's go ahead and grab let's see the leg here, the chainmail and this part. Basically we were able to grab all three of them together, we need to isolate this area. We're going to take and hold Alt drag right through here. This is going to require a little bit of clean up. But I just want to show you again how you can save things if you're seeing it headed in the wrong direction. I'm not even really sure we'll keep this one, but I want to show you that you really want to be open to all edits. Make sure that's all selected pretty clean, and again it's going to effect each one of those together. We're going to hit Command T and we want to tilt this leg back and we are going to get some artifacts, again that we're going to have to clean up. Well, let's go and bring this leg back. Let's see for some reason it looks like it didn't grab the chainmail properly or color oh, you know what it is. It's actually grabbed but it's affected by the cape layer, which is should remove that as well. But we'll figure it out. Let's hit Enter there, now the purple is going to be from the background. We're aware of that, but we're getting the cape bleeding in front, that's what it is. What we're going to do is we're going to bring the cape all the way back, because it should be in the back anyways. Now an easy fix for part of this is just to take the cape layer will turn off light transparency. The cape is going to end up behind the character anyways. We can really assume that it's going to go all the way through here and we'll just fill that in. That fixes a lot of the problem, obviously we've got where the legs meet the armor. We're going to jump over to the skin layer, select that. We're going to draw right up through here, fill that in, those are going to bond together so we don't really need to worry too much about that. Then the armor is probably going to do something like it's about right there, but we're going to fix that as well. We'll just grab the armor, grab this color and just eliminate the shadow. We got to make sure light transparency is turned off. What will happen is you can't draw outside of that confinement if light transparency is on. Actually, we didn't need to fill this and that looks like a shadow, but it's actually the background. We got to make sure that doesn't interfere with our painting. But hopefully you can see it's pretty quick and easy to jump in here and do this. The biggest thing is to remember to remove light transparency. Use the same corresponding color to keep everything intact. We'll have to adjust the texture as well, but not a big deal. We really could cheat and just bringing the character down a little bit. Let's see if that improves the polls at all. That's probably the trickiest thing is whenever you make changes like this, you got to really step back and go, "Okay was it for the better, for the worse?" Now I don't think we took too many steps to do this, but let's check if we hit Command Z quickly enough. We may or may not be able to get back to it. There's the polls before we started any changes and then Command Y. Until you get to makes no more changes and I think that was it right there. I think it looks a bit more dynamic, it doesn't look so static. She's got more of a imposing posture stance about her, so I think we'll go with that. Again, one of the things that you can do by jumping through and being able to work through all these layers at once. That even after you segment all the work like this, you can still get in there and make some pretty significant changes. Now we do have to remember that if we toggle these off, the background layer, original character base is going to be a bit off. But again, it's not going to be tricky to edit that or fix that if we need it. But we probably won't even need it. We're just going to be working off these layers from here on out. Now let's move on to the next lesson where we talk about and start adding digital paint effects to our armor. 13. Lighting on the Armor: Now we're going to start painting the armor, so let's go up to here. We're going to also make sure to live transparency on the other ones that we adjusted in the previous lesson, but let's go to armor. Now, I really didn't want the armor to be purple. I'm really shooting for more of a steelish, bluish-gray, silver thing. But I essentially used the purple just to get us to our segmented layers. I actually thought about it after a while looking at it and wanted to make it purple, but that's really not the intention. Just to get us back to a gray, we can just go to Tonal Correction, Hue/Saturation, and just kill the saturation. You drag that all the way to the left, hit Okay. I really recommend that you start desaturated anyways. You see it looks very saturated with all the flat colors I added. But what tends to happen if you work too saturated, it's really hard to go back sometimes. I guess it's not hard because there's a lot of tools to edit, but it's a bad habit to get into. Let's start with a little bit of a light source and just paint in here. I'm using the smooth painter brush and it's just basically the smooth watercolor brush that comes with this program, and I'll make sure that you got access to whatever brushes just so it's a lot easier for you to follow along. But essentially, all I want to do is get in some light source and think about things like bounce light apparent. Obviously, I've got light transparency which needs to be set right there, so I don't go outside of the edge of the work there, so I can do the edge lighting really quickly. I'll just figure out some general starting points. I want to think about plane changes and get those in place. Like for instance, there's a sharp point on the chest plate here, so it's probably going to be a little bit of a plane change and a greater light source on the one side. I am just going to throw that in there now, and then there's probably going to be a little bit of shadow over here. I'll make sure to bring the light over to this side a little more. Generally what I do here is I just throw in a little bit to light here and there. It's color but it's light. I'm always thinking about both of them together, color is light kind of thing. Just get in there and figure out where the light source might be hitting. Then just maneuver from there. It can always be a tricky thing to figure out, but I just play some things and then I blend it in. Now, the neat thing about this brush is you can apply a decent amount of paint, and just by softly going around the edge, you can blend that around, so you can do some really neat effects. Say you want a hard edge on one side and a soft edge on the other. It's as simple as pressing down hard on the one side and increasing the brush size a little bit with the bracket keys, and they're just pushing that paint around, and you can designate that kind of transition. There's a lot of effects that you start to employ when you digitally paint. But it really boils down to a series of soft and hard edge shadows. There's obviously just lots and lots of stuff that goes into it, like color theory and composition and just the list goes on and on. But essentially, if you can think about where the hard edge and the soft edge shadows go, you can get across a lot of information, you get through a lot of your painting that way. Another thing is, is to really get in the habit of putting in multiple colors. You see right now, I'm working off the base color that I started with and just some light source and I'm trying to place, but I need to quickly get in some other colors because if not, you just don't want to be in the habit of just doing two main primary colors and anything. It will never look realistic that way. I don't know if there's a set number that you can equivalent and say, okay, everything needs at least five colors or more. But I would say just here on the side of more rather than less. If you look at something and you'd think that you can get away with a couple colors, add an extra couple in there and see what happens. For instance, with this, we've got this grayish-greenish effect. Now I might want to add in just a little bit of more of a blue. I want to keep that pretty desaturated, but I want a little bit of that blue in there, and that might take something like a soft brush. Let's try. First, we're going try normal mode and just glance into the mid tone areas a little bit, see how that reacts. Then you want to use these blending modes to really help you to quickly put stuff in there. You can say, well, let's take the same color and try it with overlay. Generally overlay is going to saturate the area. If I set the combined mode, forgive me if I call it blending mode, that's actually what it's called in Photoshop, and these are very similar programs. But let's call it combined mode and let's set it to, let's first do multiply. Multiply is typically going to take whatever color along with this color and darken it. That's what you're going to see here. This is great for adding contrast, but still adding just a little bit of color as you do that. You can see it's bringing out a little bit of that blue in there, as well as darkening that area. It's good for rounding out the forms. Now, we got to keep in mind is when areas like these two parts of the armor intersect, you may want to isolate by just drawing a quick selection through there where it hits. Now if I'm trying to paint this area, that's what I've designated. If I want to isolate this edge for the arm, then I'm hit Command Shift I. I can also get to that by selection invert right there. Then now it's just got this area here, with the arm selected, so I can brush in some shadow there, start to get that depth go in there like that. Really quick ways to isolate it. Again, we've got that container of the light transparency, so I don't paint into the other areas. We hit D to deselect. If you find yourself going back to that area multiple times, then that's when you just leave that selection up and just go selection, convert to the selection layer, double-click here, and let's call this, lower arm select, or something descriptive, and we'll just do selection, lower arm selection, and then just drag that into your selections layer or group. Then remember, you don't need the visibility arm with these, and you can just double-click and Command D to deselect. Back to the armor. Where are we? Right here. Now another thing that you can do, well, let's get some more color in here. Let's actually brush the color in, so that we're getting a little bit of effect. There is a blurred edge water color, let's try that, and let's do a little bit of a different color altogether. What you really want to try to do is really mix things up. Just practice throwing different colors in there and seeing what you come up with, especially early on in the paint process because you're going to do so much painting over top anyways, that it's not really going to matter. You're not hurting anything dramatically by doing this, and you want to really figure out what happens when you introduce another color to your paint work and what it does comparatively to what's already there. Again, that whole experimentation, which is essential to figuring out new things and really getting the most out of this type of work. Not totally digging that, but I think it has a little bit more effect to it. I actually want to grunge up the metal as I go, and I've got different brushes like one for stippling, one for multiple for stippling, some for scratches and things like that, and all that stuff really adds flavor to things like armor. You see it's not overly impactful, it's not really dramatically changing it, but it's adding a little bit. At this point, I want to start shading some areas, bringing out some of the depth of what I want to see in this material. I'm going to get in here and do some of the segments. Let's go and pick something darker now, and really show some of the breaks in the material, and actually I'm going to bring this slider back over to the blue. Another thing to keep in mind is when you're doing these shadows and these little details and things like that, you may not think that the position on the outer slider matters much, but it really does. Even if your work on with what you think to be black or really dark gray, if it's got a hint of this other color, it will take effect, so we want to be aware of where that is on that slider as well. Now, the other thing is as you're trying to build in hard-edged shadows, another way you can do that, aside from using the paintbrush and then blending out is again, just use the Selection tool so you could grab something like right through here and then maybe even a soft brush, and we'll set this to multiply, and you could just glance across there, and you can get that peak rather quickly. If I hit deselect, you see it add more of a ridge there. While that selections there, I could hit Command Shift I again, I could go to a highlight, brush it with [inaudible] , and select one of the brighter colors in this range, and I can bring out the highlight on that other side really quickly, and then pan out, pan back to check the work. I just do little things like that to start building a bit more depth as I progress through this. Back to the highlights. I'm going to bounce back and forth from highlights to shadows, and as we get enough of this information in place, we'll start to erase back the line work. It's going to put this other, just checking to see where we're getting the purple from. Probably that looks a bit better. We're also going to have to paint across the line work, but that'll come a little bit later. I'm just getting some as light source and there I got to think about how reflective is the surface, how much bounce light are we going to get? Where are the edges of the material? As the material goes upward, up and around, where are the edges really sitting? I think the natural inclination is to just trace around all the edges and say, "Oh everything has this rounded edge to the side." That's a good starting point, but then you have to also try to figure out. Let me find a good example maybe right here, maybe there's a small peak or something right here. There's probably going to be a peak to the way it comes down this way. It's finding these other edges and really thinking about the dimension a bit further that you can pull out of that paint work, that I think is really important. Because again, just getting in the habit of going around every edge and adding a highlight isn't going to be enough to really make it look realistic. You got to really tried to push the depth a bit further. Let's go back to a dark brush. Let's go back to our smoothed painter, just is really like probably what I'll do majority of the paint work with or a little bit less that blue so I'm put this way. It's still a bit darker. Another way to do this too is like over dark in a lot of the shadowed areas to really push the contrast and then you can always blend it back. With any of this stuff, it's never set in stone and you can really push and pull until you get to where you want to be with it. Wanted to find some of these edges, so I can skill this brush really far down, almost use it like a pencil here. I'm constantly using the bracket keys on the keyboard. I'm left-handed, my right hand's always on that keyboard, maneuvering the keys. I think the better you get with this stuff, the more you tend to use the shortcut commands and focus less on the menus and things like that. I'm going to get a pretty heavy shadow in here or probably taken shade from the one side, and then bringing a little bit of that light source the other way so I can hold all, grab that original color and paint back this way just to get a little of that light source and blend them back and forth, just like that. Go back to selecting the dark color, grab the darkest point there. The other great thing is as you get enough of this information and place, your palette really just becomes the existing painting. Okay so let's pan back. You also want to really check your work from a distance as much as possible. All right, so we could probably use more of the paint work inside of this area to get a bit more of these edges defined. I think in the beginning that's really what I'm doing is I'm just trying to define the edges, figure out the overall depth of it. Put in some light source, get it started and then we got to think about things like texture. We got to also keep detailing, but we want to figure out what this surface is really going to look like. I'll just kind of trying to figure out the depth of these segments. Pressing down harder for more paint and almost like the weight of my hand, but a little bit of pressure for blending, but not much. Make sure to put some shadow under almost everything, like I just want to really make sure that everything has at least a little bit of depth. Now at this point, let me get a little bit more shading here, but we're almost ready to start testing the water with the brushing back some of the line work. After erasing some of that line work on that mask, seeing the fit will hold up on its own. Really there's enough information here where I could just get rid of it and start painting. But if you're, again, more kind of stress with this one, if you're still a little bit newer to digital painting, then you may want to leave your line work in longer to really get all of it in place, but it becomes a confidence thing. Now, the only thing that I'm not liking so far by where I'm at with this is I've really got to get in some more variance to the way that I'm shading. It's all kind of too monotonous and too plain, but that's where the texture should really bring it out. Texture is like a big part of getting armor to look right in my opinion. Now let's do this too just early on, let's take shadow set to multiply. Let's kind of round out some of what we got here, just by doing this. You'd see some of that color is still evident even on painting over top. You can see some of that initial brown that we added in there, brownish red. It looks a lot more lively here than it does over here where it's not apparent. It's just really a good idea to get that stuff in there, but multiply is a really great way to apply shadows. I use that blending mode quite a bit. Okay, let's pan back and see how this is coming together. I think it's starting to work. Yes, so it still a good amount of texture, it still needs a lot, but it's getting there, we're building up to the process. Okay, so we need some texture, we need some more of a brighter light source. Now, quick way to drop in a light source will be using this a lot as well. Is a glow dodge or add glow I guess, but glow dodge is the one I typically will use. I'll select a little bit of a color, generally, something brighter than what's here. It's just a really quick way to punch up a nice glow or glare. It's really great for armor obviously because you're going to get these little specular light sources here and there, bounce light and all that good stuff. So really easy way to do that. We'll be doing this a lot through the piece, but we have to be really careful with this, such a powerful effect that you really don't want to overdo it. It's really easy to overdo this. I'll try to fight the urge, but just look so damn cool that you want to just put it everywhere. But yeah, really neat effect and we'll get a lot out of the armor with this. Now I even do like little bits of bounce light here and there and things like that. Really bump up the specularity of this material. Okay, so let's wrap up this lesson and let's head on to the next, we apply some more texturing and try to get this a bit more refined. 14. Apply Texture and Color to the Armor: Now we're going to start adding some texture to the armor. I actually already started to, as I was trying to map out the process, and instead of creating a new layer, I added it to the existing layer. I want to show you. Obviously you can do that, but there's also other ways to do it, so it's not so destructive of an approach because once you do this, you have to blend back out or softer, and in this we'll select a soft brush, paint it back out. One way to do it that's non-destructive and a little more lenient to be able to go back and, forth obviously, is select from layer, create selection. That's going to give us a nice perimeter selection. Check for any artifacts like right here we've got probably from when we were doing that edit work. Just hold Shift, select that, and you can actually see it right there. So we'll fix that as we go, but not a big deal. Just make sure it's pretty much a perimeter selection. Then now let's grab a stippling brush. You've got some in the airbrush tools. I've got one right here that will be using. Again, I'll make these available for you. What you want to do is create a new layer over top, and now what happens is you're able to use the combined modes over here to help apply the effect. So I'm going to start with the dark, and I'm just going to get in here, and start to apply some of this effect on that floating layer. With stippling you just really want to vary up the brush size. You can adjust the particle size over here. I'm going to start with this one, and get a bit of it in. You also can vary it up just by the intensity in which you place it on individual parts. I tend to stay a little bit more in the mid tones to the shadows of where this goes, and then if I do some in the highlights, I'll generally paint with a light source, and the highlights, and bring them back the other way. So lots of ways to do it. I would say mainly just to vary it up, and not make it all uniform. Definitely you don't want it too uniform. You can see it starts to add a little bit more realism to it, and a little bit more variation to the surface so that it does not appear so overly smooth, and overly just flat in general, but just a really quick way to add a little bit more life to the armor. Okay, let's say that's enough for now. So we'll toggle it on, and off, and see the difference, but you'd probably go a bit further with it. Let's also try a little bit of more dense particles. So again, trying to get a little bit more variation in there as we go. So now once that's in there, you see it just made it a little bit more gradient, not so perfect. Now if we take this, we can combine this effect with different blending modes or combined modes, I should say, and you really just want to play around with these, and try lots of different things because sometimes they're going to yield not so impressive results, and then sometimes you're going to hit the nail on the head, and really save a certain effect that you might be after. There's too many of them, I would say to really memorize. I've definitely memorized a few of them, and what they do for me. The ones I predominantly use on multiply for darken, color dodge, and add glow for power effects, and lighting effects. Overlay, I use quite a bit. You see overlay has a pretty more dramatic effect, and more saturated affect. Soft light, and hard light sometimes work well for color blend effects. So you really just have to bounce through these, and check them, and then over time you'll start to see what works best for your workflow. I like it darkened right there, and actually I like multiply because I want a bit of contrast with that effect. Now as long as I keep it as a separate layer, I can really control it another degree, but I've got to be mindful of my layers obviously. In this case, I don't think it's going to be too bad, so we'll just go ahead, and call this stipple, and we'll just put it above the armor. We'll know it goes to the armor, and I guess just to be safe. Better safe than sorry. Here we go. Then if it starts going intense on any area that you are working you just create another group, and immediately it organizes what you're doing. So now we've got a bit more information here. We still need to get through, and add more highlights, and more shadow's obviously to make it look more impressive. We're going to jump back to the amour layer. I want to show you that you can also use things like even a pencil brush. So you really don't want to get in the habit of thinking that you have to use one brush for everything. I bounce around to a lot of different brushes, and if I wasn't explaining the process as much, I would probably be using even more, but I tend to paint a little bit differently as I'm narrating, and trying to explain more of the work. We can get in here with these, and get a little bit more definition into those segments I'm trying to see. Then with the pencil brush a lot of times what I'll do is I'll draw some things in. If they come across, obviously you've got opacity, and brushed entity to play with, but if they come across too heavily, I'll blend them back, and I'll show you that here in a second. So say for instance right here, I want to add a shadow. So I get a little bit of this hearted shadow that I want right there, but since it's just a little too impactful for that area. I can just come over here with the blend brush, and just soften up some of that transition, that edge because the textures on that flowing layer above it's not destroying that texture. So that's really where you have to be mindful of when you merge the textures in, because when you start to blend, your blending can actually interfere with your textures. Those layers are a great way to keep that intact. So here I'm just trying to clean up the line work a little bit more before I get rid of it entirely. I'll make sure I can see a lot of these little transitions here. Likewise, I can take this to a light source. I can hold Alt, grab the light source there. Paint in a few of these glares, and you'll see it does a really strong kind of light source rather quickly. So it's good to use this brush every now, and then. Just remember that you can paint the stuff in, and then softly pain it back. There's no rules. There's no right or wrong way, and there is no you never backed into a corner with digital, I don't ever feel that way anyways. I could texturize with this a bit as well. So I can practice just throwing out a couple of little stipples or whatever, and seeing if it works. If it doesn't, just back out of there, but I always experiment, and always trying new things as I progress through this. So again, thinking about where the edges are here, lets just throw in some random little effects there, and I can even throw in a heavier effect like this, and then just try blending it back, and around. So lots of ways to do it, and really want to put in these effects lots of different ways because you're going to get a more varied look to your paint work. It's going to look more interesting. Actually I feel like that needed to be farther over. We'll keep working on that. Okay, so, now let's see if we can get rid of the line work through the chest plate here. So we go over to this now keep in mind we are working with these mask that you have to click on this. If you click here, and you start erasing, you're actually erasing the row line work. Likewise, you can actually keep adding to, and changing your line work here, but you're working with the mask here. Just remember that, and it's not very noticeable. So you've got to make sure you click on that. Now when I erase the line work here, I'm actually going to test it too, so I don't make the mistake. Let's say I get to about right there. Okay, wait a second. Let's make sure it comes back. Let's pick stronger brush, the normal, the dark. It's got to be the dark anyways. Let's see if it brushes back. Let's try it again. Let's go to erase. Let's go to paint. It's this bearing coming back and that's what we want. We're going to erase all of his back. Pretty much will stand on its own now. It's really just that process of slowly building up to the paint, slowly erasing back, making sure you're on that. Make sure I'm going to leave that place for a little bit longer, making sure you're on that mask, and that's it. Let's go back to the armor and let's keep detailing this and bring this up further. I'm just going to keep using the same tools that I've implemented. Pencil to get a little bit of quick line making, shading, which I could also just select the existing line work and then bring this forward and merge it down. But I actually prefer redrawing it so that I am more prone to clean something up as I do it this way. As well as if I see an opportunity to not draw it and just paint it and then I'm going to go with that. It's really dependent on what you prefer. There's lots of ways to bring the line work into the paint work. Like right here, I'll switch over to the smooth water color. I can just glance over these lines and blend it back, add a little bit of shadow here. After you get enough of this information in place, like I said before, you start to use your existing paint work as your canvas obviously. You'll just start grabbing a light source over there and throw it in and see how it works and you'll need to go to the color swatches, less and less stuff to get enough information in place. We're going to do a lot with, there are so many ways with bounced light from the background. That's the other thing that pulls us together after we get some of that background information figured out, some of that will need to be brought into the character, especially the armor. But really all of it, you really want to think of the skin is [inaudible] like, the hair, everything. By grabbing other areas of the painting and painting in that same color, those series of colors together, you really start to make it look like it makes more sense and has more of a believable field to it. I can grab some of that dark from there and use that for the segments. I want to get some more shadow on the bottom of this hands and it's going to have a drop shadow from the sword. It's going to have a drop shadow from the fingers. Pretty much all of this will probably be in shadow here. I'm just working up to that, trying to figure out where the light would go and where it wouldn't, and then drop shadow onto here probably. I'm not doing a whole lot of selections and shadows right now, but it's definitely a good thing to keep in mind that you can use the selection tool to blend in some hard edge effects we'll be doing that as well. If I wanted to use it right here, I could figure out what the hand shadow might look like. Draw that in, and then grab something like a soft brush, "Stronger," set to "Multiply." I am going to just brush that in and it's going to darken the existing area. It's going to give us a little bit of an edging to the other, I don't know if that actually even looks good, but it's good to test it. There are going to be areas where it does very well, actually get better like that or might just push it in like this. This is actually going to be the hilt of the sword so I actually needed to edit that out. But what I'm going to do is after we paint this, I can copy it, bring a piece there. It'll be a good opportunity to show you how to reuse your own work within the piece. Keep in mind as well with a soft brush, you can actually do a complete painting just with a soft brush. I've seen people do amazing work with it. But what they do is they scale it down so small in certain instances that they're actually drawing with it and even creating what looks to be like hard edge effects. The soft brush is really the most versatile. Like that could be almost said to be a hard edge effects, but it's definitely too prominent. I don't find the need to just use one brush like that, but it can be done. Let's pan back, this probably looking a bit too dark. Multiply can be great for adding contrast, but like anything else, you should be very careful of overdoing any effect. Now we've got a fair amount of detail in this piece or this part of the work. Still need some more detail pulled together, but it's getting there. Hopefully, you can see the process of where, just slowly building up on the information that's already there. But now I'm almost to the point where I really want, I feel the need to like go to other parts of the painting and then come back to this because it's just one of those things where I can usually get a better feel for what needs to be in each area by a comparative thing. As I started to paint other areas, I'll be able to look at this and make some better decisions. As well as I think I want to actually change the intensity of it, maybe even the color, so let's try a tonal correction. Color balance is also really neat because you can control just certain components like the shadows here. If I want to bring it a little bit of red into the shadows, it's really easy to do that. I generally will do more of this later on, because again, I need to know a little bit more of the background information to make a better decision on all this. But it's really important to be aware of these because, again, you can control the shadows. You can introduce a color under the shadows. The mid tones will highlight whatever, but I still feel like I need a bit more of that other information in there to make an educated guess on this or educated decision. If I "Command Z," "Command Y." You can see it actually in my eye, my screen improved it. It's going to go with that. Let's go back to the painter, choose my favorite brush here. As I go I have set the toggle off, things like the outline and the line work and really see how much they're holding up on their own. Alright, so let's finish off this lesson. We'll head over to the next lesson. We'll add in a bit more texture, detail the helmet a bit further, and then we'll jump into other areas of the painting. Let's press on. 15. Adding More Texture and Details: Now, let's add a little bit more texture to this, and detail the helmet a bit further. What I want to do here is right-click here, go select from "Layer," "Create Selection." Since we felt the need to do this a couple of times and you can still see that small artifact there, I'm going to go and take the time to fix that, hold "Shift", select that, and then also, save the selection to a Selection Layer, double-click here, it's called Armor. We may have already done this, but since we made edits, that's one thing you got to be aware of, too. If you make edits to the work, then the selection layer may need to be changed, and then drag that into our Selections. Likewise, to organize what we got going here, I'm going to grab all this paint work up to the line work here. Actually, I need to create the group first. Just call this Paint Work, click, hold "Shift", and then drag it onto there. Now if I need to, I can really condense down and save some space. This will actually go up into a backup folder. I'll actually create one more folder, I'll call it Backup. If there's anything that I think that I might need later, textures or something like this, where it was the initial base coloring, I'll put that under Backup. Again, all of this is just to save space and this top work here will really just be line work. Forgive me, I keep selecting it and going to create the group, because on other programs we'll actually create the group that way. Let's go ahead and name this Line Work, drag that to the top. Hold "Shift," click that, and drag into there. Now, we're able to really organize the work, which is important. Right now we're under Line Work and Paint Work. Temporarily, we want the Armor, so I just double-click here for that selection, condense that down. Now, let's go back to our armor here. It's starting to have some bits of realism, and I don't know that I want it to be too overly realistic, but I want it to have a bit more effect than what we have here. One that I like doing is the metal scratches, I like putting those in. We can actually generate another layer. Let's go to Armor, let's create another layer over the top and just call this Scratches and Armor. I'm just going to brush these in periodically. Again, that whole idea of randomness, they will scale up and down with the Brush Size, which is nice, so I can use the bracket keys. Then I just want some where they appear larger and more prominent. Some where they're just lightly in there. I'll probably put a bit more on the arms, where she would probably have more abrasions, so it's fun to think about where would these occur? You get a bunch on the helmet and as she maybe needs to become a little bit better warrior. It's like it adds that little bit more of area of interest, and then what you can do with any texture on a floating layer, is you can place it. You can even overdo it a bit and then go back and then soft-erase it if you feel like it shouldn't be in some areas, as well as again, playing with these Combined Modes. We'll probably do something like "Multiply," and equally as well, you can adjust the overall layer Opacity, so if you feel like it's a little too in your face and obstructive to what you're doing, just jump back the opacity. I think that adds a little bit more to it, let's pan back and see. I think it probably could stand to be a little bit more visible, somewhere around about there. All right, so now let's add one more texture. I'm going to create another layer. Let's call this Armor Texture, I'll just call it Texture and Armor. Now this one, I want something, the armor looks a little too smooth down, in areas. It's got the scratches, it's got some stippling, but I also want to see just a little bit of variance, almost blotchiness, is what I'm looking for. I think we've got the perfect brush for that, if I can find it here. I think it's this Abstract Texture Brush, this might work. Let's actually switch the color to this, just a dark for now, and that's got a bit of blue in it. Let's make some of this a bit reddish, or brown-orange tone, or earth-tone I was trying to say there. I don't know if that's the brush. Let me see what else we got here. Texture Painter. No. There we go. Okay, so what this one will do for us, is it starts off strong, but then as you paint through it, it'll soften up. I don't know that I want to use this brown. I'm going to try it with the blending mode here in a second, to see if it works. What you can do is really just brush it in quite heavily, but then slowly press around and soften up the edges to it, because you're really just trying to give another level of inconsistency to the material. It doesn't need to be all over the place. Actually, to tell you the truth, I think I'm just going to go with the black here, so I'm going to delete this, let's go right to black. Just want the texture and you'll see it starts off real heavy, but then as I push it around with almost no pressure, I'm just cutting away all that excess material or texture, or whatever. Another thing that you could do, if you feel like, when I press down, completely too hard, I just get this big blob of paint texture and it's too much. Just keep in mind, you can also jump down the density of the paint and the amount of paint. I'll probably take that down, as well as the Opacity. what you can do, is you could say, if I put every bit of pressure on here, what will I get? Then you can use that to designate how much you'd take it down in the other area. The other way is just to erase it, as well as use the same brush as a transparency, and then do the same thing in reverse. There's lots of ways to really build this into the work and not feel so devastated if it doesn't work out entirely the way you thought. In fact, you are going to get happy accidents in the process of doing all of this, so it's better that you just enjoy that process. I actually like the way that shoulder came out right there, so I'll leave that alone. It's still trying to get this one to have the right effect. Hopefully, you see it's adding a lot more interesting appeal to that armor, it doesn't look so plain now. I think the tricky part is adding textures like this into the smaller areas, like I'm trying to do there with the hand, but I also know that we're going to come back and add some more edge work to all this. I'm not too worried about it being so perfect, just at least being in there. We're going to just plan all that moving around trying to get it to fit in there. I'm working from a pretty good distance away visually on purpose really because I don't want to get too caught up in the details. I feel like if you work too close, you'll actually hurt the process a little bit. But I will zoom in and check the work here momentarily but I try to apply the work from a distance like I'm doing here. I think texture can be a huge time saver because if you paint a lot of stuff by hand and you can really take a tremendous amount of time trying to get something realistic where if you throw a texture and it can happen very quickly, almost too quickly in some instances, but texture can be very important for that. It's almost next, sometimes next to impossible to make something look realistic without throwing in lots of texture because it just doesn't, I don't know it just has a harder time having that realism about all those little bits of texture and shadows and highlights and all the things that happens in realistic materials. Now let's zoom in a little bit and which will check it from a distance. The hands sticks out is looking very clunky but that's really because a lot of the line work I painted and I still need the edge that back out. The armor looks a little bit better, still need some detail work. The chest plate looks a lot better in my opinion. I'm seeing some good effects in there that I'm enjoying. Then that shoulder piece is probably my favorite, it's always like, I'll always see something sticks out as being the favorite part. So now what I want to do is see it with them or without, and like quite stand a bit, just a touch more saddle, but not much. I actually like the direction it's heading and I like what it did for the material. So I'm going to leave that in place. Now what I can do is just get in here and do a little bit more detail works. So I'm actually going to hit Command D to deselect this. I'm going to create one more layer on top of everything. So now when I start to get pretty layer-intensive on one particular area, that's when I'll add a group inside of the group obviously, call that armor. Drag all that into there. Then now each thing that I add right here inside that group is just for the armor, it's just a great way to organize that. But now what I can do is get in here with even something like the G-pen with a lower opacity a I just want to detail some of the work but on a floating layers. So what I'm going to do is select from the existing layer and I highlight just a few of these scratches here just to make some of them stand out a little bit more than others. Catch a few more of these edges. Now, the neat thing about working on uploading layer like this to is it gives me the opportunity to clean up some of that pencil work that we're trying to get rid of. So I can purposely paint over that since I know that I'm going to be above that layer. I just get some of those little scratches in there and just detail the work. This last little layer, I'll generally work full opacity and no combine modes. I mean, not always, but it's usually the way that I finalize the work. Any little areas where I can compensate for the edges that you see there, I'll go over top of that and then as we erase these pencil lines, this should all start to make sense. Let's go and check the line work one more time. Now, I will go back to those, make sure that we click on the mask icon, we'll solve to raise more of this line work should pretty much have it eliminated through here by now. Let's zoom into the hand-piece here, soft erase some of those out of the way. You see it's certainly makes sense on its own without any of that line work in place. Little by little, but we still got to go back and clean up and then we can even start to get rid of that outline as well. The helmet needs some more details so that it'll work on its own. So let's go back to the original paint layer for that. Lets start to grab some of these darks and brush and a little bit more, contrast to the artwork. You see I'm still on that texture brush, but I'm actually give it a go anyways, because a lot of times these brushes can still work pretty well as a smaller brush. See it's actually adding in some pretty nice texture anyways, so I'll just go with it. Just key in that brush up and down with the bracket keys as I go. Just trying to figure out the polite change that you're going to get from each segment of this happy she's wearing. Likewise with this, I want this to be an edge lighting, but then I want there to be a darker transition right there. At first I was thinking this would be a different color altogether, but I think just with the right amount of contrast, this will look fine. I still haven't decided what color that stone is going to be or that jewel. Let's try to get some of that in there. I'm going to pick a different brush now,I'm just going to paint her, it's most likely source and place. Another thing for realism is to bounce in and out with the light source. So you can see that I've paint it, and if you want an overly animated look, then you can go with a straight line around everything. It's going to look a little bit unrealistic and again, like animated or stylized or whatever. But the way you want to think about light on a lot of objects for more realistic approach is bouncing in and out. So it'll hit areas, then it'll dissipate and it'll come back. Especially for areas that are more tattered like armor would be, it's going to definitely do that more and more. So you've got to almost think about the texture and the way that it's hitting. Is the same thing about, at the end we will do a lot of little imperfections like this and that's how you got to think about those. Because it's an imperfection and it's a scratch or a gao, it's just going to catch light a little bit more abruptly in some areas than others. For now, we'll just fill in this stone with a light source, but we won't worry about the color yet, we will probably drop color in there at some point. So now let's see if this makes a little bit more sense on its own and we can do away with the line work, I think we're about there, little bit of bounce slight back here maybe. Back to the mask layer, make sure we're on the mask. We'll erase back and you can really just subtly do this. It doesn't have to be all the detail at once and then erase every bit of it, but I like to just slowly work up to that. But it's at least standing on its own or we can understand it and see what's going on there. We go back to the paint layer and maybe a pencil tool or something just to brush on some more defined edges here in there make sure not to trace them as well as using every opportunity to stipple or add some effect in there. Now let's check it from a distance, it's starting to read better. So we can keep doing this and obviously it still needs more, in my opinion to be finalized, we just keep picking at it. But now what I want to do is take us to a different part of the painting then we're going to work by contrasting elements. We're basically going to paint some other areas of the painting and then see what that exposes in other parts of the work and then bounce around to keep completing the work that you see are so. So let's go ahead and wrap this up and then move on to the next lesson. 16. Painting the Cape: All right. Now let's go and paint the cape and get a little bit more areas of contrast going. Let's find our cape here. Where is it? Right here. My transparency is already set. That's good. I have to decide on this really be in the color. I think it maybe a little bit less saturated by the time we're done. Let's go ahead and jump in and grab just a little bit of a dark grayish blue and let's brush in some shadows here. What I want to do first is eliminate the need for the line work. I'm just going to brush this back and forth and try to get some of those shapes in place so that we don't need the line work any longer. There's really lots of ways to do this. You could actually just go through and add some base or broad strokes to everything, which probably isn't a bad way to go. This is just the way I tend to paint or I'll detail quite a bit on each surface and then bolt back and forth from there, but tons of ways to accomplish the same thing. Given some of these broad strokes from there, smaller variations in the way they overlap and move. Let's take a shadow brush, see how to multiply, see how the same color responds. Now I can use this to push some depth, push the character forward on the canvas. Likewise, we want to create some depth with the overlap here like that. We also want to create some shading behind the legs. Hand blow the folds here. I see rather quickly we've got enough information where we get rid of the line work now, where you go back with the highlight brush at the glow dirge. But we want to be very soft with those. We don't want it to really look like it's glowing, like we do on other surfaces. A good part of making these paintings work is having a variety of effects throughout the painting. That's not too repetitious, and it's not too singular and focus and design. We want to have a nicer edge light right back here as well as right here. Now when we go to our line work here, and let's go ahead and erase these lines, make sure it stands on its own. That's about good right there because I want to leave a little bit of that in place for the ridges, but you'd pretty much see what's going on there. Now, we do have some artifacts going on right through here that we need to fix. We need to designate and figure out where those are at. They look as if they're floating above the cape layer. I'm just going to go from layer to layer here and toggle these on and off until we see it's probably on the skin layer. Now we already checked that one. Is that our mask? No, a little bit of the mask. Let's erase that pretty heavily right through here. We can also get rid of this line here for the leg now. Then some of the paint work. There's some of it with the chain mail. Likewise, we could probably just do this, save ourselves time, click from there to there, hold Shift, and then erase. I don't know, we're going to get part of the cape there. We'll get rid of that. Click from here to here, try that again. That seems to be in line work, but [inaudible]. There's another initial part, and erase back this line work here. It's starting to make sense there. Let's drop the kid back into place. It's probably the only thing that's a little bit tricky with this workflow. There's a lot more layers to organize and work thorough. But I would say that it's still a better way to work, especially for beginners, where you're really trying to figure out your own process and how you want to create this stuff. This just gives you more or range of movement and a non-destructive approaches. Here, I want a little bit more of a hard edge. I'm just using this smooth watercolor brush to solidify that edge a bit more. I'm adding its more contrast as well. Let's just really enjoy this brush from being able to blend and apply paint all in one tool. Just really easily soften up in the area of this. I'll pretty much start heavy, and then blend some of these edges back. In that way, it can slowly watch it come together. A lot of that I feel is a little bit too dark, but I could just increase the brush size. You've got things like blurred tools as well. You've got your blend tool here, which is going to be similar to what we're doing here. You've also got your blurred tool. This works really well. I've seen a lot of blurred tools that just work or are close to working. This one really does work just like you would imagine a blurred tool working. We'll use this later on to finalize a lot of the work because you want certain areas where the work is soft and other areas where it's more vivid. This blurred tool can be really great for that, and it's not going to smudge the painter around with blend tool. Then fingertip is going to smudge the paint all over the place. I use that a lot less. All right. Let's get a little bit more. I'm actually going to paint back over top of some of these dark with the light. Try to soften that up, and I need to be on probably just a normal brush. I just want to bring that back a little bit. I'm constantly painting things forward and back, trying to get the best effect. It's all about subtlety. You just really want to have lots of subtleties in your work. Like little faint solid lines and things like that. That's where texture is so important and if you can make areas of the work just very subtle, it has a more professional feel. Now let's take some of these dark over here, get a little bit of that over here. We got some more edges that we got to clean up there. We also want to darken this underneath the fold like that. Obviously, we could create a selection and do this and make it really clean, but this should be good enough. You see, I just keep using the Alt key and selecting from existing parts of the paint work. Just a huge time-saver and since I'm making a lot of sense. Now, another thing that we could do is we could add a selection through here, and we could try to get a bit of drop shadow from the character. This is shading that's going to be a little bit more of a hard edge. Now, we could take the time to make this on its own layer and all that, but we probably don't need to. We're just going to take this and multiply, and we'll just glance across there. Just something like that. Just another way to add just another effect. It could probably would touch more subtle than that. I actually want to change the shape. Let me try it again. I want the shape to not be so even with her body. I want to think about that the fact that this cape would be billowing out, so maybe it start tighter here. Notice that I'm trying to roll these rolls at the fold too just a little bit. It's thicker here and then bring it back out to here. Let's try that again. I'm going to have to do this in a couple of passes. Hold Shift, try something like that, and as well as I'll probably want it darker where it's closer to the character. Like down here and up top. I think that looks a little more believable. I'll probably keep playing with it. But a lot of times adding these types of shadows can add some interesting dynamics to it. A selection like that, paint it from this side pretty much to where it disappears by the time it gets to the other side. Just little things like that. These little subtle shadow differences that you can add. You can create some unique effects. Let's go and add one for the back leg here, and also maybe shade from the bottom up. That's another way to make something look a bit larger. It's just shaded from the bottom up like that. Now, keep in mind we can still change the color of the cape quite dramatically. I think that first, I'm just going to maybe drop some of the saturation from it. You see how that looks? It's a little better by taking more out of it, but I need that background to really see what else I'm going to do to it. Now, let's move on to the background. Let's add some colors there, just again for contrast to visualize a bit better. Then we'll move on to other parts of the painting. Let's press on. 17. Painting the Mountains: Okay, so for the background, let's go ahead and take, let's see, we've already got that existing layer. These don't have to be really refined, so I'm not even going to worry about drawing through these. I'm just going to create a selection like this. Heads I'll probably blur the edges anyways. I'm just going to draw through these like this, hold shift. They're going to be kind of these like rock formations. They don't need to be perfect anyways and packed. The randomness is kind of part of the character. Then once you get down to about here, it's all going to be solid. We have just draw through that, they come up on the character here. This is really the benefit of how certain areas being covered by other areas will start to make the process much quicker, like that. I really don't even need to connect the selection here, but I will. All right, so these are our rock formations. Then what we'll do is we'll go right above the sky background, create a layer. Just call this Icy Mountains something like that. Okay, so now we'll just drop in a soft blue for these. Fill that in. You can already see just that quickly. It changed the overall look of a scene just that one compositional or color arrangement change. It's really crazy out color works like that. Every color next to the corresponding color, it makes a big difference. You can also see that it's actually affected the artwork through here because I've still got some clean up there. Not a big deal. Like I said, it's also not needed in those areas. I could actually just soft erases since it looks like more of a distraction on out. We'll expose the fact that that needs to be cleaned up later, but I'll just go and erase that bags and it's not really that big of a deal. Also see softened up right there that just told me that imperfection right there as part of a cape or else I wouldn't have seen that when I was soft erasing. Now we go to the cape, turn off live transparency. We'll just take the smudge blending brush, kind of like a smudge brush and we'll just pull that over. Then we'll set light transparency again. Now these, I could tell that imperfection is from the chain mail. Let's find that, they're going to want to smudge it or erase it. Why is it not erasing? Let's figure this out to play on that layer and a lot of transparency is not set. You should just be able to erase that. We'll just choose Delete. All right, so it's getting there. Can you remember those little imperfections that are bothering me? Okay, so now let's take a light source for the sky. Let's just start with a highlight. Let's grab something into kind of soft lighter pink. Just throw light sources in there. It doesn't have to be very prominent at this point. I just want something in there that's kind of where I've been envisioning the light coming from the whole time on the character, but now it's actually evident and we'll pay it through that. Now with the mountains themselves, we can start to figure out what this is going to look like. One of the things I'll probably do is start with a little bit of a darker blue. Again, let's lock the transparency and I'll bring the shadows up. We need to be on a stronger brush, set the multiply. I'm going to bring the shadows up from the bottom at first. I'm going to start with any selections. I just want to get some of that base shadowing in place. I really want to keep all the brightness down as much as possible. Like there's a lot of brightness going on in the scene right now. I need to keep an eye on that so that it doesn't appear to overly animated. I definitely want animated field, but I just don't want it to appear too cartoony or I guess silly. I'll just kind of shoot some of those down. I'm also going to desaturate both these. Let's go to tonal correction again. It's command you so I'll start using that shortcut command. It won't drop the saturation. Let's grab to the sky and try the shortcut command, command U drop the saturation, not quite that much. Now let's add in a little bit more effects to the mountains. Okay, so for this I see kind of rock formation thing that I'm going for, I'm going to try using the selection tools and I've got some of my line work there to kind of guide me. But really, I just want to get in these angles so I'm going to hold shift. Now this little quick select icon kind of pops up. One of the things I do to get rid of it as just select something way down here. It could be something like that and it's going to drop it way down. I'm sure there's better ways to do that in more proper ways, but that's just the way I do it. Now what I want to do is bounce around and add some shapes here. Really just focus on some angles and some cuts in the the formations, I guess. It's kind of pemble around here trying to see what I can create with this effect. This is kind of like a cell shading effect, but it works for a lot of different textures and different things. I recommend doing as much as this possible really, seeing how you can incorporate it into your own work. Again, just kind of chiseling little pieces, trying to get some angles and some cuts in there, maybe some slight overlaps and some most picture and like what? What chiseled ice might look like. Just keep moving around and grabbing these little pieces. Fictional and put that one more of an angle. Okay, so now I should be able to drop in some of this effect. What I want to do here is figure out, okay, this need to be a highlight or a shadow. Because I'll probably need to do both but I think what I'm going to do here just go for a shadow at this point. Let's take that same blue subdue multiply and let's start by just brushing in some shadows, kind of randomly and glancing in and out of it a little bit. Command D to D select. It's starting to move in the right direction, that's what I want. I want a little bit of variation, but I want it to be a little bit more impactful, mainly to because I'm going to paint over this couple times, so get that in there a little bit stronger. Okay. So just like that. Now, what we can do is go, "Okay. We need the offset to that, " so pieces of ice or whatever. They're going to have probably some pieces over here where they catch the light more. It really just bounced around. So I'm going to go to both sides of it just because these angles are going be like prisms and they're going to shoot light back and forth. You probably don't have to put everything on one side like you would imagine, just because of the way light works and the way the prisms work and things like that. But just imagine where the light would go and not being too overly critical on the shapes, just letting it be pretty much random. A few more pieces here and there. Lets see what this looks like. Now, we're going to go to the highlight brush, glow dodge, and just hit "X". Now if you hit "X" on the keyboard, it will switch to the other swatch there. Now, get in some of this light source. I'll probably be a little bit lighter on this one because I just want to slowly work up to the light source. They tend to be a little bit more aggressive with shadows than light source, if at all possible. We can bring a little bit of light source from the top here. We can brighten up the edges of it and the top just by using that glow dodge effect. Let's create a few more selections and try to exit this out a bit more with a little more contrast. I'm going to try grab a few of these individually and doing them see what that yields me, see if I can focus on a little better. So shadow, we can use Blackburn, which I'll probably use that afterwards but let me see how it looks. Yeah, let me try to add this one with a color, so I'm going to take this to multiply or darken probably. I want to add just a little bit more of a deeper bright blue so that looks a little bit darker. What I'm trying to do is add one more level of angles to the work. That needs to be quite a bit darker. Let's try that. So I'm going to paint it back the other way. Now it looks so predominant as it does now. And like anything else, if you're trying to convey scale, you just want to work in more details. At this point, I'm not thinking too much about the background looking overly detailed because chances are I'll blur some of it as well so that the focus is really on the character. But I just wanted to look a bit more impressive than it does now. I think that's starting to give us the look, that it looks like some icy rock formations. That's really what I'm going for here. Almost there. I'm trying to picture where these breaks would look best where these angles. But I really think something like this is actually just a bit more random and I'm probably making it out to be. I don't know whether I need to be that specific with it. Okay. Let's see, probably a little bit of separation here. It still doesn't have the feeling like there's any real transparency to it. One of the things that I want do is incorporate some of that purple from the sky but I first want to give it a bit more contrast in some areas. I'm going to try the same brush set to Blackburn and this will generally leave the highlights alone a little bit more and just burn in the shadows. I may need to add a few more shadows before this will work as effectively as I'm hoping but I want to get like some darker spots in the middle and buildup to that. Now, what I want to try to do is take a light source and catch some of the edges. Probably the best brush for that will be the smooth painter. Grab a white there and I just want to try to punch in a little bit more light source on the plane changes. Probably even use it as a blending brush just to soften up some of these edges. I don't want all of them to be completely hard edge. I want this paint to go down a little bit easier so I'm going to bump up the density and amount of paint. But if it feels a little bit better but if it doesn't improve upon that, I would jump into the tablet settings and make it more sensitive. But I actually like the way the paints are been applied now so I'll go with this. Likewise, we can jump over to the mask now and eliminate line work. I really don't need that anymore. So for that spot, I have to define that edge a little bit better. I'm going to grab a few of these edges and just softly brush in some additional light source here and there. Hopefully make parts of it look a little more transparent. I'm still trying to find the effect on them after. It's not really looking as impressive as I hoped or imagined, it does happen from time to time. I'm just sitting there trying to work through it and figure something out. I think some of the shapes were actually a little bit distracting, like this large chunk of blue right there but I should be able to paint that back and make it look a little bit better. Some of them are coming across, there's just too much of forced shape or something. I don't know how to really classify it, but just doesn't look accurate. I think one thing I'm going to do is punch in some more light source on some of these angles, see if I can fix it that way. I feel like I'm fighting with this brush. I'm going to switch to pencil brush. I'm just going to draw some of these real quick and then I can blend them back. So we're going to stop right here and then we'll head over to the next lesson and keep working on the moms. So let's press forward. 18. Detailing the Mountains: Alright, let's see if by adding in some of the color to the background, if we can make something look a bit more impressive. Let's zoom back a little bit. Let's see if Black burn will work with the color brush. I want some purple in there for the background, doesn't really need to introduce a color, so color brown maybe. That's a little better. What I want to do here is just try to bring in some of that purple that we're going to get from the skies. I imagine that it would reflect off these and shine through these a bit. That's really a great way to bring the painting together. More as you get to the end of the paint work, you should be in the habit of grabbing colors from each part of the painting and introducing them to other components in the painting. It helps to make it more cohesive and just feel like it's all in the same environment. Alright, that's a little better, and then I want to brighten them back up with a bit of a light source again. Let's go to Highlight. It's got a lot brighter version of this. I'm just going back and forth trying to find something in here. It still not what I was envisioning so what I want to do is blend some of this back, try to paint through it again. That does happen from time to time where you carry something in a certain direction, and you feel like maybe it's going to get there and it doesn't. So you've got to also make that decision. Sometimes carry it back. Now. I probably could just blur this and call it good because in all reality, this isn't going to be a full visibility like she is. It's probably worth trying that as well before I go too far and to trying to fix these and spend a bunch of time in something that would probably just be blur out and I will be putting a little bit of volume in front of these so that it looks like they're higher into the atmosphere. But trying to get these to a level that I'm happy with. Just smudging these lines back and blurring some parts together which a lot of times by doing this, you can actually get some really nice textures going and some nice build-up to the paint work. It's fun to experiment like this and do it in this regard and see what you come up with. I like that soft blue that I'm getting right through here. It makes it look a bit icy. Let me try taking maybe Screen Mode, introducing a little bit of that through out, see if that helps. I just don't feel like it looks as icy or ice like as I'm going for. I don't want to get too overly concerned with the details in it but what we could do is obviously just keep repeating the process of selecting areas and then adding in a little highlights and shadows and then really getting it to take shape. But then again, we also need to be aware of how much of those will get taken away from any kind of blurry and stuff like that. Let's work on some of the detail over here to this side. I do want to make sure that this one gets brought out a little bit more. I'm just going to do a little bit of a trace to the one side and a little bit of light source there. I could also grab the whole shape like this. This is a shape that I'm seeing and then punch in the light source. Let's set those to Glow dodge and I'll just separate that from the background. Then remember that since we've got that selected, it's a good opportunity to hit Command Shift I and then maybe grab a shadow brush, usually I leave this set to multiply with the dark and we can shadow behind it. It's a quick way to push the area the panning forward and back at the same time by utilizing those tools. Alright, so now what I want to do is shade down some of this again. I really want to shade down the bottom of everything. I don't want any of this down here to conflict with our capes so I'll shade this way back. May be a bit darker. Something like that. I think we'll do a little bit of the sky while we're here and then we'll append ball back and forth, like I've said before, to look at everything in contrast. So let's go to the sky now and let's grab, we'll start with a soft brush. Grab a bit of the light source something lighter like this. Just brush through. Let's go to a regular mode, normal and let's brush through here. Just get a few of these cloud-like atmospheric stuff going on back there. You can see I'm just using that line work as a guide, but really just painting whatever I see at the moment, just using that little bit of line work to direct me. Scale approach down and get some variation in there. This is just a soft brush obviously, so you can make cloud brushes and I have some. But they're really not too necessary. They can be huge time savers, but you can do it all with just a soft brush. Let's get rid of some of that line work. Go back to the mask, soft is. where ease. Hopefully you see by now that more and more of it is working on its own and that we don't need all that line work. So and from this point on, we could really do away with all the line work, but we're going to keep it all into place, until we get to the rest of the painting. But it's definitely holding up on its own now. So let's add a bit more contrast to the sky. Let's try adding in some deeper purplish tone and let's slip this to multiply. Let's say command "Z" correction on the mask, and always check these layers. So we want to build in some depth by darkening it down here and enlightening it as it comes up to the light source that we got. Same thing can be said for darkened over by these mountains over here. Pretty much all the way around, but definitely darker at the base here. Then let's grab a little bit more of a magenta and set that to, let's save screen works for what all to see here now. Let's try "Color Dodge" and probably overlay because it's a little saturated. Yeah, there we go. So I just want to get a little bit of this color in there, again, we can always wash it back out, but just want to get it in there and place it first. Then another good way to do this is just basically layer up from here. So I'll put a layer over top and I want to bring out a little bit more of that darkness, let me see if I can set this to. We're going to set this one to "Normal" and then set this one to "Overlay". So I'm just trying to text dry the background of it a little bit. Let's try to "Multiply". That's a little better. So again, you got to be really aware of that overlay will really saturate things as you're applying these effects, it's also like that. Then we can take, let's call this one "Sky. Texture", I guess and let's add another one. Let me just call this sky highlight and let's try "Color Dodge". I just want there to be a good transition from, I don't want this up here, so purple in the highlight area. So it could be a white, it could be thick and more of a pink but something different right through here. Then again, while we're here, we might as well see what the blending mode will do for us. So I'll combine modes, "Color burn" is a bit too pink obviously. Color dodge is where we were, we know what overlay's going to do. Probably just where we're at is going to be fine. You know we'll just go with color dodge for now. So basically it's got the light source in place. It's not really the color that I wanted, based on that board I could start doing this merging things down. I'll keep in mind, if I was to hit command "E" twice. You see I had an adverse effect on the combination. So let's go back. Let's say I'm happy with this and I want to merge it into the sky, the best way is to select all the colors, right-click "Combine Selected Layers", and generally though, retain the look that you're after. So just be aware of that if you start hitting command "E", you have a chance of messing up the effect. But if you merge them all selected together, they generally will combine in a way that keeps what's visibly there. So let's paint on top of this again with another brush. I want to get a little bit more of that effect that I'm after and I think I'm going to have to darken it up for, so let's do that. This is just not giving me the the depths and the field that I'm looking for. Go back to the light magenta and try overlay one more time. But this time we're going to paint right on the layer. Now I'm just painting with normal mode, trying to figure this out but not like in dodge and that's going either. I'm back, right there. Let's just do this, let's add a highlight, collect good for now, right there. We're just going to come back to that, because I still think I can get that to look a bit better. One way I might do it is, I just add a layer over top and now I think it's just about the clouds themselves coming in front of the area that's there. So go onto a regular brush, picking more of a white to a gray, and then just trying to paint a little bit more volumetric. So a little bit more clouds, here we go, a bit more atmosphere in there. Likewise, we're going to paint some of these in front of the mountains. So just to test this effect we'll take these, let's call these "Clouds" and drag a copy of this and let's bring them right in front of the mountains. But then just move them slightly, re-scale them with command "T". I want these ones would be very light. So I'm going to knock down the opacity of them, so that they're just there but not too awfully distracting. Then I might play with the opacity of the background, once as well, in fact, I might just turn those off. It almost becomes a bit too cluttered. Then I can go back to the darker or the background, I should say. Then pick a dark again, set this to "Multiply"" or maybe even color burn, we'll see which one is better. I might darken these up even further, and it should help to push the other elements to the foreground even more. So it's just really that process of pushing things back with dark, pressing things forward and pushing things forward with light and finding a nice balance in there. Also keep in mind too that this "Cloud Copy", even though it's a soft floating layer, we can still colorize that if need be. So you can like transparency even on something like that, and entirely change the color just by going to normal mode, say we want it to be this color and we can brush right through there and they don't have to be white clouds. It does a really great job staying within that confinement of that soft airbrush effect. So just lots of neat ways to edit the work like that. So let's go and finish up this lesson. Next, we'll head over to the following lesson, where we're going to work on the chain mail. So let's press on. 19. Painting the Chain Mail: Now for the chain mail, we got a lot of it already done and in place because of the texture and obviously we've got this little gap down here. We got to fix with the HTML texture which is right here. What we're going to do is just cheat then we're going to go edit, transform, mesh transformation, we'll add some handles here, segments, quite a bit and then we're just going to drag this down like that and that'll fix that problem. A little bit of a cheat there but I don't think anybody will ever notice. Now what it is, is that's actually on a separate layer from the gray tone that's in the background of that. We've got to find the chain mail there and we're going to first start painting on this, we've got to make sure it's light transparent. We're going to darken this up, we'll just pick a dark gray, set this to multiply and we're just going to get in some shadows here, not texture. I probably just really worry about rounding out the legs with this for now, something like this. You can see it's pretty quick and easy because that texture is already in place, helping it along. What I have to really do is worry about shading it, leaving a little bit of a hint of a light source already. You can see it's pretty easy. Just a soft brush and let that texture help do the work. I still want to change the size of the legs by comparison but I'm not too worried about that because I've shown you before, there's lots of ways to get in here and edit that. I also want to get a little bit of a drop shadow from the penny plate that we're going to see here. Probably just do this triangular shape right behind it. Then I'm going to shade all of it down a little bit further. I should probably be doing the arm piece as well because a lot of times it's good to pinball around, I have to quit saying that, don't I? Really just work together with pieces like this. It's the same material, even altering two different spots of the character and just slowly build them both up together. Can I get a little bit of a hint of the musculature and the curve of the iron by putting that shadow in the middle there? A bit of drop shadow from the gauntlet and from the shoulder plate. You see that pretty much gets it done right there. Now we can get into a bunch of other stuff, some texture or this big droplets but I'm going to have a little bit closer and see if those work. I might want to size that down. Just remember, most brushes like this you can size down the particles and get some of this in there. Wasn't coming across as purple all because this doesn't have the same blending mode. Let's bring this bright to dark and let's just get a little bit of this texture in there, it's not too overly clean and perfect. I'm going to grunge it up a bit. Little bit of grit there and likewise we can scale those really far down and try to get a little bit more finer effect in there. We can also bring that to a light source and going the opposite. You can do some really neat, glitter effects with this type of look. You can also do stars really easily. You can do a space scene or a night scene. I might even do some stars in the top portion. I guess I got to do it up here too, something like that. Now if I add this texture in, it almost seems to be merged and the reason being if I just start painting the highlights, I'll show you. If I paint the highlights here with the highlight brush and make sure I'm on the light source, it's going to look good but if you were to really analyze it, it's not picking up the texture. It's going to really make the texture look a bit more flat. That's really why even before I added the shadows, it's probably a good idea to merge things but I think it's definitely going to work better if we merge it before we apply the highlights. Let's try that, we may need the shade, the texture and a bit more. We're going to take the chain mail, we're going to drag here, make a copy. We're going to bring that down to here right above the chain mail paint, take off the visibility here and then we're going to merge this down. Actually it's just neat without it but I got to wonder if i want to soften up the visibility of the texture because it's pretty prominent but we could also think about introducing it as a blending mode as well, we could do overlaying. You see there it even took on some of the properties of the underlying layer that's already shaded. Let's try a couple of these that when I add hard light maybe. What we want to do is just really go back to normal and see if there is any real difference, darken, nothing, multiply, pretty much nothing, overlay a little bit, it basically lets through the light. Color burn, got a little something there, not much. Hard light, nothing. Let's just do this, let's go ahead and just merge that together and now let's just shade over top. We've got our light transparency set still and let's try to do our light source now with add glow or better yet, let's do Color Dodge because it shouldn't leave the darker spots in place. That is painting over the texture but it's actually painting over both. It's not giving me the effect I'm looking for. Let's try that again. I guess let's try art glow. So what I want is to paint actually through, that's about area right there. So I wanted to grab more of the highlighted area, but leave the dark in place. So one way to do that and one way to really make this work more effectively is actually go back through and hand paint the highlight. Because then you're going to get a lot more control and obviously it's going to take you a bit longer, but you're going to get exactly what you're looking for. So what you want here, you want to really make sure that the highlight doesn't hit the same degree and intensity, and every spot. If you notice, if I just bring out the highlight, on some of these chain mail pieces it starts to look a lot more realistic than it does over here. So that's really how you want to think about it. Then after you hit it again with the highlight, it's going to retain that. It's going to brighten it up even on the middle sections, but it's also going to retain the higher points that you already defined. It really depends on just how much time you want to put into your work to make it look more realistic and effectively, better. But this is one of the ways that you can do that. So now probably would work to touch better if I merged the texture in earlier on. We could definitely try it that way as well. But I think for the distance that we're going to be viewing this from, that's going to look pretty good. Like you see that it starts to read is pretty realistic and we can go from that and expand upon it. We could basically start with a strong highlight through the middle, and then work out to the sides. Then as the light source bends around the leg, we just quit doing this. You can actually reverse it and go on the opposite end of the shadow area. You can shade more of the middles. Lay all of them together. You'll eventually shade some areas where you don't see it at all. That gives you a nice little variants because right now you can see every little link and that takes away from the realism. If you take this set to a shadow brush that multiply, maybe put this as your dark so you can work back and forth really quickly and then shade some of these where you just don't see them. It doesn't all have to be in like a concise way like an all unified direction like this, it can be that just in some areas you have some blachness and some darkness. That's typically what's going to give you more realism, is that type of randomness that you think about when you put it into your work. So maybe a little puzzle on the edge of the material. That's always a good idea every time you can incorporate just a tiny little bit of shadow from material or edge changes. That always makes it look a lot more believable. Again, let's work from a distance here and see if this is point to go with I hope it is. See how that leaving that little blachness in the leg there, makes it look more realistic. So again, some of them you want just paint it away where you don't see them at all. You can shade from the bottom-up to make it look more. Generally, when you shade something from the bottom-up, I think I already mentioned that, it makes it look larger and more imposing. You can give some immediate depth by doing that. Then back to the highlight brushes switched to this, then switch to this and you're ready to go. I'll designate that highlight a couple of spots here, and we could also do the bounce light obviously and get a little bit on the side there. But I think for this part, I'm actually going to leave that out. Might look more effective. I might add it later, but right now it looks more effective just with highlights on the top of the highest surface basically. So get in here, do just a little bit of the chain links. Every now and then you can do one that's just like really bright and it's catching the light more. You can obviously draw like a little sparkle or something in place that in there and add more detail if you want. I'll do one more pass with the shadow just cause I like that blach in the other leg and want to see a little bit of that in this one. There we go. We're going with the arm, get a little bit of that in there. So now we're going to grab a little bit of the color from the background. Let's pick soft brush, hold Alt, something in the purplish, pinkish whatever area. Let's go, we are still on there. Just to test this out, I'm just going to go ahead and create a selection from this. So again, right-click select from layer. So this, doesn't always have to be an added layer, but it's a really great way to tests your facts. I'm going to set it to overlay. Let's set this to normal. Let's just brush in a little bit of that. Bounce light that we want in here, doesn't have to be very prominent. But it's just going to give it a more interesting appeal. It just makes sense now with that background that some of that would be hitting this reflective surface. Just like that commodity to deselect and we could toggle that on and off and see the difference that it makes. Again, I forgot the hammer up there, which I seem to forget each time. So let's go back to the selection added up there, as well. Man, did deselect. So what will you see? It starts to pull all this together. It starts to make it again more cohesive and look like she's in that environment and as we finish this off and keep tightening up edges will start to incorporate that more from object to object within the scene. Okay, so now let's work on her hair and we'll move on to the sword and shield. Then we'll start doing some edge work and really pulling this all together. So let's press forward. 20. Painting the Hair: Let's remember to name this layer. This is actually the Chain Mail. I'll just call it color C for color effect. We're going to grab the hair and lack of transparency it's already set. Let's zoom in here a bit. I didn't want her to have light blue hair as you may or may not realize. I think I'm actually just going to go with a whitish silverish hair just because there's already so much color going on here. I don't want it to be too over the top and I think it looks pretty cooler to give a mythical character like this a bit of white hair anyways. What I'm going to do is just take the bucket tool, fill that with white. We are not better yet, I'm actually going to leave the blue, because the blue will actually give us a bit of bounce light effect. We're going to paint right through the blue. I'm going to take the brush here and just go with the direction of the strands that you see. I'm also going to make sure to skip areas. Whenever I paint here, I'm basically trying to get the larger chunks or masses of hair, whatever you want to call it, then also the smaller strands. I want to make sure that I don't try to paint every strand. I guess is the reason why I look for the larger sections. I skip around and I don't see it bounce around again, but I do. I try to find these larger shapes. I may get in here and get the larger pieces first like this and work into the smaller strands. You'll notice when you study a lot of painters, they all talk about working big to small. It does save you a bunch of time and it is a great way to really focus on your work. I don't know that it works with everything that way but it can, if you just get the large broad strokes out of the way first and come back and detail helps you to work through that process effectively. Let's say this about all we want to be with the larger directional shapes that we got. You can use things like hair brush. You can really just size the brush down smaller to get in the texture work whatever you feel most comfortable with. Just because I've already got it or is it right over here? I should have a hair brush because I made them before. I'm pretty sure there's one right there, hair brush. What this is, it's just already got a little bit of separation and texture into the brush. If I was to show you what that brush looks like, I scale this up, let's see it's really just a bunch of dots staggered together, so much like a stippled brush and you see the effect that it has over there. What happens is it gives you this nice texture to work with. It's here, horse at the multiply just go to normal. As you start to paint them more and more, there's an overlap it, it will start to get some of that texture and build in. I'll pick a bit of a darker gray here. Hopefully you can see it. I don't know if you're going to see much of the texture from this smaller application of it, but it's there I assure you. I actually like drawing in the shapes more what I started with. I'll probably go back to that a bit more, but right now I'm just trying to get a little bit more background information in there. I might set this to multiply now. I'm going to darken it up quite a bit and then work back into the lighter details. Anything about multiplied tool is every time you pass back over it, it's going to make the darker as dark until it gets to black. Which is great sometimes because when you're really trying to figure out how much contrast or how much darkness you want in a given area you're painting. You don't have to keep switching brushes or switch the color tool or whatever. You can just simply keep brushing over top and keep building up texture. I have found myself using that one quite a bit. If you noticed the ends of a hair look a bit off, we got to start working on that hair shortly. The hair's going behind the armor there, which I guess actually does make sense because the armor is foreshortened, so we may not have to adjust that. I was thinking we'd want to bring that in front of the armor. Let's take this brush again and let's now set it to probably low dodge in back to white. We switched brushes, didn't we? What I'm going to try to do is just pick apart little areas where the light source would be hitting it and try to further show the depth of the folds of hair. The best thing to really think about when doing hair is like flowing ribbons, interweaving and blowing around one another seems to be the most effective way to remember it and to paint it. The other thing is that you can brush across it in the other direction. You don't want to use this one because you're going to get that texture. You could see it right there but you can take that. We could also bump down the opacity and just use it a bit larger in the same direction. But you can also take a soft brush and go on the opposing direction. It'll work pretty good for this as well. What I want to do, I thought I wouldn't like that blue in the background. I really don't. I'm going to get that out of there by going to tonal correction, hue saturation and drop in that right down because it's actually become a distraction. Let's go ahead and go back to our mask once again. Let's erase the lines from here. You can see rather quickly, it already makes sense on its own. It doesn't really need those lines. But now, the thing we're left with is the edges back here look a bit weird. Still doesn't look as dimensional as it could. Still looks a little bit flat. But we'll fix that, but we've got the lines out of there. We're slowly getting into the part where we don't need hardly any of this line work. We still need it for the skin if got to paint the skin obviously and we've still got to tighten up our edges but we're slowly getting to where it's not as necessary. So back to the hair. Let's keep refining this. I'm going to go back to the hair brush again and set this to multiply again and just try to get a little bit more depth and texture to this. I can pop the opacity and the brush density. Generally, it can be said that you keep all the opacity and brush density and things like that. Even your tablet settings are set to firm all of these things when you're conceptualizing, when you're trying to figure out what you want to see. Once you have that information in place and you're a lot more deliberate about your line making or painting or whatever. You could really bump up the stuff. It's also dependent on how light handed you are. If you're very light handed and you're able to release gently push on things, then you probably want all that set a lot more to the higher settings anyways because you're just that light handled where you're going to press very gently on the canvas. I'm very heavy handed so I need everything turned down until I'm very ready to make my deliberate marks on the painting on the Canvas. Now let's take a soft brush. Same thing, Shadow, Multiply and let's put some of that in there just with a soft brush. Again, whenever you vary up things like this, up until this point, we're really building up texture more than anything. Now we're shaping the larger forms and trying to picture, okay, is this area back here receiving less light, so let's paint that right down, but all that texture is there that we put in place. You see, we still got to fix the ends of the hair quite a bit. We could brush all those down. But then If we come back with the light source and a highlight, all that texture will come right back, still there, just waiting for the highlight, waiting for the light sources. Let's see if it comes back pretty easily. Then it makes it really nice to be able to pick apart the work and say, okay, you don't want light everywhere, but where would it make the most sense? Where would it help bring depth to this? A little bit back here. Let's zoom back and see if that's working. Something like that. Now let's fix these edges and maybe introduce a little bit of the surrounding color. We're going to take off the light transparency. Let's see, probably the best way to do this, let's go to the Smudge Tool. Let's grab the Finger Tip brush and see if we can go with this. This brush is great because it will pull the paint pretty much as far as you want to take it. You've got a stop shy of where you want, but it's got pressure sensitivity, so you just get these little flexity end of the hair. If you notice, even if I grab the lighter or darker color that's already there, it's going to extend that. The trick becomes how to do it in a way where you can get just enough of that and you probably will have to blend away some of it. But now, the thing to be aware of is that, if you pull it away from the existing color like this way, you're going to expose some area behind there because we've done so much chopping of segmenting the work. It's not a big deal, but just be aware that if you end up seeing some of that background color, it's just because you've pulled against the stuff that's already there. But this is a great way to add that little bit of depth right at the end to lots of things really, but definitely with hair. I almost want it to fade a little bit with the opacity, but instead of worrying about that with the brush setting, I'm just going to show you how we're going to blend that. You don't want to go too awfully crazy with this. It's easy to overdo. You can see right there, it started to pull away from that blue there. You'll also want to really size up the brush, size it up and down. Again, not thinking too much on just strands, but also thinking in larger area of the hair, larger bulk shapes. This can be said to go in front of the hairs like this, so you can get a very 3D look at times if you use it in just the right way. But again, like any great tool, it can quickly get overused as well. You want to make sure too not to make all the hairs going in the same direction. Choose that Command Z to correct the work. That, at least, broke up the monotony of the edge there. You can make some of these really tiny, especially if you're going for more realistic feel and something that's high definition where the viewer is going to be able to zoom in and see every little detail. Then also, you can combine this with the Blur Tool and just softly blur some of these edges. In fact, that'd probably take the brush density way down and just slowly blur some of this, which we'll be doing this to a lot of the edges anyway, because it just brings it all together. You don't want everything to be entirely in focus. It just seems to be too much, going to kill the effects. Just glance around there and soften up some of those edges and it'll look a little more realistic. In fact, if you're doing the hair moving, like you've got a character that's in a dynamic poles, then this can be really helpful because you want to blur those hairs quite a bit to make it appear that they're flying through the air. Now let's take and add just a little bit. Remember, even though we've changed the shape of this and everything, it's on that layer, we can still define a selection from that and it'll grab all those little strands pretty accurately. Manga Studio does a fantastic job of that. Let's add another layer over top. Let's take just a little bit of the background color. Now we really have our choice and we could probably even make the argument that both colors could go in there. But I think just to continue on, let's go ahead and put the purplish color on this side. Set this to Normal at first. We can even do something where the purple is more to this side of her and this blue is more to the back. Just to try to add them both in there, but we definitely want the purple coming from the atmosphere. A little bit of that in there. I'm actually going to air on this side of more rather than less. It seems a bit pretty subtle at this point. I'm just going to brush it throughout a little bit and then, we'll try the combine mode again, so I'm going to hit Command D to deselect. Let's try Overlay. Let's check that from a distance because I want it to be in there, but I don't want it to hurt. If you notice if I go to Normal, it's there, and it actually looks probably a touch more realistic, but what it's done is actually blended down some of the detail. By using Overlay, it does tend to oversaturate the effect, but it lets all those highlight show through, which I think I like more. I'm going to leave it at that for now, and we'll name this layer and what better than hair then C for color. That'll get us the hair going for right now. We might touch up some more as we progress, we'll see. Now let's go ahead and detail the weapons and then we'll get to the skin tone and really start to bring this all together. 21. Painting the Shield: Now we're going to detail the shield. Let's go to the outer shield here. And both of these are locked transparent sororities, so we're good there. Let's just start stippling it first or adding some texture because we're going to need a rough this up a bit. So let's go ahead and add some simple shading, currently set to own resume in there. So again, you can adjust the particle size, which is really nice for a variance, and you can really overdo it in the beginning. I'll start pretty heavy just to show you what I mean because you're going to apply some different paint affects over top. Then we'll go back to some texture brushes and let's just pick metal dense. So these are some random chips, done some things, those could be said to be on the armor too. But what's nice about this is, your picture of the shield would get beaten up quite a bit more. So we can do a little bit of that. Here's another stipple brush, so you could add some variants and then we'll just go to a regular soft shadder, so to multiply, and we'll start to give them some of the shadows. I see there's just a little bit of that pink in there. Let's just go to a regular dark if anything we want to stay more towards a brownish earth tone to a dark. Let's try that. So I'll just get on some quick soft shadows, just too dark it up. Well, I won't darken up quite a bit and then even just randomly throw in some shadows. So it's not too even. So thus far, I've made things a little too even I need to randomize them a bit more. Then we are going to put shadows around any segments and an edge shadow, something like this could be said to be on both sides. Now, it really depends on what we're going for if this is going to be spherical and there's probably a slight shadow on each side, on one side, it will be a little more predominant. If we decide to put an edge this like for instance, bringing something down like this and then making another edge to it, then it's going to shade something like that and that shadow could even occur from it being spherical. It actually looks a little bit more representational of the light being on the opposite side. So we're going to go with that. This is where experimentation and just try and a couple things is always best. Digital painting and drawing almost try to never settle on the very first idea. If I can help it because I might not find the best option there. So now let's said, that's enough shading just to get us started again, we can add these little shadows around the line work and the breaks of the shield is perceiving, there's a bit of design into the shield here and these areas. Probably a little bit harder edge shadow right to the very edge like this and then shade up. So while we're doing that, let's go ahead and jump to the inner shield areas and do the same shadows coming from the bottom up. Bit of a drop shadow from this is edging and I want to get this piece right through here and I want that to look a little bit more solid. So I'll just take the smooth watercolor brush and probably go with the dark and here dark gray and keep in mind, you could just brush this, I'm pretty solid. If you've got a good control with it, it's pretty easy brush to use. But if you find yourself struggling always remember that shift click works with every brush. So it's highly powerful to be able to utilize that in certain areas like right there. So we really get a nice quick straight edge and get some clean effects just by clicking, holding Shift and clicking again. So very easy to use. What we'll do is we'll go ahead and colorize this the same way. So look as if these two materials are similar in some way, this part would probably need to be more of a leather other than a metal, but we'll just go with a metal. It's a [inaudible] piece. We can get away with it. When it's funny, even when doing things like this shifts its sort of thinking [inaudible] to really get your hand through there and then you have to think about the material you're applying based on that. But we'll go ahead and go with that. It should be fine. We want a little bit of light source back here, but not much. we want to, again, perceive that it's pretty much in shadow. But you still want some transitional lights so that you get the roundness on the forms. You can even do a little bit of edge lighting on this piece and then we can paint that back so it's not so predominant. Then you can even take the brush density way down and you could do a smaller edge light on the bottom, but less apparent. So let's do density and a model paint pretty low. We've just got to remember to put those settings back. Let's see, I can get a real subtle difference from the top to bottom. Likewise, you could just say, well, there's not going to be the light down there, it's going to be more shadow. So we could jump all this back up and go with a dark which are [inaudible] make a little more sense. So just leave like that when you drop a shadow in there. Then we can start to build on a little bit more edging and shadow and shade to the other areas. Again, we want to just randomize and rough it up a bit as we go. So probably definitely not as rough as the exterior parts. It's going to get all battered and beat up in combat or something like that. But we still don't want this to look all nice and clean like it does now. So again, we can jump into texture. So hopefully you see that there's really no right or wrong way to apply the texture or any great time you can put it in the front or in the back. Like I said before, if you're going to put ahead of the time, you probably just want to [inaudible] on the side of a little bit more because you're going to paint over it. So now I'm on the end of it, quite not the end of it, but still I'm a little bit more to the end of the painting process on the interior of the shield. I have to be a little bit more hesitant to overdo it, unless I plan on getting back in there and painting through it some more. Painting over is more, I should say. There's little things and just randomized rough spots. Let's say, we'll probably start to get away from some of the line works. Let's go to our mask layer. Let's erase this back. I don't know if all of them have got these lines here in the wooden part of the shield or whatever I was perceiving it to be, but we'll slowly push this back and see what it looks like here. Pin back, it's starting to make sense, it's starting to look about what I was after. Then also, like everything else, I can jump into the inner part of the shield, edit, tonal correction, hue, saturation. Jump that down a little bit. Now, I'll leave it, I like it better more saturated at this point. One of the things I'm going to end up showing you too is post processing where we control the saturation in different parts of the painting. That'll be a good thing to show you how to balance that out. Also, at this point the shield looks pretty flat across. We have some shading at the bottom, but that still doesn't make it look like it's got any bend. If we wanted to get a bend in there, we could shade one side or notice the brush at the multiply. It's going to darken everything not just watch over the area. If we shade one side, that does it. Also, we want to get in there and make some randomized shadows and highlights just to make it more interesting. You can also think about shading right up the middle, because if it was bold through the middle, then it might have a deeper shadow through the middle. It's dependent upon how you want to shape that. But if we go back to here, you see it looks pretty flat. Let's just try in a little bit of shadow up the middle. I'm dabbing that in there because I want to try to randomize it as I do it. A little bit heavier shadow up here maybe, have your shadow down here into the side. Try to create a little bit of blotchiness by sizing the brush down and staggering the brushstrokes. This is almost another way to texture while shading. Trying to find something interesting. Now, under the hand here we're going to want to see a shadow there. We're also probably going to want to make sure this lower bar section is darker than the top. It wouldn't make sense that this would be brighter. Also, we'll probably want to shade one side of it down versus the other side. Little things like that again, help to give it a little bit more of shape. Under this arm, we've got the arm creating a mask for us, but we need it to create a drop shadow. I think the shadow would actually get larger as it went this way. We select through there, then we'll glance across through here. I dislike so you see it. Again, it incorporates a little bit of a hard edge shadow, want it to be a little bit more noticeable than that. About there. Little things like that where we can get the effect that now the arm's creating a drop shadow there. It looks just a little bit more believable. We could get a little bit more shadow onto this bar here, like that. It's starting to have a little bit more effect to it. I think I'll keep these pieces here pretty dark, but I want a little bit more light source on them. Take that smooth watercolor brush again, smooth painter. Let's pick a white source, and let's detail a little bit of this. I could brush the same pretty heavily with white, so I can see it and get it in place, and then I can shade back over top if it's too much, too dominant. A good rule of thumb generally is to leave white for the very end of anything that you detail, and in your paperwork in general. White's pretty powerful as far as your light sources, and it's never that evident in anything. It's pretty much hardly ever seen as for pure white. But it's a great way to direct the viewer. You can use it as a tool in that sense where you can direct the viewer to something you're trying to get them to notice in the scene, keep that in mind. Now for the outer shield, I want to detail that a little bit more. This is an opportunity, when you come back to this part, where you can catch those little dense and dings , and things like that. You'll get into your light source, and keep in mind with this, we can add the light source in, but then we might go back and add some color. Chances are we'll add some color, and colorize the white that we're adding. You can get those little bits of imperfections brought out by highlighting one side of them. Notice I'm trying not to put a line right across the whole thing. It'll be real easy to go like this. It won't necessarily [inaudible] , but if I get a little bit more thought in there about the way the light might be catching certain areas a little bit more properly, and then curving over those areas based on the shape of the ding or dent that it's hitting, then it'll look a little bit more impressive. Likewise, I can do some over here, but maybe leave less of it, or even a lighter. I can even tone down the brush and do it intentionally lighter, but I can always paint it back. In that way, more light appears to be on this edge than over here. Again, just directing the detail and the viewer, and being more deliberate, more of the light sources. I think in the beginning you want to put a light source on everything. I still fight that urge because it always looks like it's adding detail or it's making things look better, but it's how it works as a whole to whether or not it is improving it or hurting it. You got to remember, if it's everywhere, it's going to be a bit of a distraction. I'm sitting here trying to paint on this area and realizing, wait a second, I'm on the wrong layer. That's always nice. Again, a little bit to detail. I don't want to overdo it, but make it look a little more interesting. Put it in there. You could show the brakes and the material well with a small highlight, and probably a little over done on that inside edge. But then I can go back with the soft brush, so at the multiply pick a dark, and on the center edge I can paint these bulge a little bit. They're there, but not as prominent. On that, you probably want to set to normal mode. Normal mode, you're generally going to wash back the detail a little more. Now, let's go ahead and see about adding a hint of color to this. Then we'll move on to the sword. Again, we're going to come back because we've still got to do our detail work or edge work, and we've got to make things more cohesive. We're going to be touching up the cap, and now that I've got more of it in place, the cap looks very plain Jane, and some parts of the arm are due as well, so we'll be bouncing back to finalize the work as we go here. Let's go on the outer shield area. We're already on that. Let's pick a brush, let's try overlay for the brush mode, and let's pick a little bit of this background color. I think the color that we're going to be going most with on the edge lighting is this magenta, and we want to keep it real light. Some of it needs to end up in there for a bit of that mood and a bit of that atmosphere reflecting off the surfaces. Now, I don't perceive this material being as reflective as, say, areas of her suit or definitely not those leg pieces. But it should have some reflectivity, almost everything does. It generally will make anything look a little more realistic if there's some other color bouncing in that material. Even if it's very subtle, I would say get in the habit of doing it, and then you'll start to see where it works and where it doesn't. But it generally will always make things look a little more appealing. We're going to wrap this one up here, and now we're going to detail the sword. Let's move on. 22. Painting the Sword: Okay, so now we're going to paint the details of the sword. Let's start with the hilt I guess. I'm going to hold arm and rotate the canvas, hold space bar and move that up and zoom into just the sword handle. You can see how bad the guard still looks. That requires a fair amount of work. Let's get into, let's see where is it at handle, okay right there. Now at the handle lot transparency. Now what we're going to want to do here, we've got some details that want to drop back in. We're just going to same thing, just brush in some general placement of light and shadow. We know the light is coming from the top left or in this case it's up now because I rotated the canvas and I want to do a bit of a gray sword here. I just want to keep these relatively basic because there's already a lot of color going on in the scene and I don't want it to become too distracting if I incorporate a bunch of colors into everything. I'll probably keep this pretty great toned here, monotone, and it's going to have some good detail anyway. What I want to do is get some brighter light source on the edges here. I want to perceive that there's going to be a bit of shadow from here, from the sword hitting the hilt and casting a shadow there. Remember, you can create your hard edges by simply selecting back and forth with the ALT key. This brush is really versatile in that way. I haven't been using it as proficiently as I normally would because I'm explaining the process. But I can generally go through a painting pretty quickly and just use this brush creating hard and soft edge shadows because of the way it works. Again, it's like press down hard to get maximum amount of pain, lighten up and increase brush size to blend. Scaled down to create a hard edge like this, and so just rather quickly I can get a nice soft edge transition with a hard edge on one side. It's really effective for that type of painting and that's showing that referred to as cutting, I believe is the term that a lot of people use. I just say hard and soft edge shadows because that's pretty much what I see through out any painting. There's just a series and a variation of hard and soft edge shadows and then that obviously combined with their knowledge of color theory and composition, all the other fun stuff. But it can really be broken down into those basic effects and then I think the real craftsmanship comes in when you start to learn where those go just specifically and how well you can use them to your advantage. There's obviously lots of interpretation that goes on in there, but that's how I see it anyways. So just getting these shadows in place, blending that paint around. You realize there's lots of settings over here to play with and mess around with. Those are kind of the ideal settings for me right now. But you know, if I can't get something to feel right as I'm applying the paint and then I'll go over there and make adjustments as well. So I might darken it right here. Leave a little bit of edge lighting on that very end edge right there. I might think about a little bit of a drop shadow to this detail right there and a stone here. Those little things here, just getting that into place and I'm going to draw the detail back and over top. What I want to do is get enough of the shading information in there, and I'm still not totally sad if I'm not having any color to it. I think I'm going to leave it just gray, but it's real easy to apply color over gray anyways, just what the combined modes and another layer, even the brush itself, you can do it. Let's say it's almost right. Let's give a little bit more variants with the soft brush. Set the multiply and then let's just shade this down a bit more in some areas. Again, just to give it some variation, we probably should do some bits of texture as well. Let's just do something in fact, I'm going to make it a little bit down the particle size. Little bit less noticeable I guess, but just some is better than non when it comes to texture. A little bit of that in there, and let's try that blurred spray, and this is nice because it just gives it that little bit of blurriness. Okay, so now, let's jump over to our mass clear here and erase this bag. Some of these lines here. You see I just softly push some holes back just so I can really watch it take shape, make sure there's enough information there for me to paint with. Back to the handle and that's where organization comes in and I could really segment these even further, but that's not too bad. But if I find myself wasting a bunch of time trying to sift through layers and I'll definitely add another group and another level of organization to it. Alright, so get little bits of light source and here try to give it a bit more detail. Now the other thing I have to be aware of, and I like to tell a fellow artists as much as possible. Be very concerned with overlay detailing too close to any of your pieces. That's probably one of the biggest hindrances with digital art. It's like the strongest benefit and sometimes a huge hindrance as the ability to zoom in to your work. You got to be very careful of that because for instance, you could be detailing the work far too much for where it's really at. So you got to get in the habit of really zooming back and being aware of what the end result is for the piece. How it's going to be viewed, from what level of detail is really needed for the end result basically. I'll just be very aware of that because you could be spending a huge amount of time on something that's not even going to be noticed. It could be something that you're going to detail and blur out like we talked about the background and things of that nature. Just be very aware of that. Especially if you're working on a client work, you have to be entirely concerned with the amount of time that something may take you and over detailing sometimes just not going to get seen is very dangerous, not dangerous but just something you don't want to do about them. Trying to push around this paint a little more, push back some of this edges. I feel like this dark edge on this right here just looks too unrealistic. I'm just using that brush to push that information back and make that edge a bit less predominant. Just remember, you've got all this gray detail in there, and you just want a color that, you could just simply grab a soft brush set to replace alpha. Let's pick a color of a soft blue stone, it seems to be like the running color scheme, so we'll stick with that and you just brush that in. You see it basically replaced some of that shadow so let's go back and try a different blending mode, and let's try overlay. You can see the colors are pretty good, it saturates it. The change is just a little bit, but keeps the information there. So as quickly as that we can land some color if need be, to an area like that. So that's about where I want the handle to be. I just want to add in the texture and detail now. I'm going to go back to the mask one more time, erase out any little bit of detail that I love so I can make sure I can really see it for what it is. You can go around it. Now, what I want to do is go back to the handle, I'm going to add a layer over top, and I'm actually going to draw over top of this with that pattern effect that I wanted to see. So I'm going to pick a pencil tool, and I'm just going to randomly draw this in. It's a little bit of blue in there but that might not be a bad thing. It's a little too much, let me just pick a dark. What I want is just really a texture effects. I'm going to draw these in. Hopefully, with some level of confidence here. Textures are one of those weird things some days I draw them well, other days I have to draw them twice, three times, whatever. But we'll just go with whatever I get here, I'm not going to be too critical. For one, I'm going to blend this inner parts, so it's not going to be as defined. I'm making it look more defined right now because I want see what I'm doing, but I really just want this random scroll work or something that's evident in the handle. So it doesn't have to be too pretty, I'd like it to be, but done is better than perfect. Let's just give it in there. Now, this is also an opportunity where when you do something like this you save it out. So when you do get it right, you save it and you catalog it. I have plenty of these textures, I could simply grab something from my library and throw it in here, but I don't know if that would teach you as much right now except for just telling that you should really get in the habit of doing that with your own work. But that's what I do. So whenever I am drawing on my better days for instance, and I get something right into my wall that looks really good, I'm going to save that. I'm going to create a layer or a copy of it and I'm going to save that and catalog it. Now the tricky part is saving things accurately where you can call them up when need be, so I like to use lots of keywords in my file names so that I can just do broad searches on my hard drive when need be. Food for thought there, it's not necessarily something you have to do if you're somebody who likes to redraw everything from scratch, that's definitely very cool, if you enjoy that and that's what you're good at. But there are those times when you could really just save yourself some heartache, and recycle your own art. Probably I already mentioned in this course because it's just something you find yourself doing when you're producing more and more art on deadlines. I can probably use this time to even get some of the detail. So you can see some of that detail was washed out when I erase there. I think what I need is a tad bit more definition so I'll throw that in there while I'm here. It's also a good time to tell you too, there's no right or wrong way when it comes to adding the line work, so you can see we're washing out the line work as we go here. But if you really want that kind of mixture of comic books style and digital painting, there's no reason you can't go back in here and redraw the line work back in, comes out really nice actually. Because you've got a lot of information in place now to guide that line work. There's really no set direction that you have to take when doing this. Almost there. Again, just enough to show there's some detail there, I'm going to give it another level of texture. You see it's not too pretty from this close-up shot, but hopefully it reads well from a distance. So now if we zoom back, rotate the screen, look at it, I think it adds a bit more to it. Now if you were to zoom right in, and like anything else you're going to start to notice more flaws, but we'll tighten it up even a bit more and then we can also use combine modes like anything else, so that some areas of it blend back. Let's try multiply, let's try overlay. Likewise, we can just paint over it. Now, we can also get in here. We can really just drop back the opacity as well. But I think I like it at full opacity, but what I might even do is depending on how much time I want to put on this, I'll call this handled texture. I may even add a new layer over top, and just bring out a little bit of light source. So let's go back to the smooth painter. Let's go to a white or someone close, and then I can get back in here and just detail just a little bit of escalating. So now what happens is the texture just doesn't look so flat. It doesn't take much, I could just get in here and add little bit of some pieces. Another technique that you can actually do is you can make a copy of this layer, move it, and color it white, and then erase parts back. For this particular instance I'm just going to show you how I do it by hand, but there's lots of little tricks when it comes to layers for creating puzzles and things like that by using the existing art and just shifting it. Remember what this brush you can blend the edges too, so you want it to look like it's coming in and out of focus or in and out of the light source. You got to remember on the previous layer, light transparency, so I could easily go right outside of the confinement. I'm just drawing over top of the texture. Let's pan back, if this is reading wall and then toggled the layer on and off. You can see it just gives a little bit more effect, makes it a little more interesting. I really don't need two layers for that, so I'm going to just hit Command E. You see as long as the layer is over top of the previous layer, it keeps that name. So that's always nice. Double-click here to straighten out the canvas, now let's do the handle and the blade. That actually took a little bit longer than I thought, so we're going to move on to the next lesson and do the handle on the blade, and wrap up the sword. So let's press on. 23. Painting the Sword Handle: Okay, now let's paint the lower part of the handle here and then the blade. What I want to do here is show you just a quick way to save time. We've got the handle itself, which is right here. Let's go ahead and just paint one of these whole segments. We'll start in the middle here. What I want to do is just start with a block then shape of some kind. I'll start with a light, just like see it better. Let's just go ahead and actually let's grab a solid brush. There is another way to get through this let's push our opacity back up. Let's go ahead and go right pass this oh I'm sorry, it's actually I'm live transparency right there, isn't it? That will be perfect. We want to create this shape and also we're going to do is just stagger the work. We're going to create one of them and then use it to make the rest. On repetitive patterns like this, it's one of the first things I see you like it might as well save the time. Some of these paintings can get really time-intensive if you don't try to take your little shortcuts like this. Okay, so let's say we got one like that. Let's create our selection. Let's hit Command C, Command V, I just want this to be its own layer. It's already light transparency and we'll call this handle, I'd use P for part, but it's going to look like paint. We'll just spell that out, handled part, segment whatever. Let's go ahead and paint this now and try to think about what it would look like. We want to paint some dark, we want to get this transitional line right here. There's going to be a shadow, a little bit heavier on one side from it. We also got this little bit of an overlap pattern that we're seeing in there. We want to get that in on each time. Let's jump to a soft brush set to multiply. I just want to darken this up quite a bit. The only thing I would say when doing this is really don't worry about adding texture to roughly match you can, but it needs to be a texture that's going make sense, repetitiously. For instance, if you did the spray, it needs to be even throughout so that you don't see patterns too much. I usually would wait to do the textures when doing this type of repetition. Let's go more to a black here, we set the overlay, that's why it's saturating it. Now if we want to be too overly critical, we can zoom up and really check the edge work here it looks a little bad. We can take the smooth water color brush or whatever really, and just sample the nearby color blended over. Now we also want to think about a little bit of a drop shadow. Let's go and do that while we're here. We're envisioning that the other part is casting just a little bit of a drop shadow. Then we can grab a light source. Just a little bit of a light source on that edge, just so it doesn't look too awfully basic. Maybe a little bit of an edge light on the front face of it, try something like that. Maybe these little pieces right here. Then I can obviously still go back and add some more dynamic light after it's all put together, but this will give us our starting point. Now generally, I would actually do all this straight up and down and then distort it back into place. We're going to try to make it work like this, but we may need to in fact do that. I'm going to drag it and see how it lines up. Just continue to do that a couple times before I merge these. It's working, keep going with this see what happens. Let's go up this way, yeah it's working. It's not that we got to be too overly critical ether because it's going to be a pretty small detail overall through the entire painting. Okay, so let's see what we got there. We got a little bit of a gap right there on this one. You know what it is, the distraction from the line work. Now what I want to do is go back to the line work here, erase this back so we can, so it's less obstructive. I can see a pretty much works here we might meet some touch up but it saved us a lot of time from having to paint that effect. Like I said, if you want it more perfect to actually design these upright like this, distort them into place, then cut the edges, they are pretty simple. Now let's go to these parts and we got to make sure that we don't grab the texture. We need to handle part copies. You can actually grab more, but I'll just click Command E and cycle down. it's going to continually merge those together. I just got to make sure that once I quit C handle copy that I checked the visibility and there's one more that's that part. We're going to merge that together. Now, keep in mind that this is the part where you could actually save this. I'll do that just to show you how I normally work. I would actually drag a copy of this and then I would take this copy and I'd put it into, let me scroll down a little further, my backup pieces or whatever. Just a little backup version of that then I go back to this one, hit Command E. Here's my handles. Now I can go in here and say, okay, I don't want it to bleed over this spot, erase that back. I can also take these they're not locked. I'll really can just merge them into the handle, but let me see what part I want to do there. Oh, and just so you know, when I take the visibility off and it doesn't disappear because this background layer is still in place. It's actually is disappearing, this is the handle. Now what I can do, I can take the handle part, right-click, go select from layer, create a selection. Zoom up here and see how some of it went outside of that area. I can just hit Command Shift I to invert the selection. Go back to the handled part, click on it, hit Delete. What that did is just allowed me to make sure it's staying within that confinement of my art work. That's important to try to do because then when you merge it down, like I'm about to write here, it all stays together. Now we've got that on one piece, we got the nice clean edge that we had originally. We've got some texture and place and now we can just jump in with the soft air brush or something like that. We can add some more little effects, that will drop sow here. Give it that randomized effect so it doesn't look so step and repeat. Now I'll shade down some of these areas on the side. Probably a pretty heavy shadow right there. It's not really one of those things that you had to do that, but I've figure would have be a good opportunity to show you that. Because there are going to be some areas in your paint work where that's going to save you just hours and hours. I would say that saved us hours it probably saved just I don't know 10 minutes or something, who knows. But there are going to be instances where that same technique I showed you will save you just huge amount of time. You got to be very aware of it. I'm going a little bit of differences here, let me go back to light source and set it to something else. Now here, we would like probably a little bit more specular effect. I can just punch in a brighter little light source and then softly blend to the sides and that journal will give you a pretty specular look to a shiny material. Then of course, little tiny glares here and there just bouncing around little textures, little make or whatever. You could choose texture with even a soft brush, but it's just whatever you'd feel comfortable with. All right so it's there. Again, this is all combined now so we can get a little bit of this in here and randomize some textures over here. We could also change the edge shaped pretty quickly if we wanted to. I'm going to leave it because I don't think that we're going to be that close up to this what's needed. But you would just create one little edge paint it and then copy it. Then you could do some overlapped scaly shape to that. All right let's go to glow dodge and let's try to just brush right through here. All right let's pan back. Yeah, starting to make sense and the handle looks a little [inaudible] to me so I'm going to shift that but let's see. Remember to check that the best way really go to the top of it. Add a layer, maybe grab some bright color like lime green or bright red or whatever. Then just take a line from here to here and draw it right through the middle and you see it is a bit off. If I go back, let's start from the sword. Go right through it, right through the middle of the sword right there. Yeah see how it's coming up right there to the right. I think we should be able to replace that pretty quickly. Because this is all now on one layer. What I can do there, just to fix that rather quickly, so create a selection right through here. Hit Command Shift T, and just bring that down a bit. As I'm looking at what really, I guess it should be right up the middle like this. But I'm looking at the line right down the middle that I've created. But I also want to look at the sides of the handle because if that line I created is off, then this will be off. Something like that. Remember too, if you get some weird little funkiness right there, you can cut it, place it behind everything. There's a lot of ways to edit right through the end of a painting, because you've got everything in place and you just start creating these pieces. Then just delete your guide layer like that. All right let's go and wrap up here and we're going to head over to the next lesson, where we're going to finish painting in the blade. 24. Painting the Sword Blade: Now for the sword blade, let's get into, what's that? A handle blade right there. Let's rotate this R for rotate, keep that on the screen there. Here we could probably just use a Polyline tool. Probably first grab right up the middle, some like this, just put in some quick shadows. Let's see with multiply. I'll just cut that bit of a Bessel right there. I'm going to try to do this entirely by hand. When I say by hand, I just mean, no added textures, just brush it all in with a soft brush, maybe some of the smooth water color, just because it is ultimately quicker to do that, and it really doesn't require anything else on something like this. Now, for the style, I'm going for, so I'm just brushing in those lines just so I can get that line work out of there. Remember I can hit "Command Shift I" to invert that selection while we're here. I really recommend doing that anyways, because it gives you an overall cleaner edge, you basically build in a stronger edge right there then trying to create two selections. We've still got our log transparency over here to guide us. We're not painting up into the background. As I've stressed throughout this, it's this highly powerful, great feature. It get a little bit of drop shadow and they're from these other pieces. I want there to be some [inaudible] and a drop shadow here. Let's go ahead and shade this tunnel a little more, then we also want to come back and start thinking about a little bit more light source, Chloe dodge, she's a white. We're using those bracket keys as you'll probably hear cycling up and down just to detail the work and use different brush size for each area, something like that. Those type of material I'm going to err on the side of stronger highlights. Again, like anything else, we can always paint the back, but it look a little more reflective. [inaudible] those, let me rotate this and look at it from a different angle, maybe not. Again, always trying different things but it doesn't always stick, figure I'll just call it something more plain like this. Let's solve to raise some of that line work while we're here. Let's go back to those side "Command Shift I". I get rid of some of those, but I need to paint them a bit more, edge lights and I got to always remember to jump back to the actual part I'm painting on, so blade. I think I mentioned this before, but it probably goes without saying, but essentially the more you do this, the quicker you'll be to really get that line work out of there. So just felt confident without it, but I think the beginning for me, even still to this day and I've been painting quite a while, but it's still just took good guide for me until I get to a certain level, but that's what I really like, this masking feature where you can slowly get rid of the information. Let's go back to shadow. Let multiply and I just really want the one side to be noticeably darker all the way around something like this. Now, let's deselect, and let's get rid of some more of the line work and see if it's working. Let's go ahead and go "Command Z", I'm actually going to save the selection, just to be save, so convert this selection layer call this Sword Blade. Again, for organization purposes I can just drag that all the way down to selections. Now, if I need that again, I don't have to worry about clicking right through there, maybe making some will artifacts by being slightly off. It's not that big of a deal, but it doesn't take that long to make their copy either the selection layer. Now, let's get that line work out of there, you can see I've missed some right there, so I'll leave that for a second. The rest of it is working well, I think. It's funny as much as I thought I painted through all there, I did miss some parts. But that's enough information for me to paint through there even this as but let's just zoom in a bit more to right here, go back to the blade, go back to the smooth painter brush, grab a dark and just work on some more of these details. Actually I wanted something that needs to be even from side to side. Try to always treat it all on a Canvas, even bringing it closer to a straight edge like that, like the side of the screen, can be helpful as a guide. You also have things like guides in here, you can obviously drag the guides once you have your rulers up. But you can also go to View Grid, once the Canvas is straight, you can use something like this, but you can also create your own grids as well, which is probably better because you can rotate the layer that way. Perspective tools, I'm not going to get into perspective on this one, that's another monster. Let's get a little bit of shadow over here. I can just grab parts of the painting and push those around even with this brush. This isn't even as strong as like that fingertip blending brush, but you can still manage to do it, it's really as the most versatile brush I think I've used definitely in this program but even throughout as it's very neat brush and the way that it functions. If I want these to be perfectly symmetrical from side to side, I could just grab them and flip them and then repaint them so that you want to see more of the one side from this perspective just to convey a little bit more depth there. But if I was so concerned with them be an absolute perfect, it's very easy to just grab the one and flip it. I'll just try to make it work with what I got here. I find yourself working too hard to put down the paint, just grab something like a pencil tool. They're written the soft brush really fine will work the same way. But you can always apply these effects and then blend them back anyways, so don't work too hard putting the paint down, I guess, hurry up and get the information in place and you can blend afterwards. All right, and you see these sides are very different from one another. I'm going to try to do as clean that up hopefully. I'm going to take the G-pen, set to transparent side is up way higher. I could just make the argument that they're not supposed to be symmetrical or even, but if I can make a couple quick changes and at least get a little closer, I'm going to shoot for that. They're actually pretty far off now that I'm really paying attention to it. I'm going to slot thinner through here. I think I am going to have to copy it if I do want these to be somewhat even. Let me show you that just because I don't want to make note of it, not fix it now. If I click through here, I use the poly-line tool. This is going to be a pretty ugly selection right here, but that's fine. Bunch of small clicks to make that curvature, right straight down the middle here. We can go outside of the edge there, "Command C", "Command B", and we should have a backup version of this now. Go edit, transform, flip horizontal, and rotate. Then just a line at right here, and it's really best to do this type of stuff early in the design. As you can see it'll probably look a little bit skewed from the handle itself, so I'll have to try to make that work. We still need to rotate it a bit more. Character, that's probably best. Now go to the one behind it, previous back these areas, you see it shifted from the blade, so let's zoom back and see that's going to hurt it, it's pretty noticeable. Now what I want to do is, and the whole handle is really another to notice from this distance. I almost want to move the blade over. Let's go and merges part down, and let's see if we can just shift that blade over bed. I want to make a little bit cleaner selection through here now. I'm going to use the ellipse lasso, draw that here. Hold "Shift" right there, and just remember nice smooth poles will usually get you a better line. It doesn't have to be too precise but want it relatively clean, so we don't have to clean up like we do on this top edges there. What I'm going to do is I'm going to cut this and move it. Just going to show you how to fix something that's off like this. Hold "Shift", click around this, make sure you get the whole perimeter shape of this play, and we'll over pass that, double-click here. You have to let go a shift to or you'll get up, it'll snap to angle. Alright, so hit "Command X", "Command V". Now what happens is we're able to really shift those because it could be said to be behind this. If I hit "Command T" I've got a lot more area of edit to be able to move this around and get it centered in between these two pieces of the hilt, a little bit better something like this. I also want to check the alignment of the handle. Now we just got to clean up the edge distance here and there. Let's just use "Command Shift T" and drag this out, and drag it back to here, so that's just the quick and easy way to do it. It doesn't distort too badly, and then if we need it to be smaller up top, we just pull these together like that. You see it condenses that down, then we just have to worry about the alignment. We'll just do it visually for now, are actually going to save this as a backup layer just in case. I'll merge it down in case it's a little a little bit off. Then we just drag that behind the blade area, and you can see it pretty much fixes that and I will just soft erase the line work again. At this point, we'll just get it all out of there. Then from here we would just rotate again, zoom up, checking the edges. Realignment issues, this edge to the sword it could be a little bit better. Some of those can be still more well-defined, but for the most part it's there. What I'll do is just clean up some of these edges. Now one last thing I want to show you when fixing something like does is you can also think about it, in terms of painting behind the object as well. Generally you're going to paint on top of the objects for the most part, but if you need to, you could also puts the beautiful thing about layers. You could drag one below, we'll call this blade fix or something, blade fix, and we could pick a pretty noticeable color difference, maybe a white. You can draw the shape that you're going to fix it with but beneath it. I think sometimes this is easier, because it allows you to focus on these a little bit more, where if you're painting on top of it, you start getting worried that you're maybe hurting some of this other paint work, so what you do here is you just focus on fixing the edge like that. Then once that's correct, you just take the top one. Now keep in mind it's going to change the name since this was below. We'll hit "Command E", it's going to do that, but if you select both of them, I believe then it'll keep the top name if you combine selected layer. Yes, I'll see that so you can keep your, so say you don't have to retype all of them. But now it's locked like transparency, you just take one of your blending brushes, and now you can just focus on taking the existing paint, pushing it to the edge. It can be a really neat way to fixture you edges and pretty quick to do, so It's always nice. While we're here, clean up some of the other bad paperwork to I'm saying. This one you can see that the there's a little gap there, so just toggle off the visibility, grab the neighboring color painted it in, and then lock it again, and blend out anything you need to. Just little things like that, so I've got to clean up the edge there on the sword, but actually I guess that could be a little bit of an imperfection. Then that's everything, as we detail this further, would this sword be this clean? It have some imperfections, we could go in there and grab probably that metal dense brush would probably be a good one. Make sure we're on the actual blade. Just a couple little imperfections, probably more of a dark there, and on this I'd probably get more into the edge of it. Do some of this work here. That's what happens if you try to paint on something that doesn't have locked transparency. Handle because they played handle right there. Again, just a little bit so it doesn't work so to awfully clean or whatever. Then lastly, like we've done on everything else, we want to incorporate a little bit of that color. Let's grab a soft brush, let's set it to overlay. Probably screen motives, wallets test that one I'm always trying these different combined modes because they're just so versatile. Again, this is pretty reflective and we're probably going to do more than just this magenta, we are probably going to get some of those blue in there as well. We want to think about these different things reflecting from the surface. A little bit of this over here. I think like overlay a bit more, it's more noticeable. Okay, let's go and stop here and then we'll continue on to the next lesson. 25. Painting the Skin: Now we're going to go and work on the skin tone. This can always be a tricky topic. That's actually why I want to leave it for last. I'll probably do the skin tone and then the face as a separate lesson or two because faces can be pretty tricky to get right as well. What I want to start with is a smooth watercolor brush. I find this one to be really helpful for doing skin tones. Then what I want to think about is what degree the skin tone might be. So there's a lot of variations when it comes to skin tones. I want immediately first to find the light source. So I'll go with what I've got here already on this part of the leg. I'll do a little bit of a dual light source, not too heavy. I want to make sure that the predominant light source is here. Then what I have to do is just think about where the hard and soft edge shadows are in the way that it blends across. So there's going to be a little bit of light source on the belly there, like this, but then as it progresses back, we're going to run into some shadows here likewise. We're going to get some shadows around the belly button, maybe a little bit of edge lighting. There's a lot of things that go into painting skin. Skin is very reflective for one. So you got to always think about the way that light is bouncing around skin. Skin has a variety of shading. It's not all just soft shadows. There's definitely some hard-edged shadows in there that will really make it look more impressive. Skin tends to have a lot of little areas, sometimes just subtle areas of edge lighting or rim lighting like you see me doing there. Likewise, skin has a lot of colors. There's never just two colors in skin. So I think that's the toughest thing to grasp in the beginning because you really go into a lot of the paint work going. Well, I just need light and dark, light and dark, and it doesn't work that way. You only get so far with that and your paintings will just look mediocre or whatever. So what you have to do is incorporate lots of color and skin. I generally will try to put at least three, four colors, sometimes five, sometimes more. It just depends on the lighting situation of the scene and things like that. But never just two, never because it'll look like what we got here, just very fake, like a toy or something, which I don't know. Some toys are made really well, you'd be really lucky if it looked like a toy. So you see, I'm just getting into the primary light source at first. Then I'll start to think about, there's going to be a little bit of bounce light under the arm and things like that. So I started to get that in. There might be a little bit of adds light on the muscle, but really subtle if even there. There's going to be a pretty strong light source on the nose. It's going to be on the top of the cheeks. I'm just going to put in some basic starting points to the face. Like I said, we'll detail this in the upcoming lessons because it's going to be a little bit more time-intensive to get the face right. But I usually throw in the basic spots of lighting that are pretty consistent. That's the funny thing about doing this type of stuff is you realize that as different as people look, as characters look, as all the different imaginative stuff you could come up with, there's actually some consistencies and you can take solace in that because you realize that it's not so daunting that there are a lot of little alarm consistencies that you can rely upon to get through the work. Because at first you just don't know where to put anything, and it all seems so distracting or confusing or whatever. But then you realize as you study more and more photos and from life and things like that, that you realize that there are some consistency that you can memorize. So that's a nice. We are just brushing and paint and softly shadowing it, trying to leave a little bit of crisp edge work here and there. Not a ton, but just some. Now what I want to do is start getting into some of the next color. I picked this beginning base as the mid tone. I want to go a bit darker than that, so I can hold Alt. I could be creating a palette as well, but I'm just going to select from what's here. It should be fine. So what I want to do is pick something that's got a little bit more of a reddish brown, I think it's called umber but I'm never really good with the names. But something in here, visually that's got a little bit more of a shadow color. It doesn't mean that I have to place it on here in full intensity. It doesn't have to be like that. I could start off like that, I can blend it out. Just really be open to mixing colors on the canvas. I think especially with skin, you really need to just put it in their real subtle and then step back and look at it. Then if you nail the right color, the right value or shaded color or whatever, just select from it. I'm going to continue to use this dark that I've got but it's going be real easy to go overboard with it. So just be very open to after placing the shadows, maybe selecting from the lighter tone and blending back and creating a new color, a new version of that or whatever, and then selecting from that. If you do that, you'll get a lot more subtlety in your work. You're not just going in and applying this one color through the entire piece because that can tend to look over done and just a bit too strong. For things like skin, you want a bit more subtle effect. So you don't want at the same intensity through the whole way. It's just like when I go to do the light source, chances are the brightest point of the light source will be on the face where she's higher up. It's not going to be as strong on the face, as it is down on legs, hopefully not. Because it won't be as convincing if I do that. I want it to be a little bit more impactful to the face. Likewise we want a little bit more shadow down here and through here. Then I'll probably come back with even a darker shadow. Again, I'm able to get a nice hard edge shadow where I need it to look more like a drop shadow, then a smooth transition. I'm going to place this throughout this tone just because I'm still building up. But I still need to start thinking about how to incorporate more color. There's going to be a rosiness in the cheeks, and that needs to be in a couple areas. The nose, generally, will be a little bit more pink and have a little bit of that rosiness to it. Generally shadows, especially in an environment like this, are going to have more blue to them, blue or green but generally blue. Definitely lots of ways to interpret all of this, but that's what I'm shooting for anyways. Then the other thing is sometimes even with light sources, with a stronger light source, you'll tend to get a little bit of a soft, darkened area by the light source. But I want that to be very subtle. I may just keep painting that back and forth till I get it just right. What else here? Notice I'm trying to do this from a distance for as long as possible before I zoom in and start doing any detailing work. This should all read from a pretty good distance. The only thing that I should probably try to avoid is lines, especially on the interior, you can see a line right here. That's not going to occur. Everything should be more transitions than lines. That's something that takes a little while to get used to, especially for me, because I came from common drawing where I put lines and everything. So I have to really fight that urge and just get smoother transitions. Lines can be made from abrupt transitions like the drop shadow, but that's pretty much it. I think the right way to say, it has more value changes then an actual lines. I'm doing a little bit of shadowing on the back of the neck. So basically the hair is come in front of the neck right here. Just a little more shading right here and drop shadow from the armor. So hoping you see I'm just slowly applying paint and trying to work up to it bit by bit. Very subtle changes because it's really easy to overdo skin. Very easy. Now I'm basically using the brush as a blender, and not applying paint. I'm just pushing back somebody shadows because I just felt like they're a bit too strong. Using the brush at a larger scale and just the weight of my hand really. I want some shading to the face, a little bit of drop shadow under the armor here, a bit of shadow under the nose. Again, I'm just kind of blocking some of those amber, but we'll get in detail more of those afterwards. A lot of this is just studying, like really studying the way that leg rests on the body. Drawing and painting out over and over again until it makes sense. But it is one of those tricky topics. It's like drawing hands. You'll never really stop getting better at them. It's best that you just think that way about it. If you think that you're going to get to a level where you can't get any better, well if you think that way, you probably will stop getting better, but you never really beat it. You never really overcome the challenge of just continually improving upon where you're at. I want to get some rosiness, like I said, under the cheeks, make the skin look more alive. We're going to put that throughout in a couple of spots too, so it just brightens up. Let's go ahead and do that. Let's zoom into here, and let's pick a bit of a rose color, something with a bit more pinkish red. Just check this real quick. Something about like that. Now we're going to create a backup of this. Just to ensure the difference once we apply these effects. Let's add a little bit more of this color. Let's try replace Alpha. There in there we're on the nose, around the eyes, I will fill in the lips. Really you can go through this, and a lot of the mid tone areas and liven up the skin. I'm just sure I want to give it the feeling that it's appears more alive, and has some blood flow. Like for instance more than the ears, probably a good idea. In pretty much any areas of the skin where it would get thinner. But then I also I think it works well in the mid tones. Back to our thing of getting in just more color than just a couple of colors, definitely more than two. Then, a good thing to do, there's a lot of yellow in the skin that I need to get out, and that pretty much is because of the base color I started with. The best way to do that, or one of the ways to do that, is to go to edit, tonal correction, color balance, and what we can do is, start with the shadows. What's really neat about this is again, we can control shadows, half tones and highlights, but we can start to put in some blue into the shadows and pull away from that yellow. Let's see, I'll be honest, I actually just kind of manipulate the sliders and play around a bit more than knowing exactly what each one's going to do. All that I know is I'm trying to at this point get more than yellow effect out of the skin. Based on the scene she is in, there's going to be more blue and her skin anyways, I'm trying to really push that. Again, just slowly adjusting these sliders, and when in doubt, make a copy to actually like something more into that level just because it starts to feel like the scene she is in, while over here it doesn't. The other thing that you can do as well, is you can adjust these effects with a backup layer and then you can erase part of the layer. Essentially so you find, for instance, I don't want to use this pink, but say I did. So I thought this pink would be a great reflected light on the left side of the character. I can make a copy of this, make this affect change, then erase back all of it except the pink layer that I want on the edge. So there's lots of ways to really use this to your benefit. To get just the right effect you're looking for. You don't have to think of it as a entirety. Pass over the whole character. I still feel like it needs to be a bit more blue in the shadow, but it's making it more pink. I think I would combine that with removing the red, and then the blue here. You see it's really just above subtle changes. Let's hit okay here and let's go and check those in comparison to what we had before. So now I hopefully you can see by comparison there was a lot of yellow, and orange going on there. It's weird I almost notice it a lot more now that I see this one. Now this isn't finished yet, but it's getting closer. Then what I want also try to do, is add a little bit of actual blue back here. I'm not seeing enough of those blue from the background that I want to see as reflected light. I try and replace Alpha, I can also try things like again creating a selection layer from the skin, creating a layer over top, just brush this one with normal mode. Here we're actually introducing blue into the character. It'll kind of taken this again more as balanced slides which probably going to sit more on the sides, and in the mid tones underneath arm here and things like that. Again, we can master all of these over here and see if the combined mode makes it react a bit better, like hard light connect. We'll play around with it, but again that's how I'm going to work up to it, and introduce new colors under the skin, and not have it look so plain. So now what I want to do is we're going to start detailing the face, and trying to refine this, so the next lesson or two will be on just the face. So let's go and press on. 26. Painting the Face: Now we're going to paint in some of the face details, and one of the things I'm going do, I'm going to merge down that blue layer into the skin copy so that we see this work up. I'm actually going to drag another copy of the skin right there so that I essentially I end up with a more version of that. With the face, it can be pretty tricky to get right, and I've got some of it drawn in place for representations sake or whatever for placement, but it's still not entirely the way that I want it. A lot of times I don't know until I paint through it, if it's going to work out exactly the way that I want. What I'll do here is start to add in the broad strokes. The shading under the nose, actually it's a bit too dark, but I'll mix the color. I want to start pretty light so I can figure out the shapes. I want to get the darkness under the nose, a little bit of a drop shadow but not much. Drop shadows of the nose can be a little bit distracting on females. You want to, really air on the side of subtlety when doing the female face because any harshness that you add, harshness and shadows, harshness and transitions is generally going to make it look less feminine and more masculine or mean or whatever. We really want to just get in some nice subtle shifts. Actually I like a little bit of blue that I added there to the underneath the neck. I'm really quick to, If I have to pick up a neighboring color and blending that in with what I've got. Now the other thing that we want to do is we want to fill in the larger, I need some of of this color here, the larger bulk of color so I can get that out. But it's essentially like for the eyes, you don't want to drop in not quite a wide but pretty close, and we'll drop the blue in over top. You can actually make layers for the eyes. Some people find that really helpful. There's times I go back and forth, sometimes I do, sometimes I don't. The other way for the teeth, I'll just drop in these flats, and you see I'm not worried about adding layers for each one I could, and it's not necessarily a bad idea, but I'm going to try it first this way, and if I find myself running into problems, then I'll use layers to bail me out. Likewise, we're going to use some of the quick mask, even if I don't end up meeting that, I want to explain it to you because there's lots of areas where quick mask can help you with things like facial features, shifting. You notice one eye is different than the other. I always have that. Like continuing battle in my work. Worrying when it's just a little bit more tilted away from camera, or a little bit bigger or whatever. I don't know how many other artists face that, but that's always been one of my Achilles' heels thing. I'll show you how I deal with that. Let's get a blue something middle of the row, little desaturated. You see I'm pretty much has drawn this end right now just to get the shapes in place. Then the color in place what the shape obviously. That's our starting point. Now, what I tend to do is bounce around a little bit, but I'll go back to my paintbrush and smooth painter, and I'll start to sculpt the face a little bit. I want some more shadow. I basically want some shadow under the jaw line too. When the head starts to tilt up, you tend to get a little bit more of a shadow right across here. It's really tricky because naturally I think we want to draw a line right there, and as the face comes up, the line is less evident, and there's more of a slow transitional shadow from the jaw line right there. I'll just blend that in, then we sample the other coloring comeback. I'm mostly more of a deep reddish brown, my shadows at this point. That's too much, but then again I'll sample from it. If you notice I'm blending and I'm sampling from the blend, trying to basically work it into the color that's already there, and see if I can get the right color because it's too predominant. It really just needs to be a lighter version of that. I think somewhere in there. I'll just keep bouncing around with this and adding little bits here and there. Now, another thing to think about when doing this, even though I'm trying to stay a little bit more soft, you can actually think about cutting in these colors at first, so you could really block in these angular shapes with all the colors that you're adding, with all the shadows you're adding and then go back and soften everything up. There's lots of different ways to do it, but that's actually a pretty popular way. I'm going to pick something a bit darker, not going to go to black, but I want something quite a bit darker for the nostrils. Then the lips, I want to shade color for that, generally the top lip is going to be a bit darker on the bottom just based on the angle that it's receiving light. Since I used a pretty solid color, I could make the selection first to preserve the edge as I'm doing this but, I really don't think I'll need to, but it's there if I need it or was there, it'd be harder because I already blended. But right from the start, you can actually create a selection from that solid color, just like you'd use a layer and paint through that. I want a bit of a drop shadow on the lip or where it rounds over. I could start to think about a little bit of light source on the top of the bottom lip like this. [inaudible] now at this brush so I usually use a soft brush for that part. Also, there's usually a little bit of light on the top of the lip. This, as well as the way it connects through here, usually on this. This is going to be the side with the greater light source. There's going to be more of that over here, and I think the trickiest thing to get right, there's a lot of things when it comes to the face, but you really want to avoid lines like right through the nose around here. Natural inclination is to put like a line right there. You really want to avoid that and you want just a nice smooth transition from light to any value change. It's got to be very subtle in that area. Light will generally come up here, usually get a tiny little bit of highlight right here. Again, just sampling from the existing colors that I've got on the canvas, I get a pretty strong highlight on the nose so you can bring that forward more like this. I think of it a little bit like I'm sculpting the work at the stage, I'm pushing color around, but I'm trying to sculpt and get just the right shapes in place for the face. I might take this darker color and think about how the shadows are going to come off the amour there. So I can use that as a way to really shape the face as I start to add the shadow in. It's doing two things. It's having the shadow to the helmet, drop shadow onto the face. Then give me another opportunity to sculpt in the shape of the face and just move lines around, move shapes around. So here I want a bit of a shadow and then notice I'll make the brush a little bit larger and blend that shadow back on each side. So I start off with a hard edge, but then I slowly blend it back, so that it's not too overly defined. I repeat that process. Another thing I try to do, I might add a larger shape of shadow like this and then come back with a light source and work into that. So it's almost like I'm layering the effect sometimes to get just that right kind of segment versus me trying to, maybe draw a line through here and shading it back. So that's another way to do it, but it almost seems like it comes out better if you work from a larger shape first and then blend back into that. So again, just to show you that one more time on the other eye. As I might just throw in a larger shape like that, which seems awkward by itself. But then as I grab this corresponding color, and I paint that back, you can generally get that shape to blend in and look a little bit more realistic than drawing a line through there. So there's obviously lots of ways to do it. Also, I'll come back and add just tiny little highlights here and there. Now one thing I will say about the highlights, and I'll need to go back and adjust this all throughout, especially down here in the body. When they look to be hot spots, it's good to take a soft brush, set to normal. Let's bring this one back to normal and sample one of the middle of the royal colors. So if you get too much those hot spot sample like the skin tone, and just brush over top of it and push those highlights back. You can always come back and strengthen them again, and really it's good to do this one from a distance. So you can really start to make sure that you're not ending up with these very noticeable hot spots everywhere. So I might grab the neighboring colors here and just slowly push those back. Again, if I go too far in this direction, I can always paint back. Doing all these hot spots will look a little bit too fake by the time it's all done, and you want to really be mindful of those. So you can just sample that neighboring color and then softly brush it back. So now let's go back to the mask and eliminate a little bit more on this line work. So we'll just little by little push this information bag. So now to trim out the eyes, red hair skin. I'm going to pick a bit of a dark, probably not quite black, but pretty close. Then just trim these out and I'll probably use just the Pencil tool for now. One of the things I've noticed with eyes at least the way that I like to do them, is dependent on the look, I try to keep the pupil away from the very top eyelid. You're going to end up shading down the eye to make it look like it's more recessed. That has depth. Let me get some of these in place and I'll show you what I mean here. So you've got to be real careful where you place the pupil and the size and relationship, all that. Because if you just throw it in there haphazardly or whatever in the shade it down, you'll seem to get this look like they appear drowsy or tired or whatever. So it just goes back to like drawing expressions. Basically, if the pupil is touching the top eyelid like this, they're either looking really high up or they're appearing sleepy or a sultry look. There's a lot of expression that you convey just what the placement of the pupil and the iris. So you've got to be aware of that. The other thing is getting the shape of the eye just right. Can be tricky so I never really worried too much about it being exactly right as much as I do about trying to edit it and make it look better because I always seem to place it off just a little bit. Now one thing I will show you is that a good thing to check the work as you go, if you have a hard time getting the placement just right, is to create a copy of the window and set it off to the side. So I'm going to go and do that now because I think this is a helpful practice and I need to do it more myself. So as to where we keep having to flip the Canvas and wait for Canvas to flip, there is another way to work through that. So let me show you. We'll go Window, Workspace, Canvas, New Window. So what it did, it just created another window and it looks like it's just a duplicate of this. It is, but it's actually the same exact file. So now you can take this and you have to have your navigator window. I usually use mine on the other screen here, but in the navigator window you're going to click this icon and see I'll just flip that. So I'm going to bring this one back over to my other screen because I'm not really using it. But the navigator window is a nice opportunity too, but this basically to me works better because now what you're able to do. See I can zoom in on this window and it's not affecting this, but if I come over here and I do a little more on her cheek or whatever,. it pops up over there. So now you're working in reverse, but more than that, you're working independently of the other screen. So I like to keep this one a bit smaller because I can notice certain details from a distance. So I can maybe put that here, and then as I work on the face up close here, I'm able to analyze the work over there and really gauge the incremental changes that I'm making. So it's definitely something that's pretty helpful. I'm actually going to over-darken the eyes and things like that, try to bring this out a bit further. You see that there's actually a lot of incorrectness in the face overall. So you'll see it looks a little strange over there, but I'm not too worried about that. I mean, definitely I'm mindful of it and I want to fix it, but I press forward through the work because again, there's so many ways to edit and we're going to figure it out and make it look better as we progress. It's sometimes just not getting distracted with the fact that it's not right and not letting it bringing you down almost. You've got to just realize that if you keep working through it, if you keep making incremental changes, it'll get better. So I want to keep that pupil a little bit low from that top eyelid. Then now as I add information to the top eyelid or to the eyes themselves, I like these heavier eyelashes, for instance. I'm going to add that to the top and I'm going to bring that inward. That probably goes without saying, but I like to point out the eyes sometimes, but essentially what happens there is you don't want to really damage this shape. So you want the shape of the eye to look as if it has depth going inward. So generally the eye will actually look thicker at this part in this angle because you're seeing into the recess of the eye. Now, the eyelashes make them wider at the end, but you've got to really be mindful of the inner white of the eye, the inner shape of the eyes. That's what we're doing here right now, are paying special attention to that. So I'm going to continue to detail this. Let's have it over to the next lesson where we keep working on the face and see what we come up with, so let's move forward. 27. Detailing the Face: Let's continue on trying to detail the face. What we want to do is get enough of this information in place where we can select from other areas of the panting like before, and just keep brushing in little bits of highlight. Essentially scalping the work and figuring out where these shapes need to go and how much. Another thing that you can do that is helpful is to use a soft airbrush. Once you get enough information in place. I think there's a good variants here that use a soft airbrush to blend it together a little bit. I'll keep that on normal mode f