Transcripts
1. Intro to Digital Painting in PS Intro Video: Welcome to my course. Introduction to digital painting using photo shop. My name is Robert Marcelo, and I'm a professional freelance artist with over 20 years experience. So you're probably thinking, Why is this course for you? I've been online instructor for over three years. I've taught many artists over the years. He's a variety of programs such as Photoshopped. I know to teach a new artist how to use a powerful tool, you have to stick to basics for as long as possible. This course is designed to teach you the fundamental basic tools for effectively painting within Photoshopped. You'll learn a wide array of techniques taught, and it's simple to understand way. When starting out, you need to realize that the simple set of tools within Photoshopped can achieve amazing results later. Weaken. Delve into all the advanced tools and settings. But first you need to feel comfortable with painting before worrying too much about everything else that Photoshopped dio. This course is designed to make that process much easier for you to accomplish. You'll learn all about layers and groups blending modes, adjusting brush settings, navigating through the interface shortcut commands, selection tools, quick mass color, balance and much more. You also work alongside me while we create a professional looking painting while only using basic methods, implementing all the tools that we covered in the first section. By getting this course, you also get my custom brush set as well as the art file to study along with Keep in mind, I'm here to help you with any questions you might have. I'm also happy to add new content to this course based upon your valuable feedback. So be sure to let me know what you think and we'll make this an awesome experience for everyone. Thank you for viewing my course, and I hope to hear from you soon.
2. L1 File Sizes: All right. So the first thing we're gonna talk about this file size the reason being this could be a major hiccup for a lot of new artists. Eso I want you to first be aware of some of the factors that go into file size when creating digital art with photo shot. So we're gonna go to file new, and you're going to see a lot of the presets and a lot of things that I default Teoh. But I want to talk a little bit about this. So it's not just a simple, say, picking your unit of measurement. In this case, I tend to resort to their inches or pixels. The more I do video editing, the more you get used to using pixels. But I came from a print background, which would've meant inches and resolution. Now, keep in mind. A common misconception is people calling this DP I okay, that's not what that is. Resolution in Computer Terms or Photoshopped terms is basically going to be P p I. And that's pixels per inch. DP eyes Dad's per engine. That's for a printer. So it's a common misconception, but I just want you to be aware of that. So if you pick 300 for your resolution nine by 16 is actually going to give you roughly a little over four K documents of 4000 pixels. So if we jump from inches two pixels, you could see it's roughly 4800 wide, which is right around four K or a little bit above. So we're gonna go ahead and default that back to inches nine by 16 300 hit, create and what's going to get rid of the extras here? You can hit command h to get rid of those as well. So first off, I just want you to see that basically, this is a pretty high resolution document. So if I go to create on this, we'll add a new layer. So if I was just drawing a brushstroke on this and then zoom in, I'm gonna have really tight clarity up until I get to a point where we start to see pics, elation and that's, you know, degradation of the edge quality of the brushstroke. It's basically exposing that pixels per inch that we talked about. So you see, I had to zoom in really far for that to occur. So let's go to create another document. Next will get rid of this mark here, found new again or command. And keep in mind that you can always see the shortcut commands if they're available as a preset right to the side command for Mac and generally control for PC. So final new, I'm gonna default to another size that I use quite a bit. And that's 11 by 17. Just keep in mind that things like 1920 by 10 80 that's obviously a typical screen size and then 8.5 by 11. That's typical sheet of paper, things like that. So I do have some of these that I default to when trying to create something for the end result of, say, a sheet of paper or maybe a video document whatever. So a lot of times the size relationships are gonna be directly related to your result, and that's where you're gonna want to talk to your printer or your end user and know exactly what their needs are. So it's going to go 11 by 17 300 peopie I and let's go ahead and put these side by side so I can explain some of the other things to look out for when working with these types of documents. Zoom back so we can see these space bar to dragged the screen over. Hover over this until you see the two arrows and you can drag these windows over. Okay, So some other things that think about when creating this type of work is paying attention to the document size down here. So if you notice is stacking it with nothing on it, just a blank white canvas shows up a 37.1 megabytes with zero bytes to the right of this, a little slanted line. Always forget the name of that one. Ah, and this one is 48.2. So let's go ahead and create some artwork on this one again. Let's make sure we're on a floating layer. We're just gonna draw across that now. Watch what happens to these numbers each time I draw on that a little bit different, right? So the 37.1 is staying the same, but the megabytes to the right is changing. The number to the right is signifying the usage of RAM or random access memory in your computer. The reason why this is important to say You have a system that has eight gigs of RAM, so that will be one of the specifications to your possible computer that you have. It's good to be aware of this number and to be aware of what your system limitations might be. So if you start to create a file size where this number gets massive and that's gonna get larger by adding layers, creating artwork on each layer, all sorts of things, they're going to keep increasing this number as you progress. You might need to be a little bit conscious of that so that you don't have system lag now. One thing I will tell you about system lag. It's either going to be dependent upon first your initial system, then how Photoshopped is set up to run, but mainly things like, you know, size of the brush. So, for instance, I have a pretty strong system, but let's go ahead and scale up this brush. I'm using the right bracket key to make this brush Just massive. I'm gonna try to draw across is, and it's not like in too bad, let's make it even larger, and I'm gonna move quicker across the screen and there's a little bit of lag right there again. I have a pretty strong system that the 16 gig of Ram Mac Book Pro So a pretty, pretty strong system and I still noticed lag by increasing the brush size. So that's one thing you have to be were aware of. The brush size, the spacing of the brush. We're gonna talk about this later just so you know. So if you're to go in the brush itself, you know, the spacing of the brush tip actually directly effects, it's lags well, and also the amount of file size you have on the document. So if you're working with larger file size, you're gonna experience more lag. All these things kind of play in, and I just want you to know about him so that when you start to create your paintings, if you're experiencing lag, you don't get frustrated and give up because I've heard that so many times from students, and I just I just wanted to see that there's some of the things that you could be aware of in control. You can work with smaller brushes, you can work with more simplified brushes. Ah, lot of the paintwork can be created with just a basic round brush with the smooth setting. We're gonna talk about that. So there's things that you can do to improve your ability to create this stuff. You can look at a file size like this and you could say, Well, when I zoom up, the quality of my art doesn't look poor until I get to 200% zoom. Whatever that number is, you could see the zoom right here on the lower left so you can see that at this resolution that still looks really nice. So it's possible. Unless my end result is asking me for this size I may not need this large of a file, in which case I can go to image size and I can play around with this and I can leave it proportionately checked right there. Notice how it connects the to, say, go down to maybe half of us are almost half of this. I hit OK, I look at it from a distance, zoom in and I checked the work and now you can see some pics Elation on the edge now, but I'm also zoomed in pretty far. So if the art needs to be viewed, it say this distance, I might be OK to produce it at this level of resolution and screen size. So that's really where these things start to play out. Now, one thing I do want to talk about before we move on is the other thing to be aware of is actually your image mode and you're not only rgb that seem like a but you're 16 and 32 bit a bit. Whatever. All of these different beds, each one of these is gonna increase the file dramatically increases and show you, and you can watch these numbers jump because basically what they're doing is they're increasing your ability to create more colors on the canvas and, in essence, the big difference. I noticed from eight bit to 16 bit. I'm not gonna get into all the details of it because I want I want to get you up and running for digital painting. But basically 16 bit is gonna allow you more room for credit. So when you start to, you know, photo bash and use mawr images in your work and your doing more detailed work and you're adjusting things more frequently. Your re scaling documents 16 bit is gonna hold true for you a bit better. Eight bit is gonna be fine for most basic paintings. Now that's going toe vary with the artists and what they think is correct. But I'm just giving you my own experience there as faras color RGB is gonna give you. I believe 16 million colors seem like a is gonna give you more millions of colors. I don't know that we need to be a specific about how many, but it's a massive amount. You can generally paint an RGB and still get some very beautiful color gamut and it looks fantastic. Some people are gonna be more prone to wanting to go to seem like a But again, if your file size is your limitation, then you may want to stick with RGB at eight bits per channel and then just kind of work as far as you can and see what your needs are and then adjust from there. So that's really all there is to it. We'll get into more of this as we go, but, uh, I don't want a bog you down too much. But I do want you to be aware of ways that you constrict the amount of data you're using so that your system will perform faster and you get a more responsive, creative feel. So one of the most frustrating things is when you're going to paint and your system starts a lag or skip and you know it's not working the way that you hope to go to rotate the canvas, and it's it's really slow and jagged that takes you out of that creative moment. So I wanted to at least show you some of this, hopefully didn't confuse you too much and will now move on to the next lesson.
3. L2 Basic Navigation in Photoshop: Okay, so now I want to show you how to maneuver around as you start the pain. So you get this campus in front of you and so you start to paint in some graphics, whatever it is, and you want to zoom in, you can hit Z on the keyboard for zoom in or for the zoom icon. You can place your white competitive whatever using under the screen, and you could do an interactive zoom in and out. Now, another thing you can do is actually hold the command button for years in a Mac, and then you can hit plus and minus zoom in to No. Okay, So I think by far the best one is really the zoom in and out icon again hitting Z. And remember that something like that you can go right into view. Zoom in and zoom out and you're going to see your shortcut commands right there. So once you do, zoom in and you're working on your ah, amazing piece of artwork and you're adding to it. You're doing things that you want to go over to the right he can old space bar, and you could pull to the right, Let go on. It's gonna snap right back to your brush. Pulled the left again, holding space bar right back to your brush. So little things like that can really speed you up. Also keep in mind that you can hold our and you can rotate your canvas kind of that compass to show you where you're at. So bringing it back to here is going to be original where you started, but you can keep rotating around to your heart's content. This is great for drawing and, you know, really getting comfortable with a certain kind of pull that you need to make against the canvas. Now, keep in mind as you zoom back, If the canvases tilted and you don't want to hold our and try to straighten it back out, you could just double click the rotate icon and will snap back right to its original position. Now, another thing I want to show you it's kind of more on the windows and we're gonna talk about window configuration as well. But one of the things that I find very helpful as I'm painting is flipping the work. One of the ways that you're going to do. This is go to image, image, rotation, flip, horizontal or vertical. Now keep in mind that's actually flipping the entire canvas. So if I hit commands and go back, if I was to go to the layer and it edit, transform, flip horizontal, it's actually flipping the layer, not the canvas. I typically will flip the canvas because I don't want any degradation and the image quality . We have to remember these a raster based graphics. So when you re size a, move him around, change him big content to start to lose clarity on the edges. Because the software is basically interpreting pixel data. It's not a vector based graphics. So just be aware that again I find the best way to do it, even though it can be a little bit more. Taxing to the system is to flip the rotation of the image itself. But by doing this when you're painting, you can spot flaws. You can really make sure that things like symmetry and consistency within your composition are accurate. So I just wanted you to be aware that again we're gonna show some more ways to really handle window configuration as we progress on. So with that, that will complete this lesson. Let's move on to the next
4. L3 Using the Selection Tools: All right, So now I want to talk to you about basic selection tools because if you're not just painting around and, you know, creating artwork Freehand Ah, lot of times you're going to use selection tools and you're gonna really isolate areas within your painting. So first off will start off with the shape Marquis. So you got, like, a rectangular elliptical, straight lines, things like that, which really can generate with the right tingler tool. So let's grab this one. And just keep in mind that you can draw the rectangular shape and you click, hold and drag, and wherever you release, that's what you get. So another thing to keep in mind is as you start to work with this, if you notice in your top left, you have these presets. So you've got add to selection, subtract from selection and intersect with selection. Now, the reason these air preset this way is because if I leave it to the default here each time I go to grab another one, it restarts Okay, so if I said it to add the selection each time I draw another one, it's gonna add to that pretty self explanatory and same thing with subtract. I can now subtract each one of these. Just like that, I'm intersect. Just that says it's gonna intersect the two and leave that selection. So the main thing to keep in mind is this needs to be set with whatever way is most conducive with the way that you work. I like to almost always set things to add to select, especially the free hand. Because if I'm drawing something, maybe I'm trying to capture a face or something like that. And then I quickly let go and it finishes off the selection. I might need to jump back in there and finish the face off. That's a pretty bad face, but hopefully you get the idea so that you can keep adding to that selection, and you can hurry up and get the perimeter select that you might need. Now, keep in mind that even though that preset is set here in this regard, you can still hold and notices a little plus sign by the lasso. But you can hold Ault and it will now turn that to a minus. So those are the two that I use the most and again I could just keep drawn away and keep adding to the selection. And I can hold all in a just a selection like that. If you click and hold, you can also get to the polygon, a lasso tool, and this one is going to give you a point by point method and then double click to release . So you just kind of have to play around with these and get a feel for it. So, for instance, you can either bring it right back to the original point and you get that little circle and that finishes it. Or you might be, in an instance, where you're over here and you could just double click your last point. But keep in mind that if it's not, you want to double click before you land on that point, so see how it's floating by. Double click right here. That's gonna be the last point, and it's gonna complete it. So again it's set the ad to double click double clerk, and again I can keep adding to this selection. But the political tool is really nice, because if you're working on something detailed and you need a bit more control on speed. Ah, lot of artists will zoom in on the work use applicable tool space bar to move around as ago . We'll get into this more as we start to create, but I just want to be aware of it. Space, part of movies. You go release space, Bart snaps right back to it, and they'll actually use a Siris of straight lines, smaller straight lines to refine something and make it look like curves from a distance. So a lot of artists find that that works really well for their control. Um, not to say that if you get good enough on your hand, help, tablet or device, you know you can do some pretty nice curves and line work with this as well. We'll also talk about dependent path to which gives you a lot of control and a lot of ah ability to edit. But I want you to first be aware the selections. So now the other thing about selections to be fully aware of is this. If you go into a layer and you just hit delete, you're gonna delete that layer in anything on. So, for instance, if I paint something like this, I'm like Oh, that's not what I wanted. I had delete. I didn't just delete the artwork. I also deleted the layer. Now, if I take the time to hit command a for select all or even just defined the selection around the the item, any one of those that work and then hit delete notice that it keeps the layer intact and Onley deletes the artwork. So that's something to be very aware of. Because again, if you're not and you have this closed and you hit delete, you might be deleting something that you can't bring back. Now one thing I won't say what this is it. Remember that you have a certain amount of reducing undoes as well. So command Z for undue to find that four year old quick Well, I guess we need to paint it. So as you create these little marks, you got command Z will take you back one time. OK? But if you hit hit command all Z and hold your fingers on command and Ault and just tap Z, you can go back multiple times now If you release and hit command Z one more time, it will bring you back to the starting point. So this is very important note because you can oftentimes get to where you need to be within your design and fix a certain element. So commands. He will take you back once and it'll go back and forward command all dizzy will take you back multiple times just like that. So that will bring this lesson to a close. Let's head on to the next.
5. L4 Quick Masking and Feathering: Okay, so now let's go and talk about quick Mask and also feathering your selections. So I want you to be aware there's lots of ways to add your selections, which in turn aids in the painting process quite a bit. So one of the things you can do is after generating some kind of selection. In this case, with the Freehand lasso tool, you can hit Q on your keyboard and you can get a mask that's actually visually represented with this pink kind of color. Now, notice that this icon right here is what controls it to that and also notice that the color swatches here change from red to gray, the black and white. Now the reason that is is you can now select any brush that you desire, and you could draw into this mask. And then if you hit queue again, it turns back into a selection. So this is very powerful because you can pick any brush you want. It doesn't matter, can have texture, can have rigid edges. It just doesn't matter whatever you can think of so you can draw with this and you can paint back your selection, and you can hit X, which flips your color swatches and with dark you cannot paint back in your selection. This works with soft brushes and notice. Even this let me zoom in here and show you even this overlap texture has a slight variation and intensity. So here's another variation in the intensity off the selection right. I can get X and impressive very light, just so I get that variation of what this texture does if I hit. Q. It looks like it's been washed away, and we only have a selection. But if I make sure I'm on a new layer and I grabbed my paint bucket tool and I fill this with a flood fill and hit command D to de select notice that it retained all of that variation so highly powerful effect for really isolating a certain area of your painting and getting some unique effects. Now, another thing that think about is feathering your selection. It's kind of what we just did there with more control, so I actually prefer to use the quick mask. But sometimes there's that instance where you need to use a specific shape or you just want to blend out the edges to a specific area. That's where feathering comes in. So, for instance, if I draw this rectangular shape and I flood fill it, I get a solid box in this edge of the solid box is going to be pretty tight based on whatever size document you're working on. So, for instance, if I zoom in and I keep zooming in, I'm eventually going to get some pics. Elation of the Edge. But it's gonna occur sooner if it's a low resolution file size. We made sure that in the beginning this was a pretty nice sized document, so that edge clarity is gonna be retained. So, for instance, if I hit command A and I delete what time a canvas around the layer command D to de select and I grab the same tool. But I put a feather of about 25 pixels. What's the difference? I noticed, too, that even rounded the edge. It's not that crisp salad, Edgett waas. You see the difference there. Now keep in mind, I got to make sure wasn't zoomed in too far because whatever size is gonna be relative based on that pixel amount that we added the feather for. But now what it did is it softened up that edge? So by adjusting that feather, you can control that and that works with any of these shapes. You can grab an elliptical. We make that 50 pixels, make sure there's no existing selection. Draw that in there, flood fill, and the fate is gonna be even larger. And you see it's actually blending to both sides of that. That line. So again, very effective for controlling the way that your selections work and ultimately controlling the way that you're painting will work. So that will bring this one to a close. Let's move on to the next lesson.
6. L5 Layers and Groups: Okay, so now I want to talk to you about layers and groups. So if you go over here to the layers icon and we add a new layer by clicking this icon here , you can also do this with shortcut command of command J. I notice if you keep adding those, it'll give them numeric values. And notice is also adding these to the top most area because that means it's in front of anything below it. So I'm gonna git commands e command always easy to go back because we only need one of these. For now, I just want to show you how these really function in a sense of hierarchy. So if you grab a brush and grab a color will say right here and we'll just pain a little bit of red. And then we'll hit command J at a new layer. And actually, it duplicated the existing layer sexual. Let's go back and hit command Z and let's go layer new layer. So it's gonna be command shift and for new layer, it's actually gonna lie to name it here, so this box could be nice. If you want to set blending modes, you can also colorize the layer. So, for instance, you can give it a color cold like this. You can immediately change your blending mode and a pass ity. All here is well of name it. So let's just call this top layer and hit Enter. So you see it color coded it here and named it here. It even, you know, place it into the top again. But then what we want to do now is at a different color paint over top of that. Now I noticed, too, that just with the opacity of the brush, you get a different tone. But if I had just the opacity here, it's gonna let that other color show through. We're also going to get into blending modes and things like that. But I just want you to see how these layers work. So again, if you just want a plane layer and you don't want to worry about any of these presets that you get by going to this Ah, shortcut command of command shift in. You could just hit this icon here. It's gonna give you a basic layer. You can also get that again by just dragging and clicking on top of their and it's gonna copied his wall. So if we take it here and drag their notice, it gives us an exact copy of even the presets. So just remember that dragging that and releasing there will give you an exact copy so it command Z to go back. So now what I want to do is show you how the higher he's worked. So if you keep adding layers, they're only going to stay to the left side of this column, and they're all gonna range that way. If we had a group by clicking on this icon and then click, hold, shift and grab the bottom or you could just hit, command and grab individual layers and skip layers. But now, when you grab and drag, those will grab together and you can drop them into the group. So now notice that these two layers have been moved over to the right, so that's showing you the hierarchy and the way it works. So, for instance, if I was to grab this group, drag it over to the new layer icon, it's actually gonna duplicate the group. If I was to grab this group and remember, you can condense these down, So this is how you kind of organize your work. But if I grab this group here and I bring it into the group, notice that it it's Segway over even further. And then if I open that group, the column is over even a bit further to the right. So this is how you're gonna kind of distinguish your hierarchy. And then again, you condone. Click these right click, and you can color called these if you need to as well, so noticed. Since everything's in this group, it color coded all of them together. And if I go back one by one, I can change these inside of the group like that. So you've got the color coding, you've got the hierarchy, you've got layers, you've got groups, and you can convince these down to really save space. So when you start getting to these advanced paintings that you're gonna dio, this could be a great way to kind of itemize all your work organized and get it the way you need and keep in mind to when everything's in a group like this, you can toggle off and on the visibility and you can also adjust the entire group. So, for instance, if I hit command T, not only can I move this all around together except for the one layer that's outside of the group, obviously I can rotate it. I can hold, shift and grab a corner and scale it proportionately hit. Enter and all of that information maneuvered together so very important to realize what you could do with groups and layers in that regard. Also, keep in mind if you're on this group and you've got all these different things going on and you want to condense it down to just a layer, you can simply hit Command E and notice that it takes everything from that group and let me go back and add a few things just so you can see if we have a little bit of paint work here . This will have a different color. Put that on another layer inside this group, so we've got a lot of different things going on there. We simply go to that group that command E and emerges that altogether. See that so really neat way to kind of, you know, not only separate your work and itemize it and work through something. But then to conserve space and really ah, organize your work. You can clean up your death, so to speak and just hit command e in that group, and that works with multiple layers as well. So if you have these two layers selected and you hit command E, it's gonna merge ALS together. Now everything's unified. So that's kind of how I use layers and groups. There's, you know, I guess, a lot that can go into it. But that'll get you moving and able to, you know, work through your digital painting or your comic work and get everything organized and utilize it in the best regard. So with that, let's go and move on to our next lesson.
7. L6 Brush Settings Part 1 Pencil Brushes: Okay, so I want to talk to you about the brush is a bit more, and brushes are very in depth. There's a lot to it. So what I want to do is first get you up and rolling with basic brush settings so that you can create, you know, basic drawings, basic paintings, and then we'll delve into brush creation and because there's just a lot that goes into custom brush creation and a lot of ability. But I don't want toe overburden you with that yet. I want you to just understand how to get a basic thick to thin line. That's probably the most important. That's what I remember the most when I got started. Like how? How come I'm not getting the lines that I want? The first thing that happens is you want to be aware of your brush shape. You want to make sure that your driver for whatever device used them, is working s so you're gonna want to test that, and obviously that goes into a lot of different devices. But make sure that your pressure sensitivity works. You want to go into the brush presets and the first thing you want enable is shaped dynamics. So, for instance, if this is not enable Look at the preview there. I'm gonna go ahead and use the bracket keys to scale this brush up. Or I can obviously do what? Their exit moving inter actively right there and up here as well. So this is what the brush looks like. This is a preset chalk brush that comes with Photoshopped. Notice that if nothing set, I just get this big blob of black on the screen and there's no pressure sensitivity, There's no line. Wait, nothing. So when I go to shape dynamics, if I check that and I select it so select by clicking to the right and I can look at all these different sliders and the main thing is pen pressure So you've got fade pen pressure pen. Till stylist will, you got to make sure that your tablet supports these and remember, amounts doesn't support any of these. You might be able to get fade to work because generally the preset, uh, can be set to an opacity so you can kind of emulate it, but it's not really gonna work. So basically, just make sure that your tablets working and let's go to Penn. Pressure for the line. Wait. So I'm going to scale this down. I notice that just that right there. I don't get a whole lot of get basically. See if I press very light and then I press hard. That's the variation I get. So not not enough for a good drawing tip yet Skilled us down and check it. Yeah, just not giving me the variation. So what I want to do here is double check that size jitters not on. And look at the difference. There. A nice, smooth line. So let's kill this vacuum further. Press down, Max. Wait. So this is a good test right here. You want a press? Very light. Press hard press late again, and you should be able to get a nice variation of line. Wait. That's what's gonna lie. To create the illustrations you want, or at least the style of illustrations I like for drawing and mainly inking s O. This is the type of brush that I would create. So the things that keep in mind is that the size jitters off because we notice, as we increase the size jitter, we got a very textured brush. Now, this isn't a bad brought, especially if you're going for a rigid line around something. But you just have to make sure that's exactly what you want. If it's not, then remember that keeping the size Jeter down is gonna give you that nice, smooth line. The other thing that actually affects that smoothing is kind of, uh, just a setting that you can add, and I don't typically see a large difference there, but mainly when you go to brush tip shape, making sure that your spacings all the way down So it's almost like jitter in the sense that if you increase the spacing, you start to get this rough edge because it's actually taking the brush tip and it's facing it out. So you start to get this overlap of the edges of the brush tip. So when it's a circle, it just becomes a series of data. But one of the chalk brush. You get this kind of rigid edging until eventually when you space it out. It's very noticeable, but again, if you're going for a fluid line, you can just turn that all the way down. You can also control the brush tip by squeezing it and rotating it here. So that's how you control the direction of the brush tip based on the orientation of the pen. So this can offer some pretty unique results as well. And the main thing is that after every change, you should test exactly what you did. Make sure that that's, you know, something that you're gonna want to see within your brush design. Obviously, these brush settings are gonna get very advanced. So what I want to do is just show you again the basic concepts of what it takes to create. In this case, it would be kind of an inking brush or just a good line brush. You want to also keep in mind that you can just adjust capacity itself as you're utilizing it, and you can get a bit more sketching done with just that. So what kind of emulates the way that pencil lines would kind of build up to give a darker pencil line? So don't underestimate your ah, you're a pass ity as well. So the other thing is is to make sure that when you have the difference from, say, a pencil brush and keep in mind you're good access to all of these so that you can play around with ease and and see what settings you like. And you're also welcome to comment. Let me know what settings you'd like to see explained a bit further, But again, we're going to start very basic and get you up and running. So if you look at this pencil brush, it's got a bit of texture. It's got a little bit of that line. Wait, pick too thin. And also, as I pressed lighter, I get a more faint line without controlling the A pass ity, as we did before. But if I press harder, I get a nice salad dark line with a little bit of edging to it. So let's see how that's achieved. So now we have shaped dynamics. Remember, none of this is on, really, except for pen pressure. We've got some texture, and we selected a pre defined texture inside a photo shop. You can create those as well. It's actually set to invert, usually not going to see a tremendous amount of difference, but it's helpful to pay attention to that. We've got some scale skills going to increase the size of the texture in relation to the brush. Got some brightness, some contrast. Depth. All that's gonna make the grain more parent in the brush tip. We also have transfer set now. This is important to note, because this is what gives you kind of a painterly brush. There's a little bit of that set up with pen pressure, and that's the part that's giving us is very light in this dark notice. If I take this off now, it's back to kind of an inking brush, so transfer is very important to pay attention to, and you can copy these settings. But it's mainly the idea of what we're going to use even to explain some painting brushes. So probably first and foremost, is that any shape can really become a pencil brush with some basic settings. Now this is a circle you can use circles, squares. It's gonna kind of condense it down and make it to appoint anyways. But there are often times brushes look a little bit better with, um, you know, just a tiny bit of a randomized shape. It just seems to feel a little bit more natural to me. But you also have to weigh. The options is to whether or not you receive any brush lag from introducing more variables . So the moral of this is, you know, kind of set up, and the larger the initial brush tip is designed and again, we'll talk about this later. Then chances are you're gonna get a tiny bit more lag. So if you download some brushes from a custom, you know, set or whatever and you start to get lag, you might want to look around. It may be that the brush was created to large for your current set up, so just be aware that so that would conclude this lesson. Next, we're gonna talk about some of the paintbrush settings and get you up and rolling with that , so let's move on.
8. L7 Brush Settings Part 2 Paint Brushes: Okay, so now I want to talk to you about painting brushes. Now notice they're all in the same area. And I've just got a ton of different brushes to have created many over the years. But the differences with the painting brush notice that any painting brush I select is gonna have a little bit of texture to it on Not always with the texture, but mainly the transfer. This is always gonna be enabled with any paint brushes I use. Let me show you some of the ones that are more popular for the way that I pain, one of which is this basic 009 hard round brush. And you're gonna have, ah, basic hard round brush inside a photo shop. Regardless. But what's happened here is I just make sure to set my transfer on no shape dynamics. The brush tip is a basic circle, and the spacing is down, harnesses up. It's actually pretty simple, but all that it really does for me is it gives me this nice, smooth fade of light to dark. No, if I can't get an extremely light version, and I'm talking like where I can barely see what I'm putting down then I'm not really set up to paint in the way that I like. So let me explain that real quick. Now, this may very based upon what you're using, but I use a wack, um, tablet. It's a sin teak. If I go to this Ah, tablet driver, I'm gonna be able to go in here and just my tip feel this is an overall firmness to the way that you paint. If you're heavy handed, you're actually gonna set it more to firm. And then what happens is I can now achieve a lighter tone. I still get the dark tone with lots of pressure, but it's easier for me to get to that lighter tone that I like. So let me illustrate that again by just in this setting again. So I'll just show you the very extreme. So it's good to play around with these, really check it, but I'll set it to firm all the way there. I'm actually putting pressure right now, and you can't see it. And there make sure playing a fair amount of pressure just to get paint to come out. The reason why I like this when I'm trying to be very subtle with the way that I paint. This actually works better for me. Now. Most artists might disagree, or everyone's gonna have a different level of pressure sensitivity preferences. So we have to do is test this and make sure it works well for you. It's gonna be a matter off. You know what? You can blend well with what you can apply just the right amount of paint with. But also I can tell you is if you go to paint and you're getting this way too quick, then you may need to adjust the pressure sensitivity within your your actual driver. And again, that's what this is here. I'm just showing you the actual driver setting to this particular device that I use again. This is gonna vary with lots of different types of devices. But if you have the same type, then you may see something like this and you're gonna just that in here. There's other things like calibration. Um, you know, I disabled brush settings, things like that. But mainly just be aware that you want to be able to get that nice soft feel. Now I adjust that differently. for using pencil brushes than I do for painting. You can also control that with the rapacity. So, for instance, you might find a nice, happy medium where you don't have to jump in here and adjust things. I'll generally set it to about something like that. In that way, I can paint pretty quickly because I'm not really struggling to put paint down. But I may even bump back the opacity as I go and just realized to get those darker darks. I mean need to hit that area a few times, so that's essentially high paint. Now, back to the brush settings. This is the most basic of brushes. No texture, really involved. But then there's sometimes that I will get a brush with a textured edge, you see, for the inside, it's pretty much the same type of brush, but for the perimeter shape, it's been affected in a way where it gives a nice texture. So that's one way to apply texture, and then another is gonna be like the brushes showed you previously, where it has texture or stippling to the inside. I think even this one looks like it does so here we can get texture more on the inside of the brush. There's lots of various ways to do that. There's grain like we already talked about under the texture tab here, and there's actually controlling the brush tip itself so you can see by the thumbnail here . If I was just to stamp this on the screen, there's actually texture within the brush tip itself. It's not a solid brush in the middle. It's got some variation. Eso lots of ways to introduce texture with your painting brushes and get lots of cool. Build up to your paintwork and we'll talk more about that as we start to utilize these even hairbrushes just made with a series of dots. I'll be showing you how to do that, and you can get lots of great hair texture really quickly just by utilizing some shortcuts within the brush design. And as you probably already know, texture can really enhance your painting rather quickly so that we complete this lesson. Let's move on to the next
9. L8 The Eraser Tool: Okay, so now let's talk about the race tool. So one of the neat things is any brush can become an eraser. So this is one of the great things about digital painting in digital drawing is that after you paint some information on the canvas, you see, I've got a floating over a red layer. I can go to the eraser tool in any texturizing brush I use to a race. Well, allow me to expose something in the previous layer. So very powerful for racing. Generally float between things like a softer race and a line a race. But any one of these brushes can give us the ability of an eraser eso highly effective as well as the opacity you've got. A pencil in black type is well, but I don't use those as much because there's so much control with just selecting the brush type, opacity and flow and erase. The history won't get into that generally what what happens there is you can isolate certain parts of your racing through the history, which we'll talk about later, but basically there's plenty of ah ability just with what I've shown you here to use the eraser in a way where you can really control it per layer, Um, and past that. You want to really use mass Teoh to isolate parts of your work like we talked about before . You can generate any kind of selection converted to a mask. You're not going to see it as well on red, and you can adjust that nice light areas in a race and detail or whatever. Eso yes, so just keep in mind that with the eraser tool, which you can get to by simply hitting E on, your keyboard will jump to the eraser tool that you can control that with your bracket. He's just like any other brush, and you can use that to a race with any brush that you pick, so that would complete this lesson. Let's move on to the next
10. L9 The Paint Bucket Tool: Okay, so let's talk about the paint bucket tool. So if you're on a different tool and you hit G, it's going to switch you to the paint bucket and it's gonna grab the top most layer eso you got foreground background. If I was Ted Exits gonna flip those two. Now, the main thing to remember when painting in this regard is that if nothing selected so I hit command d nothing selected and I hit the filter also again, g paint bucket tool, I should say and I click. Everything is selected, so it's gonna flood to the very edge of this canvas Command Z. If I generate a selection first, it's just gonna paint on that area and isolated area within that layer. So again, if we hit exit flips, those two colors and Phil is just gonna fill to the edge. Now, you can also select up here and you go to pattern. You can select from one of these preset patterns and you can just drop in some texture. You can obviously control things like capacity, intolerance and you know the blending mode as well. But generally, for the most part, I'm gonna paint anything and I'm gonna use the adjustments over here as well as the blending modes to affect the layer. So the other thing that think about is if you go to add it, Phil, which is the shift F five was double check that, actually, don't use this one a lot. Shift up five. So the up arrow means shift just so you know. But here you can see it gives us this dialog box weaken, select pattern black, 50% gray. We can adjust the preset for the pattern of the custom pattern. Eso lots of adjustments here again. Really kind of everything that was up here but in this preset buys so you could hit. Okay. And that's gonna drop that in that layer again. I'll be honest. I don't use that as much. I basically just uses fulfilling my tones and moving on. So if you hold and see, there's from different ones. We're going to talk about the great aunt told next, because that is very important. But actually, don't use anything else. I just use it as a basic paint bucket tool. So again define the selection. Whatever that might be. It could be the shape of a mountain. You can just click that or hit G and then fill that in. So you see, the opacity is down 50% weaken, Bump that backup. And then we're gonna get a solid Phil just like that. So pretty. Ah, pretty simple and pretty effective for getting in some base color to work with on. We'll explain this more as we start to utilize it in the project files so that we complete this lesson. Let's move on to the next.
11. L10 The Gradient Tool: Okay, so now let's talk about the Grady int tool. So you get to that by clicking here and holding and then release as you hover over the Grady Int tool. Now this one is very usable. I probably don't use it enough, but there's a lot of artists that swear by using it, and it is very effective. I'm gonna show you a couple of ways to create these types ingredients. But the main thing is, if you select one like this notice it goes from black toe white and there's no checkerboard . That means it's a solid Phil, and it's also, if we ever over that, that's just black and white. So, for instance, we click and drag across its going, you know, whatever way we pull it from, it's going to start black, fade white. If you pull a shorter, more abrupt poll, it's gonna condense down that fade. If you elongate the poll, it's gonna blend that fate all the way across. So very effective very quick. You can also control the way that it generates the fades. Okay, the different types of ah effects from the center out. So you see, this goes from light dark light. So it's helpful. Play with the twenties, but I actually leave it defaulted to here. And the other thing to think about is when you see the Grady in, uh, it's actually gonna go from clear. You can't really see it because we need something to show it. So let's ah, drops something and with a flood fill first, let's pick a different color altogether. He's over top here and pick two colors that will see and go back to our grading up. And so now you can see what happens as it fades in the transparent portion now exposes the blue underneath. So again, a lot of opportunities for these to be very beneficial, and you can kind of, ah, customize these in whatever way you need. So if you go to if you click right on the icon up there, it's going to give you this Grady's editor that pops up, and you can define these by moving these around and changing the color. So, for instance, this one means solid capacity. So if you bumped capacity back, see the effect that has on the green there and the needs me in the type of color so if I was to bring this end and change the color here, it's gonna affect that color differently. If I click here, I can introduce another one. You see, it defaulted back to the ah, the green. And I can keep playing around with ease and adjust in any way I need to. This is the transition from the fade. So the location of the fade I could move this back and forth. I can add on top and control the opacity. So again, lots of ways to really control and generate this. And then once I get it the way I like, I can just save. And I could save that somewhere on the hard drive if I want to actually saved Ingredient or Kansas had okay, And it's gonna be right there, ready to use so I can click and drag again. And there's that nice little fate I just created. So again, I want to make sure that explain all this course content away that I utilize stuff. I don't utilize ingredient feeds in this regard. I'll simply start here, and I use it that way. Uh, in a very basic fashion. So just light to dark. I'll even just use the light to dark like you see here and then I'll apply color modes over top with layers on this side. So that's pretty much how going to show you, You know, the paintwork going to show you how to develop your paintwork in grayscale apply color over top, and then I'm gonna show you how to paint directly on layers with colors. Um and really, the other way to generate Grady INTs is to actually select an area. So this is the way that I do most of my paintwork. So if I hold shift and I drag out a perfect circle on, I moved them place. I'll control my Grady INTs with large soft brushes so I can skill us up very large. And if I want a radiant, I can just paint across here and I can get my grade Ian fade just the way I want like that . So that's really the way I do it. But again, it's there if you need it. And it's ah, very quick way to affect a large area, especially if you're painting a background eso that I complete this lesson. Let's move on to the next
12. L11 The Smudge Tool: Okay, so now for the smudge brush, this could be a very fun and interactive way to blend your paint. We're gonna be doing some exercise where I show you a few different ways to blend paint ways to think about it. But for instance, this is, ah, just a solid box on one layer. I've locked transparency and we'll talk more about that. Just the basic idea is that it doesn't allow you to go outside of the confinements of this layer. So the perimeter edge. But if we go to the smudge brush and we start to paint back and forth with the right brush and keep in mind, you could switch this tiny brush you want actually have one that I call Mr Smudgy, and I'll explain the settings in that later. But the main thing is that it's ah, basically hard round brush that moves the paint over left and right up and down just a little bit. So a bit of Jeter. And so what you do is just with light amount of pressure, you can blend that back and forth. Now, keep in mind that the size of the brush can sometimes give you a bit of lag. So you want toe Oftentimes make the brush on Leah's bigas. It needs to be to smudge around the work, but this could be a highly effective way to quickly blend and also kind of yield some neat results in texturizing and controlling the work. For instance, you can actually pull paint around different ways and develop, you know, some need effects as you go, but the main thing is, it's very effective for blending. And again it's gonna be determined on the type of brush you have in the settings, because if you grabbed the wrong brush, you're probably not going to feel like you can blend a whole lot. You may get some need texturizing effects again. You might have it set up like you see this one has Ah, huge air of influence is just pulling the pain around constantly. Where the previous brush I showed you is actually set up to not do that, if I can find it again, Mr. Smudgy eso If I was to pull this, you know it's not nearly as, ah, it's gonna keep pulling around, but it's not nearly as affected as the previous one on What generally happens with this brush is it set up to really softly blend the paint back and forth, So settings are very important to getting just the right kind of blending effect that you want. In fact, this was one of the areas where not only did I struggle the most to get this right, but I noticed it was a lot of other. There was a lot of other students that were enquiring about this all the time. They couldn't seem to blend pain, but again, I'm gonna show you other ways to do this. But the smudge brush is a fantastic way to do it. You can even turn off the edge transparency, and you can blend the layers together in different ways. Eso that can yield some pretty neat results as well. So just play around the smudge brush so you can come up with and again. This is one of the most effective ways for blending paint, and we'll show you some more techniques, some that real soon, so that will conclude this lesson. Let's move on to the next
13. L12 The Dodge and Burn Tool: Okay, so now we're gonna talk about the Dodge and Burn Tool. You're gonna hit O on the keyboard for the shortcut command, and that will get you to hear notice. If you click and hold, it will give you each one. I don't really use a sponge tool, but Dodge and burn are highly effective, and I'll show you why. We'll start with Dodge. Let's generate a selection. Remember that if you don't hold shift, your selection will kind of go all over the place. Come in and eat it. The select. If I hold shift, I'll get a nice, perfect circle. And if I click outside of the circle, it'll disappear because of these selections up here. Remember, it's re selecting A new one commands you to go back, but if I go inside of the circle, the selection, it's gonna allow me to move it. Just be aware of that. And one last thing about selections. Make sure that when you go to change the selection, it's easy to get confused and go at it. Transform, and it won't do anything here. This is for once, there's a shape on the layer, but if you go to select transform selection. You have the same control points again. If you hold shift, it'll constrict and go proportionately. If you don't hold shift, it'll distort making ah oval or something. So Command Z, enter toe lock the transformation. Let's paint something in here and let's actually take that feather off. So we go command Z command all Z to go back and before I paint, I want toe. Eliminate this feather, put it down to zero de, select and redraw the selection holding shift, grab inside of the selection and move it over. Grab the fill tool and Phil, just like that command, do you to de select. Now What we're gonna do here is dodge this color. So basically, it's like if you're working off a photo and you want to add a light source off the side of a face, for instance, you could just sit there and hit that edge and make a pretty need effect, whether it's the very edge of this or the inside middle. Whatever. Notice that it set the highlights and I've got a little bit higher exposure. We can turn that down. We could slowly work that fade up to where you know, maybe we don't want to create a high spots. You just softly do it. Likewise, you can control mid tones and shadows. This becomes more to play as you have more to work with. This is basically just a solid, brighter color. So highlights is probably gonna be the most effective. Uh, you know, Shadow, it's gonna actually created a bit differently. It's actually gonna give you that softer glow without the hot spot. So I go back set this toe highlights. It's gonna be really easy to get get to, ah, hot spot because it's already a light color. So just be aware of that. Now. If I click and hold and bring this over to the burn tool and I work off shadows, I'll skill us brush up with the bracket keys, and I can have a nice little drop shadow to the one side. I can manipulate this and see what mid tones gives us. And let's see what highlights gives us so highlights work in the best There again, it's because it's such a bright color to start with, and you're gonna get used to using these a little bit more effectively when you have a scene that's already got a lot of different coloring. Now the real power of this and I'll show you as we start to paint stuff is that once you've got a bunch of paint, work together on a unified layer or group together. Whatever you can take this dodge tool, and you can really jump in there and create some need effects rather quickly. And then what I like to do is actually use this to define a light source on the existing work. And then once I go back to painting, I'll actually use Ault and select from this color palette. So I almost used the Dodge and burn tool in a way that it helps me to find some depth into the painting. And then I utilize the painting itself in the existing palette to create more. So I'll show you that as we progress. But I just want you to be aware of the Dodge and Burn Tool, highly effective for generating some quick dimensional effects. So with that, let's move on to our next lesson.
14. L13 The Color Picker: Okay, so now let's talk about a basic understanding of the color picker. So for instance, you can hold Ault and you can use this way of defining your color so it picks anything that you hover over on. It will drop that into your foreground color. It's like that. Remember, you can add XTO Flip those back and forth if you need to. But if you select right here, you're going to get the actual color picker. Now, this gets pretty advanced. That's got all this different stuff to worry about. But the main thing is this This bar that you see here, if I grab those two little arrows and I move it up and down, that's the hue of your color. Okay, so those are all the different hues that you can pick. If you bring the point over this way, you're getting more saturation. If you bring it down, you're getting dark if you bring it over your getting light. So basically the saturation is gonna occur from this point across everything throughout the middle. Really, because of light to dark. But it's basically hue, saturation and brightness just like the HSB you see here I picked this bright color right here and I go to saturation and now switches a slider from the utmost saturation two de saturated, but with the highest brightness. So, for instance, if I goto brightness now, I could take that all the way down to a dark, and I don't recommend that you control him here. You worry too much about lab. Seem like a RGB thes air more for print methods and, you know, Web colors, things like that. If you're not gonna be out putting to those, I would say that you just focus on this here, and that's gonna be your the type of hue that you pick the amount of light to dark in the amount of saturation and generally with painting, I find it easier to work in the middle and then use the very edges for the end refinement of the paintwork. And I'll show you that as we progress. But I just want you to have a basic understanding of how to select these colors. We'll see you go to a green, you want a darker green, but you want a darker green with less saturation. You're gonna pull it this way and down. That's gonna give you a darker, less saturated green until it reaches black and same thing. If you like this amount of saturation you have per color, you can just a just a slider here and you're gonna basically get the same amount of saturation of brightness but a different hue. So again, I'm gonna show you other ways to edit your color work as we go. But I want you to have a basic understanding of how the color picker works. And then if you go to save colors, you came and add the swatches. And if your swatches air open here, you can add that color rather quickly and will actually ask if you want to name that swatch and then you hit. Okay, we'll drop it in there under your libraries. So it was a basic because I don't use mine because I have, like, two colors in there. But again, I developed all my paintwork on the canvas and I select from there. So that's the way I'm gonna show you how to paint as we move forward. So with that, let's move on to our next lesson.
15. L14 Blending Modes: Okay, so now I want to talk to you about blending modes and those air going Apply two layers. Now, blending modes can actually be used with layers and with the brushes. So you seem over here and over here, and what happens is that we take this little or burr sphere that we have. I'm gonna actually show you adjustments, but we're gonna get into these later. But we're gonna quickly change the color of this to something like this and say that we wanted this to affect the layer beneath, but in a blending mode way, like for instance, we wanted it to darken it. We might go to multiply wanted Teoh Color Dodger. Brighten it. We could do that. So what it does, it takes all those colors within, you know, the fade, the hue, everything. And it applies this blending mode over top. And then you see it effects from a hierarchy of top to bottom. So lots of unique effects that you can generate here. We're gonna get into this as we paint, but I just want you to be aware of these. So if you just simply want to colorize part of the artwork you can use that in conjunction with the opacity. You see, you get some pretty neat effects just with that. And again, if you go to paint on top of this and what I mean by a top, this is exact layer that you're working on. So, for instance, if I bring this back to 100% and back to normal mode to get exactly what we had, and I want to paint on top of this, but I want to add a blending mode with a particular brush, I can select that I can go to whatever brush texture otherwise, and I can add a blending mode of, say, well, said Color Dodge. It's pretty easy to see that one. And then we'll pick a different color over here to apply the effect anthem brighter like this. So now when I actually apply this effect on to this sphere with locked edge, it's gonna playa blending mode with that at the same time. So I just wanted to be aware that you can control your blending modes here, So if I want to go to Darken, it's like this darker tone get a very different effect to know I can go to multiply. And with each new brushstroke, it's actually gonna keep darkening until I get the black. You see lots of unique things that you can do with just blending modes and various brushes . But remember, if you're applying the blending mode with the brush, it has to be on opaque layer. You can't just do it on a floating layer. I don't see if we go to Color Dodge, for instance. It doesn't affect that previous layer. It will affect the paint that I'm applying, but not that layer Now. As soon as I switched the blending mode here, it will affect the previous layer because it's actually interpreting this paintwork over top of the previous layer. So just be aware of. The difference is that the blending modes for the brushes will affect brush brushes that are applied to the actual paintwork like that, and then blending modes here will work off the hierarchy on also, the last thing I want to make sure to mention before we jump out of this part is remember that when merging, blending modes down together, they work most effectively with a flattened layer beneath. So this should actually show you Because see how this one is a color dodge. If I emerge it all the way down to this blue layer, watch what had happens right here. I'm gonna hold shift, select all, um, command e notice that it affected the blue and the pink area with the color dodge. But here it converted back to a normal color. The reason being is it wasn't attached to this gray, so it actually reverted back to its original color. Didn't have the ability to affect the blending mode with underlying pain. So be aware that if you ever get an adverse effect when you merge down your work, it could be that you have a blending mode floating over top of nothing. So it's basically just floating, and it doesn't know what to apply that blending mode to. Hopefully that makes sense for him. So that will bring this one to a close. Let's head on to our next lesson.
16. L15 The Lock Transparency Feature: so I want to talk to about the lock transparency feature. So if you go to any layer and you click this icon right here, it's gonna lock the transparent pixels. What that means is, if this is a flood, fill over a solid layer. It's gonna act as a container to this. So, for instance, and remember, if you're on this layer, the move told move just that layer. So you're gonna click between these and jump over to whichever when you want, but you can move it with the move toe up, down. Remember, too. If you hold shift, it'll lock into whatever position you drag first, so I could be a good way to kind of a line things. But with that, let's go and start painting and notice that now, as I paint, I can't go outside of the edge of that container and let me put this back to a normal blending mode. We'll see how easy that makes it for me. I don't have to worry about going outside of the perimeter of this shape. So, like transparency is a great way to paint. It makes things a lot easier. You can start to focus on just things like your color and the brush size and kind of the effect that you're applying within this region, an area so it makes these dynamic effects pretty easy because, for instance, says I start to get no somebody's darker tones in place, and I'm just slowly brushing a man and trying to get some kind of depth there. I could hold all select from a different area of the painting paint back. It's, um, edge lighting. So pretty easy to ah, paint in this regard. And a lot of times, if you're struggling to get you know, some detailed paintwork or get comfortable with the painting process, isolating areas of the work and then lacking transparency can kind of be your best friend, because again, it makes it a lot easier to worry about just what's inside of here than you know, possibly messing up the edge. So, for instance, if I go to this other one without like, transparency and select this color quickly, you know pain outside of the edge. Now there's times you're gonna want to do that, obviously, but you need to know the difference. And using like transparency could be a great way to really be specific. We're gonna talk about layering the work and kind of setting it up almost like a a stage where each area is locked until you need it to not be, and then you want to paint outside of those confinements. Utilizing those two concepts together can really make your paintings have lots of detail, but also in a way where you can kind of keep check on everything and not get too distracted by all this complexity. So keep in mind that, like transparency, feature is highly beneficial. And it doesn't just work with a solid Phil just here where So, for instance, if I add a layer and I take a bit of a soft brush something like this and we'll pick a different colors, we could see it a bit better. And so we kind of glance across here, we do some kind of stellar kind of effect, and then we like this. But then, you know, we started thinking that we wanted different tone to the middle, but we don't want to blend outside of the edge. We can live transparency there, switch our Hugh on our darkness a bit. If we want the inside to be a bit darker. And just like that, we can pain in there and notice that it's it's retaining that original shape. It's not making new shapes and may look a little bit like it is because we're kind of texture ring. This is more of a texture brush, but it's actually not going outside of the confinements of that original shape. So again, it makes painting a lot easier to focus on. And there you go. So hopefully that helps you understand how to better use lock transparency to age in the paint process. With that, let's move on to our next lesson.
17. L16 The Hue Saturation Slider: now. Another thing I want to show you is the hue, saturation sliders. Now there's a bunch of sliders under image adjustments, everything from levels which is going to help you control, like the dark brightness contrast, kind of same thing curves, exposure, all sorts of neat stuff in here. And we'll delve into this further as we start to create our paint studies. But I want to show you the hue, saturation slider. First, I would say this and color balance of the two most important to really start implementing into your paintwork again. I want you to understand this stuff a bit before you jump in to start using it too much. But for instance, they want to change the paintwork here. We want to retain the light to dark, but we just want to change the hue. We can easily do that with this slider, so any of the the Hughes that we want easily attainable and again it's keeping and retaining that light to dark, that saturation as well we can punch up more saturation. We can also punch up light to dark. And just like that, we're able to really adjust this and get a little bit more out of it. Now, keep in mind if you're gonna make adjustments like this, you might want to duplicate the layer first. So hit command J take off the visibility of the previous layer and then try it again. And the neat thing about this is it really allows you to watch the effect take shape and make the best judgment call by comparison. So say we want to bring this to a red, really punch up the saturation, bring out some of the dark, darker areas, you know, whatever it is, our vision is and then hit. Okay, there. And then we can easily title these on and off and make our best choice again. We could try this with the planet is Well, so this has a bit more detail to it. I'll go ahead and right click and duplicate it. I could name that if I need to Just hit. Okay. And again, let's go to image. Adjust hue, saturation. Let's play with saturation of that. And look how it even retains the light to dark and gives us that nice range of color adjustments. Well, some pretty neat effects right there. But that saturation played like the dark, something like that, and hit OK, so lots of ways to at your work. And really lots of ways to generate some quick colorization and utilize this to again select from this work and keep painting. So it kind of helped spark ideas. I believe so. Hopefully that's helped you that will conclude this lesson. Let's move on to the next.
18. L17 Using the Color Balance Slider: Okay, Now let's talk about the color balance slider. So another way to copy things is actually just to have the move tool selected, which is up here. Hold Ault on the keyboard and drag one of the layers over. And you can do this as many times as you need to sit. Can generate some really quick copies with that shortcut. So again, move, tool, hold the all key and then drag it over. Okay, so now what? This planetoid looking type shape. Um, let's go ahead and go into image. Adjust color balance. Now, the neat thing about the color balance slider is it allows you to control shadows, mid tones and highlights. So what happens is with something like this that has a bit of shading, has some light sources that has a couple of different colors. We cannot take that. We can really modify it in Ah, more detailed way. So this does take a bit more practice, so make sure you're ready for this or just start experimenting with it and then slowly implement India work. But you could go to shadows and you could immediately add more blue to the shadows, sighing to bring it to read, Really? Play with these sliders, take your time and really analyze what it does to the work and make it orations to kind of test this. Let's say we go to the highlights and we don't want to bring out some of that yellow. And I think it's kind of neat about this is it really teaches you what colors make up. What? So just by kind of playing around with this, you see the effect that has and what you can dio with what's already there. So I think I always struggled to really understand what colors air involved into making something stand out the way that it does. This kind of helps you explore that idea. Well, maybe something like a really creepy red planet. So just like that, we could makes more adjustments. It okay, eso again, Color balance is kind of neat like it. And keep in mind, too, that you can isolate ah portion of anything. So I don't really see it being is necessary here. But let's just try to hold shift. I'll move the selection and I'm gonna hit command shift I, which is actually invert selection and what I'm trying to do is I'm gonna color shift just this edge. So image adjustments, color balance. I'll go for highlights because it's a pretty bright edge Notice now, I could just affect just that edge, okay? And I could even hit OK, and then do it again. So the reason being is that each time it's gonna brighten up a bit more and it's gonna reapply a new effect to it. And I can even do something like a brightness contrast in conjunction with that really punch up that brightness and maybe even you saturation. So all of this could be done, you know, together. And for instance, once I d select that if that appears to be too strong, then I can soften that up. One of the ways I could do that is the good old smudge tool we talked about earlier. I could scale that down and just run that over that edge and blend that in. You see rather quickly were able to introduce that new light source and color on, still preserve what we had there. So again, that's just another way that you can kind of make color adjustments and implement it into your digital paintwork. Uh, just experiment with it and have some fun. And we'll talk about this more as we stood to create more of our painting. So that would include this lesson. Let's move on to the next.
19. L18 The Rulers and Grids: Okay, So something else I want to show you is basically the rulers. So if you hit command are for your shortcut, you're gonna get the rulers activated on and off, okay? And you conceive, you highlight of top there, so obviously, that's where you can find the drop down version of it. Now, I don't use these a lot, and I'll be honest. You got to be aware of these that sometimes certain brushes I've noticed lag with these on . So if you get any kind of lagged from your system, this may or may not apply to you and they're always making updates. But I just want you to be aware that sometimes you want to check things like having the rulers on and off, then test your brush and then obviously test a couple other brushes to make sure you know, you really pinpoint it down. But the great thing about rulers is that you can drag him across and you can really get some alignment going on. Uh, what I'll generally do is even use it as kind of a rise in line. So one of the things that happens with people that use photo shop is, they generally have to develop their own kind of grids for perspective. And one of the ways to do this is actually the path tool. So I'm gonna show you this real quick. I'm not going to delve into this tool too much because I do feel that as a beginner, you need to focus on other things, like getting efficient at painting and things like that. But I do want to show you this one application of it, so just follow these settings. So it's the polygon tool. So if you click and hold, you can see all these different tools. We're gonna go for just the polygon tool, and we're gonna have that set to star. So you check that, leave the rest of the defaults their sides 100 and we'll go and make this a shape. So again, just copy All these settings were at a nine by 16 uh, 300 dp. I like imagine before. But what happens is this. In conjunction with the ruler, you click and drag this out kind of go past the canvas there and have dinner. You notice it gives us this Polly online tool of this the soccer star, basically. But really, I'm using it for a great at this point. Now, you can actually just take this hold Ault and drag a copy, then let go of all to keep moving it with the move tool. But just like that, you've got basically two point perspective. So you've got the rise in line across here. You've got your stars to give you a two point perspective. If you move the rise in, line down and then move each one of these down, just hold shift, select in. Both come down and now you have a, ah, low horizon line and you're looking up it say buildings or whatever you're trying to draw. But I just want you to be aware that this is kind of a work around that you can utilize to get perspective going and the neat thing about leaving them until you're ready, leaving them in this polygon format as you can move them all around and get the full extent of the path lines you created for your reference points. So pretty powerful forgetting perspective and, ah, again using the ruler tool for alignment. So I just want to show you those road quick, and I'll make sure you got copies of these just so you can kind of play around with it. If you're not ready for adjusting the settings but back to the ruler tool, you can use the move tool and you'll see it highlights. And if you dragged us all the way up to the roller and let go, it's going to get rid of it now. Another thing. So you start really setting these up, and you're using your measurements off to the side to get accurate with or whatever you might be doing. Eso say it gets pretty cumbersome and they're all over the place. Remember that you can hit command H to take the visibility on and off. So this could be nice for when you're working on something and you don't quite want to move them all off the canvas. But there, in your way, visually just hit command age. So command are to get rid of the rulers. Command H to get rid of the roller lines. All right, let's go and hit command are again and bring that bag and you can also right click up here and changes to whatever unit of measurement you want. You got lots options there. So the other thing to remember is when you're dragging these out, you can also hit command Z and all. See, so command all Z and go back multiple times. Manzi. It'll bring it back so you can undo and redo just like anything else with the guides. And if you need more assistance for guides and alignment, you can also go to view show grid. So this is nice when you're trying to work on something with symmetry or align something and you can work with, you know, those perspective kind of lines that showed you in conjunction with this, And I'm also going to show you how to develop some straight lines. Eso again, This is going to kind of get you started on, you know, aligning things, getting an idea for perspective and then working out from there with your painting. So let's go ahead and move to the next lesson, and I'll show you how to generate some lines
20. L19 Drawing Straight Lines in Photoshop: Okay, so now let's talk about creating straight lines within your work. So one of the things that you can do with photo shop is actually hold shift. And when you draw left to right or up and down, it'll conform or condense or stay strict to that direction. Just like that, you can get some pretty nice straight lines. I'm gonna hit command a for select all and delete Mandy to de select. Now this works pretty nicely, But say you need ah, diagonal line. Um, you can't hold shift and do that. It's going to converge to one of those two points two directions. So what you can do is actually tap, hold, shift and tap again. And this leg should keep going as many times as you need, uh, in a kind of plugging away or line by line way. And if you need to go back, its gonna actually take up undo for each one of those will just take command a billy Command E. So now keep in mind that I actually disabled the shape dynamics of this brush. So typically, if your brushes like this something with shape dynamic, then what's gonna happen when you do the shift by shift method or click shift click shift against so click hold shift click. It's actually gonna try to compensate for the line weight of that particular brush, so you just need to be aware of that. Uh, now, if you hold shift and draw, you'll still be able to get your horizontal and vertical lines. No problem. But when you go to get your shift click method each time, it's gonna try to compensate for that pressure sensitivity within that brush. So just be aware that you have to go into whatever brush, disable your shape dynamics as long as it looks like this. With Noah Taper at the edge, this particular method will work just fine. So this becomes pretty handy because whenever you're trying to draw something technical along with the grid pattern, you can really get the job done. You can also kind of defined your perspective by skill in the brush down with the bracket keys, picking some kind of vanishing point. We'll say right here, holding shift or click shift, and this is a bit cumbersome and takes longer to do. But you're in more control. I guess. So you actually developing exactly what you want to see. So you may have just want a little bit of, you know, perspective this way where you dio some lines coming this way, you know your picture And maybe your prize in line is something like that. Remember, you can hold shift to get that and then maybe just take this hold all to drag it over. Pettitte transform, flip horizontal. That'll flip the layer. So a kind of crude way We've established a two point perspective. You know, it's not perfect, obviously, but, um, so that's another way you can kind of do it command, eat, emerge ALS together. But the main thing is that you're just aware of how you can generate some different point by point lines. So just remember, hold shift and get straight lines vertically and horizontally and shift click for point by point. Straight lines, too. Do whatever crazy design you're thinking of, and that'll bring this lesson to a closed. Let's move on to the next
21. L20 Blocking in Some Basic Shapes in our Painting: Okay, so now we're gonna kind of implement some of these. So as we go throughout this course, I want to teach you how to actually utilize these tools. Not just, you know, here's the tools. Go and have some fun. So let's go ahead and work through this. And I think one of the best things that kind of practice with for a little bit more of a novice is painting space space gives you some basic shapes, toe work with lots of cool textures and features. And even if you get it wrong, it can general look pretty neat. I don't know if there is a right and wrong when it pertains to art anyways, but what we want to do is first establish a background. So let's just double click here. Let's just go BG for background. And what we want to do is actually flood fill this so we can just start with a black, even though, you know, space isn't really entirely black. You know there's gonna be some purple on blues and different things like that. But we're going to start with black and just make it easy on ourselves. We're gonna add a new layer over time. And let's just call this planet one. So for this, we're just gonna take our selection tool. Remember that you click Hold, Let go on the elliptical hold shift drag from somewhere on the lower side to the upper side all while holding shift release, and we're gonna flood Fill this and let's go ahead and fill this with Let's say, just start with the I'm a medium green or something, something like that. So there's our first planet we're gonna de select by hand command D or you could just take the selection tool on tap off the screen. And so now if we grab the move told, we can move this wherever we need Teoh, we can hit command t and move this by just clicking and dragging around. We can hold shift and weaken drag from the outside point and re scale it. As long as we hold shift, it'll drag proportionately. If we let go a shift, we're gonna get some distortion. Just be aware that had escaped Command t again Hold shift. Drag this down to about What is that? About half have to hide something like that, you know, Keep in mind to You can work a larger if it makes you feel more comfortable. And then you could scale your items down later, providing that you're leaving as layers. So go ahead and hit Tenor. Now what we're gonna do is come over here. We're gonna lock transparency so that we can paint on this more freely and not worry about anything else in the scene. So let's go ahead and come over here. Let's take a soft brush. So something like a hair brush this Ah 10 very soft brush would be fine. Let's hold all and select this tone. Let's click the color picker and pick something a bit darker like this. Now let's kill the brush up with their bracket keys to get something that's roughly half the size of the overall diameter. We're gonna touch larger, and what we'll do here is just glance across the bottom, kind of in a horseshoe shaped like this back and forth. Let's just get this to where it serves to appear more rounded. It's got a defined light source to the top when skilled us brushed back and that weaken get this bottom edge a bit more Now we can click here and pick a little bit darker version and just press nice and lightly. It's going to depend upon what type of tablet you're using as far as what you can consider achieving. But just try to make something looks close to what we're doing here. It's like that, and the other thing I want to do is actually hold all, select the brighter color, skilled a brush back even further and just defined the next light source even though we're going with the same color for now. I just wanted to see how much more rounded we can make that by giving it, you know, a brighter light source up top and then a bit of ads lighting a room. Lighting to the bottom starts to really round that out. And just like that, you've got a planet like shape. We're gonna make this look obviously a lot more impressive, but we'll just take it step by step, so that will complete this lesson. Let's move on to the next
22. L21 Using Reference and Adding Another Basic Shape: All right, So now, as we continue toe kind of set up are seen and start painting. Obviously, we've got just a very basic start. One of things you might want to look at is reference, or in this case, what I call a mood board or what's called a mood board. Actually got this from store boarding. When I used to do storyboards, we would set up ah lot of different reference images and then utilize that for reference. So in this case is air all copyright and free and just free attribution type images, and you can find those online. You just got to make sure that they're usable for, you know, whatever your needs are, you're just gonna recreate by visually studying from them. Then maybe you don't need so much as faras copyright free cause you're going to do a transformative process. In this case, that's what we're gonna do Here is Well, we're just looking at these for accused and reference to light color, texture, things like that. But what happens is if you can find good images, composite them together in Photoshopped onto a canvas like this, and then it gives you great reference all in one file. You know, try to get the file size down to something manageable so that you can maneuver like Children. The previous lessons, you know, Space bar Teoh, grab and pull over. Zoom for zooming in and things like that. So you just want to make sure it doesn't lag too much. If it does, then the megabytes size is probably too large. This has all been condensed down to one layer, so you can see the to file sizes of the same. So now we can grab this window, we can pull it over, got a click and hold. And then as we come over here, that little blue highlight bar will kind of pop up. Let go. And now we've got a reference right next to us and we can look at our beginning of our space seen here, and we can start to pull from this and then paint over here so obviously would be pretty easy to generate selections. Copy and paste move things over. But that's not really what we're looking to Dio. We just want to take some cues from this over here, and we want to make some kind of imaginative space seem so One of the things I want to look at with the consolations here is kind of this No pattern that you see. So if I was to take the selection tool, you know, I'm kind of just trace where it starts to be noticeable from one color shift to another. I could look at something like that. Kind of looks like a Siris of clouds, you know, some somewhere through here. It looks like a little broken up shapes and against some kind of cloud shapes. So I can kind of take cues on that, and I can come over here with the selection tool, and I could just try to draw in something and b roll, you know, random about it, because this the shape that we're creating right here isn't, uh, to some sort of finality. And it isn't any sort of perfection. Okay, so, ah, lot of times you want to think about things is just a starting point, and I think digital painting it really helps to do that, not to worry about this being so clean and so perfect. And, you know, thinking like that tends to hinder you more than anything but simply getting it started Making the first mark and we can take and create a new layer we could maybe even sample. Like if we were to grab the brush tool here, we could hold Ault and we could sample one of these colors to get started. If we're really going for something, that was Ah, you re creation of this. I'm not really thinking that entirely. Um, you know, I want to look at the other references. Well, hold space bar to move. You know, maybe something like this actually colors better on this one, but the shape to the previous one. So go ahead and go here, hold Ault and select something just kind of middle of the row and notice. If you drag it around, it'll shift. So something right about here Go back over to here. Our selection still there. And let's go ahead and just flood. Fill this on that new layer. Command D to de select. So it doesn't look too pretty at this point. Looks even a bit strange. Definitely doesn't look like anything over here yet, but it's mainly the idea that we get a ah flood layer in place and then options start to present themselves. Or we can think about different things. We can start to paint out the edge, which is probably we're gonna dio We can use the edges a lot transparency. In fact, you can use this for your base shape. So we'll just call this just to make it easy Space shape one, and, uh and that's going to drag it over this new layer icon Let go, and it will make an exact duplicate except for the word copy. Take off the visibility of the first. So I just want to show you how sometimes you contest things and slowly build up to what you're looking for. So now with that, let's go ahead and take a soft airbrush. We'll show you the settings here, so it's gonna be the 010 very soft brush. This has been modified a bit, but it's pretty standard with something you would get. Photo shops have got transfer set spacing to nine smooth things, and you know, just look at the settings here if you need Teoh and what I can do now is come over to this skillet up with my right bracket key back then with my left bracket key, and I could just start to paint in some of this fogginess that I want to see. So this is actually one of the ways that you're gonna blend pain. It's just by using a soft brush. So we put this base shape in place just so we have, ah, sort of starting point and then we're just gonna paint around this. We're going to scale up the brush and different areas. And what we're looking for is this softness that you get through here, but noticed too. That's kind of Ah, blotchy nous as well. So right now we're just worrying about the fade and not the blotch. And it's not the texture. I was gonna compress that in there. Remember, we can toggle off the visibility of the other layer of the planet we need to. It's usually really good idea to do that. Anyways, at least take the layer and punch down the visibility or toggle it right off with this one . And the reason why is because you never know when you're gonna have to edit and move things around, so you don't want to get in the habit of not painting through your work, just like you don't want to get in the habit of not drawing through your work. I'm just gonna speed this up. I'll start with larger brush. You see, it's washing away a lot of those shapes that I didn't, but I could easily just scale the brush down and keep some of those shapes. Likewise, Aiken skip outside of that area and start to think a little bit more about the other shapes that you're going to see skillet up. Get some of this fogginess from the distance so it kind of winds the shapes out. But it also gives a little bit more blending to that shape. So something like this just to get it started say, I'm just taking that soft brushing kind of dabbing and skipping around. It's definitely pretty far from the initial shape, but it's not. It's not anything that it has to be, um, to an exact degree. This is very hit or miss. You just try it, move things around. Now the benefit of this is like once we blend out that shape, we've got enough of this in place, and I'll even paint more behind the planet here, we can go back in and we can kind of connect smaller little fades. And we can do this with a texture Brushes. Well, but I just want you to see that a lot can be done. We're just even a soft brush Now the other thing I want to dio is actually blend off some of the edge to this little cloud that we've got going on and noticed two in this ah, image that it's all over. It's not just right through the middle like we have here, so we gotta do that as well. So just kind of again use the bracket keys. I've always got my hand hovered over the bracket keys my thumb over the old key so I can quickly select a new color. And that's kind of the positioning. And Aiken jump over to the space bar if I need to. But I like to work from a distance as much as possible just so I can see the broad strokes . I don't want to jump in to start detail in yet. Just like that, we've kind of got the base starting point of our cloud, and now we're gonna continue to work this up, introduce some more colors from highlights, things like that. So with that, let's conclude here and move on to the next lesson.
23. L22 Adding Cloud Effects with a Basic Brush: So now what I want to do is show you how to build up on this and kind of use a brush and start to implement more texture. But I don't want to use any special brushes here, especially this first project. I want to show you that you can really achieve everything with the basic set that you're given eso for this. I'm gonna take the a soft brush that we've already used and it is basically modified, but it's still the brush that comes with photo shop. So it's pretty easy to ah, just the settings. So what I want to show you here is you could take even this basic brushes just simply set up as a soft airbrush click. This icon here while this is selected and I will make a version of this, you can call it testing or whatever you want to dio just to find it. It's something else, uh, testing effect, something like that. It will include all the previous settings and you notice a little I kind of the top right there so we can go into our settings over here and we can modify this brush. So what? I want to do is think about some of this variation that's happening in this constellation and you know, this kind of space cloud? Look, whatever so we want to do is come over here and do something like maybe a little more spacing. But it's gonna be mainly shaped dynamics. We're gonna do size Geter really extend that. So we start to see some variation inside of this thumbnail right there scattering. And we'll do both axes, kind of space that out. You see, if it gets too far out, it's going to start to look like stars, but just enough where it's got some variation in there and let's go and try that. If we up, the count's probably gonna sell the brush down because it's dramatically increasing the amount. But you just want to get your settings the way you like, tested over here. So you get and remember that as you scale the brush up, you're gonna get a different look. We'll see how they're spaced out right there and kind of foggy here. They're a little more focused and tighter together, so something like that, and you know you could do this all by hand because those done has taken this brush tip and it's placed it. Um, it's given it those variables that you're seeing here. So let's go ahead and add a new layer, and we can again hold Ault over here and select one of these interesting colors. I want something more into a blue than a purple at this point. So pull the slider down here and let's try something like this. I'm just gonna lightly brush this in again kind of skipping areas, moving the size of the brush back and forth with the bracket keys just kind of experimenting and seen what I see mainly trying to build in some depth. It looks pretty flat at this point, so you can notice here, too. It's softer and areas more pronounced in other areas, so that's kind of what we're going for. Depth. He kind of looked to, ah, to the space scene so we can skill this brush way down, and we get some of these tinier little law kind of dots. More focused areas like that Skip Off into the other area doesn't have to follow just that initial purple either. I definitely want variation when doing anything that's Ah you know, nature, space, any think that there's lots of variation. And, um, you don't have to be Teoh strict to your design. I guess so we'll see something like that there. It gives us more detail to look at. So now what we're gonna do next is actually take this and look at a few blending modes. So we've added this layer over top. And maybe you want to see what this looks like with overlay with soft light, just kind of cycle through these, You start to get used to which ones do what I know already going in that I'm gonna pick linear Dodge. Yeah, Color Dodge and I think Color Dodge for now because I want to retain some of the color effect That's actually too much at this point. But I want I want some of that in there mainly because I want to show you the next step where I'm gonna take this now select from the color Swatch. Bring this to a bright. It's just a really light blue whitish blue into the same thing again. But now, being even more specific or more focused into some of the the brighter areas within this nebula. So it was kind of poke and prod around and paint some of this in like this. You got to be real sparingly with anything that's close toe white, because you really want to save that for the end of your paintwork. But in this case, this is kind of I'm gonna give it the effect we need, but in a lot of paintings, you'll you'll save white and definitely absolute white for the very last. It was just like that Small design elements to it. You know, a little goes a long ways on this portion, so I should probably stop right there. So now you could see as we start to pan back, it's starting to look more atmospheric. It's starting tohave more energy and feeling to it just with those basic layers. And again, you know, play with these color molds and blending mode. So you get you probably gonna get some pretty neat adverse effects. But until your cycle thrown, you won't really know based upon your eye, you need to really figure out what goes with what you're looking for. But I think something like that's starting to look good. Um, so all kinds of test things like that. No counseling at layers, combined with blending modes to figure out exactly what's heading in the right direction. So now we're able to just that really basic brush and get some of this texture going in this kind of cloudy effect. But remember, once you do get a brush adjusted that we like, don't just leave it like this, cause through easy to get these confused It's right click here. Click Rename brush. Let's just call this Ah, for lack of a better term bumpy cloud brush and enter. You see it saves it right there. Eso Now we've got that modified brush that was just done with a basic soft brush. Tip eso with that, that'll bring this lesson to a close. Let's move on to the next.
24. L23 Adding Texture to Our Planet: So now let's go ahead and add some texture to the planet and some effects of this. So you noticed with this reference, there's a lot of different things going on. You have craters, have some shading, some highs and lows. You have a light source stone. Here. You've got some colored lighting on this one side. So lots of going, you know, lots going on. Really, If you were to zoom up, you're going to see a lot more detailed texture and things like that. So you have to figure out to what level you really need your detail to exist on this over here. But first things first. Let's go and take this. Let's put the opacity back to fall like that, and you've already kind of established some of that shading with the soft brush through this section here. So that'll get us up and rolling for some immediate depth, so it doesn't just look like a flat disc on the canvas, but we want to do here, start to make some adjustments, and I want to show you a couple things as we go here so that you're aware that there's different ways to get to where you need to be. This has already lock transparent pixels right there. So I can't pain outside of the confinements of this. But say I want to test on effect before I paint onto it. One of the ways that you can do that simply go to select load selection. This dialog box is gonna pop up, Just hit, okay? And it basically just took the information, was on that layer and generated a perfect selection around it. So it's the same thing as this except and now allows you to add a layer and work over top in that confinement while floating over that layer. So we just had the new layer, you know, just called test effect or whatever if you want to give it a name. But what's nice about this is you can now jump in here. I'm gonna click this icon here, and it'll revert these back to black and white, and I'm going to pick up a brush that, uh, really is just like a solid brush. So we'll say the chalk line brush. So this brush tip actually is something comes a photo shop. So again, just a few settings that I've adjusted to make it more like a in art pen. And what I want to show you here is that you can even take a brush like this and have it resemble some texture ring. So, you know, you can grab texture in here. What? We're gonna first test it without that skill, this way up and see, It's given us some permit, er, edge texture, but it's not giving us any on the inside. So let's ah, bump back the opacity and see if by painting over it a few times, if we could get the texture we need. So I'm gonna bring the opacity way down. I'm just glance over this just a little bit of stepping or, you know, kind of reapplying the brush as I go. So you see, what I'm trying to do is kind of get this bit of effect going through here on it doesn't have to be. I'm not trying to recreate this. Just so you know, I'm trying to be inventive, pull inspiration and conceptual information from the reference So again, it doesn't have to be the same. Just trying to kind of get something going here. So might skill. The brush up and down with the bracket Key is quite a bit and thinking about sort of highs and lows of this paintwork. Something like that. I can also, um, come back with an eraser and we'll just pick the same brush. And I could just kind of a race through this back their capacity quite a bit, because what I want to do here is actually just randomized the edge a bit more. So it's kind of like just trying to make texture out of these basic brushes. I just really want to show you that custom brushes are fantastic and we're gonna get into that more later. But in the beginning, I think it's helpful to realize that you can do everything with a basic set of brushes. Just have to. I kind of think the road a bit and you've got a not look at it like, um, the first thing you get needs to be exactly what you need to see. In fact, with painting, a lot of times, your best pain will come from multiple layers and building up of things. So, for instance, I can even get it to a level like this where it looks, You know, you could definitely see the brushstrokes, and it doesn't look is impressive, but it's a floating layer once again so I can go filter, blur girls in Blur. And I want to blurt just enough where it doesn't look like you see, brushstrokes. So something like that it okay, you see, already right there. It starts to look more, you know, like a planet, planet surface or something. Mawr Ah, Rocky and terrain. Something like that. So it's getting close already. And the main thing is, is that you're gonna build up on this whenever you're trying to get like some very neat effects going, it may not be the first layer. It may not be five layers in, but if you use the subtlety in the build up of layers you can come up with some really need effects. Another thing that you can dio Teoh generate texture pretty quickly is creating new layer. Go to filter noise at noise. We're gonna give it some kind of color to work with. So let's pick a gray something in the middle there and do that again. Noise add noise. Okay, so you see, it gives you this grain. It was kind of old school, broken television, kind of Look, I don't know what to compare it to, but it's just called noise. And let's just get towards something pretty easy to distinguish from the light and dark like that. It okay on, Let's go over here and click this to multiply. You see, it lets through some of that previous color. So we're just multiplying the dark onto the previous layers. Let's punch back capacity because we just want a little bit of this. This isn't in effect that we want to see all throughout. Now. The other thing, I think is good to do it, something like this. Zoom in and make sure that it's not so defined compared to everything else, which it actually is. So we're gonna take that and also do another filter blur. I was in Blur. Soften that up, but we want to make sure we can still see some of it. So I'm going to keep pulling this back until about right there, we can see some of that texture hit. Okay, toggle on and off with the visibility here and again. That's just another way to kind of build up and start getting a bit more grit and texture, so it doesn't look too overly smooth. We definitely want to distinguish different parts of the painting, and texture is a great way to do that. But you see, it's pretty quick to do and pretty effective okay, and you can see by doing that with the texture of starting to flatten out a bit. So I want to keep some of that light source going now. I could have raced back some of this texture, but I think that might look a bit strange with some soft brush racing going on might be able to get to work, but I want to try a different approach. One thing I want to show you at this stage to it's helpful to kind of back things up. So let's go and create a group, and you will just call this backup players something like that dragged us down to the bottom, and anything that we go to merge together for certain effects will make sure that there's a duplicate. So, for instance, I'm gonna grab these three here and right click duplicate layers. Okay, it's gonna copy those and click here. Hold shift, click the bottom one, click and drag and drop those into backup players and condense this down. I also want to take the visibility off so it doesn't conflict with anything I'm seeing over here. And I need to make sure that these effects react properly against the solid layer at the bottom because you got to remember what certain layer types and blending modes air on. They're not gonna look appropriate unless they have the bottom flood layer underneath. So let's go and take these hold shift Click Command E. And now that's all tied together. Another thing. I want to show you real quick. They don't want to keep generating a selection. Now, in this case, it's pretty easy. It's just a circle around this, but if you need to, you can go select, save selection and you can name it and call that up later if you need to. So Planet select. Now again, this is kind of silly, cause it's just, ah, a circle. It's pretty easy to Jenner generate circles and all sorts of ways for selections, but ah, more advanced area of your painting. The sexual will make sense because you can. Just if you happen to de select, it can go select load selection. Drop this down and all those selections will be saved right there. So very, very handy way to kind of make the best your selections there. So now we've got this planet isolated and say we want to bring out some of this texture. One kind of neat way to do it is just grabbed the Dodge Tool. Set it to probably mid tones. You can do highlights at first. The highlights are gonna be the strongest. And what I want to do is first just round out some of this. So if you noticed there's a lot of subtle kind of highlights going on through here, So you don't want to jump right toe highlights and punch him up too soon? A lot of times, getting paintings like this look believable is you know, when Teoh working subtleties. So just start very soft, very light. You know, you play with your exposure. Less exposure is obviously going to give you more time to slowly build up to this process. Continue to cycle your brush up and down, be okay with moving it side to side up and down tryto try to play around with it. Don't try to fight urges of left, right, Left, right, Things like that because it's, ah, again, generally in nature, you're not gonna see as much of that. So you got a I think that way Be okay with the stippling and dabbing and things like that. So there was that. Let's say that we got enough of this variation going a little more light spots in the shadow. We can always bring this back if we need Teoh. And now let's go toe highlights. And again, I'm just using a soft brush. Let's punch up a little bit more of this light source And I think it probably helps to do this from a distance because highlights can quickly get overdone. We're gonna have a lot of highlights on this 60. We've already got too much in the nebula effect in the background. So we got to be very careful how much more we add. I just want to get a little bit of that to show some variation on the planet. Maybe some on the very edge. And then if we go off our reference here, well, you see the reference. The lighting's different, but you just want to pay attention to some of these other shapes that there's a lot of various size and things going on there. That's what gives it its, ah, interesting look. And, you know, keep in mind you don't have to stick exactly to your reference, either you can introduced from your own ideas. It's one of the beautiful things about digital, since it's so easy. Teoh fix and go back experimentation becomes I'm really effective, really easy to Dio. And just like that, we've got more variation and more texture to our planet. We've still retained some of that stippling in there, so it's nice. I'll bring this lesson to a close. So now let's move on to the next.
25. L24 Creating a Star: all right, So now what I want to do is show you how once you get so much kind of going in your painting, it kind of AIDS the next step in the next step. It just makes it and a sense easier and easier. But I guess it depends on how well the ideas of presenting themselves. But one thing I want to show you is that we can actually utilize what's already here, especially for a scene like this. So let's go in zero in on this reference for a son and let's take this planet. We're gonna hold Ault and drag it across. That gives us Ah, duplicate of it. And let's go and skill us up with command. T hold shift. So it's proportionate, skilled up nice and large. And let's bring it off canvas about like this. And now let's go ahead and zoom in just a little bit and let's go to image adjustments. We'll start with you. Saturation may need to do both this and color balance. We'll see how far we get with this and let's adjust the hue, saturation, lightness, contrast. I guess if we get some yellow or orange going so a lot of times, what happens is you got to kind of carry it over to that next, Hugh. So it won't just take it green and get us all the way there. So we may need Teoh actually do color balance too. Let's try it again. Yeah, I think we're gonna have to. You can use color rise as well. Yeah, let's go and do that. Let's jump over to color balance and we just want the starting point. So you seem control it by mid tones, highlights and shadows. So you start to look at this. Okay, What color do anywhere. So that's got too much green in it. That's going to go to the shadows. One more that yellow or the red, the highlights. And you see it's starting to get closer and closer. And then what happens is once we hit, OK, it actually gives us this new range of color to work with so we can go back in, do it again. So, actually, I think I'm gonna lean towards giving that darker red to start with. But that at least gets us closer. Swing hit. Okay, there s We didn't have to you know, paint all that fresh, and then what we can do is obviously pay attention on what's here and sample from here. And let's go ahead and make sure a lot of transparency is set like this. And let's go and grab. We'll go back to a regular soft brush hold all select from the color palette over here and again if we want to test the effect. And you don't necessarily want to paint on this layer, even though you can see this that take us very long to get to just add a layer over top, try whatever affect you're looking for. But what I want to do is just slowly pain in, um, some of this kind of lava energy kind of effect going through here. So I'm just going to start off roll sporadic constantly against Skilling that brush up and down and looking for shapes and kind of test that yellow against the yellow that was already there because I could really just select from this yellow as well, obviously, and I can pay attention. That reference one of the things that I noticed with the reference as I get to the edge, the thing that makes it look rounded is the fact that a shape that would look wider in diameter over here see if I can make this more parent like that, that same shape over here is gonna appear like a shortened, more abrupt oval. And it's gonna get smaller and more abrupt all the way to the edge. So that's just how painting and drawing planets works. Everything from a crater to you know, this energy effect. You can notice that this big shape here is really the same as the shape over here. It's just because of perspective and distance and a three dimensional object sphere. Obviously, it's going to look more condensed, kind of squatty. It's back over here. I just want to think about things like that as they start to pain, so may appear more wider and larger here. As it comes over this way, it's gonna start to condense down, and these were gonna get smaller. And, you know, it's important to note that you can really do this entire painting with just a soft brush. You really can. You can do portrait's with soft brush. You can do anything you put your mind to with just a soft brush. But you may just change the settings around a bet you may. You're going to definitely be re scaling the brush quite a bit. And you're gonna use layers to your advantage a lot more. But I just want you to be aware that you can do everything with you know, either soft or hard brush. It's not so much that you need a specific brush for everything. But what happens is the more you start to do this, the more you realize that certain brushes will speed up your workflow and you get better and better creating them. So ideas kind of present themselves that way. But again, remember that in the beginning, I think it's important to just do as much as you can with a basic set of brushes and focus on learning how to paint how toe make things work, you know, not see something like this angle that looks horrible. This isn't gonna work out because it's kind of what happens is the novice. And then as you get better, you realize this isn't the end. This is just the beginning of the painting. The things I'm gonna overlay and put together are going to make this work, not the initial sketching almost. It's a build up of process of, you know, playing more and more noticed, too. I brought that soft brush right here, and it actually looks better. It's softening up that edge, and that's what's gonna happen here. But I'm not ready to do that yet. In fact, I'm just using that floating layer. But I kind of forgot about it because I use lock transparency so much So what's gonna happen? I want to show you another way. In case that happens in your paintwork. It's not a big deal, because you could just simply paying away. Kind of. It's nice, kid. You're going to see that effect that again. We're gonna implement that later. That's gonna You're gonna need to see something like that off a a son off a star. So have to get all the sin we're gonna start coming back with some dark. There's a lot of variation there. I will say something like this. And if we had to clean that up, also we have to do is go to this first layer, Select load selection it Okay, it command shift. I which will invert the selection, go back to the previous layer and hit delete. So it's really easy to clean things like that up as long as you kind of keep in mind. Of what objects were there to kind of rescue from that situation. Okay, so now, as we continue to paint, let's also check the blending mode of this layer that we just added. So we got to remember we applied it as a floating layer. So let's see if any of these previous blending modes do anything need for us. So if you notice right there color Dodge, it actually gives it some of the brighter, almost fluorescent bread. That's not evident there now. So that's kind of important to note, because that could be an easy way to implement some of this. So color dodges pretty neat linear Dodge. Get some of the yellow in there overlay. It's gonna actually dark. That actually kind of resembles this well, a little bit without a lot of smaller, you know, kind of ah, smaller details. Yet you know love to introduce that as well, but let's go and go back to linear dodge or straight screen light. So all of them kind of do it. It's it's all arguments that pinkish brighter tone. Um, one thing I do want to check, though, is like, even multiply. So yes, so multiply. Even though it's not dark enough, it's starting to give that that darker effect his wall. So we're gonna build up on that we're going to start off with. I don't know if I like Color Dodge for I think l A card like there. So we're gonna take heart light. And the other thing I want to show you is while we're here making good use of any texture that we've introduced, eso is lots of ways to do this. For instance, we could start pulling from the other texture of this planet. But let's take what we have here. First, we're gonna duplicate this. We're gonna find one of the ones that has ah has dark and damp. And let's go and do us to take the this layer here. I'm gonna merge this effect down. So that's what we've got right now for ah kind of build up in texture. And I want this one to bring out some of the darker points. But before I do that, I'm actually gonna hit command T. I'm going to scale this up and kind of move it. The reason being is I want this to overlap with already there. So I'm trying to basically create more texture with an existing texture. And I think I think we'll actually use the planet itself. I think that'll be better. So it's going to delete this one. Okay, so let's duplicate the planet called all. Drag it over, bring it up on the hierarchy like this, and let's go ahead and do a color balance. This is on mid tones. Here. It's gonna shadows First. Highlights will bring out some of that yellow. Let's see if this helps us a little bit. Command T hold shift. It's rotated around and let's go and try the blending mode color, burn and punch back the opacity. So what I'm looking for now is just to get a little bit more variation of texture. It's kind of hard to see this way, but what happens is the more we build this up, the easier it will be to bring out these other shapes. So again, don't look for exactly the right thing at this point just kind of know that each time you overlap texture, you get some nice variations inside of it. This one's kind of a bit flat for one looking for, but this will get us going one step closer. So what I want to do now is take this select load selection hit. Okay, command shift. I go to the other layer hit delete. So we've got color burn and color dyes obviously gonna brighten it. But what we're looking for is actually the darker tones at this point, something like that conceived from here to here. Now it does cover up some of that yellow. So what we can do there is actually we can actually try to duplicate this and respect everything but that spot are you know, we'll just do it on this layer. So we've got this layer here. Let's go and take the race, and it's going to just go to a soft brush. And we could even use that one we modified, so that would be right here. This bumpy club brushed. Let's just raise some of this back so that we you know, if we could tie with his on and off with Seaworld that yellow is, and I think that helps the design quite a bit. So let's go ahead. And obviously there's a bunch of yellow over here. So let's expose some of that before we decide to merge this down. Don't keep tabs on the signing off and pick out some of this yellow. And I think the other thing that's helpful at ah, point like this is not worrying too much about you know, the wrong brushstroke with wrong line partial line or whatever, because again, we're gonna keep painting up on this. So I'm gonna go in command e now, and I'm gonna grab the Dodge Tool and try to bring out some of these other hot spots. And remember, this doesn't this won't paint off of this. The shape just naturally will only work with the shape itself. So you can really Oh, this is easy to dio. It's not something have to worry about locking layer. You don't have to build another lower top. Nothing like that. So just kind of study what's in the reference and try to get some of them then. Obviously it's not giving us the yellow, but it's giving us the hot spots that we need, So that's only focus on here now. If I go into the yellow, it's gonna give us a nice, strong version that yellow and that red transition we're looking for. But I'm really just pushing this brush around, picking up, putting it down for variation. I want to start building in a little bit more detail, but I've got all that initial text should have worked with. So it's not hard to dio. There's a lot here toe kind of pull from, and we're just gonna continue to kind of repeat this process and get some of this, Ah, nice texture that we see here and get it over to here. So with that, let's move on to the next lesson.
26. L25 Adding Texture to the Star: all right, so we're gonna continue to detail the star using the Dodge Tool. Set the highlights. So what I want to do to show you that as you start to get to this point, it's probably a good idea to name your layers. Let's just call this star. And also, since we're putting so much on one particular layers forest, texture and variation, let's just drag this to here, make a copy and let's drag the copy to our backup players. And I think that what that does for especially in the beginning stage of getting comfortable of painting, is it alleviates any kind of stress or anxiety. You know that you've got a backup at certain intervals sewing start painting on this again . So let's going to go back to this. Let's grab our dodge brush and let's convince this down. So we conceal this beautiful texture and effect. Let's just keep adding to this now and trying to, you know, make it resemble a little bit of what we have here for a reference so pressing very soft and again that's gonna be subjective to what your settings are and how you like to paint. But I like to, you know, work relatively light and slowly see it kind of come together. I tend to make the best decisions. When I do that, I'm in a rush and I'm working at a more extreme in this case exposure, which is kind of like capacity. Then I'm probably gonna make decisions a bit too quickly and not get the most out of my paintwork. Some of this you have to kind of, uh, see pull together and then make decisions based upon that. So if you're working too quickly, you might make poor decisions essentially. And, you know, keep in mind, too, that as you start to do this, we only have to use this dodge tool to kind of get some of these hot spots going. And then we can use the painting method with the selection of Ault and selecting from the existing canvas here, and then we can continue on, you know, with that. So this this dodge tool, dodge and burn can actually be really neat for helping you develop Even a color palette definitely works for any type of power or energy effects, things like that. So you see, as I press here in the red. It's already become so bright that the dad still really has nowhere left to go. So you're only going to get the brightest red. I'm getting yellow over here because it was already yellow in the paintwork. So just keep that in mind that, you know, pretty soon we're gonna have to start painting anyways, because we can't get our yellow with this Dodge tool. Just trying to get the variation. And I'm kind of thinking about these kind of wavy shapes. And if you zoom in, you see, there's a lot more detail than what I have over here at this point, but and kind of keep crisscrossing the brush to get some of that and just kind of bouncing around, trying to pick out some my spot. It's something that resembles our reference. Okay, so now at this stage, I want to get some of that yellow in. I also want to make sure that the edge of this is very, very hot, right? If you notice over here, there's a lot of there's this outside influence that we're gonna add. But even the edges of pretty hot throughout hold space. Part of move. You see it. All right, there. So notice to all these shapes are really kind of sandwich down on the very edge, squished in that area. Uh, forgive me as I pause when I'm speaking generally when I'm concentrating on the painting, I'm gonna be a little bit less, uh, quick with my words, I guess. But I'm trying to really focus on what to see here. So let's go ahead and hold all now let's select the brighter yellow. Let's go ahead and set the Now This is the other thing. As we're working on the layer, we can actually paint either. You know, opaquely like you see there, which isn't bad. It works. But you got to remember as well that you've got the blending modes of the brush itself. So whatever brushes selected, you can apply whatever blending mode to it, and that'll work properly as long as you're not working on separate layers. So, for instance, what I mean by that if you have three other blending modes on top of a solid layer, you can't use the blending mode on top of those separate blending modes over here has to be solid here than the blending modes work reactionary to the solid layer, so just keep that in mind. Eso If I set the blending mode to color dodge and this is a solid layer, it's going to show us exactly what we can hope to achieve of color dodge Color dodges, actually, just like the Dodge Tool but implementing some color. So we've pretty much already used up that ability right there. So let's go to something like overlay test that out doesn't do a lot. Let's try back to ah, normal or color What color makes it dark. But I want that we're just gonna go ahead and add some normal paint to it, and we close this so I can see what I'm doing a bit better. Let's try to get some of that overlapping. You're basically paying attention to this spot right here, and sometimes what I'll tend to do, especially if I'm trying to figure something out, is all paint. I'm going to flip this must select here, use the all key, and this is obviously white. But I just wanna make sure tap out there, and what I'll do is actually work on just a specific area at first. So What I think happens here when I tend to do this is it helps me build confidence because I get one little area right in design, even though I have the reference right here, it's like I proved to myself that I could do it over here first, and then I carry through the rest of it. So it's almost like practicing on the peace. But I think that helps because it's real easy to think it's heading in the right direction , especially if you do passes over the whole thing. And then all of a sudden you had a bit of a stumbling block and, you know, have you felt backed into a corner or something like that? So just keep in mind that sometimes it's the nice to work through a portion of the painting , uh, cause pretty easy to fix anyways, so and at this point, I'm not going to try to, you know, mimic everything I see here. So I'm gonna bounce around and just add things that I think looks cool. Design. Regardless, I think there's enough of that information here where I could probably even get rid of the reference at this point. But actually still want. I like these little ring shapes from the darker spots. So I'm gonna leave that until I get those in place. And then I could probably do away with the reference. So you just kind of getting in some of that yellow Also around? I had some different spots. Make sure to scale the brush down really small and get some of the detail. So the detail is what's gonna help you convey scale. Obviously, the smaller you can add in tiny little details the better, but make sure toe work big to small. It's generally gonna come out better if you do that, and you really saved the details for the end. Don't jump in and add details to early on. It's kind of tempting because usually details is pretty pretty fun. Pretty Ah, stimulating, I think. But at the same time, if you Adam too soon and too, um, too much of it really kills the the painting. Let's go ahead and speak of that. I should probably pan back because that's another thing. You want to really try to work from a distance and make sure everything is, in fact looks away that you hope, Because when you work from, say, here, it's a totally different effect than back here. So you gotta constantly check the work at kind of the end result scale. Okay, let's go back to the Dodge Tool known and from back here, let's hit in. It's more of these highlights if you want to make sure it just noticed that at the very hottest point it goes toe white so we can get that by hitting the middle of the yellow. And if we have to, we can paint some of that back in. But then the other thing is to just kind of creates a more variation in these darker areas and never be afraid to kind of overlap and crisscross. I think I've already mentioned, but I can't tell you how many times in the beginning I just was very hesitant to do that. And that's sometimes where you get your best. Uh, you know, like the old saying, right, happy accidents. So you gotta sometimes allow that to happen. Okay, so now let's go ahead and try to get into these darker spots and kind of building more texture and the way I want to do that is at a layer over time. So click here to add a new layer and we're gonna take more of us, drawing brush line brush and just pay attention to some of these shapes here. And it doesn't need to be perfect, but just get some of that going on, so there's kind of swirling, darker areas. Basically, it's gonna look a bit strange at first, but I just want to see that we're just trying to pinpoint some of this on by drawing it in solid. It's very easy to recognize the shapes, obviously, but just don't worry about this being perfect. We're about trying to get exactly what you see here. Just get the general kind of movement and flow. So I kind of like this one, how it circles all the way around, get some of that in there and notices a few like smaller shapes off to the side of it. And you can really get more detailed, obviously, and try to get in a bunch of the smaller designs and more texture. But you really don't need to. At this stage, we're just trying to head in one more layer. Okay, something like that, And it looks crazy, right? It looks horrible. And they're probably thinking like, Why are you doing that? It doesn't make any sense. Hopefully, we'll hear in a moment. Okay, so let's say that this is what we're after. I actually want to see a little bit. The larger darker is right here. What helps kind of convey scale. So if they're to evenly dispersed, there's no larger grouped areas like we're trying to put here than these. Don't read as small anymore, right? So there's gotta be that variation, especially on something as massive as a star. There should be a lot of variation from size from here to there. So you could paint some of the send and say your hand is a bit too used to repeating processes, right? I've kind of done that here a bit. You can just again goto a race, set that same brush to a race and then creates more variation by racing back some of what you just did. Put that to salad. So lots of ways to experiment and again try toe, create variation on the design of it. Okay, so now what want to dio is actually put another blur on this, A filter blur, Ghozi and Blur just gonna blur the top floating layer. That's what we're looking for. I just want to soften up the edges a bit, so it doesn't look so so solid. So probably something in there. It's not gonna look as good as this because I didn't take the time to detail it as much. But what I'm trying to get to see here is that by just quickly drawn that end, softening it up and then using maybe like a multiply a little darker, you know, we can create that variation. So if I take the visibility off now, you could see that it was ableto really punch up the contrast in it, and we don't have to stop there. We could keep doing this layer by layer. You can grab textures into it the same way. But I basically just wanted that that little bit of darkness now, since I already put a fade on it, I wouldn't just erase this back, but I could simply take I wouldn't have raised it back with a solid brush, but I could erase it back with a soft brushed me do that and still trying to pay attention to what's here. And actually, I'm noticing it's too dark, but I'll keep working on that. But I can still use a soft brush, and Aiken tryto get in some of the smaller detail, so it's even in the darkest areas. There's like some missing spots, so that's what I'm trying to implement over here. Now again. Check it from a distance in a just a pass ity. Probably a little bit more. So let's check this from a distance as well. Yeah, I think it still needs a little bit later. Capacity. Simple like that. So close. I mean, none exact replication of this, but close to where you know it's it's getting closer by each step. And really, what ends up happening with paintwork is if you wanted to look more realistic, you just keep on going. But we're gonna go and stop this lesson here and move on to the next, and I'll show you some more effects to make the star stand out. So let's move on
27. L26 Adding a Glow Around the Star: All right. So now I want to show you how to add this effect of the kind of sun rays and energy coming off in the distance. So it looks like a bunch of small stippling, and we were going to do that is at a layer beneath the star, and we'll just call this edge like Teoh. Stay pretty simplistic with the names to make it easier to. If you go too far, they start toe, you know, worked away over. So if you condensed down this window, you gotta be careful, you know, as far as how you name these. So simplicity seems to work best for me anyways. So as I start to work behind this, there's lots of ways I could do is I could start with a basic brush set to, you know, rather yellow. Either one. Um, probably something I could see more. And I could just scribble it about, and I could dab in step lit. That's one way. And it's obviously gonna be more time consuming. It's not a bad way to do it. It's just, you know, again, time is of the essence. So if we go into here and we pick up brush front teeth. I'm gonna show you how to use the hairbrush, and it wouldn't seem like this would make much sense. But if I scroll this up to the max eyes, you could see it's actually just the spatter brush that comes a photo shop. And again, this is where you want to kind of think about how basic simple brushes conduce so much so even the brush that come with Photoshopped you just have to be modified a bit toward their more effective for whatever you're doing. So, for instance, in this case, I'm gonna go to shape dynamics, and I'm gonna start messing with the jitter and let's see, probably scattering. So I'm trying to get some of the stippling, but I need to kind of generate it in a way where I can try to emulate what I'm seeing there . So what I'm gonna do is make some adjustments. Come over here testimony. I'm still going to do a little bit of dabbing. I'm still going to size up the brush back and forth, but I'm going to do it in a way where I'm just doing that kind of to get the randomness that you see here. You see, there's actually not a whole lot of randomness, but it looks pretty even because it's something way off in the distance. But really, obviously, there's gonna be a lot of random highs and lows and areas that are more opaque than others . So you just have to kind of emulate some of that and let your I be your guide if it looks wrong that it probably is, and if you could make it better than make it better. But sometimes it's just a matter off getting started and giving some paint on the canvas, and I'm making your adjustments from there. Don't freeze up because you don't have the exact right thing going. Maybe, but I think this will just look adequate. It may not look as impressive business, but keep in mind this was with one quick attempt, an adjustment to the brush now, a brush that I would generally use for something like this and be able to get even more. Uh, resembling of this would be just a series of dots for the brush tip. So where these have some dots? If you notice as it's larger, it's actually faded and some of them are grouped together. So not bad for this particular effect. But I would probably use just a series of dots and you could see if I just brush along this , I can get the bulk of what I'm looking for. I should probably do that. First. It'll be faster and then go back. Just dab for the variance that I'm looking for. So I'm Skilling the brush down for those little tiny dots I want to see and a little bit larger for that variation. And remember, we could take this same brush and we can erase back so any brush can become an eraser. We can correct a lot of our work that way. So I think that's one of the neatest things about digital painting is that you never really feel backed into a corner. Once you realize how these tools work, forge a lot of opportunity to make adjustments on the fly and not feel too stuck. So like that we've got our base shape. And then what we could do. We could probably just keep this brush while we have the settings the way they are. Remember that if you do adjust he's just simply click on here, call it whatever you likes. Better brush. Oh, to you know, some kind of adjustment or something you're gonna recognize. So there's that and like that, then we're gonna go and take you See here that it starts off red fades into the yellow. And this might not even be the right yellow. But I guess one thing we could do just to make sure that we're a little bit closer to the yellow we want select here and the color picker didn't change at all. So we should be good, but I'm gonna lock transparent pixels here. I'm gonna pay attention to the red here. It probably looks to be a little bit of the darker red. So I'm gonna make sure that I grab with the color picker a little bit into the darker red, and I'm actually gonna paint back again with this. Selected with lock transparency will make sure that I'm not just painting outside of the confinement, but by painting backwards with the same brush, I can build in a little bit more texture that may or may not be what I need here. I'm just taking a stab at it. But that's kind of how, you know, figure out my paint processes, throw some things in there, see if it works. And the neat thing about doing a layer like this is I could easily paint back and forth. Yeah, I can even hit X on the keyboard. Hold. Halt! Select that other color. So now I can go back and forth rather quickly by just titling on, uh, hitting the X on the keyboard and brushing back and forth a little bit more that effect like that. Okay? And you can also see this large fade. So now I'm gonna try to implement that, and I'm actually gonna add one more layer to do that. Okay, Now I'll take a soft brush and let's take I don't know this very soft brush right here. I'm just gonna pain in a little bit of that red fade. Now it's going to stand out differently, because if you notice the background of the the US space here has a lot more blue where this has a lot more black. So we got to kind of look past that. But what we're looking for is that Grady it fade just gonna softly brush across is if I want a bigger feet. I'm just gonna make the breath larger and you could play with the opacity if you're you know, you're getting too much pain all at once really adjusted with that slider, let's pan back and see if we're getting anything close to what we got here. So I think the big difference is you know, there's obviously a lot of ways that the fate could come out. We've got these streaks as well, so we could try to get some of those and and again I would probably add even yet another layer. We could also take this opportunity to, ah, mess with the blending modes and see if we get anything closer to what we're looking for. I think I'm gonna leave it to normal for now because I still want to do some adjustments to the background so that at least gets us a bit closer to this. So again, just remember that each one of these effects is a series of steps. We have these layers to kind of guide us name this real quick, right fade and, you know, we just want to keep making these small steps towards the end result. That way we've got, um, you know, plenty of time to kind of see it unfold and get the best out of the work. So that a complete this lesson, Let's move on to the next.
28. L27 Painting a Light Source on Planet 1: okay. And notice, too, that we can take, uh, the stuff that we built in for the sun And we can organize that a bit or star should say and weaken Click the bottom one Hold shift, click the top one. So those air everything that comprised the star hit the group and it'll automatically combine all that into a group for us. Just call that star. And now we want to do is actually paint onto this other planet shape here. So I'm gonna hit command t hold shift, and I want to rotate it because the light source portion I want to utilize that. And I want to perceive that the star is giving off light, and it's hitting off this planet. So lots of ways to do this again. We could just grab a blending mode from the brush paint directly onto the surface. I want to do in a little bit less destructive way. So I'm just gonna go ahead and go select load selection hit. Okay. It's gonna give us a selection of that planet, create a layer, and I'll just ls for light source. And I'll name this one here double click type planet and what I want to do is go back to this previous layer in a select first the read something from the bright right here, and it doesn't need to be at full capacity. Gonna make sure I'm using a nice soft brush. But I could make the brush really large and stay back just lightly pain in some of this color because at first, what I'm looking for is kind of the radiant glow that you're going to get before I worry about the extreme edge and I want to think about the way this light might wrap around the planet. And I'm actually over painting right now. As you probably tell, look looks to be too much, but what I'm looking for make sure not paying attention to the edge as much as I am the Grady in that I'm looking for and the reason being is again, I can adjust this with blending modes. You know, maybe I want to see a little bit more of that texture come through so I can play out the blending modes and the opacity and get just that little bit of glow that I want wrong that planet surface and then I can add another layer. Skill this brush way down, maybe and introduce a little bit of the yellow like that. Make sure let's go back. I'm gonna hit Command Z Command all See the reason why I was actually want Teoh? Keep in mind since that was on a floating layer, I could have just hit delete. But the reason why is I went right to the bright brightest and that would be the yellow actually want to do this edge lighting a room lighting with the red first have intense edge of that red and then go to the yellow. And the reason why is I just wanted to make sure to mention to you try and try to really fight the urge to go to one extreme or the next the more you start to think about subtleties within your work, the more you get more range and what you can create, and your work will start to look more professional and drought, more visibility from your fan base and people admiring your work. So let's go and hit command due to de select that and you see that just those two layers added quite a bit of ah dimensional feel to the work and just another area of interest. It looks. It looks a lot more believable or exciting. I guess now that it has that light source reacting. It automatically ties those two together in the scene, and that's what we're looking for. So just keep that in mind that being aware of your light source, making subtle adjustments and again we can hold shift, grab all those together. That group named that Planet one. And you know, we're keeping our work organized as we go so we can toggle off those different areas of the work and start to fix some of the background, which is what we'll do next. So with that, let's move on to the next lesson.
29. L28 Adding Effects to the Nebula: All right, So now let's go ahead and fix some of his background. So if you notice when we move the planet shape or I believe it was a planet, we expose some of the area that wasn't painted yet. So what we'll do is just take off the visibility to the planet for now. And I guess the star as well, and we'll just go and work on this background so concede that background here is quite a bit different than the reference here. Let me show you a little trick to for getting the reference, and it's just the way you want. See, you want to rotate this. You can click are and hold our and rotate inter actively. But if you hold are and hold shift, it's gonna snap so you can get perfect nineties and adjustments. Get them just right and then zoom in and get that right where you want on the screen. So just remember our to rotate and then shift will snap so that you can rotate and increments of. I think it's 15 degrees, but it'll snap to each angles. You can get perfectly vertical and horizontal with your image. Eso now Let's go ahead and zoom in a little bit here and try to fix this up a bit. So I don't mind the blue you know, the difference in blue This is more of a royal blue to this being more navy in a deeper blue on, I might want introduce more that as we texture this. But the main thing is to fix this area of its unpainted as we moved around the composition . So if you look, if I introduce this, this is what we got for a base layer. So a couple things we could do we could fix this base layer by grabbing our smudge brush. Yeah, it's much cross right there, and we'll just go ahead and smudge some of this paint back and forth like unskilled this brush up and get rid of this solid line that I'm seeing right there, so just kind of be messy with it moving around, change the brush size so that you can see the different effect that it's yielding. And the main thing is, like I said, I want to soften up that line and I wanna make this look a bit more random. You kind of just move around and find different spots that need to be a bit more faded, a bit softer. And, you know you want to stay with many hard edges, which is what I'm seeing too much of it. This point now. Another way to do this is to just go to a soft brush, hold all and sample anywhere in here and then blend. And this can go obviously both directions. They could hold all caps in the dark. You know, we could get rid of this other layer so we can see exactly what we're doing. One person of this bag that's actually the texture off the sun. So I made a little mistake there will drag that in there. Now, keep in mind. When you drag something into a new group, it's gonna place it to the bottom, I believe. Oh, no, we did put it to the top. OK, guys, we're going Be aware that though you sometimes need to check it, I've noticed it. Maybe it's with different Softwares that it will drag to the bottom or they may have corrected this with an update. But still, I would jump in there and check. Please make sure that you're not getting an adverse effect by moving your layers like that . So convinced that back down let's get back to our painting is kind of brush This all around , moved around. I'm still looking for more variation and texture. This is still way too boring for this kind of nebula effect that we're going for. So let's get this out of our way and see what we got. So yeah, there's if you notice with our reference is a lot more variation. So I want to get some of that in there. I also feel like this is just probably too opaque. So I'm gonna punch back the opacity as well, after I kind of smug us all around. Trying to actually look for some shapes I may need to generate him with a selection is what I'm thinking at this point. So it's going take back. Bill passed today a little bit, something like that, and I feel like that's too much of that bright blue, but I'm going to use some of it anyways. Finish out what we've got, because remember, we can adjust the color balance and the hue of this pretty easily so Let's just carry through with what we've got. So just making the breast smaller and hitting some of these higher points in the brighter color notice that it doesn't react the same here is it did over here. So by surrounding the light source with some of those blue, it kind of reads is a bit brighter or hotter, no sense. And we need to bring that to, Ah, the white. And a lot of times I'll introduce some paint and then I'll blend it back, and I just kind of repeat that process. So it's almost like a racing, but still leaving some of the texture so that you're kind of not wasting any steps, and you're you're generally going to get nicer effects by building up the texture more and more you apply it. So we've got something like this, and actually a lot of this blue should been painted on this layer. That's one of the reasons it's not reacting the same because this is set to color Dodge. So slight mistake there on my part. But it's not not even gonna edit that one out. I want to see the mistake there because I think that sometimes when we don't show some of the mistakes, you don't learn as much. I don't want to just show you me succeeding all the time because it's not how you learned Teoh to get through a problem area in your work. So the mistakes that you create and the way that you get through those is a big part of being a professional. It's like somebody told me a long time ago Boston Mine, he said. You know, professionals and amateurs both make mistakes, but professionals know how to fix them. Some polls that nobody is, ah, void of make a mistake. And then you combine that with Bob Ross is happy Accidents theory. And yeah, we're going to go. Okay, so there is that is that now again, I kind of I don't feel like it's nearly as interesting, obviously, is what we have here, right? The reference is just so powerful. So we're gonna try to keep building upon that. And I really think the best way to do that is subtle alterations or subtle additions to the work. So what I want to do is take both of these now and punch back heel, pass the a little bit more. It's gonna bring out some more of that black, which is nice, because again, for my reference, we have a lot more dark in the scene. We're gonna just play with the opacity sliders. We're gonna add a new layer over top, and we're gonna try to color in some of this purple, and I'm actually gonna cheat a little bit and just hold halt, Try to pick at right color something in there, something kind of in the medium tone of it. And I can also use this as an opportunity to apply more texture. So I can just simply brush over with the purple and adjust it with color layers, color modes. Or I can also take this time to try to paint more texture. Do we get here? Okay. And let's go ahead and adjust it with its tri color mode. So color mode, just as it sounds, it's gonna color colorize everything beneath it with that. So I think that brings it a touch closer. And if you notice a lot of the texture of this reference material is a bunch of little like overlapping blotch in this kind of things going on. So it's getting closer and closer. I would say that as we keep overlaying different values that we can get there once we punch up our highlights and our stars, you know, obviously we want to introduce something like this. I believe that's a Milky Way or something like that. Um, then it would probably really get a lot closer. But another thing that we could do if we're starting to see shapes, kind of traces shape right here. So let me grab a brush and tell you what I'm seeing. So if you were to trace this shape right here, I kind of see no, Does it little something like that? I mean, obviously it's layers and multiple versions of that, you know, highs and lows, basically. But what we can do is kind of come over here and generate a selection and kind of get some of that. So the freehand tools kind of a neat way to do that and just draw through here and try to really mix it up and create some variation because you never know, like what shapes will generate little actually stay and which ones will get, you know, kind of erased out of blended back. But it's kind of fun to do this anyways, because you're just like being a little bit more forgiving of the process. So even generating a selection like that create a new layer. We're going to go with the purple once again, de select color mode, and you see it give us just a little bit of that line, but obviously to crisp of a line. Actually, let me try overlay as well. That's too much. And it took away the purple multiplies way too dark. I just want you to be able to see it. We might switch this back to color mode, but then filter blur Gaussian blur. You want to retain that edge a little bit, but we just wanted to be a bit softer. Then it waas. So I kind of put it the slider, something like that. So again you could see it's really subtle, and it's probably to definite in certain areas, but what you do is you play with the opacity. You know what I would say with something like this? You get the capacity to the most extreme dark that you want to see because your plan on blending this back, then taking the smudge brush of the softer race, whatever combination of the boat and again, you're just looking to keep certain parts of it. And this is really that build up process. So it's not something where you're looking to get the right exact peace. Our design. You're just looking for small little law, bits of texture to keep overlapping until you get something that's more rich like that you would see in nature or space. So again, it's just kind of that process. So you see, I'm pushing a lot of that back, keeping some edges, and what I'm looking for is any of the shapes that stick out kind of like a sore thumb that made me look at him go. Well, that just doesn't look. It doesn't add to it, it doesn't help it. So if I pan back, you see this side starting to look a lot more interesting than this side. And then what happens is when we bring in that, I'm gonna actually hold all Move that over a copy at it. Transform, flip horizontal. I'm gonna get command t on a scale it up because right now we're just using it as a texture . It's not again. It's not a drawing. It's not anything very specific. So it's going merges together with Command E. And I noticed, too, since I hit command. He let me go back. Command Z, they were both at 24% opacity. You want to make sure that this is the opacity you want before you merge them together? Because what happens is as soon as we knew, do merge them together. This becomes the new opacity 100%. Now, keep in mind, you can really just keep duplicating that layer and bring it back as needed. But be aware that once you merge them down, you're going to get a full pass city on that 100% combined. So let's just call this texture again and let's go and take all of these. And I don't think we need that bottom one. But actually, we might use that's We'll take all these right here, group those and just call this nebula and forgive me if my terminologies off. So right there, we've got that. I got a star on our planet and we're gonna keep picking at this and really bring this the life. So with that, let's move on to the next lesson.
30. L29 Adding Effects to the Nebula Part 2: Let's continue to add some more detail to our background. So I'm still not feeling like it's enough, I guess, mainly because I'm looking at his gorgeous reference image and it makes us look pretty plain. So not that it has to be identical to what we're looking at here, but I just feel like we can get a little bit closer without too much more advanced kind of work here. So if we take Ah and add another layer, let's add some texture. Let's go ahead and take. Could be that modified spatter brush, but that's got kind of too soft. The edges are a bit too soft, so let's take this one called Test. This one I called texture explosion and again, I'll make sure you have a copy of this. And I'm just going to paint in some additional texture, kind of right through the middle. And let's go and get rid of the planet and the Stars weeks they were doing. And keep in mind, too. If you still want to see the positioning of them, you can adjust capacity here, and it's gonna just everything in that group. So let's go and do that way we can get the best of both worlds here. So I want this texture to kind of come through here, go from larger to smaller up through here. And I don't mind this looking obviously a bit different than what we have over here. Uh, it's gonna actually lend to the feeling that it's a bit more science fiction, so they find nothing wrong with that is it pertains the digital painting space. Let's try something like this. I don't want to break up. This shape right here looks a bit strange. So again, I'm kind of looking for things that I can fix that just don't appear as refined as I would like them to. So each time I add some effects, I'll try Teoh, you know, work that end of my thought process, all right. And I feel like this needs to be even brighter still, especially towards the middle of it. Okay, Now, let's go ahead and take that. Let's get rid of the Storm planet for now. Take off the visibility there and let's go ahead and try a blending mode of color dodge. And that brings in too much bloom trying to retain some of that purple. So let's try hard light overlay. Sometimes you have to tag along on and off the visibility to see the effect, so it is still bringing in too much purple. Now, if we go back to normal, you could see it's got some purplish tone there. But let's go ahead and do an adjustment. And let's just bring out a little bit more that purple you see by colorizing it actually kind of controls everything. Ah, a bit more solid has a bit more of a solid effect, but I'm still trying to get just that right purple that's more resembling of some of what we see here. Okay, so let's try that again. That set the normal mode color burns gonna actually subtract light, make it darker when you're dodge. Not so bad, but let's try toe blurted that out of that about there. So I want to retain some of that texture and that variation right through here, but blow out some of the areas that were too strong. So if I hit OK there and hit Command Z, you could see the difference and let's go and bump back the opacity here, and that's starting toe to at least feel more more depth e to me. So I'm also trying to perceive the next stages of this. So, for instance, um, as we get into, um, sleeping bags and shapes, I'm seeing as we get into applying the stars. No, Remember, we had this layer right here and I didn't want to get rid of it yet. Let's bring that to the top and just want to show you how you know things like this is simple. Is that shape is could still be beneficial. So let's try color dodge, and you see it brightened it right through the middle. There. Let's go ahead and go to filter Blur goes in, blur again. And remember that we could really just smudge this around as well. So if you wanted added control, obviously this is applying the blur across the entire thing. So you might want to do that and then come back with in these large brush and blurred around. But what's kind of need about this is, you know you're blowing around that light source. So you see, it's got a very kind of power oriented effect to it, and wherever you push this you're gonna get that now, the more intense that Ah, color is in a certain area, the more powerful or the more effect that's gonna have. But you can still move this around and get some pretty unique paintwork going on. So it was kind of smudged that around. Likewise, I can solve to raise some of this. If I feel it's too solid through the entire middle of the design there, it doesn't matter. Toe actually blur it because we've got our planet star there. So let's go and bring these back now. Yeah, so that's looking a lot more interesting. And again, it's just really taking those stages and those those little bits of additions to the work little by little so that you get something pretty neat. So again, I'm applying this color now. But it's with color Dodge set alright already on that layer, some kind of pictures that in a couple spots, because I think that adds a lot to it. Very kind of spacey vibe in here and just pressing really lights transit break up some of these areas, all right, just like that, we've got a more interesting effect to our background and that will complete this lesson. Let's move on to the next
31. L30 Adding Stars to Our Background: Now I want to show you how we can add some stars and really hopefully Biltmore depth into the scene. Eso we could obviously create a brush, just four stars and in future lessons will probably get into that. But again, I want to keep this pretty basic so that if you're beautiful to shop, your understanding that everything you need really is right here in front of you eso with that we're going to do is take a basic brush that has just a solid Rome tip. This marker tipped brush should be perfect. So what I'm gonna do is duplicate this Click that icon and we'll call the star brush test. Okay? And see it made a copy of it. And it's got that little I kind of show us that. Now if we were to go over to this brush in the settings again, this has been modified to react like a marker so thick to thin line like art, cross drawing brush on. That's not what we need. We basically just chose this brush because it has a circular tips, obviously lots of options for that alone. Eso With that, we're gonna take and start to general the size. So this is gonna give us a variation? Um, we want minimum diameter all the way down. And let's go ahead, increase the spacing quite a bit. So you start to see these brushes, brush tips, space out like this and that's we want. Let's go ahead and hit, scattering. Let's scatter these about. Let's do that. I'm both and let's increase the count. So the main thing with this brush, what I'm looking for is that we get enough spacing toward they don't overlap is much so so they're kind of still stuck together a little bit and all. That's not bad for certain parts of it. We want mawr control. So what we're gonna dio is go back to our spacing, get the max spacing that we can. Um, let's see, it was scattering. We're gonna probably lower the count a little bit. Let's see what that gives us. So a little closer and notice if I toggle the brush lower are smaller and larger. You see a bit of difference in the way that it looks as well. So the main thing is is that we get enough spacing toe where we can create a larger pattern of this. So you see, that actually brings them together. So we want a title that down. So there we go. So we've got a lot of spacing right there. That's what we need it. So as a skill, this brush up and I get the size of the stars that I want So we'll say something like this for the first pass. I want just enough of this Ah, count where? Get as many stars on the canvas without overlapping too much. And I think that's about right right there. So let's pan back and let's put this into action. Now what we want to do is actually create this on a new layer. Call the stars. I'm just gonna start painting these, then Mr with smaller stars. And I'm just gonna kind of crisscross and notice that I can make them a little bit larger and a little bit more. Well, Pake with the pen pressure, so I'm actually varying up the way that I apply. Um, but I'm crisscrossing it so that I don't get too many straight lines and too many recognisable patterns of this particular brush type and again as you get more confident with creating brushes. You can make a brush that would do this really, really fast. But I just want to show you that even doing it this way doesn't taken absorbing amount of time. It's still very, very efficient and effective. But we can get these stars and just like that, and I compress really lightly and kind of get some in the background. But I'm gonna show you another way to do that because I think that again providing the most control is gonna be by using your layers. It was only bet. So there's our first past the stars. And again, it was done completely with a basic brush that you can modify and get You're gonna get it with photo shop, and you can modify it from a variety of brushes to get this effect. Now, if you were to zoom in and you know you see some variation of opacity, if you're zooming over here, you're gonna notice that you've got a little bit more blur to the edges of these stars. So the first thing we probably want to do is go to filter. Blur tells the employer, and we're on the wrong canvas. Let's go over here and do that filter. Blur Gaussian blur. You see right there. It immediately made it look a lot closer to our reference. So you can vary this up as much as you need to. And you can also consider that maybe you want yours, toe look. More science fiction. And you want more vibrance to your stars. Any number of things are possible with this. Now, one thing you can do is before you and blur this. You could actually copy this layer, drag it over top. It makes a copy. Take the visibility off this layer. Go back to your filter. Blur housing blur. Hit. Okay at this other layer. And let's go ahead and hit command t skilled up. Rotate it. We got to do to make sure they're offset. In fact, you could rotate it and you could flip it. And you can see that area of stars. It was missing because once we flipped it, some of those were behind the larger stars. You got to be aware of that. We can also hold all trying it over again. So you see, we get a lot of stars. We don't have to really keep brushing a man command e And just like any other texture, you can really modify this and whatever way you need, Teoh. So if you feel like the stars were too big, just scale it down, drag out some new layers and softer racism as you merge. Um, something like that. But it's a pretty random enough pattern where you're not gonna have to worry too much about it. But the main difference is now, do you have some blurred in the background, some that are more vibrant in the foreground? And I would say Regardless, we're gonna want some blur on every layer. But you can play around with the amount of blur that you apply to each layer so that you can vary up the effect. I will just say something like that. Also, we can toggle the capacity back that helps us well and then, obviously the blending mode again. So maybe some we want set the color died, You see, that actually turned them more of a blue, which you don't see is prevalent here. You see a little bit of that. But again, it may look just a bit more science fiction like, Well, let's try screen again. Play with that opacity and then you can soft to raise some of these back as well. Somebody had one more layer, and I'm actually gonna intensely draw these ones in. So this is kind of the part where I would try to picture the most visible starts again. You can see immediately that they're more in focus on the other stars. And again, it's just kind of to create a bit more contrast ing elements and variation to what's already there. Just like that. Set this 12 linear dodge and that'll make those a bit brighter. And again, I wouldn't want any of them to be completely and focus. So I'll just put a little bit of blur on these, and that's pretty good right there. And just like that, we've got some stars for our our space background. Eso. Now we're gonna add a few more finishing touches to the background, and then we'll move on to the final kind of add on. We're gonna modify it and create one more planet s. So with that, let's move on
32. L31 Adding Brighter Stars to Our Background: Okay, so we pretty much got our painting 90% of the way there, if not better. You know, we could probably let it go like this. But it's those finishing touches that really kind of push it over the edge for me anyway. So I want to show you what I would do. One of the things is I would really try to get some of these stars in place. I mean, you notice That's kind of what separates this from the majority of the rest of the stars of these little, you know, North Star kind of looking deals, the cross section being nice and bright. And it's pretty easy to do that. So let me show you how. Let's go ahead and create a new layer and let's pick up brush. We'll start with a soft brush to the first. What we're doing is we're just kind of, you know, establishing ah, hot spot for center, so kind of dab it, make the brush smaller and, uh, get the very middle to be brighter or more filled in. Let's go and zoom in a bit tighter and let's pick up brush that I will start with this marker tip. So basically, this brush just gives us this pick the 10 line, And what we can do here is what's going to us on another layer, Just in case I have Teoh soften up the effect I'm gonna scale up the brush with the bracket keys toe where my thickest point of the line is about there and maybe in a touch thinner. So hit the bracket key down one more time. I'm gonna hold shift and want to start from the center out and, um, apply Max pressure and then softly let off again. Hold shift and it will give me that nice straight line right up the middle. There. Now, I could do that again from right here. Breast the brush in the middle, hold, shift and go down. And if you've got a fair amount of hand control, you'll be able to line it up. But if you don't don't beat yourself up over it. Just hold all. Drag it over. Command t hold shift all the way around. It will snap back into place Parallel with the other one had dinner. Grab the move tool. Move that into place it command eat emerged ALS together. Check the work. Make sure they're merge. Remember, If you don't, you're not as comfortable doing it this way. Make sure this is open. Hold all drag over command T hold shift and you'll start to pick up speed. After you've done this 100 times, you're definitely gonna just skip some steps. Eso It's kind of hard for me to go slow at this point because I've done this so much. Command E and check that emerged. Hold all drag over command T old shift and snap to basically Ah, that's 45 degrees. But to a to an area where it's no diagonal From there, the lines command t hold shift, scale it down. That will give us our cross sections like that. You see, the one that I've created is a bit different from my reference, but it will do the job now, since it's floating on layer, I can also adjust this once I've merged them all together with command E one more time Command T and I can adjust these and I can look at the comparison from the glow, the lines we just generated. So something like that, I think, looks a bit more adequate. Also, keep in mind you want to design this potentially to your largest size so that you can scale these down, not the other way around. So notice that I made that star very large. Also, I'm gonna drag that layer one more time to create a duplicate. Gonna go filter Blur. I was employer saying, See, I very rarely leave anything to a full, um, clean edge, especially in painting. It's everything should have a little bit of a softer edge, so I will quickly blur things. Now keep in mind too. I'm actually blurring this on top of the previous line work. Have to be very careful with that. Because, for instance, let me let me title off the line Work, Show you what? I mean, you're basically exposing some of the previous layer so you can't really see the blur. So now I could see the full blur, and that's what I'm looking for. So I still have this solid version if I need it. But I'm gonna go with this blurred version. Hamlets couldn't try linear Dodge sit and do a lot, but cordage Oh, maybe that's why I still got emerged down to the initial a soft glow there. So I'm gonna copy that again. I want to merge that with this particular layer, and this will be our final star. So again, let's check that with blending modes. Okay, so that should give us what we're looking for. So again, this is the largest version. And I'll place this, you know, wherever. But I'm just gonna hold all gonna drag a copy. Command T hold shift. You're probably starting to see a pattern here inner, because you do. You just kind of repeat this process. Hold all, drag, hold space, partum of canvas. And if you think you're going to do a few that are about the same size, you can scale to that one size. Quickly place a few of these to kind of save time and then just start hitting Command E and you'll see him converge down to that 1st 1 Since they're not occupying the same space, then it doesn't really matter. You cannot play some however you need to. You can re select him like this. That command c command v it be on the keyboard for move and so on and so forth. And then I would recommend, you know, just keep varying up the size if you want a more impressive painting. And you can also vary up the opacity, you know, again to create levels of depth. So as I go back to this 1st 1 noticed, too If they're merged together, you can actually select one of them and command X command v pasted. It's gonna paste it in the center and then reposition that where you want and then bumped back to capacity. So again, I think that's important to get that nice variation where they're not all just nice and bright. You want to really mix this up? Command X command V B for move re skeletal little bit while we're here and turn back the capacity just like that. There we have it. We've got a few more stars and a little bit more impressive background to look at now. One last thing because this is kind of related to the stars is if you notice that this whole nebula is kind of together in this one folder, I'm gonna go ahead and duplicate this folder just like that, when a tidal off this folder and I'm gonna make a backup of the background like this. Open up. This nebula dragged this in here, The reason being, I'm gonna merge all this together. And like I said before, it has to have a solid background. In some instances, in this particular one, it does. So what that group selected? And with that flood, fill in that group a minute, Command E. Now what that does for us, if you notice if I toggle everything off, it doesn't matter now because this is own layer. So if I take the planet's off, there's everything we did on that layer combined. Okay? And we still have our previous layer and background work with. So it's a non destructive approach faras doing this. But what I want to show you is that you can actually place in another effect to get a little bit more kind of Ah Spacey. Kind of. I've whatever. And you could take this nebula. Copy. You can go filter, render lens flare anywhere you touch on the screen here. Photo shop will generate a lens flare for you. So just tap somewhere on the thumbnail image, place the star and then hit. Okay? The nice thing about this is going to give us another variation in another kind of star. So you can do this as many times you need Teoh, and there's actually a few different ones to choose from, so you can kind of place one up here. You can change the type, change the brightness, so you see there's there's lots of neat things you can do there as well. I would be careful, though, Like an effect like this. Kind of like the stars is really easy to overdo. So just, you know, pick and choose your battles, obviously. But try to give it a try to air on the smaller, lighter side at first and see what you get and then go from there and you got to remember, you're actually this is very post processing, a very end of the painting because you're having to do this on emerged layer. So it's not a big deal because as long as you stage the work properly, still have these other layers in tact to go back. But just be aware of your process and what you might have to do to go back a step or two. So now let's move on to our next lesson, where we create one more, plan it and wrap up our space scene
33. L32 Creating an Additional Planet: So now we're gonna add one more planet, and we're actually gonna make good use of our existing work. So let's go and take this planet. Let's drag that group down, create a new group. Let's grab the move Tool, Move this over. Hit command T hold shift on a scale. This one down, we're gonna rotate it while it's selected, and we're gonna move it over here a little bit smaller. We're trying to create some feeling of depth. It's going to keep increasing that down. Obviously size relationship eyes big in an area like that sewing hit inner. And right now it's gonna look pretty boring, right, Because we're just basically creating a whole nother planet that looks identical to the 1st 1 And that's definitely boring, so we don't want to do that, But what we're gonna do is actually just merges together. Someone hit Command E. And I'm going to take this and show you how we can play around with this a bit and make an entirely new planet. So obviously applying texture is a big one. Um, actually want to de saturate this green or change that color altogether. Eso one way to do it is just lock transparent pixels. Grab a brush, probably a soft brush so we don't lose this fade and let's go to it's very soft brush right there. And let's go ahead and pick something that eyes entirely different than what we have. Actually, let's start de saturated. So what I want to do is actually just knock out this green. So you notice if I paint over top, it becomes a solid and that waste some of that texture. Now we do need some of that texture to not look like this, or it's gonna be very identifiable. That's the same planet. So let's try something like luminosity, and it's still washes aware texture. Let's try saturation. That's what we're looking for right there. So you see it. It took away that that green and it still kept some of our glow. So no, one of the things I want to do is well, because I want to think about the glow reacting differently on these two planets. So, for instance, I would imagine that this planet here having this particular glow is at a certain direction away from the star, and then this one would need to have based on its position, would need to have a a glow tire up on the surface from this distance from this angle. Now, I don't know if that's entirely correct. I'm just giving you my perception is what I'm going in for as I start to paint this, but what I'm gonna do is start with the red like we did before. I'm going to set this to probably color mode. We've got that locked. So again, we're working right on the the surface of the painting. And I'm just trying to make sure that these two planets look different. You know, they're not ah, in the same orientation, the same position. This one to me is closer and smaller. Now, in the relationship of space, this could be closer. Even tow us is the viewer. So what we're going to do there is We're actually gonna blur the edge. And that should help too. Make it look like this one's closer. So let's grab a little bit of yellow now. I think that in there again, I want to bring that up a bit higher on the surface of this. And I'm also gonna set this now too color Dodge, which should bring a little bit of white, is shallow into year. And again, I'm trying to convey that this one's closer. So it's got a bit of ah ah hotter Feel the way I'm painting in the color of the light. I know some like that and also I'm going to start trying to paint that actually brings it back to green. I'm gonna go back, command all Z, but my goal is is to paint some of this a bit differently. So I'm gonna try using the Dodge Tool. And the only thing I don't like about that is it actually makes the red could have changed for Mom. You know, I'm starting to see this ring of that red that I'm not liking there. So let's go ahead and try to change that color real quick and probably color moan and select a darker version of the red. Let's go back to normal. So again, I'm just painting right on top. This it's going to zoom in a little bit more, and I may not need to do this because if we applying of texture, it may hide this. But currently I'm just not liking be the way the red looks for the transition of the color there. So I'm using all selecting from various parts of the painting. Okay, so now let's go and set this to multiply. And let's pick a little bit more of a textured brush. You know, I'm actually gonna paint this down and bring it back. I want this one to look a bit more like a almost like a moon surface. So now what I want to do is take the badge tool and hopefully we get a little bit better. The fact announced that that the highlights Okay, a little bit of smudging. Okay. And now going to take more of a drawing process to this picked this chalk painter brush I actually want to draw in some craters. So basically, just gonna shade some kind of half moans, and I can select from the highlight color and just kind of had a little bit of the and what it perceives the edge of the crater. So it doesn't have to be extremely detailed, but enoughto where again, you kind of look at this and go. Okay, That's not the It's not just a copy of that planet, So I'm basically just kind of covering my tracks. So again 1/2 and 1/2 circle have mon shaped like that. Some lines that come off the top of that. That's usually how the peak of the creators will look from a distance will see his line, that kind of jet out away from the the shape and just have fun with it. This is gonna be viewed from a distance again. This is the smaller unless of a focal point in this particular part of the painting. But you can really get away with adding a few of these on the edges and kind of conveying the fact that itself again, more of a moonlight shaped like a barren planet with no no atmosphere. So it's kind of easier if you start with the most contrast in color in this case, the white, the edge, grab the black, get in the drop shadow and uses to paint back some of that. So if the edge is just too predominant to clean, kind of, ah, mess it up a bit to make it look more realistic. It's kind of one of the main things with digital painting that makes things look unbelievable, as something will just be too clean and too Chris. It's one of the reasons why I blurt out the stars, and I can tell from this distance that I need to erase back a lot of the stars as well. But the main thing is to just keep kind of picking at it and, uh, adjusting the work as you go now. Also, they don't all have to be craters and full view. That could be a lot of like, little step on. Uh, you know, texture lines. You can draw in a lot of your texture. I've seen a lot of artists that get pretty good at that pretty fast. It almost seems like Why would I want to come create brushes when I can grab texture from photos, things like that on? That's fine. You can do all that. There's nothing wrong with that. There's a developed I that you get by doing that. But the the thing is, when you draw your own texture, you start to understand the texture a little bit more, and you start to develop your own interpretation of that texture, which is what Lindsay your style so So there is a lot to be said for just fumbling through it, making decisions and, uh, you know, laying caution. Go to the wind. Like, um, I think you learned the most by just experimenting and trying something that out of your putting yourself out of your element. Basically, I want to get over to this side. These craters are probably going to catch some of this sunlight so or keep stance on Starlight for you. May eso we can hold all weaken pain in some of that as well. You're still going to get some drop shadows here, even though it's obviously to a brighter portion of the planet being this close to the lace words. But you're still going to get some of those shadows that create ah, you know, create the details that we see. All right, let's go and check this from a distance. Uh, definitely looks more science fiction based, but that's all right now, one of the ways that we can start to make this look a little bit better again. Drag a copy. Let's take off lock transparency and do a filter blur. I was in blur, you see, just just by doing that. It starts to take all that kind of detail that's a little bit too, and focus in parts and starts to blend it together. So maybe something like that, and we can still tighten back up on the work. You know, look for the biggest eyesores in this case. I think it's this. What shape? Right here. Push some of that information back. It's funny, too, because a lot of times you can fix things by just taking a certain even this out of it. So, for instance, one of things that made the shapes like awkward is the fact that it was an even line going all the way around. That just doesn't happen very much in nature and definitely doesn't happen in, ah, planets that have been bombarded with asteroids and everything else. So you just have to, um, you know, move these lines around so they look more random and more weathered and things like that. So, just like that, we've got more of a rocky type planet or a moon type planet, and again we can keep going with that. We could take a a soft brush. What's that? The Dodge and we could you know, brighten up some areas of it. If we wanted Teoh all sorts of things that weaken Dio Now, finally that kind of conclude this. I just want to add one more effect to this planet over here just to show you, you know, kind of how you would add in these final touches to really make it you know, the best that it can be. Eso what? This other planet. I'm actually going to duplicate this, you know, Not even we don't even need Teoh. We'll just take this will go select old selection. Here is our selection from a previous example. Just move that into place and it's the right one. That's what we need and we'll go ahead and create a layover top. And I just want to see a bit more color over here. So let's try, um, let's try selecting some of this blue shadow color or bluish color from the nebula there. Let's try it at first was just a little bit of texture, but it's not a big deal. It doesn't need to be. It's brushed that in. We got a little bit more of a kind of atmospheric look, so just killing the brush up and down, painting back and forth, trying to get kind of that swirling, cloudy look that you might see on certain types of planets. Don't be afraid to, like dab here and there just to mix it up even a little bit more of a lighter tone. Okay, let's try that with a blending mode like that, but too much tried overlay. Check it from a distance and they will just make this really light. Yeah, something like that. So again, you can kind of just keep going with the, you know, techniques that I've shown you here, but basically it's being able to look at the reference, learn from it, but then convert it to your own style in your own paintwork. So you're not always just, you know, copying, pacing ideas. In a sense, you're kind of running them through your own filter in your own imagination. And again, you're gonna learn more in that process and ultimately not need references much I would never say not need reference because it's always good to study reference. There's so much fantastic information that we learn from by studying from reference but again utilizing your own artistic ability to really explore a variety of options. So let's head over to the final lesson of this particular section, and I'm gonna show you a little bit more post processing and then we'll wrap this up.
34. L33 Final Touches on Our Space Scene: all right. So I just want to show you some final post processing that you can do. So you get your painting all there, all the main parts of their But you want to still just things a little bit more and bring it out just a bit more. One of the best ways to do this, I think once you get it to a level like this, is if you notice everything has been kept into this group of all okay? And all you have to do is drag a copy of that. It commands E. And now what happens is you've got everything from this group on this one layer, so there's certain things you can get away with. Now, if you need to isolate your painting Still, you can go back to things like Planet One here, and you go select load selection it okay. And even though those selection is moved just to make sure to bring your selection tool on the inside, you could drag that over without distorting it. Place it right over that shape and you've isolated this portion here painting. Now you still have all your separate items down here. But what I want to show you is how to edit this final, flattened version with efficiency. So, for instance, say you want to change this. You want to add a little bit brighter green to this edge, Give us a little bit more, you know, impressive colorization to look at. So let's grab something in the greenish aqua. Someone in there have a textured brush that the color again. We're painting right on that service. That's a touch bright. Let me go back and let me punch back capacity. It's a bit better right there. I was trying to introduce a little bit more. I'm in effect to that planet, something like that skill of brush up and down. Maybe switch it to multiply. Now this is going to darken it. So it's punch back. That opacity could ah bet there just give some variation. So again, just some final touches to this to make it appear a bit more dimensional. Some like that commanded to de select so pretty easy to dio Now I also feel like they need to be a little bit more texture and where the highlight is. So what I'm gonna do there It's like that color set to multiply, skilled on the brush tryto punch ups, um, shadows. And they're just a little bit of texture and variation in there, so it doesn't look so playing. We just kind of scribbling in some texture. A lot of the work's already been done. So this just kind of tracing the steps and making a couple more decisions. Okay, I command you to de Select. Now, Another thing I want to do is I'd like to see a little bit more light source in just a couple areas in this space background. So we need to isolate this. Backgrounds were gonna reload the selection on this planet, and then we'll go ahead and select the other planet Select load selection. But this time we're gonna tell it to add to selection so it doesn't drop this selection. It okay? And now it's isolated that planet as well. Let's go over to the star and do the same thing. We're gonna go select load selection, add to selection. Unfortunately, we lost our star selection, and I'm not sure why. And let me try to figure that out. Let's go to just the star right here. Select load selection add to selection. There we go. So now we've got the star now. It didn't grab the feed and everything, but that should be all right. Ah, so what I want to do is hit command shift I And now we've isolated that backgrounds. I just want to show you there's lots of ways to get back to. Everything's always you kind of keep your layers. There's lots of ways to add it. So we'll take the Dodge Tool, probably just set to a soft brush. And I'm just gonna dodge in some of these hotter spots, more vibrant points and again, this is going to make it look a bit more animated and funded friendly, little different or whatever. But it's fine, you know, it's up to you and what your vision is. I just think it would look a bit cooler if it had a you know, a bit more edginess to the highlights. I'm even gonna hit the highlights of the glare coming off the star. I can also hit command shift I again and flip it and I can isolate parts of the inner planet or these star punch up a little bit more of the highlights in here. So that's pretty easy to Dio. So that's dodged told could be very effective. And then I'm gonna de select and one last thing I want to do here. It's kind of pulling a bit tighter, I guess, to less things I want to dio One is, I want to grab this much tool and I want to break up some of the the edge of the star our son is I've mistakenly called it umpteen times in this course, but, you know, just somebody's kind of flares coming off, and I'm just gonna guess at these. I mean, obviously, if I wanted these to be more impressive, I'd pull reference and really study. So there's times you definitely want to do both. But the main thing I would say about this is that we don't want to eliminate the, um me rotate the screen. Here is we don't want to eliminate the nice clean shape all the way. So you got a kind of pick a couple areas and you gotta leave a few areas so that you don't destroy the the spiritual aspect of it. What's is easy to do. You kind of get sometimes you get into in a certain effect and you just keep playing more and more. And actually, that one looks too much like a regular flame. It doesn't look accurate, mainly because it needs more than yellow in there. I'm just dragging that color. I'm gonna spending it around and find a shape that looks cool at the same time. Breaking up some of that overly Ah, clean edge. That's there. Yeah, that's Rotate that again. Do these inside as well. Double click here to ST in the image Back out. Zoom back just to make sure it's ah reading wall from a distance And the only one I don't like is actually this spot. So what I'm gonna do here is take the Dodge Tool, try to burn that. Go. So you see, we can keep making this look more intense. The main thing is, you just kind of slowly build up to it because really, is it overdue? I'm sure by some people some people standards I've already overdone it. Eso Now we can take one of things that bothers me about this little rifle planet. Are these glares? I was trying to give it a dual light source, but I think it actually looks like a distraction. So you'll see. I'm just gonna blend that back. I don't mind there being some texture there, but the highlights were just too bright. There we go. So that's our, uh, that's our space scene. And again, you can kind of just keep going and going to get exactly what you're after, but it's really just playing around with it, having some fun, and I see and what you come up with. So here's the final image, and I hope you've learned a lot of great techniques to improve your digital painting. Using photo shop, feel free to share your work and ask me any questions you might have. I'm always here to help. Also, let me know what you think of this course. By leaving an honest review, I'll continue to add new content as needed to approve the quality of this course for everyone, as always, thank you for your support and good luck with the art. I'll talk to you soon
Robert Marzullo, Online instructor of Figure Drawing and Comic Art
