A Make Believe Reality: Digital Drawing on Photography with Photoshop

1. Hello! (Intro/Trailer): Hi. Welcome to this Skillshare class, a Make Believe Reality. My name is Mimi, and I'm going to be showing you how I use Photoshop to draw characters in a scene on top of photography. I'm a freelance illustrator. I have worked on a range of projects from children's educational books to logo mascot design. Some of my favorite things to work on are personal projects for my site, Mimochai, and loading magical little worlds of characters that tell a story. I also generally draw and paint digitally. I hope to share both technical Photoshop skills as well as new ways of storytelling. I'll be going over all the necessary steps from photo selection, to drawing, and editing in Photoshop. This class is for everyone. It's great if you have drawing skills, for even the most simple drawings can be charming in this type of project. Don't be afraid. I'll keep this in an introductory level and give tips on how to use more advanced features if you're ready for that. By the end of this class, you'll have created your own Make Believe Reality photograph, which you'll hopefully be proud to share with friends and all of us. Along the way, you'll pick up useful Photoshop knowledge, and learn shortcuts and hotkeys that you'll be able to apply in many other contexts. I can't wait to see what magical images you'll create. Let's get started. 2. What You'll Make and Learn: Let's quickly go over what exactly you'll be creating and what skills you can expect to learn through this project. You'll be taking a photograph of your choice and drawing a character scene on top of it. It can be as simple or as complicated as you want. Here are several examples of images I created to get some ideas going for you. I'll take you through some introductory steps to get you started on picking a good photo and setting the scene, with the focus on how to use Photoshop to draw on your photography. Besides getting familiar with Photoshop's brush tool and layer function, I'll show you how I use Photoshop's powerful capabilities such as masking, blending, and transform in a simple way to drawing photographs and then quickly adjust those drawings so they really work on your photo. You can easily take these skills and use them in a wide variety of contexts, as you can probably already start to imagine. Lastly, before we get started, please note you'll also need a drawing tablet unless you have incredible drawing tech skills. That's it. Let's dive in. In the next lesson, I'll be gathering materials and guiding you on photography selection. See you there. 3. Step 1: Selecting a Photo: Okay, let's take some photography. I think it's best to use your own photography so you can feel a sense of connection to the image, but I understand not everyone might have pictures that they want to use. So you can always find great photography online using a Creative Commons search from a source like Flickr. In case you want to just jump right into it, I've also uploaded some of my own photographs for you to use, in my Google Drive. There's 15 different ones and they're all high-res, so that's important in case you want to print your drawing later on. Just see the link in the class description and let me know if you have any issues with them. In terms of what types of images work well, there's no hard and fast rule, but think of interesting image that have room for additional visual storytelling. Nature landscapes and travel photography work great for these and are my gotos, especially ones without too many people or other distractions. I tend to look for opportunities in photographs where the environment has already set up something very interesting, there's flows of lines that direct people's visions to a specific vanishing point or interesting perspective in the photo, and it's just missing a person or a creature standing there to really take it to the next level. You can almost think of it as you're a director of your characters and where would you want them to be in this set that you have created in your photograph? Of course these grand landscapes work great, but on the opposite extreme, macro shots with the same qualities also work really well. This is an example of something I made a while ago with a picture of a teacup in my house, and I drew a girl looking at her reflection in it. So play with perspective, play with proportion, there's no rules here. A fun one for families, I think is to use pictures of your kids, and this one is a picture of my nephew who is a dinosaur fanatic, and my sister-in-law and brother really liked it. So you can draw their imaginary friend, their superhero, their favorite animals and characters, whatever you want. As for what photos don't work well, I would say stay away from photos that are really visually full, so very busy with no room for additional visual interest or the focal point is already filled in, but again, this is totally up to you. So whatever speaks to you is honestly what works. For some people, it can be hard to decide what picture to choose, especially with so many out there. One tip is to first decide what mood or emotion you want to evoke. Do you want your image to be happy, magical, moody, inspired, warm, dark? This can then lead you to narrow down your options and pick the right picture. So go to your photographs and pick one or a few and share them with the class in the project gallery. I would love to see them, and if you need any feedback on what picture might be good for your drawing, I would be happy to give you my thoughts. We're then going to go into the next lesson, it's a quick, optional one where I'll show you my simple process for editing my photographs to get them ready to draw. I'll see you there. 4. Step 2: Edit Your Photo: Let's talk really quickly about easy editing of your photograph. This is an optional step by the way. Sometimes images are ready to go as this. For example, this is the image I've chosen to do this lesson with. I took it on a cloudy day, and I like the atmosphere it's giving. So I didn't do much more than just the brightness. But if you say going for a certain mood, a little more adjustments and filters may help take your image to the next level. Let me show you an example with this photograph. You've seen the final image in some of the previous videos. You can see the original started much warmer with much less contrast. You can definitely edit your photograph in Photoshop. Some of the basic adjustments can be found here under Image and then Adjustments. I won't go into too much detail on this lesson. If you're in need of Photoshop, play around with these tools to get a feel for the effects you get. There's brightness contrast, levels, curves, and exposure, which all control an image's brightness contrast and tonal ranges to various degrees. Then there's vibrance, hue saturation, and color balance rounding up the adjustments I tend to use the most. For simplicity, you may want to try the auto adjustments here. The manual adjustments tend to give you much more precise results. I'll quickly show you both. Brightness contrast is pretty self-explanatory. Levels also adjust an image's brightness according to an image histogram. It's great for quickly adjusting an image. Just slide the carets towards the middle until you've achieved the look you want. Curves is another nice quick way to change the contrast of an image. The bottom of the graph here controls the shadows with a top represents the highlights. You move the pointing curves and adjust the tonal range. Finally, color balance is very useful for targeting specific colors in your image. You can specify the adjustments to midtones, shadows and highlights. Here, I'm increasing the cyan and blue tones in my image. It's a little tilted, so go into Edit and Transform to rotate the image. There's a lot more you can do with transform, but I'll get into that later. Editing the picture can be as simple or as complicated as you want. If you aren't a pro photo editor or in any way intimidated by editing photos in Photoshop, let me give you my shortcut. Since I'm more focused on the drawing itself, I like to use iPhone photo editing apps to achieve quick and beautiful results. I go to app VSCO, which is a free app in the App Store, but you can use whichever is your favorite. Snapseed is another great one. Suggest using this chao as an example, you go into your library and select your chosen photo. If you've used any iPhone photo editing app, including Instagram, the user interface will feel familiar. Find a filter you like. I like using HYPEBEAST 1 a lot, but just tone down a little as you can see here. I'll then go into the adjustments section and play with the exposure, contrast, saturation, and fade. Those are the ones I tend to use the most, but go ahead and try all the other options to get the result you like. When saving, be sure to save it out at original resolution, so it doesn't lose any quality. Finally, I'll AirDrop it over to my Mac and that's it, very easy. So play around with your photo editing tool of choice until you have achieved the image atmosphere you'd like. I'd love to see your before and afters in the class gallery. In the next class, we'll get into the fun part of drawing on top of your photo. See you there. 5. Step 3: Sketch Your Scene: So let's get into sketching your scene. I'm using Photoshop CS6, but I won't be using any features that should vary too widely between the versions. I also have my settings reset to default, so it should look similar to yours. For the windows, I like to have these open, Colors, Brush Presets, Layers and History. If you don't see any of these, you can go up to Window and select the windows that you need here. So first, open your photograph and make sure it's saved as a new Photoshop file or a PSD file. If you're looking to print this later on, check your image dimensions under Image, and then Image Size, and make sure it's at the dimensions you like and set it to 300 pixels per inch. Without getting too much into it, this affects the print quality and so the higher you have the higher quality the print you'll get, 72 is common for web use while 300 is common for print. If you're just planning to use it on your computer, I would leave it at 72 so it doesn't pick up too much disc space. You can also crop the image at this point if you'd like, so you don't waste time drawing in an area you later decide you don't need. This is the Crop Tool on the Toolbar. So quick note, throughout this class I'll be showing you where the tools are in the menu, but I highly recommend learning Photoshop shortcuts to speed up your efficiency. So I'll also be teaching you the ones that I use. For crop, the shortcut is just hitting the C key. I crop my images to square dimensions, since it tends to be the most flexible for online use. Now, make sure your photograph is on the bottom layer and lock it. You don't want to accidentally draw directly on that layer because it'll be much harder to edit the drawing later. If you aren't familiar with layers, this is one of the most basic and most useful aspects of Photoshop, because you can independently manipulate each layer in a file. You can think of them as sheets of stacked see through acetate that you can move around, change opacity of, and then also change how they interact with each other. There's much more and we'll get into some of that later on. So creating a new layer for sketch tests. You can use this button here or the shortcut Shift Alt Command N, double-click on the name to rename it. I'll call mine a variation of sketch or sketches and you can call it whatever you want, but good labels and layer organization are best practice, especially as you start to have more layers and more complicated projects. Now, let's look at the brushes section. For this exercise, I'm going to be using only Photoshop's default brushes to make sure everyone can follow along. You can download brushes online too and Photoshop also offers other sets. So you can use any brush you're comfortable with, and here are just a few to show you some of the differences. I personally like to use pencil brushes because it adds that level with hand-drawn character and direct contrast with the reality of the photograph. Play around with them to see which you like. Note that you can change the size of your brush up here, or use the bracket keys for shortcuts. The left bracket makes it smaller, or the right bracket makes the brush bigger. I'm also often playing with opacity and flow. Opacity changes the opacity of your brush, and flow you can think of as the ink coming out of your pen. The lower the flow, the less ink that's coming out. For opacity, you can just hit your keyboard numbers as shortcuts, and for flow just hold the Shift and then the keyboard numbers. Also a quick note on color. I personally like to use white because I tend to draw on darker backgrounds or vice versa on light backgrounds. Of course you can use any color you'd like as long as it contrasts against your photo. I also like to keep my drawings to line drawings as I like how it plays with the photo, but again, you need to use the color in your character if you wish. You can access the color swatches here, but more often than not, I'm using the Eyedropper Tool to select the color to use. The Eyedropper Tool is here and changes the color to any pixel you select in your file. A keyboard shortcut is 'I', but an even faster way to do it is while you're using the brush tool, just hold down the Alt key, select your color and let go. It returns you back to your brush automatically. One other way you can choose your color is to hit 'N' and use a manual color selection. You can select from the color gradient here, or again, use the Eyedropper Tool in your photo. Finally, if you want to see of a color to use later, you can add it as a swatch here. Now, we can assess the photograph for what arrangement will work well. Usually there are many of possibilities, so just do what speaks to you and don't be afraid to try many approaches. I would just use a different layer for each test. Remember that Shift Alt Command N or this button here, so that you don't lose good ideas. You can always delete them later, which is literally just the delete key or this trash can button. So for this first exercise, you can make it as simple or as complicated as you want. For beginners, I would keep the focus on a basic character. If you're struggling with composition, remember what I said about imagining you are the director of your characters and the photograph is your set. You can also think about the fundamental photography concepts. Think about lines of flow to guide people's eyes or think about perspectives to play with perception. You can also use a rule of thirds, which is basically the design guideline that if you imagine an image broken up into thirds or basically a tic-tac-toe grid, the important elements should be placed where the lines intersect, so that you can create a more energetic and interesting image. If you want to create your own rule of third guide, you can do so in Photoshop by hitting "Control K" and under this guide section put a gridline of 100 percent, subdivide to three and hit "Okay". Now, when you use the shortcut Command apostrophe, your grid will show up. Note that these grids and guidelines aren't actually part of the image and do not show up in prints or when you save up the image. Of course, guidelines are broken all the time and centering can sometimes work great. So for my image, I can see that there's this empty space in the foreground of the image that is also where the rule of thirds bottom intersection would be. I can play with the proportion of my characters later, but I'm looking to fill up this space here, playing with the front plane of the image and keeping the perspective of the church in the background. I could have just as easily put the sky background and add a character back there. So now let's go through my thought process about drawing characters. I don't go straight into trying to get the final line down. I like to sketch with loose lines and basic shapes to help determine overall placement and proportion. I also have these little characters that I like to draw with. This one is Emme, this one is Hamstarcat, this is their friend Ao. Feel free to use ones you have created or existing characters that you love. If you're stuck on character ideas, I think one good exercise is to just start drawing basic circle, rectangle, and triangle shapes or a combinations of them and then add faces and appendages. Try different things instead of getting stuck on making the first one perfect. I also want to teach you some quick tools to make your iterating even faster. So the Move Tool is great for trying and drawing in different places on your photo. You can find it here or use the shortcut V. Sometimes you just want to select a portion of your drawing and move it around, in which case you can use the Marquee Tool or M to select by shape. There's different shapes you can use such as rectangle and ellipse. Once selected, go back to the Move Tool by pressing V to move just that part. Make sure that your cursor is within your selection so that it knows that that's the part you want to move. Sometimes a portion you want to select is not shape-friendly. So the Lasso Tool or L is very handy as you select by drawing around it with your stylus. You can also use this to delete portions of a drawing you don't like anymore. Finally to deselect, just use the shortcut Command D. Another very useful adjustment tool is the Free Transform, which you can find here or use the shortcut Command T. I use this one all the time to change my drawing size. Again, you can transform your whole drawing or first select the portion of it and then hit "Command T". Use this to try different proportions, either with the drawing and the photograph, or between the drawing itself. If you want to get even more advanced, you can also use Warp and Perspective Tools, but to keep things introductory I'll save that for another class. So keep working on your sketch until you feel happy with the overall composition and shape. I'll go back to working on my sketch too. One thing I like to do, is if I'm considering something new, but I'm not sure if it will work, I just create another layer to test it on. So here I started with two characters and was thinking about adding a third to create a more interesting proportion between the characters. I drew my character out on a new layer and I can topple him on and off or transform him to the right proportion that I want. Once I'm happy with how it's looking, I'll merge the two layers together at that point. On the other hand if I didn't like how it looked, I could have just deleted the trial layer. Merge is under Layers, Merge Layers, but the shortcut Command E is much faster. Just select the layers that you want to merge together and hit "Command E". So as I'm going into my drawing and cleaning up, I use the B Tool to select my brush and the E Tool to go to the eraser. I'll toggle between the two and so I work it into a place that I'm happy with. Once I have my basic composition and sketch down, I'll do a clean line on a new layer. This is essentially like taking a marker paper in real life to do a clean line on top of a sketch. One helpful technique is to take the sketch layer down in opacity so that you can see what you're doing. Locking the sketch layer will also prevent you from accidentally drawing your final line on top of that layer. So now, just go in and do a quick clean line on top. To work on your sketch ideas, it can definitely take some time. Sometimes I'll have many, many sketch layers before I find one that I really like. Once you have a sketch or multiple ones, please share them in the class gallery as I would love to see them. I'll keep working on my drawing too and in the next class we'll take our basically finished drawing and use Photoshop adjustments to really make it part of the photography. 6. Step 4: Edit Your Drawing: Here I have my final line drawing and I've set up my file to show you some more examples. I still have my sketch layer here and added some additional line work here, and I'll show you how I'm going to play with those in a bit. In this final lesson, I want to introduce you to just a few of Photoshop's capabilities that I find really useful when digitally drawing and painting. Using a combination of these tools can help make your drawing look even more a part of your photo. We went over a lot in the last lesson and I don't want you to feel overwhelmed, so I'm just going to break this into three main sections. Remember, these are all optional tools that are just here for you if you'd like to keep editing your drawing. We'll quickly go over opacity, a couple of blending modes, masking, and adjustment layer masks. Most of this lesson is about nondestructive changes tear your layers. That means you can easily toggle them on and off and not affect any of the base pixels. This becomes a huge help in case you ever later decide you want to revert to a past state after you've lost the ability to undo. Now, that sounds confusing. It'll become more clear as we get into the examples. Let's start with opacity and blending modes. I've already introduced the concept of capacity in the last class when we were talking about drawing and drawing on top of your sketch layer. So just as a reminder, you can go through here on your selected layer and just change the opacity by sliding this back and forth. So I actually like to keep my sketch layer, and you see here that it's at 52 percent, and if it was at 100 percent, it might feel like too much. I move this around a bit until I feel like it's giving you some of that hand-drawn character, but not overpowering my final line. Another aspect that I really like is using the blending modes. So the blending mode can be found here, and you can think about it as how your layers interact with each other. There's a lot to go over here so I'm just going to focus on the two that I use the most. So multiply, you can think of as darkening the layer below with the color of your blend layer and screen, you can think of as lightening the layer below with the colors in your line. Just a quick explanation about multiplying. It's a little bit not as clear here since I'm using mostly white and gray, so I want to make it very obvious by using a simple example. I'm turning off my drawing and creating a new layer. I'm going to just use a hard round brush to show you what I mean. You can think of it as when you're drawing on a paper with marker or watercolor and see you drew red. Then in Photoshop, I want to just start a new layer inside that I want to draw a blue circle on top. With digital painting, opacity will cover the red circle completely, but if you think about it in real life, if I were to draw this on a piece of paper with marker or a watercolor, the two colors right here will blend together, and that's what multiplying does. So I'm going to select my blue circle where, come here, and hit "Multiply," and now you see that it's acted like what you would expect in real life. Again, this is all non-destructive, so if you don't like the effect, just change it back, or if you do like it, but you feel like the effect is too strong, you can go here to opacity and move it down, like so. Hopefully, that gives you a clear understanding of how multiply can work. Let's start with multiply. I've named this layer shadow and it's blank right now, so I'll take my brush and you'll see just a regular soft round brush. Increase Its size. Again, I'm using the right bracket to increase it, hotkeys, and I'm going to choose this gray. Right now, I can just use 100 percent opacity. I'm just playing around with what looks good. Say I wanted to add some shadow here. This obviously does not look good. You can tell that I've drawn with a gray brush over my photograph and it doesn't look like it's part of the photo. So say I now take this and multiply it. It basically has caused the color of my gray to multiply against the green of my photo, so you can tell that here because the grass is turning into a darker black, while here, against the sky, it's lighter. Now, take the opacity, bring it down, and you can start to see how I can use shadow and make it look authentically part of the photo. Turning it on and off gives you a better sense of what that's doing. Here, I think it's looking a little bit drastic, so I'll use my eraser tool again. I think the soft ground is a basic one that everyone can follow along with. You want to erase a little bit less of it. Again, you can just change the opacity of your eraser, here, or using the hotkeys of your numbers, and just bring it down, and you can continue to erase, and just keep the highlights one want. Going back to my gray shadow. Now that this layer is set to a blend mode and a certain capacity, even though I'm using the same dark Grey, what you'll see is it makes it look as if I'm using a much lighter gray. So if I put it back to normal and change the opacity back to full, you'll see that I'm actually drawing with a dark gray brush, but because I have opacity set lower and I have the blending mode set to multiply, it looks like this. So that's the concept of multiply, is taking the gray that I'm drawing with and combining it or multiplying it with the colors and the layers below. You can think this screen as opposite of multiply in a way. It basically takes the color of your blend layer and combines it with the color below, and lightens it to the extent that your blend layer color is lighter. So say I'm using this dark shadow, if I were to set this to screen, it wouldn't really affect this blue layer because there's nothing in my gray that's lighter than this blue. It does affect the screen area because my gray is lighter than some of the darker parts of this section of the photo. Let's use highlights as example. I'll use a light gray to be my highlight color and I'll start putting in some highlights right here. Again, as with the shadows, it looks very much artificial and not a part of the photo. So now I'm going to go under this blend mode and set it to screen, and take this opacity all the way down. Now you can see through to the photo and it's affecting the colors directly beneath it rather than being an opaque layer on top. I'll do some erasing to adjust the highlight so that it looks like how I want. I'm using this with whites and grays and blacks, but obviously you can use this for all different colors. The principle is the same. You can start to see the benefits of using multiplying screen. If you don't like how it looks, you can always toggle it on and off by just clicking on the "I" here. I'm liking how that looks. Let's move on to the next section. Another very important feature in Photoshop that I love using is masking. You can think of masking as a targeted, non-destructive way to either erase or semi hide your layer below. The way you add it, and I'm going to use it on this layer as an example, is you click on this icon right here, and you see that Photoshop has added this screen here, and you can think of that as your transparent sheet. Now when you have this selected and note that you can select between the two. When you want to work on your mask make sure this section is selected. You won't be actually adjusting any of the pixels in your drawing. You're going to be covering it with this mask sheet. The way that this can become helpful is that you can hide things so it looks more realistic. Here my characters are standing in the grass, but right now they look like they're just floating on top of it. They were actually standing in the grass. You would probably see their feet covered by some of the strands. I want to simulate that but I don't want to erase my characteristics because I might want to move them around later or I might want to just change the overall effect. In your mask you can only use black and white tones. Is not colors so much as an indication of what level of transparency you like to show through. You can see here that your default colors are black and white. Black means that you want nothing to show through. To make your brush selected, and I'm going to use a hard round to demonstrate this. I'll turn the sketch off so that you can really see what's going on. It looks like I've erased part of this character, but actually I just used a black mask to cover him. If I were to turn this mask off, which you can do by right-clicking and disable line layer mask, you see he comes right back up because it's like I took off the mask. To toggling this on and off can help you easily assess whether you like some of the changes you've made. I'm going to enable the layer mask and I don't want to do what I just did. So I can hit X, and you'll see that this toggles back to white, and white means show again. I just covered over and there he is. Let me go into the details and start covering up what I think should work. We use a soft round to make the edges look more believable. Using black, I'm going to go in and start covering up their feet. Now, you can imagine that I'm building in a grass here. Then zoom back out using command 0 and see how that looks. I'm already starting to like how that looks. It looks like they're actually standing in the grass rather than just floating above my picture. Again, I can disable the layer mask to see how it looks without and just click it again and apply it. If you decide that this is definitely not something you want to do, you can always just delete the layer mask as well. I'll turn back some of my layers to give you a sense of how things are looking. One thing I want to add is if their feet were really down here, there would be greater shadow amongst the grass. Going back to what I was talking about the blend mode, I am going to create a new blending mode up here.Multiply it. We start adding some shadows there. Like last time, I'll play with the opacity, so it doesn't too too artificial. One of these layers is giving them too much feet. Add a mask, go in and cover up part of that line. That's looking pretty good to me. Love this top shadow. This is a great way to test edits. If you end up liking your edits and are sure about it, you can always combine or merge these layers so that you can save on your file size. On the other hand, say I don't like this extra line effect that I've created here, I'll just turn it off. Same thing with the shadows. I think the contrast is a little bit too high. I will just turn it off. Finally, the last adjustment that I would like to show you is adjustment layer mask. You can think of this as similar to the masks that I've shown you what the drawing and erasing. But with adjustments, so you go down here and you click on this half filled in circle. You see all of these adjustments which reflect the same adjustments you can find up here under image adjustments. The difference between these two is if I were to just use the brightness contrast levels, curves, exposure of this image, it's just been up here, I'd be directly affecting the layer I've selected which means that the pixels in this layer are actually getting darker or brighter. But say I want to test it without committing to the change. What I'll do is create an adjustment layer mask here. I'm going to use hue/saturation as an example. You'll see that they create a hue/saturation layer right here, and it's going to affect everything below it. I can take the lightness down and you see everything is getting affected. We'll light this all the way up. But it's not actually affecting any of the pixels. Again, it's just creating a mask over the photo and layering it from there. Same thing with saturation. Now say I want to make this line darker, if I want the photograph to stay the same. We just want your adjustment layer mask to affect a specific layer, you can do that. Just right on the adjustment layer mask and say create clipping mask. You'll see this little arrow. That means I'm only going to affect this line here. Now when I bring this lightness down or up only that layer is getting affected. I want to make this line a little bit darker, just as an example. This is also really useful for testing out color. So say, I'm feeling like the photograph could use a little bit more blue, but I'm not sure, or I just don't want to, again, edit the pixels directly. You can go down here, make sure the image is selected, and I'll add a color balance adjustment layer mode. Now when I move this around and we're adjusting the photograph, but not actually changing any of the pixels underneath. What's also great about this is I can very easily toggle it on and off again using this visibility toggle here. Decide whether you want to keep that or not, or maybe I'm not sure between a bluer enhancement or maybe a warmer enhancement. I'll turn this one off. Now, let me see what it looks like having made everything warm. You can see this is a very easy way to compare different edits. Is also closer if you combine both. You can actually use many differently layer masks and have them interact with each other to create interesting effects. Here, the color balance is layering on top of each other and finally affecting the image. You can clip them altogether. I've decided that I actually like how the image looked originally, and I'm feeling pretty good about how the drawing is looking as well. Zoom back out with command 0, and I think this is looking pretty good. Now that's a lot to digest if your new to Photoshop, but hopefully makes you excited to see how Photoshop can speed up your iteration process and also help you edit drawings on top of photography. Take some time to play around with all of the tools and revisit the sections as needed. When you have your final drawing, please do share in the project gallery as it's really helpful to see what others are creating. I hope you've learned something interesting and are having fun making your own drawings on photography. Thanks so much for joining.