Animation Backgrounds: Draw A Street Scene

1. Background Art Street Scenes: [MUSIC] Background art is about creating worlds and inviting viewers to step into and experience those worlds. It's the element of an animated movie that creates the feeling or the atmosphere or mood. Hi there, my name is Siobhan. I'm an artist and an animation professional. The thing that I'm really excited to share with you today in this class is that it's actually easy and achievable for you to start creating your own background art for animation, all it takes is understanding a few processes and techniques, and you can start creating these magical worlds of your own. For this class project, you're going to get to create a scene that's inspired by the charming and magical Pixar movie, Luca. A scene saturated with warm Mediterranean colors that exudes a quirky and authentic style. I know that a street scene with buildings and perspective can seem very daunting, so I'm going to take you step-by-step through the entire process, explain everything that I do, and explain why I do it. I'll teach you first how to research your ideas and build a solid reference from which to work. Then you'll learn how to translate your idea or your concept into a rough sketch, how to wrangle that complex drawing or idea into simple and manageable color shapes. From there, you'll roughen the edges, add texture and color variation, and give your world and lived-in feel. Finally, I'll show you how I add all of my new details that go into a street scene. Things like windows, doorways, drain pipes, and even washing lines. By the end of this class, you'll have completed a journey of discovery about this very unique and fun approach about making background art for animation, specifically about world-building. Most importantly, you'll have completed the journey into your own creativity. Plus, you will have an awesome portfolio piece that showcases your unique point of view and your talents. Let's get started. [MUSIC] 2. Introduction to Background Art Street Scenes: Thanks for joining me in this class. I'm really glad that you're here. I can't wait to get started and I can't wait to see the work that you produce. There's a lot to cover in this class. In this lesson, I wanted to give you a bit of an overview, give you a roadmap or a checklist. First up, let's check that you have the right things you need for this class. You'll need Photoshop or some other digital painting software, and you'll need a tablet and a stylus. If you haven't got a tablet or a stylus yet, but you're very keen on taking this class, I really encourage you to invest in one. You don't have to get a very super expensive tablet. I have a Wacom Intuos Pro, but there are cheaper alternatives out there, and even just an entry-level tablet is great for you to get up and running. So here's what we'll be covering in this class. We're going to learn how to gather and use reference images correctly. You'll learn how to create a very loose sketch of your idea or concept. Then I'll show you how to simplify that complex idea into just a few basic shapes. From there, you'll learn how to apply texture and color variation. After that, we'll get into actually drawing the main details of your scene and even drawing smaller details. Finally, I'll show you how to treat your image for shadow and light, and how to color correct your image before final render. Along the way, I'm going to be talking about how your work fits into the overall animation production and why your background is different to an illustration. This will include tips for giving space to characters in your scene, making sure that everything is properly staged for animation. I'm also going to be talking about color harmony and balance, and how to make sure that your background stays cohesive and isn't too contrasty or too jarring. The entire process is detailed, and that's why I've gone to a lot of trouble to break down every phase into small manageable chunks. You don't have to feel overwhelmed at all if you take it step-by-step. What I would suggest is you could either watch the class all the way through from start to finish and then start your own project or follow along with me. Once you have completed your project, then head over to the project and resources tab. You can post it up there, see other students work and get feedback from me. Before we dive in, I just wanted to mention that this class is part of an entire series on background art for animation. If you're brand new here, if this is your first class with me, feel free to pause this video and check out the other classes that I have on background design. I have a few other classes on painting landscapes and environments for animation. But you can certainly take this class if you haven't taken the landscape classes yet. So I hope you enjoy this, please do let me know if you have any questions throughout the class or if anything is unclear. In the next lesson, I'm going to show you how I set up my Photoshop workspace specifically for background design. I'll see you in the next lesson. 3. Setting Up Your Workspace: In this lesson, I'm going to show you how to set up your workspace in Photoshop, if you want to match the way that I've got mine set up. I have it this way simply because that's just the way that I found to be the most versatile and the most simple really in terms of supporting the specific workflow that I do when I'm painting. What I'm going to do is close off these windows, and we can start from scratch. I'll show you how to find them. Let's just say that you open up Photoshop, a new Photoshop looks a little bit like this. Well, the main thing to know about this workspace is that on the left, these are your tools for creating. You've got brushes, erasers, selection tools, shape tools. Whenever you select one of these tools, then usually the properties of that tool will appear at the top. For example, with the brush mode selected, you can come up here and change different brush shapes. You can change the opacity as well, and the flow. Then on the right-hand side of the screen, I would call the Function Windows. Things like history, your history panel, layers, properties, adjustments. Then in the middle, this is your canvas. There are really just three windows, or I should say, two windows and one tool, that I like to have open onscreen as I work all the time. They are the layer stack, the color picker, and the brush pack. What I'm going to do is go up to this button up here that says Window. From this dropdown menu, let's choose "Layers" first. I'll choose "Layers." It should pop up like that for you, and you can drag it along and nest it into the side underneath all of these guys there. But then you have to keep clicking on it and collapsing it back. What I'd like to do is just have it open all the time. I'm going to click and drag it rather to the side, and you'll see that blue line light up, and then I'm going to click on "Expand Panels," and now it'll stay open on the right-hand side there. Now for the color window, I'm going to go back up to Window and choose "Color." This color window might not look the same as yours. All you need to do is go up to this tiny menu icon at the top right. If you click on that, you'll see that there are various ways of displaying color. Yours might look like that, for example. You can also display it in that way. But for me personally, I like to have it as the wheel display simply because in this way, it gives me all the information I need. The hue either along the side of the wheel, or up here on this slider. Let's say I choose that color, I can change the saturation on this slider, and the brightness or darkness. If I want it really specifically color select within this triangle, I can do that with this center slider. I'm going click on that and drag it, and I want to place it above the layers so that I've got them both open there. That's great. I can even give myself a little bit more room with the layers if I need to. Just to note though, if you come over here to the left again, these two little squares or swatches here, are also your color pickers. If you wanted another way to choose colors, is just to click into there, and then you get this color picker popping up, and you can change your color again. Also, just to note, yours might look like that. It's the exact same color. It's just, as I said, a different way of displaying it. That's my layers and my color, and then the only other thing I need are the brushes. Go back up to Window, and find Brushes. Now, I don't need Brush Settings. Those are where you can affect different settings. I don't really need that, I don't use it that much. I just want the straight-up Brushes Window, and then I can again, click and drag it over to the side so it pops up there. Then the last thing to mention is that when I'm working, I usually change the viewing mode from this standard setting, which you can't really move this around at all. I change it to the next viewing mode up. Just hit F on your keyboard, and that gives you a bit more of a full-screen, and you can hold down the Spacebar. This little hand appears, and you can move your canvas around if you need to. If you hit F again, it goes completely full screen, and all the side things go away. You can just hover over there if you need to access them. Then if you hit F again, you're back into the standard mode. In the next lesson, I'm going to show you how to import this brush pack. 4. Downloading the Brush Pack: [MUSIC] In this lesson, I'm going to quickly show you how to download the brush pack that I've left for you. I have a folder of lots of really great, wonderful texture brushes that I'd love for you to use. What I'm going to do is show you how to access them. I think first of all, I'm going to go ahead and delete this so that I'll show you this process step-by-step. I'll go delete group. First step is go over to the Resources Project and Resources tab and download the linked file there that I've left for you. Once that's downloaded to your desktop or hard drive, you can then navigate to that folder wherever it is. You can click on this folder. If you've got Photoshop open already, all you have to do is click and drag to Photoshop and release. There it is. It should pop in underneath at the very bottom. That's the easiest way and the most straightforward way to do it. If you are having any issues downloading the brush pack or importing it into Photoshop, let me know. This is a fantastic set and I really hope that this brush set helps you, as in your work. Get to know all of the brushes that are there and try and experiment first, I would say before starting up painting, so that you have an idea of what brushes will give you, what kinds of shapes and marks. It's a really good idea to suggest, to spend a little bit of time getting to know each of them. Throughout the course, I have to say I don't have a specific brush that I will use that I know. For me, you'll see this process is all about experimentation and just finding what brush works. Up next, in the next video, I'm going to walk you through the main tools that I will be using in this class. I'll see you in the next lesson. 5. Tips and Tools in Adobe Photoshop: In this lesson, I wanted to give you a general overview of the main tools that I'll be using so that you can bookmark this lesson and refer back to it if something later on down the road doesn't make sense or if you've missed something, this will be very useful. I'll be explaining everything as I go but I thought it's also great to have all of these tips in one dedicated lesson. So the main tools that I want to be working with are the brush, the Lasso tools, the selection tools, and the color picker and then the only other thing to be aware of is a couple of functions of the layer stack. Let's get started. First off, the brush tool, the keyboard shortcut is B and this is usually where you pick the different brush shapes. Up here in the properties the only thing I usually change is the opacity so I usually paint with the opacity brought down because you can build up your tones gradually and can get quite a nice effect that way. It's also great for blending. When you are in brush mode, if you hold down Alt or Alt on a Mac or Option on Windows, you can toggle between the brush and the eyedropper. So right now I'm in brush mode, if I hold down Alt, I can select this color and now I've got a new color that I can paint with. Release Alt, and you're back in brush mode again with the new color, this is great for blending and painting as you go and it's the way that I work a lot. You can get really fast and it speeds up your workflow a great deal. You can also use the eraser as a brush tool and I just wanted to point that out, If I hit E on my keyboard, I'm in the eraser mode and that's usually defaulted to the default brushes up here, the round one or the soft round. Soft round is obviously grayish as an eraser. Just be aware that you can also choose a different brush shape if you wanted to get creative with your erasing and in that sense, use your eraser as a painting tool as well. The next tool to look at is the Lasso tool, that's L on your keyboard. If you come over to this icon and click and hold down onto it you can see the three different Lasso tools that there are. There's the regular one, the Polygon Lasso and the Magnetic Lasso. Let's just ignore Magnetic Lasso for now. It's great for selecting on photographs or something like that but we're going to just use these two for drawing and creating shapes. So here's the thing, you probably know how this works, you double-click and close off the shape. You can hit G on your keyboard with a color selected, fill that shape but there's also a great way to work with the Lasso where you can toggle between the Polygon Lasso and the regular one. So say I'm in polygon mode and I'm clicking away making points, If I hold down Option or Alt, I can switch over to the regular Lasso. If I release, then I'm back into polygon and I can close off the shape. Give yourself some time to practice that. It's a bit tricky to get used to at first but you will get used to it and it'll again massively speed up your workflow. The other thing to note when you're drawing with the Lasso is that you can also add to a selection. So just hold on Shift and that little plus icon appears, you can add to an existing selection and if you wanted to subtract from an existing selection, then hold down Option or Alt, and you can select out part of that selection. Lastly, I also wanted you to be aware of how to select the inverse of a shape. If I've got a random shape selected, you can go up to Select and then come down to inverse and once you've done that, everything outside of that selection is now active. You can paint on the edge of the that and that can have a lot of really nice application, which you'll see later on in the class. Those are most of the drawing and painting techniques, let's just have a quick look at the layer stack because I want you to be aware of a few processes that can help speed up your workflow over here. The first is to select layers or to create layers basically, as you know, you just hit this a new layer icon. But if you wanted to create a layer underneath this layer, say I've got some paint in here, fill this with some some color. I wanted a layer underneath that, I can just go down to the new layer icon, hold down Command or Control, click on it and I'll place a layer underneath and then you can paint underneath that layer. To merge layers you can just select whichever layers you wanted to merge together then right-click and come down to merge layers and now everything is on one layer. If you wanted to select all of the contents of any given layer, just come over to the icon of that layer, hold down Command or Control and you'll see that little square pops up, selection square, click into the layer thumbnail, and that will select everything in that layer. Then the last thing that I wanted to let you know about, you can clip one layer to another by hovering over the line between both layers, hold down Option or Alt, you'll see that little clipping icon appears. Click down and that layer will be clipped to the layer underneath it. You can also adjust the opacity of that layer if you wanted to blend the colors again. Those are the main processes and techniques that I want you to generally be aware of at the outset, there are many more and we will get to them throughout the lessons and I will explain step-by-step how everything that I'm doing as we go. If there's anything that's absolutely unclear or you've missed something or you're not sure how I do something, please just let me know, send me a message or pop a comment into the discussion section, and I'll be happy to help you out. 6. Gathering Your Reference: [MUSIC] It's time to start working on our project, and this lesson is the first step. This is the research and development phase. What I want to talk to you about in this lesson is how to go about finding reference images for your work and how to use those reference images as your starting point or your base. Now for this project, I really want to create a scene that is a quirky, cute little town with cobble streets or something like that. My main reference point or source of inspiration is the Pixar movie, Luca. So, I recently watched this movie, as a background artist, it's one of those movies that you could literally pause it on any frame and just stare at the background art. There's so much to see. There's so much detail, and yet it's all handled so beautifully. Nothing is overdone. Nothing is calling for attention. The backgrounds do what they're supposed to do. They support the story. Unfortunately, we can't watch that movie together. We can't study it frame by frame because of a whole host of copyright issues and legalities. So what we will do is search for similar images online from free websites and I'll show you how to build up your reference from them. So my basic idea or starting point is that I want to have a scene that's got quirky buildings, cobblestone streets. Maybe there's a central harbor or square, much like the film or the backgrounds in the film Luca, which was set in an Italian town called Cinque Terre. Generally have a bit of a starting point in my mind, now, I need to find images that are going to closely match that and give me a real starting point to draw. When it comes to researching your reference images, there are three avenues that you can explore, or three options really. The first is going to be looking at stock photos or images online and I'll show you that now. But the other two I will also wanted to mention. The second option would be if you've got personal experience, if you've been to someplace like Cinque Terre or somewhere in Italy, for example, then you should really aim to bring that experience into your work. Try to really go back into your memory of the place, or if you've got photos that you took while you were there, use that as your starting point and try to infuse your work with that sense of place that you actually experienced yourself. Then the other option you have for reference and research is to look around you in your own context, in your own area. I mean, for example, right now, I'm nowhere near Italy, but if I look out my window, I can see lampposts or drain pipes or windows that I know for sure I want to reference in my background. But let's go back to the first option and have a look online and see what kind of reference images we can come up with. I actually did have an opportunity to visit Sicily a few years ago with my mom. We went there on a trip and it was completely amazing. It's a really magical, beautiful place. So, I'm actually going to straight away start looking for images that remind me of that place. This is Unsplash.com. It's a fantastic resource for artists. This is a great site to search for high-resolution photos. I would encourage you to use either Google Image search or a website like Unsplash.com and gather maybe three or four or five images that you want to use as the base for your composition. The next step that I like to do is gather all of my images and create something like a mood board, which is a visual overview of all of your reference images. It gives you a great sense of your color palettes and of compositional ideas. I'm working with these maybe four or five images. This is enough for me, I think just to get started. What I want you to do, what I would suggest, and this is the way I like to work, is look at these images, study them closely, allow the details to embed themselves into your [LAUGHTER] visual sense and when you feel like you've got a really good sense, you've really looked and studied at these images, then what I would say is put them away. Close down the windows. Don't look at the images again. Put them into a folder. We will come back to them later on when we dial into the details. But as we move into the next phase, what I want you to do is once you've studied them, put them away, and then start drawing. The reason that I suggest this is because I don't necessarily want to be copying these images or tracing them. You can do that. I'm not saying that that's a bad thing. But I find that if you first of all study them, put them away, and then start drawing based on your memory of the reference images, you tend to get a lot more creative. You can spark your own ideas and add your own personality, your own flair, into what will be the final image. So when you're ready, meet me in the next lesson and we'll start this rough sketch. 7. The Rough Idea: [MUSIC] In Photoshop, I'm going to make a new canvas and I'm going to go with a fairly wide landscape format and make it quite big in terms of resolution. You can copy these inputs yourself into your own canvas, but anything landscape format is good since we are intentionally creating a background for film or animation. I'll hit ''Create'', and this is my starting point. I'm going to hit ''F'' on my keyboard that allows me to hold down the spacebar and move my canvas around if I need to. The first thing that I'm going to do is make a brand new layer because I don't want to be drawing on this locked background layer. For now, let me just collapse these menus off to the side, give myself some more space. I am going to start very rough sketching out my ideas for an overall composition. The thing that I really want to stress at this point is that I'm purposely drawing rough because I want to let the composition emerge itself without me putting too much control on it at this stage. I know that sounds very counter-intuitive, counterproductive, but the more precise detail that you draw in now, the less likely you will be able to achieve a really good dynamic composition. You really have to step back at this stage and draw messy and loose and allow creativity and ideas to come through. Having said that, I do have something in mind, something that I'm trying to achieve through these messy sketches and that is that I want to have a ground plane in the front. This is going to be like the main square, similar to what we see in the movie Luca. I'm going to have buildings on either side. I want them to frame our view or lead our eye inwards into the composition. Maybe have a street going back away from us in the background there. There'll be other buildings, possibly maybe an archway back there. In the front, there's going be just some steps to indicate this is the harbor. Over here, I could put in crates and things that can serve as a bit of a framing device. Not entirely sure about this as I know that they don't really fit in with the ground plane, they're floating, but I'm leaving them there for now just as a note to myself really to think about what I could do in this corner. The buildings back there are going to be tall and thin. I'm trying to keep in mind that what we want to have in this kind of a background is a very stylized look and feel, so the long thin buildings are going to work really well for that. Then back here, more houses or buildings and one behind the other so that there is a sense of depth and that overlap creates that sense of depth. Now I'm thinking about behind this archway, you could really just have silhouetted buildings. It doesn't have to have any major detail, a very simple skyline. Now that the overall general composition is blocked in, I'm going start thinking about details a bit more carefully and sketch them in, things like windows and doors. The main thing to note though is that I haven't sketched any of this up with perspective on it. I haven't used perspective grid. That is simply because I want this image with this background to have that free hand almost intentionally out of perspective field. That's what's going to bring in the stylization. That's what's going to make this feel like a quirky and very character-driven scene. If I were to go in with rulers and make everything straight, match everything up to a perfect 2.grid, you'd really risk losing the character and the unique quality, and that for me isn't what I want to do at all. Even if it feels a bit daunting to draw without a grid, in terms of perspective, try and be intuitive about your approach and don't worry too much about things being off at this point. I really want to have a loose, almost wobbly or wonky feeling and not prescribed to a rigid grid. I am of course, observing a general perspective, an overall adherence, if you like, to that vanishing point. It's somewhere in the middle. Things that are further away will be smaller and marching up a little bit. But as I say, I'm not being overly tied up into a very rigid grid. Remember again, I'm repeating myself here, but this sketch is just your idea. It's the composition that you're going to use as your starting point for the painting. The painting is going to be the final piece, so you don't have to get attached to the sketch or to this drawing. This is not a layout in any way. Think of this as your idea that you've put down in a picture form. In the next lesson, I'm going to show you how to quickly refine this so that you can have a little bit more of a concrete base on which to start working. When you're ready, I'll see you in the next lesson. 8. Refining the Sketch: [MUSIC] In this lesson, I want to show you how I refined a rough sketch into something a little bit more defined. This is always the next step for me before starting to paint. So that when I get into the details of painting later on, I have a bit clear idea of what to do. To do this, what I generally do is [MUSIC] I go over the drawing again, so I'll grab this brush and I'll begin to make one more pass. For example, down here I can sketch in some of the wall of the harbor, a bit more detailed and possibly draw in some of these bollards. I'm still not 100 percent sure about this foreground element, but maybe there's an anchor or chain attached, I don't know, I'll stick it in for now, see how we get on. I might sketch in or give an indication of the paving stones across the harbor. I can also think about how the store is going to look, like the doorstep, that's something that you might not necessarily think to include, but it is a great detail to add. Because just having the door meet the ground plane without something in-between, always looks a little bit weird. The same goes for the bottom of the buildings themselves. I do like to think about or give consideration to how they meet the ground. What is that transition from building to ground plane? Sometimes there's a bit of brick exposed at the bottom, or sometimes there's even moss growing along the bottom of the buildings, you don't want to have a dead straight line. That's going to look really odd. It's just something that I'm going to be thinking about in the painting phase, just mentioning it here. At this point, I'm also starting to think about a cohesive uniform design for the windows. This is something that we will get into in more detail, when I move into the painting phase, but I am thinking now that the windows are going to be the same, so they're going to be uniform in their look across this painting. There'll be difference in that there's going to be some with shutters open and some are closed, for example, but I think all the windows in this scene are going to have the same look. They're all going to have shutters, for example. That's already looking way better, much more workable as a sketch for the painting and I'm happy enough with that. It's super important to note at this stage, that as I said in the previous lessons, this isn't a layout. A layout in animation is a really precise, perfectly finished line drawing of a background and this is not that. This is a loose sketch, it's very intentional that we keep it loose, keep it sketchy because we want to maintain that through the painting. I'm now getting really excited to add color onto this. In the next lesson, I'm going to show you how to draw the Lasso tool and how to start blocking in your colors. I'll see you in the next lesson. 9. Blocking in the Base Colours: [MUSIC] In this lesson, I'm going to lay down the base colors for each element in this background. Now before we get started, I just wanted to say, you might probably think that this drawing or this rough sketch is so complex and you might think it's very overwhelming to start coloring it because there's so much detail. But I wanted to point out that actually what you can do is break it down into sections. Then you're actually only dealing with about eight areas of color and that's much more manageable to work with. Let's get started. [MUSIC] I've made my final adjustments to the drawing and I'm just going to leave it as it is. I could fuss over this for ages and that's not really a good idea, so any changes that I want to make from here on out, I will make them as I go. It's better to actually move on to the next stage, give yourself that momentum of moving through your work rather than staying stuck on something that's not really going to benefit the end result. As I say, I can always change this drawing again later on. The beauty of working rough is to keep the entire process in a workable state. I'm going to expand this panel out. I will call this layer sketch and bring the opacity down a little bit, then I'll lock that layer and I want to then go over to the Polygon Lasso tool and then literally start drawing out the shape of this building over here. I'm tracing or following the sketch and using the Polygon tool to get the overall basic shape. Once I've closed off the selection, it's active. Now to make the archways, what I'm going to do is subtract out the pieces that I need to, so holding down Option or Alt, I'm going to come along and just outline these archway areas. If you don't know how to toggle between the different modes of the Lasso tool, refer back to the earlier lesson where I describe all the tools that are going to be most useful to you and I've explained it in detail there. That's the overall shape. Now I'm going to make a new layer, layer of one, if you can believe it. This is the first layer of the painting process and I have to warn you at this stage, we will be working with a lot of layers and probably by the end of this process will have maybe hundreds of layers. Don't get put off by that, it's just fun to see Layer 1 at the start of the process. I'm going to fill this layer or that shape, I should say, with a color. That's something bright and warm, something Mediterranean or Italian. The next thing that I want to do is make a new layer underneath us, and to do that, go to the New Layer icon and hold Command or Control as you "Click" on it and that will place a brand new layer underneath instead of on top of the layer that you were just on. I'm going to go back to L on my keyboard to bring up the Lasso tool again and what I'm going to do is draw out the inside of these arches like this. Because this layer is underneath, it means that I can make any shape here that I need to once I've got those inner arches done. Then I'll choose a darker color and fill that shape. Great. That's all right, so those are on separate layers and that's going to be useful because I can then put different textures on each layer. I can always combine them again later if I need to. I'm just going to tidy up the bottom section here on this layer and on the arches. I know I'm going for a quirky freehand style, but I just want to tidy that up a little bit, make it less jaggedy around the edges. What I want to do next is fill this area in the back of the arches so that you can see that there's space behind there, so I'll do that. Again, on a separate layer underneath the arches layer. That's if you like the back wall of that little anyway or arc AD place underneath. Now I'm going to group all of these layers together by hitting Command or Control plus G, that makes a group of any selected layers and I'll double-click on that and name this now, Left house 1. Perfect. Now I will keep going and do the house behind it. I'm giving you fair warning that the layers will get very out of control very quickly because this method of background painting requires a lot of layers. I'm pretty much putting nearly everything on a separate layer in order to be able to edit it and work with this individually. My advice to you is group as many layers together as you can that makes sense that they go together and then name your groups. Because I know it's not going to be easy or even useful really to name each and every individual layer as you go, but if you can at least name your groups, then you'll be well on your way to having an organized system in your layer stack and that's super important for your workflow and at the end of the day you can have groups within groups and that's totally fine too, and you'll see that I do that as I go. But my main way of doing this is to name my groups and then inside have layers that I can merge together later on. In fact, it's nearly half the battle in background painting. It'll make your life so much easier and make your process so much quicker and more efficient and crucially, it also means that if you have your layers organized in a good fashion, you can pass your Photoshop file off to anybody else and they'll be able to open up your layer stack and understand where everything is really quickly. I'm actually going to group each of these individual houses separately for now. I'm going to just call them, Right house 1, Right house 2. This will be Right house 3, and this one will be 4, and then what I'll do is I'll grab all of these guys on the right and group them into one folder and I'll call that folder HOUSES RIGHT, then I'll call this one on the left, HOUSES LEFT. At this point, I've got all of the buildings done. The ground plane is going to be underneath everything. What I'm going to do is fill that with a neutral gray tone, maybe something slightly warm and then on top of that, I will draw out something for these background buildings. I'm really seeing this in two sections. This is the first section and then those are really far away section behind us. This section is quite nearer to us, so there's probably going to be some more detail in there. This is just beyond the middle ground of the image I think. I'm always thinking in terms of foreground, midground, and background. The left and right buildings are more or less in my foreground I should say, and then this section will be the middle ground of the background. For now, let's just give the far away background section a pale pink tone and the last thing I'll do is on the building on the right here, I'll just give it a side, so it's not a flash piece of color. The sky in the background for now will be a generic blue tone. If I turn off the sketch layer, that's everything blocked in. What I wanted to point out to you, particularly in this lesson is that what maybe looked very complex at the beginning of this lesson in terms of the drawing anyway, when you're looking at the drawing and thinking, gosh, there's so many things to color, what you actually got is really about maybe say, eight things to color. It now looks a lot more manageable. Instead of a whole slew of details, we ended up distilling everything down into really only about eight or nine elements. Now, each of these elements are either building or the ground plane and that's how I want you to think about this painting process as you move forward. You can break it down into simple blocks and then tackle each one of those blocks or sections at a time. Without approach in mind, it's really easy to work through this whole painting. When you're ready, join me in the next lesson and we'll do a texturing and color variation pass on this. 10. Adding Texture: [MUSIC] The adding texture is a really satisfying part of the process. You get to work with nice big brushes, you can start to get really painterly and expressive. In this lesson, I'm going to show you how easy it is to make something that looks super flat and almost like a cutout, transform it, and give it a layer of realism. Just before we move on, I want to point out that I did fix up or at least change the far background there. Because looking at it in-between the last session and this one, I decided it just wasn't working at all. I just reworked the sketch, and I haven't gone back over yet to fill in the layer of flat color. I will get to that shortly. But I did want to move on to the texture phase, because that's what I said we will be doing in this lesson. Over here, I've got this house on one layer as I mentioned before, and I'm going to color pick using the eyedropper. Then up here in my color window, what I want to do is adjust that specific tone ever so slightly. They can go either a shade lighter or a shade darker, it doesn't really matter. Then grab a really large texture brush and what you do is just start applying it directly onto the layer. To make sure that you don't paint outside of this orange color or the base color, there are a couple of ways to do that. What I would normally do is click on this layer, and then to protect it or protect the edges, go up to this icon here which says "Lock". It has a little picture of squares on it. If you click onto that, what that does is it locks the pixels on that layer, and that essentially means that you can only paint on whatever existing color or pixels are already there. Another way to do it would be if I just unlocked the pixels by clicking on that icon again. Another way you could do is you could hold down "Command" or "Control" on your keyboard, and then click into the icon of the layer. That automatically makes a total selection of everything on that layer. Then obviously you can paint over it and you won't be making any marks outside of it because that's your active selection. Either way is fine, but for these main base layers, I prefer to use the Lock pixels function. From here, experiment with as many different brushes as you like. I'm really just trying to see what looks good and choosing different brushes and changing up the color variation as I go. This is really all about experimentation for me, I don't necessarily have a default brush that I use or a set of rules around this process. I like instead just to see what brush combinations will work well together. In this particular brush pack that I've left for you, there's some really nice big texture brushes, so you should have a lot of fun working with them. One maybe rule that I do follow, it's not a rule but it's a general guide or a general thing that I do, is I like to make the color of variation darker towards the bottom of the building, because it feels to me like it would be darker, more marked up around street level where there's more life passing by the building, people, cars, that sort of thing, and making marks along the bottom, and they may be lighter towards the top. But it isn't a rule and you get to decide yourself what looks good and what colors work. [MUSIC] Because I've kept all of these three sections of this building like the facade, the inner arches, and the back of the arches because they're all on separate layers,i t's really easy to apply texture to each layer individually. [MUSIC] Once I'm happy with these inner arches, I'm just going to merge the two top layers together. To do that, just select them," Right-click" and then choose "Merge Layers". [MUSIC] I'm also color picking as I go which is a really important part of this process. While I'm in the brush mode, I can just click and hold "Option" or "Alt". That toggles between the brush and the eyedropper. Then I can sample a color release "Option" and I'm back in brush mode. I did explain this in the previous lesson on the tools of Photoshop. It's a super quick and efficient way to paint and pick colors as you go. Now for the back of the arches, I do want it to be much darker, and these are color variations. I'm not trying to do a shadow and light treatment here. That's going to come much later. While I'm painting this, I've decided that I'm going to put an entrance or maybe another archway over here in the corner. With the lasso, I'm simply going to delete part of this over here, and I think that looks a lot better. Onto the next house. This is left house 2. I'm going to lock pixels on that base color and then start adding color variation. I realized that this building is very similar in tone to the foreground house, and normally, you want to have contrast. You don't want them to be the exact same. But in this instance I don't really mind. I want things to look cohesive and unified and sometimes that's actually better than having everything contrasting sharply with each other. The same process applies right around these other houses on each on a separate layer. Simply lock pixels of that base layer, grab a really large textured brush and just mark it up, and brush and paint across the whole of the base. As I said, don't be too precious or too specific about what you're doing at this phase. Ultimately, this will all melt into the background. These texture brush strokes won't stand out so much. Of course, you can always refine them later as you start to put details onto the different elements within your scene. For now, it's just really about knocking back that very blatant flash fill and just to start giving it a bit of character. I'm really loving how these buildings are coming together actually. I love the orange house on the left. I think that's working really well. These pink houses are a little bit more tricky because I suppose they're similar in tone. One thing you might find is that you'll start off with one color as your base, and then wind up with a very different color after you've put all of the textured brushes on top. Don't worry too much about that, there are any number of ways of making fixes or changing colors back. Even at the end of this entire class when we get to the last few sections or the last few lessons, I'll be showing you how you can completely change the hue of your entire picture or certain elements within it, even after the fact, after you've finished painting everything. The last thing I'll do is the ground. Just be aware, for something like this where there's obvious detailing like individual paving stones should be there. I'm going to go back to that later, and I'm going to define it and actually draw in the paving stones. But for now, I just really want to give this a general sense of a stony cementy ground. [MUSIC] That looks a bit cementy now. Going to switch my Sketch Layer back on, and what I want to do is use my lasso tool and just simply mark out this area as a selection because this is where the horror starts and their steps going down, and I'm going to just darken it up. Again, not with any major light treatment in mind or light source in mind, just simply to differentiate this section from the top. [MUSIC] Fantastic. That is the entire texture paths complete borne out anyway. It looks vastly different to the flat cutout base colors that we started out with. Hope you can see that difference, and I hope you can see how easy it is to give something that really withered and rough worn look by simply adding one or two texture brushes with a color variation. Have a go with this, and when you're ready, meet me in the next lesson. 11. Finishing the Far Buildings: [MUSIC] In this lesson, we're going to finish off the texture pass that we had started. I do need to finish off this background area here. Haven't even put in the flat colors yet. But before I get onto that, I've been looking at these buildings and I want to change this middle building a little bit. It's not really working for me, so I'm going to spend just a minute or so just trying to see if I can tweak the color on this building here. Let's see. I'm trying to think of a color that's going to complement these foreground colors, but not be as vibrant or saturated, so let me just tone it down slightly with a more muted peachy color. See if that works. Another thing that's great about these texture brushes is that they leave some of the color that's underneath showing through. You wind up actually mixing colors together by using these texture brushes, then you can sample or color pick from that and get a new third color, if you like, and that's quite nice to work with. This is already looking a lot better to my eye, anyway. I feel that it's a bit more muted. As you can see, this can be an ongoing process. The painting develops things. You start to see one element beside another one and you decide that the colors don't quite match. That's perfectly fine, it helps you to keep the process nice and fluid. Okay, let me hop over to the back here and just block out this building right here. Something yellow like that, and I actually I'm going to go with the dark color and just paint it in a section of it here. Without even making a second layer or a second building out of this, I can just select out this section and change up the color within that selection. Maybe something a little bit warmer, little bit more peachy. That's working fine. There we go. That inner street or corridor back there is going to be a lot darker. That's nice and defined there. I probably think about what's going on back there later in the process, but on my sketch, I've got some steps going back in there. That's going to work out perfectly. Great. Now, I'm going to try and tackle the very far background, so underneath that layer, I'll just draw out all rough, generic looking building back here. Then let's see. First of all, just fill it with a neutral tone, something that's not going to stand out too much, and then behind there, I want to put in just another hint of a building with a bit of a roof top. These are going to be almost silhouetted out in the end, so we don't have to have too much detail. I suppose one of the things that I could say about this is that atmospheric perspective can come into play here, and the idea that the further things are away from you, the more muted and less saturated or less detailed that they are. Jumping back into the foreground a little bit, I just want to match up the side of that building since I changed the color of that middle building, then I will grab all of these layers which are not named at all, and I'm going to call this group background houses or BG houses. Great. Now, where are we? The very last thing that I wanted to do in this phase of the painting, is I just need to finish off the roofs. I haven't put any rooftops on my buildings and I just want to do that quickly. Some of the roofs on the reference images that I've been studying and looking at are just really flat roofs on top of the buildings and then some are at an angle like this. Maybe I'll put one of those angled roofs over here on this building. I'm actually putting this on a separate layer so that it can be treated differently and it can have its own texture. That looks okay. It looks a bit silly, but I'll leave it at that for now. I can lock pixels and just try and give it a little bit of a weathered look already, mark it up somewhat with some texture. That's fine. On my left house over here, you don't really see the whole roof, but I'm going to just put in one of those flat roofs for now. Possibly back here. On this building over here, I think there needs to be a slight roof sticking out over here. Then the very last one will be on this back over background houses. I'm going to just put in a flat roof again, something along the top to indicate the top of the buildings, just like this. It doesn't have to be ornate roof whatsoever. This building will have a flat roof. It's not reading very strongly for me. What I might do, which is probably not really essential to do at this point, but underneath that layer, I'm just going to put in a darker, almost you can think of it as a shadow, just to make it look visible really to the eye. I think that does look a lot better. That's working. In fact, this is all fine for now. I'm more or less ready to move on. [MUSIC] I really hope you've enjoyed this process so far. It's been very loose, experimental, and an explorative way to play around with colors and different values and tones. I find this part of the process really nice. It's extremely fluid and intuitive. In the next section, the next phase, maybe we're going to be leaving this behind somewhat and moving into a more precise, more focused, and detailed way of working because we are going to be drawing the windows, the doors, drain pipes, lamps and lights, street lights. We will be leaving behind this loose experimental way of working. When you're ready, join me in the next lesson. 12. Adding Windows: [MUSIC] The next phase is going to involve getting into the details. What I'm going to do now is go back to my reference images. Remember in the beginning I said you spend some time to look at all of your reference images and study them and let them wash over you and then you put them away and you start to draw from your own impressions. Well, now, is a really good time to go back to those reference images and just pick out the details within them. This is where you can study those details and try to match them closely in your drawing. The first phase is really all about getting your composition correct and getting a unique stylized field to the overall piece. Now, I wanted to look at things like windows and doors. For the next few lessons, I'll be referencing the images that I gathered specifically to see what details makeup things like doorways, window panes, brickwork. This is also a really good opportunity for you to look at maybe some details that you've missed during the first, initial phase and to add them in now. The other point I wanted to make is like I said earlier, the windows are going to be the same throughout the piece, they'll all have the same shape, have the same shutters and that's because I wanted all the tie together. Very often these small details are exactly the thing to use to tie a whole big painting together. Also, I won't to be able to duplicate some of the windows and not have to draw every single one, so that's a useful tip to know about too, is that you can just copy a window across and reposition it somewhere else. I'm going to keep the windows the same because that's what I see in my reference, when I've been studying the images that I got, all of the windows are in the exact same style or look. Of course, some will be open, some will be closed, but in my reference images, all the windows have green shutters, they all have those similar details. I'll walk you through how I draw one window, maybe I'll do an open one and a closed one, and then I'll be copying. I might do maybe three and then I'll be copying those to populate the rest of the image. Let's get started. Well, let's start with this window on the main building here on the left. One thing I notice apart from all of the shutters in my reference images, is that all the windows tend to have a white or off-white border around them. That's not like a window frame, it seems like it's just more a painted stripe around the edge of the windows, and it's common around all of the windows that I'm looking at in my reference photos. The first thing I'm going to do is just draw out a rectangle like this in order to make that white shape, I'm going to fill it with an off-white color, just something so it's not glaringly white. On top of that, so on another layer above it, I'm going to draw out another rectangle. Now, this is going to be the base color for the shutters. Again, just to note, I'm going to make all of these on separate layers, for now, I will collapse them all into one layer at a later stage if necessary, but for now, let's just do everything separately. Also, I should point out, by the way, this is just my way of drawing shutters. It's by no means like the one and only way necessarily the right way to draw, if you find an easier way to do this, to draw these shutters, please by all means use that way and let me know because this part can get a little bit tedious, fair warning, there's a lot of small details. The next thing that I want to do is draw with my lasso. [NOISE] I need to draw those small shapes that indicate the little inside shutterly things. I don't know what you call them, let's just call them the shutters. I didn't know. To do that, I will make, first of all, two long rectangles like so, fill them with a darker green because really, what I'm trying to achieve here is a feeling of light and shadow, that's going to make it look like the forms I want them to look like. Now, zooming in, here I go, I'm going to have to draw these individually, these rectangle shapes like this. Once I've got a shape figured out like that, I'm going to select a lighter color and just really brush it on the very edge. You can see from far away it looks like it's one of those shutters that's half-open, it's in shadow, and it's catching the light falling onto it. It is a bit tedious, but it's a great effect, it works really well. All I would say is if you're doing this, have a bit of patience. It's not the worst thing in the world to spend a bit of time working on small details like this, you can get lost in your work, you listen to music at the same time, and at the end, it's totally worth it. I think it probably only takes you about 10 minutes to work through one of these. There is probably a much shorter way to do this. I could maybe draw all of them at once and try and affect, create that same effect, but just to show you the concept behind the process, I'm just doing it individually for now. Another way of doing it is you could draw out or with your lasso tool, select out all of these shapes, and then start from the bottom, working your way upwards with that highlight effect and then just deselecting each one as you go. That gives you the space and the room to make those brush marks not overlap each other, if that makes sense. [MUSIC] There we go. I've actually done all of them now. What I'm going to do next is create a layer underneath this and then draw out a shape so that I can fill it with a darker color and that will give the shutter its shape; it'll feel a lot more solid and three-dimensional. [MUSIC] Then I'm going to go back to my top layer, I'm going to carve out a gap here just to show that separation, you notice that it's two sides and [inaudible], and that looks really good. The last step is to roughen up this whole thing and add a bit of texture to make it look weathered, make it look a bit worn. For the white bit underneath, that's supposed to be paint on the wall, I'm really just going to switch it up and actually use the eraser so that it looks like this paint is peeling away. You could sample the wall color and paint the wall color in, either way, it doesn't matter, but I'm just using the eraser in this case. [MUSIC] That is one window done, [LAUGHTER] 95 to go. No, I'm kidding. Next, I'm going to show you how I would do an open window. I'm going to start with the same base, that off-white layer that's going to work as the painted border, and then on top of that, I'll add a dark color like this on a separate layer, maybe make it a little bit darker, then on a new layer, what I'm doing is I'm indicating here that this is a window or I should say the window frame, I think it's probably the technical term. That's just a matter of, let's say, using a darker gray tone. Into that, I want to give the impression that there are ledges or layers of the frame, so I could do a darker border or edge and then a lighter surrounding that. That'll do fine for now. Then to do the open shutters, I will start first of all, on this side, I'm going to draw this shutter open to the side like this. Then here is the exact same procedure as before. First of all, I'll use a base that's green like this, and then on top of that, draw an inner rectangle, fill that with a darker color, and then start drawing those individual shutter things. It's the same as I said as before. What I'm doing is just trying to catch that outer edge and give it a highlight, soft, gentle highlight to give the impression that there is an angle or that the shutters are opening at an angle. Now, the only thing different here is that what I'm going to do is just cut out a couple of spaces so that we see a little bit of the wall behind it, and that'll really sell that idea that these shutter things are open. [NOISE] Lastly, I'm going to do the left-hand side shutter and you'll be relieved to hear, I'm not going to draw it fully open, I'm going to draw it in a way so that it's pointing towards us, so it gives us the impression that it's open at an angle. Luckily, this means you don't have to draw those shutters. Also, the thing is that you want to try and have variation in your designs; don't make things too symmetrical, try and always mix up your symmetry or make things asymmetrical, I should say. You want to avoid having things be symmetrical, if both sides were open at the same angle, it wouldn't look good. That's just a tip. Always try and vary up or try and don't have things completely symmetrical in your design. 13. Repeating Windows: [MUSIC] That's about two windows down and many more to go. It does get quicker, and your process does speed up once you get into the flow of it. Also don't forget some of these windows will just simply copy across and reposition in another area. I don't want to get too bogged down into drawing every single window. I've shown you the main process that I use for creating them, just keeping everything on layers and carving into the shapes to add a little bit of highlight and shadow. I did however want to show you this window because on this one, I'm going to be doing something slightly different. I wanted to add glass window panes, and I also want to add a balcony. I'm going to show you how to do that now. I'm building up this whole thing exactly as before, but this time, instead of green for the shutters, what I'm going to do is create some gray rectangles that are actually going to be the glass in the window. Well, actually, they're going to be the window frames for the glass. What I'm doing is I'm getting these done first. I'll just add a bit of texture on top as normal as per usual just to roughen it up so it's not a flat white base. Then once I'm happy with that, what I'll do next is draw out some squares. Now, these are going to be the individual panes of glass. Into that, I'm going to add some color. Usually, a dark blue or some dark neutral tone is always good for windows, and then some texture just to give it a bit of variation. That's perfect. You can get a lot more detailed, but I don't think it's necessary. This is going to be quite far away, so I think that's looking good for now. Once that's done, then what you can do is the shutters. Again, this will be the same process as before. [MUSIC] Like I did on the last one, I'm going to cut out the shapes in-between these shutters just to make some areas be a bit more see-through. You don't have to do all of them, just one or two hints of being able to see through will make them look a little bit more real. [MUSIC] That's perfect. That's a nice variation on our theme. What I'm also going to do on this window, which I want to show you, is I want to add a balcony. [NOISE] I'm going to keep this super simple because I want to keep that stylized feel to the whole painting. It's actually very easy to get caught up in realism when you're trying to paint details, so I try to remember every night again, just to stay as stylized and as simple where I can. In this instance, all I'm doing is I'm going to draw out a rectangle using the marquee tool and then fill that with a gray color because it's going to be a concrete material. Now, I'm going to use that square marquee selection tool again, but this time, hold down Option or Alt, on my keyboard, which is going to allow me to subtract some of this selection. I'm going to subtract all of this section and what's on the left is still active, so sow, I'm just going to darken that up. Instantly, it looks three-dimensional, like a rectangle, not just a flat shape. I know we're not dealing with shadow and light yet, but for something like this, it's totally fine just to indicate where the corners are with the darker tones. I'm going to name that layer base. Underneath that layer, just all I need to do is to vary simple shapes to indicate the brackets that attach this to the wall, and then lastly, go to a layer on top of this. Then again, with the lasso tool, simply draw a really simple thing, a railing and these bars. There you go. I've been looking at my photo reference and to be honest, all the balconies are truly that simple, anyway, visually, so there's really no need to over-complicate it. These three windows, it could be that these are all I need for the rest of the painting. You could spend time to draw every other window individually or you could just copy and paste these existing windows across and reposition them. If this was a background for a movie or show, you might be called upon to draw each and every window separately. Just because simply the level of detail is always very high on big productions and you have the time to spend drawing each of these one by one. But I wanted you to be aware that very often, especially working in TV animation, for example, you don't have time [LAUGHTER] in the production to spend. You don't have the time or the budget to make every single window. Possibly, the background that you're working on will actually only be seen for a few seconds of the show, to be honest. Rather than waste production time drawing things that are not even going to be noticed and are certainly not important to the overall story, you can copy and duplicate things. In fact, you will be expected to do that in order to speed up your process. My one big, hugely important piece of advice though, is that when you do copy an element in your background and reposition it somewhere else, just make sure that you change it up ever so slightly. That could be as simple as flipping it horizontally or slightly changing the hue or just adding one extra thing onto it. But just doing something so that, as I said before, it doesn't jump out as being copied and you don't run into that issue of having things looking symmetrical. If you are finding this section with this part of the process very tedious, I will say, just hang in there. These windows are actually important elements. These are going to give the buildings a cohesive feel and tie them all together. These are important indicators of character in your scene. Because wherever you see a window, you know that there's a room and there's people living there. Try to feel like you're infusing life into your painting, if that makes sense, by spending time to do these windows. Enough of the windows. I'm sure you've had enough yourself and you want to move on to the next phase. Up next, we're going to tackle the doorways. I know that's not much better, not much more exciting, but at least there aren't as many doorways as there are windows. So when you're ready, join me in the next lesson. 14. Drawing Doors and Doorways: [MUSIC] Before I move on to the doors, I've just realized that I actually didn't finish the archways property over here on the left. I actually wanted there to be three arches here, so what I'm going to do is just quickly fix that and add in that inner arch as well, and just make sure that that's okay before I move on. That's perfect, leave it at that for now. Now, for this little doorway that's tucked away here on the left, what I'm going to do is start off with a generic brown base because I want this to be a wooden door, but I'm also going to add in some glass paints on top of it as well. First of all, let me just do my texture pass as usual. I'm going to just mark it up, change the color episodes slightly so it's not flat and uniform. I never really know which colors to pick straightaway. It's always a bit of an experimentation because it's got to really fit in with its surrounding context as well. That's fine. Now, what I'm going to do is draw the main part of the door like this, then I will sample this window color with the eyedropper and pop that in there. I also want to add a curved window on the top. Cool. Because this is on its own layer, I'm simply going to delete section in the middle for either panel. I need to zoom in a bit closer here to see what I'm doing and what I want to do actually, is give the effect of the windows being inset into the door. I'm making small selections like this, just to give it that bit of dimension. Then over top, I will draw the sections of the panels or the frames on either side. [MUSIC] Finally, I'm going to insert the whole door so that it looks like there's something of a door frame. [MUSIC] Let's hop on over here to this back for background area. This one's really far away so it can be very simple. I could even just get away with a neutral dark color and not have to do too much detail, but for the sake of it, I'll draw a little bit of a door frame around the outer edge, and then draw in some panels for brush. Point to any more than that for now. On this door here, I might have to do a bit more detailing, but all I'm doing is following the exact same process with the lasso tool, and then as much as I can, just carve out little hints of a lighter color and a darker color to give that definition and to make it look more solid. [MUSIC] Also not forgetting to put a layer behind so that I can paint a darker version of the wall if you like, just to give that impression that it's an inset. Sometimes I like to paint the very edge of a dark shadow with a touch of a lighter color or a highlight. It actually helps to make the shadow stand out and not look so cut out. Well, we're actually doing really well here. We're flying through these doors. There's only really three left to do in this whole background. I'm going to do that in the next lesson. I'm going to finish up these last three doors. Make them may be slightly different from the ones that we've covered here in this lesson. I'll show you exactly what it'll do, it's different approach. When you're ready, join me in the next lesson. 15. Doors and Canopies: [MUSIC] In this lesson, I want to show you another way to approach creation doorways. I want to paint it so that it looks like there's a really deep wall or deep incision into the doorway. To do that, what I'm going to first do is make my rectangle selection, inside of that I'm going to choose a very very dark shade. Now this isn't the actual door. This is going to be the sides of the walls within the door frame and I'll show you exactly what I mean. First, I'm going to paint it up with similar colors to the wall and just soften the edge there as much as I can. Then I'm going to draw a shape across the top like this and choose a really dark tone, paint that in and that's going to give that impression of this deep doorway, deep inset door. You can see that it instantly reads as a three-dimensional space and all I've really done is played around with light and dark. Actually, what I'm going to do is the exact same thing here is have a window that matches, I know I said I wanted all the doors to be the same, but maybe since this is a shop, I know, I said I wanted all the windows to be the same but maybe since this is a shop front or something like that, it's going to have a shop window and since it's on the ground floor of the street level, it can be different to the windows above. I'm going to add a border around it like this. Now I'm going to add the door over here and I'm thinking, let's put a really nice bright blue color just to complement or contrast what we have already. [MUSIC] For this, I'll add one large pane of glass, maybe add some detailing on the bottom just to make it look like there's a panel. [MUSIC] Perfect. I'm really liking these doors, but I've suddenly got the idea [LAUGHTER] now that I want to make the lower half of this building a totally different color because I've just been thinking if it is a shop front maybe that needs to stand out or be highlighted in some way, maybe they've painted the bottom half, something like that. So the beauty of this is that with this texture brush, when I'm painting over it with this lovely yellow color, some of that underneath paint layer is still going to be showing through and give a color variation, which is what we like, so yeah, that looks great. I will finish it off with a white stripe, just like the building over there on the left. [MUSIC] Now, on top of this door, I want to add a canopy. [MUSIC] Now I know that probably sounds really complicate it, but what I'm going to do is just make it as simple as I can, just like I did with the balcony, I'm going to make one simple shape. [MUSIC] I'm going to add a flat color and then some variation, some color variation onto that. [MUSIC] I'll add a layer underneath just to give it a bit of dimension. [MUSIC] Then on top, I will create some stripes. I think that'll work well and just use a lighter color. [MUSIC] These doors are not as tedious or let's say as time-consuming as the windows, obviously there's not as many of them, and hopefully you've seen that the process is the same, it's the same process throughout. It's just a matter of studying your reference and bringing in variation where you can, if you feel that you are getting a bit too bogged down in details, it's always good to take a break, step back and don't let the hours go by and you haven't stood up from your computer. [LAUGHTER] Bear in mind that you can get tired doing this detailed work. Ensure that you can get fresh perspective by taking a break every now and again. In fact, the next lesson is going to be all about that. I'm going to put the coffee on, I'm going to sit back, I'm going to evaluate where we are in this process and I will talk to you a little bit about what's coming next. So when you're ready, grab your coffee or your tea or your juice and meet me in the next lesson. [MUSIC] 16. Mid Way Coffee Break: [MUSIC] At this point, it's time to step back, have a break, grab a coffee or grab a cup of tea and have a stretch. Maybe get up from your computer, walk-around, get just a little bit of distance from your work. At this stage, we're about halfway through, so it's a really good opportunity to look at your piece as a whole, Zoom-out, study your composition, your placement of elements and your colors. Here's where you have enough stuff in your background to tell whether it's working well together, but you're not so far advanced in your process that moving things around is a huge, massive headache. What I'm seeing here is that I can refine some of the colors on the walls at this stage. Sometimes it does happen. You start out with really nice base colors and as you add texture on top of it, using these large textured brushes, things can get muddy and you can lose the original vibrancy of the colors underneath. I'm just going to spend a few minutes just to fix up some of those issues on, for example, the wall here. Also back here, I'm going to add in those little steps that I had in mind and that were in my sketch. That's a very simple thing to do. I don't need to spend a lesson going, [LAUGHTER] through that. I also think that I prefer this building actually without the owning. It looks a lot nicer. What I'll do is I don't want to get rid of it altogether. I'll just move it right the way to the back, transform it, scale it down, can skew it into place. That actually is great because now it adds that little bit of interests back there. It doesn't look so bear. Overall, none of these windows can be ever so slightly adjusted and tweaked in the terms of their position. Once you're sure that everything matches up for scale and proportion, then I think you're good to go. Tip, that I usually bear in mind is, try to imagine a character in your scene. Put that character standing next to a doorway, and then move the character around and see if the things that you've got in your background match up to the size or height of a person. Something like a door is easy to judge if it's too small or too big. Then remember that as you go further back into the background, you've got perspective at play so things will get smaller. Remember, we're actually nearly there. We don't have very much more left to do. These small tiny bits that we're going to be working on for the next few lessons are just additional details. Everything that we've achieved so far is rock-solid. It's the most important part of the process. Anything else that we add on here is a bonus extra. With that in mind, let's forge ahead. Let's knock this background out and get it done, in the next few lessons. 17. Lamps. Wires and Drainpipes: [MUSIC] Welcome to the really small details of this piece. In this lesson, I'm going to show you how to draw some lamps, street lights, some wires, and some drain pipes and it's going to give this painting a much more interesting character and vibe. Let's start out with the street lamp here, which I had in my sketch. The way I'm going to approach this lamp is that I'm going to use my circular marquee first of all to make two small selections. That's just because it's miles better than me trying to draw these round shapes. Then what I'll do is switch to the Lasso and draw out this bell shape thing for the dome. I'm following the sketch underneath it. Then I'm just going to hit "G" on my keyboard and fill it with color. Now, it's lopsided as I expected. What I'm going to do is grab the rectangle marquee and then just select half of it exactly, and hit "Backspace" on my keyboard to delete that half. Then I can now hold down "Shift" and "V" and click and drag this shape over, flip it around, flip it horizontally, and then nudge it back over to the first shape, and now it's perfect. Now, it's very nice and even on either side, but I'm not entirely happy with it. What I want to do next is warp it, or transform it and tweak the shape a little bit. Hit "Command" or "Control T" as you normally would. Then come up to the top here and click on this icon. What you can do from here is actually grab these little vertices or points and bend and shape individual sections of your drawing to warp it into a better looking domed shape. That's perfect. For the light bulb, I just need to use a round shape, add a little bit of grunge and texture to the whole thing. Lastly, I will draw the bracket as it attaches to the wall, much the same way as I did when I made the railing of the balcony, which is very simple and that'll do fine. Staying with the electrics, what I want to do now is just add some wires and things like that on the walls. It's something I wouldn't actually have thought about doing it all. It's not the first thing you'd think about when you look at a scene like this, or you imagine it in your head. You don't notice those tiny little details like electrical wires or pylons or things like that, but when I was looking at my reference images, the more I looked at them, the more obvious these elements became. This is also something that is quite a feature in the film Luca, which is what we're heavily referencing as well. If you study the backgrounds of that movie, you can see that a lot of thoughts went into adding these elements in, these wires and things. [MUSIC] For the wires on this building, I'm literally drawing them in with a hard round brush by hand. It doesn't matter if it's wonky. I'm making sure that the brush size is very small and I'm just drawing it freehand. [MUSIC] I am going to duplicate this lamp, copy it, and drag it over here to the other side. [MUSIC] Next up, I'm going to draw the drain pipe onto this building. I'm going to use the Lasso tool and, again, making it very lively and quirky in shape. Drain pipes are one of those things that you can get away with being very stylized and quirky, and they actually look better the more wonky they are. Clothes, they instantly add character to a scene that sends off a lived in place that I was talking about earlier. [MUSIC] I think even though we are just background designers, we are not character designers and we don't have any characters in the scene, I think adding in things like drain pipes, windows, electricity, things like that, all of these elements hint at life and that's what we want to have in our background. I really love adding in these details of the joints, things that join the drainpipe to the wall. It doesn't have to be super precise and correct, but they really do add so much. I like the idea of adding also a little bit of coloration, maybe to indicate that there's rust, or a patina, or something that's built up over time. It gives them that old and really ancient feel and also that contrasts with the green so that's quite nice. It's maybe possibly a bit too red, but I will leave it for now. [MUSIC] The last thing I want to do here is just put a shadow behind this, just to see how that's working. Up until now, as I keep saying, I haven't intentionally done any shadows across most of my elements, but for the drain pipe to really stand out, I think it's nice just to put that shadow in, and it's super simple to do. Up here, I'm going to add a gutter under this roof. At the moment, this roof looks really flat and untreated and I do hope I'm going to get to it by the end of this piece. It's on my to-do list over on the side there, but I'll leave it for now. I want to rather get all of the much more important things done. I don't want to go overboard with the drain pipes though. I'll add one more in here, and then I'm going to step back and see how it looks. [MUSIC] 18. How to Draw Signs: In this lesson, I'm just going to add a couple more electrical wires on the front of the buildings and I want to add some signs above the doors. Since these are all shop fronts, we have to have signs. It should look much better with the signs. It's actually super simple to do. You can even just handwrite your lettering for the signs. I'm going to show you in this lesson how to do just that. This building needs electricity. I will go for my hand round brush again, and just free-handish like I did before. Draw all the way up here and maybe there's a transformer box or something. Then the wires can go up to side and maybe across here to this window. One thing I want to do is add in some small dots or marks. These are going to read as those little attachments to the wall so that the wire looks like it's actually attached and not just floating. It's a tiny detail, but it's actually very effective. Let's tackle the sign. It seems daunting, but I'm going to keep it very simple. I'm going to start out with a shape all the way across like this, then I'm going to fill it with a green color again. I know I'm repeating this a lot, but I don't want things to be too dispersed in terms of the palette. I go with green for now. Add variation and different tones. Then on a layer underneath, make another dark color to make it look solid. I can even merge those two layers together. Now what I'll do is grab my hard bound brush again with a light color. I'm literally just going to draw on the design. This is going to look very simple and stylized. You can then use your transform tool if you like to skew your writing or skew your lettering if it's necessary. Or even what I'm doing here is literally selecting one letter and moving it across. I want this to be a little bit weather-worn, maybe it's even rusted up some wash. Again, all I'm doing is experimenting and trying out different brushes and colors. I hope you can see why now that there is a lot of testing, and trying out, and just seeing what works and what doesn't. Even at this stage of the painting, I'm still working quite experimentally in a way. That's quite detailed, but I'm not going to be as detailed as that with the other sign. On this building, I think, or I could just get away with a simple sign and have some pretend writing on it. [LAUGHTER] That's going to be perfect. It's nice to have one element in your background that reads strong and is detailed, and then the other similar elements can be simplified. The viewer's eye will understand what they are because you've got this one element that is properly done, if that makes sense. The other thing I want to do is put some street numbers. This building here can have a little small street number. Then I'll take a few minutes and work on these buildings back here with similar signs and making them in the exact same way. These are really far away. Again, they don't have to be legible, but it's nice just to have that element of science back there. 19. Painting the Far Background: In this lesson, I want to work on resolving this fore background, before I move any further. I've been putting it off because to be perfectly honest, I didn't have a clear idea of what I want to do or what should go here. But what I'm thinking now is that I want to go back to my original sketch idea of having the archway there. Now since the foreground is working so well with these details, I'm going to try and keep it very simple back there and not overwork it. First thing that I'm going to do is add texture as usual and try and make this look a bit better. Then I'm going to create a simple shape and just simply add a lighter color here so that it gives that feeling of a structure. Now, I'll add a roof, and possibly I'm thinking this building could be a church or something like that. So I can draw on these little, I don't know what you call them. Let's call them a little archway windows. I don't have to do the shutters. That's great, that's going to save me a lot of time. On my drawing there is this lovely archway, and what I'm going to do is sketch it out with the Lasso Tool. The lit with a different color, and this is on a new layer, by the way. So yes, I'm thinking is obviously going to be darker as you go into this archway. Lightening it up and making sure that that effect reads a little bit like that. So a bit of depth, and I've just thought, why don't I just add steps in like I did previously. I'm going to sample that color, fill this shape, make sure if it's reversed on a new layer and then all I'll do is just carve out the top of the steps just like this and make them lighter, and there you go. I've also decided to put a row of small windows here at the top that's going to break up that shape and make it look a lot more interesting, and what it can do is just copy them across holding down "Option" and "V" on my keyboard and click and drag them over. When you zoom out actually that works really well. The last thing, two things that I want to do is over here I'm going to draw a handrail on the steps and literally, just doing that in by hand, and then finally, I want to copy this lamp across. The next phase that we're going to move into is going to be the light and shadow phase, and that's really like almost the last step. This background is really close to being completely finished. Before we move into the shadow and light phase, I do need to finish off my ground plane, and that's something I haven't done at all. So I'll be doing that in the next lesson. Then I'm going to do one final parse for details, and after that, add in my shadows. When you're ready, join me in the next lesson and I'll just show you a really quick, simple, easy way to draw paving stones. I'll see you in the next lesson. 20. Peeling Paint and Paving Stones: In this lesson, I'm now going to focus on the ground plane in my background. I'm thinking about a couple of things down now. Apart from adding more elements into my background, such as the drain pipes and other lamps and things like that, one of the things that I'm thinking about as I near the end of this painting is, how do I make my buildings meet the ground in such a way that it's a bit more realistic. I mentioned this at the very beginning, one of the earlier lessons, that that's something to give consideration to and now's the time to have a look at this and to try and figure it out. At the moment they look very cut out to me, there's a very flat edge to each of these buildings. What I want to do is roughen up the bottom of the buildings or roughen up the street where the street meets the building, something like that. Because if you think about it, as I said earlier, especially along street level is where there's a lot of life passing by and that's going to mark up the building's quite a bit. What I could do, there's a few ways you can do it. One way is you could create a new layer above this and with a regular lasso, just simply freehand, a border or jaggedy border on the bottom of the building, something that just breaks up that really, really flat straight line. I need to make sure that that layer is actually above the building. Even though it is part of the ground, it needs to be above the building. You could delete it off the building, but it's easier just to do it on top. Then sample the color of the ground to make it look like dash. Though painting with these lovely big texture brushes that we have, although that's great and they work really effectively, sometimes you have to actually paint or create a texture in your painting rather than just use it at the stamp brushes basically to give an effect. I'll show you exactly what I mean right now. On this building, for example, I've decided that the paint needs to be peeling or chipping away. I feel that it needs to have that or even to be missing in whole sections of it. It's very very simple to do. I'm going to draw a selection with the lasso and once I've got that done, I can paint a concrete color or a stone color in there to identify that that's the stonework underneath the paint. Then if I want to give it a bit more of an edge, what I normally would do is actually go and select the inverse sculpture. select and select "Inverse" and now paint on the orange part. You'll see that if you go a little bit lighter it actually has the effect of looking like peeling paint or weathered paint separating off the stonework. I might be getting a bit too carried away with this, but I am going to try and add a similar effect up here on the side of the building. What I'm doing now is just trying to paint it on the very, very edge of the selection with a dark color that will even further give the impression that it's peeling off because that's going to look a little bit like a shadow. I think I am getting a bit too carried away. It looks fine, but I think I should step back and leave it at that. The last piece now is for me to look finally at this ground and fix it up and add in what is going to look like paving stones. Don't be put off by the fact that you've got to draw each and every single paving stone. All I'm going to do is grab a small brush. Going to start drawing what I think are details around the edges. Add in a few scuffs and marks over here. I'm not being prescriptive or precious at all. It's really almost intuitively just adding small details on the ground. I've said all along that this approach is very loose. There is no grid that you need to follow in order to mark out the paving stones exactly. These are going to be quirky as well so it's really important in this background that we stay away from straight lines and perfect grids. The other thing that I keep mentioning, and I'll say it once again here just to be sure, is that you only need to add in as much or as many marks as will make or give an impression. You don't have to draw each and every stone. You don't have to spend a lot of time on the detail. You really just want to give that impression of stones. What you're doing is letting the viewer's eye understand that that's what that material is. But the viewer's eye isn't drawn immediately to it. They must just feel that there are paving stones there not notice them immediately because they're so perfectly rendered. That would actually just be a bit jarring because the rest of the painting is not perfectly rendered. We are almost completely done. Let's do one more final pass across this background for details and then we'll start adding shadows. I'll meet you in the next lesson. 21. Final Detail Pass: [MUSIC] We're at the final detail pass. You could easily just keep going on a background painting like this and add layer upon layer of detail. But for now, I really want to start to think about the end and I want to move on to the next process, which is to show you how to add shadows and highlights on your work. In this lesson, I'll do a last pass on the absolute major details that have to be in there and we'll get to lighting and shadow next and then anything else that we add after that is a bonus. Let's do this last detail pass now. For example, this roof back here, this needs to be finished off. What I'm going to do is add a little piece underneath so that it looks like there's an underneath section. I'm also going to add in another building just peeking out here like this, so it's layering up this side a little bit and adding that sense of depth. Finally over here, the steps in the corner. Like before, the way that I did it is first draw the overall shape then select the top of the individual steps because they're going to be catching the light, and paint it up that way. I'm also going to roughen up and add color to the wall near the steps. Then on the top over here, let's put in some of those bollard things that you see on harbors. It was in my sketch, anyway, at the very beginning. Those things that they use, I think, to tie boats, I guess. Two, so we'll make them just a simple shape, nothing too complicated. I can even just copy it, I don't have to draw each one of them individually. So more or less finished, more or less. I think everything is here that I wanted to get done , everything major anyway. When you're ready, join me in the next section. This is going to be the last phase of the painting. I want to show you how to add shadows and how to add highlights to your work using blending modes. When you're ready, I'll see you in the next lesson. 22. Adding Shadow Layers: [MUSIC] If you can believe it, we are at the final stage now with this background. I mentioned already, yes, there are a few extra things that I would like to add in, but those are all just surplus and you can't get away without adding them in. They're not essential. At least we can finish up here with a shadow and light pass and you will see close to a final, final result. The way I want to proceed from now on is to first do shadows on separate layers, and then to come back in and add some lighting effects or highlights. Then finally, I'm going to do one overall color correction for the whole painting. Let's do this. The way that I'm going to add the shadows is to, let's use this building as an example. What I'm going to do is create a new layer above everything within that same folder. As we discussed at the very beginning, our light source is coming from the top and the sunlight is just streaming down from the top. I'm going to draw this shape and then fill it with a dark color. Normally what you would do is pick a cool color in your color wheel, like a dark blue, maybe. That's normally done because you want it to contrast with all of the warm tones in the bright areas. Come up to this drop-down menu here. These are your blending modes. There's a lot of blending modes. But for shadows, it's generally good to choose multiply. Choose multiply, and then drag the opacity of that layer down to 20 or 30. [LAUGHTER] Maybe I've just been looking at this background a bit too long, but to me, this looks a little bit muddy and I'm actually going to see if I can change the colors. I'll bring the opacity back up so I can see what color this is. I'm going to go for something warmer. I know it's unconventional, it's not really what you're supposed to do. But by now, you should know my process is all about experimentation. Let's go with this, and to me, that looks good. I'll leave it at that. A good idea is to keep these shadow layers color-coded so that you can easily distinguish them from the rest of your layer stack. To do that, just right-click on the layer and choose a label down here. What I normally do, again, this is a conventional animation thing, is label any layer that has shadow on, label it blue. Any layer that has a highlight or light effect, label it yellow or orange or something like that. Next step, come up to Filter and choose blur. We're going to add a Gaussian blur onto this, and from here, you can blur it up as much as you want, but something around here is perfect. That just gives it a little bit of a softer, more natural edge. From here on out, I'm just going to work around the image like this. I'm just going to add a couple of shadows where I think it's really obvious, like under the balcony, for example, and it's done in the same way. I use a multiply layer. You don't have to use the Lasso, by the way, you can simply use a brush as well. The main point here is just start out light, you can always darken up your shadows later. [MUSIC] Over here, I wanted to point out that you can use this idea of shading to add structure to something that's totally flat. Like this pink building, I'm going to grab the Lasso tool, select an area like this along the side of it where it looks like it's totally flat one more. Then I'm going to choose a big soft round brush by simply adding depth there, that tiny bit of a shadow instantly, you've created a sense of one section of the building is jotting out, and that just adds a lot more interest immediately to that building. That's very simple tip or a simple trick, if you like. On this side of my painting, the shadows are much softer, less dramatic because the sun is not directly coming down. The light source is top center, top right, it's not catching these buildings as dramatically. That's how you would add shadows onto your background. In the next lesson, I'm going to just play around with some lighting effects and show you how to touch it up with some highlights. 23. Adding Highlights: [MUSIC] We have done shadows on the buildings, I just need to do shadows on the ground. Obviously, it's really important to have shadows on the ground. On this side, the shadows onto these buildings are small because as we said, the sunlight is high up and above these buildings, so I just need to make a smaller selection. I want to shadow over this side of the Harvard. Let's add a little blue into our shadow here to give the impression that there's water in the Harvard that's reflecting up. Just like the shadow layer, you can add a highlight layer using your blending modes as well. What I'm going to do is add a new layer, name it lights and choose orange for the labels so that it stands out in this dark. Then, set that layer blending mode to Linear Dodge. Now, grab a brush and if you paint with a dark gray color or something like that, you can see this happens. It's really useful to make those highlights or it just going to pop. I'm going to clip this layer to the building, and then we will start to add some light points around this building very minimally. You don't want to overdo it with this effect by the way, it's really just tiny little dots of highlights on edges that works really well. Then again, like before you can work your way around using new layers, set the blending mode to additive or Linear Dodge, and start to pick out some points of highlight. As with everything in this process, this part is again, all of it seeing what works and make adjustments accordingly. Really, I think that's it, there you have it. I feel like this is practically done. However, I have to say I do want to add some more stuff, I just can't resist it. But of course, you might feel that this is enough, you can't go any further and I totally understand that. If you've gotten this far in the project, this is the perfect place to finish up. Personally though, I want to add a few more things, so if you're with me, come and join me in the next lesson, I'm going to add in washing lines, and clothing, and stuff like that. Then, the final piece of the process is going to be color correction. [MUSIC] 24. Washing Lines: [MUSIC] I know this background is totally finished, but I really need to put in those extra bits, I can't resist it. One of the more charming things about the backgrounds in the movie Luca are all the washing lines that you see strong between two buildings or just on the outside of buildings, so I'm going to attempt them here and then really this is my very last edition. Up here on this building, what I first need to do is add in a small window because I want to attach the washing line here and I need that window there to really sell the idea that someone would string out there washing out here. It looks at least likes in place at a washing line would be hanging. It's a very simple window, no detail whatsoever. Now I'm going to draw the attachment to the wall that the line is going to come from. Then I'll draw a small line going across. Now, grabbing the lasso tool, all I'm going to do is draw simple shapes and that's it. I'm not going to get into any details. The thing I noticed in Luca is that the items on the lines are all really subtle, they're all light in color, they're all similar in shape, so they don't jump out. There's no garish colors or very obvious things on the line. That's what we want to do, we want to keep these very much in the background and tone down. You don't want to detract or draw the viewer's eye. But you do want to add in these things to give that feeling. I'll add a little bit of color if necessary, just to alternate them a little bit and vary up the color ever so slightly. I think that works really nice, I think that's awesome. What I might do is actually have a go at making some more of these, so I'll quickly pop a few of these around the scene where I think they're going to work in the composition. [MUSIC] I've gone and added in a new window over here for this washing line and that was literally just copied straight over from the other side. The one thing I do need to do if I am serious about having these in my scene, is I want to give them a slight drop shadow. I'm going to hit "Command" or "Control" plus "J" on my keyboard, merge these layers together. That duplicates a layer so now I've got two of the same one. I'm going to call it "shadow," and I'm going to fill it with a dark color. You can't see it yet, but what I'll do is I'll use the arrow keys on my keyboard to nudge it down slightly, and there we go, there's the shadow. Now just set it to multiply and bring the opacity down. Perfect, just finishes it off very nicely. Again, for this one, that's the layer that I'm going to work with. I'm going to hit "Command" or "Control J" to duplicate it. It doesn't matter which layer you choose, but let's just for argument's sake drag this one underneath it. Rename it "shadow," then I'm going to hold down "Alt" and click into the "Thumbnail," fill it with a color. Bring it down and then set it to multiply and bring the opacity down. That is it, folks. [LAUGHTER] I could keep going, I could keep filling the scene with stuff, but eventually it would lose all of its simplicity and its charm, so I'm putting my stylus down and I'm calling it. This is a done and finished background. Although, hang on, it's not completely done, there is one final step that we can do. It's not a necessary step, I wanted to show you how you can do color correction if it's necessary. In the next lesson, our final lesson, let's look at how to color correct our background. 25. Colour Corrections: [MUSIC] In this lesson, I want to show you a couple of ways that you can check your artwork in its final stage to ensure that your contrast is right and that your color balance is right. Now that everything's done you can actually see it for the first time as a whole unified piece. That's really important that it has this sense of unity and cohesion. What we're going to do now is first checkout image in black and white version and check that the contrast is there. Then I'm going to show you how to use a hue saturation filter to make sure that your color balance is working. To check the values, simply add a new layer above everything and fill it with black. Then you can change the blending mode to saturation. Now this shows you everything in your image in a black and white version. I can see that for the most part, there's not a lot of mess of contrast in my painting. The buildings are more or less in the same register, maybe apart from the pizzeria here of the right. What I want you to be aware of is that mostly you'll be encouraged or advised to make things way more contrast heavy. But consider that you might lose that cohesive quality that I was talking about. Remember, this is not a standalone illustration. This is such a super important point to have in mind as a background artist. I can't stress this enough. Your background sits behind the characters and the animation. Really, it should support the animation and not draw the viewer's eye away from the main focus, which is the characters. With that in mind, I want to keep my background in this instance. I don't mind that it's in the same register. I'm actually actively not wanting to have huge massive contrast. But I can see where I could make a few adjustments here. That's what I'm going to show you next. Let's say you really wanted to beef up, say the saturation of this left side building. Well, I'm going to go over to it in the layer stack, then I'm going to go down to this icon down here. When you click on this these options pop up. These are all what you would call adjustments that you can make. By clicking on one of them you're adding an adjustment layer and that's going to affect every other layer beneath it. Let me click on hue saturation. It's added the adjustment layer there you can see it in the stack. These properties then pop out. From here you can make your adjustments. In order for it to just affect your building, the building that you want it to affect, what you need to do is add a clipping mask. All that means is that the adjustment layer will be clipped to the group beneath it. Hover over that little line in-between the layers and hold down Option or Alt if you're on a PC and click down and that little clip would appear and the clipped layer or the group will be underlined. From here, you can make your adjustments. You just move these sliders along. Then if you wanted to have the building be a bit warmer, but some areas of it you don't want everything adjusted. What you can do is come back in, click on this white window here. This here is the fill, and that's the thing that's affecting the saturation. When you click on that, you can see that your color swatches go to black and white. You can now use black to undo any part of this adjustment layer because it's a clipping mask. What I'm doing is I'm painting with black and painting these arches out because I don't want them to be saturated. I want to keep them a bit more muted. Likewise, the shutters, I don't want them, it's blowing them out a bit too much. I'm applying black paint onto that section just to undo the saturation there. You can do this for each of the houses if you like, but that's how you would go about making any final adjustments for color correction. 26. How to Hand Off Your Final File: In this final lesson, I want to show you how I print my Photoshop file for delivery or hand off. A very important aspect of the background artist job is knowing how to hand off your finished artwork. Your background is actually part of an entire chain. Think of it as a link in that production chain and in the animation pipeline, and the next person who gets your background is very often either the editor or the compositor. The compositor's job is then to put the animation on top of the background. However, sometimes your background doesn't just sit behind the animation as a flat backdrop. Sometimes there will be elements of your artwork that will need to be animated as well. For that reason, the layers are hugely important. Having things on separate layers is going to allow the compositor to manipulate them or even animate them. Things like the washing line, for example, or these little flags, they could be easily gently moving in the breeze or something like that. We've seen throughout the painting process how having everything on separate layers is a huge part of the process, and now we get to see that having separate layers is also part of the next phase of animation. But here's the thing. You don't want to hand over a Photoshop file like this. This is really bad practice and I'm just going to defend myself here by saying that I was doing this to show you what not to do. It's really not a good idea to have things that say layer 110, for example, layer 131. Remember earlier I did say that if you have layers that aren't named, be sure that you've got the group named, so you can have layers within a group so long as your group is named, this is why. What you're going to do next is simply go to that group, right-click and go "Merge Group". Now, you've got a whole window just on one layer. I'm actually going to go through my entire background and do that with all of these groups that are named. For these floating layers, I might actually grab them, and bring them down to the base, and merge them down. This layer here are the little flags. I might want to keep them separate in case the compositor wants to put a little bit of motion or movement on them. I'm just going to call these flags left. Layers like this, the sky layer, I can definitely merge together and call it sky. [NOISE] The ground layer, I do want to merge down and merge together. However, I don't want to merge down this little layer that has these three posts on, in case there's characters that need to be walking along here, this layer needs to be above everything else. I will go ahead and merge the rest of the ground layers. For something like this background area here where there's likely not going to be anything moving as such, I can go ahead and just merge that entire group. Now that's all just one section or one element, I should say, and I'll keep going. This house here, I could probably merge it. I don't think there's anything there that would be moving. On this house, I can merge the whole house down and keep these little flags on the right as a separate layer. Let's put flags right inside houses. BG Houses. The ground, I can actually just flatten. If I drag the posts up to the very top, I can then just merge that entire group. These little posts are on the top then, and that's pretty much it. I've gone from having a whole stack of completely unworkable, unmanageable, and unnamed layers into something that's a lot more consolidated. Anybody now who is in the next phase of production could open up this Photoshop file, and find their way around, and quickly understand how it's constructed. The last thing I'll do is maybe it doesn't need to all be inside this group. I'll just right-click, and I'll do "Ungroup Layers", and that's it. I would be more than happy to hand this off at this stage. That is it. We have now come to the very end of the class. Really, all that's left for me to say is a huge, huge thank you to you for choosing this class and for being here and for sticking with me until the end. I hope that you enjoyed us and I really hope that you got useful information out of it for your own work. I can't wait to see your project and to see what you've created. Be sure to post up your painting into the project section. Again, if you have any questions at all, let me know, pop a question into the Discussion tab, and I'll be sure to get back to you. Thank you again for being here. Good luck with your work, and I look forward to seeing you in the next class.