Art Fundamentals in One Hour

1. Trailer: Welcome to art fundamentals in one hour. My name is Hardy Fowler, and I'm a professional illustrator and concept artist. This course distills semesters of art school into a series of fun, engaging in succinct lessons. We'll go over all of the core concepts and terminology that you'll need to start understanding and creating art like a professional. I don't even teach you my habits for success. These lessons are the building blocks that you will carry forward to the incredibly cool digital painting courses that we offer so enrolled today. Grab your stylists and let's paint cool stuff. 2. Intro: Hi, everyone. This is hearty. Welcome to the art fundamentals scores. This is a beginner level course and is designed for those who have some artistic interest or talent but may not have learned all of the technical terminology. You should have the Photoshopped Fundamentals course completed by this point. Basically, we're distilling semesters of art school into a few easy to digest lectures. I'd encourage you to download the art fundamentals. Infographics is companion Resource is to these tutorial videos. The terms and concepts that we will learn in this course will give us the vocabulary in context to learn the really cool stuff in more advanced courses. So get comfortable, grab a pen and paper and get ready to learn the building blocks that you will use to create amazing artwork. Let's get started. 3. Habits of Successful Artists: Hi, everyone. This is hearty. Welcome to habits of successful artists before we dive into the building blocks of aren't like value, color and design principles. Let's have a very general discussion about being an artist and some ideas to keep in mind that will help you stay inspired, excited and productive. These tips will help you whether you're pursuing digital art as a career or just a za means of personal expression. Part one is getting in the zone very often. The trickiest part of any project is the very beginning. We look at that blank canvas and it can be intimidating. So how do we get over the hump here? A Few tricks. Let's start with a trick that I learned from a kindergarten teacher. Take two very deep, very slow breasts. And don't worry, I'm not gonna Segway into a guided meditation or anything. But this really is surprisingly effective at quieting your mind and getting you engaged in the task at hand. Music can also do a great job of this. We all have different tastes, but it's a good idea to stick to music that isn't distracting or overly intense. I keep a Photoshopped playlist and I'm always dropping in new songs that come across them personal comfort. Now, this is kind of a no brainer, but make sure that you have a workspace. It makes you happy you're going to be spending a lot of time here, so do whatever you need to do to make it comfortable, happy and inspiring to you. All of these elements can give you that one little push that you need to get the ball rolling. And once these first successful marks air in place on your canvas, you will find that all of the voices of doubt have gone silent, and a different part of your brain is now driving the bus. You are now in the zone, and you will do amazing things here. Part to practice these courses will show you incredible techniques and huge short cuts to success that you can't find anywhere else. We can make you better, and we can help shape you into a more professional and profitable artist. But none of these things can happen unless you are willing to put in the time getting better as an artist takes time and repetition both for your hand and for your brain. But don't worry. Our philosophy is that learning art has to be fun and inspiring at all times in order to be affected. Here's some things to keep in mind so that practicing art doesn't feel like homework. First of all, remember what an incredible thing you're doing. You are creating art. Being able to create something cool or beautiful out of thin air is an incredible skill. Successful artists don't practice because they should. They practice because they love it. Getting better happens is a byproduct. It is a joyous thing when Marx you're making on a canvas suddenly becomes something realistic. So if you find yourself getting bogged down or frustrated, just take a quick break. Even five minutes away from your computer can make an image same brand new once you're looking at it with fresh eyes. Whatever was bothering you about it can then be easily fixed and you're back on track. Part three. Taking care of yourself since you will be putting a lot of time miniature workspace. There are a few things to keep in mind to take proper care of yourself. Your eyes. This is an important one. Make sure that the lighting. Injured workspace is appropriate. This means that there should be other Ambien. Light in your screen shouldn't be the only source of light in the room, so no dark computer dungeons. Your eyes need frequent breaks from focusing on near objects like computer screens. So remember the 2020 20 rule. That's every 20 minutes. Look at something at least 20 feet away for 20 seconds. This that's all of the tiny muscles that focus your eyes. Relax for a short while. Stick to this trick and your eyes won't feel fried at the end of a long project. Chair and posture. A good chairs, A worthwhile investment, especially for aspiring professionals. I used the Herman Miller Air on chair, and I have loved it. And no, I'm not being paid to endorse that chair. Even if a good office chair seems expensive and they can be, remember that you're back will thank you in 10 years. Posture. Relax. Remember the chicken. Zoom in as close as you need to, so there's never any reason a lean forward or hunch over to get a better look at your work . Let that share back and the software do their jobs and you'll stay comfortable and eight free over a long and brilliant career. Take breaks. Frequent quick breaks can really recharge both your body and your attention span. One easy way to make yourself take breaks is by drinking a lot of water while you're working. This naturally will get you up from your desk regularly for a bathroom break. Timers or reminders can be helpful to, but there's no need to be overly regimented. When your body and you or your mind are starting to feel drained. Just hop up for a quick break and get some fresh air. Your work will be better for it in the long run, so that wraps up our look at habits of successful artists. I hope you find these tips helpful. Try to keep these in the back of your mind as we move on to our next topics. 4. Basic Sketching: Hi, everyone. This is Hardy. In this lecture, we will learn some basic principles in techniques for making lines with photo shop. This will serve as the basis for learning had a sketch with this program. So this is a very good place to start and is really our first step into making art with photo shop. So let's get started. I've got the brush tool selected. I've just got a very normal default round brush. You can see here in the brush editing menu, which I've pulled up by hitting F five. You can bring that up and make it disappear just by hitting F five, and you can see my basic brush brush shape. It's just a circle you can see if I just said spacing, and I'll keep the spacing around 25%. And I want to first show you what the Wake, um, tablet does for us in terms of pressure sensitivity. Right now, none of these jitters are checked, so when we make a mark, it's just a flat line. The thickness does not change. It's just a single uniform mark, but if we go to shape dynamics, you can see I have that set to pin pressure under the size jitter, and what that does is very cool. It lets us make a line. That's thickness varies depending on how hard we push down on the tablet. I'll tightness spacing up a little bit more to make this smoother, but it has a really nice effect of almost making it look like ink calligraphy. When you press hard, it makes a thick line, and when you press softly, it makes a thin line. Now I'm gonna fill this campus white so I can clear it and start over. You probably won't use that a whole lot, deliberately making thin to thick lines like this. But what's really nice is it gives your more casual sketching a much more artistic and captures a lot of the more expressive line work that you see in traditional media. Just to show you the difference between that, I will uncheck the shape dynamics and you can see the same squiggly lines don't have nearly as much personality is these lines up above that have a nice, thin to thick variation. So just a very cool feature that the wake, um, tablet lets us use in conjunction with the software. So we're going to start some basic sketching, and I've put shape dynamics back on so that we can have that nice effect in our sketching. So it starts in basic sketching. I'm going to create a new layer, and I will name that when sketch, you can change the layer name just by double double clicking layer one. When it pops up there, I like to knock the A pass ity back on my sketch layer back to around 20%. You can change this by just hitting the number keys, and it will change it by, uh, factors of 10. If you have the arrow tool selected just a neat little keyboard shortcut. But I'm going to select the brush tool again. And the way I like to sketch is just to kind of feel my way around the shape The beauty of photo shop is. You don't have to worry about making a mistake or or doing anything that that you can't undo because it's all infinitely re workable. You don't even have toe crumple up a piece of paper if you don't like what you're doing. So sometimes this means you can trace over the same line again and again until it finally gets to that desired shape that you like is a good exercise. I'm doing my best to draw a perfect circle, which is very tough to do Freehand on a sheet of paper. But that's the beauty of photo shop is Aiken. Rework this as much as I need to and it will be just fine. So that's pretty close. It looks like I've got a few parts that are a little bit out of perfect circle. So what I'm gonna do now, is it command t And that puts this box around our sketch? What we can do now is change the size in either direction. If you hold down, shift and select one of the corner modifiers, you can change the scale. What I really like to do when im sketching is if you hold down control, it brings up all of these other transforming functions. Distort is a very useful one. It allows you to make something move around. It seems very three dimensional, but the one that I find most useful is warped. It separates your sketch into nine subdivisions there and you can make some very fine modifications. So that's if you're sketching, Ah, human figure of face that seems slightly out of proportion. This can really save you if you just need to make some tiny, tiny modifications. This is really a lifesaver and again, one of the huge advantages over the digital medium versus traditional media. If you have something that looks 90% great, but just as something that's bothering you, then, ah, these these transformed tools could be a huge lifesaver at the end of the sketch. The other great advantage is you can erase away all these stray marks that don't look quite quite right. There obvious construction lines that show the process I was going through. And honestly, sometimes they could be kind of charming to leave in your sketch. Show the hand of the artist a bit, but you can erase away completely. There's there's no trace of it, like there would be if you were drawing on a sheet of paper. But it's a good way to clean up your sketch and make it look very professional. So not quite a perfect circle, but you can see how we we can find tune things after the initial marks are made and get it much cleaner and much more correct. Just with a few techniques like the transform tools and the erase tools to clean it up, I'm going to create a new layer, and we're going to try a slightly more complex shape. Uh, I'm gonna call this one tentacle, and the reason I chose this is because it's a very simple shape and I'm gonna knock that back to 20% is well, the layer of passage e is 20%. It's a very simple shape. I'm just going to do a few are king lines here. But I want to show you how we can add a tremendous amount of detail and information, even to a simple shapes such as this with a few basic Leinart techniques. And I'm gonna bring this one front and center so that we have the best possible view. Okay, so now all this really is is some rough lines, but I've done them very quickly and expressively with my hand to give them a nice gesture. And what I'm gonna do now is create a new layer on top of that and I'll call this One Inc. I'm gonna knock the sketch all the way back to 10% so that it's just barely visible. And now I'm gonna do some much more careful and deliberate Leinart tracing over the top of this. And, as you can see, rather than trying to do it in one smooth line, I'm doing it in a bunch of small arcs, and I'm even overlapping these arcs a little bit. That gives the impression of a much more three dimensional organic shape. They're these little folds of the squishy tentacle kind of wrapping around the edge, and that makes it seem much more lifelike than if we just did a static line. And you can see that pin pressure effect is really coming in handy as well. Some of these small fold marks are tapering out to a very fine edge, and that's that's definitely what we want. I'm gonna flip the campus here. I've got a keyboard shortcut set up for that. Um, it's not a Photoshopped default, but you can adjust keyboard shortcuts. It's very well explained online if you need a guide on that, but I'm just gonna continue making these small arc shaped lines as we move down the shape So what was once just a couple of wavy lines is suddenly becoming much more complex, and ah is certainly looking more organic and interesting. So now that we have the basic outline to find, I'm going to remove this sketch layer underneath cause this is standing up well on its own . Now that I I have the correct shape outlined, there's really no need for that sketch underneath gonna clean up a few stray marks here on the interior of the tentacle, and now we're gonna add some secondary detail. The outer edge of the tentacle was done in a pretty bold line. It's Ah, brush size is 10 pixels is a general rule. I like to reduce that by about half when I'm doing detail lines. And that's our next step is detail lines these airlines that we add to the interior of our shape to add a little bit more interest and personality and dimension, so I'll show you a few things I like to do for that. I think I'm gonna add some suction cup type things to the tentacle is well, but to start with, let's just makes, um, some fine line work that sort of echoes this outer shape and makes it seem more organic. One thing I should mention is that when you hold down space bar, the hand tool appears and that lets you pan around the canvas very easily. You can select the hand tool in your tool bar as well, but it's much easier just to press and release the space bar key whenever you want to move around the canvas on the fly. Tremendously useful operation. So back to this fine line work. I'm just adding a bit of an edge to the interior. The tentacle where the suction cups are some more line work on the perimeter. I'll go from our king lines, too little dash lines, sometimes even a circular shape. If you wanna imply some kind of bumps or even a shiny a shine of light on on the tentacle, it would conceivably be kind of wet and slimy, so that's an interesting device to employ. But these little little flecks of line add so much information and make make the the subjects and much more real, with just these tiny marks that seem insignificant. But go such a long way to make your line drawing Seymour professional more realistic and a lot more interesting. So that's what I'm doing here. I am going to start adding some suction cups, so make kind of a semi circle and then a smaller one inside. And once we get just a handful of these done, we can just start copying and pasting and get our entire tentacle filled in with these with very little effort. So I'm using the lasso tool to make a selection. I'm gonna copy with command C and paste with command V, and you see it is pasted into a new layer layer one, and I'll just move those up and with the transform tool command T I'm moving that into position. I'm going to copy this layer again. Actually, you can just hit Command V again, and it will paste in whatever was last copy. So again, after you pay set in command T to transform it into place and we just kind of repeat this process squished these a little bit laterally so that they start seeming to curve around the corner a bit. Help this tentacle Seymour three dimensional, and I'm shrinking them a good bit too. I think they would kind of taper office. They get to the edge in these few suction cups that landed on the outside. I can erase away. So now we can select all of these pasted in tentacle marks. And if he hit command E, they will merge into one layer, and I'll go ahead and merge those onto my ink layer is well so that we have this all on one layer. So there we go. Ah, fairly detailed and sleek looking line drawing that all came from this very, very simple, very rough Siris of sketch lines. And that's the basic basis for my entire technique. Is you confined the shapes that you want to create with some rough lines, and then you refine them with a few simple techniques. It lets you be, is expressive and his loose and his experimental adventurous as you want to be in the outset, and you can just refine it until it looks exactly the way you want it. Teoh. It's it's really the magic of photo shop. A few more Leinart techniques that I would like to mention. It doesn't really apply to this tentacle shape, but these could be very useful, especially if you're trying to draw something man made with straight edges or any kind of machinery. If you hold down the shift key, your brush strokes will go in a perfectly horizontal or perfectly vertical line, even if you move outside of perfectly vertical. Once you hold down that shifty, you can make vertical lines or horizontal lines. That could be very handy. Another thing you can do is shift clicking, and what I'm gonna do is bring up the brush editing menu one more time, and I'm going to disable shape dynamics. I'm doing that so that it will keep our thickness of the brush. No matter what we do. Now, I'm holding down shift again, and if you see if you click, it will make a perfectly straight edge from your last line. So this is very useful is well when creating man made objects, and I'll reduce the brush size just toe trace the interior of this shape. It's ah, completely abstract form I just came up with. But even with this simple technique of tracing the interior with a slightly finer line and then adding a few finer line details on the interior, suddenly this looks like some kind of metal plate or something like that with with some very simple techniques. So that's Ah, great great trick to use when creating man made objects. So that covers the basics of creating Leinart with Photoshopped. This is our first step in a much broader process, but these these are the tools you need to get started. So practice this a good bit until your hand feels comfortable making these types of Marx, and we will get into some other really exciting stuff in later videos. I look forward to seeing you there. 5. Basic Value: how everyone this is hardy. In this lecture, we will discuss the basics of value and how we use value to create the illusion of a three dimensional form on a flat surface. So basic two dimensional art principles here to start with. I've got the brush tool selected, and I've got a somewhat unique brush tip shape selected. So let's talk about that a little bit here. This brush tip shape is one of the defaults that comes with photo shop, so it's nothing that I've made myself or anything. But let's take a look at the settings. I've got shaped dynamics in enabled, and that's controlled by pin pressure. So when we press lightly, we will get a small brush tip shape. And as we press harder as we press harder, the brush tip shape will get larger. So a quick demonstration of that light pin pressure, heavy pin pressure and light again. So that's that's all there is to that. I've also got a jitter set here. The size jitter is up 12% and that gives the brush tip shape a little bit of variations of randomness, and it makes a nice textured effect that seems a little bit more painterly, an interesting than the default flat round brush. However, if you're having any trouble with this brush, feel free to use that that default normal round brush for this exercise. And it'll work fine to to help you with all the principles that we're gonna learn here. So let's talk a little bit about value. Value is the technical art term that just means the level of lightness. So on a scale, Ah, 100% black is on the absolute lowest end of the value spectrum, and 100% white is on the highest end. So low value, high value and everything in between is basically a degree between black and white. If we make kind of a scale here, let's say I'll just sort of do kind of a 40% black, maybe 20% and somewhere around middle gray, and we'll come back from the other side and do something like that. So that's the basic idea, just low value, toe high value just to give everyone a basic vocabulary about what I'm talking about, Um, the way that I go about creating value and using value to give the illusion of three dimensions is by keeping my brush on fairly low opacity in tapping multiple times to kind of build up tone. Let me demonstrate that I've got my brush set on 20% opacity and 20% flow, so when I press the brush down one time, it gives me a rather faint mark. But as I keep pressing it again and again and again, you can see it build up that value to become brighter and brighter, and you can probably hear my stylist tapping a bit. Um, that small little operation that I did their is the basis for how I create marks and how I paint with photo shop. And if we do this slow, build up approach, it gives us a tremendous amount of control. And that's really what it's all about. When painting, you want to put the values and the marks exactly where you want them to be to create those illusions of three dimensions. So is, ah, one more simple little scale exercise. What I'm going to do is set flow all the way up. But let's do opacity in in, uh in 10% generations here, so one tap 10% two taps three four, five six and I ran out of room. So seven, eight and nine, you can see these values build up the more times we tap the brush. Even at this low percentage, it's a cumulative effect. The brush mark sort of overlap one another, and it creates a brighter and brighter value for us. And that's really the the governing principle behind creating the illusion of three dimensions on our two dimensional service. Here we build up values and use value. Teoh, give us that illusion. So is a simple exercise to help us use value to create the illusion of a three dimensional shape. I'm going to set up a few very basic geometric shapes here, and we're gonna paint within them and try and make them look three dimensional, using using value using degrees of black and white. So I've created a circle with the marquee tool, and I filled that in with my background color by holding down command delete. So that's how you feel in a color. I'm also going to create a three dimensional looking cube, so I've got the last of a selection tool here, and I'm just going to try and create a three dimensional cube. It will look kind of diamond shaped is a silhouette. But you'll see we're gonna fill this in and it will look very three dimensional. So now that I have that selection made, you can see the marching ants going around the outside. I'm gonna fill in again with the background color by just hitting command. Delete once again. So we've got our to silhouette shapes here on the layer One. If I command, click the image of layer one here. It will create selections for both of those objects. So that's very handy. It'll let us paint on Lee within the layered object. I'm gonna hit command h toe, hide those marching ants. But this election is still there. It's just hidden. So now to create a new layer and we're going to start painting in with some value. I've got my brush selected once again here and rather than going all the way to a white, I'm gonna grab a great It's just a very high key gray, almost pure white, but not quite. I like to save ah, 100% white for the brightest brights of my object. Also, notice I've got my opacity and my flow both set to 20%. That seems to be about the magic number to give me the kind of control that I like. So let's get started. We're going to try and make this look like a three dimensional sphere shape. So I'm going to start by just tapping in some basic values. And we have to keep in mind how light would strike this object three dimensionally. The brightest bright would be right about here, where I'm tapping and it's sort of radiates outward to darker colors as we move away from this primary highlight tap in a little bit more, and that's looking pretty good. So that's our basic highlight, and that's already a very powerful way to make this seem like a three dimensional object. Now, another thing that we need to make an object seem three dimensional is a little bit of reflected light or bounced light. You'll somehow you'll sometimes hear it called, so we go to the opposite side of our primary light source and add in just a little bit of light along the edge. Now what this is is the light that is reflecting off of the surface where this sphere is sitting in creating almost a second highlight on the underside. And once we have that reflected light established, it lets us see our core shadow. So I've heard this described is the anatomy of a sphere. But basically what we have is highlight here core shadow here and reflected light here. That's basically all there is to it. Now, remember how I saved Bright White for my brightest highlight? And I have ah, got that selected again. Here. I did something a moment ago that I'd like to share. If you hit D on your keyboard, it brings up black and white is your foreground and background color. I guess it's d for default. So any time you have any colors picked and you need black and white just hit D, and it will return those to your color palette. Another handy trick is if you hit X, it will swap black for white or foreground for background color. So what I did a moment ago was I hit D and X. Whenever you need 100% white hit D and X, and you'll have it at your fingertips in no time. so I'm just painting in a bright highlight of here, and that's basically it. That's how I make marks and how I create the illusion of three dimensions in a very basic sense, using Photoshopped. Now, one thing I like to do Teoh make these marks seem a little more painterly is to use the smudge tool I've got that said is our is my keyboard shortcut. But this is the smudge tool here. I've got another brush selected here. Also a photo shop default. But again, I will make this brush available for download as an a B R file on the site. So if you'd like to use this exact brush, feel free to grab that and install it. But really plenty of other shapes will do this job very well. What I'm gonna do is start smudging around these tones and the effect is subtle because really, we're just moving around tones that are already there, but it can create some very cool effects and really give your work a painterly look. If you just sort of smear these shapes around the's little marks that we've made, it can smooth them up. It can make them have little striations that make it seem like a textured object. Um, already, it's giving this kind of, Ah strange, polished stone look that I find really cool. And it's just a nice extra layer of polish that you can give to your artwork to make it a little more interesting. So if you don't like the way your marks were looking down, if they're looking to chunky your or two overlapped, just do a little smudging. You can use it. Teoh smooth things out, or you can use it to to give them new details and interest. So that's a very powerful tool to use. And I think with that, our sphere here looks pretty cool. It's got a believable sense of three dimensions. Ah, highlight a core shadow and reflected light looks like something you could pick up in your hand. And that's really what we're going for. That's the essence of creating two dimensional art. It's the illusion of three dimensions. So why don't we jump over to our cube here and I'll hit Command H again to reveal those dotted marching ants elections. So what I'm gonna do now is with the lasso tool selected once again I'm gonna hold down the option key and you'll see a little minus appear on the lasso tool. But that's gonna let me do is subtract away some of this selection. So what I'm gonna do is subtract away everything except for this plane over on this side. And if I, uh if this is not quite 100% geometrically correct, forgive me, but just for demonstration purposes, I'm going to start adding in some value to this plane of this Q. Maybe making the brightest point at this corner that's nearest to us. Okay, now I'm just gonna hit command click on layer one again to bring up a selection of the whole shape. And now I will subtract away this plane that we've already used and I'll subtract away. The bottom is, Well, so now we only have this plane selected, and I'll make that a little bit darker. This is sort of, uh, like a reflected light plane. Now that that those two planes air established, I'll put just a little bit of reflected light on that. Bottom one is well, and just like that, this is a fairly believable cube shaped now with edges. It's often cool to add just a little bit of extra highlight to these these edges. It can help make it seem a little bit less like a digital Ah, digital art creation and make it seem a little more painterly and a little more realistic, even adding some little marks that cross the plane that make it seem like somebody may have dropped this cube on the ground and it got some little bumps in its edges. Just some nice little surface details to make this more interesting. But that's the basic idea. Once again, I'll hit D and then X, and we've got 100% white selected once again. And I'll use that just to brighten this near corner to give us a really bright highlight. One thing that you should always strive for is a very broad value range. Your gonna wanna have just about everything from the darkest black all the way to the brightest white and all of your paintings that makes him seem much more rich and interesting. So a painting that's too too far in the middle of the value range just shades of gray, really that can often look flat in a little bit washed out. So strive to get those really dark darks and really bright brights, uh, in your paintings when you can. So just a little bit of smudging on these cube planes here, and I'm gonna smudge in different directions on each plane so that they seem to be going in opposite directions. And that will further enhance the sense of this being a three dimensional object with with different shape striations in surface details happening on either plane because that's how it would appear in real life. I'll create a new layer underneath above the background layer, and I'm just gonna create some cast shadows under these shapes just to give it a small amount of extra realism. So I've selected this dark, almost black color with the brush tool. If you hold down the Ault tool, he turns into a medicine dropper tool, and you can select colors from anywhere on the canvas so you can see the foreground color changing every time I select again with this medicine dropper tool. That's an extremely handy way to just start picking up colors and laying them back down. But that is how I got this dark shadow color that I've added here, and just a little bit of cast shadow under the sphere is, well, maybe it's casting a little bit more on this side, since the highlight is coming from above. And with that, I think this exercise is just about finished. We've got two very believable three dimensional shapes that are, in fact, in reality Onley two dimensional surfaces. But we used value to give the illusion of three dimensions light and dark, creating the illusion of form and three dimensions. So I hope you found that helpful. We will certainly apply this lesson, and the other basic functions that we've learned to our our exercises to come are full scale projects. So I look forward to seeing you in the next election. 6. Basic Color: everyone. This is hardy. In this lecture, we will go over the basics of color, and I'll explain some of the terminology that I use relating to color is that create artwork. So to start with, in very broad terms, to describe a color, we can reduce it to other hue, value and saturation. Let's talk about Hugh first. Hugh is the shade of a color as it appears on this color wheel, going from green to yellow to orange to red, to purple to blue and around it around. When I refer to Hugh, it's where it lies. In this spectrum, when we talk about warm colors, it's thes colors at the top. Cooler colors are those at the bottom, so that's the basic idea behind Hugh. It's where it is in this spectrum. Is it a green hue or a red hue? Etcetera. The next way we can describe color is its value. That is how light it is, how bright on a spectrum. So at this end of these bars, we have a very high value read. It's very light, and it goes to a very dark red all the way to completely black. On this end, and I've done it again with blue and a yellow color just to show you this spectrum. So when we for refer to a high value red, we're talking about one on this end and a low value red is thes, much darker tones of these colors on this end of the spectrum. So when we discuss value, this is what we need. How bright is it? How light is it on the value spectrum? The third way that we can describe a color is its saturation. That is how vibrant or rich and vivid the color is on. One end of this spectrum of saturation is totally neutral gray, and as we go over to this side, it goes to a fully saturated, very vibrant saturation, so you can see these very vivid shades of this color on the left side of the screen, all the way to completely neutral gray on this side. Sometimes you'll hear me describe the color is being very muted, and when I say that it means it's relatively gray somewhere in this range, and then when we talk about a color being very intense or vibrant, it's somewhere closer to this side. So That's what we mean when we talk about saturation. Now I have separated things as hue, saturation and value because photo shot has a very nice function. It can lets you modify things in these exact ways. So I'm just gonna make a red circle here. What's the need to create a new layer? A red circle? And if I hit command you, it brings up this hue saturation modifier. As you can see, we have control bars for these three aspects. The hue can change it along the color wheel, from red to green to blue. We can adjust this saturation. I can tune this way down to a more muted red or all the way up to full saturation, which is about where it was to begin with, so very muted or all the way down to total gray here or weaken, turn the saturation way up. Another thing we can do is adjust the lightness, which is just another word for value. We can make it higher in value closer to a pure, bright white, or we can make this darker and so on. So by adjusting these three bars, we can modify any aspect of the color. It's Hugh, its saturation or its lightness. So we have complete control over any color that we can modify In Photoshopped. It's very, very handy and a great way to, uh, to get a good handle on your color scheme. Let's revisit the concept of hue for a moment. Now this color wheel is arranged is a circle for a very good reason. It allows us to identify colors that are directly opposite from each other. These colors that are on exact opposite ends of the color wheel are known as color compliments, and they tend to work very nicely together as a pair. Visually. Now this applies to any color that has an opposite on the color wheel, so you can move this around anywhere in. These colors tend to work well, but in a very broad sense, the most traditional color compliments are red and green, purple and yellow and blue and orange. But obviously any variation there in within this spectrum works very well. Let's take a look at some artwork that makes good use of these complementary color color schemes, starting with this image on the left. For the most part, this image is a very cool colored greenish blue in hue, and it's also very low and saturation. Everything is pretty gray and muted here, but one thing that was added to be a visual point of interest is these very brightly saturated red birds. So looking at the color wheel, we have a mostly grayish blue color for the most part. But we artfully used a very bright red to give some little points of interest. The contrast there is what makes that so interesting Similarly, on this image in the upper right. For the most part, this is a very low saturation kind of great out image that's bluish green in color scheme. Accept our main point of interest. This magical looking tree has very bright red leaves, and it's immediately what your eye goes to. It's that contrast that makes it so visually interesting. Now let's take a look below at this alien character. He mostly has a purplish blue color scheme for his skin, and this is paired on the other side of the color wheel with an orangish yellow for his eyes. And the eyes are certainly the most noticeable feature in the peace because of that really nice contrast. Now notice that these air not exact opposites on the color wheel. And that's just to show you that this is not a hard and fast rule. Just a general guideline. Try to pair colors that are generally on the other side, but they don't have to be perfect compliments like red and green, for example. So that's the basic idea behind color. This is a very quick introduction, their entire college courses devoted to the topic of color and color theory. But this is enough to give you a working knowledge and to let you dive right in and start making art with Photoshopped. 7. Design Principles: Oh, hi, everyone. This is hearty. Welcome to the design principles, courts, the court concepts that we're going to discuss. We'll give you a framework by which to measure your own artwork. We will attempt to take some of the confusing subjectivity out of the equation and learned some criteria so that we can evaluate art more concrete Lee. So relax and get comfortable and let's get started. What makes one work of art good and another not so good? Obviously, everyone can have different opinions, and this could make learning how to create good art confusing. It's also subjective. How do you ever know if you're on the right track? Well, the design principles that we will discuss will give you a more solid framework by which to judge artwork. There are six design principles that we will consider balance, contrast, movement, proportion, repetition and unity. Let's take a look at each individually balance distribution of visual weight and an image. An image that has an overall equilibrium tends to be more pleasing to the eye. This doesn't mean that you need to have the exact same elements on both sides of the canvas , but you should try to balance out heavy elements with multiple smaller elements. I find this particularly useful when designing creatures and robots. Large, flat, heavy areas are balanced out with more visually active, smaller repeating elements in other places. This gives the Yad plenty of interest to take in, but it also gives it a few areas in which to rest. Contrast juxtaposition of elements with opposite attributes to create emphasis or attract attention. Contrast is a very powerful tool at your disposal. It can help you lead your viewers I to the part of the image that you want to emphasize and can be beautiful in and of itself. When used well, contrast can take many forms high value next to low values or complementary colors like the image that we see here are eyes air immediately drawn to the red tree since it's got such a high contrast with the muted green colors in the background, images with high contrast can seem rich and vibrant, and those that lack it often seemed flat in washed out movement directed path EI takes a long lines, edges or color. Making an image visually dynamic is a great way to make it exciting and can also unconsciously lead the viewer's eye around the page. We can use the implied lines of our composition to direct the viewer's eye to an area that we want to emphasize like we see here. We can also create the illusion of animation by repeating familiar objects in predictable patterns. Although each of these birds is its own simple still shape. When we see them together, our brains connect the dots and we can almost see their wings flapping as they soar through the air proportion scaling of elements as they relate to each other. In order for an image to be relatable to the viewer, it's elements need to have a scale that seems correct and believable. Proportion is particularly important when painting people, since we're all programmed to recognize each other. A drawing of a person with correct proportions can be appreciated at deeper levels, but those with incorrect proportions can often be quickly dismissed by the viewer repetition similar elements used in sequence. I like to think of this principle as though it were visual music. We can create pleasing visual rhythms in our artwork by repeating certain elements. The I kind of bumps along these elements in an enjoyable way. Unity, elements of an image coming together harmoniously. All of the elements of your image must come together is a single, cohesive visual experience. Disparate elements or inconsistent treatment of different parts of the image can be a distraction. While contrast is important, even contrasting elements need to fall within a single, harmonious, unified approach. So that wraps up our looking design principles. Remember these air guidelines to keep in mind not hard and fast rules. Never let thes limiter creativity or make you afraid to try different things. I hope you find these useful, and I know you'll enjoy applying what you've learned here in the more advanced courses ahead. 8. Project - Still Life Painting: Oh, hi, everyone. This is Hardy. In this extra, we're gonna put everything that we've learned in this course into a very quick, very fun art project. This way, everyone coming out of this course will have their first digital painting checked off their list and will be ready for the awesome things ahead. So let's get started for our project. We're gonna be doing a value painting of this apple. Now, this is a photo that I took, but you're more than welcome to use a photo of your own. However, if this is your very first digital painting, I'd highly recommend going with this one. Apples have a really nice simple shape and a great way to practice, making something seem three dimensional using value. Which is why still lifes like this object or such a time honored art education tradition This photo is available for download, and I've got a color version available is well, if you want to try something more challenging later, okay, So before we start sketching this out to begin our painting, let's talk about the values we see here and how they're defining this three dimensional object jumping back to our simple sphere rendering exercise, we can see a light source. Ah, highlight. Ah, core shadow Some bounced or reflected light and finally, a cast shadow. You can see that all of those elements apply in the same way to this apple photo light source is coming from the upper left. It has a highlight, a dark core shadow area, and some reflected light as well. Finally, it's anchored to the ground by a nice cast shadow. This formula is the key for making something on a flat screen or piece of paper seem like it's three dimensional and you'll be amazed by the effects you can create. Okay, I've talked enough about this apple. Let's grab our styluses and start painting something cool. So I've got a basic Photoshopped documents set up here and I've pasted in this Apple photo . We're just gonna leave that in this corner here to uses a reference we're gonna copy both the shape and then later the values toe to start using. This is our three dimensional object reference, so that's on its own layer. Next, I'm going to create a new layer that we're gonna do our sketch on, so I'll just rename this sketch and guys, This is my basic process for creating even really complex digital painting, so this formula can be expanded all kinds of amazing things that I'd love to show you and later courses. But for now, let's stick to this very simple object. I've got my brush tool selected, and it's just a default round brush. It's the very simplest brush that photo shop offers, and that's really all that we need to do. A simple sketch like this. I'm going to reduce the opacity of my sketch layer down to about 100%. You can do that either with this slider bar or there's some cool keyboard shortcuts for that. If you just hit the number keys, it adjusts the opacity by factors of 10 so one is 10 to his 20 etcetera. So an easy way to change the opacity of your layer. So I think this is working for us. I'm gonna make my brush very small just to simulate kind of a pencil tip, and I'm keeping one eye on the apple reference in the corner and the other eye on my canvas , and we're just going to start sketching out this basic shape sort of an ob long sphere. Essentially, it's got Cem cool little lumps on it that make it look a little more interesting than just a simple sphere. But essentially, that's what we're going for. So, so nice, smooth lines using my erase tool just to smooth out some of those stray marks I've made that I'm gonna put a little indication of that little indentation at the top of the apple. That kind of shows all the little little lines that are on the apple skin kind of pinching into this one point. So I'm going to transform this now. You want to make it a little bigger. I just hit command T to transform this layer. And if you can see, we can modify all kinds of scale and sizes. But if you hit control, you can switch to all other kinds of modifiers. Enough selected warp really like this when it divides it into nine sections, gives you a ton of control over all the little adjustments that you can make to the shape. And I noticed that right side had a really smooth arc on the reference photos, so I wanted to change that just a little bit, and I think that's better. You can see kind of a nice before and after that, that really changes the whole shape of it. Just hitting command Z to undo and up. Next, let's do a little more fine tuning of hit command shift X, which brings up this super cool liquefy function. And as you can see guys with this, you can use a big brush or shrink it to a smaller brush to do all these really fine adjustments to the line. This is the artist best friend. You can fine tune anything at a project, even if you get to the very end, and there's something not quite right about it. Liquefy can save the day, make everything just right, so I think that's close enough. It doesn't really matter if we copy it perfectly. This is just a nice exercise. So next we're gonna use this line drawing to block this shape in What I've done is select the magic wand tool and select the outside of this shape. So out of this white space on the exterior, I go to select an inverse or command shift. I and now it's switched to the inside. So now I have a selection that fits that sketch perfectly. And what I'm gonna do is fill that in on a new layer. So with my medicine dropper tool, I've grabbed that dark value on the reference photo and I'll hit option delete. And that's how we filled in. Just like that option delete fills in the foreground color. So I'm gonna make a copy of my sketch. Layer just is a safety net, and then I'm gonna merge this sketch and this new blocked in silhouette that we've created so I can see the indication of that indentation. But I've also got it's so faint that it won't really get in the way of our value painting. I'm gonna dark in the background to match the reference photo a little bit more, but mostly to give us a a good base to do our value painting. I'm using the smudge tool just to sort of brush out a few rough edges on that perimeter of renamed my silhouette layer, and guys were ready to start adding some value. So before I start adding tones, I'm going to switch to this chalk brush. This one gives it a really nice painterly feel. You can see the settings here, but this is one of the brushes that is available for download. Any brush practically works for this, even that default round. But if we command click the silhouette layer, it gives us a selection so we can paint within this apple shape with no fear of going outside the lines. So always inside the lines when you got that selection made, even though you don't see the marching ants right now, I just hit command h toe. Hide them. But we are selected here, so I've started adding in some values notice. I'm sampling them from that reference photo. When you have your brush tool selected, all you have to do is hit option, and it turns to the medicine dropper tool. Unbelievably time saving shortcut. There You can always just grab values from anywhere on the page and just kind of picked them up and lay them down all with the brush tool in the press of a key. So remember, we build up our values from dark to light, with the number of times that we tap, so these areas that air higher in value I've tapped that light color more times, so we sort of build it up on that value scale that we talked about earlier in this course. That's how we get these lights on the light planes and the darks on the dark planes. Remembering the the elements that we need to have in every three dimensional value painting . Right now, we're already developing a nice highlight mid tone core shadow, and I'm even starting to do a little bit of reflected light bounce there on the bottom. So again, using the medicine jobber tool to select that highlight, we had that really nice, shiny, bright highlight right there on the lightest part of the apple that that really gives us a ton of information about the apples, skin, all those little bumps. The sort of irregular shape of the highlight really lets us know what the skin feels like. Gives it a lot of texture. Information really starts to make it feel riel and guys. That's that's really the funnest part of this whole process is when these marks on the screen start transforming into something believable. Now I'm working in this transition area where light turns to dark and notice There are a lot of little splotchy marks, both on the painting and on the reference photo. This is called the Mid Tone and there's a ton of information there. We want that to be very visually active. There are all kinds of little bumps that air creating shadows and highlight planes. So you want that mid tone to be really visually active, like we see here, gives it a ton of realism. I'm gonna put a nice hard value edge. I wanna light edge to shine. Against that dark on this indentation area, we're gonna have a ton of information. Now I'm switching to my smudge tool will start refining things a little bit. This tool is a ton of fun to use were just sort of pulling all of these little tones around the page. And as you can see it, it really starts making things look really polished and realistic, especially with all these little striations in lines on the apple's skin. We can really pull those linear shapes around with this smudge tool, and it starts making it look super realistic. It's a lot of fun to do. Sort of smooth things out, gives things a little more polished. I tend to jump from the brush tool to the smudge tool really often in my own paintings. And I definitely recommend that technique, a ton of fun and a great way to get a really polished look without a whole lot of effort. So I'm going to do a little bit more of that refinement down here in the core shadow area again. Want that mid tone area to have some nice visual activity, and that's looking really nice. So, really, at this point, we're just starting to refine things. I think our values are pretty faithful to the reference photo, and it's certainly looking three dimensional in pretty realistic. So I'm going to start adding in a little bit of background information. So I'm using the Grady in tool, and I'm going to switch it to this mode, which applies the Grady int in both directions. See that it's kind of a good way to establish a horizon line smooth Grady INTs going up and down equally. So this is a pretty brightly lit floor, so I want that to be pretty bright. So next we need a core shadow, and I'm going to select our marquee tool. Switch it to the elliptical marquee and we're just gonna pull out. Ah, very broad ellipse roughly in the shape of this reference photo shadow. And again, I fill that in with option delete. I'm gonna run a few filters on this to make it look a little more realistic. The motion blur kind of blurs the outer edges, sort of drags it sideways, and then a guardian blur, which just universally makes it a little more fuzzy. The next thing we're gonna do is add a layer mask and with a Grady, And I'm just gonna mask away a little bit so that the shadow becomes less intense. The farther away it gets for more, the apple contacts the floor. So next I've grouped everything and created a copy of the group so that I can merge my apple into one layer. This makes it easier to adjust so we can't adjust all those layers individually. We want him to be merged together, and I'm doing a little bit more transforming and warping, just like we did to the sketch. And it's looking pretty accurate to that reference photo. I'm smudging the outer edges very lightly. with the smudge tool just to give it a little bit of a blur. Those sharp edges can really make a three dimensional objects seem flat. So a good final polish step. But that's basically it. Guys, you've now created your first digital painting we've sketched in our rough forms. Used photo shop tools to refine and transform things is needed. And then we used everything we've learned about value to make a convincingly three dimensional rendering of our reference object. I hope youll say this first painting and compared with your rock star art down the road. Way to go, guys. I'll see you all up next for our course Recap. 9. Course Recap: congratulations on completing the art fundamentals course. We've gone over habits of successful artists, value, color and design principles. We then put everything that we've learned into a fund still life project. I now declare you to be a digital artist. With these Photoshopped and heart fundamental concepts mastered, you now have all the tools that you need to jump in and start creating amazing artwork. Post some artwork so that our community can share in your progress. At the very least, save what you created this early stage so that you can compare it later on when you're a digital art rock star. I hope that you've enjoyed these introductory courses in a sneak peek into my process and all of the magic that Photoshopped can unlock. Believe me, guys, this is just the tip of the iceberg. For those ready to take the next steps into digital art mastery, we offer a wide variety of incredibly cool courses. Learn to paint faces, figures, characters and creatures just to name a few of the exciting topics that we offer. Whether you're exploring your talent for your own enjoyment or if you have aspirations to be a professional artist, we can help you take giant leaps with your digital art and your professionalism. So check out the rest of our course content and enroll. Today I can't wait to see your project. Thanks for checking out art fundamentals. Go out there and paint cool stuff.