Background Design - Colour Concepts

1. Promo Video: Hi there, my name is Siobhan. I'm an artist and an animation professional. In this course, I'm going to teach you how to create professional-looking background art for animation. You're going to get to explore color and light in a really fun and expressive painting style. Along the way, you'll also learn tips and tricks that I've used as a professional background artist throughout my career in the animation industry. For the first project, you're going to get to explore how to paint concept art thumbnails and develop these into color keys. This project is aimed to get you up to speed with the color wheel. You'll also learn about lighting and how to use light and shadow in your painting. You'll learn how to use a specific brush pack and I'll show you my brush and painting techniques. You'll also learn how to create amazing atmospheric effects in your paintings and paint up a concept art fantasy scene like this. I worked really hard to make sure that in every video, you can learn something new, from practical Photoshop tips and techniques to advice on how to speed up your workflow and become a better and more efficient background artist. When you join this course, you'll have access to all of the files I've left for you to download in the resource section, including the brush pack and all of my Photoshop files. You'll also be able to ask me any questions that you have and get feedback on your work. I've worked as a professional background designer for studios in Dublin. I've worked in Vancouver. I've worked for studios whose clients include Disney, Sony, DreamWorks, H&H Publishing. I'm really passionate about teaching the skills and processes that took me on that journey so that you can have the opportunity to learn this amazing skill set. I hope you're ready to start your journey and take your first steps with me today towards becoming a background artist for animation. 2. Introduction: In this introductory video, I want to explain the software that I'll be using for the course and what you need to get started and I also want to give you a brief overview of the course structure and explain the projects. In terms of software, I'm going to be doing all of my work in Adobe Photoshop. This is really the industry standard. There's no question about that. In the animation industry, nearly nine times out of 10, no matter what the animation software is, you're nearly always making backgrounds in Photoshop. If you want to even try it out, you could download a free trial from Adobe's website if you're not sure. But if you really don't want to use Photoshop, then there are lots of other free options. You could use [inaudible] , that's quite popular, or if you have an iPad, you can use Procreate. If you're working on a laptop or computer though, the one thing that you will need that you can't really get around is a drawing tablet. You're not going to get very far at all drawing with a mouse. You're going to be frustrated and it just simply won't be worth it. If you are very keen about drawing digitally and about learning how to be a digital artist and you don't have a drawing tablet, then I highly suggest you invest in yourself now and get one. You don't have to start off with anything fancy like this antique or anything like that. My setup is actually really simple. I just use a Wacom tablet medium. There are cheaper options out there if you don't want to go with a Wacom tablet, so do a search online. But if you are having any issues deciding which setup is best for you or you want some advice, then just let me know and we can discuss what's the best option. Next, just a quick note about the course project. The first one will focus on color and working with digital paintbrushes and the project that you'll be doing for that one is to create a Martian or a lunar landscape. Now, you don't have to go with the space or sci-fi theme if you don't want to. It's just a suggestion. I'll leave it up to you. But the application of the brushes and the techniques are the same if you want to create a realistic looking landscape. For that project, I've left a couple of assignments. One is to create a set of thumbnails, and then the other one is to choose one of those and paint it up to a finished concept art piece. By the end of the course, you'll have a background painting that looks something like this. Please do send me your projects for review. I'm going to be adding video critiques and analysis of student work and I'd love to include your work so that other students can see how you've tackled the projects and be inspired by your art work. Lastly, please also consider leaving a rating because it actually helps other people to find the course and it also helps me to know if the material is working for you. If you've got any questions, if anything is unclear at all, please send me a message. Up next in the next video, I'll show you how I set up my Photoshop workspace. 3. Setting Up Your Workspace: In this video, I'll show you how my Photoshop workspace is set up, and I'll show you how you can make sure that yours looks similar to mine so that you can follow along with me fairly easily. Generally speaking, I like to have as much screen space as possible, so I have everything nested in at the side. If you've got windows that are maybe not squeezed in at the sides like that, you can move any of these windows around, you can drag them out to have them floating, they stay open, or you can even close them altogether and you don't have to worry about them. If there's any windows that you see on my screen that you don't have that you want to have access to, at any point, you can come up to Window and find the relevant window down here. I just closed down Properties. If I wanted to open that up again, I would just scroll down and find it right right. It pops up, it's floating, and then I can just click and drag this over to the side. On this Menu bar down here, anytime there's a blue highlight, it means I can release and slot it in there. The two main windows that you're going to need or that I'll be using the most are the Layers stack and also the Color window. It's best to just have them open at all times rather than opening and closing it. I'm going to click and drag my Layers out, and then put it way over to the side, release it there. Then I'll also go and grab Color. From my drop-down menu, click on "Color", and I will place that at the top. Then if you wanted to increase the space, you could just drag this up and down. Now, your Color window might not look the exact same as mine. It could possibly be set to this layout. It's totally fine. It's this exact same color, it's just a different way of presenting it. I prefer to have my color represented like this in the color wheel. There's these sliders here. This is the hue slider, is which color you want to pick. The saturation slider means if it's desaturated or very saturated. This B slider refers to the brightness. You can slide those or you can use this handy triangle. Then in the Layers stack, really, all you need to be aware of is how to create new layers, which is the plus icon at the bottom. If you want to delete layers, it's just the trash can, you just delete that and it'll ask you. Say, "Yes". The only other control that I use is the Folder or Group icon. That's this little icon here. What you do is just select whatever layers you want to group together, and you can either hit that icon or "Command" or "Control-G" on your keyboard is the shortcut, and it instantly groups them together. Then if you want to delete that group, you could "Backspace", but a good way to know about it, because very often, I might group things and then I want to ungroup them. I just go down to the trash can and hit that, and then it actually gives you a choice, "Do you want to delete the group and the contents or just the group?" If you choose just group, you're back to having just the layers. If there is anything else that crops up, I'll be sure to highlight it and let you know. Similarly, with the tools over here on the left, I will explain in much more detail the tools that I'm going to be using and their functions. But just to let you know, these are your drawing, painting, vector tools, shape tools. When you click on one of them, the properties for that tool will always appear up at the top. For example, in the brush mode, you can choose the size, the hardness, choose different types of brushes. You can also play around with the opacity up here. For things like the vector tools, like the Pen tool, here's where you choose shape or path. We'll leave it on shape always for this course, with the fill and just with no stroke. If your stroke actually does have a color, and it looks something like that, what you can do with the Pen tool selected is just come up to Stroke and choose "No Color", which is this red line going through, and that'll reset it back to having no outline. That's about it for now. Make sure that your Photoshop layout or your Photoshop interface is set up the same way so that we're on the same page. If you've got any questions about how to set up your Photoshop workspace, just send me a message. 4. Photoshop Tools: Let's take a really quick look at the main tools that I'm using throughout this course. As I go, I will definitely take time in each video to explain whatever tool I'm using. But I wanted to give you a brief overview so that it's not completely strange or confusing to you, and also so that you know what to expect. Also that you have some place to come back to, if you feel like you've missed out on some trick or tool or piece of information. Maybe bookmark this video, in case you need to refer back to it. For this first project that's coming up, we're going to be doing color concepts. All I'm using for that project is the brush and the selection tool, but you just need to know about the brush. The brush tool, you can hit B on your keyboard or click on this icon. As I mentioned in the last video, the properties for this tool are all up here at the top. This twirl down menu is where you access different brush shapes or different brushes, and where you can affect the size or the hardness of that brush. The way I like to do, I'll probably just drag this panel out and have it floating, so that I can constantly just choose different brushes as I go. But I'll show you about that in a later video. But just so you know, that's where that is under brushes. There's another icon here which also gives you brush settings. Now, I tend to not really tweak the brush settings because all of the brushes that I've downloaded are pretty much set for me, so I don't ever need to go into here and dial it in any further. But just so you know, that's your brush settings control over there. As I paint, I will also use the Eyedropper tool. Now, the Eyedropper tool is in your tool, stacked somewhere down here. I'm going to hit I on my keyboard. There it is. Eyedropper tool. If you click on that, it allows you to sample colors on your Canvas as you go, and you can paint and choose different colors. Let me just show you. Say I've got an orange next to it, you can just use your eyedropper tool to paint and select. The other tool that I use when I'm painting freehand like this, is the Selection tool. If you click and hold on this, you've got the rectangular marquee or the elliptical marquee, that allows you to select an area you can paint inside it or you can even select the inverse by going up to Select Inverse and then let's say paint the outside. The other selection tool that I use a lot is the Lasso tool. When you click and hold down on the Lasso, you've got the regular one, you've got the polygonal or polygonal lasso tool and magnetic. I never used magnetic lasso, I find it best for working with photos. When I'm drawing, I just use these two. Much the same way as a pencil or a pen, you can draw out a shape, you can fill that shape, or you can paint over it. It's a very handy one. Similarly, the polygonal gives you straight lines and it's very good for getting really detailed work. The last tool that I want to introduce you to is the pen tool. That's the other one that I'll be using quite a lot. You can hit P on your keyboard or click on this icon over here. The pen tool works by simply clicking what are called anchor points to create a shape. Each anchor point will create a straight line between the previous one and if you wanted to create a curved line between two anchor points or between three anchor points, you click and drag. When you click and drag these handles which are called Bezier handles, these appear, and you can drag them out. That will create a nice curve. Let me just delete that for a second. A handy thing to know though about the curves, is not only can you create a nice curve between three points, you can also click and drag out and then close down one side. If you wanted the curve to go this way and then to have say, a straight line or a curve going the other way, you can delete this handle of the anchor point by holding down option on a Mac or Alt on a PC. You'll see there's a tiny little symbol that appears and click back onto the last anchor point, and that'll just close it off and then you can say go the other way. The main thing to know about working with the pen tool versus working with the polygonal or regular lasso, is that the pen tool creates what's called a vector shape. If you come over to your layer stack, you can see that this layer is not actually called layer, it's called shape 1, so all of the shape tools in Photoshop like the square rectangle, the Ellipse tool, those are all vector graphics. What a vector is, is it's basically a set of these anchor points. Whereas a lasso tool, if I create a new layer, is a rasterized or a bitmap graphic and dash doesn't have any anchor points. It's essentially a bunch of pixels and you can actually delete or paint on this. Whereas on the vector shapes, you can't paint onto them, you can't delete some of them, all you can do is affect the color by double-clicking in this icon to change the color or change the shape by changing some of the vector points. That's the main difference. It is possible to right-click on any vector shape in your layer stack at anytime and just choose Rasterize Layer. What that does, is it converts it from a vector shape into a bitmap shape, so I can now edit that shape. Really, those are pretty much the only tools that I'll be using. Now, there's a lot of processes involved with each of the tools and I'll be sure to go through all of those techniques and processes in detail as they come up. But for now, just to get started, that's all you need to really familiarize yourself with; the Pen tool, the selection tools, and the brush tools. 5. Principles of Light and Colour: In this video, I'm going to introduce you to color. We'll also take a look at lighting from a very basic point of view. I thought it would be a very good way to experiment with basic color and lighting schemes for you to get to know a little bit about this subject so that you don't feel like it's a topic that you're intimidated by. I want to just demystify it for you at the outset and get you started working in a very loose and free form way with color, and really just to have fun. These color concepts are not finished final backgrounds by any means. This is an opportunity to explore working in Photoshop with a specific brush stash. First off, let's talk about color. It can be very daunting to just look at a blank canvas and think to yourself, well, where do I even start? If you open up the color picker, you've got all the colors in the spectrum to choose from. Say, for example, you're just creating a simple background. You might think, sure, I could start out with a blue sky and then add in green hills. But doing this can be problematic because, basically, every color that you choose is going to relate to these initial color choices. It is a fluid and an intuitive approach, but what can often happen is that you'll end up with a very non-cohesive color scheme throughout your background. If the green is really electric, all of your subsequent color choices will be based on that initial color choice. They'll be bouncing off that color choice because, as you place colors down and choose different ones, your eye is choosing those colors based on the previous ones. I'm going to show you an example of what I mean. This really illustrates the point. If you've seen this before, you'll know what I'm talking about. If you haven't, then this is really going to demonstrate to you how colors can look different depending on the color that they are beside. I've got two gray squares. Behind each of these, I'm going to select an area and I'm going to fill it with another gray. I want it not as light and not as dark, something in the middle. Click ''Okay'', hit G on my keyboard, and then de-select. The gray in this square looks much darker, and the gray in this square looks a little bit lighter. Now, it's the exact same color. I'll even color pick it. You'll see there it says it's 989898. This one is 989898. It's the exact same color. But because this is surrounded by a lighter color, it looks darker. Because this square is surrounded by a darker color, it looks that much lighter. Now, this becomes crucial when you start to work in color and you're putting things together. What can you do to get around this? The answer for now, anyway, when you're starting out, is to predefine your palette before you start painting and really work with maybe four or five specific colors. When you're choosing a color palette, a good rule of thumb is to use colors that are what's called harmonious. Harmonious doesn't mean necessarily that they are the same or that they're in the same range. It simply means that they work well together. You could have reds and greens. They seem like opposite colors, but in a color scheme or in a background or a painting, they're what's known as harmonious because they work well together. What we're going to do is take a look at the color wheel, and I'll explain this concept to you a little bit better. I'm going to hop over to color.adobe.com. This is a fantastic online resource or online tool for you to use to understand and learn about color. This is basically all the colors in this wheel that exist in the RGB spectrum, which is the spectrum that we're working with when we're painting digitally anyway. Over here on the left, you'll see you can click into each one of these. These are the color harmony rules. I really would encourage you to spend some time on this slide and get to know what the different rules are. This is just a really good place for you to get comfortable thinking about a color palette. Now, in the next video, I am going to show you how to generate a palette from this, and we will get to that in time. But what I wanted to point out here is to explain that some of the best color combinations for background paintings are those that combine cool and warm colors or cool and warm tones. Cool colors are the blues, purples, greens, and the warm tones are reds, yellows, oranges. For example, you could have dark blues throughout your background and then accent that with lovely warm orange or yellow light. That brings us as a nice segue into talking about lighting. I'll leave the color wheel for now. I'll leave this link for you in the list of resources. I'm going to hop back over to Photoshop and just explain a couple of things that I want you to keep in mind when it comes to lighting. The main thing that you need to know about lighting in your composition is where is it coming from. You have to know that and determine that for yourself. Even if you're just choosing yourself where it's coming from, you need to keep that in mind throughout the painting process. The other thing that I want you to be aware of is that lighting is what gives anything its form and structure. Here's a basic round shape. If we determine that the light source is coming from the top right, then this side will be in light, and we can have even a high light at the top. This side is going to be in shadow. Then somewhere right here in the middle is what's called the local color or the hue of what we can now see is a rounded sphere. Before it was a flat circle, but the minute you light it and add shadow, then it instantly gives form and solidity to this object. Now it looks like a 3D actual shape. If you were painting a structure, for example, you could block it out in just one tone. Then by carving into that shape with lights and darks, you can define its structure. The very last thing that I want to mention, though, about lighting is just be aware that light falling on an object doesn't necessarily have to be a lighter shade of that object's color. It doesn't have to be a lighter shade of gray in this instance. Give consideration to the color of your light in your painting. It could be a blue light or a red light. This is especially important when you start relating color to your painting and you start making color and light work together. If you've been painting with cool colors, your light could be warm, as I said before. That would really impact the contrast in your design and therefore make your painting a lot stronger. I hope that wasn't too overwhelming or too much information. I tried to keep it as simple as possible because the best way to understand these concepts is to practice with them. Up next, I will, first of all, explain the brush set that I've left for you. I'll go over some of the painting techniques that I use, they're very simple, and then we'll get started working on the color concept for our project. 6. Digital Painting Techniques: In this video, I want to explain the Brush set that I've left for you and also to introduce you to some of the techniques that we'll be using in the next project. If you go to your resource folder, you'll find that I've left a file here for you called BG Brushes.abr. To install this, all you have to do is click and drag it into Photoshop. I just tend to hover over the Photoshop icon, release and then once you're in Photoshop, just make sure to hit B on your keyboard. That brings up what activates the Brush tool. You'll see it here on the tool section and then with that selected if you come up to the top here to where the properties for this tool are and just click down on this sort down arrow, you can see there the folder of Brushes should be there. Now, what I'm going to do is open up my Brushes up in a new window, I'm going to go up to Window, Brushes and that's going to open up here and stay open while I switch and swap between different Brushes. I would encourage you to just go through this whole set, there's not a lot of them and experiment with them, see what each of the Brushes does. You'll see that some of them do have quite a lot of texture built into them, some have opacity like this one. It really depends on the pressure of your stylus. You can make opaque marks or you can make very soft Brush marks. These first few ones, the first nine or so, are really the ones that I use the most. I use them to get swaths of color down onto the canvas really quickly. If you want to increase the size of your Brush, hit the closed square brackets on your keyboard and then to decrease the size of your Brush hit the open square bracket. What I want to point out in this video is how I'm going to be selecting and mixing colors. While you're in Brush mode, if you hold on the Alt or the option key on your keyboard, that brings up this eyedropper tool. keep holding down Alt and you can select any color that you want. When you release it then you're immediately back in Brush mode without having to hit B again and you can keep working, keep painting. This is really useful to select colors that are already on your canvas and it's also useful to mix two colors together. If a Brush has some texture or opacity, then you can paint over another color and select that overlap. Now you've got a new third color if you like and that's how you can mix or make gradients or gradual transitions from one color to another. You're going to see proper more detailed application of all of these Brushes in the next few videos when we actually start the project for this section, but I wanted you to be aware of the different types of Brushes that you've got and how they work. You see some of them have very specific textures like the spruce forest. I think for that one you really only use it in a situation that's called for a forest, but maybe you can use it as an abstract marker if you really want to. Also, the light beam is very specific and the water Brush. Another technique that I'll be using in the project is to select an area and paint within it. Here I'm going to use the Marquee tool, the circular one. I'm going to drag out a round shape just like this and now we can paint inside it without having to worry about the edges like very easily make a sun as in this instance. In the second project of the course, I will cover exactly how to select shapes in much more detail. But I think things like this will be really useful to practice with for now and that's pretty much the extent of the way that I'll be working for the next couple of videos. Up next I will explain color concepts and how to create a little thumbnail and then we'll get into making a abstract painting for the Martian or Robot Planet. I'll see you in the next video. 7. Creating Thumbnail Ideas: Creation color concepts or color keys, is sometimes known as ideation. Basically these are quick, loose thumbnails of ideas for color schemes. They're not finished background paintings. They're just explorations or starting points. In this video, I'm going to show you how to select a color swatch or a color scheme and how to get started on your color concepts. Always your starting point is going to be your reference material. Now I really want you to understand that collecting reference material and building up a library of reference images is really a crucial part of your creation process. Your ideas don't necessarily come out of the blue or come out of your unique imagination. They are nearly always sparked by something that you've seen, something that you've experienced. Your creativity really comes from taking something that already exists and making a brand new thing. That's how you use reference material. It's not copying. Think of it as sparking new ideas and new ways of imagining things. With that said, the way to choose a color palette if you don't have any ideas for one yourself, would be to find images that you love or you really like the specific color scheme or the look of the image. You could take a screen grab from one of your favorite movies. Or you could use an artwork or a digital painting that you really like, or even grab the colors from a photo that you took. Google, Pinterest, Artscape, all of these websites, are incredible resources for images. This image here is an example of a series of thumbnails generated from a couple of color swatches that I have. I'm going to walk you through exactly what I did to work up these thumbnails. If I open up my folders here, I'll quickly show you that I started out with the selection of colors swatches. Now, I got these from Adobe's colored website and I am going to show you now in a minute how you generate these swatches. But before I do that, because it might be a bit complex, I just want to show you that you can also pick your colors from an image. Just bring any image into Photoshop. Hit "I" on your keyboard to bring up the eyedropper tool or the color selector tool. Hover over any part of the image. You can select a color and then switch to B and paint up a swatch of three or four colors exactly like this. That's the exact same thing as these color swatches. But just so that you know how it's done, if you do have a screen grab or you've got a photo that you really like, let's quickly pop back over to color.adobe.com. This is the page that I showed you before where you can explore different color harmony rules. But if you go on to the next tab over, it says extract theme. Here you can select a file from your computer. I've got this image here that I downloaded from unsplash.com, it's a royalty-free image. I'm going to just click "Choose", and then basically Adobe selects the dominant or main colors throughout that image and generates this swatch up here. Then just hit "Save", go into your library from here, and then you can download it as a JPEG. I'm going to bring that into Photoshop. Then just select it all, copy it and open this document, paste it down with my other color swatches. I'm all set now. I'm going to work with this color palettes for my matching robot landscape. I'm going to make a new layer and then go up to the rectangular marquee tool and just click and drag out a rectangle. It's not going to be an exact ratio of 1920 by 1080. It doesn't matter. Just something that's rectangle is fine. Now, I'm going to select and paint from these colors until I've got all of them in my thumbnail. I'm just getting them down in any way at this stage, this is not about composition. It's just about painting free form, switching up brushes if necessary, blocking in colors, and you can even mix the colors up as well at this stage. I'm very loosely thinking about sky and land. But beyond that, I'm not thinking at all about making something that reads as an image. This process takes a few minutes. It's not an instant thing. Even if it looks as though I'm doing it fast, you can certainly take your time and don't rush. Once you've got all the colors done, then you can start to very loosely block in some compositional elements if you want. If this is a landscape, maybe there's going to be some mountains in the background. I'm thinking maybe there's rocks and things in the foreground. Just like that. Then now I'm going to just build up the sky area a bit, and that's it. That's a perfect one for now. I'm going to leave it there. Not do any more details, but I'm not going to stop with just one. This is my first attempt, and you don't want it to have your first attempt be the only one. So I'm going to make a few more of these. I want to have at least three or four thumbnails. This time though, I'm going to go to my other colors swatches and see if I can use a different color palette and see what happens. I'm literally going to repeat the exact same process. There's nothing different at all. It's the same thing again, using different brushes, color picking as I go, and just building up a rectangle. That took me about 20 minutes in total, I would say. You shouldn't really spend much more time than that. If you find you're spending a lot more time than that, then possibly you're putting too much detail into your thumbnail. The main thing that you want to try and do is get contrast, a definite sky, a definite ground plane, and one or two compositional elements in there in a very loose way. Once you've got three or four thumbnails done and you're happy enough, then meet me in the next video and I'll show you how to take one of those and work it up to a final painting. 8. Painting from a Thumbnail: These are the four thumbnails that I came up with based on my color scheme. What I'm going to do now is just take one of these and then work it up to a bigger painting with more detail. I know that I want to create a landscape scene. It's going to look like another planet, a Martian or alien planet. What I need to do now is choose one of these, and maybe even I could combine a couple of these and then just scale it up and work on the details. I'm thinking that this one is probably the one that I can see the most potential in. I also really like this one. I don't think this thumbnail worked necessarily, so I can discard it. I could easily make a combination out of all of these colors, but for now, what I'll do is grab this thumbnail. I'm going to hit Command or Control N on my keyboard to make a new document. I'm going to make it 1920 by 1080 pixels. Then if I jump back into the other one, what I can do to copy it over is either grab the thumbnail itself off the canvas and drag it up to the tab of that new document I just made, or you could even select a layer from the layer stack, drag it up to the tab of that document, and then release it once you're in there. It's copied automatically over. Now, I'll hit F on my keyboard. That brings up this viewing pane where I can hold down the spacebar and move the canvas around. I'm going to scale up the image, Command or Control T. If you want to scale and constrain the proportions to make sure it's scaling evenly, you can hold Shift, but I'm even just going to stretch it a little bit. It doesn't really matter. Now I've got an image. It's straightforward. It looks like it's got a sky plane and a ground plane. The horizon line is clearly in the middle. I don't really mind that. I'm not going for something too crazy or dynamic. From here on, my entire process is going to be that. I'm going to work with what's already here. When I look at this, I can start to see possible hints of mountains or landscape structures. This looks to me like some sort of desert plain. There's possibly rocks in the foreground. I'm going to work with that. Even though I didn't necessarily or intentionally paint details, the beauty of this process is that it offers up pathways to follow or suggestions for imagined worlds that you can follow. I'm literally going to work with what's there and see what emerges. You could paint directly onto this layer, it wouldn't matter, but I'll just add new layers progressively, and just as a side note, I'm not going to worry about naming my layers for this project. I will get to that later on. I'll explain all about how to name and group your layers. For this one, I'm just adding paint marks over paint marks over paint marks. So I'm not going to get too detailed or worried about naming every layer. On a new layer I'm going to use the process that I did in the last video. I'm going to work up colors, but this time with a little bit more attention or intention towards a specific composition. I'm in the brush mode. I'm using Alt or Option as the key to access the color picker and painting as I go and selecting colors. This is like the refining phase. You're refining what is there or pulling things out that are hinted at or suggested. I'm very much working rough. That's also an important point to bear in mind. Don't go into details yet, we're still a phase or two away from actually getting into details. Now I'm thinking that back here is going to have some kind of built structure. It's going to then want to put in something like a space station or, maybe it's a bit cliched, but maybe this planet is some far-flung mining outpost, and this is an abandoned mining station, or is it even abandoned? We don't know yet. Well, definitely I want to have some kind of industrial looking structure and it's going to have a tower, that much I know. Just very, very loosely and roughly block that in. Now at this point I'm going to flip the canvas. People do this a lot when they're doing digital paintings. You'll often see people just flipping back and forth. The reason that you do that, to flip the canvas horizontally is so that your eye can catch compositional errors or areas in your composition that are unbalanced. What you do is go up to image, image rotation, and flip canvas horizontally. Immediately I can see that the left side looks a bit weak, so I'll work on this for a bit just to enhance things here. You could also set a keyboard shortcut to flip your canvas multiple times and just continually flip back and forth without having to go up to image rotation. But the only thing I would say about that is I would caution you not to flip your canvas constantly. Because the whole idea is that when you do flip it, you want your eyes to catch something that looks out of place or that doesn't look right, and if you become so used to seeing it in both ways, then you might not be able to so easily spot those inconsistencies. That looks a lot more balanced. I'll go back to my normal view. What I'm going to do now is use the Lasso tool, and I want to make these mountains stand out and be a bit more definite. This is the free form Lasso tool. What I'm doing is just drawing the outline shape of the mountains, and then I'm going to paint inside my selection. I'm going to hit B on my keyboard to go back to the brush tool. I'm going to select and paint only along sort top edge because that's where it needs definition and a bit of an edge. Then hit Command or Control D to de-select. That looks a lot better. It looks way more prominent in the landscape. Now you can see how far the painting has come with just one layer added on top. I'm going to now work on the foreground rocks a bit more and use the Lasso tool as before. I'm pretty happy with where I'm at right now. I think it looks a lot more like something as opposed to what I started out with, which was just basically a bunch of abstract looking marks. This composition is now all here. All I need to do now is just refine it. In the next video, I'm going to work on adding highlights and shadows and try to bring out the definition and the details in the space station and the mountains. When you're ready, join me in the next video. 9. Highlights and Textures: For this next phase, I've got my color set to this nice complementary blue. It's going to contrast very well with the reds and the oranges in the painting. What I want to do now is work on the sky a little bit more. With that color selected, I'm going to go over to my brushes. I'm going to choose just this brush for the moment, and work on the sky. The sky is a little bit of a mess at this stage. What I want to do is just make it a bit more cohesive looking or work on the gradients a little bit more and get that nice blue tone. Now what I'm going to do is add more details to my mountain range. Like before, I'm using the Lasso tool, so it's just L on your keyboard. Drawing this out, and then with that selection, switch back to the paintbrush. I'm just mixing up my colors, making it a bit of a darker bluer color, just to make it stand out from the background range. At this point, I could start to add textures to this mountain range without actually having to get too bogged down into drawing details. If you just use one of these texture brushes like this one that I'm using right now, you can get away with adding textures that will look quite realistic and from a distance anyway, look like details. That's the nice thing about working with texture brushes. You do have to take your time though and just apply that notion that the light is coming from the central place or in my composition anyway, light will be coming from the central area of the sky, and things on the right side over here will be in shadow. So just very loosely indicating some texture. It's going to give it a bit more of a rocky or like natural organic shapes within the mountain, not just to have it be just one of black color. Remember what I was telling you about earlier where if you add a dark tone or a light tone next to a dark tone it's going to look a bit darker. I'm feeling that my sky now is looking a bit too dark. I think I might actually have to go back in and work on my sky a little bit more and just lighten it up. I'm really glad that I've got a specific and defined polish. Because at this stage, if I was just picking and choosing colors, it would be really hard to keep a cohesive look to the whole painting. At this point, I feel confident enough now to add some highlights into the mountain. I'm using the marker brush, which has quite a very thin edges, and I just want to make one or two little highlight marks just to define this. Now for this space structure or this industrial mining structure. This is going to be just really about adding highlights to the right-hand side of things and shadows or shading on the left-hand side. As I said, my light source is coming from the center, and since this mining structure is over to the left, I can define it by putting highlights on the right-hand side. Lastly, the rocks in the foreground need to get the highlight and the shadow treatment as well, and you guessed this, it's the exact same process. I'm going to use the Lasso tool. I'm going to select areas and then use a textured brush to give the impression of organic shapes. A good thing to know as well, when you've got something selected, if you've used the Lasso tool and you select an area like this, for example, if you want to paint the other side of it, go up to Select, Inverse, and then you can paint on the other side of your selection like I want to give the impression that the ground is lighter behind these foreground rocks. That's actually looking great. I think, as a composition, that's pretty much nearly finished. It's almost at the end. I think there's probably one final phase to go. Everything is there. All the details are working well, so I'm actually super happy with this. What I'm going to do in the next video is show you how to approach the last phase of your painting. If you want to add what I call atmosphere or effects, it's really easy. It's probably the easiest part of the whole process. So meet me in the next video and we'll finalize this digital painting. 10. Atmosphere and Effects: Welcome back. Let's see how far we got. We started off with this mess of color as our thumbnail. This was our first pass at refining that and wrestling outer composition. Now, this is the second pass where we added lighting and texture. It's really come a long way from that first concept stage. What I'm going to do now is actually take it to the final stage and finalize things on this painting. I'm going to and resolve the sky a bit better, maybe add a couple of more details onto this, but not too much because you still want to keep this looking like a conceptual, painterly piece. You don't want to start making it look cartoony or anything like that. Plus, also this is supposed to be far away in the distance and atmospheric, so it's more about painting and mood than an actual scene. Then lastly, in this video, I want to show you how to add effects layers for blending modes that'll add another dimension to the whole piece. First up, let me work on my sky again. I'm going to use the Clouds brush this time. It's great, really works wonders at making sky look really atmospheric. I'm just selecting again from the given color scheme in the sky and lightly brushing on some texture a little bit like that, making the gradient come together a bit better. Leave that for now. What I want to do now is knock the station or the structure back a little bit because it's a bit too prominent. It's looking too high contrast for me. I want to make it look a bit more ethereal or far away. What I've done is add a new layer above my sky, and I'm going to just add a few brushstrokes with that same color from the sky. All I'm going to do is just very lightly sweep across, just like that. That's all. Immediately, it gives you a sense of that it's far away, maybe there's dust swirling around it. The only thing though that I don't like about that is I used the Forest Fog brush and it does have quite a definite outline which can make it look a bit like a stamp. It's not a big deal, but all I'm going to do is switch to the Eraser tool. I'm going to hit "E" on my keyboard, then right-click on my canvas to change the brush shape, I'll choose a texture brush and just erase out the edges. If you hide and unhide the layer, you can see it's a very small detail, it doesn't really jump out at you, but it has a good effect, good enough anyway. The next thing that I'd like to do on this structure is give it some lights because the idea is that it should have a bit of a sci-fi feel, and glowing lights are great for giving something a sci-fi feel. What I'm going to do is choose a complimentary color, like the blue, something like that. It's going to contrast with all the reds and oranges. You really only need a few dots to indicate lights. I'm just doing a couple of dots and lines really on the structure. Now I'm going to show you how to change the color of something once you've painted it. Say you put in something like that and you're not sure that you like that blue color after all. What you need to do is just hit ''Command'' or ''Control, U'' on your keyboard to bring up this hue saturation slider. You you also get to this, by the way, if you go up to ''Image'', ''Adjustments'', and choose ''Hue/Saturation''. Then to change the color of the layer that you've selected, you want to work with the hue slider. As you drag the slider along, you can see that it actually changes color of the lights. You can really experiment, see what works for you. I think I quite like this steely blue, so I think I'll leave it there. Then underneath that layer, I'm going to add just a touch of dark to recess, make it stand back a bit more. I might just add light in one or two other places. Perfect. Now I'm going to group all of these layers together; that's "Command" or "Control, G" on your keyboard, once you've selected your layers. Going to add a new layer above all of these, and now I'm going to switch to one of the general brushes up at the top. I need a big soft round brush because what I want to do is add blending modes. Make sure that the layer that you want to apply a blending mode to is on top of everything, and you're blending modes are found over in this drop-down menu. With your layer selected, just drop down that menu and you can scroll through them. What the blending mode does is add an effect or a blending mode, a way of blending the colors together to all of the layers that are beneath them. The nice thing about working with blending modes, apart from adding interesting colors to your painting, is that they can have a very cohesive look or feel to the whole thing. I'm going to go with a red or orange color to really amp up the Martian feel to this painting, and then I can cycle through the blending modes, and maybe I'll choose this one. This is Hard Light, it gives a very definite look, not sure yet. Let me see. I'm going to make another layer. Let's see what the opposite will look like, with maybe a blue tone. I'll set this one to overlay. That looks pretty good, I'll group them, and you can see what it looks like without, and then what it looks like with them, those two layers. Now, the very last thing that I'm going to do is add a moon in the sky. I'll go over to the Marquee tool, I'm going to select ''Elliptical Marquee'', and then on a brand new layer, above everything else, just drag out the marquee, drag at the selection. If you want to make a perfect circle when you are using this, just hold down Shift on your keyboard as you click and drag, and that'll make sure that the selection's perfectly round and doesn't come out oval, then just release, switch to the Brush tool again, pick a color from my canvas. It might take a while for me to get the colors right but I think this will be okay for now. What I need to do actually is just, over top of this, paint a few clouds to make it look like it's sitting in the sky a bit better. Now I'm just going to duplicate this layer. With the layer that the moon is on, with that layer selected, hit "Command" or "Control, J", which will duplicate the layer. Now I've got two moons, and what I want to do is scale this one down. Drag it over, scale it down, and then I'll play around with the blending modes and maybe set this one to screen. Now I'm going to come up to the opacity and just drag the opacity down, and that looks okay. I'll put these layers into a folder, and now if you look at my layer stack, that's five separate passes, really. I'm going to leave it at that. I think that this is a fully finished, resolved concept painting, and you can see where we started off from, where we got to. First of all, we went from here through that phase, then we've got a bit more detail, then we added light and texture, and then added a bit of atmosphere, and the last thing was the sky with those two moons. I will leave this file for you, and you can dive into it and see how I built it up progressively, or you can even use it as a starting point yourself for your own painting. I just want to say that when you're working on your own project, I can't stress enough, the main approach throughout all of this, or the approach that I took anyway, which I find very helpful, is to try and stay as abstract as possible for as long as possible. The details really only amounted to some small sections, and I only put them in at the very end of the process. Also, the last bit of advice is just let the brush set do half the work for you. You've got a lot of brushes with great textures, and they'll give you all the detail that you need if you use them sparingly. It's over to you now. Have fun with this project, I'm really excited to see your work. If you get through it and you have a finished piece, please post it up, or if you've got any questions, send me a message if you need any help.