Characters in a Scene: Sketch to Digital

1. Trailer: Hi, I'm Patrick Brown and welcome to my new class on Skillshare called Characters in a Scene: Sketch to Digital. Following on from my last class, Characters in Motion, where I had shown you my penciling process. This time we're going full digital and you'll see the insights on how I go about digitalizing my drawing. For this class, you'll see my entire process on this piece of fan art, based on video game from Naughty Dog called The Last of Us. I'll walk you through how to create sharp, clean line work, how to colorize your scene. I'll talk in depth about my shading and lighting process and also, I work on a fully detailed background. As most of you know, I've always been about fan art. So for this class, I want you to create some fan art of your own. It could be as scene from your favorite movie or game, it could be a character from your favorite TV show. I'm giving you a complete freedom here, it could be anything you like, just have fun with it. I think it's very important that you work on something that you enjoy. It'll motivate you and you'll even find that it'll improve your skills more because you enjoy it so much. Once you have your sketch, you're ready to begin the class. 2. Setup and preperatons: Hi, everyone. Welcome to the class. Before we get started, I think it's very important that we talk about setup and preparations. So, I'll try and cover a few things that we need to do before moving onto any digital art. Resolution is a good one to start off with. When I create a new document in Photoshop, I like mine to usually be set at about an A3 size. If I'm doing a landscape one, I'll do it at about A3, which is about that right there. So, 42 centimeters wide by 29.7 deep, and I always like to have mine set about 200 and RGB. The reason that I set mine up like this is, I don't like my file sizes to be too big and it's mainly just because they take forever to save. So, if I worked on something that was about 400 resolution and it was like an A1 size, I think that that would really drag me down a bit and take up a lot of space. Especially if you do a lot of artwork and you store them on your hard drive or a USB stick, you'll run out of space fairly quickly. I think it's really important just to keep that in mind before you start anything, is just manage the size of your documents and it's good enough resolution this one, A3 size, 200 resolution. That's perfect for me and that's all I ever need. So, work on something like this, and that's where I'll create my scene. So, if you've got a sketch that you've worked on, spend some time on it, make sure it's something that you're really happy with and something that you can be quite passionate about, and really enjoy working on because I think that's really important as well. So, I'm going to show you a sketch that I've just got prepared here which are from, it's just something that I'm actually working on at the moment but I've barely started it. It's actually quite a dodgy sketch so don't judge. I haven't cleaned it up yet. It's just Metal Gear Solid Ground Zeroes. I absolutely love the game. I always play through it and I really enjoyed it. Quite short but good. I'm really exciting for The Phantom Pain as well. So, I've got the sketch and this is what you'll do. You'll have a drawing that you've just drawn up, or a lot of people just draw straight onto their computer, which is fine. I admire a lot of people that do that actually, and I think it takes a lot of talent to draw freehand straight onto the computer out of your head. But, me, personally, I like to be a bit more traditional and draw with pencil and paper. So, here, I've got Snake, Big Boss. Like I said, this is very sketchy, I usually have cleaned up these lines. So, once you have your sketch and it's ready and it's scanned in, you'll open it up in Photoshop like this. It'll probably be quite a large document or however it looks. So, what I want to do is I'm just going to transfer it into my working file that I'm going to work on, and I'll just drag it out and literally just drag and drop my sketch into the picture, into my canvas. So, here it is and this artwork will be, I'll probably do a horizontal for this one. You just got to picture in your mind how you want to plan your image. You want to make sure that you're prepared before you begin and know exactly what you're going to do. It's very important to have direction. Another thing I'll just explain is how to prepare your sketch before you begin doing any outlines for digital work. I can't really just work on it like this because any outlines that I do will clash when I'm with the sketch before, it's going to be very difficult to know what's going on. So, what I'll do now is I'm going to need to make the sketch a bit more manageable and easier to work with before I do my outlines. So, the way I do this is, this is my sketch layer right here, and I'm going to make that a bit more faint. So, I'm going to go to the opacity and I'm going to take that down to about 50 percent. As you can see already, it's going to be much easier to work with when doing my outlines. So, now, I'm going to just make a new layer, which will be my outlines, and I'll name that. So, now, I'll talk about brushes. Now, the one I use, the main one that I use for my outlines which is this one here. That one is just set as a basic hard brush, it's a round brush. If I go over here, you'll see my preset, my settings. It's just set to, on shape dynamics, it is set with just pen pressure, which you'll need a graphics tablet for this to work. I hope everyone has one. I use a Wacom Intuos4 and I've used that for a few years now. I also have a Cyntiq, which I've used a bit. But for this tutorial, I will be using my graphics tablet. Let's set to pen pressure, which is what's needed, and basically this one as well. Then, here set to pen pressure also and about 50 percent. Your line will end up like this, which is pretty much perfect for what I need. I've also ticked smoothing on for that one. I'm not quite sure if that makes any difference, it doesn't seem to change it. But, I guess I just like the sound of it, that I think that works. Let me do something which might work a little bit smoother, a bit more fluid. So, as you can say now, I can go through and create outlines as I like. Now, I've set that to about 20 which is too big. So, I'm sizing it up and down, and I'll have to set mine to probably about 10 when I start. Now, I won't cover this. I won't talk about the outlines too much because that's actually going to be the next step. But, basically, you can see now that with our sketch, a bit more easier to manage and makes everything much more easy to use. So, I'll talk about a few other brushes that I have set here. Now, I can't take credit for this because they aren't mine. I've got them from, likely you'll find them on the Internet. You get some really cool brushes that you can download, some brush presets. I have a bunch of ground brushes, grunge brushes, and a lot of them are really unique and really add to your artwork. I've got a bunch in here that just works for textures. I use them for, if there are leaves and foliage and blood spatter. I got a lot for rust and grime, a bit of dirt. So much is involved later on in my artwork process that I kind of rely on a lot of these brushes here. So, my main brushes that I like to use, all thanks to Dan LuVisi, and he is an absolutely brilliant artist. You can see here, he really focuses on the high detail and he really relies on brushwork. So, he's actually got a bunch of brushes here available to download. You can see the download link up here. His website on DeviantArt, danluvisiart.deviantart.com, and this is where I got my brush pack from and absolutely brilliant stuff, and that's what I like to use for my shading. So, I'll show you one that I have here. Now, this one's great. This one's a hard brush but still has a soft touch for shading. So, even though I set to black, as you can see, it's going to be dark and the harder I press, the darker it gets and then the lighter I press, it turns out lighter. So, that one's a good one. That can be used any way you like, and really it's just a really great brush to use. There's also the other version of it but in soft brush, and this one is my main one that I rely on when it comes to shading. It works exactly the same. The harder I press, the darker it gets. The lighter I press on my tablet, the lighter it is. So, like see there, and then I pressed harder and it comes out really thick and dark. So, that's great that one too, I really rely on that a fair bit. He has a bunch of others in here which are more grungey, and that's not all this list. This isn't all his, but I think they're down the lower half here. So, they're absolutely fantastic. So, that's the brushes and they really help a lot. So, we're almost set to move on now. I've covered how to place your sketch and I'm ready to move on. The sketch is in Photoshop and we can work with it now, do the outlines. So, I'll show you the next step and we'll continue by doing the outlines of our character. 3. Line work (Part 1): Hey, everyone. Now, I'm going to move on to the line work and show you how I go about doing some outlines. Okay. So far, just opened up a piece of artwork that I've been working on for The Last of Us. Here we have it. So, a lot of this has has taken me a long time to do this. I've actually gone through and I've drawn each character separately. It might look like it's all compacted into one but as you can see here, I've set everything up in different layers, everything has its own. Let us hide these layers and show you what's visible and what's not. They're all actually quite separate. So, I've actually made everything on separate layers just so I can have complete freedom, I've placed everything where I think it would work best. Obviously, when I was creating a sketch, I would think about where people would be placed but I would just draw them separately and when I drew the clicker over here, I had her facing this way like a little bit of a creepy scream. Joel here is getting tackled and pulled down at the same time he's fighting off another. I really wanted to get a lot of intensity in this picture. I absolutely loved this game, it's one of my all-time favorites, I would have to say. Such a great game, so well done. I really think that it would be a great example to show for this class because it has absolutely everything involved in it. We have action, it's intense, I got a lot of movement. If you've done my first class, I would have covered everything that this picture involves here in that class. So, if you haven't checked it out, it's probably worth having a look at it and you can do this class as well so that that way, you get the entire package, you can learn my entire process pretty much from start to finish. All right, so I'm just going to explain this. So, what I've done here is just to make things easy for myself, I've grouped all the sketches that I've got here and I've put them all into one folder. So, when I hide that folder, everything's just compacted into one and it makes things a lot easier when I want to deal with all of those different sketches without having to flatten them into one layer. Before I start my line work, I'm going to grab the sketches here and I'm just going to take the opacity down to about 50 or so. That will give me a good vision, I can still see my sketch but it's just faded back nicely so that when I do my line work over my outlines, where it should be a lot stronger, I can see the difference, I can see what I'm working on. So, down to New Layer and so I'm going to work on our main character here, Joel. So, I'm going to make a folder for him and I'll rename it, Joel, and that line that I made, I'm going to place it inside of that folder and I'm just going to rename that layer, Outlines. Okay, so now we're set. So, I'm going to grab the Brush tool and pull down here. I'll show you my settings again on this brush here, this is my main brush that I use. So, if I go over here to Brush Presets, you'll see that it's set on Shape Dynamics, 10 pressure, and Pen Pressure there with 50 percent. So, as I start, I'll just quickly explain that my image size is a little bit bigger than the A3 size, so 46 centimeters wide by about 29 deep. That's just my resolution just so you get an idea. So, when I do the outlines, I'm just going to have a bit of flow going through so I just [inaudible] that and I'm just going to go through and see if I can talk, it's going to be hard to talk about this while I'm doing it. I'm not used to it, to be honest. You can also grab your Eraser tool here because I do use that a bit and I'll set it to the same brush for my eraser here just if I want to clean some things up and then I can press B, I quickly tap B to go straight back to the brush. Okay. I'm just going to work on his face, trying to get [inaudible] right. Now, when you're working with your outlines, try not to take too much time on how they look. If you sit there and you really try and focus and have slow lines, you don't get that nice flow. See, I like to just throw my lines together. That way, you get a lot more movement and it comes through really nice. I'm just going to work on these eyebrows, see how I keep pressing Control Z when I'm not happy with it because that's just me, I'm fussy when it comes to this stuff. I just can't be happy with it. I have a lot of comments saying how do I get my lines so crisp. Well, it is probably because I sit there and I undo it all the time until I know I've got it right. But basically, it's just the flow I like. As I said before, I like to make sure that I throw my lines into it like that. That way, if you sit there and you really take your time, you can get some nasty edges. But if I sit there, I find it's quite relaxing actually. It does take a lot of practice until you get it right but it is worth it in the end to just take your time. See, I'll explain here, too. When I'm doing finer details like little wrinkles in his eyes here, I wouldn't press too hard and do thick lines like that, it just doesn't come out right. So, try to do some thin ones, little thin lines that just represent creases in his eyes. Otherwise, they come out too prominent. But even so, I do have a trick later on there, I'll be explaining where and when to make these lines a little less prominent even more because if we keep these lines as dark and as thick as even as they are now, he would probably look like an old man even though he is, in this game, quite old. So, later on, what I'll be doing is I'm going to select all these lines. I'll explain it all later in more detail but basically, I'll be lightening them with the skin tone to help them blend a bit more with that. They'll still be seen but they'll be a little more hidden and not so prominent, just a nice little touch. 4. Line work (Part 2): Okay, so, what I did here is a good example. So, his beard, he's got an epic beard and, it's got scruffy too because, I mean, it's the end of the world. Come on, I mean, this dude has no time for grooming. So, what we're going to do here is, you can make it as sketchy as you like. Don't worry about how neat it looks. We don't really want to go for neat when it comes to this. He's got pretty scruffy beard. He gets thrown around a little bit. So, he doesn't really have time to look good. So, don't worry if your lines aren't joining. I mean, this not only just special hands this within his face and we can actually hold it together with stronger outlines on the outside, so I'll show you as I get to it how I go about all these. They kind of merge up here with these sideburns, which are also here. Another nice little neat trick is when you've got your outline like this, and you want to check that it does match your sketch. Just go over here to your eyedropper and you can hide you layer and just have a quick look at this sketch underneath and just make sure that you're happy. So, down here I'd like this just to be a little bit more edgy just so I can give in a bit more of a chiseled look. All right. So, now that I've done the outlines for a Joe, I might move on to this guy down here. One that is pulling him down. So, what I'd like to do next. Yes, I think I'll just hide his layers. So, I'll just hide Joe for a little bit. Now I want to go to. I'll create a new layer above these sketches layer. So, create a new layer. I'll also want to group this into a new folder. So, new folder, call that charcoal since he's pulling him down. And then I'll pick my outlines layer inside of that folder and I'll call that outlines. It's just a bit more organized. Now, yeah, I'll just start doing the outlines for this on there. Just make sure that I'm black and I have my brush and straight into it again. So, now that I've finished outlining this character here, I need to kind of make sure that he is placed over the top of Joe's layer because he's more of above him. So, we'll show Joe's layer and see here how all these lines clash and it's hard to say what exactly what's going on. So, maybe the charcoal layer above Joe, I'll just have him a sketch. My preferences here is to actually- I like to make sure that as I'm going I can still see everything clearly. So, if I want to clean this up so that I can actually see this guy's arm is overlapping, what I usually do is, I'll start with Joe so I'll just hide this for a second. Now, what we have to make sure first is that all of our outlines are actually closed in because I'm going to make a selection around the outside. When we don't want that selection to slip through inside of their side of the lines here. So, I think Joe's one is pretty much right because I'm going to make a solid color just a filling inside of him so that I don't have to see the sketches or anything behind him. This is what we'll be using when we do the flat colors later. So, what I'll do is I'll get my magic wand here. Just Magic Warn one tool, you have to select your outlines layer, and then we're just going to click in the background, and I like to hold Shift and click one more time because it kind of just hugs that little bit tighter on the outlines. Now, what we're going to do is you want to make sure you get all empty space on the outside. So, around here and it hasn't caught this little section just yet. I'm going to hold Shift and I'm going to click again. Maybe twice just to get that little area. Under the tag here there's a little area there. There is one here see between his legs, because it will closes off here. So, we need to hold Shift, there we go. Something's gone wrong there and all the selections say tree inside of these pants layer. So, that's where I need to close off this little gap down here.Just get my Brush tool and I'm just going to close that off right there and I can select all that. Okay, so now that we have our outer selection it seems weird, but this is what we're going to do. I find this is really quick way. It's actually a head start to flat colors section as well. So, I'm going to make a new layer and I'm going to place that layer under the outlines, and I'm just going to call that solid. Now, what we do is we're going to go select Inverse, so that's going to totally flip out selection around. So, now Joe is actually selected himself inside. Then I'm going to go Select, Modify, Contract, yeah, by one. What we're going to need to do is we're going to go here and select just a lot gray just so you can see a difference of this section is. So, I'm going to fill that, just Edit, Fill or Alt Backspace, it's a quick shortcut. And there we have it. So, I can zoom out. Now, we have Joe as a solid piece all held together now and looking pretty cool. So, this one is ready, so I want to overlap this guy, do the exact same. So, I've going ahead and finished this guy as well. He's now got the solid layer underneath and he's overlapping nicely above the Joe's layer. So, they work well together now and ready to move on to the next part. 5. Line work (Part 3): So, I'm just going to jump ahead now and complete the line work on all the other characters in this end. Now that we get a good idea on how I go about the line work and everything else to say. I'm just keeping the flow going and making sure that everything looks neat and tidy and I'm just going to speed things up a lot more just so that we can see how it all goes and then we'll be able to move on to the next step. The outlines are now complete on every character. All the details in. Everything is held together nicely. So, in an awesome bold are on the edges to make it pop out a little bit more and allow characters are all organized separately. I have my sketches at the bottom there because of that rod at the back and always in the appropriate order to be on top of each. For instance, the clicker is in the backside he's got folded on top. So, I've got the dead guy above the clicker, all organized properly. I've got all this flat times here the solid colors just to this front guy here. He's got the solid color you can see, just to help us see everything a bit better. The next step will be flat colors and I'll be showing you how to lay those out on skin color, hair color, the top and the weapons everything like that. So, let's move on to the next step. 6. Flat Colors: So, moving on to flat colors. What I start with first is, I will select a layer for the character I want to work on. Say, Joel, and we're going to get into that solid layers that I made to this gray tone that you can see right now. See, if I hold control and just do a quick layer selection, you can see that it wraps around his entire body. This is how I want it to work. So, I want, this is going to stay on the bottom the entire time, this solid layer. And, I am going to build all the other layers base of this one. Basically, I'm going to cut pieces off of this one and copy and paste it onto a new layer. So, I'll do it as we go into bit. And then you, get what I mean. Okay so, let's say that I want to start with his skin tones. I'm going to go up here and I'm going to select the Polygonal Lasso Tool. This is how I do things. So, let's just select that. Now, let's just grab his face and his chest there. So, we basically want to, you just have to look at your outlines and you are just going to select the area that you want to be the skin tone. Let's say, it's going to end up as just a shape. So, I'm basically just clicking through with my Polygonal Lasso Tool. And when I get to it, it's like this, and you got this empty space here, which is it's got nothing to do with your solid layer. You don't even have to cut carefully around the edges. You can just go wherever you like because we're going to fix that up soon with a minus selection. So, I'm this going back through around where his beard is, set his skin tone. Well, it's not really but I'm going to use it as it's lighter. Keep going around here and down. Back to where I started, it's kind of just dot to dot with the select tool. So, just click and click; and just a little bit here where you can see his skin under his shirt there. Just grab that. Double click to close your selection. Then for the forearm, we're going to do the same. All right. So what I do here, I'll use the fist as an example. Now, you can see my selection around the edge there. It's that and it's kind of in them in the empty space. What I'll do is, I'll go into my solid layer, which has made our selections on. I'm going to hold control, shift and alt, all at the same time. And when I click on that once on the solid layer, it will snap my selection to the edges where I want it to be. Now, it's only selecting my solid layer and it's also- I still got the fine selection that was cut through carefully around. So now, it's that simple. All I can do now, all I need to do is get a solid layer. Make a new layer above that, call it skin. And now, we're going to go down to your color picker. And, find a nice skin tone. If you're not too sure exactly what's skin tone, have a look at some references; and get the eyedropper and you can select a skin tone from another image. I've done it a million times so I kind of know roughly where to get it from in the color picker. You can always change it later with few saturation. I'm going to select this tone. I might go a little bit stronger. I think he's got a bit of tan, a little bit. Maybe not. Okay. So now, you've just got to go and edit fill; or as I like to just do a Alt backspace. And then, it will fill in your tone. And there we have it. I'm actually liking that tone a little bit. So, I'm just going to go to levels and lighten that a little bit. Yeah, right there and deselect. So, there's his skin tone. Now, I'm going to go and do his hair color. So, same technique, and I can now work off because we're doing his hair color which is inside of his skin tone. I'm going to make a new layer above that and call it hair but we need to make our selection. So, I'm going to click back to the skin layer, which we just made and I'm going to make a selection where the hair would be. I'm just going to cut around the Polygonal Lasso tool and then I'm going to go right back to where I started. So now, that was a bit tricky, but if you do it enough, you'll be able to see, find your layer better, just start with that original selection. I just kind of select these eyebrows as well separately. So, I just hold shift. So, click mild selection and I can make a new one. So, I hold shift again. So, shift, yeah and I'm just going to make another switch with his eyebrows. Double click, place my selection. Now, here his mouth is actually is a skin tone. So, I need to do a minus. So, I'm going to hold alt to make a minus selection. Pretty much, I'm just cutting a hole out of my selection, so bits I don't want. Choose the skin tone of his mouth, I just want to keep the beard enclose the selection. There we go. So now for his hair color, which I will make. I just need to do that thing again where I go control, shift and alt same time; and then click once on your skin layer and I will snap the selection. So, you get rid of all that ugly space around. So, just grab my hair to be dark brown, maybe a little saturated, yeah. Then I'll do my fill into the hair layer, and now we have your hair. I'm going to make it a bit gray layer. If I go hue saturation, what this type of saturation there, it's not so strong. Now, I can deselect. So, the steps are just repeated now. I'm just filling out each section with the appropriate color. It's very important, I think, to have everything organized this way. It really helps lighter down the track when I'm doing all the shading and lighting because it's much easier to just make quick selections of a single section. Another thing to keep in mind when filling out these flat colors is, keep them all at medium tone. Say, not too dark and not too light. I like to keep in mind just at a medium. Okay so, I think he is ready. Yeah. That same process will be repeated over all the other characters, onto them as I go. I'll just fill everyone out. Get them all ready and prepared. We'll start on Ellie next. Okay. So, to do Ellie's colors, flat colors, I'll just have to layer. And we're going to work with that solid layer again. Same process as we did before. I'm going to make, I'll actually grab the shade color. And, I'm going to fill that solid layering with it because I think that's what the majority is. And it's all repeated here from now on though every character. So, I'll just go ahead and fill out the rest and make sure that we have all sections of the character's body complete, ready to go. 7. Shading (Part 1): All right. As you can see here, I've laid out all the flat colors. They're all in their own folders all organized properly. So, with the Clicker, you got of names, each layer separately with hair, teeth, mouth, everything is separate, makes things much easier for this next step. Now, we're going to do the shading and I'll show you my technique of doing that. All right. So, I'm going to start with Joel and I've already layed out, just on the right here, I have placed two references. I don't really need them but because I've got a bit of an idea of how I want to do my shading but I mainly have these here so that I can see some of the shading features of his face like, for instance, he has the little double crease between his eyes. I could have done any shading out there but this really gives me an indicator that his certain face has these little wrinkles and cast their own little shadows in a unique way. Same with his eyes, I want to get to that squinty look going in and they give me a good guide. So, if I just zoom in, I'll start with his face. Okay. So, I'm going to show the skin tones. Now, what I'll do here is I'll select my skin tone layer and I will go Image, Adjustments, Hue Saturation, and we'll just leave it off Colorize like that. So, as soon as the dialogue box pops up, I'm just going to drag that down to about 35. I won't worry about any saturation. Press "OK." Then I'm going to go up and get more eyedropper and I just want to quickly select that tone of the shade that I just made and that's going to store it into my color picker. Then we're going to go undo, Control Z, and get my brush tool. So, that shade that I just got is now stored in my color picker and I'll be using that for the shading. So, that's just how my technique works. I like to have this as the median color for the skin. Then down here, I'm going to have the color adjust grabbed as the darker shade. Later on, I'll be doing the lighting. So, up into the brushes and I'm going to select the brush that I have here, it's just a feathered, nice soft brush, so it's great for shading, and I'm just going to size that down a little bit. That size of this brush, maybe about 175 for this, I'm going to hold Control and I'm going to click once on my skin layer, that's just going to make a nice selection around his face. Then I'm just going to work off looking at these two references and I'm just going to shade then the side of his face like so. You zoom out a bit, you get a better idea. Basically, just going around. As I said, that's how fine it works. Now, you don't want to go too crazy with this softness, I don't like to make this more prominent, the soft shading. I got to keep in mind that I still am going to go through over again and I'm going to do some hard shading. So, I'm going to make selections and I like [inaudible] to stay in there a little bit more than these so you don't want them to be too hidden. So, just a little on the cheek there, a bit more shading here, just around the edges, just real subtle. Then under the eyes, it will be fairly dark. Under the nose, it will be a bit dark as well. Now, I'm going to set my lasso tool. Now, this is what I use to do my sharp shading, it's just quick easy selections. So, I'm going to start with just the aftershading of his face, like, biggest elections. So, I'm going to come down like so and then I'm going to select, say, right under his eyes there and I'm going to grab all of the section where the wrinkles join there and then I'm going to make sure we get that eye socket. Can be tricky trying to work out where it's exactly going to go. I'm going to go down through his nose, this is one big selection, and then I'll just go back to where I started. Now, as you can see, I've made just a big selection to the right side of his face which will go dark. If I fill that in now, you'll see what I mean. But I want to make sure that I've got this right first. I'm just going to cut out some of these sections that I don't want to show too much. I'm just holding Alt and it gives me a minus on my lasso and that's going to allow me to cut holes out. So, I'm just going to take a bit out from one of his eye, socket is here. Just I want to make sure there's a little bit of lighting there, maybe through a few wrinkles as well. They might be too prominent because we've already got a bit of shading there. It's different to this side, this is very light here still, but I have darkened that a little. But once I fill it like so, you still see that it leaves that lighter shade there for me still. Maybe a little, just on top of the nose here as well a little bit and another little wrinkle. Okay, so I hope it's [inaudible] right there, maybe a little bit more. I'm happy with that so far, maybe just under his lip there. All right. My next step is I'm not going to just do a straight fill. I'm going to use the gradient tool. I like to use this just for this section because I want to cover a wide range. Make sure that your gradient is transparent. You don't want to have it going from the color in your color picker to a white. You want it to be the second one here where it's transparent so that it's literally just your color you are using to drag across. I'm just going to pull from one end and point across to where I want my gradient to fade out, that's just going to cover that section. So, it's not so strong here, it doesn't have to be. I'm not going to [inaudible] from this end, drag it down to where his eyes, what have we got there, and you can then do shorter ones. Now, you can only use your gradient or you can just use the feathered brush that we had before. Gives you more control but I like to have the wider range so I can just fill bits in there like so. Now, deselect and I'm pretty happy with that. I'll just do a bit more shading up here on his forehead. Just little arc to go down and grab it on that. This is going to be one big kind of, because he has a few wrinkles in his head and I'm just going to close that off there. Again, got the gradient, I'm just going go across. See, I don't want it to be too strong on this one, it's not a harsh shadow. It's just a small little face shading there that I want to have here. We'll do a little bit more up through here. Drag it from this end, it's just really subtle. I'm happy with that. Now, I want to make sure that I get his eyes nice and dark because he's been through the wringer and he's got some really dark something eyes. I'm going to make sure that this eye is just a bit darker around the edges. Under the nose, I really want to make sure that it's actually some harsh shadowing because that's one of the spots where it's really strong shadowing. So, I'm just going to actually fill that under his nose to [inaudible] really bring that out. 8. Shading (Part 2): Then down here, I just want to make sure that his cheekbones are popping out a bit more, so I'm actually going to fill that too. Now, you can do is fill here because it's already quite dark. In order to have anything to show you it's going to have to be a strong hard fill even around here, where his nose is already starting to take shape properly the way I wanted to. Now, I'm going to do another one here, I'm following the guide I've got down in the corner there. I'm going to get my gradient and drag that right down. It's going to shows a bump at the end of his nose. I really want to make sure that I get the lightness right, so just trying to follow exactly what he's got going there. I'm doing another hard one up here, so I'll fill that. Under his eyes, I just want to make sure I make these fully dark as well. I'm just going to fill and didn't really make much difference. All right now, it does have something that's going on through here, selection box style. It should just give you a good guide of how I go about my shading side. So, that's a good one to bring out is cheekbones that, he does have that. Yup, that's working for me. Now, if I wanted to say, "Over here and I want to bring a little a few more touches on this side." I don't want to get rid of my color there yet so, I'm just going to flip that over and I'm going to get my color picker, I don't want to grab that lot tone again. So, now we have a light and we got dark, but I'm going to use that light color and I made a selection here just want to bring us a little bit more with that lighter tone. So, you just want to bring a fuel those turns back that was kind of lost. There's a lot of touches just even his cheek here, just really small, don't want to have that fully come back. I just want to show that it is there, his got a cheekbone, yes, a bit better. Even above just here, above where his eyes, he's going to have eyelid just to make sure that it is showing as well. I can continue with skin, will just continue with the skin tones and do the same technique. So, If I just wanted to select just the neck here, he's neck area and not we've already touched the face, we don't negotiating that anymore. So, just by a quick rough selection around the area you want to work on next, and then I'm just going to go to my skin layer, I'm going to hold control Shift and Alt, click once on it and that'll snap the selection and make it clean. So, you don't get any areas that you don't want to shade. Don't worry about the selection here that shows through his chin, because that's actually covered by a beard, so that's fine. Now, I just go down show his neck and there is going to be quiet dots here because it's covered by a lot of clothing anyway. So, there's a lot of stuff shading, really bring it up through there, get my Lasso Tool that I'm going to show it under his neck is going to be pretty much completely shaded because he's got his chin is what covering at all, so same technique. So I'm just going to shade his hair now. So, I'm doing the same, just darkened and grabbing that story my color picker, [inaudible] go back to that median shade and I'm going to make a quick selection, get my brush out, spice it up a bit. I'm just gong to go through and shade his head. So, I'm looking to make selections and my Lasso Tool just chunks. I'm just going to keep going of that until I'm happy. This is how I do some hair, you got to keep in mind the length of his hair. So, he's got some chunks in this one I'm going to make them larger ones not too thin. You can space them out, you can join some three. This is how I do this one. So, as it goes up most of them will join me, because they're all clashings, and as it gets into the darker section you don't really have to worry too much, because your not going to see it anyway. So, I'm just going to merge them, now I'm going to go through here, it's tricky to because the flow the head changes of it. So, you're going to keep a lot of things in mind really, doing this kind of stuff. That's better. You don't have to worry too much about like getting all this exactly what I'm doing right now, because I'm actually turning like a one. This is only one step of the hair really. I'm going to make more selections later with some even darker shading on it. Same shade, but I'm only going to go a lot, with this one just add a little bit of detail, I'm going to go through again so I can get it right. So, that's going to work for me and I'm going to go zoom out a little bit, get my gradient tool, I'm just going to go over. See I didn't snap my selection, there we go. I'm just filing from the edges each size, a little bit too much. So, here wo go. So, now I've got some details going through that, I'm just going to make some more selections. So, that's probably enough there. I've clean up my selection and other gradient over that. It's a bit better. Yeah, that looks nice. The rest of it later will be the lighting, well it actually really make an effect that. As you shade the eyes now and the teeth take them down to 35, and then I'm going to select that with my color picker, so this is my darker shade stored. Back a step. We'll make a quick selection to that layer, use my brush tool to do the shading. So, I'm going to make sure the shading is coming from the top first, with the eyes. Because the eyes are actually fairly sunken into the shadows at the moment. So, you are not going to see a lot. Especially in these intersections and the teeth. So, this side one is we completely shade it. So, I have a strong shadow on the left. Sorry the right. Then darken above. Now, I'm going to solid shading and I'm just going to some selections above the eyes. So, clean up my selection and gradient down. Now, just quickly explain this section here where I've done the arm and the creating on the clothing. So, I've just gone through one step of selecting and a shade. But, what I'd like to do with clothing, is I go over second tone again. I'll just make selections around these much bigger ones. These are going to be very soft traces. They're not going to be the very visible ones, but they really make a big difference. It really does add a nice effect to the clothing. Let me show you. Where are we? Make some Selections. So, I'll clean up my Selection just to sure. I'm just going to do a quick, softer gradient over once, and that's it. I'll even do a little bit more over here. But, see how I don't really gradient through the middle too strongly. I'll get it back in my history, that's was it was. So, that's what it was. That's what it is now. It's just a nice, little extra touch. So, you add some in detail and you can really see the flow of the clothing a lot better. 9. Shading (Part 3): Just finished shading Joel, all his clothing, skin, everything's just been shaded using the same technique that I was just showing you. And now I'm just moving to Ellie as well. So i'd just, and I'm doing the same thing with her. So I'm going to have to a few references here on the side. So, now that all the characters have been shaded, each one separately shading every single different layer that they have. And just to be, it helps be more organized, and it's just a bit more efficient. So now we're yet but one step closer to bringing them to life, making everything seem a bit more edgier. We have these nice, soft, shading tones going through, everything is still a little bit dull, but I need to get to the lighting which is the next stage and I'll explain how to work with the lighting and really make everything seem a bit more vibrant. So, yeah, let's move onto the next step. 10. Lighting (Part 1): Moving on to the next step which is lighting. I'll show you how to make all our characters a little bit more vibrant now that they have the shading all laid out. So, I'll start with Ellie down here. Basically, I've got to think about my light source which, in this case, is especially if you look at Joel's face. So, he's got a lot of strong shadowing on the right side of him. So, I've decided that the lighting is over here on the left. Probably a bit more above. It's probably, obviously, coming from the sun in this case, because he's outside. So here, now that we know that our light source- where our light source is coming from, I'll just click on Ellie's layer and go to skin. Now, so the lighting in my technique is a little different to the way I did shading. So, we're not going to be using light tones of skin color. I'm, actually, going to use the dodge tool here. What's great about this tool is, basically, all it does is it uses a soft brush. It's already set to a now soft brush and I'm just going to bump that off a bit. But what it does is when I brush over your skin tone, it just lightens up for you. That's what the dodge tool does. We untick Protect Tones. I hate that. I don't know why it's on all the time. Ruins everything for us. You don't want to have it too high in exposure. I like to have it around, just 38, or 35, or so. Now, the way it works is it has three ranges here. We have it set to midtones. There are shadows or there are highlights. What that means is if I selected midtones and I use the dodge tool over her face, it's only going to try and highlight. It's aiming for the midtones. That's pretty much what it does is it won't really affect the shadowing too much. It'll aim for the the medium tones, but if I selected highlights, it's going to aim for the brighter areas of her face and really exaggerate those. If I was going to work on just the shadows and I wanted to lighten those, they'll really lighten those a lot more effective on the shadows. But for this one, highlights is what I use when I do my lighting. I like to keep it on highlights, because I mainly want to aim for the brighter sections of her face. So, I have her face we don't really need to make any selections because we're on her layer and it won't affect any other layers. So, at the moment, I'm just going to try and aim for just this part of the face and just do a quick brush over. It's already going to make it a little bit more vibrant. I'll just do a control Z so you could see the difference. So, this is what it was, it's what it is now. It's just so subtle but adds a lot more effect. I'm not going to really try and bring out the lighting in the bottom half of the face. Make sure you do a couple of little brushes over where her cheeks are. Cheeks are very prominent so want to make sure that they're lightened up a little bit more. The middle of the nose, just the tip. That'll be just a tiny touch there. Now, you don't want to press too hard in the forehead here. If I pressed too hard this is what happens. Then it just looks way out of whack. So, I'm just going really subtle. Now, this is very similar to my shading technique. We're starting off with soft lighting, and then I'm going to go over again, which I'm doing right now. Going to get my lasso tool and we're going to do the hard lighting. So, I'm actually going to make selections say, around her cheek. I might actually just bring up a few references here that I have just so I can get a good idea of exactly where the features are. As you could see here, the top one is probably what I'm aiming towards a bit more because that has the strong lighting on the- sorry, the strong shadowing on the right, which is similar to what we have. Also, this one is very similar, but their base give me a good guide in how I want her lighting to look. The reason I have them there is because I really want to make this resemble her a lot more. If I studied the lighting on her face a bit more and I can nail that down. So, I've made a selection just on her cheek that you can see. I've just made a little, probably not that light actually. Not too much. Just really small. This side will be a lot lighter because it's more towards where the sun is aiming from the side where the lighting is strongest so. I'm going to do that. Now, the nose, as you can see here on this example, her nose is very tan. Just trying a little bit of lighting right at the tip there. So, that's what we'll be doing with her. I'll just do a little wave over that with my dodge tool again, and even up here as well. I'm just going to make a line selection through her nose, just to project her nose and do another little bit of lighting on that, too. Okay. So, that's a good example of how I'm going to keep it at that stage. I'll do her hair as well really quickly. So, I'm just getting my dodge tool, and I'm just going brush over it like so, and a little bit over here. So, this is my soft lighting, which I'm going to make sure we have that at the moment. Little bit down there as well. Then I'll get my lasso tool again. Same thing. I'm going to go through make some selections of streaks of hair. I'll show you a neat little trick that comes to doing hair. Hair can be tricky. But once I've done my selections like this, I don't need my dodge tool go over it. Actually, I'm going to aim to some midtones here as well because I don't want him to be so yellowy and vibrant. Still want to- just one little go over with the midtones and then back for lighting. A neat little trick is, if I get my brush tool out, and we just go up here and select the hard brush. I'll just get my eyedropper. We're going to select the color. Now, we get a really thin to an about four, and you can just literally just go over and make some streaks of your own. Because if you look at here, like over here, it's like as if someone has gone over it with a brush. It's a lot of little light streaks. It would take too long with the selection tool. This is much quicker and it comes out a lot more vibrant the way we want it even on the side. Just going to do a few streaks, bring them out a bit. Also, with hair, I'm just going to do one little shine that's going to come through. Just a separate shine, and this one's actually going to be more into- it's not going to be very saturated because it's like when you get that shine in your hair, a bit of oily kind of- what I'll do is actually get my gradient tool. I'm going to get my white. I'm just going to quickly go over and drag it from a real distance but just so it hits. You don't have to be too strong. Deselect and you'll see that we have a bit of a tone through this. I'll create my selection. I might go back to the dodge tool actually, and just update what we just did there, making a bit more shinier. I'll do the same just over here with top of the hair, touch just here, a little bit not too much. Now, I'll get the gradient tool. I'll drag it down. Then I'll let my dodge tool and I'll just touch it back up again. That's better. 11. Lighting (Part 2): So, I can show you some more. I'll just hide those ones for a second. I'm just going to bring out Joel's references here. I'm going to go down to his Skin layer and then do the exact same. So, as I'm going through Joel's character, the process is the same as I did in the previous clip. A lot of it's just repeated using the Dodge tool and some selections. But I'll show you this process because doing a male character can show different techniques of lighting as well. Because so, here's a good example this is coming through a bit yellowish for me, I don't really like that. So, I'm going to jump between the Midtones. I'm going to go over once, maybe twice. Then, I'm going to go Highlights. It's a little bit of marking him, but I think it's worth it just to get the right tones in his face. Now, as you can see here on his nose, it looks like the lighting runs sharply downwards so I'm going to aim for something similar here. So, I grab his nostril. Looks like it merges a bit more. There we go. Yeah. Something like that. Now, try. Now, here is a good exam- This section here that I'm selecting, because he's got an angry face he's lifting this chunk of skin here that folds over the nose, this is lift up. If you see him and you can see here, it's shining a lot there. It's because this is where the light hits a lot. So, I'm going to highlight that part. This will really bring his face to life a bit more. The chin, cheek sorry, cheek is going to come really prominent as well. You're going to have the little touch on his eyelid there too so. I'll start off in Midtones in all I think here, and then Highlights, and jump in between the two just so I can get all these tones right. Happy with that. I've just had a dash of light come down the side of this face here. Yeah. But what I'm going to do, because if we forego the Dodge tool again it's going to make these bits even lighter, but I don't really want that just for this part I'm doing. So, what I'm going to do is I'm going to actually select with the Eyedropper, that, just that little color and then we go to Gradient from a distance and drag it over. Really subtle, but I think it works. Also, down this side of his face, I just want to do another part of that as well. That's better. All right. Now, just above here where his mouth is, I want to do some lighting on that too, just real small. On his lip, which I need to change color of light, I'll just do a bit more of a reddish tone. Just want to get this too. All right. It's coming together nicely. Now, here's another little trick I like to say. See this one here, I really admire how there's a second part of lighting over here that it's dashing on the side of his face there. The strong shadowing, then you have this tiny line of light on this side of his face. I'm going to give that a bit of a go. But I'm going to make sure that I keep it on a separate layer, so that we're not ruining the shading here. So, I'm going to go to his Skin layer, and I'm just going to go to New Layer above and then call that Lighting. What we're going to do, is I'm just going to make a quick selection. I'm going to use this as a guide, so you can see here it jumps off his eyebrow, comes down, and comes down, then it hits the side of his cheek, and it even goes further down his face. Something like that. I'll use my Gradient tool for this. Now, I haven't decided what tone this will be. This could be a blue dash of lighting on the side of his face, or it'd be just a bit whitish. I'm going to choose, I've just selected a lighter tone, I've used the lighting I've done there, and I'm just going to go Hue Saturation. Sorry, I'll just select my color picker and I'm just going to take the saturation a bit down a bit. I'm going to press Okay. I'm just going to get my Gradient tool, and I'm going to drag it across. It's going to be real subtle. The best part is if you're not happy with it, redo select. You can hide that layer and just see what it looks like with and without. I'm going to get my Dodge tool. I'm just going to go back over there actually with the highlights. Then I'm going to just bring some color into it and just some might- yes, I'm happy with that. Okay. So, I'll just do it here right now. I'll just make sure that he- could use Dodge tool. He's got a bit grayish hair. So, what I'm going to do is I'm going to lighten parts of it. Keep in mind the lighting is coming from the left. Keep that in mind. So, I'm going to do some lighting. Keep it down like so. Even through his beard, and his eyebrow. Now, rest of it is going to be tricky. He's got very scruffy hair. So, this is going to take a little bit to do. What I'm doing is I've got my Lasso tool. I'm just- same as we do with Ellie, going through I'm making some selections, do some chunks and they're going to merge, all these selections are going to merge like so. As you're doing that, try and keep in mind all the little details around, like what you've done before there. Use that as a guide I'm trying to avoid the darker parts, which I haven't done so well. As I get further into the darkness over here, you don't want to have as many selections because this is the first step of this part of the hair. So, it's actually not going to be too prominent this lighting I'm about to do, it's quite subtle really. The stronger part will be coming soon. So now, I'll get my Dodge tool. I'm going to brush over that. This just adds even more detail as you can see, and see when it's done. Now, what I'm going to do here is I'm going to get my Brush tool out, same as it was before, about four point. Really, really small. I'm going to get my color picker and I'm going to select one of these lighted shades of gray that is through his hair. Now, just so I keep this clean, I'm going to hold Ctrl and I'm going to click once on the hair layer. This is going to hold everything I do. It's going to stay within that selection. So, I'm just going to go through it and just with this. I'm just going to get that using the tablet, go through and just make some nice little streaks of hair. The best part is if you think there's too much going on here through his hair, which I do, I'm going to actually grab the color picker again- sorry, the Eyedropper and I'm going to get the darker tone, and I'm going to get back through and I'm going to make a few of this more dark parts come out. I think he just needs a lot more gray actually, a really lighter gray. So, I'm going to get the lightest gray that I can see there and I'm going to take it completely down to gray. So, we want to have some real fun with this. You just want to bring it up a little bit, not much. All right. Now, not sure my selection's still there. Try not to hold back too much. Now, if you don't trust yourself in these parts, you can always make a new layer above really quick and just go, go absolutely nuts. Because you're not actually affecting your layer at all, you're just going through. If you don't like it you can just delete the layer. Simple. Yeah, that's a bit better. All right. We want to make sure that you cover all of his hair as well, get the beard there, the eyebrows and the beard as well. Now, if I really want to be fussy, I can go through and make some even smaller selections, which are going to be much lighter so. That would be like closer to what? Maybe not so much, but I'll go through- I'll really lighten those a bit more with the Dodge tool. Even through here, just a couple. 12. Lighting (Part 3): Okay, and that is how you do the lighting, in most parts to his eyes and teeth at the moment. So, I'm actually going to go and do this just some soft lighting just under his eyes there. Then I'm going to do a little white glow just here and a little circle there, and I'm going use that just pure white and I'm just going to drag the gradient over it. You don't want to make it all white, so I'm just fill that selection there, and we don't want to make him look like he's crying. We just want to add a bit of a white to his pupil, and do the same. Maybe I'll start off, we're going to highlight around that section so, but I'll start off with my dodge tool and I'll just bring out some of that. There, let's do what we did before with Ellie. I'm actually going to go above my outlines layer, actually above every layer. I'm going to create a new one called Shine because I want to make sure that this goes over the black line. You'll see it adds a way different effect because it overlaps the black. I think that's nice. Do you see it? So, we're trying to keep that flow going of that we're going to keep in mind that lighting exists on that side of his face and it will run through his entire body so down here, you'll have lighting coming down the side of his arm and everything which I'll get to later on. Okay for this last part of the lighting, I'd like to just add this little extra part that I have here. So, it's just like a secondary part of lighting, it's coming from a different backdrop somewhere. So, I'd like to add that to that, continue that onto the right side of each character just around the side. I find that it helps them pop out a little bit more. So, I'll just do more on Giles and I've made a layer here for Lynn. Actually, I'll do a new one but I'll just have it just under the outlines layer because we want it to be above all of our clothing and color layers. So I can continue doing that, so I will do a little one on the elbow here. It's not much and I might just do that, change it to white and I'll just do a little gradient fade over the top. It'll settle. It won't take long because I only want to have it in a few parts on the right side of him. So, just a few little selections. No, I don't want it too strong, just subtle and it's going to be a nice little touch. Most of the lighting has been done, so I've done almost every character now and just update it all there. All there on lighting colors. Sometimes you can go over just tiny little parts which I think this is a really nice touch. Just have tiny little selections and then do an extra little fade over and you get those little bumps. Okay, so the lighting now is complete. I've done every character as you can see, all separately. Before they were very flat with just shading, so now adding these little touches of light on their clothing and face really has brought them to life and they'll really be more vibrant now. We're about ready to move onto the next step which will be the details and I'll show you how to really polish this off now that we've structured it out with everything it needs and we'll just give it a bit more oomph. 13. Details (Part 1): Okay. So, now our characters are shaded, and they have lighting. They're really popping out of the scene now. But there's still a little bit to do. I like to make sure that the outlines aren't so, they're pretty much black at the moment. So, I actually like to make the outlines match the area of the color that they have underneath. So, this adds a really nice touch, I think. This is what really will make your artwork stand out. I'll show you how I do it. So, I'll zoom into Joel's face. Now, as you can see, the outlines are black at the moment and that's fine, and all. It's okay to leave it like that. But I really like to make sure that it matches his skin tone in a little bit more. So, if I select Joel's layer, and I'll pull that down, and I'll go to his Outlines layer. Now, I'm not sure if- a few of you have probably seen my old tutorial where I used to individually select with the last detail and I would select certain areas. What I used to do is this: I select the tone, then I'll go to Hue/Saturation, Colorize, and I would lighten that up and saturate it all individually until I thought that that's an awesome, that matches his tone, which is good and in a way that's a bit more doing it manually like that makes- it probably does turn out to be better. But I've got a new trick now, which is just so much quicker and doesn't take half as much time. All I do, is I have my Outlines layer and I change it to Luminosity, in the color modes section. Then, all I do is I go a Hue/Saturation and I just lighten the entire layer to about 10 percent. What luminosity does, it's hard to explain, but it soaks up the color underneath as it's lightened. So, if I lightened that a lot more, that actually becomes almost invisible to that layer or it goes to white actually. As you can see, it really, especially here on his shoulder it matches that green underneath. Before, when I made my overall selections and my flat colors, I brought those colors right to the edge of the outline, as you remember. What that allows me to do is really have this color touch right to the edge. If I had made a selection inside of here and expanded a little, this would be very gray here and it wouldn't look as nice and neat as that. See around his ear, he has that skin tone. But I'm looking into lightening him that much, I've only made it probably, about a 10 percent here. But we're not done, we're not done yet. So, what I'll do now is I'll actually use my Dodge tool. Areas like here around the hairline, I actually want to keep it a little bit dark because the hair here is already quite dark and you want to make sure that it's still held together nicely by the outlines. So, I want to make sure that they still keep him quite dark, but when you have here light medium colors here like the skin tone, I want to lighten those areas so. I could just leave it like this, but I like to go in and just fix up the bits that I would like to say, I'll show you here these wrinkles be down I really want them so bold. So, what I'm going to do is I'm going to be selecting each little wrinkles that I want to lighten. So, I want to keep his nose in as probably at that shade, but the little extra wrinkles that I kind of used as a guide I would like to lighten those a bit more. So, I'm just selecting the ones that I want to lighten here with the last little. Now, around his eyes, he's got all this little wrinkles and this bags under his eyes, see. Now, I'm just going to go, pretty much going around in a circle right back to where my selection began. Now, I let go, and that will complete that selection. Now, all these little wrinkles here, I don't want them so prominent. So, I'm want to go Hue/Saturation. It's already set to luminosity, don't forget. So, all I have to do is literally lighten that bond around another 15 maybe. Yes. Then, I'll press Okay. Now, as you can see, they're starting to go nice dark brownish kind of color. They're still very vibrant, which is nice. I'm going to get my Dodge tool now and go even further. Now, it's still selected. But this forehead ones I don't want them to be so, still I don't want them to be prominent, so I'm going to lighten those a lot more with the Dodge tool, which is pretty cool because we can do everything hands on. These cheekbones, I don't want them to be so dark so. You want them there, but I just don't want them to be as dark in your face. Now, I think that's about right. Because I still want to make sure their the same, but just not so much. I can de-select and zoom out a bit and that really just kind of, I think that's nice. Even without a selection, you can just use your Dodge tool to go and touch up little areas. But remember, if anything is not selected, it's going to lighten as well. So, I'm doing his ear right now, but if I held down too much, as you can see, it's going to affect his hairline here as well. I might actually make a selection of that ear and lighten manually. So, I'm just going to lighten that because I really like that brownish color pop out little bit, which is good. Around the other ear, we'll do that one too. We'll do that with a Dodge tool. This will be better. So, as you can see, it's already working nicely to look exactly the way I want it. Okay. So, the outlines now have a nice tone to them. They match the skin colors and they also match the clothing. Just gives it that nice soft touch to the characters. So that's good. That's all done. The next step for detailing is with skin colors here of the tones. I'll show you a good example. Actually, let's start with Ellie. This is Ellie over here. I'll show you an example. Put those two references here with Ellie. So, with the skin tone, you do have this at the moment, it's just one time, all white 3D skin color. But I want to add a little bit some red to the cheeks and even desaturate some other parts. So, what I would do is I'll find my skin layer, there, it is there, and I will make a new layer above it, and I'll just call this colour. So, we're going to add some color to her face. Now, we need to stay on your color layer, I'm going to press, hold Control and when I click once on the skin layer and just open highlighter. That way we don't have any brush because I'm using the brush, we're not going to have any of that on the outside where we don't want to hold too tight. Okay. What I do next is I get my soft brush, which will be this one here. It's just the average soft brush. I will get my eyedropper. I'm just going to select one of the medium tone of her face color, and then, I'm going to click on the color picker, and this is the tone we have at the moment. But I would like to bring that down into the red a little bit more. It's very right. So, I just press OK. So now, we have a bit more of her reddish tone. But what I'll do, we're on our color layer. I'm going to go to the color mode, and I'm going to transfer that to color. Now, with my brush, I'm going to just shade the difference first. So, when I actually paint over her now, wherever I paint, would turn red. So, it's a bit sunburn there, you see. I just want to add a bit to her nose because generally, nose is one of the spots on your face which go, they go a little bit red. Some deeper reddish tone, not too much because as though, she looks like she has a cold. But just enough to add a nice effect to her skin. Now, I can go over her face. At the moment, I think my brush just feels a little bit too thick at the moment. So, I'm going to take it then to half way, 50 percent, and I'll just put a bit more in her cheeks. I'll buff my brush size, and I'll just put a little bit more colors to her cheeks. Yes, just like that. Chin, also because a chin's a place where you will find there's more reddish tone. This give me a little bit of an idea. I'm just letting you know that the hotspots for these kind of tones, cheeks, nose, and chin. Sometimes in the forehead too, should be creasing her head up, but not too much. Just a little bit. 14. Details (Part 2): Now, hands are also, they usually tend to have a bit of a reddish tone through the fingers and the palms. So, I like to put a bit more red through those. Not too much but just enough. Then, here through the palm, just push it over here as well. Okay. Also, the ears. Ears are usually the pinkest, actually. Just about right that is. Okay. So, now, if I had that color layer, that's what it was. That's where it is now. I think it just adds a nice extra touch to it, which is what we needed. Okay. So, now, I might add a little bit more just to her lips. Not much, but just a little bit more over the top of what we already have there. You can do the same for the eyes. I don't think I would do it too much on this. You could stay on the same layer. If I went into and selected the black, bump up the size and then ran over her eyes, you're actually desaturating it and giving a very- there's no real skin color tone in there, it's just gray. But I don't think I want to add too much of that into her eyes. Just a little. I don't really worry too much about doing it to the other parts of the body because what I'll do it's a little bit different to them once. I would just usually get to say, this shirt, which is that light there. I will go Color Balance which is in the image adjustments. The way this work is at the moment I selected in the Midtones, say if I pull it towards the blue is more. I'm sure it's going to move that way into the blues because it's already red. But what I want to do is I want to make sure I just grab the shadows, and I like to just get the dark areas of this shirt, I want to make it a bit more blue. So, I'm going to pull towards that blue, and I want to pull it towards this cyan over here. That will just make the shadows a bit more bluish but not too much. It seems like I could also darkens that more too. So, I don't really like. I'll just press Okay and I'll just want to see the difference. So, Controls Z. That's what it was, and that's what it is now. It would work really well for [inaudible] shirt here. Changing the shirt, tying a little bit more would be would be nice. So, I've just selected Jays shirt color. At the moment it's just all green. Of course, it's a green shirt but when it's in the darker moments, it actually would lean a little bit more into the bluish tones depending on where he is of course, but, what I would love to do is go to Control B to bring up Color Balance. I want to go into the Shadows. At the moment we're set on midtones which would only change most of the green color. But I want to focus on the shadows so I can only change the colors of all the darkened areas. What I will do is I would like to bring that more into the blues. I want to bring this more into the cyan, not too much just a little subtle. I'll give it to my midtones because it seems it's changing the entire- It still does affect slightly into the midtones because they're still almost dark. If I just go back to my midtone section and I pulled that into the green a little bit more, that'll bring it back to normal. It might also be a little bit of yellow and a little bit of red tone. I'll get back to my shadows and I can also bring that cyan little bit more. So, I'll press Okay. Now, I'll click Control Z, so we can go back a step. That's what it was, that's what it is now. I think I'm actually just take the saturation out of it a little bit more. Okay. See Saturation. I'm just going to take that down by about eight, it's a little bit better. It's a bit chinky. As you can see with this guy here, we have already darkened his eyes really black lock at. Same with the skin here and he's got all these little blisters, which from being, yeah, he's injected with those crazy zombie guys. So, what I'll do is you've got my color layer 74 but this little blisters are a good example that would have seen really reddish horrible tones coming out of them. You can just really emphasizes those a little bit more all through him. You can even like give him a horrible yellowish tone, make some selection's at the ends of them. See how that looks. I'll fill those with that color. See that's already made them look quite horrible. You can even make some harsh selection to brown them, some areas that are a little bit sharper and just fill that. Then go to our skin layer and you can even darken them with a hue saturations just a little, and not [inaudible]. As you can see already it's making them look quite harsh and horrible. So, you can do a lot with the color layer. If you click here it's going to be a great example when I do this. I've got a reference here of what that look like. As you can see that's like a cauliflower really horrible beast out infection. So, if I go to the clicker which is here and under the outline layer, I'll make a new layer and I'll call that color. Same as before. This one is going to be a bit more fun because this is absolutely crazy. This infection thing that's going on here. With the brush instead of a soft brush, I'm going to go ahead and choose a crazy grunge brush because maybe that one. Yeah, it will work. So, using this as a guide, I'm going to go through and I must start off with some decent trait actually. If I go here and I'll select a black. Now, I'll start going through, I'll bump it up a bit just like some of the old desaturated. Don't be scared because you're on your own layer. You can hide it. You can delete and if you've done something wrong and you got enough history. To go back a few steps you can always delete your layer and start again. So, I'm going through I'm still leaving some of that color behind. But I'm making sure that I get some of this grayish as you can see it here. This references a lot grey, it's horrible. What is that all over? Okay, now I'm going to get a different color now. I can go to this reference and actually grab a color that I can see there. Then I'm going to go over it and make some really crazy [inaudible] might actually picture 100 percent too on the brush and don't even think about it. Just go absolutely nuts. I'm only flexing on the edges just like this one. They are all around the edges. I'm going to fill that in, like so. Now, I'm going to get my Lasso tool and deselect. I'm just going to go and delete parts of it now that I don't want. So, I'm going to highlight sections like this and it will be deleted. As you can see, it's already giving me that effect that I'm after. I'm going to get my eyedropper again and there's a horrible yellow underneath as well. So, when I go underneath the layer I just made and make a new one. Don't worry about not labeling them at the moment because we're not really using them like that yet. I'll just go and highlight the skin layer again, still with my grunge brush and then a make some extra selections underneath that one as well. I can even take that down to 50 percent. If I want to get some of those tones but not so hard and harsh. Okay. I'm really happy with that. Take it back up to 100, if you get. I can deselect now. I'm just going to get my razor out and take at these spots on the areas we don't need. Let's just see, what this would look like in a different color format. Hightlight this, I always highlight this then I just touch down on the direction on the keyboard and I'll just scroll through the column and see what would work. So, these ones began towards what I was after. Okay, so I'm going to go with soft color for that one. What you can also do is I'm going to go though them to highlight these areas here with my dodge tool. 15. Details (Part 3): Okay. I'm going to darken, so I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to select darken. So, if I hide that, bring it back, you can see the difference really like almost instantly. I think that Clicker's just about done, I'm now happy with that. I will hide that. Now, move on to the next, Ellie over here. Just to explain, that shirt that I did there, that is actually a- that symbol on her shirt, they're the trade mark shirt actually for the game, and all I did was- let me just see if I can find it. As you can see, here, I have the layer that I used for that shirt here. All I did for that was, I just scaled it down with free transform. That's "control, T" and you can just-. Literally, I found this on the Internet using Google, and I typed in Last of Us, Ellie shirt and came up with this. What I did was the free transform, I took it down. Probably should have recorded this when I did it. I literally did everything with free transform. You can just scale it, twist it. If I hold control and I hold shift on this side, I can drag that down, give some perspective then pull that edge in. You can see it's already fitting place. Because of her angle, I lifted that that up sideways. Then I right-clicked on it and I press warp. Now, what this does is, it allows me to bend it how I need to. You just get each of these squares, and you pull them the direction that you need. You can even pull this edge in just to tuck a little corner in, and that's really handy. When you've done that, you can go back to free transform and scale that a little bit more and pull it in if you need, and that's that. One the left, I'm grabbing, and he's going to need to also be a lot like this Clicker here with some grunge and blood all over him. So what I'll do, is I'd say above my color layer, grunge, that layer for grunge brush tool, and I have my grunge brush, again. Now this time, I am going to just grab my skin layer. Now, I'm on my grunge layer and I would like to add a bit of dirt, so [inaudible] skin tone but I want to make it, bring it down into the browns desaturated browns like so. Now, I pump up my brush, I'm just going to drag it across each arm like this, just to make it look like this infected. It has rolled through the mud or something, and I can also go in, or I could get a different brush again. Go ahead and get this one. Add all these little effects to it, which I can change the color again, and I would like to maybe add a bit more brownish tone like that up through the arm. I can bump that right up if I need to, and really add some texture and some grunge to some characters here. Now, I don't even really need to set this to a color mode. I'll hide that and I'll bring it back. It doesn't really hide our shading too much, but I would love to see bit more of this elbow there. So, I'm going to go ahead and just a little bit more out there. I'm going to use a grunge brush to do it though, that's better. Okay, continuing on with the details on this character. I just thought that I would explain how it's great to- How you can get the most of your brushes. Even just go ahead with a simple solid brush just like I'm, just a hard brush, just my usual one that I did my outlines with. I thought it would be cool to have even some blood just dripping, and running down the arm. It really just makes it seem a bit more separate than your usual grunge brushes, which just are always the same. Not many people notice that kind of stuff, but it really does add a lot more to your drawing when you go ahead and free hand some bloodlines in like I'm doing right now. He's got a few cuts up there in his arms, or it could be someone else's blood. It just adds that look to it. You can see here, I've covered him with blood here. I've Just got a blood layer, and I've literally just gone crazy with the brushes. That's how you can add extra detail to your grunge like this. You've lay your brush down with your grunge. But then, you can erase parts out which gives it more edges and more texture. Now, the shirt, I really want to get the shirt looking quite grungy as well. As you can see here, his shirt is very, very dirty. I need to try and match that. Ellie looks like it's half soaked down the bottom. So, in order for me to do that, I'm on my grunge layer, cool, All right. So, we're set. I've got my shirt selection among the grunge layer, and I'm going to get a good brush. I'm going to bump up my brush. Really, curve. I'm going to set this one to multiply at 50 percent, that layer, and I'm just going to go over that, it's going to give me that soaked blood as well. Now, you can see that the shirt is very dirty now, that's worked quite well for me. So, I'm going to keep that one. I want just to sharpen it, so that we get some finer details. I don't like to have too many blurred edges on my brushes, because most of this is all- my whole style is very sharp and clear. So, I like to make sure that I avoid any blurred edges. Okay. So, I'm quite happy now with the details that have been placed. I've placed in a lot of blood splatter and grunginess. I really need to make these guys feel like they're absolutely crazy in the game. They're infected, so they're really gritty and they've been around a lot, so I could really have a lot of fun with the brushes, and a lot of texturing and the techniques that I've just showed you. So, a lot of- even just changing the skin color tone, instead of just this skin color here, the creamy tone. I've added reds into it and even harsh black, blue purples, and yellows around this area. Up here wth the hair, I just put gray tones through that, so it looks like some hair that's been ripped out. So, that really makes good use of all of that. Now, we're set. We've got all these details. Now, characters are pretty much 100 percent complete now. So, I think we're ready to move on to the next step which will be the background. That will be done pretty much using the same techniques we've used on our characters. A little bit different but almost the same, so let's move on to that. 16. Background (Part 1): So, now that my picture has all the characters laid out, they're all hopefully colored and they're complete, ready, they need a background. So, something to really finish off the picture and something to really make it feel like the game. So, as you can see in the background, I have the city sky which also will be very run down and hedged with greenery climbing up the building and crawling and broken busted up cars. Everything's going to be really greedy and very apocalypse in that kind of way to really match the game. So, what I've done is, I'll show you. I have a sketch here of a background. As you can see, I've got a busted up car there. They're pretty handy actually because they take up a lot of space and you don't really need to have to detail the distance behind them. I have here which is just a shot frame. A lot of this style, I can't take absolutely full credit for this sketch because it is off a reference picture that I had from the game. It's not really something that I could come up with out of my head. I did that with a few of my backgrounds. I'm more focused around characters and really energetic action poses and things like that, but when it comes to backgrounds, I'm sure a lot of people struggle. It can be very time consuming. I think I'd have to be an architect or something to come up with something like this out of my head. So, what I've got is I had a photo from the game and I took that from my screen and I just, I sketched from this. So, as you can see, there's the garage here on the side and I felt that worked really nicely. Basically, I just needed something to hold my picture together and really tie in with the game. So, I think this makes it a bit more authentic as well coming straight from the game and it's not something that's from a screenshot or anything. It's right there in it and this is where that's come from and we're going to try and match this in my style. So, I have all the characters here and they're all placed ready to go. The next step is for the background. So, I'm going to make a new layer and I'm going to call it BG for background, and I'm just going to make a new layer within that called Outlines. Now, this background is going to match the same technique that we use for our characters. So, I need to start with nice thick black outlines to hold everything together where I'm going to start. So, let's say there's a garage here on the side, it has a lot of vertical really straight lines here. So, it's not really something that I could go ahead and do with my brush and feel to be confident about. How about we use the line tool. At the moment it's set to shape which is not right. It needs to be set to pixels and I set a weight of maybe four pixels. Now, that's a little bit better, but I'd like it maybe a bit thicker, six. That's great and I'm just following my guideline that I've got with my sketch. So, keep that in mind. Then I'm going to go down to that point right there and I can press D to go straight back to my brush. I just want to tidy up these little edges here and just join that, a little bit of perspective. I've got a gun through there. Now, back to my line tool and this process can actually take a while. So, I will jump ahead soon and show the final outlines. Okay, what I do here is as you can see, I'm working on the outside on the outer edge first with this seven-pixel thick line. So, I always like to make it a lot thicker and bolder on the outside. Because this garage is in the foreground and I want to make it more separated from this background. So, I want to make sure this line is nice and thick but, as I go in the center, as I go inside, I would like the lines to be a little bit thinner. Just how I work and I think it works really nicely. Because you don't want to have these giant thick bold lines all the way through. Okay. So, now that I've got some nice outlines going on the garage here, I might start organizing these a bit better, same as we did with our characters. So, I'm going to go to the backgrounds layer and the folder and make a new folder within. It's called garage. I'm going to place that outlines layer inside of that. What I'll be doing is layering everything the same way I did before. Because background grid layer is quite complicated and I need to make sure that everything is in order. So, what I'm doing now I'm just joining these outlines together like so. Now, the reason that it looks so dodgy is because they're not going to be seen. So, I have this van light over the top, but that's okay. We have our garage. So, what I'll do now is, I'll just fill that and I'm just going to go to a new layer underneath the outlines layer, called Solid. I'm going to go to my outline's layer. Same as we did before with the characters. I'm going to my Magic wand, make a selection on the outside of it. Then I'm going to go Ctrl+Shift+I and invert that, to select inverse and then I'm going to go Select, Modify, Contract by one. Now, I'm not going to get my color picker and I'm just going to select a gray. Make sure I'm on my Solid layer and then that's underneath. So, we're going to have the van over the top. But before I start working on the van, what I always like to do, because there's a lot of detail in the background but I've got to keep in mind that a lot of it isn't going to be same. Because we've got characters over the top. So, what I'll do is I'll make them all visible, all my characters. I'm going to select all of the photos, all at once and I'm just going to hold Alt and I'm going to drag the selected ones until I can punch them into a separate or a copy version of themselves. Then we're going to go Ctrl+E which is just a merge layers. What that's done is, has just combined all of them into one. Don't worry, I'm not keeping this. This is just so that I have a guide. That's pretty much what I'm doing. I'm going to hide all of the originals. We need to make sure that they're kept on this one here which will just be code silhouette. I'm just going to darken that to completely black. So, with the levels and I'm just going to get this and drag it all the way down to the blacks. Now, I've got a good guide as to what I need to work on in the background and what doesn't really need much work. So, I'm just going to go into the Opacity and I'm going to take the denture back at 50. So, I've got a good visual of where I need to have the focus. Sorry, where I need to really work on. I can really focus on these parts and then when I get these sections, I don't have to worry so much. Because they're not going to be seen anyway. I just think that saves a lot of time. Sorry, I'm just going to tidy this up real quick. I'm just going to get all of our original characters and throw them into the end of the folder. Now, everything's been easy to see. So, that new group photo that I made, I'm just going to call that Van. This is for the van I'm about to make. This is the Outlines, and I'm just going to throw that inside of that folder. Now, I can start doing the outlines. 17. Background (Part 2): When you are going to make a nice and neat through these sections, because I know they are not really going to be seen down here. So, I can just sketch that up rough, don't even have to worry about it. I want to get to hear, I want to make sure that's a nice line. Its got a mirror that shows there. I'm going to connect my lines. Always makes sure my line are connected [inaudible] because we need to. I just need to hide the garage layer for a minute. All right. So, all this is absolutely black. I don't need to worry about any of this detail. See how much effort I'm saving right there, just because, I've made myself a nice ask guide, and I don't even need to worry about working on that side of the van. Its all just inside. Okay. So now, I'm just going to make a new law under the van call that color, actually, solid. I'll do the same. I'm going to invert it and do this. Modify, Contracts. That will be same gray. Oops, wrong layer. Fill on this over. So now, I have my van. As you can see before, the van is now layered over top of our shed filled garage, and you can see my silhouette here. This is how I'm going to be working with our background, all the way through. So, I might just want to work on the shed, but I might just fill in there bricks as well. There's a few ways that you can do the bricks. I can just go straight with guide at the moment and draw them in manually or I can be a bit clever about it and do this. I could draw some lines up, I have all my horizontal. I'm just going to make some vertical lines down. This is on a new layer, and I'm going to highlight that and I'm just going to drag that across, these bricks, and I'm going to make selections on every second right here. Okay, now I have my selection. All I have to do now, I have the selection on every second row that you can see there. I'm just going to hold control and shift, and I'm going to press the right arrow, and this will just shift these. Okay. So, literally, all I do now is a control t , and I'm going to line that edge up with the edge of the ball there. We're just going to play with perspective here, it's going to turn out to be absolutely spot on. So, I'm going to hold control on this point down here, on the bottom one, and I'm just gonna play around with it, you can literally move that anywhere you want. As you can see, it's skewing it a lot more, and I'm just lining it up with the top part here. We do have this shift in the wall but don't worry about that bottom. I'm trying to line it up with the line that comes down there on the left. That's almost right. Now, I'm going to hold control and grab the right angle over here, and I'm going hold shift as well. So, control and shift. I'm waiting until this one up here to that perspective. Now, that's right. I'm going to do the absolute, the same on this bottom anchor point here, and hold control and shift as well. Shift is very important, because that's what maintains our perspective. If you look up top, we still have that line. I'll zoom out once so that we can see. You can see all these bricks are almost already lining up to the right perspective. Control and shift. Now, what I'm looking at now is the bottom of the garage door here, that's the perspective I want to try to line up next. The bricks are almost there, that's it. There's one more part of perspectives that I need to make sure is lined up, and that's the vertical part. So, I'm going to grab this. i don't have to hold anything in. I'm just pulling that in. Don't worry, it looks weird. But this is what needs to be done in order to make perspective right. So, I'm looking at this bottom part of the garage door here. I'm going to align that up, but I need to hold control and shift on this. I'm just this that in a little, because that needs to be the same, this edge needs to be the same, vertical line as that one. So, a little bit more even. That's about right. Okay. Now, I can pull that back, pull it right out until I have that length in my bricks. I need to pull this up a bit. So, you don't have to hold anything in there. Control and shift is only when you want to line up your perspectives. But once it's all set in place, your perspective is fine. You can just pull these up and down, pull these left and right. You don't have to hold anything else in, you're just literally playing with the anchor points now, until you see visually your perspectives. Your bricks neglect stretched out to the right length. Now that I'm happy with my perspectives on the bricks, and they are working well for me, I will- so I might just pull this top quite up a little, and I'll just press enter. Now that's set in place. What I'm going to do now is get my polygonal lasso tool, and I'm just going to highlight the edges that we don't want. We're deleting the extra bits that are no longer needed. So, I'm just going to press delete, or backspace, and there we have it. Now, the bricks in place, and they're on separate layer. I'll just place them back into my garage photo. So now, we have our shed and perspectives of the bricks, and everything's looking almost spot on to say. I'll just place some flat colors now, of our garage and I'll show you how I get that. So, let's go back to my reference, and I'll just drag that out to the side. There's our garage there, all right. I want to match it. So, I'm just going to get my eyedropper out and get one of these medium tone of the garage. So, it's this one here, and I'm just going bring it down, a little bit darker. Now, [inaudible] I'm going to hold control, and I'm going to click on the solid layer, and I'm just going to fill that with our color. So, we have that one. I'm going to make a new layer and call that door. I'm just going to de-select polygon lasso tool. Now, I'm just going to highlight the door. Back to the eyedropper, and I just want to grab, say, the color of the door. Only, it's very creamy. Looks fun there. But for my picture, I want to make sure it's more of a still color to me. Because I'm going to be fitting all the effects on later, that will probably give it that creamy color any way. So, I'm going to keep that in mind. We're still in the early stages, and I need to make sure it looks a steel color. It's almost skin tone at he moment. Still is darker there, it's a little bit of mid tone there, but that'll come lighter when I do the shading. Also, on that same layer, I might just select this upper gutter of the blue shade, because that's also the same, similar color. I'll just fill that into same color. So, that's that tone done. I'll do the same for the van as well. 18. Background (Part 3): So, continuing on with the outlines on the background. I've done the majority now, just to get that out of the way. As you can see here, a lot of it was using just the line tool and that's really all I needed for this. It's mostly all just straight lines. But here, I would go a bit more free-hand to get all that grungy-looking parking sign. Yeap, that works. Now, I want to explain how to deal with the bush work on the side here. I'll just draw up my reference again. As you can see here on this building, it's got of a lot of greenery growing up the side of the building, and it's absolutely crazy. So, we need to try and get that effect. Also, I'll try and do these broken windows while I think about it. I did do some of it here before, and I'll just show you. So,100 percent. Now, that looks crazy, but it's just brushes. I'll try and do that same effect over here. I'll try and match that. So, all I have here is, I'll get all my brushes, and I'll scroll right down. I have a few good presets here that I've found. I think the one I used for that was this one, and I sized it up, and it's actually perfect for what we want. If you want, I can find these brush presets. I found these here, DeviantART by an artist by the name of AlectorFencer. Here is the link for you there. You can just press down right over here, and you'll have this exact same preset that I'm using now. Really awesome stuff in there. That's what I'm using for this and absolutely brilliant brush. So, what I'm going to do is I'm just going to... I've already got it marked here on my sketch where I would like the greenery to go. Don't worry. It's going to be black for now, but you can change all that later. All I'm going to do is just go absolutely crazy, and draw some of it down a little bit more. Just start drawing over nice and thick. The idea behind this is I'm going to try and go really thick in the center of it with black. So, as you can see, I've just laid down with brushes. But I want to go really thick in some parts, because I want to think of this as an outline of some sort. Because I want to keep that comic feel. This is almost looking too realistic. Okay, so now, I'm going to go to my eraser, and I'm going to get the exact same brush. Or even better, we're going to go with the one just below just to be a little different, which is almost the same brush, but it's just a different pattern. The reason I like the bottom one is because it's just a little bit more rounder and it'll cut more out of it. So, I'm actually just going to go over into that. I'm aiming for the middle parts. Try to keep in mind shadowing. So, I want to keep it really thick and dark underneath it, as if it's underneath the shrubs. Try and keep, make it clear on the above sections of it. So, that way I'll get that nice effect as if it does have something underneath it like a bit of shadowing. If I really want it to be extra sharp, I can go unsharpen mask and just do it by 50, and it's going to be nice and clear and crisp now. Now that I have that as it is, I would love to actually, head back to my hard brush, brought back up the top just to my general brush. I want to try and hold it together a little bit more. So, I'm going to go around the edges and just go free-hand. If you like, you can always go control J and duplicate it, if you want to make it thicker, you want to make it long, and just thicker, and darker. I'm going to merge those two layers together. Yeah, so I have greenery. I'm going to actually have it run down the side here. I'll make it nice and thick it's going to pop out just the sides a little like it's wrapped around the building. That's going to add a nice little effect. Add a few dots to show leaves. Don't forget you can also join up a few vines here and there. So now, I have all the shrubbery, all the greenery all over, wrapped over the building, which is great. Looks like over here, I might add that train as well, because it covers to fill those gaps. So, I don't really have to do too much in the background. Plus, I want to show a lot more trees around. Yeap, so now, I've got a tree, and I'm just do a little bit extra shading if I wanted to. All right. Seems better. I'm just going to just throw a bit of a... I have them too thick. But I'm going to throw in a tree trunk in there as well. Okay, I've done all the outlines for every single section. So, I've got the middle building, and all the stuff over here on the right, the car here, and I'm just going to fill in all the flat colors now, so that we can move on to shading and lighting. So now, for the fun part, we'll work on this one. I'll show you how I do the shading. Then I'll complete the rest, so you don't have to watch me do absolutely everything. Otherwise, we'll be here for about three hours. So, for the solid layer, I'm just going to do a hue saturation, and I'm just going to drag that down same as before, probably 35, minus 35, sorry. I'm going to press Okay. I'm going to get my eyedropper. I'm just going to grab that color. I've got that now and I've stored here, same as before, and we'll do in the characters. We can go control Z, go back a step. I'm going to make a selection of solid layer, which is great. I just need to get my gradient tool and drag up from the bottom. Because I want it to be... There's a bit of shading underneath from where the ground touches. If you look at the reference over here, you'll see that, also in the alleyway, there's a lot of shadow. So, let's bring that in a little bit. I'm gonna get my polygon lasso tool, and I'm going to try and do the same shading that I can see here. So, I really love that shadow that I can see. So, we're just going to get that selection. Okay. Now, I can make my fill. So, that's nice. Its working. Also, I'll make some shadows, and I'll do fill. So, as you can see, that's already looking much better, because we've got a bit of shading going on. Now, underneath of these ledges here, we'll also have a bit of shadowing, and fill that. What I'm going to do also, is I'm just going to make a selection of this little section here. I'm going to get my gradient tool. I'm just gonna do a really subtle but vertical side. So now, I'll bring it from an angle 19. Background (Part 4): And a fill. You can see already that it's all working out. So, that's the shadowing for that. It's complete. We still have the moss to play with but what I'll do next is I'll show you how I go about texturing the side of the building with the bricks. Now, it's not the same as before where I went and made outlines on this one because this is further away and I think I can do something similar, but I think we could work with an actual texture of bricks. I'll show you what I mean. So, as you can see here, I found a picture of some bricks. What I really love about the original here in the reference, you can see how the bricks are eroded and some of them are all in different places, it's all scattered around, looks really cool, and really like it's been around for a while. That's the look I'm after. So, what I'm going to do here is with this picture I found on Google, it's just a random picture. I'm going to get this and I'm just going to make a new layer so I keep the original. I'm just going to play around with the Levels and I'm going to bring back the darks right out and lighten actually the crap out of that. As you can see already, it kind of got the different pattern going. Even better, I might go around like that. That's good. I'm going to play around with the Channels here so I go to Channels. It's all set to gray scale so I only want the black and I'll hold control and click on that. Now, if I go back to my Layers, make a new layer, set this to black. I have to go Control Shift inverse then Shift. Now, if I hide everything, you can see I've only got these black sections which is perfect. That's exactly what I'm after. Back to the original. I still want to have these white lines. What I'm going to do is back to the Levels and I'm just going to darken that and lighten that. Okay. So now, I have the brick pattern that I want to have in between, but I'm going to inverse that. Control I, and I'll just darken those more and lighten that. Then, I'm going to go to Channels again, and Control and click, back to the Layers, new layer, select Inverse and Fill. So now, I have just the lines. It's exactly what I was after. I think that's all I need. So, I'm just going to get those two layers and I'm going to pull this around and throw them in here. I've got what I need just from playing around with those bricklayers. All right. So, I need to scale them right down, the bricks are only quite small so that's why I'm not worried about the quality of these bricks here, because it's all going to be very small anyway. Take it right down to about I suppose about there, yeah. I might just duplicate that. Duplicate that across again, and again. So now, I get an entire wall of bricks. I know there's a lot of playing around but to get it right is worth it. Now, I'm going to do that perspective that I had before. So, I'm going off to the lines that I've already made and I'm just playing around with this perspective to get it just right. It doesn't matter how warped you go, you could bring that rod up and then straighten up your perspective, and then bring it straight back down again. That's how I always do mine. So, this one's way out of whack. I'm just going to play around and straighten that up. Then, press Enter. Now, that's set in place. All right. So, the best part is I have all these and they're both on separate layers, the bricks and the other part of it. I can go Control I and invert that if I like to get that effect as we do in this building, which is pretty cool, it's working out well. Stretch it out sideways a bit and press Enter. Okay. I think I might enter that as well just for now. So, now, I've got all the bricks in place, so I'm just going to actually select everything. I'm going to hide that. I'm going to go to my solid Layer, make a new one above that, and select that medium tone there and fill that in. If I get my Dodge Tool, I can manually go through now and lighten certain bricks that I want to pop out. So, to have pop out or I can just go to Levels and I can lighten all of them at once until I'm happy. So, now, I've got what I was after on the other side as well. All right. I'll add the moss in there. This is going to be fun, so it's not going to be black, just to hold it all together, to give it some outlines eyedropper and just grab one of these green colors from the reference moss here. Hue/Saturation, Colorize. When I click Colorize, it affects whatever color you have prominent in your color picker so it refers to that. So, it's already patterned in towards the greens. Just saturate it a bit. As you can see, it's already looking quite nice like moss. We want to keep it at the dark color but I want to bring the saturation up to about 70. Now, I can click Okay. It's already looking the way I was hoping, and I just want to get my Elasticity Tool and just select random parts of it. I'll just go over my selection with it, bring out the feels and greens a bit more. If I'm really fussy, I can go in. I'm always fussy, and I can get my eyedropper. Select one of those, just that greenish tone, the really bright green and I'll go in manually and start dotting out some more green stuff over the top, and that will really add to what I was hoping for. If you're really extra, extra fussy, I can go it through and get the darker tone and go back and cut stuff. It's not really cuts the [inaudible] you're going over and bringing some more darks back in the darker colors. Strong. Okay, so there's the fire escape and it's looking all right. So, it's coming along now. I need to add some grunginess to it now, some grittiness. So, with the fire escape, I will just make a selection. Go a layer above that and just real quickly I will throw over a bit of a grunge over it. I'll get my shadows section. Something that's really going to make it look a bit rougher. That's a bit better. We've got the same darker tone but I'm going to select more of a gray, and I'm just going to go over again but it's going to be very gray and it'll give it that metal look that we're after. What I'll do now is I'll get the outlines for the fire escape and I'll just lighten them by about maybe nine, and then I'll set them to luminosity. First of all, on the windows, I'll make another highlight and I'll get a grunge brush and just go over the room with that. So, that'll just add a nice touch to it. I'll get that one. Because they need to be dirty and gritty. So I just go over with that and I should be fine. There you have it. So, that's the tip that I use on buildings. I'll do the exact same for every other building I might make you go through all that process with me but I'll just jump to a few sections for you. That way you can see exactly how everything's made. 20. Background (Part 5): I have finished the middle building now. That's all complete, pretty much. I've just added some grunge brushes over there same as the other one. The green stuff here, I think, it's about right. I think, I might just add a few extras to it actually. Yes, so I'll just- now I'm going to move onto the tree. But that's way too strong, that green. I'm trying to match this tree here, let me go and get them. Playing around and see if I can get this right. Right on the top of everything. I think that will really save me. Yeah, that might work. I might just go through separately now and just make some random selections. I might just fill that, but I will lighten it all up. Let's see. I might just highlight this, actual selection itself. I just want to fade some of those nice outer greens into the part of it, so it's not all strong bright green. Okay, now I've got my tree. So, I'm just working on this garage now. I think the way I'm going to do the bricks on this, I'm actually going to get my outlines. Actually, where adding bricks, there they are, and I want to try and match this style of selective bricks. So, a certain few are darker than the others, which are much louder and I'd like to get that effect. So, I'm going to go individually and just select a bunch of bricks that I would like to darken so. Okay. So, I'm happy with that and I'm just going to now go Select, Modify, Expand by one and go on my solid layer and I'm just going to go copy and paste. Now, when I go to Hue/Saturation and bring that down, you'll see I've got different bricks and I can up to some more saturation in, give them some red. What I'll do now is I'll play around with some grunge brushes. So now, what I'm going to do is, I'm going to fix the outlines such that they blend a bit better. All right. So, I'm happy with that. I might just pump up to about 60. Now, the garage door I will just work on that. Okay, so I'm really- that's going to work. Now, I need to bring some highlights out in this door, so I'm going to get my Dodge Tool. I just need to get the outlines now, the overall outlines I'm going to raise it up for about eight plus and set it to Luminosity. Okay, so now, we have the garage, it's complete. Everything is coming along now. I've the- ground in and done the car over here along with the cityscape over in the back there. Just going to finish off this. Then, I'm going for that really rusty look. But as you can see, there's not really a lot of it seen it's just these little orange part here and there. So, that should be about it for that car and I think that should work fine. So, the background's complete now, almost, almost complete. All I have to do now is- hang on let's have a look and I'll get rid of my silhouette now, we don't need that, and bring my characters back in. Cool. Now, that's looking very detailed now. We got everything is coming along nicely. But, as you can see, everything is pretty much blending together because it's all like the same colors and contrasts at the moment. So, the way to fix that is, I will start by playing with the characters here. So, I'll just need to make selections of each. What I'll do is, see this front guy, I can merge all of his solid layers now, show his color underneath. I'm just going to make a selection of both the color layer and the outlines layer. I don't want to merge my outlines yet or at all really. I'm going to make, sorry, I will go here for the adjustments and we are going to select Levels. Now, what I'll do, it's difficult to see there, but the good thing about this is, this adjustments layer is that it will not permanently affect our character, it's just sitting above and I can hide it, or show it, I can delete it if we don't like it. So, I'm playing around the actual levels of these characters the moment, how dark he'll be and all that stuff. So, I really want to bring that down because he's not going to be too visual. He's a bit too strong at the moment and we don't really need that. I wouldn't really touch these ones here because that's going to play around with this contrast a lot, but these ones here, I just want to darken, take the lightness of him right down to about, I'm taking this down to about 150, at the moment. Then I can hide that. So, that's sitting there. The best part is, it also keeps that selection that I made, which was both the color layer and the outlines layer. That's already here, so all I have to do now is just press Ctrl and I'll click on that mask layer and it's got my selection for me. So, I want to make a new one as well above that. I want to make sure it's- I want to get like maybe really dark, horrible dark-brownish kind in bottom there, which is on the ground, but I want to make it really dark. So, I want to take that down to about there, but it still has a ton of richness of colour in it. All I'm going to do is to pick Gradient and I'm going to go all the way over him, like so. So, I want it to be a bit thicker than the bottom there. That's working for me already. 21. Background (Final part): I've really got to work on this guy that's grabbing and tackling him because he's actually almost hiding. He's blending in with the ground as you can see. So, again, I'm going to get all of his layers and I'm just going to merge them together. I'm going to do the exact same to him, and make a new adjustments layer above him. I'm going to darken him as well, by not too much, but enough. I'll just see what it looks like if I bring this lights up a bit and this darkness. See, I might touch those just a little, just to give him a little bit more oomph. Now, that's all I want to do within the levels but the main thing I want him to be affected by is the fade I'm going to have him, the darker fade. So, I'm going to make a new layer above him with that selection and I'm going to get my gradient tool and I'm going to drag that over because if you look at him, here he would have a bit of lighting on him. His lower half's bending around back, where the shadows would most likely be. So, that's kind of how I want that there to work, and I think that works well but it needs to be a lot darker. As you can see already, he's really coming out a lot more now. I probably don't need it to have it that much. I'll take it down to about 65 but I'll go back to the levels on it and make it much stronger so that we get the darkness but we still get a lot of the details that I had in him. So now he's done. So, that's helped a lot already, but still everything is still almost fitting too much with the background. So, what I do now is I'll need to go to each building layer. What I'm going to do is I'm going to make a selection of the overall, select selection of that, but also the Outlines and now we have our selection for that. I'm going to make an adjustment layer above that, so it's all about adjustment layers at the moment. Basically, I want to lighten, I'll probably bring a lot of the lights out like so. Also darken it. But I'm also going to bring out, actually, I probably won't use that. I'm just trying to play around the levels here, just to bring out a bit more, it was very dark and dim. See, if I hide this now, you can see the difference. I've already brought out a lot of the color in it but another thing I'm going to make the selection again, and I'm going to get my gradient tool. I would like a kind of bluish tone, maybe a tone like that. Then I'll get my gradient and I'm going to fade up really big, diagonal, like so, like that. It's already making our characters pop out a bit more and everything but I only want to take it down to about half way, about 50%. It's only an extra touch really. That's all I wanted it for. I'll do the exact same for the one in the middle. It's pretty much there almost. The cars, I think, are fine. One major thing that I need to add are the shadows underneath. So, what I'm going to do is, I'm going to make a new layer between our background and our characters layer. This will be called shadows. What I'm going to do is, basically, I've already done it with the background a little bit here, you can see with the van and this car here. So, I've got to remember my light source is coming from over here on the left and it's probably about that angle and that's how it affects our characters. So, the shadows are going to be bouncing off and leaning off towards the right. So, with my lasso tool, I will just make some selections of where I think the shadows will belong. So, now I've got my shadows, but I'm just going to set them to the medium gray or something like that. I'm just going to do a fill and then set it to multiply. There we have it, we've got some shadows. I can always go through and adjust them separately if I feel that's needed, but it's probably about right, nice and sharp. I could do soft shadows but personally, I like to do them sharp and clean, and there we have it. I've now made the background a bit easier to see. Also, another thing this picture needs before it's complete, there's a few things. I'll go above all layers and make a new adjustment layer to color balance. At the moment, everything in this picture, it's got a lot of red going on, the overall color needs some work. So, I'm going to put this adjustment layer above everything. That'll affect absolutely everything that you can see. What I'm going to do is drag the blues in a little bit, probably four. This only has to be very minimal, cyan will be main one that we need, probably seven. Now, I can either go into the greens which gives it that nice, it is very green but looks good, or I can go into the minus eights. Now, if I go into the eights and turn the magenta up a bit, it kind of looks it's going into maybe dusk or almost night-time, towards that anyway. But might go into the greens a little, just a little. That'll be more like midday or afternoon. That's looking okay. I might take the blues down a little bit more, maybe six. I think that's going to work, maybe 11. So, I'm just going to switch that on and off so I can have a look and see what it was and what it is now. So, you can see already that's very red, there's a lot of red going on and now it's easier to digest, you could say. Looks much better. Now, I'm going to get everything, my background, my color, all the layers, and I'm just going to duplicate that above and then I'm going to go Layer, Merge Layers, Ctrl-E. So, we have an overall flattened image of everything you can see. This is only going to be added as a filter because I want to add something extra to this. So, if I go blur and I'm going to absolutely blur the crap out of it. This is a neat trick that I learned a while ago and I've used it on a few different artworks of mine. So, now I'll just change the color mode to soft light. Now, don't worry, it's not going to stay like that, the opacity goes right down and I find that that really adds to the picture. It just gives it some depth, makes everything feel like it belongs. Just a nice little filter to add to it and it also kind of gives a bit more ambience. A bit of glow off the skin really makes the characters feel alive. I've just got to be careful with this layer that it doesn't darken my picture too much. I don't want it to be too dark. That's the end of the class. I hope you enjoyed it. I know I did. I'm really glad I had the opportunity to show everybody my process. As you can see, there's a lot of work involved in it, although this picture, it was a big one. I've always been eager to do some fan art for The Last Of Us. What a great game. For those of you who are familiar with it, I recommend giving it a play-through if you're a gamer. I'd just like to say a big thanks to everyone who participated in the class. I'm really looking forward to seeing all your student projects. I'll always be around to give you advice and help out. Just remember to stay creative. Most importantly, enjoy it.