Clip Studio Paint for Beginners: Learn Digital Illustration Step by Step

1. Welcome to the Clip Studio Paint Beginner Masterclass!: Welcome to the Clip Studio Paint beginner course. I ever wanted to start creating a digital art piece, but not real sure where to begin. Whether you're a complete beginner or just coming from another program, this tutorial will teach you step by step how to navigate Clips Studio paint. My name is Cara Harvey Hill. I'm a full time freelancer, animator and background and layout artist, and I've been using Clip Studio Paint for many years from school to Uni and now as professional full time freelancer. I developed workflows that I think can help you, especially as a beginner, and I'd love to share those with you in this tutorial. The tutorial will start from the very beginning, we'll talk through what version of clips you paint is best for you. What tablet might work best for you as well in terms of the drawing tablet to accompany you during the course? I'm just navigating the basic interface and getting used to that because it takes a little while sometimes and it can look a bit overwhelming, especially to a beginner artist. From there, we'll go into the fundamentals of drawing and coloring, we'll be talking about rough sketches of a character, finalizing that line. Coloring in a basic sense and getting used to shading. From there, we'll go on to more advanced colorings to enhance your workflow. Blending modes, gradient maps. Finally, we'll do a full illustration project from start to finish of a tree. We'll do a few mini projects within the tutorial, but then we'll do our main final piece, which will be a picture of a tree, which will just help you encompass everything we've learned during the course. By the end of the class, you'll have the skills to go ahead and do your own illustrations and you'll also have some illustrations to back you up, hopefully. Let's begin. 2. Introduction, Instructor Experience & Course Overview: Hi, my name is Cara AveHll and I'm going to be taking you three or three hour beginner course in Clips Show paint today. A little bit about me before we start. So I am a freelance animator and background and layout artist. But I've been using Clip Show Paint for a long long time when I was in school at UNI and now post UNI as a freelance artist. It's a really great tool to have, especially for a beginner. There's so much you can do on there. You've got animation. You've got your webtoon and comic book, and then also just regular illustration as well. 3. Choosing the Right Version of Clip Studio Paint : There's two versions of clip Shea paint. There's Clip Sheer Paint Pro and there's clip Shea paint X. You can do a lot in P. X is the more advanced version, I assume per version. It allows you the difference of having larger projects. So you can do comic books with multiple pages at once rather than just the one page that you get with the P. As you can only animate up to 24 frames on the pro version, which is normally about 1 second. Maybe two. It's just worth considering depending on what you're going for. If you're a beginner and you're not really sure, maybe go for the pro version and then if you're a little bit more advanced or just knowing you're going to be wanting to use this program, maybe thinking about the X or if you've got big project coming up. They also offer monthly plans. If you're not sure, you could try one, try the other, see what you prefer, things like that, seeing if you need those extra features or not, which is offered here. I think they have student prices as well. If you have a look in the education section. 4. Tablet and Driver Setup : In terms of this course, the one piece of equipment that I would recommend is a drawing tablet. I currently am using the Wacom SynthiqP 22, which is this one here, which is great. It is a little bit higher in budget. So if you're looking for something a bit more cost effective, you can either look on Ebay or something like that. I managed to get mine for a much lower price than this. I'd always recommend that or looking at something like XPPM which is a bit of a more budget alternative that's still really good quality. If you still looking for something maybe smaller, more portable or just cheaper. You can look at Wackam intos. That's a tablet I've used earlier on in my career. This doesn't have a screen, but it syncs up. The points on the tablet is very similar to where the points are on the screen, you have to sync it up. It takes a little bit of getting used to, but once you're used to it, it's not that bad at all, and as I said, can be a very useful portable option. This tablet also comes with Clips Pink P two year license. That's always worth thinking about and it has a few extra complimentary softwares and things like that you can think about. But as you're doing Clipsio course, that might be quite useful. Awesome. The one other thing that I want to point out that I didn't actually think about that much when I was a beginner because I didn't realize what it was. Making sure you have that correct driver installed for a drawing tablet. It just ensures that your laptop or drawing tablet or whatever they're working together in harmony basically and just the software is running completely as it should be and all those pen strokes and everything are coming through as well as they can. Always make sure whatever tablet you buy, you've got the right driver installed to be able to interpret what you're doing on the drawing tablet. For this course, we're going to be doing 3 hours, covering the basics of drawing mainly, we're going to be drawing. First, we're just going to get used to the navigation panel and everything like that, make sure we're completely confident. We're going on to doing a little bit of coloring, moving into shading and a little bit of the fundamentals of drawing as well. Finally, in this section, we're going to be doing an illustration piece using a lot of what we've learned right at the very end. 5. Creating Your First Canvas : When you first open Clip Studio, you'll probably be met with something along the lines of this. This is just Clip Studio. We're going to be Clip Studio Paint. This is just the interface you'll be met with. All you have to do really at this point, I mean, it will show you pass works. You probably wouldn't have anything here because you're new to the software, but you would have your pass works here, and then we can worry about the rest of this later. This is just a updates page or something like that or different assets that have come out and tutorials and things like that. All we really need to worry about right now is clicking that paint button here. I've already got it open, so I don't need to, but all you need to click is paint, which is what it will say. It says return to paint I've already got it open at the moment, but you can just click paint. It should open up something along the lines of this. Yours might look very slightly different because I have some brushes and things like that up here, but here are your brushes so you can choose, for example, between if you wanted a pencil texture or a calligraphy pen texture, they offer some. You can actually upgrade them and buy your own different pen sets because it's nice to have a bunch of range of textures and things like that. We've got our pens here. Some more there and different types all down here. We'll go through it in more detail, but first, I'll just open up. If we were to open a new Canvas, we'd start by saying new and we can leave it as this. We're going to go into doing comics and things like that a little bit later, which is what this top bar is for. You can name your illustration there. If we called this tutorial, that would be a good start. Preset. This is to do with the aspect ratio of our drawing. We can just customize that 1920 by 1080 is standard for a picture with a resolution of 300 PPI, which is pixels per inch. We can leave that as color. The paper color, you can change it if you wanted a red page. I'll come up as a red page. It's completely up to you, but you can change that about and we can just leave the rest for now because we're not doing anything too crazy. Let's make this white, so red ino. Perfect. Down here, we can check record time lapse. If we want to be recording from the very moment we start, but I'll show you later on how to actually start that when you would like to start that necessarily. I was running through, let's open this, you have to clicks okay and that will ready for you to start off. But I have a resource that I'd like to use. What I'm going to do is open my recent Chapters one to four. There we go. I'm not sure why this is flipped, but That's better. This is our Chapters 14 resource, so we don't actually have that much on there, but it's just useful for our start. If you were to flip back to that original page so you can have multiple open at once, that was our tutorial. This is what we've just opened here and then is moving on from the first chapter to our second one, which is understanding the interface. 6. Workspace Overview : So just to start off, we're going to do a workspace overview because there is a lot going on here and it can seem very overwhelming at first, but I promise you with time, you do get used to it. On the left side here, we have a subtol area. So depending on what tool you're on, it will give you a more in depth breakdown of what's going on, depending on whatever you're clicking on and I'm going fast through it, but it will give you more options within that tool. For example, here, we've got the Zoom tool, so we'll have Zoom in and Zoom out as our subtols in there. Awesome. Then down here, we've got even more options, so this is our tool properties, so we can adjust on how we do it and things like that, but we don't need to worry about that right now. Then down here, what will stay the whole time is our brush size. Brush size is to do with when we're actually drawing, how big our line is going to end up being how many pixels wide it is, whether it's 0.7 and that ranges all the way up to 2000, but you can extend it further than that, I think, just in a different way, which we'll come to as well. Then let's go over to our right side. We have our navigator up here, which is just going to show us a smaller version of the entire thing. Even if we're zoomed in, we can see where we are zoomed in on. If I just quickly draw, I'm going to go through this properly in a minute, but let me just draw in a smiley face for now. Say I zoomed in, let's go to our first tool here, zoom in and just zoom in on this area. That top portion will show us exactly how much of the picture we're seeing and we can navigate our way around using that as well. But it can give us an idea if we're really zoomed in, how it's looking far away, I can just give us that really nice breakdown of how this detail that we're looking really close out that is looking in terms of the entire picture we're drawing. We don't really need to worry about any of these for now. I just keep it simple and ignore that second panel. We've got layers down here, which we're going to go in more detail, but this is how you handle the coloring of your drawing in comparison to the line art and things like that. Again, I'm going to break that down a little bit more in a moment. This is just an overview. At the top, you might be quite familiar with this bar if you've ever used a Word document or PowerPoint or anything like that or even on Photoshop you might have been on, you see something very similar to this. We've got file up here, pretty typical things like saving is here, exporting things. If you want to make a time lapse of your work as you do it, it's going to be here, printing and all sorts adjusting your settings. We got Edit, which has got options to do with editing your picture as it says. If you're willing to transform, move around your drawing, if you're willing to correct it and things like that. Brightness and contrast. Again, we're going to recap this later on. This is just to give you a basic overview so it doesn't feel quite so overwhelming. Animation we can ignore for now because we'll go through that in a more advanced course. Layer specific to a layer in particular, so what we're working on. We're going to be talking about that again in a bit, but this is general overview, selecting, taking smaller portions of your drawing when you're moving around and things like that. E and then we can ignore filter. Windows to do with editing how your workspace looks and help training tutorials, things like that, which can be useful for beginners. So what we're going to start off with, though, is just to get used to those subtols. 7. Navigation Tools (Zoom, Rotate, Flip Canvas) : Out here, we just had a brief look at Zoom in and Zoom out. So, if you're just clicking with the Zoom in button on, it will zoom in like that and the same thing with Zoom out as we see here. If you're willing to adjust, we can move it to the side, left and right using these sliders here for our Canvas in particular. Then we can move on to our next one. We have hand. This hand is not going to be doing any drawing or anything like that. This is if you want to move your canvas about. Say I was really zoomed in, so let's go up. Zoom in. Perfect. Then I wanted to move around. I would use that hand to guide my way around the picture. I'm not just drawing. Yeah. Just quickly with that zoom in and zoom out, I typically wouldn't use this on the task, well, to be honest, I would use the shortcut Control. Let me write it out for you. Control, which is that bottom corner button, control, and then plus and control minus. This will be zooming in and out of your project without having to go through all of the going over here and finding zooming and zoom out. That just makes it a little bit easier. You do get used to it. Obviously, as a beginner, it can be a little bit much to remember all the shortcuts, going over here might be useful, but that's definitely something to try and take note of if you can. Let's go back to our hand. Awesome, we got a hand there just to move things around. That's all we need on that right now. Objects selectingyer, light table timeline. Don't need to worry about those yet. We've got our move layer, so if we want to move a layer in particular, say this will not be moving, so it's control minus as we practice zomo a little bit, using these bars to move us down. Then if it's move layer, it will be moving what I'm using at the moment. This is what I've just drawn. I'll be moving all of that rather than when we're on the hand icon that will move our canvas, which is slightly different. Cool. Let's skip these next ones because we're going to go in depth into those until we get to this top one here. 8. Essential Tools & Toolbar : When we have Clip Studio Paint, we have lots of separation as to different types of pens and things like that. I will have more different pens here because I've downloaded them online and things like that. Don't worry if you don't have all these. You will have the GPN ones hopefully already installed because they come with the software. The top few will probably look quite familiar to what you're working on right now. Again, it's in the subtol area, so we can see exactly what's going on here. We can try out a couple. Let's get rid of this for now. Let me just clear that just give a go doing a few strokes, maybe draw a smiley face or something, just to get a feel of how it is using a drawing tablet as well, especially if you've just started out. It's definitely good to adjust. We've got different ones, so they have very slightly different that's got a different brush size as this one. If you're willing to adjust your brush size, let's stay on the GPN for. Say I wanted to make the GPN slightly bigger, we can go down here to where it says brush size and go, I want it at 100 we go or I want it at 800. It's a little bit lower 300, there we go. A big thing to remember, especially as a beginner, something I forgot sometimes is that pressure definitely matters. Don't just press as hard as you can when you're working just because you're not used to it yet. I feel like I lost a lot of my artistic touch when I first started out because I was originally a traditional artist, and I didn't quite understand that you can be gentle and then push harder when you want thicker lines. I mean, that wasn't the smoothest of transitions because I'm just doing it non naturally, but that is a really important thing to remember, and I'll give a lot of life to your drawings if you're making sure to vary that line weight. Another way to adjust our size of our pen here. Obviously, we've got these, but if we don't want one of the presets, we've got this slider over here. This is in depth breakdown of each pen, so we've got different things going on here which you can adjust depending on what you like in a brush. But, you can adjust that so it's a bit more precise as to what you want. I often use this slider instead of this in my work personally. Say you're not looking for such a smooth line. This is quite a basic brush. Say you wanted something slightly different, you might go to something like textured pen, and there you go. Probably isn't going to look that good, bigger, but if we go a little bit smaller, it gives more of a textured feel to your line. So it's a bit more sketchy looking when you got it like this. Completely your preference, completely what you want it to look like. Got a few different ones. Bring that up a bit. That one's quite similar to the G Pen, but probably will have a difference in terms of maybe pressure or slightly the different looks. You can look at the specs of different pens based on what you're looking for, of course. If you want to swap, we've got different types of pens. This is, I guess, traditionally centered. It's not in Photoshop, you get all of your pens in one place, all of your brushes in one place. They can separate into being clear at of the space. Quickly. I will be showing you how to do this, but just for now. We've got marker here underneath here, that was pens but we can also look at pastel here, we've got airbrush and we've got brush, which all do very slightly different things. Mainly, it's just to do with texture and things like that. Here we've got our pencil. I like this one. This is one I've downloaded separately, which I will be showing you how to do. Yeah, we got pastor here. There's different subsections. Obviously, different pens are going to be good for different things. I probably wouldn't draw a picture with this pen because it's just not going to give me look, I want maybe it is, but it doesn't quite look right. This is probably because it's more suited to coloring and things like that. Different brushes have different uses and stuff like that. We've got chalk here. There's just all sorts you can do with different brushes, and it gives you that versatility and also the ability to make your drawings look very traditional if you want to. There's a lot of textures in here that even come with the default brush sets. That's always something to think about if you are a traditional artist or just looking for that traditional look. But we've also got things like this soft airbrush, which is very digital in terms of it's very perfect. It doesn't have those natural textures that you might get from something more like this noise brush. Make that bit bigger cause that looks more like it's been spray painted or airbrushed onto a wall. Again, just something to think about. 9. Introduction to Layers & Brush Basics : We've just been talking about brushes, but say I don't want to paint in black. Say I want to be writing in color such as red. What you do is you come down to the spot and corner here where we have our color palette. You can change it if you want to a triangle, but I prefer a square personally just because I prefer the layout that way and you can just move around here and adjust the color. I will change up here and down on your palette over here as well. But say I wanted a red over here. Perfect. Now when I'm drawing, I'm going to get that red color. I wanted to change it, instead, I wanted a green, for example. I would just move the slider along this way. There go, we're getting that green. In terms of this part in the middle and what that's for. Say I wanted a darker green, I'd move it down this way. That looks more black because it's quite dark. But darker green but still saturated. Saturated is how bright the color is. That's still going to be bright. Then up here is light and bright. Over here is going to be bright but desaturated, close a gray tone and down here, as makes sense. It's going to be desaturated, but a little bit green. It just depends on what you're working on. But you might be looking for different shades of green. That's just how you adjust those colors there. We are going to be starting to look at actually coloring something in. The first thing we need to do is develop something to color, so we'll try a bit of line art. If I just get rid of this, I'll just go like this, click delep. We can start with our paper refresh again. I'll just quickly talk you through our layers first. This is our layer panel down here and I said I was going to go through it in a bit more detail. To start off, I know there's a loads of buttons here, but all we need to worry about is this one that says new Raster layer. Creating a new layer basically means that we're not drawing directly onto our background. If you draw on that white page, you're not going to be able to draw underneath with color. I'll show you what I mean. Say I did a really simple drawing. Let's change our thing to black so you can see down here, there we go. And about size eight. Say I did a really simple drawing. Of a stick man just for time's sake. I wanted to add color if I'd have done it on this bottom, I actually can't just because a lot of people accidentally do that. But if I wanted to add color underneath, I need to add another layer, bring it underneath my stick man. Let's just label that stick man. We double click, write the word stick man in there. Pop that layer underneath and choose a color of our liking. Say I wanted my Stickman to be blue, come into that color panel, push that over there, and what we can do now is draw bigger. Underneath like that. It just saves us that time. If we're trying to color over the top, it'd just be a bit of a pain. You can't really get the lines and things like that. That's what the whole point of layers is so we can do multiple different ones. Say I wanted to give this stick man some cheeks in a different color. I come to where my first color layer is. Let's say skin is what this layer is called. Just a reminder, they're double clicking on that bottom part where it said layer two and then just putting in what I wanted it to be called. Let's add another layer. There, that's gone in the right place, so we don't need to worry about moving it. Let's say this is cheeks. We'll add in maybe some light pink. There we go. This is a bit smaller. It allows us to add in multiple different alterations of colors while keeping them separate. I decided I didn't like the cheeks anymore or I just didn't want them visible for a while. All you have to do is come over here and click where that eye icon is and it will just disappear for you, but it's still there because if you click it again, it will come back. Yeah. Awesome. We don't really need to worry about this anymore. If we want to get rid of our layers, finally, they're not coming back, just click on that bin icon in the corner and they will just disappear for you. 10. Process of Creating a Rough Sketch : The next part of our process is going to be a small character just so we can get used to the process of coloring and line art and things like that. I've actually designed a character here before we start the tutorial, but I'm going to take you through roughly how we can design a character. So, we're just going to keep it simple. You can do whatever you want. Normally characters you pick a shape and you'll keep most of your shapes to something consistent along the line. Here I've got a lot of circles, but you can do a lot of squares or triangles and things like that. That's just something that a lot of character designers go by. We can just keep it simple for now. You can either copy my design or I'll just give you a quick guide as to how to design your own. So our first step, I like to work in red when I'm doing my roughs. I've added a new layer. Just to do that. Awesome. Our first thing is to do a rough sketch. To start off with my stick van, what I did was, I want to do a face, something like that. I'm going to grab my brush, get about the right size, and just do a bit thick for my liking. Hold on. I was drawing it in, not worrying quite so much about getting those clean lines. Something that is useful for beginners is just making sure you're doing loads and loads and loads of lines. We can keep it simple. It's better to have a couple of rings around if you really need it or just keeping it that one and just trying it again and again. If you've gone wrong, like I have, Control Z. Control Z or clicking this undo button up here, is really great rather than just doing an uncertain circle, something like that because that's just not going to end up looking neat. This looks much more clean and easy to read and also it takes less time once you get used to it. We're going to design a rough body, we've got another one here along these lines. Yeah, draw in some eyes. Eyebrows. Say I went wrong, like I've shown there. What we can do as well is I didn't go through it necessarily before, but it's the same thing as where the pens are. We've got all the different types of rubbers here. We're going to get a hard rubber, which means that it's going to have that hard edge, it's not going to be soft. We'll just rub that one out. We just get rid of that or we could have done Control z up to you, then back to our pen and drawing that other eyebrow. Yeah, you can do your mouth however you want. You can make him smile, have his tongue out, up to you, and then we'll move on to our arms. So we'll put them in like that. Completely up to you how you do it, what pose they're in. You could do thick arms, thin arms, completely up to you. Just do a quick design of whatever you'd like and don't worry too much about the lines being completely clean. Awesome. So we have kind of a mock up of roughly what we want our character to look like. 11. Linework : Our next steps are to add in our line art, which you might have heard of. Line art is that clean, final line like what I've got on the left here. So what we do is we need to get a new layer, add in our new layer. Perfect. And we will go back to our layer one. This is our rough. Let's just label that in there. Then let's do that called line art. Awesome. Perfect. On our rough layer, we want to adjust something called the opacity just so we can see what we're doing. Over here, we've got our opacity and if we scroll that down, it's just going to slowly disappear. If it was zero, completely disappeared, it's completely transparent. We're going to put it at about 15. I like to keep it quite low just because I find it distracting, if not, but it's basically just a gentle guideline just to make sure we're doing it right and then we'll change our color to black or whatever color you want your lines to be and just go over that carefully, adding in your final lines. Yeah. Again, here is where we are going to be trying to get our lines to be just one. Before we had our sketchy round looking multiple different lines just to get an idea of the shape. But here we're going to be trying to get that final circle and you might go wrong. You might not like the shape of the circle the first time. What you need to do is control and see again and you can try one more time. Then I might take a few tries before I get exactly what I want. Yeah, go ahead and fill in the rest of your line art until you've got something along the lines of my character on the left. Again, this was just for demo, and I've actually already got my character ready, so I don't have to finish this, but pause the video here and go ahead and fix up your character until you're ready for color. All right. So pause video here. Awesome. Once you're ready with your character, what we can do is, first of all, get rid of our rough. We don't need that anymore. So we'll just come right over to the corner here. Delete layer. You don't need that. I'm just going to delete this line art as well because we don't need that either. All I'm left with is my stick Mm, which is my linear as I'm showing here. It's not connected to the background or anything, and we can make it disappear just by clicking that I icon here, as I mentioned before. When it comes to coloring a piece, there are multiple ways you can do it. We're just going to focus on a quick blocking. It's just the quickest and easiest way to get your character or get an idea of the colors you want and things like that. As I said before, we're just going to practice with those layers. Add in a new raster layer just like that, pull it behind our stick man. Awesome, and we are just about ready for color. 12. Basics of Colouring and Using the Colour Wheel : Cool. This is the start of Chapter three drawing fundamentals. We already started on line art and getting used to drawing in interface, but now we're going to move on to doing some coloring. We have our Stickman layer, nice and simply done there, our clean line art and everything. We're just going to go underneath this layer one and as we did before, just get used to naming our layers because that's just a really good habit to get into. Otherwise, you end up with 80 layers and no clue which one belongs to what? Let's just call this bottom one color. For now. Awesome. What nature is to do if we're just locking in stuff is using that fill tool, which is always useful. Let's say I get this fill tool, which is this bucket down here, and I wanted to fill, say my character in a shade of green, something around there. If I go to fill based on this character, say, I want my head to be green. Say I wanted our head to be green and I just click Fill there. The whole thing is going to be filled in green, which is not what we want exactly. We want it just to be in the area of the head. We can do two things. First of all, set our Stickman layer as our reference layer, so it knows what we're talking about. We don't technically have to do this right now because we only have one layer of lineup, but when it comes a bit more complicated, you might have multiple different layers. I can always be useful just to set that as what we're referring to. We're saying we want it to respond to these lines in particular. Let's just get rid of the color. Sorry, reference layer. Then we're going down to our color layer. Now if it says refer to other layers. Right now it's referring only to editing layer, nothing's going to happen, nothing's going to change from what happened before. But if we click refer to other layers, now, if I want to fill in his skin green, it will fit to that size in particular. Let's try doing the rest of the face. Say I want a dark red maybe for inside his mouth. Perfect, and maybe he hasn't been brushing his teeth quite quite enough, he has slightly yellow teeth going on there. Awesome. Now say I wanted to color in his body green as well, and I wanted that same shade of green. I could try and match the color roughly of what I was aiming for, but it might not come out exactly the same. You see? I've got a bit of a slightly darker shade of green. I don't want that. There's an easy way to fix that and it's using the eyedropper tool. We can either come over here to where that droplet sign is here. And we can click Pick display color and that will just match exactly to what we want and just pop that in there that will give us the exact same color or we can use the tool by clicking the letter I on our keyboard and then that should just match perfectly for us whatever we need and then go back to our tool when we need it. Perfect. Then let's just finish that off. Let's do his hands. They might be a little bit open and the feet I don't think are going to work, because it's too open. But there's other ways we can do this. If we go and just clean this up, let's use our brush, maybe make it a tiny bit bigger and fill in those feet. Just being, you can be as careful as you can, but we are going to it's better to be careful afterwards when we're just going to go through and make sure everything's filled in and everything's looking correct. We're going to use that shortcut that we learned earlier going to we can either go here and click Zoom in or use Control plus, as I said before, and use the hand tool with the hand tool. The way to quickly skip to there is just by clicking space and holding space and then you can just move around like that. Or as I showed you before, you can go to the hand like this that will help you move around. But once we zoom in, we realize our color isn't quite as neat as we need it to be. We go in with a rubber a hard rubber because if you use a soft rubber, there's a hard we use a soft, we're not going to get those clean lines, it's not going to work. That would be for probably when we're coloring or trying to get that smooth gradient, but right now we're suited to a hard brush. Just go through and find all of those imperfections and just make sure drawing is looking nice and sharp. Awesome. Anything wrong up here? Go in with our brush. Remember our eyedropper, shortcut. Click that teeth thing, and there we go. Awesome. Say we wanted to we've got our Control minus. Zoom out. We've got our drawing now. It's all colored in, but we want to see what it looked like before we colored it in. We go back to how it looked before, but we don't want to delete all of our color. All we have to do, as we said before, is click that eye button off just to have a view of it and we can go back on and the same thing the other way around. If we want to look at our colors, you can just click that off there. Perfect. 13. Using Clipping Masks : The next step in what we're doing here would be just have a quick look at using clipping masks before we go onto our first proper exercise. Let's add in our new layer. We want to add some shading to our character. Let's label this shading that double click and shade it. Perfect. Just say that. We're going to click this top button here, Clip two layer below. So we're creating something called a clipping mask, which means that our color will only go inside whatever's on the bottom layer. We can only shade in, say I but I'll show you exactly what section we're talking about. When I fill it in, hold on. When I fill it in, it will show exactly what I'm referring to. We can only color in that section in particular. Or if I do just a little draw, see how it only shows up in that section, which is exactly what we want, it's still underneath our lineup, but yeah. Perfect. Say what I wanted to do here was shade the skin. Let's look at what color our skin is. Good. Then move this over and down a little bit just to get a shading color. We go in with our G Pen in decent size, maybe a little bit more than that. We can add in just a lovely little cell shaded line here. Just to give this character some depth, make it look a little bit three. You can also add a shading line here and something over here as well. Just to make it look like the light is hitting over on the left side of him. We've got a sun coming in from I have to come up there down here. I got a sun coming in from over here somewhere. What we're going to need is shading, but we haven't done the shading on the top. Let's just grab that color again, and go back to our GPN in a decent size and draw in that shadow there. Yeah, we can even do a little bit there because he'll be blocking the light as well. Name that up. Yeah. It's just really useful in terms of not having to worry about if we didn't have this clipped, we can unclip it as well. So if we click that again, look at all those outside lines that we've got going there that we don't need at all, it just takes much less time than trying to keep in the lines and we can just focus on the important parts rather than something easy like that. That's a really easy way to approach. Awesome. I'm going to just quickly stop the video here again, and then we're going to go on to our next exercise, which is the drawing sphere exercise. 14. Using the Lasso Tool : The next thing that we have to do just before we start on our sphere, just to keep everything really nice and neat and tidy, we're going to put our stick man away because we don't want to get rid of him yet because we still might want him on the page. But say we're just not dealing with him right now and we're going to have a bunch of new layers and we don't want all to get mixed up. There's a really easy way to keep them together. If you go to here where we had our layers and go across to, we've got new layer folder. We click that, we'll come up with the word there folder one, and let's just call that stick Man, just like that. Now, if we click on our layers that we want, hold down shift, click that second one. Sorry, hold down shift, click that second one and the color one, and just drag that in till that gets that red highlight around the outside. When we drop it, nothing seems to have changed, but if we click this down icon here, hopefully, all of them should disappear into our stick Mount folder. They're all separate layers. Say I wanted to change our shading said I wanted to add in some want to make it dark or something like that, I can still go and do whatever I want. That's not making it darker, but I can still go in and do whatever I want and I haven't lost all those layers, but we can now also treat it as a whole picture as one. We can move it around as one and things like that. If we want to move around our layer, for example, the Stickman, use Control and That's Control We want to transform the layer and that will enable us to be able to move around our character. Say we want to move him down here to get him out of the way, click Okay down there and he'll be completely fine as it is. It's popping back up where he was. Cool. The other thing that can be really useful with Control T is say, I just wanted to move his head. Say I wanted to change his head to a different one and put his head down here. Let's just pick him up like this. We highlight the area you wanted. We went to, click to Lasso, and then we use that same Control which allows us just to move the area we've selected. We move this down here. Pop that down there and to get rid of this because if I say wanted to start drawing a new head now over here, nothing will happen because we need to be drawing inside this section and also on a layer. But we can only draw inside this section. We won't be able to draw it anywhere but where it is highlighted, so we click Control D, then everything will go back to normal and you can draw however you would like. Let's just pop his head back on because we don't need that. Perfect. So we've got our stick man in our folder there nice and neatly and we've got a title up here as well. But now our next thing to do is go through some fundamentals. We're going to be talking about how to draw a ball and shade it realistically. Our first step is going to be to add a new layer. We're going to go to our lasso tool, I mean, I briefly mentioned the assu already, but we have lots of different types of lasso here. We have polyline, which is if you wanted those straight edges when you were selecting, it will give you a much more trolled shape. Control D to let go. For example, it can be useful depending on what you're drawing. Get rid of that, or we have rectangle ellipse and things like that. There's all different ways you can so if you don't want to have that free form organic way of doing it as well. Say I wanted to select a complex shape. Say I wanted a rectangle, for example, and I wanted a circle attached to that as well. What we can do is where we have selection mode. This is just going to move it around. Say I did one over here, it's going to be a new one and a new one and a new one. If I have my selection there, and then I go, I want to add to my selection now. When I do a new one, it will just add to that selection. We got the same thing. Say I wanted to cut something out, can cut something out there. Or down here, and here we get just the middle part. We can actually get some really nice complex shapes by doing this method. We can change it if we wanted to add an ellipse in there, we can and that will do the same thing there. We can add in our free form. You can switch interchangeably within these and it still works. That's just always important to note. But getting onto our ball, which is what we're doing, we're just going to go for a simple ellipse, which makes sense. 15. Shading Exercise: Drawing a Sphere : If we just try and draw a circle, it can actually be quite difficult to get it as a circle, it might end up looking a little bit lopsided, a little bit thin or fat. But if we do our circle but hold down shift, that will just give us an even regular circle. Hold down shift and then let go when you're ready it's about the right size, and we're just going to do this in monochrome. Let's pick big dark gray from over here on the color picker. Go to fill and referring only to editing layer, can fill that in. That is our first step ready for this ball to come to life. From there, we're now going to add a clipping mask, which is what we already talked about a little bit. We're going to add in that. Let's put this as our base layer. Then add in our new layer. And call that shading and go to clip to layer below. If you remember, clip to layer below is what we did here where we had the shading on a different layer and it can only show up. Everything we do will only show up in this ball section now no matter what we do. If I had bright green and I just colored over, it would just stay in that circle there. We're not working with bright green right now. Let's just do a mid tone of gray. What I want to use for this tutorial is this soft airbrush, which you should already have because it is a default brush. We're going to make it quite big. Keep the hardness very low. Because hardness will give more of a defined edge if it's very hard, you can't see because it's eclipsed. Let me just show you here. That'll give quite a hard edge where this will give us a nice soft blended edge like that. We're looking for something soft right now, so we're just going to in of that. That was just demonstrating. We're going to pop in our half tone. This is the ball with no light on it at all, and we're just going to drop in a nice lighter color here. If we have our light color here, that implies that let me just add this in. Implies we have a light coming from over here. Yeah, so we've got sunlight coming in over this side here, and it's going to be hitting the ball and then we're going to have our shadow over this side, just so you know, we back to our shading layer. We've got our half tone here. Which is how it's responding to the light and then we're going to bring up that half tone as we can. We're going to go with the same color as this about halfway. We're just going to pop in that lovely shadow there. Not shadow, lighting there. Then if we make it a little bit smaller and what we can do is add in something called reflected light. When you have this is very simplified, but when you have light, normally on basically every object, you'll have your actual light source, but you also have reflected and bounce light from the objects around you that will reside in the shadow. Normally, this area is also going to have a little bit of a light to it. Over here, you're going to have something a little bit lighter and you can add that into yours as well. You can bring that up a tiny bit. It's looking a little bit dark. We've got a reflected light. Let's just label that in light. You might have done this already if you're into traditional art, but it's just always good to know and experiment with the brushes is useful anyway. We've got our half tone. We've got our core shadow over here, which is the darkest part of our ball because it's not getting any reflected light and it's also on the darker side of the ball. The next thing to do is so we're going back to that shading part, and we're going to bring up our highlight area. We want to define where the light is hitting first. So let's let's make this a little bit larger. There we go. Only slightly, I'm just going to make that get lighter in about the same spot as where this light is hitting. We can just edge that up and make this bit smaller as well. Can you see this ball starting to look like a three D form? It's all about I feel like that reflected really brings it together just to make it look realistic. Then when we get quite close to the lightest value we're looking for, we can bring it much smaller and define a high light area. That's the lightest section of the ball itself. Just to add a bit more contrast as well. Where I said that core shadow, the darkest part of our ball, we can add in a bit of a darker area. I'm just going to go in with that dark color pop on here. You can use whatever type of brush you want. I'm just going to pop on this one, but anything you can find and that's a bit to light still. Bring in a little bit of darkness over here, where it feels right. If you're not sure on the color, pop in where the dark shadow is and see how dark it is at the moment and then just bring it down a little bit more from there. You can just emphasize that section a little bit more. And it really just brings out the three D aspect of the ball. It takes a lot of trial and error, so don't worry if you're not quite getting. I'm not sure why that's coming out, the wrong color. Let me just pop it in a different. Pen. There we go. Perfect. That might just help us to get the more contrast go in there and our last pop. Let's just label up what we've got so far. As I mentioned, see if you can remember pop in red. Got our highlight over here. As much the same size as the other ones, is 2.5, there we go. Highlight. Then we've got one more thing to add in, which is our shadow. I will cast quite a dark shadow. We can't actually do the shadow on the ball because the shadow will be cast into the outside of the ball range. We'll just go underneath, not on the base layer, but underneath that, add a new layer. Let's labeled this shadow. Perfect. We can use that soft tool as you're doing before. Make it quite big. As the shadow gets further away from the ball itself, it's going to get less visible. It's going to get lighter. Let's just pop in. Something to start off with and this really brings our ball to life. Popping something along the lines of this with the darkest part being there, you can even darken this side a little bit once you've established something. Then I'd also sharpen up the side closest to the ball because as you get further from the ball, lines will become fuzzier. But in close proximity, that's a bit too hard. Once something soft, then we can just up the hardness. We can get something that's a bit more sharp and it will end up being softer as we work so we can work our way backwards with that hardness and just add in the transition and we can pop on the other side as well because that needs to be a bit flatter anyways. If we turn the hardness right down, it's right up and just take a little bit off that end to make it go a bit lighter. You can adjust and play with this as much as you want to get the right result for you. You just pop this on high and bring this down a little bit comes hard bit too far. The and awesome. We have produced something that gives that three D effect. We've got us so we've got that highlight, which is the brightest point on our ball and then our half tone, which is the general color, core shadow, and reflected light and our actual shadow underneath. This is called a cast shadow. I'll just pop that in there. That's always a good time to know as well. Cast Shadow. This is a value study. Values are how bright or dark a color is. Once you've established values, every color has a value, but this is a black and white representation. Of what you can do in color, if that makes sense. This is the most important foundational part of what's going on, and then you can add colors that are light, so they'll correspond across this way. Where we have this highlight, it might be something that's more like a bright red, and then our dark part would be down here. I'd be a dark value. I would coincide with the gray, but it would just be a darker red, if that makes sense. It's really important to get your value knowledge strong and then that will help you with your coloring as well. But this is our basic, if I can get rid of this just so we can look at it by itself. This is our basic bull study. Really well done so far. Is there anything else I need to cover? Oh, and we'll be moving on to Chapter four soon, which is looking at blending modes and gradient basics and things like that. You can have a go at doing multiple of these just to get used to that idea, pushing the values even further. In terms of pushing the values further, the further you push the values and the less textured, the brushes you use. We used a soft brush. If you use something more like the noise brush, you're going to get something that looks a bit more textured. This almost looks like metal or something like that. It's quite neutral. If you pushed it even further, so it's brighter highlights, less smooth gradients, more harsh. And more contrast, that's going to look more metallic where the opposite way might look more like velvet or something that doesn't have any sheen to it. These value studies you can practice, making it look more like different materials, and you can also just practice making things look three D. Awesome. That's what's covered for now and we'll move on to Chapter four. Thank you so much. 16. Keeping Layers Neat: Layer Folders : The next thing we have to do is just make sure we're keeping our workspace clean, keeping our layers clean. We're just going to have a look through there. Rename this nibs. Perfect. We're going to take them off anyway. We're going to add a folder like we did before. Just click on that, rename it. Once again, doing that, hold down shift and clicking all the layers we need in there and pulling that into our folder. When that goes red, we can just drop it. We've got everything in ball and we've got everything in stick man so we can make either of them disappear. 17. Gradient Maps : What I want to do now is just have a little look at our stick man again in a bit more detail. Let's bring him to the center for now. Right now we have quite a boring texture going on with our stick man. He is just this solid green color. He has his shading here, but say we want to step this up a little bit. Let's say we got our color. We'll call that our base for now and we'll add a new layer. This time, what I'd like to do is I'd like to add a gradient. A gradient is where it goes from one color to another. We can see on this side, I've clicked the gradient tool, under the fill button and we can have it going from one color to the other as a fill. For example, just draw a line in like that, and there we have our gradient. We can choose what colors are in our gradient by using these. If I set this color, say I want him to go from light blue light blue color. Then we go to our secondary color there, double click that and I want it to go to a purple lavender color, S there. That's what I want my character to look like. Now when I do my line, we can do that transition. Yeah. If I wanted to go the other way, I'd start from the bottom go up. If I want it more gradual, I'll make a longer line like that. If I want it less gradual, would be shorter. We can have it so it basically doesn't have much overlap at all. Completely up to you. There's also four ground transparent which would be one side to the other and it just becomes completely one side will be just Alpha, which is nothing, and then the other side will be one color. This is just going from blue to nothing, and there are many different ones you can do. Let me just table this off. Now we're back to normal. You can also have multiple colors. You can have more complex. Here's a sunset, they've got five different colors in there or six different colors. I miscounted. So when I do this, got a whole sunset going there. I will do blue sky. Let's do that. Perfect. Actually I want it this way. This is how I want my character to be colored for now. I'm going to add over the top of this another layer, his mouth again, just that dark red. I'll just fill that in for now. We can use the Lasso selectol and using the reference layers as we did before or you can just fill it in. This might not be quite as perfect. I felt like do it in this case to show you the different range of things you can do and then do those slightly yellow offish teeth or his teeth and then go back in. I selecting that darker color. Okay, everything shaded in nicely. Awesome. There you go. All right. Now it's time for the shading, so we don't need this one anymore, get rid of it and let's try a new one. If I want that darker color, maybe I want that dark blue, so we'll get the big GPN as we did before. We'll go for blue, dark blue, and make sure it's clipped on. Remember that clipping below. Give it a bit bigger, not that big. See there we've got shadow color. But this doesn't quite look right anymore, does it? It looks a little bit off. This is because, obviously, our colors changing throughout the character from top to bottom, so it's not going to make sense for our shadow color to be the same the entire way through. Doesn't quite look right. 18. Introduction to Blending Modes and Gradients : But what we can do is use something called a blending mode. If I choose instead of just having this block solid color to go over here and pick a different way for the layers to blend together, I can get a much nicer result. I swap to multiply, which seems to have just made it darker and not done much for the image. But if I now bring back the opacities and make it a bit more transparent, you can see that although it's made, that consistent shadow, it's adjusting based on the light of the layer, each layer. Over here, we've got a darker shadow because it's on a darker color, but it's more of an overlay. We can also use overlay, which is another type, which just has a very slightly different effect, but it will adjust based on your colors that you're using. That can be really helpful if you don't have that consistent look. If you have a textured character as well, that can be really helpful. That always comes into play very well, and we have all these other different types of layer blending modes. Say we wanted to add a light, add another one, flip that in and let's add a bright light. Make it something like bright yellow. Just get it shine. We know that the shadows coming this way, so let's add a soft light. Up here, the hardness is low. Perfect. It doesn't look all that great now. Maybe I can bring it up a little bit and then add something. But when we a bit bigger into it all the time over here and in here. When we make it into a light, we can have soft light here. That just adds that a little bit more glow into your image. We soft light, we've got hard light, which is going to be a bit harsher. You can adjust the opacity to make it fit your picture more. You can adjust the color a little bit. Vivid light, that's going to be a little bit more vibrant. Yeah. There's all these different ones you can experiment with. Those are the main ones you'll probably be using as a beginner, but there's different sorts so if you're not sure, you can look up what they do or you can just test out different ones and see what works best for you. This is how you can use a bit more of a complicated process to coloring your characters and this comes really handy when you're using more complex colors or if it's multiple different things, they are different colors, but they're all in the same shading. 19. Downloading and Installing Brushes : The next thing to cover is using different brushes. We have quite a nice range of brushes. The default brushes on Clip Studio paint are quite nice. But say you want to upgrade or change or use a specific type of brush, say you wanted an oil paint texture or something like that, for example, and you can't find what you need. Clip Studio has a really nice marketplace of loads and loads of different types of brushes that you can use. So to access those, we have to go back to our Clip Studio. It will be on the screen for you. What's the loads. For some reason it's only going to in upgrade now, but that actually doesn't matter because we're going down to where it says service. We want to go to Clip Studio paint assets. Assets is where we can basically get a combination of all different things to help us draw. It'll be quite easy to navigate and you can search in exactly what you're looking for. But yeah, they've got all these different things. You can see all these advertisements for different things that artists have created as resources and we are looking for drawing and painting materials. If we click on there. Say we wanted, as I said, an oil painting brush, click on here, it says free, you can pay money and things like that, but we're just going to be looking at free ones for now. Must have miss clicked on there. You click on there. There we at. Perfect. It's giving us samples of exactly what these different types are going to look like and even a demo. You can see this is very similar to what we're covering with the ball. We've got that half tone and we've got the cast shadow there, we've got the reflected light. This is the core shadow here. It's quite similar. Awesome. That's just a demonstration of how this brush could work for you or these brushes, collection of brushes, and it's got a demo of all the ones there. To get this downloaded onto your Clip Studio, we have to do is click Download and it should download as an ABR file. Yeah. So once that's all loaded in, I will come back. 20. Creating a 3D Character & Using Soft and Hard Light Layer Types: This is Section four A of the course and it's going through applying what we learned in Chapter four and the previous chapters as well. Basically, what we're going to do in this section is render out a three D version of that stick man that we developed in Part three, using the techniques we've learned in Part four. The first thing you're going to want to do is grab that stick man and we're just going to take him out of the stick man boulder now and pop into the top. There he is. Awesome. Control T that and grab him and pull into the middle of your screen. Remember to hold that shift button and then drag him out so he's nice and big. Jumped. There we are. Let go and click Okay when you're ready. Awesome. To start off, we're going to use quite similar techniques to what we did before when we were coloring in our stick man. All we're going to do is add a new layer underneath. And we still got the Stig Mansa as our reference layer, which is awesome and we are going to go to fill and choose a dark green color. Let's pick something out like this. Have we set this to refer to other layers? No, we haven't. We need to make sure we're clicking that refer to other layers there. I'm just going to desaturate that a bit and bring it a bit lighter. Keep it brain neutral. That seems about right. Perfect. Now, if we get rid of reference layer of the stick man, we're left with something along the lines of this. Now, because I use the texture brush, which you might have done as well, I'm just going to have to go around my edges and clean up. I'm going to get just a G pen. I can either go round with a pen like this or I can rub away just that texture on the edge and give it a smooth finish. I'm actually going to using a hard rubber, a little bit smaller. Just going around the whole thing, and smoothing out all those bumps because we want that smooth three D look going. Going around the whole of my shape, taking up the smooth edges. Again, some of you won't have this problem as you will use just a regular pen, which makes your life a little bit easier for this step, but it shouldn't take too long, just to roughly plush out. It doesn't have to be 100% perfect, but you can see there's quite a lot of little bumps and crevices in this shape at the moment. Which I don't like. I'm just going to try and get rid of them as best I can. I actually quite like the imperfect finish. I feel like it makes it feel a little bit more handmade with the final result. I don't mind doing this. Just going to lightly shape round it, I would say, and get that nice smooth edge. Try not to change the shape of the actual head as you've already developed this and hopefully it should be free even. Lovely. I think we're just about ready to move on to the next step. Awesome. That is looking good to me. No next thing to do is just smooth out that inside as well where we see those. We don't want that to be a horrible line. Doesn't really matter about those dots for the eyes at the moment. We are just focusing on getting these lines around the mouth and around the edges of the character. Make a mistake, you can either click undo or just fill it in using a pen on the other side. Like that. Just taking out those bumps just there. There, I think that was a bit too much there. Just try that one more time perf. Awesome. Now we have a lovely base to start with less of those jagged edges that stand out. Obviously, it's not perfect. We're going to be using a clipping mask, which hopefully you're familiar with by now. If not, we can run through it one more time. We're adding in a regular layer, then clicking where it says, click to layer below. That means that when I'm drawing over the top of it, I'm using rubber. I draw over the top of it, it will just stay to that area, and we're going to have a go at shading the same way we did that ball just now. Our first thing that we want to do, I've decided that let's take some notes first. Actually, just to make sure we know everything that's going on, we're going to have a light. Going to use a different pen. We will have a light coming from this direction. Let's draw that in. There's our light direction, and it's going to be a yellow light. As we mentioned when we're doing the ball, make this visible. Hold on. Can we cut this? Just in the road please? When we had our ball, we had our light direction over here and we have to first create this half tone light going on here to start adding that depth. The first thing we do after we pick that dark color because I'm making my character green, you can choose whatever color you want. But my character is going to be green with that yellow light shining on them, so I'll do something like this. I'm just going to grab a soft airbrush as I did before, change my layer to a hard light layer because it's going to be quite a strong light. Make it nice and big and just add a warm glow in that area. It's going to look quite similar to the last ball we did, and then I'm going to make it smaller and just up the intensity a bit. That's a little bit too pale. It's quite easy to tell when you've gone wrong with the color because it will not look like it's naturally getting brighter in the right spot. Wrong, that looks better to me, adding a highlight over here too. I don't want to make it too significant that it stands out because this is just the slight gradiation then we want to get that really nice bright highlight in there as well, something along the lines of that, making sure we get it in the right spot. That looks about right to me. Then we're going to add another layer. Clip this one as well. We're going to add that bounce light, which was this part down here. Our bounce light is coming from our surroundings and main light is coming from how it's actually lit. The best way to explain that would be the environment, so the sky, the sun and things like that, have a general effect and light up everything a little bit, but then you might have a bright studio shining on you and that's what you can see. Now we need to paint in that bounce light or the reflected light. We're going to use that soft again, but we're going to use a soft light this time. In a blue because it might be like the sky, as I said, or just that blue color reflecting. You see when we drop this in here, we get that nice three D feel to our character all of a sudden. I don't want to go too crazy with this. Otherwise it ruins the illusion. That's too hard. I'll bring us right down. That should be all right. I think. Looks good to me. We've all bounce light going, I might just lighten it up a little bit right in the center just to give it that sense of direction. We know exactly where the pinnacle is. You can see we've got that nice core shadow, this dark line here forming that we want, but we can actually emphasize that a bit. That looks a bit off. I just want to bring that down just a touch. Then we're going to pop in after that put. We're going to pop in another layer. This one, no effects on it, and select that nice dark color, bring it a tiny bit darker again adding in just a little bit of a dark line over here somewhere. Maybe pop a little bit there for some contrast. You can then down this side as well. You can still clip on this you want to do that. To help it blend a little bit better. I'm actually going to bring down the opacity just slightly to about 68%. Then when I cup it and put it in, hopefully we'll get a bit of a softer shadow that still looks good and do the same on the bottom, something like that, and over here as well. That just gives us a lovely three D feel. It's feeling like it's in a three D space already, which is great. But now we need to add a bit more of our character to it if that makes sense. 21. Rendering Materials : Our next step is to take another look at the character. The next thing we could put in is maybe his mouth and his teeth. Let's go underneath what we have so far and just pop in a dark red for inside the mouth. That's looking a little too pale. Let's just try again, make sure it's really red and dark and make sure our opasts back up. That's where our issue lies. Now that's looking a bit dark. There we go. We have his mouth in there, and I also want to add a little bit more darkness as well. I'm just going to pull that that way and just drop in a bit of a gradient. That always helps to make things look a little bit more realistic if you have that variation in color. G add a little bit of a light underneath as well. My more pink. And that's starting to come together really nicely as a three D look. The next thing we need to add, you can go ahead and pop in some teeth, add a layer just above and just section out those teeth like this. We can just fill those in with an off white, keeping it moderately muted and dark. If you just fill that in refer only to editing layer and put those in there. Looking good so far, turn that off really quick, and I realize that might be a little too dark. We're just going to have to balance it out in a second. Just sharpen up those teeth and correct any errors, and then we're going to do a little clipping mask on top of that area as well in multiply and add in a nice muted blue. Shadow, if I'm using the correct. Add some hardness to this. Just bring that down like that. Awesome. That just gives these teeth a bit more of a three D feel as it pushes them back into the mouth. Bend these to make them look a bit more curbed and three D. I reduce that shadow because that's looking a bit too harsh at the moment. Awesome. Got some teeth going there. And just to add a bit more contrast to the mouth itself, I'd like to add on top of everything we've got a hard light. We're going to do a hard light and remember it's going from this side and it is a bright yellow light. Just go in there with a nice defined pen. It should be clipped to there. There we go. That'll come out a bit better. Now when we add in our lip, it will look as though the light is hitting this section because it's coming from up here and it's going to hit there. I'll just give that nice three dimensional look to this and we can do the same but with a darker color, multiply on the top as well if we want to. Where the lips are turned away from the lights just pop that in there. If you're not 100% about anything, color, remember, we've got that tonal correction. I'm thinking this isn't quite looking how I wanted to. Let's just go edit tonal correction brightness, bring that right down. That's looking a bit more my speed. Awesome. We've got our mouth going. We've got our face and our body. The next thing to add is our eyes. I was thinking about how I want to stylize the eyes because obviously, they're quite drawn on at the moment, but I'm thinking I'm going to make them look a little bit metallic almost, so we can drop in something, maybe a little bit yellow because that's the most common color in the environment because the studio lights being yellow and just drop in a sharp circle here and circle there. We'll be able to see them in a minute and drop in those eyebrows as well while we're one there, and one here. We can also go ahead and do the arms, one like this one like this. We can always clean this up later, don't worry. I remember Control Z if you make a little mistake there. Just pop these on here, this. Same with the legs. We can deal with the hands and feet in a minute. Let's get rid of our thing. Awesome. They're looking all right so far. When you're dealing with something that is metallic, there is often a lot of gradient in there, but there's also harsh highlights in there. We're going to go from one extreme to the other with this section. I'd like to go in with a small brush. That almost fits in there and add in some highlights that aren't very gentle necessarily. Hopefully, es try this one more time. Just cut this here and we're checking how I did it before. Going to add in some bright spots. You make it slightly smaller. Hang on. I'm just going to add in a nice highlight on top. To give a real metallic feel to it and the same on the top, making sure we're leaving that little black section at the bottom to give that contrast and the feel that this is made of metal. The more sudden white we put in more highlights. Cool. They're not really feeling like they placed on the character though, so we're going to add a little bit of shadow in a minute. But just pop on the eyes a nice highlight looking not too bright, but quite bright one side, the nice gentle one in the bottom corner. That should give the feeling of a three D e. Nice. Nice that back, I can see a bit more. We got that defined highlight there and then just a really light bounce light or reflected light on the side. That makes it feel like a three D BD eye. Awesome. We've got our multiplier layer there and we can actually just use the same one. We're just going in with that darker green color. Let's pop in some shadows. If we go in with this, make it a little bit smaller than that with eight. That's a bit too dark. Let's actually add another one, another multiplier layer. Then we can make it a little bit less intensive as well. The shadow is going to come over here as the lights coming from. You can't see this general direction. Yeah, we're just going to pop them in there and then bring down that multiply layer too much, then I think. You can also add in a little bit there as well as on our hard light layer. Add in a highlight at the bottom. Don't worry too much about getting on your eyes because it should be clipped, it should be pretty easy to put in. That just adds that extra little pop. The contrast will make it feel like they're two separate things rather than laying flat. Awesome. Our head is basically done. Got those weird metallic eyebrows, the eyes done, and the mouth done. We're going to do the same thing with our arms. Let's just find the layer where we did the metal. Perfect. We can just adjust the silhouettes, make them look a little bit more interesting maybe a little bit thinner around these areas, just like that. Put that same thing on the other side. I was a bit too thin. But just to keep it interesting, just shave off a little bit maybe. Perfect, down here as well. And same thing with the legs. Otherwise, if you don't vary the line weight, it can just look like you drew it, if that makes sense. We're going to be doing something quite similar. First of all, I just want to finish off these lines because I feel like in some places you will be able to see. I'll probably get thicker where it goes in, you will be able to see where it goes in on the arms. Then let's add in some highlights. Make it nice and small. Pop in it takes a few tries sometimes, but don't give up. Maybe you've got some nice variation on that because it's been welded there. Then try the other side. That's much more high contrast. Highlights than you would see in some other things like the body we've got here. I'm just going to take out let's do it in black. Just going to take out some of the highlights on this side because it would be in shadow there wouldn't actually be any highlights around here. It's not picking up anything because it's blocked by the body. It's not getting any light, so it doesn't make sense it would have a lot of shadows. Just while I remember, let's drop a couple of shadows highlights into the legs. That looks about right to me. So we have our multiplier layer and hard light, we'll add in a nice bright light. Now we'll add in a dark shadow underneath. We goes in. Add some contact shadow. Awesome. Looking good so far. We've got our arms, we got our legs. Let's just cut these off as well, while I remember to make sure it's looking super clean and perfect because we won't be able to see where those legs join. Our last step is just adding in those arms and legs. For this part, we can use our lasso tool. Let's just select in these areas that we need to fill. There and there. Perfect. Works very well. Fill them in with that same base color. The easiest way to get this is going to be there. Click I when you're doing that. Then let's just fill in these sections. We'll give them their own layer, actually. Above the multiply, we're going to fill in those four. Now you can get rid of the stick man almost for good because we're almost done. Perfect. Let's just refine up the shapes if we want. Take out that really weirdly pointed corner because that's not going to work in a three D shape for this. It's more of a two D look and just round out some of those shapes ready for our next step. Awesome. This is going to be quite a similar process to what we did before. We're going to have to find that highlight. Let's go in with our soft and our yellow. You go with slightly smaller. If it's coming from over here, we're going to need to make it hard light first and also clip it to that layer as well. It's make it hard light. There we go. That's looking much better. On this side, we're going to do this, but it's not going to catch as much because we have the shadow there, so most of it will be in shadow. You can already see how that's really bringing together the three Dness of that hand. That's looking good. Let's do the bombs. It's just going to be catching at the top there. Let's just shake that out a little bit. Our highlight will be more there and then also on this side there, and we'll get that soft rubber high hardness and just break apart those shadows. Those highlights a little bit to make it look a bit more rounded. Perfect. We've got our feet and we've got our hands. Now we can drop in some bounce lights, add another soft light. Get some blue. Pop that in wherever it seems to fit. Get it under here. Maybe coming up, but that looks cool to me. You can tone it down if you're not feeling it so much. I think that is about right for mine. I think our last step might be similar to what we are adding with the ball is adding those shadows. The last thing we need to do after clue this is adding in some shadows. We can do this using multiply. For our head, our head is going to cast a shadow onto the body. Let's have a go using our soft tool, low hardness and just popping in, that's way too saturated. We don't want to look like that. Something maybe blue. I'm pulling it over this way because we know the show is going to hit that way. That's looking nice. But what we want is as we had before, shadow, when it's close to the source of the shadow is going to be much more defined than as it drifts off down this way. We can put it more like that. That makes sense. Making sure we've got a great shape there. You can cut that down again. Awesome. I can bring that shadow down a bit of extreme. A add in. I mean, we might want to do a dark blue like that. Add in a lovely shadow for our character as well, just on the floor just to make him feel like he belongs in the space. So we do there and there for the feet and he's going to have a big shadow for his body. As I mentioned, this part is key in just making sure that he looks like he belongs. Let's try it more time. Actually, let's do this on a separate layer because it's getting all over his legs. We can just pop this down to the bottom because it needs to go under everything anyway. There we go. Getting a bit more of a pop now. Let's just bring that color down a little bit more before we start. There are with our rubber, take out everything on that side and most of what's on this side as well there quite parallel to the character. So it shouldn't be too big of a s shadow. Lights come up here. It's actually probably going to be more like this. It's not going to be cast very far at all. Over here, might only get that teens shadow. Take all of this. Then just add in a nice soft circle or where ding. Actually, I might leave it out to circle, simply things down a little bit because that's looking a bit much. There. Then this is in again and see how it looks. Yes, better there before and that one's already covered. Something like this is basically applying all those ideas we learned. Using those hard light and multiplier layers actually in practice just really helps you to get used to using them in context. I know we're doing that with the bulb, obviously, this is a little bit more complex, but hopefully this was helpful and we're moving now on to our final illustration piece, which is going to be a tree, which we're going to approach in a more traditional sense, where here we used more multiplier layers and hard light layers. Thank you. 22. Sketching a Tree Illustration : Now we're going to apply most of the knowledge that we've learned throughout the rest of the course and also build on that knowledge as well with an illustration of a tree. Our first course of action we miss starting a new illustration project or at least mine. Obviously, everyone's process is different is making sure we find some references. The first thing to do would be to find a reference of a tree. You can either go outside and just take a victory of one if that's what you prefer or have a look online and just find a strong reference to be using for this process. Show you here. I have grabbed this picture of a tree and I liked the shape of this one. Let me just click on Layer seven. When you copy and paste in an image, it might go out at any size, so we're just remembering those control. Control T is to grab our picture, then we can drag it about. Don't panic if you can't do anything else or you're confused as to what to do. If you want to rotate it, that's how you rotate it. But don't be confused if you're not sure what to do, make sure you're clicking that okay or you can just click your Enter button and then it will sit in the right position. It also might sometimes go a little bit lower quality when you're moving it. Don't panic. Once you click Okay, it should go completely back to normal. We have this picture of a tree. That's what I want to create, but you can make more of a mood board. You might have more of an idea of, I like the shape of this tree. But I don't particularly like the colors, so I might use a different thing for the colors. You can just have a look on Pinterest or on Google, whatever you'd like, just to get some inspiration for what you want. I've also got another picture here, so let me just open this up. There we go. I prefer this set of colors. Sorry, I'm on the wrong layer there, going down to Layer six. Control T again. I really like the colors in this image, so I'm looking for something more along the lines of this for my picture. I prefer to have this set of references on top of my original tree just so I can see it. I'm just going to pull that up and label these both reference one. I double click to there reference one and click off when you're ready and I'll label that for you and then reference. Two. Perfect. Then just to keep things extra neat, get rid of that we can put all of this into a folder as we have been doing before. Folder, call them references. Are There we are. We'll click these two, hold shift, click both of them, just drag them until that red outline comes up and we can just pop them all in there, they're not going to bother us anymore and we can also get rid of them at the same time if we're not using them anymore. I want to hide our first one because all we need is our actual reference to the tree right now because the first thing we're going to do is that basic sketch to get those shapes in. To start, we're going to want that new layer because if we're not getting that new layer, it's going to be on something else. Is going to be really inconvenient and we'll call this our base sketch. You can use you'd like. You can use whatever you'd like to sketch this out. I personally I'm going to use from the brush pack that we downloaded in Chapter four right at the end. I like that oil sketch brush. I've been using that I would like to start off in a dark red. Sometimes. You can start off in black. It's completely your preference, of course, but personally, I like to draw it a dark red. I just find it makes it easier for me, not really any reason why. Let's go ahead. I'll change my brush size. Remember there's two ways to do that, guys, we can either go down here to where it says brush size and change it there or use the scroller here. See? That's a bit too thin. We want to be able to see some of that texture. Just a tiny bit smaller. I've gone for about I think 17 will be about right. That seems good to me. Then just start off. We want to be starting getting those basic shapes. It doesn't matter if I'm just going to make a tiny bit bigger. Let it go. Exactly, everything right because obviously you can go back in and correct. But just getting an idea of roughly what it's going to look like. All I'm focusing on right now is the branches. We don't need to worry about the leaves at all yet, just blocking in that basic shape. I pops in here, goes up to about there before it's interrupted by branches. Then I assume there'll be a branch under there. Let's come down on the other side. A really great thing with trees is trying not to make everything match each other. Instead of doing that, you make it very slightly different on each side to give it that more interesting shape and making sure we're going light with our touches. It's going to give it that more expressive alive feel because this isn't very dynamic in comparison to just adding a little bit of curve there as I'm planning to do here. Let's continue. Get rid of that. You can control Z, if you remember. Then let's go back to adding some more on here. You can add in some basic details, but we're going to be painting over this. This is just a rough guideline. This isn't important at all yet. It's just to establish those base shapes. Drop it down to there, drop in those branches like that. We've got this main branch over here that can make it a little bit thicker. As we go. Perfect. You can take your time with this, absolutely no rush at all. With time, you'll get stronger and more confident in laying those lines down. If you find it helps you get a bit more confident, you can even trace over this at first just to be getting an idea or even if you want to focus on your coloring, you can just trace it if you use a bright red, for example, you'll be able to see a bit better, but you can literally trace over. Transfer that drawing and then when you're worrying about doing something more like your drawing process, that's when you can focus on doing your actual base sketch by yourself. I'm just going to make this a little bit thicker, I think, just to make it feel right. I know there is a rule when drawing trees that the total of all the branches added up together is the same as the base. The thickness of this, you can't see where I'm drawing. Let me just do the thickness of this section here should be the same as the total of this and all the branches combined, if that makes sense. That's how it gradually gets thinner. Well it back down here and grab our brush and add in a few of those brushes. Again, no need to worry about it being too perfect. Then we've got this branch back here as well. I do both. I'm just going to bring this. I can see I've gone wrong here. Again, no worries if you go wrong, you can always correct it. There's something really nice about digital art. The beauty of it is that it doesn't ruin your page in the same way it does if you go wrong. There's a lot of room for experimentation. Lovely. I just bring down that other side like this. A lot of sticky out branches like that. Just establish some of those in there. Again, not needing to get too bogged down in the details right now. If you want to change something, for example, I like this drawing, but I think that they need to be slightly closer together because this space here does not feel like the same as that space there. No we go Control Z to get rid of that part. Then we can just use our Lasso tool as we learned earlier, grab this section and say, Okay, I'm going to Control T to grab it and just shift that over. You can either use your pen to shift it or you can use your arrow keys. I'm pulling that over to the left a bit and that's looking much better to me. I'm going to pop it there by clicking Enter and then Control D to deselect it. Or you can click this button in the corner to deselect it if you prefer to do that as well. Back to our brush. I'm popping in that extra area. But these branches will come later. I think that's about all I need in terms of the base sketch for our branches. Awesome. Let me change that to base sketch base branches. 23. Coloring and Shading the Illustration : Now we're going to add a blocking of the shapes of our trees. The next step is to go, I would like to go in with our dry oil paint, which just that little bit thicker and try and block in the rough shapes of our leaves. Let's label this. Leaves. Let's just pop in some shapes so we can see over here. Here we can also identify the forms. We're trying to look for where they're forming little circles or circles where there will be the different chunks of the tree. You can see if I highlight in a bright red or something. We've got this area here, there's one area behind, and then in front of that, we've got this branch here. We got one up here as well. One over here. We can separate intersections and get an idea of the form of the tree itself. Just so we can think about that in our minds while we're doing this step in the process. We've gone in with that bright red. Pop it down to there and make it a little bit more orange as well, I'd like to do. I just pop that in there. Looking like more what I want. There's something about here. Again, not having to worry too too much about it because we are going to go back in and clean this up. But it's just giving us that rough idea of what we're going to end up looking like because it's better to block something out and then bring it back rather than getting lost in the details really early on and then finding them when it's too late to change it, if that makes sense. We're going to pop some stuff here. I got a darker branch here, a bunch of stuff scattered over here. Awesome. I was looking dog the pen used before. This is a rough idea of what I want. Perfect. Yeah, I think I'm about happy with that and I can just go with a robo. I'm just going to go with the needed erasa and just take out a few of those areas if I'm thinking that's really off from what I'm looking for. So I want that a little bit rounded out. I notice how this area seems to have a little bit less than the density of the rest of the picture falls off around here, but I like that asymmetricality of it, it looks nice. You can also in this stage push your shape. If you want something to be a bit more cartooning, you might want to have some more straight edges or something like that or add a bit of personality to the tree completely up to you or you can keep it more naturalistic. But just popping in a little bit of variation and shape language if you just popping that last bit down here. Cool. I think I'm happy with this so far. But an amazing way to check it out is by flipping it horizontally. You wouldn't think of it, but especially with drawing faces and things like that, when you're drawing, you get very used to looking at it. In traditional art, normally use a mirror and then you just hold up your picture in the mirror. I can give you a really good idea of what it actually looks like because your eyes are so used to it. What we're going to do is there's two ways of doing this, but we're just going to go to Edit. We'll go to rotate and flip canvas and flip horizontal. When I flip it, do I see any issues? I think it's looking pretty strong to me at the moment. Maybe I'll add a tiny bit more down here just to match up with what we've got going. That's that smaller branch there. This connects about over here. Overall, I'd say I'm pretty happy with what I've got here. You can make a bunch of adjustments here if that's what you'd like. Maybe I'll knock off a bit more under here. But again, not needing to scrutinize it too much at this point in time. Awesome. Let's flip that back. Edit, rotate ashbth Canvas, and flip horizontal. There is a way to make it slightly more accessible. I've actually got it open at the moment, but you won't have that open on your window. If you click Window and scroll down to where it says, quick access, it should be Quick Access up here, Dai missed it. But if you have that checked, I've just unchecked it recheck it. Quick Access, it should open a tab that will look like this and I'll have set one and set two. You can scroll down in set one and just go to where you have all these tools already ready. You can just pop that into your toolbar up here, so it's ready to use, and then you can flip horizontal whenever you need because that's just a really helpful tool to have throughout the entire process. Cool. Our next point in the process is starting to put down those values. What we're going to do is we're going to add a black and white filter so we can get a better idea of the value, so how dark and light each area is, and also a posterized filter as well just to make it exceptionally clear exactly what's going on. What we're going to do is we're going to go to filter correction what we're going to do is we're going to go across to edit and then go to What we're going to do is we're going to go to layer and then correction layer and see where it says posterization. Then we're going to turn that right down low. It really simplifies down that image. Let's turn it down to three, for example, perfect. Got that posteration letter, posterizyer going. Don't panic. It's not actually changing your image. It's just the layer, so you can take that off whenever you want. That can be super helpful to simplify down those values, but it's much easier when we've added in, you can add we go to gradient map, which was layer, new correction layer scrolling down to the bottom, what we covered at the start of Chapter four, gradient map, that's popped it into black and white for us. Now we can see, there are the darks, there are the mid tones. Here are the lights. We know in this photo, our background is going to be the lightest part and then we're going to have a highlight color that's the midton and then we're going to have the darkest color in the leaves. We know that the branches are actually quite light and then they've got those small areas of contrast. Okay. Taking not this, we're just going to grab a dark color. They're looking quite orange, I would say. Let's go for something a bit orange. We can actually correct this and I will show you how if you're not really feeling the colors a little bit later on. Let's say we go I like to go for something a little bit saturated first and then work my way backwards a little bit. Let's pop in our new layer. Going to pop that on top and say this is color branches now. So I'm going to add in using I mean you can use anything you want at the moment, so maybe we'll add that in using dry oil paint or you could use a pencil or a pastor completely up to you. I'll use this pencil here and just drop that down a little bit so we have a better size. We can start blocking in. That's a little bit dark for our drawing. Start blocking in some of those darks. It doesn't have to be perfect. As I'm saying before, everything can be changed as this is just a digital drawing. Popping that in there and we will see how this comes out a little bit later on. This part has a very dark patch. Popping a little bit in there maybe. Then we'll make it nice and small. We can add in some of these branches. It comes over there like that and has extra area. If it looks ugly, don't worry. This is the ugly stage of the drawing. I promise you it will come together. You just have to be patient with it. Add in some of these extrai branches. And fill in down. This one doesn't seem to have that much dark at all, so we can just pop in a little bit down one side then up here we get a little larger. Multiple different ways to do this. You can just put a base color down for the whole entire tree. You fill in your coloring with a base layer more similar to what we did when we're working with the stick an at the start and then just add a multiply layer over the top, which we covered in the fourth chapter. But I'm just showing you different ways you can do the process. Let's pop in this section here. You can see there's a dark section. You're completely welcome to use my reference, if that's what you prefer or if you're following your own reference, it might just be slightly harder because obviously you're not working on the exact same thing I am. We're popping some up here. Perfect. You can color over the leaves for now, it's not that important or you can leave it so it's not because we can always pull our colour branches under our leaves as well. There's no problem there. There's a little bit over here and we don't need to get bogged down in the details of the leaves because that's coming a little bit later. Once we've added in the majority you want, put some there. Let's go ahead and test it against the gradient map and posterization. We pop them both up. Just put this underneath those so we can see how it's looking. I might take off my leaves because they're getting a bit distracting. We can see here, so we want that dark section there. We want that to be a curve, and we've got just our darks and our lights at the moment. Don't worry about those midtne values. They will come with time. But I'm thinking everything is looking pretty strong. We can take out here as you color, you'll see any faults in your silhouette. I can see there that that's supposed to come in a bit more. Don't be afraid to add as long as you're not color picking during this time, you can add it and when you take it off, you'll be coloring in the right color. But I'm just going to add in some of those key areas I've missed. That is looking pretty strong to me so far. That is this branch down here. Let's just make a bit of a change on that because it's not quite looking right, is it? Good. Cool. I think I am about happy with how it's looking so far and the values are looking similarly balanced, which is awesome. When you step back, it shouldn't look too awful. But obviously, it's quite abstract right now. Let's pop off those filters. You can put the leaves back on if you want, and we could add in that light color. Let's look at a lighter orange maybe. Something like that. Going in, it's nice to go in with a bit of a textured brush maybe just two or let's go with a thin gage brush. That should be a default brush. You should have that as well. It may be in a 15 and just popping in that extra bit of color here for the lights. I think this is bang on, but we can add some more if we're not feeling it. A really good thing to make sure we're including throughout the whole of our drawing is color variation. It just makes a painting look so much more realistic. You can just move about your colors are slight bit. Maybe as you travel down the branch, it gets a little bit more orange or saturated. You can see that happens in the bark over here. So as I'm adding this, I'm getting a little darker. You add a little bit more yellow. We're going to add more variation in as we go so this isn't the most urgent thing to add. Just make that nice and bright up here. Maybe a bit more saturated as well. Obviously, there's no harm in making mistakes because you can always go back and change it afterwards. My strongest piece of advice would be don't be afraid to make the mistakes because you improve so much better and so much quicker, working that way rather than being afraid to do things. It just takes much longer to learn how to do things if you're not willing to make the mistakes in the first place. Let's just add in a bit more on the other one as well. That's going to be a bit light now, isn't it? Pop those down there. Let me get a little bit more orange. This brush has a bit of opacity variation when you go a bit lighter, so I can just add in those sun dapple effects that we've got going on there. And we bring that up again, this one seems to be a little bit darker in value than our first tree, as you can see here. I'm going to take down that saturation bit because that's looking a bit too much, but keeping those values a little bit darker on this side. Filling in those gaps. This part seems to be pretty dark. It's not as vibrant, clearly not saturated enough. You just take that out, try again, so control sy. And I'll show you another way just to adjust it if you're still not feeling it. If you're thinking to yourself, these colors just aren't right or this is too light or too dark or not contrasting enough, there's something called a tonal correction. If we go to edit, scroll down to tonal correction, we've got all these different really useful tools. We can look at brightness and contrast, for example, and we can say, I wanted that to be darker, pull it down, it's all darker. Or contrast up will make them more saturated and also emphasize the difference. You can take off the preview there, put the preview on there. Obviously, I don't want it to look like that. That's a bit crazy, but you might just want to adjust your values a little bit. Keep comparing with your posterization. How are these looking in comparison? So what we're needing now is that half tone. We're needing something in between our lightest value and our dark is value to pair the two and marry the two and make it look natural. We've also got a little bit of dappling in this area in particular, which we can add in with a texture brush. Let's go ahead and check that out. Take these off. Looking at this kind of color. I quite like that color. Let's pull that in where we can see. I actually might turn this on that doesn't seem to be doing much to make it brighter. But that does. Let me just check that colors right. Yeah, that works. These back on and we can see here roughly we've got some dots and maybe I will go back to something a little bit more dry, like an oil paint or the oil sketch brush just to really give a bit of an idea of some texture. They're supposed to be make this bit bigger, a bit of transition here. This is a bit light, as we can see, Lets go straight into dots. Obviously, you can adjust this to your preference. You don't have to be completely on the reference, but I'm just enjoying doing this. This is how I prefer to go about it. I think those values are looking a little too orange for my liking, I might just bring them down a little bit. A little bit of dabbling there. What I also like to do, they're looking a little bit off right now to be fair. It will take a moment for things to come together. What I like to do just to make my drawings a little bit more interesting is where I have dark values. First of all, I add my extreme docs, which is just pulling down and seeing where is there no light at all? Push that a little bit, just give that detail that makes it nice and believable. Areas like that over there. This whole section here seems to be an extreme dark or roughly an extreme dark and this section here may What I like to do, as I was saying, is go for what are my darker colors and you can actually add variation by just going towards the much more desaturated side, but doing it in a blue color or a green color because there's a lot of things like reflected light that can just look actually really nice if you pop it in there just a little bit. Let me try with this brush a little bit smaller. Maybe you might have some moss growing or something like that or a reflection. Let me make this a little bit lighter. In certain areas, because it's got the same value, blending really nicely to that trunk and not look out of place. You can go anywhere with it though. You could have a bit pink in there maybe, push it a little bit more purply. You can have so many different colors in your trunk without looking strange. You can add areas that we think are more sun facing. We bring those up a tiny bit more. Add that variation in there. Until we have something along the lines of this. I know it's looking a little bit shaky right now, but just give it time and hopefully everything will come together. Our next step is something called working with an underpainting, which is something I like to do personally as an artist. I will add a new layer and clip it to where I put in my leaves. All I'm going to do is basically go crazy with some texture brushes, literally anything, and pop in loads of really bright values. This is for the same reason as what I was talking about before, where I just want to make sure my colors are popping and very nice and exciting. I might look crazy right now if I just throw in some nice bright yellows, even blues, maybe blues in the darker areas where I'm seeing there's going to be some shade. You might have blue and purple down there. Let's put some bright purple in these areas. Don't go too crazy. You want this to look pretty itself. So you don't have to add too many different things. But I would say avoid, I guess, the color that you think you are going to be using because we just want things to stand out on top of that. I want it to be quite a saturated orange look because it's supposed to be sunset in my picture. I'll pop those in there. I like this red that I've got going here. Let's put a bit more down here. I can use all my different brushes. Let's pop over to my pastel. Might add in a bit of that. Crayon, doesn't matter if it looks a bit wild right now. Blue. Let me make that a bit darker. Blue. This can also be an earlier indicator of your values as well. You can drop in those darker values where you're looking for them to be. Where we have this dark section here, I'll put some darker colors and lighter sections, of course. Maybe I'll put in a bit of a glow there. And in the areas where I think it's going to be a little bit lighter. I know it looks crazy right now. Again, if you're not sure, you're not thinking your colors are looking the best, tonal correction and there's all of these to help you out, but you can do hue saturation luminosity if you want to get crazy with it, switch out from what you were thinking you were going to do. There's all these different types of color patterns that can come out of your work even if it's not what you were originally planning. I actually quite like that. What do I prefer my original? Quite like that. Let's go with that. Perfect. This is going to be my underpainting. Now it's time to take a bit more of a look at my second reference. Let's just go back here, make that visible again, then we can close this down like that. Let's keep everything labeled, this is underpainting. Then add in our next layer on top of that. I mean, I can go over this with a color picker a little bit just give me an idea. Although these branches are green, I am not seeing a lot of green in this image. I'm seeing a lot of oranges and yellows that look like greens because of the circumstance, which is very common in color where things aren't quite as they seem. We've got a lot of yellows and almost oranges going on here, even though they look like perfectly green trees. I'm going for something along the lines of maybe this if we just look at that posterization again, we're looking for a midtone and then it's going to descend into the darker area about here. We bring this up and say I want to use my Where is my brushes gone. There we are. Perfect. Another one I really love to use. It's one of the default brushes is that watercolor splash brush on my underpainting. I just think it's really gorgeous. The way, it'll probably be more visible if I just do it on a separate layer. It just adds that natural traditional look of a splash of watercolor or like a droplet on your page that wasn't supposed to be there, but it really adds that lovely texture in there. That should be in the underpainting layer. If you wanted to combine those layers, you can just pop them together like this, right click and merge selected layers, pop them together, and then just clip that back. No need to panic. Obviously, that pen everything out, and then let's put a new layer. This is going to be leaves to Perfect. So we have our color. We know it's going to be kind of like a mid tone yellow weirdly enough. And we're looking for kind of like a mid ish color right now. Just popping that in with a round part color brush maybe. No, it's not coming out. Actually, I'd rather use one of the just use a thin gouache brush instead. That'll come out a bit better. There's no pressure to go very hard in this stage of the process. Obviously, you can keep changing around your colors. We don't want to lose all this underpainting we've just done and we are actually going to turn down the opacity of what we're putting on right now so we can still see that, but we're just going to pop in our values so we can see over here. We've got our bright sections. Then there's add in something a bit darker. I think I want to go for my shadows a bit more red and deep. Maybe it's not quite what I want. Again, not being afraid just to readjust. M of these aren't perfect because we are going to be going back into these areas once. We're just basically establishing those dark and light spots. This area under here. I want under here to be dark over here. Bob in with that light color again. I and click and put that on top. This is looking about right to me in terms of what we're going for. I know there's a bright spot here, that should be about right. I want to bring this opacity down a little bit so we can actually start to see our underpainting underneath. We can see those beautiful colors coming through and adding one more layering. Basically, we can just start grabbing colors in. I'm going to pop this over the top of the color branches now. With whatever pen you want, you can go with more textured or less textured depending on your preference. We can start smoothing some stuff out and adding in some new values. I'd always recommend working from a big brush and working your way down to smaller brushes so you don't get bogged down in the details, but it can be really fun. This is one of my favorite parts of the process, having fun, picking out those colors that you like, and you can move them about as well. Let's say I only use this one. Bigger size. It's bluey color, actually, white. Eye and click again. But we end up with all these gorgeous colors that the right balance, but also giving that variation to your branches. And also a bit of that texture can get revealed underneath as well, which is really lovely. I didn't like that one. It's just a process of mixing and matching what you like and don't like because obviously, not all the colors are going to meld in perfectly to what you wanted. I might say, I want that dark purple. This dark bulb instead and bring that over here because I didn't get enough of it in this section. That looks great under that there, or I feel like that looks great. Well, maybe I want something a bit more of a bright orange in this section, and so on and so forth. Add in this ready color here. It just keeps that Oh, this whole area full of life because there's so much variation in color in the branch and things like that, and that's just something that's really fun to emphasize or at least I feel that way in my own work. But this is completely down to the preference the person drawing, of course. We're looking like we're getting somewhere with this. I'm thinking that my color branches aren't quite working at the moment, though. 24. Final Touches and Details : What I've noticed in my reference is that they look much more saturated and orange. I'm going to see if I can make a few adjustments. Tonal correction, hue and saturation. I'm going to turn up that saturation a little bit. Let see if I can adjust the hue to make it more red at all. I'm not sure how happy I am with that. There's always room for painting over. I've adjusted it a little bit and I'm seeing here that I'm wanting something a bit more orange than what I'm getting at the moment and maybe a bit darker. We can just go in and make some adjustments. This a bit bigger. Go in with this one. Yeah, everything can be fixed. So don't get stressed out if something's not looking quite right because you can fix it, e you can. But I might not get bogged down in this until I've established the whole scene because that might just change things a little. I'll just move on to the next step for now. I'm really liking the colors that I'm getting in my branches. The next step of what we're going to do is add sky. I like to do this in two. I add a normal layer at the bottom, and I'll call this my underpainting as well. Underpainting. There we go. Personally, I'd like to go with something a little bit more obscure than just doing that square border. I want to add in something circular. I've just gone onto that atto tool and click Ellipse, get a Control T and just adjust it to exactly where my liking is. I'm going to want my trees to be in the sky with a framing, something like this. Awesome. I just want to fill that with a lovely bright orange to contrast our blue. I'm just going to add in some noise, big brush like this, something nice and bright. Literally, no worries as to what going in with big brushes, normally, you can do whatever you like. Some chalk, perfect. Maybe switching around my oranges a bit. Just adding in some beautiful textures to the work. When I paint over the top, it will just give me a little bit of contrast and interest to go That looks perfect to me so far. Then I will just go over the top with my blue. That's going to go right on top. We're going to go over everything. Going to pick out a lovely blue color. I think well in my painting here, the sky is looking on the paler side of blue, but something along these lines, I think I'm happy with. Then I'll go in with whatever brush I'm feeling. Let's say, I could do thin gouache brush to them but all on the same page. I'd like for it to go. I noticed in my reference, it goes from a light color to a bit of a darker color. We've got our posterize on yet, we've got that light color going into a darker color. Oh, going to do that. Perfect. We can basically just start to carve out our actual shapes. This is where we're starting to actually hold down the tree a bit more, so we're getting those shapes that matter. This is why I was saying, don't worry 100% about how it's coming out. We can leave a bit of the underpainting in there, so I'm just going to bring this back and try one more tanks. I'm not feeling that. I'm just going to take off my reference there so I can do that one bit. No one, this one. There we are. I'm just going to start carving out this area here. You can always go back and fix things up, so no worries for mistakes. But where we can see holes in the trees, branches, or whatever, we can add those in where we can see those distinct shapes. We can add those in as well. Here don't feeling this brush. Let me try this one. Making sure again, we're not pressing too hard because we do want some of that underpainting bleeding through. I feel like this area could do with a little bit more underpainting bleed through. I'm just going to go in with a soft brush like that and go back in with my We can get some of that beautiful orange color going under here. You might have. Everything is looking quite soft right now, but I'm just going to remind you that we are going to be going back in and carving this out as well. No worries. There's a lot of blue space in this picture, so we can have a lot of fun. Adding in all this dappling. This is also why I was saying, don't worry too much about the branches because obviously we're losing a bit of it in this. I'm just going to bring that back a little bit because it's not quite how it looks. There we go in here we got kind of break. That is this area here. I personally, I am not too fast at this point about it looking exactly like the tree. I'm more focusing on stylizing it based on my own preference. You can really try and stick to exactly how the tree looks if that's what you're looking for. I am literally just going for a nice shape wherever I feel looks right where I want to carve it out, let's just make this a little smaller. You can get those really nice clean lines if you'd like. You can change the shapes of the holes to make them look a bit more realistic. It will come together in a minute, I promise. You add it with the blue? I'm just going to darken my blue, make it a bit more vivid as I go up. That's a bit too far for me. But make it a little different, like that. Start establishing that. I like quiet painted looking sky might not be what you like, so you can make it very nice and uniform or you can keep it a bit more painterly the way I am doing. This part looks pretty solid. There's not much blue gap in the actual bush. It's underneath. I think I've mistaken this area up here for the wrong part. That's more along those lines. Actually, I liked it like that. Go in once again blue to cut out those shapes. There are obviously 100 different ways to draw a tree. This is more on the abstract viewpoint, but I think it will just give you that insight into the different ways you can use these painting tools doing it this way. But completely up to you, you can go something a little bit more grounded and realistic or putting in more detail. You can do more drawing heavy. Linear heavy, you can keep your line art in for that cartoony style. If you're going for something animated, love animated backgrounds are more cartoony like that. I do like working with line art and things like that. But as I say, completely your preference, this is just this tutorial. There's so much room for creativity. I really love how this part is getting a bit more scattered. It's really cool to introduce those blues in down here and you can see the difference within that part and comprised the top, where it gets thicker. I personally like to emphasize. I didn't have faith in my values for the branches, but as I said, I just wanted to wait out because I feel like they're popping much better now against this blue background and it's quite hard to tell when you're first starting out. I'm glad I waited a bit before I went crazy trying to figure out what was wrong because this blue part can be one of my favorite parts of the whole process. But it's actually coming together a little bit now. I feel like it's looking all right. Going into this top it with the wrong color. Always good. You can add a transition color. The way I like to find that would be to be looking between those two values, soiling of something. I don't think I do that right, looking at the color wheel. Down here up here, it was in that we want something out there maybe, which will just bring these together in a really lovely way. You can make it look cloud like almost just to blend them together because if you're trying to make it really smooth and almost like a gradient, it can just make it look clumsy. But if you make it intentional and add in some shape, it can make it look more artsy like you meant to do it the whole d. Awesome. Just pop some in similar on the other side. Now, I love those small little bits of underpainting that like to creep through as well. I just really gives that painting that life. It really feels like it's that sunset you feel rubbing out the wrong layer. It's supposed to be this one. Then just carving out some of those. They don't look the same. If you're using one brush, you can end up getting that same shape over and over again. I might be some places where it connects a bit. Don't like that, there we go. I'm getting those tiny little holes. Overall, I'm feeling quite happy. Let's just give it up, flip horizontal test. I'm feeling like it's looking pretty strong. If you feel like it needs a bit of filling out as well, you can just go onto a new layer. Let's just label some of these up because we're letting them go sky. Layer six is our leaves three, go color branches, and I'll lay at eight is nothing at the moment. Just checking everything looks okay here. Yeah, we got that dark tone. I was taking more inspiration from the picture before. I decided to go with a bit lighter colors than what we've got on here, but we still got that idea of the shadows and then the lights in similar places, this dark corner, then we got those light areas on our tree. So I'm pretty happy with that. We can go back and just basically do some cleanup on this area using a nice strong brush some sort. Maybe we add some texture in not necessarily that brush, sometimes it takes a bit of a trial and error to find what kind of texture you're looking for. That might be kind of it. Awesome, just to really get across exactly what you're wanting. Just pop this in here. Just make this nice and maybe not 2.5, there we go. Pop in some more branches because we've got quite a lot going on here that's been simplified. I think it's time to put in anything we're missing out on. There's quite a lot of detail in here that's been simplified. We can go in and add in all these dainty little branches to give it a more realistic feel or we can just leave them out if you're feeling for more of a simplified look, which can be good. If you've got loads and loads of trees, you're adding into your design. A lot of little branches can feel a bit overwhelming. I just depends on your stylistic choice, really. Pop in a little bit more. This one is looking like it was in the pen I was using. Well you make it bigger. That's fine. Carve out some of these branches to make them look a bit more purposeful. Yeah, a huge part, especially when you're at the coloring stages, is just carving things out. So even if the line doesn't look strong, once you give it a bit more life and variation in its line weight, so how thick it is, it can look much better. That just looks like a stroke, but when you take out a little bit there, take out a little bit there, looks more like an actual twig, that makes sense. I'm thinking that looks a bit too strong. I'm just going to pull that back a bit, maybe put a bit of this brown over the top, just to bring it back to what I'm looking for. Put some green on top of there as if the branch is covered by some leaves. You can add highlights if you, if you want some really bright sky, maybe a bright sky, bright light coming from the sky. Quite one I'm looking for. You can again do this with not clipping layers, those types. You can go in with a soft glow or anything like that. Soft glow, soft light, all of these, and do your own layers separate to that. But for this painting, we're just going to go in with more of a traditional feel. You can add some watercolor splashes over the top, just to bring it all together. Just that extra texture can make it much more appealing to look at. I also sometimes like to go in with. I'm just going to use the brush. We just downloaded, which is down here in thick paint, going down to oil sketch and just adding in some scribble lines to add texture. You can just color pick wherever and add some lines of scribble to imply some texture or just add some interest to your picture. Could be some light raking over some leaves or something along those lines, making it a little different from all being smooth. In there, maybe if there's an area that isn't dark enough, you just visit that with a darker green or vice versa, if you want to add in some highlights, this can be a great way to do that. Yeah, I'm thinking that's about done for my picture. I'm feeling really happy with it so far. I'll just show you again the idea of using a gradient map. Say you just want to see what other colors might look like on your picture or you're just not feeling quite confident in the colors you have. Sorry, I'm just fixing this. I just noticed it. One last flip horizontal. Yeah, I'm feeling quite happy. Just might want to bring that in a little bit more. Again, just finish whenever you want to be finished completely up to you how you're feeling about your own work. I think every fellow better. Just balance out a little bit more and take off a little bit there. That's not matching my lovely blue sky. Cool. Back to the filter. Let's go to layer, correction layer, gradient map and say, I want to go to sky and I want it to be sunset. Obviously, that's going to made it look awful. But if we bring it down, it can have a completely different effect on how it looks. I washed out the blue because it's adding that red to it, but it's also giving that sunset feel in a different way. All these different gradient maps have those different effects. I'm going to get rid of that, delete that and just give you an idea by adding more new correction layer gradient map. Maybe I want midday sky. Obviously, these are quite overwhelming until we bring that down a little bit. But this makes it feel more like it's a dark, more moody day. There's los different ways you can adjust your photo. Even if it is just a 10% addition, it can just make all the difference to the mood of your piece. I'm just going to delete that again. Delete and delete that. Perfect. Those are just my last alterations. Just forgotten to add some branches on this tree. And make that look thinner. Adding some gorgeous little branches here. I think that about does it for me. I'll group up everything I have. Merge selected layers. I'm just going to show you how to do that in more detail. We're going from the underpainting. We're going up to our top layer, going to left click and click merge selected layers to bring everything together. Now we just have tree. Perfect. We can get rid of our references now. Don't need our title anymore. You can delete our posterization layer, delete and delete our gradient map here. That was just make it black and white. Delete. We're going to control We can move all of it at once now and just zoom that in holding shift to maintain the shape that I had. I'm going to have mine like this. You can clean up these edges, so I'm thinking this blue would look a little nicer if it was just to those nice hard edges there. Perfect. Over here. Awesome. Just making sure it's got that nice. Round but slightly hand painted feel to it still. Lovely, really happy with that. My last thing is, I personally don't like a completely white background, so I'm just going to do an off white orangey yellow and fill that in. I think that about does it for illustration. I've got my finished illustration here. The last thing that I will just say is I love to put a little bit of a grain over my image. I might duplicate my image, which is right clicking, sorry, and then clicking duplicate layer. Going filter, render perlin noise, bring the scale all the way down. This looks like nothing at the moment. But if you just bring it right down, just adds that little bit of grain. We can do that and maybe add a multiplier layer to it. If you zoom in, you can just see it adds that little bit of extra variation where it didn't before. You might not like the way it looks, but I personally do. That's just given me my final result, which moves us on to Chapter six. 25. Exporting Your Artwork (PNG & JPEG) : We're now moving on to Chapter six, which is our final chapter, which is just looking at saving your artwork once you're ready. The first thing to do is just make sure that across the course of doing this artwork you have been saving in case you have to go away and do something or unfortunately, if your program crashes, which is unlikely, but it's always bet to be safe. S's clicking Controls when you want to save or just going file and save along here. But once you're ready to export your artwork fully because this is a Clip Studio Paint file, so you can't just use this as an image right now. You need to export it because it's got all this layer data and it's just not going to open unless you have Clip Studio Paint. You need to go export single layer. It's going to be a single layer for us and then clicking JPEG or PNG or PSD, if you're wanting to just move it from being clipsuoPaint file to a Photoshop file. Difference between a Ja peg and a PNG is a J peg is going to be slightly smaller file size, more compressed. A PNG, when you blow it up will be slightly higher quality artwork, but a JPEg should be fine for this type of work. A PNG also means that say, I wanted to save this with Alpha in the background, so transparency, all I wanted was that blue circle and then the trees down the middle. Then I could save it as that. If it's a PNG, will just fill this in white so you won't be able to use it transparently. But that's no problem for me because I want that cream background anyway. I will be saving it as a JPEG, so I'll go File, Sports single layer and click JPEG. Once you do that, it will just open file, explore, and you can choose where to save it. Try and use good names so you don't end up with loads and loads of Untitled one, untitled two, which can just get really confusing and difficult to navigate. Try and be responsible with your files, but obviously completely up to you. 26. File Management and Organization: If you have Clip dio paint on multiple devices, it can be useful to sync your different programs. If you're in Clip Studio, you need to make sure you're logged in at the top here so you put in your username and password. I'm on my account and then go down to Manager Works and click that there. It will come up with all the stuff you've been working on on this device. Once you close down your drawing, not while it's open, you can just switch this syncing button on, and that should mean that if you open it up on a different device, logged into your account, you can open it as normal on any device, which can just be really useful because then you don't have to worry about transferring it using USB or using a drive link or whatever to try and move it across. It's already there for you. But that is everything to cover in Chapter six, and I think we can conclude it here. Thank you so much. 27. Class Project: Draw Your Own Digital Illustration: For your class project, you'll be creating a digital illustration. He's applying all of the different techniques and things that we've learned throughout the course so far. You can either follow along one of my examples or you can create your own using the techniques that we've learned during the session. We're going to be still starting with that rough sketch, moving on to linework, coloring that in, and then we can add on our final details like gradient maps, shading, all that sort of thing, and just figure out what works best for you. Making sure all that time, you're going to be keeping everything structured. That's labeling all of your layers and also putting stuff in folders if need. Completely up to you, whatever works best. After you've finished your entire project, you're going to be exporting that as either a JPEG or a PNG file and then uploading it to the project gallery. You can also upload a short explanation of what you did alongside your work. Also just take your time and enjoy the process and just get used to the workflow. There's no pressure on you. Have fun. 28. Congratulations! What's Next?: Congratulations on finishing the course. You've now learned how to use Clip Studio Paint, going from just understanding the interface to understanding the tools and finally creating your own illustrated project, taking a huge step forward in your art journey, so be very proud of yourself. The next thing is just to make sure you keep practicing. Try out different subjects, different brushes, and different colors, and all sorts, just to keep refining your workflow and see what works best for you because every artist is different. Got anything to share, please upload to the Project Gallery. I can see what you've done. I'd love to see what you guys have created using the course. If you really enjoyed the course, feel free to leave a review because we always want to know what we can do better for you guys and however you can learn better. Thank you so much for watching. Bye.