Color Characters 101 Fundamentals of Coloring

1. Introduction: Hello and welcome to Character Art School, Complete Coloring and Painting. My name is Scott Harris. I'm an Art director, Das, and I'm also a total freak for character design, character painting, character coloring, character drawing, I love characters and I think you're here because you love them as well. I'm going to take you through this course very much in the same way I would teach my actual students. Hopefully you're going to get the feeling that I'm standing right next to you, that we're side by side. When I'm teaching you the various concepts, I want you to learn very, very well. Now, this course is separated into three main sections. The first section really is the fundamental theory that we need to know, particularly on color and light. Light being the most important part. Then we move on to the general painting workflow. This is how we're going to be applying all of that theory in a logical and coherent way. And this is going to be very important for you to memorize and take to heart. Last off, we then take a look at some coloring styles and then we also have some demos, full demos as well as time lapse commentary so that you can see the painting process in granular detail. Now this course has been designed to take you from a zero level of knowledge to a very professional level of knowledge, and I think the course will achieve that. You may be approaching the course from varying levels. My advice to you is if you know digital art software like Photoshop or equivalence to completely skip module two. Otherwise, modules 134.5 are good for everybody and I would highly recommend them to you. I'd also advise that you go through the course twice the first time around. Just take a look through the course, watch all the videos, take notes, and try to gain a fundamental understanding of what is happening the second time around, Do all of the assignments and really be diligent and dedicated in what you're doing. One of the driving factors when I was creating this course was to create a course that was clear, efficient, and extremely comprehensive. I do believe that this is probably one of the fastest ways to learn high end digital painting of characters, as well as coloring of characters very, very rapidly. I hate time wastage, I hate rambling, and I really, really don't want to waste your time. I want you to do this course, get your value out of the course, and then proceed to continue to color and paint in a professional way the characters that you want to present to the world. Let me also say, thank you for buying the course. I'm sure you're going to find immense value in it. I'm very, very excited to teach you, and I cannot wait to see what you're going to produce by the time you're finished. So let's get right into it and I'll see you guys in the lessons. 2. Art Tools: Before we get into the main lessons of the course, we're going to take a look at the software and hardware that can be used to color your characters as well as draw your characters. Now, if you are already familiar with digital art tools, you can totally skip over this lesson. You really don't need to go through this if you're new. Let's take a look at the tools available to you and let's get right into it. First thing is you want to make sure that your computer, whether it's a PC or Mac, has at least an Intel Core five processor. Really, this is just to ensure great performance on your brushes. The capability to work on larger canvases with higher resolution images. The Ram helps for that as well. You also want to have eight gigs of Ram. I would recommend a ten ADP screen if you can. If not a higher resolution than that. So ten DP is full HD or higher. And the reason is it gives you more screen real estate. And of course, I also want to mention that if you can get a computer or a laptop or a tablet with a high quality display, that would be better as well. A display that is capable of showing a broader array of colors. And you'll see when you go to the store, when you're shopping around, they'll mention the types of displays and the types of color capabilities of the displays. Ips is something that is favorable. The IPS display technology, it really does display very vibrant colors and really a nice broad range of color accuracy. Something else you can look out for is the Adobe RGB color gamut of the screen. Now I know that might sound complex if you've never heard it before. Really, it's just a little stat and it tells you how much of the Adobe color gamut the screen prescribes to. A lot of mid tier to high end have about 70% color gamut. And the very high end can have up to 95% possibly even up to 99% color gamut coverage. Which means you're going to see more colors and more subtlety in the colors. Now obviously there's a price implication Work within your budget and see what you can afford. Let's take a look at some of the software that you can use. Adobe Photoshop really is the industry standard. I know the word photo is in its name, but it really is a very powerful application. The cost to use it isn't too high, it depends. You can no longer buy it outright. You can buy it on a Be Photoshop photography program for about $10 a month, I believe. Ten or $15 a month. And that will get you light room as well. That's for photo editing, but you can then use that for $10 a month. You can use Adobe Photoshop and get access to all of its features. It is the industry standard. It has perhaps got the highest level of tweaking that you can do in terms of layer modes and in terms of brush settings and things like that. However, just because it is the industry standard doesn't necessarily mean it's the best. We're going to look at some other software that is quite similar and also fully capable. Something to also remember as we move through looking at the rest of the software is that most of the software can do 95% of the things we needed to do. All right. Adobe Photoshop, you've probably heard of it before. It's become a pop culture thing as well when people say they're going to shop this or shop that, But it is the industry standard. And I think it is very beneficial if you can use Photoshop. Just learn the best right now and get it over and done with. And then you can move into the other applications relatively easily. Another great application is coral painter. Very similar features to Photoshop, of course, less focused on photo editing in terms of the extra tools and more focused on the paint tools. It's key feature really is that the paint and the papers in the application or the backgrounds really with the papers as they say, act like the real media. You will get rough types of paper, smooth types of paper. You'll get water colors that bleed, like water colors, oil paints that dry, like oil paints. You can even dry the paints in the app if you want to, and the paint looks quite realistic. Now of course, this depends on the type of style of coloring or painting that you're going to be doing. But Coral painter has everything from very digital tools to very traditional tools. It's a good option there. Just to point to note with Coral Painter, Coral Painter does use a lot of CPU power. I would recommend going to an I, seven model, 16 gigs of Ram and maybe a dedicated graphics card if you want to use Coral Painter. It is very resource heavy and it has been for many years. It just takes a lot of processing power to do all those calculations of the paint moving and swishing and mixing together. Do keep that in mind with Coral Painter. Next up we have clip studio paint. Honestly, I cannot praise this application enough. I believe it's a Japanese made application. I'm not 100% sure on that, but I think it is Japanese made. I've been using it for three or four years. I use a bunch of different software times. I'll switch between, but Clip Studio Paint effectively is a one soft purchase. You can buy just the pro version. They've got the Pro and the E X version. The pro version has everything that you need to draw and paint characters. No problem. It has great brushes, great brush mechanics. It has very similar features to Photoshop. The developers are really constantly updating the application and the best part is. The software costs, if I'm not mistaken, 59, $99 Of course, depending on when you're watching this course, that price could increase or decrease. But nevertheless, it's a once off purchase. And you have this powerful, very awesome and extremely productive, efficient software in terms of system usage. It's very efficient. It can work on a lot of range of computers, and the performance really doesn't degrade. I cannot recommend clip studio paint enough. All right, let's move on to Procreate. Procreate is an ipad application, particularly for the ipad Pro with the Apple pencil. We'll discuss that a little bit later. Procreate is fantastic because it really brings the world of touch, interaction of your canvas with the world of drawing on screen. It has very powerful features. Like I said, most of these software packages share similarities between each other. And procreate is no different. It has layers. It has layer modes. It has variable brushes and you can make your own brushes and great canvas sizes. And it really is a fantastic application for the ipad Pro. It really is ipad Pro specific. If you're going to be drawing, painting, coloring on your ipad Pro, this is the application you want to use. There currently is no application that can compete procreate. There are some alternatives, but they aren't even close to as good as procreate. That's it for the software side. Those are my recommendations. Definitely, take a look at those pieces of software. Let's move into talking about the hardware. The first thing we want to look at is drawing tablets. Now these types of drawing tablets do not have a screen on them. There is a little bit of a disconnect when you first start using it. These connect to your computer. There are two brands here. Wacom, which has been really the biggest brand since drawing tablets came into being. And more recently, a Chinese company, if I'm not mistaken, has come up called Hu. Ion And they also produce really great quality tablets at a much cheaper price point. However, I am pro Waco, but that's really just because I've been using it for so many years and they really are sturdy and robust. I have very old tablets that have lasted 1015 years, so I can really recommend Waco, but Hon gets great reviews and you can look into that. These tablets are great, they come at a great price point. They're as accurate as on screen displays. The pens work the same way, they're wonderful. You may be worried that, yes, there's going to be a disconnect because you have to stare at your computer screen and have your hand below you. Not really looking at your hand, but I can assure you three to 5 hours on one of these, just constantly drawing and you really get the hang of it in it, it's no big deal afterwards. The only area where these drawing tablets are weaker than on screen drawing is when you're really wanting to do clean, refined lines for your drawings. The very clean lines, right inks, if you will, or your clean up lines or your refined lines. But other than that, it is achievable these days. Especially in something like clip studio paint, where you have the ability to turn on a feature called brush stabilization. And brush stabilization really allows the computer to calculate out all your little wiggles if you're managing to draw a line slowly. So you know, it's really up to you. But if you want a more natural drawing experience, you'll want to look at something like an on screen tablet. Here we have a Wacom Synteq on the left and a Hawaii version on the right. These also plug into your computer and they act as secondary displays. However, you can actually move Photoshop onto the screen and literally draw on the screen. It is very cool. It is very awesome. It's not going to make you better at drawing or painting, or coloring. Please keep that in mind. And in fact, for coloring, I would actually recommend just a standard drawing table because your hand gets in the way, obviously, when your hand is covering the screen. But nevertheless, you can't go wrong with these guys either. I can also recommend them and they are really great. Those are on screen tablets. They vary in price. They are significantly more expensive than the non screen tablets, significantly more. They also vary in size and style. They go up and you get ones that can fold in different ways and ones that can stand really vertically or they can rotate. Do research them, but of course, consider your budget. I wouldn't go and spend too much on one of these. Think about it before you buy it. The last but not least, we have drawing tablet PCs. And these are fairly new. Maybe in the last three to five years they've been coming up. The Apple Prad Pro is very new. I think it's only about a year and a half old now already. But it does require a separate purchase of the Apple pencil and also that apparently the new Microsoft Surface Pros do not include the pen, but the older models do, and the older models are still on sale. Nevertheless, the Apple Ipad Pro runs on IOS. You'll be primarily using Procreate on there and perhaps a suite of other apps just to kind of complement it or maybe help you with some edits or post production of your work. But nevertheless, it is a fantastic, fantastic device. I have an ipad Pro. I love drawing on it. The battery life is crazy. I've drawn it. I paint on it. I color on it all the time. It is a good device, it is very efficient and procreate can export to PSD. So you can move to your PC later and do some tweaks if you want to, and a lot of time you don't even have to. Microsoft Surface Pro, on the other hand, is a full computer. It's a full tablet PC. As I said, the older models come with the stylus. The newer models apparently do not. You have to buy it separately. It's $100 I hear it doesn't use Wacom technology. It uses different type of technology in the pen. But I have used these and it works perfectly fine to me. There is no discernible difference in the drawing capability or the painting capability. It really is the same. Now when you're using a service pro, because it's a computer, you'll then want to use Photoshop or Clips to your paint or another software suite to draw and paint in. And also a great device, as another point to note on the Service Pro that Kickstand kicks back in a really nice way where you can rest it for a drawing in mode where the screen tilts up a little bit. The ipad Pro, you're going to need a laptop stand or something to prop it up if you want to use it in that way. But nevertheless, those are your hardware and your software options. I've just recommended the that I think are really good and we'll help you just get into it really quickly. Let me also say guys, we want to keep in mind art is really about the theory and the practical. Don't worry so much about the tools. Don't let it stress you out, Don't freak out about it. You can get by the mid range computer, a cheap Wacom tablet or Ion tablet, and a subscription to Photoshop or a purchase of clips you pain or whatever you can get by. Just fine. Try to grow your skills. Don't worry about the hardware and software too much. All right, but those are my recommendations. And I will see you guys in the next lesson in the course. See there. 3. How We See: Welcome to the first lesson in module one, Understanding Light and Color. In this lesson, we're going to be taking a look at how the eye works. All right, in order to do this I'm going to just do a small little illustration here of the side view of our eyeball. Draw in the photoreceptor sections here at the back as they go into the brain. We're going to do some theory. And this will actually be so useful to you because you'll understand why we choose one particular thing to focus on heavily in our art, which is value over another thing, which is color. All right, in your eyeball, as light enters, it hits a bunch of photo receptors that are split into two types. It probably looks something like that in the eyeball, all right, it's little spiky ones and then there's little round masses as well. There's all these little spiky ones. Little round masses probably looks like that from the side view. Effectively, I'm going to just simplify here. We have rods that receive light information and then we also have cones receive light information. All right, the rods and the cones and these are very important in terms of how we understand how we see. All right, inside the surface, when you're looking directly into the eye, there's tons and tons and tons. I probably couldn't draw them fast enough. There are tons and tons of rods. About 120 million rods in the eye. In fact, let's write that down there. 120 million rods and then there are about 6 million cones. All right? In the average human eye, that's probably the distribution. The rods are what detect brightness, right? Brightness and darkness. Okay. We'll just indicate it like this. Darkness to brightness, right? The rods detect brightness. The cones pick up color, right? You can see just by the split here of the 120 million to 6 million that a lot of our three D vision is due to the rods. Because the rods can see the difference between somewhere that is lit and somewhere that is not lit. Right. Can see the depths of the shadows and the brightest highlights. And the rods are doing the heavy lifting in terms of our understanding of form. All right, whereas the cones, they are primarily there to pick up color. Now from a scientific point of view, if I'm not mistaken, the cones also can detect degrees of brightness in a particular way. But the heavy duty lifting of that is the rods. And the cones have three types of receptor cones, right? You have the blue receptor cones and the red receptor cones. And then you also have the green receptor cones. And now bear with me because I know that you've signed up for a course on how to color and paint your work. But of course, this is really pivotal. And believe me, this will be very useful to you and very, very helpful to you. So bear with me as we go through this. But don't worry, it's not very long and it's not very complex. And I'm also extremely simplifying the process as well here. All right, so this is what's happening in our eyes in terms of the cones. I actually want to just turn it like this, and perhaps you've seen these colors before, maybe you've seen them on your TV, or you understand them in terms of pixels on LCD displays. That the individual pixels of your screen is made up of one little little lights and one little blue light, one green light. These three receptors combined is how we get our full spectrum of color, is how we see our full spectrum of color. But what's quite crazy, what's really interesting about this is that your brain mixes the blue and the green. Or should I say, rather that you can detect all the things in between the blue and the green, right, as the blue and the green mix. And you can detect all the things between the green and the red as the green and the red mix. So you can imagine going into red, you're getting browns, you're getting yellows and things like that and then it's going into red. And then from the blue you're your cyans going into your lime greens, your turquoises and that as you go into the green. However, your brain doesn't link these particular receptors, sorry, do not link to each other. Blue and red. They do not link. Your brain just makes up the color in between. All right? And it's quite crazy. I know technically the made up color would be magenta. That's the base value. It's just made up in your brain, which means your magenta. And my magenta could be completely different, and we would never know, because whatever I call magenta is magenta. Or you really like pinky purples, you might call it that too, but it could be an actually completely different color to you. All right, but nevertheless, it's a bit of a crazy thought. But this is how we get our spectrum of color. And also our color wheel is derived from the system of red, green, and blue. These are what we would want to really call the true primaries. Some people would argue that the true primaries are cyan, magenta, and yellow. That's more of a technical debate on the subject, but really just keeping things basic. Red, blue, and green are our primaries. And it's also how our computer screens and our cell phone screens display the full spectrum of color to us by using RGB set ups in the pixel structure. That's how we see. Once again, the big thing we want to take away from this, the big thing is just how pivotal rods are, right? And just how important the value information is, right? The brightness information is for how we see, primarily discerning three dimensionality and form in terms of the light receptor part of it. In terms of light, via the rods, via the brightness, via value. Value to us as artists is absolutely foundational, it's absolutely core. And you will see how this ties in very heavily to professional coloring and professional level character painting. Value is exceptionally important. Of course, color plays a big role too, But the split of importance is something like 90% important value, 10% important color. Because color, of course, there's multiple uses of it. But color can really lead to mood. But value leads to true understanding of the forms. All right, that's it for this lesson. Let's move on to the next lesson. I'll see you there. 4. The Scale of Light: In this lesson, we're going to now look at value. As mentioned previously, value is important, it really is the foundations and the fundamentals to coloring and painting. Well, if you grasp this lesson really well, you're on a solid footing moving forward. All right, so first off, we're going to take a look at the value scale. Right now in art, we obviously only have a range of white being the brightest we could represent in an image, and black being the darkest we can represent. If you look at the color pick on the right side of the screen here. When we're talking about value, we're really just talking about brightness and darkness in art. We represent this brightness and darkness in of ten steps. Let's start with the brightness being white, which I'll just use a very light gray to represent that on the screen. Can barely see it, but it's there. Our next step would be a little bit further along. Step two, step three, step four, step five, step 6789. Let's grab these guys and just make them a little bit smaller so we can get ten in there and ten would be black. And this is what we call our value scale. Okay? The reason we do this is in reality, what is the brightest you get? Who knows? Probably some star in the galaxy, right? It's extremely bright. What is the darkest you get? Is there blacker than black, You know? What does a completely lightless area look like? You know, unless you're in there, I assume it's hard to tell. But it's probably, you know, for us, pitch black. All right. But in odd, in order to talk about value properly and in a more efficient way, we break down. The brightest can go and the darkest we can go into these ten value steps, or these ten value stops, right? And it depends who you're learning from, whether they go one to ten, where one is the brightest to ten, is the darkness darkest, or vice versa, it doesn't really make a difference. But just knowing that, we talk about these ten steps, these ten value stops, right? So this is how we will say that. You want to make sure that when you're painting x y, z object or coloring x y, z object, that there is a big enough stop between two values, right? Two brightness levels, so that the viewer can see what is in light and what is in shadow. Now we're going to go more into that. We're just taking a brief overview now of value. We're going to go more into something called the two value statement a little bit later on, but for now we want to understand value in art is really brightness or darkness. It's got nothing to do with color, right? It's just brightness or darkness. Now of course, go back to the color picker here on the right. We can see that color can be bright or dark. So we can have a bright red or a dark red. But that's got to do with the value of the color, right? And value forms the foundation of all of this, Okay, so that's the first big thing, the value scale, Learn the value scale of heart. Get used to the idea of the value scale so that, you know, a one or retina is bright white or a one or retina is black, depending on which way the scale is moving. And that five is generally what we call a 50% gray or a neutral gray. And that we go from, we paint with 5.3 or we color with 5.3 that is one stop away from the other values, right? Because there's a stop away. We say, oh, separate something by one stop. While we'd separate 5.3 by the stop of 42 stops, we'd separate 5.2 by the two stops of 3.4 Now, let me not make you feel like it's super complex, it really isn't. We've really just got ten values in a scale, brightest to darkness. And that is how we talk about it when we say, okay, you want to keep the value more neutral or middle. You want a brighter value or you want a darker value. Okay, so that is the value scale. But there's some important stuff we want to talk about with values as well. It's so obvious, but no one really states it. So I decided, you know what, I have to state this so that you guys are pro ride in the beginning. Here we have a value only version if you want to call it a gray scale or a black and white version. Although it's technically not black and white because there's many value ranges in here. Nevertheless, we have a gray scale version here of a piece of artwork that I've done previously. The important thing I want you to realize is that different objects. Have a different inherent values, just like different objects have different colors. If someone said to you while a leaf is green and the bark of tree is brown, you'd be like, do. That's obvious. But what is not so obvious is that different values, I mean, different objects, right, have different values. That's not to say that some objects don't have the same values. But this is such a crucial point and I've never seen a tort ever in anything. Different objects have different values. What I mean by that in your character work to use red on the illustration here is her hair's value differs from her skin's value, right? The eyeball's value differs from the skin's value. The earrings value differs from the skin's value. The lips value slightly differs from the skin. The value of the earring differs from the hair and so on and so forth. And obviously on the skin, the skin has its value areas and then shadowed value areas. All right, and same thing with the hair. It's shadowed areas and it's lit areas of you will have some values that can be shared in a value sense. For example, the highlights here in the hair seemingly are quite close to the skin value. All right, but keep this in mind, different objects have different values, just like different objects have different colors. Later on, we'll go through a value check layer. Just a simple tool you can use in Photoshop to check the value of your work and see I see I've made my hair value and my skin value the same. Let me change it up because here's the key thing as well. If we make two values similar to the viewer, the object is the same object even if you've made the colors different. Now this may seem crazy because you're like, that doesn't make sense. Like the color is different. But you're saying the value can be the same. It is true the color can be different, yet the value can be the same. You could have a blue and a red that are at the same value. While the viewer will perceive the difference in color, their brain will not perceive the difference in value. And they'll lose one key thing, which is why we learn value in the first place. They will lose the ability to distinguish in three dimensions the difference between those objects, as well as the planes and the shadows and so on. If the values are the same, value is pivotal and value is fundamentally important. All right, so that is it for value. For now, we are going to go through some more advanced topics on value. But learn the value scale of my heart. Get used to this idea that different objects have different values. And start asking yourself as you look around, what is the value of this? What is the value of that? What is the value of this light that I have on in the room in contrast to the value of maybe my computer monitor or my pencils or what have you start looking for value. Because as we grow in our artistic ability, we learn to see better. And learning to see value is fundamental to being able to paint well. Right. And color well. Awesome. I'll see you in the next lesson. 5. Perception of Forms: When it comes to how we perceive things in the real world. There are really two big fields that help us to see three D, and the one is perspective and the other is light, right? Light is really where we're going to focus on is our concern. When we're talking about character coloring and character painting. One of the most important things we want to always keep in mind is that as human beings, we see shadows first and then we see the light. That means we determine the three dimensionality of an object by its shadows. Now that seems weird because you're like, well, you need light to see things that is of course, obviously true. But the shadows, the form shadows in factors are called, help us to understand and distinguish what is in front, what is behind, what is around, what is turning, what is square, so on and so forth. We see shadows first and then light shadows are what essentially help us to understand three D forms. This gives rise to something called the two value statement or two value form lining. We'll get into that in a bit, but for now, let's take a look at this example image on the left, we have this girl leaning against a wall or window with her cell phone. What we're going to do is first we're going to just break that image down into just plain value. We can see there's a nice value split. Her jeans are different from her shirt. Her shirt is different from her jacket. Her hair is different from her skin, et cetera, et cetera. And even in the scene, we can see various different values. All right, you can see how bright her shoe value is compared to pretty much the rest of the scene, barring the sky. What we can do is we can simplify the values even further to maybe just two or three values. And we get something along the lines of this, all right, where we can still really understand what's happening in the scene. You can see a girl standing, she's wearing jeans, got sneakers. She's got a phone or something in her hands. We can see her face, we can see her hair, we can see the buildings, we can see the sky. And as you can see, everything is still fundamentally understandable. And we've broken down that vastness of complexity into really just two or three values. What we're left with at the end of the day really is light and shadow, and we're able to distinguish the forms by those shadows. All right, here we see a good example of the two value statement. There are around three values in this image, but nevertheless, the principle of having light and shadow applies. I've painted this simple cube over here. It's just got two planes, the front and the side of the cube. And we can see, especially when you look at the thumbnail view, that we could easily perceive this as a three form, yet we've only used two values. All right, the two value statement or two value form lighting leads us to a fundamental principle when it comes to how we want to color forward, paint our works. What this is is really that we want our shadows and our light to read clearly, right? What that means is that just the two basic values of shadow and light should make the object look three dimensional. All right? We should be able to achieve a three D look with just two flat values. Okay? That's not to say that we're going to be starting any kind of workflow just using two values. No, that doesn't make sense. Although you can certainly practice that and you'll have practice assignments on that. But it's to have that key understanding that if you're painting something or you're coloring something, you think to yourself, well, this looks really flat and perhaps your intention is for it to look very three D. Then you need to ask yourself, apart from all the other complexities that you're busy dealing with on that particular area of the painting or the coloring section of your drawing. Have I got the two values down, right? Do the two values read clearly? All right. As we will learn as we move through the course, shadows become a very big concern for us. Both form shadows and amb, occlusion shadows which you will learn about because these are essential to creating a three D look. To end of this lesson, I just want to say again that a strong read of light and dark, light and shadow is all that is needed for a strong form. Foundation, hope this has been useful and I'll see you in the next lesson. 6. Planes: We now understand that we can achieve a good form, read a good three D. Read with just light and shadow, right? And having those things read clearly. But the key question is, where do you put those shadows, right? Where do you put them? And the answer lies in planes and learning the planes of the human form, I have these three heads here as an example. The first head here on the left hand side really is just a very basic model of the head and it's filled with mountains and valleys of complexity. If we go to head two, the actual plan planes really are just the different sides of things is quite complex. So if I start drawing planes here, I would imagine they would do something like this. It would go in and then around the eyeball, down around the cheek, down in here and around. And you can start to see that, wow, there are like seriously a large number of planes and they change. For example, here, if we go over the lip, the planes start changing. And we can grid them out, right? So we can get a grid view of all the different planes and the angles that they are facing. Now, light travels in straight lines, and we're going to actually look at that in the next lesson. But we want to understand that obviously different objects have different sides, right? A three D object has multiple sides and light is going to hit some sides and not hit the others. We need to know the sides. As you can see, planes are fairly complex. How the heck do you learn them? The answer really is that we'll see number three here is we want to study simplified versions of the planes. For example, if you can imagine ahead number two here, we'd have like planes on the nose like this and then the underneath planes here. And there would just be so many planes of how the cheeks go and then the planes go in there and around the eye and then out like that. It's just really complex. There's so many of them. Thousands, millions of them. Even, right, we need to simplify. A simplified version of the planes would be something like this. Where we say, all right, what if we make this whole section of the forehead here? Just one plane. Just one plane. Just one plane here. We have one plane going in toward the eyes, right? One rounded plane for the eyeballs because they're circular. Another plane coming out below the eyes. All right, Plan here for the cheeks. Plain here for those cheeks, et cetera, et cetera. And we split the nose into just two planes, a bottom plane and a top plane here. And we can actually in a side plane that comes down like that. And you can see we start to understand how we can get the general shadows in, in a general way. And as we're learning the planes more in depth, we can start bringing the level of detail up if we're going for a very realistic style of coloring or painting. Now of course, when you talk about those types of stylings, things scale, sometimes you just want very simple coloring and that's fine. Sometimes you want more advanced coloring and that's fine. But I'm teaching you to be a professional and that means you know how to do everything from the most complex thing all the way down to the most simple thing. Going back to planes, planes are critical. How you learn the planes is you find models of simple facial planes. You look for reference images of simple facial planes. Now usually these come in the forms of sculptures. An artist would actually make a simplified planes structure sculpture of the head. Now I can't show you those because pretty much all of them are copyrighted images. I don't personally sculpt, so I don't have one of those heads. But nevertheless, a simple Google search, planes of the face planes of the human body will give you millions of results that you can study and reference from. Believe me, when I say this, you want to go in depth in terms of your understanding of the planes. You want to do a lot of planes studies and really get a feel for the angle of the planes on the face. For example, this points down, this points up, this points out you have all these planes when you understand the planes. Then we add a light source. For example, we say, okay, the light sources here, top left, where will the light hit? We can then see that it may not hit this plane here or of the nose. So that would be in shadow, right? It may not hit some of this plane or some of this plane, but it hits this section here and we start to get that three D form coming through. There was a plane here, probably wouldn't hit there. It might hit a little bit there, some here. But maybe not this section either. We start to build form out of the understanding of the planes and the location of the light. That is the basics of planes. There will be more information in your assignments. I'll see you in the next lesson. 7. Light and Reflection: In this lesson, we are going to be learning about light, light sources, and reflection. Okay, The first thing we want to know about light is that no matter what the light source is, whether it's a light bulb or the sun, that light typically moves in straight lines. Okay, light moves in straight lines. A consequence of it moving in straight lines, it radiates out in straight lines, is that it reflects in straight lines as well. If there was a surface here, very smooth surface, the light would reflect in straight lines as well, right? No matter what the surface is actually, the light always reflects out in straight lines based on the planes of that surface. Our first big point, and something we want to think about particularly in regards to the planes, is that light moves in straight lines. Okay? Very perfectly straight lines. Straight lines. This is how we want to think about how light moves. All right, The second thing we want to be aware of is the sources of light around us. So I'm going to draw a simple scene here. We will have the sky and the ground, then we can put in a sun here, let's say this is an outside scene. In our typical outside scene, when we think about light and you ask somebody, well, how can we see everything? Where does the light come from? People will obviously say, hey, it comes from the sun and it's radiating from the sun. While that is true, and the majority of the light is coming from the sun. On Earth, when we're standing outside, the sky is also acting as a light source. Light waves move through the atmosphere and the sky and its beautiful blue nature itself becomes a light source as well. The sky in itself also costs down its rays of light. It's blue light gets cost down into the world. We have the rays from the sun and the rays from the sky shining down onto the ground and onto the objects and so on and so forth in straight lines. We have two light sources already. But then what happens is everything that is accepting the light on the ground, the ground surface, and what have you then itself sends light back up into the atmosphere and of course, to the objects around it. You can see here that we actually typically have three major light sources going on. Now, if you are in a room, your bedroom, for example, and your bedroom lights on, then you're really only having around two light sources. That's this style of interior lighting. You know someone is inside based on the light being a particular way. Right? They're lit from one light source, one main light source, the bulb. And then that light bounces all around the room and on all the objects. And then you have the secondary lighting coming there, should I say, the reflected lighting from all those objects filling the room. Now in this instance, we would technically call the sun the key light because it's the brightest and it's the main light source. Sky would be our secondary light source. Or you could call it the ambient light source as well, but let's keep it secondary for now. Then the ground would be the reflected light source, reflected light, which you could also call bounce light, which itself, depending on the circumstances as well, generally speaking, would also be ambient light because it's contributing as bright light to the scene. The key light really is the brightest light, the secondary lighting and the reflected lighting. The ambient lighting is the other types of lighting, and we'll talk about three point lighting later on not too far from now. Three point lighting is really critical for us when we want to color and paint our characters in a way that is super convincing, super believable. Doing things that you wouldn't think you would do with paint color basically to achieve a very believable and a very appealing effect. Our second point over here is that, generally speaking, three light sources are good, right? Three light sources are something we really want to have in our work if we can, and of course based on the style of the work that you're doing, if you are doing. More simplistic coloring. You may not even have distinct light sources, right? If you're not going for a super three D look. However we want to know the extent of our capabilities when it comes to lighting and how light actually works. All right, now moving on to reflection and reflectivity. Just going to make this stuff a little bit smaller so there's some space. Imagine if you will, light flying from the sun in straight lines, it's beaming off. And it's going to hit two balls, right? We'll have a ball here. Let's call this ball the glass ball. We'll call this ball the clay ball, right? It's hitting a glass ball and it's hitting a clay ball. What we're going to do is we're going to zoom in with a microscope onto the molecular structure of these balls. Here's our zoomed in view. Okay. When we zoom into the molecular structure of glass, we see that the molecules are really close together and they're really tightly packed next to one another, that the surface of the glass is really smooth. Okay, When we come to the clay at this very close o particle molecular level, we notice that the particles are very, very randomly placed and they're going all over the show. And the surface of the clay at that level has all these little mountains and valleys and ditches and things going on. So what happens is light still continues to move in straight lines. Doesn't change that, it moves in straight lines. But when it hits the clay, it hits at all these different angles and then reflects off in really crazy ways, right? That light particles and the lines of the light particles, if you will go in all these different directions and start overlapping each other because the reflection is not a direct bounce back. A straight bounce back, you get a hazy appearance. When those types of surfaces, like clay type surfaces, rock type surfaces, matt surfaces are hit with light, they just do not reflect things very well. Sure, they reflect their color, they reflect their value, they do not reflect high lights very well there. Then they do not reflect the environment around them very much. They also have a different type of bounce lighting, right, which is very hazy. You can imagine if these were little particle dots bouncing around here in the clay area of things with just like a hazy glow of lights, right? However, conversely, when the straight, when the straight light beams hit glass, for example, as a surface type, it bounces directly back. Because of this direct a bounce back, this gives glass its nature of showing off highlights and often reflecting the world around it. Colors around it, the things around it. And this applies to all highly reflective surfaces. Glass and metal and chrome and things like that, right? Very shiny plastic, et cetera, et cetera. Knowing this, understanding how light works and interacts with these types of surface types helps us to understand how we would render or paint or color something that is plastic versus something that is perhaps cotton versus something that is perhaps chromed. Right? So it helps us understand. Okay, maybe I should have really bright highlights on things that are metal, on things that are very shiny, but on things that are cotton or wool, I wouldn't go too crazy with the highlights, right? And things of course, go into various degrees of complexity where you really want to take time to understand why and how does silk reflect light compared to why and how cotton reflects light. And so this gives us our third point here, types of reflectivity, right? Based on the material type, okay, types of reflectivity. Now we are going to move to the form lighting principle in the next lesson. The form lining principle is really the hardcore lighting principle that all painting coloring is based off of. But I feel that you should be now well equipped, well equipped in your understanding of light planes and value to really grasp that in a rapid way, and I hope you do that, is it for this lesson. Lights move in straight lines. Generally want to strive for three light sources. That's a guideline, not a rule. And the types of reflectivity based on the service material type. I'll see you in the next lesson. 8. Lighting Forms: Welcome to this key and pivotal lesson, The form lighting Principle. The form lining principle really is the core foundational principle we, as artists use to help us color and help us paint our work to varying degrees of believability. We base all of our lighting knowledge pretty much on the form lining principle foundationally. And then we add extra bits of information as we need it on top of this, this really is our foundational principle for lighting. Now I'm going to be doing this step by step. Don't worry too much about how I'm doing it, how I'm using Photoshop, or how I'm using the tools that is covered later on in the course. For now, focus on each of the individual elements of the form lining principle. Let me also say this and hopefully I'll remind you at the end as well. You want to remember every single element of this off by heart. Let me say that if you can remember it off by heart and how it works in the form lining principle, you have a very, very strong foundation in painting already. All right, let's get started in front of us. Here we have just a gray circle. This gray circle is going to become a sphere. What we're seeing is the sphere without any lighting, and all we see is its inherent value, which is about a five on the value scale. And its inherent color instance, we've gone with just gray. Its color and its value are very similar, okay? It's a farm in the value scale and its inherent color is gray. What we need to do is determine or define a light source. Okay? We are going to say, let's put the light source top left. And we'll just draw in little three D arrow here just indicating where the light is. Our lights coming from the top left. Now that we have a light source, something starts to happen, right? We're going to start seeing form shadows occur where the light does not touch. I'm selecting this shape, this circular shape here. I'm going to grab the soft brush. Gently add in based on the planes of the form. Now obviously a circle has gazillion trillions of planes. Nevertheless, we're going to wing it. Put in some form, shadows, darken it here in the areas where it gets pretty dark. And you can see immediately how, what we've learned about the two value statement and just the power of light and shadow, What that can do to something so simple, like a circle. It has effectively turned it into a sphere already. And yet, we haven't even done all the other elements of the form lining principle yet. Remember again how important the two value statement really is. But if you look at the thumbnail view, if you had to show this to some rain a person and say, hey, what do you think this is? We'll go, well, it looks like a gray ball or maybe it's a gray planet or it's a gray sphere, right? They wouldn't say, oh, well it's just a gray circle. And that is the power of shadows and light in terms of the area here. That is our base local value. Okay, so those are form shadows. And there are shadows that appear on the form once the form is lit. Okay, the form shadows. Next we're going to add ambient occlusion shadows. Now, ambient occlusion shadows, the name hints as to what the purpose or how this shadow comes about. First of all, ambient refers to the type of lighting. These shadows are caused by the ambient lighting, not the direct lighting. The direct lighting causes the form shadows, but the ambient occlusion. Shadows are caused by the ambient lighting around the area or the environment of the object. Occlusion refers to light being cut off, light not appearing somewhere. When we understand occlusion, shadows which we'll get into just now, which is like a space between your fingers or the darkness underneath your shoes when you're standing on the ground, it's almost pitch black. Occlusion just means two occludes to stop the light coming there. Of course, shadows just indicates that it's the ambient occlusion shadows. Now, ambioclusion shadows are weird. I'm probably explaining it in a strange way. But what's important to know is that ambient occlusion shadows appear to us when the edges of a form tend to turn the sphere tends to go over around into the back sections of the sphere, right? There's a back and a front and a side, et cetera. What happens is the inclusion shadows are very subtle shadows that appear around the edges of forms like this. And they help us to get a sense of the turning of the form. All right, the turning of the plane, and you can see it enhances the overall spherical look. I just want to be a little bit more subtle here. That's also a hint as well. You want to be subtle with them. They're not supposed to be overly harsh shadows, okay? Let's just get that in there. Okay, that seems nice. All right, those are our ambient declusion shadows. The purpose of them, once again, is to show the turning of a form if an object or a shape that you have drawn does in fact turn or is a rounded form, even if it's a square form. If it turns or it has another side, you want to have a degree of ambient. It is a shadow that is being formed by the occluded ambient light. Okay, let's move on to the next element. What we're going to do here is we're going to add just a general level of additional light before we get to the high light. Now, the light often is just formed automatically in this region, right? It's just formed automatically because we've shown a light source that's created the form shadows, and you already kind of have a light zone, and you can see in the thumbnail, we already have a light zone there. But we're going to add the stage as well because it's also very useful when we're painting and we're coloring to think about light as a stage. Now let me just reiterate once again, you don't want to think of painting as adding light, adding shadow. I want to really encourage you to think about get the right inherent value, an inherent color, and just add the shadow. And you've saved yourself a lot of drama and a lot of steps in trying to make it look three D, working on making sure your shadows read correctly. Anyway, let us add this light. I'm going to select that local color there. And I'm going to increase the value maybe by one or two stops. And we're just going to beam some light onto that section. Our ball looks a little bit more, three D now. Okay, that is the light. And the light is obviously coming from the light source. We're lighting a zone. Let's go to our next layer, if you will, or our next element of lighting, which is the highlight. Now the highlight generally occurs at only specific points. Another way I want you to think about a highlight is think of a mountain range. There is one mountain that is the tallest mountain. Let's call it the peak of the mountain, right? The peak amongst peaks. Think of the highlight like that. When you start putting a lot of highlights all over something, they don't really seem like highlights anymore. They seem like really bright little markings on whatever you're doing. The term highlight really comes from the highest point of light, like the highest peak in the mountain range. Use highlights very sparingly. What we're going to do is now select that light color, increase its value. We're going to add a little bit of a smaller highlight here. One location where the light is brightest. Okay? Even go a little bit brighter in the core there. All right, in the center of that little shape. Okay, fine, that is the highlight. But there is still work yet to be done. What I'm going to do now is go behind our sphere and I'm going to draw a cast shadow. All right, let's do a cast shadow like this. That seems reasonable enough for an example. Okay, So important thing to remember with car shadows is car shadows are transparent, all right? They're pretty much transparent. You don't really want to do them opaque. It'll look weird having this really harsh, dark, black shadow over something. Unless of course, you're doing that for an intentional reason. It's important to remember, car shadows are transparent, but they are usually quite dark. Another point to note is that the edge of the car shadow is sharp in very clear, bright light. And it can be a little bit fuzzy when the light is diffused. For example, think of a fluorescent lighting. Think of a very cloudy day. Shadows don't tend to have very sharp edges when it's a cloudy day. Okay? When the light is diffused. But in sharp bright light or general normal lighting circumstances, the cast shadows tend to have a sharp edge. Now, the thing to remember with car shadows is that they are casting off from the form as the light beams past the form, areas where the light does not hit. The cast shadow is formed pretty obvious in a way the same time, you want to think about how a car shadow might look based on how the light is moving past the form that is the cast shadow. All right, cast shadow. We've just put that layer underneath our sphere just for convenience sake. As we're working next, we want to talk about reflected or bounce lighting. Okay, so I'm just selecting our sphere again here. We are going to grab a bit of the light here from this surface which is now a white table or our white environment. Because as the light shines, some of the light shines down past our sphere, hits the table surface, and then bounces up again to the back of the form. All right, and this is our reflected or bounce light which we've already learned about a little bit already when we had done the elements of light. All right, the light sources, what I'm going to do is just do a gentle soft whip brush, do a very subtle spray of this reflected light in that shadowed area there. The key thing to remember with reflected light is that it generally appears only in the shadows. Bounced light for its reflected light tends to really show itself only in the shadows. Now, why is that? Well, because it's reflected light, it is a lot less bright than the actual light source itself. If there was reflected light in the light areas, which there is, you simply cannot see it because the light areas are being overpowered and blasted with the direct light source. Our reflected light is firmly seen in the shadow areas. I'm going to add another light element yet, which we will call our secondary lights. Okay. Our secondary light is, could be the sky if you're outside, or it could be another globe. If you have an orange globe in the room and then a red globe in the room. The red globe being a slightly less powerful, maybe a more distant light source. It would still shine its lights. Light would still reach our object. This is our secondary light source. It's secondary to the primary or the key light source here. I'm just going to hint at it just a little bit on this outer edge. All right, We're going to say that there's a secondary light source to the right now. It's different from the reflected light because it can be brighter. And secondary light sources based on their brightness can also be seen in the light. It just depends on the lighting set up. As we do that, let's add our secondary light source in here as well, so that we're aware that there is a secondary light source coming from the right. Maybe it's really far away and a little bit distant. Okay. All right. Our secondary light source. It's weaker. I'll just put here second that we know it's our secondary light source. I'll just say primary here or key light source. Okay, we've got one more thing we need to do in our form, lighting principle, and that is the occlusion shadow. Now, whenever an object touches another object, generally speaking, you get an occlusion shadow happening there where light just simply does not get to. Right. The light is itself occluded. Let's just put that in there firmly. Occlusion shadows. I'm going to select our sphere here, just hiding the selection so it doesn't get in the way. While we're working, I'm going to select a dark shadow color. I'll just even select black. I'm going to be subtle with it because there is a lot of curvature happening underneath our sphere. You'd only have a little bit of an area with the occlusion shadow, but it would be something like that. That's a little bit too lacking in subtlety, but there we go. All right, those in fact are all the elements of the form lighting principle. We use these elements when we're painting a particular thing to determine what elements we want to add and take away based on the lighting scenario of that particular object. Now, when you're dealing with various types of art, maybe you're going for a very cartoony look. You may not use all of the elements of lighting workflow, right? You may use none of them. You may just do completely flat color. But if you want to bring in more and more dimensions, you want to use more and more of the form lighting principle. Let's discuss this principle now with just some key notes on what's going on here. And we also want to start to try and see how a workflow, how we might work and implement coloring might derived from this particular principle. All right, what we want to do first is split the families. Here we have the light family, we have the shadow family. Things from the light in the shadow family do not cross into each other. Generally speaking, for example, we do not have values from the light family occurring in the shadow families areas. It just doesn't happen. The values are completely separate. Why? Well, if we remember our two value statement, everything needs to boil down to the two values. Obviously, if we have values from the shadow zone, in the light zone, values from the light zone. In the shadow zone, everything becomes a blurry mess and we can't read the forms anymore. That is the reason these families are in effect at war. You could say in the light family, we have our base or local color and value. We have our lit area, we also have our highlight, right? And we want to remember, we don't want to go crazy with highlights that is almost at the instant sign of an amateur or someone who really doesn't understand lining principle. They just have highlights on everything like the character or whatever they're drawing or painting. It's just super glossy and stuff, it just looks really weird. Okay. So those are the elements of our light family. Crazy thing is you'd think the light family would be this crazy, huge family. They've only got these three members. Really, everything else is part of the shadow family. Once again, emphasizing how important shadows are then in the shadow family side, although yes, we do have the ambient occlusion occurring in the shadow family side. It's a little bit different but nevertheless, it's lighter. It's part of the shadow family. We have our ambient occlusion shadows. Yes. Mind you, Also in the light family would be the secondary light source as well obviously because it itself is a light. Okay. So we have the ambient occlusion shadows in the shadow family. We have the form shadows which are really our base shadows. When you're doing shadowing, you mainly want to focus on your form shadows. I put a number one there and number two and your ambient occlusion shadows when you're just working with your base value and base color and you have the desire to create that three D form work just with your form shadows and your ambient occusion shadows. Work those until it looks D, don't worry about the other elements yet. We have our occlusion shadows. I'm reiterating this for your sake so that you're getting used to the idea of all these elements. We're going to list it out on left as well. That's not to waste your time, it's because we want to derive a workflow from this. It's all good and well learning the form lining principle, but can you use it in actual piece of art? That's the real question. All right, we just had a sip of water there. Okay, This is our reflected light, also called bounce light. That's because the light shines down and then it bounces off the surface and back onto the object right at whatever angle it is in relation to the object. Key thing to note here is reflected and bounce light are part of the shadow family, right? Because these lights occur in the shadows, you see them in the shadows, even if scientifically they are occurring in the light, you do not see them in the light. In the terms of an art, we want to be mindful that they are occurring in the shadow areas, right? Just doing an arrow there to our secondary light source. And then we have our cost shadows, which are cost by the form. Important to remember, they are transparent. All right, when you start looking at all of these elements in a list of fashion, we have our base, local color and value. Then we have our form shadows, our ambi inter collusion shadows. Then our lights highlights reflected lights. We can add secondary lights at this point as well in the workflow collusion shadows and our cast shadows. Let's make sure we've all got them all. 123-45-6789 Okay, there we go. We've got all of them there. Now something important to note is look at where the cast shadows are. Look at where the occlusion shadows are. They're last. And this is very important. You don't want to be painting in cast shadows somewhere in the beginning because you're going to end up painting or coloring over them. And that would be weird because cast shadows, cast over things. Usually if an arm is over a character's head, you want to have painted the head and then do the cast shadow over that, right? So it's very important. But in essence, this is how we get our general lighting workflow. Okay, Our general lighting workflow. I hope this has been a very useful and very to the point form lighting principle lesson. Learn it well. Learn all of these elements off by heart. Get it over and done with, and you will thank me later. That's the end of the lesson and I'll see you in the next lesson. 9. Understanding Color: In this lesson, we're going to learn about the elements of color. In front of you, you see a pretty typical color wheel. This type of color wheel is called a Arb color wheel, and you'll find out soon why it's called that. Nevertheless, color has a properties to it. One of which you'll already know, which is value, which is the brightness or the darkness of something. The next one we're going to take a look at is hue. Hue basically refers to all these different colored segments. Not necessarily the color itself, but rather the frequency range or the color range that the particular color falls into. In order, we have yellow, red, magenta, blue, cyan, and green. The word urine comes from the yellow, red, magenta, blue. Going back into the yellow section, I don't know necessarily why they left out C and G, but something that is important to note is it's good to come up with a mnemonic for yourself so that you can remember all these segments. Because the color wheel, knowing the color wel off by heart, helps you know what intermediary colors a color can move to in its particular range. Obviously, yellow goes into oranges, oranges moves into red, red into pink, reds into magentas, magentas into purples, and so on and so forth. Now, another important thing about hues is that colors are divided into warm colors and cool colors. And I'll split the wheel now to show you the warm and cool split, which is around here. Warm and cool colors tend to really contrast one another. Warm colors, as the name implies, feel warm and heated. Cool colors feel cool and cold. As we move through the course, you'll start to see how having a good interaction between warm and cool, and also how we treat warm and cool when we're lighting objects, is a very important facet of understanding hues. We have color, we understand value is brightness and darkness. And we understand hue, warm colors and cool colors as well. But there is a third element, and that third element is saturation. Saturation refers to the amount of gray in a particular hue. If we look at this orange segment here, as it moves to the center of the color wheel, it gets less and less color rich. That has more and more gray in it. In this instance, we call this neutral gray or the 50% gray saturation. You can regard it as the amount of gray or you can regard it as the color richness. Either has a lot of gray or a little bit of gray essentially. And that will saturate or desaturate the color. Now when you combine this color wheel into the information and the knowledge you have about value, You have a very broad range of colors to work with. Tons of different brightness and darkness levels, combined with tons of different saturation levels, combined with tons of different hues. And obviously, the color wheel is a simplification of the hues. Because as you can see on the color picture here in Photoshop, you know the hue levels just quite crazy. Most computers support 24 bit color, which is 24 million colors. And in reality, the range is significantly higher than that I'm led to believe. Okay, but nevertheless, these are the core elements of the color wheel and the core elements of color. Now there is some addendum information to be spoken of as well. It's more about terminology. You may have heard these terms before. Tint to what is a shade? What is a tint? What is a tone? To be honest with you, day to day life, most people misuse these, particularly the word tones. But I suppose it does have a use in music as well. But nevertheless, shades, tints, and tones are separate elements. A shade is when you add black to a color or degrees of black, right? You will start getting the shade or the shadow values of that particular hue. Tints, on the other hand, is when you add white to a particular hue. Tones are the varying steps of saturation. It's when you add gray to a particular hue, those are what shades, tints, and tones are. Having this vocabulary under your belt, and this understanding will very useful to you when you're painting and coloring your work. All right, as an example, let's take this red for example. I'm going to get a painting brush here. What I'm going to do is slowly in the darkness of it to give me different shades of that particular red. You can see we get quite a nice spectrum. Tints of this red, on the other hand, have increasing the amount of white in the color. And once again you see a very nice spectrum. And last but not least tones have us dealing with the saturation level here. We will move more toward gray on Photoshops, particular color picker here we'll move to a 50% gray in a diagonal fashion, desaturated a little bit more. Those are variations of tones that really is color. In a nutshell, that is the lesson and I will see you in the next lesson. 10. Color Shifting: We've learned about color theory, now we're going to learn how light color affects surface color. A very common beginner mistake is to assume that when light hits an object, that the object is simply going to increase in value. What I'm going to do here is I'm going to just give you an example of this on the red sphere at the top here. The assumption is that, okay, I've done my base color, I've done my local value, and my local color, I've added in some shadow and now I want to light, I'm going to select the base and I'm going to increase the value of the red, and I'm going to put some red here. While this is not necessarily untrue under certain lighting conditions, what is more common is that the hue will change based on certain factors. All right, the hue will change. We won't just increase the value, the brightness of the base red, we're going to change the hue as well. Now this means we need to go to our color wheel, here, our ob color wheel, and do a nice line split between the warm and the cool colors. All right, on this side we have the warm colors and on the side we have the cool. Now, generally speaking, as a general guideline, most of the time we fall under warm lights, whether it's globes in our house, whether it's even fluorescent lights in our house or our offices, or we're outside underneath the sun. Our primary light source usually is warm or fairly warm. When it gets cool, things become a little cold and chilly and feels a bit weird to us. I think in general, we opt for warmer types of lights or more daylight like lights because it feels more natural. When a warm light hits a surface of any particular hue, it tends to cause surface hue to warm up as well. Okay? When a warm light hits a particular surface hue, whatever the hue of that surface may be, it tends to cause the surface to warm up as well. Now, there are many lighting circumstances that are possible, but this is a very common one In general, this is the most natural looking way to do it. Also, before we go into the examples, is the opposite true? If a cool light hits a surface of a particular view, does that hue cool? And the answer is yes, of course. It also depends on the coolness of the light and the color of that particular light. But lights are going to fall into a category of warm or cool. And the sun is generally considered warm because it is yellow. Let's move over to our spheres and see what the correct approach would be to lighting them. Which doesn't mean just increasing the brightness, but we're also going to warm up the hue as well. So I'm going to switch to the soft brush here and we're going to start with the red one. Now if we ask ourselves, what warm area or warm direction will this red move into this particular red? It's probably going to be toward the orange and the yellow. It's going to warm up towards the orange and the yellow. We'll pick the base of value here, base color, the local color, increase the value. Because we're lighting this side, we can increase the value. There's going to be light there. But we also want to move the hue a little bit. Of course, the extent to which you move this is dependent on what you're actually trying to paint. But you want to get the general principle here that would be a good way to light that particular surface. You're changing and shifting the hue of the local color. Warming it up as the light hits it. Let's go to the blue. The blue would warm from the cool here up into a San, right? It's going to warm up into a San. We'll select it. We'll increase the value because we wanted to get brighter. We'll warm it up towards San. You can see how natural it looks to do a hue shift as well as a value shift. All right, last but not least, let's do this green sphere. Once again, we'll increase the value, then we'll hue shift toward a lime green. Going into this lime area of the warm colors here, it provides a fairly convincing, nice warmed hue. It looks naturally lit. Now a question you might ask is, well, what about the shadow areas? What about the shadow areas on the dark side of these spheres over here to the key that you want to remember here is that shadows themselves are effectively the absence of light, the absence of light, which means it's the absence of that hue, shifting ability of the light. Really, shadows are just a lower value of the local color. Okay, The shadows really aren't necessarily affected by any hue shift. You don't want to go and be like, oh, well I warm the light so I'm going to cool the shadows though you could do that and you have creative freedom, generally speaking, shadows or the absence of light. And definitely, if this is your base here, you would just really drop the value for a shadowed area and let the light and the hue shifts in the light do the talking. Okay? That is in effect how light color effects surface color or the local color of an object. When you have warm lights, you want to hee up. That's the end of this lesson. I'll see you in the next lesson. 11. Colour Schemes: In this lesson, we are now going to take a look at color harmony and color schemes. But we're not going to go to crazy extents with this, because color really is quite subjective. It doesn't really have hard and fast rules. It has more guidelines in front of us. We see the color wheel on the left and on the right a bunch of different splits out from that wheel. And this is your typical kind of splitting of the wheel into various schemes if you will, or divisions. At the top, we have the primaries and the first one primary is just R, G and B, red, green and blue, which we build most of our wheel O, which is how the cones in our eyes see color. Then we have next to it the Arguable Primary. Why is this called the arguable primary? Because it is argued in certain art circles that these could also holistically really be primaries as well. If you look at printing or the printing industry for example, they often print in what is called CMYK, which is sine magenta, yellow and black. Cmyk also produces perfectly legible and readable images when you're looking at your magazines or books and what have you. Then we have secondary. These are secondary colors that are really just the colors next to the primaries, hence why they're called secondaries. And you can derive a secondary color scheme, which is a color scheme using secondary colors. And then, of course, you may have heard of complementary colors before. Complementary colors are directly opposite each other on the color wheel. As we hit this point, you can start to see some subjectivity already taking place. Because you may be saying, well, isn't blue and orange complementary? Aren't red and green complimentary? What's up with this color wheel? Why doesn't it work like that? Well, that's because there isn't really a perfect color wheel per se, right? Just manmade color wheels. And if you look at Photoshop, doesn't even have a wheel, although you can download a particular wheel, but it doesn't really even have a wheel, has this color strip. And how would color schemes look if we had to work with this strip, right? Color can be very subjective. Then we have analogous colors. Those are really colors that are right next to each other on the wheel. For example, yellow, orange, and red are considered an analogous and so on and so forth. As you work around the wheel, you can just pick the colors that are next to each other. Split complementaries really that you have a primary and then just diagonally off from it, instead of directly across, you have a split complementary which gives you a three color scheme. There you have monochromatic color schemes. Monochromatic really just meaning single color, You'd have a single color, In this instance, we have the blue. Then you'd have various other colors being either higher valued blues, lower valued blues, darker valued blues, more saturated of that blue, less saturated blue. So you're really staying in that one hue range. That really is an overview of the general splits you might see when it comes to color wheels and color harmony. However, I want to show you a great way to simplify this process where you don't really need to necessarily learn all of this. It's not going to make a huge difference in your life. We're going to that right now. What we're going to do is we're going to achieve color harmony using the rule of three. Technically it's the rule of three plus one, but we're going to call it the rule of three here for this example. Okay, let's put it here, color harmony by rule of Three. With this system, you really can't go wrong. There may or may not be a U in the word color. It depends how you like to spell it. Just interchangeably, use both. All right. Color harmony By rule of three, what you want to do is you want to pick your primary color, whatever you think the main color in your character is going to be their main descriptor color instance. Let's take blue. Okay, we're going to go to the blue, pick its value, pick its saturation level, pick the hue as you prefer, and decide to yourself what your primary color is going to be. Here. We are going to have a single primary color. I don't like that. I want it to be a little bit darker. That will be our primary. Then pick a secondary color. Okay. I'm just going to go with whatever. Let's go the yellow and orange. Okay, let's take that. It has its own hue and value and saturation level. Important to note, you do want these colors that we're choosing here to be different in value, right? Different in value. And of course, different in all the other elements as well. The more difference you can get between them, the better. Because that way we're eliminating parallels in our value. And eliminating parallels in our color as a tertiary color, which we're going to be calling our accent color. I'm going to go for a red. Let's go for this type of red. Very warm red. Very warm and bright red. Okay, so what we have here is we have a primary secondary color, which we have just chosen based on what we feel like we're being subjective here. And then an accent color, okay? You could also call it your tertiary color, but let's keep it accent, and I'll tell you why when we have the selected. All right, let me just get the square selection tool here. When we have these selected, we want to arrange the percentage of color in our particular piece. Let's say it's our character outfit according to the status of these colors. For example, the primary color, let's use black for the notes. Our primary color, we will want to have around 50% coverage and communication to the viewer that this is the primary, most of the color on that character, whether it's the suit or they're out for their costume, is going to be blue, blue, or the primary color 50% You want your color split here to be 50% to your primary. Then when it comes to your secondary, you want your secondary to be 30% right, 30% The color used on your character to define their color scheme will be the secondary. And then last but not least, the accent or the tertiary color will be the last 20% Okay? So that you have an uneven split, right? Asymmetrical split of the colors. Now, when you're building a character, when you're painting a character and coloring a character, this does not mean that you only use these colors for the character. No, rather this is the color scheme of the character. The hair is still going to be whatever their hair color is going to be. The skin is still going to be their skin color. If they're wearing watches, or accessories, or bangles, or what have you, you can choose whether or not you want that to be part of the scheme or not. But generally, if they're holding something that simply cannot be part of the scheme, for example, they're holding a golf ball. Golf balls are typically white. Tennis balls are typically green. You would still color things in the way that they are, but you want the overall vibin feeling of your character's clothing or their outfit and their shoes, and their general accessories. Or they feel to be these three particular colors. So that if you were to put these colors down and say, hey, what characters do you think fit this scheme? So let's take, for example, this particular color scheme I have here just occurred to me now that I used radial and blue. But nevertheless, I would think something like X Men may be cyclops when I see these colors. Right? He's got a blue suit, it's got yellow straps. He's got his red visor. And actually here's a perfect example. In this instance, if you're not familiar with the X Men character Cyclops, the comic book version character, you will note that the color splits kind of apply to him in this way as well. The only thing that's red is really is his visor on his glasses things. And then he's got yellow straps, but most of his suit is blue. So he's actually a pretty good example in that case, obviously we can't put an image of the dude here. Nevertheless, I want to reinforce that you want the values between your colors to vary. A simple check to do this in Photoshop, and we'll do a more advanced check a little bit later on, is to just color pick and check the value level, right, Where is that blue? All right, maybe that's about a four. Where is that yellow looks like? Where is that red? It's like a 1.5 on the value scale, right? Because you want that variation of value, because the viewer's brain is perceiving that value. Now let me just add a little extra thing. Feel free. You heard me earlier says the color harmony by rule of three and then I did mention plus one. Feel free to add in additional accent of just value whether it's black or grays or whites, because that can also help add to it, obviously depending on what you are doing. All right? But the rule here is to strive to keep the color age, the general scheme usage to three colors. Don't use more than three, don't use less than three. You can actually get away with using less than three. To be honest with you, that means you really just eliminate the accent color. But consider and contemplate this very simple way of really getting great color schemes by just using the rule of three. That is it for this lesson. I'll see you in the next lesson. 12. Dynamic Lighting: We're now going to take a brief look at the concept of three point lighting. And on the right we have a wizard character girl that I created. And on the left we have a single point lit source sphere. Now you already basically know a lot of the three point lighting principles because we've gone through it already. But I wanted to go over this again just in a little bit of a different way and use the term three point lighting to help you realize how important three point lighting can be when it comes to creating a really believable and a really appealing three D look in your work. Now you're always going to have at least one light source on your work, unless you're doing a very simplistic coloring style where there really aren't any clear light sources. It's more of a graphic style and less of a realistic lighting or formed type of style. Okay, now beginners tend to generally always only use one light source at the start. They think to themselves, all right, there's three object is lit, so there must be an area that is lit and an area that has shadow. And that's all I'm ever going to do. Whilst that's not necessarily untrue, if there is a single light source, when this is done in all the work, the thing, the object, or the characters that they're painting or rendering seem to be very flat, right? They seem to be very boring. And this is where the wonder of three point lighting comes into play. On the left hand side, we have our sphere and it is currently liked from just one side, the top left. What we're going to do is we're going to introduce a blue light on the right hand side and we're going to introduce a reflected light on the bottom. Like I said, nothing you haven't typically seen before. But we're going to take a little bit of a twist when we look at this. And we're also going to use our wizard character Kami on the right to illustrate how effective three point lighting can be. Now, three point lighting is called such because we have key light, which is our main light, our secondary light, which is going to be our blue light, and then our reflected light at the bottom, which is going to be our tertiary light. We have 123 point lighting. Let's get into that. And we're going to quickly add in these lights. I'm going to use a similar blue that is on armies, a bright colored blue using the soft brush. To do this, we're gently going to add in this secondary light source here. Note how I make sure that it's certainly a lot brighter near the edges. And I can actually increase the human value a little bit there at the very brightest points of the light. All right, We've now introduced our secondary light source. You can also see in the thumbnail view that it increases that three D read quite significantly. All right, now let's go ahead and add in our reflected light. I'm going to just make this light but more dull color. It's going to be a high value gray in the green range. The reason is, we don't want to have competing value levels, or we don't want to have symmetry, if you will, between the values of the secondary light source and the reflected light source. Also, keeping in mind that our reflected light generally only appears in the shadows, right? In our work, we want to keep it not too bright, not too light. In fact, I actually think we should take that shadow value. Rampant steps up a little bit, but not too much. Then we can move into that greeny gray range. We can actually give it a bit of a test and see that seems reasonably good for a reflected light source. We don't want to make it too bright. All right, so what we have is a significantly more three dimensional looking sphere, because we've lit it from three points. Of course, we can further enhance it with a highlight and so forth. That's not necessary for this particular example. Now if we go and take a look at Carmie and let's zoom inherit, take a look at her face for example. We will notice that she is indeed a victim, if you will, of three point lighting. Making her look more dynamic and more three dimensional than she would otherwise look without the lighting. We can see that on the left hand side of her, she's got a key light. Let's just change the brush there. She's got a key light and she's got a secondary light on the left hand side of her. Our key light shows itself here in the highlight of her nose and the way the light, the value increases on her forehead. In terms of her jewelry and the trimmings of her clothes, her scarf, you can see the impact of that key light on the base, the local color of the objects that the light is shining on. It's the same on her gloves and so on and so forth. There is a definite key light in the scene, and that gives her a good sense of three D and of course, the shadows reinforce that key light location. Next we have the secondary light, which shines almost in a repeating pattern, if you will, of dark light. Dark light, for the most part where there is light, then there isn't, then there is light, then there isn't on areas that that secondary light is hitting. For example, we see here, it's hitting the top of the hat, then it doesn't hit. Then it hits again. Probably doesn't hit again. It hits here, but it doesn't hit there, hits here. It doesn't hit there. It hits a little bit here. Then we kind of go into reflected lighting there. And we can see here how that blue light is shining on her hair, on the side of her face, right on her lip, a little bit in her eyes, even on the inside of her eye socket. You can see how that secondary light is enhancing the three dimensionality of her. All right, three point lighting is great for this dynamic effect here on the gloves. Now keep in mind as well, when you are doing secondary lighting, try to have it fade as naturally as you can from the edge into the form. And obviously be logical about the planes. Also, don't draw solid straight lines of the secondary light just beaming in a solid straight line like this. Don't do something like this or it just keeps going because you want to break the light up, it looks more natural. You look around you, even right now, look at elements in your room. You will notice light generally follows a pattern of lit area, shadowed, area, area shadowed area, lit area shadowed area. Whether it's in a macro sense or a micro sense. Nevertheless, moving on, we also then have a reflected light source shining up from the ground. And that we can see here in the more gray light shining up at the bottom of her chin there going into her jaw, bottom of her ears, even the bottom of her hair picks up some of this reflected light. Any bottom surfaces that you feel would pick up this will get this bottom reflected light treatment. That's secondary. This is bottom reflected light. This bottom reflected light on her earring. You don't see the left hand side secondary light because it's very similar to the color of her earrings. But you do see the key light in the form of that high light there. You have it, more or less in a nutshell, three point lighting, with the example of Kami over here. And I do hope that this has been very useful to you. I'll see you guys in the next lesson. 13. Atmospheric Perspective: In this lesson, we're going to take a look at what atmospheric perspective is and what it means in the real world. In our drawings and of course in our character coloring and character painting in the real world, air builds up between objects As they recede further and further back into the distance, there is more and more air build up. What this means is that foreground elements are darker, clearer, sharper, and more contrasting as elements move back into the distance because of the build up of air, their values are lighter, they have less detail, they're much less contrasting, and that means contrast between one object to another and they overall less detail. And so this really is what atmospheric perspective is. Now, in a sense, at your typical kind of camera angles, or rather, should we say, at the typical perspectives of viewpoints that you tend to draw characters at. You won't see an incredibly large amount of atmospheric perspective because the objects, for example, an arm on the other side of the body is pretty close to the body still, there's not a lot of air that could be built up there. But nevertheless, we use this as a tool for dramatization, right? So we're building in additional drama and an additional sense of depth And three demand ensionality into our pieces using the principles of atmospheric perspective. Now on our drawing in the middle here, this is. Go groan. Here's an Orc. You may know if you know drawing theory and line weights that we tend to draw thicker line weights on lines that are in front and thinner line weights on lines that are behind. And as the lines get thinner and thinner, we receding those objects into the background. So it's a way for us to create depth using atmospheric perspective by ensuring foreground objects have thicker lines and background objects have thinner lines. And that is how we typically use line weight. So you can see in Grogan over here, he's got significantly thinner lines on his hair braids compared to the line of his shoulder here going into his arm. And then once again, the lines are really thick on this foreground, hand here, as well as the blade to distinguish it and create a sense of depth. Now you might say, well, there really isn't a lot of air between these things, and you just said that there's not a lot of air between these things. That is true. But remember, we are creating images. We're not creating real things. We're creating images and we're trying to persuade the viewer of the believability of the images. So any tools we have and can use that will help to persuade the viewer is good. We also want to keep in mind believability trumps realism, right? Believability trumps realism. If something is more believable and not really realistic, it's still more believable than it is real, right? Believability trumps realism. Now, moving on to Charlotte on the far right here. The elements in our particular sphere of interest are her rear arm here, her right arm, as well as her right leg. And both of them have lighter values compared to their foreground elements. And again, this is done to differentiate them from those objects and elements, and also to help the viewer understand that there is depth in the image. Now it's generally a subtle effect. A fairly subtle effect. But having it in adds so much extra depth to the piece. Use it as you see fit. That is, atmospheric perspective. And I'll see you in the next lesson. 14. Edge Differentiation: In this lesson, we are going to learn about the essentials of edges. How they relate to coloring, how it relates to painting, and the type of cornerstone they really are in art creation in general. But before we get to the edges themselves, it's important we learn about depth of field. Now I want to do a practical exercise. Pick something up nearby to you and hold it as close to your face as possible, where it is still in focus. Just focus on one point of that element. What you'll probably notice and is something you've probably seen before, is that once that's in focus, everything else goes out of focus, it becomes very blurry. In essence, you've created a shallow depth of field by holding it so close to your face. Now, depth of field technically refers to the distance between the nearest and furtherest objects that are in focus. That is the depth of field. You could almost call it the depth of field of focus, right? The distance between the furtherest and the closest objects that are in focus. Everything outside those areas is blurry, right, and out of focus. A shallow depth of field refers to an area that has only a small amount of objects in focus. And then near or foreground objects are blurred, Background objects are blurred. A deep depth of field refers to not much blurred in the foreground, not much blurred in the background. A lot of things are in focus. For example, landscape photography. Generally speaking, a lot of things are in focus. When you talk about portrait photography, generally only the person's head is in focus and then the background is beautifully blurred in that instance. Now, why does this matter? Well, just as a start, if we take a look at the edges of these stars, they're pretty nice. And we take a look at the edges of these stars, they're pretty blurry. And immediately to our vision it tells us something to the likes of, hey, look at me, I'm in focus, and hey, don't look at me. I'm not in focus, I'm not important. It brings objects forward when they have sharper edges and pushes them back. Now, how this relates to us and how we paint has a lot to do with the brushes that we're using, or the edges of the brushes that we're using. Most art applications support multiple types of edges, right? They have a bunch of different brushes that do a bunch of different things. Now, here on the hard edges side, we can see what a nice, crisp hard edge looks like. And then, similarly with the soft edges and the lost edges, in your traditional typical art theory or art fundamentals, you will be taught that there are three kinds of edges. Hard edges, soft edges, and lost edges. Edges that are more implied but not stated, they get lost. It's simple enough to grasp this concept. Some more examples here, just showing what is happening between the edges. Now once again, I want to reinforce that you want to think about hard edges almost as if they're saying, hey, I'm over here, look at me. They create such a strong contrast between values and of course the edge itself that they draw the viewer's attention to themselves. And soft edges, on the other hand, are very timid and they don't want to be noticed. And they're kind of like, hey, don't really notice me kind, I'm not really here, don't look at me. And that's the way you want to kind of think of soft edges. So we can use soft edges in the sense to push things back, and hard edges to bring things forward. But we can also use edges in a compositional sense in our works where, where we place hard edges, it draws their focus, right? So we can define focal points with edges and non focal points with soft edges, right? So that's the way we want to think about edges. But what I want you to do with edges as well is think very much of edges as you would a value scale, except in the world of edges. And so we'd have, let's just say argument's sake. Ten steps. I'll do as many foot on the page yet. But we are going to take this particular brush, it's a hard edge brush and slowly lower its hardness. Now, not all apps support this, but that's not the point of the exercise. What we want to do is slowly soften the edge hardness. Actually wonder if this effect is even going to work, okay? All right, we're slowly but surely hardening the edge hardness. And you can see almost most of this bar is pretty hard edged. And what you want to do is think about edges as a scale of edges going from very hard to increasingly softer, softer, and softer, and softer, and softer. So that you think of edges as a broad range of edges. We'll go about this far and then I'll use a soft brush just to indicate even softer edges. Okay, Think about edges as a scale, going from very hard to firm, mediocre, soft softer. Let's make that a little one softer. And then softest edges, right, that are really, there's almost no edge there. It just looks like some kind of smoke or gas or air. Think about edges as in an edge scale. Now we will elaborate on this more when we get to the style examples of the different coloring techniques and different painting techniques. And when we're doing those practical examples, think on the theory, remember the theory. And if you can please take notes, edges are a cornerstone of art that a lot of artists pushed to the sidelines and only realize many years later how much they really needed all of this edge theory. As a last example, we're going to take a look at the impact edges really can have when it comes to focus. Here we have a series of red dots in the background and a blue.in the foreground. The only reason we're going to say the blue dot is in the foreground in the moment is because it's overlapping the red dots. But when we start manipulating the edges, we can see how our eyes are immediately fooled, tricked by what's happening when we change the edge types. Here we've blurred the edges of the background. Suddenly it appears like that blue circle jumps forward, right? But what happens when we then blur the blue circle and we keep the background shop? Now our focus is deferred to the back circles. This is the power of edges and it really is a simple thing to do, but like I said quite often and neglected, keep this in mind when you're painting. Be mindful of your edges and be very intentional at what points you want to use hard edges and what points you want to use soft edges, why you are using those edges at those various points. That's it for this lesson and I'll see in the next lesson. 15. Observation: As we're leaving our core lighting and color theory, I want you to ask yourself the question, how did the art masters come up with all these crazy theories that we use today in realist type coloring and painting? How did they come up with them? The answer is obvious. They really took their time in observing the world around them. And I want to encourage you as we leave the section to become an observer of the world around you. Look at the way light hits certain objects. Look at the patterns that light creates. Ask yourself why light does one thing on one surface and another thing on another surface While you're at it, start paying special attention to the subtle ambient occlusion and form shadows that occur on objects. Because as we've learned as we've moved through the section, those two values, your light value and your shadow value are really the foundation of your three D forms when you're painting. Now even if you're going to be doing more simplistic coloring on your characters, more cartoon style coloring, if you want to do something that is Cel shaded like a mango anime style, all shading even so those simplistic styles are derived from the fundamental principles. So I want to encourage you, become an observer of the world around you. Be a little bit crazy about it, be a little bit intense about it. Look intently at things. Be weird in the mall or when you're working in the streets. When you're at school or when you're in class or in university, wherever you are, be crazy about it. Observe the heck out of things you need to learn to see more than the average person is seeing. Paying special attention and giving special value to shadows and lights and reflected lighting and bounce lighting and secondary lighting. And understanding how the lights and the shadows are working to create that view of three dimensionality that we experience. So let me encourage you, become an observer, go out into the world, be more than you are when it comes to the visual world and be a little bit crazy. Go overboard when it comes to looking at the world around you. That is the end of the section. I'm so excited to teach you more practical, more applicable things in terms of character coloring and character painting. So let's get right into it and I'll see you in the next module.