Color Characters 102: Coloring Tools and Techniques

1. Module 2 Introduction: Welcome to module two, and welcome to the Introduction to Digital Coloring Essentials. This module is all about learning the digital tools that you need in order to color and paint your character designs effectively. Now, if you are a beginner, this module is highly recommended for you. We cover some nuances and of course, the essential tools needed to achieve the coloring and painting that you desire. However, if you are already fairly familiar with digital tools, you know how to use Photoshop fairly well. Or clips sto paint or anything similar. You don't really need to go through this module. For the beginners, we'll be taking a look at the shortcut keys, the various tools, layers, modes, selections, and so on and so forth. And you'll also get this keyboard file, printable version of it in your resources. Photoshop will be used as a basis software example. But keep in mind that really the shortcuts and the general utility of the applications really remains the same amongst all the software packages. Particularly when it comes to brushes, brush editing layers, layer modes, and so forth. Most of the major software packages share these features. All right, let's get right into it. Let's get started, and I will see you in the first lesson of module two. 2. General Tools Overview: In this lesson, we're going to take a quick overview of the general tools that are used in digital art applications. To start off, we're going to talk about the canvas. The canvas really is where we're actually going to be doing the drawing, the painting, the coloring and so forth. The canvas really represents the output size of our work, if we're going to print it, or the screen resolution size of our work based on options that we select when we create a new document. The next section we're going to discuss is the layers section. The layer section allows us to build up layers of transparency, basically the same proportions and size as the original canvas document here. And it allows us to do things on different layers. For example, if I were to paint a character's hair on layer three, I could then, because I'm using the layer system, adjust just the color of the hair. Usually we have our lines and our drawings on a top layer and we tend to paint underneath. Most of the software will allow you to create new layers in your layers section, as well as adjust the layer modes, which we will get into later. Let's move on and talk about brushes and erasing. Now in Photoshop, the brush tool and the erase tool share the brush library. Now these brushes can be imported, can be downloaded. There are thousands of brushes out there, particularly for Photoshop, procreate and Coral Painter. You can make your own as well. They really do offer a broad range of media type simulations, for example, watercolor and pastel and so on and so forth. But you'll find in most software applications, you're able to create your own brushes, manipulate the brushes, tweak them, and so on and so forth. And the brush tools as well will generally give you opacity control and flow control, which will go into a little bit more detail later as well. The next very important tool we want to talk about is the selection tool. Now in Photoshop, when you click the selection tool and you hold it down, you get the rectangular marquee tool, which gives you rectangular selections and spherical selections or elliptical selections. Then you also have the free hand and the polygonal tool. They call it the lasso tool here, most people call it the free hand because you can just draw out selections. Selections allow you to select areas of your piece and manipulate just that particular area. You can move it around, you can change its size, you can transform it, and so on and so forth. The polygon version allows you to achieve more accurate selections by giving you a point to point functionality if your hand is a little shaky or you have some really, seriously tight curves that you want to select. Next is the color picker. I have the color picker here on the right, a mini window that I brought up. But the typical Photoshop color picker looks a little bit like this. It allows you to select both value saturation and of course the hue Here you can see you have access to quite a startling number of color options. When it comes to digital coloring, that really is the color picker. Then let's talk a little bit about basic navigation. A lot of software includes a navigator window. Procreate does not, but you don't really need it because you can manipulate the page with your hands. But the navigator window lets you have a small thumbnail view. You can click the little red box and pan it around the page. As you zoom in and zoom out, that little box gets bigger and smaller. Additionally, you can use the space bar, which will open up the navigation hand and it lets you drag and pan across the page. Last but not least, let's just take a very brief look at the top menus here. Apparently in most software, and some of these you'll probably be familiar with. The File menu, which lets you create new documents and export documents. The Edit menu, which will have you editing various elements and things that you're using in the actual document. The image menu, which controls a lot of elements based on the actual page or the canvas. The layers menu, which has layer options type, which controls typing and text. And the selection menu, which controls everything to do with selections. The window menu, which is also common in a lot of graphic applications, allows you to control a lot of the windows and a lot of these user interface panels. You can really just drag them around. If you see there's an interface here that I have that may not be on your particular version of Photoshop or the application you're using, go and check its window menu. And just click the box that you want and move it to where you'd like to have it. Of course the help menu as well. Just having help for the particular software application. The three D menu is not often used. This is particularly only in Photoshop, not really used for digital art very much. And the filter menu controls a range of filters, but we'll go into those the right time when we're going to be using that functionality. It is important to note that pretty much most of the applications that I've named and a lot of the major graphic art applications, do have certain filters and things you can do, such as sharpening and blurs. You'll see that really in general, if you learn one really well, you can have a fairly broad scope of use in other software applications because a lot of things are shared including the application shortcuts. That is it for this general tools overview. Let's get into the nitty gritty of it. I'll see you in the next lesson. 3. MCanvas Size and Resolution Guide: Let's now take a look at creating a new canvas, particularly with regards to size and resolution. The applications will generally give you the option of choosing a width and a height of the canvas that you'd like. And then the measurement tools, whether it's millimeters, centimeters, pixels, or what have you. A lot of artists will tend to choose pixels or millimeters, and then determine the page size by that. The applications often offer presets. You can see here, Photoshop is offering photo presets, print presets, illustration, and so on. That's it. I particularly use print preset. And I go for an three size canvas here, which is pretty big. When you convert it to pixels, you can see it's got a height of 4,961 pixels and a width of 3,508 pixels, which is really great for digital arts. Almost currently, a perfect size page for you to use and the paper size is pretty much standardized. Next, it gives you an option for orientation. Do you want to start with page being vertical or landscape horizontal? Either way, it doesn't really make a difference. You can adjust this anyway in the documents by just flipping it or just doing a page rotation. Very important is the resolution section. When you're doing digital coloring, digital painting, you really don't want to do it at a low resolution or anything. I would say lower than 300. Now, if your computer is having performance issues, I would say, look, go down to 150, but try to not go lower than that. But generally speaking, the standard is 300. And if you have a beefy machine, why not go to 600 as well? Just know that it does require a lot of processing power and Ram to actually paint at that resolution. But it's going to give you the highest, one of the highest basically resolutions you can get for digital painting. But I pretty much paint on 300 pixels per inch. I found that to be perfectly fine, and I have a very powerful computer, and I still find 300 to be fine, and we want to stick to pixels an inch. Okay. In terms of color mode, generally speaking, a lot of the art apps will automatically default to RGB color, which is red, green, blue color, which is digital coloring. A lot of people ask the question, especially beginners ask the question, should I be using CMYK, which is print color, because maybe I want to print my artwork? The answer to that would be no, because you want to actually paint with RGB color and color with RGB color. And then when you want to bring it to print, you then convert the document to CMYK. If you were to paint or color in just CMYK, the way it works in the software applications is it's going to limit your actual range or actual color range, and you don't want to do that. Rgb. Color is 24 bit on most computers. Most software these days stick to RGB. You can leave the bit here at eight bit, you don't need to worry about that. And then this is simply selecting what you want the background content to be, which is usually white, black, or a background color. And some applications will give you the option to make that background transparent. Whatever it is, it doesn't really matter. Even if you choose transparent, you can just add in another layer and make it white. All right, that is really the basics of the page size. As a general guideline for the general resolution and not the actual pixel per inch resolution, try to stay at a width of around 3,000 or at least 3,000 pixels at your longest side to get that good print resolution in your work. Other than that, there's not much more to worry about in terms of the canvas really just ensuring your width and height are at a good pixel dimensions. Your resolution is at 300, if possible, and you're definitely working in RGB color. And that is it for this lesson. 4. M204 Installing Brushes 2: Let's now take a quick look at how to install new brushes into Photoshop. And the process really is very similar for most of the other applications. I have the brush tool selected here. And I go to the brush tool settings at the top here and click this small gear icon. When I click the icon, there is a section to the middle of this very large menu that says load brushes. You can also replace brushes here, as well as save brushes or reset them to the defaults of the software. In this instance, I'm going to choose Load brushes, and then I will navigate to the brush file for Photoshop. The brush file usually ends with, I'll select that, I'll click Load, and it has loaded those brushes in. Now if you want to keep things fairly simple for the course purposes, you can go in, select, replace brushes. Click the brushes that you've downloaded, click Load, and it will replace all the vast number of default brushes with just these core essential brushes. This particular brush pack, which is included with the course as my personal core brushes, which includes a sketcher for drawing inker flatter for doing flats and inking a soft opacity with low flow brush, which is good for doing soft shading and ambient occlusion shadows. A dual edge brush, which is hot on one side and hot and soft on the other. A square type of paint brush, which is great, smart default paint brush. A round style paintbrush that shares the same properties. A grainy brush for a nice grainy look. A circular paint brush for a more soft look. It's a very soft edged brush. A watercolor brush that really does work more or less like watercolor. A rough square brush that works a bit like pastels. A rough round brush, which also works a bit like pastels or chalks. And then a speckle brush for doing freckles and other textural effects. And a racer, which is a hairish type of texture brush, I rarely use that one, but I've included it anyway. That is essentially what is in this brush pack, and that is how you install brushes. 5. M205 Common Shortcuts 8: We're now going to take a look at some of the most common keyboard shortcuts in digital art applications. Now, we're not going to go comprehensively through every possible keyboard shortcut. As I've said previously, Photoshop and similar applications are very deep. I would advise really playing around with the application while you're doing your work, while you're doing your paintings, playing around with it, mess around with it, and make mistakes. Obviously have a backup file available for you so that you can mess around and actually experience some of the random tools and other elements of the software you're using. Alternatively, do consider looking for a deep comprehensive education in the application you are using. Knowing your tools well is always very useful because it allows you to be much more efficient and focus on the art itself. With that said, let's get started and we're going to start with B. And B is our brush tool and it allows us to use our various brushes. You press B for the brush tool. Similarly, you can press E for the erase tool. And the erase tool will come up and allow you to erase whatever you've painted. Now you may want to change your brush size. So I've switched back to brush there with a B, and I'm using square brackets right to go bigger, and square brackets left to go smaller. The great thing about this that it's a very easy and efficient way to change your brush size, which is something you will be doing a lot when you're doing digital painting and digital coloring. Additionally, you will want to know how to undo and redo. I'm going to put three dots here. If I hit Control Alt Z, I will undo and I can redo with control shift Z. Now depending on the application in your keyboard preferences, you can change this. Usually I have control z set to undo and control shift z set to redo, because Photoshops version of undo is an undo redo in a single button. When you go control Z, it will only undo your last action. You can see there just constantly undo and redoes that action. We'll run it. Next, we're going to talk about the marquee selection tool, which is M, that is this icon over here. It gives you the option of having a rectangular or an elliptical selection. I'm going to press M there and I'm going to draw out a selection. And I will press Delete to erase the content on that layer that I just created. Next we want to look at the move tool. Let's put a dot here. Let's change our brush. Can use a hard edge brush here. Change our dot, and I'll hit V to get the move tool. The move tool can manipulate anything you've selected or whatever is on your layer. At present, click and drag, and I can move objects around using the move tool. You also get the lasso selection tool, which you can access by pressing L. It gives you the option to use either freehand selections or a point to point selections. The point to point selections works by clicking points and giving you a selection that way when you complete it. The freehand selection allows you to create freehand selections where you just draw the selection that you would like. Now what you can do as well as you might find, particularly when you're painting, you really don't want to see these lines because they mess with the edges of the area you're painting in order to hide them. You hit control H. Now the selection is still there. You can see I can still paint inside that selection. But the selection lines are hidden and they don't get in the way, and they're not distracting when you're trying to paint. Now to select something with a keyboard shortcut, you would hit Control D. Control D is the selection button. Now what you can also do is you can select the move tool if you wish, or the mark tool, select an object and then hit Control. This gives you the capability of transforming the element. What you can do is you can scale the element around, you, can squish it, can stretch it, and you can also move it in this particular mode as well. That's control to hit the transformation tools. Now something important to note is you might say, well, I don't like how much control I have you. I want this object to stay exactly at the right size and proportions. Photoshop has a built in constrained proportions button, which is the same, generally speaking, across most of the art applications, which is Shift. If I press Shift first and then I click the little handlebar there, it will maintain the proportions. I can't go outside of the actual proportional sizing of the shape. All I can do is scale it proportionately. That is shift incidentally. Shift also allows you to move things in perfectly, straight, horizontal, or vertical lines based on the original direction I hold shift, I click, and if I move down, you can see it's going to move perfectly down. It can also move at a 45 degree angle or perfectly horizontal Vertical movement, whips vertical movement, Horizontal movement, or 45 degree movement. You can constrain the movement by holding the shift key. That shift applies not just to transformations but to anything in general. All right, that is the shift key for constraining proportions and keeping things aligned correctly. What you can also do, if you want to select everything on a layer, you can hit control A, which then selects everything on the layer. You can hit control C to copy memory elements and control V to paste. Now we've actually pasted this element into memory as well. Now we've got two of them, very similar to other applications. All right, what I've done here is I've used Shift to select multiple layers. I'm going to delete both of these layers. Now we can go through that again. I'm pressing B for my brush tool. I'll put that on layer three, and I'll put this on layer four. If I move them independently, I only move one line. But if I want to move both of them to select both layers, I can hold Shift, click both layers and I can move both elements around using shift to use multiple layer selections. Let me show you another cool trick. If you've got an element that you'd like to duplicate and you don't want to use control C and control B and so on. A short way to do it is just to hold Alt. Click the object and drag it in the direction you want, and Photoshop will make a copy for you. This also works in most other art applications. Incidentally, you can hold Alt Shift to make sure that it is directly aligned below the original. Next we're going to take a quick look at the Text tool, which is not all applications have text tools, but nevertheless, Text Tool allows you to type and you get your normal options of font and bold styling alignment and so on and so forth. You can change the color and what have you. That is the text tool which is last but not least, we're going to take a look at the gradient tool shortcut key is, and we're going to be using gradients and we'll go into them in more depth later on in module three. But nevertheless, when you start Photoshop up for the first time, it may be on the paint bucket tool. Just click and hold the gradient tool and you'll get the gradient tool here. Gradient tool allows you to do a variety of gradients and it allows you to create gradients to use. For example, here we have a pink to a blue, we have a dark green to a light green, or we have a red to transparent. The two transparent type of gradients is the one we mainly use. We select an element and we just do a slight gradient from a location over another location. That is the gradient tool that is G on the keyboard. Those are some of the most common art application keyboard shortcuts. I hope this has been a useful lesson and I'll see you in the next lesson. 6. M206 Brushes Opacity and Flow 12: We are now going to take a look at brushes, flow and opacity, and we're going to talk about brushes first, kind discuss some of the brushes in the brush pack in a little bit more detail. Starting with the sketcher brush. Now, the key thing we want to remember when it comes to brushes is we want to keep in mind our edges. Effectively, a lot of the time a brush is used is either to produce a certain type of texture, but fundamentally more so, it's to determine a type of edge. Whether the edge is very hard, very soft, or a scale of edges in between. So we're generally selecting our brushes based on its edge type. So the sketcher brush here really is a good brush for just doing drawings, right? You can draw well with it. It's also good for adding some nice, hard edged highlights and things like that. When we blow it up, you can see that the brush both has size dynamics on. And what that refers to is that the size changes based on the pressure as well as opacity dynamics. So the lightness or the darkness of the stroke is also determined by the pressure. And the great thing about this particular brush having these settings built in is that it can kind of be used like a marker of sorts. You can see when I start overlapping it, it really has a market type of effect as well. Whilst at the same time, being very versatile as a pencil brush as well, because, you know, it will start to look very much like a pencil, won't look like a marker at all when you're drawing things out. Okay. So that is the sketcher brush. The Ika flatter brush, as its name implies, is a brush that doesn't have opacity, but it does have size changing based on the pen settings. So it works kind of like a thick dark ink coming out of the brush. Now, it's called Ika flatter because you can ink with it when you want to do nice, super clean, super smooth lines when you're doing inked works of very comic book or manga styled works, But it's also great for doing flat falls of shapes because it puts out a consistent amount of paint that doesn't change based on pressure. So you can get a nice, clean, solid flat fall with the inker flatter brush. And that is one of the benefits of that particular brush. Now, when we go over to the soft flow brush, it's just called soft op flow just to indicate opacity and flow. The opacity and flow in this particular brush, they're set over here, and also a little bit in the brush things if I'm not mistaken. But this particular brush does not have size for its pressure, right? It does have opacity. So when you apply pressure, you will get a darker stroke and you place very lightly, you will get a lighter stroke. But the size does not change, and that's important because a lot of the time you're using this soft brush, do things like shadows, your ambient coccllusion shadows as well as your form shadows, and you don't want to have shadows that have these little sharp pointy tapered ends at the end of them. You want everything to be very consistent. And so that is the purpose of this brush, and believe you me, this will be one of the most common brushes you use when you're painting the soft flow brush. The al edge brush is a specialist brush. I don't particularly use it very much, but some artists do find this type of brush useful, because based on the angle that you're turning the brush, you can get a hard edge on one side and a soft on another. It kind of mimics something that can happen naturally in terms of how forms are built, where you have that occlusion shadow coming in on the inside, but a nice crisp edge on the outside of the shape. It kind mimics it in that particular way. Give it a try, see how you like it. The square paint rush is both square for a very good reason and works like a painting brush. It has sars dynamics on, and it also has shaped dynamics on in terms of, I mean, opacity dynamics. So when you press lightly, you get a very light stroke, and you press hard, you get a hard stroke. You might say, well, this kind of looks like a very weird random edge. And that's quite intentional. The problem with digital tools, when you're using a round brush all the time, particularly photoshops default brush, the brush strokes start to actually look quite digital, and the problem with that is it just looks a little bit fake, right? Looks a little bit fake and unbelievable. So this square brush has been created and exists to kind of mimic the real look of paint fairly well, fairly effectively. And it's random edges kind of mimic the types of random edges you tend to get with sort of similar traditional types of brushes. So the circular shape was eliminated for a square, and you get a brush with these properties. Great brush for getting a very paintedly stroky look in your works. That is the square brush. Okay. Let's clear this content of this layer. Now, the round painter is effectively exactly the same as the square, except that it has a round shape to it. Now, it's that very digital brush I told you about. However, there are instances where you want to have a bit of a round look or you're rendering particular surfaces. So it works very much the same way. You can see it's got a very sharp edge of this particular brush. Use it where necessary, definitely try it out to get certain effects. It's great for highlights and things like that. It's not too dissimilar from the sketcher. Okay. Grainy paint is grainy as its name implies. We'll take a look here. It gives you a very chalk like effect, good for certain textured surfaces for background elements as well. Circular paint. It gives you a very convincing circular but not digital round effect. You could arguably paint an entire piece with just this brush as well, right, because it has a very natural look to it. So it's a circular painting. And the watercolor brush. I call it the watercolor brush because it seems to have watercolor like effects, even though I implement them in a manual sort of way. So unlike coral painter, the watercolor brushes and various traditional like brushes do not really bleed on the page and seem wet. If you do use coral painter, you can get these very realistic watercolor effects in that software. However, it is as hard as to control in that sense, as well as it would be on normal paper. So you use it at your own discretion. This particular brush gives very convincing and very nice watercolor like effects and great for the loose type of coloring on certain sketches. The rough square brush is a very thick and rough brush, which is good for blocking in certain things, especially if you want to start painting, doing the structure of a painting with just paint. You don't do the structure of a drawing. You don't have a drawing as a basis. You want to just start with paint. It's very good for blocking in elements, blocking in environmental objects, and so on. And you can use it for a particularly nice rough texture on a surface, that can vary. It's a very solid brush, a very nice brush, a very natural looking brush. Of course, if you want to draw with it, it gives you that fantastic charcoal look. This rough round brush very similar to the previous brush. It's just a round a version, a little bit more streaky, a little bit less grainy texture. Can use that where you find a need for it. To be honest, we'll go to the last two just now. I primarily stick to the inker flatter. Well, generally speaking, I'll always use the sketcher, the Ika flatter, always the soft dot flow, generally, the square paint, and then the round painter. Depending on the style I'm going for, I might switch to the other brushes. Lastly, we have the sketcher brush here and the raker brush, the speckle brush mind you. The speckle brush just puts a lot of dots on. Now, it seems kind of partially useless in the beginning, but it isn't really. It's good for things like freckles, stony types of textures, doing pores on skin and on high detailed paintings and things like that. And as you get more adept at painting and coloring your characters, you'll find more and more uses for that particular brush. Last but not least is the raker brush. It's effectively the same as the speckle brush with a few settings that have been changed, right? And this brush is good for adding additional textures into already rendered hair. I don't use it to do hair. I just, you know, it just seems like, you know, you think in the beginning, well, this is going to be a quick way to get that hair look out. It isn't really. It's good for sort of enhancing already rendered or already painted or colored. Here if you want to get that additional texture. So these are the brushes that are included in the course. And these are my personal brushes that I use for pretty much all my artwork, whether it's landscape paintings, drawings, character paintings, character coloring, and what have you. So these are the brushes that I use. Now, in photoshop, you can see the brushes here and you can modify the size and the hardness of certain rushes if they allow that setting with this window. All the art applications will allow you generally to modify the size of the rush. The hardness setting is something that is typically a photoshop type feature. Now, something I wanted to show you is the advanced brush settings here. This is something that you will find in most of the art applications, including Procreate on the iPad, where you have quite a multitude of settings and you can see as I go through every single window here. There's so many different settings that you can change on the brush, apply to the brush. Now, these types of in depth detailed setting dynamics is really a subject in a sense for another time. Brushes can be manipulated in countless ways from their angles to their direction only to the speed that they push out ink and paint so many factors. I would encourage you to check it out, play around with it. You can always replace any of the brushes if you mess them up by messing around with these settings by just re uploading and loading into photoshop that brush file. But nevertheless, do take a look here and start getting used to the idea of perhaps creating your own brushes at some point. However, I can assure you that the brushes in the pack, you can really trust them. They're robust, and I've been using them for years, and I've actually custom built this to be sort of very much an all round brush kit for photoshop specifically. Right. Last but not least, I want to talk about something very important, which is the opacity and the flow settings. Now, each brush on their own can have their own individual opacity and flow stings built into their complex settings here, right? But this opacity slider here and this flow slider here are sliders you will see in the other art applications as well. Now, opacity obviously refers to how thick the paint is, how transparent it is, level of transparency, is it opaque or transparent. But you can see that there is a brush setting, particularly with the sketcher brush, where if I press harder, it's more opaque and where I press softer, less opaque. Nevertheless, the opacity setting can override that even more. Now, depending on whether you're doing certain more painterly styles of work, You will want to keep the opacity setting, not too high, maybe around 80% for more painterly work, because it gives you a lot of control, a lot of microcontrol over your hand movements as to how much opacity is being applied. Similarly, when we're doing shadowing and shading on our characters, paintings, and character colors, you want to make sure that the flow is not particularly high. This setting mainly applies to the soft up flow brush. Keep the flow low. This is one of the key secrets to blending. Now, we won't really particularly be looking at blending as a subject in the course, because blending is not really a subject. It became a digital sort of subject of like, how do I blend colors. But to the base artists, historic artist, blending was just a matter of putting two colors next to each other and smudging it with your finger to get a smoother flow out of it. For us, I want us to think about blending as edges. What kind of edge would enable one value or color to flow into another value or color. Nevertheless, having a low flow on the soft brush, right? You can play around with it on the other brushes. Allows you to get smooth transitions from one value and base color to another value and base color. So opacity once again has got to do with the transparency or opacity of the paint is thick and you can't see throw it or as its semi transparent. And the flow has got to do with how much paint is coming out of the brush at a particular time? How much paint is being sprayed out at a particular time. Once again, keeping a low flow is advised for more painterly styled works, and generally, any time you're using this particular brush the soft flow brush. In all other instances, you can keep opacity and flow at 100%, generally speaking with most of the other brushes because they have opacity and flow settings themselves already built in. I hope that explains the opacity and flow to you and I will see you guys in the next lesson. 7. M207 Alt Key Color Picking 1: We're now going to take a quick look at the functionality and the importance of the Alt key. When you press Alt, it brings up the color picker and it's a toggle. If you hold it, the color picker stays, and if you let go, the color picker disappears. It's not really a tool switch, it's more of a toggle switch. Of course, this is good for just picking the colors that you want to use from your piece and painting with those. But it's also a very useful tool for blending. If I wanted to blend this blue into the purple, could pick the blue, start painting, then pick the middle color, Start blending with that to get a smoother blend. Pick the purple there and blend it in through. As I constantly pick and blend, I can get a nice smooth transition that is effectively the utilization of the Al Key. It really is one of the great features of digital, which means we don't have to have a set of paints on the side. Once we've laid down our initial colors and values, we can just pick off the canvas and work as we need to using the Al key. That's that for this lesson. 8. M208 Digital Color Pickers 2: Digital color pickers represent one of the most powerful tools in digital art software today, and different software implements the color picker in a bit of a different way, but they fundamentally all do the same thing. In front of you, we have on the top left photoshops, digital color picker. On the top right, we have coral painters, and at the bottom, we have clip studio paints. Regardless of how it looks, they all perform the same functions. All of them offer the ability to change the value. And they all also offer different methods of selecting a hue. Photoshop employs its vertical hue bar, clip sto paint and coral paint using the circular bar to allow hue selection. Regardless, it doesn't really make much of a difference, although I do know that a lot of painters prefer to use a circular hue selection bar, and you can get plug ins for photoshop that will allow that. Then lastly, they all allow you to choose your saturation level. Now, on the topic of the color pickers, with great power comes great responsibility. Just because you have every humanly available color at your disposal, doesn't mean you should use all the colors. Don't forget what we've learned in terms of our rule of three color selection system. That's a great guide to help you. But also, when you're painting a general rule to keep in mind is that you don't want to use your base color or have your base color at a two higher value or two lower value. And why is that? Well, we want to make sure that when we're doing base colors, we try to stay in the middle of the value range and in the middle of the saturation range, which allows us if we're lighting enough room to do adequate lights and enough room to do adequate shadows. So we have a broad range of value and also a broad range of saturation. As for your hue usage, that obviously depends on what you're painting. But keep that in mind, you generally want to start with your base values in your base colors around the middle area, a middle value middle saturation area to be safe. And that's about it for the digital color pickers. Okay. 9. M209 Layers and Layer Modes 5: In this lesson, we're going to be taking a look at layers and discussing some layer modes. Now 99% of good art software has a layers functionality. And that's the capability to add additional layers where you can separate art elements and art assets onto separate layers and continually add more as you need them. One of the common uses for layers is that we will do our flat coloring on a particular layer and then do our shadowing and our lighting stages on another. We'll also put our lines at the topmost layer. Now, layers are very versatile, You don't just put things on them, you can manipulate those things as well using layer modes. Layer modes change how the layers work and how they display the pixel information that has been put on them. In particular, I wanted to mention the multiplier mode and the screen mode. These modes are generally also available in all the other software as well, also called multiply and screen. I'm going to select this layer with this very reddish circle on it and I'm going to set it to multiply. And as you can see, the effect that the circle has, it's almost as if the circle has become transparent in sense. But what the circles color now does is it multiplies the value of the underlying blue circle. What you get is a resulting new value which is significantly darker. The simple way to think about multiply is that it tends to darken and saturate in some instances more the elements underneath. Conversely, screen does the opposite. Now you notice that the rest of the circle disappears. And that's because it can't lighten white any lighter than it is that part disappears. And here we see a lightening of the resultant color of the underlying blue circle, right, which is from that layer being on screen. When something is normal, it just displays as if it would normally display if you were using a particular paint on a particular canvas. Right? Hence, why that layer mode is just referred to as the Normal mode. Now, as you can see, there are a multitude of layer modes. Each of them do various things. And a lot of them are more useful for photography than they are for digital art. Although I would encourage you to go and play around with them and just see what they do. It doesn't really damage the file. You can just pick something and mess around with it and see what happens. Right. The ones I want you to pay special attention to particularly multiply and screen. I'm going to set those back to normal. We're going to talk about another feature of layers, particularly in Photoshop. This is also available in most other digital art software. That is the ability to select the contents of the layer in Photoshop when you hold control and you click the layer thumbnail, Photoshop will then automatically select all the content on that layer, will create a selection of that content as well. Whether you're on that layer or off that layer. I'm on a new layer here and I'm going to put some red into this circle over here. But you'll see that it is on its own a separate layer, but it was constrained to the selection of that layer. Once again, how I did that was I clicked control and I selected that layer. Don't worry, we will definitely be going over this and you'll hear me doing these things while we're going through the digital coloring workflow in module three. Another useful feature is the ability to clip layers. What clip layers means is taking one layer, let's take this circle over here, and telling it I only want this layer to display on top of another layer in Photoshopping, when I hold the old key and I hover on the line between the two layers, can clip the layer there. In some other art software, this is called referencing the layer or similar terms are used, but this is called a clip layer or a clipping mask. In a sense, what happens is you only see my red circle inside the blue circle, the top layer. The bottom layer is the reference layer. And the top layer is constraining itself only to the regions that have pixels in the bottom layer. That is layer clipping. Another useful feature as well is called alpha locking of the pixels. I'm just going to unclip that circle over there. What alpha locking is on layer one, Here we have our red circle, that's layer one copy, and on the normal layer one we have the blue. Now let's say for example, you want to paint only on the areas that already have color. But you don't want to use a selection just in case you end up painting the thing on a different layer. You want to paint it on that particular layer. And what you can do is you can do what is called an alpha lock. And it's called alpha because it locks all the pixels that do not have any color information. All the transparent pixels in Photoshop, that's this little icon over here, this little checkerboard icon. Now the applications, it could be called alpha lock or transparency lock. In procreate particularly, you have to do a particular hand gesture to get that and you'll have to look at procreate's help as to how to initiate Alpha lock in that piece of software. Nevertheless, if I click Alpha lock on our red layer here, you can see that there is no selection. But I can't paint outside the actual area that has fold pixels. However, I can paint on the inside of that area. And that is what alpha lock does. It allows you to, for example, once you've done the flat fills in a character. Let's say you've flat filled the hair and you've flat filled the skin to lock those layers to only the areas you filed so that you don't have to worry about accidentally going outside the lines. That's really the point of it, and it's a fantastic feature and it really allows us to work very, very efficiently. That is, in a nutshell, layers and those two layer modes multiply and screen. And I'll see you in the next lesson. 10. M210 Selections and Transformations 2: Let's now take a very brief look once again at the power of selections and what we can do with the selection tools. The first selection tool I have here is the lasso selection tool, also known as the freehand selection tool. And it lets me make freehand selections. I can just draw out the selection area that I want. Selections allow us to isolate the area in which we want to paint or draw. Let's not forget that we can also do this by clicking control and then clicking the layer thumbnail. It's very similar in all the other applications that will select all the content on that layer. Now selection really is just a general thing. It's not layer specific. You could have a single selection running across multiple layers. And you could do various things within that space, across multiple layers. But when you are on a layer and you have a selection, you can also transform that selection by hiding control. Transformation tools are very powerful. They allow you to scale proportionately by holding shift or without proportions, by letting go of shift. They allow you to rotate. They allow you to distort the image by grabbing one of the middle handles so I can squash it there or I can stretch it here. They also allow you to do perspective warp. When you hold control and you click one of the ends, it's almost as if you were bending a piece of paper in three D space is very good for creating graphics on objects. For example, if you have some texts that you've typed out, you've designed a two D graphic that you'd like to put on a character's shirt or pants or something like that. That is perspective Warp, Coral painter, procreate and clip studio paint all have this functionality. As well as Photoshop. You also then have access to the polygonal selection tool. It varies between software. For example, if I wanted to cut out this sphere, pretend it was on a white background and they were not on separate layers and I wanted to cut it out. The polygonal selection tool allows you to get very accurate selections by clicking a point to point to point. It allows you to select point to point in this way. Really great for getting those accurate selections where you may not be able to freehand this level of curves. But in a nutshell, those are the capabilities of the selection tool and also how you can transform things and move things that you have selected. See in the next lesson. 11. M211 Adjustments 3: In this lesson, we're going to be taking a look at image adjustments, particularly brightness and contrast, hue and levels adjustments to help us with that. We have gender on the screen. On this layer here called art copy, we've got all of the artwork and all the different layers, The skin layer and the hair layer and all that merged into a single layer So that we can effectively do the adjustments on just this lap, particularly brightness and contrast and levels. Let's take a look at those first. If we go to the image menu and go then to the adjustments, sub menu can choose brightness and contrast. This image adjustment allows you to adjust the brightness as well as adjust the contrast of the image. Increasing the stops between the value ranges, creating a more contrasted look. Now, the reason you'd use this adjustment is perhaps if you have too close values to each other, between your lights, your shadows, and your mid. Or if you feel you've painted really dark and you want to brighten it up a little bit, you can just do a quick brightness contrast adjustment. Let's move on to levels, levels give you more granular control. You have three sliders, a shadow slider, mid values slider, and a bright values slider. Very highlight value sliders. You can manipulate just the light values. You can introduce just more light values or increase mid, or decrease mid, or increase your darker values. This is more advanced version of brightness and contrast, which is a good way to think about it. This will allow you to really get the most optimal output of the image. You can use the preview slider here to compare versions. Preview checkbox, right? That is the levels adjustment. Last but not least, we're going to take a look at the hue saturation adjustment, which is something you usually use when you're busy painting the piece out. We're going to go to the levels, to the layers over here in this folder. Going to scroll down to her hair layer, it says hair highlights, but there are both the hair and the highlights. Can see As I toggle this on and off, we just get the gray background of her hair. I'm going to select just the hair there. Go to image adjustments and hue and saturation. This box gives us three sliders. A hue slider, which will allow us to change the hue of the hair. Saturation slider, which will change the saturation. And a lightness slider, which will change the value. Let's say we want to do her hair to be a different color, let's say a darkish blue. We can manipulate these sliders to easily and quickly change the color of any particular element in the piece. All right, that is a very quick overview of the human saturation, brightness and contrast, and levels adjustment tools. Definitely take some time, fill around with them and you'll see, they're pretty straightforward, we'll see in the next lesson. 12. M212 User Interface Customization 2: Let's now take a look at common user interfaces and unisa interface elements across mainly the PC based software such as Photoshop, Coral Painter, Eclipse Studio Paint. Now generally speaking, Photoshop has set the industry standard, and the other software packages generally have very similar elements, such as a navigation panel, quick selection, color area, brush, presets menu, as well as a layers area, as well as the tools, the top menu items, and the additional options. The good thing to know is that all of this is customizable. And you can tailor your workspace to something that you find very effective and efficient. A lot of these applications can be used in other ways, whether they're strictly illustration oriented or they're being used for graphic design. You might want to customize your interface in a way that works for digital painting or digital coloring. The particular layout I have here is designed just for that, Gives me my navigator, my color picker panel, and access to my brushes, as well as obviously the layers. Now generally speaking, you will find access to these extra panels if you don't see them in your application. Under the window menu, you can see here in Photoshop lists all possible windows that I can open and access. Little panels that I can open and I can drag them around. I can make them side menu here as well if I want to pop them in or out, or I can just drag them over the interface and reposition them as I feel is necessary. Another thing to note is that most of the software applications in their preferences menu give you the capability to actually change interface elements, such as the size of text, the stars of the interface fonts, and also enable touch modes depending on the software that you're using. If you have a machine that is touch capable, so keep that in mind, but always know that you want to have the workspace that works best for you. And that is also quite efficient because what you will find is that digital coloring, digital painting, very similarly to traditional painting, traditional coloring does take a lot longer than the drawing process, the initial drawing and planning process. That's mainly because you're applying multiple levels of color, obviously, depending on the style you're doing. However you want to be as efficient as possible with your tools. Definitely look at and find and play around with, and mess around with the interface to get the exact interface that works for you. This is the end of module two, and I'll see you in the character coloring workflow module three. 13. M213 Software Stress 1: If you're new to digital art tools in digital coloring and painting, you may be feeling a little bit stressed out right now. What if I don't know how all the tools work? What if I haven't remembered half the stuff I've learned in this lesson? Don't worry about it. As we move through the rest of the course, you'll see these things brought up again and again as the tools are constantly used and implemented in an actual character coloring workflow. I don't want you to feel that you're ill equipped, but I want you to feel that you will grow as you learn and use the tools more. There are, of course, resources out there that you can get to grow your knowledge and experience with the particularly selected tool of your choice. However, let me say that the best way to learn is by experimenting, clicking random buttons and trying random things. You really can't break the software most of the time, and you can always reset everything back to defaults in the software system settings and preferences. Don't worry, don't be afraid. Let me encourage you that if you are fresh and you're still very, very new to digital coloring that I'm right here for you. Please use the tools to ask questions, get feedback, and I'm always here to help you. Don't get software stress, just focus on your creativity, your designs, and the character coloring and painting that you want to do. I'll see you in the next module.