Transcripts
1. Introduction: Welcome to module
three and welcome to the Coloring and
Painting Workflow Overview. Module three really
is the core of the course because
we're looking at the color and painting
workflow itself. Workflow really is how we apply theory in a practical way, in a logical order that
is hopefully clear, easy to understand, and
also easy to remember. In this module,
we're going to look at three stages of production, reproduction, production
and post production. Reproduction is really
where we're going to be prepping ourselves for the
main painting process. And we'll look at painting
and context elements such as a value check layer as well as the 50% gray canvas and
also line preparation. The production phase is
the bulk of our work. Here you will see something that should look quite familiar. Pretty much the stages of
the form lining principle. That's a few little extra
things as well added in there. Then post production
looks at the things we will do to really finish our
work very professionally. Something to keep
in mind is that the production phase here
really is the bulk of the work. It's pretty much 90
to 95% of the work. And you'll find that pre
production and post production are real quick,
quick to implement. As you're moving
through this module, keep in mind these four pillars
of three dimensionality. You know there are
quite a few stages to the form lighting principle, but if you keep these in mind, you'll be on a steady
footing to always getting a three
dimensional look. Form shadows, ambient occlusion, shadows, reflected
light and highlights. I've put light
peaking in brackets there to remind you
that you really want to have a
single highest point of light per single element. For example, hair one
point of highest light, Face one point of high light, and so on and so forth. Keep these four pillars of
three dimensionality in mind, even if you are looking
to create colored work of a particular
style that may not implement all the
stages of the workflow. That brings us to the
final point here, which is coloring styles, a wealth of coloring
styles out there. And this workflow is universal
whether you want to do very simplistic
coloring or you want to do very high end and
advanced digital painting, whether it's realist art, comic art style art, animated style,
or what have you. This workflow can scale
up and scale down. You can learn one
workflow and you can be efficient and effective
at painting and coloring. Well, what's more, this workflow is universal
not just to characters. You can use this workflow
to paint environments, backgrounds, creature designs,
and so on and so forth. So don't worry about
style for now. Let's get straight
into the workflow and I'll see you in
the next lesson.
2. Digital Canvas Pre-Production: In this lesson, we are
going to learn about the gray background layer
and the value check layer. To help us with that, we
have Arme mage over here. Now when we are painting, we want to try to
avoid painting on a white background or
a black background. And the reason for that
is that we perceive color and value and relative
brightness in context. When we're looking at Karmi right now with this
white background, we're interpreting
her coloring and her lighting in the context
of this white background. She looks okay. Her values
and things are fine. That's because she was actually painted with a gray background. Now to add a gray background, we simply create a new layer and then fill it with
a five value gray, or a 50% value gray, right? Which is really just
a middle value gray. When we do this, it is a much more balanced background and much more balanced context. Allowing us to paint
with an even hand, if you will, toward our
colors and toward our values. That's the first thing
that we'll want to do when we're starting
our workflows. Make sure that we're painting
on a gray background. I've brought in Mi for
another reason as well. That is to discuss the
value check layer. Now the Value check layer is
exactly what it sounds like. I'm going to ad a layer
here. I'm going to call it VC for value check. This layer sits right at
the top of the layer stack, right at the top of all the
layers as its name implies. It's a layer we're going to use to check our values, right, to make sure that our light and our shadow have even stops, enough stops between them
that they're contrasting. And that the various
elements that we're painting have different
inherent values. For example, the skin should be a different
value overall to the hair. The hair should be
a different value overall to the hat, for example. And also that the light and
the shadows inside the skin, the light in the shutters
inside the hair, and the objects and
elements do have enough value difference so that the viewer's brain can see the difference
between those values. And as such, then perceive
the forms, the three D forms. I've created a new layer on top. And what we're going to do
is we're going to go edit, fill, and we're going
to fill it in black. Now, it doesn't matter what
software you're using. Generally speaking, all
the recommended software will have the
capability to do this. You simply select
the entire layer, you fill it with black,
then you set it to the layer mode called
saturation, right? The saturation layer
mode, as you can see, it presents you with basically a gray scale view of the work. Right now, you won't
paint with this on, you use it just by turning
its visibility on and off. Just to check your
values and make sure that things are working
in the right value sense. Okay, that is the
value check layer. That is the gray
background layer. So that we can paint in context, the good even context with a gray background
and we can check our values with a
value check layer. Once again, it's a black
field layer set to the layer mode saturation
at the top of our piece. That is the value check layer and the gray background layer. I'll see you in the next lesson.
3. Line Preparation: When you finish the
character illustration, you'll want to prepare
your lines for coloring. In this lesson, we're
going to look at some things to keep
in mind in order to make sure your lines are ready for the painting or
coloring process. The first thing you want to
keep in mind is to just go around the piece and try
to clear up any edges. Needing up the lines now is it's something you want to
get over and done with. Clear up any edges, any rough or scruffy parts, anything that is overlapping in a weird way or
anything like that, go through the image and clear up those rough and
scruffy edges. Now you'll also want
to make sure that your line work is on
a separate layer. You want to have the lines on a completely separate layer. This is particularly useful when you want to
modify the lines, and it also helps in the
general painting process to not have the lines
on a single layer. For example, if I hold control and I click
this thumbnail, you will give me a selection of all the lines on the layer. If I want to paint
the lines red, for example, modify them red or over paint
them, I can do so. And you can see
there that we have a nice red line work painting. Now what can happen is you may forget to actually draw your entire cleaned piece
on a separate layer. Now if you've done that, we
have an example over here. We have a lines on a
background layer here where these lines are in fact
on a white background. Don't worry, all is not lost. You'll see here that
when the layer mode is set to normal and the lines
on background layer is loved, if I try to paint some
red behind the piece, you don't see anything. However, if we set
the layer mode for lines on background
to multiply, you're effectively telling to multiply all the
underlying color. You can then effectively
color the piece. The downside of this, however, is that you have
very little control over your line coloring. If you did have ambitions
to change the lines in some way or to move elements or tweak elements of the lines, you're in a little
bit of a tight spot. Always try to remember to draw your lines on
separate layers, especially your final lines. All right, let's take these away and I'm going to
show you another thing that you can do to prepare
your lines for color. Digital is very sharp, it's very crisp, especially
with the line odds. When you think about
traditional drawings, even ink drawings, the graphite or the
ink will often fall into the small little grooves of the paper at a very
zoomed in level, creating a softer line effect that you don't see on digital. Digital just looks
very, very sharp. What you can do is you can
mimic this natural look in your line coloring by
duplicating your line's layer, which I've just done there. Going to the filter menu, going to blur and gogan blur, and most software has a
gogan blur of some sort. Then manipulating the amount of blur on that
second lines layer, we effectively duplicated
the lines layer. Here we've got two lines layers. The top lines layer, we're adding a blur to, and we're blurring
all the lines. What you want to do is get
a good degree of blur. You can see if we blur too much, it looks strange and poofy. If we don't blur it all,
it looks very sharp. We want to get a good degree
of blur just to soften those edges and then
slightly modify the opacity of the blurred layer so that the effect
isn't too strong. What this does is
it creates very natural, smooth looking lines. And it also allows the color falls that you will be
doing to have a nice, smooth transition into the line, rather than this very
harsh black line, flat color with a very
sharp edge between the two. You'll see here as we toggle the visibility of the
layer on and off, just how much effect the
softening has on the piece. This particular piece is the piece we'll be moving
forward with through the workflow to indicate and do the examples of the
entire coloring workflow. There you see the line softening effect once again, right? That is it for line preparation. I will see you in
the next lesson.
4. Stage 1: Local Color: Welcome to this first
stage of our coloring and painting workflow which
is laying down the flats. Now what do flats refer to? Well, flats refer to flat color. We're laying down
just flat color, no gradients, no weird edges, just single flat colors. You can see here
that we're using the Inker Flatter tool or equivalent brush in the
current software you're using, to just do a solid
blob of color and fill in a particular area,
That's what flats are. And we're going to
fill in the flats for each region independently. We'll label this layer skin. And we'll progress
throughout the piece, doing a layer for hair, a layer for the bubbles, a layer for the shells and the tentacle and so
on and so forth. So we're going to be
laying down flats now. Our file has been prepared
for this coloring process. We have a value check
layer here at the top. We have our lines in a
group which includes our softened lines
layer as well as our normal lines layer to
give it that nice soft edge. Then we will have our
layers underneath the lines for building each
of our flat layers up. Now we've also included the gray background because
we want to make sure we're choosing values in the
right color context or in a normal color context
where we don't have a white or black being too contrast in how we
select the values. Now on that note, when you're doing flats, you can flat in any
color arguably. But I'm going to make a
recommendation to you. Let's say that we want
to do the skin and we might be prone to choose
something like this and say, well, that looks like a
reasonable skin tone. The problem is that's
quite a lit skin tone. When we're doing
flats, we want to make sure that here in
the color area, we want to have a range of high values and
a good range of low values. So that when we're
doing the shadows and the ambient clusion
shadows and the car shadows, we can use those
lower valued ranges for those when we're doing the high lights and the reflected lights
and the other lights, we can use the higher
valued ranges for those. We want to make sure
we have a broad range of values in our piece. If I were to choose a
value for the skin tone, I could start at
what I would like it to be if it were
under true lighting. And then move it down
into a bit more of a gray area and just my hue
a little bit warmer there. That's about the value that
I'd use for the skin tone and the color moving
onto the flatting. The way I personally do this is I use the Inca flat brush. It's got a hard edge and it's
pressure sensitive as well. For size, I literally go in and color the
surface by hand. There are other ways to do this, but what you want to keep in
mind is you want to keep in mind that you want to have accuracy of
each of the regions. I'm going to go
ahead and color in the entire skin surface
here of the face. What I'm doing is I'm
paying attention to staying in the lines and not letting any of
this skin value and this skin color bleed
out onto the hair. But if it does, I'll just switch to the erase
tool and erase it so that I only have
the skin on this layer. I'm just going to
come in here and fill this using the
precious sensitivity to get into those
little corners. What I'll do is make sure that any area that
I have gone over, skin tone that shouldn't
have that tone, I'll come over and erase out. For example, the eyebrows are going to be part
of the hair layer. We'll just erase
out the eyebrows. The eyes are going to be
part of the eye layer. I'll out the skin from
the eye layer here. Similarly in the mouth, we've
flattened out the face. Now, there are other
ways to do this. Let's go to our lines layer. One other way to
do this is to use the magic wand tool or
a full selection tool. The magic wand tool here in Photoshop will basically try to guess what area inside a shape you are selecting
on the lines layer, the sharpened lines layer. I'm going to click in this area and you can see the software has made an approximation
of the space inside here. Let's create a new skin layer and see what happens when we fill in based on this selection
to use the brush here. And I'm just going to brush
in over the selection. We will de, select
the selection. As you can see, there are quite a few little gray areas that haven't
been filled in. Now if you want to use
that selection method, you can go in and fill in
those gray areas as well. What you can do as well,
let's undo all of that. We've got our selection again. If your software supports it, you can go to the
Select Menu Modify, which will modify your
current selection and select the Expand option. You then choose the number of pixels you want to
expand the selection by. In this instance,
let's go with four. Let's do a full,
again, deselect it. You can see there
are still some gaps. It's a little bit more accurate
than the first selection, but there are still some gaps. There's even another way
you could approach this, delete these skin layers. We're not going to
use selections, we'll create another skin layer. What you can do, I know a professional
artist that does this, is just simply color the
entire skin area in like this. Go throughout all the
areas that are skin. Just do all the skin and
then come in afterwards and actually just erase
what is outside the areas. You're not really focusing
about staying in the lines, you're worried about erasing everything that
outside the lines. That's certainly a
viable method as well. You may be asking about the paint bucket tool if you've used a paint bucket tool
where you select a paint bucket tool and you
then just fill an area. The thing with the paint bucket
tool is that it needs to read the information
on the lines layer. It doesn't really work for
us because if I were to use the paint bucket
tool here and do a full sure it's filled in, it's used the same technology as the selection tool to try and guess the area that
you're trying to fall, but we've placed that color on the lines layer
that we definitely don't want to do because now we're having our lines in
the skin on the same layer. And then we can't modify things on the lines
layer properly anymore because there are
pixels being fold in on that layer that
are part of the skin. The paint bucket tool is not really an effective tool for us. I would certainly
recommend just using the anchor flatter brush going in and filling
every region. Something to keep
in mind is that flatfulls do take
quite a bit of time. The flatful process is one
of the longest things to do. It's the easiest thing to do. The most basic thing to do, really, you're just
coloring in flat color. But it does take
quite a bit of time, especially when you
want accurate flatfuls. I've gone ahead and flatfiled
the entire piece so you can get an idea of what the
flatful step should look like. Here, I've given
the right values and the right colors to
areas that are white. So I gave us some blue hair, it's got a skin tone, got pink shells,
the blue bubbles. She's hiding a knife behind her back or
something like that. She has the tentacle with the little suction
cups on the tentacles. The suction cups
on the tentacles and the little patterns on her shells actually share the
exact same color in value. That's one of those
examples where smaller detail areas can
often share a layer. They don't even have
to share a color. They can share a layer. Now let's go over
to our value check layer and see the values here. We can see that though the
colors are all different, we also have differences
in the hair to the skin, for example, the
skin to the shells, the shells to the tentacles and the skin to the tentacles. This is very important,
almost more important. In fact, it is more
important than the colors you choose
themselves, right? You want to have
these separate values because when the viewer
is viewing the piece, they're primarily
actually viewing the values first and
the colors second. Okay? And that is
the on flatfolls, you have been provided
this file so that you can work on this step by
step as you go through. But I would also
recommend, of course, using your own artwork, preparing your own lines, doing the flatfolls
on your own artwork, and moving through this
workflow on your own artwork. All right, that
is the flatfolls. I'll see you in the next lesson.
5. Stage 2: Variations: What we're now going to
do is we're going to add color variations to
our existing flats. Now if you're worried
about messing up your existing flats, you can just simply put
them in a backup layer, copy all layers, put them
in their own folder. And I have a new layer here
called base flats backup. It's not a bad idea to do that, but generally speaking, when
you have more experience, you won't really worry
about it too much. Because what we're
going to be doing is we're going to be
selecting each of these separate
elements that have got flat falls and we're going to give them some color variations. And the reason we're
going to introduce these variations,
as you will see, is so that we get a more
varied surface base color before we hit the lighting. And what it does is at
the end of the day, it allows our work to be a little bit
more vibrant and have a broader range of color and just look a little
bit more appealing, a little bit more believable. Now, something to
remember as well is that whilst the flatting process
does take a long time, as mentioned in the
previous lesson, and adding these color variants, mind you, is going
to be quite quick. The reward for doing this
lengthy flatting process really is that you get
to do the rest of the steps of the form lying
principle relatively quickly. Whilst the flatting process
does take a long time, you can actually do the rest of the lighting workflow
quite quickly, comparatively speaking. Nevertheless, let's get
to the color variations, which is what this
lesson is all about. What we're going to
do here is we've got the skin layer selected. I'm going to hold control
and click the thumbnail. And that's going to select
all the layer contents. Alternatively, you can click the lock alpha pixels button, which will lock all the
invisible pixels on the layer. What we're going to do
is we're going to grab the soft op flow brush
or a very soft airbrush. In your application of choice, I'm going to click Color Pick this skin value that we've
used here, the skin color. What I want to do is I
want to introduce perhaps a slight value change. Just a little bit
of a value change and somewhat of a
different hue change. Generally a hue that would
make sense on that surface. For example, I've moved
into a pinky ranger. I'm going to gently add in some extra soft areas
of this pink color. Now truth be told, you probably won't even notice these colors that much
once the lighting is in. The main purpose
here is that we get a surface variation
going on these flats. The flats aren't so
dull and boring here, I'll just add little bits of this new salmony color
into the skin areas. Just randomly, I don't
really think too much about lighting necessarily
when I'm doing this. And I'm just adding some
variety to that flat. I'll move through the piece, doing this for all the
other elements as well. We'll select the hair here, control H to hide
those selection lines. And I will just get a little
bit of a different variant. We won't change
the value so much, but we definitely want to
change the hue, right? So we won't play with
the value too much. Because if we play with
the value too much, we're moving into territory of doing the shadows
and the lighting. And we don't want to mess with
that stuff at this stage, We just want some variation
in the flats here. You can see I'm adding a bit of a turquoise into the hair. This is, I don't want to say it's a
secret technique per se, but it's not used very often. And not many people know
to do this to their flats, to just proceed onto doing the rest of the
lighting workflow. And it's a nice way, some extra professionalism
into your work. All right, let's
head to the bubbles. You can hew up or hew down. When you're doing this, it's
not the end of the world. Just make my brush smaller. There I am using the soft flow
brush or a soft airbrush. And I'm just dabbing a
little bit of variant of, a bit of a gradient,
if you will. We'll do the shells next. We'll move the shells
into a purply range. The effect really is
quite subtle tentacles, you can see while I'm
doing this, even now, before we've even
hit the lighting, how quick it is to move
between the elements, now that they're all on
their own separate layers, it really is something
really good for workflow efficiency to have
these separate layers, everything on a separate layer, we won't worry about
those small details. We can do the blade
handle for sure, color picking that base value, giving it a slight
value adjustment, but mainly a hue adjustment
and just introducing just some extra types of color in there,
some extra colors. All right, and I think
we won't worry about the R's in the blade
top that much. That is, adding color variations to our flats for the purposes of a end painting really
enriches the end painting. See you in the next lesson.
6. Stage 3: Forms: We're now going
to take a look at the shadows stage
of the workflow. And this is by far the most important
part of the workflow. This is really the
lesson you want to take notes and you
really want to pay close attention to everything
that we're going to be doing regarding the shadows. Now you might notice that the characters irises
have been painted green and the lips have got a nice soft edged
lip color to them. And I've done that actually
rendering all the shadows. All the shadows have
already been rendered. So that I can show
you at the end of the lesson what that's
going to look like. But you can go ahead and flat
fill these areas as well, just each on separate layers. You can put your irises separate
layer or on the R layer, it's fine, and the lips
on a separate layer. All right, before we get into
the actual process of it, we're going to just take a
quick look at some notes as to what we're going
to be doing per zone, for the skin zone, for the
hair zone for the bubbles, for the shells, et et cetera. The first thing that
we're going to be doing is we're
going to be putting in general big shadows. General big shadows, emphasis
on the word general. We're not going to do any hector crazy thinking about
planes that much. Going to be doing
general big shadows. Then we're going to do
ambient occlusion shadows. Then we are going to
do the form shadows. Then wherever we need to, we're actually going to plug in some Ac and some cast
shadows as well. Now we will do an
occlusion stage near the end of the workflow. And cast shadows stage. A proper car shadow stage, if you will, at the
end of the workflow. But it's important that where we recognize areas that need additional occlusion or that need some car shadows
to read Well, during our shadow stage
that we put it in now, it'll save us some time later. Let me reiterate again, this is the most important part of the workflow.
That's the one thing. The second thing is the forms
need to read at this stage. That means the work needs to look reasonably
three D has to have a reasonable level of convincing Three D at this
stage, stage two, really after the
flats and we hit the shadows before we move on to the other workflow stages where we're doing lighting
and high lights and so on. The third thing is
you want to really, really over invest at this
stage of the workflow, over invest in the shadows. You can underinvest in all
the other steps afterwards. Because if this reads well, the foundation of
the image is set, okay, you really want
to work hard here. Let's go ahead and
get into this. And I'm going to be soft
shading this particular piece. That means I'm
going to use a soft brush and we're going to focus on a very smooth
style of rendering. That is the style of the
piece is going to look quite smooth and gradient
nicely gradiented. Now that's not to say that this workflow only
applies to that style. Once again, this is a
universal workflow. If you want to have a
rough painterly look or a watercolor look
or what have you, we're going to cover those
particular lo in module four. But really you just want
to focus on the workflow, right, and the fact that
we're doing shadows. So don't worry too
much about style or the look of the workflow
that can always be changed. All right, is going to be a slightly longer
lesson than usual. I'll do my best to keep things as clear and
concise as possible. Let's get right into it. What we're going to be
working on in particular is we're going to be
working on the skin here. What I'm going to do is I'm going to create a
layer above the skin. And I'm going to call
it skin lighting. Now when we say lighting
doesn't mean light, it just means the entire form lighting principle
that we want to apply. We're going to do that
all on this layer. What you can do is
you can either click your skin layer and
control on the thumbnail. And click to select the area
so that we only painting on our new layer within the selection of the skin
only you could do that. However, if your software
supports clipping masks, which most of the software does, you can just hold out and huber between the lines here between skin
lighting and skin. And it'll say to the
skin lighting layer on paint on the areas that the
skin layer covers. Right? Which basically locks all
of our pixels to the skin. You can see here,
it's only painting on the skin no matter where
I move the cursor. Right now what we're going to do is we're
going to switch to our soft op flow brush or a
soft brush of your choice. We want to make sure that
the flow is quite low. Now you will see
when you look at the full demo of this painting
from start to finish, that I actually started at
100% flow and I had to make an adjustment about maybe one fifth or one sixth
of the way through, and that can happen sometime. Really pay attention
to your flow setting. Keep it low. 70 to 80% is fun. What we're going to do is going to hold Alt and we're going to color pick our base
skin value here. All right, skin color
and skin value. We're going to drop the value down here in
the color pick area. We're going to drop
the value down. If you want to, you can play a little bit
with the hue saturation. This is really just
subjective creativity. You can do it as you feel and get a shadow
value going, right? We've color picked and we've got a shadow value and
what we want to do is just spray it as hard
as we can on a spot. Go up to our value check layer and make sure that
there's adequate contrast, that there's a clear
distinction between the light and the shadow
and it looks like there is. In this case, that's great. We're going to move onto that first step that I
said in the class notes. Bring those up. Number
one, general, big shadows. What I'm going to do here,
it's just delete that. I'm not worried about painting the lines because I've
got my clipping mask. I'm going to say to myself, well, where is the
light coming from? We're going to keep
things simple. We're going to say there's
a light on the left side, the main key lights on
the left side of her. What I'm going to do is make
my brush really big and just gently spray in
some big shadows. The right side of her body
is probably going to be more shadowed and more in
shadow than the left. Just some general
shadows get them down. Not too dark. I'm
pressing very lightly. Anywhere I think
needs a little bit of a general shadow, you can see. Now we've got a
lighter left hand side and a slightly darker right. These are just your
general big shadows. All right, next we're going to move onto our ambient
occlusion shadows. Really ambient
occlusion shadows once again show the
turning of the form. We're back at our skin
lighting layer, same value. We've got the same value
there and the same color. What we're going to do
now is ask ourselves, wherever a ambient
occlusion shadow may occur. Right, usually at the
edges of the shapes, we will lightly spray in an
ambient occlusion shadow. At the edges of the shapes. The edge of the head
here, it gets ambient. Same thing at the
edge of the ear. Don't be shy with the value. You can see me
adding it in here. At the edge of the shoulders, I play with the
brush sensitivity, the pressure sensitivity of the brush to make sure
that I'm keeping it nice and smooth as it gradients into the
light part of the skin. Right? I'm adding in these ambient
occlusion shadows to the edges of objects. All right? Wherever the forms
turn, that is, wherever a form is rounded
or returns to another side, it's a good idea to have an ambientclusion
shadow at its edge. I'd like to think that this is actually fairly straightforward, so we're going to just add
these in quite quickly. I'm going to move
a little bit more rapidly for the
sake of your time, we're going to get these
ambientcllusion shadows in. All right. Now you want to try and avoid having
too harsh of an edge. You don't want to have like an ambiclued shadow like that, where you haven't been trying
to control the gradient. Just try to keep it
nice and smooth. And if it isn't smooth, just go over it again a
little bit softer. And keep it in there, keep it nice and smooth. This edge of the form
here is going to get an ambient inclusion shadow
here, this side of the arm. Now you'll want to do this a little bit more carefully than I'm doing it here.
This is still correct. It's not incorrect, but I am expediting my speed
for your sake. All right. Those are the
ambient inclusion shadows. We've got them on the edges
and that's really nice. I do tend to use the term ambiclusion little bit more loosely than its
strictest meaning, but I'm sure you understand
what I mean when I say, let's get those
shadows on the edges. All right? Now,
once those are in, we then move doing our
next shadowing stage, which is the form shadows. And this is the very
important stage, all right? This is also requires us
to really have invested time in just having a good general understanding
of the planes. Okay, While you're working, always assess, do you feel
the value is dark enough? I tend to go too dark, so I wanted to drop the
value a little darker. I think I'm going
to just leave it as it is because I tend
to go quite dark. Excuse me. That is
easy to fix digitally. That's the great
thing with digitally. You can really fix everything
if you do make mistakes. But anyway, we'll keep
that value the same. Now what we're going to
do is the form shadows. The form shadows of the
shadows that fall on the form in the areas where
the light isn't touching. So what I'm going to
do is we're going to do the form shadows
here on the face. And I'm going to
start painting in shadows in the eye sockets, lights coming from the left. I imagine the side of the nose would probably have
a bit of a shadow there. Keeping it smooth, keeping
the gradient smooth. I want to have a darker shadow as we come to this right
side of the face here, because the lights
are not touching there underneath the nose. We're going to add
another shadow here. Here's where we can
imply a cast shadow. It's one of those instances
where we can actually, let's get a car
shadow going so that the nose is casting a bit down. Then we can put a little
ambient occlusion shadow here on the edge of the nose as it goes into the eye socket shadow
of the left eye. You can see we keep those
edges nice and soft. It's very important to do this. It's better to have very soft
edges that you can harden, rather than trying to
soften very hard edges, which can be very, very tricky. Since the head is really round, I'm thinking, let's
have more shadow here. And we will want to have a shadow under
the bottom lip here, a little bit more under
the chin over here. Similarly in the ear, you can put some little car shadows. We want the holes in the
ear to be quite dark. We'll stick to the face. On that note there,
we're going to move into our adding slight occlusion
shadows to the face. What we want to do is darken
that shadow value a little bit because some areas need
to be a little bit darker. For example, here
by the nostril, the inner parts of the eye, the eye socket, mind you, then these little
areas under the hair, just where the hair connects. There's going to be a lot of
ecclusion happening there. We're going to just
enhance those shadows. This little gap by the ear
as it goes next to the head. Similarly by the ear lobe, as it connects to the jaw. We want that to
be nice and dark. And also these dark areas
inside the ear itself, really, this is the process that you want to be
working through. Do the general shadows and then work the ambient occlusion. So the car shadows that
you need in the occlusion, shadows that you
need in this area, you may notice little areas of gray or whatever the
background color you have is peering. Don't worry about that. You can't sit and try to get those types of things
Super perfect. That's why we have
post production which allows us to clean
up some of this stuff. Don't worry about that. I can come in here and enhance some of these ambient
occlusion shadows. Let's add in that neck shadow. All right, which is going to
cost a little bit as well. We'll just add the shape of the casting of
the neck shadow, keeping the edge
relatively harder here so that it
appears to be casting correctly throughout
the shadowing process. I'm thinking about the
ambient occlusion. Shadows are where
the form shadows are where there is
going to be shadow. For example, here with the clavicle connects
collar bone there, it's going to be a little
bit of shadow in there. For example, here where the arm and the shoulder
connect to the torso. We want the shadow to be darker. We want to make sure those
edges are not too hard. We'll add that shadow in. Similarly with the breast
managing our brush pressure, managing how we do it. If you feel you've
overshadowed anywhere, just hit for the Rays tool. Make sure it's on the
soft brush here and you can just come in and
erase it lightly. You want to work the shadows
exactly in that order. General big shadows, ambient occlusion,
shadows on the edges, form shadows and
constantly working them, looking at it and assessing
the surface area you're doing and making sure you're
painting those shadows in. Just going to enhance
those shadows there. I would work on
every single surface in this particular
way right now. Don't worry too much at this stage if you feel like
you're not grasping it. Because there are
plenty of demos in this course that you will see the exact workflow playing out, particularly the ones
we've done so far from the flat to the flat
color variations, to the shadow stages doing
the big general shadows, then the edge, ambient
occlusion shadows, then the form shadows. We're asking ourselves where on the form do these shadows fall? For example, here we might do a big form shadow
there for this breast. Here we can put one here because there's not
going to be light. And perhaps between
the breasts some shadows there. Maybe
there's too much there. So we're going to
erase that and keep things soft but
accurate as possible. All right, what you
want to end up with, let's move over to
those layers there. Is you want to end
up with a piece that looks something like
this. All right? You want to have a piece that
looks something like that. All the shadows
have been placed on every zone and it's fine
if it's a little dark because we also have the
lighting stage to help us lighten areas when we're adding actual light
to the piece. And you can see the hair
particularly requires a good number of passes
of the occlusion stage, where you're really darkening the little shadows in the hair. Note the general
shadowing of the hair. Right? We've got
a lighter area on the left and a dark
area on the right. Same thing with the skin.
Lighter on the left, darker on the right,
and similarly applies to everything else. Okay, that is the shadowing
stage over, invest, nitpick. Add the details that you
want to add and make sure as you're adding in each of these stages that
you're saying to yourself doesn't
look three D. One of the big reasons why it
may not look three D is you may be placing the
shadows in the incorrect place. The solution to that is to go
back and study the planes. You really have
to invest time in studying the planes, all right? But it won't take too long. I can promise you
that you only need a general planes understanding. That really is the end
of the shadows lesson. But let's just do a comparison between the flats
and the shadows. There are the flats,
those flats don't have color variants because
we have our backup layer. If you remember from
the last lesson, here we have the shadows. Once the strong
foundation has been laid, you will see in the
following steps, how easy it is, how easy it is to make it look great
and super threedy. And really a nice example of forming principle, all right? But work the stage. Believe me. Work the stage. Take my
advice. Work the stage. All right? I'll see you
in the next lesson.
7. Stage 4: Light 1: In this lesson, we're
now going to take a look at the general
lighting phase. If you've invested the time
in doing your shadows, this phase will be
relatively quick. You still need to think
about the planes. And we're still
going to be working on our lighting
layer and we will do so throughout the rest of the
piece. Let's get into it. Let's start with the
skin for example. We'll go to our skin
lighting layer here. And we will color pick the
lighter value of the skin, not the shadow value,
the lighter value. Then we'll do a hue up, then we'll increase the value. We'll then check by
doing a bit of a test, check the value of that
light and see if there is enough contrast to make it a viable light looks a little
bit too light to me. I'm going to drop the
value down slightly, undo that, give
this value a try. That seems reasonable. You
don't want it to go too high because we still need some
value room for highlights. Now we're going to move
to the skin lighting. There it is, of course, clipped to the skin layer. You can also use a
selection if you wish. We're going to light any areas that need
additional light, and we're going to
use our understanding of planes to determine where the light
would hit if it were shining from the top left side. I'm just going to move in
here using a biggish brush. Light areas, pressing very softly and bringing additional
light to the piece. For example, here,
the left hand side of the breasts are
receiving additional light. This front chest area can get a little bit
more light as well. Similarly here by the stomach, you'll find this stages
particularly quick. You just need to
make sure you're not pressing too
hard and not getting too harsh edges
out of your brush. You'll see how I strive for
subtlety and you should too. We want to just introduce
light where it's needed. Mainly. This would be on
the left side as well. Do keep that in mind, you
won't introduce much of this light in a shadowed area or in the general shadowed area unless you really feel you
need to add some light there. We'll bring up some
additional light in the arm here. Here as well. Let's move to the face. I'm very tempered with how I used the soft
brush in this instance. I ask myself, well, if there was light
hitting the face from the left,
where would it hit? I imagine we'd have a spot
here on the forehead. Some light on the nose. Possibly on the top plane of the nostril,
perhaps not so bright. A little bit like that.
Definitely on the left cheek, you can see stroke
it very loosely. Press very gently. I build it up slowly. You don't have to rush to
build up any of these zones. Right then the eyelids as well would receive
a degree of light. They tend to get quite lit. Does depend on the
lighting circumstance, but it adds a nice
degree of dynamism. We want to be careful when we're doing this
lighting phase as well, not to eliminate our
ambient occlusion, shadows on the
edges of the forms. That's a very common
beginner's mistake. If you do that,
it's going to make the form not look three
dimensional anymore. That's pretty much it for
the lighting of course. The higher degree of accuracy
you pursue in this stage, the more fidelity
the image will have. You're really playing
with a scale of very realistic down to a scale
of very simplistic. We're going to keep things
in the middle ground here. Still doing the full workflow. Let's hit the hair, go
to the hair layer here, Hair lighting, select
our base color. We're going to warm
it up a little bit in the hue and we're going
to increase the value. We want a nice, substantial increase and we are
going to keep it very soft and let the
gradients work well. We're going to do this
once again with subtlety. And primarily in areas where
the hair would be lighter, we don't want to
go, that's light. Light, that's, that's
that's light, et cetera. We just focus on where
the light would be at. A where the light would be basically focus
where the light would be. I have to ask myself, do I want to do with
some of the gaps in the hair, Is it in shadow? If it is, I want
to leave it unlit. If it isn't in shadow, I'll add a few streaks of light to it. We'll just slid a
few of these areas, but very subtly we don't
want to overdo it. We would then move
through each zone, gently applying light to areas where we feel
need extra light, that are getting hit by a
general source of light. Effectively, we're enhancing the existing light zones that were defined by us placing shadows in the
correct positions. All right, let's take a look at what happens when we've done
this over the entire piece. We should have our flats and
our shadows completely done. Then when we've applied the
lights across the piece, we'll have this type of effect where it's
almost as if you're turning a light on and off from the left side and it's lighting. The forms, you'll move that
across each of the layers. Taking care to consider the
planes to use subtlety. Don't forget that you
want your flow to be quite low in this instance
or your opacity low. If your software doesn't have a flow setting, keep your Pacy. About 80% just gives you more control over how much
paint you're using per stroke. That's that for the
lighting phase. Let's move on to the next phase.
8. Stage 5: Light 2: We're now going to move over to our reflected lighting stage. The thing we want to remember about the reflected
lights is that they generally appear
in the shadows. They also generally
appear from the ground. They're bouncing up from
the ground and they're hitting bottom
surfaces of things. We're going to go ahead and
use our skin lighting layer here to do an example of that and how you
can paint that in. Of course, you'll move
across all your layers, your lips, lighting layer, hair lighting layer,
and so forth. Going in and doing the
reflected lighting where it should likely
to be appearing. Let's start here on the face. What you're going to notice
is that now that you've got your shadows down
and your lights down, and you've built up
the bulk of that form. You're going to notice that
when you add reflected light, it suddenly brings
a whole new world of dimensionality to the piece. And that is why
reflected lighting is one of the four
pillars of lighting. What I've done here is this is my typical color that I select, which is a highsh value in
the green hue range gray, it's really just a
slightly greeny gray. And you could pretty much
arguably use anything. But I feel that a mixing of the light comes to
something like this. A lightish gray
or even you could just go a flat gray high value. That is the color
that I'm using there. What I want to do is I want
to imagine what planes the ground lighting might be shining on in the
shadowed areas. One of the most
common locations for this is at the bottom of
the chin and the jaw. So we're going to go ahead and we're going
to paint that in. What you want to do is make sure as you're painting
in these strokes, that the gradient, as it moves into the skin
is very smooth. You want to avoid
harsh edges, right? You don't want sharp edges. In this instance, I
start off just painting a light smooth section and then I move
into a little bit of a brighter section here. And I keep going over that
edge to kill that line, that harsh edge that we get a smooth gradient
moving into that area. Bring a little bit more up here. I'm going to add a little
bit under the ear as well. I'm just asking myself, if there was light bouncing
up from the ground, where would that light, potentially, it may hit a
little bit of the ear here. Certainly a place
it definitely does tend to hit is the
bottom of the nose. Just keep in mind, try to
keep it in the shadow areas. You can see already the three dimensionality
that you're getting from adding that reflected
lighting into the face. Really you just move through
the piece, painting it in, making sure those edges are really soft edges
because if they're hard, it kills the effect immediately. Maybe there's some
bounce and reflected lighting in the eye area
here in the eye lid, top area, below the nose,
here on the nostril. Even indeed, even in the
eyes there will be some. I'm not in the eye
layer at the moment. Of course, they'll
also be on the lips and so on and so forth. So I'm going to move
ahead and just show you what the entire piece
will look like when you've added this
reflected lighting in. This is our piece without
the reflected lighting. Very similar to when we
added all the lights. You'll notice as
if you're turning a light on and off
from the ground. Let's go to this zoom level. Actually, the zoom
level is fine. Let's turn that layer on
with the reflected lighting. It's off once again. Once again, let's keep it on and just
explore it a little bit. You can see here generally
bottom facing planes, planes that face the ground, get this treatment to
one degree or another. What I tend to do is, depending on whether the area
is in a focal point or not, I will lighten it. As we get to the
top, this area here, you can see it's
quite light there, but here on this main piece of sweeping here, it
gets quite bright. The value of that reflected
light gets quite bright. We have it on multiple
areas of the face. We have a little hint
of it in the eye. We've got it on the
lips and the top lip, the bottom of the nose,
the bottom of the shells, mainly bottom facing planes. The bottom of this arm
here, that arm there, and here on the tentacle areas that face the bottom planes. And that is the reflected
lighting stage. Going to move onto
the highlight stage. I'll see you there.
9. Stage 6: Highlights 1: We're now going to discuss highlights and the
highlighting stage. Now something to
keep in mind is that highlights appear
in the lit areas. Also, you will want to restrain
your use of highlights. Highlights Sound really
fun, bright beginners. A common mistake
is that they place highlights everywhere
on everything, and we want to show restraint. We want to put highlights
at where we believe is the highest point of light on a particular surface or
on a particular element. We're going to do the
example on the skin layer. Once again, it's a
very common layer. And we are going to pick
our light zone color, one of our values within the light zone,
somewhere fairly light. And we're going to he up a little bit and we're going
to value up a little bit, then do a test. All right, let's check that
on the value check layer. Seems good, do that. Go back to our skin
lighting layer here. What we want to do is pick
one or a few zones in the lid area or a few
elements that could have a potential highlight based on the planes on the face here, for example, that I see three very viable zones
for a good highlight. The first zone would be
a small little section just here on the forehead, which would be the
highest point of light on that forehead
section on the nose, lightly spray in a bit
of a nose highlight, trying not to eliminate my
ambient occlusion edge there. I'll start here with
the brightest point at the tip and I will drag it up a little bit
and kill some of the edges a little bit to
make them not so sharp. All right? Maybe
even as I do that, I'm thinking to
myself, restraint. You want to show restraint
with the highlights? I'm not going to have it
extend all the way to the top. Then on the cheek here, a little bit of a subtle
highlight just on the cheek. Nothing too crazy. That would be probably
it for the face. Actually, let's just add a little bit here to the eyelids. Just the tips of them. A little trick I like to do because that area of the
eyelids can catch light. Just in the middle area there. All right. That would
be it for the face. Now you can mess around
with and you can add subtle lights here and there
on your highlighting phase. But you want to show
restraint because the minute you start adding
too many highlights or two bright highlights, you really start losing the three dimensionality
of the forms. For example, as we move
to the chest area, imagine there would be
a spot probably like here that would receive
a lot of light, or more light than
the other sides. I try to stick to light
zones here on the breasts. Maybe a little bit of a section, the section here on this breast. And to really try, keep things minimal and
think about the planes, Do not go crazy with
highlights, you'll regret it. The arms here, for example, cylindrical objects tend to highlight with a
strip or a stripe, a bit of a light stripe there. Always adjusting my
brush size as I need to. We probably have a bulb
like highlight here, just there on the arm and
kill the edges softly. Similarly here in the stomach, probably this left
side would have a little bit of highlight
because it's raised, its planes are raised. You can see you
really have to show restraint when you're
doing highlights. Go ahead, do your highlights. Remember, you want to pick
the light zone color, hew it up, and value it
up quite substantially. That is effectively our
highlighting stage. You'll move through the piece doing this on each
lighting layer, the skin lighting layer,
the lips lighting layer, and so on and so forth. And once again,
I've gone ahead and done highlights on
the entire piece, just so we can save some time. There is the work
without highlights. Here is the work
with highlights, particularly on the hair. You want to your
zones very wisely, don't go highlighting
everywhere, It will really ruin the three
dimensionality of the hair. Okay, there we have the
highlights on and the highlights off, on and off. All right, we'll leave those on. I will see you in
the next lesson.
10. Stage 7: Highlights 2: When we're painting high lights, there are going
to be times where certain surfaces need
to be more reflective. And the way we indicate
their reflectivity is by hardening the edges of the highlights on that
particular surface. In this instance of
this particular piece, these tentacles are actually going to be a little
bit more shiny. What we're going to do
is we've moved over to the tentacles lighting
layer over here. We've put in our
highlights and our lights. You can see in this
section of the tentacle. And what we're going to do
is using the soft rush, we're going to come in and
we're actually going to harden up selectively
some edges. Now, which edges do you
pick to harden up while you really have to look at it
and see what makes sense? But generally speaking, you
can harden up a fair bit of the edges and it
will start to make the surface look a
little bit more shiny. Now the edge is on a particular surface in terms
of your lights heading. It is the more
reflective that surface is until such a point where you can have a
mirror reflection. And it's really just reflecting
everything around it. But in this instance,
we're going to go for just slightly shinier. We're not going to go
for a mirror reflection. What I'm going to
do is just color pick this highlight here. Use my soft brush at a
fairly small size because the smaller size means I get
a tougher edge, harder edge. And I'm going to harden the edge of this
highlight area here. Now I want to make sure things
don't look super streaky. I'll still change the brush
size at times just to make sure the blending of the
gradients still looks good. Particularly inside
this highlight area. You can see immediately
the change that it has to how we
perceive that object. Now here I'm actually going
to select the shadow. And I'm going to use the
shadow to harden the edge, the inside edge of that
particular highlight. By doing so, I'm implying to the viewer
that this thing has a greater degree of reflectivity based on its harder
edged highlights. I'm going to go in and harden
them even more just to get a little bit more contrast between the lit area
and the shadowed area. You can see here we're
getting quite a firm edge. Now let's not forget, we want to think about
edges in a range of very, very soft all the way
up to very, very hard. You want to get a nice
range of edges when you're painting and coloring
in general, right? And that area is done. The perception of
the surface material of this object has now
been altered, right? It's more of a shiny surface. I'm going to do the same
up here as an example. Now, typically the light
edge would be the hardest. The side that's
facing the light, and slightly softer at
the side that isn't facing the light here, I'm coming in and once again, I'm hardening the
edges of these lights, of the highlights here on all surfaces that
need to be shinier. You want to harden up
the edge a little bit. That's not to say,
make it raise a sharp. For example, if we used
our ink flatter brush, particularly on the surface, you could probably bring
it up to a mirror finish, but that's what a very
hard edge would look like. All right, so we're just
putting in a very hard edge. Certainly it is effective
for very shiny surfaces. This is not going
to be ultra shiny, maybe a medium degree of shine. Okay? That's effectively
what we'll do on every surface that needs
this type of edge treatment. In this particular piece, the only areas we're really
looking at this happening are the tentacle and the
handle of the knife. The top section, this gray
section of the knife. As for the bubbles, technically we could also do it on
the bubbles as well. I've just not opted to in this particular piece because the bubbles are actually more
of a background element. I don't want to put too
much focus on them, but make sure you're hardening
edges on surfaces that are shinier are meant to be
shinier or more reflective. Actually, before we move
on to the next lesson, let's take a look at what this
looks like when completed. That's without the hardening. Look particularly
at the tentacle that is with the hardening. And you can see how
our perception of the surface material of the
tentacle has changed quite significantly before and after. Make sure you have
a pass where you run through on your
highlights and harden those edges if the material type is more of a reflective
type of material. All right, let's move
on to the next lesson.
11. Stage 8: Highlights 3: In this last lesson
on highlights, we're now going to take a
look at adding specularity, or specular highlights,
to our piece. Now, specular
highlights really are the brightest points of light. And usually there's only one
single specular highlight per a particular zone. Similar in the way
to highlights, but even less and
more restrained than highlights are what we do
with specular highlights. Or at least what I'd like you to do as we are moving through this workflow is to put
your specularity layer, or your specular highlights
layer above your lines. And what I've done here is I
have the lines layer here, which I've combined
our hard lines and our soft lines into a single lines layer and put
it above the lines layer. And you will notice that when you're doing
specular highlights, that you will be erasing some
lines that you don't need. Because it's pointless if a specular highlight
is underneath a line because the
specular highlight is brighter than anything
underneath it, right? So it has to be on top. We put the specularity layer
above our lines layer. All right, we're going
to move ahead in this piece and go and add
some specular highlights. The first highlights
we're going to add, we're going to take our
Inca flatter brush, which has a nice hot edge. We're going to add the specular
highlights to the eyes. I'm just going to put
a dot there and a dot there and I'll put a
smaller.in the eye as well. This is just a stylistic choice. You can put as many
highlights as you want. And these don't have to
be a particular shape. They could be square,
it could be triangular. I'm also going to add a specular highlight to the lip here. Add another little one as well. What I would like to do is add a single specular
highlight to the nose. Let's just say, okay, her nose is very shiny. What I'm going to do here
is I could use white. Going to use my soft brush for this based on the surface of the skin being not quite as reflective as
the eyes or the lips. I'm going to just bring my value up there and I can
hew up a little bit as well. I'm going to add just a small little highlight to her nose. Right. That's pretty much what we do when we're
doing the spinklers, particularly the white
spicklers are quite easy. Now you can see I've removed the circles marking the highlight positions
on the bubbles. So what we do is we
move into the bubbles. We can use our ink flutter
brush or our soft brush, as long as your edge is hard, and add in those
bubble highlights, which is pretty straightforward. And we'd move through
the piece and do that. But there's something
else I want to show you. As we know this tentacle
is quite reflective. And I'm going to show you
a fantastic technique for getting really hard edged but smooth specular highlights in. Once you've done all
your other lighting, what we're going to do here
is we're going to go to the inco flat brush
and we're going to pick a much higher value. We can even increase
the hue here as well. We're going to use the
inco flat brush and the soft soft op flow brush in unison with
each other, right? First of all, we're going to
lay down a stroke inside, right within our
highlighted area like that. Then we're going to hit
the erase tool and use the soft op flow brush
and erase the tips out until we get a nice smooth
gradient into that area. All right. Immediately, I'm
sure you can tell it looks a lot more glossy and a lot
more shiny. Let's do it here. Do note that I do
move the brush quite quickly to get these
smooth strokes in. We'll do the same there,
and the same here. Of course, if you
feel that maybe you want this to be the
single brightest point, we can just erase
over it and lower the value as we are erasing that little extra
specular there. Let's do this point here. You can see I undo until I have the stroke exactly as
I'd like it to be. I would advise as well. Don't take second
best with yourself. Don't rush. Get things exactly
as you want them to be. All right here, I'll
do the same once again and I'm just going to
lighten most of the stroke. Voila, we have a
very shiny tentacle with some speculats on it. Consider what material types would have a specular lighting. This blade here, for instance, would certainly
would this handle top of the blade or
the hidden blade. So I'm going to do
the very same thing. I'm going to put in
a bright stroke. And because it's on
a separate layer, there is no issue with me
erasing those edges out. Right? You can see in
certain instances, let's look at our old lines
where there were lines. For example, the nose
on the lines and the circles on the bubbles,
I had to erase them. And this is common practice. Usually you realize
you've put lines somewhere where you
actually want a specular. And you have to go into your lines layer and
erase those lines. Come back to the new lines, you can see they've been erased. And this layer
specularity layer, specula layer is one of
a few layers that will be putting above the lines
or right on top of things, but we'll get more into
that as we move on. Right, that is the end of
the highlights lesson. Here is my fully completed
speculus for the piece, not much different
to what we just did. Just a few extra bubbles. I will see you in
the next lesson.
12. Stage 9: Dynamic Lighting: We're now going
to take a look at adding secondary
lighting to your piece. The first thing you want
to do is think about what direction would the secondary lighting
be coming from. We've got our primary
light on the left, got reflected light
at the bottom. Perhaps a good secondary
light location in this instance
is from the right. That said, it doesn't have
to be from the right, it could also be from
the left as well, and it would still
look pretty cool. But nevertheless, with the
light coming from the right, the secondary light source. We're going to approach this in a very similar way that we approached the reflected
lighting step. What I've done here
is I've selected a very high value blue. Now of course, you could
select whatever color you feel works with the color and scheme that you're working with. And what I'm going to
do, I'm going to use the skin lighting layer again
as an example for this is we're going to move
in and lightly paint in this secondary light, shining on any
planes that face it. What I do is I come in with this soft brush just to get
an initial glow happening. Then I move closer in to
add the secondary lighting. The brightest point of it. Very similar approach to the way we do the
reflected lighting. Now also remember it's okay to overlap the reflected lighting when you're doing this stage, for example, secondary light
is clearly going to be shining on this section
of the arm here as well. I just overlap that reflected lighting and continue to paint
in my secondary lighting. All right? It's a pretty
straightforward process. It can be quite time
consuming as well. It depends how many details
you have in your piece. Here on the face, Let's add a
little bit to the jaw line. Try to make sure that you're
not having two hard edges. You don't want it to
look like a line, it must just look
like light shining. We can add some to
the ear here as well. I'm using the soft
brush for this as well. Also, take note that I've added a small blue specular dot on the specularity layer just to indicate that light source
in the eyes as well. You work layer by layer, section by section, adding
this secondary light source. When you're done, it should
look something like this. Once again, you know,
you're getting it pretty much correct
when you can turn it on and off like a
light switch as such. Now that we have the
ground reflected light, the key light on the left and a full light on the right or our secondary light
source on the right. We now have three
point lighting and it makes our work look
very, very dynamic. And three D. That's it for the
secondary lighting lesson. I'll see you in the next lesson.
13. Stage 10: Contrast: We're now going to move onto
the occlusion shadows stage. Really we're going to be
enhancing all the darkest, tiny shadows in the
piece in this stage, first thing that we
want to do is create an occlusion shadows layer below our specularity layer and
above our lines layer. That's the very first
thing we want to do. Then we'll want to set
this occlusion shadows layer to the
multiply layer mode. What we're going to be
doing is we're going to have this layer multiply the values of the
colors underneath. And we're going to then
use the soft rush. And paint with black. What we're going to do
paint on that layer, but we're going
to use selections from our flatful layers. For example, in the skin here, we're going to hold control and select all of those areas there. Hit control H to hide
the selection lines. And then I'm going
to move back to my occlusion shadows layer. Right, This one here is called occlusion shadows class because the finished occlusions
have already been done. Just in case you're
confused about that, let's move into it. If we unhide the selection, you can see that
we've got all of the skin areas selected. But just be sure that you are on your occlusion shadows
layer when you're going to be painting in
the occlusion shadows. What I'm going to be doing
here is asking myself, he where are they going to be? Shadows that are
really getting close to black on the form. All right. And one of those areas
here would be in these tiny little
crevices by the hair. I'll gently stroke in occlusion, shadows where the
hair meets the head. Wherever I feel they may
be really dark areas. Once again, you can see
these little gray areas that do not have any full. Once again, don't
stress about them. We can clean that up when
we're doing our final touches. Were any areas we haven't fold or that didn't get full,
probably we can clean them up. What I'm doing is I'm
moving through the piece, looking for areas
that need to have more occlusion shadows or
darker occlusion shadows. I go through step by step and add them wherever
I feel they need to be. Here under the ear, for example, could do with a little bit more. The section of the neck here. Don't be afraid to use
the arrays tool as well to clear up edges. For example, if I wanted to do an occlusion here
in the pit which is a viable location and I did something like that to
enhance it, that's fine. I can then just use
the arrays tool and erase the areas that
are not meant to be occluded and still
keep my occlusion. Right. That's the great thing about having it on
a separate layer. I might want to enhance the small little gaps between the shells in which case I'll have to go to
the shells layer, flat layer here and select them. Control H to hide that selection because I don't want to paint
on my shells layer. I'm going to go back to
my occlusion shadow layer that dark and just enhance
these shadows here. These are more
subtle occlusions. You can see the
difference this makes to how the forms stand out. All right, we'd move through the whole piece
including the hair, adding in occlusions wherever
we felt we needed to enhance the darkest of the
dark shadows in our work. Now here is the final
occlusions for this. It didn't take too long, it's not really a very long stage. You're really just
trying to identify areas that are a
little bit too light. Here you can see
as I turned it on, north is introduced contrast and you can see a few
zones that have gotten the occlusion
shadow treatment. Right. And that is that for
the occlusion shadows layer. Once again remember
above your lines, below your specularity layer. All right. I'll see you
in the next lesson.
14. Stage 11: Cast: We're now going to
do the final part of the bulk of the form lining
workflow in painting, this character which
is cast shadows. Of course, cast shadows
are those shadows that are being cast by some object
over another object. Another key thing we
want to remember is that car shadows are typically
quite transparent. The edges of the car shadows
is determined whether the light is very bright or if the light is
very dispersed. For example, car shadows on a cloudy day will
have a softer edge, and car shadows on a bright, sunny day will have
a harder edge. In instance of this piece,
I think we're going to go with more of a
normalized lighting, so we're going to stick
with harder edged. What we're going to do
is we're going to create a layer above all of
our other layers. It's particularly above
the specularity layer we can call the car shadows. And we're going to set
the mode to multiply. We're then going to use the Inca flatter brush or a hard edged brush
in your softer of choice to paint in essentially black stripes
of the car shadow. We want to try and mimic a car shadow effect with
this pure black first. Then we're going to use
the soft up flow brush, or a soft brush to erase
the parts we don't need, as well as create the
transparency in the shadow. But let me show you how
we're going to approach this now before we
actually get started. Generally speaking, depending on the piece
you're working on, you may not have too many
car shadows in the piece. Just think logically about what could be
creating a car shadow over a surface or an object in the scene or in the piece
that will guide you. In this piece, there are
only a few locations for car shadows and one of the biggest locations is this big swooping piece of
hair over all the other hair. What I'm going to do is I've
got the Inca flatter brush. I have black selected. I'm on my car shadows layer
with multiply. And I'm going to try
and mimic the shape of the shadow that may be
occurring from this hair. Now, this can be as accurate or as simplified as
you require it to be. Also based on the style
that you're going for. I try to get it as
accurate as possible, but we need to keep in
mind we're not computers, you're not going to get
100% accurate car shadows. Really do your best here. I'm using the Inca
flatter and I'm just erasing the bits
that I don't need that are coming outside of the hair there, guessing at that edge. I'll raise this
section here too. Just imagine where that
bottom piece of hair will be. Then I'll switch
to my Rays tool. Switch to this soft rush, lightly erase in
the transparency I'm pressing lightly
so I can get a degree of transparency over
this car shadow. That one looks a
little bit dark, so I'll go over it again. That is a very quick way to
paint in the car shadows. Just going to smooth
that edge up over there. We have one cast shadow in. I'm going to jump right ahead to the car shadows I've
already placed, and we can take a look at them. You can see that I extended this cast shadow
here, around here, up and over through there, just to give the
impression that it's definitely in front of
the rest of this hair. I added a small little one
under this piece of hair here. And then I also added
some car shadows, mimicking the edge of
the shell shapes as those shells cost down on this side from the
light on the top left. That's pretty much
the only car shadows that are added into the
piece because we had already done some of
the key cast shadows at the beginning
of the workflow. When we were doing
our shadow steps, we added in neck car
shadow and we had this very slight nose car shadow underneath the nose here. That's something we
might want to enhance, which we can do when we're doing our final clean up stage. That is the cast shadows lesson. Really just look for clear, obvious places where
something would be costing. Create your layer. Make sure it's set to multiply. Use black. Use the brush edge that you think is necessary for the lighting circumstances. And then go in painted in. Erase it so that we have
the transparency and that is how quickly
create cast shadows. Great, I'll see you
in the next lesson.
15. Post Production: We've now completed all the steps of the
lighting workflow, but we've got some
things to do still yet. But before we get there, this is a great time to stop and consider
what we could change in terms of the
levels and the hue and the saturation of
the individual elements. In order to do these adjustments digitally and efficiently, what we'll want to do is
merge our layers together. For example, over here we have the skin lighting layer
and the skin flat layer. What we can do is hold shift, select both right click and
then choose Merge Layers. This works more or
less the same way in most of the software. Now that the layers are merged, we can then go to the Image
and the adjustments menus and pick from the variety of adjustments here to
make to that section. I'm going to go ahead and
merge the lips layers as well. And I've gone on ahead and merged every single
layer so that every separate element now has the lighting and the flats on
a single individual layer. This really just
again, makes it easy for us to make those
edits and adjustments. Let's take the skin for example. First, let's adjust its levels. This would be the value levels, the dark values,
midtone gray values, and the light values. I'm going to add some
additional lighter values in play around with
the mid tones. I'm really just
losing my eyes to see what I feel feels
right in the context of the gray background and
the piece overall in this preview box lets me
see the difference between my changes and the
previous version. It was a little bit
dark, so I'm glad we've increased the
skin value there. Now be careful when you're
using tools like that. Always do your value check to make sure that the
values still read well. You want your lights
and your shadows to be clearly contrasting
against one another. When you're making
these changes, just be vigilant on that. Let's take the hair for example. We'll do a huge
change on the hair. Let's say just for
argument's sake, we wanted the head
to be more green. Can add a little bit more
green into it there, increase the saturation
a little bit. Then we could keep that change, it changes the feel of
the piece quite a bit. What you'll do once you finish the lighting is take
that moment to pause, merge your layers together, and go through and make
the level adjustments so that you can achieve the
contrast levels that you want. If you made something
too dark or you made something a little
bit of the wrong color, this is the time to change it. Before we move on, make sure that you do
have this adjustment. Stop off point along the way as you're working
through your pieces. I'll see you in the next lesson.
16. Skin Enhancement: In this lesson, we're now
going to take a look at subsurface scattering on
the character's skin. Now, subsurface scattering is a light effect that occurs
when light enters an object, scatters around
underneath the object, and then causes a slight glow on the outside of the object. Types of areas to think
about this is for example, on the ears when light
is shining through a character's ears or the little pieces of skin
between your fingers. You've probably
seen that it glows quite red sometimes
depending on the lighting, obviously, Another way to
think about other objects, for example, are gummy bears. Gummy bears are a good
example in jelly, for example, of how
subsurface scarring works. Where the light enters,
the object bounces around inside and then causes a bit of a glow for
what is underneath. Now obviously under our skin quite a lot of blood
vessels in blood, we get a warm red
glow occurring. This is one of the
key things that makes a character that
looks dead maybe, or stale, or maybe really
pale, make them look alive. And we're going to do that now. I'm going to show
you a very quick, easy way to do this,
particularly in Photoshop. The way you can mimic this in other applications is really just to create a normal layer and just put a light bit of a red or a very cherry
red with a soft brush. But in Photoshop there is a great layer mode
called soft lighting. First, I've created
a new layer here, and we're going to call it SSS
for subsurface scattering. And we're going to set the
layer mode here to soft light. Then we're going to grab
a very bright cherry red, our soft brush here
and gently put subsurface scattering or paint our subsurface scattering onto the areas
where it would be. Now, common areas for subsurface scattering
generally tend to be the cartilage
areas of the ear. Oftentimes the
cheeks very subtly. Sometimes the nose, I'll show you an extra bonus
effect for it as well. Let's do the ear
area, for example. I'm going to select the skin area there
because I don't want to paint on the
hair or anywhere else. I'm going to lightly
spray in some of that red and very
bright cherry red. We'll do some on
the cheeks here. Be very subtle with it. You don't want to overdo it. You'll see me undoing if I feel that it's gone
a little bit too red. There's one cheek,
there's the other. Now the beauty of the soft light layer is that it maintains the values that we've placed underneath the way to do this, if you do not have soft
light layer in your software to really play with the
opacity of the layer as well. Just to get those values
to shine through, let's add some on her nose
to be subtle with it, right? A slight little trick that
is quite appealing to do is to put some of this just on
the corners of the eyes, the corners of the eyelids at the top right here of this eye, at the top left of that eye. It looks a little
bit like makeup. And you can actually
use this layer to bring in additional colors as well if you want to give
a character makeup look. Let's go with
purple for example. We can actually spray it in
just very lightly there, and it allows the values
to show through, I think. Let's go with the
purple. Why not? But generally going
with this cherry red is also quite nice as well. We'll stick with
the purple there. Let's go back to the cherry red. Now, areas where you
would see this occurring, more of a redness than a
subsurface scattering, is at the joints of the
knees and the elbows here, I'll put a light bit of
pink there of this chair. Red, mind you a little
bit here as well. It just enhances
the look and makes the character look
more alive, right? That they've got blood
running through their veins. If you feel the effect is
a little bit too strong, can just adjust
the opacity of it, which I think I'm going to do. I prefer subtlety over
very brush coloring. But of course, do
it as to what you feel looks best and
works best for you. Let's toggle this layer on
and off and take a look. And what this does to the feeling of life
in the character. She seems like a toy previously, just going to use my
soft eraser here. I just feel like it's a little
bit too red on this cheek. Just going to lightly
erase some of it out. Just keep it more subtle. That is, adding in subsurface scattering onto your character using the soft light layer. Or just using a soft
brush in a normal layer and playing with the
opacity of that layer. Great, I'll see in
the next lesson.
17. Secret hair Painting Technique: Hair painting can be a
royal pain in the butt, unless you know a secret
hair painting technique that will make your
life super easy. Now, at this stage
in the workflow, we've already got some nice
light and shadow zones creating the bulk masses
of the forms of the hair. The hair has form, but it
doesn't really look like hair. It looks a bit like
Plato or something. Right? This technique,
you've seen me use it once before when we were doing the specular lighting on
the tentacle sections. But what we're going
to do with this technique is we're going to create two additional layers
on top of our hair layer. We're going to call
one hair painting shadows and the other
hair painting lights. We're going to use
the sketcher brush. The reason why we're going to
use this particular brush, the properties of
the brush really is that its pressure determines both opacity as
well as the size. When we do a stroke
with this brush, let's just do a red example. Here we get a varying
degrees of opacity along the stroke and we get these nice sharp
points at the end. Now painting hair is a
process of looseness. You want to be loose and flowy
just like the hair itself. What we're going to do is
we're going to enhance the existing light areas and the existing shadow
areas with hair strokes. And then we're going to use our soft brush to we
raise back the tips, making it blend well
and look really smooth. I'm going to do a
small section example probably on this strip here. Then I will show
you what it looks like in my versions that I've
done on the entire here. But the process really is a rinse and repeat process once you've got all these
base forms down, all right, once you've
got all the base lighting down that
we were really done, I'm going to do
first is I'm going to pick my shadow value here. I'm going to darken
it just a little bit. I've clipped these two layers down to the hair lighting there. If you don't have
clipping your software, you can just put the layers on top and create a selection of your hair and just paint on those layers within
that selection. What I'm going to do here is I'm going to work on
the shadows first. I advise doing it
in the workflow of all the shadows and then
all the lights after that. As an additional note, you will be able to see this full painting process in the full workflow
of this video, the full time lapse video of this particular painting, right? Let's get to it. To
rotate the canvas here. One of the reasons I'm rotating the canvas is because
I need that flow. I need to flow correctly
with the lines. What I do is I find the
shadow areas and then I pull some strokes out from them. All right? I'm pulling
the shadows out, if you will, from
the shadowed areas. I'm trying to get a nice
variety of strokes here. Pull another one there. Actually you want
to try and keep detail, the stroked detail. Don't think to yourself, oh, it looks messy. It's okay. Have a degree of
stroke detail coming through of the overlap
of the lines and so on. Also, change of brush size. There's no harm in getting a few very thin strokes to come out as well and to cross
through the forms. All right, let's build this
one up a little bit here. You can see I'm very, very stroke with the brush. I'm trying to be very loose. There's a dark zone. I'm being a bit risky with it, but I'm pulling some of
these hair threads in. All right, once that's done, you press to go to your erasor. Use a soft eraser
and then lightly erase the tips of the hair out. Maybe that was a little
too light on my part. Let's just undo that, right, We just want
to get the tips out. You would do all the shadows
in this particular way, and you can already see
how it's starting to look a little bit more
like actual hair, of course, in this
universal general workflow version of the hair. All right, now let's
move over to the lights, the hair painting lights. And we're going to do basically the same thing, the same brush. We're going to select these at a very light value
here, test it out, make sure it's nice and bright, and we're going to go ahead, particularly with the lights. We want to exercise
that restraint. Once again, we
don't want to light every single section of
the hair with one of these bright highlights
on really the areas we've marked as having
this lighter lights. There's only a few areas here. We've had this
lighter highlight. You want to put these
brightest streaks of hair into those areas only, right? So what I'm going to do, again, I'm going to try to
be very loose here. I'm going to increase that
value a little bit more. I'm going to pull
these threads out of that bright spot,
just like that. Let's get a few smaller
strokes in there. We'll do this side here as well, this piece of hair over here. Don't worry if you over extend
some of the lines a little bit because that's what
the eras tool is for. I'm going to use just a
slightly smaller brush here. Now this particular
technique can be scaled right up to
realistic hair. You just really have
to ask yourself, how detailed do you want the lighting workflow
of the hair to be? Okay, you can scale this right up to photo real
hair if you want to. Works in the exact same way. Here I've switched
to the eraser, I'm erasing those
tips once again, we have a nicely rendered
piece of hair here, quite convincing for
the current style of the workflow right now. Let me show you what it looks like when it's all
been rendered out. And you can see how careful I've been with the high
light zones, right? We don't want to have too
many highlight zones. But as for the shadows, go crazy with the shadows. Put them wherever
you need them to be. They really bring in
that extra feel of the threads of hair and they're running all across the piece, right? That is the secret. Hair painting
technique, painting strokes with a brush with
opacity and pressure on size, and then using a soft
brush to raise the edges. We work in a shadow and
a light phase on this. Remember, two values
are pivotally important for pretty much everything we do
when we're painting. That is the end of this lesson.
18. Line Colouring: In this lesson, we're
going to be taking a look at line coloring. But before we go to that, let's take a look at some notes about the line
weights themselves. If you have thick
lines in your piece, they are harder to hide. Generally speaking, you want to then make sure that if
you're doing thick lines, they're there for a reason and that they're actually
part of the piece. In this piece, for example, the lines are meant to be here. We're not trying to paint out
the lines at a later stage. Now, if you want to have
a more painterly look in your work where you don't want to see the
lines at the end, Then you'll want to opt for thin lines in
your clean up lines, because thin lines
can be easily hidden. Now of course,
line weights vary. You may have line weights
that are very thick. For example, more of a
graffiti style line weight. And obviously, the lines then
are a feature of the work, so you want to keep them,
whether you color them or not, the lines are a feature and you want to keep them visible. But just keep in
mind that if you are going for a very
painterly styled look, thinner lines are better. And you want to keep the
line weights very small and minimal because
you're going to let the painting or the
coloring do the talking. But thicker lines
will be prevalent in more illustrative work where you want the lines to be seen. Let's keep that note in mind. Going on to the line coloring, it really is quite a
straightforward process. We're going to use
the soft brush to do this and we're
going to create a layer above our lines layer if you're using
Photoshop or software. The last clipping, you can
clip it to the lines layer, which basically just
creates a selection. Or you can control click the thumbnail,
create a selection, hit control H to
hide that selection, and then create a
new layer on top. And then you can go ahead
in and paint the lines. Line painting is
pretty subjective. You can do whatever you want as long as your forms
are still reading. Now one common way to
do the line painting is to select a darker value or a shadow value of
the current area. For example, in the skin
I'm going to select the skin shadow value and then make the lines of all the
skin areas this shadow value. You can see here, there's quite a nice softening
effect to the piece. The piece doesn't look so
harsh and so sharp anymore. Very similar to what
we do in the line softening when we're softening the lines using the blur tool. Similarly with the
hair, I would select a hair shadow value here and go ahead and make all the lines of the hair that darker
shadow value. It really does
soften the look of everything and makes it look a little bit more professional. Of course, this is
style dependent. You may like black lines, and I personally use
black lines a lot. It all depends on
your preference. Another technique
that you can do is if the value of the area you're
doing is five to ten, so it's a very dark valued area. The idea is to use a light
value for the lines. This is quite a
modernish type of look. You'll see a lot of
modern animation and a lot of modern
illustration will do this where darker valued
zones have very light lines. Then conversely,
values five to one. The lighter values are used on surfaces that
are values five to one, then use a darker line,
For example, the skin, we then use a darker line, you can see it has
quite a nice effect. It's obviously more of an illustrative effect
because of course, you're not hiding
the lines as much. Last but not least,
you can also do all the lines in
just a single value. A common technique
for this is to use a lightish brown,
which is quite nice. I'm going to just do it
over the entire piece here. This also has a very
particular look about it. You may have seen this before. It also aids in
softening the piece. I would advise to use just a slightly darker
value for the eyes, because you can see you can lose quite a lot of
readability in the eyes. But it softens the whole
piece up really nicely. And of course, you can really do anything you want with this. Just as long as your
image is still reading, use your creative vision and your creative subjectivity to
decide what you like best. That, in a nutshell
is line coloring.
19. Overpainting: We're now getting very close
to finishing our piece, so we're moving on to
the overpainting stage. I've created a layer here
called over painting, and it sits above all
the other layers. Now you want to do the
overpainting stage once. You're really happy that all
the values and the colors, the hues and saturations, all the adjustments
have been made. And you're really happy with
the piece at this point. So that you can go in and use the over painting layer
to change things, move things around, paint in the little gaps that
you've missed, and so on. So you want to make sure everything is right
before you do this, because the over painting layer sits above all the other layers. If you had to do
further adjustments, things would start
looking weird. Now of course, you can go
to those individual layers, for example, the skin here
and fix the skin by hand. But generally, the
over painting layer is done right at the end. All right, let's get into it. And what I'm going to be
doing is I'm going to be using the soft brush and
I'm going to be color picking a lot and
literally painting over elements to clean
up these areas. For example, I'm going to fix these little gray areas there. I basically just color pick and spray to get those
gray areas out. I've already thought about some things that I'd like
to change on the piece. Particularly on her left eye. The left eye doesn't read super well from a distance like
there's not enough green. I feel there's not enough green. The over painting, there is a perfect chance for
me to come in here, add a little bit of
additional light as if I were drawing
right on top of everything and getting
things to read a little better so we can see the difference
there before and after. Let's go a little bit
closer before, after, there's a little bit
better I read there, This effectively is
what over painting is. It's your chance to fill
in all those little gaps before we move on to
the final adjustments, overall adjustments and effects of the post production phase, I'm going to carry on doing this and by the time you get
to the next lesson, all these little gaps
will be filled and we'll be ready to
move on. See there.
20. Post Production Effects 1: We've now reached the final post production
stage of the piece. And we're going to be looking at a few different
effects we can do to the image to
really finish it off. The first thing
we're going to look at is the shadow gradient. As well as adding a color
balancing overlay layer. Regarding the shadow gradient. What we need to do before we can work on these effects is we want to merge everything
into just a single layer. We don't have multiple
layers anymore, we just have a single layer. What you should have
at this point is an over painting,
the car shadows, layer specularity, layer
occlusion shadows, your line coloring, layer
your lines themselves. As well as the coloring
and painting group. I have a group here
which has all of our individual elements
layers on them. All right, we want
to bring these all down to a single layer. What we can do is
simply select all of them and then merge
them all together. First, let's make a back up. I'm going to select
them all here. We'll leave the value
check layer out. I'm going to duplicate all of these layers by right
clicking and going Duplicate. Then I'm going to
right click and merge the duplicated
layers together, all my old layers. I'm going to just
select them together, create a new group, and
put them in a group. And just call them source because that is the original
source of everything. And then we will just
deselect visibility. Now the entire image is just on a single layer and it's ready
for us to do our effects. I'm going to call
this effects one, and we're going to do those various effects
that I've just discussed. Okay, the first thing we're
going to do is we're going to hold control and select
the entire image. I'm going to hide
that selection. We're going to take the
soft brush and black, and then we're going to
create a new layer on top. Call it shadow gradient. We're going to set
that to multiply. Now of course, keep in mind that these effects that I'm showing
you are entirely optional. They're just added extras. I'm showing you some cool tricks and tips that I like
to do on my work. Typically most, most things
are lit from the top right, which does mean
we're going to have somewhat lower values
at the bottom. The shadow gradient on a multiplier layer with the
soft britta black is really just a quick way
to darken some of the lower areas and keep
the upper areas lighter. You want to do, you want
to keep it quite subtle. That's pretty much
all we do there. One of the reasons we do
this is in character work. The focal point number
one is usually the head. It's generally always the head. And the focal point
number two is the hands. Generally, this section of the piece should
be the lightest, the most contrasting, and so on. To draw the attention
to that focal point, that's the shadow gradient. Next thing we're going to do,
keeping our same selection, we're going to create a layer,
and we're going to call this our overlay layer. We're going to use
this layer to create a color balancing
effect where we're applying a single color. It could be any
particular color. I'm going to show you that
we're going to use a blue. What this does is it brings
all of the different colors into a more balanced family of that particular
overlay color. But let's go into it and
you'll see What I mean I'm going to do here
is I'm going to take the inker flatter brush. We've still got our selection. I'm going to just select
a bright blue, right? The highest bright blue here, we've called the layer overlay. And this is what
we will be doing. We'll just be doing a
flat silhouette fil over the entire piece, right? This is something I tend
to do with all my work. The value does change, but the color changes, but the idea of it is the same. What we're doing is almost think of it like you're
casting a light on it. Grouping all the
values and colors that you've used into a
single family of sorts. What we're going to
do is we're going to set this layer mode to overlay to the layer mode. Then we're going to
bring the opacity down quite significantly
in the five to 10% region. You can adjust it
as necessary here. Let's toggle it on and off. It's a very subtle effect, but it brings the entire range into a similar lighting
cost, if you will. Right? Everything now
seems more unified. Right? All the colors seem
a little bit more unified. And that is the
shadow gradient and the overlay layer on
top of our effects. One layer which is a group
layer, which is a compressed, merged layer of all of our
elements onto a single layer. Let's move on to
the next lesson.
21. Post Production Effects 2: When light at
different wavelengths, refracts at different angles, you sometimes get an effect known as chromatic aberration. You see a few different
colors on an object. This can sometimes
make the object look quite a little bit more
three dimensional, just in a general sense, what we're going to do
is we're going to apply a chromatic aberration
type effect to our work. And how we're going to do
this is we're going to first select all of our
layers, duplicate them, and merge them now into
one layer we can disable our old overlay shadow
gradient effect layer because now we have
everything on one layer. Then we're going to want to hold control and select the
entire image space here. I don't know why that little
area there is not selecting, but I'm going to add
it as well. All right. Now, in Photoshop, this is primarily how you
do this particular effect. If your software supports channels, you can do
it there as well. I'm going to switch to the
Channels tab in Photoshop, which is next to the Layers tab. What the channels really do is they allow you to edit just all the green or all the blue color
information of an image. Here you can see that
all of that information plus it combined is all visible, looks very similar
to the layers tab. What I'm going to do, I'm
going to hide my selection. I'm going to select
just the red channel. I'm going to press
V on my keyboard. Give me my move tool. And I'm going to use
the keyboard to nudge or move the image by one pixel. Using the directional
arrows on the keyboard. I'm going to move all the red pixels just once to the left. I'm going to select the green, use the keyboard again and move all the green pixels
once to the right. And I'm going to move all the
blue pixels on to the top. I've got left,
right, top, but you can do it any
direction you like. I personally wouldn't recommend moving it more than
one pixel across. The more you move it,
the crazier it looks. Here you can see the effect of the chromatic
aberration, right? Let's go and compare it
to our previous layers. What I'm going to do is I'm
going to just duplicate them again. Merge them again. All right, the top layer here has our
chromatic aberration, and this is just our
merged color layers. Let's take a look
at the difference. Obviously, it looks a
little bit more blurry. That's not necessarily
a bad thing. There's our old version, and he has our new version
with chromatic aberration. Take a closer look at what's happening with a
chromatic aberration. You can see that moving
the pixels has caused these strange color
changes happening, particularly at the
edges of things. Right? The effect can
be quite pleasing. Now, you don't have to
move all the channels. For example, you could move
just the red in the blue, just the red in the
green, or what have you. I would recommend
playing around with the effect and seeing
what works best for you. That is how you implement chromatic aberration
into your piece, giving the view a
sense of three D because of the weird way we've made the light appear
to be refracting.
23. Conclusion: We've now reached the
end of module three. Let's keep in mind the
main form lining workflow, particularly in
terms of the shadows that we did in the production
part of this process. We want to make sure
that the shadows and forms read well and look three D because everything else is relatively
straightforward. After that, make sure you
really get that down. Learn it off by heart.
Learn the form lining principle and also overinvest
in your shadows phase. Also, don't worry too much about post production effects because
you can really just mess around in the software
and figure out your own effects that you'd like to do at the
end of the piece. Once all the bulk of
the work has been done. A town maps of this entire process will follow this lesson. And you can use it as
a quick summary to guide you when you're
painting your own work. Do take a look at that. In module four, we'll be
looking at a number of ways to scale the
fundamentals of the workflow, which will allow us to do
simplistic coloring as well as scale it up to
more advanced painting. It's been great. I hope you've enjoyed this and learned a lot. Let's move on to
the next module.
Scott Harris, Illustrator, Painter | Character Artist
