Color Characters 104: Coloring and Painting Styles

1. Introduction to Character Coloring and Painting Styles: Welcome to Module for Coloring and Painting Styles. In this module, we're going to take a look at how we can use what we've learned about light color, the form lining principle, and our workflow. And apply it in varying ways to achieve different styles of coloring and painting for our character work. Now what we want to realize is with the theory that we've learned and the general idea of the workflow we've learned, we can scale up our knowledge to high end paintings and scale down our knowledge to simple coloring. It obviously all depends on the style of work that you want to produce. Now when we think about workflow, we want to realize that workflows can be flexible. It depends what you're painting is a comic book style workflow, the same as a high end digital painting, workflow Is a high end digital painting workflow the same as a very simplistic cartoon style workflow. They really vary. The workflow we've learned in module three is a solid grounding and a solid foundational workflow for us. But workflows can be flexible and really you can design your own workflow. The theory, however, remains the same. We still really are applying in just different ways and to varying degrees and varying quantities. The form, lighting principle and our color and light theory. We pick and choose what we want based on the style that we're going for. When we scale up to high end painting, we're using a lot of the theory in for not all of it. When we scale down to simplistic coloring, we're using just a bit of it, a few bits and pieces. I'm really excited to show you what you can achieve with the knowledge you already know. Let's get right into the lessons and I'll see you in module four. 2. Achieving Flat Coloring and Gradient Style Coloring: We're now going to take a look at our first coloring style, which is basically flat coloring with gradients. One definitive aspect of this style is that you tend to use pastyle colors or you tend to use only tints when you're doing your flats. Now this particular illustration is one of a Celtic warrior princess, name is Gwen Deer. Her style was always intended to be this flat coloring style so that her lines get really shown off nicely. Now if we color pick, you'll notice everything is light. It has a lot of white in it, and there are no very dark colors. Even the brown of the wood is not very dark On the color panel here, you want to stick in this top area here in this top range here. We're not worried about doing our general lighting workflows mid because with this particular coloring style, we don't really need value range. It's not really that much about having light and shadow contrast per se, we want to stick around here. Then we'll obviously just differentiate our hues and do our color schemes and whatnot, but keeping a lot of white colors. We want to keep a lot of white there and use a lot of tints. That is the one thing. Now, I've gone ahead and pre flattened out this entire piece to show you how we take this very simple coloring style just a little bit further and amp it up just a little bit. We're going to be doing two things. First thing is that we're going to be using the soft rush and the gradient tool just to gradient some areas and add in some different tones. The second thing is that we're going to use the Inca Flatter tool to add in some highlights. Here you can already see a massive simplification of the general lighting workflow where we're only using flats. We're not really sticking to the rule value choices here. We're going to just keep things simple. We're going to use the color we want the surfaces to be is the color we're going to pick, not the color we hope it will be when it's lit. Rather the color we want it to be is the color we will pick. Here we have all the flat separated into separate layers like usual. Let's start with the skin and let's hit the gradients first. You can use the gradient tool. You can use the soft brush. It doesn't matter, I'm going to switch the soft brush. I'm going to go to the gradient tool here. This tool does vary with particular software, with different software, and how it works, But it's generally the same. It's generally the same. I think. I'm not even going to clip a layer, I'm just going to select all the skin hide that selection with control H. I'm going to use this little icon here which is a radial gradient. Let's just do a demo. The radial gradient just creates a little circular gradient. And also the horizontal gradient here will create a horizontal gradient over the surface. Let's actually use the horizontal gradient. What I'm going to do is I'm going to basically dress up these flats. We're not doing any hardcore lighting. It's a very illustrative orientated coloring style where we're keeping the focus mainly on the lines. We're letting the lines do the talking of the forms for us with the line weights and the overlapping of the lines. To do the talking, I've selected her skin there. I'm going to just drop it just a little bit. Maybe change the hue just a little bit here. And we're going to do just a light gradient on her skin there. That's a, it's about that. For that, just go to the soft brush here. We can allude to some soft shadows on her. You really want to be subtle when you're doing this. Let's just get a little bit of a darker value that seems fun. I'm just going to just darken her skin a little bit there and just pick some areas almost like the big shadow stage in a sense, but you don't have to think too hard about it to be honest with you, Right? That we can add some implied subsurface scattering of just be subtle with it, right on her cheeks, paint in her lips. But just really lightly, we keep things very light. We don't want to break the use of the pastel palette that we have here, right? Our tinted palette, right? Let's not forget tints or effectively our hues with a lot of white, right? A color with a lot of white added to it. I move across the piece. For example, the armor here, select the armor with my soft brush and really just dress it up a little bit, right? It's a. Intensive workflow. And it's also very quick. It doesn't take as long as the normal workflow, all right, I'd move through the piece and dress it up. As you can see, it's pretty straightforward, I'm sure now that you know the full lighting workflow, you can see how straightforward this really is. We don't put car shadows in. We don't put form shadows in. We don't necessarily put in reflected lighting. You could, but generally you don't need to. You can play around with that if you want to. Then let's just go and look at highlights. Let's go back to the skin layer. What we're going to do here is I'm going to just pick a much lighter value of the basic cantone switch to the Inca flat brush. I'll just pop in a highlight there, a little dots. Put one on the shoulder here. Got to pick the areas you want to highlight. Maybe here on the knee. It's very simplistic. That's pretty much what we do across the entire piece until it was complete. Just subtle coloring, focusing on the flats and making sure the scheme reads well. Yes, keeping them in the pastel range. I'm going to the eyes here, I'm going to just add the lights to the eyes. Characters look quite dead when you don't have the light added to the eyes. Even had a little highlight to the eye as well, just with a hard brush, really. That is the nuts and bolts of this, this particular piece as well, I think would look a lot nicer. Let's merge the line layers together. Actually, we'll duplicate them and merge them. This piece would look a lot nicer with brown lines. It would just soften it up a little bit, selecting all the lines there. Going to grab my soft brush, probably a fairly darker brown here. We don't want the lines to be too light, they will become unreadable. Just go ahead and paint all the lines brown when it comes to surface material. Surface rendering, for example. If you do want the metals to look a little bit more metallic, right? Because you don't want them to be too flat. Just take your flat brush. Let's go to the armor area here. I'm just going to clip a layer down on that. Let's just call it armor light. I'm going to use white. And we're going to do the same technique we do for certain highlights. Let's just say we've got a light running across here. All right? I'm going to hard brush a light in there. Could just go with that. Even that seems okay and then what I can do is just soft rays on the Rays tool. No, I'm not. I'm going to soft erase those edges. All right there. I've just taken away one edge. And then I'll lighten that up and boom, we've got some nice reflective armor. And we can just rinse and repeat that across the surfaces. You can, of course, go ahead and just soft, soft brush in some highlights as well if you want to. But remember you want to keep the focus on the lines and on the flatfolls. The flat falls in, the lines are doing all the work. If you start adding too many lighting layers, then you start moving into a different type of style, right? Because the more elements we use of the lighting workflow, the more three dimensional it's going to look. Then you start getting conflicts with the level of detail you intend and the level of detail that you're rendering. There's just some highlights as well on the skin. But keeping things very simple and very flat, that is a very quick and easy way to get a flat color with gradients. Look to your work, which is very nice for well illustrated pieces where your focuses on the lines, on the line weights. And you're really letting the drawing do the form and the three dimensional talking rather than the coloring itself. Great, let's move on to the next style. 3. Achieving Animation and Anime Cell-Shaded Style Coloring: In this lesson, we're going to be taking a look at animation style or anime style cell shading in terms of how we color the piece. We want to get an authentic cell shaded looks almost as if we were capturing a frame of animation. You might notice that we are using a very similar process that we used with Gundea. We have very pastel colored flats going on here. You want to approach in the same way, sticking to this very high value range with a lot of white based colors as your flats. What we're going to do is we're going to dress up each of the flats the same way we dressed up the flats in the basic flat coloring work. However, we're not going to imply shadows anywhere. Here you can see I've worked a little bit on the face, and I've added some soft sprays of some blush on her cheeks. I've added some gentle lights into her eyes. You can add lights across the piece. And just general color variations, very similar to the color variation step that we did in the general universal workflow. And we'll do that across the entire piece. Just adding some color variations and adding a bit of tone, but not touching the shadows at all. Because the way we do the shadows, it's what's going to define that cell shaded look. And that is what we are going to get into. Now here we can see all the flat layers. What we're going to do is we're going to create a layer above the flats. And we're going to call this cell shaded shadows. This can be a bit of a tongue twister, don't worry about it. When we have that layer, we're going to set the layer to the multiply mode. And we're going to set the opacity of the layer to around 20 to 25% Let's go to 21, it's fine. We're going to use our Inca flat brush. A nice hot edge brush and black. You want to have that nice firm edge. All right, we're going to do the entire shadows of the entire piece on this layer. What the multiplier layer is doing is it's multiplying the values of the underlying flats and it's actually creating an automatic value decrease on those specific colors. For example, if we look at the skin here in the color figure, I color pick the skin and here we get the skin's value, the skin's color. Then when I color pick the, the cell shaded shadows layer with our black, multiply 20% You can see it moves down in value. As I click it, you can see we're getting a value shift there. It automatically does this across all the underlying flats. The same thing happens with the hair. We have the hair at a higher value and then an automatic shadow at a lower value. We have a two stage process when we're doing shadows in this way. The first process is we go in and we paint all the shadows in the piece. Then the second thing that we will do is we will a ply, a gargan blow filter to kill the very harsh edges that this particular technique creates. When you do that, you get a very authentic look to your cell shaded pieces. Now you can do this for Disney style work, can do this for mango style work. It's just a particular look if you want to achieve that, animation stills type of look in your work. All right, let's go ahead and we'll do some of the shadows on her face. Feel free to make sure you're in black. Feel free to use the Erase tool as much as you need to. And you'll probably use the hard erase tool. Make sure your erase tool is on inca flatter as well, or whatever hard brush you're using. Let's go in. You can see I can stroke as much as I like because the inker flatter brush is just a solid opacity brush. You get no variation in strokes, it's always consistently the same. To apply that shadow there, we'll bring up a shadow here on her cheek. Just do that. Put a shadow here for her nose, side of her face. And we're just going to erase that shadow out of her hair. Definitely. We want that eyelid shadow makes the eyes read super nicely. You can add some shadow here into her hair. You can use the arrays tool really as well to shape the shadows that you're creating. We're just going to paint these in, just erasing unnecessary shadow in the hair here. If you want to, you can totally do this per layer in terms of you can, you can do just the skin shadows if you want, just the hairs, etcetera, et cetera. But you'll find that it's actually really easy and really convenient to just do it very easily just on a single layer throughout the entire piece. We'll give her top lip, a shadow, just a little bit of a shadow there. Let's do her scarf as well, an example of other surfaces as well. Now you can go ahead and make this as complex or as simple as you like. It's going to look great either way. If you get too many small shadows in though the style starts changing a little bit, just watch about getting too many little shadow shapes. What you want to do is think about where the form shadows might appear. You're still using your lighting theory in terms of planes and asking yourself, hey, where would some of these form shadows still appear in the piece, and how do they wrap around the various objects? I'm sure you can see the effect is already starting to work, where you really get that animation look. But you're going to see it all come together really nicely when we apply that gargan blur to these shadows that we've applied. All right, we have our cell shaded shadows layer here. What we're going to do now is we're going to apply that blur, filter blur and gargan blur. We want to soften the edges, but we don't want to make it hyperblury. That's like ultra super blury. We don't want to go too blurry and we don't want to keep it too sharp. Ensure you soften the edges and you can just compare with your preview how much softening you've done to the edges. Once that's done, you will have a fully shaded piece. Really the workflow once again for this is we do our flats as usual on separate layers. We then make sure that we're sticking into that past color range with a color scheme for this type of work. We can then go and dress the layer. Adding some lights if we want a few little light areas with a soft brush, keeping things very subtle, nothing too hard edged. Adding in some effects like the subsurface scattering or the cheek blush here. Then we create our single cell shaded shadow layer set to multiply opacity of around 20% We use a hard edged brush on black on that layer to go in and then paint in all the form shadows and get that cell shaded look into our work. That is how you achieve the cell shaded style coloring. I'll see you in the next lesson. 4. Achieving Digital Water-Color and Rough Style Coloring: In this lesson, we're now going to be taking a look at more of a rough water color styled coloring. In this instance, we haven't done any flats because we're actually going to directly apply the color as we go using a single paint layer to get all the coloring in. Now the thing to always remember is that as long as you know the full painting workflow, you can pick and choose whatever you want out of it that you think is going to work to achieve the particular style you want to achieve. I'm using the watercolor brush from the brush pack. It's not really a true watercolor brush, it's not going to work like true watercolors. But it does give a nice rough effect. And it allows you to get more of a rough type of look to your work when you want more of a traditional feel. So here we have this character that I've drawn called Charlotte. And we're going to just start painting her as she is. Now, your color choices again are going to probably veer more towards the light, more towards the pastel. When you're doing more simplistic type of coloring, when you're dealing with actual watercolors, actual watercolors, you work from light to dark, building up layers of the water color to build your shadows. Starting lighter is usually better. But of course, it does change based on whatever initial color you're choosing. Let's go ahead and start painting her with this brush. Let's just take a look at the texture of this brush again for a minute. And you can see it's got very soft edges and it builds on top of itself in a very natural and loose way. Actually want her dress to be a little bit darker. This will be a little bit longer than the previous lessons, but hopefully it will be worth it for you. What you want to do here is be very loose with a strokes. Don't worry about going outside the lines. Go ahead, paint in the areas you want painted in. We're going for a more loose, natural look as you work. Try to work from back to front. And what I mean by that is ask yourself, what would be in the most background layer? In some instances, it's the skin here, but for the most part here, this dress is more of a background. We are working on layer. We're not going to worry about layer management, we're just going to work on this single layer and try and paint from back to front, from the background planes of elements to the foreground planes of elements. It's going to paint in her arm here, we can clean up these messier edges a little bit later, won't worry about them too much for now. We can come in later and clean them up. You get this color bleeding happening. Like for example, the skin hair running into even the dress running into the skin areas, that's a part of the style. In a way, this rough water color type of look, you will have some bleed that occurs. Try to keep things loose, keep things natural. I'd recommend this style primarily for more simplified works so that you don't have to spend forever painting in every different region. You can see she doesn't have a ton of zones. She's got skin, shoes, dress, her hair, her eyes, her microphone, and her musical notes. That's pretty much it on those zones. Effectively, I'm doing a loose of flat falls, you could say. All right, just getting her shoes in. Be sure when you are cleaning up the outside of the shape. Be sure to erase. Don't color, pick gray or your background. Otherwise you will have random pieces of white or gray paint on your work. All right. Like I said, you'll see areas where there is no not perfect coverage. That is the way it's supposed to be, right? You want that natural look, so don't get too hyper focused about worrying about coverage or filling in all the details exactly as they should be getting all those little gray areas out. It's no big deal. All right? Give her pink hair. If you've ever used water colors before, you may know that they're pretty hard to control. They tend to bleed randomly in random directions to applying too much causes the paper to crinkle and do weird things. And a lot of traditional artists who do paint in water color tend to use those random occurrences to their benefit. In the same way, when you make so called happy accidents on the piece where you're having some bleed in a weird direction or something like that, Try to see how could you integrate that mistake, or so called mistake, into the work, all right, Versus trying to fight against it. You can see I'm sticking to very high kinds of values here. Add the highlights in our eyes. We'd continue to flat out every single element there, but loosely being very, very loose about it. When it comes to shading, we're simply going to drop the value down. Going to adjust the hue if you feel it's necessary. I like to sometimes have a morbired saturation in the shadows, then come in here and just loosely paint in Using the color picker to blend where you feel the shadow should be. Color, pick the skin. I'll color pick my shadowed color. You really don't want to work too hard with this. You want to keep the loose, natural look. I really must emphasize that as well. You don't want to work too hard. You want to strive to avoid any edges that are too harsh. Just keep things nice and loose and natural. Now the one area where you can start getting hard with your edges is when you're applying highlights to things. And you'll see that in comic book coloring as well, when we do the comic book stylization, that is something that applies there as well. That generally speaking, highlights help to have something read very quickly. The highlights are where we will want to start using harder edges in our strokes. Here I'm just applying, implying a little bit of occlusion, blending the colors out so it's pretty dark at the bottom. We'll bring it to a little bit lighter as we get to the top to keep things loose, keep those edges soft. I'm just softening those edges up. I'm just going to clean up the interior of the eye here a little bit. We're just going to do a nice big shadow on her hair. Actually, the light in her eyes is coming from the left. Keep this a little bit lighter. Keep the light. You can do general lighting here as well. I'm going to do some on the hair here. Just increase that value a little bit for some general lighting at the very top of her hair, keeping the edges nice and soft. Let's do someone w's skin as well. Why not? Okay. And if you wanted to not look blotchy, just blend out those edges, let everything have a nice soft edge to it. I really just manipulate how I'm using the pressure of the brush to get those soft edges in there. Tidy that up just a little bit, leave some bleed there because it looks like it's bounce light. All right. Now what we can do is we can actually add a new layer to do this if we want to. Keeping the same brush, we can go in and add some really bright highlights to particular things. We want to remember with highlights that they tend to appear only at the highest point of light on a particular surface. We can go a little bit harder with the edges, but try not to go too crazy with the highlights. Obviously, if we do that, then we cease to lose that idea of form, that sense of form, right? To put a hall on her cheek there. Just going to soften that a bit. Put one on her arm here. We can use those hard edges. It's no big deal. Put on her knee. Put one there. All right. I'm just going to grab this light value. Put the high light on her lip. Let's bring her eye value to a little bit, her iris value to a little bit more saturated. We can add in some shadows at the top to get that contrast in from the distance, right? You may have already noticed that we have the line colors at a brown color. We've made a dark brown lines to keep the lines nice and soft. But in terms of the layering, we've got everything as usual. We've got the lines in the lines softening layers. And then we have our gray background and our value check layer. Sure, we've got differentiating values of each of the flat zones, if you want to call them that. When we've done that, we can go in and you can use the ink flatter brush if you want very accurately raising here we can go in and actually clean up all of these scruffy edges. You might want to leave them though, you really might want to just leave them for the, the rough watercolory style look. Or you can clean them up and you'll still have the look because of the way you've done the internal painting of the piece here. You can see me just going ahead and I'm just clearing up all of the outside, outside of the lines painting. Just like the previous two lessons, this is a very quick way to get some color down on a piece, primarily. Once again, if you want your work to be more illustration oriented, where the drawing is doing a lot of the talking in terms of the forms, in terms of having the forms read. That means a lot of time investment in the line weights and the overlaps and of course the form read of the actual illustration itself. This is almost like a halfway stop between very straightforward flat field coloring and starting to get into more character painting. I'm just going to clean up between her fingers here, I think. Let me just emphasize this point again, looseness, you really want to be loose, looseness in your hand. Just being free with the strokes, not worrying too much whether light or shadow is necessarily like super perfect or super accurately presented. You want a general idea when you're doing this style, you can see it's quite appealing. Let's whip up a white background there to see what the presented view might look like. I'll probably do some adjustments just to make the skin a little lighter. I do tend to make the skin a bit darker, but that is that particular workflow, a water colored style, more of a rough look. I will see you in the next lesson. 5. Achieving Chunky, brush-stroked Style Painting: When we move into more paintly styled work, we need to start implementing more of our general lighting workflow. The reason for this is because the lines get less emphasized and the paint becomes more emphasized. And we have to communicate that form and that three dimensionality primarily with the paint. We're going to do an example of a more chunky style painterly workflow here using robot robot in front of us. We're going to start in a painting there. Here. We're going to stick to our mid range values. Here we have a good high value range, a good low value range to get our shadowing and all of that jazz in. Now, just like in our universal workflow, what is really important is that we get our shadows to read really well. I'm going to just rough in some value here and just get this base paint in. I'm not worried too much about neatness for now. We can just clean that up later. We'll probably focus on his head section for this particular example, what I'm going to do immediately as I start, this doesn't have to be flats by the way. I know I flatted it a lot. It can just be really loose and rough. What we're going to do is now really start immediately working on form shadows. We won't do initial big shadows or anything, we're going to just start just getting those form shadows in. Let's assume the light sources here from the right. We're going to start working in our form shadows. Now our value check layer becomes extremely useful when we're doing work like this. Because we want to constantly be checking as the paints blending and what have you that the values are reading. Well, here I utilize the brush pressure to get me those varying degrees of darkness being the actual elements. What I'm going to strive to do is work in the shadows in such a way that we start getting an idea of the form of this particular robot. The reason this is a chunky style we're using, the square brush, is that we're keeping the brush strokes quite visible. We're not trying to hide the brush strokes. We're not trying to have everything be super smooth shaded. We don't mind the brush strokes being quite visible. What I will do is I'll proceed to just start painting all of these sections. Getting the shadow read in, getting some elements to read using just the light and the shadow. You can see I've already painted in my ambient occlusion on the edges. I'm thinking about the planes, where is light hitting, where is light hitting? So we can get that form read. Now. I'm going to move a little bit rapidly here for the sake of your time, let's add in some lighting. Just a little bit of lights, we can add a nice highlight. Let's hew this up quite a bit. Keep it nice and hard. Maybe he's very shiny, let's give him some eyes. We're going to work every single element in this, starting from our midtone values, mid values. The key thing to remember is that whilst the form lining principle largely represents the strict rules, so to speak, of how we want to light the workflow application. Once we know the workflow, the application of the workflow can vary based on what we want to achieve. That's quite important to remember because you can see that I'm not strictly following the exact workflow we've learned. But I do use a lot of my knowledge from that workflow to help me implement all of these stages. I constantly ask myself, what have I not done? Have I got the occlusion shadows in? Are the ambient occlusion shadows reading? Well, does this highlight make sense at this zone, using that old picker there as well to blend things that don't seem to be working super well. Let's get some occlusion shadows going here, the very dark occlusions and can actually put a little highlight on each of these bolts. You can see how stroky the look starts to become, how very traditional the look starts to become when you can see those brush strokes. Nevertheless, as I work through this, I'm thinking about all of the elements of our lighting workflow and putting them in as necessary. It's going to clean up the outside of this shape. You have to also keep in mind, you definitely want to be hewing up when the light is hitting the surface without a correct he up as vibrant as that one is there, the object will correct, the color will not look correct and it can mess with the lighting as well. Okay. You can see as well that I take a loose approach and you'll want to have more of a loose approach when you're doing soft shading, like we did for the general lighting workflow. And that was done to learn the workflow there, you really want to have a degree of subtlety and accuracy in your gradients. But when you're doing more painterly styles in the real world with real materials, there does tend to be a large element of randomness that occurs. Little brush, bristles, do this and that on their own, they do things you didn't intend to do. That is one thing that creates the natural look. The other thing that creates the natural look that if you want a stroke of your stroke of paint to look natural, that you implement that stroke naturally, right? You want to implement that stroke naturally, which means you need to be loose. What I'm going to do here is I'm going to paint in some sockets for the eyes by putting a shadow around the eyes here, we're getting an indented shadow around these robot sections. Then I can bring in some of this lighter value to shine on the inside of the one side of the socket. And perhaps highlight the rim on the outside of the socket. The thing is you want to remember that really the principles we've learned in our general line workflow, we can mix and match, and play around with them and do crazy things with them to get a painterly look or any look that we want. In fact, we can without lines at all. We don't need lines of this course is focused on character illustration painting, but you can using that workflow paint without lines at all. All right, let's make this design a little bit cooler. Let's give him, I don't know, some more design flare. Thinking like maybe some kind of stripe lets light that stripe. It's darker on one side might have a highlight on the other. A little bit of a highlight there, let's indent that as well. So here you can see I'm effectively drawing, in a sense, with a paint, right? Let's add a slightly higher value into here. Perhaps some light is touching inside here. So what you can see as I work on this piece is that I will implement different lighting principles at different times. I don't work in this very strict sense of, okay, I'm going to do flats, then I'm going to do color variants, then I'm going to do x, Y, Z and work through the workflow. Now as I'm painting, I really mainly work on, okay, what is the base value? Base color here, What is the shadows right? And get those in. And then everything else is just icing on the cake is just decoration on the cake. Let's work a little bit more on this piece. Going to make these fuel pump sections here red. Maybe that's a little bit too high value. All right, Let's light this hydraulic section. Some kind of hydraulic section. Light it just to use a little bit of a bigger brush there. You can see by lighting it, I've almost automatically built in the ambient occlusion shadows. I'm just going to add them in, additional ones there. We're going to these little red bits hewing up as well in our lights up too much. We added the highlight there. Let's add a highlight here. Let's pick from that highlight, the piece. We're going to just put little shadows in there. We can light a little bit of them inside. We can have our highlights creating a little bit of a rim light on these guys. Actually, it would be the other side. Mind you like that. All right. We can make this section more gray, Light it up a little bit, but we want to remember shadows, shadow saw, show shadow, shadows. Shadows are everything you can see that we would continue throughout the piece like this section by section. All right, adapting the workflow as we need it. Determining what is in light, what is in shadow, and really achieving that painterly style of the brush. This particular brush does help in this instance because it's not round, it doesn't look digital, it looks traditional, it looks very painterly, almost all painterly in a way. Remember your stages, remember your ambient occlusion, et cetera, et cetera. That is effectively how you achieve a paintly style. Let me just say one last thing. You want to keep in mind that when you're working on more paintly styles, you want to use more of the workflow. You may be implementing things at different times as you're working through the piece. You don't have such a strict workflow. The fundamentals don't change, the stages don't change, but the workflow doesn't remain as strict as it once was. Great, I'll see you in the next lesson. 6. Achieving Smooth Painterly Style Painting: In this lesson, we're going to take a look at a smooth painterly style. But instead of a demo, we're really going to look at a key principle that defines this painting style compared to, say, the chunky painterly style that we've looked at previously or compared to, say, the smooth shading style that we looked at in module three. What we're going to take a look at here is we're going to be focusing on edges when you want to move to a smooth painting style or a painterly style that's moving more toward a realistic type of style or realistic type of painting. The edge consideration becomes one of your number one key priorities. If we take a look at this cast shadow over here on Kari's nose, we can see that the edge that faces the light is hard and the edge that faces away from the light is quite soft. Similarly, we see a similar effect happening here, the cast shadow of the neck. It's harder at this point, and yet it tapers at these points. Even when we're talking about the high lights, look at the high light on the nose. The edge that faces the light is harder. The edge that faces away is softer. This is a key principle, and it does require some intentional thought and time investment to ask yourself, which edge is going to be harder? Which edge is going to be softer based on the direction of light? Based on the planes you can see as well that here the planes of Mi's nose do something like this as it moves into her forehead area. We really can't put a hard form shadow here. It would look very strange to have a solid hard form shadow line there. Yet we do have a hard edge here. And the reason being is because of the eyelid flap and the folding of the skin, it causes that form shadow that is generally soft to have a very hard edge on the one side as we climb into another plane, which is the plane of the eyelid. When you're pursuing more advanced painterly type styles and you're using all the elements of the workflow. Occlusion shadows, ambient occlusion shadows, cast shadows, secondary lighting, reflected lighting, et cetera. You'll want to be paying attention to how you manage your edges. That's the end of this lesson. 7. Achieving Comic Book Style Colouring: Comic book style coloring really is a simplified type of coloring that is designed for efficiency. When you have a massive comic book project and you want to create color pages of every single block, it can take quite some time. If you're going to be doing a high end painting technique. Efficiency underlies the general thinking behind comic book coloring. Now, not too dissimilar from our flats and gradient style coloring, our simplified coloring style, we fill in flat layers of the colors we want. However, in this instance, we don't just stick to the pastel ranges. We can pick and choose where we want to do advanced lighting on any of the surfaces. It's up to you whether you want to add reflected lighting, whether you want that reflected lighting to be hard or soft, or what have you. But think about the underlying value of efficiency when it comes to coloring and comic book style work. Now, one of those properties of efficiencies that speak, obviously this is not true of every style. But generally speaking, comic books have an inking phase. They go from pencils to inks where an incher dedicated Inca will ink it, and then it moves from inks into coloring. The inking stage and the penciling stage both indicate generally shadowed areas that by the time the final illustration comes to the colorist, a lot of the shadowed areas are pretty much already there. And depending on the style, you may have highlight areas indicated as well. In the particular way that I've drawn Chrono Viper over here, we have the highlight areas as empty shapes and shadowed areas as stroked in shapes. That takes away a lot of the work of adding in detailed form shatters because the pencil or the Inca has gone ahead and done that stage already. In some sense of style, you could argue that, yes, maybe this illustration is fine as it is even in its colored form. A simple as it may be because many things are already indicated and it has a very finished look to it. And that's really just because comic book style work and more cartoon or styles work tends to have a very heavy emphasis on the lines, a much lighter emphasis on the actual coloring of the painting itself. What we're going to do is we're going to go ahead here and work on the suit. We've got all our flats all separated on individual layers. I'm going to just put in here suit lighting. And I'm going to clip it down so that we're only painting on the suit. What I'm going to do first is just grab the soft brush, grab a darker value of the suit. Just gently brush in shadow, just some general shadows. Now really you can scale this. How hard core do you want to go with the shadows? Do you want to really spend tons of time on it or do you want to just keep it more simplified? It's up to you. We're going to keep it fairly simplified in this example. And I'm just putting shadow in a very general way where I think there would be shadows. I'm not even going to worry about cast shadows or crazy occlusion shadows or anything like that. Just going to generally get some shadows in. All right. I'm going to then use the Inca flat brush and get a slightly higher value of the suit. And I'm going to go ahead and paint in all of the areas that are marked as the light areas. While I do this, I'll tell you a little bit about the character. This is a character that I created called Chrono Viper. She's a hero shooters style character where you could play her in a game. She has three teleport pads that she can install across an area of a map or a location where the battle is happening. She can teleport between the three of them so that she has a lot of variable sight lines. She's snipping the enemy team, or what have you. The character is built around that concept. She's very mobile. She can climb walls and whatnot, and climb up obstacles. That makes her quite a deadly enemy. Although I would assume she would be a much lower health character in that particular game because you want to keep things balanced. All right, here I've done these top suit sections. I've just started filling in some of those highlights. You can see really, we're keeping things simple and straightforward and we're letting the lines do the bulk of the work. Now I must say, doing the flat falls still takes as long as it usually will take. That really is the longest part of the process, but once the flats are done, you can actually finish the entire image in a relatively short space of time. The full demo of Chrono Vipers start to finish coloring process is in the course. In the next module I would move through each of the zones doing this, putting in light shadows and putting in hard edged highlights wherever they have been marked as such. Again, remember you have all the elements of the form lining principle at your disposal. Use what you like where you'd like to use it. I'm going to move straight through to the finished shading of this piece that's without the shadows and the lights. And that is with the shadows. And the lights also included an added specular layer for the light on the lips and what have you and for all the white highlights. We can just compare versions. You can take it quite far, you can take it to quite an appealing level. This particular piece only has a key light in it and a shadowed area doesn't have three point lighting or reflected lighting or anything like that. It's because I really wanted it to have more of a comic book, to have a faster workflow. Then I've gone and added in little extras like having painted this red dissection. Just added a soft brush red over, it appears to be glowing. Similarly, I added a soft brush glow behind these gray shapes, it appears that there's some underlying light source on the teleport pads. Otherwise, the workflow is pretty straightforward. Nothing too complicated about it. Then let's move over to the final adjustments where we had done an overlay layer and done some tweaking to the image and made it a little bit brighter. The reason I made it a little bit brighter in this instance is I tend to be a little bit dark in my values. I wanted to stand out on a white background so that it's still read quite clearly on a white background without being too contrasty. Even now, it may be still a little bit too contrasty. I'm still deciding that is comic book style coloring, it is pretty straightforward. The key differentiator is that usually the illustrations already indicating the form shadows. Also, you're not just picking past style colors, you're picking any colors that you'd like in the particular piece. That is it for our overview of stylization and I will see you guys in the next module.