Color Characters 105: Complete Coloring Demos

1. Introduction: Welcome to Module five and welcome to the coloring and painting demos. In this module, we're going to be taking a look at commentated T lapsed demos, and then you're presented with a full demo of the entire workflow. Now it's important to note that the full demo is, in fact, also time lapsed, and that is to keep file sizes down for the platform as well as to make sure that you're not going to spend up to 10 hours watching a demo. It's still at a pace that you can follow and see everything in granular detail, so don't worry about that. Do know that higher end painting styles, particularly something like Kami or something that has a lot of edge control and is employing all the steps of the form Lining principle. We typically take a lot longer, and of course, more simplistic styles take a lot quicker. I think on average, I would average between around eight to 12 hours for very high end painting and 3-5 hours for a lower or more simplified style of painting. Keep that in mind. I'm really excited for you to see these full on workflows, and I hope you're going to get a lot from the demos. Do watch and rewatch them. This is how you really learn and how you really grasp some of the nuance, and I'll see you guys in the demos. 2. Timelapse Commentary- Carmi: Hello and welcome to the Carmi time lapse, and we're going to take a look and I'm going to commentate through as we take a look at this workflow. Now it's running at quite a fast speed, but I'll pause along the way to discuss certain things. So you can see there that I'm in photoshop. We just finished the flats, and I've moved toward doing the all important shadows phase here. There were no color variants on this particular piece, but I tried to add them in later. And you're going to see quite a stock change to what I decide to do with her as we move along. So here I'm following our typical soft shading workflow, and going in, working the shadows, But I started to think to myself as I was doing this that I didn't want this particular piece to look soft shaded. In fact, the project that I was working on for her actually had more of a painterly style. And while I can achieve this in photoshop, I decided to at some point, move into coral painter and use some of its painterly brushes to give the piece more of a painterly look, and so I actually start from scratch. But I did want to show you how things can change. When you decide you want to get a different look or a different style or that a particular coloring style is not working on your drawing. It's okay. Don't worry about it, don't panic. Just go ahead and make the changes that you want. So she was coming along fine. There was no issues with the stylezation. But I just felt that the stylzation wasn't suiting the project very well. And you'll see me switch to Coral painter. Sometimes when I'm conceptualizing a character and drawing in the breasts. I know that in this particular instance, this character has quite large breasts. It's strange because I never actually intend them to have large breasts. It's just the way that I draw them. I'm trying to think about the masses, and I think sometimes I end up overpportionalizing them. But we did have to tone down that area. You've seen her true final of this piece. She's actually got a stripe over that area that I just painted in, didn't even draw it in. So here, what I'm doing is, I'm using the square brush and photoshop there briefly, and I wanted to get a photoshop type of brushed look, but I wasn't happy with it. So you can see immediately here, we switched to coral paint to 2015. And really, let me say as well, we're talking about Coral Painter, you really need only one version of it. This is a 2017 piece. But Coral Painter from about 20:10, 2011 onwards, didn't really change much. So if you have a version from Ben onwards, it's pretty much the same thing. And so here I go in and start doing the normal work flow of shadowing. I did some extra work on the face, and that was because I wanted to test the entire workflow on her face, just to make sure that I was happy with the way the stylization was coming out. I looked a little bit more painted, a little bit more brush stroke as I moved through. And so then once that area gets well done, I then go and do the standard work flow through every other element. So obviously here, I'm working on the hair. We're doing the hair shadows. And I do jump around a little bit. Making sure everything's working fine on the face. And this is quite a milestone piece for me, this particular piece. Every now and again, I do a piece that goes beyond my expectations of what I was personally capable of achieving, and you'll find as well in your art journey that you're constantly growing. You'll have plateaus, and then you will have times when you're reaching high peaks, and then your plateau a little bit, and then you'll reach another peak. And that really is just the nature of art, and I think the nature of many things that are skill based, the more you work on it, the better you get, just keep going. And so here, just again doing the shadow phase and really really, really investing time in the shadows, thinking about them, modifying them, adjusting them as necessary, and then moving on to the light phase. Looking at it now, I feel like there wasn't enough contrast in a lot of areas. But fortunately, as we know, we can use adjustments just to help us out, bring in some extra shadows, bring in some extra occlusion. As long as we've thought carefully about the placement of those shadows. And so they're doing the reflected lighting. And so hopefully by now, this isn't unfamiliar to you in terms of every particular thing that I'm doing in the piece. You could say, k, well, he's doing specularity on the jewel, he's doing the lighting phase or he's doing the highlights phase, and that's exactly how you want to look at and see art. I would hate it if you were at this stage, and you felt that, you know, there's some kind of in talent or something like that. I mean, there really isn't. I'm not actually naturally talented at art at all. It's really just learning, just learning, learning, learning. I'm pretty much more mathematically oriented, strangely enough. But I really loved art, and I admired people who did it well, especially in my sort of early 20s, and that's when I decided, Hey, I really want to do this, and I'm going to do whatever it takes to do this. Proving to myself and also proving to a lot of my students that it's not a talent based thing. It's a dedication and a passion based thing. If you've got the passion, if you have the dedication, you can certainly excel and be great at art. And so here doing the material rendering of the gold. And gold, in particular, whether it's silky tup of gold or actual gold, you really want to have very good contrast between the highlights, the light, and in the shadows, because that strong contrast is what makes it look like a gold tup of material. If the contrast is too subtle, it looks kind of yellow or tardy. It doesn't look right. You can see how sort of glinty the highlights are on those gold sections. Moving with gloves. And you can see, particularly looking at coral paint on the right, not really much different from photoshop. In fact, as I've said before, most art software, good art software is quite similar. You have layers, layer modes, and things you can do on the layers. You have a color picker, color panel there with huge saturation in value, and then you have a little navigator window. All the elements, of course, with Kari as well. She's been flatted out, so she has separate elements. Of course, if she was going to be truly painted, probably I would have done a less refined drawing for one because she didn't need to be so illustrative, if she was going to be a painting. But also, I probably would have just worked on a single layer. There's no problem doing that to just make sure that you're applying in your mind, you're applying each of the elements of the formating principle to that section. Working on similar colored areas, the butt in the belt and the scarf, and then moving on to the specularity of the gloss potions and what have you, adding gradients, adding lights, shadows to them. They're actually transparent. There is really nothing there. I'm not painting the gloss, any particular color. I'm just putting the highlights onto the shape really, and letting the highlights make the form read and adding the reflected lighting there to the gloves. And once again, I'll emphasize that you really want to understand the planes, think carefully about how the three d object is rotating, and that helps you decide, well, should there be a reflected light here, would light actually hit this area or not? And you know, on the one hand, I want to say that's all there is to it in a sense, because once you know the form lining principle, then you just determine where are these elements of the form lining principle going to hit on the form. Of course, when you do understand the edge control, which I'm sure you do by now, you don't want to have things that look like brush strokes. You want things to gradient, and they can look like a stroke, perhaps on speculars or areas that need hot edges. But you want to keep things kind of smooth, not very sharp. Digital has a tendency to be way way way too sharp. And it's one of the very first things I'd learned about digital was, don't get caught up in the sharpness of digital. Real paint is a lot softer, and it makes it a lot easier for the viewers eye to move around the piece, just like real paintings. Here I'm back into Photoshop now and doing my post production. And Photoshop is excellent for post production or production. It's also excellent for post production. I couldn't do the level of finish I do without photoshop. You can see I'm doing some actual adjustments on the design using the Warp tools and the warp selection tools there. And that is me checking out different designs. We decided as a team that there was a bit too much visible area for her waist area. So it wasn't a problem. Just put a nice cross design there and it actually fitted quite nicely and worked out well. And that is the end of the time laps. And I hope that was useful. Do take a look at the full demo, and I will see you guys in the next demo. 3. Timelapse Commentary: Your Call: L et's now take a look at this time maps for the piece, your call. And it's more of a a manga styled piece, a little bit more of a manga style piece, just in the drawing style and also in the painting style. And you see I go here and I do a gray flatfill of everything. This really isn't actually necessary. It ends up not being necessary at all because when you're flat filling all the separate areas, you already have this filled in area. Sometimes I do this because I want to make sure that no matter how many effects I'm doing, everything is still staying within these initial bounds. But to be honest with you, I don't do this anymore. It's really actually is a waste of time for me. What I would rather do now if I wanted this is I go and select all the flat fold areas, merge them on a layer, and just make it gray. And then I can have that as my shape selection or my silhouette selection, if I want to move all the elements in one go. Think of it as a sort of a staying in the lines type of tool. But anyway, we do the gray flatfll, and then we go into doing all of our normal flatflls. And what I'm doing here is by using the layer ordering, as long as I keep The background layers behind and the foreground layers in front. I don't have to be super accurate with the falls. That said, it's probably better to be more accurate with the fulls, just in terms of more easily doing certain types of shadows on edges like the amboion shadows and some occlusion shadows. This piece was a bit of a time pressure piece. I was taking some shortcuts. And honestly, I don't recommend shortcuts. I mean, efficiency tools is one thing, shortcuts is another. But nothing unusual that you haven't already seen in terms of the workflow. Just going ahead and flat filling. Keep in mind that the more elements you draw, the more individual elements you draw, the more details you draw, the more fills you're going to need to do. Sometimes it may be better to temper your enthusiasm to add millions of accessories and things because of course, all those elements, if there are different colors or different values, they're going to require separate flat fills. And there I was slightly playing with the opacity of the lines just to see if I could soften the lines up a little bit. I do believe I go ahead and color the lines as we've been doing so you can see, I also added those details to the cards, and so they're going to need their own falls as well. I really don't like flat filling. In fact, I'm sure that as you're working in your pieces, you start to realize flat filling is very time consuming, and it's not a very complex activity, so you get bored to doing it. I usually listen to a movie while I'm doing it or I listen to some music, and even music can get repetitive. I'd recommend putting on some blue rays or DVDs or what have you. Or stream from Netflix or what have you, and just just get it done. I know it's a bit of a pain, but it does make the rest of the workflow ridiculously fast. I mean, so you could go and paint one thing at a time. You could totally do that. But if you get all your falls done in the beginning, it really is a time saver. Here, I'm using the digital tools to actually help me figure out the color scheme. I didn't think about it beforehand. I just use the hue saturation adjustment to see what works, see what colors I feel look good together. On that note, color really does tend to be quite subjective. There are some major color groupings that generally look good together, but for the most part, it's quite subjective, and I think you can easily do it on instinct and not messed up as long as your fundamental drawing is good, and you've got a very solid understanding of color and light, which hopefully by now, you should have. There we go for the shadowing stage. I'm going for a soft shaded look, but you'll see that I'm trying to keep a lot of the workflow more simplified. I'm not doing crazy accurate shadows, a little bit of subsurface there on the skin. And a lot of soft brush usage. Keeping things soft. Remember that a soft edge really basically says, Hey, don't look at me. I'm soft, maybe interpret me in a weird way, whereas a hard edge shadow is a bold statement, the soft edge shadow is more ambiguous. When you start using a lot more soft edges, things become a lot more implied. You have a lot more implied detail than stated detail. And implied detail can be very useful for guiding the viewer's eye to areas that are stated detail. Particularly in a character piece, the eyes, the face, usually, those are your focal points. You can keep everywhere else a little bit softer and then harden up on the face there. I was just changing some brushes, making a new brush there, modifying some settings. Putting in some cars shadows here for the hair, which are those hard edge shadows. Another tip I would recommend is leave the actual eye detailing to last. When you detail the eyes and even in drawing, even in painting. When it comes to painting the yes, if you paint them in early, the piece can feel finished before you're actually finished because that's how strong they are of a focal point, and it's our human nature to want to engage people by looking at their eyes. So try to leave the eyes flat. You can see I haven't really touched them apart from giving the RS a color and the eye ball, you know, it's base sort of light gray value there. But yeah, leave it for last. Even here, I'm doing the painting technique, but a very quick version of it, a more simplified version, not too heavily detailed in the hair. But each section really receiving its treatment of shadow lights. I don't think I've done highlights at this stage yet. And that's kind of where I start making stylistic choices because in this piece, it's not going to be a sort of a soft shaded style with a lot of the flining principle. We're going to kind of simplify the highlights and simplify the reflected lights with just hard edged thick color. So you'll see that happening shortly. Now, always remember that if you have a good drawing that is badly painted, it's still a good drawing. If you have a bad drawing that is well painted, it's still a bad drawing. So you really want to make sure that your drawing is 100% as good as humanly possible, as good as it can be, that you're completely satisfied with the drawing before you even touch color. Color and paint is really just another level on top of that structure. That's not to say that you can't in vert commas draw with paint, certainly you can, you can paint straight out. You don't need a drawing, but you want to then make sure that your fundamental structure is solid. And if you are going to just use paint, then what you're going to want to be doing is creating the forms with the light in the shadow, primarily focusing on the shadows. Building up the structure like that and then only later moving into detail as you're adding in all the elements of the form lighting workflow. Here you can see I'm starting to move into lights and highlights, The hair is going to get pretty light. Once again, on the hair, you want to pick really one zone. Maybe two, but generally one zone where there are going to be the lightest lights and just leave the lights on that one zone. In here, you'll see I do these particular highlights just on one section, and I keep my percentage of the form lighting principle. If you think about it, what percentage would specular or the highlight of the form lighting principle be. It's a very small percentage. It's 10%, maybe even 5% of the entire form of that form lighting sphere. You want to think about your usage of the highlights in that way. Here and the here, I keep it very, very minimal. When you start overdoing it, you lose the effects. You have to show restraint with highlights. And so here I'm playing with various styles in terms of what I'm doing with the lighting. Some of it soft edged, some of it hard edged. You know what are these stones? Are they gems? Are they opaque? Are they transparent? And you can see they're pretty hard edged specular, still not touching the eyes, and I'm doing some light stylization on the metal. And then there we move into doing the lights in the eye. You can see immediately the minute you do that. Suddenly, the piece seems finished. Arguably you could leave it at that. But I know that I've still got some work to do. I've got areas that need lighting. You can see I've taken a very hard edged approach there with the reflected light forward slash could possibly be secondary lights. And this just goes again to kind of simplifying, when you start simplifying certain elements of the form lighting workflow, then you get your more coloring type of styles, less painting styles. And really, painterly style these days, you know, historically, it was because they were using paint and brushes that things looked bruh. But as you know, we moved into the 19th century, and we started having air brushing and all of these other looks, Painter style became a thing where it was a style. It wasn't just well, this is how paintings look because of the brush strokes. I became a style. And so it really is a matter of seeing those edges and having gradients that are not smooth gradients, but they are stroked gradients where you can see those brush edges. And so here nearing the end of the workflow, adding in some secondary light there, just very hard edged. It gives it a particular comic book style look a little bit more advanced than comics, but gives it that kind of look. Seems I went against my idea of the blue, kept it white. I think I might bring in blue again. I'm not sure. Testing out a light there on the clothe. Here we're just adding some extra soft lighting into a face. It's quite hard. It can be quite hard to find a balance when you're trying to achieve a particular simplistic style because as you add those layers of form ning principle, then you're moving up the realism expectations of the piece. I decided the cards needed more texture, so I just added these lines, just to give them a bit more of a printed look, I suppose. I decided I wanted to go with this theme the deck of Cards theme. It's a pretty subtle effect. The rest was really just layout. The piece was pretty much done from here. I did some other changes, I rotated on the page, I played with a page composition, nothing major, film lighting principle lighting related ready. Flipping the image, making sure she looks okay from both sides. That's in the image me mage image rotation flip horizontal. And there's our overlay layer to balance the colors. So really just final adjustments, I'm doing some over painting. Playing with a design. I'm never really sure where I'm supposed to put my signature. If I could, I'd just leave it out to be honest with you. Most people don't even know what that symbol is, I just put it in for copyright reasons to just say, Hey, that's my signature. But I hate it. It's a compositional nightmare. I like pieces to really just speak for themselves. I'm using the liquefied tool there just to do some slide shape adjustments. And you can see, I mean, this is just really in your post production phase, trying to get that final loud. What would look like if you printed it? Where should I put the logo or the signature if you will? What kind of graphics could I do to enhance the piece. And to be fair, I actually think these subs of things really just detract from the work. And I spend way too much time filling around with those things, but I should probably just do another piece of artwork, to be honest with you. But effectively, that is about it for this commentary. There's just a few little touch ups that I do, but we've been through the bulk of the workflow, and I think you get the general idea of how you can really manipulate the form lighting principle to achieve varying degree, varying scale degrees of looks in your work. And so you want to start with the most complex one. You want to learn the most complex one, which is that full lighting workflow that we've gone through and understanding all these principles of light and color. And when you know the hard core crazy rules, then you can move to scaling it up or down as you need to. Looks like I decided there were actually some additional touch ups to be done. Particularly with the highlights on the clothing there, just to show up the forms a little bit more. What I'm doing is I'm actually doing the secret hair technique that I'm painting those lights, and then I'm soft erasing them out. Give them a subtle look. And the lines can see some of the lines have a bit of brown on them just to soften the line look. It's quite strange, actually. I'm quite convinced that I was done just now, but clearly I'm not. This does happen to me sometimes. I probably put the piece down for a few days, looked at it again and said, Hey, there's some stuff I want to change. Let me say that you don't have to do everything in one go. You really don't. Adding in some car shadows on the cards there and doing some over painting on the lips. I must say, though, I don't feel like this extra nit picking made too much of a difference overall that's one of the problems of the ages, W is a piece finished? Who knows? It's finished when you decide it's finished. And this was more of playing with a story. Maybe she was hiding cards. She's cheating at the game or something like that. That should be the end of the piece. Let's take a look at the time flow here. The end. So I will see you guys in the next Traps commentary. Do take a look at the full workflow. Show you we'll find some nuances in there. I'll see you guys in the next taps commentary. 4. Timelapse Commentary: ChronoViper: Welcome to the Chrono viper T labs, and we're picking up really just after the flats have been completed. And I've gone ahead and started working on the skin layer and adding in some soft shadows and a little bit of subsurface scattering. Now, this piece is a very comic book style look. The illustration is a very comic book style. And so I want to keep things pretty simple, pretty straightforward. And a lot of the times with comic book style work, the highlights and the shadows, as we've seen in the coloring style section, are usually marked out. And I think a lot of the time, the colorist has limited freedom, particularly in a comic book workflow. They have limited freedom of where they can place lights. A lot of the art direction in that regard is done by the comic book artist. Of course, it depends on the title, depends on the artist. But a lot of the time they stipulate where the lights should be and where the shadow should be because they're deciding how the form needs to read in the pencils. The inker as well needs to follow the direction of the pencil, which is basically the primary artist in a comic book. Here, the workflow that I'll move th is really nothing you haven't seen before We're working on the individual flat layers. And adding in the general big shadow stage, you could say, really keeping things simple and also making sure things read. Here on the hand, for example, the suit is really this gray color. The gun is also a dark gray. There can be a lot of confusion to the viewer if they can't differentiate the different shapes. And so what I did there on the hand is that I lightened the values of the shadows. And really, that's done purely for viewer understanding. It's not really even necessarily light theory. It's more about manipulating that composition so that the image is still communicating clearly. Here I'm moving into doing the flatfiles, of all the lit areas. Now he suit is probably some glossy nylon or some kind of plastic based material. It has very hard edged highlights. Something to definitely keep in mind with these sort of pieces is that when you're going for a comic book style look, you want the lines to do the talking. And so you don't want your coloring, your lining, your painting, to mess up all the time investment that you've given to the lines or to hide the lines too much. And I've found quite often that when you're trying to do a very high end painting workflow. Maybe you're going for realism or you're going for a very chunky painterly style, that when you're doing that on lines that have got a lot of work put into them, something's going to lose out. Either the painting style is not going to work well or read well, or you're going to have to over paint a lot of the lines. And really, if you want more painterly work, you tend to keep a lot of thinner lines, a lot less detail in the areas because you're going to be over painting that line detail. But when you're going for more of a line based art work, you want to keep things more simple. Keep the coloring slightly more simplified and have your lines read. Here using hard edged highlights, raising them to really just get that kind of metal look. Actually end up playing around with that a little bit more on that the blade area of the gun. There I was actually trying to figure out what layer that blade at the end of a ponytail was on. I eventually found it. I don't know what layer. I put it on. It was showing a layer with something, and I got totally lost. Now I'm doing all these red sections, giving them some shadow, and I'll do a highlight pass as well, a light forward slash highlight pass. Also, keep in mind, don't add speculars to things that just aren't specular materials. Obviously, that's going to change how the viewer is going to interpret that material type. What I was doing there is using a soft brush to kind of create an under glow lighting effect on the teleport pads. I do it here on the gun as well. I give it a bit of a highlight. And then I go right on top of the layer to the gun base. Give it a slight glow, so it seems like there's some light scattering happening. And then I realized pretty late in the game that her top lip shadow needs to be a little bit darker than the bottom lip. That particular thing really makes lips read that the top lip is darker than the bottom lip, ply because of the planes, not that we want to apply to hard core lighting theory, but because of the planes. The top lip plane faces down, so it's usually a lot more shadowed, and it'll pick up some reflected light from the ground. And the bottom lips plane obviously faces up, so it's usually a lot more lit. It's actually a quick trick, even when you're just using pencils to get really good looking lips, by making sure the top lip is dark, and the bottom lip is somewhat lighter. A Now, it's very likely that you've already done character art school complete character drawing. But if you haven't, you can take that course and have a look at how to achieve multiple styles of drawing. Because of course, drawing itself has multiple styles, all the way from realism, all the way down to simplified cartoons. Here I'm going into the layer, and then I just duplicate it and I do some adjustments. I'll do a little bit more adjustments because I noticed she was a little bit dark on the white background. It's also easier to lighten docs than it is to darken lights. So it is better if you work slightly darker and bring up the light rather than working too light, and then you're kind of in trouble with the shadows. And that is pretty much the end of that workflow commentary. At the end there I was just applying a photoshop effect called stroke, which was giving a gray border line to everything. It's really just just a little effect and added effect. I didn't go with it in the end of the day. I tried it. I didn't really go with it. And I'll see you guys in the next commentary. 5. Timelapse Commentary: Hiding Something: Welcome to the Hyding something demo, and we're picking up right after the flats and going to color variations. This is obviously a piece that you should probably be quite familiar with. This particular character was created specifically for this course. I wanted to have a very, very clear workflow for you guys. And so you probably already know all the phases of the workflow, but I wanted to include this demo as a nice long kind of overview of what you've learned in terms of applying the form lining principle, having all of the stages of the form lining principle applied in a piece. And so we've done color variations. We've moved to the skin there, and I'm going ahead and adding in the shadows. And we know that we want to do our general big shadows first, then our ambient occlusion shadows, then our form shadows, which I'm doing here. And then wherever we can, where we feel necessary, adding in those car shadows and the occlusion shadows. I know by now you've probably tired of hearing me say this, but I really repeat myself just to emphasize how important certain things are. And the shadows really are everything. You want to really, really overinvest in the shadows. This entire piece's total painting time was somewhere around 5.5 to 6 hours. I'll see the time lapsed full demo is a little bit shorter. I think it's somewhere around 2.5 to three. And a lot of that time is the shadowing phase. Trying to make sure that the shadows are placed correctly, asking myself, is the form reading well? Does this seem to make logical sense in three D space, where I'm placing the shadows? Also checking, where do I need a cost? Where do I need occlusion? Where do I need ambient occlusion? Is an edge not reading because the ambient occlusion is too light or too dark, is the edge of brush strokes too hard at some places or too soft. No doubt you've experienced throughout the course, just how complex the theory itself is. Really applying the workflow is pretty simple and pretty straightforward once you understand the theory and you have a logical workflow to follow. Applying it's not really hard. You just follow the steps. But you start seeing how complex light is, and even how much further you could take the lighting in something, moving the light sources around the piece, and also considering different material types. So here I'm just continuing to work the shadows. I really just want to think about where I'm placing these things. Her stomach area, you may notice the shadowing looks more toward realism in terms of the way that the light and shadow move over the muscle area. And that really is me looking at reference images and looking and abstracting really the light in the shadowed areas of the stomach region. And then I just rinse and repeat those same shapes that I learned maybe a few years ago. And really talking about the topic of reference as well, use it when you need it. Really use it when you need it. Obviously, don't steal, but you want to take the core principles from the reference and then reapply them in your work. Another thing to note is really that real life reference, particularly when you're doing reference for painting, you're looking at light and shadow is substantially different from photographic reference. Cameras are not as accurate as our eyes, just in general, but particularly in terms of how our eyes handle contrast, cameras don't have this sort of dynamic contrast capability that eyes have. And so whenever possible, really observe the world around you and look at how light is working on certain surfaces, different skin types, different weather conditions, different lighting conditions. Start trying to memorize how that might look, what kind of brush you might need to achieve that effect or what kind of hue saturation or reflected lighting colors or values you might need to pick. And so I'm moving through the piece here step by step. I'm going to increase the speed just a little bit to get us through it a bit quicker. You can see immediately, you add just simple, soft shadow to a flat, and suddenly it's three dimensional. That once again is a testament to the power of shadows. On that note, there are artists who actually flat to the shadow value. They flat to the shadow value. This might be you, right? Doesn't nothing changes about our theory, but they flat to the shadow value. We've been flatting to a mid tone, essentially, or a mid tone local color. They flat to the shadow value, and they only paint in the light. And perhaps if you think like that, I don't know many people who do, to be honest. But if you do think like that, there's nothing wrong with it. You've just then already done the shadows stage, and you'll have to then overinvest in your lighting stage, so it just gets reversed. But nothing will ever change that sort of fundamental rule of the two values. The two values have to read. Light and shadow have to read. Light and shadow have to build the form. And no doubt, if you've done character art school, complete character drawing, and now you're doing character art school, complete coloring and painting. You might think, Wow. There are a lot of rules. And that is realism. Realism has these rules. There are rules that we need to create things that look realistic or that can at least appear to be believable in some sense, they're in space, they're in time, they have, they have light. And what we do is we find our freedom and our creative freedom within the rules. And there's plenty of freedom within the rules. You can effectively create any kind of creature, any kind of being, any kind of person, any kind of world. It's unlimited. That's one of the wonderful things about realism. There is really clear communication happening. This is this creature and this lives in this world. It's this person with this personality, et cetera. So we're moving on to the light stage here. This is my full workflow of that lighting stage. I'm very careful to not go crazy, mainly put it in the lit areas, carefully consider, where does the light belong? Once again on the hair, I've mentioned it before. I'm mention it again for your sake. Chill out with the high lights on the hair, really chill out with them. Keep it to sort of one zone, maybe two, and you'll have decent looking here. Moving on to the reflected lighting stage here. Really, this is just picking and choosing those reflected lighting zones. It's going to speed it up a little bit. Thinking about the planes, which planes face downwards, and also making sure that that gradient edge doesn't look like a stripe, at least in this particular workflow, that it gradients n into the color it's flowing into. So under the shells, they pick up a little bit of reflected light. Now we're moving on to highlight stage one. Just getting those very bright lights in being even more tempered now than we were with the lighting stage. Only a few zones are going to get this extra light. And using it there as well. Tempered on the hair, holding up those forms. And going from element element and really just following our workflow. This workflow really has a lot of power. There's a lot of power in the workflow. You've seen the capability to scale up scale down in what can't you do once you know the form lining principle. It's not much you can't do. We move on to the speculates on the ice, and we'll go and put a few speculates on other areas as well. You can see me taking out certain lines. Doing the speculars on the sort of octopus leg there. She's not quite a mermaid. And the idea was really that she had a little bit of creepiness to her. She's got elf ears. She's got a knife behind her back. She's got octopus legs, yet she's still quite pretty. She's still quite beautiful. And I was playing around with using a green secondary light. Maybe I should have at the end of the day, but I want to keep things sort of standardized a little bit because that would have added to the eeriness of the piece. You're not sure if you can trust her or not. And then sort of the color would have linked into her eye color. You know, green doesn't necessarily seem good in some circumstances, particularly underwater. In a forest, it's okay. Underwater, it's a little bit weird, glowing green. So there we are adding the secondary lighting. And really, we're doing like a nice soft brushed stroke first, and then we go in to the lit area and kind of brighten it up. We do that obviously because we want to keep that edge nice and smooth, considering all the areas where that light would touch, enhancing where necessary. Adding little secondary light speakers into the eye, just gives us a nice dynamic feel. And then working on the costs and the occlusions. I think I actually want to go back and change that cost. I I don't really like the angle of it. I think it's okay. It's fine. It reads to a reasonable level. But it's just I suppose my subjective view that hey, you know what, I'd like to give it a bit more of a curve. The final one that we ended up with, give it a bit more of a curve. Well though, I guess it's okay. So here I move into our first adjustments before we start doing some of the finishing things and I was playing around with, possibly changing some of the hues of elements. In the end, I decided, for the sake of keeping everything standardized. We'll just keep it the same. We won't do any crazy changes. Moving subsurface scattering, putting a little bit of makeup on our eyes. Also using that soft light layer, which is above the skin layer and skin lighting there. And then we go into the so called secret hair painting technique. I wanted to call it Scott's secret hair painting technique because I do consider it mine, but let's just call it the secret hair painting technique and you guys can have it. And so here, I want to just emphasize how flowy you have to be. You really have to flow with the hair. You can't have these strokes coming out at weird angles or anything like that. The hair flows, you need to flow with the hair, and of course, it's shadows, so they are very important, much more important than the light. And so we really want to invest over invest, especially in hair, depending on the fidelity you want, you can take this particular technique all the way up to, very high end realism by using a range of stroke sizes from thick strokes to thin strokes representing single hairs, similarly in the lights. But you want to really think carefully about where you're adding these elements. Then of course, you're raising those tips and you get a very, very professional finish, a very professional look. Here we're doing the line coloring. I went with just sort of a local color most of the time. Just a darker local color, softens the image a little bit, makes it look a little bit less Illustrator comic bookie style. You generally want to leave the eyes as a particularly the eyelines, the eyelashes, you want to leave it as a darker value because when you start making the y lines too light, you lose contrast. And generally speaking, there is a lot of contrast in the eyes. Even in real people, there's just a lot of contrast. And here I'm doing some over painting, filling in gaps, clearing up all of those sort of nasty little areas I didn't fill in previously. And this is really going to be a testament to your level of dedication and professionalism in your work. You know, some artists might leave this in, didn't really care. You want to strive to be as professional as possible. I use a white background there because I was quite certain correctly so that I wasn't seeing the full full in properly, so quickly turned on a white background, turned off the gray and let the white shine through to have a better look. And you'll notice the bubbles are not perfect circles, and they could be, but they don't have to be, right? They don't have to be. You'll find that art really necessarily isn't about precision in realism, but more about precision in theory. Are you applying all the elements of lighting work foe? Are you using perspective relatively well in terms of how you're considering where to light elements? Are you thinking about the planes? There we did the blue over layer, and we did the chromatic aberration, moving the channels around, just by one pixel, softening the look and giving us a nice professional finish. And that really is the end of that workflow. So I hope you've enjoyed going through hiding something again in a little bit of a faster tar lapse from the overview Tar laps that we viewed in Module three. And Define gives us a nice solid view of each step. One thing at a time, getting each element done one thing at a time. That is the end of this workflow video. Thank you for watching. 6. C2 Conclusion Final: Congratulations for reaching the end of the course. If this is your first time through, remember to go through the course again and now engage in the assignments, applying all the practicalities of everything you've learned. If it's your second time through, please be sure to post your work. I'd totally love to see it, and I have no doubt that you've seen a rapid skill improvement as you've moved through this course. Please feel free to be in touch with me. You can ask me questions, leave me feedback, and I would love to see your work. I'd love to help you out and really walk side by side with you to get you to the level that you want to achieve. Thanks so much again for buying the course. I truly appreciate it, and I hope you've found an immense amount of value as you've moved through the course. That's all from me, and I'll see you guys when I see you. Cheers.