Coloring Digital Art: A Practical Approach

1. Intro: Hello everyone. I'm Mauricio Perez, a digital illustrator and digital painting enthusiasts based in Mexico City. To me, color and color theory are fascinating subjects, but they have an immense amount of subtopics to choose from, and it can be really easy to get lost in their complexity. You have primary colors, secondary colors, tertiary colors, color schemes, color harmony, color temperature, chromatic aberration, the list goes on and on, and if you're looking at it from a purely theoretical perspective, things can get really complicated and really frustrating in no time, but it doesn't have to be that way. I decided to make this class about color because it's a topic I've struggled with my whole life. Also because I know that every artist who aspires to become a professional needs to master this skill. If you just got your hands in a drawing tablet and you want to filled you digital canvas with amazing and colorful artwork, but you don't know where to start, this is class is for you. If your pieces rely heavily on linework and you find it hard to transition to more volumetric drawings and paintings, this class is for you. If you fancy two-dimensional graphic art, but you're interested in experimenting with a more plastic approach, this class is also for you. I want to keep things fun, I want to keep things simple, and at the end of the class, I want you to have a finished product, a finished illustration you can actually share on your social media. Here's how it's going to work. First, I will show you my tools and worker. You'll get familiar with the brushes I use, my settings, and how I keep my layers organized. Then I'll teach you about the fundamentals of shading. I'll show you how to shape basic volumes with some of my shading techniques. You'll learn about the three building blocks of color; hue, saturation, and brightness, how they relate to the color wheel, and how they relate two key concepts; color value and color temperature. After rushing through those three topics, we'll begin a step-by-step process in which you will learn how to apply local colors to your character, how to pick up light source, add some shadows, some lighting effects, and so finishing touches to complete your project, which will be a 3D version of your favorite 2D characters head. I created this class to help you in your own color exploration journey and to make color theory a little bit more enjoyable and a lot more palatable. Let's not waste any more time. Let's get to it. 2. Tools: [MUSIC] Okay, everyone. I thought I'd made a little introduction video to show you the tools I'll be using during this class. These are very simple tools that come by default in any digital painting software. Even if you're not using Procreate, you shouldn't have any problems to follow along. First, I'll open up my brush library, which is the brush icon at the top-right Menu bar. Go to the airbrushing brush set and select a soft round brush. As you can see, it's called a soft brush because it produces dots and lines with a blurry soft edge. Next, I'll pick a hard brush, which as its name also implies produces crisp and hard edge dots and lines. Speaking of lines, Procreate has a very cool feature. If you draw a line and hold the tip of your finger or Apple pencil down, it will create a perfectly straight line. Before you lift your finger up, you can change the length and direction of your line. Something similar happens when you draw a curved line. If you hold down your finger or Apple pencil, it will let you change the size and orientation of your curve. After you lift your finger, you'll be able to keep modifying your lines further by hitting the Edit shape button. If you draw a circle like shape and hold your finger down, it will create an ellipse. If you press and hold down with another finger, it will create a perfect circle. Something similar happens when you draw a rectangle and hold your finger down. Except this time if you press and hold with another finger, you will create a perfect square. By the way, if I tap and hold the color selection tool at the top-right corner, drag the color with my finger and lift my finger on top of my rectangle, I can fill the entire shape with color. Moving on to our next tool, the smudge tool. This is a very powerful tool that allows you to smear pigment around the canvas and create smooth and soft transitions from one color to another. But there's a couple of things I must mention. Number 1, as with the brush library, the smudge tool library lets you pick and choose from any brush in your collection, but I will always use the smudge tool with the soft brush selected. Number 2, I make sure to adjust my brush opacity to about 40 percent. Then I started smearing pigment using my finger or Apple pencil with swift and gentle touches on the screen, going from black to gray, then from gray to black, and also with vertical strokes until I get the gradient I want. Up next, we have the eraser tool. If I use it with the hard round brush selected, you helps me create crisp and hard edges. In this case, it's helping me define the edges of the rectangle I had created earlier. Then if I use the smudge tool, I can blur that edge and even make it disappear into a gradient. Then I can take my eraser again and redefine my edge. I can also use my eraser with a soft round brush selected to create a blurrier and softer edge. Then we have the selection tool. To activate it, I hit the selection icon at the top-left of my menu. This tool helps me select a section of my canvas and modify it without altering the rest of my piece. In this example, I selected an area of my canvas and filled it with paint using my brushes. We can also use the selection tool to make other modifications. This time I'm using it to select an element of my canvas, this black dot. Then by activating the transform tool, which is the little arrow icon next to the selection tool, I can make even more radical modifications like changing its size, move it around, or even distort it to change its shape completely. That's about it. We're now ready to move on and start painting. In our next lesson, we'll be talking about light and shadow. I'll see you there. [MUSIC] 3. The Color Panel: [MUSIC] For our first lesson, I want to show you the easiest and fastest way I know to shade a simple shape. But before I do that, I need to introduce our friend, the color panel. On the right-hand side of the top menu, you'll see a little circle that represents the active color. Tap to open the color panel and then tap the "Classic" tab at the bottom of the pop-over. In its classic version, the color panel allows us to adjust the saturation and brightness of a color by moving a radical around this rectangular color field. To change hue, we must use the first of the sliders below. But wait a minute. What does hue saturation or brightness even mean? Well, hue is just a fancy word for color. We move the hue slider left and right, and the color field changes color. It's that simple. Saturation or chroma refers to the brilliance and intensity of a color or hue. Move the slider to the right and it becomes more vibrant and intense. Move it to the left and it becomes muddier and grayer. Notice how when we manipulate this slider, the radical moves in a straight line from left to right inside the color field. Lastly, brightness, also known as value, describes how light or how dark a color or hue is. If we move the slider to the right towards white, our hue becomes lighter. If we move it to the left towards black, it becomes darker. Notice that this time the radical moves in a straight line from the top to the bottom of the color field. For now we're going to move the saturation slider all the way to the left, towards the gray. By doing this, our hue slider becomes irrelevant since our hues are fully desaturated, which means there are the dullest they can possibly be. This way we can paint in grayscale and focus on the very foundation of color, value or brightness, up next in Lesson number 3. 4. Value: [MUSIC] During this class, you'll see me change my opacity levels all the time. But what does lowering the opacity of a brush do exactly? I'll give you a quick example. I'm going to paint with the hard round brush using this dark gray. While the opacity is set at 100 percent, I can paint that exact value in a single stroke just by pressing down with the Apple pencil. When I lower the opacity to a 29 percent, even when the color selected is the same gray, a single stroke overlaid over itself is never going to get me to that value, no matter how hard I press with my Apple pencil. In order to make my value darker, I'll have to lift my stylus and paint over it. This approach allows us to build up our values in a much more controlled fashion. To begin shading an object, the first thing I must establish is the local value or local tone of that object. Simply put the local value is the real value of an object without the influence of light or shadow. One easy way to figure out the local value of an object is by painting a background. Now I have to ask a very simple question. Is my object lighter or darker than that background? If I decide that it's lighter, I'll paint it in a lighter value. If it's darker, in a darker value. Makes sense since things are not light or dark in and off themselves, they are always darker or lighter than other things. Now I have a flat shape. To make it appear three-dimensional, I have to introduce light and shadow. In order to do that, I need a light source. Let's imagine that the sun is illuminating the sphere from this angle. Now, one lucky break for us artists is that light travels in a straight line. To determine the shadow area of my object, all I have to do is draw two straight lines from the imaginary position of my light source and I'll get these two points. Now, all I have to do is join those two dots following the shape of my object, like a latitude line in a globe of the earth. What value should my shadow be? That depends on many aspects like the texture, material, and reflectivity of my object. I've heard people say that a good starting point is halfway to black from your local value. But I think that it may be a little excessive. I recommend that you go just a tad darker than your local value. If it's too light, you can always go darker. But as with traditional media, if you go too dark, trying to make your shadows lighter is much harder. To add my shadow, I'll go to my Layers menu, create a new layer and make it a clipping mask. That way I can only draw on the painted area of the underlying layer. Now I take my soft brush, decrease its opacity, increase its size considerably, and start adding my shadow. A quick and very important note. While I'm painting in my lights and shadows, I'm not putting my finger stylus down and rubbing it across the screen without lifting it. Instead I'm making little strokes, barely touching my screen as if I were drawing the letter U with my finger in the air, in a back-and-forth movement, starting from way outside my shape and working my way in, slowly building up my value. I'll make a new layer and place it underneath my shape. Remember those two lines I drew to establish our form shadow? Well, now I just need to stretch those lines to where I think the light is touching the floor and join those two new dots to create my cast shadow. I'll use the selection tool on the left side of the menu bar to create an ellipse. Then with the transform tool, I'll give it the shape I need and tap my finger anywhere on my canvas. Now, what value should my cast shadow be? I use the color picker by tapping and holding to select the value of the floor. Now I make it a bit darker and paint in my new value. Cast shadow done. I'll create a new layer and name it occlusion shadow. I go to my color wheel and go way down in value. I make my brush a little smaller and paint away. This will be the darkest value of this painting, since light has the most trouble getting there. Shadows like these tend to appear where two surfaces or objects meet, like my sphere and the floor in this case. See how this type of shadow makes my scene a lot more volumetric? [MUSIC] Let's paint in our light. Let's start with the least popular of them, reflected light. Besides traveling in a straight line, light has another property, it likes to bounce a lot. As soon as a ray of light hits a surface, it bounces at an angle, losing some of its intensity, but preserving just about enough to lighten the areas in shadow. When I paint my reflected light, it's imperative to make sure that its value is lighter than my formed shadow, but darker than my local value. To do that, I can open my color panel, pick the value of my shadow, then my local value, and choose a value between them. By adding reflected light, I created the darkest value in my sphere, a border or frontier that marks where light is no longer welcome, commonly known as the terminator. One light down, two more to go. I'll create a new clipping mask layer, color-pick my local value, and this time I'll make it a little lighter. Softly and slowly, I'll add some direct light. Finally, in another layer, I'll paint a little specular highlight by going a little lighter in value. My specular highlight should be pointing directly to my light source, by the way, because it's literally a reflection of that light source. We're done. This practical little exercise has taught us a lot about lightning an object, and controlling our values. They will be very useful when it's time to resume our class project. Now, we'll finally introduce color by learning a little something about saturation and hue. 5. Saturation: [MUSIC] In the previous lesson, I taught you how to manipulate the brightness slider on our color panel to obtain different values. In real life with actual pigments, the equivalent of that would be to mix black and white paint to get different shades of gray. Whenever I went up in the color field is like I added white to the mix and when I went down is like I added black to a mix. Now we need to examine what happens when we add color to our digital pallets. Now you know that if we move the radical all the way up to the top-left corner of the color field, we get the lightest possible value, which is a pure white. Conversely, if we move it to the bottom left, or right corner, we get the darkest possible value, a pure black. But if we move it to the top-right corner of the color field, what we obtain is a pure color or hue. A pure color is the most intense version of a hue, a color that hasn't been contaminated so to speak with black or white. When we move this circle around the color field, what we are effectively doing is adding white or black to a color. Let's demonstrate this in a more traditional way. Adding white and black manually like we would do with actual pigments. I'll start with this pure red. I'll sample it and add some white to it. I take my red at 100 percent opacity and add white at 50 percent. Then I pick that sample and add 50 percent white, sample that and add another 50 percent. Do that a couple of times more until I reach pure white. Now let's analyze what happened with the help of the color picker. If I color pick my samples, we can see how our pure red is moving towards white, losing saturation or intensity in the process. Now let's try the same but adding pure black this time, you'll notice that our red got lower in value but it didn't lose saturation. We can finish this lesson by saying that when adding pure black our color got lower in value, and when we added pure white our color lost saturation and got lighter in value. But wait a minute now, I thought you said that if the little circle was at the top of the color field, that was the lightest value we could possibly get. That's true when working in gray-scale. If we go to pure white and start saturating that white towards any hue, we increase its intensity but also affect its value. Not all colors are saturated equal. When we saturate a white towards purple, blue, or red, it gets darker super-quick. Green, orange, and especially yellow are late bloomers and it's harder for them to get darker in value. In other words, when we go from a lighter value to a darker value in grayscale or reticule travels in a straight line from the top left corner to the bottom left corner of the color field. But when we add color to the mix, it travels in an L shape from the top-left corner to the top-right corner, and then to the bottom-right corner of the color field. Like I said before, red, blue, and purple at full saturation are darker in value than yellow, orange, and green at full saturation. Take that in mind when working from grayscale to color because they can really mess up your values. That pretty much cover saturation. Let's move on to my favorite part, the hue slider, or as I like to call it, the color temperature slider. [MUSIC] 6. Color Temperature: [MUSIC] I know what you're thinking. I know that you know that I'm about to talk about the primary colors: red, blue, and yellow. If you're guessing that I'm about to tell you that if you mix those colors together, you get the three secondary colors: green, orange, and purple, you'd also be correct. I'm also pretty sure that if you guess that, then you must know that if you keep combining primaries and secondaries together, you get another type of colors called tertiary colors. But let me stop you right there, before we talk about tertiary colors, I'd like to separate these six colors here into two different groups. [MUSIC] Two different nations separated by a border. We'll call these two nations in dispute, warm colors and cool colors and these two nations each have a ruler. On the one hand, there is orange which we would consider king of warms in the color wheel, and on the other hand, we'll declare blue as the coolest color in the color wheel. This is just a metaphor by the way; in real life, the warmer a source of light is, the bluer it gets. [MUSIC] Look it up, it's pretty cool stuff. Also, color temperature is pretty subjective but for the purpose of this lesson, let's say that our warmer color is orange and our cooler color is blue. [MUSIC] Let's hit politics aside for a minute and keep mixing colors. I'll follow the same methodology as in the previous lesson, only this time, instead of mixing colors with black and white, I'll mix them with the adjacent colors in the color wheel. I'll start with this green and add a bit of yellow until I change hue, and then I'll do the same but with blue. Then I'll repeat the same process with each color and I'll talk to you in a bit. [MUSIC] By mixing colors together, we've created paths, lines of communication between colors of both nations. Even when their respective rulers wish to draw their citizens towards them and force them to pledge their allegiance, the other colors can't help but talk to their neighbors and in doing so, some of them change their political inclinations. Let's start with green again. We know that green is a cool color because it's on the cool side of the border but these greens that gravitate towards yellow are more liberal, more open to dialogue with the enemy. They embrace multiculturalism and consider themselves warm greens. Some of them are so radical that even cross the border looking for political asylum. Conversely, the greens that gravity towards blue or more conservative, they're loyal to their king, they're cool greens. By now, it should be pretty obvious to you that every primary and secondary color has two possible political inclinations. Yellows that gravitate towards green are cooler, and the yellows that go towards orange are warmer. Oranges that traveled towards red are warmer than those who travel towards yellow. Blues that go towards green are cooler than those who go towards purple. In some, there are warm, warms and cool warms, and cool cools and warm cools. But then, there's a third type of tertiary colors. These colors don't just mix with adjacent colors in the political or color spectrum. These colors mixed with the colors on the opposite side of the color wheel and they do so because they simply don't get into politics. They consider themselves neutral. To them, all colors are created equal and they should live in a world without borders, in peace and color harmony. I would like to talk about a little bit more about them in our next lesson and after that, we'll begin to work on our class project. [MUSIC] 7. Color and Light: [MUSIC] Now we know that every hue in the color spectrum can move in two different directions. Depending on the direction they take, they can get cooler or warmer. But how do we know in which direction a color should move when we're painting? The answer lies in the light source. Just as color can be warmer or cooler, light sources can be warmer or cooler as well. Our first step when lightning and coloring any scene is to establish the temperature of our light source. Some examples of warm light sources include sunlight, of course, a tungsten light bulb, or a bonfire, an overcast day, the moonlight or the light from your computer monitor are some examples of cold light sources. The color of the light will determine the direction your colors are going to travel in both the light and shadow families. You might have heard the phrase warm light produces cool shadows and conversely, cool light produces warm shadows. Do you remember how I talked about a border that separated the light from the dark in the gray-scale exercise called a terminator and that I also use supporter analogy to separate warm and dark colors in my color wheel? That's because those borders are one and the same. To better illustrate this point, I'll use this portrait of Matisse by French painter Andre Derain. Hopefully, you can see a very conscious decision by the artist to clearly separate his light and shadow families using color temperature. I don't even need to sample these colors for you to immediately acknowledge that the warmer colors are facing the light, which is most likely produced by the sun. You should also feel that there are cooler counterparts. Those blues, greens, and purples are in shadow. There is an idea I got from Marco Bucci, he calls it the bully principle. I'm paraphrasing, but Marco basically says that light is like a tyrant. It wants to influence all the colors it touches and make them more like itself. In Derain's painting, you can see this principle in action. The orangey-yellow light of the sun is so overwhelming it overpowers the local colors of Matisse's skin and pipe and also the grass behind him. The warm colors on this painting live in tyranny. You can feel how yellow is contaminating them and controlling their behavior. Meanwhile, on the shadow side, things are a lot more loose and anarchic, and cool colors are allowed to wander around the color wheel more freely. In fact, things can get so relaxed that there's a really cool party going on in the shadow side of practically any painting. A party's so wild that it can challenge our perception of reality. I'll use this other painting by Claude Monet to explain what I mean. This painting also has warm lights and cool shadows. But the way Monet achieved that contrast is less evident and more fascinating than Derain's. In this painting, the coolest colors are these purply tones in the background. But when I color pick them, the little circle in my color panel doesn't place them in the cool side of the color wheel, it placed them in the warm side. In fact, there are no hues of the cool family in this painting. How can it feel so balanced and colorful? Then I thought about tertiary colors. I remember that when we mix two opposite colors, we get those neutral earthy tones. I picked an orange from Matisse's painting and choose a dark blue because that's its opposite in the color wheel and tried mixing them together. After a while, I was able to match its value and a few minutes later I was able to match its hue. Then it hit me. When we neutralize a color by mixing it with its complementary, we also changed its temperature. That means that neutralizing a warm color makes it look cooler and neutralizing a cool color makes it look warmer. That's why all the hues in the painting stayed in the warm side of the color wheel. That cool purply tone was in fact a neutralized orange. It looks cooler because it does have some blue in its DNA and because it's surrounded by all those saturated yellows, oranges, and reds. In lesson 1, I told you that an object is a lighter dark in and of itself and it turns out that colors aren't cool or warm in and of themselves either. It all depends on the context that they're in. Well, that's about all the color theory that I know. Now the time has finally come to start working on our class project. [MUSIC] 8. Rough Sketch: [MUSIC] It's time to sketch our character. I will begin my sketch by activating the drawing guide in the Actions menu, which is the grange at the top left of the screen. Then I'll tap on 'Edit Drawing Guide' and select the 'Symmetry' option. Now, everything I draw on one side of my Canvas will be drawn on the other side in real-time. This would allow me to finish my sketch in half the time. When I'm sketching, I try to break down the figure I want to draw into basic shapes first, leaving any detail for later. I use the same approach for a cartoony characters, as well as for some more realistic and organic shapes. I think you should have guessed by now who this character is. So let me give you an example of what I mean by breaking down a character into simple shapes. I think of the cranium as a circle shape. I do the same for the eyes and ears. The upper lips are like a deflated football, and the cheeks are two circles as well. I'm using the peppermint brush included by default in the brush library. It leaves the mark similar to an HB or 2B pencil, and it is in my opinion, the closest thing to sketching with an actual pencil. But you can use whatever brush you feel most comfortable with, or you can scan or take a photo of a sketch you've drawn traditionally as well. There's really no right or wrong way to do this. After I've defined my simple shapes is all about adding details and refining my drawing until I get the character and expression I'm looking for. This sketch doesn't need to be perfect, since we will not use this line work in our final illustration. Just make sure to clean your lines so you know exactly where all your contours are. Don't be afraid to steer away from the original design of a character. Here I'm adding some fangs to my design because I want to add a personal touch to my piece. It might take you some time to get used to drawing with the symmetry option on. But trust me, it's absolutely worth it, and it's a lifesaver when you need to finish a piece in a hurry. Here I'm using simple shapes again to draw his hair. You'll notice that it takes me a couple of tries to get it right. So my advice to you is not to try to jump straight into clean lines at the very beginning of your drawing. Clean lines are the result of many layers of sketching. Do several rough passes, lowering the opacity of your brush, and drawing loose lines until you feel like you're ready to commit to harder and darker lines. And we're done. On to the next phase, the color block. 9. Color Block: [MUSIC] We'll begin our coloring process by making a blocking with flat colors, separating and naming the largest shapes of our subject in different layers. [MUSIC] I'll start by creating a new layer and placing it below my sketch. Then I'll pick my first local color and begin painting without any regard for the edges of my figure. Remember that in Lesson 1, I told you that your local value was the value of an object without the influence of color or light? Well, the same idea applies with local or flat colors. They are supposed to serve as a starting point from which we will begin to add our shadows and lights. A color blocking is essentially a layer of color that serves as a starting point. Flat colors referred to areas of color painted in uniform or identical tone and hue. [MUSIC] When I'm done coloring an area of my drawing, I'll pick my eraser with the hard round brush selected to create a nice and clean contour. I can also set my sketch layer to multiply and lower its capacity to see what I'm doing more clearly. [MUSIC] There are many ways to do a color blocking depending on what kind of software you're using. Some people prefer the Lasso tool, the Pen tool, or the magic wand while using photoshop for instance. The cool thing about Procreate is that it lets me use that feature I talked to you about in my introduction, where if I paint a straight or curved line, Procreate with automatically polish it and then let me modify it. Only this time I'm not using it to paint, but to erase all the paint I don't need. [MUSIC] When I'm done correcting, I'll open a new layer. This time I'll place it above my skin layer since the eyes are in front of it. That is also the reason why I didn't polish those edges because I knew they will get covered in paint. With drawing assist node activated, I draw a circle and Procreate does half the work for me. Then I tap and hold my screen with another finger to make it a perfect circle. Then I tap and drag from the color circle to the inside of one of my eyeballs to color them. [MUSIC] During this process, we won't be focusing on any details, but rather on establishing the major masses of our subject in our color range. It's very important that every time you color a new element, you do so in a different layer. Placing elements that are the closest to us in layers above our first layer and the elements that are the farthest away from us in layers below our first layer. It may seem like a lot of work now but trust me, it'll make our life much easier later where we begin to shade our character. [MUSIC] I will also make sure to include the PSD file of this illustration so you can see how I organize my layers. This is a pretty straightforward process. It's not particularly hard, but it can be time consuming depending on the complexity of your character. So put some music on, loosen those shoulders, relax and enjoy it. [MUSIC] Choosing the right colors for a painting is a subject matter that deserves its own class and that's precisely why I think this exercise of painting a cartoon character is so useful because the color palette is already established. Cartoon characters already have very distinctive colors assigned to them, which we can use as flat colors for our illustration. By the way, you've probably noticed that I'm picking my local colors from a palette. I created it by tapping the palettes tab in the color panel, then I tapped the plus sign in the top right corner and selected new from photos. Then I loaded a screenshot of my character that I saved in my camera roll and that was it, I had my palette. But you don't necessarily have to use that method. You can pick and choose your flat colors following your gut. Changing cooler tones for warmer tones or vice versa. Don't feel limited or afraid to experiment until you get something that looks good to you. [MUSIC] Don't forget to activate the drawing assist every time you create a new layer by tapping on it and selecting drawing assist from the options menu. [MUSIC] One common mistake when painting eyes and teeth is to color them using pure white, but you need to remember that you need to be able to go lighter in value to add your direct light and highlights in those areas. I prefer to use a light gray for the eyes and a light yellow for the teeth. But again, give yourself permission to experiment with different options until you get something that looks right to you. [MUSIC] It's also a good idea to deactivate your linework layer every once in a while to check for imperfections and wobbly edges in your flats. [MUSIC] Our color blocking is complete and we're ready to start shading. [MUSIC] 10. Shadows: [MUSIC] Now it's time to add our shadows. To do that, I'll start by establishing my light source and the direction from which the light is pouring down my subject's face. I drew these blue guidelines to help me establish where light and shadow areas will begin and end, and also to help me create any cast shadows. In this example, I'll shade the nose by painting in my shadow where those two blue lines touch it. [MUSIC] You'll notice that the red I chose to paint my shadow is traveling towards purple or getting bluer. By making that choice, I've already established that my light source is warm and therefore all my shadows will be cool throughout the rest of the piece. Everything we've covered in this class revolves around this simple idea. When you're applying shadows and lights to your local colors, you are changing their value by making them lighter or darker. But every time you change values, there's got to be a corresponding changing hue towards a warmer or cooler version of your flat color. The direction your colors take will be determined by the temperature of your light source. If it's warm, your highlights should be warm and your shadows cool. If your light source is cool, your shadows should be warmer. [MUSIC] Now you've seen me using my guidelines to paint in the shadow cast by the nose of my character. Both the technique and the brush I'm using during this whole process are the ones that I showed you in the lesson about value. I'm using a soft brush with a very low opacity and I'm building my shadows working from the outside to the inside of my figure, gently lifting my Apple Pencil after every stroke. Don't forget, you can also sculpt your shadow shapes using the eraser tool. Quick tip. As I'm adding my shadows, I keep thinking about each individual area of my character's face in terms of simple shapes. I'm thinking about the cranium, the nose, the eyes, the mouth, the cheeks, and chin, essentially a spheres. The only difference is that some of them are more elongated or less perfect than others. You can see that reducing your character to simple shapes is not only useful to sketch them, but also to render them. I told you in lesson number one to avoid going too dark with your shadows. But it seems like I failed to follow my own advice in the mouth area. No problem though, all I have to do is tap on my clipping mask layer and adjust it's opacity to make those shadows a little less intense. I'm sure by now you have noticed I'm adding my shadows using clipping masks. To use a clipping mask and procreate, I simply create a new layer above any flat color layer. I tap on my new layer and select clipping mask from the Flyout menu. Any changes made onto a clipping mask will be clipped to the layer directly below it. You can layer as many clipping mask on top of your flats as you need. I could also use the Alpha Lock option in the Flyout menu to add in my lights and shadows. But if I choose to do so, all the changes I do to my image will be permanent. I like to have the possibility to try out different color temperatures and delete any changes I'm not pleased with. I typically use one clipping mask for my shadows and another one for my lights, and once I'm happy with the direction my piece is taking, I merged them together. But that will happen further down the road. [MUSIC] The process is always the same. To create a new shadow, I color, pick the local color of an area, change its hue, making it slightly cooler at a little bit of saturation and make its value darker. [MUSIC] Remember to work slowly and progressively. Don't make your shadows too dark too soon. It's better to keep reevaluating and tweaking your values as you add more lights and shadows to your image. [MUSIC] That's the point of using clipping masks to be able to make changes to your image at any step of the way and as you deem them necessary. [MUSIC] Just remember this is my first shadow pass and I'll probably keep adjusting my values as I keep adding details to my piece. [MUSIC] Well, these form shadows are looking pretty good to me. I think they've added a lot of volume to my character already. With that in mind, let's get to the next step, occlusion shadows. [MUSIC] 11. Occlusion Shadows: [MUSIC] Occlusion shadows, also known as ambient occlusion or contact shadows are a type of shadow that is independent of the directional light source. To select the color of my ambient occlusion, I simply pick the color of my form shadow and make it a little lower in value and increase a little bit of saturation. It also doesn't hurt to make the hue a little cooler if you wish. To paint the shadows, I need to make my brush a lot smaller in order to create a hard edge. Then I'll make it slightly bigger to create a smoother transition. You can think of this type of shadows as the places where two surfaces meet, where the light has no way of getting. You'll see me painting them where the nose meets the mouth, where the eyes touch the face, in the corners of the mouth, the inside of his ears, and any other place I think the light would have trouble getting in. I mentioned that light would have trouble getting into the corners of my character's mouth, which will create a cast shadow over my teeth. To achieve that effect, I'll now use the selection tool. If I tap the "Freehand" option in the menu bar at the bottom of the screen, the Lasso tool will let me draw freely over the area that I want to work on, creating a dotted line indicating the area that I've selected. When I'm happy with my selection, I simply tap on the gray dot that appeared when I started drawing to close my selection. Now I can use my soft brush to paint at the very edge of my selection, effectively creating a hard edge and my cast shadow. Now I just have to repeat the same process on the other side of my character's mouth. Then I have to select my teeth and darken the cast shadow I painted earlier a little bit more. [MUSIC] During the flat colors phase, I painted and shaded my teeth as one solid structure. But the selection tool allows me to separate each individual tooth and paint the occlusion shadows between them quickly and easily. I simply have to go over the edge of one tooth and select a small area of an adjacent tooth. Then by using a soft brush, I start painting near the edge of my tooth to create the occlusion shadow. This way, I can give the impression that his teeth are in contact with each other and that they are one in front of the other. Now I just have to repeat the same process five more times. [MUSIC] I think that covers the occlusion shadows present in my character's mouth. Let's move onto his face. I will add some occlusion shadows in every area where two surfaces meet, like the eyes and his forehead or his cheeks and his eyes, at the top of his head where that lump of hair and his cranium skin meet. Another obvious place to add an occlusion shadow will be the inside of his ears. I think this part of the process is when our characters really start coming to life. In my opinion, occlusion shadows really sell the illusion of three-dimensionality. As I mentioned in the previous lesson, adding shadows to your image as well as adjusting how light or dark they should be is a long process. I usually don't paint in my lights and shadows so orderly and methodically. Being completely honest, I tend to go back and forth from shadows to light and back to shadows in a much more intuitive and unruly fashion. But for the sake of clarity, I'm trying to keep things as orderly as possible. Just remember that most of the time you'll have to make a second or even a third pass in order to get the values of your form shadows and your occlusion shadows right. Great. That's it for our occlusion shadows. Onto the next step, painting in our light. 12. Lights: [MUSIC] This is probably the easiest part of the process. To create a highlight, I'll simply color pick my local color and go on the opposite direction in the hue slider towards a warmer hue. Then I'll decrease the saturation considerably. Finally, I'll lighten this value by sliding the bottom slider to the right. But remember, try your best to not go to pure white. I'll begin by adding direct light to the iris or pupils of my character. This is pretty much like adding light to that sphere we painted in gray scale at the very beginning of the class. Next, I'll paint in the direct light on the nose of my character. I make sure to desaturate my local color and move it towards a warmer hue this time. Don't overdo it, a little bit will do. [MUSIC] Now, it's time to add some highlights. This should be the lightest values in our composition. I'll go with a super light red for the nose of my character. [MUSIC] Try to be subtle with the highlights as well. If you overdo them, your character could end up looking too plasticky. [MUSIC] I'll also put a highlight in the lower lip since it's facing the light as well. [MUSIC] Next, I think I'll add some direct light to his tongue. But this time, I'll use one of the texture brushes that come by default with Procreate instead of my regular stuff brush. After a few experiments, I decided to go with the old skin brush in the materials section of the brush library, but you can try other texture brushes as well. [MUSIC] For the highlights in the eyes, I'll use almost pure white and a hard round brush. [MUSIC] Don't forget to turn off the symmetry option while painting highlights, since all of them should be facing right towards the light source. [MUSIC] I think that in order to make these highlights pop, I need to darken the value of the shadows in the eyeballs to create a little bit more contrast. This is what I meant by making several shadow passes. As you progress with your painting and keep adding detail, this type of adjustments will become more and more necessary. [MUSIC] Then with the help of my eraser, I'll create a softer edge at the bottom of the highlight, erasing it with a soft round brush at a very low opacity. [MUSIC] I think we're done. Now, it's time to work on our background. [MUSIC] 13. Backgrund and Reflected Light: [MUSIC] To work on my background, I like to create a new layer and place it below every other layer in my project. Now, it's time to choose a color for our background, which will then inform us about the color of our reflected light. I love how these neutral pink looks against the more vibrant colors of my character. But since I gave him fangs, I don't think it fits the mood of the piece. I need something a little darker and macabre. I decided to go with a dark purple since my character is a pale yellow and purple is it's complimentary. Then I'll pick a lighter version of that purple and create a gradient using a big soft brush. Then I can use the Gaussian blur adjustment to make it even smoother. Now, I'll add some reflected lights by picking a lighter and more desaturated version of the purple in the background because this phenomenon is produced by the light produced by your light source bouncing off your background. Mind you that this type of light is less intense and only visible in the shadow areas of your painting, so make sure to paint it gently and smoothly by using a soft brush with a very low opacity. I will add reflected light in every area of my character that's facing the floor, like the bottom of the upper lip, the bottom of the ears, the chin, the bottom of his hair and the bottom of his nose, and also the bottom of his eyeballs and the bottom of his pupils. You must also keep in mind that its value should be lighter than your form shadow value, but darker than your halftone or local value. To help you with that, I think this is the perfect time to introduce a little hack that can help you to keep your values under control even when you're working directly with color. This is what you need to do. First, create a new layer and place it above every other layer in your project. On the right-hand side of your layer, you'll see one or more letters, these tell you which blend mode is active on your layer. By default, normal mode is active, shown by the letter N. Tap it to open the "Blend Modes" menu. Now, select the "Color" option at the bottom of the list. Now, paint your whole layer with white paint and you have a gray scale version of your piece. This will make it a lot easier to judge if your values need adjustments. The awesome part is that by using this layer with this blend mode on, you get two illustrations for the price of one, one in full color and another one in gray scale. I love how reflected light really helps to sell the true dimensionality of the character. I forgot to mention that I'm still creating new clipping mask and clipping them to my local color layers , but at this point, you could choose to paint reflective lights in your shadow layers or your light layers, or you could merge those layers together to keep things more simple and organized. You'll learn more about that on the next lesson. We're done. Now, let's go to our final lesson where we will refine and add some final touches to our project. [MUSIC] 14. Final Touches: [MUSIC] Now I'm going to do something I think I should have done earlier, which is merging my layers. You can merge a layer by tapping on it, bringing up Layer Options and then tap "Merge Down". Here I'm using another method. I'm merging multiple groups by pinching them together with two fingers. Simply pinch together the top and bottom layers you want to merge. Much better. Now what I'm going to do is create a new group of layers by tapping on a layer and then selecting every other layer I want to group by sliding my finger to the right on top of each one, then I'll tap on the option "Group" at the right corner of the layer panel. After I group my layers, I will swipe left with one finger and select the option "Duplicate". I'll tap on my new created folder and select "Flatten". Now I have a copy of my character in one single layer. It's time to add some final touches to our painting to really make it pop. I'll start by adding a texture. I've gathered some textures from the Internet and saved them in a procreate file so I can have easy access to them. But I'm pretty sure you can find a lot more by browsing through the Internet. I'll pick this old book texture. I'll press in slide with three fingers in my screen and a menu will pop, then I'll tap on "Copy". Then I will go to My File, I slide three fingers down and tap on "Paste". The texture will appear in a new layer. Now I have to enlarge it until it fits my Canvas using the Move Tool. Next, I'll tap on the layer and choose between the different layer most procreate or any digital painting software offers. First I try multiply, then I'll scroll down to see if there's something else I like. I'm really digging this divide mode. It has made everything cooler. Now I can go to the Adjustments Menu and add a little bit of noise using the noise filter. I'll make it harder or smoother sliding my finger left and right. I think I'll add some blood in his fangs by creating a new layer above my teeth and playing around with the brushes in the elements section of the brush library. I lower the opacity of the clouds brush and create some bloodstains on his teeth. This clouds brush also allows me to add a little fog in the background that I think will add a nice touch to the piece. I just need to create a new layer, place it above my background and paint away. Then painting on the same layer, I'll pick a hard round brush with a rather small size, low rate opacity and paint in a little rim light. I think his hair could use some work too. As you can see, I broke the edges of the hair on the left side of his head. I did it by selecting the fine hair brush in the materials folder in the brush library. Then I color pick the sample of his hair and added some loose hair strands by adding some brushstrokes following the curved lines of the edges of his hair. When you're done adding details to your character, all there is to do is keep adjusting your values using the color mode layer we created earlier until you are satisfied. You can keep playing around with the vast array of filters and effects your digital software of choice provides and with all the incredible texture brushes you can find online if you look around. Once you are happy with the result, it's time to save your file and export it to share it with the world. Congratulations. [MUSIC] 15. Final Thoughts: [MUSIC] Hello everyone. If you made it all the way through here, there's just one more thing left to say, thank you. I really hope you enjoyed watching this class as much as I enjoyed creating it. Believe it or not, during the long process of writing, filming, and editing this class, I solidified a lot of concepts that I understood. I made this class trying to include all the theoretical and practical information I wish I had when I first got my hands on a drawing tablet, and I barely scratched the surface. This class is meant to motivate you to deepen your understanding of color theory, to study the old masters, as well as allow you to understand the workflow of many contemporary artists that upload their digital painting process videos to the web. Remember that getting good at anything is all about effort and consistency. Don't hesitate to leave a comment or review of the class, and please don't hesitate to follow me to receive more content like this if you like this class. Once again, thank you so much for taking this class, and I'll see you next time. [MUSIC] 16. Bonus Video: Student Project Critique #1: Hello everyone and welcome to the first installment of the critique rig, a space dedicated to offer you some feedback on the class projects you submit through my Skillshare class. Coloring digital art, a practical approach. To date. It will feature artwork submitted by Edna. I'd like to start by pointing out all the good stuff about your project. First of all, great drawing. It's impressive to think you didn't even use a stylus, but rather your computer mouse to draw it. So kudos to you. Secondly, it seems to me you have a very solid understanding of older lighting principles discussed in class. I see you use one light source. I can see the direction in which the light is traveling through our cast shadows, occlusion shadows, and even some reflected light. That lets me know you have a pretty good grasp on the concepts and ideas discussed in class. In a solid enough foundation to keep building on it and improving through practice. But there are a couple of issues with your painting. To better illustrate them, I'll take advantage of the color layer hack I showed you in lesson 13. In case you forgot, here's how it works. You open your Layers panel, create a new layer. Tap the letter N to open the Blend Modes menu. Then select the option color, fill the whole layer with white paint, and you have an instant grayscale version of your project. I'll duplicate the layer to be able to show you the before and after versions of my quick paint over. The first issue I see has to do with your values. Can you notice that even when the colors are different, the value of the background is almost the same as the value you use to color your character. In fact, if you squint your eyes in some parts is difficult to see where the character ends and the background begins. That is called a lost edge and it's not always a bad thing. In fact, many artists use this technique to enhance their compositions, improve their shape language, and direct the attention of the viewer. Making them lose interest in the areas that blend with the background and pointing their eyes towards focal points. But in this case, given we only have one character in a solid color background, my guess is that it will be better to have a clearer and higher contrast between character and background. The second issue has to do with color temperature. I feel that the difference in temperature between the areas in light and the areas in shadow could be a little bit more emphatic or dramatic, as it is, the purplish stones you use to color carriage are both pretty cool. I feel like they also don't have enough contrast. So we have a lack of contrast in both temperature and valid. And I can address both issues by color picking the purple you used in the shadows and making it a bit more desaturated, brighter and warmer. I will also color the inside of his mouth a little darker to create a bit more contrast with the yellow teeth. Now you'll see me coloring the teeth in a lighter yellow to create a bit more contrast as well. Finally, let's address the darkest areas of the character, which are the nose, the ears of the browse. While using black or any color close to it, you might get tempted to be very conservative when it comes to paint in daylight. But don't be. It is as important to have a clear distinction between light and shadows in those areas as it is when you use lighter or more vibrant colors. And finally, never neglect adding bright highlights in areas like the notes. Especially if your character is an animal. Dogs, cats, bears, wolves in creatures alike tend to have very wet and bright noses. But focus in the eyes since they are the ultimate focal point in any portrait painting. Now when I activate my Grayscale layer, hopefully you'll be able to see a clear distinction, a higher contrast between the parts of the character Dorian light and the ones that are in shadow. It's getting a little better. But I think we can get an even higher contrast this time by altering the background color. I'll use a less saturated and slightly brighter version of this green. And what that does is makes the background recede into the distance, making our character pop seem closer and draw the attention of the viewer. So in conclusion, every time you want to figure out if your values and color temperature are working nicely. You can do two things. When working digitally. You can use a white layer in color blend mode to get a grayscale version of your painting that will remove color from the equation and let you judge your value selection. And if you're working traditionally, you can simply squint your eyes and see if the areas of light and shadow are distinguishable from one another in both value and color temperature. Here I'm using the Gaussian blur tool to simulate what happens when we squint our eyes. If you can see the border between light and shadow and warm and cool color families that we discussed in lesson 6.7. With enough clarity, it probably means you need to adjust your values. And that's all for the quick tip of today. Hopefully you'll find this information useful and helpful in the road ahead. Lastly, I'd like to encourage you to post your artwork in the project and resources section of the class. I'm looking forward to see what you're working on and that will be more than happy to critique your artwork and help you succeed. Also, don't hesitate to leave a review of the class in the review section. It may not seem like much, but it really makes a difference in terms of making this class accessible to more people in the platform. Thank you so much for your time and I'll see you very soon.