Transcripts
1. Digital Color: Light & Shadow Made Easy!: Welcome to my rendering course. Here I'll teach you how to add light and shadow by analyzing the forms in your comic art, manga illustrations, and I'll teach you my methods for creating rich and detailed colors one step at a time. My name is Kurt, and I'll be leading you through this course. I've been working in the comics industry since 2011 for publishers such as Image Comics, IDW, and Top Cow on books like Judge Dredd, Glitterbomb, and Hackslash. I started creating art tutorials on YouTube back in 2013 and since then I've recorded hundreds of hours of tutorials and taught thousands of students all over the world about digital art. I've designed this course for anyone looking to improve the quality of their rendering. Rendering is basically adding the highlights and shadows to a piece of art. Understanding how to see in three dimensions when you've only got two can be a little complicated, but I'll show you techniques for deciding where those lights and shadows fall. By the end of the course, you'll be able to use these easily repeatable steps to create your own masterpieces. I'll be teaching you methods that I've sharpened over the years, doing thousands of pages as a professional colorist and there's no talking heads, no PowerPoints. This is all step-by-step, all at real-time and you'll be able to see my screen throughout and follow along. We'll start off learning the different types of lighting and how to apply them. Direct, indirect, ambient, I'll show you how working with multiple layers of lighting can create an amazing final result. You'll get all of my high resolution files with all the layers and I'll even include some of my own PSD files from some of my published work with all the layers so you can study and learn from those too. I'll be using Photoshop and Procreate in this course, but feel free to use any art app that has layers and layer modes, whether it's Clip Studio or Krita or Sketchbook Pro or MediBang or Art Studio Pro, all of those will work. You want to be a better colorist, you want to be better at lighting, this is the course for you. Check out all the details in the description. I hope to see you inside.
2. Course introduction: Hey there, my name is Kay Michael Russell and welcome to whatever I have decided to call this course. This is my new rendering course. A rendering, not in the 3D modeling way, but 3D as in just light and shadow. I've done other coloring courses in the past. I have several, and I've always focused on the big picture of what it means to be a storyteller as a colorist and how to draw focus and add atmosphere and mood and all these really big concepts that are really the most important thing when it comes to color, at least in comics, which is my background. But I've never really focused on why light goes in a certain way on a face or why this shadow looks this way. It's something that I've been asked before over the years of well, how did you do that or why did you decide to do this? I haven't intentionally avoided this course, but it is pretty technical. A lot of this stuff is, and I realized that when I started planning this is that there's so much that runs through my head as I'm choosing where the lights go, and where the highlights are, and where the shadows go, where the reflections go. That I didn't think it was really suited for YouTube, especially I have a YouTube channel and in today's day and age where everyone has, if you don't grab someone the first 10 or 15 seconds, they're not going to watch your video. It wasn't really suited for that, it's little too technical for that. I've decided to put this course together to show you guys how I think about light and shadow. The other reason that I haven't done a course quite like this in the past is a lot of the stuff I've learned really over the last year-and-a-half. Not the big things, but some of the small details and things that I've picked up, little tricks that I've picked up along the way that have made me much more comfortable working with light and shadow. I really want to dig into that in this course. I should clarify that this is not a drawing course necessarily. If we work on any particular piece of art and I'm going to provide you with the line art for that. I don't expect you to be fantastic. A pencil or ink to be able to do this course. Although, my focus in my career has typically been comics and I've gotten into some digital illustration lately. But the concepts we're going to talk about, they're going to work in almost any art style. Whether you're coloring comics, or whether you're coloring your own illustrations, or web comics, or digital painting even to an extent. These lessons are universal and applied all of those different areas. You'll probably hear me reference things in terms of comics terms a lot because that's just what I'm used to. I've colored atomic comics. But anyway, I hope you guys enjoy the course and let's get started.
3. About the instructor: Before we jump into the course, I want to take a few minutes and tell you guys a little bit about me so that you know whom you learning from. Again like I said earlier my name is K. Michael Russell or you can call me Kurt. Most people in the real world do, K-U-R-T. I've been working as a colorist since about 2011. Some of you that have noticed my hairline are probably saying that was a late start. Yeah it was. I was in my mid-thirties before that took off for me. I pulled up a comicvine.com which is sort of a Wikipedia of comic book credits. You can go there if you want search for my name and you'll see. I've worked on about 80 books. You can see my pictures about 20 pounds.I'm not going to talk about it, I need to change that one I guess. So I've been coloring six seven years I guess. It was a slow start those first couple of years, I seriously would say about 4-5 years. Not long after that when I realized that there wasn't a lot of coloring education out there and thought people needed, I created a YouTube channel. If you're watching this video, there's a good chance that you probably came from there. Most of my audience does. But if you're not familiar with it you can go to YouTube, search for my name K. Michael Russell and you'll find my channel which is primarily focused on comic book coloring tutorials but there is some digital painting and some illustration stuff in there. I want to expand that into other areas and drawing and things eventually but not there yet. You can also go to comiccolor.com and look up my credits there. I've got a few more things than comic vine list just because they don't always list every little short and pitch and things that I worked on. That is a little bit about me. Last I checked, I've students in 147 countries or something ridiculous like that. I never expected this to grow the way that it has. Wherever you are watching this course now you know a little bit about me, so let's dive in.
4. Tools: I wanted to do a quick video on the tools that I'll be using first-off, because everyone always wants to know what am I using. Do I need to use that? It's totally up to you. Honestly. Whatever you want to draw on, whether it's Procreate or Crito or GIMP or Clip Studio or RStudio Pro or Photoshop or whatever, use whatever you want. But everyone always wants to know what I'm using so I'm going to go over that with you guys real quick. First off, my primary application that I think I'll be using during this course is Procreate. This is an iPad Pro application or regular iPad 2, I guess. But I got an iPad Pro myself, 2017 model with newest version of Procreate and Apple Pencil. That's what I use most of the time. We'll probably do some stuff in just regular old Photoshop. I use Photoshop CC. Not everyone is a fan of the subscription model, but I've got to pay for the video editor and all that stuff too anyway, so I just go in and get everything. In Photoshop, you'll notice MagicPicker and that's a lot of people ask me about that, my color picker. It's an extension, so paid extension called MagicPicker, so you don t have to have it. It just keeps the color picker open, which I like more than the little pop-up box thing that Photoshop does. But I'll either be using Photoshop or Procreate in this course. But like I said, if you prefer another application, there are a lot of good applications out there. Like I said, clip studios, very popular, Art Studio Pro. I discovered recently seems to be pretty awesome. There's free stuff like Crito and Gam, and I'm sure I'm missing something major Sketchbook Pro. Whatever you want to draw with, you can keep drawing with. I'm going to try to keep this course as agnostic as possible when it comes to applications. But since everyone always wants to know what I'm working with, now you know. Let's move on.
5. Let's clarify some terms: This lesson I want to cover a few, just some of the basic terminology and get some of the out of the way and make sure that we're all on the same page. This series of lessons isn't really going to be how to color 101. I'm going to assume that you can get a drawing to this point, for example, all it's just a line art layer with some like a pencil drawing with some basic flat colors underneath. If you don't know how to do this, then I would suggest maybe checking out some of the more basic courses, some of my YouTube videos on some of the basics of how to color, because the nuts and bolts of how this works, I'm not really going to get into very heavily in this course. But I didn't want to do one video where we just walk through this so that at least all on the same page here. When you guys hear me talk about line art or the inks tend to be tall it, that a lot of times, I'm just talking about the regular line art layer that wherever your drawing is, basically. Now, in this case, I've got a drawing at the top. I've got basic background color layer below it and then in between, we've got what I call flats and what the industry calls flattens and the comics world. If you guys hear me talking about the flats layer or flattening, flats are just the very basic flat colors. That's why it's called flattening. There's,no light, there is no shadow, it's just the Skinner that color, the hair is brown, eyes or blue. There is no variation in the colors at all. The reason this is important, at least especially in comic type art, is that we can always go back and use that layer to make selections. Just about any art application's going to have some selection tool or some magic one type thing. For example, I can go to my Flats Layer, even if I've done other things on top and use the magic one to select areas that are all that one single color. It's important to make sure that once you've set this flat layer, once you've got your color set here, go ahead and lock that layer down. In then the file that I sent you guys that's available for download files should already be that layer should be locked down, but you'd never want to edit that layer. You might can edit the entire color, but you don't want to do any, brushing or any rendering of light and shadow on that layer because we can always go back and use that to help us make selections. We can make selections, say on the flats layer and then work above it with a different color. You can see how that contains that. I know this is really basic, but I do want to cover a few of these topics for you guys. The other thing that you're going to see me reference throughout the course is Blending Modes, I don't always call them blending modes I usually just say the Layer Mode, it depends on the app you're using, but just about any major or application has blending modes or layer modes. What these are right up in Photoshop anyway, they're up at the top and you can in there the normal and multiply in screen. You guys are probably familiar with some of this if you've been doing digital art very long at all, but the very basics are you put your line art in multiplying at the top, and then everything you color is underneath that, a multiply will hide all of the white space basically in your line drawing. The line artists at the multiply and then we're coloring underneath. We'll be using different layer modes throughout the course, but those are some of the basics. Again, if this all sounds a little too much for you, you might want to pause and check out some of the more basic lessons first before we move on in the other stuff, there's a, basics of digital art with procreate course that I've got, there's YouTube videos that I'll link that I've done. I don't want you guys to feel too lost at the beginning, but these are just some of the real basic concepts. I think they were ready to move on now.
6. Rendering direct light: All right. In this lesson we're going to discuss a type of light, it's called direct light. When most people think in terms of the light source, direct light is really what they're talking about. I'm going to use this program called Handy to show you guys how this works. In the application there are multiple light sources, but I've got these turned off. As I move these lights around, you'll see some other ones, there's one back here also, but we're not really focused on the ones that are turned off. We're going to focus on this one light that's turned on, that's our direct light source. Now if we were standing outside, the direct light might be from the sun over-head, or maybe it's moon-light, or maybe it's a street light or whatever it is. But in this case we're just going to use a regular or white light source here. What I want you guys to think about when you're deciding where this light is going to go. I want you to put yourself into this light. Lets say for just a second, for the sake of the discussion here, that you are this light. The light is your own eyes and this is what you're seeing. You can only see from this light source. I'm going to mark this up a little bit here. From here, now the light source, everything to light can see is lit. Obviously, we're on the right side of this guy, so we're seeing the right side of his head. We're seeing the right side of his nose, ear, cheek, all the way down to here. This is an older guy. He's got some skin that's hanging here. It's blocking the light from going past it. This line right here is really what you need to understand, is the difference in the light and shadow. It goes in other areas here. But really what we're seeing here is that line makes up the edge of what that light can see. If we are this light source again, we're asking what the light sees. It sees all of this stuff, but the light can't see over here, so it's in darkness. When we take this into a drawing, for example. Let's go back into Photoshop here. If I'm that light source, I'm just going to make a new layer. For now this is just going to be normal mode. I just want to give you guys this as an example. If I'm that light source and I'm at roughly that same angle, then on this face, for example, I'm going to see all of this and maybe some of this, all of this whole area here. If the lights back here and it's pointed toward us this way, that's really the only thing I'm going to see. I might see the edge of his nose here. If we go back to our piece, I'm going to try to duplicate that same lighting effect. You see right about there, let's say for example. I have this line that comes down through here and then I've got that little bit of his nose. From the direct light source, that's what I can see. That's what I'm going to render and go back to my Photoshop example. You can see that playing out here. I'm just focused on the skin for now. We're going to worry about the hair later. That same little green line that we saw here, I've tried to duplicate that on this guy. The angle that light shows up and where it shows on the face completely depends on where your light source is. You can't just think of it in terms of, well, it's on the right or it's on left. You have to think in three dimensions. If we go back to our little drawing here. From this angle I could say, well, he's lit from our right side. But I have to think a little bit more. It's also behind him, because I can have light from the right side here and we've swung it more around toward the front. It's just about even with him at this point. The line moves. Before, whereas the line was along this line, this is the edge of what the light can see. If we move the light, we have to move that line. As I swing it around to almost half way, then our line follows the profile of his face. Being able to determine where that line is, is really what rendering is all about. We're going to get into why some edges are soft and why some are hard a little bit later, but this is an important concept to wrap your head around. If I move my light again around to the front, then again, that difference is changing. Put myself in the eyes of this light, I can see a lot more now. I can see all of this stuff now. But I can't see the side of the nose because it's being blocked by the nose itself. So now we'll use this handy model as an example to go by as a reference point here. Of course it's not the exact same face and it's very different, but the mosaic shapes are going to be very similar. I'm going to make a new layer on top of my flats. I'm going to set this to Linear Dodge, in Procreate it's known as Add mode. Your application might use a different name, but Linear Dodge or Add is probably what it's going to be called. I'm just going to pick a really bright saturate orange color. We can test that out. I want this to be very low opacity. I want to turn this brush down quite a bit. I think this brush is on about 15 percent at this point. The exact color here doesn't really matter a whole lot. We're just going to use this as an example, I've got a bright warm color. Let's say my light's going to be a very warm color. I'm not thinking about much except where these edges go. If my light is in the same place, it's going come down. Let's make this a little bit more opaque so you guys can see it. I'm just going to try to start following that line. What happens at his eye, it goes this way and then it goes around his cheek and up here. It does something like that. Then on his nose, we just catch the little bit of it there. Sorry my cat decided to join the conversation. All right. That's how I can use the reference to decide where that light's going to go. Let's say that, like a brush-y, painterly look is not what you're going for. You're looking for more of a comic book style rendering to this. The same principles apply. I'm still going by my reference here. Instead of using a brush, I can use the lasso tool or, the selection tool, whatever your app uses and again, we can just follow those same lines. Something like this and draw it down like this. I'm being rough with this. Of course you'd want to remove it from places like in his ears and we can add it to the nose area again. You can either switch to a soft round brush, and fill that in. This is just in normal mode or we can set it to Screen Mode is also pretty popular. I like to get really saturated colors in Screen Mode, fill it in this way. The other reason that I like to work on multiple layers for things like this is let's say, that I've made this orange-y color, but I don't really care for it. I want to switch to a different color. Well, I could go in and re-select and try a different color and all that again. But if I want a separate layer, I can just open up, say, the hue saturation or wherever app you use and shift that color. Maybe I want it to be more of a blue night-time color. I want it to be something dramatic, like it's red or it's purple or whatever it is. I can always go back and adjust this after the fact. That's one of the reasons that I like working on multiple layers sometimes, is because if I had done this, just to show you guys an example, if I hadn't merged this down. Let's see, I'm going to duplicate my flat so that I don't mess up my flats. Let's say, I'm merge this down to a just all one layer. Now it looks like this if we turn the lighter off. If I go in and say, I want to go in and try to edit, well one, I can barely even make that selection anymore, but I would have to go in and re-select it and if I tried to change that color, then it's just not going to come out exactly the way that I anticipate it. That's why I like to work on separate layers, but that's totally personal preference and not something you necessarily have to do, but it's something that I'd like to do. Now another way to treat direct light is to treat it as coloring the shadows instead. Instead of adding the light, we can add shadows and really get the same effect. It depends on how you want your art to look and it's really totally personal preference, but I tend to like to do the shadows first, but that's totally up to you guys. I'll give you another quick example here. This time I'm going to trace the same line, but we're going to go the other direction. We're going to follow the line of the face like this, but I'm going to go this direction is time, I'm just going to go all the way around here. Then I'm going to use my flats to remove it from the outside areas. Instead of adding light, we can add shadow. I'm going to make a new layer. I'm going to set it to multiply. We can just fill this with a color instead of brushing this time. I'm going to get like a cool baby bluish type color and just drop that in here. It's little too strong for the effect that I want. I can, adjust the opacity of that layer. I can bring down some. It really came out a little green for my taste. I can also go in and just change the hue saturation of that color. In this case, I'm just changing the hue to warm that up a little bit. Before he looked a little green, looked a little sick. Look purple is not bad that and I can adjust the saturation. I can adjust the brightness and decide how much that effect that I want. But the end effect here is about the same. It just depends on whether you're starting light and going dark or starting darker and go into light or starting in the middle and going both ways, either way works. Cut out that nose part. This is the first step to understanding where to start with light and shadow. We're going to get into more detail on this because you don't always want these straight lines here. There's going to be some that are more blended. If you go back and look at our guy here in handy, you can see that there are areas where the light is softer, the transitions a little bit wider. For example, through here is kind of a fade, but then on his nose it's a pretty hard edge and the shadows and really hard edge and then you've got some more soft stuff. That really determines how good your light is going to look, is those areas where there are softer in places and harder in places. Well, how do you determine that? That's we're going to talk about in the next lesson.
7. Transitions between light & shadow: To understand which edges should be soft and which should be hard, we're going to use everyone's favorite instructional tools for light and shadow, which are the basic shapes. I know some people get really tired of seeing tutorials on these. But almost everything can be made out of cylinders and spheres and cubes. We are going to use them as an example, and I'm sure we'll use more later. For the sake of our example for this lesson, we're going to say that the light is still at the same angle that it is in this picture here from handy. Our light source is behind all of our subjects here. It's to the right, but it's still behind it. If we were standing in front of it, its us and then these objects, and then you can see the light behind it. I hope that makes sense. Let's think about what the light sees first. We talked about this earlier. What does the light see? On this square, let me just make a selection here so I can stay inside the lines. I'm using my selection from my flats layer. I'm going to use some hatching lines to make this easy. This light is going to see this side of this cube here and depending on where it is, maybe the top table. But for now we're just going talk about this side. The lights is going reach this side. Let's think about this one. The light is back here somewhere, and so the line of what that light sees is going to fall about like that. The difference in the side that the light source sees and the side that it doesn't see. It's going to be of an edge about like this. But as you guys know, spheres usually don't have a really hard edge like that. They've got a soft edge. The reason for that is, the area where that separation happens between, what the light can see, on this side. We're seeing this side and the eye is closed over here, we can't see this stuff. The reason that this line is usually smooth, it's because it's curved. On the cube, this is a very hard edge right here. I would equate this edge to the edge of his nose here. It's a very distinct difference between one side of his nose and the other. We have an hard edge. But in places like where his head is, that's a very soft area, so it's a little bit more blended. If you think about it, it makes sense. If our line is roughly through here, then it's going to fall off as it goes around this side here. I'm going to get a soft brush and show you guys. Let's see, we don't want to select that or that. If I just get a soft round brush, it's going to look something like this. The edge is going to be soft because there's no hard edge there. But there is a hard edge on the Q. When we go back to our example in handy, now you can see just like the cube and just like the sphere, we've got this soft area through here, so the transition is little bit smoother. But as we get on edges like his nose, it's a much harder edge. This is a much harder edge because you've got this little skin fold here. You've got the orbit of his eye. These are hard edges. In these places, that's where you're going to see the harder edges in your rendering. Then you can see it's soft again, under his chin, a little bit softer than it is on his nose. You need that transition space there, to go from light to shadow. We're not doing a hard edge there, we're doing a bit of a blend through there. You can see another hard edge on his skin hanging down. This hard and soft edges, it's really important to understand this and it's important so that your work looks much more dynamic and much more realistic, by not having the same either hard edge everywhere or soft edge everywhere. Because you can see in reality this doesn't really have one edge all the way around. Now of course, there's some art styles. If you're doing an animate type style or something, that's perfectly acceptable to have, some of these hard edges that create some of thing, because it's more of a cartoony type effect. But if you're going for something that's a little bit more realistic, then just remember you're going to have places that are soft along that transition are going to be a little bit wider and then places where that transition is short is where you're going to find those harder edges. Let's go back to our actual example guy here, and let's do him up. I'm going make a new layer and it's below my line art, but it's above my base colors. I'm going to set it to multiply. The color doesn't matter too much at this point. I'm going to get a periwinkle blue color there. I'm going to make a selection and procreate. You can hold down two fingers and grab the contents of a layer. I'm going to grab all of the things that we've colored so far and getting my brush here, now I'm just using the default flattened marker. If you're in procreate, if you're curious. I did set the brush mode to normal. Thinking about my reference, let's go ahead and paint this in. I'm going to paint this with a hard edge to begin with and we'll worry about hair later. It will go like this and using a pretty hard edge on everything and then underneath here. I'm doing this quickly just so you guys can see. Now what I can think about is where are my hard edges and where are my soft edges. On his nose, remember that was a hard edge so I'm going to use a smaller brush and add a bit of a hard edge there. But some of these places, they really weren't that hard of a transition. They were pretty smooth. I can go get a smoothing brush or a smudge tool or whatever you want to use in your art. Some of these areas, I can soften this up. You have to play around with getting the right smudge tool, but I think is a turpentine brush in procreate. We are softening this up a little bit. Around his neck, I'm going to leave that hard. On his forehead, I'm going to leave that a hard edge because that part of the skull forms an edge there. Now you can see you've got out the roundness of his face happening here but you've got the hard edge on his nose. Again, if you think about why it's soft in places, because it's round at the places where it transitions from light to shadow. That's the key here, the transition from light to shadow. If that area curves away from your light source, then it's going to be a soft edge. But if it forms more of a harder edge there physically and that transition from light to shadow like on his forehead or on his nose here. It's going to be a harder edge. Now of course, there are a lot of ways to get this effect. Let's say if I delete all of that work we just did, and come up with another example here. I'm going to make another layer. Again, I'm going to set it to multiply. I'm using the same color. Instead of a harder brush, I can get a softer brush. There's just a regular round brush like this. Make sure it's dark enough you guys can see. You could start with going in with softer edges. I just made a big, soft blob there basically. And then I can go in with an eraser that has a stiffer edge, and just clean it up that way. I might come in here with the eraser and form those edges this way, because I'm on a separate layer. The only thing on this layer is this shadow that I'm doing. If I use the eraser tool, then I can go in and harden up some of these edges that I wanted to be a little bit stiffer. But then I've still got my soft edges left over. There's a lot of ways you can go about doing this. This concept of hard and soft edge is a really important one to understand and it's one that you really just have to practice at quite a bit. If you've got an app like the one that I've been using, play around with it, set up a light source, for example, like the one we've done, and work on a piece with it, work on a a head with it or whatever it is you want to work at. Then move the light around. If you've got an app like this, just move the light and practice at a different angle and just get used to looking for where is it soft, where is it hard in these cast shadows? We are going to talk about cast shadows later, but these are usually hard and just play around with those different ways of looking at it. Now some of you are saying, well, I don't have this app or I can't afford the app that I want, that's fine too. What I would do is go into Google and I searched for, what did I search for? I searched for light and shadow face models. That's what I searched for. As you can see, there is a lot of them. Tons and tons and tons of faces at different lighting scenarios in different ways. I would use those as an example. Say if you don't have an app or something that does it, then go through and just find some of these photos and find something that looks interesting and practice doing a face that way. I'm focusing on the faces primarily because there's some of the most complicated shapes so if you can figure out how to light a face, you can figure out a light pretty much anything.
8. Choosing light colors: Far we've talked a lot about the shapes of the light that we're working with and the edges that they make in this things. We haven't talked much about which colors to actually use, and I'll be honest, we could spend hours and hours and you could read multiple books on the subject like I have and still come away a little confused about how to get nice lighting colors and how to make them look realistic. What I want to try and do is condense this down to a couple of tricks and techniques, shortcuts you can use, to really make this process a little bit easier. There's some stuff here early on that might be a review for some of you guys that have taken other courses, but I just want to run through a couple of quick points real quick about how light work. I've got a couple of different just colored circles here and I'm going to use these red and blue ones here in the middle for now. When you're picking a lighter color, let's say you've got a red object like I've got here and I want to color that with some color. Well, the first thing you need to figure out is what color is your light source, okay? Because if it's a cool light source, it's going to have a different effect than if it's a warm light source. What if it's a neutral light, like sunlight and that thing. What you generally don't want to do most of the time, is just use a lighter version of the same hue that you're already looking at. What I mean by that is, if I pick this color red here and I go over to the color picker in Photoshop. Well, a lot of people will just think, "Well, I'm going to get a little lighter and choose that color and then I paint with that color." It's not too bad, it's not terrible. Then they want brighter and there's nowhere else to go, so they get over here maybe and it starts to look a little pink. It's definitely getting pinker the brighter that I go across here and it's like, well that, it doesn't look bad. But, what happens if I shift those colors a little bit and shift the hue a little bit. The hue is this slider bar right here. When I talk about the hue, we're really just talking about what color it is. Is it blue, green, yellow or whatever. Now, over here in this window, the hue goes around the color wheel like this. This is changing the hue, when I change this on the circle over here. It really just depends on whether the light source is warm or cool. But let's say it's a warm light source, like it's a sunny day. Well, I'm going to pick my base color. I'm going to get a little brighter and I'm going to also add a little bit of orange, just shift it toward the temperature of the light, okay? If the light's warm, I want to go warmer. If the light's cool, I want to go cooler. But I'm going to shift it a little bit more toward orange. All right. I'm going outside the lines to fix this. There we go. It's a little bit orange. As we go further around, I want to keep shifting this more and more toward yellow. I'm getting a little bit brighter when I'm adding yellow each time. A little brighter, a little more yellow, a little brighter, a little more yellows, so right in the middle it's really yellow there. But you see how much more warmth this has. I don't really even mean that literally like it's warmer, but it just feels better, because we've got this nice transition. If you look at this on the color picker over here, starting in the reddish part, there we're getting more and more orange, more toward yellow and that's how more closely represents what light does in "Real life." The same thing works if this color would have been blue instead, like if it was a cooler light source. Again, I'm going to pick my selection here. This time I'm just going to get a completely different brush, like a warm or a cool blue color. Just make sure the opacity is, just not 100 percent I want some of this to come through. It's just a soft brush. There you go. It's like what a blue light source would look like. But if you look at it in the color picker, there's all this blending that happens. It starts in the red and as we get more toward this blue, then that hue is shifting toward purple, until we're all the way into blue on the other side. Same thing works over here. Same thing with a blue color. But how hard is it to go back and forth, switching these colors and shifting and shifting it? That's what I want to show you guys a trick today. I'm going to make a new layer on top. I'm going to call it Light and I'm going to set the mode to Linear Dodge. Now, Photoshop calls it linear dodge and then add in parentheses Procreate calls it add mode, and it's not a mode that I hear talked about a lot. But it does a pretty good job of duplicating that effect that we want without having to change colors every time. If I go back to my red one over here, I'm going to pick a warm orange color here. I'm just going to pick it one time. Let's say that my light is warm and I want to be a warm light so I'm going to pick that orange. Again, I'm going back to my brush, make sure that it's not 100 percent opaque. Let's lightly brush this in here. Let me make my selection again. Stay in the lines like a good color should. Lightly pressing and then I'm going to make the brush a little bit smaller and do it again. The brush smaller and do it again, all the way into the middle here. Now, I never switch colors here, but look at what happens in the color picker over here. We're starting with a really saturated red which is probably too saturated. But for our purposes today, this will work. But as you watch as I color pick, you see that hue slider shifting more and more toward yellow. It's getting more and more toward yellow till we get right there and it's almost pure yellow. I've got a built in color shift here in this layer mode without having to go back and switch those colors over and over. The same thing works on the blue in here. Let's get something that's not quite this saturated. Let's tone this down a little bit. A little bit darker, a little bit less saturated. We've got a place to start that's not all the way saturated already. I shifted these colors a bit to get a little bit more range to work with. But if I pick another light, go back to my ad mode layer, my linear dodge layer. Now you can see, again, if you watched that color picker, you're going to see it start to shift toward that cool color. It's going all the way from here, all the way down to this blue here. We've got to built in color shifting, hue shifting effect by using that particular layer type. The same thing works with even opposite color. Let's say I've got a red object with a cool light source. Bright blue light. If we look at, again, we're starting with this deep red and the closer that we get to the center, you can see that hue is getting more and more toward purple, all the way to almost blue over there. This particular blending mode, this layer mode just doesn't really good job of this. I'd like it better than screen and hard light and lately I've been using it quite a bit. Now, in some scenarios where you have like a bright sun shiny day outside. A lot of times you don't really want a strong color to your light. Well, what do I do in that case? I know I shouldn't use white or if you don't know, you should never just render with white light. I almost say never, but it's generally not a good idea. I gave you guys an example, I think we looked at this one already, but I wanted to show you guys what I did here to make this make more sense. If I turn off my all the direct light here for a second and try what I just did, so I'm just going to make a new layer and set it to that same linear deluge mode and we've got warm light and the soft brush. This isn't going to be perfect. We want to use it as an example. But that orange looks pretty good on the red. You get this nice bright orange effect and it's probably a little too dark, but something like this, you get the idea. But when you put it on the blue, it ends up looking off. It doesn't really work the same way it does it because we're instead of increasing the brightness of the blue, it feels like it just deadening it and it's pulling it toward this gray color. The reason for that is because we're mixing a blue cool base color with a warm light source. The only way those two can really connect to each other, they have to travel through the de-saturated gray parts of the color picker. If I try this again with an orange light, you end up with this very de-saturated weird color. It just doesn't look quite as good as what it does on the red. The trick that I do when I've got a "Neutral light source" or one that's really close to white, is on all of the warm objects, things like skin and anything that's red or warm is I will use a warmer light. Maybe not quite as warm as what we've been doing it, but I'll use a warm light and then just switch to a cooler light for the other areas, it's a little too opaque. But now I end up with this blue that still feels blue, okay? Don't be afraid to mix up your light lengths and I have said this a million times, this is just my way of working. This is my way of thinking through this stuff. If you have a different method or a better method, then by all means use it.
9. Examples of direct lighting: So we've talked a lot about direct lights so far and we've used a couple of examples here. I thought that we would go into an actual page here and put some of this stuff into practice. What I've done, I've got a little white box I've added over here just to make some notes and point some things out for you guys, and you guys will be able to download this page to use as well. I'm going to make a new layer above my base colors, call it "Shadows" and make sure it's set to multiply. I've got all my color files. Are they base colors, I should say, on this one layer below. So this Spiderman here's just all one color, either all red or all blue at the moment. So we are on a shadow layer and let's see what I used before my example. It's a baby blue, sky blue color here. The reason that I chose that particular color and the reason why you see a lot of shadows as being painted with cool colors, at least during the day time, is that the sky acts as a light source. So in all the places that the direct light from the sun is not reaching, those places aren't just dark, they still catch some light there. In our case here, we're going to be using a bluish color because the sky is blue and it acts as a big light source. So we're using this blue color for that reason. I'm going to go ahead and just select all of his body here. I had that preselected earlier just to save us some time. I'm just going to pick a brush here, and it doesn't really matter which brush you use. You guys can use whatever brush you want. What am I going to think about here? It's daytime for one. I've decided that I don't really want to paint in the light first, that I actually just want to start with shadows because there's not going to be as many shadows, and especially when it's daytime. So we're just going to put some shadows in a few places first. I'm thinking of this entire time. I'm thinking of those squares, and cylinders, and spheres, even on a character like this. If I go in here and do this as an overlay for you guys, I'll put it on a different layer. Of course, the top of someone's head is pretty much a sphere. So the top of the head is going to be a sphere. He is kind of looking down to his phone. If we look at this from the side, if we turn his head to the side and start drawing here, it's going come down like this. We're just going to align this substrate across here. So think of it as like this, and let's just think about where the tip of his nose would fall. Right about there? Right about there. Let's go and put his eye here as well. It's right about there. If we look at this from the side, then his head is going to come down to where his eye is, and then it's going to come out to his nose, and then back down to his chin here, and then this is going to go up. This is not a perfect example, but it's going to be something like this. His neck down to that angle is more like this. We are going to think about that whenever we're deciding where we're going to put this light. If the light is coming from the top, if the light is coming from up here and from the Sun, then we've got a sphere here, so we're going to light the top of it. Then this turns down here. We can darken that a little bit if we want. Then we've got more light coming here. Then its shadow again. So that's what I'm going to think about when I'm going over here to this new head over here. Can we go back to my shadow color? Something about like that. Going to start brushing his head. So we 're going to start with his forehead, it's a little in shadow. We're at an angle here, but his nose is going to create a bit of a shadow on this side. Then I've got all the cast shadow from underneath his head down here. The cast shadow is when his head is casting a shadow on. I can bump up the opacity of this brush a little bit. But you can see now even on a piece like this, we're using the same principles. I'm thinking about all of this down here being shadow, even areas like shoulders. Shoulders are round shapes, so they're sort of like spheres. Now, they don't go all the way in. This part of the shoulder is inside the body here. So we're not seeing this, but this part acts as a sphere all the way through this area here,and it follows like this. I'm thinking about those shadows falling on the underside of that sphere and those are going to be soft edges through here. Why? Because the shoulder is round. So I'm going to come back to my shadow layer and my shadow brush, and just lightly paint this hand on the underside. I'm leaving it soft. Again, no real hard edges on that because of the transition from light to shadow's going to be smooth because the shoulder is curved. Now we get to places like his chest. If you know your comic book, "Anatomy," anyway. If you look at his chest from the side, his neck comes down and then the chest comes out pretty flat, and there's usually just a little bit of a lip down here at the bottom of the pec muscle,, and then it goes down to the rest of his chest, and his abs, and all that stuff down here. This little angle right here creates a point. It's not quite a smooth curve on men here, anyway, going down at this angle. So we can create a hard edge right here because of that little point right there. When we go over to this side again and we switch back to my shadow color, then I can do this edge a little bit harder like that. I don't have to blend that quite as much. It's a little bit of a harder edge because of that little lip right there. I hope that makes sense. I know this is a hard thing to wrap your head around, but we've got that edge that runs across from here to here. That's why we can do a harder edge on area like that than we would on the shoulder or this transition is a lot slower because it's a curved edge. We've got shoulders done. So what's next? We've got the arms. Well, arms are basically cylinders. Let's get something you guys can really see. There we go. We basically have a cylinder here. Right now it curves in a little bit, it's not a perfect cylinder but we basically got a round object here and then we have another cylinder, it comes in at this angle. It narrows a little bit but it's still just a cylinder. Okay, so again if its lighted from the top, especially that cylinder we're going to see at this angle, you're going to get a soft shadow that comes across here. Or pretty soft anyway because this edge isn't too hard through here. Depends on where it is on the arm. If I come down here, get my shadow color again, and because the shoulder overlaps there some of this is where's going to be in shadow and the same thing on his arm down here. All of this is going to be shadow. If you make a mistake you can always go back and delete it. That's what I'm thinking of in all of these different stages is where are the shadows and what are the basic shapes that are underlying all of this anatomy? All right, so this is going to be shadow on this side. Now the other thing to think about is of course you've got your cast shadows from his arm, for example, so its arm might throw a bit of a shadow this way. I lost my selection there. There we go, so his arm is going to cast a shadow down this way. Again I'm keeping that pretty soft because of the sun's really bright and it's not going to be as super hard edge through there. Now, and this is where I think a lot of people get a little overwhelmed. They think that they have to go in every single little nook-cranny here and start outlining all of these little shadows, and you can if you want to. But keep in mind to go back to some of my other lessons in some of other courses. From a storytelling standpoint, we want the most contrast and the most focus to be up here at the top. I'm going to put more detail into these areas near the top all the way down the bottom. You can rough this stuff in a little bit. The further down the body you get, you can be a little less detailed because in this case we're not really want to draw attention to his legs and his knees. I might get a softer round brush or something and roughly put in some shapes down here where the shadow is going to be. Again, even these legs are basically cylinders. I'm making sure the edges are soft, and I'm pretty much done at that point with the shadows. We could get into a lot more detail, we could go into his hand and guess what? It's made up of the same shapes we've been talking about. So if I go back, the shape of a hand is pretty flat through here, so this is kind of like a cube in a way. Like a flat cube, and then you've got the fingers, which are of course cylinders. You can think of all of this anatomy in the same way. I'm going to come on the underside and start painting those shadows on the underside of this fingers. You guys get the idea. If we go back to my original shadows on this, you can see that here. You can see that on this gentlemen too, the bad guy here running away with the purse. I'm thinking when I'm putting these shadows in, "where's the light source? What can it see?" If the light source is above which it is in this case, then what areas of the face is it going to catch? It's going to see the forehead, it's going to see the nose, most of the face. But all of these little underlying areas like under his eyes in here, that's under his eyebrows so that's something that's going to be covered, under his nose; it's going to be a shadow there because the light's not reaching under there. Even added a little bit on his lips here, this underside of his upper lip. I've added some shadows there to help give some depth to those areas. Again, you can see of course the shadow down here on his neck and on down the line. I kept the shadows pretty simple on this. But in all of these separate scenarios, I'm still thinking about these things in their most basic shapes. I know you guys, you're tired of me probably saying that, but we've got a sphere here. We've got a cylinder here, we've got another cylinder here. And even more complex shapes like the chest, we are keeping it pretty simple. We've got the shadow from his arm here and a few shadows thrown around down here, but that's pretty much it. Going down into his leg again it's a big old cylinder. So I'm staying underneath here with the shadow. And throughout this whole process I never had to pick a different color or change, go back to the color picker and keep going back and forth in all of these shadows are that same blue color here so it saves a lot of time. They are working on separate layers like this, it save you a lot of time from having to pick different colors everytime. You can see those shadows in this panel as well. Again, if the light is coming from the top which it is, that's the sun shiny day out here, then under the eye socket we're going to see shadow there under the chin. We're going to see shadow underside of his hand, underside of his arm. This guy's face is tilted, so we're not seeing the same type of shadows. You've got to think of this in all three dimensions each time you do this. In this case, this guy's face is facing down. The shadows are facing down. I'm focusing on faces again because these things are complicated, faces are very complicated. But if you ever come across a face or angle or situation you're just not sure how it works. Try to find some reference, whether that's an app like Candy we talked about earlier, I've got my light source kind of directly overhead, and so I can see where those shadows are falling. Now in sunlight, obviously you're not going to have shadows this dark. I'm just using this as an example to show you guys where the deepest parts of those shadows are under the nose, under the cheeks, under the eyes.
10. Creating highlights & speculars: In this lesson where we're still working within what is really the direct light. We're going to take it a step further here. Within the areas of direct light there are highlights. There're areas that catch more light than others. You guys can see these little bright spots of light here and there on the nose and the top of the head and his arm, and his hands. They're called specular highlights where It'i almost like, think of it as a mirror. If the surface of his costume was a mirror and it was that reflective, then you would have your light source coming down from wherever it is. Let's get a brighter color. Our light source is coming down, and it's these areas of the specular highlight where it's bouncing straight from there right into our eyeballs, into the camera. That's why, like for example, on the top of his head, the highlight is not on the top part of his head. Because if you look at this, if we turned him to the side again like we did earlier. If we look at this from the side and this is just a rough shape of his head from the side, then the light is not hitting the top and bouncing back to us. That angle doesn't really make sense. Just keep in mind that the RI, the camera is going to be over here. I'll do it in blue. This is our eye from this side. Here's some eyelashes. The light's not going to bounce from the top of his head and then straight back up into the air, it's going to come down and it's going to bounce it at an angle back to us, and that's what we're seeing here in this area. The light's coming down, it's bouncing off that angle right into our camera or into our faces. Everyone looking at it. If we go back to this example from earlier, you can see there are some areas that are brighter than others. Some people can see this more easily than others. But you can see that this area here, it's a little bit brighter. This part of his nose all of this. All of this stuff is brighter than the rest of it. If you have a hard time seeing these areas, one thing you can do is run the mosaic filter in Photoshop. If you have Photoshop or a blurred in some other app and these areas are pop out a little bit more. You can see how this and this, and this is brighter than some of these other areas of light. Those are the planes of the face that are in a perfect position to direct that light right back to the camera. This is a little bit easier to see with a planar face, this is just a model of a face where all the surfaces have been flattened into just their main surfaces. Right now, if we put the light, say angle we were looking at earlier today, behind him and facing us. Then if you think about an imaginary line from the light source to his face and then straight into our eyes. I can't really draw that, but imagine this coming straight into the camera here. Here's another eyeball. If this angle, it's brighter here and it's brighter on his nose, because at that angle, it's bouncing from the light off his skin right into the camera. Now, what you're going to notice is as I swing this light around, these areas are going to get a little bit darker. Because the angle is changed, the angle of the light changed. If I start swinging this around, you can see that right about there. This is no longer the brightest plane. Now, we've got right about here. Let's see if we go up a little bit. Now, this is the brightest plane because the angle changed. Now the light is facing him a little bit the same direction we are, again, bouncing into our eyeballs. You see this little rim line right here. It's a little bit brighter there. That's because that edge is where the light is bouncing from the face into our eyes or into the camera. Same thing here. This area is pretty bright too, but as we swing this camera or swinging the light around, watch these different areas you'll see right now, this one's brightest, this one second, this one's darkest. But as I swing this camera or the light around, now that's more in front. Now that's changed. Now, this is the brightest one. These two are a little bit darker and these are even darker still. Because they're acting like reflective surfaces. They're acting like a mirror would. We can see this if I continue to go on around then now this one is the brightest and this one is darker. This changes as we move it all the way around the eye, all around the head. It works on the top and works on the bottom. If I put the light below him, sorry, I'm trying to do this left-handed and draw with my right. Then you can see the light is hitting these areas that are that are facing that direction. The chin, the bottom of his nose, and the underside of his eyes, even this little area of his brow here. These are all planes that are facing down. Because if I turn this eye to the side and then the light is moving too unfortunately. But you can see this angle it's much more clear that if I can line this head up, no we can't, This angle is facing down, this one's facing down, this one's facing down. When we bring this background to the front, it's really obvious why that's happening. You really see at this angle. You're always going to think of which surfaces are going to mirror the light to our eyes, the closest. We'll look at an example in procreate here. All the highlights that I want to add, the important thing to know at this stage is only keep them limited to the areas that are already lit. I don't want to dip into the shadows anywhere at this point. Now this is just the way that I think about this. If you have a better way, that's fine with me too. But for this stage, I like to think of it as the direct light that I've already painted. That's the boundaries of what I'm about to do next. When I start in adding these hotter highlights, now I've just made a new layer and this is an add mode. You can use screen mode or hard light or whatever mode you like. But I like add mode or screen mode for this. It's also called Linear Dodge in Photoshop. When I go into paint these areas of highlights what I'm about to do, I'm thinking like what are the edges of this guy's face that are going to grab the most light and it's all the little areas along this edge here. I'm just going to be rough with this here. A little bit nose, top of his ear. Maybe his neck down here. Now any of this of course, I'm just rough and this end if you guys, but we can go in and we can blend some of this. It's not quite as harsh is in the smudge tool, blend tool. But the important thing is to keep it, like I said, keep it contained to the areas that we've already lit here. I'm not getting ever hear anywhere yet. I'm keeping it contained to these areas that already have light. If you want to get a little bit harder, just keep on layering in here. Again, of course we can go in and we can smudge this up. We want to hide our tracks, hide our brushstrokes here a little bit. The good thing is working on a separate layer like this. If I wanted to go in later and change that color, I can just change the hue because I want a different layer. I'm going to leave it. I still wanted to be a pretty warm, so I'm going to leave it right about there. In the next lesson, we're going to keep on doing these highlights, but we're going to break down how the surface texture of wherever your coloring is going to affect that highlight.
11. Surface texture matters: In this lesson, I'm going to still continue to talk about these little highlight, these little specular highlights, and show you the differences and where they need to be and where they don't need to be. It's important to understand what type of surface that you're lying at any given time. We've been doing a lot of skin so far and skin is pretty reflective. You can see in this piece, for example, if I zoom up here a little bit, you can see that there's very minimal of these little bright highlights on him. He's just reflecting in the parts that are facing up or facing the sky, like his forehead is facing up a little bit. The top of his cheek here, his nose, so this little bright little spots of highlight there are catching the light in those places. But you're not seeing the same things on his shirt, because the texture is different. A shirt this color unless it's some span decks or something, it's not really going to reflect light like that. If you look at your own shirt out in the sun, you're not going to see a bunch of really bright highlights all over the place unless it's wet or something. Going over this guy, again the top of his head is catching a little bit right through here, top of his ear, all the little edges on his face that are facing up is catching those highlights. You can especially see this. Of course, we've talked about this earlier. You can see it on Spider-Man here. You've got to light here on the sides. You get the light on his nose. All of these areas are facing up, but not straight up. It's important to remember that because the light has to bounce off of that toward us as the camera. It's going to be down a little bit further from the very top. You can see it on the edge of his hands, edge of his arm here, just in little places. Even as knuckles, you can see this knuckles are a little bit higher. This finger, the angles a little bit higher, so it's catching more than even the one next to it. You've got to think about all of those little angles and how that's going to work. You can especially see this on this guy and I added more on this bad guy because he's little dragged out and he's sweaty from running. He's got more of these little specular highlights because his skin is moist, because he's been sweating, and that's really something to keep in mind. If you have a very smooth texture or a texture that's wet, it's typically going to have more of these. Now, like on this purse here, I added some of these little highlights on the edges here, because I wanted this to be like, it looks like a nice purse. It's got a little bit of a sheen to it and it's not just a flat color. But I didn't do that same thing on his jeanes. Because again, jeanes don't reflect light that way, because they're not smooth, they're Canvas. Even within Spider- Man costume, the blue part is generally not as reflective as the red part. It's a little bit darker and doesn't usually reflect light that way. You don't really see as many of those really hot highlights on the blue as you do the read, and he's pretty commonly colored that way. This guy we were working on earlier, if let's say that his face was really sweaty, then you might get a bright color. The color depends on the situation. Go in here and add some little areas of really bright highlights. I'm just throwing this around as an example. But he starts to look a little bit wet because most faces don't have that many specular highlights on, unless they're already sweating or something. You should always keep in mind the texture of whatever it is you're coloring. This is especially true. You can see in this panel here. If you look at all the clothing and all of these guys, so like this guy is green and this blue and this pale white shirt here, there's no real specular highlights. The place where the direct light hits and you've got your shadows, and that's pretty much it. But look at Spider-Man, that red spandex he's wearing. I really wanted that to look shiny. Just a couple of spots that are a little bit brighter and completely sells that effect. But what I see beginner colors do and beginner artists do, is they think that, highlights are awesome. They make everything look cool. I'm going to put these things on everything and they add these bright specular highlights on everything, and it just doesn't make sense, so it's important to keep that in mind when you're working is to only use these little hot highlights in areas that are very reflective and very smooth.
12. Creating indirect/bounce/ambient lighting: Everything we've looked at so far has been direct light. In this example, we've looked at several times now, we've got a light from the right, and it's lighting everything that you can see. In the shadows, we don't have anything. Now we know that that's not really how light works in real life. What works in real life is you have something called indirect light. I've set up a weaker light source over here on the left side. As we move the head around and the lights staying in the same place, I've got that really bright white highlight, that's our direct light we've been talking about, but on the left side of his face now you can see that we've got this much weaker light. It's not as strong, and it seems to be much softer. That's the key thing to keep in mind when you start working with indirect light. Or you might call this ambient light, you might hear this be called bounced light. There's a lot of different things you can call this. But what I've found is, by understanding how to work with indirect light, you can really come up with some cool and realistic looking effects. It's not really that much harder. It's just a different way of looking at things. We're back in procreate and I'm going to make a new layer just for the sake of easy turning this off and on. I'm going to set this to add mode also. You might want to try screen or some other mode, but I like add mode. We're going to do a different color this time. I'm going to pick a color that is opposite of our light source color. This isn't always the case, but a lot of times it looks pretty cool. Let's say that our guy is out in the sunlight and it looks like maybe it's late in the day, it's a really orangey sunset we've got going on here. The color that you're going to choose for the bounce light is really the color of the environment. Sometimes that might be an overall blue sky, but it could be something different. If it's nighttime, then it might be a different color. It's totally up to you guys which one you want to use, but you want it to be a subtle color that is not as bright as your direct light, not in this case anyway. It's generally going to be the color of your environment. Don't forget if you put this on a separate layer, you can always change it later. The rules that I would set up for myself when I want to do something, when I want to do some bounce light is, I want to think of it as a light that it's coming from everywhere, it's coming from every angle just about. But typically you want it to be opposite your direct light just to make it easier to work with. You want it to be dimmer and softer than it then what the other areas that you've done. What I'm going to do here is I'm going to imagine a very weak light blue light source coming from the left side and we're coming from all around. But these are only going to be in the areas that the direct light has not touched. Because in the direct light areas where that orange light was, it's going to overpower this, so this light is not going to go into those areas. I'm just going to rough this in very lower its opacity. It's only about 15 percent. It's going to hit over here. Let me this side of his nose. All of these little areas over here. We can adjust how much of this affect the image later. Again, I'm just trying to think of where would the light go as long as it wasn't direct light. That's not perfect, but it gives us a good starting point. Now I could go in, I don't want any hard edges on this light. Because it's not a harsh light, everything is going to be soft. I'm going to blend this with the smooth, like a blender brush here. It's a pretty weak color like there's not a whole lot of color in it so you might want to bump up the saturation a little bit. You might want to turn it down, it's up to you. You can play around with the actual color but I want to keep it that bluish color. I can turn down the opacity like overall. If the effect is too strong, I can just turn that opacity up and down. You could do it on the hair too if you want. But again, keep it in the areas that are not being reached with the other light source. You can see it's a very subtle effect, but it makes a big difference and it gives you something to do in the shadows. I know when I first started, I really had a hard time. Like, I got a big shadow here, I don't know what to do with it. Well, this is what you can do with it, is you can add a very light, very subtle bounce light into those areas. It really makes it look a whole lot better. You can see this effect, it's very subtle, but you can see it in the shadow areas on this guy's face. You can see it under his arms. Turn this off and on. You guys to be able to see that bouncing off and on. Again, they're only in the darkest areas of the shadows because we've got the blue light from the sun or the sky in this case, that's still lighting these areas that the sun's not hitting. You can think of that sky is one big light source and you can see it a little bit on Spider-Man here too. If you turn this off and on, you can see that little bit of very subtle blue. It's only showing up in the shadows and nowhere else. The same rules apply to this as any other light source. I wouldn't want this effect to be very strong under where the hairline is here, that hair is going to cover that. I don't want as much of it, under the eyes, if the light's still coming from the top, then you're eyes are still going to be dark there. The same rules apply here. If you wanted to do some very subtle, more specular highlights on this you could, adding a few little lighter spots here and there. But as long as you keep it simple and not over powerful or not powerful here, then it's going to work pretty well. Here's some other examples of this in the first panel. If I turn this off and on; and especially if you look like in this area underneath his arm, under his chin, this guy's face even a little bit up here, there's just a little bit of that very subtle blue, you'll see that bouncing in and out. It's all contained to the shadows and it's all opposite our main light source. These are all the areas that are facing down. Again, if you don't like the color, you can always shift the color later. To recap on indirect light, because it's easily overdone, is number 1, make sure it stays contained to your shadows. It shouldn't, it should never seep into the direct light part because again, the light from the, in this case, the sun is already lighting that and this other lights going to be far too weak for that. One, keep it contained within the shadows. Two, keep it soft. In none of these areas have I used a lot of really harsh edges on that blue bounce light. Then three, just keep it subtle. That was the last thing is don't go too crazy with this. Unless that's what you want. If you want crazy, if you have, let's say, for example, I don't know. Let's say these guys are standing right next to, I don't know, some glowing blue orb or something that some alien has placed here, then yeah, go into these areas and go crazy. Make it as bright and and and crazy-looking as you want. In a normal circumstances under normal lighting, you're not really going to get a bounce light that's as bright as your direct light. If the light was brighter below, then you probably need to rethink your lighting scenario. I think that is it for direct light. Let's move on. Indirect light.
13. Lighting reference examples: I was looking for images to use as examples of something called ambient occlusion. I found some but then I realized that there's another exercise that I think would be good for you guys to get used to understanding where light sources are and get some good examples of really dramatic lighting. I was pulling up some stills from Infinity War. Even when I watched this movie I was noticing just how good lighting is. It's a great example of a lot of the principles that we've talked about and they'll give you a lot of examples. Next time you get actual chance to watch it, I'll give you some things to think about here. We're going to talk about ambient occlusion in the next lesson we're going to talk about these exercises instead. What I did is I pulled a couple of stills from the movie that had some pretty cool dramatic lighting. I want you guys to try to train your eye to find these things because it'll make you a better artist because you're able to see where the light source is coming from and how it affects things especially faces. In this image here, it's very tight close up here of Thanos. I want you guys to try to figure out where the light sources are, because you can get a pretty good indication just by looking at the way the light is falling on his face. If you have a problem seeing this, some people have a problem differentiating the different colors a little bit. Don't be afraid to blur it or do like a mosaic effect or something or even just squint your eyes. You'll be able to see these things I think a little bit better. I'm going to break this up into three areas here. We've got a pretty strong light, this orangey warm light from the left side. You can see if I was going to be rendering this out, you can see all these little shapes here of that light hitting its face. There are areas where it's brighter along the edges here. That actually tells us something. That tells us that, because the highlight is right along the edge, this light is way behind him. It's going to be somewhere way back here because none of this light is crossing the halfway point in this face. None of that orange light is really on this site at all. If it's face is acting as a barrier, then we know that all of these stuff, this is only going to be on the side with the light. Now if it was more in front, you might catch some spots of it out here. Something but it's just not in this case. Let me just let me get that to match the color. How about that? There we go. Something like that. We've got a color of light about that color. Now, on the other side, we've got a much weaker, cool light. We know it's much weaker because it's just not as bright. But this blue stuff you're seeing out here. It's probably about like that. Again you can see all the little areas that this light is making the shapes through here. You'll get better at training yourself to see this stuff, but it's just along the top. There's really not any coming in from below. There's not any come in from the right. We know this light is pretty soft and it's placed right above his head I would say or between us and him. You can see this in all these other images too. I turn this off. Hopefully you guys can see that little bit better now. When you blur it you can see we get the blue line through here. We get the warm light on the other side. Let's go to another example here. This is a really similar, probably from the same scene, except we've got three light sources this time. Or effectively three light sources. We've still got our warm orangey color. You guys can see how that falls through here. But this is something that I found myself doing subconsciously and then I started we're actually paying attention to it. If I was rendering this as a comic, those are the shapes I can make. Now again, switching to the blue light. Little spot of it there. It's blending in here a little bit. Can I do something like that is a little bit on his lip, a little bit of reflection. You can barely see this. I'm just going to circle it like that. Again that light is in the same place that was before. It's above him and it's very soft. Now there's another light and this could even be a row of light or something behind him from the left, but it doesn't look quite as orange to me. But there's a yellowy orange light down here. You can really see that on the shiny parts of this costume. We can make out all three light sources there. What you can do is, try to duplicate this with your own drawing. We're going to do this in just a second. But we can use this lighting setup and try to put it on the face that we made earlier. Just as an example and I won't be exact because their faces are shaped very differently. But it's a nice way to train your eye to look for this stuff. Now this one is not as dramatic. This is just a white light coming from the right. You can see where the specular highlights we talked about earlier and his costume is very shiny. It's really pointing us towards that light sources. If we think about the line from our eyes to this costume, and then think about where that light would bounce. It's going to come back this direction. Which makes sense because we can see over here that his face is lit on the side. Something like that. He's got some warmer, hotter spots too, so we know where that light's coming from based on what we're seeing here. The last one is another pretty dramatic one of Loki. We've got this really bright blue shape doing all of these stuff. Then it looks like we've got a little bit of red. Let me switch colors. We've got some red little bit here under his cheek here. That tells us this light's coming probably over his shoulder, his shoulder is actually creating a shadow right here. It's not lighting the whole side of his face. This light is coming up from this side. You can use these as examples. Let's go back to this guy here. I've set up our illustration we did earlier. I'm going to darken this guy a little bit just so we can see these lights a little bit better. We can think about, if this guy were in the same position, could we create a similar lighting situation? We've got to hair to do. I'll run over just pretend he doesn't have hair for now, we'll color like this. Starting with the orange light on the left. It comes down into his eye like that. This isn't going to be exact I'm just going to use this as an example today. Then we've got the light coming down. Now, Thanos has a very strong cheekbone here. Under the lip here, top of the lip. Again I'm just trying to transfer this over here. It's not going to be exact but, would be a good exercise. Then what else? We got his nose. Luckily this guy doesn't have stripes on his chin we would do something like that. Let's just get orange color. We'll put this in. Let's try screen mode. Just a soft frown brush not a fancy brush. There we go, doesn't look bad. That's the orange one. Let's go and get a little creative here. He don't have those big wrinkles in his forehead but we can pretend here. Then this comes down and around. Again he doesn't really have these big heavy wrinkles. Do little bit down here, back of his neck, lip, and then there's a little bit down here. Let's make a new layer. Put this one in a screen mode also. We're going to lower the opacity of this because I don't want it to be that much of an effect. After we've brushed then and we can lower the opacity. This of course looks a little harsh so we can always go back and either was an eraser or a smudge tool or something like that and ambler some of this away here. I don't think I found a good example, but a lot of times you'll see in the areas that both lights might overlap a little bit which we really don't see in this example. You'll get more of a white highlight because the lights are blending and getting closer to white. Again if you really squint or if you're able to see this, you're going to notice where there are areas are getting even wider, like on the tip of his nose, on some of this area up here because it's really catching a lot of that light. You can push some of this edges more toward quarter white here. Get the idea. Anyway, but I wanted you guys to find a movie like that's really dramatically lit, and just get used to recognizing where the light sources are coming from and it really will give you a better eye for this thing. Let's go and move on to that ambient occlusion lesson.
14. What is a terminator?: All right, so I was editing some of these videos and I realized that I left out a pretty simple concept that I wanted to run past you guys and just explain why you see this, and it's something called the terminator. Now, it sounds very dramatic, and it's not nothing to do with robots or Schwarzenegger, but it has to do with this space right here. You guys will notice, I did a little bit more work on this earlier just playing around with it, and you'll notice that I left a little bit of an area here between my shadow and my light color, just to let a little sliver of that base color come through basically. This is an area I might also punch up with a little bit of red like we talked about in the subsurface scattering lesson. But the terminator is really just the separation between the light side and the dark side, and we're not talking Star Wars there either. Here's an example a real world example here and I'll show you guys some comics examples also. But you get to a fuzzy, darker area, right between where the light is and where the shadow is. So and the reason for that is of course, you've got the brightest parts up at the top and then it gets darker into here, and then you've got the reflected light, which here you guys can see in this little area. But so what's left in the middle is called the terminator and it's always a little bit darker. Now, I'll give you guys a couple of examples of this from some comics. In this shot of the Hulk, so we've got this yellowy green light, whatever it is coming from, the white light coming from this side and its meeting this very warm orange light from the fire on this side. We can see what's happening in the middle here, and a lot of times a good artist will actually go ahead and put this stuff in there. But it acts as a way to separate those two areas of light and it gives you something to do where they meet. We can do all of our rendering up and to getting close to that point, but not all the way to that point. You want to leave a little bit of that dark area in between, and you can also see this in a much more subtle example of this on this piece here, where did my zoom button go, there we go. On his arm here, we've got bright going down to dark, and then we've got the bright that little rim light there along the edge, so right there along that edge, that's your terminator, that's the darkest part. Found one other example here, and this is a really good one from Star Wars. This was colored by Justin Ponsor. This guy is lit heavily from the back, so we've got this very bright shape, and then we've got the light which is atmospheric, or ambient, or bounce light, indirect light coming from the front, and in the middle, again, you've got that dark line. Okay, this is the darkest part right here where the ambient light isn't quite reaching up to that point, but the direct light isn't either, so it's in between. You guys will see me in my own work doing that quite a bit, and if you start looking for it you'll find it everywhere, just like a lot of the other concepts that we've talked about. That's what you guys are seeing, if you ever see an artist's leave some of this space in here where it might be the base color, it might be a little bit darker than the rest of the image, that's the terminator where both sides of those light sources are meeting together. This has been a quick little video, but I hope that makes sense for you.
15. Painting ambient occlusion: All right, in this lesson I want to talk to you guys about something called ambient occlusion. Now this is not something that I use often, especially when coloring comics. It's just a level of detail that's probably a little too far for most common book coloring styles but for those of you that are digital painters or illustrators or you just want a really detailed lighting on your pieces, then this is a good concept to wrap your head around. In this example, I found this example online of ambient occlusion being turned off and on, but you can think of it as a way to show all the little nooks and crannies that your light source just can't get into. You can see the difference here, but on the right side, there's no ambient occlusion. Everything is lit equally and there are places where the light's reaching and there's places where it isn't but even all the way down in these little nooks way down here at the bottom, they're still lit up. This is the same brightness as this area over here and it's not really realistic now. In the example on the left, they've turned ambient occlusion on and you normally see this term thrown around with games and 3D graphics and rendering and that stuff but it's a good thing to understand but you can see all these little areas that are really deep in there, the light's just not bouncing into those areas because the light will bounce a few times, but it gets weaker every time it bounces. The light comes in here and it bounces and it bounces and it bounces and all of a sudden it's so weak that it doesn't bounce anymore. What happens is you end up with these areas that are very, very dark. This happens even with rendered faces. If we go back to this image from Infinity war, there are areas under his eye in this area here, inside of his nose obviously is very dark, this line underneath his lips and all of these areas are very dark. What's happening is, of course the light's bouncing all around but once it starts getting in these little areas, well, it just can't bounce anymore, or if it is bouncing, what we're seeing is so weak that it just doesn't show up at all. This is something that you guys can put into your own artwork if you wanted to. We go into procreate; I'll show you guys how to think about this, or at least how I think about this. All right, so we're in procreate here and I'm going to go and make a new multiply layer. This is another shadow layer, and this time I don't really want to use a strong color as far as in the blue we used or orange or something we used, I really want to desaturate this quite a bit to where it's almost gray but I'm going to use a blue-gray in this case. Just going to get a soft brush and in all of the areas where two areas are forming a little valley or nook or however you want to call it, nooks and crannies is the best way I know to describe it in English, but I don't know if that phrase works worldwide, but it's in all the areas with little seams and the areas where things are getting tighter. I could come in her with a soft brush and I've got the opacity pretty low. We can always turn this down. Under the hair line and that's going to catch some shadow a little bit under here, under his eyes, we talked about those examples. Under his nose, maybe even along the creases in his face if you wanted to. I'm making this dramatic because I want you guys to be able to see it. The area under his lip, inside of his ear, under his jaw line and all of these little areas. We could blend all this if we wanted to and smooth it out a little bit. Soften it up. She's in the smudge tool but if I turn this off and on, you can see it's very subtle, but it makes a big difference. It doesn't have to even be that precise a lot of times unless you're really, really zoomed up but you can see the difference here. This applies to any two objects that are coming together and making a corner. Now of course, if we wanted to the effect to be stronger, we can go in and darken that even more or brighten it up or whatever you want to do here but we'll leave it about right there. In a little bit, we're going to go through a full piece taking everything we've talked about into account and we'll be able to all practice this together but it's a very subtle thing that can make a big difference in making your pieces look a lot better.
16. Subsurface scattering: In this lesson, I want to talk about something called subsurface scattering. I think I mentioned this in another course as well, but it bears repeating here because especially when you're doing faces is something that comes into effect quite a bit. What I'm going to do here is over on the side, I want to draw this a guy from the top very quickly. Like here's his nose and his ears, and these are terrible ears, and you got his hair and all that stuff. We're looking straight down at him. Now in our example here, the light is passing this way. If we take this little area right here, this little box, let me draw that in different color. Take this little section right here and we blow this up. I'm going to blow this section up. This is his cheek, say right through here. If you get really, really close, so close that this is actually the thickness of his skin. This little area here is the thickness of his skin. and we've got hair out here, and then we've got all the rest of his insides over here. Think about these two little lines here as the thickness of his skin. What happens is on all of these little angles, so right there on the corner. The lights passing through that skin, the skins full of blood. So what happens is as the light passes through those angles, it becomes a little bit redder. It's a pretty simple concept if you think about it, the lights passing straight through skin, and the skin's got blood in it. What's going to happen when the light comes out? It's going to be redder. The light's going to come in and it's going to bounce around inside the skin here and come out redder than it went in. This is something that you'll see a lot, especially if you ever see someone shine a flashlight through your ear. It'll look really, really red through here because the light is picking up all that blood that's inside. You could do this on the same layer, you could do it on a different layer. It doesn't really matter how you want to do this and make a new layer does for simplicity's sake. I'm just going to get a soft brush in this example, I'm going to choose a medium red. I don't want it to be too bright, I don't want to be too dark, and this will change depending on the skin tone. But right along the edges of the transitions between light and shadow, I'm going to start adding a little bit of this red. You see it like on his forehead coming in here, maybe not quite that much. Just in the transitions, a little bit of red in here around the nose, especially, you'll see this a lot on noses, but a little bit more on the nose, in the ear, and that's going to be catching a lot of that. I'm just really doing it along these little transitions. Again, it's a very, very subtle effect, but it makes a big difference. It makes the skin look a lot more alive. It makes it look like, hey, this guy is actually got some blood in his body. It's very, very subtle. Of course, if you do it on different layer and the red's not quite right. You can always adjust it to make it a little bit more yellow, a little bit more orange. Wherever it is you want to put it, saturate it a little bit more. You see this effect really pumped up a lot around noses in some art styles, so that's what you're seeing there. It's a very simple little technique that you can do. Of course, you can blend this more, you can add as much of an effect as you want, you could lower the opacity after you've painted it. Let's say it's too strong, you don't want it to be quite opaque. You can always adjust the opacity. There's all options there you can do, but that's the reason why I like to do it on a different layer sometimes is because I'm able to adjust it after the fact. Anyway, it's a little quick short lesson, but makes a big difference. Let's move on.
17. The Fresnel Effect: Hey, there. There's one more concept that I wanted to go over that I've actually had covered on my YouTube channel. I thought about rerecording it, but I realized that probably couldn't do any better than I'd already done. I'm just going to cut in into that lesson. You guys will see me about 10 pounds heavier from when I recorded this lesson. But it's a technical lesson, but I do think it's important. It's a good way to get an extra step of realism into your lighting, and it's called the funnel effect. So here's me. In this video, I want to show you guys a principle called the funnel effect and how it can make for better lighting, more depth, and just overall more realistic lighting. It's going to be a very technical tutorial by my standards, so bear with me, and hopefully, you guys will learn something. So check it out. I was watching Guardians of the Galaxy two the other day for the third or fourth time. I notice something in this scene, and I realize that I wanted to do a video on this. It's pretty technical relative to the stuff that I normally do here, so bear with me. I'm going to give you a couple of different examples because I know everyone learns in different ways. Hopefully, you guys will find this as neat as I did. It really felt like a light bulb for me a couple of months ago, and I thought this scene would be an excellent example of how this can be used in digital arts. In this scene, in Guardians of the Galaxy, they freeze the image. So Groot's dancing around, or he's about to start dancing and it freezes. Then it does this pan around him. Premiere will cooperate, here you go. It does this pan, and everything's frozen, so nothing is moving. But one thing that I notice, if you look at Groot's head, for example, and especially like this green light that's shining from this over here. It appears brighter here, and in this side of this face is in shadow. As we swing it around, you'll notice that what we're looking at on the right side, talking about this highlight right here. This highlight actually appears. Now the light itself is not moving, and nothing in the scene is moving. Only the viewers, I moved, the camera moved, the virtual camera in this case. Another example if you'll see in this scene is, if you'll look at this little highlight on his eye. His eye is very reflective, obviously, and you can see the reflection of the sign in his eye, but as we swing around, if you look closely, when we get throughout right here. It disappears. The light didn't turn off. He's still lit green everywhere else, but that reflective, that specular highlight on his eye is no longer there. When we're designing where we're going to light things, and where we're going to add light to a figure, we have to take into account, obviously where that light source is. Which you also have to take into account where the viewer's eye is. You can also see this, I said, on the right side of his face. You've got that light appears, that highlight that pops into view right here. So what is that? I was looking at this [inaudible] , it looks realistic, but what's happening. It's called the funnel effect. I've got some stuff here in Photoshop that I want to use as a way to explain this. This is not the greatest illustration in the world, so apologies. What we're seeing here. Let me make a new layer on top so I can draw. What we're seeing here is, we've got a room. Now this is a mirror. Take my word for it, it's a mirror. We've got a light source over here. We've got a guy, blue guy over here, and orange guy over here. When we're looking at Groot's face, for example, this plane of light that appears on the side of his head. It's showing up because of that explosion that's happening behind him. The reason it happens is, if we're in this guy's position, the orange guy's position, we're not going to see the reflection of this light bulb. We're not going to be able to see this lamp over here in the mirror. We've pretty much got his view and lights being thrown everywhere. But I can't see this lamp in the mirror, because it's not reflecting in that direction. The light is coming across here, and then it's bouncing out this way. But if I'm the blue guy, now I'm the same distance from the floor here. I'm going to see this light in the mirror. This is how the physics works there. If I'm standing there, I'm looking at a mirror, I'm going to see an actual reflection. I'm going to see the lamp here, and I'm also going to see your reflection in the mirror here. It might help to understand this looking at it from the top. Again, here's my great drawing. Here's our blue guy, here's our orange guy, here's our light source, and here's the mirror. Again, take my word for it. The lights being thrown around all over the place, but it's only being reflected back to this viewer at this angle. So the guy in blue is actually getting a very strong reflection, his almost like he's looking at two light sources. He's looking at the light source, and then he's got to light source in the mirror. But this guy is not seeing that. He's not seeing that reflection. Now lights getting thrown around all over the place and he can see the mirror, but in order for him to be able to see the light itself, we'd have to move it right next to him pretty much. You've got this line of sight doing this back to him. What's happening in this image is that the light is coming from the explosion behind him, reflecting off of Groot's head and then bouncing right into our eyeballs as viewers. That's the reason why when we swing this background here, it changes because the light is coming in and the strongest reflection of that is actually going to be a different angle. If you think of that surface as like a mirror, that's why we're getting that brighter light there. Another way to think about this would be like a pool table. I think, I've used this example before, but I have a better understanding myself of this now. If I'm deciding where I want to light something, what I'm really doing is think about a light shooting like a pool or billiards, whatever you want to call it. If I need to color this wall and I want to put a specular highlight on that wall, where does it go? Now obviously felt on pool table is not extremely reflective, but let's say that it was. Let's say I'm looking in this direction. How would I determine where that goes? So it's just like shooting a pool ball. So I would try to find the angle that gets me this. So I'm going to shoot the blue ball here into this yellow ball and say that's my light source. There is where my specular highlight is going to go. So that's how it makes sense to me, I'm a very spatial type thinker, and so for me I tend to look at it, in those angles. So here's a practical example, I'm going to give you here. Again, crude drawing of a guy here, that is facing a light bulb. I made it smaller because it's further away from them. In this shot, it's basically the same thing except, think of this as, in this case, well, let's say this guy is four feet from us, and the light bulb is eight feet from us, in here, they're on the same plane. So you've got a guy standing here, and then right next to him, you've got another light bulb. Let's say it's equidistant from us in both cases. Let's say that I'm going to throw some highlights around this guy's face. So I'm going to get a little bit brighter and add a little bit of yellow. Let me just get your brush here, and I'm going to do is really simple and rough, but I'm just going to get over here and I'm just going to be able to cover the front of his face. You might catch a little edge of the ear there, I got the square brush I'm using, but you might catch a little bit ear and maybe some on the skin down here. That's going to fade because the neck's round. Now let's say that, that's the color I'm going to go with for this light on this guy at this angle. But this is the same scene, the light source is in the same place. But on the above example, we can start with that same color basically. We're going to see that a bound like this angle. But it's going to be brighter. It's going to be brighter at this angle, because of what I just showed you. So think about his face as being that mirror. From here, we're not really getting any direct reflections, we're just seeing where the light's hitting, but not much of it is reflecting back to us. There might be a really subtle small spot maybe on his cheek or something, but on the tip of his nose, you might get a little bit. But here you've got this plane along the side of his face. So this is all going to be brighter, not black, let me get into the color. So this is all actually going to be brighter. Because again, it's almost like the mirror scenario, where we're getting a direct reflection off that mirror. Actually, even if you look at one other example of how this works in real life, if you look at my video, so you guys, eyes are the camera, my webcam in this case, you can actually see the reflection of this light over here, to my left in the guitar behind me. So a really smart person could probably do the math and figure out almost exactly, where that light is in the room based on the angle of that reflection. You can even see this on my hand, and you'll see that as I turn it, it's actually getting a little bit brighter as I turn it. That's not because from the light on the left, that's from the ceiling light that's over my head, because at this angle it's bouncing just like it is off that mirror directly into the camera. But as I turn it a little bit, I'm changing the angle I'm not seeing that same reflection anymore. So I hope this is making sense. Like I said, this is about as technical as I usually get on this channel. So this is the first tutorial you've ever watched. You're thinking, "oh, my God, this guy is talking over my head. It's usually not like this." So I want to show you guys another example in the movie.This became almost a game to me in the last couple of weeks, as I've been looking for this effect in different places and it really gave me a much more solid understanding of, where to place specular highlights, and where highlights go in general. You guys can see this. It's a little bit dark, but as the head is moving around, you see this white, real very broad light here. You can almost see the shape of it. I feel like that's one of those big rectangular, is it a soft box? I don't know, some photographer or videographer is going to correct me, or umbrella or something, but you can almost see the shape of it, that rectangular shape. This isn't necessarily the funnel effect, but it's showing us where the light in this scene would be, so it's bouncing from the camera off her forehead, and over here, behind us to the right a little bit. There's a little bit of reflection you can see on the neck bottom of the chin. Also, I don't know if that's probably a different light, I don't think that reflection on her jacket would be strong enough to do that. So there's probably two lights happening there. Now, I'm going to zoom ahead here. This is the scene I want to show you. So we've got a scene here where she's looking at us, and you can see how bright this side of her face is. Again, if you think about skin, is very reflective, more so than most materials like my shirt and things like that. So if you think about where the camera is currently, we can again interpollate that, as we go straight from the camera to her cheek and bounce that off just like we did at the pool table, we're going to get a light source over here somewhere. But you'll notice that we don't see that much brightness at this angle. I don't think they change the lighting in the scene, because you can see a little bit of it here, on the side of her jaw line here, it's a little bit brighter there, because there's a light that's reflecting from that. But as we jump back to the other angle, you'll see that it looks brighter again. So whenever you are lighting something, not only do you have to think about where the light source is, but you also want to think about how it's reflecting back to the camera. That is going to change, as you guys can see, her face looks much brighter there than it does here, even though it's the same light. My voice is a little harsh because pain meds that I'm on drives me out, and I'm coming off a little right now. I had sore surgery a couple weeks ago, if you don't follow this channel regularly. I gave an example of this here in an actual comic. Now I threw around a good bit of that blue reflected light in all the shadows, because the sky is blue and it's going to light all darker areas, but you can see this especially right here in this area. Let me do this. This will edge right along here. So it actually gives us a legitimate reason to have what is basically a rim light. Rim light uses some of the same principles, but they're usually just along the edges. But you guys can see in this comic, it looks fine without that particular light there, but when you add it in, it creates a lot more depth and it makes it a little bit more realistic. So in keeping with the theme before we wrap up this lesson, I did want to show you guys a Thanos example. Just to hit everywhere so that everything matches. But this is a great example of the funnel effect from the movie. If you pick this up already, you can probably already see it. But in this scene, he is strongly strongly lit from behind. He's got a very bright white sky right behind him. So what you're seeing here is really really white highlights, these almost blend into the sky here, they basically do, there's almost no separation right here. The reason for that is, when you think about where we're standing, and if you think of the side of his head here as the mirror, we're basically seeing the sky reflected on the side of his head there. So all of these little areas where it's really really white, it's just a perfect angle for the light that's behind him, to get bounced right into our eyeballs, or in this case the camera. So I hope you guys enjoyed that lesson. Let's get into our exercise.
18. Final exercise - Part I: All right. In this exercise, I want to put everything that we've talked about into practice, and I'm going to provide this image to you guys for download. It's going to already be flatted so all you got to do is start lighting it if you want. Feel free, of course, if you want to go in and change any of these colors, you can. But I'm just going to leave it like this for now. What I'm going to do here is we're going to light this at a couple of different angles in a few places, probably not the entire image. We're going to go through some of the key areas. I want you guys to use this exercise to practice lighting from the top, lighting from the left side, lighting from the right side, and get yourself into thinking about light in that way. Because I think what a lot of, especially beginner colors do is, they're like, "All right, so it's time to go," and they just start throwing lights all over the place and everything is lit equally and it just doesn't work very well. I want to talk you guys through what I would be thinking about as I'm working on this stuff, and hopefully this will be a big help for you guys. In this example, I'm going to be using a lasso and brush method, which is pretty common in count books sell art. But if you want to paint this, you want to be more brushy with it. There isn't a right or wrong answer here. We'll start with his head. Also, I want to thank Max Dunbar for providing this image for us. Max, if you guys were around from my very first course, very, very first one, long time ago. He provided some art for that one too. Now of course, one other thing to keep in mind here is that this piece has a light source already established. We can look at the shadows on the ground. We can look at the shadows under his arm, underneath his beard. He's lit from the top. But for the sake of our exercise, we can play around with that a little bit. But if you were actually going to be lighting this guy, you would want to light him from the top. We will use a couple of different examples there. First I want to show you guys what I'm thinking about here. I'm going to make some notes on top. Let's say I want to start with his face because again, faces are the most complicated of all here. We've got the forehead comes down. I'm going to create a grid line on this so you guys can see. We've got a little wrinkle there, with a little bit of a hump, and we've got another hump there for his eyebrow. This follows like this. This is a great example of why a lot of art videos that you see use cubes and spheres and those things because that's really what we're looking at here. If we break this down, if I use a different color, this is pretty much one flat plane. Some of is covered by his hair, and then we've got these little partial cylinders, we're only seeing parts of them. Because a part of it goes into his head here. But all of these little round areas are like little mini cylinders. I'm making a mess here. When I come down here and I want to start rendering this, I'm thinking about those shapes. I'm going to track this down, and it's going to be on the top of this one. It's going to be on top of this cylinder. If you can't do this the first time, but it takes a little bit of time to figure this out, I promise. All right, so we've got our light coming in like this. This goes like this. We'll get rid of the hair part here. All right, so what I've got lit here is the plane of his forehead and just the tops of these little ridges here. My areas, it's not exactly right. You guys get the idea. We can be as detail with this as we want. I could even go in and erase all these little areas in here. It's probably getting a little too detailed, but that's fine. I'm just going to use a screen brush with an orange color, and there you go. Now, because we've got these round surfaces, because we've got these little squiggly cylinders through here. But I could make another pass right alongside the edge of that cylinder. See what I mean, so it starts to look like his forehead has some form there. Going further down, again, you've got to think in three dimensions every time. The top of his nose forms a shape. Now this area is underneath, so I'm not going to select that part because it's pointing down. This plane right here is pointing down. So I'm not going to select it. Then we've got this little area facing up. I'm really thinking about all the planes that are facing up. Maybe the underside of his eye here. Again, this is a plane that's facing up. Again, to switch to my brush, fill it in there. Maybe a little bit more on his nose because it sticks out a little bit more than the forehead does. It's facing more up. That's a thing. When you zoom out, it really makes sense. All of this is all basic shapes. If I go back to my notes again, my notes layer, and switch brushes again. Yeah, this is a plane facing forward or facing up. This is a plane facing up. So if we were to continue those little grid lines we were doing earlier, does this number, if I were to draw a line right down the middle of his face. This is what I'm thinking about. You don't have to draw these on your particular image, but it gives you a way to visualize what's happening there. Now his cheeks are probably going to be lit up here. In all the areas where you want the highlight to really stand out, it's in all those areas where the specular highlights are going to be. If you think about the nose is being round and you're going to get a really bright spot right there because of all those reflections, because it's round, they tend to form one of those little points like that. Depending on how much of an effect you want this, you could even come in here and add a little bit of this up top. It just depends on how you want to do that, but it adds a lot of really cool realism too when you add those different levels of lighting like that. All right, so now we can move on, let's say to this arm for example. Now it's like, "Oh man, I haven't done a hand yet. I don't really know how to think about this." Break it down into those basic shapes again. What do we have here? We've got spheres. His knuckles are basically spheres, remember that. We've got cylinders again. They're everywhere. So fingers are made up of cylinders. What else do we have? We've got this surface which is flat. We can think about this as the edge of a cube that's buried in his hand there. So we've got a flat surface. Again, I'm going to flip back to my color I was using, and I'm going to select the tops of these spheres. Again, if you want to brush this instead, you could do that. Then for the rest of his fingers, again, we're just lighting the top sign. We could probably connect some of this if we wanted to. Again, switch back to my screen brush. That wasn't the right color I was using. Let me get the right color. I think that's it. Yeah. Again, all of these little round areas, where the light's really going to get caught, we can select those areas and make those a little bit brighter. What about this part of his arm? You guessed it. We have another cylinder happening here. It's really big. It's not bigger than the ones we've looked at so far, but it goes like this. Now, that's the biggest simplest way to look at that, but there are areas in between that are even other shapes. What I might do for something like this is first off, go in and just select that color. I'm just thinking of it as a big sphere at this point. I'm just going to cover the top half with a soft brush. Now, let's think about this a little bit more. What is this shape happening here? You can look at your own arm if you are a muscular guy, maybe you can. I don't really have those muscles, but you feel these muscles in your arm. If I wanted to make a grid out of this, it would come down. This is a big muscle right there on top, and then this comes in and the rest of these go down this way. This is what you need to train yourself to look for, is all of these little shapes. You can draw the grid line to this way if you want to. But learn to look at everything you are coloring this way. In this case, we've got a little indention in here, where that light is formed, where that muscle is formed. I could go back to my light here and just select the top part of that muscle, and switch back to my brush. Add a little layer there. Maybe this muscle sticks out just a little bit, not quite as much though. Then at the very top, we've got a sharper highlight there at the top. I'm doing this on skin, but this applies to all of these different areas. You just have to think of it as what basic shape is it forming first? Even on things like hair, you're thinking, well, this is a big bunch of hair in different shapes and there's no way that you can break this into shapes, but you can.
19. Final exercise - Part II: We'll just continue on with his hair here. Some you guys might be thinking, well, how do you come up with basic shapes out of this? It's such a strange shape. Just about everything can be made into those basic shapes. All of these curves here at the top. You can look at this a couple of different ways. You could think of it like part of a sphere. It's not exactly perfect, but this part of it is very similar to a sphere. Again, if it's not an obvious shape, think about those grid lines. I'm thinking about a big old bushy beard on this guy. These grid lines are going to do something like this. If we were to look at this as a wire frame model. That's a big weirdly shaped cylinder there. The important thing is it's curved. So we know that, if its curved, then we're going to use the softer edge on. Where it's harder, we can use harder edges. But the same thing continues here. If you think about these shapes that's a round shape, it's just inverted. I'm thinking about where the light is going to go. You can make some little hair shapes in here if you want. Make it a little jagged. I'm not going to get under the nose because that's going to be blocking that. But overall I'm going for the top. That's the key here. Aligning from the top so I want my light to be from the top. You don't necessarily have to use the same color either. We could switch this a little bit warmer, a little bit more red. There we go. I like that better. Same thing down here. We've got all these little shapes in here. I'm being rough with this. That's fine. We got a little overhang there from his mustache. I'm not coloring the very top. Then there you go. The trick with hair is not to color it like you're coloring all these individual strands, throw in a couple of them. You don't have to do a ton of them. I can just trace in some shapes in here where that hair might go. You can overlap these if you want. It doesn't have to be perfect. I'm following the shapes of what his hair would be. You see how cool that looks. It looks looks like hair. I didn't go in and paint a million hairs. I just put in some jagged stuff and there you go. Again, if this shape is following like this, then I'm going to get a shape like this in here somehow, maybe. Then I can put in a few out a little messy areas in here. But now it feels like there's a curve there that's catching that light. We would do this all over the place. We do this up here, we do it on the beard down here. Just briefly. Now I'm going to leave the bottom side of it undone because it's facing down. Again, I got a little strip. Max even drew it in here. This strip of hair does this number. Then you could throw in a few more. Now, this takes practice. If this is your first time ever trying this it's not going to be this fast and it's not going to look that good. Just to be honest with you, I've been doing this a long time, so don't worry if your hair doesn't look quite like mine. If you can get comfortable doing faces and hair and thinking about basic shapes, then you can color anything. Let's try this at a different angle. I'm just going to rename this one to top light so we can turn it back on later if we want. Make another copy of my flats. We'll call this one right side. Now we'll get a different color this time, maybe blue. So top light is very easy because it's what we see most of the time. Most of the time our light is coming from the top. What if it's from the right side? So you're still going to think about those basic shapes, but we're just changing the angle the lights coming in. If the light's coming from our right side, then I start by grabbing most of his head, but I'm going to cut into some of these areas that are on the left side. Some of this you just have to finagle like that. But I'm leaving some of these spaces in here because on the left side of the image it's not going to get lit like that. I can go in and we could select as much of this as we want. Then just switch to my soft brush pen in there. Again, here it's shiny. If you want to add a few little spacular effects along the edge here. Now it's lit from the right. Again, it depends on whether the light is behind him or in front of him. I'm doing it directly to his right, so all of this little area's going to be lit on his ear. This side of his nose. Maybe this part of this face. This could even come out far enough to catch a little bit maybe. There you go. Moving on, again, we got to the top of this beard here or the mustache. Again, I'm doing this rough so you guys get the idea. But I would go in and just practice. Practice moving the light around. Maybe you do one from the bottom, which is basically the opposite of what we did on the top line. If I duplicate this again, and we'll call this one bottom, and I'm just thinking of the opposite that I did the first time. I'm thinking about the underside of his eyebrows. Now, his foreheads facing up, if it's coming from the bottom, there's really no reason for light to come from the bottom here, but I'm just using this as an exercise, then his forehead angle at this angle is facing up, so we're not going to select any of that. But this part of his nose, the underside of his nose, this little area here well that one's facing up. This one faces down and I think. This faces down. Even this little area through here faces down. The underside of his mustache. Again, I'm doing this quickly just to show you guys. It's looking very dramatic here. Maybe just the front part of his hair because this stuff faces down. You're just thinking about which direction is the plane face and where that light source is, there's no just generic light. You have to come up with something. The other thing to keep in mind I'll just throw in here, is that if you're going to have a really strong light source, if this was nighttime, and I've talked about this in other courses and other lessons, that I might want to wash the image in a different color. If this was night time, I might make a new layer and fill it with a blue color and just set it to color mode. Then you can adjust the opacity of this effect. It looks like it's night time now. Because he's in that blue color. It's in color mode. Then I'm just playing around with the opacity of it. You can go really strong effect have it very high, or you could turn it down and be very low. That blue light looks a little bit better that way. Now the other thing that I want to bring up in this exercise I want you guys to work on is the surface texture. We've talked about surface texture. There some things that are going to be more reflective than others. For example, if I'm coloring this guy's ax, I'm going back to my top light example here, where it had this orangey color light, then things like leather and what I would imagine all of this stuff is made of, is not going to be really, really reflective because it's leather. I'm just going to very lightly use that in some of those areas because it's not as reflective as skin is. The more reflective that something is and the shinier it is, or the smoother that it is, then the more I'm going to get hotter and hotter highlights like you see on the scan. Now on some things like his ax here, I'm just going to roughly select this and then I might decide to go really, really hot in some of these areas, because of this ax is really sharp, then it's going to have those little bright areas like that. I don't know if that area would actually go right there, but you can do something like that. Same thing here. All of these little areas, not particularly reflective. I'm doing this very quickly. But for something like a skull, let me darken the skull and just a little bit give us more dynamic range here. Again, I've got this wolf hanging over the top of it, so the top is not going to catch any light, but all of this area is. I'm just thinking about all the tops of all of these areas. I can select others. Go really, really bright because the skull is more smooth and more reflective. You can see the difference in how the skull looks like it's made of something different than what this leather is made of. Same thing on his feet, I wouldn't expect a highly reflective boot or anything. I'm not going to do those. The specular highlights on that. But maybe his bow is. Maybe his bow is made of 11 gold or something. It's super reflective. You guys can make that decision if you want. For those of you that would prefer something a little more painterly, I'll do a couple of runs through that in the next lesson.
20. Final exercise - Part III: For those of you that prefer more of a painterly type style, you're not a fan comic book style, thought I would run through one of these real quick. What I've done is I've still got my flats on the bottom. I made a new layer on top. I'm using add mode, but you can use whatever mode you like. I liked the way that it mixes colors. We'll pick another orangey color like that. Let's see what that looks like. That works for me. I'm going to set the blend mode on the brush pretty or the capacity of the brush pretty low because I want to be able to layer this and build this up. Because what you guys you'll see if I zoom in here, the opacity of this brush, it's around 20 percent. That's one pass, that's two, three. The more that I'm using it, the brighter that light's getting. You can play around with the actual color. A little more yellow maybe like that. I want to switch this a little bit more yellow. There we go. Same principles apply. If I was going to like this from the top, then I would just start filling this in. It's on a separate layer so I can erase this part of this if I wanted to and make the brush a little smaller and get in some of these other details. Again, thinking about all those little cylinders and things at that's made up of, top of the nose. At any point, if I really want to punch up these highlights, I can just adjust the opacity of the brush. I can punch the amount the size with the opacity and really get in here and add some brighter highlights if I wanted to. Same color brights. That's why I like this blend mode a lot. Pretty cool. Same thing on this. Let's turn this back down, turn the opacity back down. Linear dodge or add mode is very, very sensitive, so I try to keep it pretty low opacity. Again, a different technique than before, just brushing in some spots, so hair here and there. I can use the smudge tool, pull some of this down. Then really changed the opacity quite a bit. If I wanted to put in some really, a little hot little highlights in here. It's just a different look, same principle. Before we wrap up this exercise, I wanted to go over some of the other techniques that we covered, at least briefly to show you guys how you could apply them in a real-world scenario like this. Now, we're a little limited here because we really don't know what the environment is in this example, you can make it whatever you want it to be. Instead of going with environmental colors for the indirect light, I want to show you guys another technique that you can do here. First thing I'm going to do is make a new layer or we can do it in the same layer. I'm just going to select some of these shadow areas, where the hair's sticking out and maybe underneath here. Not much. This will be pretty subtle. I feel like I've said subtle a lot in this, but that does tell you guys what you need to know about my coloring style. But just in the shadows and it's just right along as face there. Because the light from his skin is actually bouncing onto his hair, the light is picking up the color of his skin and transferring it to the hair. We've got warm colors and warm colors typically means is just going to get even warmer. I'll pick the base color for the hair and then just move it up and make it more saturated and just a little bit brighter. This brush is just in normal mode, nothing fancy here. I'm just going to very lightly brush that along there. It's against a very little subtle effect. But it looks really cool. Because we've got a little bit of warmth and I may have overdid it a little bit, but that's up to you. Same thing on his skin. I get too close. But all of these little areas where this skin would reflect off itself, the nose, the light's going to bounce off the nose, off the nose, off the nose. The skin is actually trapping the light in all of these places. Every time it bounces, it gets more and more saturated. His nose even getting reflected from underneath his beard there. His beard is reflecting up also. Again, I'm going to pick the base skin color and just get a little bit warmer. Let's see what that looks like. It might need to be a little red too. Yeah, let's make it a little bit redder. Because as it gets more saturated, it's going to get redder. It might be a little bit much and bring it down just a little bit more. This is something you have to eyeball there. I like that. In all of those areas where the light's getting trapped, it's just becoming more red. You could deep and push this a little bit more, and it's too much. Sometimes it's a crap shoot. Feels that way to me. Now that's just in the areas around there. You could also just, if I go in and select the skin, deselect all the skin, and we'll put them, make a new layer and get a soft brush this time. In areas like the eyes, more red. The eyes and the nose. It's a little too oranges in it. Let's turn a different layer. Let's just change it a little bit redder, not quite so much. Bring it down a little bit, a little desaturated. You would put on his ears. I don't really spend a lot of time on his ears. So there you go. It really looks like he's got a lot of blood flowing in his face there. That was a combination of a little bit of that indirect light, the bounced light from his skin along with some of that subsurface scattering that we talked about. We've already got a few highlights in here. But what if we wanted to throw around a few more to some really thin little white highlights, I'm going almost completely white. Just in a few places and some of those little white highlights. These are very, very bright. Again, don't overdo this. It's easy to overdo it. But you can throw that around in a few places if you want. It just adds an extra layer of realism. That little bit of white there. Actually the red's on that layer too. You guys are going to see it. Then the last thing, what was left? Ambient occlusion, I think so. Again, I'll just make a new layer like we did before. Put it in multiply mode. We'll get, there's so much red around here. Let's see what we get like a middle grayish red color in here, and just a soft brush. Again, all of the darkest areas only. You can add a little bit of this. Then there is nose, whereas his lips meet here that usually gets pretty dark. All this is going to get a lot darker. We can even add a few into the hair along here. There we go. Again, subtle, but a lot more contrast looks pretty awesome. I hope you guys, when you look at this image, if you're like me when I first started, I would look at this final image ago, man, how did they do all of this? How did they decide on that red color and what made them choose that color yellow? Seeing it all as one unifying piece, it looks great together. But when you break down the magic that's happening here, now that you guys have seen all the different layers that I'm using, all the different techniques that I'm using, then I hope this is a little bit less mysterious now. It's one of the things, this method is not for everybody. There's some pure purist, I would say artist out there like, oh, you should only paint on one layer and using all this digital stuff is cheating. I just think that's BS personally. We've got these tools that allow us to take shortcuts and figure out things that work for us that we wouldn't be able to do traditionally, and techniques that don't have a traditional equivalent at all. My method of rendering that I've taught in this course is more of the way that computers render things in a way. But you still can't forget the art element of it. As we've talked about really early in the course, this particular course doesn't really get into Nino storytelling and drawing focus. Those are the really, the most important things when it comes to coloring for sequential books is how do you lead the reader's eye around and how do you draw attention to certain places and how image like this, I would put a lot of detail in this area on top, especially as face more detail there than anywhere. I would use in detail in his upper body and its arms and legs. But as I went further down the image, I would use less and less detail. I'm not going to go into this amount of detail on the wrinkle and his boot, or the scullery here, because the amount of detail you have also helps to dictate where the reader's eyes going to focus first. If all of those concepts are not thing that you're aware of, they're definitely important when it comes to coloring. Be sure to check out some my tutorials or some other materials on that. So I think that about wraps up this exercise. Let's wrap up the course.
21. Bonus lesson - More "punch": All right, welcome to the bonus lesson, which I just decided to add. I was in the process of uploading the course and I was editing and working on putting it up everywhere. A lot of sites need promo image. What you guys are seeing is, where I finished that up at the end of that exercise. I went to post it and I was like, I want it to be a little more punchy and I was going to be used all over the place. I worked on it and came out with this. The look at them side-by-side, you guys can see, this one looks a little bit richer, a little more contrast now, yeah it looks great. Then I thought, my students need to know this, they need to know how to do this punchy trick. That wouldn't be right to just to beef up my photo work after it was done and and not let them know how to do it. Now I'm back with a bonus lesson on how to do this. It's really simple guys. I want to run this through for you guys real quick. Here's where we left it off. It looks pretty good. I'm really happy with it. But I wanted more contrast and little more, just interests in the colors. I did two things and this is really simple. Now if you have Photoshop, you have levels adjustments. A lot of programs have levels. Some programs have it and call it curves and use different ways of editing the contrast. Basically, I'm going to make a new adjustment layer. Now in Photoshop, this is a little half-moon and you go up to levels. Now what you might have to do in your own program is you might have to edit that layer itself. I would just make a copy of it first before you make any changes. But it'll half-moon symbol and choose levels in Photoshop anyway. All I'm going to do, I've got three little sliders here. Now I'm not a total expert on these sliders, but I figured out a few things. First off, I'm going to grab the slider on the right. I'm going to pull it forward a little bit, I want to brighten it up. Just to the point that it almost starts to blow out like I don't want to go crazy with it, I want them [inaudible] to be really bright. Something about like that anything more and it starts getting a little blown out. I'm just pulling in the right. Now in your final piece might not have been exactly like mine, but for me that's what worked for me. That's the brightest parts were by pulling that down where brightening them up. Then on the left side picker here, I'm going to drag that to the right, so adding a little bit of darkness that way, see the different standards. I just darken that up. The middle one is really just to contrast levels. We do this number and write about their scenes about where I had it. I just drag it over to the right from where it was just a little bit. I turn this layer off and on. You can see it's increased the contrast and it looks pretty good, we're not quite done yet. I'm going to make one more layer. This is a two layer trick here. I'm going to make this layer overlay. Now, let me see what did I pick before? I've got a deep blue color here. What I did is, I picked a dark navy blue color just because it was opposite of everything else we were doing. Just a soft brush, nothing fancy there. Just a soft round brush. I started going around the edges with it and framing the action here with it, okay? Just around the edge. If you want it darker in places like this corner, I want to hide some of this plainly colored stuff. I think I darkened it a little bit more, just darken that up. We can always adjust and it can be a little heavier than I did but you can go back and even adjust that layer after the fact, if you wanted to make it more green or you want to make it more blue, red, whatever it is. But I think I'll leave it right about where I had it, which is right around here. I'm going to group these just so I can turn them off and on together. There you go. It's more contrast, I've got some nice blue shifts in there from that overlay layer. That is how I punched up that piece. It's really simple thing. I hope you guys enjoyed the bonus lesson and thanks for watching.
22. Conclusion: That brings us to the end. Thank you guys so much for signing up. I hope you enjoyed it. I hope you learned something. If you want to learn more, there we go. Check out 01ArtSchool.com. That is my collection of courses online. I've got courses on common coloring. I've got about 20 hours I think of coloring tutorials. I've got some on how to use Procreate. I've got some on color theory. If you want more from me, you can check out that site and if free just move with your speed, then be sure to check out my YouTube channel, is just K Michael Russell, if you want to Google that. But I have 200 videos, at this point it would probably take you a month or two to watch them all back to back. There's no shortage of material there either. Again, thanks again for your support. Sure to follow me on Facebook and Twitter and all the different places. Hope to see you again soon. Take care.
Kurt Michael Russell, pro colorist & instructor
