Concept Art Architecture - Design and Paint Stunning Cityscapes

1. Architecturetrailer: welcome to concept art architecture. My name is Hardy Fowler, and I'm a professional illustrator and concept artist. I'm calling on all artists out there with a passion for creating cool looking buildings and cityscapes. If you've ever dreamed of making a career out of this, I'm here to tell you that the dream is really you could make a living doing this. All you need is a killer portfolio to launch you into an amazingly fun in rewarding career . This course can get you there. I'll show you all of my professional level techniques and tricks that will demystify the entire process of creating stunning cities. With Adobe Photoshopped. That stuff is way easier than it looks. In an easy to grasp, step by step process. I'll share all of my digital painting techniques and custom tools that will have you amazed at how stunning, expansive and detailed your scenes can be. But this course is so much more than just a painting. Demonstration will teach you everything you need to know to start thinking like a professional environment designer to tie it all together, we offer responsive support and loads of other course resource is to make sure that every student can take their work to new heights. Don't miss your change to create worlds. You could do this. It just might lead to a dream career. So enroll today, Grab your stylists and let's paint cool stuff. 2. Introduction: Hi, everyone. This is Hardy and welcome to concept art architecture. This is going to be a super fun and valuable course for any artist so good on you for signing up. I've got some real game changing techniques to share here that will make new levels of awesome work possible for any artist. Let's check out some prerequisites for this course. You definitely need to have completed art fundamentals and Photoshopped fundamentals Before getting to this point. I would also recommend checking out painting environments first. If you want to know how I do the background landscapes and some of our projects, most of what we'll do in this course is in the intermediate skill level range. But we're gonna take things one step at a time, so no one should be worried about being out of their death. Cityscape Painting an architectural concept Art is a really cool set of skills to have with the techniques will learn. In this course, you'll be creating vast cities in futuristic worlds in no time the sense of power and creativity you'll feel bringing structures and city to life Really amazing. The best part is you could make a good living doing this. All kinds of entertainment industry clients create a huge demand for artists who can imagine and render beautiful cityscapes and interior shots. These are skills that you can really bank on, and they will make you much more valuable as an art professional. Let's take a look at our course outline. The lectures Ahead will focus on concepts and theories to get you thinking like an architectural concept artist. These include architecture, painting, overview, depth and scale mood and story composition in a really cool video on how to adapt iconic architectural styles. Once we've covered those subjects, I want to share some special photo shop tools and techniques that make architectural painting way easier than you might think. Photoshopped geometry, seen lighting and custom shapes from their will. Put all of this knowledge to use with some awesome architectural painting projects that will simulate real world paid assignments. I'm really excited to share this course with you guys, and there's a lot to dig into. So kick back, grab your stylists and let's bring some amazing worlds toe life 3. Overview: Oh, everyone, this is Hardy in this sexually will take a broad look at the art of architectural concept painting and discuss some key guiding principles. Just to be very clear, we're not working as architects trying to come up with really buildable buildings. The concepts artists job is much more fun, in my opinion, and not nearly that complex. All that we're trying to do is come up with cool looking buildings in cities that someone would want to see in a movie or explore in a video game. This is very liberating, since we aren't shackled by any boundaries of engineering or even physics, as long as everything looks plausible and architecturally sound enough to be believable. And that's all we have to concern ourselves with in the same way that we would design in pain, a futuristic robot, it doesn't have to actually work. It just has to look like it could. After all, the concept artists primary goal is to paint cool stuff that will capture the audiences imagination. Before we move on to the actual concepts and techniques of cityscape or architectural concept art, Let's ask ourselves, how do we define success? What do buildings cityscapes and interior shots need to look cool. Well, here is a checklist of core goals to keep in mind, regardless of the setting period or type all great architectural concept. Art should have the following death in scale. This is a big one. All cityscapes need to feel huge in deep. You need your viewer to feel like they're a tiny speck in an enormous, majestic world. The viewer should be able to check out a close up detail in the foreground and then let their eyes sore out to infinity in the vast distance that you'll create. Even interior shots should have a strong sense of space that the viewer can occupy in their imagination. I have lots of really cool techniques on how to create these effects to share with you, and it will be a recurring theme throughout this course. Strong sense of mood. This is the emotional resonance that your image should inspire in your viewer. Does this place look cheerful or gloomy, Inviting or foreboding? Color choices, in contrast, play the biggest roles in determining this. But every detail that you include should serve to support the mood and feeling that you are hoping to inspire. So make sure that you really give that some thought. At the beginning of your project, it will be a guiding light story. Every building in city that we create should tell an interesting story and should make us think about the people who dwell within who lives here. What are their daily lives like? What influences shape their culture, the architectural style that you adapt in the technology that you demonstrate can speak volumes about the imaginary people who populate your worlds. We can spark that viewer's imagination just a little and make them want to spend some time in the worlds that we create. And then our images can start to take on a life of their own beautiful rendering. This one is a bit of a no brainer, but it does bear pointing out. Our paintings need to be beautiful to behold and well composed, even if we have great depth, mood and story. If our rendering is handled poorly, no one will pay attention long enough for your work to be appreciated fully, we'll go over some specific techniques to make sure that every tower window in City Street that you render will shine we're gonna put some serious power in your hands here. You won't believe what you're able to achieve, so that's a good idea of the broad strokes of this kind of structural concept art. Keep these general guiding principles in mind as we move forward and you'll be off to a great start. 4. Depth & Scale: Oh, everyone, this is Hardy. And this lecture will take a look at one of the most important concepts in creating cool city skates. The illusion of depth and scale. Creating a sense of hugeness is one of the best ways to make your cities, buildings and architectural paintings memorable and all inspiring. So this lesson is gonna be very valuable. Be sure to check out the perspective Infographic attached to this lecture. It's a handy cici for the general concepts. It will go over here. Okay, let's discuss several key ways to achieve a sense of depth. Thes are vanishing point, linear perspective, layering and scale, surface compression and atmospheric perspective. Obviously, there's a lot to unpack here, so let's dive right in. Let's start with Vanishing Point linear perspective. This is when we use straight lines converging at a vanishing point on the horizon to create the illusion of depth and its simplest form, which is one point perspective. There is a single vanishing point in our image where all parallel lines converge. Artists create thes perspective grids is underlying guidelines for the environments that they sketch. Here is a simple line drawing to help illustrate this concept, all of the parallel orthogonal lines in the image converge in a single vanishing point on the horizon. Even in this simple example of a cube, you could see how powerful this concept is. Taking this concept a step further, you can set up multiple vanishing points. Here is a look at another queue, but this time we have to perspective vanishing points to describe it in three dimensions. It gives a cube a bit more complexity and realism. Almost a cinematic quality. Three point perspective is the furthest degree to which you can take this vanishing point concept. It is most commonly used for cityscapes like this one, or images where there needs to be a strong sense of both depth and height in this image. Not only do we have converging perspective lines, giving us a sense of depth in two planes, but the lines created by the building's converge as they go upwards. It creates a really dizzying sense of height, makes the building see massive and towering. Let's zoom out and take a look at all three vanishing points and the perspective grids that come from. We have three vanishing points, one for each axis and it creates a really powerful sense of three dimensions. Now is a great time for you to do some perspective grid exercises with Photoshopped to start experimenting with these concepts. Photoshopped makes construction of these grids incredibly easy here, the techniques that I most commonly used. You can turn off shape dynamics on your brush editor and hold down shift to make perfectly straight lines. Once you have your vanishing point determined, all you have to do is use this shift clicking technique to do line after line until the entire canvases filled with converging lines. Super easy. Another great way to make a quick perspective grid is to repeatedly copy a single line and then distort the copies together. Let's check out how to do this. I'll draw a single straight line by holding down Shift, which makes you brush tool, either go perfectly vertically or horizontally. Once I have this line, I'll switch to the move to which is V on your keyboard shortcut. If I hold down Ault and shift when I move this line, it will automatically make a copy. From there. I'll merge this new layer down so that I have both lines on one layer. Now I can repeat this process. Two lines become 44 lines become eight and so on until I have very quickly created an entire page of parallel lines in practically no time at all. Isn't Photoshopped awesome? Now we just hit command T to bring up the free transform function. Hit control, and it gives you more transform options I like to use distort for this. Once we have hit Distort, you can modify these bars out on the edges, and you can distort the entire array of lines into any perspective. Plane that you want. Photo shop is automatically keeping the lines parallel and in perspective so that you don't have to plot out each line on the vanishing point. Very handy. Shortcut. Give this a try or feel free to download the layered perspective Grid file. If you'd like a template next, let's check out the concept of layering and scale. Simply put, this principle states that objects that are nearest appear larger and will cover up more distant objects. This is very useful for creating the illusion of depth when we have multiple similar objects in our image. If the viewer can assume that the objects air roughly the same size, like the people in this image, that all we have to do is make them smaller and smaller as they recede into the distance, and it will create a powerful illusion of depth. The layering of these objects, where the nearer ones cover up the more distant ones, makes this effect even more compelling. Now let's check out the concept of surface compression. This is where we make surface details on the planes that we define compress as they recede in our image. A cobblestone path is a perfect example. The stones in the foreground seemed quite round, but as they recede into the distance, if we start to squash them so that they seem flatter and more numerous, it creates the illusion of depth. We can use this concept to make things seem round as well. Let's take a look at a circle with this pattern of smaller circles. Inside looks pretty flat, right? Like a pizza. Well, if we start to compress the circles out near the edges of our main shape, making them flatter and more numerous than suddenly, this circle starts to look very spherical in three dimensional. Apply this concept to a tree trunk or a column on a building, and you'll be amazed by the results you get. Okay, so that's a basic look at some great devices to create the illusion of depth up. Next, we'll take this a step further. 5. Atmospheric Perspective: Oh, hi, everyone. This is hardy. In this sexual, we will discuss atmosphere perspective. This concept is part of depth and scale, but since it is possibly my favorite tool for creating the illusion of depth and because it's so powerful, it deserves its own dedicated video, so atmosphere perspective. This is where we put darker objects with higher contrast in the foreground, and we put lighter objects with less contrast in the distance. Simply put, things get lighter as they get farther away because there is mawr, air or atmosphere between the viewer's eye in the distant object. This is an incredibly powerful tool to give your images a sense of depth in distance. Let me show you a quick exercise. To demonstrate this concept, I've set up a layered file with a simple scene made out of only black silhouettes of some building features. These air split up into four levels of death, a foreground showing a building street and car close up with a lot of fine detail, a middle showing, some building silhouettes slightly farther back and finally a far distance, showing some rooftops out in the distance and behind that, a simple background. Now we make all of these layers visible, even though everything is black. But because of the different scale, we can sort of tell which objects are closer in which are farther away in the distance. But we're gonna make this depth effect much, much more powerful by using value to give the image atmosphere perspective. Let's start with our far distance layer. I'm going to hit command you to do a hue, saturation adjustments. I'll adjust the lightness of this layers that is a pretty high value, a very light grey, almost white. Next, I'll do a similar adjustment to the middle layer. The building shapes closer to us. This time. I won't lighten it up quite as much. I wanted to be a few steps darker than the rooftops in the distance. Isn't that amazing how deep and interesting this image suddenly looks? All because we've used value to give it atmospheric perspective. In fact, even though this images on Lee silhouettes with absolutely no interior rendering of any of the forms, it practically has a sense of being an entirely believable, realized cityscape. That's how powerful perspective and silhouettes can be when defining your architectural painting. Let's check out a really beautiful video game that makes great use of this concept. It's a platformer that came out a while back, called Limbo by play Dead. Does this art style look familiar? This entire game is black and white, and it uses nothing but silhouettes and atmospheric perspective. Look at descriptive and rich and beautiful. The environments look amazing. Use this concept to give your environments, cityscapes and buildings incredible depth and interest With this one simple trick. Let's jump back to our exercise and take this one small step farther. Before we finish up, I'm going to create a few layers in between the ones that we already have. Let's name each of these new layers missed. Now, with a soft round brush, I'm gonna very subtly paint in some soft glows to the spaces. Between are layers of distance. This will look like mist settling in the low points of our city. Now it doesn't have to look like a super foggy day, but if you add this effect with some subtlety, if you just give small hints of thicker air or atmosphere in these spaces between the layers, it becomes very natural looking. Starts making the three dimensional space, even Maura. Tangible and believable. We can also add some bloom effect as if the sun were shining through the rooftops. You can even apply a subtle Gaussian blur filter to your foreground to give it this really cool depth of field effect. Feel free to download this layered file if you'd like to play with adjusting the lightness of each layer and perhaps give some practice to painting mist in the spaces between. I've also worked up a landscape version of this exact same concept. The principles and techniques are identical, so you can see how the illusion of depth and scale is just is powerful regardless of the setting. Is there a lot of fun to create? And they take very little time, since you don't have to worry about any interior rendering, so take a crack at creating your own. I hope you found this principle helpful. It's one of my favorites, and I think you're really gonna love using it in our course projects. Later on 6. Mood & Story: Oh, hi, everyone, This is Hardy. In this lecture, we will discuss mood and story. This is how to make your architectural art resonate with your viewer on an emotional level . Mood and story are very interconnected in these scenes, but let's try to address them one at a time, starting with mood. In order for any work of art to be successful, it has to evoke a feeling in the viewer. We want the cityscapes that we create to feel like a living, breathing place that our viewer can occupy in their imagination. So how do we do that? It all starts with early decision making. At the beginning of a project. Decide on the mood and feeling that you want your scene to evoke and make all of your design decisions around that build up from the desired mood. If you want your image to be gloomy or foreboding, try a darker, muted color scheme. Dark dystopian cityscapes are a great example. If you want to make something seem idyllic or evoke happy feelings, use bright colors, warm shadows and make things seem alive and hopeful. Ah, glorious sunlit castle. Showing a kingdom in its prime mood is one of those big picture concepts that we need to decide early on in our process. Now let's talk about story in a way. Visual storytelling is what all art is meant to do, but it's especially important in architectural concept. Are the implied narrative that the viewer gets from our image can really engage them and draw them into your world Now, this doesn't mean that you have to spell out a sequence of events in every image, but we want to create a sense of wonder. Make the viewer want to explore your world here. Some great general ways to tell a visual story with your concept. Art Signs of Life This is a fun one. Show your viewers that people inhabit your world, even if none are visible now. You can literally include a character in your scene, but you don't have to. In fact, sometimes it's better to imply the presence of people rather than show them directly. Subtle clues like smoke coming out of a chimney or a light shining in a distant window. Little ships flying around a futuristic city, ornate wood or stone work in a Victorian city. Little details like this make your image very human and relatable to your viewer culture and design style. The architectural style and details that we choose can speak volumes about the world's. We create and can really drive our visual story. We can use all of the notions and preconceptions that people have when they see a certain architectural style to our advantage. For example, is someone sees a Victorian cityscape, They can assume all kinds of story elements about the people and culture within ladies and Victorian dresses, gentlemen with suits and top hats, maybe even steampunk type technology. Use all of the underlying information that comes built in with every design style to give your worlds layers of depth and complexity pass to explore. All of the gamers out there will really latched on to this one. I love to include past to explore in my cityscapes. Now these can literally be foot paths or roads or more indirect paths, like an alleyway between buildings, anything that will look like a cool place to explore in video game concept art. Our main job is to create somewhere that will be a fun three D environment to play around in, so we want to really lead the eye around our image and invite the viewer to come get lost in our world's. Keep these ideas in mind as you start any concept, art architecture project and you'll really enjoy the results you get. 7. Composition: Oh, hi, everyone, This is Hardy. In this lecture, we will take a quick look at composition. Basically, composition is the way that we placed objects and divide spaces in our scenes in a way that is pleasing to the eye. College and art school can devote entire semesters to this subject, but this will be a quick set of easy to remember tools to gadji. Composition guides can sound very concrete in mathematical, but it's very important to remember that these air only guidelines your own. I is the best judge of what looks good, so go with your gut first and foremost. Okay, that being said, let's check out to handy time honored guides for composition, the rule of thirds and the golden ratio. With the rule of thirds, we divide our Candace into three equal sections, both vertically and horizontally like this. Now think of the points where these lines intersect as Little Bull's eyes try to put your main focal point Whatever it may be on or very near one of these points. And it will give your image of pleasing composition pretty simple, right? The next guy that will look at is the golden ratio This is that cool mathematical spiral pattern that you may have seen before in movies or on TV. The pattern is based on a ratio of approximately 1 to 1.62 that is one unit high and 1.62 units wide, or vice versa. This was discovered by 1/12 century Italian mathematician named Fibonacci. It's incredibly cool. This ratio occurs in countless places in nature. Spiraling Nautilus shells the inner ear in human anatomy. All kinds of proportional relationships found in nature strangely adhere to this ratio for our purposes. We can use this pattern to help us determine nice looking compositions. Place focal points within that spiral pattern, and you will have a pleasing point of interest every time. You can also try to include elements that lead the eye around. The parking curb of the spiral is, well, anything you can do to send the eye around. The image in a pleasing way will make your composition more solid and interesting. Play around with these guys. It's really fun to apply them to existing artwork and see how often it works out. That these add up before we finish it bears repeating one more time. These air Onley guides don't feel trapped by these numbers. And remember that if it looks good to you than it is. Okay, that's our crash course on composition. Remember these simple tricks and they will serve you well. 8. Adapting Iconic Architectural Styles: Oh, hi, everyone, This is Hardy. In this election, we will learn how to adapt iconic architectural styles into our work. Architecture is a standalone art form, has tremendous beauty and complexity, which is why it has inspired artists and historians for centuries. But this very complexity is what makes painting, cityscapes and architecture intimidating for many artists. Don't worry. I'm gonna show you a new way to think about architectural styles that will demystify the entire process. This is way easier than you might think So, First of all, you don't need any kind of architecture or art history expertise to create beautiful, believable cityscapes. Remember, in most cases, the main goal of our paintings is just to look cool. The buildings that we designed don't have to adhere perfectly to a historical period or style. They don't have to match any existing city. They don't necessarily even have to obey the laws of physics. The architectural styles that we borrow from Onley need to create a feeling in our audience . To put this another way, let's check out a principal from my painting machines. Course I call this engineering for art. It doesn't have to work, but it has to look like it might take this robot, for example. Now I have no engineering expertise whatsoever, and I cannot explain much about how this robot might actually function. But all of the little mechanical details that I'm suggesting here give the viewer the sense that this really could be a functioning walking robot. The exact same idea applies to architectural paintings. Let's call it architecture for art. It doesn't have to be perfectly true to history or period. It just has to feel right to the viewer. There are so many amazing architectural styles and periods to borrow from, and any of them can be adapted to almost any application. You can take elements from a medieval castle and make a futuristic mega city. You can borrow a flowery Art Nouveau design and turn it into an alien corridor. Don't worry, I'm not going to send you off to study endless architectural periods or have you go on field trips to churches around the world. As concept artists, you don't have to rigorously study the dates, locations and influence of architectural styles. All that we're interested in is the look and feel of each style and how we can use it to make our world's look cool. So now I'm gonna show you how to grab any iconic architectural style and boil it down to its based design elements so that you can reassemble the pieces to create your own world. We'll check out four very useful iconic architectural styles as examples. I'll show you some real world photos of each than some paintings for each, and I'll be doing some cool line our window drawings on the side just to show you how to adapt thes styles and put them to use. I'll also list the main design elements of each, and I'll include a list of feelings and uses. I know it's a lot, but I hope you'll start to see the possibilities in the power of this shortcut way to view in adapt architectural styles. Okay, let's start with Gothic. This is a cool one that you'll immediately recognize its featured heavily in churches and castles around the world, which is why this style is ideal for castle and fortress concept art. It has kind of, ah haunted, gaunt quality that can create all kinds of moods in the viewer. Towering spires, buttresses and gargoyles all great tools to spark the viewer's imagination. So let's disassemble this style into its base design elements. It's characterized by Arch is coming to a point at the top. Towering, pointy spires, buttresses and lots of repeating, ornate elements. All of these pointy triangular shapes can make Gothic buildings seem menacing. But because of style is on so many impressive cathedrals worldwide, it can certainly evoked grandeur and majesty in our viewers as well, a very useful style. Next, let's take a look at Art Nouveau. This one might be a little bit lesser known and maybe a bit tougher to define, but it's really beautiful and worth checking out. Art Nouveau is a much softer, delicate style that seems to be inspired by nature and flowers. In particular. This style has more gentle, curved shapes, floral designs and patterns, and overall feels more feminine and a bit otherworldly. To break Art Nouveau down into its base elements, we'd have to mainly say circular or oval shapes and floral designs. The overall effect is kind of an organic feel, which is why Art Nouveau adapts very well, too futuristic or alien building designs. Up next is Art Deco, another really iconic style that you will all recognize It immediately evokes grand skyscrapers from the early 20th century and makes us think of industrialization and grand visions of the future. Games like BioShock make heavy use of Art Deco to adapt these feelings into an eerie, dystopian vision. Art Deco is characterized by rigid geometric shapes, like the perfectly mirrored lightning shapes and the perfect circle design on this window that I'm drawing. In many ways, it is the opposite of art Nouveau rigid geometry, as opposed to organic and natural, use this style to give a feeling of futurism, make them seem harsh or masculine, or just to evoke the early 20th century. Finally, let's check out the Victorian style. This one is really great and can be adapted for all kinds of fun uses. I think of this style is a very proper, refined and haughty style. It's the snobbish aristocrat of architectural styles. Victorian style has been beautifully adapted to the entire steampunk genre, borrowing all of its charm and feel of pride. Victorian architecture has the simplest elements. It's characterized by simple rectangles and circles, but arranged in ornate way. So look for repeating parallel lines or circular curves. The simple geometry of Victorian designs make it one of the easiest to pull off with the photo shop tools, and I'll show you had to do that in the Lectures ahead. Okay, that's our look at how to adapt iconic architectural styles. I hope this has helped to demystify the entire process and perhaps, has you looking at architecture with fresh eyes. There is a huge world of architectural styles out there, so find some Web images get inspired, and you won't believe what you're able to create from the amazing building blocks all around you. 9. Photoshop Geometry: Oh, hi, everyone, this is Hardy. Now that we've discussed the concepts and theories behind great looking architectural paintings, let's learn some concrete techniques on how to bring these ideas to life. I'm going to show you how to make Photoshopped do a lot of the heavy lifting for you so that lectures ahead will be super valuable. We'll start with what I call Photoshopped geometry. Photo Shop has all kinds of tools that can create perfect geometric shapes, lines and services. Since architectures made up of these elements as digital artists, we can use these geometric tools to make our job much, much easier. I've set up a cool worksheet that will run through together, will recreate each one of these Leinart exercises, and each will demonstrate a different photo shop technique for getting perfect geometric shapes. No more worrying about wobbly lines, perspective errors or a symmetry. With these techniques, you'll get clean, crisp, professional looking Leinart every time, and these principles carry forward to the full scale architectural paintings it will tackle later on. Okay, let's start in this upper left corner and check out some ways. That photo shop makes perfectly straight lines. Easy to accomplish First, let's do this polygon shape with a brush technique called shift Clicking. I'll select my brush tool, be as a keyboard shortcut, and then I'll hit F five to bring up the brush Editor for this technique will need to disable shape dynamics. We want to align to be a uniform thickness throughout. Okay, with shape dynamics off, go ahead and tap the brush it a starting point now if I hold down, shift and continue to make marks. Photoshopped automatically creates perfectly straight lines between the point you click. It's sort of like connecting the dots with this technique. You could make any shape you want, and it will always have perfectly straight sides just to add some interest. I'm going to shrink my brush a bit, and we can do this on the keyboard with the bracket keys with a smaller brush. I'll trace around the same contour, using the exact same method a few clicks later, and I've got some cool detail added to the interior of our shape. Pretty cool. Next, let's look at another used for shift clicking. I'll hit F five again and will enable shape dynamics once again another way that shift can be used is by holding it down while you're making a brushstroke, which will confine it to being either perfectly vertical or perfectly horizontal. This makes it really easy to create lots of perfectly horizontal or vertical lines, which you'll encounter a lot in architectural painting. Let's create a new layer and take this a step further. I'll shrink my brush again with the bracket keys, and let's create a parallel detail line off to the side here. Since this new line is on its own layer, we could easily make a copy of it hit V to select the move tool. Then we just hold down option and shift and simply moved the line over. As you can see, it creates a copy automatically. Now. You could certainly just draw a new line or even copy and paste. But with this simple keyboard shortcut, you congrats and copy any element with incredible ease and speed. In fact, let's copy this on one more time to have a nice row of three that looks pretty cool, but let's mirror it to the other side is if we were creating a door or a window frame, merge these layers so that they're all on one layer by selecting them in the layers panel in hitting command e. Okay, great. They're all on one layer. Now we just make a selection with the Marquis or lasso tool, use marquee. And just like before we use the move tool and hold down option and shift to move a copy over to the side. Next. Let's flip this so that it perfectly mirrors the original. With these new lines still selected, hit Command T to bring up free transform next hit control to bring up all of these secondary transformed functions. For this, let's select flip horizontal, and it will make this copy into a perfect reflection of the original. I'm sure you can imagine how there's copying in transforming can be an enormous timesaver. You only have to render one side. Okay, great. Next. Let's check out these exercises on the bottom left corner. I'll show you how to use selections and the stroke function to make all kinds of cool shapes. Let's start with this rectangular window panel. We'll use the marquee tool for this, so hit em on your keyboard, and then we'll drag out a rectangle similar to this example. Next, let's divide this shape into smaller windowpanes with the marquee tool still selected. Hold down option, and you'll see this little minus sign appear next to the cursor. Let's use this to subtract away somethin rectangles from this main shape, and we'll have a more complex, subdivided selection. Now let's check out how to make this selection into an outline. Go to edit and select stroke. This will bring up a dialog where you can specify this stroke with color, capacity and other parameters. I almost always leave opacity at 100% but you can adjust that if you want to, and we'll stick with black to match the brush diameter that we've been using. Let's go with six pixels and then hit. Okay, Just like that, our selection is now Leinart. Let's add a bit more complexity to this one. Before we move on, I'll merge down all of the Leinart layers that we created so far, and I'll create a new layer. Next. Let's use the marquee tool to select a rectangular shape inside of this window pane in words just a bit so that it looks like a border perfect. Next, let's again go to edit stroke and give this shape a thinner stroke, Say two pixels. Okay, great. Now that we've got this first windowpane done, we'll use the move tool to make a copy again with option and shift held down. Just move this interior detail shape over to the window pane next to it. Great. We now have two perfectly matched interior shapes in these top two pains. We could continue copying and moving these individually to each windowpane, but it's much faster if we go by twos. So let's select these two new interior detail layers and merge them together with command E pert. Now that they're on one layer, we'll just use the move tool with option and shift to drag copies down to the middle pains and then again to the ones on the bottom. There we have it a super easy way to get some pretty detailed shapes using nothing more than strokes, elections and move tool copy. Let's jump to this exercise next door and put this concept to a slightly more complex test . Let's switch our marquee tool to any lips. You can do this either by holding down the cursor on marquee on the toolbar to bring up the other shape options. Or you can just hold down, shift and hit em to toggle between rectangular and elliptical shapes. Did you can tell by now I'm a big fan of keyboard shortcut? Okay, let's make a perfect circle by holding down shift in, dragging one out to the approximate shave we've got here. In the example. Now, just like before, let's go to edit stroke and give this one a six pixel outline. Okay, cool. Let's define this interior edge by dragging out another perfect circle by holding down shift. Now, notice that this new selection isn't lining up quite right with the circular outline we just made. This is easy to fix while continuing to hold down shift. Also, hold down the space bar. Now we can move this circle around while we're defining its size. Move it into place so that it shares a center with our first line. Okay, perfect. Now, once again, go to edit in stroke to give this one another six pixel outline. Looking cool. Okay, Next, let's create some finer lines on the interior of what is starting to look like a curved window trim. We make another perfect circle selection. Move it with the space bar if we need to, and then go to edit stroke in this time, we'll give it a finer line. Wait just two pixels. Great. That definitely adds some nice detail. Let's do the exact same process, but will place this circle closer to the interior edge before we add the stroke. Okay, great. That strokes Looking really nice. Now notice that our design calls for a semi circle, so we'll use the rectangular marquee tool to select the bottom half of the circle and cleared away by hitting delete. Let's do some simple rectangular selections to give this window trim some side panels. This should seem pretty easy by now. I'm just using the rectangular marquee in stroking selections. We'll create another interior shape and give it a finer line. Justus. We did before. Next. I'll use the move tool to copy and move this side over to its opposite so that we can get two for the price of one. See how easy this is as a final bit of finish to the trim, Let's give it a little window sill. I'll drag out a long, thin rectangle and I'll once again go to edit stroke to give this shape and outline. Great. This window is almost finished, but I'd like to show you one other cool way to get nice outline shapes for these pieces. Dividing the windowpanes Let's start with a simple, long rectangular shape, dividing the vertical access now, rather than just stroking a selection. Let's fill it in by holding down option in hitting. Delete. Now we'll just copy this shape to make the other dividers. Use the move tool to create a new shape and then hit command T grab this corner handle and then hold down shift to rotate it. 90 degrees will move it and resize it so that it's in the correct position that we want. Okay, great. Now I'll use the move tool toe. Once again, create a copy of this horizontal piece and move it down a bit to fit into position. Next, let's go to our layers panel in. Select these layers that are our window divider shapes well hit command E to merge those shapes together onto one layer. Now here is how we turn these filled shapes into an outline Command click on this new layer and that will make a selection of all these window divider shapes. Next, go to select, modify and contract this. That's a shrink, our selection inwards by whatever amount we specify. Let's go with four pixels. For this, you can see the selection is now a few pixels in words. Now just hit delete, and it will clear away this contracted selection, leaving a four pixel outline behind. Cool. That's a pretty nice looking window. Let's tackle these more advanced windows in this upper right hand corner. But first, let's merge together all of these layers that we created so far so that our layers don't get too numerous now, since we know that we can move copy anything that we make and reflect it to make a mirror image on the other side, then we already know that we only have to render half of this window trim. I'm doing that now with the brush tool and some shift clicking to give us these basic shapes. I'm holding down shift to get the vertical and horizontal lines right, and I'm only letting go to do the slightly curved shapes at the end of the window sills, otherwise all straight lines. Okay, that's a nice start. Let's make this side trim Panel more interesting with Cem Bey Details. Freehand. I'll draw small curve at the bottom of this, and then I'll just hold down shift and make a long, vertical line to the top. Another curve at the top and we'll just do another shift. Vertical line back down. Perfect. A nice little woodwork detail. Next, let's use a marquee tool and with option and shift once again, we'll just move a copy over to the side and then again for 1/3 identical detail element. Very cool. Now, after a small amount of detail in line work along these horizontal lines, we could make a mirror image of everything that we've done on this window to the other side . Once again, use the move to a copy operation to create a copy and then hit command T then control in select flip horizontal. I know this seems like I'm just spouting out letters on the keyboard, but the's shortcuts air such a time saver that they're really worth teaching your hands to do. Okay, awesome. We've got some really nice, detailed, perfectly symmetrical window trim. Now let's get started on this interior window shape, I've chosen something a bit more complex. It's a rectangular shaped window, but with a round top to create this outline, let's create and feel some solid shapes. And then we'll contract the selections that we as we did in the previous example. I'll make a new layer, and I'll start with a rectangle about the shape of the example here. Once I had that in place, I'll hit option delete to fill it in. Now let's switch our marquee tool to any lips and will create a circle on top. It's important that the side of the circle matches up with the rectangle said. It looks like one continuous shape. Remember, you can use this space bar to move this shape around if it's not quite right on target. Okay, that looks good. So we'll fill that into with option delete. Great. Now that we have this shape, let's command collect the layer to make a selection, and then we'll go to select, modify and contract to shrink the selection in words. I'll contract this one by six pixels and then we'll just hit delete to clear away the interior. Perfect. We've got a nice, complex shape defining our window opening. Next, let's create thes cool looking windowpane dividers, just like we did in the last exercise. I'll create a new layer, and I'll handle these vertical and horizontal dividers very easily by move, copying these rectangular shapes and moving them into place. It's the exact same processes before. Okay, great. I've got all of these horizontal and vertical elements in place. Now these ones at the top are slightly trickier. Let me show you how to pull this effect off. Let's copy one of our horizontal dividers and put it right here on top of this rectangle. Now let's hit Command T and rotate this one about 1/3 of the way towards vertical. Next, let's copy that element and rotated again to about 2/3. Finally, let's rotate another copy to be perfectly vertical 90 degrees. Now let's merge these three rotated dividers together, and we'll do move copy over to the side so that we can just flip it horizontally, just like we've done before a few times. Okay, great. Now that we've got perfectly symmetrical, radiating window dividers, it's looking really nice. Finally, let's create this circular divider in the middle using the elliptical marquee. Let's create a perfect circle right in the center of these radiating dividers. Again, you can use space bar to adjust the placement of any selection while you're making it. That looks just about right. So now we can hit delete to trim away the parts of the radiating dividers that we don't need. And then we can use this exact selection to create a stroke outline. Just go to edit stroke and let's do about 15 pixels for this one so that it matches the rest of the dividers. That looks pretty close. Okay, now we need to gather all of these window divider layers and merge them onto one layer. Be sure not to merge everything that we've done so far, because we need these dividers to be on their own layer for what we'll do next. Okay, great. That's much Tidier. Now just command. Click the divider layer and let's contracted about four pixels. Just like before. We simply delete away the inside and presto! Very cool, complex window, done with simple Photoshopped geometry. Amazing. Up until now, everything that we've done has been perfectly front facing no angles or perspective whatsoever. And what's the fun in that? Now I'd like to show you a super easy way to take any front facing two dimensional drawing like this window. We've just created and use Photoshopped geometry to bend it into perspective. This is practically Azizi is a few clicks. Okay, let's start by making a copy of this entire window that we've just finished. Next, I'll hit command T to bring up free transform. Let's hit control and select, distort with distort, weaken. Grab any of these corner handles and completely change the angle and perspective of this entire window. This is really handy when you're working within a perspective grid, and you need to fit something complex into that three dimensional space. You just make it front facing first, using all of the super easy vertical and horizontal line tools that photo shop provides, and then you simply distorted into place. Now this definitely looks more three dimensional, but it looks a bit like a flat sticker of a window. It lacks depth, so let's do a bit of fine tuning to fix that. First, I'll use the polygonal lasso tool to select this inner window shape. The polygon lasso tool is nice for this, since you can really take your time and hit the four corners precisely, rather than trying to carefully trace it with a free hand lasso. Okay, great. Now that we have that selected, I'm just gonna use my keyboard arrows to nudge this interior part down into the right. See how it starts to make the window trim, Seeing deep in three dimensional already a big improvement as a finishing touch, Let's do a bit more line work with our brush tool hit F five to make sure that shape dynamics is disabled because we're going to do some shift clicking, holding down shift in keeping that connect the dots idea in mind. Let's shift click to make the interior edge to this side of the wood trim that we can see. Let's do this again on the upper portion and even along these outside edges of the window trim to make this would work seem like it has some thickness and dimension awesome. A super easy and very cool way to adapt a two dimensional drawing into a very three dimensional looking space. Okay, one final exercise I'd like to show you is a bit more fun in Freehand, but it still makes great use of Photoshopped geometry with shape dynamics still disabled. Let's create a basic three dimensional cube. I'm holding down shift for the vertical lines and then shift clicking to make these perfectly straight perspective lines. Perfect. A few lines, and we've already got a pretty convincingly three dimensional cube shape. Let's move. Copy this shape over, and I'll show you some cool ways to take something extremely basic and give it some character and embellishments that will make it seem much more refined and artful. Let's make this cube like it's made out of Warren Stones. First of all, I'll use my eraser tool to chip away a few nicks and chips around the edges, making it a little less perfect thes blemishes air especially effective when placing them in corners. I'll grab my brush tool, but I'll turn on shape dynamics because we're gonna do some Freehand drawing. We want our lines to have pressure sensitivity so that they'll look nice. Okay, great. Now let's go to these places where we are raised away some gaps and detail in these little cracks of it. Imagine little chunks of stone that fell away, leaving these gaps already. This simple cube shaped is starting to look like a really sophisticated and riel material that you can reach out and touch to take this detail in a step further, let's add some very subtle brick patterning. I'm just adding in some faint lines to indicate some bricks all stacked up. It's very important to follow the perspective established by our outer edges, so really take your time. When lining up these brick line angles, I find that varying. The thickness can give your brick patterning a little more interest. But do whatever looks cool to you? Don't forget to stagger a few vertical gaps as well, to give it that offset brick pattern. With just a little more detail work, I think this one is done. We turn the simplest of shapes into a pretty interesting architectural drawing. Very cool. Let's copy this original cube one more time and try another variation. I'll hit F five and switch off shape dynamics. Once again, let's use shift clicking to add a cool little ridge to the outside of this cute kind of like a little raised trim detail we want that used to seem like they're angling outwards towards us. So make sure you follow the perspective determined by the original cube shape. And then we'll add these little small angled lines to show the contour of this detail shape . Okay, that looks pretty cool. As a final detail, let's create the indication of a little inset panel as if this were some ornate chimney or something like that. I'll create a new layer, and they don't make a square shape with the rectangular marquee tool. I'll then subtract away another square shaped by holding down option, and we're left with this nice square border shape. Next, let's go to edit and then stroke, and we'll give this one about a three pixel outline. Okay, cool. Now let's make a copy of this new shape, since we'll need to reuse the original in a moment. Once we have our copy, let's hit Command T and then control so that we can find Distort, just like before will use these corner handles to manipulate this shape until it fits the correct perspective. Perfect. Let's use the original that we saved and transform it to fit this other surface of the queue. It's amazing. A three dimensional. These tools can make even the simplest shape seen. Hope you can imagine all the applications for this. Okay, great. Now that thes inset panels are in place, I'll do a little bit of fine tuning by selecting the interior of the shape and nudging it with the arrow keys to give it some death, just like we did on the three dimensional window above. Once I've got this adjustment made of both sides, all that's left to do is to switch back on shape dynamics, and then I'll just do a little bit of detail brush work to get this shape, a sense of texture and service. With that, I think we have a finished exercise. I hope you found this exercise helpful. Get these techniques in practice and Photoshopped will do the hard parts of every architectural painting for you. 10. Scene Lighting: Oh, hi, everyone, this is Hardy. I've set up two more very quick exercises to give you a good idea of how I go about lighting a scene. This is how we use value light and dark tones to make our seems seem like believable. Three dimensional spaces will also look how even subtle changes in your lighting scheme can have a significant impact on the mood and feel of your image. Let's start with this representation of an outdoor cityscape now. Obviously, these air extremely simplified rectangular cube shapes and like the detail we would find in a fully realized cityscape. But they do have correct three point perspective and are set up in a way that will help us render different lighting schemes. One other thing that I want to point out is the layers tab over on the side. I've gone ahead and created solid shapes on separate layers for each group of planes and one for this circle shape as well. Because these shapes are on their own layers, we can command click the layers and get a selection any time we want a paint within those shapes, I want students to be able to very easily call up a selection and then paint within so that we can focus on value and light rather than Photoshopped technicalities. So any time you need a selection, just command click on the desired plane group and the marching ants selection will appear an incredibly powerful photo shop tool that will save you hours in your projects. For our first lighting scheme. Let's try a midday light where the sun is overhead. I'll make this layer called mid day visible, and you can see that I've done some simple Grady INTs to get the sense of a sun shining down from above. No, let's create a new layer in name it rendering. This is the later we're gonna paint in values on these planes and give these shapes and three dimensional lighting. I'll go ahead and command click on the front planes layer and you'll see the marching ants appear. I'll hit Command H to hide those because I don't really want them to be a distraction. While I paint in tones with my brush tool selected, I'll use a very soft, simple round brush pretty much an airbrush. That should be perfect. Okay, I'll go ahead and start tapping in some values. While I'm doing that, let's think about how this theoretical son would be hitting these theoretical buildings. I want the light to hit thes front planes most directly. So use, um, lighter values there. Since the sun is above, I'll make these shapes brightest at the top. It gives a sense that these front planes air really bathed in sunlight, even after a few brushstrokes. A strong sense of light sourcing gives it seen a really dramatic and authentically three dimensional field that's looking pretty good for these rectangular shapes. So I think I'll jump over to this circle and try to make it look spherical. To get my selection, I'll come and click on the circle layer and bring up our selection Super easy. Using my brush tool, I'll pain in some tones to make this circle start to feel three dimensional, with its brightest highlighting facing upwards and towards the light source. Pretty cool. So easy now to give this light sourcing one more degree of realism. Let's switch to our eraser tool in a race away. Some cast shadows where some of these shapes air overlapping. I'm just doing this freehand since shadows can be somewhat diffuse and ill defined, but feel free to use a lasso tool if you'd rather have more control. Really cool. Now let's try the same thing on the sphere. But we need to make this shadow curve a bit to match the curve of the sphere. Wow. See how much realism that adds Cast shadows are one of the most powerful tools in the architectural concept artist kit. Now, for some reflected lights, I'll switch to a darker value of gray, since I don't want these to be quite as intense is the main highlight side. I'll command click on the side planes layer to bring up a selection for these other surfaces. Once again, let's hide these marching ants by hitting command H Great Now with our brush tool, let's add in some subtle, reflected lights to these dark sides. Thes congee, light bounced off the ground or neighboring shapes are just a bit of ambient light. Casting subtle glows on some of these surfaces. Reflected lights can kind of be whatever your project artistically needs him to be awesome . That's looking really three dimensional. Now, notice. I've also got a sunset lighting scheme set up on a layer. Let's see what that looks like after painting in the plains. Wow. See how that gives us seen a completely different mood and feel I've made the lighter planes on the side. It completely changes how things feel in this scene. Give this second lighting scheme a try or even try to come up with different ones on your own. Just make sure that you keep your values consistent with the light sources that you've set up, and it will always seem realistic. You'll be amazed at how different light sources can give the same elements. A totally fresh look. Before we finish this lecture, let's check out one more very quick exercise on how to light interiors. I've got another document set up with a simple room blocked in just using perspective and a couple of window shapes that I've distorted into the correct perspective. These will represent our light source just like the last exercise. I've got these shapes on their own layers so that I can use them to call up selections for each surface, the walls, floor and ceiling. So essentially everything is ready to go. All we need to do is create a new layer for our rendering, which I'll do now. Okay, great. I'll use the same soft, round brush and let's start by adding some value on the floor. I'll command click the floor layer to bring up the selection, and then I'll hide it with command age. So when rendering an interior, we need to think about where our light is coming from and how it will react with the different surfaces illuminate. I'll start painting in some tones on the floor here to show you one of the most important ways that light behaves in an interior space. Notice that I'm going very bright directly under the windows. This is the light that is reflected directly in the floor surface, as if it were a mirror. Now, obviously, most floors air. Not quite that shiny, reflective but even diffuse materials like wood do have quite a bit of this reflection in them. And, as you can see already, especially if I our race away a bit near the walls edge, This gives a very realistic effect pretty cool. Right now. I'll do something similar up here on the ceiling, and after that I'll just do a small amount of rendering on these walls, since the lighting in most interior rooms is somewhat diffuse in most places, the light on your walls can often be fairly subtle. The one thing you want to make sure of is toe have a nice value edge here, where the two corners meet. That sharp change in tow will really make the hard turn in the plane seemed very realistic . Just like that, we have a very cool interior lighting scheme, and this works, no matter how complex the surfaces are, structures within. Our one last degree of realism that we can add is some direct spotlighting coming in through this window. For this, I will just copy one of these windows shapes by selecting it with a lasso tool and making sure that I'm doing that on the windows layer. I'll hit command, see and then command V to copy and paste this shape onto a new layer. Now I'll need to flip this shape and squash it into the plane of the floor. To do that, I'll just hit command tea for free transform, and then I'll hit control and flip vertical. Now that it's flipped upside down, I'll bring up free transform once again to find Distort. With this function, I can move the sides of this shape into the correct plain and make it look like the shape is just sitting on the floor. The angle that you defined here really determines where the light source outside the window is placed is not an awesome way to add super cool atmosphere detail. I try to find a way to include one of these windows shapes, spotlights in just about every interior concept painting that I do since they had so much charm and mood. Okay, I hope you've enjoyed this look. It had a light, a scene and how we command click layers to call up selections. Keep these simple principles in mind, regardless of how complex the spaces and shapes of your seen our and they will never let you down. 11. Custom Shapes: Oh, everyone, this is Hardy. In this lecture, we're gonna look at custom shapes. This is an incredibly powerful tool that I've learned about recently, and I'm really excited to share this with you. Custom shapes let you turn any image into a vector stamp tool that you can apply to your artwork because it's vector base. That means that you can skew and scale these shapes in any way that you want, and it will not lose pixel resolution here. I'm using some of the custom shapes that I've made from photos or that I've made out of geometric designs have created with selection tools just to give you an idea of what this tool does, you can see how quickly these can make a cityscape seem incredibly deep and detailed. The possibilities are endless. You can create an entire Gothic skyline with just a few clicks and adjustments. Any shape that you create could be transformed, stretched or flipped to give it endless variety. Beyond these silhouette shapes, we can even add in highlight shapes to instantly add detail and interest to our buildings in a matter of minutes. If we layer in transform these highlight shapes, they can gain incredible variety and complexity. The best part is we can use thes highlight shapes, is command clicks, elections and then paint within them, giving us incredible control over how to illuminate all of this cool detail. This works for any kind of cityscape, even mind boggling. Futuristic mega cities can be laid out in detailed with just a handful of shapes and some fine tuning. You won't believe how powerful this tool can be. Basically, custom shapes can add tremendous stepped in detail to your artwork and Concordes, all kinds of happy accidents and unexpectedly cool effects to appear a great tool toe have at your disposal. But like everything else in Photoshop, it needs to be used artfully and with restraint. Okay, let's go over some of the technical aspects of how this tool works, and then I'll show you how to make your own custom shape from a photograph. First of all, custom shape appears is this little blob shape on your toolbar or you can just hit you is a keyboard shortcut. On this first drop down, make sure that it is set to pixels. That's all really need for our purposes. You can adjust the blending mode or opacity, but I typically leave those alone at normal and 100% since I mainly end up using the shapes . I laid down his selections to paint within afterwards. More on that later moving over here, we see, are shaped library. Now Photoshopped comes with some defaults, like the pushpin and light bulb icons, but is a digital painter. I never really found much use for those, which may be why I ignored this awesome tool for so many years scrolling down. Let's find some of the shapes that I've made. Now, if you want to use these shapes, you can do so but downloading and installing the provided CSH files. Once you have these files, click on this little gear icon and go to load shapes from there. Navigate to where you put the downloaded CSH files. I've separated them into a few sets by category, but for now let's load the one called castles. Just like that, a full set of custom shapes is now in your library. Let's start some of these out as you can see weaken, drag out this size and proportions that we want. You can hold down shift if you want to constrain the default proportions, or it could just place the shape freehand and make it taller or wider than normal. Just like that, we have a pretty cool looking row of Gothic spires. Silhouettes like these are incredibly powerful and contained tons of information. In fact, as we learned in the Atmospheric Perspective Lecture, you can create and almost completely realize cityscape with little else. But for this exercise, let's take it a step further and check out the full power of this tool. I'll grab one of these highlight shapes and start dropping in a shape to add detail within these silhouettes. I'm just using one shape here, but in a full project. Remember to use multiple shapes or transform things so that it doesn't look too repetitive or like a stamp used over and over. That looks pretty cool. I like all the detail and complexity of every little window and tower that this single highlight shape indicates, but it's a little too bold. Let me show you how to apply this kind of effect with more finesse. We'll just treat this shape as a pattern or template. I'll make it invisible for now, and I'll create a new layer. Now, remember, if we command click any layer, Photoshopped creates a selection of all pixels within that layer. So since we have this highlight shape on its own layer, I'll command click. And then I can paint inside of this selection on my new layer. I'll hit command age to hide the marching ants, and we'll start painting. See how nice and subtle and refined this effect can be. This really is one of my favorite ways to add detail to any painting. It makes it seem like you've been agonizing over details for hours, but it just takes a few clicks. Okay, now I'd like to show you how to create your very own custom shapes. You can do this with practically any photo you come across, but it's best to find something with quite a lot of contrast in your main focal point, somewhat silhouetted and isolated. For my example, let's use this photo of Mont ST Michel in France. See how this is pretty much already a silhouette against this guy that makes it perfect for creating a custom shape. These next steps are fairly technical, so pay close attention or rewind if you need to. Next, we need to remove all color from this image. So I'll hit, command you and bring up hue saturation, and then I'll just take saturation all the way down. Totally great. Out next, we need to do a levels adjustment to Max out the contrast on this image, we're gonna reduce it entirely to black and white, so we'll hit command l and that will bring up a levels adjustment. Let's slide these handles on the ends closer together, and you will see the contrast increasing sharply. Keep going until all mid tones are gone from the photo and you can only see black and white . Perfect. Now that we have reduced this to pure black and white, let's create a selection using a cool trick. Make sure that you have black selected is your foreground color and then go to select and color range. This will make a selection out of whatever color you have said is your foreground. See the marching ants outlining everything black on the page. Okay, we're almost there. I'll use the marquee tool to sort of trim off the bottom part, and next we'll go over to the paths tab, which should be right next to your layers tab. If you've got your workspace set up like I do, even if you don't, the past tab should be very easy to find. Next will go to this little icon that looks like a circle with Victor handles around it. This icon is the make work path from selection button. Click that, and it will turn your selection into a vector shape. Suddenly are outlined. Building is described by thousands of little vector points and handles. It could be kind of dizzying, but don't worry. It's not as scary as it looks, and your computer is not gonna explode or anything with this work path to find. We now go to edit and then define custom shape. Give your new shape and name, and that's that you can now access this new custom shape anytime you need it hope you can imagine the possibilities. There are so many applications for this tool, but if you're not quite is psyched about this or if it seems overly technical or if you're just having trouble finding good photos, feel free to use my custom shapes for this course, and you'll still get really cool results 12. Project Briefs: Oh, hi, everyone, This is Hardy. In this election, we will discuss Project Breeze as a concept artist or illustrator. You first need to thoroughly understand the finished product that your clients want. Good communication is key, and this often comes in the form of a document called a project Brief that comes from the client. This is just a set of instructions and Web image visual references outlining the scene or world that they want you to create. Briefs can be many pages long or just a few quick sentences. Depending on how much creativity the client is leaving up to you. They need to communicate the general ideas like General City type period and cultural references. But they also need to give you an idea of the feeling and mood that this place is meant to evoke to get you all from New York. This process. I've worked up some quick project briefs as a starting point for our main concept art architecture projects. So let's check those out for our projects have chosen a good variety of fairly mainstream concept art project ideas. This will give us the opportunity to explore a lot of different design and rendering challenges that you might encounter in your own work, and it will help these projects simulate a re a world paid assignment. Check out these descriptions and references below and see what kind of ideas start coming to mind. Do a Web search to gather your own visual references is inspiration, but not for copying. Never let thes Web images influence you too much. We're going to rely on our own visual memory and design knowledge to come up with new and even cooler designs than anything you might find online. So don't let women ages limit you just inspire you. We need to make sure the work within these provided brief guidelines. So read carefully and always feel free to ask your client to elaborate. If anything is unclear, questions are your friend. Now I totally get that. Each one of these projects takes a tremendous amount of time and creativity, and that's a lot to ask of our students. While I recommend checking out each one of these projects in the order that I've laid out, you can certainly feel free to skip to the project or projects that interest you most. If you plan on skipping around here some quick points about each project so that you'll know what to expect. Leinart Alley will be a very simple exploration of Leinart and perspective. To create a cool scene will get a lot of use of photo shop geometry techniques that we discussed earlier and will get a very cool finish line drawing that makes great wall art. Consider this a good introductory project. Very simple stuff. Castle Meadow will be a bit more challenging and will focus more on using seen lighting and custom shapes. To get an incredible amount of detail and mood into our image will learn how to create an epic sense of scale and story. A great portfolio builder. Loft interior will be a nice change of pace. Will design and render a cool, inviting interior space loaded with atmosphere and story will use photo textures heavily to make every wall and plain come alive, and we'll explore some really cool lighting effects. Cyberpunk cityscape is the culmination of everything we've learned in this course and is the most challenging project. Call, though, will be creating the sense of incredibly complex in detailed buildings. It all really comes back to the concepts learned in seen lighting in custom shapes, a very worthwhile challenge and a great portfolio piece. Okay, I hope that quick preview helps guide you to the project an interesting most if you don't have time to do them all in order. Now that we have our project briefs and we've already discussed all of the elements of successful architectural concept art, let's put all of this awesome knowledge to use and start our first project. So grab your stylists and let's dive in. 13. Line Art Alley - Perspective & Rough Line: Oh, hi, everyone. This is Hardy. And welcome to the Leinart Alley project is gonna be really cool one. So let's get started. I've got a blank canvas here, and we're gonna start, first of all by establishing a perspective grid. This is always a nice first step with an architectural painting. It gives you your framework, of course, to make everything look three dimensional gives you that nice grid to base all of your lines off of. But it also helps you a lot with shot design. Once you know where all of your perspective lines are gonna be, it immediately gives you this sense of the three dimensional space that your image will occupy can actually help you with the ideation process. So just like our perspective exercise we did earlier in the course, we're just gonna make some parallel lines, merge those together and then just keep copying and merging again and again. You sort of get an exponential growth with these lines. And just like that, we've got a full page, an entire array of parallel lines, which I'll just distort into a perspective. Planes zooming out a little bit. I'm distorting up to give us our vertical plane where, of course, going to do a three point perspective. So this will establish our vertical building lines, those lines going from the ground up. And this is what will give us that really great sense of height in our image. So just copying that array of lines again, giving us one of our lateral perspective planes and just sort of pinching in those distortion handles on the side. And there we go. We've already got two planes of perspective set up to vanishing points kind of off of the campus. So for our third, we're gonna do this a little bit differently by shift clicking around and around the canvas and just to this vanishing point that I'm establishing in the center. So we click to the middle and then kind of click off of the canvas, choose another little track to go in and in back to the vanishing point, so skipping ahead a little bit, this is a kind of a repetitive process, and I'll try and make these perspective grids available to you guys is a template so that you don't have to bother making these cause honestly, once you have the basic one in place. You can kind of just copy them and Lou things around like I'm doing here. And like I said before, this is sort of the shot design part of the entire project. This is where we decide where our eyes going to go. All that great stuff that helps us determine really the feel of our project. So I've got my vanishing point it about a 1/3 mark. Remember that rule of thirds compositional guide? And I think we're all said. I really like the way those perspective planes look. I can imagine the three dimensional space, So I've created a new layer called Rough Sketch. I have turned off shaped dynamics so that I can shift, click and do some straight lines, just like we did in our Photoshopped geometry lecture. And I'm just sort of establishing the basics of this environment. I want to have this be a cool little alleyway, lots of little pass for our I to follow and noticed everywhere where I have a line that's in the same perspective plane. All I have to do is sort of mentally follow that little grid that we have underlying. I've got all those perspective lines at low opacity so that there there is a reference, but they don't really dominate the image. So all you really have to do is follow those guides just like I'm doing here, racing away a little bit. And it'll always work out. It will always be in the correct perspective plane. It will give even this very simple Leinart and incredibly realistic three dimensional feel . So this this project is just a great early exploration in perspective. Make making good use of these grids. Making some really cool depth effects with very little effort doesn't get much simpler than a simple line art drawing. Now, this first step, this rough sketch is sort of just a guy. We're gonna come back in later lectures and do do some more refined passes to make this look nice. Give it a little more personality than just these completely flat uniform thickness lines. This doesn't look very hand rot at this point. So what we're doing right now is really just getting our idea out there defining all of these main planes and buildings really establishing our scene right now. So as you can probably tell by now and by the project brief. The idea here is just sort of, Ah, cool looking, European style sort of Victorian alleyway won't include some really cool feature windows, but I also wanted to have this really nice sense of a path to come and explore. So that's that that video game appeal that we spoke about in our mood lecture There's some kind of cool, little implied place for the viewer to explore in their imagination. That's always a great thing to include in any architectural or environment painting. Want to draw the viewer in, make them wanna peek around the next corner and really just explore these worlds that we create? So, using this depth perspective plane I'm making these parallel staircase lines come out and again as long as those go to that vanishing point that we established, it will always look correct in three dimensional, so it takes a little bit of figuring out. You sort of have to establish this three dimensional space in your own mind and make sure that you're always making these lines go to the correct point. So here, just a basic rectangle to establish this window and all we have to do is follow those underlying grid lines and it'll work out perfectly So same thing on this next window just repeating the same type of process and even this window on the opposite side of this alleyway. Notice it. It follows the grid lines across that space so that these windows are the same size. Gonna put a little doorway here on either side of this little step just to give some further interest. One of those great little signs of life tricks for giving our image a cool story. Kind of nice to imply that people live here. So windows, little apartment entrances, things like that really sparked the imagination and just make these images seem relatable and cool. And that's what we're going for here. That's kind of the whole point. Make it seem relatable and something interesting that the viewer would want to check out. So the's basic rough lines air basically coming together. Now I'm just sort of adding a few little secondary details just for these little lines to be kind of a framework for a sui move forward. Not really worrying about the line quality looking too nice or detailed at this point will switch our shape dynamics on for later steps and do some nice looking brushstrokes, some of that nice, thin to thick line weight that gives this line a lot more character, artistic appeal and personality. But for now, this is just sort of some grid work lying down, laying down the appropriate lines and getting our idea in place before we're worrying about anything like artistry and brushstrokes, anything like that. Establishing the general parameters basically. So I think I'm gonna have one more little plane change back here, maybe a little doorway or something just toe. Have a little bit of interest here, out on the edge. But we certainly got our composition working to draw our focus to this main alleyway. We've got that vanishing point right about the 1/3 line across, just like our rule of thirds helps us dictate. And that's working really well. Our eyes is definitely drawn by all these converging lines going to that that vanishing point, and that's really good. That's exactly where we want the attention to be. We have this little area in the distance, and I have thought about some rooftops, but I think I'll do something a little more simple, maybe just a building with Cem repeating window shapes back there. But for now, I might just leave that relatively undefined, and I will detail that in later. But this is coming together really nicely. You can see how quickly and easily you can establish these very realistic feeling three dimensional worlds with just a little bit of line work, eyes in real time. This was probably only 10 or 15 minutes of work to get this going. And if if you're working with a perspective grid that you just download, it should be even quicker than that. So ah, great early exploration in using three point perspective to give you this really cool sense of three dimensions, you can really feel the height of these buildings. You can look up and see stuff that's above you, and you can let your I follow that alley path out to that vanishing point. So I think we're ready to move on to our next step. A great start 14. Line Art Alley - Refined Line: Oh, everyone, this is Hardy. In this section, we will continue our Leinart Alley project with some refined Leinart. So let's get started. So we've got our basic grid in place. We've got our perspective established, and we've done some rough Leinart to just get the general feel of our world in place of the Plains details, windows and stuff. So now it's time for a second pass where we'll just do this in a much more refined way. So I have turned shaped dynamics back on. This is where we want our our brushwork to have that nice artistic feel and that pressure sensitivity from our tablet is what gives us this. So I've created a new layer called Refined Leinart, and I'm basically just going around in tracing this stuff but giving all these lines a little more personality noticed a lot of them are kind of interrupted. They sort of stop and start. It gives the impression that all of these planes air made up of little bricks and papers. Just interesting little things that make this seem like more than just perfect geometric shapes, little rectangles or flat in cubes. That's kind of boring. So this step. We're trying to give a lot more personality to our drawing. If you remember that Photoshopped geometry lecture, we had some little cubes that we rendered in the lower right corner and one of them we took a simple cube and just turned it into a little chipped edge. Kind of stone rot looking feeling thing. And that's basically what we're doing here. We're taking these perfect little polygons and using our artistic hand, using that nice brush pressure sensitivity to make it seem or artful and interesting, one thes these surfaces that were creating to be much more tangible and realistic. So I'm doing a little bit of Photoshopped cheating here, just copying one thing over to the other. Always great to let this software make life easy for you. And those two doorways were just close enough to make that work. So any time you can use folk photo shops tricks to to make life easier for you, go for it. But for the most part, we're just kind of having fun here. Just doing a nice line drawing using this brush tool in a kind of a pen and ink kind of way to give this a really cool feel notice. I keep my brush diameter the same as much as I can, especially for these early steps. I'm kind of just outlining the basic large forms here. I'm not getting too into the details like little individual bricks or seems or trim work on any of these walls I'm trying to do just define these larger shapes in this first passed. So that's what I'm doing with this. This thickness here and I'll shrink from time to time and we will do some fine detail work later. I'll certainly use a smaller brush diameter for that. But for now, these thes early establishment lines where we're just trying to get these basic large forms in place. I try and keep that that line weight pretty uniform, just to give it a good kind of line hierarchy. We want thes thickest lines to be our big, large overall forms, and then we save those fine lines for the the internal detail that will add later really makes it look nicer if you can keep that line weight kind of consistent and orderly in that way. So that's a really great pro tip for you guys, is toe. Try Teoh to leave that Leinart diameter alone as much as you can and save those finer lines for later steps. Using a little bit of shift clicking here, I turned off shape dynamics because I wanted a few of these lines to be perfectly straight . Kind of likes, um, wood or stone trim work around these little corners. Wanted to look like one of these really cool, kind of old alleyways you find in Western Europe, where there just neat little everything's just sort of carved out of stone. It seems like so much care and craftsmanship went into even the most mundane of little city details. Every little wall and corner seems like it has so much artistry to how it was carved are put together with masonry. Really interesting stuff. So I'm trying to capture a little bit of that charm and personality for this alleyway to I like how the the brick steps here are not the same thickness. It's kind of a thick one on the bottom and then a thinner when kind of like they had to make some little adjustment because somebody didn't measure something cool. Little human details like that really bring a lot of back story an interest. Make your your project more relatable. It's one of those great signs of life story telling details that that we talked about earlier. Just trying to make some cool little corner details, starting to add in a few little sketchy things to make some of these surfaces feel like a riel material. Again, we're always following that underlying perspective grid. Even with these little chips and scratches, little Leinart details that I'm adding to some of these more interior shapes, and we are getting into some detail now notice. I've dropped to a smaller brush diameter just for some of these finer details. But even these little things these little suggestions of brick patterning it all follows the perspective grid. So I'm sort of doing that freehand. I've got that grid underneath to kind of trace. We can use all those Photoshopped geometry tools to distort flat brick planes into place, and we'll do some of that stuff later on. But for now, I just wanted to show you that you can actually just sketch this out freehand. As long as you have that grid underneath to follow, it really makes it pretty easy. It's almost like you're you're just following a plan and filling in some detail. So it's this really nice mix between freedom and nice freehand artistry and also following a very carefully, carefully wrought plan. It really makes a nice experience, and I hope you're really seeing the power of this, this process. So let's do some Photoshopped geometry to add a little bead detail to these little corner edges. So I've repeated this little bead detail, and I'm just going to distort it into place. And just like that, this is when just ridiculous amounts of detail start becoming so easy with photo shop. So we've used our Leinart are nice pressure sensitive lines to make this look nice and hand drawn. And now we can start using all of these Photoshopped tools to add in a ton of detail. And again, just following that perspective grid makes it look so deep and realistic and really professionally done if you can really stick to those grid. So this is a great early exercise. All of the projects it will do in this course deal with this perspective concept to some degree, so this is a great way to warm up and make sure that you can really adhere to these principles. Thes three point perspective planes to get this cool depth effect. Because when we start painting things using color and value to make really realistic looking environments, we really have to have this concept down pat. So make sure you're feeling good about your perspective. Work here, really get used to this three point perspective. Kind of get that concept in mind, and it will really serve you well throughout this course and give you some amazing portfolio pieces. So I'm a racing away. Some of this detail work just to make this seem kind of old and chipped away thought that would be a cool detail to add. And I think that's really working. So those little of racers really make this look interesting and like it's something old. My might have been made hundreds of years ago cool little back story like that to make it seem interesting, and I'm also got this little detail. It kind of skips up to match the height of the stairs. Thought that would be kind of a cool little detail. These little blemishes and imperfections or what make it seem more human and not not like a computer generated, perfectly realistic three dimensional world, you know, made out of rectangles and cubes. We wanted to seem like something hand rot and charming. At the end of the project. I'm gonna show you a cool way to make this look like it was drawn on old paper and actually makes a really cool piece of wall art. If you can get that effect to work for, you really makes it look like something that might be a really old ink drawing. Make something very cool to hang in your house, or it's a nice Children's book style. I've really gotten some good use out of that. That simulation of ink on old paper really has this charming quality and just makes for a great style for Children's books or all kinds of applications. But I think you guys are really gonna like that. But before we could make that effect work, we definitely want our line are to be is nice looking as possible. So that's what we're doing here. Just adding all these little tics and details. Little interesting things that make this all seem like it's made of some stone or plaster material that you can just practically reach out and touch. Want this to be very riel in our viewers mind. And every time we can follow these perspective grids thes planes that we have set up, it'll just make the whole world seem that much more three dimensional and realistic somewhere you can really step into and be a part of. And that's definitely what we're going for in architectural concept art. So I hope you're getting that kind of result with your paintings all about the three point perspective grid. And if you can stick to that, adding in some detail to this little edge element here, thinking to make it kind of a doorway, maybe like a storefront. If there's a little shop in this alley, any kind of back story you can sort of come up with in your mind will always make it interesting. But this is coming together really nicely. Got a lot of cool details. Think it has a really nice feel to It definitely has the attitude and mood that I had in mind when I set out on this project. I think that's working really well. so I'm going to start adding a few little brick patterns, so this will be a good test. Let's see how closely you can match these two perspective planes. I'm sort of hand painting in with a very fine brush, just a few little suggestions of bricks. That's staggered pattern where they're not all lined up together. He want this seems to kind of be offset. And I'm just following the little rectangle shapes that thes two points of perspective dictate for me. So that's it. Just erasing away. I'm using those interrupted lines kind of using a very light touch on my tablet to make these lines just barely a wisp. We don't want these to be nearly as bold is those bigger form lines that we already established. This is more just a texture. Ah, very light feeling set of lines to just make you get a hint of these kind of cobblestone brick path type things that are laid in could have done. These is just ovals or something irregular. But I thought it would be cool to make them nice and rectangular to really reinforce that perspective grid that we have set up. I think that is really effective. So are refined. Leinart step is coming together really nicely up. Next, we'll start adding some really nice detail. Windows is a feature element, and after that what we'll do a little final polish and, well, just about be done with this one. 15. Line Art Alley - Final Polish: Oh, everyone, this is hardy. In the sexual, we will finish off our Leinart Alec project with some final polish. So let's get started. So we've got everything pretty much finished here. Everything but our main feature windows. So that's what we're gonna add in here. And this is gonna be very, very similar to our Photoshopped geometry exercise. Those windows that we did in that worksheet were basically just using all of these handy Photoshopped tools to make a nice front facing window. And then we're going to detail that end and then distort it into the perspective plane. So I'm just holding down shift here to sort of establish these main side elements of this window kind of the window sill under it. This nice looking window trim on the side And again, every time you hold down shift, it makes this perfectly straight line. So these little be details that I'm adding to this window casing here all very easy to do with those Photoshopped geometry shortcuts that I showed you in that earlier lecture, adding a little circular detail, A little bit of hand painting again. You never want these things to get so rigidly geometric that they lose their character. So I try to mix in. Ah, good amount of Photoshopped geometry perfectly straight, crisp lines with a little bit of hand drawn element is well, just to make it seem charming and show a little bit of hand of the artist, which which viewers always tend to like, especially for these images that they sort of have, ah, Wall art Final goal in mind. Not necessarily a concept art piece that will be part of a movie or a video game. But there's something that needs to look cool in its own right and be a nice piece of art. And that's what we're working on here. So I've got a really nice outer window trim set up here. All of those nice bits of wood work really making that interesting so that will define our interior window. And just like in the exercise, using a circle and a rectangle together to make one of those cool, little gentle our king windows and again, just like in the exercise were using Cem rectangles filled in with solid black and then just copying them to make these little window divider panels and same deal just using that radiating pattern kind of rotating this window divider a few times until it's it's got a perfectly shared center copy that merged them together a few times and then just delete away this circular inside part. Just a sort of trim away the parts we don't need. And then I just stroke that exact same selection and we've got a really cool set of window dividers. I love that kind of radiating circular pattern in these window dividers. You see that? A lot of real world windows in this Victorian style, and it's ah, really nice look. So I think we're in great shape on this window. Gonna contract these selections for these window dividers and turn them into Leinart again . We just sort of delete that part away. Very, very easy. Photoshopped makes these super easy. This is sped up a little bit, but not very much. So this this type of technique really takes very little time everything that we can save time with anything we can flip over and mirror to the other side. Anything we can copy and and just use multiple times. It just saves so much time versus traditionally drawn pieces of this kind. So I have made a copy of this window so that I could get double use out of it. I'm sort of distorting it into the right plane just as we didn't are exercises just hitting command T and then control to bring up those secondary functions. And that's Ah, it's really working. Well, so saying, if I can get a little more use out of this, maybe put that window over in this little recessed doorway over here, starting to look like a little too much of the same thing. So I'm doing a little bit different treatment on this little door, way over in the distance, this little storefront thing. But already look how much incredible detail and charm it adds to our entire painting just because we had those really cool feature windows. So I'm gonna do another window just for some variety. There's that sort of smaller rectangle on the left side of the page. I thought it'd be cool to have some shutters kind of closed, as if who knows? Maybe this store is closed for the season or something like that. Just a nice little detail. So it's really the same kind of process we're not going to do Ah, glass window with dividers, But you do need to start with a cool exterior window trim. And I'm just polishing that up a little bit refining it. And I'm gonna put this divider in the middle like we have some shutters, really just latched in the middle like it's all closed up. And we're going to get that nice little louver pattern, the little slotted type of of wood panels that really make that cool shutter pattern by just repeating the same line. I'm just making some rectangles here by stroking a marquee tool. And then I'm gonna add these little these little slats, these little individual pieces of louver by just putting this little simple pattern this little shape on the side and of line going horizontally, just like in our perspective pattern. We just start repeating that over and over again, and it kind of grows exponentially. Look at how incredibly easy and effective that is, just repeating one little shape over and over. And it makes it look so incredibly detailed in three dimensional. And once we distort that shutter window into the correct perspective plane, it'll fit in our image perfectly. So just doing a little bit of that recess treatment to this first window, we did to kind of make it sit back into its frame a little bit. Give it a little more depth in the perspective plan, and I think that really goes a long way. So just jumping that back to this one for a little bit of refinement. But I think that's looking great. So again, making a copy of this new window that I made and then just fitting these corners into the perspective planets, there's really no guesswork at all. It's practically just put those corners directly on the corners of the perspective grid, and it will work perfectly. So actually put two of these in a pair weaken, sort of distort them together like they come in a set. And that looks great. So really getting some great use out of this shutter window that we've created here, like how that's looking a lot. See if I can get a little more mileage out of this 1 may be in some of these these alleyway windows here, and if you distort them a lot to where they're almost squashed vertically it starts to sort of break down the lines a little bit. So I'm doing a little bit of touch up work just to make that look a little more hand rot. Sometimes you get these gets these little staircase distortions kind of a strobe effect if you distort the's a little too extremely so that that's really a great way to to make that work for you. So now that I've got some windows in place, I'm going to try and sort of start integrating them into the background a little bit more. So I've got some little kind of chipped, plaster brick pattern looking stuff going on here. Gonna put a little bit of depth on this shutter window, See if I can give that a little bit of dimension like it's popping out from the wall. I think that's really effective. Same thing on this first big window that we did just give it a little bit of dimension. Don't want it to be just wafer thin sitting on that wall. Always good to give it a little depth, but I think that's looking really great. These little bric lines in little imperfections in the wall really tie these windows together kind of make them sit in the environment really nicely. You'd never know that there was something that we created kind of separately and then placed. It really makes them work well, so I think I'm gonna make this a doorway instead of a window. So just doing some little shift click maneuvers to kind of get a little panelling may be a little inset for panel door type of thing. Very cool. That's all it takes is just a little bit of line work to make these little parallel lines little angular, inset panels. And suddenly we have a pretty interesting little surface. There was a blank space just a moment ago. So little techniques like this, all of that photo shop geometry stuff. I know that lesson probably is not the most exciting or interesting one in the course, but really useful stuff. So it's worth paying some close attention to every one of those operations so that we can just really make that work for us. Adding a little bit of detail, kind of a little diamond designed to these little little caps here on these these trim pieces on the corners a little bit more brick patterning. I try to be pretty light handed. With that. It's it's incredible. You can leave a good amount of white space in these Leinart pieces, and the viewer will sort of mentally connect the dots for you. So don't want to get too heavy handed with those brick patterns. Just a little fine line here and there. So what I'm doing now, I've actually made all of the layers invisible so that I can just do a new design on a clean white background. But I am making a window pattern that I can repeat a lot of times there's that that distant surface kind of at the end of the alley, and I'm just gonna put a large row of windows like it's a two or three story building with a lot of repeating windows, maybe kind of in office or a hotel type of place. It has a lot of the same window over and over again, kind of out of laziness. I don't really wanna design a big, complicated church facade or anything like that, but this will give a good amount of detail to this distant area. It will make it something interesting for our eyes to go seek out in the distance. But it won't be so visually active or so interesting that it will compete with anything in our foreground. So that's kind of my thinking. They're sort of striking a middle ground of, of how interesting and how attention getting. I want this distant set of features to be. So there we go. I've got a pretty nice looking window, very simple, just just vertical horizontal window dividers again just to make it interesting, but not too interesting. And I think that's working really well. So with that, I think all I need to do is add a little bit of brick patterning to kind of connect the dots a little bit. Make this look really cool on the edges so that when I copy this, it can sort of join together those little brick shapes, or what kind of connect the gaps. You see that it makes a cool little space between the windows that we can repeat over and over again, and I'm sort of doing that same concept above. I wanted to be the space between the floors, the first floor on the second floor and so on. So there we go. I just copy this set upwards, and you can see it's a recurring thing. I sort of copy things, merge them together and then copy them again. So that's how one thing becomes two and then to four for eight and so on. You can really populate huge areas of your cityscapes without much work at all. If you just do one sing well, you can copy it over and over again. Of course, you don't want to do that in a area of focus, because it's kind of obvious. But for, ah, background element like this, we can really just copy the same thing over and over again. And it looks really cool, so to make it fit this space, I've created a layer mask, and I filled it in with black so that I can just paint in white and kind of reveal it selectively. And there we go. We've got a really cool background set of windows. There's something interesting on the far side of this alley, and I've even knocked back the opacity of those distant windows just to make the sense of atmospheric perspective, like those lines are a little bit more faint in sort of light because they're farther away . There's some air between here and there, adding a little more panel work to these little residents. Doors in the alleyway here. But guys, we're getting pretty close to a finished product. Look at all this cool detail that we've managed to get with just a really simple three point perspective space that we established a little bit of line work with some pressure sensitivity and just some Photoshopped geometry to make these cool windows that are essentially just straight lines. That photo shop makes in little selection techniques, so nothing really artistically sophisticated here. It's just a formula that we can follow in a grid, that we can make everything fit within, and it practically falls into place. It takes a little practice, definitely won't tell you that this is super super easy, but it's an incredibly useful technique, and I hope it makes really new levels of realism possible for all of you guys. Some some really great time saving techniques for professionals out there as well. These techniques can make what would take hours and hours to render really go very quickly . Just a little more detail in going on here, and I I think we're about done. So it's time to just add some personality sort of finishing touches. So I've created a black layer on top. I'm asked the entire thing out so that it's hidden. And now I'm just painting white on the layer mask to kind of reveal in. So basically it's like I'm revealing these shadow colors. It's just this one single value change to sort of define light and dark, and it adds so much personality in depth to this image. So as you can see, I have the sun kind of shining on this near area, and it's casting this cool shadow up the alleyway. The shadow kind of climbs up the stairs. Isn't it a cool detail? You can establish any kind of light source that you want for this, but I really like doing it this way so that you have some interesting cast shadows. Some some kind of storytelling element almost makes you want to go explore that alley, even Mawr and just finding a few areas where this light source would cause shadows to exist . Two. And considering maybe blacking out this window but I think I'll leave it white in just a little bit of light and dark work. And that is just about all it takes. Look how cool that is. What a a neat next level kind of detail that we can add and just makes it look like somebody may be used in ink wash or something on their traditional Leinart drawing just to give it a little more dimension. So if this is gonna be wall art for your project, this adds a lot of charm and interest. So I hope you enjoy that technique and is one final step. I would like to show you how to make this look like a traditional drawing. So I have grabbed this stock picture of an old piece of paper from pixels and I'll include a link so you can go find it a swell. But any old piece of paper texture will work well, I've put all of my Leinart into a group, and I've set that group on overlay, and I have changed my black layer to a multiply layer with this dark brown. And that's about all it takes. Guys just switching your ink layers to overlay and maybe copying it and then just adjusting that dark black layer and look how cool that is. A really cool hand rot feel. I hope you've enjoyed this one. A really cool introductory project in a cool piece of wall art. Congratulations on completing the Leinart Alley project. This was a really cool introduction to three point perspective and world creation. Let's take a look back at our project steps and see how far we've come WAY started with a simple three point perspective grid. From there, we roughed in our basic, seen with some simple line are we then refine the main forms and added detail. From there, we added in some feature windows, and finally we gave our project a really cool paper texture to make it seem like a hand drawn pen and ink peace. Hope you've really enjoyed this project. You've gotten a cool portfolio or wall art piece out of it. Join us for our next project, where we'll take everything we've learned here and take it to the next level school 16. Castle Meadow - Concept: Oh, hi, everyone. This is Hardy. And welcome to the Castle Meadow Project. This is gonna be an awesome portfolio builder. We're gonna put a lot more of the painting techniques and principles that we've learned to good use. Let's check out a few things that I already have in place before we get started With our castle concept, I've got a pretty cool landscape already painted here. Now we're just focused on painting buildings in this course, But be sure to check out painting environments. If you'd like to know my techniques for getting these landscape effects, I will make this image available if you'd like to use it as a starting point for your project. First of all, let's check out the perspective Good that I have in place Notice that I put the vanishing point pretty low. I want to set a fairly low horizon so that our eyes would be directed upwards. This will make our castle seem really tall and impressive. We definitely want this project to awe and amaze. I've also done a few things to set up our composition. The golden ratio is being used here to sort of loop the viewer's eye around the canvas. It kind of rolls down the hill in this cast shadow and then get steered up and around by this little pillar thing and then this cloud shape in this guy, this is all looping us back to the main focal point where we'll put our tall spires. If you're doing your own landscape, it really helps to plan these things out so that the castle and main focal points will really shine. Okay, let's dive in and start working on our castle concept. So I'm just going to create a new layer, and we're just going to start with a basic sketch. So I got that perspective grid in its own layer group, and I've knocked it way back in opacity. I wanted to kind of just barely be there. We can see all three points of perspective, and again, I think that vertical one will be most important on this one to give us this big sense of epic tall nous and height. Want this castle this whole environment to just feel massive and really impressive. So one element I'm going to start with is this foreground element. It's kind of this little archway sort of this old ruined collection of stacked up bricks. Just something cool to sort of frame in the composition. Give us something really interesting in detailed in the foreground so that we can kind of mentally extrapolating what this castle is made out of when you have these really huge environments. Sometimes you need something in the very close foreground to give it a little bit of context. Once there's some something really close up that you can get a good look at these materials and see what all of this is made of. So that's what that little archway in the foreground is just a cool little close up detail . But now we're just starting to concept in our castle. So I wanted that main tallest spire to be right where our golden ratio compositional devices leading us as we discussed a moment ago. But for now, I'm just sort of making up little scribbles. Establishing towers. I started sort of having death in mind. What with tears of depth I wanna have I would like it to be pretty complex, not just one single monolithic building, but a big collection of different levels of debt. So maybe a little city inside the castle walls, little collections of towers, different different places for the viewer to explore and their imagination. So that's all I'm really sketching in here. We're not at all worried about thes sketch lines looking nice. This is purely for reference, and our next step will just be to block in these in silhouette form. So for now, it's all about ideas making this look cool, kind of filling this three dimensional space that we have established with our perspective , grid and the environment that we've already painted and just making something interesting in cool, so sort of the world building part of our imagination process here. So, working on a little castle gate, kind of an interior wall that lets you into the main castle, it's interesting. You have to sort of think like some kind of a city planner, layers of securities that will have some kind of a very large, tough to get past wall on the outside that would let those who belong inside the castle in , and then we have maybe a city with townspeople in that that interior place. But then maybe there's another wall so that only royal people can get into the tall towers , little things like that little back story elements that all of these little structural details kind of kind of lay out for you. So fun stuff to think about, kind of making up these worlds. And again, we always want to imagine all of the people living within them all of the cultural references, little details about their lives that really dictate what these buildings look like and how they're set up. So a lot of really fun, cool things to ponder in this early phase. And it's really nice because we're not at all worried about making any kind of nice looking lines, all about ideas and just the general look of things at this point so very fun. And it's also kind of cool toe. Do this on an already done nice looking painting because we can really think about how to fit things back into this. This cool environment we already have established and again feel free to use this image I've already made, or it certainly encourage you to try your own. If if you're familiar with landscape painting and photographs in Photoshopped, or if you've taken my painting environment scores. Putting a cool little bridge here in the distance just is a nice little third level detail way out in the distance. It's always great to have a nice range of debts for your viewer to look at, and that that is, of course, what that foreground Arch is all about. But it's cool to have things in the way distance just always wanna have lots of things for the I Teoh to go way far away and explore and also look at things really close up. So that's that big range of depth that we want to communicate. I think this is looking cool. We've got a nice main tower, all kinds of really high buttress things going on here. That's all fitting with that that vertical three point perspective we have set up, so it'll make this whole castle seem to kind of sore upwards. I think that's really coming together nicely, so we've got a pretty good general idea of our structures filled out here. We got an outer wall, an inner protected area with a little city, some little buildings. I'm indicating there and then an inner wall that protects the interior part of the castle, those high lofty spires. So we've got a whole suggestion of a civilization and a hierarchy all set up here just implied with the simple details that we're adding. So I'm starting to indicate some some second level details. Just some ideas of wanna what I wanna have go on. And this is the part in our later steps that will just seem like magic, because we just use custom shapes to just fill these spaces with unbelievable detail. If we just layer a few of those shapes over one another, all of these little interactions between the detailed areas start happening makes all kinds of new things that you never would have seen unless you overlap these shapes together. So custom shapes is definitely a tool that I am really excited to share. I think it's that the key for making really high levels of art possible for people who may not have ah, whole lot of experience with digital or architectural painting, So I hope you find that as interesting as I do. So we're going to start doing some silhouette. I think I've got my sketch just about where I want it, so I'm coming back now and we're doing this in layers. We're gonna do this in multiple levels of death. And I'm starting with our most far away objects, which is the actual castle here. The towers that are far away, high in the sky, looming large on the horizon. So that's what I'm doing now. I've got a a brush tool at 100% or just about there, and I'm just doing some crisp line work, kind of tracing these edges to establish these These contour shapes for these silhouettes and again silhouettes are so important for this kind of painting. As we saw in our atmospheric perspective, exercise silhouettes and atmospheric perspective are practically all you need to give everybody a really solid sense of three dimensions in your image. So the details that we add the highlights, the rendering we do with custom shapes. That's awesome, too, and it makes your image impressive. Makes a great portfolio peas, but the silhouettes, the stuff that we're defining right now, that's what makes it seem realistic and deep. That's what really gives you that sense of dimension and makes it seem like it's occupying the space that it's sitting in so very cool stuff once I have a full perimeter defined. I just used the magic wand tool to select the outside. And then I did select Inverse to select the inside and then option delete. That's what happened there, did it pretty quickly, but we just select inverse and then fill it in. That's how I turn a Leinart sketch into a filled in silhouette, and that's basically all there is to it. We have our main castle, defined with a nice silhouette that really is impressive. Against that light background, it really makes it stick out. It's exactly what we want. So I'm just going to sort of start to come forward here with my layers. I'm gonna do these one at a time from far too near. So for now, I'm just sort of defining this little town that I've got in this middle middle tier here, making little houses. Nothing too detailed and again custom shapes is going to do a lot of the heavy lifting forest in our later steps, when we really make these contours look just full of detail. All of those really cool Gothic spire shapes and castle walls and little turrets that I've got set up. Those really make these contours incredibly realistic. But we still want to do a pretty solid job here. So I'm taking my time trying to do some pretty crisp line work. And once we have a nice perimeter established, we just use that magic wand tool once again to select the outside and then select inverse and then fill it in. And that's I'm just wanted a time building these layers of depth. This is really just like our atmosphere, perspective exercise where we have ah, Far away Group ah, middle group and a near group. And all we have to do is make the far away when a little bit lighter in value, and it will just push it way back in our mind's eye. Incredibly effective way to make things look very far away gives your whole image this epic sense of depth and scale a really effective technique. So that brings us to our outer wall. Here. This will be the group that is most near to a So once we do, our atmospheric perspective shifts. This one will be the darkest in overall key. Now I'm just using the same color for this initial sketch phase, I guess where we're just outlining the silhouettes. There's no need to worry about color, really, at this point, cause all we're doing is just sketching and in defining these shapes. But once we have them all made weaken, take a good look, it all of them together and do a little bit of a hue. Saturation adjustments are just sample some colors from the background to kind of lighten up. Those far away elements do that atmospheric perspective shift to make those far away groups look a bit lighter and like there's more air between the viewer's eye and those objects that are far away. So just using one color for this outlining process. But we will certainly change those, just as we did in our atmosphere, perspective, exercise. And you won't believe how much realism this this project has. Even in this early phase, just with ease, simple principles, atmospheric perspective, silhouettes, linear perspective, these really simple basic concepts that that anybody can can grasp, just put to a effect that that makes it seem much more massive and epic. So there we go. We've got our are three levels of our castle defined so I'm just gonna do the same treatment on this little archway that I've got in the near ground here just to give us a little bit of contacts, something to make, make that depth, even mawr, enhance that really near object to bring our I close in and then let it soar out to the horizon. But that's basically the same process. We're just tracing around, and then I'll fill that end. So up next, we'll start adding some detail in a little bit of rendering to this one, So I'll see you in the next lecture. 17. Castle Meadow - Custom Shapes & Rendering: Oh, everyone, this is Hardy. In this lecture, we will do a rough rendering of our castle project. So let's get started. We're going to start doing some custom shape work. But first of all, let's do those atmospheric perspective shifts on each of our silhouettes here to kind of establish that death. So I'm stabling Cem colors from around this background image to see if I can establish a good base color for each silhouette so you can see right there I've lightened up the entire castle a good bit just by sampling that color, and that already pushes it way back. So I'm gonna try that same kind of technique on this nearer tear. And while you can already see this effect starting to take place doing some hue, saturation adjustments with command you as needed. But guys, you can see with just a few color changes here, this really changes the entire feel of this. It's starting to take on a huge sense of scale. So it's an exact principle that we did in our atmosphere perspective lecture, but just applied to a a real project here and already that that pushes those tall castle towers way back and makes this archway in the foreground seem really close off camera. I did do a little bit of adjustment to that archway. I just wanted toe kind of run it off the top of the canvas. You may notice that's a little different. So now let's do some custom shape magic to really make thes silhouettes more detailed and interesting. I'm just going to start dropping these in around the perimeter of this castle. So really, we're gonna let this do the rial detail work for our castles silhouette? I did some pretty crisp line work when tracing those outlines, but it homeless doesn't matter because we're gonna let these custom shapes add so much detail to these little silhouette shapes. These things that we see sticking out in the castle's contour. This is also a really fun time. It feels like you're playing Sim City or something, placing different different buildings in different parts of the castle. So ah, lot of fun. It's almost just like you're deciding which parts of the structure should be, which is kind of just like building your own your own world. So a ton of fun here and I hope you really see the power of this really easy technique. Just a few shapes. It only takes a handful. But if you transform them, overlap them kind of mix and match. They really take on so much unexpected variety makes it really interesting. So I hope you're enjoying this process and get a lot of good use use out of these shapes that I've provided a little bit of organization I'm doing in my layers notice I put everything in a group, so I've got a group for the everything For this far castle. We've got our base silhouette on the bottom and then I've just got a few layers on top that I'm using to place these custom shapes here and there. So on the end up merging all of that onto one silhouette. But for now, it's just good to keep things in groups so that we don't accidentally mix up some silhouette shapes from one layer of depth. One group for another. So a nice way to keep things organized. And I'm just sort of fine tuning here. Guys just sort of mixing and matching adjusting things. If things start looking too repetitive, I'll just make a quick change, but I think that really works. Look at all those spires. The scale that it adds this castle is really incredible. Makes things seem huge back there. Like they're just rooms and buildings all piled up on top of each other. Seems like ah whole world to explore out in this area because of all the skill we've added coming back and doing a little bit of hand painting. Just making a few of these things a little bit different. Kind of connecting a few things, helping integrate certain areas together. Always a good thing to do is do a little touch ups. Kind of make sure it all looks cohesive, wanted to really come together and work well. And, wow, you can just see how much detail and how much life there is in that that far building right away. So that's working. Well, I'm gonna move up to this nearer level, this inner wall area that we've got here and just using a few simple custom shapes toe add some interest there and just like before we got that in its own layer group, adding a few little spires and rooftops to this little town below the main castle just to give that some detail as well, touching things up a little bit. One thing I didn't mention in the last lectures. We have to be kind of kind of noting where we're letting our castle and our ground come together. Notice those castle walls kind of follow the lay of the land, the contour that we've established in our background painting. So that's something you really want to pay attention to. I wanted this castle to feel like it was kind of built on top of this mountain, almost like we see parts of the mountain still sticking out like it was just kind of an on site decision when they built this castle. Always nice to sort of integrate your structures into the environment, so that's just something to keep in mind there. But we're in our outer wall, really adding some nice layers of depth and wow, just amazed at how much detail and complexity these custom shapes add to our silhouettes. So now it's time to go back and do some highlight shapes. So I'm going to start back in our distant tall castle, and we'll just grab one of these highlight shapes and start distorting it into perspective . Wow, just that one shape. Add so much detail. I love that one, and I'm gonna use pieces of it kind of over and over again. Copy it and transform it That one in another, one of my favorites will kind of be my main feature for this one. So I try to make a new layer for these early ones just about every time I make a new shape . And it's a good way to keep things organized, lets you transform things and make copies pretty easily. So you have to keep those layers under control, which is why we group them to keep them organized. But it's a really nice, flexible way to get a lot of detail on the page and keep things organized. But, wow, I'm just already stolen that. How, how much detail? This adds to what was just a silhouette moments ago. Just hundreds of buildings and windows in there. You can just imagine all of these places for the fictional people toe live, so hope you're seeing the power of that. Just a few brushstrokes can get you so much detail in so much variety, just erasing away a little bit. We're also really thinking about our light source here. Obviously, I've got kind of ah, twilight late in the day kind of lighting scheme. So I want this main sunshine side to really be that really bright highlight side that we're establishing here. We'll put a reflected light side on that darker side as well. We don't want it to be totally in shadow over there. Still want to describe those sides of the castle is well, but we definitely want this to be our main really glowing bright light source on this this sunset side and you can see it's such a dramatic effect. Those those big faces of the buildings catching that bright sunlight looks really cool. So for color, for now, we're actually not that worried about it. I'm just using an off white kind of is a placeholder again, we're just gonna command click on these custom shape layers that were making in paint within them as a selection. So these colors that I'm using or just placeholders they're not really important at all. I'm kind of trying to do I'm sort of like the colors that I expect them to be just for the sake of context and so that I can sort of design with the feel in mind as I go. But this is all just gonna be a selection that we paint within later. In fact, I have kind of a nice burning orange color in mind for that main sunset light source. I think that would look really cool if if that broadside of the castle was catching some really nice, bright kind of orangish pink sunset hues, I think that would be really cool. So experimenting with a few other custom shapes. Honestly, those 1st 2 that I used cut me just about 90% of the way there on these. But for the sake of variety of trying to add in a few other things and varying the scale, sometimes just to make it look like something different and not not something that's too repetitive. But it's amazing. I would have worried mawr that custom shapes would just look like a stamp that you used over and over again. It would look really lazy and unprofessional, but what I'm amazed by is how the the changes in scale and the layering that you can do with this tool really make that concern go away? It's not even a problem. They turn into their own take on a life of their own, really become something unique and amazing just about every time. So I hope this handful of custom shapes really inspires you to make some of your own t get even more variety and really shows you the possibilities and the amazing results you can achieve. So, guys, you can probably see the basic strategy here. I'm kind of just jumping from from layer of depth to layer of death. Just tryingto add detail from from back to front. And making these these little layers is detailed as we can. So just using that same shape once again to make this inner castle wall kind of interesting and just grabbing, copying and pasting certain shapes to make this all work, make it look cool. But every time we we add a new highlight, it just had so much detail in life to this image, something that I really could have never achieved. Just hand painting. Well, it would have taken a lot longer. Let's put it that way. So ah, really great shortcut to amazing results. And of course you can always hand paint is much as you want. I always feel free. Teoh goes deep into that artistic process as you care to. But I really wanted to show you this really quick and easy, almost shortcut to incredible success that that you can do here. So ah, great way to go about this. But it's kind of just a matter of of doing these. These layers wanted a time kind of coming forward, making sure that everything looks as cool as it can before we move on. So sort of like we're taking the time laying the groundwork here, making these really great selection shapes that we can use later to paint in with with a lot of control and finesse really makes it something really great to paint within. Once we have all of these nice shapes defined to make all of these details that we can then just pain in like it's just subtly catching the light. We have total control can really use those seen lighting techniques that we that we talked about to give this the exact mood and feel that we want a great way to control everything so working on on this near wall here just trying to give some interest to this wall so that it's not just a big, flat monoliths trying a few options here, seeing what looks cool. But honestly, I think that that may, in wall shape that I've been using a lot is probably going to end up being my winner. A few. These were pretty cool, so always good to try a few different things and see what comes of it in a little bit of layering and overlap can often yield really amazing and unexpected results. So give all of these things a try. When, when something's not working, just grab a different shape. In fact, sometimes a shape made from a photograph of something completely different can become something really cool for for the thing you have in mind for it. I think I made a shape out of the front of a truck once, and I used it for part of ah, space station in an illustration. So you never know what the use is gonna be of these things. So try all kinds of things, and it's really easy to experiment with these things, so give it a world, you'll get really cool results, adding a little bit of detail ing to this, this near ground archway here just to make it look cool, even bending one of these shapes to make that nice curve for the arch. And I think that's awesome. And guys, I think we pretty much have our custom shapes established here. So I'm just gonna make all of these layers invisible because now we're just using them as selections. So I'm making a new layer calling it render. And now I have command clicked that custom shapes layer to make that selection. And I'm just painting within. Look at this really cool sunset mood lighting that I'm just suddenly painting in here, and it just really starts coming to life. You can imagine which, which parts of the building or in shadow you could. You could really dictate anything. If there's a cloud coming by and covering part of the building, you can leave part of that in darkness. You have total control to make. This is interesting and is moody is you want so so many possibilities here. And wow, just with that couple of brushstrokes painted within these really cool selections that we've made that pretty much is starting to look like a nearly finished building just like that. So an incredible short cut to success here, trying a few different things, adjusting that light source to see how bright we want to make it, splashing in just a tiny bit of reflected light here on the shadow side, just sort of picking up some of these colors from the sky to make it all fit together. And I'm blown away by how easy that is. And what a cool effect, how moody and atmospheric that that can be with just a few clicks once we take the time to establish these selections. And now we're just doing the same thing on these other two years of depth, just adding a lot of personality and light notice. I left some dark areas in that distant castle so that I could make this wall kind of glow. What that tall turret to really be catching some sunlight is if it was the highest point, and catching that last bit of daylight kind of have to think about our light source and where where these things would be catching some light But at the same time, we can kind of give ourselves some artistic license and just make the parts that you want to highlight the brightest and most attention getting so a really cool technique there. And here we go. Just painting in this bright side of the castle was experimenting with kind of a gray or color. But I think I'm gonna stick with this really burning orange sunset type of color scheme we have going here cause it's just looking so cool and again just grabbing some of those sky colors to make this distance side of the castle a little bit more of a reflected light, making that a bit of a cooler lighting scheme. This is, Ah, pretty warm colored image overall. So I wanted to definitely do something a little bit cool just to balance it out of it. But I think that's looking really awesome. One last thing we want to do is render in this shape that we've made for this archway in the near ground. So just a little bit of color, and I think we're ready for our next step 18. Castle Meadow - Texture & Detail: Oh, hi, everyone, this is Hardy. In this lecture, we will add in some texture in detail to our castle project. So let's get started off camera. I have collected a group of photos and we're gonna use thes as photo textures. I'm gonna make all of these available to you guys, but I've just pasted each of these individual objects into this layer group called photos. Just is a good way to keep these organized taken start to get kind of numerous and harder to keep track of. So this is how have come up with to keep them all together and organized, so I'll just select one individually and will start applying. These two are are layers of death here. So I've copied this one down into my castle layer group so you can see it's back there behind the other walls. And what I'm gonna do is make that a group and we'll call it photo textures. Now I am gonna command click the silhouette of the castle and we will mask this entire group out. Soc have created a layer mask so that all the photos we put in this group Onley exist inside of the silhouette of the castle. So once we've done that, we set this group too soft, light blending mode that is the key soft, light blending mode. And just like that, it creates this cool underlying texture effect to really handy blending mode. I use this for just about every kind of concept artwork that I use that I do just because it's it's so versatile. It lets all of your rendering show through but gives you that really nice. Underlying subtle texture gives you some nice color variation as well. Just generally makes things look so much more realistic. So since we have everything in a group together, I can work entirely within this group and just copy things around, transformed them and just add in photos from that group above. Whenever I want to try something new, we just grab it from the photo group and drop it down into our photo Textures group. So I hope that way of organizing things makes sense to you. It's it's a good way to just kind of keep your library of photos without destroying any of them, and then you can just sort of grab them and drop them into the group that you're working on . So we'll do this process a few times for each one of our layers of depth and honestly, the way I'm doing it right now, this is pretty heavy handed. I'm gonna end up knocking all of these way back. I don't want it to look nearly this bold or defined. I want all of these to be just an extremely subtle suggestion of texture, not a literal representation of these chimneys or brick walls that I'm showing. So it the moment it looks pretty heavy handed, But But we're gonna knock this all way back, and I'm doing that with some erasing right now again. Just want this tiny little hint of texture. Don't want to obscure all of that awesome custom shape work that we did already. That's really the main device that we're using to make this castle look really epic in scale and really interesting. But I certainly wanted to show you guys how we could apply some photo textures as well. So just trying a little bit of everything again. Whenever you wanna add a photo, you just go up to your photos group. Grab the one that you want and just copy it into that soft, light, photo textures blending mode group that we established below. So it's sort of just like copying things from one folder to the other any time you want to use it for one of these little texture purposes. And this is kind of cool, a little tough to make some of these fit the right perspective plane. So, honestly, this is just something that we use sparingly on a large scale image like this. But in other in other rendering projects, especially interiors, this soft light blending mode is really a lifesaver. It works better in smaller scaled objects like an interior room. You could make a wall look incredibly realistic with a photo texture, but for large scale castles, things like this, I try and rely more on custom shapes to give us that really huge sense of scale and in distance that we're looking for. But these photo textures are really adding something here, I think, especially that that spiral staircase set of columns is really working for some of those long, tall shapes. So saying if I can make this little corner pediment type of structure do some good for us as well, just trying to find interesting uses for all of these and kind of distorting them into perspective to see how we can make him work for us. Always cooled, experiment with lots of different techniques, and I can't say that often enough that no single technique is something that you can rely upon. Each one of these techniques is a tool that you should use with some restraint, used artfully to try and get to a result. So I just wanted to show you guys a little bit of everything kind of different ways to enhance a really large scale, epic building project like this one. So I'm trying to make this subtle suggestion of some little windows. Maybe there's kind of, ah, winding staircase up one of these towers, so window on each floor is you go up cool. Little signs of life. Details like that really lets you imagine the people within When you see a window like that really adds a human element that's always nice to try and capture. So copying this around again, trying that little staggered spiral staircase look. But we'll knock that way back to make it a pretty subtle effect. And there we go never want any of these photo textures to be too bold. They can ring false if they're somehow way too bold or or don't fit with the atmosphere that can really kill your sense of distance. So be careful with these. Use this with some restraint, especially in this project, since it's really just sort of, ah, supporting element. It's not the main main driver of our sense of depth here, So same exact technique. I'm working on the inner wall tear now, but I've just created a new layer group. I've put a photo inside of that, and I have masked the entire layer group out after command, clicking on the silhouette of our inner wall here. So that's how we make sure that none of these photo textures go where they don't belong. Once we mask out that photo texture layer group, it keeps everything inside of the silhouette, so you never have to worry about some photo. Weirdly being on a layer where it doesn't belong, it keeps everything nice and orderly, and that's definitely a good thing, especially in some of these architectural paintings. When we start dealing with lots of layers of depth. It can get kind of confusing. So anything you can do to help yourself out and make things organized and keep them where they belong that will give you a much Tidier final product make things nice and neat, and you won't have any trouble tracking things down. Or if something is not working, you know exactly where to find the layer to fine tune it. So these organizational tools air really helpful in a great way to keep your project on track. So same process. We're kind of just moving from from far too near here, doing this big wall on the nearer ground side of the castle and just dragging and dropping in photos whenever I want to try something a little different. So I hope that that way of ah organization is working for you thought this little corner piece might be a kind of cool detail to include on this outer wall to Sometimes you can find a use for something that was sort of unexpected and just like with custom shapes, sometimes a photo of something that seems unrelated can end up being really useful. I've taken a picture of this metal bucket that I found out in my shed one day, and I've used it for practically everything. It just makes all kinds of things look kind of grainy and interesting, so I encourage you to grab your own photos. Everybody, pretty much Everybody has a camera in their pocket thes days. So snap photos whenever something just looks like an interesting or unusual texture. Thes thes photo libraries you can build really add up. On the other hand, there are so many amazing photo resource is available toe artists These days there are some truly free, creative common license websites, like pixel and unspool ash, just to name a few. And I'll include links to those amazing high quality photos that are truly copyright free. You can use them even for commercial purposes. All they ask is they have a few rules about, you know, not showing anything in an inappropriate way, but nothing we have to worry about his artists. It's pretty much a free for all, and some amazing resource is there. So using this cool brick wall texture on this near archway and actually this is where this photo texture is really going to do the most good force. We're gonna leave it pretty bold because I want that to seem like it's really close up. Wanted to seem very tangible, like he can reach out and feel that stony texture of this archway. And we're gonna give it a lot of realism by trimming away this one angle of it. And we're gonna do it again with another layer of the same texture. And I'm just distorting that into these two different perspective planes. So we've kind of made it look like a cube. We just use the same texture but distorted it in to perspective grids and, well, look at much realism. That adds to this archway so amazing it really brings it to life with so little work. So I am now grouping everything that I have done so far making a copy of the group and then merging things. This is sort of how I start to consolidate layers. We put it all in a group, make a copy, and then hit command E to merge it. And you can see I'm sort of lifting these little layers just to show you that they're all on one layer right now. Weaken, Sort of transform things start to mess with things and custom shapes, rendering photo textures. Everything is all just in one nice, tidy layer. And it's cool because we have our groups copy. See, I'm working on Group five copy right now. Well, the Group five folder is still there. Underneath. It's just there's a backup if we need it, or if we need to command, click some kind of selection, one of our custom shapes. But this is a great way to start toe. Really Use that artistic hand painting editing technique to to try and make your image more interesting. Were not so worried about keeping layers organized. We just sort of grab stuff copy, pasted a race, hand paint. Do whatever you need to start to find tune things, so I'm starting to spots. Um, some cool opportunities to change things make them more interesting, and that's what we're doing here. That's why it's nice to sort of merge a lot of these layers into 11 Consolidate it layer so you can just work and not worry about having to edit multiple layers just to get one effect . So a really nice technique you can see him sort of copying and pasting areas of the castle , kind of trying to give it a little more dimension. So I've copied one of the towers on the sunny side and brought it over. The dark side is if maybe one of these parts of this dark side was coming out towards us a little bit catching a bit of that light sources, it crosses over that shadow. So some cool things you can do with this using a brush tool now to just sort of add in some details hand painting in a few things trying to make This is interesting as we can. So some really tall buttresses I'm painting in here a few little details out on these perimeter shapes, using some shift clicking to make some straight lines and just carving in some detail making. This is interesting as I can again. This photos, uh, I'm sorry. The custom shapes really do a lot of the heavy lifting here. This doesn't need a whole lot of touching up or detail. This is kind of just the fun part where we do a little bit of hand painting, start making it feel more like a hand rot painting rather than just a collection of different shapes. And I I don't think it is that when we used this much variety and finesse, but always nice to come back and do a little bit of hand painting as well to really tie these things altogether, make them seem interesting, like Hand of the artist is really showing through. So I encourage you all to not skip this step and and again just use that artistic hand. These pressure sensitive tablets make this feel like such a natural, painterly process. So it's a lot of fun and and can really make this personal and satisfying for you. So give this a shot. It's a lot of fun and a great way to start tying things together. Also a great way to start cleaning up little areas that aren't quite working. So these areas where there's these buildings in the little town are hitting the ground look a little bit little bit fake, cause they're not really giving the scale that I want. So I'm using a little bit of cast shadow trying to really push those back into their environment, make them seem like they belong, So some shadows kind of painting in a little bit of highlight on some of these rooftops. I'll add some little suggestions of bushes and trees just to give gifts. Um, scale reference to so all kinds of really cool stuff that we can do with this hand painting steps start really making this a realistic looking world. That's what we're doing here. Love that term world creation. I say it for a public a dozen times in this course, but it's really exciting. We are creating a world here. Ah, really neat and powerful thing. Teoh experiment within a activity that really is not nearly as possible without all of these digital medium tools. So I hope this is the start of, ah, real passion for you. Something really cool that you can either advance your career with find that dream job that you're looking for just building awesome portfolio. We're just something you enjoy. It's extremely satisfying, a lot of fun in a great way to ah to expand your horizons. So I hope you're enjoying this and really seeing new ways of doing some really cool stuff here. So just adding in some shadow that that area inside the castle wall was looking a little bit too bright, figured it wouldn't be catching quite so much sunlight. So just dimming things up a little bit, maybe adding a little suggestion of a highlight on this upper edge of this inner wall. That sort of helps toe pick it out from these castle shapes behind it. A lot of visual activity on all of these layers of death. So it's always good toe. Find some way with a highlight or some atmospheric fog in between the layers, those misty effects we did on our atmosphere perspective lecture just to sort of separate these tears of death. But just with a few brushstrokes, it's really making this inner wall layer really pop forward. Makes it seem a lot more close to us than that, the castle in the distance. So a cool way to to add a lot of realism with just a little bit of hand painting also gives it that nice hand painted charm is well, so really coming along here again, just sort of moving from far too near and adding in detail where we can on this dark side of the wall, going to start hand painting in a few details here. A little bit of edge lighting to to make that pop out from the landscape in the buildings in the distance. Just some cool stuff to make that look a little more realistic. We've got the suggestion of these little buildings around the bridge kind of Bridgetown over there. Teoh work on to just to add a little more detail. And these dark areas really make a nice contrast for the really brightly lit, glorious kind of sunset part of the castle. We've got so always nice to have a good value range, kind of even a good mood range. It starts looking kind of red and foreboding over on this dark side. So a little bit of a different kind of story we're telling over there a little bit of contrast, always a cool thing to include just sort of looking for opportunities. Teoh tune things up a little bit, making, making all these little lines and hand painted marks to try and make this look as interesting as possible and find ways to integrate it into the background a little bit more . Whenever something looks like it's just not quite sitting where it belongs, that's when we do these little operations toe really fix it. And that's when it's been official to have everything on one layer like we did. So that's why we do that. So for now, I'm going to start doing a little bit of fine tuning to this archway in the near ground. Gonna really try and make this seem really tangible and realistic. So good, good bit of hand painting on this one to make it seem nice and realistic, giving it some nice edges in some areas where we're making these planes kind of distinct from one another. Also making a little bit of a glow coming around this corner that sunlight behind this archway is so bright were pretty much looking into the sun. So I'm gonna have some bloom effects. That's when the light is so bright that it kind of comes around the corner. Even if it's being blocked by something, we really want to show that and a lot of drama to its it's sort of instant drama. When you have the sunshine kind of glowing through, something always makes it look very dramatic and interesting. So that's what this little edge treatment to these brick wall layers are four, really just to make that son kind of glow in there. And now I'm adding some some direct sunlight. Those really bright highlights to the sides of this archway that are facing towards that sunset. I don't think that's working really nicely. I've switched to color dodge mode and we're just gonna paint with some grace. Um, really bright highlights, especially along this edge, really makes that corner kind of turn for us. Makes it a really tangible, three dimensional object. We can see that edge of this cube type shape really well, so that Corner's got all these cool scratches and little details on it. I love that. With just a little bit of photo text, a ring and a little bit of hand painting, we've turned basically a silhouette into this really realistic looking kind of brick wall thing. So just integrating this into the background a little bit. Just painting in some little blades of grass like this is sort of an overgrown kind of area of ruins, something that hasn't been taking care of for a long time, and it's kind of falling apart. So let's a little fun ways you can make these more interesting and detailed and just give it some cool story once and blades of grass kind of catching the sunlight. But, guys, I think we're just about ready for our final Polish stage up next. 19. Castle Meadow - Final Polish: Oh, hi, everyone. This is Hardy. In this section, we will finish our castle project with some final polish. So let's get started. Everything's basically in place, guys. It's just this last step where we're gonna add some fine detail. Little finishing touches to make This is cool is we can, before we put it in the portfolio. So here I'm just adding some little vine details just to try and make this pillar in the foreground look kind of ruined. And for gotten just kind of a cool little story element just to give us, um, fine detail in the foreground, I think that's looking awesome. I'm gonna add a bloom effect to this layer, and I think we'll try it in a few areas around the canvas. But check this out. It gives this nice, warm sunshine glow kind of like the sunlight is burning around the corners of these edges. It gives it a really cinematic quality. It's kind of a camera lens effect that really looks good. And scenes like this it can also really push things back into the environment, makes things really sit in the atmosphere well, so if you have a depth issue where something is not looking as far aways it needs to be or if you have two different tiers of depth that air sort of tough to pick out from one another. Just add a little bit of this bloom in between those and it will really start to separate. Things really send things back into the distance. So we're doing that on this outer castle wall here just to make that far corner of it kind of disappear behind that hill really makes it sit in the environment really nicely. So Ah, very cool trick and a nice thing to save for this final Polish stage, since it's just something you really can see at the end in, uh, really make those changes and give it a stronger finishes possible. So pushing some of these distant objects way back into the environment with this little bloom effect. One thing to be careful, though you want to set your layers to lighten notice. I've got all of these bloom layers set to lighten blending mode that just makes it so that it doesn't brighten anything up, that it doesn't belong to it. It just makes the dark colors lighter. You won't lose any of your cool highlight work that won't get washed out. So lightened mode is perfect for that. This phase of the project. It's always a nice idea to take, maybe even just a very quick break before this very last final Polish stage, you can be kind of artistically drained at this point. There have been a lot of steps up to this point, So if you need to take a break and come back with fresh eyes and really give it the strongest possible finish, now is a really good time to do that. Because this is our last crack at this. And we wanted to have the coolest possible finished product. So a good time to take a little break if you need to. It's, um, detail. Now that we've got all these cool bloom effects in place, I'm gonna switch my brush to color dodge mode, and I grabbed this orange color, and I'm just painting in some little lights like they're a little lit windows all throughout our castle in our whole city. Here and color dodges good because you paint with a color, and every time you add another brush stroke it makes it both brighter and more saturated. This is how I paint fire effects, and I figured that is how everything in this medieval type period would beginning. It's light, so it's like we have little torches lit. Here are little candlelit rooms throughout this city, so that's all I'm doing is just doing some little brush strokes of some little tiny rectangular shapes, Sort of just wherever some of these areas there are actually little dark spots where I left the indication of the window. Look, for the most part, you just sort of Sprinkle these little effects around the canvas, and it really looks like a living city. It's one of those great signs of life story elements that really make it feel like they're people living in there. There, somebody, somebody is up in that room at the top of this tallest tower. So really cool stuff to to consider and really starts bringing your your image toe life here. When you give these little signs of people so cool effects to add in and it's really super easy, it's just a few tick marks. You never want to go too overboard with these unless that's really part of the design, unless it's like a futuristic city escape or something like that, where you want to just overwhelm with bright lights. But something like this. I think subtlety is good. You don't want it to look like a Christmas tree lights all over the place, but adding some little torches on that bridge to just a sort of guide the eye around. And I think that's really cool. Another cools signs of life technique we're going to use is just this chalk brush to give some tiny little indication of little puffs of smoke coming out of chimneys. Isn't that cool? That's all that takes is just one little Siris of brushstrokes kind of type brushstrokes that the base of the chimney and then just sort of fan them out. And it gives this really easy indication of smoke. So a really cool way to add that signs of life type of thing. Another way. We just indicate people and how just about every great concept art painting has to have a flock of birds flying away, right? Not really. This this technique may be overused a bit, but it adds so much movement, an instant drama so just painted in a little flock of birds made them bright white over the castle silhouette so that they would stand out and then kind of a darker gray out here in the sky. So even if it's the same flock of birds, I wanted to give him that contrast. Let them stand out from the background. So wow, that had so much instant drama in scale makes this place seem huge and dramatic, and you can really sort of the viewer will mentally animate those birds. You can just see them flying through the air. So a very cool thing to do. And that's the reason why you see birds added to so many concept art paintings again. Use that with restraint, but certainly a handy tool when you need it. So spotting a few areas in the landscape where I thought it could use just a little more detail so that you could see, I just grabbed a copy of that more detailed hill on the interior of the castle wall and just pasted it in. And I'm doing a little bit of brushwork trying to make that extra little hill that we've added kind of fit into that place, and we just sort of borrow all of that cool detail that we already did. And and that's that. So, guys, I'm now working on a copied emerged layer of the entire Candace. If you want to do that, just select all with command A and then do Shift Command. See, that is the copied merged function. It's copy merged command shift, see, and then you paste that in that will paste copy and paste everything. So it's like it's grabbing the entire set of layers and pasting them all together. So when I'm at the very end of a project like this, I like to work on a flattened layer. Now, certainly just make a copy. You don't want to flatten everything, too, where you couldn't edit it ever again. But just see, I've got this layer at the top where I've got everything flattened, and we do that with that copy merged function. So definitely don't want to do flatten your entire image and lose all of these cool layers . But copy merged instead, so I definitely want caution everybody about that, but just kind of jumping around the canvas, adding in little finishing touches might see about doing a little bit of Bright Ning with color dodge mode. See if there's anywhere where I want these lights to really pop. We just paint in with gray. But if it's in color dodge mode, you can see it just adds a little, a little bit of punch, a little bit of sharper value to make that look even more dramatic at a nice, shiny highlight in your main focal point. It could give a nice kind of camera glow, too. The guys with that, I think we just have a finished painting. I think this one really came out well, congratulations on completing the Castle Meadow project. This was a really fun project and hope it's really open your eyes to some game changing techniques and giving you a solid portfolio piece. Let's take a look back at our project steps and see how far we've gone. We started with a pre painted landscape kind of the site plan for our castle way, then sketched in the basic elements, keeping composition and perspective in mind. After that way, blocked in silhouettes and applied some atmospheric perspective. We then used custom shapes to add silhouette detail and some awesome highlights to our buildings. From there, we added in some subtle photo textures and detail in some final Polish for a really sharp looking, finished project I couldn't resist. I added, in this horses, well, just to give us a character in the near ground for context. But you certainly don't have to do this. I hope you've enjoyed this project and get some really great results. Jonas in our next project will take what we've learned here and bring it to the next level . 20. Loft Interior - Concept: Oh, everyone, this is Hardy. And welcome to the loft Interior Project. This is gonna be a really cool in something totally different from anything else we've done so far. I think you'll like it. So let's get started to start with. I've got a perspective grid set up, and this is just our basic shot design like we've talked about before. The perspective grid really has a lot of information. It gives you the feel of the kind of angle your environment will have. So I've got this all together on a group. I've got that vanishing point set pretty low. I wanted to be a pretty low horizon line so we can kind of look up at the ceiling of this cool room that we're gonna create the ceiling, and this big window I have in mind will be main kind of selling features for this one. So to start doing some lines, we're gonna turn off shape dynamics so that we can do some shift clicking just by holding down shift and kind of connecting the dots just like we did in our photo shop geometry exercise. And we'll just get started now that we have our grid in place. A lot of these early steps will be just kind of like connecting the dots, just sort of getting these ideas out there. And there we go. Cutting that first line on the canvas that's sometimes the very hardest one is to just figure out what you want to do. So my rough idea here is I wanted to be a loft, So we're gonna have ah, vaulted ceiling kind of one of those pitched ceilings where it comes to a point, and I want there to be this little raised workspace kind of hang out area. What? There's to be a really kind of inviting, warm looking, maybe cool, futuristic office type of place. You can have some nice warm lighting. Ah, lot of cool, little homey details, but try and had some contrast to that with some technology stuff. So that's sort of the concept I've got these little steps that I wanna have is this little raised nook in this loft. So to create this far wall I've just created this little wall shaped kind of a trap is oId and I'm just gonna make life easy perspective wise by just distorting this entire shape into the perspective plane. So we're kind of treating this like it's a rectangle, even though it's a slightly more complex shape because weaken distort it. Those handles air still rectangular, and we can use that shape is if it were a rectangle. So even though this room is in a perfect cube like a normal room would be and that that would make it much easier to do the perspective on. We can use these little Photoshopped tricks to to treat it like it is. So just repeating this shape into this near apart again, we've got those perspective grij really showing us which lines need to line up. And just like that, just with distorting these shapes, we've got these somewhat complex forms into perfect perspective without much trouble at all . And I'm just gonna go back to my Leinart layer and start filling in some of these lines. Now I notice I've made a little perspective mistake here. I didn't quite connect the right lines, so I'm just erasing that away. I won't lie to you guys these little mistakes I make or not intentional, especially for the demo. But I didn't edit them out because I want you guys to see that I make mistakes too. Don't get it right the first time. But this is also edible. That's one of the best parts about the digital medium. Even if you make mistakes, you can just come right back and make changes. So it's never too late. It's never worth just scrapping the whole project. You can just kind of fine tune things. So I've created this circle. This is kind of kind of be our main memorable feature of this entire piece. So that's just sort of there is a place holder, and they got, like, to design something kind of cool, sort of a futuristic type window. So I'm gonna make all my layers of invisible for a minute so that I could do a little bit of design work, gonna fill in a layer black just so that I can see this light windows if there were a light shining through it. So just a circle. But I'm gonna use Theological Marquis, and I'm going to stroke this selection just to start giving us some cool like window dividers. That's where I want the design work to really be here on these awesome little window dividers. We're gonna make it look sort of like a nice old fashioned traditional looking window, but with some slight hints of futuristic stuff like, That's kind of my whole. The whole selling point for this concept is it's gonna be a cool contrast between old Victorian style stuff, with some futuristic hints as well. So there will be a need. Need contrast there, so just making some other little dividers. It looks a lot like a bull's eye right now, but if the concept of have in mind works, that effect will go away. See, I'm just sort of a racing away some of these dividers, and there we go. I think that's perfect. That's just about what I had in mind. It sort of got these connectors on the outside on one level and then 90 degrees on the inner level, just to make it look a little bit different. And I think that's really cool. I'm doing a little bit of brushwork to kind of fill in these little rounded corners, make these little dividers look like maybe they're they're welded on or something cool like that, just to give it that nice little bridge between an old traditional looking window and something kind of futuristic. So I think this is perfect. And what I'm gonna do is merge all of these divider shapes together. I'm gonna command click the divider, shapes and then erase those away from that white circle. So the white circle with those erased away dividers is actually our finished product for this design. And remember, any time we have a layer we can command click, it's. And now that I've got this white shape with those dividers subtracted out of it, I can command click it and turn it into a selection. And I'm just gonna stroke that here. So I'm definitely gonna hang on to this window pattern that we've just created. Want to keep that there so that I can command click that layer any time I need to and do some painting within? Certainly that's gonna come in handy when we start establishing a light source. We want the sun to shine through there. If we want to highlight the windows edge, all kinds of really cool things can be made much easier if we just keep these little shapes together. So that's what I'm doing here I went ahead and darkened. The entire background normally had work on a white background, but with this window being such a key feature, I thought I'd make the window white and everything else just a tiny bit darker just so that I could see what I'm doing. And I think that looks awesome. You can see with just this tiny amount of line work in a perspective grid and a little bit of cool design work for this window. We've got this really believable space. It's it's already got all the feelings I wanted to capture here. It's kind of cozy, sort of. Ah, neat mix between traditional sort of an old room and some slightly futuristic stuff. So I'm starting to add in some little details. I'm gonna make a little desk here. Maybe it will have, like lots of monitors like this person is some kind of a computer engineer who's working alone in this cool loft apartment. Kind of a neat, neat contrast between this old sort of dusty, traditional Victorian style room. With all this technology thought that would be kind of a cool, interesting story we could tell here, So sort of an old traditional table. Certainly not a fancy chair, just kind of a wooden stool again. Just grabbing that contrast. And I'm just indicating, like some little pictures on the wall. Just cool. Little details, maybe a stack of books here and there. I think I might try, kind of, Ah, a slightly fancier antique looking armchair over here in the corner. And guys, I just sort of had a few these in mind. But there are so many resource is out there. If there's a piece of furniture that you want to be inspired by, just check it out. Do a Web search. Grab something from one of those really great free stock photo sites that I mentioned earlier, and I'll link those here as well. But there is such a world out there of great things to be inspired by, so check that out. I also got that golden ratio available here anytime I want a little perspective clue. I think I'll have a neat little hanging plant here in front of the window. I want those leaves to really catch some of that bright sunlight that God will be really cool, and it's sort of a secondary detail I'm gonna add in some little panelling on these sloped sealing edges here. So kind of a little inset panels, something with a little bit of death just to make this ceiling kind of interesting. The way we've got our perspective set up, it definitely draws the eyes upward. So let's make that ceiling kind of an interesting feature of our peace here, and I think that look cool. So once again, these perspective grids that we have in place practically let you just snap these elements right where they belong. If you just adjust those four corners, makes it incredibly simple and gives it such a three dimensional feel really amazing stuff . So, guys, I think our design is looking really sharp here. I like how that's coming together. I like that paneling looks so much. I think I might try something kind of like that on these kick board edges of these steps here just to try and make that look a little more interesting to kind of something right at eye level that we've got here. So I want that to stand out is something sort of interesting and memorable. So just copying emerging is we've done before. It's how you turn one element into, Ah, whole Siris of elements. And then we just distorted into perspective. So just like that, these cool little Photoshopped geometry, Leinart shortcuts they work over and over for so many different applications, I hope Hope you're really feeling that the power that those can put in your hands very cool stuff. Fine tuning this a little bit, making sure I get thes thes panels tow line up right in the correct perspective and doesn't have to be perfect. But I think that looks pretty believable. Definitely looks like a series of steps you could walk up to get to this little raised area and get to this cool, little cozy workspace with this cool window. That's kind of all there is to our story here doesn't have to be some grand, high minded concept. Every time you draw something, there doesn't have to be any kind of amazing, clever story. Sometimes it's just a feeling you're trying to get across an interior. Environments definitely can be a good, good outlet for that type of strategy, and I think this is really coming together nicely. It has all of these all of these feelings that I want to communicate already just in this this Leinart phase. So I'm going to start making some selection. So, just like in our seen lighting exercise, I had those little polygon shapes already made these surfaces that we could just command click and call up anytime we needed. And that's all I'm doing here. I'm using the polygon lasso tool to create these areas that I'll use his selections so that first when there was just the floor. Now I'm going to do these steps, and I have selected something outside. But if I hold down command an option, it lets you subtract away the selections that are already there. That way, if you have borders where they're kind of shared lines, you can just subtract away the parts that don't belong, kind of trim it away like I'll do here and there we go. So whenever there are two walls that share an edge, that edge will always be perfect. You'll never have any overlap. You kind of use one selection to define the other one. It's a really incredible way to make these pieces all fit together nicely. So as you can see, just about Every time I make a new selection, I sort of make it bigger than it needs to be. And then I use the selections that are already around to sort of subtract those away and give it that perfect edge. Hope that makes sense. This is a really nice time saving tool to make these pieces kind of fit together perfectly . And as you can see, I'm just sort of labelling these little planes one by one using the other selections with Command. And Ault held down to kind of make these pieces fit together. Every time I create a new selection, I'm using the selections of the stuff around it to make it work. And I think that's looking really cool. Will certainly make great use of these selections as we start lighting are seen in the steps to follow, and I think that's gonna work nicely. So guys, again, something I chose not to edit out. I didn't do it on purpose, but I have made a mistake here. I have sort of goofed on my perspective. This near wall doesn't really make sense three dimensionally, so I'm gonna have to edit something a little bit and I just wanted you guys to see that this happens to even professionals. You can just change things. It's no big deal at all. So I have to move this wall out to the bottom of the stairs and look how easy that was. I've got our perspective plane. It all connects an easy fix. So didn't do that on purpose, but ah, good thing for everyone to see that these little mistakes can be fixed very easily, so I'll just fix that line work, actually. Think that looks much cooler that way. It's sort of like the whole room is kind of coming out into this main space a little bit more. So I just have to sort of fix these few little selections that I made. Make sure they fit this Leinart correction that I've made. And that'll work out great. So never fear. Little accidents like this happen all the time, But everything is just infinitely re workable with Photoshopped, so don't worry about it. I think we've got our document really nicely set up here. We were in great shape to start doing some lighting and and get this concept really going into the cool steps. So I'll see you in the lectures ahead. I think you're gonna like this one 21. Loft Interior - Rough Color & Photo Textures: Oh, how everyone This is hardy. In this section, we will add some rough color in some photo texture. So let's get started. Show you guys a really cool kind of creative way to add in some color when we're starting with just a blank canvas. Sometimes it can be sort of tough to just use the photo shop color picker and just come up with colors out of thin air. So what I do is just grab a bunch of kind of random photos, things that had the approximate color scheme that you're going for and just start pasting them in. They can be totally arbitrary. You can see I'm doing these at all kinds of weird angles. Wherever I think the colors that I'm seeing might work will fit. So it's kind of this cool abstract collage way to paste color in. And just all we're worrying about here is color. None of the details. Once we have everything in place, we're gonna blur everything so that it's totally unrecognizable. So just a cool way to kind of make a collage of photos that just sort of splash all these colors you might want to use into your environment. So Ah, cool. Way to go here now. I did sort of start looking for photos with a certain color scheme in mind. Kind of that nice, warm, comfortable room. So looking at these loft interior type of places or kind of modern office spaces, I knew I would find a lot of those cool, soft wood colors with some nice, warm soft lighting as well, so you can search with with an idea in mind. But as you can see, once we blur these things that the subjects of the photos themselves, they really don't matter anymore it also. There we go. We've got kind of a nice little starting point, a bunch of interesting colors that we can sample. And, of course, if you need to pick up a color when you're using your brush tool, just hit Ault Option on your keyboard and it'll turn your brush into that eyedropper tool so you'll see me do that a lot at this really rough, expressive phase. I've got my brush tool and I'm just painting around, but I'll use alter option to sample a color and just kind of picked the color up and lay it back down very quickly becomes this really nice, natural quick process. So that's a great way to do. Sort of get a foot in the door for a color scheme. Just borrow a bunch of photos, blur them out to where they just become abstract colors and then just start sort of sampling and refining things with your brush really just kind of splashing things around almost randomly. I want this to be a really expressive, creative part of the process. We're not even worrying too much about value. Are lighting. Just want to get some cool colors that weaken base everything off of around. We want to kind of pivot around these main cool colors that we establish, and it will be kind of this jumbled mess of colors to begin with. But it will be more refined as we g o. In fact, that whole sampling and repainting technique with option it sort of has this averaging effect. It kind of smoothed things out really nicely and just using a bit of a Grady int sort of starting to think about light now. As you can see, I made a selection from that window pattern that we made and gave that a nice, bright light source that will certainly be our main light source in the image in our main attention. Get her so ah, focal point for sure. Now you notice I've got the surfaces group. I've got that layer group expanded so that we can just command click these little planes that we made in our last lecture. Any time we want to make a selection so you can see, I'm already starting to add a lot of seen lighting, really giving some dimension toe all of these different planes of this interior space that we've established. So this is when those those steps that you took in the earlier lecture really start to pay off. So I'm just selecting the floor by command, clicking that floor surface, and we could just paint within. There's that reflection under the window that we discussed in the interior shot in the scene lighting exercise. So, as you can see, it's like there's light reflecting down onto this wooden floor off of that window. And using these little kick boards is kind of a dark contrast for that, doing some adjustments, seeing if anything's working better. But I kind of like this. See if I can use this photo just t add a little bit more variety, Something kind of interesting using that on different blending modes. Just trying a few things if I can find some really wild color variation that I might not have thought of, but I kind of like the way things were going to begin with. So just some experiments. You can use these photo color techniques for just about anything. They're really great ways to just start off a color scheme because it is really hard to start with no base point. Photoshopped has has so many great tools, but you kind of need a starting point before you can start pivoting off of that and really making some strides in your image. But this is coming together really well. I love this this expressive, rough color phase really a lot of fun and just let you start defining these spaces. Look at three dimensional. This is already looking. We've got a really nice mood going to. It's got that nice, warm color that we were going for. It looks like kind of ah, an inviting, cozy kind of environment. Interesting place to explore and and that's that's really what we're going for with all of our architectural paintings. And, of course, these selections that we made our surfaces layer group. They make all of these little adjustments that I'm making so easy. I'm just painting on on this this rough color layer, but because I had these selections available, all kinds of adjustments are really easy to do. So now that we have rough color in place, let's add some photo textures. So I've got a group of kind of random textures that we're gonna use a wood floor, a little wall, grainy texture and Cem some trim details and some bricks that we're gonna use. So I've got those in a layer group just called photos, and those are going to stay there. What I'm gonna do is copy photos out of this and we're gonna put these in a soft light blending mode. Layer Group won't believe that. Cool. This is so I'll drag this 1st 1 I'm gonna start with this wood floor down to a new group and we will rename this group photo textures. And now the way we make this would sort of start toe really sit into this paint. This color scheme that we've made is will just put this layer group on soft light blending mode. So it's a really cool thing here will take this layer group photo textures and change the whole group too Soft light. And just like that, the wood kind of starts to interact with the color beneath in a really cool way. So it shows all of the color and even the value that we've already established, but it lets you just get a tiny bit of that texture peeking through so a really cool thing . And now all we have to do is just start to distort this would into the correct perspective plane. So I'm actually gonna try using this on hard light. This would texture is so subtle. And I think I wanted to be a little more a little more harsh and give it a little more pop . So for this, what? I'm actually gonna try hard light for a little while, probably gonna use soft light for the other photos. But this would is such a cool, soft bleach type of wood. Finish that I I wanted to try something with a little more contrast, a little more punch. So a rare instance where I'm going to use hard light instead of soft, light guys. There are lots of blending modes. Soft light is the one I get. The most use out of hard light can be handy sometimes. In instances like this, there's also overlay so lots of fun stuff to experiment with. But they each have a job. And soft, light and hard light tend to be the best for this type of integrating a texture with a nice under painting that we already have done here. So looking really cool and I always amazed at how how three dimensional a space starts to look when you have some kind of linear pattern texture like this. Would all of these planks air kind of going in the same direction? So when we distort that into our perspective plane, look at how three dimensional it makes that space look so really could make these photos work for you and make your image look really realistic as tons of dimension and detail, interest and personality. So really great steps here. I'll make all these photos that belong to me available to you, but free stock photo sites like pencils or unspool ash or just Amazing Resource is really high quality stuff that is absolutely free, no strings attached. So ah, great resource that have recently discovered, and I'll include links to those sites. Ah, great thing to check out. So now that I've that wood grain texture on top, I'm doing a little adjustment to the color underneath just toe, just to see how that's working. Think I might try and add a little this wood texture to this middle stair plank here just to give that a little bit of interest? I think that's cool. So again we have all of these little surface selections that we can make. So I've just trimmed away everything that isn't the floor. And just like that, we've got a nice floor that's on Lee on the actual floor surface that we want. So we use those selections to make life really easy, and that's looking cool. But I think I wanted toe be a little more great out. Very cool. I like that kind of bleached, whitewashed looking wood floor for this one. I think that'll be a cool, cool effect for this, so just kind of fine tuning the hue, saturation, the color balance just to see if there's something that will work just a tiny bit better adjusting the photo texture itself Just toe make. This is cool, looking as it can possibly be, and I think that's really great. I love some of the wood knots we can see in the near ground, probably going to cover that up with some details later on but really great looking stuff. So now we have, Ah, nice looking wood floor, I think having a start text oring in some of these walls. So I have this red little square. This is just from the side of a plaster wall building, I think, from from a trip to Italy or something. But I've gotten so much use out of this great texture because you can just fill an entire interior wall. And it has all of these cool little kind of flaking paint details. Just very interesting little variations, but nothing. So I catching that it it takes away. It's just a really nice, subtle texture that kind of sits in the background. So, as you can see, we're just distorting these these individual textures into place kind of making them fit the plains where they belong and they look incredibly realistic. We will use all of our surface selections to just command, click and delete the outside kind of trim away the excess. So it's kind of like we're always coloring inside the lines. It's it's it's really great shortcut to have those selections, and I know it took a little bit of extra time and in the previous lecture. But as you can see really paying off, ending up being a huge time saver here in the long run, I think I'll put this texture on the ceiling as well. Never want to let things get repetitive, but this one is just such a nice, subtle texture that I don't think there will be any any noticeably overlapping variations. It's got that one little light spot, but I'll Leadsom detail to make sure that isn't too obvious. Never want anything to look like a stamp that you've just used over and over again. But of course, we'll come back and detail this. Wow, that's looking really cool. Everything fits together nicely, so merge all of that onto one layer and I'll take the saturation down. That photo has kind of a reddish hue, and that could be a little overpowering. So I just knocked the saturation all the way down on the photo texture itself in it. It's sort of adopts the color of whatever's underneath it. That's what we want here, one all that good, rough color experimentation that we did to really show through, adding a little hint of that brick texture and that little upper corner. But that's kind of Ah, an area that I want to sort of disappear Not really an interest, a point of interest. So just sort of letting that be. And now I'm using this cool little wood trim to make a kind of crown molding type thing. This is a big stone piece of trim from this, this gateway, and it really makes a nice crown molding effect. And you can you just use this over and over has so many great uses stone or wood work it. It kind of just becomes whatever you needed to be. He so I've got a handful of textures that I have just gotten so much mileage out up, and I'll make those all available to you. But really great stuff and you never know. Sometimes the most random photo can end up being a really useful wanted to keep around. So always take photos. When you come across an interesting texture, they might end up really serving your work. Well, in the long run, So a great, great habit to get into gonna make kind of a little floorboard here, going around the bottom. And this this phase, it's sort of just ah, hodgepodge of photos coming together, trying to make sure these were all in the right perspective planes or doing a little bit of distort their but in our next step will start doing a lot more hand painting kind of unifying all of these effects together. And all these photo textures will just sort of become, ah, background tooth for all of this paint to sit on. So even though, if it starts looking a little repetitive, kind of photo collage, we don't worry about that. We're gonna unify everything with our photo textures to come in our our hand painting. I mean, we're gonna do in the lectures to come. So this is ah, laying the groundwork for some very, very cool stuff to come and really need effects were getting so far at so much interest, so much realism and really enforces that perspective, especially with our our wood grain trying some filters here. I love the paint daubs filter for photo textures because it makes him seem not quite so perfectly crisp and photographic makes him seem a little more painterly. So I think we're about there. One more photo I want a paste in is essentially just a circular version of this crown molding that I've used kind of want to have a nice little window sill around this. So have this nice circular picture frame that we're just going to apply around the outside of this window just to give it a little detail again. That cool Victorian meets futuristic contrast I'm trying to capture here, so this will really help sell that. But I think our colors and textures are looking good, so we'll start adding some details up next 22. Loft Interior - Detail & Story Props: Oh, hi, everyone. This is Hardy in this lecture will continue our loft interior project by adding some detail and some story elements. So let's get started. So we've got our color scheme in our photo textures in places looking really cool. So now we're gonna just start refining things, start bringing this back to feeling like, ah, hand painting. So we're gonna start using the brush tool. A few more little selection tricks to add some detail in. The first thing I would like to do is we're going to start working on this ceiling up ahead , mask out a few of these photo textures that air looking a little too bold. Just knock those back. I kind of want the painting to start taking over here and let those photo textures just sort of sit back is a support element. But the next thing I want to do is make this ceiling a little more interesting to go ahead and merge everything into a copy of our main group before I get started. Just so we can start consolidating a bit. So I'm gonna make kind of a frame Ah, rectangular selection. And then I just subtracted away the middle, and I'm gonna start copying that I'm going to do two rows of three for this, and it will be these cool little inset panels for the ceiling. So that's that's perfect. I've got this little group of six, and I'm going to distort this to match this this rectangle of the ceiling, get it all nicely in perspective, and that really enhances that sense of depth. Just this little detail, and that looks really cool. One thing I'm gonna have to do is kind of move that Inter panel so that it looks like it's set back a little. But already this effect is really working for us. So just distorting in the other side, I saved a copy before I distorted the 1st 1 and that's really cool. So I want to select the inside of all these squares and create a new layer and fill that in . We're going to say that because we're going to use that to sort of nudge those inner squares back and up a little to make those inner panels look kind of kind of setback. So now I'm just filling in all of these squares as they are, but because we saved these inner panels, which I've just lightened a little bit. Now we can move those back and up a little bit, see how much dimension that gives it. So I'm gonna do that on both sides. You have to do it in different directions for both. And now that we have that, I'll just command click that selection and delete them away. So we have these nice little recessed panel details for our ceiling. Very cool. I think I might try something kind of similar for these little kick boards on these steps going up to the little raised area. So just copying a bunch of rectangles here in to distort those into the right perspective plane in a moment. But for now, just just kind of making everything fit, making a copy so that I can use this effect again once we we use both steps. So always good toe to save a copy of these things. Once you you make them kind of make that one shape. Copy it, merge it, copy and merge again. Teoh, To get all the numbers you need, always good to save one so that you can use it repeatedly. if you need to like we did on both sides of the ceiling and on each little step here. But this is looking really cool already since we started this video a lot more interest going on and it's it's starting toe take on a lot more life than just feeling like color with photo textures. This is where it's gonna really start feeling more like a cool art project. So just contracted that selection in and deleted it away. And I think we're on our way. I'm just going to use that is a pattern. So ah, command clicked that layer that we created and I'm just painting within it on a new layer, so just sort of darkening things up. But of course, some of these edges air actually facing the light source, so they'll be catching some highlight. So I want to make sure we get that in a swell. Really, Give these a lot of dimension. Isn't that awesome? We've got this little highlight happening on that edge that it's catching the sunlight coming through that window. So I kind of have to really think about these light sources. How light would be striking each one of these new, little, slightly more complex shapes that we're making really gives it a lot of detail. A ton of realism if you could make it match your lighting scheme really faithfully. So always have to be thinking about light filtering through the room, which surfaces or facing towards that light source. Which ones are facing away and we just add light and shadow accordingly. And at this point, we've pretty much got most of the colors we would need for this already on the canvas. So it's just a matter of sampling and painting in. So I've created a circle and stroked the outline just to give a little highlight for this circular window sill. And just like always, we kind of distort that into place. Make it fit. Wanted to look like there's kind of a little raised edge on this window sill, catching the sunlight going down, so I'll mask that out completely, filling a new mask in with black and then just reveal a little bit. So that's just that light edge on the bottom curve. That's that's catching that light that another stroke, a new layer that will just stroke with this darker brown color to give sort of an outline around this window trim would have knocked that back and opacity. Don't want it to be superb old or even They're everywhere but looking very cool. I think it's time for a little hand painting, so I've grabbed this kind of calligraphy brush. It's just a squashed oval at an angle, and I've disabled shape. Dynamics is you can see I'm just shift clicking all around, creating all these cool straight lines kind of tea. Just give a little more presence to a lot of these edges. Ah, some of these air dark lines and all had some highlights as well. But these really long, straight lines that you can add add so much realism. Look, that little highlight. It makes it look like there's a little extra bit of woodwork, kind of where the steps meet the floor. So this is such an easy step. Just doing some shift clicking around your image in just a little bit of free hand painting . But it really defines all these edges. These cool little corners where these planes come together really kind of squares things out, makes it look a lot more painterly and interesting. I'm to do a little Actual freehand painting now have turned shape dynamics back on. And I just want to make this little corner kind of catch some light, adding little nicks and scratches, kind of making this look like sort of an old room. Don't want it to be dilapidated, look like a haunted house or anything. But all of these little imperfections that we had really add lots of character. And, as you can see, a switched on like perspective grid because I want some of these lines going out from this window to be perfectly horizontal or vertical, as they would be in the perspective plane. But isn't that cool? And so much character and charm to this previously kind of flat wall? There was some photo texture there to make it kind of interesting, but now it's really starting to feel like a painting, adding some little divots here where the edge of the floorboards come over this steps really cool stuff. Maybe even a few little seems where wood planks kind of meet one another. Really nice stuff. I could do this for hours. I get kind of carried away thes little hand painted touches really make these paintings personal and enjoyable. And I think your clients, your teachers, your audience, whoever you're sharing this with, that's where they will really see the hand of the art. It's really appreciate your work. So have some fun with this guy's. You've kind of done a lot of hard work laying the ground work up to this point. And now it's just time to kind of drag grab colors from around the canvas and just sort of have fun with it. So just checking out any new little opportunities where I could do a little bit of interesting hand painting to make this look cooler, kind of calling out some of these little planks on the floorboards, making them look a little more distinct and interesting. But I think we're really ingratiate. So I'm gonna start doing a little bit of treatment to this window. Gonna do kind of ah ah, light like it's spotlighting down on the floor. So we're gonna copy that selection, and I'm checking out my composition, cause I wasn't sure which way I wanted this spotlight to go. But I think this side is perfect, So as you can see, I just copy that exact shape of the window, moved it a little bit, and now I'm just sort of squashing it, making it fit that floor perspective plane. And just like that, we have this really cool spotlight like the sunlight is shining through the window, making this perfect kind of spotlight shape of itself on the floor, at so much detail. I'm gonna put our window elements in its own layer. Now it's time for a really cool bloom. This is where it's going to really feel like a morning glow kind of burning through that window. So I've just got a soft brown brush, a super soft airbrush, and I'm just painting a glow like the sun might be just about peeking out of that corner from the window and look at much drama that instantly adds, making this kind of a yellow slightly to the green side. But isn't that amazing? Guys at so much interest really makes it look like a warm, sunshiny room and just trying a few things, seeing if I wanted to darken the actual window shape itself. But for now, I think that's looking pretty cool. Let's add some rays of light this will look like one of those awesome little columns of light shining through a window. So I'm just making some marks with a round brush kind of the approximate direction where the sunlight would becoming. And we just do a motion blur, set the angle to the angle you want it to be and Max out the distance and look at that. We have these really cool, very realistic looking rays of light, kind of pouring through our window. So cool. So I gonna try this again, see if I can get it a little more refined. Experiment with this as many times as you need. But sometimes the winner doesn't happen on the first try, and we just distort kind of make it like a cone of light coming out of there. I'm gonna try some different blending modes. I think overlay actually works a little bit better. Get rid of these. These parts coming out of the top here and next. We'll add some little sparkles of dust. I've got this scatter brush set up. It's basically just spraying little dots around. Makes a cool little impression of dust floating in those rays of light. Always makes something seem really atmospheric and interesting. So ah, cool thing to copy. I'm copying that layer and giving it a little Goshen blur just to make those little specks glow a little bit. But, guys, that's how we do a really cool atmospheric window. So next it's time to add some cool story props to our image. So I've pasted in a new group of just random things. These are some pictures from my library that I kind of collaged together and did a filter on. I don't want them to be super distinct. I want all of this stuff to kind of just be background texture. This is a picture framed in my house, A little cool things that I thought would work just to fill in this wall space make it look a little interesting. So for each of these, I'm adjusting the brightness, the hue, whatever I need to do to make it sit back in that environment, make it really present. They're adding a layer style to these photos just to give it a little drop shadow. You could just paint underneath that on on separate layer, but lots of different ways to do these things This is a floor mat in my house as well that I just took a picture of. So these things are all around you. Great stock photography websites you can borrow from or just find stuff that's nearby. Ah, really cool way to just add a lot of interest and personality. They're just these cool things all around us. It'll work. So I had attempted to do that in an angle. But I think I'm gonna just stick with the perspective grid, make this perfectly kind of flat and and square to our environment. And then, as you can see, how it changed the color by hitting command, I that's invert that that inverts everything. So everything that is white turns black, everything that yellow turns blue, and it's a good way to just sort of check and see if there's some cooler way to do something. And I actually ended up sticking with this. So a little bit of hand painting never want thes photographic resource is to look too out of place. Always wanted to be painterly, so I'm just adding some little kind of tasseled frayed end on this rug. Give it a little more realism kind of a highlight on that near side. Just start doing some of those shift clicking lines on this picture frame just to make it feel like it belongs. Where is so? I'd caution you with this step. When we start pasting in these elements, they can sort of seem out of place unless we very carefully make them fit. So these books, for example, so cool. Very nice texture, great looking old stuff. But as you can see, I ran a paint daubs filter to make it look a little less photographic. And now I'm just doing some adjustments both to the shapes, adding a new book here kind of leaning on its side. Just a few things toe to make it a little more interesting. And we're gonna have to do a good bit of work on. The Color is well because right now, those air so bright and so colorful that they don't really seem to fit. So let's de saturate it with a hue saturation adjustment. I'm actually adding, ah, layer on top to make it have some some of the brown that's in this environment just just sort of knocking that super bright saturation down a little bit. And with that, it fits much better. We're adjusting things that brightness, and I'm gonna handsome highlight. This is really sitting right under that window. So we need a few shadows, A few areas to make it fit. Just kind of hand painting toe sort of make this our own. This was just a photograph, but with all the things we've already done with it, it's really become part of our paintings. So little highlights where that sunlight is catching those books makes him seem even more three dimensional in these cool little details. Just I had so much character so much that it's sign of life quality that we're after really makes it cool. So one thing I really wanted to include was a little hanging plant. So I'm just gonna kind of sketch this out. I have the idea of kind of, ah, hook in the ceiling and a little kind of plant basket hangings of just shift clicks and little straight lines. Maybe a little pot. And I'm doing this kind of an orange color just to give some color interest. We don't have much that's really bright, saturated in colorful in this image. So I'm gonna count on this flower to do that. We'll have a really nice green kind of leaves sort of spilling out of this, this pot and I want the leaves to to be in front of that really bright window. Love an opportunity to have some really bright sunshine shining through. But for now, we're just doing a basic rendering of that little pot putting that highlight down. And now I think we're ready to add some leaves. Just doing these leaves with that that oval shaped tilted brush. Kind of just hand painting these and they're pretty impressionistic. I'm not getting super careful with each leaf or anything like that. Just wanted to look cool and painterly and get us an opportunity for some color. So it's starting with a base of dark green, and now I'm gonna come and add some really bright, bright green. If you ever observed leaves, when the sun is really shining from behind them, they get to be this really bright kind of neon green color, and I'd love to capture that here. I think that's really working. Makes this whole room a lot happier. Kind of like a house plant does in real life. So you kind of have to think like an interior decorator sometimes with these things to make it all work out. But, wow, that adds so much interest. So with all these little knickknacks and details that we add, we really bring our environment toe life, make it much more human and interesting. So give these details a shot I think you'll really like, would it adds to your project and up next, we'll have a little final polish and we're almost ready to call this one Finished. I'll see there. 23. Loft Interior - Final Polish: Oh, everyone, this is Hardy. In this section, we will finish off our loft interior project with some final polish. So let's go ahead and get started. So we're pretty much there. Guys, we've got a lot of cool story elements. A nice color scheme, some textures Cem painting to make it all kind of gel together. So the last thing to really add is just some furniture just toe kind of fill this scene ing in a little bit, kind of populated with some little areas of interest. So a really easy technique for painting furniture. It's basically just silhouettes with a tiny bit of color inside. And then maybe a little bit of photo text, oring and soft light blending mode. I'm not really getting into too much detail. These air kind of just background props to make the environment look cool. But it's a nice thing. Teoh ad. There's inspiration for furniture everywhere. Actually, furniture design is kind of its own standalone art form, so check out some references. I kind of had this chair in mind that I saw one time that I'm just sort of relying on my memory for this. What this kind of cool, old looking Victorian armchair again to sort of play off of that cool contrast between futuristic stuff, an old timey, really cool, traditional looking stuff. So I'm gonna have a workstation with some really advanced looking monitors set up on the other side of the room. So we'll have a nice little reading chair with a stack of books on that side. So doing that contrast kind of playing on that balance. So I'm gonna make this old looking table with some cool little kind of curvy legs, just a old wooden piece of furniture, kind of antique looking and, ah, a little shift clicking kind of disabling shape dynamics when I want to do that long, straight edge for the table, but just really kind of trying to make these legs interesting, making the table flat but making these legs a little bit curvy and spend early just to give them a little bit of interest. But super simple stuff. Guys just essentially shift clicking and silhouettes, this little wooden stool, nothing but a collection of lines and a few things just to make it look a little bit round a simple wooden chair. And once we have all of this stuff silhouetted in weaken. Just add a tiny bit of highlight kind of to set it back in the scene. Give it those light sources that it needs adding some little spokes here for the back of the chair. And there we GOP pretty easily setting up the indications of a chair, a table and an old armchair. So that's all there is to it. Pretty cool stuff. You can place things around. If if something isn't quite fitting your composition or isn't quite in places, it should be. You just move these silhouettes around super easy. So I'm disabling the sketch and that we have these silhouettes in place. There isn't a whole lot that we need this sketch for anymore. I'm gonna add those computer monitors in a minute so we may take a look at this sketch again for that. But for now, I'm just adding in these light sources, kind of this light side, letting it it shine a little bit to that whole edge of the table, catching some light from the window. Very cool looking stuff, and I'm keeping things pretty loose here. I wanted to be kind of nice and painterly, just sort of an indication, a good place to show that hand of the artist, little details that make these paintings charming and, in one of a kind, always a great thing to include. And here in these final steps, where we've taken all this trouble to make things nice and in perspective, set things up in a nice, organized way. It's it's time to just sort of have fun and at all the charm and interest that you can in these final steps. So that's what I'm doing here. Just scratching in little details, making this table look kind of interesting, even though it really could not be simpler. Just a silhouette with some highlights. Very simple stuff. Of course you can get is detailed as you want. If you have some furniture in the near ground, just find some cool references, some some photo textures, anything you need to make it fit in the environment and adds an interest to your painting, giving a little bit of variation to this would stuff. So it's not quite so monochromatic. A few areas of more saturated brown just to make it look kind of old and interesting, and I think that's working really well, I'm gonna bring that same effect to these wooden chair legs over here on the far side. But I think I want to do kind of a brighter color for the actual upholstery of this chair. Maybe kind of a bright red or something might be kind of interesting, but for now we're just sort of light sourcing this chair, making it look like it's it's really sitting over in that corner under that window. And these really bright, almost white highlights shining from that window really do the trick. It just makes it look like it's really present in that environment. That's that's just what we're going for. So cool. I love how atmospheric these little details make your image and that big, bright, glowing window with those rays of light. We've really set the stage nicely for a really nice mood and feel for our image. So very cool stuff. Let's add in some of that at cushion that upholstery here, you sort of indicating the basic shapes of this chair kind of the wingbacks. I thought I might do one of those things where it's got those little, almost like a little buttons that tie down the upholstery on the chair back. So just sort of an indication of that. Want this to look kind of old school and comfortable. But that would be a cool detail, and I'm not really sticking to any kind of photo references to, well, these these little furniture elements are pretty simple, and I'm leaving them kind of vague deliberately. Just think they're sort of charming when they could be left somewhat sketchy and a little bit a little bit loose. That's what we're doing here. Just adding some highlight where that son might be catching that fabric a little more brightly. I think that works. It really sits in the environment. Well, very cool. A nice, nice detail, that's that's the reading chair over in the corner. There's a nice little bit of story detail, and it certainly fits with the theme and the mood that we're going for here, really liking how this furniture's coming out and super easy. Probably just about 10 minutes in in real time of painting here. So I hope this technique really helps you get some cool results without a whole lot of work . Very, very easy stuff and you can just fill up your canvas with as much or as little of these little supporting props is you want to. I should also mention I had that hanging plant on the chair side before I started this lecture, but I decided to move it. It was on its own layer. I thought compositionally it worked a little bit better on that super bright side of the window really lets those leaves kind of shine. So just, uh, I want to make sure everyone knew they were not going crazy. That plant did switch sides a little bit of line, works of details on this chair just to sharpen things up a little, making those little buttons a little more interesting. And it's looking great, putting a few little indications of shadow behind some of this furniture just toe to make it look like that light is shining. So I've just copied the shape of this table and made a new later layer and just filled it in. So we just have this Gaussian blur run on this outline of the table, and just like that, we have this perfectly faithful shadow. Kind of lets it look like a little light is being cast against the wall behind that table. And I'm just going to do a little bit of free hand painting behind this armchair. So very simple stuff. Okay? I'm gonna use are shaped tool. You can actually do rounded rectangle, So not a custom shape here. This is one of the standards of this tool. So my shape tool is set to rounded rectangle, and I'm just copying these cool little rounded rectangle shapes. They kind of look like, ah, modern computer monitor. So a really easy way to get tons of sort of interesting shapes in place. Just copying this base one over and over again, Kind of distorting it into the plane. Thought it would look cool if we had this really big set up of monitors. Kind of a whole whole array. Who knows what kind of work this person does but makes it look futuristic and interesting. A nice contrast with the rest of our style and all the other elements going here. So we got our screen surfaces in place. I think that's looking pretty cool. Not gonna add a few little support elements just to make this sit it want to put a little more highlight on this table, though, before we get too far into the monitors. Think that's like a nice though? So there we go. Give give these monitors a little bit of backing a little stand to kind of sit on just a few little things toe. Tie them together. I considered having them just floating there, but maybe we're not quite that far into the future in this one. So did want. They used to have little little stands, little mounting brackets, things like that. So I've contracted the selection in, have gone to transform selection so that I can move this to the side a little bit, have also locked the layer and that so that I could do this little highlight around the outside. It's like adding a little little shine to the outside. Makes make it look like a nice chan furred edged like some kind of really sleek, high tech product, a great way to easily add a quick highlight. Of course, this monitors edge facing this window would be catching quite a lot of light. There are a 1,000,000 different ways to do this, or you could just do it FREEHAND or with shift clicking lots of ways to get a nice straight line. But at this point, guys, I'm kind of just doing whatever to get a few indications of some interesting stuff going here. But these air basically just silhouettes with a few little details on them to get the point across. This furniture shouldn't really take a whole lot of time. It's kind of an afterthought and cool little knickknacks to to fill your image and give it some good background story. I think that's looking really cool. Gonna dark in these a little bit, just for contrast. And, yeah, there's air looking very nice. They seem to really fit in the environment well and doing a little bit of shift clicking to make some straight lines. Anything I could do to make these look very sleek and high tech without a whole lot of extra effort. So now I'm going to do sort of a shine like thes screens, air reflecting a little bit. So just a few little marks with brushwork, just like we did our rays of light by the window and I just do emotion, blurts, filter, blur, motion blur and a little bit of a little bit more blurring. And just like that looks like kind of a cool reflection on some of these monitors. It's pretty bold the way it is. I don't want to quite that strong. So I've masked it out, and I'm going to reveal that just a tiny bit inside the monitors, Justin Indication to look like a reflection, make it look like a shiny, glassy surface. I think that's just about purpose brought perfect. So one more thing I want to do, I've got this logo that I have made in it. This is available to you if you want it just to put some cool little kind of screensaver something high tech to include on the monitor here. So no need to come up with something to elaborate. I just wanted these screens to look like they were on, and I'm trying this orange color. Think I'm gonna change that? That looks a little scary and menacing like an evil computer. I watching us or something, So probably go with something a little less threatening there, but just cool to have these little logos Teoh to make your monitors a little more interesting. Very cool So I've copied that, giving it a slight glow just to make this look kind of cool. Like it's a little glowy logo. But, um, actually kind of liking that better crisp. Let's try a cooler color, maybe something greenish blue kind of scion. Much better that that's a much friendlier color. Looks like this person's workstation is not for the evil empire or anything like that. So very random logo that I've used in a lot of demo projects. You'll see that on our next project is, well, very cool trying to, ah, mask out just a little bit saying if that would look better, but I sort of like it it. Full opacity, actually. So no need for that layer mask trying this a little more, see what I can get to work. And, uh, it's pretty cool looking good, though. Guys, I think this one is really coming together. Were very close to a finished product here. Thought this ceiling was looking just a little bit too flat. So I've grabbed another photo texture just to add a little bit of din gin. Cem interest to the ceiling here. I wanted to be very subtle. Don't don't want it to look like the ceiling flooded or anything, but just to make it look old and interesting. But just final touches. At this point, I hope you've enjoyed this project a really cool way to come up with some very atmospheric , very three dimensional interior concept art. So hope these techniques have really helped you hope you're enjoying your portfolio pieces . This is, Ah, great skill toe. Have something that's really in demand for concept art. So with a few more little details, I think we're about ready to call this a finished product. Congratulations on completing the Loft Interior Project. This was a really fun project in a great set of skills to add to your tool kit. Let's take a look back at our project steps and see how far we've come. We started with a simple perspective grid way, then added some roughed line hard to establish our three dimensional space and get our ideas down. After that, we used photos and painting to get a rough color scheme in place way, then use photo textures to make our environment more realistic and interesting. From there we added detail in lighting effects and finally, some furniture and final polish to arrive at a really cool finished product. I've added in a character to give this one just a bit more personality, but you don't have to do this. I've also added a subtle indication of a futuristic cityscape looming outside the window. I love how this one has turned out, and I hope you're really pleased with your project as well. Join me for our final project up ahead. It will take everything we've learned so far and apply it to new awesome challenges. You're gonna love this one, you see there. 24. Cyberpunk Cityscape - Concept & Rough Color: Oh, hi, everyone. This is Hardy and welcome to the cyberpunk cityscape project. This is gonna be really awesome. So let's dive in, okay? I've got a basic perspective grid set up and also a golden ratio Pasted in and notice I've got are Vanishing Point right at the center of that cool little spiral. So we've got a nicely composed place for all of these converging perspective lines to kind of draw our I. So it'll be really cool. This is gonna be one of those awesome, just dizzyingly huge, futuristic cityscape. So we're gonna have a lot of really tall, almost impossibly huge dazzling buildings just going up into the sky. Ah, that's just sort of my basic idea for this. It's gonna have a lot of really huge, impressive detail, lots of crazy, futuristic stuff going on. I'm imagining so many great iconic movies like Blade Runner or Fifth Element movies that just really show you these mind boggling, huge, futuristic cities. And that's what we're trying to do here a really great, really valuable asset to have in your portfolio because these seems so complex and technically complicated that they can really wow your audience really show a lot of artistic know how. If you can get a really good one of these in your portfolio and if you follow these steps, I'm gonna show you These are not nearly is hard, is they seem all of this mind boggling complexity that we include. It's all just sort of the product of, of taking these simple principles that we've already learned already put into practice and just kind of applying them to a more complex setting. So nothing that we're going to do here is is anything new are something that we haven't done before. It's all gonna rely on those same principles. So we're gonna use perspective, obviously, to give that great sense of depth, give our buildings a sense of just hugeness and height. We're gonna use custom shapes a lot to really add just mind boggling amounts of intricate detail without much work. It also custom shapes really makes these incredible amounts of detail possible. Without spending weeks on this, you can knock this out and in a few sittings, if you just use custom shapes that I'll provide or you can certainly make your own and just a little bit of patients in detail and some good planning. So a great thing to have in your portfolio, it's gonna look like this is the most complicated, most difficult image you ever could have done. But it's not going to be so stick with me. Follow these steps and you're really gonna love the results that you get. So this sketch, I'm working on a few things I'm keeping in mind here. Obviously, we want that huge sense of dizzying height when everything to seem just crowded and busy a crazy dystopian future. But we also want to have a few things in the foreground to keep things relatable. Give us, um, materials to sort of extrapolated to the rest of the image. So that's why I've got this near side kind of a walkway with a railing. I wanted to feel like we're way high up in the city, maybe miles up. So we're going to see some city lights below as well as up so very dizzying sense of height both above and below. That will really help this cool, futuristic look. And I've also got some buildings here were sort of establishing tears of death, just like we did in our castle project. So I've got this near side, sort of like that archway we did in the castle, and I'm going to include all kinds of cool, detailed material. You'll be able to see the stone surface of this walkway, maybe some details of this little iron railing, all kinds of crazy monitors and futuristic lights on this near side. And then out in this farther side, sort of across this little open space that I have in mind, we're going to start adding just the's huge, monolithic buildings. And my idea is to have these cool little circles carved out of these giant buildings. So it's sort of like these buildings are just simple tall towers, but there's a little circle cut out of it. Maybe even this is sort of a path for the little car ships flying car ships to fly through . So that's just sort of my my concept here. Basically, if you make these buildings look huge and impressive and atmospheric, you don't even really need ah gimmick like that to make it look cool or interesting. This year, the sheer scale and amount of detail that will get with our custom shapes We'll get you a successful looking, futuristic cityscape, but but I kind of jazz this up a little with a cool little concept. It will give us an opportunity for some nice silhouettes, kind of a dark circle framing some really bright highlighted surface of the building in the background. So this is all very loose. I'm just trying to follow this three point perspective grid do a little bit of that city planning stuff, so think about what these buildings are. Four. That near building kind of across this space might be sort of residential, so I'll have lots of windows, maybe little lights or, I don't know, air conditioner units. Things like that little walkways and then up above will have kind of a more commercial area , maybe a pedestrian walkway that will have all kinds of signs and advertisements. One of those cool futures where it just seems like there is mind boggling detail everywhere . It's like everything you look at is trying to sell you something with some bright loud advertisement, all those great holograms and neon signs that we see in movies like Blade Runner. One thing I once heard about doing these futuristic cityscapes that I love and I want to share is you want your audience to feel like they are a cave man looking at Times Square for the first time. So we want to just really dazzle the viewer with the scale and detail. So I think that sketch is great. I skipped ahead of it to a rough color step, and I just painted in a few are pasted in a few photos here and blurred them. I'm just going to continue. That sort of experimented with a lot of things before getting to this base. So I didn't want you guys to see just a minute after minute of me trying and an undoing thing. So that's sort of where we are now going for sort of this cool scion green type color mixed in with a little bit of of warmth. Now, with our color choices, we need to really start thinking about mood. And I was considering doing one of those very dark, depressing, Blade Runner type of dystopian cityscapes, but actually think we'll make something just a little bit more cheerful, even hopeful here. So this will be kind of late afternoon sun, almost sunset type lighting will have some nice warm tones, some cool things to balance out. Just ah, cool colors and warm colors. Give it a nice range. A lot of really great contrast. And that will really help us give us this sense of scale. But certainly if you want to get a good, traditional, dystopian future escape in your portfolio one of those dark nighttime, maybe even rainy scenes like in Blade Runner. Definitely. Ah, time honored tradition. So feel free to go that route if you want to. But this is what I've chosen for. This project is sort of, ah, warmer, cheerful type of lighting. How about is cheerful is this can get So this is sort of just a base kind of our our silhouettes that we're gonna create just like we did in the castle project. It's gonna be a little more complex, since the depth is sort of tough to determine with ease it this phase it Lee, since everything is such a crazy strange shape and not not quite as is intuitive, is the castle walls. We did so adding in some of that bright burning light, maybe that's where our main light source is coming from this will give us a lot of cool opportunities to have cast shadows, maybe areas of these huge tall buildings that are lit but others that air in cast shadow from some other tall building that we're not seeing. So cast shadows are always a really cool way to give incredible amounts of information and detail. Just adds instant drama to your image, trying to give a little hint of Cem glowing city lights below but already getting a pretty cool sense of height and scale here, those buildings across this little space or are looking farther away because of the subtle atmospheric perspective, were working in here really, really getting some cool stuff in. And I like this green kind of mechanical looking color we've got in the foreground. So these things far off kind of in the distance can start looking very bright. Maybe we've got that afternoon sun kind of hitting some of these sides of the building to really help us define those cool little circle cutouts. And here we go. We'll put a little sunshine hitting part of this building across this space, but maybe not all of it to a cool cast shadow there. So with these type this type of scene, it's it's really just a matter of taking all of these principles in just kind of going farther with, um, it's all the same concept. As long as you understand this scene lighting, exercise a little bit of the photo shop geometry and you understand perspective. You can do this. All it is is applying custom shapes to kind of create the details that light those sides of those cubes or that sphere that we did in seen lying. It's really the same thing. So I'm applying a paint daubs filter to our rough color phase here, and I'm going to start getting us organized by just cutting out and dividing these into tears of depth. So I'll have a foreground area here, this little walkway with all these cool little TV monitors, and I'm sure I'll have lots of advertisements and signs hanging. I'll copy that from the rough color and paste it. So now we've got this on its own layer, and I'll put it in a group and calling foreground, and we'll just sort of separate out every little tear of depth that we have here, so I'm jumping over to this near building kind of the residential building slash commercial walkway. And I'm just cutting that out. The lasso tool is great for this so that you don't have to try to free hand all of these long, straight lines of these building edges. So polygon lasso tool is really great. Same thing they're just copy and pasted that into a new layer and created a new group. So in later steps, we're gonna start putting custom shapes on top of these to give us those Those great details make it look just impossibly complex and detailed. I think you're really gonna like that step. It's it's amazing how much detail we can add with just those custom shape. So that has really been a game changing tool for May, I hope. Hope you find that is useful as I do here. We are kind of a farther building. Just gonna do these sort of one of the time, anything I want separated out so that I can always add atmospheric perspective between the layers. Kind of that. Adding missed effect and I'm just using a selection to make a nice, neat cut out of these little circular holes that we're gonna have. So just a few little craftsmanship, things that it really pays to get get done right early in the process that you don't have to worry about it later on. So cutting out this next tall building that has a little circle cut out, and after that I think we can pretty much leave everything else to the background but want to subtract away. This little circle is well, so I'll I'll create another circle, and I'm just using these his command click selections to kind of subtract away. So it's sort of just like creating a little temporary pattern to cause 11 little selection that we need. So there we go. I think we're in good shape. It's always great to get these layers kind of organized, probably not the funnest part of the process, but this is really helpful. So now that I have all of these individual tears kind of cut out and put in their own layers, I am just going to start command, clicking them in painting within them. I want thes silhouettes to start being a little more distinct from one another, so that's why we just pain in really cut thes levels out from one another so that it really makes sense, which is near, which is far. So just painting some lighter value. Maybe there's a little atmosphere, some blue sky off in the distance, sort of lighting this darker side of this. This middle building we've got here very cool and that that really helps define these silhouettes nice and neatly up. Very, very good way toe. Start getting a feel for these spaces that we've created. I think I want that area behind this first little circular cut out to be pretty bright will end up adding highlights when we do our custom shapes. So for now it's almost like we're just establishing our shadow colors, sort of the silhouettes without any light shining on them, really. And then we'll add those highlights later. It's sort of like you're turning on the light switch later, once we do all our custom shape work. But guys, this is a pretty believable, three dimensional environment that we have here lots of cool distance we can see. We've got a nice hierarchy of near ground, far ground. We can really get a sense of the hugeness of things. Right now. They're just sort of simple shapes going up into space, but very cool stuff. You've got a good sense of depth of atmosphere. So I think we're off to a good start. Got a nice mood to. This is exactly the feel that I want. Futuristic, but not really depressing. So I think we've set the stage nicely for some awesome detail. Work ahead and we'll start doing that in the steps ahead. 25. Cyberpunk Cityscape - Custom Shapes: Oh, hi, everyone. This is Hardy in this section will continue our cyberpunk cityscape by adding custom shape . So let's get started. We're pretty much going to devote this entire lecture to custom shapes. There gonna be a lot of them because that's what we're gonna rely upon to add just crazy, eye popping levels of detail. So by the end of this video, you won't believe how complex this image looks, and it's all because of just overlapping, awesome custom shape. So this is gonna be a cooling. But before we put down our first custom shape, I want to make a cool little railing pattern. Just something a little bit unusual and interesting to have is a little repeating element. So I'm just designing one little segment of this and then we'll just repeat that over and over again, kind of a photo shop geometry thing. And it's very similar to the window design in our loft interior projects. So trying to sort of tie these all together just a little bit, maybe implying that these air part of the same universe not really sure, but just trying to make something cool for now. So I think that's a pretty good base for this. I'm gonna add a few little bars before I start repeating this all over the place. But that really looks cool. It's unusual, kind of futuristic looking, but something that I could make look kind of like old beat up metal. What this city escaped to seem a little bit tired. All of these places, even though its way into the future and everything super high tech, it's cool to make them all look kind of run down to like. It's all just a little bit overcrowded. And there's just so much going on that things get sort of neglected fall by the wayside. So this might be the only thing in this entire lecture that is not a custom shape. It just wanted to include a cool little hand made, repeated element detail there and is a little bit of detail. I'm kind of breaking a few parts of this may be the the metal rusted out or something like that kind of dangerous when we're way up high in these cities, but let's start using some custom shapes guy. So I've got a pack of futuristic shapes that we're gonna use for this, and the first thing that we're gonna do is use these to make some really cool silhouettes. We're gonna enhance these silhouette edges. Ah, lot with custom shapes. Right now, they're mostly just flat. Or have a few little polygon shapes on the outside. Not very interesting. So if we overlap some custom shapes, we can add just ridiculous levels of overlapping detail with just a few clicks. So a cool way to enhance these these little contours that we have established here in our individual layers. And just like in our other courses our excuse me, our other projects, we just use these as a selection So you can see I'm just command clicking those shape layers that I made. And then I'm just painting in that layer that has our our foreground silhouette here. So that's all there is to it. Using a little bit of lasso tool to make some little flat panel shapes, and the government put all kinds of signs and advertisements up there, just want things to be really dizzyingly crowded and stacked up on top of one another. It's one of the cool things I'm gonna try and capture on. This is just that impression of a cityscape that's just so crowded and overwhelming. It's just got years and generations of technology kind of all stacked on top of one another , kind of like this big vertical junk yard held together with some some high tech stuff. So that's definitely what we're going for here. A super urban type of feel. Want to really create a powerful sense of that for our viewer? Make you just be ableto really hear and smell this place when you see the finished product . So that's the goal. Just applying this same idea to our next tier back this near building group. And I'm just sort of repeating some of these shapes so that I can use them as a selection and just paint in the side. And just like that, we've got these cool little pipes and things sort of sticking out the sides of our building . Suddenly, that looks way, way more interesting than it did just a minute ago. Same thing I'm gonna do for this little bridge that's sort of connecting these two huge buildings could be some kind of walkway, some kind of utility line bringing pipes or water or who knows what, but ah, cool little way toe. Bring some detail from one side to the other. So now we're going to start giving these edges of these buildings. Some detail is well, and guys, I think I might be using the same shape for most of these. So this is so easy to just repeat and keep adding, I have to silhouette futuristic shapes at this time that I use most frequently. But a lot of times it only takes one just to get the same thing, to get the effect across. I mean so very cool, already adding lots of interest to our silhouettes there, adding one of these circle designs to this one to see if we can do something kind of cool. Not sure about that. Might come back and use that one a little bit later. But for now, we'll just sort of continue doing silhouette work to make this look really cool. Make all of these little edges is interesting and defined as we can. Maybe like little antenna sticking out. Maybe this is some kind of ah transmission system or just futuristic looking stuff. It's one of those engineering for art, things that we discussed earlier in the course doesn't necessarily need to have a use. It just has toe look like it would make sense. It has to look plausible. And certainly these little pipe and intend looking things look like they belong in this distant future type of environment. We're setting up here, so just sort of taking this concept back layer by layer, just doing silhouettes right now. But we'll add in some highlights shapes after we're done with this. So custom shapes were just really, really going to town on custom shapes today. But that's really the most useful tool you can possibly have. Really wouldn't be to sure handed do an environment like this without custom shape. I certainly wouldn't be nearly is time efficient and and not not as much fun. It's just such a free, creative process. So now that we have our silhouettes in place, I'm going to start trying. A few other things might do a little more work on these silhouettes, see if some of these other shapes maybe add some cool outside detail just to make these little edges a little more interesting. Like that looks like it might be some kind of little fire escape Stairway. I think this shape is made from ah, building. So there usually just nice highlight shapes. But that little ladder effect it gives this is actually kind of nice. I like that. So that fits. Well, you never know which shape is gonna have the best use for which one. So organizing a bit kind of turning off the shape layers that I made so that I can start doing some highlight shapes and we'll start that now checking my perspective because that's gonna really come into play for this. So there we go. We've got our first highlight shape and I'm distorting that into perspective on our near ground. So let's say this is some kind of scaffolding or just some kind of cool looking technological element sort of in the ceiling above this walkway in the near ground. So very cool stuff. And guys, a lot of these can be sort of repurposed for almost anything, but basically all we're looking for is just were grabbing cool looking detail from each one of these shapes, distorting them into perspective and kind of layering them up together. That's that's when the unexpected really cool things happen is when you layer these together, put them in perspective, let them start interacting with one another, and they just become something brand new. It's it's really cool. It's It almost takes the process out of your hands. Let's a take on a life of its own, but at the same time you have so much control, just very cool. A lot of this foreground will be kind of dark. I wanted to be sort of ah, silhouette for that. Bright, burning sunshine will have kind of happening behind it, But still we want the detail to be there, even if it's subtle and not brightly lit. So it's worth worth taking the time to make this near ground look pretty interesting and detailed. So using a variety of shapes just to give it this really cool, overlapping technology effect here. Now these are some of my favorite custom shapes. I made these. They're not made from a photograph, but I just did these with selections, and they just add insane amounts of instant detail to giant buildings like this. They work really well on huge spaceships or space stations, but a cool little personal project that I made specifically for this. So I hope you get some great use out of these for educational use. Something that I've really enjoyed. I've got a few of them in this style, but going with this 1st 1 just to try and establish the main large facades of this far away building. And of course, we want there to be some some good scale to these, and I'm also thinking about leaving some whole places. In later steps, we're gonna add a bunch of lights, all kinds of glowing advertisements. Lights is if there are people living in all of these stacked up crowded apartments together . So we need to leave a few dark spots. We want the sun to be hitting this in a lot of the places, but we also need to leave some of those little holes so that we can put thes realistic glowing lights. That's what gonna make it look populated, make it look like an interesting cityscape for their hundreds of millions of people just living practically on top of each other. So that's what we're going for here. That's that's the overall effect. So as you can see, just layering a few of these different shapes, kind of this super futuristic paneling and then just some cool latticework kind of, ah, city building. And here we've got this cool oil rig looking scaffolding with with some some walkways and staircases, all really cool to make these really contrasting shapes work together. So really makes this look like some kind of crowded residential complex with all of these really futuristic tech elements all around it. And that certainly fits. Our goal fits our brief perfectly here, so just grabbing and repeating things when they start working. I'm creating lots of layers, as you can see. But that's why we've got this all inside of layer groups that we never let shapes for one layer stray into an area where they don't belong. And, of course, you just merge them together when they start getting to numerous, because we want want to be able to just click on one layer command click and get our selection out of it. So we'll keep these separate when we're placing this shape so that we can transform them, make them work for the space, but after a while, it's always good to just hit command e and consolidate those layers. Ideally, we would like just one custom shape highlight layer for each tier, hope that makes sense. But with the amount of shape work that we're doing here, it's important to keep organized. Or there could just be so many layers that it gets confusing so later. Groups are really great for that. And just remember to merge things that can safely be merged together from time to time. Well, look how well that works. That little pipe highlight image on this little walkway spanning these two buildings. Sometimes it's just amazing how perfectly these things fit. And that is certainly one of those cases. Even the perspective kind of adds up. We've got these little bendy pipes just just really fitting that perspective beautifully. And what a cool detail. I think that's made from a photo of some kind of industrial complex. It just all of these pipes really catching the light from the side. So a really beautiful photo that they made a really useful custom shape. So here we go. Every time we move back in distance, we kind of want this scale to become even larger. So in that near building, we can see individual little apartments. You know, even little pipes, walkways. We could conceivably be able to see a person from that distance. But now, in this building I'm working on here, this is getting so far away that it's it's starting to become like seeing a huge, monolithic building from a great distance. All we can really see is the the giant facades will see some lights shining in these dark spots. But really time to let this scale get get just huge and epic. And it's especially cool having those little circular holes that we establish that's really working well. So using these futuristic shapes, for the most part, I'll do a little bit of those industrial looking, lattice type things. It's well, just to give it a little bit of context. Don't want it to look so futuristic that it becomes alien or strange. Here's another shape that love. I think this is from a photograph of a motorcycle engine, but once we're sort of messing with the scale, it really looks like it could be part of this gigantic building, just some kind of tiered levels of structure. So a great repurpose ing of ah photo, the other great thing about custom shapes is a kind of unifies things, even though all of these shapes were made very differently. Ah, lot of them are from photos or the ones that aren't they all just kind of look the same. They have this nice cohesiveness that you just don't get when you're trying to do this kind of detail by hand or with photos. So this is a really nice way to just make things come together in jail. Now, as we're adding just shape after shape and adding all of this great eye popping detail, it's important to remember that this really is just a simple Is those cubes in the surface lighting the scene? Lighting lecture? I mean, all we're doing is establishing a light side and a dark side. So imagine that these buildings air nothing but cubes facing the light source. And then there's a side that's not exactly facing the light source where we have our reflected light. So these shapes on adding to the front those will be facing directly into the sunshine, and then this side, that sort of facing towards that other building that one is sort of the the reflected light side, so it'll be more subtle. Exact same principles is that scene lighting exercise just a bright side facing the light source and something a little less bright facing the reflected light side. So just light and shadow, really making these three dimensional forms. But as long as you consider them a cube in your mind, it's really just a matter of applying the same exact principle to a slightly more complex shape and in custom shapes just sort of does the work for us. We just fit thes shapes into these planes that we've established with our perspective grid kind of just slap them onto the side of this imaginary cube you have in mind, and that's all there is to it. And it just takes a little patience, just kind of keep going. And it it just continues to add detail. So if you would care to pause and kind of rewind to the beginning of this lecture, it's pretty amazing how far that we've come just in this short amount of time. Just by adding and overlapping all of these different custom shapes, it is just added so much detail, and of course, we're gonna end up just using these as selections that will be painting within with an airbrush, a soft brush. But I got to say, I kind of like this. Look where we have these solid colors. It's sort of an interesting, very graphic look to it, and there's so much detail and it's so much information that it's kind of cool. So I always take a moment to just sort of enjoy this phase, even though it's not gonna make it to the final product worth admiring how cool and how remarkable it is that we can get so much detail with just a simple technique like this. So certainly hope you're getting a kick out of this like I do of really useful technique. And I hope I hope it's really been an eye opener for you. Just kind of continuing this process, guys, that it sort of gets easier. We don't need quite as much detail the farther back in space that we g o. But we certainly want something interesting for our eyes to kind of go out towards the distance and seek out so definitely want that toe have a lot of cool detail for our eyes to explore to always great to have that nice range in depth that we talked about. Wanna have these really cool elements in the near ground will be able to look at the details of this railing, Maybe something cool on the lock away here. Certainly a lot of lights and advertisements, but we also want to be able to look far, far away And just imagine who could be up in this giant building, sort of the corporate overlords at the tall, tall top of the tall tower. Something like that. There, all kinds of storytelling implications that we can imagine here. So lots of cool stuff to consider. And that's what these details that we had in the far distance really, let us do that kind of mentally connect the dots for us, and that's what we're going for. The guys look out cool. This is We've added so much detail in a short amount of time, and we're really setting the stage beautifully for us to do a really nice amount of seen lighting, really gonna work out well, so just adding a few little shapes into this far background, and I think that works nicely. Maybe maybe another little silhouette. I'm I'm determined to find a use for this circular custom shape and make something kind of cool. So they will have, like a little horizontal building kind of sticking out something some kind of walkway spanning this big path, something cool. There we go got another building kind of far away. And of course, we can lighten these so much with atmospheric perspective. In fact, I'm just knocking the A pass ity back on a few of these. Some of them work quite well, just as they are, and I think that's really nice. So I have paused and taking a little break here, just toe sort of assess things. At this point, it's, uh, it's easy to get bogged down when these things get so complex and I've decided I want one mawr near ground element so even closer to the near ground. I've decided to put a little staircase, so I did a little quick sketch to indicate that, and we'll just sort of add in some some more foreground elements. For the sake of atmospheric perspective. I'm making it an even darker color than we have is our base for our near ground and just adding Cem some custom shapes. Here is a good starting point just to make this look kind of cool. But we'll go ahead and block that all the way in, and I'll just have some stairs kind of sloping down the side, and we'll add individual little treads to that kind of, ah, rail looking thing. And there we go. That kind of really makes it more personal. We can imagine this being a little space that that somebody could just walk right down and take off down the walkway. It was feeling a little kind of open ended in the foreground, so that's what I thought I needed one more very near ground element to make this look kind of cool. So, as you can see, I've got an entire new group that's above the foreground layer group that we're just calling stairs. And that's where where I'll add these, these little details and now it's time to put a few highlights shapes on them. So I'm actually using one of these more castle like stone textures. This is a cool opportunity to sort of add some contrast, where we have all of these crazy, futuristic things going on in all of our other layers of depth. But maybe this staircase is kind of just made out of the same stuff is they are now kind of all these relatable materials. We can ask him old degraded looking brick, maybe, Ah, maybe some graffiti, something cool like that, A little light on the wall, just like any kind of kind of run down urban city escape. You can imagine a great opportunity to make it really relatable and and that human element that we're trying to communicate in all of these. So just copying this little custom shape piece here and making all of these little stair treads to kind of go up. So just like just Azizi is that as long as we distort those into perspective, we can we can make this really work, make a little runner kind of going down the stairs as well, And isn't that cool so easy to make a pretty much instant staircase and just a racing away ? Some of the little risers on this stairway and we've pretty much got everything we need to be ableto do some seen lighting in the near ground. I'm definitely going to keep that pretty dark. Always like my extreme foreground, to have some darkness toe Let the all of the highlights in the distance kind of pop out. Doesn't nice job sort of framing the composition is well, you can imagine that golden ratio that that spiral would kind of loop down right around that staircase and bring us right into our perspective grid. So that's perfect. Adding a few little detail elements to this walkway. Kind of wanted this to have a little bit of detail to. We're gonna use photo textures pretty heavily to make this near ground stuff look cool. Custom shapes will definitely do most of the work for the far ground stuff, all of the distant massive objects. But we're gonna use a few custom shapes and mostly photo textures to make everything in the foreground really look realistic and tangible. I want you to just be ableto since this entire environment in every way. So the cooler, the experience we can create for our viewer or a client, the better. And I think this is coming along really nicely, Guy. So with just a few other little finishing touches were almost ready to close the book on our custom shape work. But wow, go ahead and jump back to the beginning of the lecture and then look at the end. And it is really amazing how much detail has been added with essentially a single tool used applying it to all these principles that we've learned and just a little bit of variety and overlap. And that's all it takes, Um, some really amazing results or possible with this techniques. I hope you're enjoying that hope. You're seeing all the incredible possibilities here, some very cool stuff. So a few other little extra elements we can add to the far ground just to make this a little more interesting. But beyond that, guys, I think we're pretty much ready to move on to a rendering step and we'll do that up next. I'll see you there. 26. Cyberpunk Cityscape - Rendering: Oh, everyone, this is Hardy. In this section, we will continue our cyberpunk cityscape by doing some rendering. So let's get started. So in our last lecture, we did really all of the hard work getting all of these custom shapes in place that we can now uses selections Anytime we command, click those layers and that we're just gonna paint within those selections and start really bringing this world toe life, really painting some cool highlights. This will really give us a great sense of mood that we're looking for that nice late afternoon sunlight kind of burning through the buildings, giving us a really warm, cool, atmospheric feeling. So I'm gonna sort of go from far too near to start with, at least So I've got a new layer called Render and I'm working in our background layer group just a bring in a little detail to this farthest level of depth here. But it's pretty nondescript back here. In fact, we've got so many cool, layered custom shapes going on that it almost doesn't matter. It becomes sort of just chaotic, overlapping shapes. So just a very quick introduction. But I think I'll jump around a little bit. See. See what I feel like working on first, grabbing some colors from from some of these and I'll. I'll create a new render layer on our near building here and paint in some shadow colors. I think this is the one where I want to have a really cool cast shadow. So sort of just painting some some light values here. But then I'll have a really bright kind of burning sun going on as well, almost as if there's some building we're seeing kind of off screen that's blocking the sun . So painting a cool line just to have ah highlight really high up on one of this and then the rest of the building in shadow. I think that looks awesome, really get a sense of sunlight, really gives it a cool look like there's something blocking that son any time you can really make that light sourcing feeling extra strong that that really makes your painting look realistic. So ah, cool, little extra effect we've got there. It also has a nice contrast with that sort of dark side of the building behind it, that'll that'll work really well and will handle that one next trying to make this little connecting bridge sort of fade in, kind of like the sun's hitting it. But then it sort of fades into shadow of this, this next building back. So we'll just sort of keep repeating the process. Just sort of creating a new rendering layer in each of these layer groups, and you can check out the layers to have any time you need to keep track of what I'm doing here. It's starting to get a lot to manage. So that's why it's so important that we keep thes, thes things grouped and organized so that nothing just gets so chaotic that we can't tell which layer we need to work on, because at this point there there are quite a few. I added in a little bit of a cool color on that sort of dark side of this building we're working on just for a little contrast. And some of these buildings farther off in the distance really want to create a bright orange, very warm color scheme so kind of planning ahead a little bit, trying to come up with an opportunity. Add in a little bit of cool colors just for some contrast, A little bit of relief. Any time in image gets too monochromatic, it it kind of flattens things out. So if you can think of these things have a little bit of contrast. Even if it's subtle, that will really work. So moving back, one more tier of death. And this is where I'm gonna start adding in those really bright, warm, sunny colors to try and make this feel like that nice, warm, late afternoon sunlight and even brings him some interest. So getting quite saturated in a few places here trying to make this cool and guys just like our other projects any time we want to paint within these selections, we've got everything organized. We've got all of these custom shapes on layers, so we just command, click and just paint. So it it becomes so easy, and it really is just like that scene lighting exercise. Except instead of just simple cubes. The shapes air just a little bit different, but the principle is the exact same. The technique is the exact same because all we're doing is command clicking to call up those selections anytime we need them, and that's that's all. There is to it. So very cool stuff, really bringing this one toe life with just just a few brushstrokes. We really have done the hard work already. Getting these these layers in place toe. Let us make these selections so very cool. Seeing all of this amazing detail sort of just appear before your eyes. It's like magic once you have these selections ready. And already it said added, so much dimension. We can see all of this amazing scale that we've worked on creating. I'm gonna start bringing some of these details over to these custom shapes we made on this near ground side. So it's it's always good to kind of work far too near. I find it's not super important to go in that order, but that's the way I like to do. It helps me keep the scale and the light mood in mind, especially if you have some really contrasting color schemes, cool colors and warm colors that you want to interact. But I kind of just go in whatever way makes you comfortable. So all the way to our staircase here in the extreme near ground, adding a little mix of of light and warm and cool colors. I want to have a little sense, like there's a little lamp, maybe somewhere above lighting this staircase. And I think that's perfect with just a little brush work inside of these cool custom shapes we established for our staircase, and that looks really atmospheric and realistic already. So, guys, that was very quick how we could just add so much life and color and interest to our image here with just a few brushstrokes. So after you have those selections, this this really becomes easy and fun. So it's laying a lot of groundwork, keeping things organized tryingto really use your imagination to come up with those cool shapes, really make them fit into that three dimensional space. And then once you have all those parameters established, it really just becomes this fun process of kind of ironing things out in painting in a little bit, really bringing it to life. So notice we still have a lot of nice dark spaces that we've left on a lot of these buildings. A lot of the custom shapes air sort of designed to do that. They have little holes so that we can see little dark areas and in our next lecture will spend a lot of time adding little lights, all kinds of little indications of of office windows or apartment windows, all kinds of crazy holographic advertisements really cool things to make this whole world just seem overwhelming. In one of those huge, visually active cityscapes that we see in movies, it's gonna look really great. But for now, I'm just doing a little bit of fine tuning, kind of checking out each one of these. Render layers to see if there's anything that I could do to make these cooler. And now I'm gonna do a little bit of atmospheric perspective on each tier. So I've got my brush on normal, and I'm just painting in a layer called Atmosphere on on each of these setting a color dodge. I think I wanna have a really bright bloom way out here in the far distance just to make it seem really bright, like that son is almost setting over there, adding a little bit of atmosphere on each one of these layers to try and make them sort of sit back a little. It really adds to the scale, So just like our Atmospheric Perspective Lecture where we painted missed between each one of those tears. That's kind of what I'm doing here. It's like we add a little bit of fog between each tier of depth, and it makes them seem even more separate, distinct from one another. And it makes him all seem bigger. That sense of space and just huge distance becomes even more realistic. And as you can see, I did some really bright ning up in that light source spot so we can still see the details . I didn't want that atmosphere perspective to totally drown that out. So I came back and brightened that rendering layer in color dodge mode just to make that yellow really bright like maybe there are some windows or metallic surfaces that air really reflecting that sunlight service. Very cool looking. I think these little fog layers that we've added in or adding a lot of interest in detail and look how much deeper and what a greater sense of scale we have with just a small little adjustments. So very cool stuff, kind of checking everything, making sure we're keeping our layers organized, and I'm going to start adding in some little signs. Time to start thinking about all of these cool little details it will have in our foreground. So I've used the shape tool, which is still you on your keyboard. Or it's just that little shape wear custom shape tool usually is, but have switched it to the rounded rectangle tool. I love this when it always makes a nice, futuristic looking shape and I'm gonna add some kind of TV monitors up here. This is that part of the future escape that I want to just be crazy and sort of overstimulating one of those environments where it just looks like everywhere you look, there is some huge loud advertisement. The whole civilization is set up on consumerism where where everything is trying to sell you something. So I'm gonna have these TV monitors with some kind of crazy advertisement or newscast, or I'll come up with something interesting to have repeated on that, and we have a lot of monitor. So it's just a total assault on the senses of all kinds of things. So you can imagine walking down this city street high up in the sky with just all kinds of noises and lights just ah, huge assault on the senses. So that's that's what I'm going for here, starting to sort of add the framework for all of these little detailed signs that will add all of this cool advertising stuff that will make this really seem futuristic and kind of dystopian. So now that we have those monitors in place, I'm gonna make a few little hanging signs to to sort of suspend from the ceiling of this little walkway that we have here. So again, using that rounded rectangle tool, a little bit of brushwork to make a little scaffolding, maybe some wires sort of suspending it. And that's all there is to it. If we make a few cool shapes here, I'm using a circle design. We can just repeat thes, maybe just two or three, and you can get away with just some repetition. But a little bit of variety in your sign shape, I think, goes a long way certainly makes it seem more realistic where it's kind of like every company that buys an ad is trying to do something different and creative, so you sort of have to think like an advertiser. Any dense urban place with lots of lots of eye catching advertisements that you've ever been can can really help you draw upon for these details. So really want to make it over the top and interesting at as much detail and variety is we can come up with to make it look really cool. And I think that'll work. I like these shapes. So with just a little bit of repetition, I think we can make this enoughto look like some good variety. So I think I might try copying this one up above to maybe a series of three. Put those together. Maybe each one has a letter on it or something like that. Kind of looks like electrical utilities to Maybe I'll have some wires coming off of that. Another cool detail to add. I'll definitely try to include some wires kind of suspended from building to building when it's this far in the future. It's possible that you wouldn't really need cables for these things, but they still just look so cool that I usually end up going ahead and including them also makes it just seem very urban and dense. Sort of one of those things we expect to see in this kind of really densely populated area is just all kinds of hanging cables and wires bringing connective, itI and power Teoh every one of these gazillion people who might just be stacked on top of each other in this kind of civilization. So always a cool detail. Lots of great story that we're working on here. These little signs are a lot of fun to do, and it's really fun to start thinking about this thing is a living, breathing world really starts to come together. Notice. I'm locking these layers. You just hit that little transparency button. It's right there under the blending mode. Any time you do that, you can paint within that layer without even making a selection, and it won't go outside of the pixel. So a very handy way to do that. And I'm just getting a little organized here, sort of putting these these objects in a group so that I can call them up if I need to make a selection. So I'm using the past tool to stretch out a single or a pair of wires here. Once you make a path, you can just stroke that selection by using your brush tool and dragging it down to that little circle that's called stroke selection. You could just do this freehand if you want, but I find it's kind of nice to do that with with a path just to give it a nice, perfect curve. And again, when you're in paths, just select your brush tool once you have your path made and dragged the path down to this little circle at the bottom. It's called Stroke Path Super Easy, and it's a nice way to get a really perfect arc to these kinds of long wires That could be kind of tough to do freehand sometimes, but just sort of making these kind of random. I like when it looks like it's just this massive tangle of wire. So a few little junctions, little areas where the wires air kind of linked together, but really looking like something that I might have to have a bunch of birds and pigeon sitting on or something like that. Anything we can do to reinforce this dense, urban type of feel in our near ground, I think, will really help the whole vibe of this guys that's looking really cool I'm contrasting the selection a little bit to see if I can add a highlight. Kind of cool is if it were catching some of that sunlight, but I actually think I like it a little bit better with that contrast. So with that, I think we're good with this. Up next, we'll start adding some photo textures, and we'll do that on our same soft light blending mode as we did before. So let's get started on that. I've pasted in a handful of cool photos that will will use in a few different places, just like on our castle project, mostly for these distant objects. These huge buildings in the distance will only need a subtle photo texture where photo textures work. Really well is in foreground things. So I'm gonna try and get some cool tile. Some cool, gritty looking surface is going on in these near ground points of interest, but for the most part will just use, um, subtlety in these distant objects, the custom shapes and rendering that we've done already do such a good job giving a set sense of scale that we we don't need much from the photos. So let's start in our staircase I'm using this cool old brick wall doorway is kind of a cool photo texture for this staircase, So I have put that into a layer group, which I've masked out, and I'm switching it to soft light just like we did in our last two lectures. And that really brings a ton of interest almost instantly to this staircase. So I'm doing a little bit of adjustment. Didn't want that to be quite a bright or visible playing with the color balance a little bit toe cool things off just a tiny bit. Won't wanted to not take over the rendering that we've done, but sort of just make it a little bit cooler. And I think that's working well. I want to make this a little more subtle, so knocking back the opacity, racing away just a tiny bit, and now we'll start paint pasting in a few other things. We organize this in the same way that we have in our other projects. I keep all of these photos in a group, and I just copy them out of that into the soft light Photo texture group for whichever tier of depth were working on. So as you can see, I've pasted this little trim detail in a few different places, just sort of grabbing it from that photos folder and dropping it in to the tear that I'm working on. So let's move to our foreground here. I've got this really cool tile walkway. I really like the feel of it. It's a nice texture, and it really reflects this son in a way that fits my my composition here perfectly. So it'll really reflect that nice late afternoon glow off of these tiles. It's got kind of a nice golden hue to it, so bringing some cool color interest is well, so that's a really nice fit. It works very well with what I've got going on in the rest of the image. So every once in a while you come across these little golden opportunities, something that fits really perfectly. You never want these photos to just take over an image there. Just there is a little extra punch to make these a little more interesting, but certain opportunities really present themselves, and you can find one that really does a lot of good for your image. But as you guys can see. I really find ways to use the same stuff over and over to really give it as much. Mileage is, I can out of each each picture that I use each photo and again the ones that I've taken I'll make available to you. But I also will certainly link you to these amazing free stock photography. Resource is so added a little bit of grit, some of that metallic texture to the hand railing just to give that a little more interest . And I've got this cool impression of Cem ductwork and pipes that I thought would fit nicely with these custom shapes we've got going on in this little overhang over this walkway. But I think that's really cool, Going to use this metallic kind of gritty texture just to give these these monitors up above a little bit of two. Figured these things wouldn't be very clean. They're getting kind of pollution and all kinds of city grime on them from day to day. So I thought a little texture on that would be cool and that that will just be settled because we're gonna put some lit up activity on that monitor later. But I think we're doing well, just flipping the canvas pretty regularly. I don't think I've spoken about that until now, but that is a really great thing to do pretty frequently. As you guys have no doubt noticed, I do that very regularly. It keeps the image fresh in my mind, anything that you're working on. If it doesn't seem like it's quite looking right, just flip the canvas. It'll make it seem like a brand new image, and any time you have any kind of problem that you're just not quite sure what's going wrong. Often that can really make it jump out. Anything that's not quite right. Well, just seemed immediately obvious. So a very handy trick I have made my own custom keyboard shortcut for that photo shop makes it very easy to do so, using that sort of plaster stucco wall photograph for these distant buildings and it even at this totally different huge scale, it actually works very well. It gives just enough grit in sort of irregularity that it makes the's huge mega structures seem like they have a little bit of variation, like they're actually made out of some tangible material that you can really imagine, so that little variation and value to makes it look like some big panel kind of welded on there. So, guys, I think that's looking great. Thes photos, air giving us just that subtle punch that we're looking for, adding some interest and color variation. But for the most part, I think we're all set. With this step up ahead, we'll add a lot of lights and final polish, and we're almost ready to finish this one. I'll see you up ahead. 27. Cyberpunk Cityscape - Lights & Final Polish: Oh, hi, everyone. This is Hardy. In this section, we will conclude our cyberpunk cityscape project with some lights and final polish. So let's get started. This is gonna be a really fun way to end this project. So we're basically gonna add all kinds of lights and logos to make this place just look lit up in dazzling, like one of those crazy future escapes with all kinds of bright neon advertisements off just a media overload, all kinds of stuff to up to make it seem like a total overstimulation of the senses. One of those just crazy cityscapes. So I've grabbed a few stock photos that have some nice looking cities at night, and we're gonna borrow these two kind of add in the little bright, glowing parts Teoh create little cool indications of lights in our city. So this is the main one that I'm gonna use great little office buildings with lots of good repeating lights, kind of a little grid. So I'm kind of just gonna grab interesting pieces of this photograph. Wanted a time with the selection tool. I'll just cut our copy and paste that into a new layer. Gonna put this in its own group. I'll just call that lights again, and I'll set this group to color dodge mode. So watch this. It makes it so that only the bright, shiny parts of the photos show through. We don't even have to worry about anything else that was on that photo. So just with that change in blending mode, it kind of perfectly integrates these photographs into our painting. All that shows through is the little shiny parts. All we have to do is a little bit of a racing away and maybe a little repositioning to make thes fit in those cool little dark spots that we left in our custom shapes. So that's the general process here. I'm just gonna be cut a copying and pasting from that photo and putting it all over this canvas, not really worried about masking much out, it can kind of just go over these buildings in any real way. The one thing is, I do need all of these lights to appear behind this railing, so I may do a little masking for that. But essentially we're just grabbing these elements one at a time, making them really add incredible amounts of scale and detail to our buildings back here, especially sort of down below. I wanted to have a really cool sense of ah ah whole lit city below. As you can see, I just masked out this layer group by command clicking that rail pattern that we still have in our group. So that's why it's always good to keep these selections available in case you need to do a command click and create a mask later on. So it's kind of, Ah, fun process. We just sort of essentially decorate our entire image with all of these really cool, dazzling lights just to really bring it to life. You won't believe the change from the beginning of this, even even though it's already got such an incredibly epic scale epic sense of of story and hugeness before this part, this is that really cool little extra bit of polish that sends this one over the edge really makes it memorable, creates that really atmospheric sense for the viewer. So that's definitely what we're trying to do. As you can see, I'm using the clone stamp a little bit to fit some of these little arrays of lights into little places where they belong like that cool, angular little gap on that building that we're working on now. So very cool stuff. I'm trying to do this a bit artfully. For one thing, it's not at night. So I don't want this toe. Have every light in the city lit up, so I'm gonna try and use this effect with a bit of restraint. However, even if it were a nighttime cityscape, you have to be a bit careful with this because if you overdo it, it starts Just looking way too much. It sort of becomes one note. If it's just nothing but huge collections of bright lights, it sort of becomes all that. You can see these air. So I catching and that is what we want here. But you have to use this artfully with some restraint so that it doesn't overwhelm the rest of the cool work that we've done. We've put in so much great work up to this point. You definitely don't want to drown it out with essentially this little last special effect that we're adding. So just a word of caution. There it adds a whole lot of interest definitely will help our scale and really bring this whole sense of a huge, bustling mega city toe life. And, ah, but we do need to be a bit careful. So looking very cool so far, just tons of detail you can seek out and explore and every little corner of this so really making this work, I'm sort of fine tuning a bit, adjusting the brightness. If it's in an area where I I want that part of the canvas to sort of sit back like we have here in these sort of far edges of this building that's receding away, I'll erase it back a little bit. Wanted to be subtle what the detail to be there if we go seeking it out. But I don't want it to grab your eye and just steer it towards these sort of unimportant parts of the Candace. There definitely pieces that you want to just sit down and sort of fade into the background , and that's certainly one of them. But this single photo I'm getting so much mileage out of this so many great varied little areas that we can borrow, and this was just from a stock photo websites, so these images air out there and they're entirely free to use. So, Cem, some amazing resource is no need to even worry about Google images. And we're worried about copyright or anything like that. These images are made to be used their creative common license. So ah, supercool resource. If you weren't aware of that, just kind of trying Teoh cover every riel part of the city here to give its, um, some interest but trying not to get too repetitive or again be too heavy handed with this effect. It's a great one, but we do need toe use it with summer straight, just sort of grabbing this whole block of stuff on the bottom of that one just to give our entire distance here a little bit of cool city light treatment here just to make it look cool. And I think this is coming out great. Look at all the interest. We've added a few more little office windows, and I think we will just be about done with this. I generally separate this step into two rial parts. The 1st 1 is just little lights, kind of office building windows, just things to make it look like there's somebody working in an office or living in one of these little housing units, the other one that I use and we're going to start that now is this crazy advertisement stuff. Wanted to just look like Bourbon Street or Times Square. Some crazy party going on where there's just advertisements and signs everywhere in this photo again from a stock website is really great for that. Just about every color in the rainbow lit up in neon to make this look cool. Now, if you have things on these sites that are readable and recognizable, maybe like a really corporations logo or some sign like I think that said Seafood, I don't really want that to be a part of my project. So I just ran a filter on that. I think it's pixel ate or maybe mosaic to to make it sort of nondescript. Just I really want the color, the impression that it gives just of some really active visual walkway that's just saturated with media and advertisements. This is some an area where we have to be kind of careful, so check it out. I actually just painted in a rectangle, and if I hold that off from our building and put it in perspective. We have a really cool little hologram kind of projected out in the open. So repeat that step a few times here. But back to what I was saying, we need to be a bit careful about our choices here. With our whole logo and media type of treatment we're doing here, I would suggest avoiding characters in languages that you are not fluent in. They look cool because they're mysterious. Tow us. But if you add in some wording or character from a language you don't understand, even if it looks cool, you really run a risk of either adding something silly or possibly even something offensive . Or you might just get the entirely wrong unintended message across. So avoid languages that you don't speak. And I would also say avoid specific corporate logos that are well known, So I wouldn't want to put the McDonald's golden arches or a Nike symbol, for example, in this because that sort of takes over the image. Once you look at this, you would say, Oh, it's the future of McDonald's or something like that. You don't want that to be the biggest impression that your image gives. So I've created a few logos that we can use here just to be sort of random. I kind of just made them up. There's not a whole lot of specific design work in mind for that, but it will give us a cool sense of a corporate logo now. On the other hand, if you're doing concept art for a movie, you could certainly it could be part of your job to include a sponsored logo in there. So I think I remember Blade Runner. I really recall the Atari logo featuring prominently cool logo, kind of a nice retro throwback type thing. And in that really im sure Atari paid for that. So just something to consider. But let's add in some of these logos that I've made these air all available to you and pretty simple stuff, but will use this in our lights layer just to add a few specific logos and advertisements without having any of those traps that I mentioned earlier. Any of those pitfalls that you want to avoid about using specific known logos and I've also created this cool little design the guy's face with the little emojis and some strange characters that I just made up to be our TV screens. That will be as if there is some bizarre, futuristic newscast going on. And that guy's telling you what's going on with all kinds of crazy lights and logo's going on sort of seems like something that would fit in this environment. So just copying these these items from my logo group into this color Dodge Lights group. So once they're in color Dodge, you can see they take on this totally different character. They start to look really cool and, like they're just glowing on top of whatever they are. And the good news is because we're in the future, we can make these things not necessarily bound by these little sign shapes that I make. It's sort of like their projections they're sticking out beyond it makes it look even more futuristic if they sort of holographic Lee stick out beyond their bounds. So ah, very cool way to treat Dad. And it's also easier because we don't have to worry about our selections so much, but already this is adding so much interest. One other thing, just as I mentioned in the last lecture were flipping back and forth a lot. Once we get to this stage of the project where we start having actual words and text in our image, you sort of have to commit to which side you want your image to be oriented at. Because obviously the word lotus, for example would be backwards if we flip it from now on. So I'm gonna zero in on a final choice for which which side? I want the final to be flipped on. So just one more thing to be aware of when you're adding these actual text logos. So let's have this cool TV screen guy and start sort of copying him around these monitors. I think that'll be cool. Actually, I'm gonna add this lotus logo to the other one, get a little more use out of this. Make this a really big one like it's copied to this entire building, maybe projected onto the side. And I like the way it's glowing in the shadows. Very cool. So I'm gonna flip the canvas and take a look at this with fresh eyes. See if I want to commit to this text shape and actually guys, I think I may flip this. I think this is the orientation I want my final to be. So I am reversing these logos, changing this text on Lotus so that it faces the right way and I'll change these other few little signs that we've got here so that it all fits very easy. They're all on their own layers. We just hit command T and then flip horizontal, super easy stuff. But I'm gonna go ahead and call that a final decision and this is looking great. I like the way these logos, all these little projections, holograms, cool stuff like that is working. I think I'd like to include one logo that's actually just sort of painted onto the side of one of these buildings on playing around a little bit. With that, you may recognize this logo have used it in several of my courses. Just something kind of cool to include, So I'm gonna let that sit back pretty subtly and just be part of the building. Kind of like it's painted on. Maybe try a projection here, too. Kind of double it up. Repeating element. I think that's cool. There really aren't many wrong answers with with this whole process, as long as we just make it outrageously loud and over stimulating, the effect will be there. So a really fun and interesting part of this whole world creation. I hope you guys have really enjoyed this when we're zeroing in on our final steps. So I really hope you're pleased with this process. I know this one was very involved, had lots of moving parts and lots of things to manage just because of the scale and scope of this kind of project. But I hope you realize that the principles the actual artistic skills needed are just very simple. Are they are is an extension of these exercises that we don't. So if you understand those core principles, this type of image really isn't out of reach for you. So if you have any technical questions, just ask them in the Q and A section, or just reach out to me otherwise. But the principles are really what are going to get you these kinds of results. So I hope all these techniques have really made new levels of cool stuff accessible to everybody. I know there was a time when I was extremely intimidated by this kind of image. It's just there's so much detail, so many things going on to keep track of. It's just mind boggling to think how these artists can keep all of these things juggled in their mind and keep it cohesive enough to make something beautiful and understandable and and have a good story to tell. But it's really custom shapes and a few simple principles that make all of this amazing detail work and make it so incredibly cool. But I hope that's really coming across for you guys. So I'm going to sort of try toe, make this upper tier of these this array of monitors. But it's sort of mask it out behind that that staircase thing, but seeing if maybe a different side of this might work better because it was so yellow down the low. But I truly just fine tuning at this point, sort of messing with all these cool little lights and logos to try and make This is cool is possible. One other thing I want to say is, before I started this last step, this final polish step of the project, I took a good long break. I think I may have even come back at it another day with fresh eyes, just like on every every project. It's this final little 10% maybe even 5%. That sort of makes a good promising project into a great one. So you want to make sure that you're bringing some energy to these final steps. If if a long involved project like this one seems like it's taking too long and you're just bogged down, just set it aside for a while, work on something else and then come back at it for a really strong start. So I'm doing a little bit of last minute atmosphere. I want that bloom effect to really be burning through where the sunshine is sort of starting toe peek around the edges of this building. But guys, at this point, this is very final stuff, what these power cords to sort of stand out. So we've got that atmosphere behind the power cords now because I raced away with the power cord selection. I think that's looking awesome. So checking things out from different points of view, I'm doing a little bit of hand painting. I thought this little area of this walkway was a bit under described it sort of just a flat plane, adding in a little railing cap to the end of this walkway so that nobody falls 200 stories to their death and maybe adding a little bit of essentially scribble to these little signs , these air languages. I'm just sort of making up some letter forms, adding a few little tick marks, some arrows trying to make this look as cool as possible. And I considered adding a bunch of graffiti just for a little extra storytelling. But I'm gonna kind of let that slide for this one. So we're really closing in on a finished product here with a few more little touches. I think this one is really come together. Nicely lit a little of this light peek through these parts of the staircase, but essentially, this is just final touch ups at this point. So I hope you're really pleased with your project. I hope you've enjoyed this process, and I hope it's open your eyes to a lot of new possibilities for your work, adding a little highlight to the railing. Maybe just a few more finishing touches but taking a step back and taking a look at this. I think it's a really awesome finished product. So guys, I think with that, we just about have a finished painting. So let's do our recap. Congratulations on completing the Cyberpunk Cityscape project. I hope you found this to be a really rewarding an eye opening challenge. Let's take a look back at our project steps and see how far we've come. We started with a simple perspective grid and did a rough sketch to get our basic idea down . From there we used a collection of photos to come up with a rough color scheme. After that, we used custom shapes to fill our world with dizzying amounts of detail and interest. Way use those shapes and selections to do our rendering. And then we added photo textures for some added detail and complexity. We then added lights, logos and holograms to bring this futuristic mega city toe life. To polish this one up for my portfolio have added a handful of simple characters, ships and birds. Just a populate this city and make it feel more alive. Well, check out how cool all of these effects are working together such a cool sense of scale, mood and story hope you can really feel the power that we have put in your hands with these tools and techniques. Join us up next for our course. Recap in some great ways that you can continue refining your architectural concept or 28. Course Recap: Oh, congratulations on completing concept art architecture. We've covered concepts and theories, including architecture, painting, overview, depth and scale, mood and story composition, and adapting iconic architectural styles. We then learned some special photo shop tools and techniques that make architectural painting much easier. Photoshopped geometry, seen lighting and custom shapes. We then put these lessons into action over four awesome architectural concept art projects . Leinart Alley, Castle Meadow, Loft Interior in finally cyberpunk city. Post some of your work so that the entire course community can see your rock star skills. If you want to continue creating full concept our project and continue to build your portfolio, check out this page of new project briefs that I've put together to give you a great starting point. These air similar to the assignments that you might receive from a real world client. So they're great practice. Architectural concept Art is a fun and worthwhile skill to pursue, so I hope this course has been a step towards a lifelong passion for all of you. Keep at it, do awesome work. That's it for concept. Art, architecture. Thank you so much for enrolling and for being part of our community, be sure to check out our other courses, covering a wide variety of awesome digital painting disciplines. There is an awesome world of art out there. It could use more awesome artists like you. In the meantime, good luck with your artwork and is always paint cool stuff.