Concept Art Beginners Class

1. Concept Art Beginners Class Introduction: Welcome to the concept art beginner's class. And this class, you will learn all the basics to create a complete conceptual art work from scratch using some of the most efficient digital painting methods, we cover the full spectrum of the creation process from learning how to see values and composition all the way to the complete painting process and a 100% real time, no time lips us, no parts skip. The class, comes through with all 2D working files and includes the whole collection of custom brushes we use during our lectures. The moment you enroll, you will have private access to the act of support channel whenever you need some help, if you're just getting started with concept art and went to learn the core aspect of building a strong foundation. This is the perfect class for you. My name is Kamen. I've been working as a professional illustrator, concept artists, and animator for over ten years for video games, films, and commercials, co-creating a large variety of project. Therefore, I have a huge passion for teaching art and even a greater passion for and teaching creative blockages. So despite the fact that illustration and concept yard are a super valuable resource in entertainment industry. There's so much more to being fluent in a visual language of shapes and colors. And the first step, we're going to look at the pen tablet setup and how to define the button presets. In the second step, we're going to look at the image resolution, basically starting in your document. The third step will be the importing of custom brushes and getting a little bit more familiar with the Photoshop interface. The first step will be picking a motive and basically starting the first steps of observing and getting into Composition and the understanding of composition. The fifth part will be to cover our tool pellet and the actual methods we are going to use to paint. The six part will be the documents had up in which we basically define our composition and the overall layout of our picture. From Part seven to 12, we cover the actual painting exercises in which we go through a continuous painting process that gradually introduces the most common painting methods used in concept art. And the last step, we are going to have a conclusion and look at why it is so important to work in black and white or in values to really train your eye to understand light and shadows. So let's get started. 2. 01 Pen Tablet Setup: Hello and welcome to the very first section of the concept art beginner's class. But first thing I want to cover with you is the tablet pen setup. Now I'm using white come into us s, which is very affordable tablet, I would say because it just $60. And you can, yeah, perfect to use as a beginner just to get to get started and it's also easy to get. Now, I'm just going to draw a little pen right here just to cover the very simple setup that I personally use and I prefer. And there are a lot of different tablet models and tablet versions out there also. So in this case, I'm using the most common Pen type, which usually has like two buttons. And the front button is usually the equivalent of, I'm just going to draw a little mouse here. It's the equivalent of the right mouse click OK. And like the backside of this button is one that I personally love to define as the Undo button. And to do that, I would have to go into my tablet properties. And this is a step that is unique to your tablet model. For me, it is way come. So everyone who uses a webcam, lucky you, this would be the same procedure. I'm just going to Penn. And in this upper like the pen tip, he basically defines all the pen settings. And on this upper field, it just says undo because I already defined it of course. But in keyboard and keystroke, you basically just press Control Z. And here you type in the name of the particular function that you want to have. It is not named specific, so you can type in anything. It will use this key stroke and then you print. Okay. Now I already did this. I'm going to close this window. And I just want to really mention that you do not need to have a way come for this class or any other specific model that any graphics tablet, as long as it has pressure sensitivity, will do the job. But this can save a lot of time as I can demonstrate it here real quick. When I press this button, I can really quickly undo all strokes that I do not want to. Heaven my picture. So that's, that's it for now. And see you in the next section. 3. 02 Image Resolution: Alright, welcome back. Now, I believe this is the point where the class actually starts. Now that we're all set up, we have our tablet or upends it up. And the first thing we want to do, of course, is to open a new document. Now I can either press Control N, but just for the sake of to keep it as holistic a, just go to file and press new. So we did just just for, for one time, for the rest of the time I will use the shortcut. And this window here opens. Now, I get so many questions about resolution, like, what type of resolution do I need in the beginning? How life doesn't have to be? Is there any trick or secret to it, like, what's the best resolution? Now, there is a very, very practical approach to answer that question. And we're going through this approach right now, as in this field, which says width, we simply going to type in 50, we just make it 50 pixels wide the picture, so 50 points of information that the image can store in its width and the height. We're going to type in 25. Okay? So that 25 points of information and the height. So if we multiply this, we simply get the whole amount of pixels in the image and we're just going to press create. And we can see a very tiny canvas that appears in which we want to zoom in now. And I'm going to press Control and space and zoom in. So it's also good practice to get to get your your navigation skills to a point where it feels really comfortable to move around the picture. And then I'm going to use a brush. I just press right-click and just choose a very simple standard right brush. And we're going to cover the way how to load the brush in here in the next section. So don't worry about that. Now, when I paint now, you can see that it just looks very fragmented. Okay, just looks almost like a mosaic. And we don't want that right, unless we're going to do some poor pixel game or pixel illustrations, which I love. But unless we really specific about what we're doing, we, especially within the realm of concept art, we do not want to see these image points basically. Ok. Now, this already gives you a kind of an intuition on where we add with 50 to 25 pixels. The next picture, I'm just going to close that one that we are open. Pressing Control M will be. 200 by a 100 pictures. So we're just working oh, way up here. Just so you can get it in intuition. And also you can get through the workflow of creating new documents quickly and just to make it more, I would say like a habit. Okay. To get some get a routine. Basically. Now when a draw right now you can see it looks a bit more recognizable What I would say with the lights here, but still the Yep. The corners looking terrible. So it's just way too, way too small the resolution. And now this is the point where I can speak from a certain experience that for me, let's open a new document here. We don't need that one anymore for me. And image size of around three thousand and ten hundred, five hundred pixel would be a good start. Now, why am I saying start? I'm saying start because if I draw something right here, and this is a point we can already start experimenting. So feel free also throughout the class two really, to really use these different segments and sections to play around because my, my classes are built to really train your intuition not on, not only your intellectual thinking, but all routines I'm presenting here. So you get, you get a good overview basically, OK. Alright, now I like this. I'm happy with the result. And eventually throat painting, high sense. Okay, wait a second. Like I feel that this tree that I'm painting right here, it, it really needs more. Let's check out what we have here. Maybe we give it some, some of these leaves. And I zoom in. I realized, OK, like this is, this is not the resolution. I want like I wanted to have some fine details right here. And so I'm already getting these, these pixel artifacts and I don't want that. Like I really wanted to have more of a sharp looking image. Now, it's very simple to then go and basically go to image and image XYZ sighs, I'm doing it via the UI now so you can see where it's located. And this way I can simply plaque below the image up. So it basically interpolates all pixels that were not there before so that they look smooth. Okay, now, I can type in 4 thousand pixels for example. And when a person OK, I can see that, yes, my image is still, still a little bit blurry. But as soon as I start painting over it, you can see that the lines get a little more defined. So I really, I just extended my playground and I extended what I can actually do. We then my picture just by later on scaling my, my pixels up. Okay? No, no, sorry not scaling by picture but increasing the amount of pixels. So and therefore scaling the image up. Very important. Alright, now that should give you a rough overview. Play around with it. Try your own different image sizes and the more often you do it, the better because there is no overarching solution to what image size you should use. It really depends on the project, and it depends on what we want to do. Now, it's about it. See you in the next class. 4. 03 Importing Custom Brushes: Alright, welcome back. Now, attached to this class, I sent you a brush file, a dot ABR file, which basically contains custom brushes. And now we want to load these custom brushes into this particular window which opens when a press right-click on my canvas while having this brush tool here selected. Okay, that's the first brush tool in our tool settings. The way to do so it's actually very simple. We just click on this little icon here, the settings icon, and then go all the way down to import brushes. And then depending on where you downloaded my brush peg, you simply double-click it and your brushes will appear in your brush window right here. In the particular folders. That's pretty much it. Yeah, it's, it's as simple as that. And of course, if you really want to go into depth in creating your own custom brushes and see how these customers were created. You can always do the concept art sessions, essentials class, which really covers this in depth and how you can even make custom brushes from photographs, just like this one. All right, that's pretty much it. Let's go to our next section. 5. 04 Picking a Motive: All right, I know you want to get right into painting, but before we do any stroke on the canvas, there's one major thing we do as artists in general, not only as concept artist and that is observing or studying in this case, nature. And like right now, you might not be sitting in nature. And we're going to use the powerful Internet for that. And there's a wonderful site called Splash. Now we can actually close this picture here. We don't need that anymore. And I'm going to open my browser and type in an Splash.com that we go. And the cool feature of the site, first of all, of course, that we have like a huge amount of pictures contributed by photographers from all around the world that are free to use. And the cool feature of this side is actually that it has a filter, okay? And I'm going to type in Hilts as it happened to show some very nice results that we go. And one feature when it comes to observing that the Internet or the computer in general can really help us with in a very efficient way and really speed up the way we learn actually is that we can display the pictures in black and white, OK? In this case, we will use this filter here. So we just click on black and white. And then it will only show all the pictures that have black and white. And what happens when we look at these pictures is that we can basically take a lot of weight from our brain, especially when it comes to drawing. So that we're not trying to figure out too many things at the same time. In this case, we can only focus on the values, okay, so we can only focus on black and white and whatever happens in between. Now, what I want you to do is to just scroll through this and select five pictures. I already have one here that I really like. And there's no special method I would say that you have to use. That one is beautiful. But personally isolate these pictures. That one is amazing tool. And in a way that I can cover a large spectrum when it comes to perspective and composition. So I'm really looking to, to have a, have a broad spectrum of pictures and of compositions. Now, met one is actually quite interesting to this one right here. What that's really good. And I miss c, this one is amazing now I already own and that loss very quick. Could actually look at this one. Beautiful, perfect example. Okay, I think that was already five pictures that went fast. Maybe I will. These were these ones are quite similar. I'm actually going to ditch that one and choose a more iconic one instead. There is a certain feel I'm looking for that one actually. Very promising. Yeah. That one should do it. Alright. I got my five pictures. See you in the next section. 6. 05 Tool Pallette: All right, welcome back everyone. I hope you chose your pictures and before we actually use them, we can finally have our first hands-on experience with drawing. Now we're going to open a new document. And I still have my a previous settings of 3 thousand by 1500 pixels. And I keep them. And I say create. Now this should be, this should be looking like this also on your screen. And we're going to use two tools throughout the next sections to describe or a pictures. And I think it's one of the most powerful tools we have in Photoshop. Ok. Now one is the soft brush, which we can access a free press right-click. And then under the edX. Now if you downloaded my brushes and installed them, this should like, should look exactly like this. And under the edX tap, there should be this soft round brush. And we're going to use that one. Now you scale it up a little bit. Just like that. And now when we draw something, depending on what color we have, we can see these beautiful brushstrokes. Okay. Now I'm going to undo that. And the next setting we're going to take is under this color tab. Here, we go to that little menu. And then we have different ways of displaying our color picker. And in this case, we're going to use the HSB sliders, which stands for the hue, like the different color values, the saturation or saturated the colors. B is for the brightness game. And we're only going to touch the Brightness slider as we're gong to work mainly in black and white. Okay? So because this way we can really speed up or a learning curve and focus basically on main aspects without having too much distraction. Okay? All right, now that I have this one selected, I can just start playing around and experimenting with with just giving this scenery some different shades basically. Okay? Now, when I'm done with experimenting yet, the next tool we're going to look at is the lasso tool, okay? Now the lasso tool can either be accessed by pressing L or we simply go to this little, this little icon here. And we're going to select the simple lasso tool, not the polygon tool. And with the lasso tool, we can make selections and Photoshop. Ok. Now what is the selection? Selection is basically this, just so you get in a hands-on understanding of it. Like these lines basically define the border of the selection. And if you don't do anything with selection First, you can actually move it around and find, find a better spot forward. However, as soon as I paint something Now let's go back to the brush pressing b. You can see that the selection is the only part that is actually affected. Okay? Now if I'm going back to the lasso tool, I can move this election again without moving my my actual the actual part that are painted. Okay. So you're again, I can do this. And L to have the Lasso Tool move it around. And this should be our first practice. Ok. Just pressing L, moving the selection around, pressing be drawing something inside this election. Okay? Make this, make this irregular thing. And eventually you will see it. It makes a lot of sense later on, but it's important that you, that you get used to using the shortcuts because it really speeds up the whole process and it also speeds up your learning. Like if you, if you're not stagnant when, when working on a picture, that means you, you reward yourself in a way that you learn faster. Okay? So if we have this set up and if this feels intuitive, we are like a 100% ready for the next steps. So see you there. 7. 06 Document Setup: Alright, welcome, you did it. And we are finally at the point where we can start using our pictures. And also this is a wonderful point to actually learn about format and how to import pictures into Photoshop. So let's start right away and go to the folder where we downloaded or a pictures. And in this case, I would love to start with it one. I deliberately use that one because it has a different format, so it requires us to change the foreground in just a second. And also it is quite simple in its shapes. Ok, so what we will do first, after we just drag it onto our empty Photoshop space, we just go to this tab up here and drag this down a little so that it's not sticking their anymore that serve as. And then I make it a little bit smaller. And within that picture I zoom out a little bit. So I still have the full picture in view. And from here I actually started opening a new document. So I pressed Control, knew. And I wish I could now type in a resolution that gets closer to what we see here. Ok, so make the height larger number than the width. But I want to keep it just to show you a nice tool in a different way, how we can work, okay, I don't want that. So a press Create. And we have our same format. Now, don't be confused if just open that in a new tab. So we just do the same thing again, we drag this picture out just like that. And then unfortunately we have to do this process again, like making this a bit smaller and putting it up there. Alright, now we have our or other document basically open. Photoshop treats these windows now asked to document. I want to change the format so it gets closer to that one. Ok, so there is a tool we just called the Crop tool. And we can either access it by pressing c or just simply click on this icon right here. And then you can see there's the frame appearing around the around our canvas. And we can grab one corner of this frame. And as you can see, super quickly just changed the format just like that, very intuitively in a way how we want it and it even shows us the percentage on how, how much we changed our or a picture. And yeah, basically the ratio. So I wanna keep it like that. And you will immediately see that these checker kind of pattern displaying, which means that there's no information on that layer. So this indicates that this layer is transparent in this area. And I'm sure it's not the first time you saw those. You see these, especially on images that have an alpha channel. Or some websites that have, for example, PNGs or logos that they offer deliberately use this pattern to show that these the logos have an alpha channel and they're transparent. Okay? So we just press enter. And to fill that, there's a very nice little trick that we can do to fill this whole picture again with the background color. Grant color in this case is the color that's displayed here, which is why if we just press control at the remove button. And there we go, we just fill the whole picture. Alright. That's, that's pretty much all we need to do to actually prepare the picture. And I let me just get this a little bit bigger. And pressing B atom abreast selected and we can actually start trying. But we do this in the next section. So I'll see you over there. 8. 07 Painting Hills: Welcome back. Attempt to draw. And the first thing I want to mention is that this picture has kind of a bluish tint to it. But we're only going to work with black and white. So we will mainly use this slider right here that's going from doctorate. So just make sure that the saturation sliders on 0, and then we're pretty much ready to go. Now, I chose very, very large brush and the forest color that I want to set up here is basically this, the sky color. So this is a pattern that we will follow more often throughout the, throughout the practice. So we just get a, get an idea on what's the most efficient way from what I figured out so far to to set up the picture. Okay. So I just try to fight this. Brighten that. I just look at this little spot right here to find perfect brightness. So this one looks good. And then I just give it a little bit. Like a darker color up here. Maybe we can get a little bit dire for appear. Just like that. Alright, that's, that's pretty much it. And now the first thing we want to do now is to really set our horizon line k. And in this case, the horizon line would be this hill right here. It would basically be the first indicator that for us seems the furthest away from us. Okay? So we basically just press L and then we just draw a little hill right here. Let me just do that again. Just like that. Okay. And then I drew it all the way around here. And now I press B and just try to get a darker color that it's similar to the one we see here. And then I draw and we can see how good a nice, nice shape here. Okay? Alright, that's pretty much it. Let's move on to the next step. Now we would want to know how to actually remove selection. And we can either do that by selecting the lasso tool with L and click somewhere. Or let me just undo, we press Control D. And then it basically. Remove this selection and we can create a new shape. Now in this case, draw the second Mountain, the second Hill, which we see right here, which slowly starts to get darker. Okay, so I just make this little shape right here. Select my brush and choose a slightly darker color and fill this shape. Right? And now we do the same thing with the third hill that we can see here. Starting with the largest like that. And I just connect this. And I go almost black here. Not fully, but almost we go. Okay. And now we can already see press Control D, What happened here? Okay? You can already start to get an intuitive feel of our composition. Ok, so we have a format that is, it's not that stretched, but it is higher. Then it width. So it's, it's pretty nice too to give it some time type of depth. And also what we did is basically we have defined a surface right here. So although we didn't create any textured or any real details, let me just zoom in. We still kind of get an idea that there's some like Rocky organic ground, okay? And with only three shapes. Now the next thing we would want to do is we make it this brush a little bit larger. We go to these areas that need a little bit, like some blending basically. And we just press all to pick whatever color we want from here and draw over this. So without, we can pick any color that is already on the canvas. So you can see with by merging these, how quickly we get some, some nice looking results here. Same here. Maybe we can do soft and this one here, little bit. We go. And then the same thing here. Just make some areas here a little bit brighter. Here we go. Okay, so now this should be a good practice just to get a hold on the workflow and just to, to intuitively enter basically a pattern that allows us to really efficiently create some, some paintings and also some compositions that we can add details later on. So try around with that. And I see you in the next part. 9. 08 Painting Depth: Alright, now the next picture we're going to use is that one. And the reason I choose that one is because we have a very plain simple background and something that is basically a character. It's basically our protagonist in the story and it has a bit more fine shapes that we will actually also explore by using the lasso tool. Now, same routine here that we want to establish, that we just put the picture on that side and we create a new document. Oops, same mistake that edit again. This is basically also a setting you can change in the preferences if you would need to have the separated in the very beginning. For me, it's not that it's not that much of a problem now. So I proceed to crop the picture a little bit. Closer IT here, just like that, even further. Alright? And then we can start selecting or a big smooth brush again. And basically start with a pretty bright color. As we want to fill up the sky first. Get some of these cloudy strokes in here. Alright. Okay. Now we actually one too. Get our horizon line first. And to do that, we will use a different version of the lasso tool, the one we already saw before, which is the polygon lasso tool. Okay? Now, the cool thing about the polygon loss at all is that when you click, it makes these very straight lines. And so you can do a very straight line, especially for the horizon, all fossil architecture. And this comes in very handy. So what we can do to get a very straight horizon line is to press Shift. And by pressing Shift, we get either a 45-degree angle or a vertical line or a horizon horizontal line, which is perfectly straight. And we want to do this also in a more lower third, I would guess. And this picture, so I start here, would be a bit higher, like here or here, and just close this. And from here, I basically make the color a little bit darker. And even more, pick from here. So its mix of choosing the color here and picking the color from here. So I just slowly blend everything in the way, the way I wanted. Okay, so can get a little bit darker, especially here in the foreground. So now what this practice does, let's talk about this while I'm filling this out. Is basically it not only trains your mind and to, to, to basically become more brave with a workflow. So to lose your fears of opening masks and thinking more in terms of ACCA paper cutout style instead of brushstrokes. And this really speed up your learning curve because you don't have to guess anymore, but you have a very practical and approachable routing in a sense. So this is what we really want to focus on, that it's very applicable and very practical. And then later on, within this whole mainframe, we can add a more theoretical side to the perspective and how we're seeing things the stored and get smaller when they're further away and how they relate to each other. So it's really nice to get, to get a nice blend between the intuitive side and the theoretical thinking. Now there you see this little bright line. This is also something we want to, we want to get here. And just adding that I really liked that reflection. Ok. And now I press control D to remove the selection. And now I do press l again. This time I want to use the classical lasso tool and basically create this little hill that on the side here. And we know like replicated exactly like it as he can also become creative here. Just make sure main composition stays pretty much the same. I can just close this off like here. And in this case, it's okay if there's no selection here because I will mainly and very, very gently also just paint the top of this one. Like basically just very, very softly. We tried to give you a hint that that there's a large landmass that begins also on that side. And the centered even disappears. And then we can actually take the soft brush and just create a little bit of this reflection right here. Same thing on that side. Okay, pressing Control D, That should do it. And now let us go for this little hill here that seems like it's a bit more in the foreground. And right here, we can also press shift. Now we can. So, yeah, remember that's why we use these the polygon lasso tool. This is where you can actually press Shift to give a straight line. But the cool thing is, as you see now what I did is I basically just change the polygon nasa tool and it keeps my selection. And even with that tool, I can remove the selection by pressing alt. So I press alt, click and hold Shift. And then it basically removes the selection from that one and gives me a straight line again. So I don't draw over this edge and just try to switch around between them. Because usually these patterns repeat in Photoshop. So even when I'm drawing with a normal, with the normal brush, you can use shift to draw straight lines. So apparently this is, it's not working within a normal lesser tool, which is a bit sad, but it, it still does the job. So clearly quite dark, that's low area. And always remember to take your time to really observe what's happening in the picture and then slowly put in your different cart like tones, like the old value. So in this case, there's really no need to rush as it's, the observing is more important than doing. So. You just pick the color there. And you can see how we get a bit closer to our motive. And also I pick some other dark color and try to go a little bit darker on the foreground. Here we go. Okay, and now let's go for our protagonist. Now, in this picture I want to zoom in a little bit to get a, to get a better Few for how this looks and it does not have to be super accurate. Okay. Like, please don't try to create an anatomically perfect swam right here. Just just you can even start with a sphere. Okay, so, so let's, let's really make a beginner friendly and let's just create a little sphere right here. Okay? And now I'm just going to take some of the bright color and draw on top of that fear, some of that darker color drop below that sphere. Ok. Ok. And now I want to show you a really cool shortcut to invert your selection. We just control shift I. So basically then we will draw an everything except for that sphere. Now, we just select the very dark color and then create our little reflection of that sphere in the water idea. Okay? And remember you can always change the brush, brush size if it gets too small or too big. And then at some strokes here. Okay, and our press Control D, and you can see it's, it's going freely, like it's doing pretty well to just have the same composition like this picture without thinking too much of perspective, without having too much like textural. Although in this brush there some texture that I bet if you use this brush that I'm using, which is of course included. And you will have these nice little sprinkles from noise that's happening. And I'm just, I just realized that there is a little darker area over here. We put good. Alright, and also right here we can just soften this up a little bit. I mean, these are just details, but the core thing here is that we really want to get like this, this routine, because the moment we paint a picture, we start remembering its key elements. And in this case, the key element in the composition, we have a character in the Lower Third. And the depth of that picture that mostly the object here I defined as further away if they get brighter. Okay, so if I would pick a color right here and just let, it's just an example. Okay? You don't have to repeat these steps now. But if I'm drawing something like.NET run here and basically draw a hill that is a bit bigger. You would have the feeling of this huge, massive mountain Being in the background. Okay, so the only thing I did here basically is to take what I learned from this picture a step further. And still the illusion works pretty quickly. Okay, so it's, it's really something. The more you do it, the more you understand why the routine is so important and why to learn this pattern and how it benefits you and the long-term. Alright, so let's move on to our next section. 10. 09 Developping a Routine: All right, welcome back. Now this is the next picture we are working with. And as with the others, I'm going to start with the sky and just, and get this nice little gradient here. And this is the perfect picture to really test and try out what we've just learned where the lasso tool to really basically get, get the routine a bit more solidified. So I start with this tiny little mountain scape and the background right here. Give it this loads getting brighter over there. And then there's a nother mountain scape juice dried after that pan of just that one was a bit steep. Just stay but more realistic here. So just like bed picking some Dr. Connor from over there. And we go. And then I see there's another one over here is I'm really just working with the shapes that I see. I'm not trying to interpret too much, not trying to overthink, but really just like sneak my way into the picture. No, actually use the foreground. And maybe if there's a much darker color will go. So it's getting even darker down here with this forest like region. And then we even have some variety edges on the top. Kind of give these mountains like a round shape. Another one here with a slightly more Bright Edge. And then we can actually connect these dots here and these both parts, making them fade into each other. Like a gap there. So you can see the moment you know your tools and they get comfortable. You can get super quick results. And this is a perfect example for that. And this is also the part where we actually start using texture, our structure. So, but let's leave it for that with that by now because we already have a nice set of tools where we just used the lasso under soft brush. And I really want you to let that sink in and also try around with it by yourself. So in the next section we're going to start with textures C over there. 11. 10 Working with Textured Brushes: All right, we'll come back. Now this part is going to be exciting. And I really encourage you to take it slow, because what we're going to do can become overwhelming quite quickly, especially as we're now going to work with layer mask now. But before we do anything, we of course have to import our picture. And in this case it's the one which is absolutely beautiful and same here we're going to create a new document where we are going to make sure that it has the same format. Oops. Oh, does not really want to go. Okay. Well, why not? And now I will actually press Control and delete to fill it with the background color. And as you just noticed, just as a side note with alt delete, you can actually fill it with the foreground color that is selected here. Alright. Now I will just separate the image frames. We go. And I just want to show you different options on how to brighten up that, that image okay, or make it darker depending on what you want to do. Actually the million options and this is one of them. You can press control u. And this dialog opens, which is basically one of the many image editing tools you have when going to this image tab right here. And in this case we want to get the same color are the same shape as the background. Would say something like that. And now of course, we use our lasso tool again. Press l and just give it a nice mountain shape right here. Some nice hard edges. So I exaggerated the format a little bit, but it's nice you can always give yourself some artistic freedom here. And another good practice is to remove some of this election like we did previously. Just press Alt. And if you find parts that are not looking nice, you can just remove them. With this, with this method, which is very efficient. Alright, that should actually do it. Now, let's just draw in shape with a soft brush. And give it a bit brighter color, just like we did the previous time. So this step actually should be quite easy for you. And now what we want to do is we want to, actually, basically, we want to make sure that even without the selection, we only draw within this region of the mountain. Okay? So I will just remove, sorry, remove our selection right now. And you can see this is merged into one picture. Okay, so whenever I draw onto that one out, like everything will get affected. Now, there are many, many ways how to avoid that. And the way I'm showing you right now is just one option out of, really out of thousands of options on how you can create masks in Photoshop. Now let's go back to our selection. And what I will do now, I will create a new layer that contains what I have in my selection here by just pressing Control j. Okay? Now we can see in our Layer window here, in case any window went missing, like throughout the class, you can always find your window by going to window. Okay, so that's good to know, but usually the setup should look exactly like the setup I have right here. And now within this layer, within this layer window, we can see that there's this little picture would chose us there we have the mountain right here. Now if I make this layer invisible, of course, nothing will happen because we have the same mountain below, basically exactly the identical image on the background layer. Now what we want to do first is we want to go to our background layer and just pick a nice background color here and give it a plane colleges like that. And then we make our layer visible again. And ta-da, we can see we can turn off on our mountain on an off physically. Okay. So we we simply have the ability when we press control to move our mountain around. But we wanted to do with it, you know, and to move mountains. We just want to give this mountain the ability that it is only the only place where we actually draw. Okay, now, I have this layer selected. The latest election is very important because whatever layers selected, this is where we draw on. And now when I draw something, just get a brighter color. Same problem, right? The whole layer gets effected. Okay? Now to avoid that, let me just undo here. We click on this little icon right there, which locks only the part that are transparent. So everything outside of this mountain, there is no image information. So it will not allow us if this is on, to draw on that. Now when I draw now we can. Perfectly see how only the mountain gets affected. Alright, if you managed it that far, congratulations, I know it can get confusing very quickly within the masking and the layers and locking the, the layers. So take your time with each individual step and it will become very intuitive and very easy. And to be honest, I'm sure many of you already are familiar with the concept of layers, because many of these tools get so popular. And even in mobile editing apps, they have layers now. So it's, it's very, you can get confident with this very quick. Now let's start drawing. Start to give this mountain some of these shadows here. I'm just choosing an even smaller soft brush just so that we have a little bit more of a hard edge here to do it. So I'm just picking some colors here and there and adding some colors here and hopes. We go this little, this little corner here. And that is kinda the mountainous casting a shadow on itself. Looks beautiful. Alright? Now if we get that far, now it's the first time we can actually start using custom brushes. And I'm sure you've, you've dabbled with them before already, which is no problem. I really want to encourage that this is a beautiful thing, but now it's the time to give this mountain some structure. And the reason I'm only doing it now is because it is so tempting to get lost in these experiments. Okay, so the reason I just limited our workload to two tools so far is so we can focus. Ok, because one of the easiest things in the digital world is just to get lost in all the tools and all the possibilities. So you want to get kind of streamline your information or what you observe, or what you're capable of, if that makes sense. And now there's one brush right here. It's 83 pixels wide, which is perfect to use for the snow which I, which I basically created from this picture. And you can use this brush choosing a very bright color. And now when we draw over this, we can see that only the mountain has affected, which is really cool. And it gives us also very quick results. So can our snow layers here. And you can see how fastest goals can even pick a darker color and make it in an inverted way. Just like that. And that's pretty much it. Now, there's one more tool, which is basically also just a selection tool which I want to show you here. And it is right on the Office tool, right on the Move tool. Usually it's displayed as a rectangle, might be displayed on your toolbar like that, you simply click and hold and select your ellipse tool. And when I just draw an ellipse, you can see that it creates a selection in an elliptical form. But we want to have a perfect circle to create this little moon here. And we just press shift. And there we go, we have a perfect circle. And depending on how fantasy he wanted to go, I mean, it doesn't have to be fantasy if someone would have used a very telescopic lens. So then would be possible to scale up the moon right here. But we just want to, you just want to find a moderate size. So we have that selected. Let's also give this moon a little bit of a nice structure. And oh yeah, I know this is a beautiful example to show you why I can't draw on this moon. Now. I'm very happy that this happened because actually we're working on a locked layer. Ok, so in this place where I'm drawing, even when I have a selection, it does not get respected. So the layer has the dominant part here in saying where we allow to draw and where we are not. Because we have this locked. There's locked transparency map on, we cannot draw on this field. Now if we turn this off, we're now again able to, to basically finish our picture. All right. That should do it. Press Control D. And if you manage to come that far, congratulations really, because it can really get overwhelming. And yeah, I hope you can try around with his. I really encourage you to try it with a different steps. And I see you in the next section. 12. 11 Combining all Elements: All right, welcome back everyone to our last picture. And of course this is not the last picture. We're going to draw a bad from the five we chose. This will be one of the more difficult ones. And you will see in a second why. So we will focus first of course on the basic steps we did before. So I'm just going to open a new document and prepare the format first. Making a nice high format just like that. There we go. And then I bring that one to the side. And that should do it actually. Now the first thing we're going to do is of course, to define the background. So I'm just going to pick a nice bright color. And of course my soft brush. And then I'm going to draw in some, some type or shapes and try to emulate that sky that we see here, that the nice soft gradient is actually like a supers of gradient. Now we go. And then with the Lasso Tool again, I will create my mountain shape right here. There we go. And of course I will try to implement this gradient also here, just like that. Creating a nice dark shape. And then we can use our nice snowy texture on that one that we used before. That should really give some nice results. Bit brighter, brighter. Well actually that should do it just like that. Yes, there we go. And look at this. It looks nice, bright snow caps and then some tiny light peeking out like that. Beautiful. And then we can move on to the second mountain right here. And always remember we don't have to be like super accurate. It's more about the overall composition that this is right. And within the overall composition, you can really play around with the details. You don't have to be like super on point with all the shapes. It's more that the overall pattern really feels the same. Person control D to remove the selection and moving with the next shape. A little bit of a darker amount right here. Getting some director Shapes. Go light corner. Yes, getting closer. And now we can go for this foreground. So this is the first time we actually encounter, would really looks like perspective. So this perspective is basically defined through this center pathway. But before we touch anything, we really want to create this basic dark shape in which we then can play around and try our first attempts to create something that looks perspective, or that at least creates the illusion of a perspective because this is what is actually happening. And when, when we master aircraft, we create tiny little illusions. And the some of these illusions somehow then tells the viewer there's depth within the picture. Alright, now this should do it. It's very gentle. And pressing Control D, this should be the base for our path right here. Now, the path itself should be actually quite simple because we also use the lasso tool. And when using the lasso tool, we can exaggerate a little bit and just create the same exact same shape that we see here. This time we have to be a little bit more accurate. And see if we can intuitively recreate this tiny bow here that gets smaller towards the end. And then of course, making it brighter. And within that one creating these two main pathways right here. Like Ben, getting some details like that, we don't have to be super accurate. Okay. So if we did this, we can press Control D again and just look at our And what we created basically. And if we are happy. Now this is the first moment where we can actually use a new custom brush. I created from this picture, where we have some foreground stones. Now with this brush, it is important. It's the brush that says 811. And with this brush also, when you hover over it, it says rocks. You want to be you want to make sure that you use a dark color, okay? Because it works. Let me just demonstrate this real quick and works with shadows. So as you can see, it takes a section of this picture and just create some rocky surface. Okay? Now, so we just want to give it some strokes just like that. That should be enough. Maybe one more towards the center. There we go. And that's pretty much it. Okay. So the same thing we want to do on the side right here. On the top. Just one or two strokes on the foreground, giving it some structure. And then we go back to our soft brush. And with its soft brush, we can block out the dark shape that is here in the foreground. There really gives us a very nice, very nice feel that this way right here is coming really close to us. Okay? Here we go. And now with one of these precious here, we can basically start to go a little bit more experimental and try to merge this foreground texture that we create with a brighter color, should do it. Yeah, there we go with the background. So we slowly want to fade our texture that we create right here into the background. And what does will create as basically the illusion of the texture being continued in the background. Although there's no texture anymore. And this really creates a large sense of depth. And this is something where you really need to have some like trial and error moments where you just try around and intuitively make the brush smaller the more you go to, to the, to the well sort of background of the picture. Because there there is no fixed rule on how to approach this. Like there's a million ways that basically reach the same point. And especially here it is very wise to, to go a bit more of an experimental route. And now another thing you can do is pick a very simple hard round brush and break up the shape right here of this path. Picking a dark color and really making it a bit more rough, like really give it some hard edges or some bright stones like picking out. So just to, to play with this with the basic shape of this, of this path so that it gets smaller and smaller and smaller until the, I thinks, OK, this has to continue right here. Okay. And when the, I think that continues, it basically tells us that the rocks really disappear into the background. So also you can use the brush to define the shape a little bit more, make it a little bit more smaller, like that. And then there's this cool brush where we can just have some nice little dots. And these dots can basically really create some. Nice rough texture and some rough patterns. And we don't have to fully create them just partly. And still the I will fill out the blank parts so you can see just where the light is coming in here. I'm just going to create some of these little tiny dots maybe giving a little bit of a darker color. Also. There we go. And you can immediately see how this starts to form some nice patterns. Wow, should do. And maybe we can add some nice highlights over here. Some like brighter spots, because this is a dark surface. So everything pride we put up here will come out really intensely. Just like that. Well, that might have been a bit too much. So you can see how you have to be really gentle with these, with these strokes because textures are really intense. And now this is also a tiny moment where I can introduce a new tool. For example, if I want to later on at some texture to this mountain, and this is also a very common method to do that. I would press either w or go to this quick magic selection tool and just draw inside of this shape. And it will automatically try to capture everything that kind of has a border. So if I press Alt now with the same tool, oops, and drawn to this shape, it really tries to find that border and exclude the selection. So here I keep drawing just normally and it adds up back there. So you can see that this is a very quick and efficient way to make quick selections after, basically after you lost them. So, and here we could add some of these nice snowy textures again. Again, there are no rules. I'm just trying to inspire and be inspired by these patterns and pictures here and try to play with them and try around with them. So they should be it. If you, if you want, you can totally at this little protagonist right here, which is like the competition is just amazing, lovely picture. So thanks to Dorothy limb coup. Apparently shut this picture. This is like the perfect example to really just explore the, the storytelling aspect also of that picture. Okay, this guy stands a bit more in the foreground, which is another problem. But yeah, you can see I really want to encourage you to play around with this pictures and expand the borders. And especially with a custom brushes. So if you see a custom brush and you like it, just try it out with it, just explore it and just feel free to, to, to start dueling. Okay, so because this is where the fun actually begins. So if you made it till here, congratulations, because this is quite a tough one because many things are coming together. And yeah, you kind of have to take it slow and repeat the individual steps until this fields really, until you really have some self-confidence with individual steps. And from there you can easily pick up the momentum. Awesome guys. See you in the next section. 13. 12 Applying all Methods: All right, welcome to our last section in this series. And this bit is going to be very exciting as we are going to combine all the methods that we learned so far and apply them in our image that we are going to draw without a reference. So the first thing we want to do, of course, is to create a new document. So I press Control and press enter. And the first method that we repeated, basically, what I have to say, the first step that we repeated over and over again is to draw the sky. So a will just create a nice background gradient. And initially I'm thinking of a more of a darker sky. So we could eventually at some nice planets or stars over them. So let's give it all a little bit of a darker color. And then usually when we're dealing with skies, we have a gradient that is brighter on the downside and more darker the more we face upwards in this guy. So the next thing we want to do is just define a nice horizon line. Horizon that looks interesting and that kind of like tells a little story just like that. We go. And at one I'm going to also make a little bit darker. And for that one, right away, I would start basically adding some of these nice little snowflakes writing you using that snowy mountain brush that we created before. Well, I mean, we didn't create it but we used it. So definitely want to use that net one here also. Some peaks there we go. And the next layer press Control D and L again. So basically just remove the selection. And now I'm creating another horizon line. And this time also I am using a darker brush and just give it a new new mountain scope. This time a little bit more flat. And I would even do this one more time. Just I maybe have like a nice foreground hill right here. It's coming up. And we go and just go a little bit darker. Alright, so let me just undo that and actually keep this election right here and give these mountains here just another little bit of snowflakes. So we have a nice repetition here from the foreground, Just like that. Look at this. And now we already have kind of a nice mountain scape. And now I want to do something that we did in our last picture, which is to create a shape that looks like a path or a river almost that grows as closer like Dr. closer it comes to the camera. So basically, I'm just showing you an example here that you can follow or you can try your own. It's really like a very freestyle approach right now. And I really encourage you to just experiment and just try out your own little shapes and explore. All right, so it's shrinking over there. And now I'm going to pick a little bit of a brighter color and create another gradient. And remember, we're all doing this on one layer, like there are no, we're pretty adventurous. No layers, no nothing. Just going right into it. And we go. So in this case, we can kind of try to incorporate the shadow of the mountain right here a little bit. Maybe even start already, like playing with some type of reflection. So something, I'm just grabbing a smaller brush and I'm really experimenting here. So feel free to explore. Why don't we go giving all these edges that could potentially reflect in that water surface, giving them a darker edge. And now I'm going to remove this election and have a look. Alright, I'm quite happy with this. On this side here I think the river or whatever, this could be a little bit more extended. So I'm just adding a little bit more water over there. And this should already do it. And now I think it would be very cool. Remember one picture where we had kind of like a little element on the water. And now I'm going to draw something also with the Lasso Tool pressing Shift. Oh no, I remember there was a working so I'm basically just creating little boat with the Lasso Tool. And then I'm selecting the polygon lasso tool right here. And now I remove the selection, basically just pressed to remove the selection like we did before. So I have a flat like cut below their board, is like that. Now press B again. Choose a darker color, maybe almost black, on the lower side. And press control the URG, this exactly what I was I'm hoping to get. And now I'm just using hard brush to maybe paint something like a finger or something on top of that boat. Maybe with a little staff or something. That's also going to the water. We go. And now we can actually do the same for the reflection just with a more softer brush. So we just pick the colors from here. And basically I extend the reflections and little bit. And let's do something even more fancy. And now you're getting really experimental here. And this is the perfect purpose of this section right here is two, to give you a little bit too much information, basically, so to overwhelm you a little bit. So you get the sense of how we're just applying all the things that we've learned and basically just how many methods there to actually use them. So it's also the idea to really inspire you to go really experimental with everything we learn. So these are basically all the reflections and gave it was a bit whack right here we go. So, and then of course we want to add our nice little planet and that darker sky. That was what I had in mind personally from an earlier stage. So basically I'm just giving it a nice bright h. From here. Maybe we can even use a more textured brush. There we go. I think this should, should actually do it. Yeah, I love that one. So now we're going, we're going to some little stars picking very bright color and this very hard brush right here. And remember I'm deliberately not going into detail too much of the steps because I want you to experiment by yourself. I want you to really go into a more experimental mode where you try around to apply the methods by yourself and. Don't be too stuck on on how I approach things. It's just really to show you what we can do, right? So, and from here we can actually maybe trial around a little bit with some of these cloud brushes. Just adding some very gentle details. It's a mist. Maybe even in the foreground, the darker would say. Just like that. We go. And now we can even take a very soft brush and write some darker areas just to give the picture a bit more contrast. That was a bit too much. So it's, it's basically there is no fixed rule on how to approach things. But there's just a rough idea on how we can actually feel ourselves into the picture and try to play with the things we created for ourself. In this case, I would add a little bit of foreground structure, maybe, especially in this bid right here. Just so there's something for the i2 to play with. Basically some shapes and some some areas where the eye is not too lost. And this should actually do it. That's pretty much it. And I know this was quite fast and might have been a bit overwhelming, but this is, the core idea is that eventually you get to a point where there are no more rules. But the rules that you are actually applying are pretty much always the same. So we didn't really use any new method right now. We just like implemented the same patterns that we learned from all our previous pictures without any perspective grid or like previous knowledge of perspective. And that's my main aim, is that you intuitively basically start to create the illusion of perspective or create a certain depth without all the intellectual approach. So you really start to, to refine your intuition. So congratulations really if you made it that far and please share your final result, this is very important to me and I hope you'll join me next classes because always remember there's the concept art essentialist class where you can go much more in depth and create your own custom brushes. But if you made it until here, congratulations, and I hope to see you in my next class. 14. 13 Conclusion: Right. Before you leave, let's have a little conclusion and look what we've actually learned so far. And starting with this little feature idea, we first basically used our lasso tool and the soft brush. So we almost have only two shapes right here. So this was basically a simple practice to basically just set up a document and create some shapes. Now. And this pirate, however, we actually created some first layers of depth with the foreground character, where we really tried to basically create kind of an illusion of perspective. So also right here, we're just actually using the soft brush and the lasso tool. And on the third picture, we kind of like deepened our routine and used a little bit more foreground layers. So in this case, the depth would be created by the shapes. And in the third, sorry, the fourth picture, for the first time we actually applied texture. And this is where we like, where things actually get quite powerful because we have basically three tools. We have lesser tool, the soft brush and textures. So these three alone are basically like from their cosmos of possibilities, explodes and thousands of new directions from where you can basically create new knew I'd work. And in this picture, we basically combined all these things together where we really had like a foreground, where we added some more detail and also edit some type of protagonist. Now the last picture, which was that one, was NO white tough because I deliberately made it that we go through it quite fast. So you're not too much distracted by my version of the picture or by, by my approach of how I implement all the previous pictures. I really want to encourage you to create your own combination of all these things we did. And now one more little thing I want to rebuild your u is what we can actually do with this, which is something like this, where we actually start to color the picture. However, this would go like way beyond the scope of this class. So I really want to encourage you to check out the concept art essentials class. If you think you can really deepen your practice and you, if you want more, basically, so if you say, oh man, that was way too easy and I could do something way higher. So not saying that this is actually quite doable, it's just that I want to have a class for the whole spectrum. So if you say, this is, this is a little bit tough, you basically stick to these practices we did because they're really strengthening your core as you, as you say when doing workouts. But these core aspects will help you out later on. So I encourage you to practice and eventually we can have a result that is similar to this. So also in the concept art essentials class, I describe very accurately how you can actually colorized. You're black and white images. So it's pretty much exactly this what we're doing. Plus of course, the creation of self-made custom brushes. So hope you enjoyed the class and hopefully see you in the next one.