Create Concept Art for Film & Animation

1. Background Art : Hi there, my name is Siobhan. I'm an art instructor and an animation professional. This is my Skillshare class on learning how to create a digital painting that can be used as background art or concept art. In this class, you're going to learn important principles for composition that are absolutely fundamental to creating art for films, for games, or for animation. You'll learn how to create a visual sense of depth in your painting. How to create a visual sense of story. I'm also going to teach you key compositional rules, such as the rule of thirds. But crucially, you're going to learn why the rule of thirds works. It has a lot more to do than just simply making a pleasing image. Knowing this is not only going to make your work much stronger and dynamic, but will also clarify for you how professional artists work within a wider context of animation production. I'm also going to teach you how to make visual research, how to collect and analyze images for a project, and then how to distill your own vision into a series of thumbnails on which to base your final project. Then we're going to dive deep into the process of making a digital painting. I'm going to walk you through step by step, the exact process for creating painting like this. Everything in this background is painted directly. There's no photo bashing, no masking. Everything that you see here is made with the brush stroke. I think this is an incredibly intuitive and powerful way of working. I'm going to show you the exact techniques and explained thoroughly every step as I go. By the end of the course, you're going to have a fully realized major portfolio piece. You'll also have a clear understanding of how to generate any digital painting. Because we will have demystified the entire process from start to finish. I've worked as a background artist on many games, TV shows, and films. I'm really passionate about sharing the skill set and knowledge that took me on that journey. I really hope that this course will open the door for you to begin your own art journey. Thanks for checking this out. I hope you enroll, and if you do, I look forward to working with you. 2. What to Use for this Course: For this course, I'm going to be creating my background art in Photoshop. Photoshop is the industry standard. It's the software that most artists use. It's what you'll likely be using if you do end up working in an animation studio. But if you don't have Photoshop and you don't necessarily want to buy or get a license for it just yet, that's totally fine. There are plenty of free options out there that you can go with. You could use something like Krita or something like Procreate for the iPad. You can definitely follow along with me in this course using any other digital painting software. But if you do want to follow along with me, you could consider even downloading Photoshop for a free trial for a couple of weeks, and just testing it out and seeing how you like it. Once you've downloaded Photoshop or you're happy to work in your own specific software, the other thing that you'll need for this course is a drawing tablet. I'm using a Wacom tablet, the specific one that I work with is a Wacom Intuos Pro medium. A lot of people ask me about which drawing tablet they should use or which one to get, and again, there are a lot of options. You don't have to go with a very expensive Cintiq or large Wacom tablet by any means, you can start out with a basic, cheaper alternative to Wacom. I do recommend getting Wacom, if you are really keen to pursue digital art. If you know that this is something that you want to invest in, because you will use it for years and years to come. But if you've got any questions about choosing a drawing tablet for you, just send me a message. Feel free to ask me, and I'll try and give you some advice. Once you do have your tablet and you're ready to set up, what you need to do is just install drivers, that's standard. I think most external things need a driver to work, plug it into your laptop, and then you're ready to go. Getting used to working with a drawing tablet does take a little bit of time, if you haven't ever worked with one before. The main thing to note is that unlike a mouse, the cursor on your screen when it's controlled by the pen, will be mapping the corresponding area on the tablet. With an external mouse, you can keep it really in one spot, not move it about too much, and still manage to move the cursor, but with a pen, if you want to move the cursor on your screen, you'll have to move the pen on your tablet. That's really the biggest difference that you have to get used to. Once you get used to using dash, I don't ever use a mouse for anything whatsoever, I use the pen and tablet for all of my navigation. I usually have my tablet right in front of my laptop like this, and I use the pen with my right hand and I use my left hand to make any keyboard shortcuts like for example, Command or Control+Z to undo, I do that a lot. I literally keep my hand hovered over those keys while my right hand draws. Obviously, if you're left-handed, you can just switch, swap that around, have the pen in your left hand. You can swap the tablet around as well. To access the right-click option, just press the lower button like that and it brings up your, I don't know what this is called, but the menu that usually comes up with a right-click. So that just about covers everything that you need to have for this course in order to follow along with me. If you have any questions whatsoever, just send me a message. Up next in the next video, I'm going to go over the brush step that I've left for you, because that is very specific to this course. I'll be using a lot of very texture brushes, and I'll just explain how to import that brush set and get yourself familiarized with it. When you're ready, I'll see you in the next video. 3. Importing the Brush Set: If you look in your resources folder, our attached video, you'll see a file that I've left for you called landscape brushes.abr and these are pretty much all of the brushes that I've used during this course and making this background. I've put them all into one one so you can just easily access them from there. To bring them into Photoshop, what you're going to do is just click on that icon and or that file and drag it down. I usually just drag it down to Photoshop and release. Then Photoshop's already open, so I'll go create new just to get any kind of a canvas up. Now if I hit B on my keyboard or go up to here, or open window and brushes, it should be the very last folder in a set of folders. Maybe you've just general brushes in your brushes window. The very last folder should be the one that you've just dragged in. If you twirl down the little arrow, you can see here all of these brushes inside. I will be walking with you through how I use these throughout the painting process. I don't think that I'm going to use every single one of these. Maybe, there are one or two ones that are use over and over again, but there's certainly a few brushes that are very useful, like dead branches, washer, things like dash, smoke. I'll show you as we go along how you can apply those to your background painting. If you wanted to just, I'd encourage you to maybe go through this folder, all of these brush options and just see what kind of brushes gives you what effects. It's nice to get familiar with them. But absolutely the best way to learn how to use texture brushes like this with very specific applications, especially something like water. The very best way to figure them out is to actually use them in the painting. That's what we're going to do. In the next video, I'll just give you an overview of common tips for landscapes. I want to teach you about how you can give consideration to atmospheric perspective in order to create depth. I'll see you in the next video. 4. Common Tips for Landscape Art: In the next two videos, I'm going to explain some design principles for concept art or for creating art for film or animation. These principles will help you to understand how your painting actually works to create believable worlds that your audience can not only enjoy watching, but really feel as though they can step into and explore or be a part of. That's really the ultimate goal or the ultimate aim for concept artist; to create believable, imaginative worlds where the audience feels as though they can really step in. When we talk about composition for film, there are a number of things that people often highlight that you should have in your paintings to help the audience engage and feel like they can really enjoy looking at your work. You've got leading lines. In this example, these lines, they may seem that they are just part of the painting, but they actually work in a very strong way to direct the audience's eye to this area of the canvas, any lines that form part of your painting that actually help the viewer's eye to travel to a specific area of the painting. Another compositional technique is the rule of thirds. For example, in this background that we created in a previous backgrounds' course, you can see that if we apply the rule of thirds, the focal points are divided up along this grid. Another technique or another compositional technique is to work with cool colors versus warm colors in your composition. Opposite colors will really help to enhance a strong dynamic quality in your image, simply because warm colors versus cool colors creates contrast. You can work with something called shape language. Shape language is where you can break your composition down into basic geometric shapes, like a circle, a rectangle, or a triangle. Again, using a combination of these shapes in your composition will create contrast. You always want to have strong contrast in your design in order to make your composition dynamic. If we talk about leading lines, symmetry, shape language, warm versus cool colors, it's all a lot to think about and apply. What I'm going to do the way I would like to explain all of this is to break it down into what I see as really two main criteria. One has to do with creating a visual sense of depth within your scene and the other has to do with creating a visual sense of story. You want your concept art to look like a real world and you want there also to be a visual sense of narrative so that your audience feels that they can engage and spend time with your art. If you take all of the components of composition that I've outlined and unify them under these two criteria, then you really will be able to begin to understand concept art, and background design as powerful aspects of storytelling. Let's talk about how you can create a sense of depth and good composition in your shot. I'm sure that you're very familiar with the idea of perspective. I've talked about perspective in my previous courses, particularly in the story-boarding course. Perspective is a linear construct where you draw your grid and then things that are further away appear smaller, and things that are closer to the viewer appear relatively bigger. In landscapes though, we tend not to use the grid so much. Instead, what you can do is think about and implement atmospheric perspective. This is the same idea as linear perspective but instead of line work, you treat things that are further away as simply having less contrast or less saturation as the things that are closer. This is actually how we see things in reality. The atmosphere or the air around us makes things that are further away appear to be less saturated or have less contrast. If you apply this to your paintings, this immediately creates a very strong illusion of depth. Creating that sense of depth is what is the key element to making your scene look real. This also goes towards creating contrast. Contrast, as I said before, is all important. You can have contrast in your colors, your tones, values, and shape. But depth really creates something of a natural contrast, something far away versus something that's close. Contrast of depth will actually create a journey for the viewer, a sense of traveling through your landscape from the foreground to the background. Of course, along the way, they'll be directed through your use of leading lines, your use of symmetry or thirds, your area of interest, or cool tones and warm tones. All of these things are going to lead and direct the eye but essentially it will be that sense of depth that will carry them through. In the next video, I'm going to talk specifically about how to create a visual sense of narrative so that once the viewer does step into your work, they can follow the story that you're telling them. 5. Why the Rule of Thirds Works: Composition for film anyway is as much a narrative tool as the script. By composing your shots, you can actually tell the audience as much if not more of what's going on in the story than a character's own dialogue. Now this is a crucial point for you to know and understand when it comes to visual language. Over and over again, I think in any tutorial course that you're going to find on background art or concept art, you're going to be told about the rule of thirds, and people often will say, "Draw your grid like this, and make sure that you place your character on these points, because this is going to create a pleasing image." The problem is that no one really explains why it makes a pleasing image or a pleasing composition, other than to say, "Well, that's where the viewer's eye lands." For me, there's so much more to the rule of thirds than just flash, and it actually has less to do with making a pleasing composition or with the fact that the audiences' eye somehow only go to these four specific points when they're looking at the frame. I'm going to explain in this video my thoughts about the rule of thirds and why it creates such a strong and dynamic picture. For me, the reason that the rule of thirds creates a strong composition is because it satisfies our narrative reading of an image. Now that might seem like a bit of a complicated thing to try and grasp, but it's the key to understanding film and understanding story and film. People often think that when we're watching a movie, we're engaged in a very passive activity compared to say, reading a book, where you have to really actively use your imagination to visualize things. But I actually think that watching a movie is just as active as reading a book, because what's happening is that you without even realizing it, you're constantly decoding some very sophisticated visual cues that altogether form a narrative, individual sense. I don't have the time or the scope in this course to go into this in depth. But if you are interested, if this has sparked your interest a little bit in understanding or learning more about visual language and how we decode or how we read film, then I really suggest that you check out something online called the Kuleshov effect. That will explain to you how editing works or tell a story and how subsequent images work together. Film conveys a very specific narrative structure or experience, and we're actively engaging in that as we watch the images, as well as while we listen to the dialogue. That's to say that the images themselves can build a story as much as the dialogue or the script. But abstract painting can tell a story, but it doesn't tell a narrative. What I mean by that is that classical Hollywood structural film uses motives such as conflict and character identification to build a narrative that has a beginning, a middle, and an end. I'm not saying it's a good way to tell a story or a bad way. In a Western context, that's how we understand story. It actually goes all the way back to ancient Greek times, has its foundation in Greek theater. To us, like it or not, we like to have a story that has a beginning, a middle, and an end. It satisfies our understanding of what a story arc is, we can relate to the hero's journey from beginning, middle to end. It's something we identify with and we go along with to see how it all pans out. The strongest motif or the strongest motivator for narrative arc, the one ingredient that sets off everything in a film, starts every story, is conflict. Conflict is present in every story that we tell. Pretty much every single story is propelled or motivated by conflict. If you try to think about it, every film that you can think of in this classical Hollywood paradigm, either has conflict at its core, whether it's inner conflict of the character, or is over conflict between characters, or it could even have subtextual conflict of ideas or themes. But the reason that we watch films and stories is simply to understand how other people resolve conflict, so that we can resolve it when we have to face it our ourselves. Now let's look at setting up and composing your shot with the rule of thirds. If you set up a shot that's completely balanced and harmonious, it simply doesn't have any conflict in it. That will come across, believe it or not, as something very stable, very ordinary, very mundane, and maybe a little bit boring. A composition that has two equal halves in the frame just naturally reads as novel, maybe traditional, but very stable. The moment you set off your composition into third, put your character off to one side in a third, you are introducing conflict. The character now is fighting for his screen space, you could say. A binary division of the frame is normal and stable. Dividing your frame up into rule of thirds creates dynamic, interesting, adventurous, and therefore pleasing images because it satisfies our narrative reading of the image. In this image here, by placing the cabin or the area of interest off into the very extreme third of the frame, you're basically giving a lot more power and dynamic quality to the surrounding environment. It gives the impression that this little cabin is isolated in the forest and is possibly at the mercy of the forest and the environment that is actually surrounding it. The two-thirds of the friend are given over to the forest, give the forest that feeling that it's dominating this cabin. That's not to say that people don't use a binary set up in their compositions, I like to use it quite a lot. A lot of filmmakers such as Wes Anderson or even Stanley Kubrick, used to create images and frames that were divided into two equal halves or had symmetry in them. Just know and understand that when you apply the rule of thirds to your image, it's not simply just because that's where the viewer's eye lands, it really has a much deeper meaning and a much deeper connotation that actually relates to how you tell a story. 6. The Importance of Visual Reasearch: In this video, I'm going to explain a way that you can work with visual research. Visual research is an essential step in your painting process because you need to have a starting point. Starting from a completely blank canvas without any prompt or any visual image to work on is very difficult. You can start from your own imagination, but unless you're very skilled and you've done this loads and loads of times over the years, it's actually a really difficult point to start from and you'll run into problems later on with your composition. The approach that I'm going to explain to you is really useful, especially when you're just starting out. I find that the best thing to do is to sit down, spend half an hour to an hour looking at reference images. All this means is that you type in the topic or the theme that you want to make your painting on and you look at the images that come up, whether it's on Google or on Pinterest, and you use these as your reference images. You're basically searching through a library of images and studying pictures on a similar theme. What you want to do at this stage is just look. Don't do any drawing or painting at all at this stage. Really just spend time to look and to give yourself time to take everything in that you're seeing. You will inevitably see things that other people don't see. You will be drawn to images that other people aren't. This process of looking and visually researching your topic is very individual and unique to you. The point is that you're going to extract ideas and notions and concepts from the stuff that you see and put that into your work in a way that nobody else will. Once you've spent a lot of time looking and you've gotten what I would call a feeling or a sense of the image that you want to create, then put all of those research images away. Try not to keep them open. Try to just trust your own instinct and your visual memory. Then start to jot down your ideas either by sketching, drawing, or painting. But again, don't immediately start drawing a big layout and don't start painting what you think is going to be the final image or the final painting. You're still at the stage in a very developmental phase of the workflow. It's very experimental. You can't jump forwards to a finished end result right away, even if you think that you can see clearly that end result in your mind's eye at this point. In the next video, I'm going to explain exactly what the next step is that once you've gathered and studied visual research. But it's really important to note this point that I'm talking about how it's still very much the early stages, the experimental stage, and so the thumbnails are not even going to relate necessarily to the final painting. I just want to say trust the process for visual research and sketching. Then you'll find that you can actually allow a lot more creativity into your work than if you had rushed forward and started in on the final painting straight away. 7. Creating Thumbnails: In this video, I'm going to explain how to setup your document for a background painting, and also get you started creating thumbnails for visual development. So when you first open up Photoshop and you hit the Create New button, you get this window, this dialogue box, which is where you basically set your document size and dimensions. So over here on the right-hand side, we're just going to make some changes in here. But just so you know, when you open up first, these are the recent documents that you would have worked on. You can also save presets. I often use a 1920 by 1080 size document, so that's saved. Then there are other tabs that have default sizes for photo, or print, or illustration, web, etc. I generally just go straight over to the right and put in my own dimensions and size. What I like to do is 1920 by 1080 is a standard rectangle ratio. What I like to do for background design is just to double that, because 1920 by 1080, even at a resolution of 300, might be a bit too small, and it's always better to work large so that you have options for creating smaller camera moves, or zoom, or cuttings. So let's do a double 1920. So that's going to be 3840, 2160. I'm going to leave the resolution there at 300, even though technically, it should be fine at 72 because this is not going to be printed. But I'd just like to give myself that actually room terms of pixels. I am going to click onto RGB color though. That is an important thing to note. RGB color refers to your computer screen and CMYK color refers to printers, printing ink. So just set it to RGB color. It does actually make a difference. You don't want to have to run into issues at the very end of your working process and then discover that your document is in the wrong color mode. Okay. So click "Create," and here we go. We've got our document. I'm going to hit "F" on my keyboard. That allows me to just use the spacebar tool to move my document around if I need to. So to start out, the first thing I'm going to do is create a set of thumbnails so that I've got some way of generating some visual ideas. As I explained in the previous video, you would have, by now, collected a load of reference images, you'll have studied the mood and the feel of images that you like. Now, it's about how you interpret that research, that visual research that you've done, and try and come up with your own ideas. The first thing I'm going to do is make a new layer above this background layer. I am going to then hit "M" on my keyboard, which will activate the marquee tool, which is up here to the left. So clicking on "M" like that, I'm going to click and drag out just a general rectangle. I'm not trying to get 1920 by 1080 ratio. I just want a general triangle shape. Going to release. That selection is now active. If I turn my brush tool and just increase the size of it, you'll see that because I've made the selection, only what's happening inside will get painted. Only the inside of that selection will actually be affected by the color, the outside won't. So I'll just delete that by hitting backspace on my keyboard. What I want to do now is just start very roughly and loosely blocking out an idea for a composition. At this stage, I'm not going to do anything about details, I'm just literally blocking out color and tonal values. I don't even really necessarily need to have to worry about color. It's more about using tones of even one color to create a small thumbnail composition. I'm going to now switch to the brush tool and literally start fitting this area in with color. I've opened up the brushes, the landscape brushes folder, and I can choose really any of these brushes to get started, and it's just a matter of filling my little thumbnail area with color, but trying to keep in mind and keep focused on the fact that I am working a little bit with the compositional idea that far away things are lighter and foreground things are darker. So forest scene to me will have trees in the foreground, and that I can just indicate with loose lines that really, at this stage, I'm not getting into details at all. I know I'll probably have slight foresty trees in the background. As you can see, I'm getting very abstract with this and that's the whole idea, because the minute you start working into details and trying to figure things out, and be precise at this point, you have lost any hope really of letting ideas that you've never thought of come to you. You cancel that out immediately. So it's best to stay loose and very, very free form at this stage. That's one little composition. Command or Control D to deselect. Go back to m. I'm going to do another. I don't want to just do one or two. I'm going to try and work up four or even five of these ideas, these thumbnail sketches. Really, if you're not getting anywhere, if you're feeling like this process of using color and stuff is a bit complicated or a bit frustrating, you can, by all means, do this thumbnail process with a line drawing. So if I were to just even sketch out my ideas with line, and then go back in and fill it in with color, that's totally fine as well. Let's see, maybe for this one, I'll do something that's more scenic with mountains in the background, rolling hills. In fact, I'm even thinking now as I'm doing this, maybe this is not a cabin in the woods, but a tent, and maybe this is a lake and there's people camping by the lake, but still keeping that foresty theme going. Draw in some trees. Okay. So you could do a simple line drawing as well and if you wanted to add color to that, on your layer stack, if you hit Command or Control as you click on the New Layer icon, that creates layer below the active layer. So it's just very a handy way to do that instead of creating a layer above and then dragging it underneath. You get the idea. Even this is a little bit too much detail and I'm not all that happy that I'm painting in a little fire in the foreground here. So I won't do too much. I think I'll just move on. I want to do one more thumbnail. These two are not quite there yet in terms of my visual idea of what I've got in my mind. So I'm going to give it one more go. Maybe I'll switch to a brown color for this. Zoom out a bit, that also helps. The idea with doing this is that I'm framing an area of interest. I have in my mind that the cabin is going to be around about here in the composition, so using these trees as a framing device is very useful to lead the viewer's eye towards that area of interest, especially when everything is so muddy and strange as these thumbnails are. It makes sense to me, certainly, if you're the person painting them, it 'll make sense to you, but you want it to also read for somebody else as well. So you have to share these thumbnails with somebody else and discuss what direction you want to go in. Let's say we've got something like that going on. This may look like nothing at the moment, but I've just had the idea that maybe this cabin is here on this side and it's surrounded by a forest, and there's a little stream running through the frame like this. Again, leading the viewer's eye towards this area. So I'll do a few more of these, but I think you get the idea of how you can go about creating a thumbnail. I want you to give it a go and use, experiment with the brushes that you've been given in the brush pack. Experiment with the brushes in the brush pack and see if you can come up with three or four, or hopefully five, or even 10 thumbnail ideas just for composition and for total contrast. When you're ready, meet me in the next video and I'm going to take one of these thumbnails and start to refine it a bit more, and try and take it to the next stage. 8. Making the Sketch: The next step in the process is, once you've got a few thumbnails based on your visual research and your mood board and all of that, the next step is to take one or a couple of these thumbnails and start to work on it and refine it for a finished drawing. I have been looking at these. I also did a few other examples just to show you some more better ones. This was my first pass at doing some thumbnails. I also worked up a few extra ones on the same theme exactly. You can see that you can actually work a lot on this. It's very quick. It's not meant to be a detailed, long process. You can fire these little thumbnails out, quick and fast, and get your ideas down. But all in all, I seem to be going over the exact same idea in pretty much all of them. There's a pretty standard horizon line going across the middle. As I mentioned before, I don't really mind about that. I think that I am trying to create a scene for a shot in a movie or an animation, a concept scene, so I don't need anything too wild or too dynamic. It's supposed to just set the stage. The other thing is that, composition-wise, I am gravitating towards having a cabin or an area of interest on one of my thirds, and also using the trees as much as possible to frame out my composition. Finally, I am trying to play with the notion of light versus dark in my values just to give the sense of going back. What I'm going to do next is I think I'm just going to grab this thumbnail here, just going to go command, X to cut it, hide both of those layers, command, V to paste it down. I can get rid of these two other layers now. This is going to be my thumbnail layer, so I'm going to double-click on that layer name and just type in, Thumbnail, then scale it up using the transform tool. I'm going to do pretty much the same process again in terms of blocking in. I'm not going to start making this thumbnail a final image. I'm not going to start working in details onto this thumbnail. What I'm going to do is use this thumbnail as a starting point to generate a very rough sketch, and from there I can then start adding details. I'm going to lower the opacity down just to lock it back a little bit. I'll lock that layer to make sure that I don't draw on that layer, and then create a new layer above that to start afresh. I usually just hit D on my keyboard and that turns my color swatches to black and white. So I'm in black and I can just maybe start sketching out this composition. The first thing I do is always just generally make some kind of a frame. I want a tree in this area of my frame. It's in the foreground, so I've got a bank of the ground just rising up in my foreground here. I'm not sure yet how far across this goes. Maybe there's another element over here of trees or something like that, but this tree is the next thing that's important in my composition. Then back there is this cabin which, in my thumbnail, is really too big. I want it to be a bit smaller. I'm just sketching something very rough, very loose. Maybe it's got a porch in the front and steps going down. There's probably vegetation around it. As I said, I know I want this to be a bit of a snowy scene, so I'm keeping that in mind. Foreground or the midground is going to be snowy, there'll be snow on the trees, and then in the background there will be forest. Be aware that, when somebody says draw a forest or paint a forest, you don't have to get super detailed. You don't have to think, "Oh God, now I've got to draw all of the leaves, all of the branches." You'll be amazed at how much information you can give the viewer or give someone looking at your image by just indicating vertical elements like this. I know that sounds very simplistic, but to me, that reads as forest. That's what you have to keep in mind going forward with this process, is, obviously you want to have detail and you want things to look like they're supposed to look, but there are certain things that you can do to just make the drawing be realistic without having to labor over and get lost in incredibly unimportant details. The most important thing for this background is a mood. It's not really a detail or realism. You want to be able to create a mood because mood is what drives the story. This thing here that I'm drawing is going to be rocks, I want this cabin to be quite far back there in the distance, not so far back. If you're unhappy at all with any of your line work at this stage, just move it. Just grab it, select it with the lasso tool, hit V on your keyboard when you hover over the selection and that makes it movable, then you can move it. Then deselect, command or control, D. Actually, I think all of that needs to move to the right-hand side a bit, so let's select this. That doesn't look like anything to anybody else, but to me, it's a very good start. I feel like I've got my composition organized and, in my mind, I know what's going to go where. I might now, at this stage, you don't have to do this, but what I might do is just refine it a little bit further. So I'm going to take this one step further to get some of the line work a bit cleaner, move things around just slightly how I want them. All I'm going to do is lower the opacity of that first sketch, create a new layer above it. It's best practice just to lock that underneath layer so you don't draw on it. I'm going to go in and just slightly refine this drawing so that it's not too messy looking. I want it to be a little bit more readable, a little bit clearer. It'll make the next phase of the drawing that much better. I'll just fly through this very quickly. So there's my more refined drawing. That was my rough, and I've cleaned it up a little bit. I think I'm going to just leave it at that. In the next video, join me, I'm going to start blocking in my values. Not so much color, but values, tones, and just to make sure that I am able to create a very believable sense of depth based on this line-drawing. When you're ready, I'll see you in the next video. 9. 09. Blocking-in Values: The important thing as I keep [inaudible] for background art is to create a sense of depth in your frame and create a believable scene that you can step into. Right now in this video, I want to lay the groundwork for that by just blocking in basic tones and values in order to set the groundwork for that sense of depth. I'm not going to do anything other than lay in tones along a specific value scale going from light to dark. It doesn't matter really what color I choose at this stage, because I can always work up my color later, my hue. But for value, I want to focus on just working with nearly one color so that I don't confuse myself, and I can stay within that light to dark range. I'm going to pick a bluish tone because I want the scene to be wintry, to be cold and obviously that's going to work well if I stick within that color spectrum. So something in a blue range, something desaturated. What you can do is, if you want to switch between various brushes and you don't want to have to continually right-click and choose a brush. What I like to do is go up to window and set this panel here brushes. When you do that, it actually pops open and stays open. You can either minimize it if it's too big, you can also come down to the slider, which makes the icons a little bit smaller icons. Let's bring the icons down a little bit. I like to have it about that size. Okay. So again, this is my landscape brushes pack, which I've left for you. If you haven't got this yet, just go and download it and installed it in Photoshop and then we're ready to go. Let me lower the opacity of my drawing down. Lock that layer and create a new layer above it. I'm also going to switch between brush and eyedropper icon by simply going in brush mode. Just hold down option or Alt on my keyboard brings up the eye dropper tool. Once you make a color selection, you can release option and you're back into brush. It's a great way, as I've mentioned before to select and paint at the same time. All right. As I said, I wanted to have snow, so I want to bring some snow elements into the foreground. But I'm keeping these big upright trees that are framing my area of interest quite dark, and then fading out my mid ground. So in the next video, I'm going to start refining my color blocking, it's another step in the blocking phase. But this time I'm going to start slowing down and working a little bit more deliberately. So I'll see you in the next video. 10. Colours and Tone: In this phase, we're going to start bringing in color and trying to refine the composition beyond just simple rise or dark tones. The first thing I'm going to do is create a background layer of color so that I'm not working off of this white plain background. It doesn't matter hugely, but just a very light subtle tone in the background there is going to help a lot. With that done, I'm now going to go back up to my paint layer up here and I want to break this up. I could have done this in the first phase, did it on different layers. But the truth is that sometimes when you are just in your brush mode and painting, you tend to get distracted from making new layers each time. So for that first, initial pass, it's fine to do all of your painting on one layer, and indeed, you can do the entire thing on one layer. Just be aware that that is definitely an option, if you want to treat this in almost a similar fashion to a digit or a traditional painting, you can definitely do so. I am just very used to creating artwork on layers and being able to move things around if I need to and grab elements, scale them up very, very quickly. So that's why I like to separate things out. So this foreground element I'm going to use command or control x to cut it, and then command or control if you're on a PC plus shift and v, will paste it in place. If you just press Control v or Command v it puts it in the middle. I'm going to undo that. Command control plus shift and v paste this into the exact place where you cut it from. That's there, and because I missed some of my rocks in the background, I'm going to quickly go in and do that. Just mend that up. Next up, I'm going to select all of this. I'm not selecting these upright trees in the background, but this area and this tree here, and all the way down here. I'm going to do the same thing. Cut that, paste it in place. Now I've pretty much got a foreground, a mid-ground, and a background, and I'm going to stick to those three areas of the composition, and I will add layers as I go to build up each of these. But just with that, in my mind, knowing that I can paint something behind that tree and not have to worry about it is great. At this stage, I'm going to delete. I can delete my thumbnail. I'll keep my sketch for now just in case I need to refer back to it at any stage and I might just put it on top. It's very handy to turn it on and off and see if there's details in the sketch that you've missed out, like rocks in the foreground or my river or stream. But I'm going to focus on painting on these layers from now on. I've switched to a bit of a brown color. I'm going to start working into this full-grown tree here. If you want to change the direction of your brush, you can just right-click and move this arrow around. Some of the brushes are very specific in their shape, and it's useful to just turn it around if you need to. For this phase, I would say you really don't have to rush it at all. You can take your time. We are still trying to stay zoomed out, still very loose and we're not trying to make details yet. Now I'm using this light blue tone throughout and keeping the palette quite consistent. Not going to mix up too many colors into the scene. It'll all be within the same spectrum, more or less. On the rocks here I want to give the impression of snow building up because that will define the shapes a lot better than just having a bulky gray mass, and I can also switch to a much darker tone and that'll give some definition to the bottom of these shapes. For the background, I'm using one of the sample brushes that has very sharp or abstract texture going on, and I don't mind about that. These marks here are just really to indicate scrubby, bushy shrubs at the background, and forest undergrowth. So I'm not worried too much about defining shapes at all. I just want to give that impression. The last thing that I will do in this pass anyway is to define the section of the backgrounds. I'm going to bring that tree towards more of a resolved look and also work on the cabin. As I said before, my process is very experimental as I go. So I can't tell you which exact brush you should use for which part of your background. It's up to you to play around with these brushes and with the shapes of them to get the effect that you want. It's all about creatively using brush shapes to make a specific effect, and not really so much about using one or other of the brushes to define something at all. Certainly not at this stage, not in the beginning phase. So don't worry too much about what brush you should use. As you can see from the way I'm doing it, I'm literally experimenting and trying out brushes as I go. I got a little bit too detailed in that carbon. I'm going to stop myself from making any more details there. I'm just going to try and bring in some final marks for my trees. Now I'm going to try and fix up the trees in the background a little bit, get them a bit more resolved. What I'm going to do is I'm going to create a new layer above that rough layer there and just create a straight line. I'm holding down "Shift" and just making a straight mark like that then come out to just turn it on its side or turn it a little bit, and I can now add to that if I want, and then I can duplicate this by clicking and holding down "Option" or "Alt" on your keyboard and that just drags it across. I'm really trying to just refine these trees in the background by making thinner, more precise tree trunks, and I don't want them to all be straight up and down because obviously in a forest, the trees are always at a slight angle. None of them are really completely vertical. But using thin lines like this gives that impression that they're a bit more further away than the foreground tree. Now I'm going to just merge these two layers together. These at my new set of trees. Merge layers, and there we go, and that's looking a little bit neater and tidier and a bit more realistic. I'm happy enough with that. That looks a lot more resolved, and the impression of the forest is a lot stronger now that I fixed up those background trees. I'll stop it there for now. I'm going to come back in the next video and then start to work up the background from the background towards the foreground and start to bring in some more detail. So when you're ready, join me in the next video. 11. Painting the Forest Trees: I've blocked in some basic tones and colors. Now, I'm going to just work in that process a little bit more. I've got my cabin on this layer, I'm going to just right-click over this layer and merge that down, so that's now all on one layer. It's looking pretty close to my sketch, which is good. I happen to kind of gone off too far in terms of the direction of the sketch. What I'm going to do now in this video is work on the background a little bit. For this, in a very small way, I'll start to use some of the highly-textured stamp brushes with images and they might disperse the forest. That was my row four and I can delete that. Create a new layer above that blue background layer and with brush selected, going to choose a tone that's a little bit grayish sort of range. What you can do with this brush, it changes size depending on how hard you press down. I just go like that and then maybe do another line underneath with a lighter color. In the layer stack on the Layer icon and hold Command or CTRL and click "New Layer" that puts that layer underneath. It's a bit blue looking to my eye, hold on. Let me undo dash, just make this a bit grayer, looks better. Just like that, instantly we've got a forest. I really love these accidental brush marks that appear when you work abstractly and without focusing too much on details, stuff can happen that really adds to a lot more dynamic ways that if you had tried to go in and draw things. So this to me is reading a little bit like fog or mist, or it could be smoke. I'm going to leave it exactly as it is right now, I think if I just click on it, it's on this mid ground layer here behind the cabin. That's fine, that's actually cool. I'm going to leave dash. I'll turn off my drawing just to have a look at the painting a little bit. What I need to do is just figure out these trees. Those trees are on this layer back here and I'm going to just make these a little bit more tree-like. Since I have started to introduce these very photorealistic brushes back there, I might also use a couple of these branches or dead tree brushes and work them into the composition as well. Just not overly, but start to work on it a little bush. But first off, I will resolve my forest and get my forest finalized. So creating a new layer, I'm going to now switch to the lasso tool and carve out a shape like this, then switch to my brush tool. I can sample a darker color for now and I'll just use one of the regular brushes that I've been using and paint inside. Then the same thing again over here, using the lasso tool to create a more defined shape. This whole process is really about now bringing this background, sort of forest, to give it a bit more detail and a bit more resolution based on the two palaces that I've previously done. Eventually, I'm going to actually add the branches onto these uprights and make it look like there's a bit of a canopy and maybe give it some more definition in terms of twigs and branches. But for now, I just want this to be a lot more defined than they are. You can really mix up your shapes in terms of organic shapes and linear, sometimes I'm using the lasso to create those very straight edges, but then oftentimes I'll just switch back to a brush and try and just paint or draw a bit more organically, especially for the branches coming off the sides. Whatever you feel makes the image look more pleasing to you, there's no set rules whatsoever. All by trying to train yourself for composition, see what works. Train your eye in that way. That just comes over time with practice and with doing this sort of approach, the style of painting over and over again. As you can see, it's a lot of experimentation and a lot of seeing what works where. I can hit the "Undo" button as many times as I need to and just keep going. But this is definitely starting to feel a lot more defined and a lot more resolved already, even just with, I think making those straight lines, straight up and down lines with the lasso tool really does help as well. When you're working with the lasso tool like this, just make sure that you are putting your marks on separate layers so that you can grab it and move it if you need to. You don't want to paint down onto something else and then have to try and erase it out. I'm just going to draw by hand twiggy, sort of branchy looking things in the background, sort of dead trees in the dead of winter. I can use also this very small drawing brush to start to bring in a little bit of a hint of texture, not too much to start and see where that goes. That's actually come a long way, that's a very good stage to look back and just see where do I need to tidy up on the right-hand side there, it's a bit of a gap, so I can paint that in on that layer. The forest is looking pretty good now, that's definitely a lot more defined than it was before. In the next video, I'm going to start working on bringing detail into the mid ground, work on the cabin a little bit, I think. Also start to bring in textures for some of the scrubby, brushy elements or bushes and trees that I want to have building up. When you're ready, meet me in the next video. 12. Adding Textures and Details: A few of these brushes do have very specific stumpy looks like this one, 301. I mean, what I tend to do, and this is a suggestion if you want to work with something like that, is I'll make a new layer underneath. Say I want to put it in the background over there, make a new layer, select my color, something dark, and stamp it down but then using the transform tool, you can rotate it, scale it down, move it into place. Then I'll usually switch to the eraser and just knock some of it back so that it now looks very unobtrusive to the eye and very, very subtle. I'm going to use a couple more of these. Let me make it even darker and put one in the foreground. I'm not going do too much of those bushes because it can get very obvious very quickly. Sometimes I actually just prefer to work with a drawing brush and actually just draw on branches if I need to. What I want to do now is try and bring some snow texture into the composition and that's very important for a wintery forestry feel. I'm going to start painting on to my trees. Before I move on, I'm going to try and consolidate some of these layers. I always start out by grouping them just to see where I'm at. This group contains shrubs and scrubby things. This is my main mid ground layer, so I'm just going to call that mid ground. That's a texture layer. Texture and texture. These are my trees, so I'm going to call these mid ground trees and these two layers here are my background trees. That's my foreground. Just call that layer foreground. For example, if I start to work on my foreground tree and create some snow texture on it, what I'd like to do is come over to that layer and using my command or control key on my keyboard, I'll press down on command and click into the thumbnail icon of that layer and that selects everything on that layer. I'm not going to worry about this. All I'm concerned about is the tree. I would be able to paint on the tree and stay within this boundary area. I'm going to make a new layer above that, switch to something very textured that's going to give me that feel of snow. A brush that's quite maybe something like this, which is a bit broken up. Because I'm on a layer above it, if it doesn't work, I can just delete that layer. But I'm going to lightly, that looks very snowy, brush onto there. Now it might look a bit too much. I find that with this, the process is you want to create a texture and create an effect, and then knock it back, scale it back because more often than not, it's a bit too much more than you want. Just undo and then come back in with my eraser. Erase it back a bit because we don't want all of that. Now I'm just going to repeat this process for the background trees, just giving a hint of snow on the tree trunks back there. In my folder of mid ground trees, I can command select into the thumbnail and get the selection just right so that I can paint over and just want to lightly brush on some white snowy texture from the bottom upwards. I'm not going to cover each and every branch or I'm not going to cover the whole entire tree trunk. I'm just lightly trying to give the impression of snow. Maybe the snow is coming from the left hand side and so just I need to brush on to the left of each of these branches. That's looking actually quite good. I'll leave it there. That's pretty much the most I want to do in this pass. In the next video though, I'm going to start treating the cabin and the tree on the right hand side. When you're ready, join me in the next video and we'll start to add those details in. 13. Adding Snow on the Trees: But at this stage, I think you can clearly see the whole painting is really starting to come together. I'm still very much working in this abstract and known defined way and using as much as possible the texture brushes that I have at my disposal. This is really what the process of concept painting is all about. The final product always looks so polished and finished, but the actual process is much more loose and much more intuitive than you would normally think. I want to encourage you at this stage to keep that in mind. Try to avoid getting bogged down in details, drawing like branches and leaves. Try to avoid going zooming into one specific area and corner and working on it. Try to keep zoomed out, keep your eye on the whole composition, making sure that everything is reading cohesively. In this video, I want to add more snow to the trees on the right. I want to add snow and texture to this cabin and then also make this front area a bit more resolved. If I can get through that, then I'm actually pretty much nearly finished. After that, once those two or three areas are resolved, then it's just a matter of putting on some nice effects and adding atmosphere and tone, which is one of the easiest parts. Let me just finish off the tree first and then I will get to the cabin because I do want to talk about the cabin a little bit. It's an important element. It's actually the focal point of this painting. I'll see how we get on with the trees, if I can get this finished, and then I'll talk to you about that cabin. There's a couple of things I want to point out about it. First off, this tree, it is still on this main midground layer. If I were to select the contents of that layer, it gives me a pretty much a good enough definition. I might just hit L on my keyboard. Where are we? Hold down Shift, so that I get that little plus icon. What I'm going to do is just make a straight line around the edge with this selection. That's a bit better. I just want to refine that edge, so that I can paint on it. Then I'm going to make a new layer above it. Again, in the same way that I treated this tree, I will do some snowy effects going up along the side, keeping it consistent with all the other trees. I'm pretty happy with the trees, I'm going to leave them at that for now. I might work back into them a little bit later. But for now, I think they're okay. It's good enough for me to move on. I want to just start to work on this cabin a little bit. In the previous video, I did explain a lot about how character needs to infuse your painting. Really, you can have an empty landscape scene like this and still speak about character, which in turn speaks about story. As I mentioned before, concept artist is different from an illustration. You're not just setting a scene, you are telling a story within your painting. The way you do that is to hint a character, even if you don't have an actual character in the image. A built structure always points to some kind of character that there's a person there. In the next video, I'm going to talk a little bit more about this concept or this idea and explain how I'm going to approach finalizing the cabin in the corner. When you're ready, join me in the next video. 14. Painting the Cabin: I originally thought that I was going to have a finalized or very finished rendered cabin over here in this section of the painting. But I'm actually now beginning to think that this dilapidated looking random cabin is quite nice as it is. I think that as the painting progress, the mood that has come together out of this has a very specific tone and this ramshackle run-down and deserted cabin really fits in with that mood that's being created. I'm actually not going to make a fully finished cabin. I'm going to try and keep some of this rough, edgy, broken down looking feel as I paint over it a little bit more. So in other words, the feeling that the timber is broken and falling apart, the gaps in the walls and things like that. I'm going to keep and I'm just going to try and add a little bit of detail and put snow onto the roof. It's on that mid green layer and as usual, I'm going to make a layer above that. Then this time I can't zoom in a little bit. If I hit "F" on my keyboard, it'll bring up this full-screen view. Actually now you can start to see that if the painting is definitely coming together and I'm very happy with the mood that's being established. Viewing it like this in full screen though, I can see that around the area of the cabin, I'm going to need to make a little bit more defined paths along those shrubby, bushy undergrowth areas just beneath the tree. So I might just take a couple of minutes and do that now. So what I'm going to do is use one of these stamp brushes, dead trees, or dead branches. Forget the color. If it's not too dark, then it'll look quite subtle and it'll definitely add a lush. I'll also use the eraser to knock back any of those marks if they are to the standard too much. Then I'll just brush on some texture around the cabin to set it into the background a bit better. I want to give the impression that the cabinets on a slight bank that's going down to the stream or the creek that's running through the picture plane. This stamp brushes are great, but you do have to use them a little bit cautiously as I keep reiterating, but I think I'll leave it at that for now and start working on the cabin property. The level of detail that I want to add onto this cabin has to really relate to this idea or this notion that the timber pieces are a bit broken. I'm trying to use a dark tone to indicate the broken edges and then a light tone Just to pick up highlights where I think maybe the ambient light is falling onto these pieces of timber and really that's all. I'm not going to go in and do wood grade or anything like that. I'm now going to go in and try to add snow onto the cabin. So once the snow is on it actually does start to look a lot better and more realistic. So it takes a while to get it right because I don't want to cover the whole roof with white. I want to give that impression of snow drifts and also keep in mind that the roof is broken in places and so I need to bring some of the roof back in. It's just a matter of working with the brush and then switch into the eraser as needed. Then in the foreground, I'm going to bring in some more organic shapes to indicate rocks and to indicate that bank. So right now before I go any further. I'm going to go in and consolidate layers. I can merge these two layers together. Merge layers. So just merging down layers where I can to make sure that things don't get completely messy. I usually create a new layer when I start applying texture, just in case that texture doesn't work. But once it's created and it does work and I'm happy with the look of it then I don't really need it to be on a separate layer. I'm not going to really go back in and change it. At that point I can merge it down. So it's looking a little bit nature in my layer stack and I'll continue going. So these top layers, that's my texture layer over my cabin. That's just these foreground branches on the left here. So I'll leave those as is. 15. Creating the Story in the Painting: Well let's see, we are definitely towards the final lap around this painting. What I was talking about in the last video was the notion that this cabin is going to introduce story and character to our scene. I've decided that I want to take it one step further. First of all, I thought about having a normal, regular looking cabin, and then as the painting progressed and the mood and the atmosphere got established within the painting, I decided to leave it as this derelict, run-down shack. But now I'm thinking, What if there was a hint of somebody inside it? I'm going to try and create a fire glow that's coming from inside the cabin. There's a couple of reasons why I want to do this. One, is because it's going to immediately introduce to us this idea of somebody in the scene and immediately spark interest of the audience wanting to know, who is this person? Why are they there? How did they get in there? It opens up story in a major way and the other reason is allowing, by choosing to create kind of just an effect of the fire glow coming from inside. That's going to introduce a really nice contrast in color. I'm going to work with bright, oranges and reds and give a little bit of a very subtle glow. But that will be enough to contrast all of the blues and all of the cold turns that I've been using throughout the piece, and that very nicely goes back to the other concept of creating contrast in your images. Whether it's through the composition or through your choice of colors, contrast is a really nice thing to have to make your composition more dynamic. What I'm going to do is identify where my cabin is again. That's cool, my cabin is on this layer. What I'm going to first of all do is make sure that I've got gaps in my cabin for the light to leak through. That just means going in and erasing out some of cabin. That was my very first initial drawing. No, that's my texture on the top. This is my cabin here. I could also hide all of these layers so that I can see exactly what I'm doing. I'm just going to erase out some of these. Turn everything back on, turn that on. Underneath that layer, I will command control, click to create a layer. I'm just going to use a regular round brush from the general brushes folder and choose an orange color. Just go through yellow first, so something like that. I could even bring the opacity of my brush down a bit. Looks like there is a fire glow in there, but to really sell the idea, I need to try and make that fire glow spill out. 16. Adding Glow for the Fire: Now what I'm going to do, in the last video, I just created the glow that you see inside of this cabin. Again, introducing the notion that somebody is probably like hunker down, hiding out, or taking shelter there. That's that layer right there, glow. What I want to do now in this video is just have that spill out a little bit onto the surroundings, and just enhance it a little bit more. You don't want to overdo it at all like this. I don't want to start painting red reflections on the trees or anything. All I'm going to do is, in the brush mode, I might go up to a regular soft round brush. Regular soft round brush at one of the Default Photoshop brushes, increase the size of it a lot so that it's nice and big and it can be diffused. Then just selecting with the eye dropper, one of these glowy tones, either the red or the yellow. I'm going to just put a few dabs down around the outside like that. Now this is on its own separate layer. Let me see. Hold on. This is on its own separate layer, and that's good because then I can really play with that. I can scale it down. I can bring the opacity down if I want to. Also, let's have a quick look at blending modes and see if that's going to do anything. Right now it's on normal. If I come down to Overlay or Soft Light, that really knocks it back quite a bit, or Hard Light gives it a bit more of an intense glow. I think I'll go with overlay for now. Bring the opacity down a little bit, maybe around 70 percent is fine. You can always add more it's a lot easier to add more rather than to take it away. I don't know. We'll see. The other thing that I want to do is I want to add in some smoke effects. Let me just see if it's going to make any difference if it's on the snow. Point to the mouse here. It kind of looks like the barn is on fire though, and I don't want to give that impression. I just want it to be that it's coming from the inside, so that's maybe a bit too much. Let me just take away all of this. Erase that out. I think what I'll do is I'll create a smoke layer. Let me just call this glow too, so that I know what that is. I'll make a new layer above that and on this layer begin with this, or actually, you know what? I might have some smoke brushes. Let me come down and see. Do I have anything in my folder? I have texture brushes, that will do for smoke. I've got one that's called "Smoke". We can also look at Mist. Let's go with this for now. I'm going to choose a kind of gray color. That's going to work very well, I think. Touch of blue in there. Now it's starting to look really nice. That looks like there's actually a fire being lit inside and somebody is in there. Doesn't look like the actual barn itself is on fire. Let me just do this really quick. There we go. Put some snowy tops onto these trees back here. I'm going to double-click on that layer, call that layer "Smoke". Go back to the Smoke. Rush for a minute. I think that's looking a lot better. In the next video, join me, I'm going to paint in the stream or the creek that I want to see running through here. Then I'm going to finalize the painting and call it done because right now I'm very happy with where I've got it to. The mood has really established, it's a very nice, loose and painterly scene. There is the element of character in it, the element of story, and it just needs to be finished and finalized. We're on the final stretch, when you're ready, join me in the next video. 17. Painting the Forest Creek: Really the very last thing that I want to work on in this painting is to add in the forest creek, or the little stream that I envisioned in my thumbnail. It's very straightforward. I mean, there are a number of ways you can do it, but I have approached this whole entire painting with a very intuitive and direct painting approach, which basically means that I've drawn or painted everything. I haven't used photo textures, and I haven't really used masking layers. I'm going to continue in that. You can obviously use a photo texture, drag in a photo of a river or a stream if you wanted to, but it's so easy and straightforward to just draw one. In this video, I will show you how I'm going to do that, and then I'll work towards finalizing the whole thing and then wrapping up. Let's choose a layer that we're going to put it on. Obviously, it's going to be behind this foreground layer. On that layer I might hit "Command" or "Control" in my new layer icon so that underneath it, and then with the Lasso Tool, I'll carve out a bit of a shape. It's going to come around like this. I can see where I've generally indicated where I wanted to go, but I know I want it to be trailing off into those shrubs and bushes at the back. That's my shape defined and I will hit "G" on my keyboard. I wanted to go with something of a dark color. Obviously, it's a very moody piece. It's not a bright sunny day, so I don't want my stream to be a very bright blue. I want to keep it within that very dark range. Also, to add the feeling of being in a forest. I'll just click into there and there it is. Already I've even got paint on this layer that covers it up, which is good. That's going to add to that. What I want to do is give the impression that this is iced over. So let me just call this stream and I'll make a new layer above that. Building on these areas here with my brush, I'm going to indicate some buildup of snow on the banks and just lightly brush on like that. I could even choose a slightly darker tone to give the hint of a shadow. That's just the banks of the stream, that's the stream itself. The next thing I'm going to do is between these two layers, let me just say banks, B-A-N-K-S, so I know what that is. I'm going to try and create a bit of a reflection. If I come down to this folder here, which is my mid grown trees, right there, I'm going to hit "Command/Control J" on my keyboard that duplicates that entire folder. Then I'll right-click and merge this into one flattened out layer. I'm going to grab that, drag it up in between stream and banks, then I'm going to come up to Edit and go to Transform and flip this vertical. Then I'll use the Command T option to just select it and then drag it down. So it's pretty much reflecting the trees above. But I'm going to grab each of the corners here, holding "Command" or "Control" on my keyboard just to give a little tiny hint of perspective, click this "Check" icon to commit to that. Now, I'm going to go over to the layer, I'm going to hold down this time "Option" or "Alt" and that brings up this little mask or clipping icon and what you do is you just click in-between the two layers and it clips that image to the one below. It looks okay, you can make any adjustments after that if you want. What I'll do is actually change the blending mode to multiply. No, I think just leave it. What about overlay? Let's take the opacity down a little bit. It's not so bright. If anything jumps out, you can just change it. Erase this because that looks a bit too bright. Those marks look a big bright. No one's going to go in and see if you copy the exact same tree down directly. It's just to give an impression. With that in place, I'm actually going to create another layer but I want this other layer to be clipped to the stream as well. So I'll drag it in-between and then it automatically clips as well to the lower layer. Now, I'm going to try and do some effects of ice or snow. I'll do that with the brush. Let me see, I'll choose a big texture brush, something like that because I know this brush is very snowy looking. I can drag it above that layer once the layer mask is clipped. I'm not crazy about that brush actually. Let's see. Yeah. There we go. That's nice. You just need a couple of streaks like this to give that sense of there's ice across the stream. It's looking nice and reflectiony. I'm going to choose just a regular drawing brush and make some little spots here and there. We really don't need much more than that. But we could experiment with some of these [inaudible] effects. Or are they? Well, that's a good one. The rough round bristle is also a good one to use. It's a nice streaky thing. I was looking at the light beam. This is a very dodgy brush to use because the minute you put it down, it looks so obvious. But maybe even just one thing like that might work. I don't know at all. Possibly not. But I'll leave that to you to experiment with if you want to. I'm not going to bother to reflect this tree into the creek because the next and final phase that I want to do is create a vignette around the edges. That'll darken up dark corners, so I'm not going to need that. But I do want to just do a little bit more on the ice. I think that that looks okay. Believe it or not, let me just put this into a folder, call this whole group our stream. That's pretty much it. That is our painting, nearly 100 percent complete. As I mentioned, the very last thing I'm going to do is add a bit of atmosphere, some fog and vignette around the edge. So when you're ready, join me in the last video of our process and we'll finalize this painting completely. 18. Final Touches: The final touches on this painting, the adding of the atmosphere and the effect is so super-simple. Like anything else that I've said previously, you don't want to overdo it. You really want to just keep it as subtle as you can. I'm just seeing a few spots here and there that I want to fix up. What I would do is basically, I'll make a new layer above everything and I'll call this layer vignette. The reason we do a vignette is just again, to reinforce the focal point. A vignette sort the viewers eyes towards the very center of your composition to where the area of interest is or the action, the staging of the scene. It's commonly used. It's very common in film. All you do is you grab a dark color. Let's go with [inaudible] color. You want an even-ish, kind of a brush, not something that's going to read as, like, for example, forest fog. No, not really. Let's just go with one of the soft round brushes, increase the size and just paint on. Now I know this looks incredibly drastic, don't worry. I'm not really going to leave it like this. Painted on [inaudible]. In the layer stack, change this blending mode to multiply and then bring the opacity down to about 50 or even 30 percent, something like that. It's going to add a lot more of a mood to your painting. I hide it, it looks very flat. If I add, it adds a little bit more depth. You can also change the color of this vignette. I'm not happy with it. It looks a bit gray to me. Hit command Control U to bring up hue saturation sliders. Let's see if we can get it looking a bit more blue. I think that ought to do it. That's it, guys. We're actually completely and actually finished. I'm going to lock that layer because it's supposed to be just the top layer. Underneath it, you can experiment with putting a mist or fog. I always like to put in a little bit of a ground fog or ground mist. Let's go back to our mist brush. See what that looks like. I'll choose a light color. That's the end of the process. I'm going to call this painting done. It's a finished realized concept painting for a background, for a scene in a movie or an animated film. If you hand this off to a client, it will give the director or the producer the exact visual information that they need for the scene that there is story, there is composition, and there's also a hint of character in here. I hope you enjoy the process. All that's left for me to do really is in the next video to thank you for watching and to give you some pointers on where to go to from here. Join me in the next video where we'll wrap up.