Create your own found footage monsters

1. Create your own found footage monsters: Hi there, I'm back and I'm an illustrator and production artist. In this lesson, we can be making spooky found footage illustrations. We're going to go over how to source your photographs, how to prepare them with the art of photo bashing, and how to design an integrate your creatures to make them look authentic. If that sounds like fun to you, and I'll see you next video. 2. Picking your photograph: To start, I'm going to go over where you can find some interesting photographs for your found footage, illustration and what's best to look for and just kind of go through some of the ones I found. Obviously the best pictures you can find are the ones that you take yourself. That way you have much greater control over the composition. You can take them with a flashlight or with the flash of your phone or a camera at dusk or at night or any really time as long as you have a good grasp of the maintain the spooky in your shot needs to look like the photograph was taken offhandedly, but if you looked back, there was something in it that's, is hidden in the shadows. Or if you want, you can just grab images of a Google or images on Flickr. It's fine as long as you don't plan to sell them in any way. These are just for fun. So they went break anybody's copyright. Important thing is to have a good sense of staging where you want the monster to be. So these are some of the ones I gathered together. Mature mix of photographs I've taken myself and one of the Zofran off the Internet. So let's just have a nice sort of feeling of presence. And if I have a feeling of drama, so I like this one because it's very misty with the snow and the fog. And this, I thought it'd be another fun one, something huge looming in the background. And these ones I've taken off of YouTube, just to screen caps of found footage, pieces that people upload or from those sort of YouTube channels where they love to put the red circles in the thumbnail, kind of not Chris shot. And then it's like it breaks red circled like there's something here, something here. And it never is like your watch hours and hours of these things. You'll never see his spooky monster. You'll never see a ghost. But you can if you put your ghost in there. And that's what we're going to be doing next. So something to look out for and the composition of the pictures is, as I said before, we want to look a little offhand because that makes them feel more authentic. A lot of these because the screen grabs from somebody's stream. So I have chosen a nice composition so you can see all the lines follow. So this area here, we want to see something here. And we can, but it also means we can put something in here. This little extra scarier, something a little bit more hidden. Whereas I'd say a not necessarily bad but definitely very uninteresting shot would be this one where all the lines again almost completely. So the center, you're expecting something here now and then to make this little special, just have something here or poking out here. That way you kind of trip help the audience. But in general, you want to have a sense of shape, a sense of drama in the picture for you to work with. Now this is something that is very important in the compositions for when you're doing your own illustrations. And the fun thing of what I'm gonna be showing you is that even if something is static photograph, if it's not quite living up to what you want the image to do, you can very easily manipulate it and still retain that feeling of authenticity. So what we're gonna do is bring this start off with a very simple illustration and then work our way to more and more complicated and more advanced methods. And we'll be going over that in the next video. 3. Setting up the background: We have our images. I'm going to pick one out, which I think would be fun to work with. Have a sudden look at some of these ones. These ones actually all came from an abandoned more than America from this guy on YouTube who structured a GoPro to himself and just kind of explored around it. And it's just these amazing shots, like you can see in the composition. There's so much tension here, so much blank space here, because the environment is a tiny devoid of natural light. Which means the light from his flashlight makes these fantastic kind of strange effects on everything around him. You have a wash of light hair. Then the little pinprick of light here and here where it's shining off of the glass. And again, you have a lot of tension within the shots. You have these areas here which are very light, but then it gets progressively darker until it becomes this inky blackness. Anything could be hit. I could put a little red circle here and say ghost cited in abandoned mall. And if you squint, maybe there's something there. But what I'm to do is I'm going to pick, like, I quite liked this one because the first quote, a bit of drama in the compositions of foreground, middle ground background. Because there's a fair bit of blur here, definitely in parts of the feeling of movement and the thoughts helps it feel like the picture is more scientific. It wasn't staged, it was screen grab, which is what you want or photograph that was taken rice at the last second. So what we're going to do is we're going to go to Photoshop, setup a new image. I'm going to bring up the image size so you can see, well, I work at 2880 by 1620. This is essentially ten ATP doubled. So it will look good even if we shrink it down 300 pixels per inch. And you can just copy that. They wanted to take this track over here. She going to crop that down for the moment and just salts out so that we can actually edit this. And then y always like to do, just drag it down to the plus here. This is that we always have a backup just in case anything what's happened, nothing is. But now what I like to do is separate the foreground to the background. Some people work straight onto the image like this, but I actually quite like to have a good amount of control. Now, we could use the lasso tool and just crop this out like so. But it's a little rough for something that's this close, the camera is a little bit more farther away. I wouldn't worry so much, but it's quite close. So I wanted something a bit more refined. I'm going to Control Z. Again. What we're gonna do is press this button to make a mask layer and then using SAS to use the hard round. This section. And we're just gonna do is we're going to mask out this door section. Just been a little rough, but a lot more concise than if we were just using the L2 tool and then soft round for this to match the softness of the blur on this section. Make it a little bigger. I doing this because I'm thinking of having something here so that you have the lines leaving here, which is where you want the audience to look. Just to fill in this section hertz, it selects everything. Going to work in a little more into this section. Now we just press this button. Again. Boom. We call that selection. So we're gonna go select, right-click with the Magic Wand Tool select inverse, and we're going to delete this. Now. We can have something here and it won't affect this area upfront. And then we'll send means that command U. We can make this darker if need be, or brighter if we wanted to make it really stark. But I'm just gonna leave it as is for the moment. And then y likes you to do is using quite a bright color or white, as long as it's not black. Select flexor, pencil tool or wife or whatever brush utilized to use to draw with. And it's just super loose destroy something in. So we have the lines since you have the composition coming in here. So you want something around here. Just for this very simple illustration. I feel like you can have something like the head is. He here? We're knocking into detail just yet. In fact, we're not doing any anything. We're going to be designing a creature with more sensitivity. In the next video. This is to make sure that what you design actually looks interesting. Or more people who draws straight into the photographs. What they end up doing is he's very blobby kind of mushy designs which aren't that interesting. Whereas if you give yourself the space to work on the kind of Zeit you want that will fit the composition. You'll find you'll have a lot more freedom and each port you come up with will be just a lot more interesting. I'm just going to draw a very simple figure. I kind of figured out I wanted to vaguely humanoid figure here in the corner, just slightly cut off. And this could be a man or woman. It doesn't really matter. Nobody wants to think that. Actually what I might do, the stretch oral kind of spindly, ultra large figure, almost like it's striving towards, towards the camera to give you a sense of real menace. See, yes, somebody just simple. We can just make this black. Now we know roughly this is It's going to look like so we can then work with this into a more interesting design. And I'm gonna be going over that in the next video. I'll see you then. 4. Drawing the creature: Okay, so we've got background and go kind of rough outline of where we want monster to be. If you've seen my lesson on how to create horror illustrations, horror characters, which I highly suggest you do because I am going to go up for some of the stuff in that video. But in very brief, essentially easy trick is to avoid the temptation to go very aggressive with the creature. You know, this is supposed to be a key, slightly shocking illustration rather than something from an action video game. You don't want. Here's my angry eyes. My big slowly big slide that Smiley mouth. And can I use my huge Resident Evil ON clause? That's not particularly scary. Real life. Certainly that was coming in. I be pretty scared. But it snot going to give the right kind of feel, the right kind of sense of menace that he wants in, unlike what we trying to accomplish with this new layer over this loose sketch here. Well, I thought would be fun, would be to take this pose, then pick a theme, and then just run with that theme. One thing we could go with some blank stare, eyes. Finally, sketch, but then maybe just add some more. If this guy had like horrible long set of muscles. I'm not also, I should say your pipes come down to the face, making looked quite industrial because you call this quite long flowing figure. Then using that as a theme for the rest of the design. He's made of. Since she ports and tubes. Just using the sketch to inform where all this stuff is. Obviously you can do whatever you want. I'm not gonna tell you what to draw. But if you're following along, that's perfectly fine too. Because something you often see these kind of produced urban legend creatures is they have quite kind of silly names, kind of things which people make up online or for the titles of things like newspapers. This really could be called something like horrible to man or pipe man was something like that. If you think of it like that, then becomes a little easier to kind of come up with things like this. Then you can, you know, still having fun, you can start making up a story about, about this and about this creature of what kind of law, what kind of backstory do they have? This part of experiments which were going on? He look at the amalgamation of rubbish that's that's built up and it becomes sentience? Or is he just a guy? He's just a guy who really loves his tubes. I put some of these ports for more tubes in here. Plus pupil center, not like holes In. Increase its design. Its English is quite off putting. For whatever reason. These horrible, cheap like fingers, small to use, just dangling down behind him. Going to bring the opacity down the additional sketch a bit. Now, see where I need to be more specific for improving the details such as they are. But this should highlight, if anything, the importance of doing a very loose sketch layer first, because this means that all the hard work of the pose is already done for me. Like I've already done that. I can just use this as a guideline for our I put the details rather than working straight into them and resulting in, could end up being quite a, quite a boring pose or quiz stiff pose. Whereas because just taking the time to do that extra layer, that means. Kept also thought forward momentum of the creature with a character, but without sacrificing details, if that makes sense. It's just the thing of making sure you have the foundation. Fuel drawing first. Just a nice sketch. Even if it's just super rough. Even if it's just going to copy from a photograph or whatever, it's all good. Then when you work over that, you can then have a lot more fun with the details and they then become social load-bearing, if that makes sense, you've got the hard work done ahead of time. And that means you can have fun with the details rather than making. And I taught design out of details. Because something that I used to do as a younger artist and I see people doing sometimes still is in assessing the little details that you want in the altar sign. And then doing a kind of connects the dots where one detail leads to another, leads to another. And then you then get is quite a stiff kind of buoyancy, unimaginative, but definitely quite a stiff, quite an energetic image where you can see it's been a case of connected adults, one thing to the other, and any kind of sense of movement. And the sense of life is diminished unfortunately. But again, this isn't something wishes case of. Well, you know, if you do this, then there's nothing for it. Just means that you need to do a very rough, loose sketch. First of the pose and the intent. And then you can go over that with your secondary sketch. It's all good. Because I knew this arm here isn't going to be showing up. Just a little rougher with that because I know it's gonna be cutoff, but I do like to make sure I have at least something that just in case just in case I change my mind, wants to move this guy around. You didn't really want to cut yourself off and give yourself no options if you do want to change it later on. Cool. I'm reasonably happy with this guy so far. My add some more later on. Just tidy up some of these little bits. Let's see what he looks like in the extra drawings. Welcome to do is just tidy up this bit here. Let's make it all kind of tight. Find some of these loose edges. Just because I'm lazy. Essentially, we're gonna fill in this character with a paint Phil. And I didn't want to have to do that by hand. Just closing it in. C. It's pretty good. The left and a little better get the hip here. But that's fine because I can just steal this up. Cool. Tell me one more gap here. Fine. It says select the outside and then the plus up heirarchy, slip that everything. Yeah, I get the Select, Modify, Expand, expand like to right-click on the mouse, on the pen. Selected first new layer below. It's got a very dark gray below door area. There he is kind of peeking out. Let's just move them around the world. I didn't mess up this area. Fell by n. It's cursory save. We got the very start of gross looking creature. And we call him situated in the area. But he looks very much like a cartoon at this point, and that's not what we wanted to look, at least relatively realistic. I'm going to go into more of the details of how to shade and how to light this guy in the next video. 5. Rendering the creature: We've got our creepy dude here, but he's not really sitting inside the composition very well. Still tell he's a drawing in the finite details of the line out. And then we're gonna go on to the paint in general, we know that the light source is coming from this direction around here being the focal area. So any light is going to be going in this direction, and this will then inform the shadows on the line work. So with this in mind, we can start adding little details and little shadows around where they wouldn't speak. I find just little details, little bits of shadow in the line work can really help a drawing gaining more 3D field. And these are just going to be like little shadows. I'm not going to be doing huge sweeping statements. They still help to inform more detailed pass the painting later. Because especially with paintings like open-ended be doing later, they are going to be very purposefully overdone in terms of textures and filters and things like that. You didn't need to be too precious with the line work. You don't need to make sure that it's all perfect because it's going to start to disappear into the background. They are already in Santa look more 3D, still looking really quite cartoony, but you can see where the light is hitting him from this direction. And what we're gonna do this weekend to make that more succinct. Create new layer, right-click, bring it down to click Mask. Now this is quite an important aspect of these paintings is that you should always, especially as possible, to use the color picker tool here to pick a color from the actual environment in order to make for your painting look like it fits in that environment. So I'm gonna go here for quite a light area. She can, as you can see, it's actually more of a purple area it knew to expect. And then with the creating tools that circle and fill the second color being black, I'm going to give them a bit of color. It looks kind of right. That looks good to get ten control. You just bring that all the way down. Then I'm gonna take then in the second worries, CC well, I don't know where I want the eyes to be and just get rid of this layer for a second. Just go in here to talk them off for now. Because I want those to be quite clear. And it's really sought to come along. It starts to fit more, is looking slightly less like a cartoon, but we still have some more things to do to make it a realistic. And keeping that in the next video. I'll see you then. 6. Final rendering: Welcome back. What we're going to start now, stuck doing some highlights on our creature and won't like to do with that. It's actually not work underneath the line up actually on top of it. And again, we can color pick from around here. So it's less than natural. Same with the pencil tool. I recommend any kind of small paintbrush that has at least a little bit of green to it. I get a little bigger and then bring the opacity and the flow down just to make it a little softer. These ANCA really hot highlights just yet and just work in where do you want to collect the catching our design. There we go. We're already sought to work in over two at the top of the painting, using the pipes as a starting point and then working outwards and using the photograph itself as a guide as to how much, how much liked realistically be reflected. If you're not entirely sure about this, if you're not sure how much light you should be doing or you find that It's coming up at even that's absolutely fine for you can do is say, I've done this all at the same value. So I'm just going to duplicate this together just to prove a point. This isn't a particularly realistic way of lysine the creature. But if you're still quite new to illustration of this kind and aren't quite sure where to start. You can just do everything less than flat like this. It's absolutely fine. Now what you do is just click this button here, create a mask, then go from white to black, then go over to the gradient tool. And then just do this. The mask, which is this soft ramp shape here, will essentially do the work for you. The highlights a stronger here where the light is hitting it and then getting slowly more and more diffused as he go alone. That's just a nice little trick to help you out if you're finding that the illustrations that you are doing for the creatures coming out, coming out a little bit flat. Just get rid of that. Now what I'm gonna do, come on to new layer. We're going to use our fill tool. It's going to make a plain gray. 100 hundred twenty four hundred twenty five doesn't really matter as long as it's a middle gray. Fill. And go to Filter Noise and add noise. Then all the way up uniform. You don't want them on the tactic unless you're doing a monochromatic painting. Click Okay. Now I'm going to go down to set this to overlay. Then that gives us the image to this very stark kind of run down look. But as the look of a low resolution picture and this amount of film grain over the top of your illustration will actually do wonders in blending one element into the other. Because it helps hide a lot of the small details and the consistencies that you've already made and will make the illustration blends better into the rest of the painting. But it can only do so much. You still need to have relatively semi realistic, I'd say start to make it look like it fits in. This one is getting there. It's not quite there yet, but putting them to continue to work on. So I'm just going to bring the opacity down a bit quite so extreme. Then what I like to do is select all the layers, but in a folder. And now what we're gonna do is make a new layer. Right-click on it to create clipping mask. How long would you next is given for the moment. Essentially render out the rest of the image. Let's just do lots and lots of little details, little touches here and there to make it feel a little more realistic. And I'm doing it in the play it over the top so that I'm not totally reliant upon the line work. I'm just going to paint over the top and make some more bold decisions. Then if I was to be doing everything underneath the line art layer, this will also help me paint over the line up without feeling like I'm making too big of a risk. And because this on a separate layer, you can just change it. Or they said south again, without feeling that you need to make everything perfect. The highlights and just work my way back. And he's already son to look more placed within The paintings. What we can do now, its color from white to black. Right-click to get the grading tool, we're going to put a really aggressive ramp here. We'll have our ramp here. And then we're going to go down to overlay just a really blow it out. Just play around with how much of the creature you want to show off. I think that's good. See if we can bring it down just a little bit. Really the sort of things there's no hard and fast rule. All you need to do is just have a good eye for what you think for your picture. It looks the best. So I'm thinking somewhere around ear. That's looking good. Now, something that I'm not too keen on is these green axis. They are part of the original picture, but I think we can do better without them. I think they're distracting a little bit. So what we're gonna do, we're gonna get the lasso tool. We're gonna do is just select them, delete them, or you can lose him because this slide is here. Then we can go to edit content aware fill this thing and it should automatically make a perfect fill in. It hasn't hair, but we can still walk around that marshy layers back down together. And then just with soft soft brush, anyone you like, just color pick and then just bring it right down. Walk your way through to make it a little less jarring. Ever hands looking at k. There you go. Look at better. Another thing you can do. God, where the motion blur. On this section, we can do, see what it looks like. Let's track these down, duplicate them, merging together. Let's put a little bit blur, filter. Blur, motion, blur. The camera's going left to right. That's a bit much. Let's just bring it down to about five. And already it's looking a lot more naturalists looking at all like it's part of the image. Now another thing we can do is go to New File. The same dimensions as the original one. But let's make it a **** a lot smaller. Make it 60% smaller. This will make sense in a minute. We take all our last copy them controls Command C and Command V. If you're on a Mac, then really scrunch it down. Now what we can do is give it a nice Dutch angle this way or this way. I think this way is better because it looks on menacing and forth. A Dutch angle allows us to make it look a little bit even more unprepared. Like this isn't a professionally shot photograph, and also it thinks are slightly skewed like this. What happens with when you see angles which are slightly askew is they are inherently slightly off putting and therefore very helpful if you want to make a spooky picture. You don't want them to be especially nice to look at and thin with the smaller resolution, you can see that a lot of the details of the drawing which can easily be seen in this high-resolution one. This super fork ADHD size are a lot more kind of smoothed out in this version. Therefore, making this look a little bit more realistic. Let's have a look what that's gonna look like. Turn this into a clipping mask with a ramp just for him. Make it really dark. It may be too much, but it might not see. Hopefully again. Yes, we can quite nice actually gives him over at the mall. Definition. While I might do, is just go in and just gently erase some of the light catching hair on his pushy Clem was pretty gross, disgusting. Just to help lead the eye up to these nasty eyes up here. There we go. We've got quite a simple found footage illustration. And something I didn't talk about is when you're doing these kind of creatures. And easiest mistake is to just have them front-and-center or just have them hiding a corner. Whereas some of the best ones, the creatures slightly cut off in this case by this door frame hair, in other cases by an object within the shot. And this just lends it a little bit more authenticity. It makes it feel a little bit more real, less staged, if that makes sense, another thing you can do, she's quite fun, is take all the layers, drag it down, merge them. Then with the rectangle tool. Just a couple of these just at random. Try and keep them quite thin, if you can. Then holding the button above the Control button, I don't remember which one is the error. Then slide them across. Give it give you an illustration. A very role of found footage, but highly damaged found footage. Look, this maybe what you want for you, maybe not. It doesn't matter because it's all on the same layer. I'm going to save this. Let's call him tube. Save. And there we go. We call first and simple illustration of found footage. Look. And if you want to just play about with this image and this technique, go ahead. I'm gonna be going over more complicated techniques and more complicated methods in the videos to come. So you can stop the video now and just work on your own or you can continue watching for some more advanced methods. Either way, I'll see you in the next one. 7. Level 02 Mist monster: Okay, sir, we made an illustration of a spooky guy in Tours. Now we're going to transition to a giant creature outdoors. Now this is going to require a few different techniques than the illustration we did before, but it's more or less the same. Now, I've got this photograph of this quite innocuous looking area, but it was really quite nice and misty. Anything that we have around here is gonna be quite covered up by the midst. But what we want to do is separate the sky from the foreground. Now, that is a message you can do with this on the new specialized sweat of Photoshop, but duplicate the image. Let's get rid of that one behind select sky. And it's okay if we were to delete this is done quite, quite a good job at separating out the far background. But it's really messed up the tree and it's really messed up where the Voc comes in. But all is not lost. Because there is a method that we can use to mask out this front area from the sky. That's to make ourself a mosque. And we're gonna do that by duplicating the original hair. And they go to command you, bring the saturation way down and then go Command L to pick up the levels. And we're really going to crush these levels together so that the foreground, especially this tree here, are really distinct. Press Enter. Once again, select sky. And as you can see, it's selected. The computer thinks is the top. That makes sense. It's delete that. Said again, just to make sure he gets it. Now it's looking a little bit rough for only do is just duplicate it. A bunch of times. These labs. Again, what we can do is duplicate this layer, put it on top of our mask. Clipping mask should have happened. It's done correctly. There we go. We can put wherever we want behind it. It still looks more or less what we want. This tree could be a little harsher. Those duplicate this layer a few more times. Once again, that, yeah, that looks much better. Smash these together. Just keep it simple. And then we call ourselves, unless you have us to draw something, something huge, following and a half hair, Let's have a creature kind of moving this way. Taking up this space. Just going to do the kind of random set of shapes. Kind of big dynasore looking creature. What we call come on. You bring the lightness way down. And then we've got a very loose sketch for anything this might look like, well, it might be fun to have it look like it's covered in vegetation and such. Hollowed out stomach here. Just to make it look a little unnatural. Move this leg and it's not too bad. My bringing him in the little super-duper, huge. Once again, just going to use this sketch, figure out the how is fine. But with this one, because it's quite far away. We're going to do a slightly different method than we did with our horrible tube man. I am still came to our new sketch. Something else a little neater. This guy looks like salt with a dark. Let's pick a color hits and match the background. Do single, set, clipping mask to the original. And then it's gonna come on. You got to colorize similar kind of blue. Just raise up a bit. Because we're gonna be getting rid of this sketch layer. Eventually. Something which some people do when making these massive creatures for found footage is they tend to put too many details in them when those details realistically would be lost at that distance. And it breaks the immersion more or less. What I'm gonna do is stop painting in a much softer brush than what we did the two men. Can you use this one? This is quite a nice versatile brush. Once again, just picking from the environment on the layer that's clipped to the original spring. Just going to slowly work in shadows. As you can see this on top, on top of the line work, because the line work is really unnecessary for this kind of illustration. The good from the top. For now. Just to complete obliterate that line work, It's still using it for the color picker for reference. Because we have objects which are this far away, especially on a very misty day like when this photograph was taken, you really do start to lose a lot of the details. If this was a particularly sunny day, this was very far away, would even start to take old blue hues as the water in the atmosphere gets thicker and thicker, the farther away you are. Let's stop. And I want them they're pretty happy with the way he is looking so far. Like this chicken emotion into one layer. If this opinion, like, we can always just erase it. Back up again. Because I want to give this kind of a shocky Look. I'm being very consistent with the length of the muscle. Whatever is coming off this guy. The fingers want to make everything quite uniform. But if you just add in extra long areas that would clump together, it becomes a lot more natural looking, which is what we want. We want this to look at least semi realistic, even though the image itself is supposed to be ridiculous. It looks like it's getting, I'd like to start new layer. Then soft round. Just select some of this faulty area here. Just really, really walk in. It's bringing the opacity down. We can work more ups this way. Really blend this guy into the environment. Even bring this opacity down a little bit. Now as you can see here, this, this area here could be a little darker because it stopped to interfere. You get these white outlines a little. This happens isn't a problem we can do is create a new layer. Right-click on it. Good answer. Quick Mask. Let's just select quite a dark brown, reddish brown hair. And then just work that into this tree. Just make it a little bit more real. Let me give it that we call the humongous dude. I think he can be a little better. Let's command saturation, a little bit of his likeness, but more just of a hearing aid seems like he's far away. The further away an object is, the lighter becomes. I felt like some of these details there center of distracter, little. Like them. They can smile lights, not too many though, because this isn't a particularly sunny day that this photograph was taken. We didn't want too much contrast, as I said, when people make these illustrations of the kind of megafauna crypted, the mistake they put in too much detail. And that kills the illusion that what you're looking at is very faraway. Lock that so it can go to the edge here. We won't be working more with a suggestion, suggestion of shapes, rapid definition. In fact, duplicate, really immersing them one. Give me the lock as well. Let him out a little bit too much. I think that's a rhyme apply. Play around with the crop. If we weren't quite like the original. See what this looks like. I think this might work if he was a little smaller, if he was less center of attention, if that makes sense. In height and find the best on this tree as well. Having the tree in front really helps sell the idea that this is a photograph that was taken without any forethought. If you have something in front partially concealing the creature, then it gives the image more fitting of amateurish NAS rather than taken by someone who was caught the camera on the tripod, they set up the sharp, everything looks great. The creature is smiling for the camera and service week, and that can be fun, especially if you're doing more of a silly illustration for four ones like these where you're trying to get an air of authenticity. These little mistakes actually lend it more authenticity. Then reduct Fermat, skin. For green on 25126, whatever mid-level gray Filter Noise Add Noise. Overlay. Quite high. Yeah, I think that's good. There we go. We've got our cool megafauna creature here. Partially obscured, looming absolute the mist. And you can do these with almost, I think, photograph of a landscape with a nice horizon line. These work especially well if you have several layers of depth to the image. So quite lucky with this one because have advanced foreground, middle ground, and then quite faraway background. But you could very easily have something behind these trees. It's just something that is behind this rich hair, especially with the MIS coming in lens. It unlawful lot more mystique and the ability to go really big with whatever you're painting. But try it out with any kind of a photograph that you have. You get better through experimentation and just mucking about and finding out fairly, as I said in a loss of my previous videos, once you get rid of the idea of FPGA image being precious and everyone needing to be perfect the first time you find, you can just have a lot more fun than you will improve as you go along. So we call it one more video, which is the more advanced version, where I am going to be going over an image shot in the woods. And that means a lot more masking and a lot more photo manipulation to get what we want. But if you feel like you're up to that challenge, I'll see you in the next video. 8. Level 3 Woods monster: So now we would try something a little more difficult. But I'm going to Silko through it step-by-step so that you can still follow along. I have these images I found on YouTube of guy recording is hike through the woods at night. And some of them, which is fantastic, especially for the kind of image that we're looking to create. And I particularly liked this one. There's a lot of drama here. We have the pathway leading up. You know, you have the area here is where we stick a monster. But I felt it was a little too staged, and I thought it'd be fun to take one of the slightly less interesting images and kind of bump it up to make it as good as this. I also really liked this one. But I felt like the kind of trails off here could be good is if we take some of these images and mash them together to make a new image over the top. So I'm going to take this one, duplicate it. Because I like this area here. That could be fun to have over the top. On this side, I'm just going to make it across. Obviously, temp one. Let me write this so we can just very roughly get rid of that tolerance set to fairly low. It's just five. Get rid of as much of this as possible. But it still looks quite rough. Not being too precious with this because I'm going to make it blurry again so that a lot of these kind of reflecting edges just gonna be removed anyway. So you didn't need to worry about them? Because it doesn't need to be super-duper. Perfect. We're not making a legitimate photo manipulation. We're not trying to legitimately fool anyone here. It needs to look absolutely perfect. Just as long as you know, as long as when you look at it, it still looks legit, soft, round just to feather out this area here. Blend better, see what that looks like. To make this launcher crop this image as well. Obviously the temptation is to go and brush like this. Do the whole thing like this, that would take that would take forever. No one's got the time for that and really sought to lose energy on the image. Let's, let's walk through some of my other lessons. Keeping your energy up, keeping me the interest in what you're doing. It's very, very important. If you can keep that, then you'll be in a better, better space. Is going to go to the transform. Because I think we can have these come in a little further. Luckily, it's already quite blurred. So we can be quite, it can be quite rough with it without looking too strange, but it feels like negative area here. I think what we're going to have creature, creature here. Poking out by felt like we could have a little bit more further, your chair. Let's see what else we have in our collection. It's got these trees here. Let's add them. I'm just going to roughly stick them in. Lasso tool. Just very roughly cut out what I know are not going to be using. Bring the command needs, bring that saturation down just a little. Then we can erase further the soft round, just like nip away the edges here, just to blend it in to this photograph to help it match the blurriness hair. Going to duplicate this and get the filter blur, motion blur. Just blurt out a bit more. And then once again, the soft round like a medium opacity on the layer I suggested erase away that close to the middle because he can see this static with this is moving. And I do that a little more heavily here. Just to cover up some of that roughness around the edges. When then what we can do to kind of help blend it all together. White, black. Create a tool, circle, all that, all that I found. And just put it in quite a harsh right now, we could keep it set here to overlay all the kids, such it's a multiply. And then just play around with it until we feel like getting the desired effect. These little bigger. Now as you can see, we've taken an existing photograph and we've changed it considerably by mashing together several different photographs to make a brand new image. And this is something which allows concepts are sessile or production artists do for illustrations that I make for films and video games and TV and stuff like that. It's a really fun, really quick. A way of creating a background out of photographic reference without having to do everything by hand yourself. And when you're doing stuff like this easily helps if you're taking photographic sources from the same area. So lucky with these ones that they were all from the same video. So they have more or less the same, they have more or less the same colors. They've come from the same forest. So you don't have anything that looks to innocuous. Everything looks like it's from the same place. Nothing stands out. But it's taken what about 1015 minutes for us to get this for us, it would take forever to hand paint this, just gonna get rid of some of these dark areas showing up. Yeah, I've started our creature hair, kind of like the idea of a face painting hair and then quite a long strange neck. Probably make it a bit bigger actually. Like it's looming out of the pathway. That's before going to take this loose sketch. I'm going to do a title sketch over the top of it. Would be fun to have quite a horrible D-ring face. Guidelines here. Almost like it's got a horrible kind of mosque like smile. I can keeping, keeping in mind that the light is coming from this direction. During the heavier lines, the heavier shadows at the top. Mean. I come around to painting this kind of hard work in the area will be done already. Something just incredibly creepy about these social don't like faces. Not quite sure what it is. I'm sure somebody clever than me will be able to say why they kind of unsettling. I think I quite like the hair. Um, I have that. Continue down. A theme. Make it slightly more difficult to coloring later on. But someone says it's just worth it. This one because it's kinda leaning outwards this way. Want to put a little weight on this arm here, be supporting the rest of the creature. Know what I mean by that is that you can tell a lot of balance is being put here. Keep it quite stiff. Then that means we can have better contrast with this arm in front where it's a lot looser. Voltage up here for if you never show about drawing hands, always drawn on the palm first, just as big block like this, and then put the fingers in afterwards. This a little further up. Just to really contrast guys telling in the gross character or this, all the squares hat might make him tail here, made out of there if this fall him up in the final image or not. But like I said earlier, the T guy, sometimes it's nice to just make sure you have the entire thing because then you're not bound to arbitrary areas where you've cut yourself off just to save on time. And if you change your mind, she can always just change it back again. Gross. My old trick. This, I'd have to sorta all these extra things, a little extra areas. And no, That's just not gonna happen. Is got a fresh layer, nice bright color, nice hard round. Just going to fill in the main parts of the body here on a separate layer, of course, math see this on the sketch layer. Every strand of hat. I am going to just do the main body. We are going to be doing some stuff with the half later, but thats with another trick that I'll explain shortly. Behind. Sorry. I'm just going to cut that out fairly quickly. Save this around, see, next the best like that that could really affect from now. Then. Let's pick them up. Skin tone, I'm thinking initially, maybe. In these darker ones, because I want the face to be quite pale. Get rid of artifacts here. Lock this layer, pick this one. Kind of face area here. Already. Sunset spooky, like chalky texture, brush. Going to pick some other colors. Bringing the opacity way down. The quite gentle with this. Then just go over some of the darker areas. May be thinking thick while I've been tight. Now why don't I pending ball detailed in the head and you're right. But all things indicate time. It's kinda top of the sketch layer and start putting it a few details. Actual pencil, brush. Just got back from having just get rid of some of these flying knots. Scarier than ever so slightly. Given some horrible teeth. Sure about the eyes. I might take them out later, but I might keep them in. This pump them face be Colt by the light. Extra sharp areas. The same for the hands as well. Now, let's select all three of them. Three hotlines, put them into a folder. Then scrape out of this is about at well, the Golson means I can have a nice easy clipping mask on top. So now I can be a lot more easy breezy with pulling on the highlights and stuff like that. I had to worry about keeping until the lines because clipping mask, we'll make sure that happens for me anyway. To stop eating the occasional highlight here on the hair. Again low down because that's where the light source of B as she around these areas here. And the clipping mask is great because it means that I can't color outside the lines. Means I can make my ramp here just to really make sure that mic mixture on getting my sauce of having everything in those in that folder. Make sure it really blends in with the area. Again, we put that one group because I feel like this is a mask, so I'm going to press this button. That means everything we've drawn this area is dependent on the mask. And then getting down to black, one would do so. I'm just going to bring the opacity down. So when I see, but this tree is because I want this guy to be behind this tree. And then with kind of a key, keep it to this pen here. Can go in and erase. Mask again, this isn't on the main, permanently erasing. And even the illustration. I'm just going to get these limbs of the tree. Essentially you're going in front of the creature. I satisfied with the position of the creature in the illustration. Unfortunately, these trees are quite blurry. But then that just means that when let's apply the creature out just a little bit to compensate. Looking bad. Gonna get rid of that entirely in the shadow that's being cast here by this rock. Because it's just gonna be your tree anyway. But that doesn't mean because we can see that shadow there. We know we should put some shadows here to make it really blend in with the environment. Bring away back up to the top. And then this is very likely feather the edges a little less and less crisp. Just switching these exact motions. Textured brush, cool. Let's go. Its base layer, new layer. We've got heart creature here going behind the tree. But now let's put in some more shadows here around this area to make it look a little bit more convincing. Do the same for the creature. Come in. Just add some shadows from the tree. This prompts Not quite it for me. Then before we go any further, let us see what it looks like with the green affects. Putting that layer, Filter, Noise, Add Noise. Tail. It's already looking pretty horrible. Especially see the way that the grain has kind of evened out. These details looked quite harsh without poem, has now been softened and made for homogenous. And sometimes he did want that. Sometimes you want the image to look quite crisp. But in this case, we're trying to, let me spooky monsters. You want these to be subsumed by the texture. And then that way the whole mistakes don't feel quite so prominent. But something of notice is that I feel like this area here could be lighter. This area here, the hands could be a lot better. We could fix that. This could change this from multiply actually to overlay. And I think that looks a bit better. Let's bring it down so it's not quite so harsh. I think what I might do is duplicate this layer, set it back to multiply. Then just just to center, it's mostly affecting this area here and I'll smash their face and the hands. Much better. You can get mad doing lots of layers, looseness of effects. But sometimes it's nice just to keep it relatively simple. And I kind of like the way this one's come out to another. Let's make it a lot smaller. Let's make this 40%. It command C and D. Actually looking kind of nice. Then bring these in a bit more focused. And then let's duplicate this photo with the creature. Right-click on that and merge group. Just hide the original one. And then just fairly, very slightly, Let's put it at blur on it. That's kind of my Schindler. Kind of angle. 13th, way too much. Feel like too. Yeah, that feels that feels good. That feels like it fits into the rest of it. These about sometimes I can happen when you're resizing layers. What might be fun? Not quite sure if this will work, but when they were known, unless we find out these layers altogether, traveling down to the K1, merging together. Just hide things from my perspective, just moving them a little bit. So it really feels like there's creatures looming out because the original angle picture was looking downwards towards the ground. But we want to give more of sets of minutes. I might do that. Original background, Edit, Transform, Transform perspective. Kind of changing a little bit. It becomes a little bit more leaning, a little bit more menacing. And then you can play around with filters, scan guilt, photo filters. I don't usually use these a lot. But sometimes you can find that they help add kind of weird sense of authenticity in the sense that I didn't think they look particularly good. But again, you'll try and to get the look of an amateur image rather than one which has been professionally staged. And sometimes he's kind of extreme filters can help with that feeling of authenticity we've been talking about. It's kind of interesting. Let's really quite nice. Blue magenta. Bring this down a little bit more. Yeah, I think that looks good. I'm going to be leaving some of the pictures in the lesson folder so you can mess around with them yourself. And this lesson isn't quite over as you've probably noticed from the length of the videos. But what I'm gonna be doing is something a little different in that I've got a few more ideas for some other images, some other illustrations that we can do with this theme. However, I feel like I've gone over at least all the major points of which four I could teach you. The next few videos aren't really going to be a lesson. We'll just chill Hangout where you can just watch me go through the process with some nice music on and you can follow along if you want to, or you can just watch them in the background as you make your own spooky images. Obviously, when you're done, I would absolutely love to see you post them in the comments. I'd love to see what kind of spooky, creepy creatures you make for yourself. If you enjoyed this lesson, I would really appreciate a rate and review after you are done, as it helps me make better videos for you to enjoy. If you really enjoyed this lesson, then feel free to subscribe to my channel so I can keep making more videos. This also lets you message me with your arts or I can offer advice if you feel you need it. I hope you enjoyed this video and this lesson, and I'll see you in the next one.