Creature Painting - Design and Render Like a Pro

1. Trailer: welcome to creature painting. My name is Hardy Fowler, and I'm a professional illustrator and concept artist. I'm calling on all artists out there with a passion for creating cool looking creatures. If you've ever dreamed of making a career out of this, I'm here to tell you that the dream is really you could make a living doing this. All you need is a killer portfolio tow launch you into an amazingly fun and rewarding career. This course can get you there. I'll show you all of my professional level techniques and tricks that will demystify the entire process of creating creature Aren't with Adobe Photo shop In an easy to grasp, step by step process, you'll learn digital painting techniques that will have you amazed at how alive, beautiful and realistic your creature art has become. But this course is so much more than just a painting demonstration. We'll teach you everything you need to know to start thinking like a creature designer to tie it all together, we offer responsive support and loads of other course resource is to make sure that every student can take their work to new heights. You can do this. Don't miss out on the chance to turn your creature are into a professional level product. It just might lead to a dream career so enrolled today. Grab your stylists and let's paint cool stuff. 2. Intro: Hi, everyone. This is Hardy and welcome to the creature painting course. This is going to be a super fun and super valuable course for any artist so good on you for signing up. Let's check out some prerequisites for this course. You definitely need to have completed art fundamentals and Photoshopped fundamentals before getting to this point for. This course will assume that you're comfortable with basic our principles and photo shop operations. Most of what we'll do in this course is in the intermediate skill level range. But we're going to take things one step at a time, so no one should worry about being out of their depth. Creature painting really might be my favorite thing to do is a concept artist and illustrator. I mean, painting monsters and all kinds of imaginary beast is just fun. The best part is you can really make a living doing this. All kinds of entertainment industry clients create a huge demand for artists who can imagine and render awesome looking creatures. These are skills that you can really bank on, and they will make you much more valuable as an art professional. Let's take a look at our course outline. We'll start with a creature design overview. Then we'll discuss shape, language, animal references, thinking like a designer and making creatures seem alive. Well, then, put everything that we've learned into action with four awesome course project. I'm really excited to share this course with you guys. So kick back, grab your stylist and let's bring some amazing creatures to life. 3. Overview: Oh, everyone, this is Hardy. In this lecture, we will take a broad look at the art of creature design and discuss some key guiding principles. Creature design is most commonly used. Is either concept art or promotional illustration for movies, video games or tabletop games, just to name a few. Along with character, environment and machine design, Creature design is one of the central pillars of a concept artist, skill set and possibly the most fun. I'll bet that most of you have already drawn a monster or two in a school notebook or something, so a lot of this course will be like hanging out with an old friend. A successful creature artist is able to pair a creative and effective design with a beautiful, realistic and compelling rendering. Design and rendering are the two legs that this subject stands on, and one cannot stand without the other. So how do we define success? What makes a creature painting cool? Here is a checklist of core goals to keep in mind. Great creature paintings are believable and relatable. Every creature design needs to have roots in an animal or a creature that most people are familiar with. The audience needs to believe that the creature they're looking at could be a living, breathing animal. Good observation of animal references paired with successful rendering, is the main way that we achieve this creature. Paintings also need to have a recognisable role or function. We need to easily be able to tell if the creature is a predator, a cuddly fur ball or an outright nightmarish monster. Just to name a few broad categories. The feature of each creature must clearly guide the viewer to the correct conclusions about the creatures role or function beauty. Now this is a tough one to quantify. But every creature painting must have a harmonious partnership between good design and good rendering. The design principles taught in art fundamentals are a great place to start. The point is, even if you have a really great idea, if the design and rendering are bad, no one will pay attention long enough to appreciate it. Visceral reaction The creatures that we create need to cause a gut level reaction with the viewer. Are monsters must scare or discussed as soon as they're seeing are friendly creatures must be instantly likable or adorable, no matter what the creatures. Purpose or role is we need to make our viewers feel strongly about our creatures just by looking at them. So if you keep these general guiding principles in mind as we move forward, you'll be in great shape. 4. Shape Language: Hi, everyone. This is Hardy. In this lecture, we will take a look at shape language. Shape. Language is the use of geometric shape elements in artwork to achieve a desired visual impression. So, basically, if we know how certain shapes communicate certain ideas, we can use shape language to make our viewers feel a certain way about our artwork. This could be incredibly useful in character, creature and machine design. Let's stick with three primary shapes for our discussion Circle, square and triangle. Each of these shapes can be associating with certain attributes. Circles seem friendly and approachable. They are non threatening and trustworthy. There are no sharp edges, and everything has an easy, smooth curve to it. Circles can also imply feminine squares are dependable, stable and solid. They seem static and sturdy or even boring. Squares can also imply masculine triangles are aggressive, dangerous or threatening. The sharp edges imply both motion and speed. Let's take a look at some sketches that make heavy use of each of these primary shapes For its shape. Let's take a look at a cartoony face, a machine and an animal first. Let's take a look at a sketch of a very circular human face. Now these air exaggerated, but you can see almost every element of the face is based on a circle. It gives him a very friendly, non threatening quality. It also reminds us of around baby's face, which almost everyone will associate with harmlessness. For a circular vehicle, let's check out the Volkswagen Beetle. It is perhaps the most circle heavy design ever for a car, and it certainly seems friendly and harmless. Just about every element of the design is a circle or a curved line for our circular animal . Let's check out this hedgehog now. This one is a bit of a contradiction, but I included it because I wanted you to see how powerful the visual effect of the circle can be. This animal is covered in spikes. By all logic. We should be afraid of it or repulsed by it. But almost everyone who sees one of these things wants to pick it up and give it a hug. They're just adorable to us, practically solely because they're just one big circle their entire body shape, their eyes, ears, nose, all circles and our trust of circular shapes will make us pick up something that will probably poke our hands next. Let's take a look at some square designs. I've sketched a very square human face. This guy seems very sturdy, masculine and perhaps dependable. He's also quite static. There is no movement and nothing much going on with him, predictable and even boring, but enjoyable nonetheless. Next, let's check out this semi truck. It is designed almost entirely out of squares and rectangles. It seems very heavy and utilitarian, a dependable and sturdy machine that performs an important but unglamorous tasks for our square animal. Let's take a look. A cow. Another sketches, an exaggeration, but it really captures the essence of a cow. It is heavy, slow and somewhat boring. It's sturdy and dependable, but again performing an unglamorous task. Finally, let's examine some triangular designs This triangle based cartoon face shows have the aggressive, pointy sides of a triangle can make a face seem dangerous, evil and villainous. You can find heavy use of triangles in almost every Disney villain for our triangular vehicle. Let's take a look at this fighter jet. Everything about this machine screams fast, aggressive and dangerous. Triangular shapes imply movement and sharpness, and this machine really communicates both triangles. Air very useful when you're designing a machine or a creature that needs to look deadly sleek and fast, take a look at this shark, for example. It is composed almost entirely of triangles, its nose fins and, most importantly, teeth are all triangle shaped. We're hardwired to recognize pointy shapes like teeth or blades as a potential danger. So remember that whenever you're designing something that needs to be scary or dangerous now that we discussed each shape in some detail, let me show you a few pieces of my own artwork that have made heavy use of these shapes. Some of the shape language is a bit more subtle than others, but it's there if you know where to look as a bit of homework, start trying to see shaped language in some of the artwork or images that you see in media or advertisements. It could be really eye opening in a valuable exercise to a character artist 5. Using Animal References: Oh, everyone, this is Hardy. In this section, we will discuss using animal references and creature design. Animal references air the key to inventing new creatures in a way that everyone will find relatable. Nature is the ultimate source of inspiration. So many incredibly cool looking living things out there. If the creatures that you pain have parts that remind people of familiar animals, then your design is already easy to understand and has instant credibility. Let's take a look at a few characters that I've designed and kind of reverse engineer them back to the animal models that first inspired them to get a better understanding of how this works. I love this 1st 1 even armored creature with a spiny shell, dangerous stabbing front legs in an armored head full of sharp teeth. The most obvious inspiration. This guys the hermit crab. But he's also inspired by the front legs of a praying Mantis and the jaw style of a parana . So we borrowed from all kinds of different creatures to arrive at this design. Now this dangerous looking guy is a cave dwelling monster who uses spikes to attack his prey to achieve the cave dwelling angle I referenced cave animals, and they all seem to have very pale skin from a low light environment. The large eyes fit with this, too, as if you were able to see in very low light. I also referenced a puffer fish to get the spiky look. Finally, I went with another Parana type interlocking jaw to give him some very deadly looking teeth . Now here's another take on a cave monster. Since he lives in the dark, I thought, Oh, be cool if he was totally without eyes, Echo location came to mind, so I gave him a bulbous forehead, kind of like this beluga whale, though not nearly as friendly looking, most of his body and this shiny looking skin was informed by a salamander. Finally, his motive attack was to be a long, grasping tongue, just like this chameleon. A huge variety of animals mashed together to form this guy, but it all had to come together in a very cohesive way, and I like how it worked out. This guy's terrifying. In one of my favorites. He is a huge, segmented creature who must immediately resembles a mill API. I gave him lots of stati arms like the praying Mantis, but his body is made of hard, spiky segments, kind of like this spiny lobster finally have included some cool bioluminescent light is a kind of threat display. So I hope these examples give you a good idea of how to reference animal models and borrow features from each to come up with something new and cool looking. Remember, everything has to come together in a cohesive way so that you don't end up with something silly, like a chicken with the dog's head. But feel free to take cues from animals from totally different environments, and you'll be amazed by the cool new ideas that come up. 6. Thinking Like a Designer: Oh, everyone, this is Hardy. In this lecture, we will discuss ways to think like a creature designer. This is a road map that will help you build your idea from the ground up. We begin this process by asking a few big picture questions. The first is a big one. How do we want this creature to make us feel? This goes back to the core goals of making a creature relatable and inspiring a visceral reaction when you first set out on a creature designed. Decide how you want the finished product to make the viewers feel and then make all of your design decisions based on that. Do you want your creature to be a horrifying nightmare that makes people recoil and fear and disgust? If so, then use every design and rendering trick that you learn here to make it happen. Aggressive triangle shapes, teeth pointing in slimy things. Alarming colors or threat displays all great ways to ring those alarm bells in the human brain. Do you want the viewer to adore your character? Try making them round soft or furry. Give them lots of human features. If you want your creature to be respected, or even revered, give them an air of intelligence most easily achieved with the eyes. There are so many feelings that creature images can inspire. The main point is to keep in mind that these feelings are the foundation and the first step of your design process. Start with the feeling that you want to convey and build up around it. You'll never go wrong. Once we have this feeling decision mate, we start considering other factors that determine the creatures shape and form. First of all, function. What does this creature do? If it's a predator, it will need sharp teeth, strong muscles, claws for grasping or other visual cues that make it clear that this creature can chase down, catch and kill things. If the creature is intelligent, it should have expressive eyes, possibly a large head for a large brain and evidence of some kind of technology to show that it has the capacity for higher thought. The possibilities go on and on. Is it a scavenger, perhaps a large herbivore or even a domesticated animal that can be harnessed? These questions of creature functionality are a great way to guide your design. The next factor that can shape the creatures form is its environment. We should be able to tell something about where this creature lives based on its appearance . Does it live somewhere cold? Give it heavy for Does it live in a cave? Perhaps give it pale skin and some kind of wait and navigate in the dark. Does it swim in the water? Does it fly? All of these environmental questions help shape the form of the character. Now I know it's a lot to consider, but once you have the basic framework to work within, it actually makes things easier and less daunting to arrive at a design solution. Now, once we have these big picture questions answered, we can turn our attention to how to communicate our solutions in a beautiful and artistically pleasing way. So how do we accomplish this? Let's quickly jump back to the principles of design from art fundamentals. And if you skipped art fundamentals, you are officially busted. Two core design principles that really applied a creature design our balance and repetition . Balance is your A call is a distribution of visual weight in an image for creature designed . That means you should try to find ways to balance large, heavy areas with groups of smaller, more visually active areas. Basically, our eyes tend to like being able to bounce around and visually active areas, but then take a rest on a larger, calmer area. So remember to include both visually active areas and large, calmer, flatter areas. The other element that I use heavily is repetition. Similar elements used in sequins. This is a great one for creature design. Look for ways to repeat some part of your creature and have the repeating shapes taper off in size. We tend to find these repeating rhythmic shapes pleasing to the eye, and they occur again and again in good designs. Since this is found a lot of nature to it also makes your creatures Seymour alive. Unbelievable. So now you're approaching your creature art like a designer, and your work will be much more believable and beautiful up next. Let's check out how to make your creatures seem alive 7. Making your Creature Seem Alive: Oh, hi, everyone. This is Hardy. In this section, we will take a look at ways to make our creatures seem like living, breathing organisms. This is one of the most important ways that we will make viewers believe in our designs the concepts and techniques we will spell out in this lecture or possibly the most valuable content in this course. So pick close attention and really practice this stuff. You'll be amazed by the results you get. The first step in making your creatures seem alive is to try to think biologically creatures need to appear to be made of the same elements that really animals are. That means realistic textured skin joints powered by muscles, interlocking jaws with bony saliva covered teeth and realistic deep jeweled eyes. These are just a few of the elements to keep in mind that will help elevate your creature designs to something believable enough for a wide audience to get on board. Let's check out some do's and don't to show you what I mean by this. We'll compare Cem poorly sketched animals, and then we'll look at how to elevate them to something that is more biological and believable. First Let's take a look at this very humble depiction of a horse. Now, this clearly isn't a great rendering and falls well short of seeming like an actual living creature. Sure, it meets all of the general parameters. It has four legs, hooves pointed years ahead, neck and snout, that air all accurate enough. But it lacks all the things that would make it seem alive. Most of these elements are missing, which is why this sketch looks kind of childish. An amateur. There's no impression of muscles beneath the skin, the joints, hair, mouth and eyes air all overly simplified and give no indication of the anatomy within. Now let's look at how we can better approach this. Here we see a much more professional looking rendering of a horse. We can see muscles beneath the skin off the little overlapping lines around his perimeter. Give the impression of 100 muscles working together to make this guy run majestically. His joints are realistic. His eyes, mouth and hair are all behaving as they would naturally. So how does one get from drawing this horse to being able to draw this one? The short answer is one. Observe animal details as much as possible and to practice. I know it sounds daunting, but if you start really noticing the shapes and forms that animals and even movie creatures make, you can call them up any time you want and install them into any creature you can imagine. They become tools in your digital artist kit. Let's check out another example. Here we have another rather humble drawing, this time of my favorite dinosaur. All of the elements are there for us to be able to identify this creature, but it falls well short of feeling like a real living animal. Now let's compare this with a much more successful rendering. Now this one seems alive. We get a sense of muscles, skin texture and even realistic spikes and bony plates. You can practically hear this awesome guy breathing and feel the ground shake as he lumbers along, all because we paid more attention to the parts that he is made up of. Okay, so that's, um, general stuff on body parts and how to think in terms of biology and anatomy. Now let's get a little more detail and check out some specific rendering techniques that will make any creatures Seymour alive. These techniques are creature art gold, so give them some practice and you'll love the results. Let's start with the eyes. Eyes are an incredibly powerful part of the body in terms of communication there. Also the creature designers best friend, because when done correctly, eyes can make creatures roar to life. A quick demonstration. I've got an alien characters face here, and I've got it all rendered up except for the eyes. Now, if any of you have taken the painting faces, course you will remember the I tutorial and how we use the Jewell lighting scheme to make I seem translucent, deep and soulful. Well, we're going to do something very similar here, but we're going to take it up a notch in terms of detail and creativity. After all, we're designing a cool alien creature here, and we want the finished product to be unique and memorable. A quick refresher on the jewel lighting scheme. While we normally light ino pig sphere like this with a highlight mid tone, core shadow and reflected light, the jewel lighting scheme is sort of the opposite. To make this sphere seemed deep in translucent like we would want it. I toe look, we actually make it darker near the top and let the light bounce around inside and make the lower part of the sphere the brightest. I know it seems backwards, but it really works. Finally, we add a bright, very stark highlight over the darkest part of the top area. And just like that, this sphere looks translucent and deep. So with that Jewell lighting scheme in mind, let's begin adding some color to this blank I area. I've got my alien face all set up here, and I'm going to create a new layer and just call that I color. And I thought we'd go with kind of a cool, grayish blue for his eye color and again keeping that Jewell lighting scheme in mind. We're making the bottom part of the eye, the brightest. So it's like the light goes inside of this translucent sphere and bounces around. So you want to keep the top part of the eye pretty dark. And here I'm just a racing away, a pupil near that top part, just using the erase tool. And here's where we had that super bright highlight on top and just like that his eye looks all jeweled and translucent. Now make sure that that highlight crosses over the pupil. You want it to look like that highlight is above the pupil, so it really helps if you make it spanned both that colorful iris part and the pupil beneath. So now I've gone back down to my eye color layer, and I'm just adding in some striations. Guys, check out some photos of riel, human or even animal eyes. There, some incredible detailed stuff going on there. You should try and emulate or even use some of that text, a ring in your eye art. There's so much interesting stuff going on. So I'm just smudging out these little striations to make that I colorful and interesting, and I think that's looking really cool. I'm gonna adjust the hue and saturation just to see if there's a a shade that I like a little bit better just to make these eyes Seimas vibrant and interesting as possible. But that's pretty much the technique. Now check out how small changes to the shape of the iris can have a huge effect about the feel of the entire creature. These are just a few ideas, but they're so fun to do that you can really get carried away, and I hope you do give these exercises some practice, and your creature's eyes will have all of the depth and beauty that they need to be really authentic and memorable. Since most creatures that we create need to have realistic muscles, let's revisit the concept of value edges. Now all successful value renderings need to have a mix of both soft and hard edges. Like we see in this simple diagram. However, this concept is even more important and creature design because it's the key for making something look fleshy and organic. Let's check out some examples. All of these creatures have a nice sense of musculature beneath their skin. This is accomplished by rendering these muscle shapes in a specific way that uses different value edges to define them from one another. Here's a quick demonstration. We have a few random organic shapes that will pretend or muscle groups in a creature, so we're just going to use our value step to make them seem realistically three dimensional and justus importantly, defined and distinct from one another. We start with a nice soft value gradation on top of one of the muscles. Once we like the look of that, we start the next one with a very hard edge. We kind of cut underneath with some smaller, sharper brushstrokes Right away, you can see the definition between the two shapes. We then render out of soft edge away from this new hard edge, and we're left with two soft shape areas separated by a hard edge. After adding some tone on top to unify things, this suddenly looks like a realistic organic form, just like musculature beneath the skin. Although we'll apply this concept, it's a more complex shapes in a full creature project. As long as you remember to include both hard and soft edges, your creatures will start to look alive. One final rendering concept that I'd like to show you is something that I call wet lights, thes air. The very bright speculate highlights that we had to something to make it seem wet or slimy , similar to what we just did on the I highlight. I learned quite a lot about these while training to be a medical illustrator, but they have all kinds of fun applications for creature design and can really take a character over the top amphibian type. Skin can be made to seem super realistic with these wet lights, or whenever you have a huge mouth full of teeth, wet lights or just what you need to make it seem really and authentically biological. When designing monsters, things that looks slimy and have big teeth always strike a chord with the viewer were just hardwired to find these things scary and repulsive. So let's check out a quick demonstration so that you can see how to add these in. So I've worked up this nasty looking tentacle monster for our demo here, and he's just about finished. All of the steps are done, but we're saving wet lights for kind of a final Polish papa at the end here. So we're going to start that right now. I've got it set up on another layer, and I've got pure white selected in just around default brush, and I'm just going to start adding in these little, very bright, very stark highlights, bumping in some little dots here on the tongue, adding some little string areas of highlight to these rolled up edges of the lips really anywhere that needs a little bit of extra pop. I'll even add in some little stringy saliva hanging off of the tongue here. And this adds a lot of movement to a lot of dynamism because suddenly it looks like they're all these little droplets of spit flying out of his mouth. It just makes things seem like they're moving a lot more very interesting stuff. So wet lights, air, really a final polish just to add a little bit of extra pop. So moving down the rest of the body here, I'm picking out the areas on these round little sort of cylindrical shapes on his body that would be facing directly towards So these little folds behind the jaw, this area on the head wherever the brightest highlight would shine. That's where we really want to shine these in and notice. I'm interrupting these a little bit. It makes it look like little folds of amphibian types, skin stretching over his body so you can really fit a ton of information into these wet lights or a really useful visual communicator on top of just looking really cool and adding a ton of ickiness and grossness to a monster, so an incredibly powerful tool. Give this in practice, and I think you'll really like what it does for your creature paintings. So now you know all of my secrets for making your creatures seem like living, breathing things Give these techniques in practice in your designs will be leaping off the page. 8. Creature Project Briefs: Oh, I everyone, this is Hardy. In this lecture, we will discuss creature art briefs As a creature honest, you need to first thoroughly understand the finished product that your clients want. Good communication is key, and this often comes in the form of a document called a project Brief that comes from the client. This is just a set of written instructions and Web image visual references outlining the creature that they want you to create. Briefs could be many pages long or just a few quick sentences. Depending on how much creativity the client is leaving up to you. They need to communicate the general ideas like creature type and environment. But they also need to give you an idea of the feeling and attitude that the creature is to convey to get you all familiar with this process. I've worked up four quick Project Breeze is a starting point for our four main creature projects, so let's check those out for our projects up, chosen a good variety of fairly mainstream creature ideas so that we can explore a lot of design and rendering solutions that you might encounter in your own work. Check out the descriptions and references below and see what kind of ideas start coming to mind. Do a Web search to start gathering your own visual references is inspiration, but not for copying. Don't let thes Web images influence you too much. We're going to rely on our own visual memory and design knowledge to come up with something new and even cooler. So don't let weapon and just limit you. We need to make sure toe work within these provided brief guidelines. So read carefully and always feel free to ask your client to elaborate. If anything is unclear, questions are your friend. So now that we have our project briefs and we've already discussed all the elements of successful creature art, it's time to start our first project. So grab your stylist and let's dive in. 9. Project 1 - HOWLER - Sketch & Ink: Oh, uh, everyone, this is Hardy and welcome to the howler Creature project. In this section, we will start with our sketch and ink phase. So let's dive in. I've got a blank canvas set up here, and I'm just going to start a sketch layer and is always they usually like to set that on a pretty low opacity, usually 20 or 30 or something like that. And I'm just grabbing my chalk brush and I'm going to start making some marks here. So it this early phase, we need to remember all of our building blocks of design. We need to think about the feeling that we want this guy to have. What is his role and what is his environment? So what? There's to be a predator type character. Basically, we're designing this around the framework of a bipedal dinosaur type creature. So if you think the loss of rapture or T. Rex, you're not far off wanting to look like a riel living animal. But if you think dinosaur, you will certainly be on the right track. So I'm just trying to rough in a very basic body shape, remembering some of those design tricks that we talked about as well, trying to get some repeating shapes going in some balance and some repetition just to make this guy look interesting. But for now, I'm just defining the main forms of his body and trying to get opposed that I like. Another thing from our brief we need to keep in mind is with this guy's name, the Howler. We want him to have his jaws really wide open, have that big mouthful of teeth, be a really prominent part of what we take away from this one. So I'm tryingto designed with those elements in mind and just try and make this guy look cool. And as we always do in our process here, it's just a lot of trial and error. I add in marks and then change things with some transform tools or just a race and start over. So that's the beauty of photo shop in all of our courses is that there really are no mistakes because everything is infinitely re workable. So don't don't fear making taking any chances, just just go for it and keep re working until it starts to look cool. But starting to get some traction here. I'm settling on Cem shapes that I kind of like I've got that huge, wide open mouth so that we can imagine this guy's howling just like his name suggests. And he's certainly looking pretty scary. I wanted to look like a predator, certainly wanted to look kind of mean in a little bit scary, but I want to stop short of making this guy and all out monster nightmare eso that's that's where I am with that we will have a project like that where we're just trying to design something horrifying and scary. But for this one, we're just making him kind of a naturalistic predator. So that's where I am design wise to make him a little more interesting than just, ah, basic dinosaur. I wanted to add some crests to his head so that square area on top of his nose and on the back of his head, that's how we're gonna add a little bit of design interests so that he doesn't seem quite so much like a generic by pad dinosaur. We do want to push ourselves a little bit to make this something interesting, because most of the time, in a professional setting that, that is, what you're being paid for is, is something original. Another good thing that these crest do is give us an opportunity to have some repeating elements. Remember that repetition core design element that that really works well with creatures? So those crests on the head and neck here are really going to help us out with adding some visual interests and just make this guy look look pleasing? Is it designed so kind of feeling my way through those seeing how I want thes repeating crest shapes to work? Exactly. But but there certainly adding some interest to the project here and just defining some of these body parts. I'm starting to get pretty specific with the head area that's coming together really nicely . And that's the way these creatures sketches often work when you start is a a blank canvas. You just start blocking. Cem shapes in with a vague idea in mind until something starts to look just a little bit cool to you, and you start defining that more and more and you build outwards from from the part that's working, and suddenly it all just sort of seems to fall in place almost like your hand takes over and you can just let the design happen. So that's sort of what's going on here. I'm really liking how that head is shaping up, so I'm sort of designing the rest of his body with around that. Using the head is a pivot point and bringing that lower eyelid up on his I just to make it seem like he's he's really giving everything he has to. This shriek he's letting out had seemed a little bit large relative to the rest, and that could be cool sometimes, but just seemed way too big on this guy. So look before and after, and I think that's a much better fit. Think of what? This guy to have some really dexterous arms. I want him to be using his arms as part of his attack as well, not just his mouth. So we're gonna give him some some pretty developed arms. Give him some musculature. I tend to adapt what I know about human musculature, and in what I hope you all learned in human anatomy and our figure painting course 22 creatures as well. The basic muscle groups of humans tend to translate well when you're making creatures and also gives the viewer something to relate to. Most people know about the general muscles of the shoulder and the arm. So even when you're designing a non human being like this guy, if you include those familiar muscle shapes, it actually gives your creature a little bit more credibility. It makes it something more identifiable that the viewer can latch onto, and that's always a good thing. Some opening up liquefy. Remember, that's just command shift. XTO Open up this window and I'm just sort of sliding things around just a little bit, adding a little bit of definition and pushing and pulling parts of the page until they look a little bit better. Such a great thing, liquefied. It will get you out of just about any jam you can get in at photo shop and and you can use it at any phase of the project. So Photoshopped really is a miracle for artists. Once you're familiar with the digital medium, there's just about nothing you can't get away with trial and error. It's infinitely forgivable. So one of the main things that like to preach here, over and over again. Sorry if I sound like a broken record, trying a few more things with liquefied just to see if I can change the shape of the head and kind of the curve of the neck. But I don't think that's quite working as well, just fine tuning this head shape just a little bit more. I like that. The way we've sort of raised his head up, kind of like he's raising his head to scream, really trying to make his voice carry. That's, Ah, slightly more aggressive pose that I like. And I think I may even bring some of these little crest shapes down the back of his arm might be a cool way to get some of those repeating elements into other parts of the body, so certainly a need option to explore their just really finding our way through you just feel is Ugo whatever looks cool. Whatever direction you think might be a good thing to travel down, just go for it. Photo shop will let you get away with it. If you want to try something that's very risky, you feel like you're risking all the work you're doing. Of course you can always just save aversion and come back to it. But a much quicker way to G. O. Is noticed the little snapshot icon on the history panel. If you click that little camera icon, it makes a snapshot of that state, and you can go back to that any time. So it's sort of like setting a safety line for yourself before you attempt something that might be kind of risky, like totally erasing a part of your character or something like that. Just hit snapshot before you do. And again, that's right here over in the history panel. Very useful tool. Another great thing about that is, if you do set a snapshot, you can use your history brush to paint back to that state. So snapshot is something I definitely think you should get familiar with, because it can save you for making potentially a wrong turn. And it'll further emboldened you to to take risks and push your artwork. And that's really the whole advantage of photo shop. Is that risk free environment that we can paint in making some of these crushed shapes on its head string out a little bit to sort of turn into almost little whisker type looking things. I think that makes him look just a little bit nastier and meaner. And and I think that that certainly helps push him beyond just looking like a generic dinosaur type bipeds creature here. And that's what we want. We're not blowing any any minds with design creativity on this one. This is just a simple opening project for our first creature project here, but I certainly do want it to not be boring by any means. So pushing the boundaries just a little bit. But keeping things relatively vanilla, let's say and just enlarged him a little bit to Philip the candidates. Sometimes it's easier to get these initial design decisions made in a slightly smaller area , or at least that's the way I find it. But once it gets to a certain level of development, I like to go ahead in large, enlarge the work to fill the canvas, a good bit, just defining some little curled clause. I want them to seem kind of coiled back like he's ready to just spring forward and grab it . Something really look like he's ableto chase something down and catch it. Remember, we want toe really make this guy's role clear. So all of his muscles, his teeth, his claws, all of those things really scream predator to anybody who's viewing, even if they're not really conscious of that. These visual cues really tell the story. So, along with all those visual design elements like balance and repetition, we need to keep these role and function big Picture questions in mind as well, along with how we want the viewer to feel about our character so want to respect him is a dangerous looking character. That's our general feeling. We want them to know that he is a predator who can run down and catch things and killed him with his big, sharp teeth. And we wanted to look like he. He lives in a relatively normal land based environment so he can run on two legs. All of those questions were answered with these visual cues that we're drawing in here. So keep those in mind. Remember to build up your design around those big picture questions. In fact, I had most of those things answered in my mind before I even started sketching. So take the time to to get sharpened up on all of those decisions before you put stylist to tablet, so to speak, and your design will be coming from a much more solid place, and I think you'll really enjoy the work that comes of it. But with that, I'm just sort of sketching in a few more extra details and this guy's looking shark and to try a few more little liquefy options. But I think I've basically got this sketch where I'd like it to be. Of course, up next we will drop the opacity on this layer, and I'll begin an inking past just to make it a little more solid. But for now, it's just a little bit of fine tuning, adding a few more little tiny extra details. But I'd say that this is just about ready to go up next. We will think this character in so I'll create a new layer and I'll name that ink and notice. I've drop the opacity way back on my sketch layer, just want to be able to see it, but I don't want it to really obscure my ink work. So it's which to a normal round default brush just to give me some nice, crisp lines, and I'm just gonna begin the process of going around the entire perimeter of the character , getting in those initial bold shapes. What the initial lines to just define the main forms of the character. So we'll worry about all those little interior line details. It make it look like muscles and all that cool stuff that makes him seem alive will do that on another pass with a smaller brush to make him finer lines. But for now, I'm just getting in the main big shapes with some relatively thick lines. And really, at this step, we just want to focus on some nice, crisp brushstrokes. We were nice and free and loose and expressive in our sketch. Face it this phase. This is where we worry about it looking a little bit more tight and refined. So of course, you never really had toe worry because you can just erase is needed. But this step is all about making crisp, deliberate brushwork to give your line work a little more of a professional feel. This is the step that you had come to before. You would submit this idea to a client just to say do you like? This? Is this okay? Toe, take to a final painting because you haven't invested too much time. You don't want to get an entire color painting finished before getting the OK from a client or a teacher if this is for student work. So this is a nice professional presentation without getting too far along. So just a nice, crisp line. Drawing always looks good and is a nice, effective way to communicate an idea without investing too much time. So it's just a matter of going around the entire perimeter again, just trying to define these thes main gross forms. And then we'll come back to the inside and add in some some detail, work to the interior and notice I I even change the design a tiny bit added a finger to that claw down there so you can often catch little mistakes or omissions that you had in your sketch phase. When you're doing this inking pass, so just a nice opportunity to clean things up and maybe fill in any gaps you may have left if you're getting a little too faster, expressive with your sketch phase. That certainly happens with May. But that's the way you should be during the sketch face. Don't want anything hampering you down certainly don't want to be worrying about line quality at that phase. It's more just about the idea in the posed the expressiveness. But right now we're just taking it a step further, cleaning things up in making it look nice and crisp so that our idea will look nice and professionally presented. That always helps it be. Ah always helps you sell it to whoever is viewing it. If if it has a nice presentation. And, of course, when we get to our final rendering, that's when we'll really poor on the good stuff that makes it look super cool. But if this phase, a nice, crisp line drawing, will do the trick, so just defining these feet, I left those pretty loose in this sketch phase. So defining those claws a little bit more. Some of these muscles that define the leg and some wrinkly toe areas down there as well some of these muscles and bones around the hip, where the midsection meets up with the hip, and I think we're in good shape so more these a little wispy whisker looking things coming off the tail just to have another nice repeating element as we discuss it in our visual design lecture. Just to tie it all together and just make it look cool also adds a little bit of movement. You can almost imagine those wispy things coming off of the head and tail blowing in the wind a little bit. So always a great opportunity toe. Add some dynamism and movement to your illustration here. So this is now. It's time for these little second level level details. I've shrunk my brush a good bit. It's a finer line that we're doing now, and I'm coming into the interior and making all these cool little wrinkles and indications of muscles beneath the skin. This is all that good stuff that we learned about in our make. Your creatures seem alive lecture. So I hope you really practice those techniques and are ready to bring them to your project here because this is really the important stuff that helps sell your design. It has to seem alive, has to be a riel, riel creature that anyone can believe in. Or else it just it just won't get off the ground, but with a little bit more interior design work, I'd say this guy is just about all polished up. Up next, we'll block him in and start a value painting. 10. Project 1 - HOWLER - Value: Oh, everyone, this is Hardy. In this section, we will do the value step for our howler creature. So let's get started off camera, I have added in a splash background These are super super simple to do. We have a video on how to make them where you can just use this one, the files available for download. But I makes it nice background. So the next thing we're gonna do is block in using our Inc steps. So I've selected the outside of the character with the magic Wand tool and that little negative shaped by his far elbow there. And I'm going to go to select inverse. So now we've switched from the outside of the character to the inside. So all we have to do is create a new layer and fill that in. I like to use this dark scion color for my silhouette base, and then all I do is make a copy of the ink layer and merge those together. So I have a nice silhouette with the Leinart on top of it, and we're all ready to start our value painting. So I'm grabbing this bright orange color as I always do for value paintings. It just works well with the the Dark Scion. But we're not worried about color at all at this phase. Just value just light and dark. So really, you could be doing this in black and white at this phase. Doesn't really matter. We're gonna convert it later. So with a value painting, remember, fundamentals of value. What we're really worried about is how to make our character look three dimensional. So we're thinking about where our light sources and how light strikes the different planes of this character. So I'm imagining the light sources roughly above and maybe a little bit to the left side of the page right now. So any of these parts of his face that I'm working on that air facing towards the light sores, I'm gonna make brighter in any of the planes that are facing away. That's where we leave those shadow areas. So if you go back to the simple sphere rendering exercise, it's really just an extrapolation of that. That simple principle make the light source face where the light is. If you make it consistent across the board, then really it's just a matter of wrapping your head around what all these smaller little shapes are that that add up to the overall shape of the character. So I hope that makes sense. Once you understand how light behaves on that simple sphere, it's just a matter of applying it to these different shapes that you've established on your character. Now that's very important. That's the key to making something seem three dimensional. But what I think might even be amore important step. And you're going to hear me say this about a 1,000,000 times in this course is value edges . Okay, so that was the first time in a project. But look back. It are making creatures seem alive. Lecture if you need a refresher on that. But value edges are the key to making your creature seem organic, like there are muscles and bones in all kinds of living things, living thing, parts going on beneath his skin. So what I mean by value edges is we can have soft value edges where the lights turned to dark over a long period, a nice soft gradation, and we also have period areas where there is a stark contrast where light switches to dark very quickly. and we need to have both. All good value paintings have both soft and hard edges, but it's most important in creature. Paying is because those areas were soft and hard edges work together. That's how we give the impression of muscles beneath the skin. So I'm doing this all over. The place already will have areas where there is a nice, soft, great Asian, kind of like on his jaw. But then, when I want to define another muscle or another little fold of skin or something, I start cutting in a very hard edge somewhere to the side or below are or next to that soft edge. So I hope that makes sense. Create the soft edge and then cut that hard edge right next to it to create a new area. New muscle, a new fold of skin. That's how you make these creatures seem really organic, and they really start to seem alive. You can see with just this simple bit of rendering on the head. This guy's already super believable, is both a three dimensional object and is a living organic thing because we're both paying attention to our light source. Like the sphere exercise and we're paying attention to our value edges, Like we discussed in the making things seem alive lecture. So I hope that makes sense. I'm gonna talk about that over and over again, because that is honestly the key of of making your value step work for you and make your creatures seem like organic living things. Its value edges. So I hope you don't get tired of me saying that. I'll try and move on to other topics to, but that really is may be the single most important step that I can impart to you on the value step is to get those value edges right. Okay, so now that I have exhausted that thoroughly, we're kind of just jumping all over to get the general shapes blocked in here for where we have that light source hitting and notice. After I do all that edge work, I'll come back in sort of unify things. I make my brush a good bit larger, and we do that with the bracket keys as a keyboard shortcut to make them larger and smaller . And I'll just sort of unify everything over the top. So, in a way, when we pick out all those muscle shapes with all those edges. What we're doing then is is coming to wrap skin over them with those larger, unifying stroke. So that's how I think of it. First you have to create the muscles, and then you need to cover them with skin. And that's how you end up with a nice, realistic looking results. So remember, in our design, we wanted some of those repeating design elements toe to come all over the body. So these crests on his head and knows I've got those coming down the arms as well. So we've got kind of a cool, cohesive design coming together, even in the value step. You have to be careful because sometimes things that seemed like a good idea at the sketch phase don't quite translate too well to value. And and you need to just change something on the fly. And I think we're fortunate here. This all seems to be carrying over pretty well from one step to another. But don't be discouraged if something is not looking the way you thought it would at the value step, because you can certainly make changes to your design. Even at this phase again. The great part about photo shop, you're not committed to anything. Nothing is in Real Life, Inc. It's all totally undoable commands. These is your best friend. So I've got most of his neck and his upper body rendered in pretty well here again. Remember, from our design principles, we want to balance some nice, flat calm areas with some visually active areas. So I can see several places where I've got some very visually active areas. I think around the nose and the teeth, a lot of repeating folds of skin. Same thing right behind his head, on his neck, going down by those crests on his head. A lot of overlapping little folds of skins. Person, really visually active areas. Same thing on those rib looking shapes under his arm. Ah, lot of repeating small, visually active elements, and those look really cool. But we need to balance that out with some areas where it's a little flatter and calmer, sort of like we have on the rest of the neck, or this arm area is kind of a big, relatively smooth, flatter area, so the eyes tend to need to rest a little bit if it's just all visually active elements all over the page, it can kind of wear you out. You start losing track of what you're supposed to even look at because it it just all turns into visual white noise. Hope that makes sense. So remember to balance things. That's one of our most important core design principles is as it relates to creature design , balance and, of course, repetition. As we discussed in the previous lecture and just using this smudge tool, I think we've only used the brush tool up to this point. But I'll do some smudging as well that that really does a cool job of making the skin seem realistic. All those brush brush strokes can start to look a little bit too modeled, and when you smooth them out with just a little bit of smudging, suddenly they look like nice, flat areas of realistic skin. So this guy's certainly looking like an organic creature, so we're doing well in that regard. I hope hope your projects are satisfactory on that front, too, to this point, But of course, Redux as much as you need to, and you will get there, but a nice organic quality. This guy can totally believe him is a living, breathing, biting, clawing things. So he's he's checking all the boxes that that we needed him to. I think we're right, right on target with our project brief and everything in front of the arms is looking just about done so well. I don't want to forget his hold back half here. Got to render that in. That's a pitfall I fall into Sometimes is I get so enamored with the fun parts of the body , like the mouth and teeth or something like that, that I sort of don't save any energy for things like feet and legs by the time I get to the bottom of the body. So take a break if you need to recharge because you definitely don't want any part of your creature to look like it was an afterthought, like you just slapped it altogether after spending a nice time a long time doing a nice rendering of some other part. So make sure Toto be honest with yourself about that. And if you need a break, certainly do so a lot of the times, which you may not know is in these projects is. I'll pause the recording, take a little break and come back at it with fresh eyes. So even though they seem to be going extremely quickly and effortless effortlessly, there certainly pauses built in there. So don't feel like you need to do this all in one giant sitting or anything, because often that's not the case, even with these demonstrations, so no worries there. Take breaks, Dona. Don't overdo it and save some energy so that you can have your creature looking great from head to toe or tail to claw or whatever. But coming together pretty well. Wanna add some little wrinkle shapes to this toe again? Just toe. Have some visually active areas going on on this back half that will balance out nicely with that pretty smooth, calmer area on the thigh and knee. I think that's just about right. Definitely want to save a little detail for this back foot. Even though we're certainly on the downhill side of our value rendering, this is starting to look like it's it's getting closer to finished at a little bit of tone here on this part, even though it's it's gonna be mostly in shadow, I think by the finished product and adding, in a little rendering to this tale, probably gonna end up leaving that pretty dark. So I don't think I need to spend a ton of time on that. But I do want it to look interesting and not just like a flat area of tone. So doing a little bit of of value edge work on that as well. There you go. I said it one more time, but you can you can really see that. That really is the key to making those muscle looking shapes. Really looking like they're under the skin makes this guy look super organic and believable . You can almost hear that that shriek coming out of his mouth, and that is definitely what we're after. That will sell your audience on your creatures being a realistic thing. So a little bit of those unifying tones my brushes pretty large, and I've got it set on a low opacity, and it's just sort of unifying things together. So it's kind of like we're covering all these muscles with skin where they look a little too defined and that will really tight altogether. Make it look super realistic. Just a few finishing touches here, a little bit of smudging and some touching up, and I think this guy's just about ready to go up next will convert him to color. 11. Project 1 - HOWLER - Color & Detail: Oh, hi, everyone. This is Hardy. In this section, we will convert the value to a color painting for a howler project. So let's get started. So I've got our value painting all finished here. It's looking good. I'm gonna make a copy of that just to save aversion, to be safe. But up next, we'll hit command you to bring up a hue saturation adjustment. And I'm going to turn that bright orange that I use for value paintings into kind of an off white, very pale yellow. And next notice. I've created a new layer, and I've put that underneath the value layer. This is where I put some some color just to splash it in. Give it a little bit of a feeling of modulation underneath the skin. And I thought this nice Scion color would give just a kind of feeling that I wanted for this. So really, we're just sort of filling in those super black shadow areas. I wanted to look more like living skin. That's what the purpose of this layer is. But it's a subtle step, and I think that's just about right a little bit more, and I think we'll just merge those together. So I've got that is a single layer now, and at this step, it's just all about refining what we've got on the page. It's it's essentially converted to color already. Now we're just gonna gonna refine things, polish it up a little bit. So I'm jumping all over the character here, just adding in some shadows, areas that I want to darken up or polish up a little bit anywhere with those brush strokes and the value steps started getting a little too rough and adding a little details. A little cash shadow under the armpit like I'm doing here, making the tail a little bit darker so that it looks like it recedes away from the light sores. Things like that refinement. That's that's the point of this step, and I'm just using a large circular round brush. It's very soft to I've got the softness down around 25% or even lower, I think just so that we can smooth things out a little bit. We don't want to totally kill the effect of all those nice modeled brushstrokes that we did with the chalk brush at the Value step, but we certainly want to smooth things out. It gives it a a much nicer, refined look. And remember, when you have the brush tool selected if you hold down the Ault or option key, it turns the brush into that medicine dropper. So notice I'm doing that a lot. You just jump around the page, grab a color with that medicine dropper as needed, and you can just pick it up and put it right back down. And over time, if you do that process enough, it has sort of an averaging effect. It it brings all of the colors a little bit closer together ends up with a much more polished, refined look. Is things sort of start to jive a little bit better, so I hope that makes sense. But this is a really fun kind of Just turn your brain off part of the project. Just jump around the page and and let your your artist's eye in your hand just do all the work. A little bit of smudging here, just to refine things a little bit, but mainly we're just doing that, picking up and laying down of color step by holding down alter option in switching to the medicine dropper tool. So a few things about his anatomy that I am refining a little bit notice around the jaw have put a bit of a shadow behind that last tooth on the upper jaw. I wanted to seem like his jaws are really stretched wide open, so there's a bit of a shadow, and that loose skin kind of hangs down below. There really makes his mouth seem like it's just stretched to the limit, because again, this guy's name is howler. We want to give that impression that he has got his mouth wide open, letting out some earth shattering shrieks. So that's just what we're hoping for. Their jumping all over the character that obviously I sharpened up the crest behind the arm a little bit, had some darker values. I added in just to make those lighter arm crest shapes pop a little bit and even adding in a little bit of darker line work in a few places just to stretch that value range places where the skin might come into contact with one another, or where to creases air coming together. Those were places where you can save your darkest darks so see right in the crease of the armpit. There, put a very dark line and there, on the crease of the legs. Well, just areas where skin actually comes into contact with other skin. It's good to have one of those really dark shadows, because value range, along with value edges, is one of those things that really sells. This is a realistic three D form and as an organic living creature, so I hope that makes sense, but really just jumping around a lot. Take a look back at my original value painting just to do a little bit of quality control. Make sure I'm not getting too far away from the original or anything. So another good reason to save an earlier version is sometimes you can you can go off on a tangent trying something and lose sight of your original plan. So all I was doing there remember the snapshot tool is a great way to do that as well, just to make sure you're you're on target. So I've actually selected a brighter tool just for a little bit of extra highlighting and even, ah, finally renaming my my skin tone layer there. But I think this is looking good. Now we're going to create a new layer and give this guy some teeth, and I've got a very cool step on step process for creating teeth. And the first step is this red color. Now, since teeth and bones, for that matter, are such a fleshy organic tissue, it's always great to start with this red. It's kind of gross, but it's It's like their blood based, so you'll save some of that red around the gums where it comes into contact with the rest of the head. But also, as light shines through teeth, it actually kind of bounces around inside of them a little bit. Ah, three d artists will know this is subsurface scattering. So we want some of that red color to be sort of in the makeup of our tooth tissue that we're making here. So I hope that makes sense a bit of a technical, a technical explanation, but much more simply, start with red. The next step is to move to this orangish color. I'm leaving in a little bit red right where it contacts the head. So where those gums are, but I'm painting this yellowish color, a nice tooth Boenisch color out towards the tips of the teeth. And now it's really starting to look like realistic teeth. Already, if you just did this flat orange, it wouldn't look nearly as realistic. You need that read under painting to really sell. It is a realistic, organic, bony looking type of substance, and finally we switched to a very bright off white. We do this both to to make the tips of the teeth a little bit wider than even that yellow. But it's also a nice little shiny highlight you can add in. Make these teeth seem sharp like they have, Ah, nice, sharp angled down the middle. Think of them is a pyramid shaped or something like that. So I think that's working well, a little bit of smudging Teoh average these things out, but I think this is looking just like the diagrams that we have here. And that is my formula for creating realistic looking t super simple. And it works in just about every situation. You could do a bit of a hue, saturation adjustment or color balance if if those very saturated tooth colors aren't quite fitting and I'm even erasing away a little bit to make those perimeter t seem to curve around the head a few of these crooked teeth or back in shadow a little more just for a little extra realism. And I think I'm gonna del the saturation and adjust the hue just a bit to make it fit with that more green skin color. I think that looks great, actually. Might do a quick color balance just to try something a little more. Scion what the teeth to jive with the skin. I definitely want there to be some contrast but wanted to fit just a little bit better. But I think that's good to go up next. We'll tackle his eyes. So remember our entire I demonstration for creatures in that jewel lighting scheme. We're gonna apply that here in our first creature project. So remember, we want the bottom half of the eye to be the brightest part, cause it's kind of like the light is going in and then bouncing around at the bottom. So keep the top part of the eye darker and the lightest part near the bottom under that dark pupil that I'm adding here. So going for, Ah, red and yellow. Actually, the same colors is the bony teeth. Just to give him a nice, scary, fiery colored I thought that would make this predator look a nation intimidating. And I'm just smudging out some of those cool striations details that we did in the eye demonstration as well. I'm gonna actually a race away a little bit of this tone at the top here just to make that that Jewell effect more apparent. That really helps, too, and making the bottom of his eye a little bit brighter, making that effective strong as I can and adding that bright white highlight right over the pupil kind of spanning the pupil in the iris. So I love that. That's the moment when it all starts to look really, really is in eyes when you had that highlight. So there you have it the Jewell lighting scheme, adjusting this shape of the pupil to make him see maybe a little more reptilian. I think that's a great fit, and this looks great. So trying out different eye colors just to a hue saturation. See if there's some other hue that looks even cooler, and I've done a little bit of an adjustment, but I think that is pretty good to go. So up next we'll do what I will call dark skin. This is kind of when you add the paint job to this character. Right now, he's kind of a flat, greenish grey, but I want some more interesting color patterns there. So I've created a new layer called Dark Skin, and I've said it to multiply mode very important. And I'm putting dark skin under the teeth in eyes so that we make sure that it it makes those those tissues pop the I and the teeth. We want those parts to pop so the darks make those lighter colors pop out. And oops, I've selected the channel incorrectly. So I'm asked out the entire dark skin multiply layer. It's a black mask fully filled in, and I'm just painting with white now to reveal those areas where I want that dark brown contrast color to show up. So anywhere I wanted to be a little bit darker. I'm just painting white on that layer mask right now, and it will start to reveal in some parts of this cool, dark brown multiply color and you can see it immediately gives a ton of cool color interest . A lot of nice contrast between that light, greenish pale skin suddenly like it really is like giving a cool paint job to your sports car. Now that you you're done modeling it and putting it all together. Now it's timeto give it all kinds of cool paint, so all kinds of little animal patterns feel free to references many animal model photos, as you want. I'm kind of thinking Tiger stripes. Or maybe something something from the sea, like a tiger shark, actually, just those subtle striping that you see just to give this guy's skin some cool patterning. But there is a huge world of possibilities out there. You can just leave. It is flat color variations. A simple Grady int is often all you need to make your character look cool and have a nice color modulation. But trying something a little more interesting here some of this neech striping just to give his skin Cem interest. And it also fits with the the idea that this guy's a Predator and stripes air. Typically, there is camouflage in nature, so maybe this guy's toe hide and in tall reeds, toe ambushes, pray or something like that have some kind of cool back story on hand to explain all of these design choices that you're making but basically just just giving him some cool color variations. It works on both sides of that equation. It makes your character make more sense biologically, and it just looks cool. And we're trying to accomplish both, obviously with every creature painting that we make. So I hope that makes sense. This is a really fun step where you just get toe, drop these colors in and make it shine. So I'm thinking he's crest on the back of the arm. Might have that nice, stark contrast kind of like the crests on his head. Seeing if I can tie those two together. This is looking pretty cool. That's probably a little bit harder of a line that I want. So I'm gonna find a way to smudge that in. Remember, you can smudge on the layer mask Justus. If it were a normal paint layer, all the tools that you use as if you were painting on a normal layer. They applied a layer masks as well, so don't forget that you can smudge. You can even run filters on layer masks. It's all there to help you just get to the same finished product, so I'm asking some of that back out. I thought those lines were a little bit too stark, but this is definitely having the desired effect. Some really cool color variation. I like the way the brown is interacting with that paler, greenish gray color. Definitely like the brown, But I'm thinking I might actually change the underlying skin color just a little bit. But of course, with just a command, you hue saturation adjustment. Once you have all the stripes and little modeled patterns where you want them, you can play around with it as much as you want to see if there's some color combination that might work better. You could completely change this guy to having bright pink skin and dark blue color patterning. Anything would work in with hue saturation adjustments. That's what you can do. So I'm actually painting black back into these areas that I have revealed just to have some slightly more ornate second level type patterning. So there's a little circular things just to make part of the of the color patterning a little bit better jumping back to my tooth layer wanted a little bit of rendering on these fingernails and toenails. So I've actually copied one of the bigger teeth. And I'm just gonna pace that down and you can see I'm warping this around, copying the same shape just very quickly and easily get some fingernails. Want to have a little bit of rendering on that? I have said earlier. You want to make sure that these parts of the creatures body out on the edges don't get overlooked. So something a sort of forgot wanted to jump back too quickly, and I can erase those back a good bit. Want them to be subtle. Just want them to have a little bit of attention paid to them. I don't think this is looking great. Let me try a little bit of an adjustment. See if there's a cooler looking underlying skin town and oh, I like that lot better. I'm gonna del the saturation down a little bit. That's great. I like how the less saturated gray skin contrast well with the more saturated accident color that we just added on a multiply layer. I think that's working really nicely. So I'm gonna create one more layer and render in this guy's tongue, and I think we'll be just about done with our color step. So just a sort of a dark grey tongue, adding in a little bit of rendering sort of, ah, modulated shape, like it's got two halfs to it. But that's about it. It will be mostly in shadow. So I I think with that rendered in, we've just about got our color step all finished. I'll see you in the next lecture. 12. Artfully Using Photo Textures: Oh, how everyone This is hardy. In this lecture, we will take a quick look at how to use photo textures to enhance your paintings First, a quick word of caution. Photoshopped makes using photo textures so fun and easy that an artist can really get carried away and end up way over doing it. Don't fall into this amateur trap. Remember that we're using photos on Leah's a subtle texture in order to enhance our paintings. Don't rely on photos too heavily. Okay, with that being said, let's check out this really cool technique. Once again, I have our humble sphere rendering exercise from art fundamentals. I've given it just a bit of color so that you can see how photo textures interact with the color painting beneath. This is a very simplified example, but when using photo textures in a real project, at this point you would have your painting very nearly finished design is complete and it's fully rendered in color. All that remains is final polished, and that's where photos come in. Check out this layer group called photos I've pasted in to cool texture photos for my library. One is a crack sidewalk in the others and old brick covered in little green bits of algae or something. We're gonna use these two photos to punch up our sphere and make it more interesting, colorful and rich. So I'm going to make a copy of this entire layer group, and I'll rename the copy photo textures. Next, we're going to mask out this entire photo texture layer group so that the photos can only be seen within the silhouette of the sphere. We do that by command, clicking on the sphere layer over here, which creates a selection. We then go over to the layer mask icon and click it as you can see now, the photos in the photo Texture Layer group are Onley visible inside. The sphere will never have to worry about any of these photos going outside of the seers shape up. Next is the important part, so pay close attention to this step with the photo texture Layer group selected. We go to this drop down menu, which changes the layer blending mode. We then go down to soft light as you can see. Suddenly the photos interact with the sphere layer below in a whole different way. We can see the color and rendering form of this fear below, but we're still getting all of this cool texture from the photo. Pretty cool, right? Let's do that one more time just to make sure that you've got it so jumping back to normal blending mode and then once again we select soft light to achieve the desired effect. Now you certainly noticed that there are quite a few different blending modes. But with very few exceptions, this is the only one that I really use very regularly. Once we have soft lights set for this entire layer group, we can start to manipulate the photos themselves to fit the shape. Better for this exercise will transform them to seem to fit this spherical shape more naturally. So I do that by hitting command T to bring up the free transform function. If I hold down control and click, it brings up all of these other great transform options for this one. Let's use my favorite the warp function. As you can see, it divides to transform into nine subsections that weaken, bend and manipulate with lots of control. They make this flat photo seems spherical. Let's just bend the corners to kind of wrap it around. After we're done with all four corners, weaken. Do some subtle bending to the interior lines as well, whatever you need to do, really, to make the texture fit the underlying shape. And as you can see, once things start to fit together, they start to look really realistic. So let's try this again with this mouldy brick photo. We just hit Command T to bring up the transform function. We then control Click to bring up the other, transform options and select warp. From there, it's just a matter of bending things around to fit the underlying shape, and we're left with a pretty realistic looking finished product. This technique is applications across the board on just about every course that we teach here. Characters, creatures, environments, machines just about anything convey a fit from the punch that an artfully placed photo texture can provide. I hope you found this useful. Now let's put it to good use back in our project. 13. Project 1 - HOWLER - Final Polish: Hi, everyone. This is Hardy. In this sexual, we will conclude our howler project by adding some final polish. So let's get started. I've pasted in three photos that I used frequently in my own work. It's this cool fabric pattern, kind of a leopard pattern and also a couple of frogs that I was able to get pictures off at a local zoo. So I'm gonna show you how to use it is I've gotten a ton of mileage out of these three photos. I hope you find them as useful as I do. So I've got these in a layer group that I've just called photo textures and what we're gonna do is mask this group out. So I've command click the silhouette and then we just hit that layer mask icon. So now all of these photos exist within this layer group that has a mask. So, as you can see, we can move them around, even transform them inside, and they'll only stay within the silhouette of our character here. So that's a really handy way to organize things so that nothing really happens outside of the lines. So I'm changing that whole layer group too. soft light. This is the key so that entire photo textures group is set on soft light. And that's what lets all of our painting underneath show through and only let's just a little bit of this texture show through. So that's the whole whole key to this is that soft, light blending mode. So, as you can see, I'm just moving that fabric pattern around a little bit, doing some transforms to adjust the scale a racing away some of those harder edges so that it's seamless between the two. But you just copy these layers as much as you need. I'm using the clone stamp tool a lot, too, just to sort of stamp this texture around and look at that. It it makes his skin look so much more realistic. You never know where these golden photo textures are going to come from. This thing is just my wife's skirt with this cool fabric pattern and didn't seem like creature skin to look at it to begin with. But it works so well, and I have used it so many times in my professional work, so always keep an eye out. I'm running a quick paint job filter just to make it seem a little less photographic. Next, let's try this frog at this cool, pebbled skin texture in. So I'm pasting that back into that soft light photo texture layer group, adjusting the hue a little bit. Didn't want it to be quite so blue. Think I'm just gonna remove a lot of the saturation that will let the colors below show through So that's just really need Peverley texture over the top of his shoulder. And I'm just gonna clone that in in a few areas where I want a little bit of texture variety, it looks really cool. You can practically feel that pebbly texture just by looking at this. So already we've added a ton of realism. But as I was saying before, the's textures are all around you. And just about everybody has a camera in their pocket with there cell phone nowadays. So feel free to snapshots anytime you want, and you'll really develop a nice photo library of of things you can use all the time, and you never quite know which which one's gonna work. So, uh, so try different things doesn't necessarily have to be an animal. You're taking a picture of that, they will end up being a cool animal skin texture. So this frog with the dotted skin is another one that I've gotten a lot of great use out of . These are all available for you to download. Use them as much as you want your learning process, and I think you'll enjoy them. So just copying and cloning transforming things around to see where it works. And with that, I think this guy's nicely photo texture. It looks way more realistic already. So next let's add some of those cool little speculate highlights the wet lights like we did in our demonstration. So I've created a new layer I just named it highlights. I'm going to switch to ah, good old chalk rush and select pure white. And I'm just dotting in some little, very bright highlights. This makes the skin look shiny and even a little slimy. I don't want to go too overboard with this guy cause I don't want him to be on outright. Just creepy nightmares don't want him to look just like a normal predator, but but these wet lights make him look way more realistic. Make him seem alive. All part of our whole make things seem biological and believable. Israel organism. And I think that's working really well. So just dropping in some little shiny areas to give him that nice, shiny, amphibian looking skin that were after Remember to use thes sparingly. If you you go overboard cause they look so cool you can get carried away. But if you take it too far, it kind of kills the effect. So save these for areas that you want to really stand out because they had a lot of pop without without much brushwork it all. And man I love that shiny texture really starts to make him really come alive. So this tongue would be especially wet since it's got spit on it. So some extra bright, shiny, contrasting highlights in there on that dark tongue color, I think I'm even gonna add a little bit of spit, kind of stretching around his opening mouth. There may be kind of flying out cause he's he is shrieking really loud, so that breath flying out, maybe making some spit fly around. I know it's gross, but this these are the things you need to think about. Teoh to make your creature seem riel and for some reason, spit coming out of the mouth always does a great job of that. So just a little more highlight work, maybe Cem some extra areas that could use a little pop like these teeth, adding just a little more shiny nous to make them seem kind of wet, covered in spit and in all that great icky stuff that it just rings those alarm bells in the human brain and makes this guy seem kind of scary. Very cool. Little, little more spit in the corner of the mouth here, sort of stretching over that tongue since he's opening his mouth so wide it it sort of tells a little bit of story. So incredible how much information could be related in these little highlights. I think that's looking great. So next to add a little more polish, we're gonna add some secondary light sources. So I've created a new layer, and in some of these dark areas, I'm just adding a little bit of bounced light. So remember our basic sphere rendering exercise. One of the most important parts is that reflected light that bounces up near the bottom This is just that Ambien light that can bounce from from anywhere, Really, it helps round out the three dimensional form of your creature, hear very well, and it also just makes the whole thing look a little bit cooler and more painterly. So we get a lot of good mileage out of this step. It's also really fun. This is sort of the step when you've done all the hard work, and now it's just time to put these last little bells and whistles on it to really make it shine and always a fun part. There could also be a lot of information in the secondary light sources just on the color you choose. If you choose Ah, bright orange or something for your reflected light, it can make this guy seem like he's near a fire or something, or some kind of creepy green can make it seem like he's in an alien environment. So things to think about another great reason to keep this on its own layer because you can always hit, command you and do a hue saturation adjustment to change the color afterwards if you want to try a different feel, so after those reflected lights. I'm adding another secondary light source up top, just on the same layer. But I want to really bright, almost white, kind of pale yellow just to make it seem like there's this spotlight above his head. I use the same lighting scheme on just about every creature because I like there to be a nice shining spotlight in the main area of focus. And I think that it's certainly the head for this guy. We've got all these great details his teeth, his eyes at cool, tongue whipping around and all those neat crests on his head. It's definitely where I want the focus for this guy to be. So I'm saving that really bright spotlight for this area and you can see what a difference that's made. It's really making him shine on. That certainly draws focus to this most interesting part, and also I'm being pretty fine with my brush work here. The brush is very small so that I can make some very subtle little finite brushstrokes and really have a lot of information there, so a great thing to try out in a great way to add a lot of detail and focus to, ah main selling point of your character and guys. You are, of course, invited to follow exactly the characters that I'm doing Step for step. But my main goal here is just to give you the keys, the tools really to to bring your own ideas toe life. So I hope this is more of a roadmap. And not not exactly just a step by step copy what I'm doing. Ah, great way to learn is to do that. But I hope Teoh just give you the tools to make your own stuff. Eventually, one final little detail, I'd like to add on this layer is a little bit of transmitted light coming through that skin that's kind of stretched over his jaws on this far side. Since we've got that bright spotlight established on the far side of the face, it might look cool to just have a little light coming through that skin. So sort of what we do on on ears, sometimes in character paintings or face paintings. Same kind of thing, and it makes him seem a little more biological and realistic. So just doing a little last minute fine tuning to our photo texture layer. I've merged all the photo textures together, and I think that's looking good. So I've grouped everything and made a copy of the group, and now I've merged the entire group into one layer. So look, I'm just working on one merged layer for this guy, and I do that so that we can treat his edges were really getting to the very final Polish stages here. I'm going around the entire perimeter of this merged single layer of the care creature, and I am just smudging with the brush it. It makes the edges just slightly blurry. It's sort of polishes down. Anything that might have been a little strained mark on the outside of the perimeter makes it look much more finished in three dimensional. There's really hard edges can can make it seem a little bit flat. If that happens, I'm also pulling out some little wisps of those whisker looking things just to make them stretch out a little bit, adds a little more movement makes him seem more realistic. Even pulling out these tips of the teeth just a tiny bit makes him seem a little more really so great Use of the smudge tool there, doing some last minute color checks just to see if anything else looks cooler. You never know til you try, so I think that works. I'm going to do a little bit of color dodging. Switch my brush mode to color Dodge and I've selected just a flat gray and I'm I'm just making a few areas of this guy much brighter. So those highlights on the back of his head, just a few areas make them shine just a little bit more, really makes them pop. And I think that's looking great. Maybe just a little bit more. And then we'll give him a cash shadow. Just toe have him having anchored to the environment, and I think we're just about there. Shadow always make something look much more realistic. Just anchors them to the setting, makes everything seem three dimensional. Make sure light source makes sense. So a super easy step. Just run a little motion blur on that on. I've got that set to multiply mode, by the way, the layer itself. And with that, I think we're very close to a finish painting a little glow behind him, and I think we're done congratulations on completing the howler project. This is a great first creature project, and I hope you got a lot out of it. Let's take a look back at our project steps and see how far we've gone. We started with a rough sketch to get the basic idea of our creature mapped out. We then inked him in to clean things up. After that, we did a value rendering to make him seem three dimensional, realistic. We then converted our values to color and finally added some photo textures and polished for a great looking finished product. All in all, we went from a blank canvas to a supercool finished creature that we can be proud of. I hope you really enjoy this project. But this is only the beginning. I look forward to seeing you for our next creature project, where we'll build on what we've learned here and take it to the next level 14. Project 2 - REAPER - Sketch & Ink: Hi, everyone. This is Hardy and welcome to the Reaper project. This was gonna be a ton of fun. We're going to design a nightmare type creature, just something really scary and nasty. A lot of great techniques and design tips that you can use any time you're gonna need toe design a really scary or horrifying creatures. So let's dive in. I've got a blank canvas set up and I get a sketch layer set to 30%. So we're just gonna dive right in and start making marks. Um, let's start by asking ourselves some big picture questions design up around that. So obviously we want this guy to be scary. We want the viewer to just recoil in horror as soon as they look at this guy. That's the big picture thing that needs to guide are designed from the ground up. So what is his environment and what does he do? Well, I'm thinking I want him to be this kind of ambush type monster who hangs up in a cave or something. He'll he'll be bracing himself against cave walls and then sort of snatches things from down below. Maybe even with a long grasping tail, sort of like a scorpion. So that's what I'm thinking. For his role and function as's faras his animal models, we're gonna borrow from a lot of different creepy crawly, so insect models work very well. A lot of overlapping triangular shapes, sort of ocean crustaceans. Even. He'll remind us of a crab a little bit, too. So all of those nice arthropod animals that have these overlapping, shell like parts. That's what I'm going for here because that feeds into the design design shape language that we want to use as you'll recall. Triangle shapes make him seem very aggressive and dangerous, even sleek and fast. And that's exactly what we're going for here. So already in designing this center mass of his body, I'm using as many triangle shapes as I can. We want everything to be sort of sharp and pointy, and one more kind of psychological trick I've got in mind working here is I want some identifiably human features here now, usually with with something scary. You wanted to look very alien and indifferent, but is sort of a way to make something like this seem even more upsetting and gross is to have some kind of recognizably human feature. So the 1st 1 I'm doing here is I want him to have some very human looking teeth so you can see those bottom t sticking out from beneath that hooded upper part of his weird monster head. Those are gonna be some very human looking teeth. So those are my my big picture thoughts that I'm I'm working from here just trying to create this general center mass and doing some liquefying and plenty of a racing in transforming with the warp tool, as you can see, but trying to get those human looking teeth all of these really upsetting looking details just to make him look nasty also reminded a little bit of the way of a turtle's head comes out from under the shell. I want his head to be almost sort of hidden back underneath these little overlapping shell hood type things going on over his head. Sort of like the alien queen in the movie aliens all time great creature designed right there. So, uh, I always feel free to be inspired by the great ones is as we all are, so that you can see him using liquefy a good bit. This creature is certainly more of a design challenge than the howler creature was, because that one was basically dinosaur based. Hey, had just about every feature that we expect out of, Ah, Velociraptor or a T rex, this one. I'm challenging you guys a good bit more to make something purely out of out of thin air, essentially soem or abstract, that that makes you rely on your animal models a good bit more. You have to borrow from a lot of different inspirations and not just follow one formula as easily as we did with the howler. So certainly stretching you guys on this. We stick rely more with with the design principles, so I notice a lot of repetition. Cem repeating elements like these little hood shapes that overlap and change shape a little bit, but they repeat a good bid as well as they go back on this character and also trying to balance things out with Cem relatively flat areas combined with a lot of more visually active areas. So, for example, the forehead is a pretty wide open flat part, and then we have these very visually active rows of teeth little overlapping parts around his shell as well. So plenty of balance there is. Well, just remember it. If you can simplify things down to those core design principles, it makes things a lot less daunting. But this this certainly is a step up and challenge because it's just so open ended. Its a ton of fun, though. I hope you guys really enjoy this when kind of setting your Selves free on this, not to have to follow any animal model too closely and just really let those creative juices flow. So now I'm kind of liking his center mass a good bit. So I'm going to start rendering in some extremities going out. And remember, the concept is I want him sort of bracing himself up in a cave wall so that he can snatch things down below, which is why you've probably noticed there's a large blank area at the bottom. I'm saving some room for that grasping, scorpion tail looking thing that we're gonna add in. But for now, I just wanted to have four main weight supporting limbs that are bracing him up on this cave, and basic segmented limbs similar to ah crab are all kinds of different insects may be praying Mantis as well, but these air just supporting his weight. And I'm going with basic sharp ending hooked, claw looking tips for these arms. But, uh, I might change that later on, actually, cause it's not quite as interesting as I think it could be. Give this guy some more arms. Since he grasps things down below, I thought I'd give him some long, sort of more articulate arms, maybe even with some little weirdly human looking hands on the end again, if you can find ways to have some recognizably human features contrasting with all of this great monster stuff going on, that can really add an extra edge of just psychological horror to the viewer. And remember, we're trying toe ring as many alarm bells in the viewer's mind as we can. So those teeth in those weirdly human looking arms will certainly do that for us. So a little more liquefying here. Remember, that's just command shift X. Whenever you want to bring up that menu, and I'm just adding some detail is I refined things here, but basically the basic shape of this guy is coming together nicely we've got his head is a nice CenterPoint. You can tell that that's where we're supposed to be looking because all of these all of these shapes sort of lineup and point towards that part. Another another handy use of those design elements we've got. All of those lines are king towards that face, and we'll we'll do some stuff with color later on toe. To back that up is, well, so always good to be planning ahead, even at this early phase. But for now, just really exploring finding out what what looks cool, the the way this guy's weight is distributed, the way he's propping himself up his aggressive posture. What? What can we tell that he's doing with with his posture? All of these great questions to be thinking about is we're designing these very basic initial steps. So I'm thinking that those triangular pointy tips to his claws or just not quite interesting enough, so I'm adding some some kinds of fingers out to the ends here just to make it seem a little more interesting. Maybe even a little more humanized looking fingers again, just to make this guy seem all nasty and horrifying. That's sort of the fun part of this nightmare category of Creature is it's sort of simple in a lot of ways, because you only have one goal, which is toe make this guy scary and make him gross everyone out. So it's a very simple mission. You're on here, doesn't doesn't have to ring too many other bells, just has to be scary and horrifying, and you have done your job. So things are certainly checking that box. And I like that. I think he's more articulated. Hands and limbs are working better didn't quite like the rendering on some of these. So you're gonna have to bear with me through quite a bit of redo. And I considered editing that out of the video. But sometimes I want you guys to see that that I don't get this stuff right on the first try. That is really mainly the whole. The backbone of this technique is that when you're using photo shop, you don't have to get it right on the first time like you do with with paper and pencil or anchor paint. You get a smell. Any do overs is you need. So even if you hope you don't mind bearing through a few revisions here and there, but I want you guys to see that I am totally feeling my way through on these things and I race and redo a good bit. So never feel bad about that. Take his many tries as you want, and in fact, that the trial and error is a big part of the creative process. Sometimes, if you get something that looks okay on the first pass, you could regret it later. So rework it and redo it until it becomes great. Ah, a favorite teacher of mine had a quote that I love. He said The biggest enemy of a great drawing is a good drawing. So basically, if you allow yourself to settle for something that is good, you might miss out on doing something that is great. So don't satisfy yourself with just okay, keep pushing it. Keep erasing, keep transforming, save new versions or do snapshots if you have to. You can set us many safety nets as you need, but this is the phase where we push that designed to make sure that we find that great, great drawing that we're looking for before we start painting it in. So ah, quote I hope you hang on to Now that I've got his body rendered in, I'm going to start this tail curling down below. So I went for a long kind of s shaped curving down below, and I want that to really look like it's just ready toe snatch something from down below. Really cool. And I think I'm gonna work in some Ah, some heavy repeating elements on that tail. A little fine tuning on these forward hands that are holding him up here. I wanted the back ones to be a good bit bigger just for some contrast. And I think there's a cool so jumping back down to this curving shape, trying to figure out which way I want this general s shape to be curving Think I like the first version better. So we will stick with that and just really indicating some very general shapes here if getting seem to satisfy myself with thes thes clause. So bear with me with a little bit of revision with such an abstract creature, uh, definitely doing a lot more trial and error than I would with something more more predictable, like a traditional by Petr Quadra Pet animal. When it's something totally off the grid like this creature with no exact counterpart in nature, you definitely need to feel your way through a good bit more. But I think we're on track in doing some spiky repeating elements out to the side. Justo, echo that design principle that we try to include in all of our creature designs, repetition and balance. And I've got a nice three pronged claw. Think I'm gonna do some nice toothy bone type color work for that later on, just to make that that claw looked deadly, like it just snaps shut on anything that happens toe walk by and and really ah, congrats it. Maybe it even hands it up to those little hands up above and those hands handed up to the Mount. So trying to help the viewer imagine some functionality, maybe even imagine some movement going on where that clog grab something and passes it upwards. All kinds of little story details like this can really make your nightmare type creatures even more horrifying and grow so just a little bit of refinement, adding, in some elements just toe make this guy as scary as possible. Like I can feel myself kind of getting close to having this design wrapped up. So this is when I'm jumping all over and just adding some little secondary details to make him as cool as possible before we try inking him in and going on to the painting steps. So just really some experimentation here to make this guy. It just is horrifying and nasty is we can and liquefying as well just to do some last minute fine tuning, adjusting the weight of these shapes. If anything looks out of perspective, now's the time to adjust that so fine tuning, really, now that we have all of these main main decisions made and in all of our design challenges essentially solved, this is just when you pour on the extra love so that this guy's is a school is he deserves to be, and I think we're definitely getting there looking like this nasty, horrifying monster. So back to the big picture feeling of how do we make this guy scary? To put it simply just is many spiking triangle shapes as you can fit into your design. We're also gonna add all kinds of icky stuff in the rendering phase, things like a lot of wet lights to make him seem shiny and slimy. That's another thing that that people just can't seem to find upsetting and gross. So all of those things really work together. Shiny, slimy skin teeth that are very prominent, invisible and spiky things those air a few great main categories of way to make a nightmare type creature really scary and memorable. So with just a little more adjustment, I think this guy's just about ready to start inking in. So I will create a new layer and we will call that ink, obviously. And at this step, remember with thinking we're essentially just redoing everything. But instead of focusing on are designed too much this time. We're just making the line work nice and crisp, making everything look refined in professionally presentable. So this could be a little bit of a a tedious step and actually feel free to skip it if you want to go straight to painting. But if you're trying to present this design professionally to a client or a teacher, this is a great step to do just to get your design approved before you do a whole painting . So a nice professional Chris presentation. It can also help you really explore your forms a good bit more. Start making some decisions about textures and what kind of feel you want. These areas of the creatures body toe have so some some nice things. You can figure out about your design in this step as well. But if there are any steps in this process that can be skipped, this is the one. So I've got this sped up a good bit. This actually takes quite a bit longer than you're seeing here. But we're essentially going around the entire character, giving him a nice, crisp treatment with a round brush and just making all these little designs a little more, a little more clear and refined. So that's that's the basic point. Want to make sure that all of these overlapping sort of complicated body forms that this guy has are understandable and distinct from one another? So all of those little stray marks and expressive line work that we see in a sketch phase that are part of the creative process we're going to sort of edit those out and just, uh, just let all the clean, deliberate brushstrokes show through here. So that's all I'm doing. Really, And just got to go head to toe or ah, tale two Klahr, whatever. On this Ah, this horrifying nightmare creature. So looking pretty cool so far, making these nasty little three pronged grasping claw on his tail a little more defined, sort of indicating some of these little lobular shapes that thes spikes on his tail come out of. We're gonna define all that with value at our value. Step up next. But for now, it's just sort of cleanly indicating it. Another great thing that this ink step does is it allows us toe build our silhouette off of some nice, crisp, clean line work. If you try and do the magic wand tool around this sketch layer with all those stray marks, you're gonna end up with a lot of weird, hairy outer edges. Teoh to your your silhouette. And that's not really what you want. So this is certainly a handy thing to have us both is ah, display function presentation to a client or a teacher or or just for those reasons, those on internal reasons of making the rendering job a little bit easier and cleaner down the road. So that's that's pretty much what we're up to here again. Sped up again. Bit. Since this guy has so many body parts going on this, this ink took me quite a while because I wanted to give each limb enough attention so that nothing looked like an afterthought. But obviously, I mean, I think I've lost count. Is this guy have, like, 10 legs and tail in about 50 different spikes in clause? So ah, lot going on here. But that's part of what's gonna make him so alarming and upsetting to the viewer. Is all of these wiggling, writhing arms and legs It really gives people that that visceral horror that that were we're trying to inspire here, So this is coming along pretty well. I think I've got the main forms just about all marked in. So I'd drop the opacity back even more on the sketch layer so that it's just barely there. And I've made my thinking brush a little bit smaller here so that I can come inside these main shapes and do some secondary detail ing inside. Really make it look like that nasty alien therapist type type treatment, even making these teeth a little more defined. And, man, those were gonna be a really nice feature and are painting those human looking teeth clicking together on all these wiggling, grasping arms. I think it's gonna make for a really nice, horrifying monster. So mission accomplished. We're certainly on track, just adding in some little secondary rendering lines to make all of these forms give him a little more weight and substance. Sometimes those large forms, if you just to find the outside, it can be a little bit tough to tell what they are. And when there's so many overlapping limbs in different elements to a design like this, it could be really helpful to stow. Add all of these little small, defining marks to the interior, just makes it look cooler and makes everything a little easier to understand. So I want to give these claws some dimension to, and he's a little little repeating elements coming down the tail. But we're getting very close. This guy's starting to really come together. We can get a sense of each part of his body really well. We've got a sense of the weight thing. I'm just gonna copy this are my like that arm better. So we're just gonna steal that from the other side again? The beauty of Photoshopped just borrow from any side of the page and you're good to go just a little more rendering again. Just a sort of a repetitive process, especially with so many different elements. But it really helps this guy stand on his own as a line drawing. Even now that we've turned off the sketch layer altogether, he's sort of standing up without that is a crutch, adding in a little bit of line, Wait there some forms that I want to really stand out. So these margins of its head just adding a little bit of weight so that they pop out from everything going on behind them again. Just giving this guy a little help. And I think we're just about done. I wanted you guys to take a look. I've updated the line, are just a little bit from what I did on the fly. I changed the shape of his head a little bit. And while my original idea was to make this guy blind and without eyes. I thought that Cem glowing eyes kind of hiding under that shell would be even creepier. So even at the Leinart stage, I've made a bit of a a design change. So feel free to do that any time. When did you guys to see this quick update that I made off camera just so that you're not lost when we get to the painting phase, which is up next? So that's where we are now will block this guy in and start a value painting. 15. Project 2 - REAPER - Value: Oh, hi, everyone. This is Hardy. In this lecture, we will do the value rendering for our Reaper creatures. So let's get started. I've got the Leinart already. Dogo. He's looking super creepy and nice and refined. So I think we're ready to block him in off camera. I've pasted in a splash background you can make your own, or this is certainly available free to use if you want, but same exact process is the howler creature. So with the magic wand tool have selected the outside of the Leinart and all these little negative shapes to that the spikes have created. And once I've got that selected, I'm gonna go to select inverse. So now it's selecting the inside, and I've created a new layer which I'm going to fill with this dark scion color. So all delete fills in with your foreground color. So now we're all blocked in, have made a copy of my ink layer just to be safe, merged thean clear with the silhouette. And now we have a nice base that we can start our value painting with. So I'm going to switch to my chalk brush, grab that bright orange color that I always do value paintings with, but again, you could do this in black and white at this step. All we're worried about is value and we're off. So I'm starting with the head. Just want this to me. The a main selling point for this guy, a focal point that the viewer is going to key in on. So I want to start. Just I guess, what? I'm approaching this with all of my creative energy right out of the gate. I want to start with this main selling point. I never really start with fingertips or the bottom of the toes or anything. Always want to start in the main point of interest just to make sure I can make that super cool. Otherwise, it's kind of like What's What's the point? If you, ah, if you mess up the main focal point, can't get it to look good than then. There's no much point of having nice looking rendered toes and fingers, so that's that's my general concept there. So with any value rendering, remember, it all comes back to that basic three dimensional sphere that we rendered in art fundamentals. It's gotta have a highlight of mid tone, of course, shadow and reflected light. All of those elements are what make any object seem like they're three dimensional when a light source is shining on them. So, of course, um, some much more complex forms all interacting here with this guy's face and eventually the rest of his body. But it's all the same principle. If you can understand how light strikes a three dimensional object, and if you can keep your light source consistent, then you can make anything look three dimensional just by building up tones and making the brighter light source where the higher value is. So that's all there is to it. Wherever those planes are facing up towards the light source, as they are heavily on this side of the jaw right now, then that's the part that you give higher value to, And on the flip side of that, any plane that's facing away from the light sores, like this darker side of the face that I'm working on now we make that lower value, and at this point, I, uh, I'm just sort of picking out all of these neat little spiky shapes, really thinking of that spiny lobster inspiration or or maybe even praying Mantis. Just all these little spiky details that we can include on this value step to make him look like this nasty, armor plated, nightmarish creature. So that's definitely what we're going for. Notice on that brow above the eyes to got a really stark value edge between light and dark . I'm gonna have some glowing eyes in there. So I've left those areas that the eyes will be in very dark, want those to really pop and have a nice, nice, creepy glowy I hiding back there in the shadows. And I've also left room for those teeth cause we're gonna make those look kind of bony and in realistic sort of oddly human looking to So another thing that we touched on a good bid in the Heller project is the idea of value edges. So while we needed to look three dimensional, like that spear model shows us, the other main thing that we need to keep in mind is those value edges. We need to have both smooth gradations from light to dark and stark edges, where it changes from a high value to a low value very quickly. So you can already see. I've got a good bit of that going on. There are some smooth areas, like the weird little forehead area where we've got some nice, gentle, great Asians. But that's paired with some very stark shadows. Stark edges for the value. So right where this first little hood plate of armor over the head where that ends, I've got a nice sharp cut off and it goes to shadow. So that is really the key to making something seem realistic and organic. Is those value edges? So I know I'm a broken record on that, but that that really is this secret. I hope you guys can can make that leap and really understand that concept Could your work will look so much more realistic if you can find a way to use those edges effectively. Like, I think we're putting the pretty good use here so far, This guy's got a nice, organic, nightmarish looking feel. Teoh, uh, can't help but remember the great alien characters from the the actual movie aliens. I mean, great organic forms just just made everything seem creepy. For some reason, these these forms just ring one of those bells in the human brain that make things just seem a little bit icky and seemed to just bring an alarm bell. So that's That's certainly what we're trying to emulate. Hear things like bugs and little spiky, slimy creatures that people are just afraid of in the deepest parts of their brain. So what we're trying to invoke here, So doing that with value edges, sharp triangular shapes and we're gonna add wet lights to make him look slimy and gross later on. So I think the finished product is really gonna be something special here, I hope. Hope you guys were having fun with this nightmare type creature, and I can't wait to see what you come up with as far as your own ideas, the whole universe of possibilities. And it it's a lot of fun. Just toe. Turn yourself loose when when the main goal is just to make something scary. And Gross doesn't get much more fun than that is a creature designer. So with this guy, it's it's gonna be quite a bit of rendering cause obviously, we just have form after form all these layered little plate things that I'm just gonna have to render in. So definitely be aware that this is sped up a good bit. Probably about 2.5 times normal speed. But a good bit of work here, and I definitely and not going to get this all done in one sitting. So this is sort of Ah, take a deep breath and buckle in, cause because this kind of creature with this many elements working together, that can take some time. So if you are if you are doing this is a profession or a freelance project, just take that into account creatures With this much complicated stuff going on, they take a lot of time. So So definitely think about your pricing Accordingly. You got to make sure that your making those hours count and with this one could be potentially ah, higher dollar type of creature that you'd have thio Thio ask for to justify all the time spent. But when it's ah when it's just a free for all like we're doing here, we're going to spend as much time as we need. And certainly if it's just a learning process for you here, take all the time you need no time restrictions whatsoever. just have a great time and try and get these really cool techniques mastered, and they will serve you extremely well. So trying to use, um, values toe define some of these repeating elements again. Remember our design principles that apply so directly to creature design Repetition is one of the most important ones. And we're trying to make these repeating elements. These little spiky shapes that sort of bump up the curb of his back in recede away from us . We're trying to make those really pop out with this value and also these sort of triangular overlapping armor hood shapes, same deal. They're just a nice repeating design element over and over that we're just trying to render in a realistic way here. So remember is is this guy's light source fades away, sort of rolls back down his back. We're gonna have more of these areas in shadow. Once we convert to color, I'm probably gonna come back and just universally shade in some of these areas on its back . So for now, I'm mainly just trying to pick out all of these three dimensional forms and render them in a realistic way. So mostly worried about light sourcing and value edges to make all of these little organic forms distinct from one another defined indistinct so that they look like different body parts sort of overlapping. That'll give us that really cool organic crustacean insect oId look that we're going for. It'll be a really cool finished product, and we can't forget thes areas even though they're gonna be on the shadow side. They definitely need some rendering as well. So this one really will take a good bit of patients. But we're gonna get toe every part of them, top to bottom and give it the attention that it needs so that no part seems like an afterthought, which which is certainly a danger. You run with a fairly complex set of forms like we have in this guy, but very cool looking stuff. As long as you can stay excited and invested, it will never get tedious or boring for you. So that's definitely a main philosophy that I try and always remember is that this is fun. Guys, this is Ah, great, great way to make a living or even a fun thing to learn is a hobby, so you should never get frustrated by your artwork. If you're feeling that way, it's certainly just time for a quick break and come back at your project with fresh eyes and anything that may have been frustrating you. You'll be amazed at once you have a fresh set of eyes to look at it with. Everything is just, Ah is totally brand new. And the solution, whatever problem you were having, can just pop up immediately. So now that we have this main form and head rendered in, we're going to start doing some of these creepy crawly little extremities out behind him. So this main larger leg, I guess, is extending out behind him. So just adding some little spiky bits, maybe some little stringy, overlapping, value edge type things, just to give it some muscle type qualities. I guess at this point it it sort of turns from, ah, hard exo skeleton type creature to maybe we're even seeing some skin with muscles. So not exactly sure what kind of texture ring I want the used to be. And frankly, when it's his wide open with this kind of creature, you don't even really have toe have to adhere to any rules he can have both skin with muscles or, ah, hard shell exo skeleton. He can have both. We just made this guy up out of thin air, so there are no rules. And as long as it visually makes a good bit of sense and the character seems kind of a cohesive, you can get away with combining as many different flesh types. If you want to call it, that is, You want to. So honestly, you could have a guy with both scales and feathers. If you wanted, it wouldn't look too out of place as long as you kind of unify things, make sure it's part of a cohesive design. So notice I'm doing a little bit of smudging here and there just to refine some of these areas, mainly brushwork at this point. But as we jump around, if any of these brush areas get a little too modeled or textured or failing to really turn into something that looks like a realistic object instead of just brush marks, that's usually a good time to do a little bit of smudging. That's really one of the coolest part of any project is that moment when the brushstrokes that you're laying down on the canvas really start to look like something realistic. That's always the goal when we're doing a rendering like this as you want. Just these little little brush marks these digital operations that you're just tapping down with a stylist to start looking like something rial. It's really the coolest part. Still a thrill for me after all these years of doing this professionally is that moment when it really starts to become real. So rendering out these muscles on this this arm, I think I'm definitely gonna go with Cem skin and muscle type tissue here on these extremities. I think that will give us a good opportunity for some really nasty looking, slimy, wet light skin. Think that's gonna be a really nice fit? So again, just using value edges to pick out those little overlapping forms. Smooth edges next to hard edges that give us those sense of defined forms from one another . And that's exactly what we're looking for. So reworking this area a little bit. It got a little too many forms, I think overlapping, So I wanted to make this a little more recognizable. Kind of is a human type bicep area. So that's what I was going for. Their got a little too weird, a little too unrelated ble. So if if something is a little little to off course, humanize it a little bit and it might bring it right back to where you want it, it's certainly what went on there. But coming along well on this guy's arm out here to the I guess Forearm air hit stuff to say exactly what the's body parts are because this guy doesn't have really many, many neighbors in real nature, I certainly hope not. At least I've never want to see this thing in real life. And that's the measure of a successful nightmare type creature design is If you ever saw this thing in real life, what would you do? And certainly I think we're putting this guy firmly in the hope I never see this thing column. Even if he was tiny, he's still just creepy and disgusting. So using this little elbow area to create some little folds of skin that will be a great place to put some wet light highlights later on and these teeny tiny little arms under his chin. I'm doing some very human type muscle rendering on that as well. Along with those teeth, I want those two seem like a really human part. It's almost like he's this creepy little baby hanging out from under this giant set of armour, something I can't quite explain all of the psychology that goes into these things. But, you know, creepy when you see it. And certainly this is hitting the mark on that front. So just to finding all these cool little folds of skin, remember, balances our main design element, along with repetition that we want to capture here. So we've got lots of very nice visual active areas, visually active areas combined with some calmer, flatter areas. So an example of each. We've got a lot of visual activity on all those little folds of skin, sort of around the shoulders and jaws in that little elbow area. Very visually active, a lot of small repeating elements right next to one another. And then we've got some nice, calm, flat areas where the I can rest a little bit, I'd say on the forehead and some of those larger areas of the armor plated hood above his head nice, calm and flat, so be sure to include both. Otherwise, if if there's too much of each. If it's all too flat, it'll look boring. And if it's all to visually active, it'll it'll just be kind of exhausting and tough to make sense of. So include both is sort of a broad design goal, and you'll really be happy with the results. So I think we're hitting on all of the main lessons that we we learned before. A creature projects really coming a life here in our nightmare design value is such a cool step. Its when it really starts to become something riel and obviously will polish this guy up. And there's a ton of cool stuff lying ahead on this one. Some new techniques for this type of monster that we didn't cover in the howler project that I can't wait to show you. But for now, it's just a matter of of getting this guy rendered up head to toe so that he he looks really cool and will hold up all those Polish steps that we're gonna add later on. So jumping over to this arm on the far side and a lot of these arms will be in shadow. I think I want that entire head and I guess chest area of this guy to be leaning out kind of far. So those arms under his chin and certainly this big one off on the far side. We'll have some pretty heavy cast shadows just to push those back a little bit. Make him seem like his head is aggressively leaning out towards us, which which is even scarier. So just rendering these in, really. I'm not so worried about large picture value things like where the cast shadows will be. Ah, I am a little bit, but we're gonna address that with some just large shadows once we converse this to color. So for now, just trying to render all of these forms three dimensionally, and we'll worry about what needs to recede and what needs to be in a cash shadow later on. So another little opportunity for those nice fold wrinkle looking skin under the elbow here that's a great touch will make this guy look nice and icky. So rendering the last of these creepy little baby arms and I think we're just about good. He's looking great for the entire upper half. All of these difficult extremities are rendered in. I think they work pretty well together. A few little finishing touches, areas where I'm seeing room for some touch up. But on the whole, I think this guy's looking pretty sharp. Might actually switch to my eraser tool and put a little shadow area where this back is sort of rolling around in the back. But I think that's working. We're gonna render up this awesome little grasping claw at the bottom here just to finish this value rendering off. So this claw part is gonna be the nearest thing to us. I wanted to look like it's reaching out towards us very much like his head is up above. So I want those to be our brightest values wanted to really pop, and I think I actually might change that to a bone tooth type color rendering when we do the color conversion later on and start adding those details along with the teeth on its face. So just rendering this to look like it's curving out towards us, it's gonna fade to almost total shadow once it starts curling up underneath those arms. So just trying to get some of these little repeating lobular shapes that kind of look like the muscles that make this powerful tail curl up like a scorpion. So that's what I'm going for here. So just using some value edges again, combining soft edges with hard edges just to define all these little lobular shapes that make this nasty looking tail seem organic and realistic and really makes you believe that it could reach out and grab you. And that's exactly what we're going for for this creepy nightmare type character. So with just a little bit of unifying brushwork that didn't take very long at all for these little spiky things sticking out, I'm gonna add a little stretchy membrane of skin above. Each one gives us a nice repeating design element, and it just adds to the creepy ickiness. Any time you can add those stretchy little folds of skin that always makes people kind of grossed out. I think it's a great fit for this one adds to the icky factor that we're going for. So with a little bit of smudge work in a little bit of last minute refinement, I think we're just about finished here. This certainly looks three dimensional. We made great use of our three dimensional light source using lights and darks to make him look around. And we also did a good job using value edges to define all of those little organic shapes that make him seem like a real living thing. So checking all those boxes there up next will convert this guy to color and start adding all kinds of cool effects to really make him shine. 16. Project 2 - REAPER - Color & Detail: Oh, everyone, this is Hardy. In this lecture, we will convert our Reaper value to color. So let's get started. This is gonna be awesome. So we've got our value painting done. So we're gonna do a hue saturation adjustment, command you and I'm going to take it up to this nice off white, pale yellow color. This is place I usually go after. I convert values. Actually, this is a good common starting point just to raise that skin tone a little higher up. So notice I've created a new layer underneath the value layer and I'm just painting in with a large soft brush, some browns and reds just to sort of fill out some of those really dark values. And on the areas, like around the hands and the tip of the tail, some parts of the head here I'm making it a little more red. Just a sort of eco human skin tones a little bit. How the nose and ears get a little more read. The fingers wanted toe to go for that, give us a little bit of variation in our color so that it's not so flat in one note. So I'm just doing a little more refinement there, splashing in some of these colors underneath. Now I've made a copy of the value layer, but then I've merged those those two new layers together so that I've got a value layer in that layer I'd put underneath all on one layer and just doing a little bit of experimentation to see if anything else might look good with some color balance or hue saturation shifts. But I think I kind of like this this starting point where we are So now with a very large soft, round brush, I'm just painting in some shadows areas where where the body would be casting shadows on itself. So we talked about that a little bit in the value step. Now that we've converted this guy too rough color, we're just gonna come back over the top and start thinking about these global values. Have this This guy would be sort of curving away from the light source towards those far sides and how some of these little arms would be caught in shadows that that the rest of his body is casting. So things like that, it's great to have these large soft brushes to get this job done for you. And it goes superfast. Actually, when you have a larger value, so we don't want to totally kill all that great rendering we did even on those shadow areas . So don't go too heavy handed with this, but it makes it look super realistic once we have all of these shadow and sort of big picture value solutions mapped out here in a nice cash shadow always make something look super realistic, especially when you've done a nice job on the value rendering is I think we have here. So just refining things a little bit, kind of looking at it in color Now, with some new I seeing what little steps I might need to take to make this value seem even more realistic. What can we do to make him seem more three dimensional, more organic? What kind of value edges do we need to sharpen up things like that? So this is really a refinement, step and notice. I'm switching back and forth a lot from the brush tool to the medicine dropper tool. And remember, once you're using the brush tool, all you have to do is hold down Ault option, and it'll automatically switch you to that dropper tools so you can see that pop up every once in a while. That dropper tool just samples any color that it's over so you can sort of pick it up and lay it down really fast. And it's a nice way to refine things. Sort of averages out the colors if you do that for a little while. So again, every once in a while, just attempting different things with color and color balance hue saturation just to see if there's some little variation, some little different flavor. I can give this guy to make him look even cooler and actually tilted it a little bit towards blue here. And I like that a little bit better. Just a little cooler. Icier. I think that's a nice base. And, ah, at the end of this lecture will add some some really dynamic color patterning to this guy to make him really pop. But for now, mostly just worrying about base colors and value just sharpening things up here, making it look nice and refined, and I want to have a nice value range, so pushing some of those farther areas really pretty dark, so that it really stands up makes it seem really three dimensional. I'm getting a really nice sense of both the head kind of looming out towards us and that creepy grasping claw out to get us down below some actually using the clone stamp here to try and possibly repeat some of these head shapes just to see if that little area under that armored hood needs a little more refinement. I think that looks pretty cool. Might stick with that Just toe. Didn't want that area to get so lost in shadow, even though it is to be a dark area. Makes ahead, look kind of hidden in there. I didn't want it to be left is an afterthought. So the little bit of a racing on actually stretching the value range even further, so erased away to some really dark darks, letting that background silhouette show through around the teeth and eyes. I want those areas to have a ton of contrast, cause we're gonna add at some nice, bony looking teeth in some glowing eyes. It should make him look super creepy and really help. Still, this guys are our nightmare creature that we're after here, but coming together really nicely. I think this is This has come a long way just from from converting it from that orange value to this color. So much more believable and realistic. So a really fun step up again. One of those great great points when your marks on the canvas start to really seem like a real thing. Really. Part of the joy, this whole digital painting process that we're after here. So hope you're having as much fun as I am. A little bit of cash shadow work that spike off of this hood could be casting a shadow over that arm. So any opportunity you confined to have those nice cash shadows areas where where you can have a nice value contrast that bright area, these shoulders it's catching this bright light really right next to that dark cast shadow supercool makes your value seem vibrant and dynamic. So adding some some brighter highlights to these areas in those nice cut shadow lines just to make it seem even more realistic. But, guys, I'm feeling pretty happy with this. I think this this looks like a nice color base. I think we're in great shape here he looks three dimensional, and the colors are working in a broad sense. So I think it's time to start adding some some of these cool details in. So let's ah, finish up a little shadow work and then I'm gonna zoom in and we're going to start getting some details in on this face. So I created a new layer called teeth. And remember, just like in the Heller. I have this really nice formula for building up really realistic looking, bony, fleshy looking teeth. So it's just a series of colors that we use. It's three steps. So the first thing is this dark, maroon red step, and we're gonna render in each one of these teeth individually in this dark red. And it it always looks weird at this point cause I've never seen anything with red teeth. But remember these air to look like realistic bony teeth. And when light shines through teeth, it actually kind of shows all of the realistic flesh iness of tea. So you want that red base to show through, and even on these spikes out around its sides, especially those ones in shadow. I want that red to show through Justus if they're catching a tiny bit of light, and that light kind of refracts underneath the surface. So again, subsurface scattering is with three D artists called this and and these little spikes on the side. I want him to be the same kind of material or tissue as the's t. So we'll have a nice little variety of different materials, making this guy look cool, given some contrast between his normal skin and some other stuff going on here. So some nice little signature pop points here. So the next step we switched to this yellowish orange and we start rendering the teeth again and more out towards the tips. Let some of that red show down towards where the teeth meet the rest of the head, and that'll that'll really make it look like it's sort of receding to gums or something like this. I know the teeth kind of go straight into this guy's sort of armor plated exoskeleton head , but it still looks cool. So our final step is grabbing this very bright off. White color Works is both a highlight and is just ah, whitener to make those teeth just a little whiter if you want. And now just blending back. There's awesome roots of the teeth, sort of joining in with that that exoskeleton lower jaw and man, that looks so cool. I love this step and doing some smudging just to make it all work together. Kind of getting these little tooth margins tow line up. And ah, how cool is that, guys, that you can practically hear those creepy teeth clicking together. So we're gonna apply this effect. So to some other places, we did the red step on most of these other little spiky clause. So coming back with this yellowish orange and right away, it looks like a nasty, bony colored tooth. So adding this white highlight out to the ends here and we're gonna blend those in a little bit and ah, put some of this yellow here on these spikes on the side as well. Just to make it clear that those air the same material is these teeth and and claws and wow , what a difference that makes. I love having different kinds of materials to really make your creature pop, and it just makes it seem so organic, really making this guy come alive in taking the creepy factor over over the line here, which is exactly what we want. So ah, cool step. I hope that tooth rendering formula serves you well. It's it works pretty much every time. So I hope that's a great trick for you guys to keep hold off teeth and spikes. Air looking very cool. I think this is definitely inspiring a visceral reaction. So we are. We're achieving a lot of these great main creature design goals here. I think this is Ah, this is shaping up nicely. And I think even those those teeth on his face, I had hoped they would go pretty well. But I'm starting to think that's gonna be the main selling point for this guy. That's that's really coming together. Well, so now for some fun color stuff, I've made a new layer called dark skin, and we're gonna set that to multiply. And I filled it in with a dark well, not even that dark sort of a brown dish orange color. You can see it over there on the layer, the layer of icons. And once I filled it all in, I'm asked the entire thing out, and now I'm just revealing it. So painting on the layer mask with a soft brush I'm painting white, see, is my foreground color. And I'm just revealing in some of this dark brown. This is what we're gonna uses our accent, colors and notice. I've put that underneath the teeth layer so that even those darks we'd still see those white teeth. That gives it some great contrast. So I'm just sort of splashing in this darker brown just to give it some nice contrast areas where I want some pop to happen areas where I need a little more value contrast, anything that I need to make this guy pop a little bit more so the tip of the tail and one of those teeth to really stand out. So I made that dark, and I'm even adding in some cool little patterning on the forehead. Here. Great place to add stripes or spots or any kind of cool little animal skin pattern that you want to add. So just sort of coming up with some little triangular V shapes. Another great opportunity for a repeating design element, and it draws focus to the face kind of tapers things down towards that nice, pointy jaw back to the teeth that are such a nice selling point, and it gives a lot of color interest. So adding these little skin patterns just dots stripes. It's It's just purely abstract. Whatever looks cool, really, or ah, tons of great animal models out there to refer to. So find, Ah good tiger leopard or some kind of fish that has a skin patterning that you like and just reveal in this darker, multiply color in that kind of pattern. And you will love the results, probably one of the funnest part of any creature design. It's kind of like you've built this great creature, and now you get to give him a really slick paint job just to make it look cool. So this step makes such a huge difference and just smudging things out and again. We're still working on that layer mask, so I'm actually just smudging the mask. Not not that dark brown color itself just to change the way it's revealed or hidden on the page. So you have to think a little bit abstract lee when using layer mask. But while what a handy tool And what a great, easy way to add a ton of color interest to this character who's really shaping up to be quite a creepy dude here. I'm very pleased with how this guy's looking and left a lot of nice, dark area for those glowing eyes that that I'm planning on as well. So using this color to make those the shadow areas recede a little bit more. Just lots of nice value contrast anywhere that you need to just push a little bit darker. It's a great opportunity to just splash a little bit of that that color in, and I'm using these very large brushes. So it's something that doesn't take a whole lot of detail work. It can be done in a pretty broad sense. So just checking to see if I want this accent color to be something else. Ah, there's all look cool and it's kind of like we can switch him to different teams or something if this was ah, video game, but I think I'm gonna stick with that that dark, brownish yellow. I think that works really well and jives well with the rest of the color scheme. So I think That's a winner. All right. One last cool little finishing touches to give this guy those eyes that we've been preparing for. So adding those in and this little shadowy spot, I think I wanted to have multiple eyes, maybe two eyes on each side, like some kind of creepy insect. But, um, it wouldn't quite vibrant enough. I'm switching to a different color, actually. Switch my brush to color Dodge to give it this nice, bright, glowing blue with color dodge that colors get bright really quick. So that looks super cool. I really like how this has turned out. 17. Project 2 - REAPER - Final Polish: Hi, everyone. This is Hardy. In this section, we will conclude our Reaper creature with some final polish. So let's get started. I've got a few photos pasted in here, and I've got them set up in a layer group that I'm just gonna name photo textures. And once again, we're using this fabric pattern skirt and this poison dart frog picture, and these are both available for you. So go ahead and grab them if you want to use him in your own work or feel free to find your own textures. But what I'm gonna do is mask this group out. So I command clicked the silhouette layer and then hit that layer mask button down at the bottom of the layers panel. And now, as you can see, we can move these photos inside and it's it's never gonna go outside the lines, so I'll switch that photo textures group too soft light. And that's the whole key to using this photo. Texture and technique is using that layer group on soft light blending mode. And First World will do a little work with this skirt. Fabric pattern. Texture gives that really nice. Modeled texture, usually a nice place to start. It's just sort of Ah, good general blotchy skin texture to use nothing to specific but gives just a nice, realistic quality to this skin. So adjusting the hue a little bit, bringing a little bit of a hint of blue to that just make it a little bit different. More interesting. And I like that a lot better looking cool. So for this frog, I'm going to try something different. I've taken it outside of the layer group, and by hitting command I you can invert. It basically makes every every pixel on it. It's opposite, so it's both a negative and the colors are opposite. And I like how it's sort of a different take on that that frog texture. So we're gonna paint that inverted texture in and check out all these cool, little uneven circle patterns. Almost looks like some kind of undersea creature octopus skinner something interesting. So I thought that would be a nice change, and it really seems to fit, especially in these dark areas, like where the forehead meets that shadowy area under the hood of armor supercool and in those dark areas by the shoulders. I really love how this one works. So this dart frog that I took a picture of years ago has been one of the most versatile textures that I have in my library. So I hope you get is much fun and good use out of that is I have It is it's total years to do with what you will. Uh, so looking good there. Just a little bit of adjustment on these textures, checking everything out, seeing if anything might work better. But I really like how this is working out. So I'm gonna mask out this this frog texture just a little bit kind of reveal it back in May have gotten a little heavy handed with it. Sometimes when something starts looking cool, I get really carried away. So no problem at all, just just coming back and getting it with a little bit of masking out just so that it's not quite so distinct. And I think that's working really well So you can see how much realism these photo textures bring your creature and that we're all set up. Next, we'll add some wet lights. So remember this from both the howler project and from the wet light demonstration we did before our projects. We're just adding some very bright, pure white highlights to just a few select areas to give him that nice, shiny, slimy look. So I'm being very restrained with ease, easier just to be used on a few areas. But they do so many great things for a character, especially a ah icky creature like this. They mean ah means so much to go to the information it comes across it. It looks slimy and gross, yes, but you can also tell so much more about the skin. So by interrupting these little Siris of marks, you can tell that there are some bumps and grooves to that skin. It adds a bunch of complexity to your creature that even all of this value rendering doesn't quite get. So save those those wet lights for a great final polished trick. They'll they'll add a ton of dynamism and ickiness to a scary creature. But there's also just a lot of information takes your creature to a whole new level of realism. And, of course, having some dripping drool kind of an homage to the alien characters. Uh, also makes this guy look extra nasty, like he's just watering his mouth ready toe to come each year or something. So just bumping these little highlights around wherever they might work for a little bit of extra pop even in these very dark little nooks and crannies, sometimes there can be these a little shines, sort of shining out from the dark, and in those spots, it even has a lot more contrast, so that that's a super great place to hide these But these little folds of skin anywhere, especially here, where a cash shadow is getting out of the way and we can see these bright little shiny highlights. So this is definitely one of the single most important things you can do to make a creature seem alive and biological, which is one of our main goals of any creature painting. So a very powerful tool hope. Hope you get a lot of good use out of that one, and just kind of jumping all over with such a big character with so many different elements again, we always have to make sure we're not leaving any any part or even any area of this body unaddressed, so splashing in some of these little wet lights just to make this grasping tail area nice and Nikias well, in especially out here, where some of that dark brown color comes in. It makes those wet lights really pop. So and especially cool place to include those wet lights is anywhere where you have a nice , darker or more intense color. Contrast is almost always a good way to G O. Working on this hanging spit a little bit, just just thought that could use a little more touch up. And it's, ah, pretty noticeable feature. So I didn't want that to be an afterthought, a little bit of smudging and fine tuning just to make this guy look good, but, uh, jumping back in history actually a little bit because I sort of like the version I have earlier working pretty well. So sometimes you don't have to reinvent the wheel, but always feel free toe. Check out other possibilities. So it's more of these little shiny, wet lights on the tail again. Any time you make a series of these highlights or have little interrupted lines, it adds information. It's like they're a little folds of skin or bumps on the surface that you might not have noticed. That right here is well, just the fact that I did a series of these. You can almost feel the texture of that nasty bumpy shell just from those wet lights. It's essentially a smooth area before we added those highlights so you can see the power there with just a few few little brush drugs. So that gets looking great up. Next, we'll add some secondary lights to this guy. New light source. Justo, add some roundness and also a ton of atmosphere. So with this guy looking all scary and sinister, he definitely needs a secondary light source bouncing up from below. For some reason, when faces are lit from beneath, they look spooky, kind of like if you hold a flashlight under your face to tell a ghost story, well, this is certainly much scarier than that. So adding, Ah, very subtle reflected light to this dark side of his face, and it just really makes him look wicked and more sinister, and it also gives you some more opportunity toe define the three dimensional form of this really cool jaw shape over here. So I've added some some nice secondary lights where those teeth they're kind of anchored in really makes his jaw seem extra realistic and bouncing some of this light up on the shoulders and other parts of this armored chest hood thing area that we're working on here and that is looking super cool. Add so much dynamism to an already very cool image you guys can probably tell. But I'm pretty excited about this one really love and how he's turning out. So I have put all layers in a layer group, and I made a copy of that group and merged it all into one layer by hitting Command E. And I do that so that we can have our entire character all of our work on one single layer . And now I could go around the entire perimeter with some smudging only set on about 15% just to give a very light smudge to every perimeter edge on this guy's body. So we don't want any hard, stark edges that can be kind of a leftover effect of blocking in ah hardline sketch. So a tiny little bit of blur to every outer edge really rounds things out. That's kind of the way things end up looking in photographs or even in real life, he's. These super crisp edges just don't seem to occur in reality. So go ahead and buff those out with some smudging and in your character will look much. Excuse me, your creature will look much more realistic. I'm probably calling this guy character all the time, so I apologize Creature and pulling some of these little spikes out with even a little more smudge intensity. Just to make them kind of taper to a super fine point makes him seem sharp and even like there's a little bit of movement. So a little bit of liquefy noticing any little weird proportion are angle issues that you might want to fix, and I think that's good. I like the way those arms taper a little more evenly now, but guys were getting down to really the very final stuff. I've switched my brush to color Dodge. We're just going to selectively brighten a few choice areas just to make make this guy's value range pop a little bit more great place to draw attention to any special places that you you might want to draw attention to. So certainly the teeth and head, a few areas of those arms and a little last minute color check. But this guy's looking really great. I think. I think we've got things just about right. So now it's just a few minor presentation, things like like the cash shadow, just a sort of anchor him in his environment. So I wanted this guy to be kind of holding himself up in a cave or something. So I'm putting some shadow marks, underwear his hands go and attempting to actually render an abstract cave wall. But that's not really working. I think I'm just gonna put some little cash shadows under these nasty little grasping hands just to show that he is holding himself up on something. And I think that works pretty well. So little bit of a motion blur in that direction to make things all add up. And I want that that one hand on the right of the page to be sort of reaching out. So three of them are holding on to the wall, and that other one is sort of floating out in the air and just erasing that away. I want this to be a very subtle effect. Nothing too important to create a new layer. Just have a cash shadow on the ground again. This shows that he suspended in the air nothing, Nothing sitting on the ground. So we get that whole concept of how he just hangs there and grasps it Things so put a bit of a bright glow behind this guy just toe sort of make these little spiky shapes in the bottom silhouette Really distinctly. And one more thing. Before we call this guy finished, I would like to add a little bit of atmosphere, sort of, ah, bloom effect. So we're going to create a new layer on top of everything after I'm done brightening this up a little, a new layer on top, set that toe, lighten mode and just splash in a little bit of color peeking around these edges that bloom light as a ton of drama and and realism. So I hope you like this guy. I think he's just about finished. Let's check out the finished product. Congratulations on completing the Reaper project. Let's take a look back at our project steps and see how far we've come. We started with a rough sketch to work out our design. We then inked in all of his creepy details. After that, we did a value painting to make him seem three dimensional inorganic. From there, we converted him to a cool color scheme and then added photo textures in final polish. All in all, we went from a blank canvas to a very cool, super scary looking finished product. I hope you've enjoyed this project as much as I did. You can get some killer portfolio pieces out of these techniques. I look forward to seeing you in the next project, which is a creature I know you're going to love. 18. Project 3 - PHOENIX - Sketch & Ink: Oh, hi, everyone. This is Hardy and welcome to the Phoenix Creature Project. I'm really excited about this one, and it's packed with ideas and rendering techniques that you guys are gonna love. So for our creature projects have focused on dangerous, predatory, scary type creatures, things that make the viewer scared or even repulsed. Well, we're gonna flip over to the lighter side of creature design and finish with some friendlier looking creatures. This is gonna be awesome. Let's dive in. I've got my blank canvas in my sketch layer all set up and ready to go. So I'm just going to dive in and kind of see where my stylist takes me. Just start making marks Now, at the beginning of every creature project, we need to address those big picture questions. What do we want the viewer to feel about this creature? What is his role? Well, even though I've named this guy Phoenix, I'm actually using a dragon is my starting point. That's kind of the base I have in mind. Phoenix is just sort of a good name for a magical flying creature, and that's definitely a main point. I want to get get across so I definitely don't want this guy to seem scary or monstrous as a traditional dragon can seem like. I want him to seem majestic, kind of, ah Marvel type creature, something that would make the audiences jaw drop in awe. So I'm going to avoid all of those icky monster design and rendering techniques that we've gone over in the 1st 2 projects, and I'm going to try to make this guy I'm or likable and inspiring. So how do we do that already in these rough shapes that I'm I'm working in here. Notice that I'm using a lot of long, curvy lines whenever possible. So remember, in shape language that this circle always seems friendly and approachable, so that will really be our base point that will rely on now. I'll certainly need some triangle shape so that this guy seems sleek and fast and nimble, but the circle will be our our base for this. For sure. All those curvy lines give him a nice, rounded out, non threatening quality. Another way to make this guy seem likable and even revered is I am inspired by a lot of animals that that people tend toe like in Revere, so it's a little tough to tell at this early point, but obviously I've got a bird in mind. In some ways, he's got some bird legs, obviously big, majestic, flapping wings that always evokes a bird, something that humans just have. Ah, an ingrown fascination with It's just the magic of flight that seems to just capture our imagination. So bird is a great model to start from, especially when we're on the job of magic flying creature. So a very heavy dose of bird. Um, also, you can see some elements of a horse, that very strong neck, kind of a strong jawline and head curving around a very noble looking animal so that that's definitely the head shape. Maybe even a little bit of lion is well, the legs have that double jointed look. They're curved up in a very classical typos, T given that really cool, rampant lion type device. So those creatures, while they seem like they have very little to do with one another, we can combine them in a really cohesive way just by trying to sort of boil it down to its essence. What is it that people admire about these very regal and noble seeming animals. So I'm hoping to capture a little bit of those important things from each of those animals and use them as a model. And then it just becomes a trick of trying to meld it all together in a successful way. Make it all jive is a single cohesive thing and then sort of turn on our biologist brain to try and make this all seem like it could be a really functional living creature. So that's all the big picture stuff looking at, the more my new details, uh, designs in recent movies like the Ekron from Avatar. I love those. They had these really cool wings that were large, flapping wings like you might expect to see on a bat or something. But out of the tips, they actually turned to these insect like wings that had multiple little digit ations. I wanted to try something like that. I don't want this guy to have insect looking wings, but I wanted it to look like he had these little, many wing fingers that sort of spread out at the tips here. That was sort of one of these design challenges that that was in the project brief that I wanted to try to carry over. Now, the trick to that is it certainly looks cool. You can imagine the wings being sort of like human hands, but they spread out so you can see the fingers and the little thumb curve on the top of the wing and forearm muscles. They'll have those nice human analog that we can draw from. But how to make this finger looking wing thing work and not make it look too icky like a bat wing or something like that? Certainly, the bat is gonna be a very obvious pitfall for this type of creature, so working hard to make this seem very UNB at like now the head is going to be a huge selling point because I need this guy to communicate all kinds of soulfulness and intelligence. So I want to be careful that his head shape isn't something too aggressive or scary looking . I probably not even going to show any teeth. Just one is mouse to be closed. His eyes are going to be extremely important because we want him to seem very soulful, an intelligent like he knows what we're thinking or something like that, an animal that might even be able to talk something like that. So we want to imagine being able to have a conversation with this guy and later in the color steps. I think I'll really try and make those eyes stand out and have them really beautiful and soulful. So the head shape, even the mouth shape, are going to be very important because it almost becomes like a character design. When the faces this important, we have to make sure that his mouth expression doesn't look angry. His eyes, too. We want them to seem soulful and intelligent, but not angry, not bored. We gotta hit it just right in the middle and make sure that we're really capturing the sense of reverence and intelligence that we want this guy to communicate. So I'm closing in on a head shape that I like a good bit. I really like that big, strong neck curving around and, of course, thinking biologically a little bit. He's got a very broad, barrel chested type of figure. Obviously, he would need some really strong chest muscles to be able to flap thes giant wings in back to shape language notice. I'm reworking these little wing tips a good bit. They keep seeming a little too triangular and aggressive that keep falling into that trap of seeming kind of monstrous and icky. So I'm just trying to find ways to soften that out. Bring him back to that gentle, majestic feel that I want all of these design elements to back up, and I think it's coming along pretty well. I think his legs and that really nice curving tail that I sort of happened upon are working perfectly. So might slim up his midsection a little bit just to make him seem really lightweight again . Drawing on the bird is a model. Everything in a bird is is designed to be lightweight in just sleek and aerodynamic. So want to communicate a lot of that to back up here To these wing tips, though, just moving things around a little bit, just cutting down on these really pointy triangular shapes and trying to round things out as much as possible. Of course, it doesn't have to just be a Siris of ovals. You can you can leave some things looking aggressive and triangular. After all this guy does need to fly. He needs toe look fast, and that's what the triangle does for us, but too many pointy, spiky things. And he starts looking a little monstrous, like our Reaper or even the howler. So we want to avoid that. And so far I think I'm walking that line pretty well. So it zoom in a little bit, start doing a little work on this face to see if I can get thes eyes and facial expressions to communicate all of these things that I'm hoping to and plenty of trial and error here. Don't want him to seem like a traditional dragon full of mouthful of teeth. Not sure if I even want toe make it seem like he breathes fire or anything like that, although a friendly, noble dragon certainly could conceivably. But I don't want his teeth or his mouth to be the main defining feature of his face. I wanted to be his eyes, and actually we're gonna make him seem a little more human than we might normally if we were following an animal model. So I'm gonna have his mouth have ah, pretty human expression. And certainly his eyes were gonna be very relatable and recognizable, so tryingto redo this mouth in a more downplayed way so that it seems not quite so aggressive, like it's his main weapon or anything. He might not even be ableto bite. He's just such a gentle, intelligent type of big, majestic creature that that maybe that's not even what he's going for. So I keep kind of revising this mouth and making it smaller every time. I think I like that better it it seems like a more soulful expression like he's he's just got his mouth, a rest thinking or something he's not. He's not roaring. He's not showing teeth, not doing any of those aggressive monster type things now. Ah, jumping back to the subject of design notice on finding some places to do some good repeating elements. Actually, those wingtips are a great example of that. That's why those have such a cool look is it's just repeating elements in sequence really just almost automatically makes something look cool. So I want Cem some cool little fin shapes to be coming down the back of his head, and we're gonna repeat those down his back. That's definitely something I want to include and actually starting to zero in on a pretty successful head solution here. Still a lot of fine tuning to do for his eyes and mouth. I had that brow over his eye a little too close to the eye that made him look angry, like he had his eyebrow pointed down, which always makes somebody seem angry or something seem angry. So I wanted to soften that a little bit. Give the Isom space so that he seems a little more new, neutral, like he's just thinking, not necessarily angry or enraged. Like these nasty monsters we already done before. A little bit of fine tuning to these toes of decided to hang another toe out just to give it a little movement, repeating body parts just to give it a little bit of dynamism. And here we go, bumping these little crest shapes, curving them down around the back of his neck. And it's amazing how effective those repeating design shapes are to making your design just come a lot. It creates a movement to it, kind of leads the eye down the back and just carries you around the design in a really pleasing way. So I like how this this head is coming alone. We could have easily made a dragon with a very long snout. Many traditional dragon designs have that, but that's just not quite what we're going for here. So a more rounded out head just almost seems kind of baby like, but eyes just using with intelligence, confidence and wisdom Definitely what we're going for. So I think, is a general structure. This is working very well. The mouth is just about right, but might need a little more fine tuning and even rendering in the I a little bit just to do a little visualization for myself, just to see where things take us. But is a general sense. This sketches is working pretty well for me. I love his pose. The legs kind of curved up at different angles, almost like he just leapt off of the rock he was perched on and is taking flight. So we're catching him right at that wow moment where he is doing his his majestic dragon or Phoenix type thing. So this is really a selling point. If you were designing this creature for a movie or a video game, this is really what you want to sell. It is him and his very coolest moment. And I think that's certainly what what we're doing here with this pose and just tryingto described a few more details for myself before we take it to the ink phase. But I think we're very close to being there, adjusting some proportions on his eyes, the shape of the head and the mouth a little bit. Just a little bit of fine tuning, wondering if I want a little implied beard hanging off of his chin, but I don't think we need that. I think the shape of the head stands up pretty well on its own, just strengthening this jaw shape and refining a few things but pretty cool design. I like the way this is shaping up, and I think with just a tiny bit more descriptive line work. We're just about ready to start doing some more crisp line work on our inking pass. So that's up next. So after a few more tiny adjustments to the sketch, I think this guy is ready to ink up. So I have knocked that sketch layer back to a very low opacity and I'm just gonna grab a good old hard round brush and start going around the entire perimeter of this guy with a pretty small brush. It's about a six pixel wide brush at this point. Good, good boldness to do the entire outside with, basically just defining all the big shapes on this first pass. And then we'll come back and do some more fine line work for the interior with a smaller brush. But I always like to start with the head, just toe, define the most descriptive and important parts of the character first and then sort of work out from there but approaches. However you're most comfortable. Ah, cheating ahead a little bit, doing a little fine line work on the head just cause that's so important. I want to really define these these shapes before moving on to far there just to make sure that they're working it this crisping phase. So remember the ink faces just sort of a nice presentation tool. If you were presenting this to a client or a teacher of being a great point to do that, just that the idea phase never want to get too far along in a full painting without getting it approved by whoever it's for. So this is a great level to take it up to just to submit it as an idea saying, Hey, is this good to do a final painting for before you get too far along? Cause if you hand in a final painting that never got approved and somebody says, Actually, this this really isn't what we want, then you've wasted a whole bunch of ours, and that's, Ah, that is certainly not good for illustration business. So ah, great step to get proficient at is just doing a nice, crisp line drawing. And it's super easy. All of your design decisions are made were really just sharpening things up. Maybe defining a few design ideas a little bit as we g o. Sometimes this is kind of a nice exploratory process to you. Get a second look at everything, and if something's not quite looking right, you can always make a design change on the fly. But for the most part, just trying to make this guy look nice and presentable and get all of these forms really well described. So every little muscle shape remember we're making him seem biologicals, all these little overlapping lines, these little why shapes that it makes. That's what makes the implication of muscles beneath the skin really makes this guy seem like a living creature. You can practically hear him breathing or hear those big wings flap is he takes flight. If you get all these these design and biological details correct, do them in a convincing way and you'll really love the result and your client will to. This is a great way to to really sell something. So if you like something and want, want to get it approved, you're going to use every every trick in the book toe to make sure that whoever is approving it really jumps out of their seat and and says they love it. Wow, go for it. And here's double your fee, By the way, that doesn't happen very often, but we can dream, right? Just kidding. You will be paid very well for good work, so keep keep it up a little bit more definition Here, out on these wing tips, I think I've finally settled on a nice combination of curvy lines in triangular shape so that we are in a very basic sense, communicating speed and sleekness along with nice soft curves and friendliness. So sort of, Ah, difficult balance to walk. But but I think we're having some success here and just defining these powerful forearm muscles and that will start rendering in the lower body. Never want to leave any part out. I usually start at the top with the head, so it's always a challenge for me, as I've said before, to make sure I don't run out of art energy by the time I get to the feet and legs. So take a break if you need to. Always no shame in that. But make sure that nothing ends up seeming like an afterthought. Ah, pitfall that I always have to work a little extra hard to avoid, because that is sort of the natural way things up. By the time you're rendering the toes, you have spent an awful lot of time on other parts of your creature, and it just might not might not get your best effort, so make sure you're approaching every part with same same love and intensity, and you'll really appreciate it later on. So another nice repeating design element thought I'd echo those crests on the back of his head and bring those down to the tail. Almost little feathery looking things. So a nice repeating design element. It also sort of evokes a bird and thought would be cool if his tail kind of forked into two long stream, e feathery looking things here at the bottom. So drawing from a bunch of different animal Anna logs and really makes it cool, I think we've walked a pretty tricky balance here pretty successfully. But I hope all of the big picture stuff that I was talking about makes sense. Just need this guy to seem majestic and intelligent and soulful, but still a living thing so larger than life in some ways, but still rooted in reality in nature. So that is the challenge. It is such a fun type of creature to come come in a attempt because of those difficult and really rewarding challenges that you can try to do. So this get me done with anything you could be doing a majestic sent or type creature. Ah, majestic griffin. Any kind of mythological creature you could graft this kind of intelligence and reverence onto and really come up with a really cool and results. So the marvel is what I call this very broad category of creatures. There are a lot of fun making these really impressive and memorable characters. So with a little interior line work, we're just trying to sell all of these little muscle shapes and folds in the wings, things that make him seem like a real living creature. But with that, I think, are Leinart is just about done. We'll start doing a value painting up next. 19. Project 3 - PHOENIX - Value: Oh, hi, everyone, this is Hardy. In this lecture, we will take our Phoenix project to the Value Face. So let's get started off camera I have pasted in a splash background. It's the same one we've used for our other creature project Just pasted that right in. So now we're gonna use our ink layer to make a silhouette. So with the magic wand tool, I've selected the outside and any other negative shapes your you might have like around his tail. And we just select in verse. Now we create a new layer, and I'll just fill that in with this dark sigh in color, make a copy of the in Claire and then merge it together so that we have a nicely set up silhouette that we can start our value painting on. So I'm just gonna rename this layer silhouette and we're good to go Simple. Is that so? Starting a new layer and I'll name it value grabbing my chalk brush and I will use this very bright orange color that I always use for the value step and we're gonna get started. I typically start with a creature's face, especially in a character like this where his personality and his intelligence is such a huge part of what we're trying to communicate. Want to make sure that the face expresses everything that we need it to, so always a good idea to start. It's your most important parts when a hit, those really important selling points with all of the artistic energy that you have. So that's what I'm doing here. And this will be a pretty important and minute detail oriented part of the character to get right so making sure to give this a lot of time and very careful attention. So just like we always talk about it, the value step we're remembering that three dimensional sphere rendering and trying to make our values make this guy look three dimensional. So any part of the face or any part of the entire creature that's facing towards the light source, we just make that a higher value. So more brush strokes, brighter values for the plains facing the light source and, of course, the planes facing away. We just leave darker, they're facing towards shadow, so that's a huge simplification of the concept, but that that really is all that we have to do. And as long as you can understand all of these little shapes that you're describing and follow that that simple formula, it'll always end up looking realistic. So for now, I'm just picking out all of these main little shapes, making sure to get the expression of his mouth and his eyes just the way I want them. Don't want anything to look too angry or aggressive because again, we want this guy to seem sort of noble and intelligent and don't want him to see monstrous in anyway. So I think I'm having some success there. He looks kind of calm and contemplative, exactly the kind of intelligence and wisdom that I'm hoping to communicate so really doing a full value rendering kind of get all of the shapes picked out. I'm even unifying these these tones together a little bit and it's coming together nicely. I think he's got just the expression that we want. His head certainly looks interesting in three dimensional, so just like I always say and value paintings as well other than getting the light sources right. The other thing we have to pay very close attention to is value edges, so We need to have a good blend of both soft and hard edges. So check out the earlier lectures if you need to go into more depth in that. But something I've said over and over again is how important value edges are. So just sort of moving back from the face here and gonna sort of work my way down. So he's got these really cool repeating design elements, these sort of fin shapes coming off of his head and going rolling down the back of his neck to give us a nice repeat repetition effect for our our design and just want to make sure and give those rendering to make them seem three dimensional seem like they're part of his head like it's all connected. Don't want to seem disjointed or anything, and I think that's working out pretty well. Just painting in some of these these values on his neck again. We're trying to evoke all kinds of regal looking creatures, and certainly the horse is a huge inspiration for this part of him. So horses next have these really awesome, powerful and defined muscles. So that's sort of what I'm thinking of here. I want this cool, curving neck to have ah, really strong muscular definition, and that's certainly what we're doing. And again to achieve that, we just keep our value edges in mind. So each little individual muscle shape or even these little folds of skin behind his his face here, all we have to do is have ah, stark value edge between each shape. So a nice, smooth value edge to describe that soft shape. But then when we start a new one, we just cut underneath it with a very hard edge between light and dark. So that works every time. And as you can see, I'm I'm using that exact concept literally hundreds of times in each creature everywhere where there's a new little shape form, like a muscle or a fold of skin. Each time we do that, we just we accomplish that with a very stark value edge. So gotta make sure to have both soft and light. And that's that's really how you make these awesome creatures seem organic. So, uh, something I say way too much feel like a broken record, but that that is really kind of the secret to this whole technique. If you can master that, then you can really create just about any kind of creature, and it will always look organic and realistically, three dimensional. So Ah, very powerful concept and one that I hope I hope you guys really take to heart. So just refining things a little bit, adding a little bit of shadow between these little fin shapes that curve around the back of his neck and blending things out a little bit. We want to keep some texture brushwork, but a little bit of blending to just to soften things. I don't want to soften it to the point of looking smudgy, your airbrushed or anything but always nice to refine things, especially when it's a character that we want to like and admire. Sometimes some softer brushwork can make things seem a little smoother and friendlier with our scary and ugly creatures. We kind of want to stay away from that. We want everything to be harsh in icky and alarming looking, but with a creature that we want toe like positive feelings about, we can do that. We can smooth things out, make it seem more friendly and approachable, and, um, you know, have a tactile feeling in mind that isn't repulsive, like like in our scary creatures. Hope that makes sense a little bit of refinement coming back to the face, just jumping around a little bit and doing a little smudging. But I think that looks pretty good and certainly the neck and face treatment there, nice and cohesive. A good contrast, a little more bumpy detail, stuff going on on the face. But again, remember, the other design element that we wanna feature heavily is balance. So we need both those visually active areas and some areas of relative calm toe. Let the I rest, so certainly the face is extremely visually active. But some of those larger muscle groups of the neck are nice and simple in a nice area for the the I to rest. So a good way to balance things out there. So just thinking in terms of how to make this guy seem alive and biological in nature to in order to flap these giant wings, this guy would need some really powerful upper body muscles I've given him, Really Ah, some chest muscles that could cover pretty much his entire midsection. So certainly that's something that we can observe in birds. Practically a bird's entire underside is muscles that flap its wings. Wanted to emulate something like that for my dragon type Phoenix here. So that's what we're doing here rather than just one simple muscle group. I wanted to split that up into a bunch of little muscle shapes just to make it more interesting, some large and some a little bit small again for some contrast in some balance, but generally just looking like a very powerful set of muscles that could really flap those wings down. I'm hoping to make this seem like such a a realistic, in visceral experience, for the viewer wanted to just really feel the power of this guy and practically hear the sound that those wings make when he flaps Justus. He's jumping off to take off here, so really trying to catch him at that that great wow moment that makes all these marvel type creatures so compelling and inspiring and powerful muscles in a powerful sense of the moment is a great way to achieve that and going back to the balance once again, you can see towards the top of the chest. It's It's pretty simplified and in a nice rest area. But below here, even down into the muscles of his midsection, We're doing a lot of more visually active repeating elements. Justo, give it that nice balance. And also just to make it look cool. These little repeating muscle shapes kind of draw the eye down. There are very rhythmic quality Teoh designing creatures. You can kind of just bump your way down all of these little repeating shapes both on the back of the head, down the tail and even these little muscle groups trying to capture a bit of that same effect with this and it's ah, it's coming together well and also makes him seem very biological. All of these very defined and strong looking muscles tying this guy together really creates a very dramatic effect makes it a really cool and compelling sense of realism. So that's what I'm working on here and racing away a little bit of shadow. At some point, I think I'm gonna save rendering the wings for the end of my value painting here. But I do want it to seem like that wing is coming out towards us just a little bit so I'm gonna leave that a little bit darker. Actually, the light source would technically be shining down from above. So I think these surfaces that were rendering here would be directly exposed to that light source. That's why they're pretty bright, but the wing is is coming out a little bit. Some of that would be in shadow. So if we can remember to keep that wing underside just a little bit darker than the rest of it, it will really help. The overall three dimensional feel will really have a sense that that wing is coming out towards us. Because, of course, he wouldn't be folding his arms all the way back directly behind his back. They would be angled out towards it's just a little bit, even if he's at the height of the top of his wing. Be here, so jumping around, just unifying things here and there as I see fit. I'm usually pretty good about going rhythmically from one end of the body to the next. But of course, with Photoshopped endless flexibility. So just do whatever feels good. Jump around, however, like however you like to work best, whatever is most effective for you so no hard and fast rules. They're just just whatever makes you comfortable and gives you the best result. Coming down to the legs here just again, picking out some little muscle shapes, some big, some large have some nice variation there. But honestly, this creature doesn't exist in real life, so you don't have to worry about any kind of muscle, anatomical inaccuracy or anything. As long as it looks like there are some muscle groups, it'll look realistic. It'll be believable. Incredible. So the rendering technique is much more important than the actual information. We don't have toe study some animal analog meticulously and copy every muscle on, say, a horse's leg or anything that's really not necessary. All of viewer will really take away is this guy really looks like he has actual muscles beneath his skin and and that's what makes him seem realistic. So again, we just use value edges, soft muscle groups, and then we just cut back with a harder edge underneath to create a new one in those groups of muscles lying right next to each other, separated by those value edges. That's what makes it look realistic. The body, I guess looking at human beings as an example, Really, we're just a series of all of these little shapes that just come together, and that's what makes things seem organic. Hope, hope that makes sense a little bit of more finite rendering on the feet. Some of the little wrinkles where these folds of skin would bunch up is he folds and unfolds his claws here. Those claws on the feet, I think, are about the scariest and most monster like thing on him. I figured he he needed some kind of slightly aggressive, predatory looking thing on him. They didn't want him to seem to harmless, but But we certainly used a lot of restraint there. And he's not Ah, not at all a scarier, super aggressive looking creature. But I think those air cooled just enough just enough edge and aggressiveness to make this guy seem imposing and formidable. But not taking it so far is to make him seem scary. So always a balance. You have to strike here, but again, you have to keep those big picture questions in mind throughout your whole project and make sure you're always on target. So remember what you want your viewer to feel about your creature the whole time. And don't stray from that. Or you can end up with something that was not really what you originally set out to. Now again, happy accidents are a wonderful thing. You may totally pivot and change your mind if it's Ah character, you're just doing for your portfolio. But if it is professional work or an assignment where you have to hit a certain target about what the character is supposed to be like, then you really can't deviate too much. So something to keep in mind there. So again, using some value edges just to pick out some little muscular shapes on this tale. What the tail to be pretty simple. Noah. Hugely intricate repeating muscle shapes on this tale. Just a few long strapped like looking muscle shapes. And then we're gonna let those little fin shapes down the length of his tail. Br interest there so, so much going on with this guy that's cool to look like cool to look at. We're going to just sort of let the tail kind of chill out and be sort of ah, background element and just picking out some some little fin shapes here, doing a little smudging to make that all cohesive and come together. I think that's working well. The fins on the back of the head, even the points of the wings and these little fin shapes on the tail. That's a nice repeating element. Trip throughout. The entire character makes him our creature out there makes him seem like a cohesive, believable being. So, for example, if I had these triangular shapes on the back of his head, but I switched to something completely different, like bony spikes or something on his tail, he might seem a little bit disjointed. Like he's. He's made up of too many different types of creature parts, so just something to keep in mind. It's It's cool to have some variety, but you want some elements in there that unify the creature from top to bottom and don't want to give him feathers on one side, scales on another and then fish fins on another, for example, don't want to get to two out of the box on that. I wanted to seem like a cohesive, single, unified type of feel across the board, so something to keep in mind there. I think most of this guy's looking great. We're gonna come back to these wings that I'd say for last and again, thinking biologically, We want this guy's arms to be extremely strong. So some huge muscles here in the arms in the forearm. But think those muscles are the ones powering these little digitization shapes that the tips of the wings. So he's looking very strong, and I'm basically just abstracting human muscles for this. Just a done enough of this that I sort of know how to predict these muscle shapes in the arm and forearm. And if it looks like something, people recognizes human but, of course, is adapted a bit to fit. This guy's role is a flying creature. Uh, it'll make it seem more credible, more believable because people are used to seeing those muscle shapes. It's something most people can recognize, so it makes it seem realistic makes it believable again. Remember, we want this wing to appear to be coming out towards it, so I am going to try and make that entire wing area a little bit darker than the entire one . So not super worried about that when we're just picking out all these little muscle shapes . But when were polishing up our value painting, I'm gonna make sure that that effect is coming across. So I want these little wing vegetation shapes to seem like they are overlapping, kind of folded together, really? So that we can imagine this guy when he's not flying, he can kind of fold his wings up. So I'm just adding some areas of value, and I'm just gonna let let there be a little dark space between and then I'm gonna come blend that out. So we have a very sharp value edge between those little wing vegetation cr realistic that looks. It kind of looks like a cash shadow between them. And just like that, they look like thin, thin objects that are stacked up together. And that's exactly what I was going for. So with a little bit of smudging to smooth the soft side of the value edge and then that very hard value edge between those folded shapes, it really makes that effect come across doing some sort of our king brushstrokes. What those little digit ations to seem like? They're cupped slightly like they are designed to just catch the air and push it down. So that's what those little our king strokes are meant to communicate, and I think that's pretty effective. But this wing shape is actually a pretty simple, relatively flat area to render. It's not nearly as complex is all these muscles shapes that we've been rendering so again, on the whole, we've got a nice balance, um, some visually in active areas to balance out all those really active muscle areas. So a really nice kind of happy accident that that worked out that way. This wing is sort of the simplified area, contrasting with all the more visually active areas so that that worked out well. And to be honest, I hadn't really thought about that. So happy accidents, always an artist, best friend. And sometimes things just fall into place pretty nicely for you. So unifying things a little bit. Wanna make sure that this forearm seems sort of like it's both a part of this wing, but also kind of separate, like there's sort of a flatter membrane type part of it that it comes off of the forearm. So, uh, walking a bit of a tricky balance between separating that out and making it look like it is part of it. So that's what I want to go for their, but just a little bit of smudging, a lot of just large flat areas here that we want to make it look nice and smooth again is a nice rest area for the I, and that's coming together really nicely. I really like how those folded wing shapes are coming across. That's exactly what I was hoping they would look like. You can really imagine them folding together very believable, make this guy seem super biological gives us some clues on how how his body works, some other opposes. You could even imagine him in because of that. So taking a look at the big picture and I really like how this guy's coming out. I love this project, always a Superfund category of creature to tackle, and, um, this pose is really coming together. Great in the value painting, I think is, is doing it justice. He looks really three dimensional. We're getting all of the great biological cues that we wanted to. His personality is exactly where I wanted to be, looks very regal and noble and We're certainly getting a lot of cool. Wow. Factor from his wings can imagine him right in that that wow moment. So it's just a little more polished here. This is really coming together. Wanna splash a little bit of rendering on this far wing. But of course, that's such a background element that we don't need much on that at all. So with just a little more polished, I think this guy's just about done in the next lecture. We're gonna convert him to color and then start adding some polish after. That's gonna be a ton of fun. I look forward to seeing you guys there. 20. Project 3 - PHOENIX - Color & Detail: Oh, everyone, this is Hardy. In this lecture, we will convert our value painting to color. So let's get started. So we've gotta finish value painting. The first thing I'm gonna do is make a copy. Just is a safety net. And now that we've got that, we can do a hue saturation adjustment to our value layer and start makesem color choices. What color do we want this guy to be? It's pretty wide open since he's such a total fantasy creature. We could make him neon pink or green blue anything. But I'm I'm starting in a pretty neutral place, kind of this pale, slightly yellow color. And I made a new layer below the value painting, and I'm filling that in with a little bit of scion just to sort of smooth things out. So it doesn't look quite so black and white as you can see it as a very nice smoothing effect having that layer underneath, and it also lets us modulate things. I'm splashing in just a bit of red in certain areas just to start giving it some modulation . Don't want it to be quite so monochromatic, and we'll get to a lot more on that later, but that's looking pretty good. So I've merged those together and I'm just attempting some color balancing with command. Be just trying different things. Really. I really didn't have any kind of ah notion before starting this of what color I wanted this guy to be as long as he's very vibrant and eye catching wanted to be really striking and beautiful just to back, you know, go along with everything we've already done to this point. So now I'm gonna stick with this for now. And I am just polishing things up just a little bit working on this same layer, but with a large, soft round brush. I'm just sort of smoothing things out and notice. I'm switching to that medicine dropper tool. We've said this before, but you can switch to that on the fly when you're using the paint brush tool just by hitting the Ault or option key. A super handy shortcut. So what I'm basically doing is hopping around, hitting alter option to pick up colors and then laying them back down. We're just smoothing things out, making making them look a little more polished and refined here, not making too many huge decisions on color choices but just want things to look smooth and start making it look like a more polished rendering and a color painting. And I think that's coming along really well. He already looks very believable is ah, color figure. We've already taken it step past just normal value. So just like that weaken convert this with with very little repainting into something that looks like it was done completely in color. So another pretty much magic trick that photo shop offers that that saves a ton of time and make something that seems incredibly complex, really right at your fingertips. So I hope you like that. That technique saves a lot of time. This is looking good. I'm just kind of jumping around and refining things. As we said in the value painting, I want this wing that's coming out towards us to be a little bit in shadow. It it really helps, makes it seem three dimensional that it's sort of reaching out towards it. So that's why that's a little bit darker, kind of casting a shadow down on the rest of it, and that as a ton of realism, so trying something else. Now I'm I'm thinking I might might go a different way with his color. Um, and you guys see me do it a lot of experimenting here, but it's really just about finding your way through. So for now, we're going to stick with that. But I'm creating a new, darker color layer. We're gonna switch that to multiply. And as you can see, it just adds another layer of depth. It's a darker accent color that we're gonna put on top of our first color layer. This is so that we can have sort of dark areas of the creature and light areas. So you'll see. I've got that totally mast out, and I'm gonna try and modulate this this layer underneath again, thinking we might go with a bluer based something cooler. But you can see there's just a ton of experimentation at this phase. I really wasn't sure what color to make this to start with, but I think we'll go with a pretty intense blue is a base, and maybe is a complementary color scheme. Maybe I'll make this darker accent color kind of an orange, maybe sort of. Ah, slightly greenish tinted orange so I'm gonna fill in this multiply layer with this orange color. Oh, man, that looks great. I love the way that mixes the blue and the orange really interact well, and that's because their compliments on the color wheel and awesome I'm just gonna reveal in some of this accent color with a soft round brush. I'm painting on the layer mask for that dark multiply layer so you can see it's all black. But I'm painting in white on the mask to reveal selectively where I want this darker orange accent color to show up. This is kind of like giving your creature a cool race car paint job. We've got him all constructed, got got all of his parts, looking three dimensional. Now it's time to give him a really slick looking paint job, and that's what we're doing here. This is maybe one of the funnest steps in this whole process. Let you really make your your creature looks slick, and I think this is really a nice fit with the the Marvel type angle that we're going for. This guy wanted to look really majestic and important, and I think these bright kind of fantasy creature colors really sell that nicely. So that's basically what I have in mind making these color choices. Of course, it's all about just making him look cool and slick and that sort of race car paint, job, type of attitude that I discussed earlier. But we also want to think like an artist. Think about things like complementary colors. Contrast things like that that really sell your creature, make it look like a really vibrant and professional rendering. So all important things to keep in mind in this crucial step of converting our value painting in the color but certainly is fun because we've We've already done so much of the hard work of rendering this guy to make him look three dimensional and realistic. And now we just get to sort of have fun and just make him look really, you know, really shine him up, make him look really majestic and impressive. So a lot of fun here and and certainly not nearly as labor intensive is, is the rendering that we've done before. So I think that's working well. I'm gonna give this guy and I now, so I've created a new layer, and if you'll remember our I rendering demonstration and the Jewell lighting scheme. Basically, we need to think of this I as a translucent sphere to begin with. So that means the light is darker at the top and it gets brighter at the bottom. It's because the I is going inside of this translucent object and sort of bouncing around ends up making the I look brighter at the bottom. So now that we've got that, I'm gonna erase away a pupil just going with a normal round pupil. Remember that the shape of the pupil has a ton of implications for how the creature feel. So I don't want him to look like he has lizard eyes or anything sinister. One of it look nice in human and relatable. So I think that simple round pupil in these really beautiful, vibrant blue eyes really do a good job of that. Added another little pupil dot just to make him seem a little more interesting. So to add a little more vibrance to this, I have switched my brush mode to color dodge, and I'm just brightening up a few areas in here, adding some of those really cool iris striations that make this look realistic. Just little lines that radiate out from that center point. And it makes his I look really deep and interesting and just smudging those around a little bit. But this is working nicely. I think the blue works well with the rest of his color scheme. So we'll add that bright white highlight. And just like that, the I look super translucent and jewel like, just like that jewel lighting scheme. So just like that, we have a super deep and interesting I that really communicates a lot of soul and intelligence exactly what we were going for for this guy. So just toe, try a few things before I move on. I'm gonna see if any other colors work better. Since we've got this on its own layer, there's no harm in just hitting command you and doing a hue saturation adjustment. And this yellow is actually kind of cool. I'm gonna play around with this a little bit, gonna use the history brush toe, actually reverse back to the blue in certain places just so that it's part blue and part yellow. Maybe give it kind of a two color look. But that might be, Ah, a little too complicated. I'll slide it the other way, make it kind of scion. And then history brushed back. And a man that works great elevate. It's got hints of scion, and hints of Blue really adds to the interest, having two different types of color work there and that I so great a really vibrant, soulful I exactly what we were going for and exactly what we need to help pull off this majestic, intelligent and noble seeming creature that we're going for here. So just a little more refinement here on this accent color layer that the darker orange color just ah, racing, I guess hiding rather on the layer mask a few parts. It was super smooth the way the transition happened. So I'm picking out a few little areas to have a slightly more stark change. Make it look like more realistic animal skin texture. Where one color kind of switches to the other makes him look a little more biological and not quite so airbrushed. And I think that's really affected with just a tiny bit of work. So the next thing I'd like to try is to add a little bit of transmitted light. I want some light to be seeming to shine through some of the thin parts. So in portrait painting, this is what we do to a human ear that has a light shining behind it. The light seems to come through and it lets this red color shine through. So I figured these wings are very thin in places. So I want some of this light possibly shine through to make it look like a real biological part of a real animal. So where these wings air thin, that's where this light would shine through. So I'm gonna try a little bit of this now. This technique in the whole whole concept of transmitted light can very quickly make your creature seem kind of icky and gross. So this works very well for scary or icky creatures. But I need to be very light handed with my application here because that is definitely not something that I want this creature to communicate. So I'm being a little heavy handed to start, but I'm gonna dial this way back. Only one. A very subtle hint of this, actually, really like how that red is working with the other colors we have here. But again, I don't want this guy to be at all icky or scary in any way. And certainly light shining through thin skin has the effect of grossing people out, Really, in a lot of ways, so with this type of character have to be very light handed. And that's Ah, that's what I'm doing here, spending a good bit of time on this just to make sure my application of this this is very so don't don't want it to get too carried away. So just a hint to give it a little bit of color interest and a little bit more biological realism of that light shining through those thin areas of skin but super delicate and light handed and measured in our approach here. Ah, very handy trick, though. And of course, if you're doing a scary creature, by all means poor, this honest thick is you want cause it It just helps make things seem pickier and grosser, so a great way to go. But with that guys, I think our color conversion is just about finished. Really great looking color scheme, a lot of different cool elements working together beautifully so up next, I think we'll add a little bit of final polish and we'll call this guy done 21. Project 3 - PHOENIX - Final Polish: Oh, hi, everyone, this is Hardy in this section will finish this creature by adding some final polish. So let's get started. I've pasted in this animal print fabric texture once again. This photo has so many great uses. I hope you find it is useful as I have. And I'm just gonna use the lasso tool to cut out this center portion. Really? This is the most useful part with this animal print. So I'm gonna pay set into a new layer and just go ahead and get rid of the original. I'm gonna put this in a layer group. I just hit command G to put that layer in a group. And I've named the Layer group photo textures. Now by command, clicking the silhouette, I've got a selection. And then I hit the layer mask tool and there we go. This photo is now on Lee within the silhouette of our creature here. So after we do that, we switch our photo texture group too soft light. And just like that, it's just showing the texture through, But we can still see the underlying painting. So now I'm gonna find tune things a little bit inside switching the size and scale in position of this and maybe brighten it up a little. It's kind of darkening this guy's colors a little more than I need it to. Don't want to affect the value really at all. Just what that texture to show through. So that looks about right. I'm now using my clone stamp tool, and I'll just sort of repeat this texture around this guy, wherever it looks, looks like it will be useful. And just like that, that had so much interest and and modulation to this guy I've pasted in that same shape again, just toe have a little bit of a different scale. I shrunk it way down so that that texture is a lot smaller and more finite. So I like the very big areas of texture on the wings but want something a little more detailed in small going on on on some other areas. So that's that's what I was doing there on the chest and head. Those spots are a lot smaller and then bigger out on the wing. So a little bit of contrast there give it some variation, make it look interesting, and wow, that already adds so much interest in realism. The awful use of photo textures can really punch up any creature just about any kind of painting, really? So I hope you find that soft light blending mode useful. It's looking a little bit heavy handed. This texture is kind of everywhere. So what I've done is added a layer mask, and I'm just going toe hide away. Some of this texture don't want it to be quite so everywhere. So just painting black on this layer mask to hide it a little bit don't want to totally kill it off. But I don't want it to be quite as heavy as it was without the layer mask. And I think that's just about right. Kind of taking looks at it with him without just to make sure it's what I want. Adjusting the the layer transparency of the whole layer group just toe make it a little more subtle, and I'm also gonna run a little bit of a filter on this. This is that paint daubs filter makes this texture look a little more painterly, not quite so much like a photo, and I think that's working really beautifully. So nicely textured adds a lot of realism and interest, so our next step will be to add some secondary lights. I'm gonna make a new layer and call them secondary lights and these air those extra light sources that add a ton of really cool accent and personality to your character. It also your creature. Excuse me. It also helps round things out. It makes it seem more three dimensional when there's another light source bouncing other than your primary light sores really gives this guy three dimensional feel. It also just makes it seem like he's kind of dramatically got a spotlight shining on him from somewhere else. Just for some reason, always makes things seem a lot more epic and important if they have one of these extra light sources shining on it. I can also give you a lot of cool cues about the environment that this guy's in. So, for example, if I wanted this guy to look like he was on a battlefield, I could add a bunch of orange secondary lights, make it seem like there fires burning all around him, something like that. You could handsome, creepy greenish colors if you wanted him to look alien or like he's in some weird environment. So lots of potential for information to fit in with your your creature if if you really artfully apply these secondary light sources. But for the most part, just want this guy to have them is kind of an accent. Make him look a little more three dimensional and painterly. Just kind of a a charming way to make your rendering look more professional and and just more beautiful. So this one I'm doing here is sort of, ah, reflected light. It's not super bright gonna make it sort of ah, neutral color trying some different things with the hue saturation adjustment here. But basically we're going for something pretty neutral and pretty subtle taking a look at what a very bright one would look like over here. But, uh, I think we're going to stick with that, so I'm actually gonna add one more secondary light source, and I want this one to seem very bright. I think it might be cool to have it seemed like the sun is sort of shining in over his shoulder here. Behind these crests on his head might be a neat little detail, tohave so I'm having a very bright secondary light source light up those those shoulders and I'm gonna bounce them here on the back of the neck. I just think it would add to the whole epic feel if almost like this guy was jumping up to take off with the sunlight behind him. And it sounds a little cheesy, but I think it will add a lot of drama, and, uh, I think that works well. It certainly helps that shoulder area pop out from that neck that it's supposed to be in front of. So a lot of great three dimensional applications there. So I have grouped everything and then merged it together as you'll notice. I'm now just working on a copy of that that I've merged together. So savior layers in a layer group. But you can just copy that group and then merge them together by hitting Command E. And now that I'm working just on one layer, I've got my smudge tool just set on a low opacity and Arlo strength rather, and I'm just going around the entire periphery of this creature. I'm smoothing out all of these really hard edges when we've worked so hard to make something look three dimensional. Sometimes these really hard edges can totally kill that. It just makes it seem like it's flat and cut out. But if we can smooth those edges out, make them just a tiny bit blurry and smooth, and it really helps round things out. So treating edges should always be on your checklist of final Polish steps, something that you really need to do to make this guy seem finished and make him seem professional and three dimensional. So you work so hard at this point. Don't let these last little steps mess anything up when there were so easy to do. But basically you just go around the entire edge. Nothing terribly difficulty. You are intricate to what I'm doing here. Just sort of a little light smudging with with low tool strength. And ah, and that does the trick. Now, with these little repeating fin shapes, I'm actually given those a little bit more of a smudge just to draw that point out. Maybe even apply imply a little bit of motion is going on there, so when you want something to seem like it's moving, you can you can add just a little bit more of this. Blurriness makes it seem like it's that the camera, even though there is no camera here, the camera kind of captured at a moment emotion mood moment and made it seem blurry. So a little bit of, ah, photo trick there just to make things seem like they're moving. And, of course, voter ship has all kinds of filters to simulate that, too. So same idea here just ah, just some refinement, though, for our edges. And with that, I think I've made it all the way around the track, and that certainly helps. This guy's looking a lot more polished. Very cool. We're getting close to a finished product and really, really liking this one. I'm gonna add a little bit of punch by switching my brush tool to color dodge, and we're going to select a very soft round brush, and I'm gonna pick a few areas that I want to brighten. That's what the color Dodge setting on your brush does. It makes things super bright, super fast. You have to be very light handed with this, or you can totally washed things out. But I noticed a few areas on the face and the neck, and even that bright spot on the shoulder. They're brightening up a lot. It just adds some punch, a little bit of a little bit of accent to this, these areas that we want to draw attention to so you can see before and after a really cool addition there, and it makes things a lot more interesting. This guy's getting very close to finished. Since he's not on the ground, we won't do any kind of a cast shadow. But one thing I would like to try is a bit of a bloom effect. So what that is is when light kind of shines so brightly through something that it makes it seem like it's it's actually shining around the edges. I've created a new layer called it Bloom, and I'm going to switch my brush mode back to color Dodge, and we're gonna set this blending mode toe lighten. So pause and rewind if you need to see any of that again, I changed a lot of modes, but check it out. It just adds a little bit of glow going on behind this guy. So if we're going for that sun shining through effect that really help sell. It makes this guy seem very epic and dramatic, just with those little subtle glows peeking around the corners. Really cool Effect Medio again be very measured in your application of this, but it really adds a lot of drama and is, ah, really cool final Polish trick Teoh have at your disposal. So I hope you find that interesting experimenting with some different colors. It was pretty red trying something a little more yellow, little more orange. But guys, that's pretty much it. With these last little finishing touches to add drama, I think this guy's just about finished. So let's take a look back at our project steps and see how far we've come. Congratulations on completing the Phoenix Creature Project. This one was a lot of fun. I'm really happy with how it turned out. Let's check out our project steps. We started with a rough sketch to get our idea and basic shapes in place. We then refine the line, drawing with an inking past. From there, we blocked in a silhouette, ended a value painting to make him seem three dimensional and organic. After that, we converted him to color and then finally added photo textures and final polish. All in all, we went from a blank canvas to a finished product that we could be very proud of. I love this guy. I hope you've enjoyed this project and have gotten a great portfolio piece out of it. I look forward to seeing you in the next creature project where we'll build on everything we've learned here. 22. Project 4 - GOLIATH - Sketch & Ink: Oh, Harvey one, This is Hardy. And welcome to the Goliath creature project. This is gonna be a Superfund when definitely a different type of creature than anything we've done so far. And a lot of really great design and rendering techniques. We're gonna go over, so let's dive in. So I've got the blank canvases always. And we're just going to jump in and start making marks and at this point, the blank canvas. This is when we're starting to ask ourselves all of those big picture questions about who this guy is gonna be. How do we want him to make us feel? What type of design devices should we use to make make those things happen so broad? Since I want this guy to be a big brute, a big, strong character. But I want him to be friendly. I wanted to be kind of ah, sidekick, big, big muscle guy to have in your corner so sort of ah scifi type creature. I'm thinking of things like Chewbacca or maybe the crow guns from mass effect. There's really big, strong but friendly ally type creature. So that's what I'm going for wanting to be very big built muscles have a lot of really angular features. Remember, from shake shape language, we can use the square pretty heavily to make him seem dependable and stable. And we certainly want that guy to have all of those things wanted to seem like he's just carved out of rock. He's just a big, strong brute of a guy, but we also want him to be likeable, wanted to have kind of a sense of humor. So I'm even in these early steps trying to work in a bit of a grin, some kind of disarming feature just to make him seem friendly as well as big and imposing. So just as I've been sketching kind of freestyle trying to get an idea in place here, notice I've used this square pretty prominently. That crest on his head is gonna be sort of his most memorable selling feature, and it's a very squared feature wanted toe look like he's got kind of a big square shape on the front of his head. It makes him interesting, makes him look like he's something other than just a generic humanoid type creature, and it also gives that square sense of stability and dependability that we want one of these big brute sidekick type characters toe have, and also that that grin that I'm giving him with his big, oversized alien mouth really helps helps him have that sense of humor, gives him that disarming quality so that he doesn't become too scary. I want the viewer to know instantly that that they should like this guy and try to be friends with him. This is one of those guys you team up with for a side quest or becomes part of your spaceship crew again thinking of mass effect that crow guns always like the design of those guys and certainly a similar personality I'm going for here. So taking a lot of keys from human anatomy, this guy's mostly humanoid, and I'm just sort of exaggerating those features. I'm giving him a super built, an exaggeratedly large upper body. His arms and hands are just gigantic along with his head and face. Um, so I'm gonna I'm gonna balance that out with some legs that are just a little bit smaller again. Just trying to find ways to make him seem credible and believable is a living thing. And even as a humanoid, but I don't want to get too boring and make him just a human that I grafted a few extra features on. I always found a lot of the creatures that that old TV shows like Star Trek invented. They were just so obviously made, designed with with human costuming in mind that most of the time they were just a generic human with some strange facial feature, different colored skin, something like that. Not very interesting. So I want to get well outside of the box and make this guy very different proportions in different feel from a human but at the same time, all of the recognizable things that that make him humanoid. Two arms, two legs, two eyes, things like that upright posture and all of those good things. Now I am designing this guy to have some for honestly, I probably wouldn't normally, but I definitely want to include a furry creature in in this course just to show you guys my technique for rendering that. And I thought that would work for this guy. Maybe even make him remind us a little bit of Sully from Monster's anchor. Something like that. So I am giving him some for I'm not quite sure if it's gonna be all over his body if we're gonna go full Chewbacca on this or just sort of have for in certain places, but certainly on his arms, maybe Ah, maybe on his lower body as well. So sort of fine tuning this ideas, I go. But that's definitely a feature I want to include, if nothing else, just to show you guys my technique for rendering this but really liking, always coming together already. He's got sort of ah ah, hunched over posture. You can imagine where his backbone is going. It's sort of an s shaped curving from the back of his neck all the way down and around to his hips. So that's really an interesting pose. Even though he's just relaxed, kind of sitting there at rest. It's actually sort of a dynamic pose because of that curve that we've built into his back. It also makes his his muscles Seymour imposing like they're all just curving forward almost aggressively, even though this guy's just kind of chilling there. So a cool thing to try and work out that the position of the shoulders, the angle of the neck. All of these little posture details that we we learned from practicing human figure drawing really come into play when we're designing. Ah, very human based creature like we are here. I also want to give him some really big and expressive eyes. Since we want this guy to be intelligent relatively, you know, you can talk to this guy, go on space missions with them things like that wanted to have a very soulful face, very communicative, and have his eyes be a huge part of that. So I made some pretty large eyes, and we're gonna definitely try and do a supercool rendering for those because there will be a big part of the personality that this guy exudes. So notice. It's just been a lot of feeling my way through a lot of trial and error, erasing and redoing. That's how we get to this point. That's sort of the entire technique of design and ideation that that we teach here is just keep making marks in trying things and mess up as many times as you want until you get there, just trial and error. Feel your way through. It's It's super liberating in a great way. Teoh really get a lot of improvement in your work in such a short amount of time Because you're never worried about messing something up. Don't forget that snapshot button is over there on the history panel. So whenever you're worried that you're coming to a fork in the road, you're not sure if something you want to try is gonna work. Just hit that snapshot button and you can jump back to that state anytime you want. So jumping back to shape language, just trying to get his many squares and on this guy as I can want him to be really angular . So those lower leg, the calf muscles, those air practically just diamond shapes. Same with this forearm. His jaw. Ah, lot of very angular, masculine square shape so that this guy just seems like he's just carved out of a mountain just very dependable and stable. That's what we're going for. Also want you to be ableto just imagine this big, gruff, booming voice. Maybe he tells jokes, or something so smiling but big and imposing, sort of. The contrast we're going there and should hopefully make him seem pretty charming. by the time we've got our design finished, I think we're on our way. This guy's pretty likable, at least in my humble opinion. I think we're having some success already like this guy and would like to go on some kind of video game space mission with this guy. So that's that's sort of the mark for success that I'm shooting for here. Now that we've got his main proportions built in, I'm just sort of coming back in for a little bit of secondary line work, just toe sort of figure out a few more details. What kind of little points of interest. So I want this guy to include, um, I really like the way his musculature is established. He looks like a big, hulking, strong guy, and that's that's definitely what we're going for. Adjusting a few proportions here, I want to make sure he's fitting in the right perspective, and you sort of have to imagine the perspective lines. But any time there features that are the same on both sides, like two feet, two hands, two eyes, etcetera, you want to make sure those lineup in the correct perspective plane. So that's why those feet are a little bit offset in the hands as well. It all has to line up in the right perspective plane. So that's why we do a little bit of fine tuning and reworking this hand on the far side. Here I love these big, hulking hands are always Superfund to exaggerate proportions with and certainly fits with the personality that we're going for here. So just doing a little bit of a racing sort of describing a lot of these little anatomical features with a little more detail. I wanted to have fewer toes in a normal person, maybe just kind of some big, big, clunky toes just to go on these, actually, relatively small fetus feeder. It's much smaller than his hands, just sort of a I thought of a pretty interesting feature. Teoh sort of reverse. Make him a little more interesting, also makes him much more hawking in the upper body. Wanted to keep that didn't want to have gigantic legs to balance that out. I wanted it to be sort of off balance like we have here. I really like that effect, these gigantic arms and hands and relatively small legs. Now they certainly have to look strong and sturdy enough to hold up this large upper body. But you get the point just going for an interesting off balance type of thing and trying to get a little bit more of a square shape here on this shoulder and define some of these contour lines a little bit more. And I think this is coming together really well. Just flipping the Candice back and forth constantly is you've no doubt noticed, and I've set up my own keyboard shortcut for that. But it's not a photo shop default, but, ah, Photoshopped makes it really easy if you ever want to set up your own keyboard shortcuts. And I would certainly recommend that because flipping the canvas back and forth pretty regularly always keeps your your creature any painting you're working on fresh in your eyes as soon as it flips the other way. Suddenly, any kind of problem you may have been having that you couldn't quite put a finger on just becomes obvious to you. It's like you're looking at it for the first time. A super handy trick, something I learned back in art school would have to hold traditional paintings and drawings up to a mirror to try and figure out something that wasn't quite right, but obviously much easier here in the digital medium. So give that a try. You'll be amazed at how how different it makes your artwork look and it can make any kind of problems. You have just jumped right out at you. The solutions can be much easier to find. So trying to make this abdominal musculature kind of match that curvy, hunched over contour we have so we can use all of those little lines of those muscle shapes muscle shapes to two further back that that posture up that we're going for and just adding some little indications of some for where I think that should happen. You could go really overboard with this, making huge and furry like he was made to live in some kind of super cold, snowy environment. Things like that, I'm I'm really just doing for this time is ah, rendering technique demonstration, not not making that a huge part of this guy's story, but certainly will use that for some color interests and just a bit of texture contrast when we do the painting always nice to have a few different flavors going on in the same character. So that's that's gonna be a nice thing to add in later in just of finding these little muscles. Trying to make things is interesting as we can. Before we call this guy finished. I think that's working well. A few little neck muscles trying to sort of tie things together make the head and these arm muscles sort of one cohesive type. Feel anything that isn't quite working. I'll start to find Tune at these last minutes of the sketch phase, changing these perspective lines a little bit seen if if there's a different sort of posturing, I can do with this far arm to fit better and just sort of feeling my way through, I think I like him kind of spread, spread out wide, sort of that more aggressive arms spread posture. I think that's working well but can't seem to quite get a version of this hand that I like just right, so redoing that a little bit. Never be afraid to just a race and start over. If there's some stubborn part of a drawing that's not quite coming together for you, always an easy thing to rework, but I think this guy's coming together nicely. A few last minute proportions I'd like to adjust, but for the most part I think we've got all of the elements in place. It's it's achieving all of the goals that we set out for ourselves and certainly communicating the feeling that we want the viewer to feel and everything seems correct, design and rendering wise. So I think this guy's just about ready to call, finished and up next will in came in and give him a little more refinement. So to get that process started, I'll just create a new layer and rename that ink and realize I just forgot to name my schedule air So when ahead and took care of that and I knocked the opacity way back on the sketch layer is Well, so now with a a dark a round brush. Really, I'm just going to start defining all of these main shape, so really, we're just tracing in this one. We've got our design work done, and now it's just timeto makesem. Crisp lines to sort of make make this creature more refined and clean looking before we move on to a painting step, so this is just sort of ah craftsmanship step. As we said in the other creature project, this one can actually be skipped if you don't feel like you need it. But if this is professional or student work, this is always a great step to do in order to submit your idea to a client or a teacher before moving too far along in a painting. So a nicely rendered, inked looking line drawing is a great professional presentation for any idea. And if if you're really trying to sell an idea to go to finals phase, then up, then this is a great way to do. It makes things look very nice and professionally presented, but technique wise were just using this same with brush to go around the entire entire area of the creature, really just just going from top to bottom, defining some of these little interior shapes. Normally, I'll try and get around the entire outside before doing much interior line work. But often times when a face is a big selling feature, I want to just tackle that right off right off the bat, so putting a little more time into that, but but I think that's looking good. So we're gonna move on to the other parts of the body. So I'm thinking that these little furry kind of braided pony tails on his back about that would be a cool idea just to show that this guy's intelligent. He's not just a dumb beast or anything. He can actually groom himself and would care to tie his hair back like this. I'm gonna keep that for now. But, uh, I'm not sure if that's gonna make it to my final painting. Not sure if that's exactly working with the rest of the feel of this guy, but that's the idea behind this. It's easy toe change these ideas as Ugo and I think I probably will end up changing that. But for now, we're gonna leave those little ponytails in the back again. I just wanted to include for and this guy's a rendering technique. But that may not make the final cut. No big deal, Always easy to change it. Any phase. So just kind of running around the entire perimeter of this guy just to define all of these shapes and give it some nice crisp line work before we move on to the cool value paintings in our next step and what thes thes muscle shapes to be very, very solid and imposing. So these Chris Bold lines really help us do that. They define these forms, make them seem very, very solid and ready toe ready to add some rendering to. It's really just sort of, ah, process of just putting the time in and getting the job done. It's It's sort of one of those parts of the project that you can sort of switch your brain off and put some music on and just kind of do some rendering. It's something that should be fairly automatic, not a very artistically or creatively demanding part of the project. Again, we've got our design done. All of our hard work is pretty much done for us. So we, uh, we just crisply Inc this in and he'll be ready for the next step. Often a good time. Teoh. Refine certain aspects of your creature if you weren't sure about something, or if if you sort of left in area vague and your sketch. This is always a good place toe really end up finalizing those design decisions. Make sure everything's exactly the way you want it. So one good thing about this ink step is you kind of can't just cheat your way around some part of the creature that you you are having trouble design, and you sort of have to commit to solutions on this one. So if there's an area that that you're not sure about, you can always make sure that you'll tackle it and get it nailed down by by the end of the ink step. So a good way to sort of make sure everything is on board before getting to a painting. Sort of, ah, quality check before you get too far along. So I hope you find that useful. But again, just sort of have toe go through the motions here and get this guy done. I've sped this video up a good bit just so that you guys aren't bored to death. Watching me essentially trace the same lines. But good technique I definitely wanted to share so didn't want to skip this for you guys, but we've done this in every creature and you've taken any of our other courses just about every project. So hopefully something you're very familiar with and always a good thing to know how to do Photo shop just makes it super easy to make these nice, crisp line drawings. But we're just about finished year with our entire outer perimeter defining these main shapes. These big hands, arms, everything, and I think it's all keeping true to form. One thing you gotta be careful of is sometimes your sketches can be really nice and expressive. You can get some nice free line work, and when you go back to ink it in, you can actually lose a little bit of that. Some of this really careful, crisp line work can actually kill off some of the personality if you're not too careful, so I always want to check back. Make sure you're not losing any personality at this step, so keep that sketch layer around. Don't don't destroy it or or ink over it or anything. Keep it around just to do sort of a quality check. Make sure that your ink layer looks every bit is cool and charming is your sketch layer, and you'll be really pleased when you're ready to start the painting so Ah, cool little tip. Kind of a warning to keep in mind. Don't wanna lose any of the personality you got on that sketch phase, but just doing a little bit of interior line work, kind of defining some of these cool little crest shapes on his head. Just want to make that all look very realistic again. We want this guy to seem like a riel biological living thing. So all of these little details are kind of would make him seem like a really living thing. So definitely want to take our time, get this idea really nailed down. Make sure that we love it before we take it to a painting phase. And guys, I think we're just about there with just a little more detail line work. I think this guy's just about ready to paint in. Got a lot of really great rendering techniques toe share in the future steps. So I think you're really gonna enjoy it. So we'll go ahead and call our ink drawing done, and I'll see you up next in the value rendering 23. Project 4 - GOLIATH - Value: Hi, everyone. This is Hardy. In this lecture, we will add value to our Goliath creature project. So let's get started off camera I've pasted in a splash background. It's the same one we've used for our other creature projects. I just feel free to pace that end. Or, of course, you could make one for your own. Next, we're gonna use our ink layer to create our silhouette. So I use the magic wand tool to select outside of the ink layer and then just hit Select inverse, and we can fill in a new layer. So that's all there is to it to make a silhouette. Once I have that done, I just make a copy of the ink layer and merge that copied ink layer with the silhouettes. And now we have a nice silhouette toe work from. I'm gonna make a quick correction to this guy's contour. Just sometimes you notice things once he's silhouetted in that you didn't see before in the ink face. So always a good time to try that out. I think that's working better, So this guy's just about ready to start painting and remember, we can use this silhouette layer any time to create a selection. We just command click that silhouette layer image and we get a selection of this guy's interior. So created a new layer called value to grab my chalk brush and is always this bright orange color to do a value paying. So we're gonna start on his face. Same things I've been saying for our other creature projects. But it this phase when we're starting to think about creating the illusion of three dimensions, we have to keep two very important concepts in mind. The first and most simple is just the idea of light sourcing. Remember that three dimensional sphere that we rendered? That's really the basic idea for this entire illusion of three dimensions. We have to make the planes that face towards the light source brighter and higher and value , and the planes that face away from the light source darker. It's really about as simple as it is, as long as you can apply that simple concept to the more complex shapes that that make this guy up. Then he'll look three dimensional and realistic. So light sourcing is how we make this guy seem three dimensional and round. Now The other important value concept that we need to keep in mind is value. Edge it. Now we need to have both sharp and soft value edges. That's what makes this guy seem organic. That's what all of these little shapes that make him up, all of the each little bump in nook and cranny, each little mussel shaped beneath the skin. We need those to be separated by hard value edges that the shapes themselves are actually very soft value edges. They're kind of like round spheres themselves. But what makes this guy look organic when we render him is the way that those shapes are next to each other. There's a hard edge that separates each one of those, so make sure to include both those soft edges to make these soft round shapes. But we need to separate each shape with a hard value edge, so check that out. I'll basically go back and forth this entire rendering, making soft edges kind of tapering away gently and then starting a new shape with a very hard edge, kind of cutting underneath the one before it. So that idea of value edges is so important in creature painting It's one of those things. It really makes each creature seem seem organic and like a living thing. So very important idea to keep in mind something I'm sure beaten over the head too much beating a dead horse here. But that's that's really one of the most important keys to making your creature paintings seem organic. Hope. Hope that makes sense. And I hope you guys can really pick up on that. So starting with the face since I wanna attack this part with all of my artistic energy, since I need this to be a really main selling point for this guy, one of space to be really expressive and get across all those big picture feeling points that we want this guy to have remember, we wanted to seem likable and friendly, but also big and imposing. So again, we're thinking Chewbacca. Or maybe the crow guns from mass effect. Something like that. And I think we're getting there. So the the expression on his face is crucial. He's got this really wide mouth. It's kind of curved up in a grin, makes him kind of disarming and charming. You can imagine this guy has some kind of corrupt voice. And maybe, he tells jokes, something like that I mentioned in the previous lecture. But those are the ideas I'm keeping in mind. Just toe get this guy's personality very much across to the viewer, and I think we're having some success there so far. But beyond that, I just want this guy to seem interesting. I'm one all these nifty little design elements to make his face interesting. I wanted to both be relatable is very humanoid and of course, the lips and eyes do a good job of that. But I also want this to be interesting. I want it to be something that nobody's seen something exactly like it before, because often that's our job is a concept artist is to create something that that hasn't been seen before. It always has to be relatable and and evoke things that people have seen before. Can't be just totally random and out there. But we wanted to be original and interesting, so it's a balance across wanted to be relatable but also interesting and new. So that's sort of the balance that we strike is a concept art professional is is we have to make those two very important criteria work together, and they're kind of opposites or sort of ends of a scale. So a tight rope that we walked there, but it's always a fun challenge, and it's a ton of fun when you have some success, and I think we're pretty much hitting that right on the head here. So his head is looking pretty good. It's got all the expressive elements that I want lots of interesting, little visually active areas, and I'm just going to sort of start working my way out. Now Remember, during a value painting, what will do often is use value edges to pick out all of these very small, subtle shapes. And then we'll come back across with a larger brush like I've been doing and just sort of unify things, just with some soft tone over the top of everything. It just sort of blends it all together. That way, things don't seem so so light and dark, light and dark. You don't want to seem like he's got zebra stripes. You want things to sort of gel together, and that's what those large unifying tone brushstrokes do for us is sort of bring things together so that it doesn't seem so visually active, like just a 1,000,000 different areas of light and dark going back and forth cause that that could be a little bit exhausting to the I. That brings me to my other point is we need to have both a nice balance of visually active areas and areas of relative calm again, something I've said in each of our creature paintings. But that's a really important design principle. To apply to creature design is we wanted to have both a lot of visually active areas in areas where are I can rest so you can see kind of where his nose would be, where it meets the top lift. I've got a ton of little repeating shapes there, but then other areas on his head, like above his eyebrow and even out on his jaw those air a lot smoother, relatively calmer, visually active areas. So I need to have both. Otherwise, the I'll just get exhausted with too much visual activity, and it even becomes a little tough to tell what's what in terms of the forms. Impossible to see what what is his mouth? What is his I That's what I mean by that. So just doing a little bit of light blending makes a nice, smooth gradations again. Get my value edge differentiations going there, and we're just going to unify things a little bit. But this is just a process of kind of settling in, getting some music on and just going head to toe on your creature. It's It's basically the same principles that were applying to each area of the body. Wanted to have realistic light sourcing again, just like that three dimensional sphere. We want to keep value edges in mind, but for the most part we're just describing this three dimensional form, and it's ah, it's a lot of fun. This is one of those really fun parts of the project where things start to really stop being just marks on a screen and start really seeming like something realistic that you can imagine more fully a really rewarding in interesting part of this process. Hope I hope you guys get is excited about that as I still do, kind of. One of the first things that got me excited about art is one of those great moments when marks on a page become something more than just brush strokes. Really? Ah, fun part one of most rewarding parts about being an artist. So one of those things that just keeps you excited, toe come to your desk every day. I hope you guys are experiencing that working our way down here now, since I want his body to be a little bit hunched over these areas on his chest kind of these ribs, I'm gonna eventually leave in shadow. I want thes abdomen muscles to sort of come out. So I want those to be lighter. I think we're gonna do a little shadow treatment on this chest area earlier just so that that hunched over posture really comes through. I think that's an interesting part of his poses. Is the way his chest kind of curves backwards into the shadows. But then his abdomen and lower body kind of start to curve out to the front and also picking, using some value edges to pick out some little muscle shapes, make his midsection interesting and have some cool little muscle shapes again. What? This guy to seem really big and imposing. So I'm gonna give him some pretty developed muscles wanted to seem like he could just Kalaba enemies with you with his big, muscular hands. So a big part of our story we're trying to tell here think that'll come across well, so I've pretty much got that shadow treatment in places. Chest looks like it's really receding back into the shadows, and then his lower abdomen is is starting to come out into the light more so. I think we're really successful with that. That's that's doing exactly what I was hoping it, too. A little bit of blending to make that come across. Got some nice abdominal muscles described there. And, of course, these airbase pretty heavily on human muscles. But guys, when you're designing creatures, as long as it just looks realistic, you certainly don't have to match muscle for muscle. It doesn't have to be an anatomical chart by any means. It doesn't even have to have Anna logs and human anatomy. It just has toe remind people of the muscles that they see in human figure drawing BB close enough, especially when we're doing such a heavily human based creature like we are here. It needs toe remind people of human anatomy quite a bit so big pectoral muscles in his chest, recognisable ab muscles and similar muscles to human legs as well. That's what I mean. Just it needs toe. Be pretty close toe to the human anatomy that it's based on. But don't feel like you are. You're tied to that in any way. Get as creative as you want. Give this guy another set of arms, more eyes, anything you want. He can still be humanoid and remind us of a human, but we should. We should base all of our musculature and a lot of our anatomical structures on human, so they just relatable and recognizable. That's how we connect with the viewer, on top of making this guy just seem friendly and charming and likable. We need those anatomical cues to really help him be a relatable and a successful character , and I think we're getting there with this guy. So just trying to render out these legs again, using value edges just to pick out all of these little overlapping muscle shapes that it's sort of eventually come together to make it seem like a cohesive riel living creature again , I often have to take a break when I get to the legs. For some reason, I use just about all of my artistic energy just getting to this point. So I never want any part of your creature to look overlooked or or something you just sort of phoned in at the end. So if you need to take a break, if something's looking like it's not quite getting your best effort than just take a break , that's a good sign that you are sort of running out of creative gas, and it's a good time to just go grab some water, take a quick walk and come back and finish your guy with with all the energy that you had when you started it. No shame in that at all. And it's Ah, big part of my day is a professional is just recognizing what I'm starting to burn out, and I need a quick break. Otherwise the work starts to suffer, and we don't want that. But leg muscles are looking pretty good and compelling again. Just value edges. You can see a really strong one around that, that knee, where that muscle from his calf kind of crosses over. So it's a good example of what I'm talking about by those value edges. But legs were looking good. So time to render in these big, awesome muscular arms. And basically, I want his show shoulder to end up. Reading is a big, pretty round shape, but I do want that to seem like they're some little muscle fibers beneath the skin. So that's why I've picked out several little parallel shapes I wanted toe seem like, uh, there are lots of little strappy muscular fibres beneath the skin, so that's what I'm doing there. But some really heavy use of value edges to make all of these cool muscle shapes again, heavily human based. So check out human arm references. If if you need a a big, muscular creature like this to be relatable, that's a great way to do it. But picking out little shapes and then unifying things together. That's sort of the process that we used to go here. You know, I've got this sharp kind of hook area where his shoulder comes in with his chest. Not so sure how that's working for me. I may may come back and rework that, but for now we're just sort of going around and getting the basic forms rendered in so that it'll work for us. But, yeah, I think I'm gonna get rid of that sharp pronounced hook shape and just sort of try and tie his shoulder together with his chest a little better. I think that's working a lot better. Also, when you can see that nice continuity of anatomy between the shoulder in the chest, it somehow helps you imagine his function a little bit better. You can feel how those muscles work together to maybe make his arm swing in a big punch or something like that. So often these little anatomical cues can really help us imagine this guy's functionality. So a big part of visual storytelling, which is is essentially our main job here is to get get all these points across. I've put some little wrinkle shapes on his elbow. Just is, ah, cool little visual detail and also because it's mostly flat and relatively visually calm areas on his arm so far. So I wanted to put a little visually active, smaller area just toe sort of balance that out, always have to keep these things in mind. These balance cues and in all these design elements that we taught in art fundamentals, things to really carry across the creature designed and again the two that apply most to creature design are definitely repetition and balance. So noticed some repeating elements that are occurring on this design. Most notably, he's got these little spiky things. It go behind his head, sort of down the angle of his neck. Uh, some of these shapes in his chest and abdominal muscles, those repeating elements, even these muscles strap shapes in his forearm. Those were all good repetition cues, even trying to get a little bit of that going on with the ponytail type things going on on his back. But, uh, for now, we're just ah, finishing up our rendering. And be honest. The more I look at it, I'm not sure those pony tail shapes or even the little hair hanging below his head is really working for us that we may actually revisit that. But for now, let's just finished rendering out all of these cool body parts since we're so close to being done here. So again, just picking out some value edges to separate all of these little muscle strap shapes blending things together a little bit, want that big, strong bicep to have a nice hard value edge to separate it from the forearm. And guys, I think he's looking pretty much done. He looks believably three D and ah, indefinitely looks organic. So I think we're just about done with our value painting before we move on to color. There's a quick update for this guy off camera. I did decide that those little pony tail shapes were not really working, so had made a small change to this guy notice on his back. I just added some little repeating element Crest shape similar to the one on his head. I thought that would be a better design choice and just remove those weird little ponytails that weren't quite working with the rest of the character. So I just wanted to show you guys that changed before we move on 24. Project 4 - GOLIATH - Color & Detail: Oh, everyone, this is Hardy. In this lecture, we will convert our value painting to color. So let's get started. So we've got our finished value painting. I'm just gonna make a copy of that layer just that I can have that as a safety net in case I decide to come back to it later. But it's time to start making some color decisions. What do we want this guy's color to say about him? I've done a value shift by just hitting command you to do hue saturation adjustment. And I've changed that value layer to this cool, icy blue. After that, I made a layer underneath it. I'm doing that to just sort of do Cem sub coloring. Want to have a little bit of modulation? Maybe Cem some warmer colors out towards his his hands and on his lips. But for now, we're just sort of unifying things a little bit, raising that value underneath, seeing what kinds of color combinations work well. So making good use of that hue saturation adjustment and again that's just command you is a keyboard shortcut, so putting a little more red on the outside of the hands, trying to do that kind of skin tone modulation that we do in human figure painting as well just and how that works. But I think that's a good enough starting point. So I've merged those two layers together, and now comes the fun part where we just sort of refined things. I've got all of this color layer on one layer, and I'm just hopping around, kind of adding in some shadows, darkening things out, unifying things a little bit. So ah, lot of this choppy brushwork starts to just smooth out and look more cohesive, like it's it's done is a single, unified thing, and it also lets us define our form a good bit notice. I'm I'm adding some darks for the most part here, just around things. Out that arm on the far side or the legs with knees bend a little bit. Those all need to have some shadow in themselves doing that at this point, and also just unifying things again. We use that eyedropper tool whenever you have your brush tool selected, just hit Ault or option, and it will switch it to that eyedropper tool. You can sample any color on the canvas and just sort of pick him up and put him back down a great way toe very quickly, jump around the entire image and really get some refinement done without a whole lot of effort. Uh, picking a higher value. I'm going to do a little bit of highlighting. Didn't want these areas to get to dark and again with this icy blue. The color statement we're making right now almost makes him look like he's some kind of ice creature. And that's not what we're going for. You have to kind of bear with me on this because we're gonna add that accent color. Multiply layer is our next step. But for now, I think Blue might work well, is a base. And then we'll let those accent colors kind of balance things out. Because if he's just to be kept so cool in his color scheme like he is now, it really does almost imply lucky, some kind of ice creature, like maybe the the ice for the frost giants, whatever and inthe or something like that that we're not necessarily trying to say, but notice. I'm doing a little bit of fine line work. Some of these little shapes on his face. I thought it would be cool to separate them with Cem Cem Sharper line work just to make it look like little little different panels on its face and things like that. Ah, cool thing. You see an alien design sometimes. So just trying to bring a little bit of that across on this guy and ah, smudging out just said it doesn't look quite so linear. Uh, sometimes that fine line work can clash a little bit with the painterly style that we teach here. So needs a little bit of finesse and a little bit of smoothing out to make sure it doesn't look out of place, adding a little bit of highlight again. This face is definitely the most important selling point on this guy in terms of his personality. So I want to make sure to give that the attention that it needs Teoh communicate all of these subtle things that we're trying to get across and also a nice opportunity to add some highlight really make some of those little value edges that define those muscle shapes. Really. Pop makes him look super cool and he's coming together. Certainly we can go from a simple value painting to a pretty complex looking color rendering without much effort were just a few minutes in here, guys, and we've converted something that was totally flat value into something that's pretty dynamic is a color painting, so Photoshopped really makes it incredibly easy. Obviously, you don't have to repaint anything and color as you might in a traditional under painting type technique. So a huge timesaver really lets you kind of compartmentalize the way you need to think about things. So we can focus entirely on value in one phase of a project and then make all of our color decisions later so super liberating. It takes a lot of the pressure off. You don't have to have every little bit planned out before you ever put pen to paper. You can just sort of make it up as you go. And it's a great way to design a great way toe sort of discover things about your painting as you go that you might not have ever planned out. So really one of the best parts about the digital medium, I hope, Ah, great take away from our courses here, but just jumping all around to add in some highlights. Now, remember, I did want this guy to have some for, believe it or not, I let most of the for texture and get done with some photo texture layers. So we're gonna do that in our Polish face. For now, I'm just rendering this guy's musculature as if he did not have for making him pretty pretty. Just look like skin, I guess. And we're gonna add that for feel in the photo texture layer and add a little bit of polish to make sure that that jives well with what we've got going on. But for now, just sort of painting things in jumping around and refining things a little bit, making sure it all jives together. And I think we come a long way in a super short amount of time. So just sort of refining things. Notice I switched to this sort of squashed circle at an angle shaped brush. I like to do that for finer brushwork. Sometimes it just has a bit of a more expressive feel to it. It has no texture to it whatsoever, so you end up actually seeing brush marks. It's sort of Ah, cool feel. Ah, like being able to see the hand of the artist a little bit in these paintings and and this brushed is a good job of that. Obviously, if you do your entire value painting with that, things get so textured that it gets a little confusing. So I use this brush sparingly, but ah, handy tool. And as we always say, it's It's definitely much more about the technique that you're using than the brush. So there, unfortunately, is no magic brush that makes everything easy. So I think he's rendered up pretty well. Now I am just really going to start some experimentation, see what kinds of color statements I want to make. So I've merged the entire creature into one group. He has now emerged guy. I'm gonna do a little bit of a liquefied. Correction decided. I wanted to change his posture ever so slightly, make his head come forward a little bit, just in opportunity. I noticed there, uh, accentuate that sort of s shaped curve to his spine. A little bit really makes his his posture just a little bit a little bit more interesting. So Ah, good way to go there and remember, you can use liquefy it just about any phase of the project. But you do have to merge things together to make that work effectively. So sort of had to do a leap of faith there. But I think this is gonna work out fine. With a little bit of experience, you kind of learn to trust yourself with ease. Big decision. So liquefies is our very good friend here. We can make these adjustments in any phase. Really a miracle fix. Can't. Can't tell you how many projects in school I did traditionally and got to the end. Just wished I could make one very tiny change. But of course, by then, way too late. So let's add some accident color. I've created a multiply layer above this guy and just clicking that character silhouette weaken. Just fill in that shape and I'm picking an accident color. I think I'm gonna go with this even darker Scion, seeing if I should adjust the layer underneath. Seeing how that works. It's a lot of experimentation just to sort of see what kind of colors strike your eye. Well, so we masked out that entire accent color layer filled with black. And now, with a soft round brush, I'm going to just reveal that color in selectively. So we sort of get to pick where we want this cool, dark accent color to appear. So I thought his arms, knees and sort of the top of his head should have that darker color and maybe even a little bit of cool striping going on in his eyes. Just make that focal point a little more interesting than the rest of these smooth color transition. So doing a little bit of finer brushwork with that masking at this point. And I think that looks awesome, suddenly has a totally different feel, and ah really makes your character a lot more dynamic and interesting. And also the little striped patterns can really make him seem like a realistic living creature. So gonna bring some of that striking striping back down the neck. And he's taking on kind of a cool, shark like feel suddenly that that crest on his head looks a bit like a dorsal fin, so evoking some cool creatures that I really hadn't even intended up to this point, So a lot of cool eye opening things start to happen at this accent color face. So, like I've said in previous projects, this is sort of like giving your race car that you just built a really slick paint job really makes him look cool and gives him some nice contrast. He's got some really bright, high value areas on him. And now, with this darker accent color, there's a really nice rich range of value. Those muscles on his arm look look much cooler with this dark treatment up top, and I think that's working beautifully. So just ah, really doing some fine work here to make some of these transitions from from light colored a dark color, a little more interesting. Thought it could do a little bit of patterning here. Think I will have for down on his legs. So thinking of some kind of big cat type pattern sort of tiger striping things like that down on his leg just to make that for tight texture make a little more sense, and I think I think we're on our way here. This accent color step is always super fun and makes it a lot more interesting when the character starts really coming a life. So next. I think once we're done with that, it's about time to move on to some other steps. But before we do that, I'm gonna do a little bit of an adjustment to this color layer beneath. See if there's another color that interacts a little better, and I think that's a winner. A shifted it to green, made it just a little bit warmer than that icy blue. And I think that's a lot cooler. So with that, I think we're just about ready to finish polishing this phase up, and I'm starting to think about adding an eye in on this guy. So I started to think about what colors might work well with these very cool dark. So I'll create a new layer. Call it I they're going to go with kind of an orange. I just something very warm to balance out all of these cools, and we'll start by just adding in some color. And remember that Jewell lighting scheme We want the I to be much lighter towards the bottom and much darker towards the top. We're gonna add that highlight shape at the top, so we need that to be dark at the top. I'm adding in some little cool iris striations just to make that I look interesting. I want this I to be a huge selling point for this guy. I need him to seem intelligent and soulful. So hello. Race away. That pupil got him kind of looking up to the right. Seems a little bit inquisitive and expressive. Didn't want him to just seem deadpan like he was staring off into the distance and making that pupil shape just a little bit out of round. I'm actually gonna smudge out some little striations away from there, make it seem a little bit star shaped. So let's see if there are any eye colors that we like even better. It's why we do this on a layer so we can do a simple hue saturation adjustment just to check this greenish color is kind of cool. Might try the history brush to back that out, but not sure about that. I think I want to stick to something pretty warm. So doing all these different, different adjustments just to make sure that there isn't anything even cooler, weaken do want everything to be is great as we possibly can, especially on this very important part. This is my favorite part. Will add this super bright white highlight right where the pupil and iris meet smudged that out just a bit. And just like that, his eye looks totally alive. It makes him look super soulful and very interesting. I really like how that's working, so I'm actually try making his eye a little darker just to make that jeweled effect even more pronounced. So I'm gonna mask the entire I out and reveal it away just to give it a soft effect. Like it's it's back there in the dark. His eyes were so deep and jeweled that they actually light struggles to get in there. So that's sort of the effect I'm going for their and those really dark edges or a really interesting and wow, some of those reds air coming out even better now. So I like that a lot, making that pupil shape kind of star shaped just to make him seem a little more interesting and not just normal human, But I think I think this is working well, so I'm going to jump off from that. I highlight layer and just start doing some little wet lights of rename that layer wet lights. And even though I don't want this guy to be super slimey like, say, are are our Reaper creature, I do want him. Teoh have some areas. It seemed pretty shiny. So these crests on his head obviously aren't furry or anything, so I think they could benefit for some from some highlighting. And since we've set up that nice, dark accent color, we have some places where those highlights could really pop out nicely. So some good opportunity to make your rendering really vibrant. Always a great thing for these wet lights to do for you make some little focal points really stand out. So some of these little crest shapes over his eyebrow, these pointy parts at the front of his head, all these little details that make his head and face interesting great places for these wet light. But again, with a creature that we want to be likable, we don't want to do any of these icky rendering techniques to intensely. So just something to keep in mind you some restraint there. But these big, massive muscles on his arms could definitely use him. Highlights want those to be a focal point. Two. So a little bit of shiny nous makes it much more eye catching and cool looking. So a great way to add some interest. And I think that's a great fit makes his arm look really extra muscular. Like that skin is just pulled taut. That's that's exactly what we're going for. So it's just a little more adjustment. I think those wet lights are looking just great. I'm actually gonna do a little more work to this accent color layer just toe to see if there's any way to make that work a little bit better. That's why we keep it on a layer mask, weaken, reveal and hide it in any way that we want. One thing I'm gonna do a little differently here is actually have a second accent color layer of Put a new orange multiply layer underneath this dark scion. What they're to be kind of a mid tone between the dark and the light, so this adds even more complexity. There's this nice orange that's happening in that area between light and dark accent colors to see that layer I've got underneath the first dark accent color. It's really just a 2nd 1 I guess technically, you could do as many as you want. I usually keep it to one, are sometimes, too like we're doing here. But really, take this as far as you want. Just seeing if we can add some some color interest to this guy. And I didn't want him to be so flat and cool across the board. But I think that adds a lot of interest. Great color scheme we've got going here. So we've done some great work converting this guy from value all the way to a really nice and complex color scheme. So all that's left is some final polish before we call this guy a finished creature. 25. Project 4 - GOLIATH - Final Polish: Hi, everyone. This is Hardy. In this lecture, we will finish up our Goliath creature project with some final polish. So let's dive in. So he's all colored up, just about fully rendered. One of the last things to do is add some photo textures. So I've got a few pasted in here and I got them in a layer group called photos. Ah, cool leaf texture, good old fabric pattern. And also, my dog was kind enough to volunteer to model for this for texture. So we're gonna get a lot of good use out of that one. And of course, these are all available for download. So grab him and have fun with him in your project. So I think this nice div er on her back is just perfect for what I want to use for this guy's arms and legs, I think, and we're gonna just paste this selected area into a new group that I'm gonna call that photo textures. So we're gonna now mask out this entire layer group a command, click the silhouette of the character and then hit that layer mask. And, as you can see, just like in our other project, this photo is now on Lee, visible within this guy's silhouette, so he will never will never accidentally get photo texture outside of the lines. So we switched the layer group too soft light, super important. Here we go again, soft light. And that's what gives that awesome blending mode where the photo texture actually shows through. But we aren't covering up our entire painting and guys just like that, you can see this guy's muscles and everything, but it looks like super realistic for like he's some kind of ah, sask watch or something. Ah, great texture. I got lucky with this picture of my dog, but this is such a super easy way to make somebody seem or some creature seem furry. So just pacing that in and starting to manipulate things a little bit copying it a racing away these borders so we don't have any hard edges. But just like that, we have completely changed the the skin on this guy to be furry in places, so I'm gonna have a few different skin types going on on him. But I wanted his arms and legs toe have this for texture, and we pretty much got that done with just a few computer commands, so really powerful tool. This furry texture is especially useful for this. It it's something that just seems to work like magic, so nothing is quite as easy as for, so I hope you find that useful. That's basically my technique. It works for just about anything. So next I'm gonna grab this trusty old fabric pattern that I just use again and again. It's going through a little dark, so I'm gonna brighten that up now that it's inside that soft light layer group and just pasting it around, dialing back the opacity a little bit just to give it has that really nice, subtle, modeled kind of spotted texture works in so many different places. So I think it's a great fit here for this guy's more kind of shiny, sort of amphibian looking skin that he has on other parts of his body. Gonna apply a bit of a paint daubs filter to some of these photo textures that for especially looks so photographic that it can kind of clash with the nice, painterly look that we've worked so hard to establish. So whenever that's happening, just run a bit of a paint daubs filter on your photos, and it'll make them look much more like they were painted in and not not such a photographic stick on. So I thought this leaf texture was pretty cool, too. Has a nice organic biological look to it and has some nice shiny highlights. I thought I'd give that a try. I'm gonna see if that works well on his arm. That is super cool. I'm not sure if that is exactly gonna work. It's It's such a finite texture so, so intricate that it's almost distracting. Actually, I'm gonna try to a few more places to see if I can make that work. And by all means, try this one in your own work. It It's a really cool photograph and would have some great applications. But to be honest, I I think the good old fabric pattern is probably gonna work better for us here. So trying some filtering a few things to make that work a little bit better, But the end of the day I just think this modeled look, these little subtle spots that this fabric pattern gives us is just better. And I really like the way that's playing with that highlight on his shoulder. So I think we're gonna go with that, guys. And now that we have that done, I'm doing a little bit of smudging in some mid tones to make some of those areas on his legs seem seem like for. But that's looking great. So next we're gonna add some secondary light sources. Ah, great final Polish step. It adds. A lot of three dimensionality, kind of rounds out any edges that might have seemed a little bit flat, but most of all, it just sort of makes things look painterly and charming. Like this guy was lit by a professional photographer, and he's got some kind of spotlight going on in the background, just toe make him seem or important in dramatic. So I really like these bright pin lights on the side is a nice secondary light source. Always makes a character or a creature look, look much more dramatic in Epic, and that's almost always what we're going for, even if we want to. Whether we want a like or despise the creature or character that we're making, we always want them to seem important and eye catching and compelling. And certainly these dramatic secondary light sources do a great job with that. So just sort of picking out some little spots where where this perimeter of this creature would be catching these little extra pin light. And it's also a great way to help reinforce a sense of for so notice. I'm kind of scribbling out some little individual furry lines on this arm on the dark side . We're gonna smudge that out once we merge this guy in our final edge treatment step. But for now, just sort of some scribble e lines to imply some individual little hairs coming off of his arm. That's about all we need. So gonna carry this pin light sort of curving around his back just a little bit. Some of that light even sort of coming over that crest and in lighting up some of these areas on his neck and shoulders Very cool. You can see how much three dimensionality and just sense of atmosphere that thes secondary light sources add. They're so powerful and they contain so much information for such a small amount of brushwork. So just really we want toe bounce these around anywhere where these light sources might be sort of catching a different edge for this guy. So some light sort of coming down from the floor, maybe that lit up area of the floor is is bouncing a little bit of light up these dark areas. Really? You can sort of make the lighting situation fit whatever you need to to get a little extra rendering in there. So notice I put everything in a group, made a copy and then merged that group together. So now I'm working on a single layer. I've still got all my layers saved in case I need to edit anything but working on a single layer just to polish things up and see what I'm doing here is just pulling out some little individual furry hairs off of these thes furry parts of him. So with smudge tool on about a 60 or 70% opacity, we just pull out a few little individual hairs on the edges and wherever light turns to shadow and it really helps it look like realistic hair. You could just see Cem for blowing in the wind. Also add some nice drama. So once we have those little furry edges described. Well, I'm gonna go around the entire perimeter and just treat the edges like we always do. Remember, You don't want any super sharp cut out looking edges. Ertl have the effect of really flattening everything out, and it'll kill that really cool three dimensional effect that we worked so hard to achieve . So make sure to treat those edges before you move on. I know sometimes when you're so close to being finished, it's very tempting to just call something done, especially if you've got a lot of hours invested in it. But these steps are important that that last 5% just to make it make a good painting into a great painting. So So take the time and certainly take a break if you're feeling on the verge of burnout because, ah, it could be a lot of hours invested in a single image at this point. So no shame in needing a little break. But we are really getting their guys. This guy's looking awesome. Hope you're really pleased with your projects. Eso next next step is just to give this guy a little bit of pop in a few selected areas, so I've switched my brush to color Dodge, which brightens things up intensely, got to use this very, very conservatively, or it can totally blow things out in just a few brushstrokes. So just on his head and neck, a few other places have really added some pop. And I think that's looking super cool, trying some different colors, just sort of one last check to see if I could find some totally different color scheme. And actually, these all look super cool. But I think I'm more or less going to stick with my original idea, maybe some subtle adjustment to the color balance. But that's really fun to just try a total opposite color scheme with that hue saturation adjustment. And it's happened before. Sometimes you can totally change direction at the very last minute and end up with something super cool that you didn't plan on for your entire project. So a neat way Teoh discover new things about a project even at the very end. So another really cool part about Photoshopped so just experimenting with a few last minute things. But for the most part, guys, I'm really pleased with this creature. He's super likable and supercool checks, all the boxes, all the the requirements that we set for ourselves with this creature. So with a little bit of a cash, shadow and emotion blur to smooth it out, I might actually add a little bit of, ah, glow behind this guy after a little more adjustment to the hue and saturation. But for the most part, I think he's looking really sharp, and I'm very pleased that this guy's turn out so well put a subtle glow behind him. But after that, I think we've just about got a finished painting. Congratulations on completing the Goliath Creature project. Let's check out our project steps to see how far we've come. We started with a rough sketch to get our basic idea and pose established. We then inked him in to clean things up. From there. We did a value painting to make him seem three dimensional in organic way, then converted him to a cool color scheme and finally added photo textures and final polished for a super slick looking finished product. All in all, we went from a blank canvas to a final painting that we could be proud of. Look how cool this guy is. I hope you're all really pleased with your projects and have gotten some keepers for the portfolio 26. Course Recap: congratulations on completing the creature painting course. We've done a creature design overview, discussed shaped language, animal references, thinking like a designer and making creatures seem alive. We then put these lessons into action over four awesome creature art projects. Post some of your work so that the entire course community can see your rock star skills. If you want to continue creating full creature our projects to continue to build your portfolio, check out this page of new creature briefs that I've put together to give you a great starting point. These air similar to the assignments that you might receive from a real world clients or their great practice if he likes it more practice on your rendering skills. I've got this cool stegosaurus project all set up for you to practice Painting Creature aren't is a fun and worthwhile skill to pursue, so I hope this course has been a step towards a lifelong passion for all of you. Keep at it and do awesome work. That's it for the creature painting course. I hope to see you again and future courses where we'll build on everything that we've learned here