Digital Art Fundamentals

1. Welcome: Welcome to digital art fundamentals. Hey, guys, I am Hardy Fowler, your instructor. I'm a professional concept artist and illustrator with over a decade of experience in the industry. I am also the founder of digital painting Studio, where I have helped thousands of artists level up their skills and even launch careers. But mostly, I am an artist. I am happiest in that moment when I have just painted something that feels awesome that's what I want for you guys. That's what I want the main takeaway to be from this course. Digital art, digital painting apps can be a huge topic. You can spend years mastering the finer point. For this course, I want to teach you the most valuable, most actionable, fundamental skills and concepts so that even if you're a day one beginner, you can start making cool art today without feeling daunted or burned out. Approach we'll take is three basic steps, and this is the same format that I use for all of my courses, even Concept art Academy, my master program, because this really works. Train your brain. Let's pick up some of the core concepts, the building blocks of art. Train your hand. This is where we pick up the stylus and get to work. I'll walk you through some really fun and easy digital painting exercises that will get you comfortable and confident with digital painting apps, and we'll start to really develop those fine motor skills. Putting it all together, we learn to do by doing. So we'll finish this whole process with some projects. We're going to put what you have learned into practice. By the end of this curriculum, you are going to make a digital painting that you feel proud of. Before we jump into the fun stuff, let's talk about equipment. What do you need to have to participate? We do have quite a lot of flexibility there. I am using an IMAC and a Wakem Intuos Pro tablet and Photoshop version 2021, I believe. Now, you don't have to have any of those specific three things to do beautifully in this course. Can I use Procreate? Yeah. Can I use an iPad? Yep. Can I use flubster? That's not a real thing. Can I use Cintiq? Yeah. The only real requirement is that you're using a setup that has a pressure sensitive stylist. This is key. Beyond that, use a tablet, use any popular digital painting app. The main value of this course is the technique and the concepts that you'll learn and those work on any app. The one caveat that I want to make everyone aware of is that I will be using Photoshop. I will be teaching the course in Photoshop. If you're using a different you may have some interface translation to do, but most of the stuff I'll be doing is quite basic, and you shouldn't have any problem porting those functions over to your app. So welcome if you are a traditional artist porting your skills over to the digital medium or if you're a newcomer to art in general. This is a great first step to really unlocking the creative power of this incredible medium. 2. Digital Painting is Awesome: Let's talk about why digital painting is awesome. First of all, it is convenient. You never have to sharpen pencils, wash brushes, nothing ever runs out of ink. There are no art supplies. So once you have your computer, you have your app and your stylus, you're done buying stuff. You can kind of kiss the art store. Goodbye. Just pick up your stylus and you're creating art. Easy. It is reworkable. This is the greatest part undo Command Z. All mistakes are forgiven, so you never have to worry about hypothetically spilling coffee on an inking assignment the night before it was due. Oh. Control and efficiency, you can just get more work done when you work digitally. Even the most skillful traditional artists in the world just can't fill up a canvas with color as fast as I can just click the fill tool. So who remembers coloring something when you were a kid using a marker, and it just keeps running out of ink? It's like, I want this circle to just be solid red, but I'm on my third marker, and it just looks like half filled garbage. That stuff just doesn't happen with digital art. If you want that circle to be red, it's going to be red. Click. Done. So, for the most part, digital painting apps just do what you want them to. You don't have to spend so much energy trying to physically tame some medium. It allows you to keep your focus and your attention on artistic concerns. So digital painting is convenient, efficient, it's infinitely reworkable and forgiving. All of this makes creating art less daunting. It's more fun. It allows art students to really accelerate their development without that fear. And most popular digital painting apps do a pretty incredible job of simulating all of the expressiveness and charm and warmth of traditional media. So in the lectures ahead, let's take a look at the apps in a little bit more detail. We'll learn some basic functions and how we can use those to make something awesome. 3. Choosing an App: Let's talk digital painting apps because there are a lot of cool options out there. Things like Clip Studio Paint and Krita and Corel Painter, those have some really loyal followings. But at the moment, the digital painting app war is still dominated by two key players, and those are Photoshop and Procreate has really given Photoshop a run for its money in recent years. So which one is the best? It's very important to mention that both are awesome. You can create amazing art with either, and everything I'm going to teach in this course really applies with either app. You can make cool art with any popular app, so you really can't lose. It comes down to which app is the best fit for you, depending on your ultimate goals, your priorities as an artist. So let's break these down a little bit along a few really key important comparison factors. First of all, price. Photoshop, at the time I'm recording this is 2099 per month, but there is a seven day free trial if you want to try it out. Procreate is 999 with a one time payment. You paid ten bucks and you're done. Huge advantage there for Procreate, especially for a casual, creative user, kind of an art hobbyist. And I'll include links to both in the description if you want to check out and compare. Convenience. This is another really big advantage for Procreate. Since it's tablet based, it is really easy to just kind of pick it up and start making art. The interface is really intuitive, too. So I think a lot of artists just really like that feeling of having something in their hand and making art quickly and easily. It has that kind of sketchbook feel that a lot of artists, especially traditional artists find really appealing. That's important, since especially if you're a beginner, the more you practice art, the easier it is to kind of just pick it up and start doing it. When you're just sort of hanging out or relaxing, it can really accelerate your art, and that's really meaningful. That really makes a difference in your ultimate goal. For the record, Photoshop does have a tablet version, but at its core, I feel like it's still an app designed for the desktop. So I think the convenience and just pick up and paint factor still does favor Procreate. Power. Here is where the scales tip the other way. Huge advantage Photoshop. It really pulls ahead because it has just a lot of features, different ways you can control and edit and modify layers. And there are just dozens of other features that are significantly more powerful in Photoshop. As an example, Procreate caps the number of layers that you're able to use where Photoshop does not little things like that, little limitations really make a difference, especially for more serious or even professional users. So while both apps can give you great results and can get you up and running and painting quickly, in the long run, as you become a more advanced user, Photoshop's capabilities just end up going beyond Procreate. It has a much higher ceiling, and that leads to our final category. Industry presence, another area where Photoshop takes a meaningful lead, it is simply the industry gold standard. So if you have aspirations to work in a creative field, Photoshop is almost an essential skill on an artist's resume. That's really worth something. So while each app has noticeable advantages, both are awesome. And in the big picture, they are really quite similar. It comes down to what kind of user do you think you will be? If you're a hobbyist who just wants to pick up a tablet and paint something from time to time, Procreate is perfect, cheap, intuitive, beautiful. If you want more depth and power if you have creative career aspirations. Photoshop is still that industry standard. It's what I use, and I love it. So that's a quick look at these two most popular digital painting apps. Up next, let's set the apps aside, and let's look at some really powerful core art concepts. 4. Taking Care of Yourself: Let's talk a little bit about taking care of yourself as an artist. If this is something you're going to be spending a lot of time doing, it's worth learning some good habits that will take care of your long term mental and physical well being. So let's talk about physical first. The most important investment you can make upfront is in your workspace, and that all starts right here with your chair. Now, good office chairs cost a ridiculous amount of money. This is the Herman Miller Aaron chair, and I almost threw up when I bought it ten years ago, but my back has thanked me. This is actually a worthwhile investment. I guess you have to ask yourself, how much is your back worth to you? In ten years, I guarantee you will thank yourself if you can afford to just spend that upfront investment and buy a very high quality chair. Herman Miller Aaron is what I've used. I really bought this a decade ago, and I've never switched. It's awesome. Another good way to take care of your back is just to get butt out of chair every once in a while. You just can't dial in for 10 hours a day and expect to feel great the next day. So take frequent breaks, get outside, stretch a little bit. A little tip that I use for this is just to chug water kind of constantly. This sort of naturally forces you out of your chair to take bathroom breaks and ends up making your legs, the rest of your body stretch. Your back feels better at the end of the day. Let's talk about posture. In general, when I am facing my canvas, I keep my feet flat on the ground so that my knees and my elbows are at about a right angle. We want that 90 degrees so that when you're holding your stylus, you're not leaning over, you're not reaching out too much. Believe it or not, even holding this stylus at an awkward angle for 10 hours a day can lead to neck problems long term. So posture, just kind of keeping your back pretty straight, not leaning forward and keeping your arm kind of elbow down on the table, comfortably resting. Stuff seems minor, but in the long term, it can really add up, so it's worth learning these things and making those good habits early in your process. Now, the leaning in thing brings me to eyes. First of all, the lighting in your workspace is important. We don't want to be drawing in any art dungeons where the light from the monitor or from your tablet is the only light around. It can end up being bad for you if you're just staring into that blue light for 10 hours a day without any other ambient lighting. So somewhere with windows, if possible, or if not, just turn some lights and some lamps on so that you have some ambient light in the room. Your eyes will thank you. You don't have to lean in closer to that monitor. There are Zoom functions. You can actually bring your painting closer to you in a way. So use that. Don't find yourself hunching over or leaning in over and over just to see your work more closely, bring your work closer to you. Another good rule of thumb for eye health is the 20 2020 rule. Basically, every 20 minutes, look at something at least 20 feet away. For 20 seconds. This gives your eyes a rest so that your eyes aren't constantly focusing on some near ground object, and it will avoid any kind of long term strain that could lead to thick glasses. Now, mental health, becoming an artist is actually this crazy emotional journey. It's something very introspective, something that you do for yourself. But it's also kind of a minefield. Students, especially those with professional aspirations, have to navigate all kinds of things like imposter syndrome or intimidation, especially when you look at all the amazing work out on the Internet. It's important to do a few things to help keep all of this focused. First and foremost, remember that your art is for you. Paint the stuff that you like. It should be this really expressive, wonderful, introspective process that feels like just some time for you to reflect on yourself what's important to you and express yourself creatively. If you can stay in that place, art remains this fun joyful process rather than something that feels like work or feels stressful. Another thing to keep an eye on is burnout. Again, especially for those artists with professional aspirations, it is easy to overdo it to feel like I have got to be the hardest working artist in the world or I'm not going to make it. This can actually lead to long term backward steps in your development as an artist if you overdo and burn out. So what I try to do is set up some sacrosanct time where I am not doing art. Weekends for me is all about family and getting outdoors. I think some kind of guardrails like that are a healthy habit for all artists to have. So there you go. A few pearls of wisdom from an old artist. Use these in your long term success, and health as an artist will be much better. 5. How to Get Better at Art: Developing art skills is hard. It can take years. It can be frustrating, and it can feel more like a chore than the fun, self expressive relaxation experience that it's supposed to be. So today, let's chat about navigating that, how to get better at art, how not to quit. So mindsets and philosophies that I've collected over the years, but also some actionable real steps that you can take. And these are some things that continue to have huge impacts in my own development. A lot of these come from observations that I've made as an art mentor. There just seems to be certain things that really successful art students all seem to be doing in common. So let's try to lift the lessons out of that. So hang with me for a quick lecture. This is genuinely useful stuff, and there will be a cool painting taking shape in the background. And I'm going to try to keep this as fluff free as possible. I'll try very hard to avoid platitudes, like, don't give up on your dreams, but don't give up on your dreams. Okay, when evaluating how best to learn art and improve quickly, the first question that we usually ask ourselves is, should I go to art school? Is it possible to get really good without it? Well, let's look at this from a self teaching angle because I think the line of art school or no art school is a little blurrier than we might think when it comes to actual real learning. When those real moments of gaining skills and knowledge when you're really getting command over something, I think it's always self teaching. Here's what I mean. You can sit through four years of university lectures and you can take amazing notes you can really participate. Or on the other side, you can watch 10 hours of art YouTube a day. But the real moment when all of that information actually becomes your knowledge, your skill, those moments are going to occur when it's just you at your desk, probably way late at night, messing around with a project and suddenly it will just click. Oh, now I get it. Value edge control. It really works. It's like, you can be told something. And you can even believe it. You can write it down and think you know it, but until you actually figure it out for yourself, it will be purely academic. So the first takeaway today is we learn to do by doing. Real steps forward mostly seem to happen when you have these late night epiphanies that make you realize that that thing you heard years ago was true. You just had to discover it again for yourself. And now that lesson, that skill is really yours forever. We have to find a way to set ourselves up to make those epiphanies happen. Let's talk about consistency. Now, seeing meaningful improvement in your art takes time. There's really no way around that. We can't matrix the information into our brain. It has to be your hand holding the tool, going through the motions over and over again, or you simply won't see progress to use that gem metaphor, you know, you can join a gym. You can buy a whole room of workout equipment, but you're never going to get in better shape if you don't use them. But life is busy. Everybody has jobs, bills, family, and relationships to maintain. So how do we magically create these extra practice hours while keeping the wheels of life turning? For that, we have a time honored little life hack. You simply carve some space out of your weekly schedule for some sacrosanct art time, distraction free time that belongs to you and your art and no one else. And maybe just an hour a day where you can just be totally dialed in. But you have to really commit to this. It can't feel optional. And you have to make sure that the times that you choose are something that can be respected by the people in your life. So your friends have to know that you're not available to come hang out during these hours or, sorry, you can't bother mom or dad now, they're working. And look, I know this is a hard ask. You're likely already tired after work, or if you're a parent after getting your kids to sleep, and you probably just want to, you know, relax, watch Netflix, play video games. But even the busiest people can usually find a 1 hour gap in their schedule. So try and think through your day, see where that might be for you, and really try and nail that down for your art. Now, you've probably heard that one before. Committing hours, really committing to learning something, that's not a new idea, but I have a flip side to this that I think is just as important. So artists who feel strongly motivated to improve quickly, like, really intense, eager artists who want to do it. They actually have a tendency to way overdo it. So make sure to have time blocks in your week where art is specifically not allowed. For me, that is the weekend. And unplugging, just kind of getting your brain out of art and just taking a break is critical and not just to avoid burnout. You actually learn more effectively when you mix consistency in your practice time. With consistency of your break time. It's like those pauses between active learning sessions. It lets the new information, the new muscle memory in your hand really file itself away neatly in your brain. You end up learning more quickly and more meaningfully than if you just go all out all the time. So consistency of practice time and consistency of rest. Next, let's talk about the idea of perfection. Now, artists, and I am talking about myself too here. We are neurotic. We live in our heads, I think, way more than most people. And when we think about the long term arc of our development as artists, it can be really easy to think of the ultimate goal, the top of the mountain as a state of perfection. Like, one day, I will be so skillful and so knowledgeable that I'll be able to paint anything perfectly. The Internet will just explode every time I post something, and I'll be turning away job offers from AA companies. Here's something that you definitely already know, but that we all still need to hear. There is no perfection in art. No day will come when you are just done getting better at art. It's this never ending journey. And actually, can you imagine how horrifying it would be if you ever reached the end of art? Like, sorry, you have reached maximum level, try something else now. I would be terrible. So instead, let's do something that leads to a much healthier learning headspace. Embrace imperfection. There's a Japanese philosophy called Wabi Sabi, which centers around finding the beauty in imperfect and impermanent things. I really like that. It helps me keep my work loose to think that way, keeps things expressive. And in fact, I've noticed that most of my art idols, their work is just a mess of brushstrokes. It's the farthest thing from perfection. But it's awesome. So the takeaway, the thing you can actually use in your own development from this is when you are practicing art, make sure that you are just practicing for you. Practice work has permission to be ugly. The most meaningful, valuable piece of art that you ever create might be one that you never want to show anyone. It's just this ugly exercise where you had a breakthrough. So don't paint for the Internet. Don't paint for likes. Paint with a specific goal of taking one step forward for yourself. Get 1% better today. And that idea of challenging yourself brings us to the comfort zone. Here's the main thing behind this. If your art isn't changing, it probably isn't growing. And this is hard, especially when you reach a certain skill level, and things start feeling like they're finally working for you. It's like you decide, I've arrived. I'm done. And that makes you immediately take your foot off the gas. It makes you stop stretching and experimenting. And that's why so many artists plateau. They kind of end up in this middle zone and they feel like they've reached some ceiling that they can't break through. This is maybe the most common concern I get when mentoring another artist, something My work is good, but I don't feel like I'm getting better and I don't think I'm ever going to reach pro level skills. So when you feel stuck, it's time to blow it all up. Try another approach. Try another tool, a new technique, a new teacher, something to just get you out of the rut that you have worn down by sticking with the same formula for too long. And this piece of advice is really hard for me. This is the hardest one for me to practice what I preach because I like my work. And honestly, I've been doing this for a while now, and sometimes I just want to stay in this nice, comfy box that I have built for myself. I don't feel like taking it all apart and learning a new way forward. But every time I just get over myself long enough to try something new, like a new brush setting, a new tool or working from light to dark instead of dark to light, I almost always love the results and I learn something new that has lasting value. I always wonder, why didn't I do this years ago? The final point I'll leave you with is huge. Support and accountability. Learning entirely on your own just isn't as fast or as effective and many artists are real introverts. We prefer our private inner worlds, which can lead into these lone wolf learning mentalities. And that's totally fine. You're going to spend lots of hours with just yourself when you choose the art path, but it shouldn't be entirely on your own. Try to find a small and trusted group to give you constructive but honest feedback on your work. As the awesome art YouTuber Kelsey Rodriguez put it, find some art friends who will lovingly rip your works to shreds rather than just seeking out empty compliments. This group also keeps you accountable, right? It motivates you to get the work done. Makes you stick to your plan because you don't want to let anyone down. Most of us are all too willing to let ourselves down. But if a friend is counting on us, we deliver. So use that. I hope you find a few of these helpful. These things really made a big difference for me. I'll be back again soon with a new video, but in the meantime, good luck with your artwork. Paint something cool today. 6. Value: Hey, guys, in the lectures ahead, let's talk about some really important core principles of art and how we can apply those to digital painting. For this course, let's focus on the two most important ones, I think, which are value and color. First up at that, let's talk about value. This is the most fundamental, probably the most important visual quality in any rendering process light and dark. Value can describe form, so it gives us shape, three dimensionality, and depth. If we use that basic highlight core shadow, reflected light and cast shadow, we can make things on a flat screen look round. This is that most fundamental illusion of three dimensions that we can achieve, and it's this really exciting, cool first step for any digital painter. To understand value, we have to think about light. So we have to define our light source in every painting. It could be something we're aware of, like a sun or a street light, or it could be something more implied, but light moves in a straight line from its source to the subjects that it will illuminate. So for this image, let's say that the light source is here somewhere in the screen. The light is kind of shining down in this general direction. Here's where we have to really turn our brains on and start thinking like light. We have to determine which parts of the object are pointing most directly at the light source. To do that, it's helpful to try and mentally simplify the objects. Let's imagine that this sphere is cut in half, or kind of looking at it in section, and I've actually smoothed the curves out into these little facets so that we can see how light strikes each plane. Now, as we can see, the planes facing the light source most directly are given the highest value. So with this main high light value being at the top of the spectrum. As we follow the planes outward away from this direct highlight, the values on these planes start to darken, increasingly so as their angle away from the light source increases. And if we follow this all the way out to our core shadow, we find that this is the place where the planes start facing away from the light source. So this is where the values become darkest. That's it. That's the basics of value lighting and object. And if we take that a step further, the cast shadow is just the area on the ground where these rays of light were not able to reach the ground because they were blocked by our shape. That's all a cast shadow is. We also have this reflected light area. It's facing away from the light source, so why isn't it dark? It's actually because light bounces up from elsewhere in the image, in this case, bouncing off of the floor. And reflected lights are really important. They're crucial to completing this illusion of three dimensions. So don't leave these out. They anchor the object in its environment, since basically it's just light from the surrounding area sort of splashing up onto the object. So remember to think about light and planes in every object that you paint. When applying a value to something, make sure that it makes sense with your light source and with other parts of the image. If something feels off, just try to mentally break your subject down into planes, and I'm betting this will be the answer. Our next value concept is another key concept. This may be the most underappreciated and crucial aspects of realistic painting value edges. So in addition to just being light and dark, we need to think about value in terms of edges. Does the value have a soft edge like a gradual gradient from light to dark? Or does the value have a hard edge, a sharp, abrupt cut from light to dark? Great key to realism is balancing these hard edges with soft edges, and it is something that is so often overlooked. This works especially well in organic subjects like painting people. Our faces, especially, we have soft gradual gradients for areas with smooth curves like cheeks or foreheads, but we need to balance those soft value edges with some really hard cuts in areas where the planes of the face change abruptly. So the inner corner of the eye, the corners of the nose, the nostril, lots of abrupt changes in plane around there. Also the edges of the lips, the corners of the mouth, all amazing opportunities to add in some hard value edges to balance out the soft ones. This is an awesome way to show muscles and anatomy. Just include these two kinds of value edges. This was a huge light bulb moment for me, for countless of students who I've mentored, make sure you have this balance in there, and I'm going to teach you some awesome ways to control value edges. You will love the results that you're going to get. So there's a look at value, the most powerful fundamental art concept. Up next, let's check out color. I know that 7. Color: Next, let's talk about color. So obviously, color can be an extremely valuable tool to create feeling and mood or to lead the eye with contrast and pop. And on the surface, it can seem really self explanatory. This thing is either red or yellow or whatever. But if we dig a little deeper, there are some crazy light dynamics that can have some unexpected and really cool effects on color. First of all, the way color is perceived can change dramatically depending on what it is next to. It's relative color. For example, the dots in the center of these diagrams are the same in each set, but check out how different they look. The background color bordering each dot has a huge impact on how we perceive the color of the dot itself. The light environment, where the object exists also plays a huge role. Is the object being brightly lit, or is it in shadow? Does the light have a color to it? Is it sunlight or maybe light from a fire or an alien spaceship or something? All of this stuff is really important for making the objects in a scene seem like they gel together like they belong. There are all kinds of psychological cues that color can have on the mood and the feeling of our image. So bright and saturated can be happy. Cold and gray can be depressed, and there are 1 million variations in between. The other thing we can use color for is an eye leading device. We can use contrast. Kind of if we have an image that's mostly cool colors, we can save some reds for a point of pop. I love doing this. There's this blue flower in this cave project where everything is orange and just burning red. But we have this one cool colored little flower and your attention goes directly there. So those are the kind of ways we can use color to really lead the eye. Another thing I've gotten a little bit addicted to is these very brilliantly reddish orange birds. I'm starting to put this in way too many of my pieces, but I love it. If it's a mostly cool color scheme, adding in some red birds just gives it this perfect amount of pop and accent, it's a great eye leading device, and it helps that the birds are sort of flying towards the focal point. So some really great ways we can use that contrast in color, those great pairings to kind of save our focal points for that bright area of contrast. I'm sure you're all aware of the good old color wheel. One thing I want you to be aware of is complimentary colors. So that's when we have colors on opposite sides of this color wheel. If we pair those together, they tend to have a pleasing look. And you can kind of skew this just a little bit. They don't have to be perfect opposites. But give that a shot. You'll find that blue and orange, red and green and purple and yellow when used in some variations and with some finesse, about always looks pretty nice. So just a quick look into color, we're going to do some really fun exercises with color so that you can start using these principles and making these skills your own. 8. Basic App Functions: Hey, guys, welcome to the basic functions exercise. This is where we pick up our stylus, open our app, and actually start using these things so that you can feel confident and comfortable with your app before we start making art. Very basic functions here. I just want to go over what the main parts of the canvas are, how to use some essential tools, and that'll be about it. I am using Photoshop, but if you are using an app that is not Photoshop, you will have to do a little bit of interface translation, but again, quite basic stuff that you should have no trouble catching up with. Let's get started by basic terminology of what we are looking at. This part in the middle is the canvas. This is where we paint. These elements on the side are our toolbar, which we have right here, and then we have our panels on the side. Now, I have a few enabled. You can customize your workspace to a large degree in Photoshop. You can tell it which windows you want to be active, and you can see the ones that have checkmarks here are the ones that I'm using. That is the Layers panel, and we'll go into layers a little bit more. The history panel, which is sort of this really nice running record of every operation that you make, it's sort of like having a long list of undoes available. So if, for example, I make a mark and I don't like it, all I have to do is go back one step, or I can go back many steps very handy. I also have my color swatches layer enabled. You can see the check mark next to that. The others I don't use that much. The navigator just sort of shows you where you are in the canvas. Very customizable. So there are text editing tools. There are three D editing tools. There's this whole world of stuff that I rarely even use, but I just wanted to point out the ones that I had. So if you want your workspace to look just like mine, these are the ones that we want to have visible, these ones with checkmarks. Okay, let's start by creating a new layer. This is my Layers panel. So we'll go down to this little plus icon and create a new layer. That is this one layer six. Okay, whenever we have a layer selected in our layers panel, that is where the action will take place. So if I paint, it will take place on layer six and not these other groups. Perfect. Now that we have a new layer, I am going to use my brush tool. That is this icon right here, the little paint brush or B on your keyboard. Shortcuts are your friend. They are this really great way to save you time and worth learning. So I'll be saying the shortcut for just about every tool that I select. Now there is a universe of brushes that you can pick from. In fact, this diamond shaped one is something that I've been using for a freelance project this morning. For this exercise, let's keep it very, very basic. I'm going to use the standard round brush, and here it is. It is simply a circle, and it makes little marks like this. We are going to edit how this brush works a little bit so that it'll kind of serve what we are trying to do. To do that, I will open the brush editor, which is five. Okay, this lets us start at our brush tip shape. That is great. It shows the brush has 100% hardness, but we can adjust that. We can make it very soft like an airbrush, or very hard. Oh, sorry, or very hard to make it more hard edged. That's a really nice thing to be able to change. Now, you can actually change that with a keyboard shortcut. If you hold down Shift and the bracket keys, you can adjust your brush hardness by 25% increments. So down we go and up we go. Another good use of keyboard shortcuts is you can use those bracket keys just without shift and make your brush larger and smaller incredibly handy. So let's see, some other really important brush functions is we have these two things we can effect here, which are opacity, and flow. Opacity just says, If I have the color black selected, and let's say I put my opacity down to 50 or almost 50, it will give us 50% black. So if I tap again, it does another 50%, but you can see this overlap where the two items kind of you know, we had 50 and 50, and it made nearly pure black. So opacity can be dialed up and down to show how much of the color you want to have visible. That's really important. The other main brush function is flow. Before I go on, I want to mention that opacity can be changed on your keyboard just by hitting the numbers. It changes them by 10% increments. See that? You can do the same thing with flow just by holding shift. I'm holding Shift now and pressing the keys and it dials it up and down. So just to show you more about flow, I'll turn opacity all the way up and let's turn flow pretty low. Now, this gives us an entirely opaque black mark, but it kind of makes the tone spray out of your stylus kind of slowly. Let me use my bracket keys to make the brush softer now. And this will make it feel like an airbrush. It's flowing out gradually. I have to hold the stylus down kind of a long time for it to really develop any darkness. Feels very much like airbrushing or using a spray paint can. Now, we're going to do a little bit of line art to first get acquainted with this tool. And I want to show you one more really critical brush function, and that is smoothing. What this does is steadies your hand. If you have no smoothing enabled at all, and if I have flow and opacity up at 100%, I'm going to try and make a straight line, but you can see there is some wobble, right? Here's another one. See that little wiggle. It doesn't look good, kind of makes my lines look like they are not confident. Oh, by the way, I am just hitting delete to clear the entire later to make these marks go away. And then I'm left with another blank layer. Okay, if I turn smoothing way up, it makes that line silky, smooth. Isn't that great? You can do curves. You can make, you know, much more accurate circles. It's this great way to steady your hand. It's like it gives you an instant five years of experience as an inking artist. So be very aware of this. If you dial it up too high, it can kind of start feeling like you're running through sand or something. It makes your hand tired very fast. So be aware of that. I usually do line art somewhere in the 50% range and painting with tone, maybe in the 30% range. But there we go. Opacity at 100 flow, let's try about 50. And let's make this Let's try and draw this cube. Smoothing will be a big thing here. Again, we're on layer six. We have a brush and I have made it a little smaller with my bracket keys, and let's just sort of trace what we see here. Very basic brush stuff. Every time I am making one smooth ish, you know, mark with my stylus, hitting Command Z. If I make one that I don't like, you can just undo or remember the history panel, you can just go back in time or forward in time. It's this nice record, this safety net. Okay. Now I'm going to do some accent lines inside, and I'll press a little more softly. And that makes my brush not quite as big and bold of a line because if I bring up the brush editor again, let's check out shape dynamics. I have the size jitter set to pin pressure. And what that means is, if I press very lightly with my stylus, it makes a thin line. But if I start really mashing down on it, it becomes thick. So thin and thick, pressing hard, pressing lightly, pressing hard, pressing lightly. It's really powerful, and it gives your lines this very expressive quality. And that's why I'm able to switch from bold ish lines for the outside of this cube and thinner lines for the inside. It does this nice job of making it feel like this pretty traditional line art experience. It feels like you're just sketching in a sketchbook, which is what we want. I want this to feel very natural. Okay, I like our cube. I think that's a good first attempt at using the brush tool and showing some of the nuance that those settings can have. Next, let's try something a little more challenging. I mean, drawing a perfect circle freehand, that is hard, right? Let's lean on smoothing a little bit more to try and do this carefully. Makes a huge difference. Still not perfect. I'm going to try that one more time, see if I can be as steady as I can and really rely on smoothness. Okay, that is not perfect, but it's pretty good. So hearty screwed up, right? What do we do? Actually, the point of this exercise is that I want to show you that everything is editable with digital art. You can change pretty much anything. One of my favorite things that Photoshop offers, and there are analogous functions on other digital painting apps is something called liquefy. You can go to the filter menu and pull it up here, or the keyboard shortcut is listed right there. It's Command Shift X. That brings up this second little editor window, and it lets you actually sort of move lines around. Anywhere where this circle is sort of looking a little lopsided or just not quite the way I want it, liquefy lets you do this really nice job of fine tuning it if you use this little push tool. There are other functions. Don't really use those very much. This one is gold. Incredibly powerful because it lets you fine tune things with a lot of control. Now, this one still looks a little bit too top bottom oblong, so I want to show you a few more editing functions. If we use the Marquee tool and drag a square around our circle, which I did right before we did Liquefy, I can then hit Command T or go to Edit Free Transform. There it is. And that gives me the option of scaling the circle up and down. I can make it wider, I can make it larger to scale. There's all kinds of things we can do to change the way that line art looks. So everything is editable. You can use liquefy to kind of nudge things around. You can use a Marquee selection and Command T to change the shape, rotate it. There are all kinds of great things you can do. There's another one. If we hit Command T again and then control, it brings up some secondary options. And my favorite one is warp. This gives you this grid that lets you kind of push and stretch and kind of mold your things like clay, your marks, your lines. I just lets you pull and stretch them around in a really controlled way. Very powerful. So there you have it very basic use of the brush tool for drawing line art. Incredibly powerful, infinitely editable. And I hope that that's a good kind of first outing on how to use this tool. Let's move down to this next section and check out some selection tools. These are really important because they let you isolate certain areas to work within. You have a lot of control over the shapes that you make. You can do some perfect geometric things. It's a really useful way to control how and where you are painting. So let's create another new layer, layer eight. And the first one I want to do is jump back to that Marquee tool. This is the one we use to do the liquefy function. Now we can simply make a rectangle. If you hold down shift, it will constrain the proportions and make that a perfect square. But if you release shift, you're free to do whatever. Now, there's a rectangle. Great. We can paint within that and it won't go outside of the lines. We can fill with a solid color by either using the paint bucket tool or what I like to do is just use a keyboard shortcut. Option and delete will fill with whatever foreground color you have. For example, if I pick a different color blue or purple, if I do option delete again, it fills with whatever is in your color picker here. Very cool. But let's just stick with black and white for this one. Now, we can make multiple selection. So if I make another rectangle, I can then hold Shift, and it puts a little plus sign on the Marquee tool. Do you see that? That means we are adding another selection, and we can fill that in. There's no limit to how many of these you can make. You can make, you know, 100 of these, and it all works. Now, there are other versions of the Marquee tool. You can use the elliptical, switch from rectangular to elliptical. And again, if you hold down shift, it makes a perfect circle. Now, notice I'm not exactly on target with the circle that's kind of the little reference point here. If I'm holding down shift, I want it to be a perfect circle. But if I also hold down spacebar, check this out. It lets me move it around. So if I release Spacebar, I'm sort of stuck at one little axis point, but if I hold spacebar, I can move that. So this gives us a tremendous amount of control over the size, the shape, and the location of what we are making. So I'll fill this one in too. Option delete. Great. Let's try another perfect circle. Again, holding down shift, and I'll move it by holding spacebar now, if I want to subtract a shape out of this selection, I just hold down the option key. This time, it turns the Marquee tool into a little minus version. So shift is plus option is minus, subtracting away. And again, with spacebar I can move this around, can put it right where I want it. And there we go. We have a circle with a little empty negative space inside, and we can just hit Option Delete, and we have filled it. Awesome. So, other than the Marquee tool, the primary selection tool that we'll use is the Lasso tool. Now, there are a few versions of this one, too. There's this free Lasso tool, which basically just lets you, you know, go wild with your stylus, kind of make a selection in any shape you can imagine. That's useful in many instances. There's also the polygon Lasso tool. So if you want to make very geometric angular shapes, this gives you a great deal of control. You can make a perfect polygon, basically, and it will have very straight sides. Useful in certain instances. Let's go back to the free lasso tool, and let's try and make this kind of swooshe shape. Just to get you comfortable with making freestyle shapes, there we go. Now, one thing I want to do before we fill this one in is I want to show you a function that I am really fond of. If we hit Command H, it hides the little dotted line. I find this really distracting, this marching ants dotted line. So when I'm trying to paint something, I don't want to see. If I hit Command H, it goes away, but the selection is still active. I can paint within it. I can fill it. I can do anything I want. It's still there, but when I hit Command H, it hides it, kind of makes my whole painting feel a little more natural like there is in this big, obnoxious, blinking interface happening. So there we go. Selection tool is a great way to isolate what you want to paint on to have control. Okay, let's talk more about layers. One of the greatest, most editable parts of digital painting is that you can organize these things in new layers. It gives you a lot of control. It lets you experiment, lets you apply certain effects to some parts of your painting without others really powerful. What I'm going to do is actually grab this cube that we made earlier and use that. In fact, let's take both of these designs. One first layer concept that I want to show you is that we can leave layers separate or we can make them joined. We can actually smash them together. You can do that by going to layer, merge down, and it makes the layer that you are selected copy onto the one below it. So it's sort of like imagine this layer kind of going splat onto that one. You can also select the two layers that you want to join and do merge down or merge layers, Command E. There we go. Two layers have become one. Now, I want to make a copy of these to use them over here. I will drag these down to the plus sign, and it makes a copy. Now I have two of these. To move this layer around we'll go to the vector tool or the move tool, I think it's called, and I'll simply move them over. There we go. We have a new version of this that we're going to use somewhere else. Okay, I think you're with me so far. I'm going to create another layer because I want to show you guys what makes layers so awesome. If I make a new layer and I'm using my brush tool, I just hit B, we can spray paint under these layers. And as you can see, the line art shows through. This is being affected underneath the layer because the line art, the black paint is above it. Now, if we change the layer stack, if we put the blue above the line art, then obviously it covers it. So this is a really nice way to do that comic book style coloring. You'll never actually mess up your line work. You can just put the layers underneath it, and it lets it color in that way. Very cool. And you can make as many layers on top of one another as you want. You can have them above, below. It gives you all of this editability. And if you use that move tool, you can just independently rearrange elements with no worries about affecting the others. Again, just sort of a great way to target certain areas and have complete control over how each effect happens. If you want a layer to still be there, but you don't want to see it, you can click these little eye icons to toggle the visibility. So, for example, I don't want any of those marks other than this blue paint to remain, so you can just hide them visible, invisible. Really cool. Now, let's do something with this one more time. I am going to make one more copy of this line art, which I remember is layer seven. By the way, if you want to be really organized, you can double click the layer name and rename it. So if you work in a document that starts getting lots and lots of layers, it's very easy to lose track of that. So just a good habit to be in is renaming. I don't always follow my own advice on that just for the record. Okay, once again, using the move tool, which is V on your keyboard, and I'm just moving this square and circle pair down below. Now, this is a common situation where I have a line arc shape and I want to fill it in. I want to perfectly solidly fill this cube and this circle with, let's say, this blue color. So I could create a new layer underneath it because I want the line art to show. And, obviously, we could try to coloring book style this, actually trace it. But the odds are that you'll have little blobs outside, and it will, you know, make you crazy when you color outside of the lines just like when you were a kid. So I have a better way. Let's make sure we are on our line art layer, and we are going to use the magic wand tool, which is W. Now, this tool lets you make this selection it detects the edges of line art or any pixels, really, and it uses those to govern the selection. As you can see, it has selected the outside of this cube. If I go to this underlayer again and fill that in, it fills the outside of the cube. Not exactly what I want, but we are getting somewhere. Now, one thing you may have noticed is that, let me do it again. It filled the outside of the cube, but for some reason, color went inside of the circle. That is because of this little gap. When filling in line art with color, we have to really pay attention to not let little gaps happen like this. Think of it as a leaky ship. We need that line art to be perfectly continuous. We can't have any leaks or spots where that selection can kind of get inside. So watch if I do it again, you'll notice the dotted line is only on the outside, and but there we go. I treated the circle the same as the cube. We're still not quite there, right? This isn't what we want. We want the insides to be filled. So again, one more time on the line art layer with the magic wand tool, let's select the outside, same thing. But this time, we're going to go to select inverse or Command Shift and I. What that does is it flips the selection. So instead of selecting the outside, now we are selecting the inside of these shapes. And finally, if we go to our underlayer and hit Option Delete to fill, Perfect. We have our line art filled in. A really great way to just quickly and easily block in some line art so that if you have a character or some kind of drawing that you wanted to color in, this is a great way to just get started with that, have it instantly blocked off. One more really powerful basic function that I want to show you guys on this exercise is layer mask. These allow all kinds of control and reworkability in your art and they're a really good thing to learn how to do. I have pasted in two photos that will be part of this exercise, this cracked photo of some concrete, and if I double click on the name, we'll rename these just to keep it organized. Cracked and brick wall. If I click the visibility on and off, you can see which is which. Okay, layer mask basics. If we select the layer that we want to add a layer mask to, we just click this little icon. It's kind of a little rectangle with a white circle in it. And notice that next to the layer, it adds this white box. Now it switches your color picker automatically to be black and white because the way layer masks work is that if we paint black within the layer mask, it hides the layer. It's still there, we just can't see it because the black has masked it out. If I hit X and flip my background for foreground, it gives me white, if I paint with that, I can reveal it. Again, I'm just pressing X to toggle these back and forth, but black makes it go away. White makes it come back. So you may think, why not just brush and erase? The good thing about this is that we're not destroying the actual cracked photo itself. If I use the eraser tool on this, it actually removes those pixels. With a layer mask, all we're doing is hiding them, and then we are free to bring them back. Very easily. The other good thing is the way we put paint on this layer mask and critically, make sure you are selecting the layer mask. We want this box to be around the mask and not the layer itself. Otherwise, you'll be painting black onto your photo or whatever you're masking out. So we can paint in any way we can use the brush tool, so I can change my flow and opacity. I can use any kind of specialty brush in the world, any tool that adds black or white, you can do that. So there's a ton of power. Okay, let's start over. I'm going to go to delete Layer mask and let's kind of composite these two photos together. So using the move tool, which is V on your keyboard, I'm just going to move this cracked photo over the brick wall somewhere. Okay, so it's covering it. We can't really see the wall beneath. I will add a layer mask. Again, this icon, that little box appears. This time, I'm going to fill with black. So if black is our foreground color option delete, it fills the entire mask in black, which, as you now understand, makes the layer completely invisible. The entire cracked wall photo can't be seen. Okay, let's hit X again to switch back to white, hit B, to use our brush tool, or you can just click these things. And if we brush white on our layer mask, it reveals that hidden photo. This is basically how we composite thing. A photoshopped thing you've ever seen that's kind of putting someone's head onto someone else's body or you name it. This is essentially how that is done. It's how we take two things and make it look like they all kind of belong together. So that's a really powerful, fundamental basic thing. And again, infinitely reworkable. You can just switch from black to white, and I can make part of this go away again. It gives you a ton of control, which is really cool. And as you can see, it can give you results that are pretty convincing. So a really powerful base concept. I hope these basic functions are helpful. We will be applying this in some more exercises, and then on our main course projects. I'll see you there. 9. Foundation Drawing: Hey, guys, let's check out the digital drawing Foundation exercise. This is a few very simple but very powerful techniques that if you spend a little bit of time getting familiar with these and mastering them, they can really unlock some huge possibilities in your digital art. So these are carefully designed to kind of teach you a single main important thing that you can then apply to your own creativity. So just some building blocks that you can use to create awesome stuff later. So let's go through these one by one, starting over here, just kind of with some mark making. I'm going to create a new layer. And for this, I am going to use Wait, not this one. I want to use this brush. It's kind of a pencil texture. It's got a diamond shape and a little bit of texture to apply, and this one will be shared with the lecture if you want to use it, but one important thing about digital painting that I want everyone to know is that the brush is not as important as it might seem. They are cool. They can add a little bit of style and flavor to your painting, but they are not going to make you an instantly awesome artist. So even a basic standard round brush that comes with the app will be fine for this, but I just wanted to point out that I'm using something that just has a little bit of paper grain to it and a diamond shape. It just feels like a pencil, and I like it for this kind of sketchy stuff. Okay. I've got flows set to around 60 and smoothing right around the 50% mark. And the first thing I want to do with practicing drawing is just get used to making some parallel lines. And I'm not using any photoshop trick to, like, keep these lines parallel. It's just a good thing to train your hand to do. It's kind of like the lifting weights of training your hand to make confident marks is just to make some diagonal lines that are roughly parallel. And I think those are pretty much on point. That is kind of the most basic dribbling a basketball kind of thing you can do to get your hand really familiar with how to do these things. Obviously, when we get circles involved, it gets a little harder. I'm going to turn smoothing up. And let's see what we can do to make some ellipses that feel kind of on target. Something about like that. And I just hit Undo to practice this over and over again. The reason this is helpful will come into play in this next section. But the more you get comfortable and the more able you are to make a pretty accurate circle or oval shape, that is a really good skill to have. So, if it looks like this in the beginning or if you're just all over the place, practice it until it feels like you can imagine, you know, a ring floating in three dimensional space, a hula hoop. And then we can try and take that a little farther, work on some perfect circles. Again, this is all just about training the muscles of your hand to be able to do these things pretty well when you need them in an actual drawing. If I was drawing some creature that had a round part of its body, it's nice to have this skill in my back pocket to be able to do these curves in a meaningful way. Let me try one more, see if I can hit this trace line pretty well. Then a few others just as more practice. But that's the basic idea. We're over here in the practice area. This is the Bunny slope, the training ground insert sports metaphor here. There we go. So that's just absolute fundamentals of digital drawing. You know, can you make a straight line and can you make a curved line? Now, let's talk about some digital app cheats that make this easy. If you need a perfectly horizontal or vertical line, you can just hold down the Shift key, and it does that for you. I use this all the time, especially with mechanical type designs or any kind of you know, thing that needs something to be truly perfectly parallel, you can do that. You can also stroke selections, which is quite nice. So if I wanted to make a perfect circle with the Marquee tool, I could just go to Edit stroke and stroke it with the thickness of my choice. So this sheet is more of a drawing practice, like actual drawing, but I just want you guys to be aware that there's often a digital solution when you need true geometric perfection. So let's move on to ellipses. Let's make a curved line. Now, what I can do to make this perfectly parallel is simply copy this line and switch to the move tool and just move it over and then I'll merge these two layers together. Simple as that. In fact, I'm going to copy these two and move them over again and I'll copy that. That's just a good way to make tubes that are perfectly parallel, but this is all just set up for the next thing. I've made a new layer, and after we've practiced this ring, what I want you to do is start thinking about three dimensional shapes and using these ellipses to kind of turn these two flat lines into a cylinder, a tube of some kind. It's really powerful when we can start imagining these really basically flat shapes as something three dimensional. This is a great first step. As a medical illustration student, I got drilled on this kind of thing. If the ellipse is wrapping around a drawing of a vein or an artery where somehow like this or something, I would get called out on it. So this is a really great foundation of three dimensional form drawing, and it's remarkable. There's so much information that comes from just these form tracing lines that kind of show us what these forms are. Another great habit just a drill to work on. Let's jump over to some perspective stuff. This is a huge topic, but one of those core things that once you understand it, it unlocks worlds of possibilities for your digital art. So let's create a new layer. And what you can see is I have a one point perspective grid setup. So basically, there is a vanishing point right here on the number one, and all of these lines radiating out from the center. This is a really time honored art principle is using one point perspective to make something feel like it is in a three dimensional space. So for these planes facing towards the vanishing point, I am essentially following the lines set up by the perspective grid. These lines have to point towards the vanishing point. I'm holding down Shift to get these other more perfectly horizontal lines, another nice little photoshop cheat. But for these lines that are in the planes facing towards the vanishing point, we need that to follow that perspective grid. So there you go, a cube in three dimensional space. But you can do this in all kinds of different ways. We can have a fence that recedes off into the distance. And if I just make each one of these posts the same height according to the grid, it gives this incredible illusion of depth, and they're getting closer together the farther away we go and if I connect those with some horizontal planks and notice I am tracing these perspective lines or following them a little bit. They're a guide. They're not like a hard and fast must do. It makes this really cool impression of three dimensions here if we have a second set of planks. Have a cool little fence kind of receding into the distance. It just gives this really awesome sense of three dimensions. There are all kinds of applications for this a cityscape with buildings. You could have all of the windows facing a perspective grid. On the ground, I want to point out one more thing. Let's say we have some pavers or some cobblestones in the road. We can use that perspective grid to make these seem three dimensional, as well. Now, let's say they're not exactly rectangular. They're kind of irregular shaped, but kind of rectangular. What is most important about these cobblestones that I've rendering is that the one that's closest to us is very wide. It has a lot of space up and down. As we go into the distance, these pavers get kind of smooshed horizontally. It's like I am squashing them up and down. And the more we go towards the horizon, the more they get compressed until really, they're practically nothing but little lines, and they get more numerous, they get more tightly packed. And it gives this really vivid impression that the ground itself is three dimensional, that we can kind of go off into this distance walking down this path. It's a really powerful impression. So I call this surface compression. It's basically when we are looking down at our feet, we see things kind of wide, their full form. But as they go off into the distance, they start getting squashed. And we'll look at a few more examples of that later in the exercise. Let's expand on this a bit. This next little box is for two point perspective, basically the same idea, except instead of one vanishing point where all of our lines converge on this single point, we have two. So let's see a cube that exists following both perspective planes. Each plane kind of goes toward the vanishing point on its side. This is kind of taking it to the next level, but it has cool applications in things like cityscapes, where we want to have kind of a really dizzying sense of depth when we want to be able to look down the street in two directions. You can actually even do three point perspective, which kind of creates a sense of height. But I just wanted to show you there are kind of higher levels of this, and it's really powerful stuff. So basics of perspective, such a powerful, fundamental concept that can really unlock some really magical effects, especially in environment art. Alright, let's keep going. Let's come back to this topic of surface compression. So I'm going to make two circles. I'm using the circle Marquee tool, and I will stroke this selection. Edit, stroke. Let's give it a pretty big one, like eight pixels. That'll work. And then I'll copy this, go hit for my move tool, and we'll move the copy over, and I'll just merge these two circle layers. Stuff we went over in the basics function. Now, the one on the left, we will make circles without surface compression. Basically, all of the circles that I'm using to fill this space are flat. It gives the impression that we are looking at a two dimensional object. This one always looks like a pizza or something, something flat it has a lot of different circular objects on top of it, like flat pepperoni on a pizza. It makes the whole circle look very two dimensional. It doesn't look like anything curves around the side. It's just flat. There's nothing very three dimensional about this at all. Now, that's okay if you are rendering something that is supposed to look flat. But what we're trying to do is figure out how to render things that feel three dimensional, even though it's a two dimensional screen we're working on. For this next one, we are going to apply surface compression. These circles right on the top of this imaginary sphere, those are quite flat. Those are pretty much like the ones on this side. But the crucial change happens as we go out toward the edges of our sphere, the circles start getting a little bit smooshed. They get more horizontal, we aren't looking straight down on them anymore. They are angling away from us, and the effect is kind of more and more intense the closer to this horizon we get. So if we start imagining this as the moon, for example, here we're looking down into a crater. But as we get closer and closer to this moon horizon, you can't really see down into the craters anymore. You can only see the sides of them until when we're looking out on the horizon, you really can't see down into them at all. If anything, you just see this little line where the crater's edge is. This concept is really powerful. Anytime you are painting a three dimensional object or just trying to describe it with lines like I'm doing here. And it doesn't have to just be circles with craters, for example. Any kind of object that has any kind of texture on Remember this, this way that we can make things look like they disappear over a three dimensional horizon. It really has a very powerful effect of making these objects seem three dimensional. Surface compression, make a memory of that one. Cool. Let's dig into texture just a little bit more. Let's start by making a pretty simple rectangular pillar. Now, I am imagining a perspective grid just a little bit. Maybe there's a vanishing point over here and another one over here. It's kind of like this but not quite as extreme, and I'm sort of freestyling it a little bit. With enough practice, you can actually start calculating perspective grids, really without the grid in all cases. Now, I still definitely use grids, especially if it's something complicated, but I just wanted to point that out. Okay, one tool I somehow have not yet pointed out is the eraser tool. It's basically exactly what you think. We simply press E. We can control the flow and opacity just like brushing. It's sort of the reverse of brushing. But here I want to with full opacity and flow, just remove some little notches out of here. Okay, so I'm basically just giving this pillar some little lip, some secondary detail to make it seem like it has some texture. Cool. Actually, there's another trick I want to show you here to get perfectly parallel lines, and I'll erase this one as well. There's a nice little digital trick that makes this incredibly easy, and that's the clone stamp tool or S on your keyboard. What this does is it lets you sample an area by holding down option, and it turns it into this little bull's eye, and that lets you paint whatever you have sampled again. So it really clones it. It's kind of like a way to brush in a copy. But for a smaller, more useful use, I actually just sample a line that I want to be perfectly parallel, and then I just add it in as simple as that. And same over here. I want to have these lines be perfectly symmetrical and it's a nice effect. It really just makes those lines look mechanically precise. Another important thing that I do with machine design. When you need those lines to look perfectly parallel, this is a great way to do it. As you can see, it copied a little bit that I didn't want to, but we can just kind of erase away and polish. So just a handy use of another digital tool that can make your lines look straighter and more interesting. Let's come back to talking about texture. I want this to feel three dimensional, but I also want it to feel like stone. One of my favorite things to do with stone is just to chip some little bits away, kind of make it seem like it's this hard rocky texture that if you just, you know, knock it with a pickaxe, little bits of it would cleave right off. And we simply erase away parts of our perfect form, and we kind of make those little form details. Like it's a little wedge knocked out of it. It also works on corners, too. That's actually where rocks most often break off is where they have some sharp corner. So just these little changes to your form, you know, this is basically still just a rectangular cube, but this has a huge impact on how this texture feels. Does this feel like rock? Does it feel like it's organic? Does it feel like something metal? You can actually make these decisions and show it with surprisingly little mark making. You can imply a lot without actually showing. So let's build on that a little bit. The opposite of this, this is a very, you know, parallel lines, very straight line, very man made feeling thing. But let's go for very organic looking lines. Now, what I'm doing with pen pressure actually has a pretty important effect here because as we make these smooth curves, I am tapering these out at the end. This little bit right here where it eyelashes from thick to thin, where I'm pressing hard and then softer, softer, and then not at all. That little move right there has a huge impact on making something feel organic. So, just these curves that I'm making, first of all, that's probably the first cue that this is organic. But it's these little terminations, like, right. Here And another one here looks like a little wrinkle in this really gross, I don't know. This is going back to medical Illustration roots again, where it's intestines or something. But this is how I learned to draw organic forms is with these little terminations. It's called eye lashing. It's where you kind of let go of the mark of the ink line right at the end and let it sharpen to a nice little point. And it just has these really nice organic quality to it. And then we can do more of that ellipse work if we want, just to describe the forms, but pretty optional. So there we go. Those are the main moves that I have for just organic versus, you know, stone man made type of drawing. Really small little tricks to put in your kit, but very valuable, very powerful. Okay, our last digital drawing foundation exercise takes place on top of these 23 dimensional ish forms that I've created. Let's make a new layer. The purpose of this is to remind you that anytime you are drawing an object, you can imagine it occupying a larger three dimensional space. So for example, whenever I'm drawing like a bell shaped piece of shoulder armor, I imagine it fits within a sphere, but we just sort of didn't finish the sphere. Let me show you what I mean. If we follow these basic spherical rendering lines, we can make this piece of shoulder armor or whatever. You know, any three dimensional shape will need to do this, too. And it's sort of like we have just kind of it's an incomplete sphere. It's like we have drawn this spherical shoulder pad, but the parts of it that we don't see make a complete sphere. And that makes the shoulder pad itself seem very three dimensional if we remove our guide. You know, this seems like it has the right shape, the right forms. And that's really powerful. It's all about making the lines you make fit in the correct three dimensional space. You brain has to be a little bit of a three dimensional calculation engine. You have to know what to do with these things. Let's say we have just a stick with gear design, for example, let's say this is some a wrist guard for an archer. I am following this imaginary cylinder that tapers as it goes down toward the wrist. So it's like I'm subtracting away these little middle parts in my mind, but they still need to feel like they are there. Really handy just to imagine the larger three dimensional space that you're working around, very handy with armor, all kinds of machine design, even character design, you can do this, too. Simplifying the object that you're drawing into a three dimensional base shape like a sphere or a cube or a cylinder, and imagine that as your framework when you are drawing it. If it doesn't make sense within this simple shape, your perspective is probably wrong. You're probably somehow miscalculating the three dimensional nature of the object that you're rendering. But if you keep these little guides, even if they're completely imaginary in your mind, you kind of can't go wrong. So one of the most powerful fundamental drawing concepts that I'll leave you with. But I hope you guys practice these. This is very basic stuff, but there's a whole world of drawing represented in this page. So if you can master these fundamentals, you just apply it to different challenges. You weave in your own imagination and you're up and running. 10. Value Exercise: Hi, everyone. Let's take a close look at value. This is it, the single most powerful and important way that we can create the illusion of three dimensions and really describe form. This is definitely a concept that we want to absolutely master. So this exercise will really help you put the concepts that we've already discussed into practice, and let's really make these skills part of your toolkit. Let's get started. I have designed a bunch of different exercises that'll get us used to building up tone, kind of creating value, lights and darks. And then we're going to get into some more detail about how to control value, how to use value to create these really cool illusions of form and three dimensions. But we'll start in a very basic way and build up to the more complex stuff. This is going to be very cool. So I'm going to start by creating a new layer and we will do that. That'll be layer five. And the first thing we're going to do is just mess around a little bit. We're going to get used to building tones. So I'm using the standard round brush. And as I've described earlier in the course, we can adjust the size of this brush with the bracket keys, just bigger and smaller. But in Photoshop, if you hold down Shift and do the bracket keys, you can adjust the hardness of the brush too with your keyboard. So it increases the hardness by increments of 25. It's really cool. You can go from a super soft airbrush to a very hard brush just by using shift and bracket keys. So I'll be doing that kind on the fly as we go, it's a great and efficient way to kind of change your brush's edge, and we're going to get into edge control very heavily later on. One final thing about brush settings is right now I've got it set on opacity and 30% flow. You can change opacity with the keyboard keys. The numbers end up just being factors of ten. So six is 60, for example. With flow, if you hold shift, it's the same thing. These numbers just end up being factors of ten. And if you do two numbers quickly, you can get a smaller number. So I did 32 would be 32. But let's just start with 30 and 30, and we're just going to build up some tone to get used to making value. We simply tap and I have white selected as my color. So one tap is a 30% mark of white. But let's tap some more. Let's start really building up. And as you can see, if I tap over and over again, it builds up brighter and brighter tones. We've got white here where I've kind of repeatedly been tapping down on this. And that is basically the entire essence of creating value. I'm just clearing this layer to do this one more time. And really the whole purpose of this first little exercise is just get used to tapping the stylus over and over again, just like I'm doing here and see how that kind of builds up value. I want you to have a lot of control over how light and how dark you make your values. So this is kind of the play around square, the bunny Hill, just to get used to making marks. Couldn't be simpler, though, very easy stuff. Now for a value scale, we're going to take this basic idea and control it, kind of plot it out as a scale. Now, value scales seem to there isn't a standardized thing for is ten the lightest or the darkest? So let's just make ten the darkest. One, two. And instead of just tapping, I'm kind of tapping and scrubbing, two, three. One, two, three, four, one, two, three, four, five. I'm going to get a little more kind of freestyle here. Just kind of eyeballing it. I just want each one I do to be a little bit brighter than the one that came before it. I'll increase my flow and opacity a little bit. And we are getting pretty close to pure white. In fact, I may have gotten to pure white a little earlier than I wanted to. But that's the basic idea. We just want these values to kind of have a scale. We want to have control over making a dark value and then all the way up through this spectrum, all the way to a high value. So play with that a little bit. It couldn't be simpler. It's just all about getting acquainted with these tools, getting used to tapping multiple times, using that opacity to kind of layer these tones, letting it build up over these numbers until you go from a very dark value to a very high value, the highest value of all, which is white. Very simple stuff, but important fundamentals to grasp. Let's put this into practice. This will be our first three dimensional form that we're going to render could not be simpler than this. We're just going to do a sphere. So I'm going to switch from pure white to something that's not quite that intense. A high key gray. Now, remember, when we command click on a layer, it will create a selection of all the pixels on those layers. So I very deliberately put the shapes that I want you to be able to select easily on their own layer. So as we go through these exercises, you can just command click here, and it will make a selection. You won't have to worry about tone getting outside of the lines or anything very handy. So I have selected this circle, Command click I also hit Command H to hide that. It just makes the marching ants disappear, and I like that. You can hit Command H again to bring them back, but it's just nice to get that distracting dotted line out of the way when we're painting. So here we go. I'm going to create a new layer, and let's just start adding in some tones. Now, this arrow indicates the light source. If we think about this sphere as planes, if we kind of imagine it is this sort of low polygon count three dimensional object, then the planes that are facing up towards this light source have a higher value. We tap more. We give more tone to that area. And if I actually do use a little bit of pure white in this very most intense part of the highlight, makes a very realistic sense of this being a spherical shape. Most importantly or equally importantly, is that main highlight is this reflected light that we've talked about. So I'm going to drop my flow and opacity down to about ten just so that I have a lot of control. In fact, as a general rule of thumb, if you feel like you are a little out of control, if the tone is building up too quickly or if it's not behaving the way you want it to, just lower your flow and opacity and just go more slowly. If you build those tones up very slowly, you just have perfect control. Nothing will kind of get away from you. It'll all just do what you want. So that's what I'm doing here with this reflected light. And if you remember the main parts of three dimensional rendering, we have our highlight, this brightest part that is facing most directly towards our light source, and that sort of starts to fall away to our termination or our mid tone. It's this awesome kind of twilight area between light and dark where it crosses over. That brings us to our core shadow. And then finally, the reflected light, which really does a great job of rounding out this form. But already you can see this is really powerful. That's just some light and dark tones on what is just a flat circle. But suddenly this looks very three dimensional. It looks like something we could reach out and grab, which is incredibly cool. Now to take this a step further, let's do a cast shadow. I'm going to create another layer, but I'm going to put this underneath the shapes layer because I want this to be behind this sphere. And for this, let's do this really easily with the gradient tool. I've just hit G in Photoshop is the gradient tool, and it's got a few different modes. We're going to do this radial gradient. Also, make sure that your gradient is set to, I believe, this mode, which will go from the color in your foreground to transparency. Honestly, I don't know what most of these other ones are even used for. So we're going to stick with that. Now I will put the gradient opacity at 100. I just hit zero and we'll just pull a radial gradient out. Cool. So that made this nice radial gradient. I'm going to hit Command T, which is free transform and squash this down. And we're just going to sort of put that behind the sphere. It kind of makes it look like this light source is actually shining a spotlight on this sphere, which is awesome. That's just what we want. So the spotlight is there, but we need the sphere to be casting a shadow. So I'm going to create another layer and basically just do the same thing. But I have selected a darker color. For the most part, actually, every time, when you have the brush tool selected, if you hold down Alt or option, you can sample any color on the screen. So I know I'm throwing a lot of keyboard shortcuts at you, but this stuff is enormously time saving, and it can really just make all of this seem like second nature. So it's worth committing those to memory. Let's make another radial gradient with this darker almost black color, and once again, command T to free transform it. And we squash that down flat and basically just slide it under the sphere. And that really adds some realism. Very cool stuff. So just like that, we've gone from a totally flat circle to something that looks very authentically three dimensional. That's the core concept. This is the most basic expression of using value to create three dimensional form. So give this one a try maybe even a few times to make sure that you're really getting this and that you're really feeling those results. This looks like something you could reach out and pick up. That's what we're after. Moving on, let's move to edge control. Now, value edges are one of the most important and most overlooked concept in creating realistic paintings. This is incredibly powerful. Now, what I mean by value edges and edge control. So, now that we understand this spherical rendering, highlight, mid tone, core shadow, bounced light, and cast shadow, this basic expression of form, that's very powerful. We can do a lot with this, but that's not everything. What we also need to be thinking about is the edges. Does the value change very slowly from light to dark? Does it have a smooth gradient from the lightest light to the darkest dark? Or does it have a hard edge? That's really important. So look at this diagram. We have both soft edges and hard edges, and to make something look realistic, especially organic forms, we need to have both. We need to balance those soft edges, those smooth gradients with these really hard cut edges. So this exercise is designed to look at a few different ways that we can do that, ways that we can control the edges that we're making with value so that it doesn't always just end up looking like this. Semi controlled tone, but it doesn't really look like anything precisely because there's no consideration for the edges. Let's explore that here. I'm going to create a new layer and each of these little areas is just a way that I typically use to control edges. So with my brush in this fairly high key gray, let's do 2020, just to give that a try. Let's talk about some ways to control edges. The first one is pressure. With these pressure sensitive styluses that we use, we can either press hard and make a large mark or we can start to press a little more lightly. It shrinks brush size that we're using. And as you can see, the smaller the mark I'm making, it starts to sharpen the edge just a little bit, especially on this highlight side. It's starting to look like a fairly hard cut between light and dark. And that is exactly what I'm trying to produce here is this really hard line between the shadow area here and the highlight. I'm going to harden my brush by holding down the bracket keys and see how far I can push that. Awesome. So just with different brush pressure, so a large mark out here in the soft edge zone. And then if we start to kind of shrink our marks, tighten things up, and start really carving away at this hard line, we have both. And I have no idea what this really is, but it starts to look like something three dimensional. It's incredible. It looks like it could be the entrance to a cave or something. It starts to really make your imagination work. So value edges, super important stuff, one of the most important key concepts in all of digital painting that I teach is this. So let's try some other methods for this. Another one is brush and smudge. So let's just lay down some tones with our brush, kind of whatever. And now I'm going to switch to the Smudge tool. I hit R, and I typically use this brush. These are all going to be included with the course, but this is my most basic one. It doesn't really have a ton of texture to it, but it just looks a little bit brushy. So let's try this at about 60%, and I can just sort of carve away the edges on one side. I'll leave the edges soft over here, or I can even kind of smooth those out and make them kind of feathered and more soft and gradient like. But if I cut across, I can also make a very hard edge. It's sort of like you're moving the tone around, and if you concentrate the tone in a certain place, it gives you a harder edge. But if you scrub on it and kind of feather it out, it will give you a softer edge. So it's really just like you're smudging charcoal on a piece of paper with a finger. You can feather it out to make those smoother value edges, or you can really cut in and try and get something with a nice, hard cut edge. So a different way to do it. Equally effective and quite powerful, I think. So adding in some tones once again just to sort of fine tune this, and you can just keep going and going super powerful stuff. Another way to do this is actually even simpler. We just brush in some soft edges. So very soft stuff here. That's practically just purely a gradient. But if I switch to the eraser tool, I can subtract away some tones. So I've got a hard edge somewhere. I'm basically cutting into the gradient with a harder edge. And we can kind of start to imagine that as something. It all starts to work. One of my favorite parts about digital paintings that moment when something starts looking real when it changes from being marks on a canvas to something that we can actually imagine picking up or interacting with or a world we can walk out into pretty exciting stuff. The final way I want to show you guys to create value edge control is with selections. As you know, there are 1 million ways to create selections with Photoshop, marquee tools, paths, all kinds of ways. But for our purposes, let's just use the good old Lasso, and I'm going to create a pretty random shape, something like that. Sort of a narrow part and a larger part. And I'll expand this. Oh, if you hold down Shift, by the way, lets you add multiple selections, super handy stuff. Now I'm going to hit Command H again to hide that so we don't have to see it. And with a soft brush and pretty low flow and opacity, once again, we can just add tone within the selection. And what this does is it gives us the hard edges on the selection border with these nice soft edges inside. This can be really cool for something like foliage or something. I'm going to make some very rough, kind of not great looking leaf shapes just to give you this general idea. But if you make these selections and then slowly add these soft edges in, it gives you this really nice, realistic sense of edges and value. It just looks three dimensional and realistic. So this whole area, edge control, really give this stuff, these techniques some practice. You're going to use these a lot, and it's going to create beautiful effects, worth some attention here. Next, let's apply what we have just learned in this experiment section. Let's actually put this to use. So I'm going to create a new layer, and we will command click the shapes layer just so I can work within this. Let's start simply with this sphere. Let's say the light source is coming from above and to the left. Essentially, this is the same thing as the sphere we rendered earlier. We're going to do a highlight, which will fade away with a nice soft value edge to the core shadow, and then I'll do a little bit of a reflected light. But the main point here is that I want to cut a new primary highlight in. I'm doing those small brush sizes, kind of the pressure sensitivity method like we did here. To add in another form. And essentially all this form is is two spherical shapes kind of smashed together, nothing too complex. But as you can see, it looks like this weirdly organic, kind of realistic thing. If I enhance this reflected light a little bit, actually, it almost looks like the light from this is bouncing up onto that form. It gets really believable and three dimensional. I'll do a little bit of smudging, too. As I'm painting, really, I kind of use all of the things that we've learned here. There's no one method that I think is best. I reach for all of them when I need them. So it's a great way to just have those skills on tap, ready to go whenever you need them. But that is this basic idea applied, and it looks incredibly realistic. So all that is edge control, soft gradients and hard edges, balanced just about perfectly. I'm going to make this edge even harder, actually, with some more smudging, just to really show you what I mean. Very cool. Now, one of the best applications of this principle is to create realistic looking anatomy and musculature. And muscles, essentially, when we are rendering them, it's basically this. It's two round forms kind of next to each other. This most classic bicep muscle. Let's try it on that. So almost identical process to what we did above. I'm just building up some tones, treating this bicep muscle as sphere number one, basically. It's sort of an oval, but you render it the exact same way, really, just a different shape. And then the other muscles below here, the tricep, and the others, I treat as form number two. And that's basically it, guys. I'm going to imply other forms, too, all of these awesome tendons and just anatomical structures that lie beneath the skin. It's all just value edges and different forms or cylinders stacked on top of each other. And with just this method, it implies all of this really cool, believable stuff going on underneath the skin. Instead of just being a kind of boring shape, suddenly, we're seeing all of this anatomy. It's believable. It looks realistic. It looks correct, like something that's alive. And that's huge with painting people, faces, and creatures. Even if you make a monster up, something that is not at all a real thing in the real world, if you render it with this principle with these value edges defining one form from another, and even with these wrinkles around the elbow crease, that's all I'm doing is putting one gradient next to each other with a hard edge in between. And I'm just doing this over and over again. May have gone a little overboard with the wrinkles, but you get the idea, and I think that looks cool. I'm also unifying things a bit, adding tones over the top, just so that all of these little forms I'm describing don't get so visually active that, you know, we want it to seem like it's covered in skin at the end of the day. So that's important stuff to do, too. But I hope you are starting to see the enormous power of this important concept, value edge, control, incredibly cool stuff. Moving on, let's jump back a little bit. This is going to be relatively simple compared to all of the edge control stuff that we've been doing, but planes are another incredibly important way to describe three dimensions. So with this cubic shape, I'm going to grab the Lasso tool, but I've switched it to the polygon lasso, which is much better for creating flat planes. You just click and drag, and it makes a straight line for you. So, similarly, we're just going to imagine our light source being let's do it the same as over here. So this will actually be kind of the dark side. So I'll just drop a little bit of tone there. Let's make this side brighter, though. I'm going to create another selection. Whoops. Very similar process, and I'm just brushing in some tones. I hit Command H before I started brushing, by the way, just to hide that so we wouldn't have to see it. Very simple stuff, but incredibly powerful, as you can already see. The thing that I want to do to take this one small step further is to show you how powerful it is to emphasize edges, especially when you have an angular form like this cube. This can be incredibly cool. So I'm going to turn shape dynamics off on my brush. So when I make a mark now it will not have that pressure sensitive thin to thick line. It's just one continuous line width. And that's what I want for this because we are going to do some shift clicking to emphasize these edges. So I will click at the top of this cube, hold Shift, and click again. And it made this line from top to bottom. I'll do that a few times to make this a little more visible. And I may highlight this top edge as well, just to add some edge to this. This little highlight right on the rim of these forms just really enhances the sense of this thing's angularity. We can really feel that sharp edge more than we could before. One more really cool thing to do with this concept is if we add a little imperfection, it's really cool to do this right at the angle. So let's say this is a brick or something, maybe a metal object. And it's got a little chip on the corner. And that makes sense, right? Because the corners are where things get bumped into. It's where it hits first, if it falls, things like that. But if we add a little imperfection, I erased away a black mark, and then I'm just adding that highlight back in. It just makes this entire cube suddenly seem way, way more realistic before we erased anything, and I'll go back in my history just to show you that. Looks sort of believable, but after we do those steps, it looks incredibly more realistic. You can imagine holding that, picking it up. It just makes it more believable to your viewer. And that's what we're after. So just remember that about planes and adding this little edge treatment when there's an angular object, super powerful stuff. One final exercise before we're done with this value sheet is all about midtones. Now, midtones is this special zone right where high light turns into core shadow, kind of this twilight area. It's called the terminator weirdly, in some texts. But it's this very special part of a value rendering lots of cool stuff can happen here. We have lots of great opportunities. Let's first just render a simple sphere again. And by the time you're at the end of this sheet, you will an old pro at rendering simple spheres. But same deal over and over again. Basically, we're just tapping in tone, having a highlight, a mid tone and then just bouncing in this bounced light with a lot more control to make sure that that is dark and subtle and everything that we want it to be. I'm doing a little smudging here just to add a little refinement and interest. Let's use white to add a little highlight, and I just hit D to go back to default black and white, and I hit X to swap those. So if you ever need white, you just hit D and X really quickly in Photoshop, another handy little trick. Okay, so that is good enough. Let's copy this layer over a few times. If you remember from the line art exercise, if you hit V and get the move tool and you hold down Option and Shift, you can just pull a copy over. That's all there is to it. So I'm going to do that again with the move tool, which is V, Option and Shift, and I just pulled it over. Very easy way to repeatedly make copies if there's some object you need to repeat over and over again. That's really cool. Now, the reason we have three of these is because we're going to explore a few different ways to use the midtone to see some cool effects happen. So I'll create a new Well, actually, I'm going to do this on the same layer. We can communicate a lot of texture in this area. So let's first just do what we did on this cube and drag across some little scratches, imperfections. We're basically pulling dark into the light and then pulling light into the dark. I described this earlier as kind of imagine the mid tone is like a war zone, and we're kind of attacking across the border. So send these little imperfections into the darkness and then send the light tones into the darkness and send the dark tones into the light. But it's all happening at this midtone. This is kind of where these little subtle differences between light and dark are most pronounced. It's where we can see this action happening in a more visible way because we have light shining on it, kind of defining these little microforms in a really intense way that we don't see right in the highlight or right in the shadow or even on the reflected light. So the midtone is a great opportunity for this. Let's do kind of a pebly texture. Maybe it'll look like this is sort of a bumpy alien egg or something. And all I'm doing now is essentially making microspheres in the midtone. I'm making this whole shape over and over again, but just much smaller. And just because we put it on the midtone, it kind of informs the entire rest of the image. We can imagine that this bumpy texture is happening everywhere, just because we can see it here on the midtone. So as you can see, I'm bringing some lights into the dark and I'm bringing some darks into the light. Might add some really bright highlights just to make that look kind of shiny, add even more information about what this might be made of. So cool how realistic that looks. So that's all midtone making that work. It looks like this cool alien egg or I don't know, something kind of gross and subconscious going on here, but it's awesome and a very realistic effect. So give that a try. Let's see if I can think of one more here. Why don't we carve out some little designs here? Have some lines kind of going in and out of the midtone. And same thing. We have some lights crossing into dark and dark crossing into light. So there we go. That is a big look at value, some of the most powerful and coolest concepts that we can use in all of digital painting. So really give this sheet a little bit of time. Give this some practice. Commit these techniques to memory. They will serve you incredibly well. You won't believe the effects you'll be able to achieve. And we're going to be using this stuff a lot in our main course projects up ahead. 11. Stegosaurus: Okay, let's put all of this cool new knowledge to use with our first real project. I love dinosaurs. I'm betting there are some dinosaur kids out there, some of you who may have grown up drawing dinosaurs. So what better place to start than the awesome Stegosaurus? So let's take a look at my layers. I have the line art on its own layer, and then the background is just white. So that's all that's going on there. We have the line art on one layer and background. Now, what we're going to do is fill this line art in with a solid color, just like we did with that cube in the basic functions exercise. And then we are going to add some form shadow. We're going to do some of that value stuff that we did in the value exercise to try and make him seem three dimensional, make all of these awesome wrinkles and little bony plates, look like they're the right texture. Basically going to use everything that we've been discussing and practicing and exercises to come up with a really cool result. If you want to use your own line art, you don't just want to color what I have created. That is totally awesome. Just kind of get it in a setup like this where you have line art by itself, and we'll just follow the same steps. So to start with, remember how we filled that cube in. We use the Magic Wand tool, and we just select the outside and then we go to select inverse so that we flip it from selecting outside to inside, and then we have a selection of this shape. Let's create a new layer. I'll just call it base silhouette. Perfect. We have a bit of a design decision to make. But I'm going to fill him in as his base color with this cyan option delete to fill him in that easily, we have a pretty cool dinosaur. One function I want to point out is that if you want to change this base color, you can do that really easily anytime by hitting Command U, or I think it's image adjustment, hue saturation. And this brings up this really handy slider that lets you change the hue, red, green, blue spectrum, basically, the saturation. So how gray is it or how burningly vibrant it is? And then lightness. It kind of lets you raise the value or darken it. So you have complete control over the color of this. And actually, the way we're going to set things up, even after we're done painting this in, making it look three dimensional, you can still come back and change these colors. It's all infinitely editable, which I really love. So for this guy, let's try something like that. I actually don't want to go too dark for my base. I think that's just about right. Okay, cool. We have him nice and blocked in. Let's create another layer, and we will call this multiply shadow. Okay. Now, we're going to fill this layer in with the same silhouette. Here's another handy Photoshop trick I want to show you. If you click holding down Command on the thumbnail for the layer. So holding down Command and click, check it out. It creates a selection of whatever pixels are on that layer. So I've just created a selection of the base silhouette. Really nice if you want to paint within a shape of some kind, you just command click, and it makes that nice dotted line selection for you. This, let's fill this in again, actually with a similar kind of cyan color. So you can barely tell the difference. But one really critical difference with this layer is that we're going to change this from normal blending mode to multiply. Now, there are lots of different blending modes in Photoshop and Procreate and all popular digital painting apps. For this one, let's start just with this one. It's kind of the most basic blending mode. It makes things darker, but it also takes on a quality of the color. So it works really well for adding shadows. It's kind of this dark blue shadow. Okay, so we have our base silhouette and our multiply shadow. Here is where we are going to apply that masking knowledge. Let's add a mask, and it's all white. So this shadow layer is completely revealed. We can just see it completely. All right. Time to use your value exercise knowledge. I am going to start painting with black. So it's like I am hiding the shadow, if that makes sense. Let's lessen the opacity of this a little bit. You can make a layer less opaque or more opaque just by Oh, wait, I am actually making the mask less opaque. Okay. There we go. I don't want that shadow to be quite so stark. All right. Starting over, if I paint with black, it hides the shadow, which is sort of backwards, but it's almost like we're painting with light. We are shining a light on the upper half of our Stegosaurus. I'm imagining his body is this sort of cylinder. He's this long cylindrical shape, basically. So let's think about that sphere that we rendered. We have our light source coming from here. That means the bottom half will remain dark. This leg will catch some shadow. Oh, brush settings, by the way, I have it at 100% opacity right now and 34 flow, but play with these to get the kind of marks that you like. I also have a pretty soft brush. Notice these nice soft edges kind of making these forms feel very round and three dimensional. It's like that leg is a cylinder coming out of the main body, which is a cylinder. Pen pressure is set to the size of the brush. So if I press lightly, it's giving me these smaller marks. And as you can see, I'm trying to tuck this lighter color up against the edge of his front leg here. I want this to kind of stick out from his armpit, I guess. So I'm trying to control that very much. I want the leg and the arm to seem like they are kind of in front of the belly, the armpit. I hope you're kind of seeing the power of this already. It sort of lets you control where light and shadow happen just like we did in our value exercise. But with a mask, you can add and subtract. Anytime I want to add more light, I paint with black. So let's put kind of a second little muscle wrinkle or that kind of thing, maybe along this side of his leg. It makes his leg look like it has this cool muscle. There are two different forms just like we did on the value exercise. All I'm doing is painting black on the mask to hide that shadow, make those lighter colors appear, or I'm painting with white to kind of bring the shadow back. So here's where we have to use our brains a little bit like this three d light calculating machine. You have to think where on this Stegosaurus would planes be facing upward towards the light source? I think it looks like right here where his ankle kind of creases, he would have planes facing up. So I'm making lots of little taps and I'm kind of scrubbing the brush around to get these marks. Every once in a while, I'll paint with very strong opacity when I want to get one of those hard value edges. Like, right here, there's this crease in the ankle, and I have turned opacity all the way up because I want that to really pop out is kind of a strong highlight set against the shadow. It makes the leg look really three dimensional. Uh, maybe here, this crease on the forearm, too. We can have a pretty strong value edge there, as well. Actually, you know what that's making it kind of come out towards us more than I really want. So maybe we'll just make the toes catch some light. Actually, not that either. We'll leave that arm pretty dark. Infinitely reworkable, right? We can do whatever we think works best. Alright. Cool. Let's keep going. Anywhere I want one form to kind of stand out from the others. So like right here where the leg joins the body, there's this little crease I have indicated with line art. Well, I'm making a really sharp value edge there, too, to make it look like this form kind of rolls around and rounds off there, but then it changes plane suddenly. It's that really powerful concept of value edge control. It makes makes round things look round and it makes organic things look really believable. There are all of these little wrinkles and shapes kind of mashing up against each other, which when you think about it, that's kind of what organic forms are is just a lot of little roundish shapes, imagine rolled up noodles of clay kind of mashed together to completely oversimplify them, but I think it's kind of just that easy to think of them that way. Cool. So edge control, using masks to kind of go back and forth as needed, that is the key here. Now, one thing that is also very powerful here is the midtone. Remember on our value exercise, how we have that part where light turns to dark that we can put all of this texture information within. You see how we have it turning from light to dark right here in his belly. If I take a little bit of light and make this wrinkle kind of cross from the light zone into the dark, it starts looking really three dimensional. It's like we can hide all of this incredible texture information just in that little zone. Incredibly powerful. And you can communicate volumes with these moves without actually having to go in there and exhaustively render it over and over again. I kind of lets you imply detail without showing a ton of it, which is really nice. It kind of does a lot of the heavy lifting for you, kind of let your viewer connect some dots on their own, which is always great if you kind of let your viewer participate. I'm not going to get super detailed with this because I want this to be mainly just an exploration, like you checking out these fundamental concepts, but you can get really detailed. You can get in there and noodle around all of these wrinkles. You know, go for it. If you are feeling this and starting to get really inspired by the possibilities, detail this one, go crazy, make all the little pebbley texture of his skin. But check out just by bringing these little marks across that midtone zone, it just makes it look three dimensional and believable and realistic, which is really powerful as an art concept when you think about it. This is a key to much greater things. And once you start feeling those possibilities, you're off to the races. I especially like this little zone, his little wrinkled belly. It just it feels very dinosaur like, which is cool. Right, maybe a little more feature to the back of the leg. I have rendered a lot of creatures in my career. So I have kind of a sense of these things. So if your muscles are not looking exactly like how I'm rendering them, don't worry about that at all. It's just kind of this is meant to show you a concept, value control, edge control using that midtone to make something that feels realistic and three dimensional. Um, so definitely want this to be like manageable, and I want you to get good results. So just just kind of follow the steps. Don't worry too much about anatomy or anything, and I think you'll love the result. Oh, cool. Let's splash a little light on this leg that's sort of sticking out. Kind of like it's emerging from the shadow. I think that'll be really cool. Awesome. A few little wrinkles, give them just a little bit of light, maybe some of these wrinkles down below. Actually, I think these nice looking ones on the side of the leg could use a little love, as well. It's all up to you, though. You are holding the brush. You are in control. These are decisions that the artist makes, which is really awesome. Trying to make this little shoulder blade pop out just a bit more. Maybe a hard edge where this little hip type muscle joins the rest of the body. Nice. These little wrinkles kind of catching a tiny bit of light in the shadow part of the foot and leg. Every little wrinkle just kind of adds something. It makes it feel more complete and believable. It's incredible. And as long as I have been doing this, this still makes me feel excited. It's cool seeing that illusion of three dimensions come to life. So speaking of that, let's make these bony plates on the near side seem like they're close to us, but let's darken these ones on the far side. So I'm basically just painting white at 100% for these far plates to give them that darker color. And I'm leaving the ones on the near side light so that they, you know, seem like they are in the light source. But these farther ones are off in shadow. That's already having a really compelling effect of just three dimensions. This this creature has depth and distance. There is stuff happening over on the far side of his body, even though we can't see it, it's kind of implied by these little cues, these illusions that we are creating. Oh, by the way, I'm holding down space bar to kind of move around. Even when you have the brush tool selected. If you hold down space, it lets you pan around the screen. I should have mentioned that in an earlier exercise, but better late than never, and that's a very handy one. Okay, we'll make these spikes on the far side dark. And let's see, I'll put some highlight on this foreground spike. Don't have to get super detailed. I know I've said that, but I tend to get carried away because I just enjoy this so much, making something feel lifelike and three dimensional. That's just cool. I think that's one of those fundamental, like, thrills of art. And one of the things I hope you take away from this is that really cool moment when something starts feeling sort of real on your canvas that like, Wow, I can't believe I made this feeling. One of my favorite parts of being a teacher is when I hear about that from students. So I hope it's clicking for you. Awesome. There is our shadow layer. I think that's really effective. Again, this is all editable, so I can make the shadow layer darker, actually, I think I might like it slightly darker and we can change the color of the base silhouette, check it out. We could make this guy purple. And it still looks real. The shadows become a darker purple because of that multiply setting. It reacts dynamically to the colors underneath it. That's kind of the special thing about multiply. It's not just a flat paint color. It does this dynamic thing where it kind of affects the colors underneath it dynamically. It makes it look like it should. So if there's purple under it, it makes it kind of darker purple. If there is neon green under it, it would work in much the same way. Now, let's come at this from kind of the other angle. We have started with a pretty middle tone, but let's add some highlights. We're going to do this in much the same way that we added the shadow layer by creating a new layer. Man clicking on either one of these layer thumbnails to get that selection, and then I'll fill it in with a fill color. Let's try something like this. It's a warm gray. It's in the yellow hue. By the way, anytime you want to use the exact colors I'm using, they are in this code. It's called a hex code, a six digit code that every color has a unique one. For example, the base silhouette color is this, if you want that one. A really cool little handy thing. I was unaware of this little number for years, but that's what it's for. Okay. We will fill with that color that we had option delete, and we fill it in. We're going to use another blending mode this time, but this time, we will use overlay, which, as you can see, it lightens the value just a bit. Again, this reacts dynamically to whatever is under it. So I can change the color of that base silhouette, and overlay will affect that dynamically along with our shadow. So we're kind of like building up effects. Once again, let's add a layer mask. This time, I'll fill the whole thing in with black. I kind of like painting with light instead of shadow. So that's what I'm going to do here. And we're basically going to come over the top and add some highlight to the top. Now, it's taking on this kind of cool hue variation. It's like we're adding a little bit of a greenish tint to this. I kind of like that, but we can tinker with it. All I'm worried about right now is just making these forms look cool. We're adding a little extra highlight wherever it's needed, wherever these forms would naturally have that. So The parts that are most directly catching that direct light source. And as you can see, this just adds more dimension and adds more interest, just makes the color look more believable and nuanced. It's just a cool way to work with adding these filled in layers that we just reveal or hide with layer masks, infinitely editable and forgiving and just it really is a nice workflow. One thing I like to do from time to time is flip the canvas so that the image feels kind of fresh in mind. In fact, I've probably done that a few times without even realizing it. But we do that by going to image, image rotation, flip Canvas horizontal. I've actually made myself a custom keyboard shortcut for that, but you will not have that by default if you're using Photoshop. It's just something I had to make. But it can be really handy if you if you want to use that, you just go to edit keyboard shortcuts and you can kind of enter in your own keyboard shortcuts, which can be handy. Okay, adding a little highlight on the bony plates. This layer is more of an accent. It's kind of like a little extra zing because I think our multiply shadow layer does a really nice job of describing the forms, we don't need a whole lot of other rendering other than that. So this is kind of extra, but it's still nice, and I still wanted to show you guys the technique because it's powerful. You can get some really nice and meaningful effects here. Again, I am revealing and hiding kind of over and over again as I go. We have that highlight kind of really strong and revealed fully in some parts. And then we taper it off with a soft value edge. Very powerful. Maybe I'll add a little light to that jaw. I think that's cool. That's probably about good. We'll probably want a little bit of lighter value on these bony spikes. But I think that is pretty much good. Let's tinker with the color of our actual overlay layer. Let me call it overlay highlight just to stay organized. All right, not on the layer mask but on the actual pixels themselves, I'll hit Command U. Let's see if a different hue. As I scrub this little bar around, it changes color, the hue of that overlay layer. As we move more towards the blues, it starts to gel a little bit better. Maybe a tiny bit bluer. But experiment, you know, go wild. Try all kinds of different hues. Make the saturation really bright. You know, I can have some unexpected, cool, happy accidents. For our purposes, I think something about like that feels just about right. Yeah. Now, is one final little bit of polish or almost final? Let's go back a little bit. Let's mess with the actual local color of our Stegosaurus. And again, this is where we have all of this control. We can completely change our mind and make him into, you know, a much warmer color thing. Actually, these pinks are incredibly cool. What I want to do is create a new layer and command click the base silhouette so that we are working within the selection. And I'm going to add a few local colors. So for example, I want the spikes on his tail or his little toenails to have this sort of bony color. So I will hit Command H to make that selection invisible, and let's just brush in some color. You know what? I want this to be lighter. Let's go lighter in our color picker. Do this entirely to your preference. But what's so great about this is even as we change the local color, because this layer is underneath both the multiply layer and the overlay layer, it gets affected by those. So we still get this form shadowing and we get some nice highlights from the overlay layer. It all just works. Let's see. Maybe toenails too. We can do some of that stuff. And it is affected dynamically by shadows. So cool. You can go on and on with this. We could add all kinds of patterning to the skin. In fact, let's try something like that. What if we create a new layer and I'll put this one beneath, let's call it bony color. All right. Let's call this accent color. Just to do it in the same way, let's command click and let's fill this with, like, I don't know, maybe a let's go crazy. Let's have a pink color. That is really intense. So let's darken this a little bit. Lower lightness, lower saturation. That feels kind of cool. Now let's mask. So again, add a mask and let's fill the whole mask in with black. Command delete. Now, painting with white, we can reveal that color. So if I just use a huge airbrush, I can make the bony plates, this fun like purplish color. And we could add spots on this guy. Might be cool to give him kind of a gentle fade from, like, dorsal to ventral. I think that could be really neat. And it just makes the whole creature feel more nuanced, like he's got multiple colors going on, and that just makes him feel more interesting and complete, especially if I splash some more of this darker color down below. You can get really kind of detailed with this. Like, you can decide maybe it has sort of a spotted pattern. Actually, I really like the way this often looks. If we actually hide this again, it makes it disappear. So it's sort of like we're eating away at this darker color with certain patterns. And it makes it look like this cool, you know, natural skin patterning that this reptilian or whatever type of creature might have. You could put some spots on the plates, just make this look interesting and like a real animal. That's totally up to you. This is a great way to be creative, and you could make this thing zebra striped. You know, you can do all kinds of things. Give it the pattern that feels cool. I always love this part of a creature design, or I do spaceships in the same way. It's kind of like where we give our model car a cool paint job. And just to point this out one more time, you can hit Command U on any of these and change the color. Let's say we want them to have purple or yellow for the accent color. Actually, I think I prefer that. That really nice warm color, maybe something really burning orange. I think that's really quite beautiful. I don't know, tough to tell what I prefer. This can be so fun. It's hard to pick. Nice. Okay. We're just about done. You know what? I want to give this eye a local color so I will just hide that shadow layer and it gives them a little blue eye. Okay, final polish. This stuff is all take it or leave it. You don't need to do any of these things, but they can be really cool if you want to. Let's add a cast shadow under the Stegosaurus. I've created a new layer. And I've named it shadow. Now, this is a really quick and easy way to do this. You can always hand paint a shadow, which is cool, probably the more craftsman like way to go. But if we just pick a shadow color, something like this and hit the gradient tool, which is G, really like this. First of all, make sure that your gradient is set to this, where it goes from foreground color, which is this kind of dark cyan to transparent, these checker patterns. If it's on one of these other ones, it could get weird. So this is the one we're after. And we're doing this one, the radial gradient, the one that looks like a box with a circular shape in it. Okay, let's turn the opacity up to 100%. And this is what a radial gradient look like. You just drag and pull and it makes this dark spot, basically. Let's make a radial gradient somewhere in the middle of our page. And let's hit Command T. And if I hold down option and shift, it squashes this towards the middle symmetrically. Now, if I move this under our dude here and we can keep editing this. You can make it very long. You can move it it looks like a perfectly decent, I think, cast shadow. I think that's pretty believable. You could copy this and make smaller ones and put them individually right under each foot, which I think is maybe a little more believable and realistic. But you don't have to. I think it's cool when it simply looks like a blurry shadow. Oh, by the way, I did that kind of quickly. But if you want to copy something, you can either drag the layer down to this plus icon or with the move tool selected, you just hold down the option key, and it kind of grabs whatever you click on and makes a copy of it. Pretty cool. Let's lower the opacity on this basic one to let those foot shadows show up. And one final little bit of polish that I think always adds a nice little zing to these is I've created a new layer on the top of the entire stack, and we're going to set that to lighten. This is a really cool blending mode. That does is it lets us paint a color, but it only makes things brighter. It won't make the white any lighter. It's kind of invisible to white. All right. With a orange or some warm color, experiment a bit and that radio gradient, once again, we're going to just add a radio gradient. And it's kind of like there's a little gleam of sunshine kind of shining through this Stegosaurus' plates. It's just kind of this instant drama move that I really like. And I'm going to try some really intense colors. I've switched to this orange just to try and make it feel dramatic and it's kind of a lens flare thing. This is very cheesy and it's easy to overdo, so use this with some restraint, but I just want to give you guys the tools and let you artists make these decisions for yourself. So I hope you like this. So very powerful, fundamental techniques here that you can use in just about anything. But this Stegosaurus is a great warm up, so feel free to use my line art or a sketch of your own to do something similar, and I hope you like the result. I'll see you in the next project. 12. Still Life Value Study: Okay, guys, for this next project, let's get a little more traditional art schoolish. We're going to do a value study. You're probably familiar with these. This is where an art teacher sets up a bowl of fruit or some random object and puts a really strong light source on it. These are a really time honored, classic approach to learning to paint realistically, because it teaches us to break down the objects that we see into their fundamental parts of value. And just as a refresher, those are the highlight, the mid tone, the core shadow, the reflected light, the light that kind of bounces up from the surface, and finally, the cast shadow. We can see all of those things if we learn how to look for them. And that's what this kind of project teaches you. We are going to paint this apple. It's a great object because it's mostly spherical, but it's got that awesome little indentation in the top that'll give us some practice with value edge control, and there's a little bit of surface texture detail, some of that cool stuff going on with the skin. I have taught value studies with this exact painting for years. It's a classic. I think it'll really teach you how to do this process well. If you're looking for a greater challenge, I have some other objects that you can study as well. I've got this lemons and a cup and this candlestick holder if you want a more complex object. Also, for those looking to stretch a bit, I have color versions of each object available. If you want to do this same process, but work color into the mix as well, that would be really great. If you're up for that, go for it. Few quick words on the brush I'll be using before I get started. I'm using this Photoshop default chalk brush. I'm just doing this to add a little bit of texture and interest to what we're doing. But you can use a simple circle. Any brush will work for this. It's just something I'm doing to make it a slightly more interesting textured look, but don't worry about that at all. In my brush settings, I have pin pressure set to size jitter so that if I press lightly on the stylus, it will give me a very thin mark. But if I use more pressure, the mark gets wider. So it gives us this nice thin to thick variation. It makes our brush strokes look much more natural. Gives a lot more expressiveness and a natural feel to our painting. So let's go ahead and get started. So I've got a basic photoshop document set up here, and I've pasted in this Apple photo, and we're just going to leave that in this corner here to use as a reference. We're going to copy both the shape and then later the values to start using this as our three dimensional object reference. So that's on its own layer. Next, I'm going to create a new layer that we're going to do our sketch on. So I'll just rename this sketch. And guys, this is my basic process for creating even really complex digital painting. So this formula can be expanded to all kinds of amazing things that I'd love to show you in later courses. But for now, let's stick to this very simple object. I've got my brush tool selected, and it's just a default round brush. It's the very simplest brush that Photoshop offers, and that's really all that we need to do a simple sketch like this. Going to reduce the opacity of my sketch layer down to about 100%. You can do that either with this slide or bar, or there's some cool keyboard shortcuts for that. If you just hit the number keys, it adjusts the opacity by factors of ten. So one is ten, two is 20, et cetera. So an easy way to change the opacity of your layer. So I think this is working for us. I'm going to make my brush very small just to simulate kind of a pencil tip, and I'm keeping one eye on the apple reference in the corner and the other eye on my canvas, and we're just going to start sketching out this basic shape, sort of an oblong sphere, essentially. It's got some cool little lumps on it that make it look a little more interesting than just a simple sphere. But essentially, that's what we're going for. So some nice smooth lines using my erase tool just to smooth out some of those stray marks I've made. I'm going to put a little indication of that little indentation at the top of the apple that kind of shows all the little lines that are on the apple's skin kind of pinching into this one point. So I'm going to transform this now. I want to make it a little bigger. I just hit Command T to transform this layer. And as you can see, we can modify all kinds of scale and sizes. But if you hit control, you can switch to all other kinds of modifiers. And I've selected warp. Really like this when it divides it into nine sections, gives you a ton of control over all the little adjustments that you can make to the shape. I noticed that right side had a really smooth arc on the reference photo, so I wanted to change that just a little bit. And I think that's better. You can see kind of a nice before and after that really changes the whole shape of it. Just hitting Command Z to undo. And up next, let's do a little more fine tuning. I've hit Command Shift X, which brings up this super cool liquefy function. And as you can see, guys, with this, you can use a big brush or shrink it to a smaller brush to do all these really fine adjustments to the line. This is the artist's best friend. You can fine tune anything at a project. Even if you get to the very end, and there's something not quite right about it. Liquefy can save the day, make everything just right. I think that's close enough. It doesn't really matter if we copy it perfectly. This is just a nice exercise. So next, we're going to use this line drawing to block this shape in. And what I've done is select the magic wand tool and select the outside of this shape. So out in this white space on the exterior, I go to select and inverse or Command Shift E, and now it's switched to the inside. So now I have a selection that fits that sketch perfectly, and what I'm going to do is fill that in on a new layer. So with my medicine dropper tool, I've grabbed that dark value on the reference photo, and I'll hit Option Delete. And that's how we fill it in just like that. Option Delete fills in the foreground color. So I'm going to make a copy of my sketch layer just as a safety net, and then I'm going to merge this sketch and this new blocked in silhouette that we've created. So I can see the indication of that indentation, but I've also got it so faint that it won't really get in the way of our value painting. I'm going to darken the background to match the reference photo a little bit more, but mostly to give us a good base to do our value painting. I'm using the smudge tool just to sort of brush out a few rough edges on that perimeter. I've renamed my silhouette layer, and gosh, we're ready to start adding some value. So, before I start adding tones, I'm going to switch to this chalk brush. This one gives it a really nice painterly feel. You can see the settings here, but this is one of the brushes that is available for download. Any brush practically works for this, even that default round. But if we command click the silhouette layer, it gives a selection. So we can paint within this apple shape with no fear of going outside the line. So always inside the lines when you've got that selection made. Even though you don't see the marching inch right now, I just hit Command H to hide them, but we are selected here. So I've started adding in some values. Notice I'm sampling them from that reference photo. When you have your brush tool selected, all you have to do is hit Option, and it turns to the medicine dropper tool. Unbelievably time saving shortcut there. You can always just grab values from anywhere on the page and just kind of pick them up and lay them down all with the brush tool and the press of a key. So remember, we build up our values from dark to light with the number of times that we tap. So these areas that are higher in value, I've tapped that light color more times. So we sort of build it up on that value scale that we talked about earlier in this course. That's how we get these lights on the light planes and the darks on the dark planes. Now, remembering the the elements that we need to have in every three dimensional value painting, right now, we're already developing a nice highlight midtone, core shadow, and I'm even starting to do a little bit of reflected light, bounce there on the bottom. So again, using the medicine opperTol to select that highlight, we have that really nice shiny, bright highlight right there on the lightest part of the apple. That really gives us a ton of information about the Apple's skin. All those little bumps, the sort of irregular shape of the highlight, really lets us know what the skin feels like, gives it a lot of texture information, really starts to make it feel real. And, guys, that's really the funnest part of this whole process is when these marks on the screen start transforming into something believable. I'm working in this transition area where light turns to dark. Notice there are a lot of little splotchy marks, both on the painting and on the reference photo. This is called the midtone and there's a ton of information there. We want that to be very visually active. There are all kinds of little bumps that are creating shadows and highlight planes. You want that midtone to be really visually active, like we see here, gives it a ton of realism. I'm going to put a nice hard value edge. I want a light edge to shine against that dark on this indentation area. We're going to have a ton of information. Now I'm switching to my smudge tool. We'll start refining things a little. This tool is a ton of fun to use. We're just sort of pulling all of these little tones around the page. And as you can see, it really starts making things look really polished and realistic, especially with all these little striations and lines on the apple's skin. We can really pull those linear shapes around with this smudge tool, and it starts making it look super realistic. It's a lot of fun to do. Sort of smooth things out, gives things a little more polish. Um, I tend to jump from the brush tool to the smudge tool really often in my own paintings, and I definitely recommend that technique. A ton of fun and a great way to get a really polished look without a whole lot of effort. So I'm going to do a little bit more of that refinement down here in the core shadow area. Again, want that mid tone area to have some nice visual activity, and that's looking really nice. So really, at this point, we're just starting to refine things. I think our values are pretty faithful to the reference photo. Certainly looking three dimensional and pretty realistic. So I'm going to start adding in a little bit of background information. So I'm using the gradient tool and I'm going to switch it to this mode, which applies the gradient in both directions. See that? It's kind of a good way to establish a horizon line, smooth gradients going up and down equally. So this is a pretty brightly lit floor, so I want that to be pretty bright. So next we need a core shadow, and I'm going to select our Marquee tool, switch it to the elliptical marquee, and we're just going to pull out a very broad ellipse, roughly in the shape of this reference photo shadow. And again, I filled that in with option delete. I'm going to run a few filters on this to make it look a little more realistic. The motion blur kind of blurs the outer edges, sort of drags it sideways, and then a Gaussian blur, which just universally makes it a little more fuzzy. The next thing we're going to do is add a layer mask. And with a gradient, I'm just going to mask away a little bit so that the shadow becomes less intense the farther away it gets from where the apple contacts the floor. So next, I've grouped everything and created a copy of the group so that I can merge my apple into one layer. This makes it easier to adjust. So we can adjust all those layers individually. We want them to be merged together. And I'm doing a little bit more transforming and warping, just like we did to the sketch. And it's looking pretty accurate to that reference photo. I'm smudging the outer edges very lightly with the smudge tool just to give it a little bit of a blur. Those sharp edges can really make a three dimensional object seem flat, so a good final polish step. But that's basically it, guys. You've now created your first digital painting. We've sketched in our rough forms, used photoshop tools to refine and transform things as needed, and then we used everything we've learned about value to make a convincingly three dimensional rendering of our reference object. 13. Tonal Landscape: For this project, let's do a landscape painting using a really powerful fundamental concept called atmospheric perspective. Basically, the short version of this is near objects in a landscape painting are darker and more detailed, and they get lighter in value as they recede into the distance. So our closest object will have our darkest value range, and we'll get lighter or more accurately, we'll get closer to the color of the sky as they go far away from us, just like we see in this graphic. We're going to do a landscape painting very much like that little test file that we just checked out. We're going to use darks in the foreground, and it's going to get lighter as it goes out into the distance, and it's going to create this really awesome sense of depth using that one really power fundamental concept of atmospheric perspective. There is a kind of fancy brush that I will share for this project as well if you want to, you don't have to, but this one's kind of fun because it gives this sort of foliage texture. It's really just like a pencil simulator, but it does a nice job of looking like little visually active leafy things. So I wanted to share that if you want to try this brush. There are all kinds of texture brushes that you can have as defaults in Photoshop or procreate that would do largely the same thing. Keep an eye on flow because if we have flow low, it makes this texture more pronounced, but if we crank it all the way up, it makes it more of a solid line. So depending on what kind of job I'm doing with these shapes, I will be dialing flow up and down with keyboard shortcuts. Okay, let's jump in. I have a layer created, and I'll name that foreground. I want this to be the thing that is closest to me. W flow at 100%, I'm just going to make a little hill. With the foreground, this is the area where our feet are planted. This is our viewpoint. We are looking out on this landscape world from this spot. So things are very close up. We can see individual blades of grass. I'm going to paint a big tree in the foreground, just to give us this nice framing thing to make our composition feel nice and anchored. So, cool. We're in the shade of this big tree trunk. Now, what I like to do from time to time is flip the canvas. I actually have a keyboard shortcut for this because I use it so much. Sometimes it just is easier to make brush strokes in a certain diagonal. Like, for me, it's much easier to paint in this diagonal, kind of low left to high right than try to switch my elbow around, and, you know, it's just a much more awkward angle to do that. So it's much easier to just flip the canvas and make life easy on yourself. It's also a nice thing to keep the canvas fresh. Whatever you're painting kind of looks new in your mind's eye if you do this regularly. But that is a good tree trunk. Let's lower flow to ten, and I'll start kind of brushing in some little leafy, bushy looking things, maybe even a bit of foliage above. Like there's a nice canopy. It'll give us some nice visual activity just to make this look leafy and kind of pleasant. Okay, I will turn my flow up again maybe around 80. And now I'll make a smaller brush. Again, with the bracket keys, I can make the brush bigger or smaller and I'll start making some little branches. Again, this brush has a nice little bit of texture and tooth to it. It kind of makes it look like there's a little bit of grain to this brushy stroke that we're making. I just kind of like that. It gives this a little more character than just a standard brush. But that's totally up to you. I think for the most part, brushes in general, digital painting app brushes, get a lot more credit than they deserve. Brushes can be held up as these magical things that just make a painting instantly awesome. And that's not really how it works. It's much more the technique and the concepts, the expressiveness. Much more important is the artist holding that stylus than the brush being used. So I do want to share these because brushes are fun to play with. They can give your project a little extra texture, a little something cool to hang on. But I just wanted to point that out that brushes are not a magic wand that make instantly beautiful paintings. They're a tool. And like any other tool, they are only as good as the hand holding them. Okay, cool. I think that is pretty much what I had in mind for the foreground. We've got a tree trunk. We've got some leaves, some branches. We can tell that this is a very near object. This is a big tree, but it looks like we're just a few feet away from it, and we can just reach out and touch it. That's what we want from this foreground layer. Okay, so next, let's create a new layer. Let's make sure it's below our foreground layer. Let's label this middle ground. Sure. And now this is important. I'm going to make a slightly lighter gray. Because since this is behind the tree, we want this to be a lighter color. We want it to be like a hill that's a little farther away. So let's do that. I'll just start coloring in, basically, just filling in this area with tone. And at this point, this is when I can always start to really feel the power of this. It's like I can envision this entire space just at this point. Because this color is lighter than the foreground black, it pushes this hill back a little bit, which is just awesome. Okay, let's make some trees over on Yonder Hill with first by making a few trunks. This is totally a Bob Ross technique of just making little Z shaped marks, starting at the top of a little tree trunk and kind of getting wider as it goes down. Hope there are some Bob Ross fans watching this. The guy is my hero, and I still watch him on YouTube constantly. Any kind of tree shape that you want to make with any brush will work. Kind of just an indication that we're after. And the scale is important. Over here, we can see the base of a trunk, but on this hill, we can't really. It's becoming more of a whole tree that we are seeing. We can see the basic shape of the entire tree from top to bottom. But we're not seeing quite as much detail, not as many individual limbs and sticks and blades of grass. I'm going to add in some of those just to give this a little bit of detail, but not as much. The amount of information that we show should decrease the farther away that we get until finally, if we're looking at some really distant object, it shouldn't have much visible detail at all. It should be vague and far away because that's kind of how things are the way we perceive them in nature. If we try to detail everything to the nth degree on a painting, it ends up not working. This is a lesson that was really hard for me to learn. I used to put just maximum hours and effort into every visual painting, every digital painting. They ended up looking kind of dead and uninteresting. There just was something not working. And it's because I was over detailing. Everything on the canvas just was so detailed that it all just sort of faded into white noise. So this is a way that we can show our viewer what is near and what is far. It's how we can sort of play art director with our work and show them where we want their attention to go. It's all really cool, and it's also nice just because you don't have to render everything for three days. You can just kind of spend that real artistic horsepower on the stuff that matters most. Really that selling point that you want your viewer to pay attention to. So a little advanced art wisdom, something that took me years to figure out for myself, and you'll probably have to kind of learn that lesson painfully, too. But hopefully you'll remember this project. Okay, so a pretty decent little stand of trees kind of on the middle distance hill. I've implied some little rocks and stuff. Silhouettes are so powerful. It's amazing how much information you can communicate just by suggesting a thing or two here and there. It's really powerful. The more we can, you know, create in our viewers mind by just suggesting rather than trying to detail everything to death, the better. Good thing about having these things layered too is that you can make changes. You can move things around if you want your composition to change. Maybe I want these trees pointing more towards the canopy, or let's say, I'll go back in history. I can hit Command T to free transform and make this bigger. I can change the scale. If I hit control while in free transform, I really like using warp to stretch things around just to see if there's more energy I can work in incredibly powerful. But actually, I think that's pretty nice, so we will leave that as it is. Let's make one more layer back. I'll just call it distance. And just like before, we're going from foreground is at the top of the stack. Middle ground will now be in the middle appropriately, and distance will be farther back. And of course, since we're moving back in distance, we raise our value. So once again, check it out. We have this lighter value that just pushes this way back into the distance. That just always blows my mind how much that really looks like a hill. And just like before, we're going to take another step down in detail. I'm going to make these kind of a vague implication of a tree line off in the distance. We can just see the tops of the trees, kind of like we're looking at just a tree lined hill. And because we see less, it pushes this back into the distance even more. Amazing. And so easy. I, you know, this is real time. We're just minutes in. And this is feeling like such a fully realized landscape. As a professional concept artist, efficiency is absolutely critical. I have really gotten used to just finding quick and easy ways to communicate ideas really easily. And this is one of the best ones. This kind of atmospheric perspective, tonal landscape is huge. I have used this 1 million times in professional work, and it's great because it communicates an idea. It gets the point across to your art director, to your team. Really easily of the idea that you're having. So if you want to do something other than just, you know, basic tree landscape, please do. This is just to show you a concept. If you want to stretch out creatively, I absolutely encourage that. Let's make one more far away tier, and I'll just call it mountains. Once again, we put that layer below this one and once again, raising the value. And let's make this just a massive mountain. Something where we are seeing no tree detail at all, really. We're just seeing this colossal peak towering in the distance, very dramatic. And there we go. That's the easiest one because there is practically no detail. You can easily adjust the shape. You know, what kind of mountain do you want this to be? How many peaks, how many little valleys, it's all up to you. And, of course, we can transform this, too, with Command T and warp just to stretch it around. Maybe we want this to kind of run out of the canvas. Totally up to you. But it's a very powerful way to create a few different tiers of depth to sort of let your viewers see what's near, what's far. It's awesome. Now, one other thing that I like to do in this kind of painting, and I will switch to a standard round brush, the most basic Photoshop brush there is, is we can make the bottom of these layers a little bit lighter. So I'm going to lock the transparency or we can just command click on the pixels to make sure that we're only painting within this layer. But locking does it. I will use white for this. We're just going to paint some mist. So with a very soft brush, I'll turn hardness all the way down so that we essentially have an airbrush, and I'll turn flow very low as well. 10% might even be too much, but let's see. Just going to spray in some very slightly lighter tones near the bottom of each of these. It gives the sense of mist. That's another really powerful thing we can do with atmospheric perspective is make it look like there's fog between each layer. Isn't that cool? It just makes it look a little farther away. We can make it seem like this hill is sort of disappearing out into the distance. It makes it seem a little bit mysterious, kind of lets the viewer imagine what is out there. It's really fun and just really atmospheric. So we want to do that a little bit less with each step closer that we get, but I think we can still do it a little with this middle distance one. And then maybe kind of not at all on the foreground. But I think that's really effective. That's basically the project. If you can master this idea of atmospheric perspective where near objects are dark and detailed, and objects get lighter and sort of more vague and less detailed as they recede into the distance. It's incredibly powerful and it opens up huge new worlds. Believe it or not, this fundamental concept is the basis for even very complex bits of concept art like this cyberpunk cityscape that I just did. It seemed really complex, but I promise you, it's all built on this very core principle. I hope you enjoy that. I hope you can really feel the power of this. 14. Character Art: Hey, guys, let's finish with one more really cool project. This is going to be coloring in some line art for a cool character. So if you have your own character art, feel free to use this. Follow the same steps. Or if you just want some practice with this coloring technique, feel free to use my line art. Once again, very similar to the Stegosaurus project, I have the line art on its own layer, and we just have a blank background layer beneath. So that's our basic setup. And once again, just like the Stegosaurus, Well, we're going to start by blocking this entire silhouette in so that we have the interior of the character blocked out. So I'll use the magic wand tool to select the outside of the character. And also notice there are some extra shapes here. This little crook of her arm and the sword makes this negative shape, and there's another little triangular one here that her hair makes. We need to select that as well. So just like with the Lasso tool, if you hold down Shift, a little plus sign appears next to the magic wand tool. So we want to do another selection with that plus for that shape and this one. Okay, great. Now we truly have everything outside of this character selected. So once again, we go to select Inverse, and we now have a selection of the inside. I will create a new layer and I'll name that base, I guess, and this is pretty arbitrary, but we'll just fill it in with a color. I've picked this pale cyan, and if I hit Option Delete, it fills her in. So cool, we're in good shape. We have the base blocked in. I can command click this anytime I want to color within the lines. So if I make another layer to paint a color for her jacket, for example, I don't have to carefully try to color within the lines. I can just command click this base layer and I get a nice clean selection so I can do this really quickly without having to go to great pains to stay within the lines. Now, this project is going to be a little more involved than the Stegosaurus, but very similar. The main difference, the thing that adds complexity here is that we have a lot of different materials to color. It's like, we're going to need to use a lot of different crayons in the box to have her skin and her hair and the medal of the sword and her clothing. There are a lot of different materials that we're going to have to color. We're going to do each one on a new layer so that we can change the colors at the end if we want to. So this number of layers is going to get big, but don't worry about that. That's all just part of it. Let's start with skin for our next one. Since I've already created that new layer, I will just name it skin, and we'll make her Caucasian. I'll go for kind of a yeah, kind of a light Caucasian skin tone, something like that. But there is, you know, wide open creativity here. Now, I have a round brush selected, and my flow is at about 60. I am being pretty careful here to color within the lines. This is really, it's literally like a coloring book. When you were a kid, you have to sort of just take your time and keep it within the lines. If I have a little bobo where I go outside of a certain material, I just use the eraser tool, which is E on your keyboard. And I just kind of whittle that away. Taking our time with this step where we're kind of blocking in each material just because it's the best way to keep this looking clean and professional. That's what we want from this. We want a nice crisp look where each material is defined pretty, you know, correctly, pretty right on the line and within its boundaries. We don't want this to look too messy because I think that's part of the beauty of these is having that nice crisp, professional look at the end. And it just takes some patience. This is one of those parts of this job where you just sort of have to do it. So turn on some music, put yourself in the zone however you like to to kind of get into a peaceful art vibe and just kind of patiently do these individual delineation. And there's not really much to it. With that base blocked in, I can command click anytime so that I don't have to worry about going outside of the border of the character. That makes life very easy. And we just kind of add steps. We add new materials. Anytime there's a new part of this character that we want to have filled in, we can. We just add a new layer so that it stays organized. Let's do one more, and then I don't want this to get super redundant with all of the materials that I'm doing, so I may skip ahead in the tutorial, but I definitely want you guys to get the main idea here. It's just basically taking your time, zooming in if you have to. Remember, you don't have to lean in to look at the screen. You can bring the screen closer to you. This part that I'm coloring, actually, it looks like I designed that to be more of like a leather wrap. So I may I may go over that when I do leather. In fact, maybe I'll show the leather step as my next material just so that we're not skipping too much. I always want these tutorials to be comprehensive. Like, you don't miss a step or anything. But this is sort of repetitive, and I also don't want to just bore you guys to tears. Okay, let's make one more leather. And yeah, kind of a brown, I think will work. But again, the awesome part of all this is that it is infinitely changeable. In fact, let's jump to her skin right now. And if I go to image adjustments, hue saturation or simply Command you, I can make her, you know, we can go avatar. We can do whatever we want here. So it's all super editable and reworkable. In fact, I kind of like that slightly paler look by raising the lightness. So really, all we are doing is delineating right now. We're not committing to any of these colors at all. It's just sort of filling in and isolating each individual material. So leather, where it's supposed to be leather, you know, as far as our design seems, and, you know, skin tones, just picking out each individual material and tracing it and filling it in. I think this grip can also be leather, so we will sort of while we're at it, just fill that in too. And let's see. Yeah, I think that looks good. It also gives the sword a little bit of variation so that it's not just one note. It looks like it's got different stuff going on. I like that. So hopefully you can kind of see where this is heading. We're on our way. It's just a process of defining each material and trying to do kind of a crisp job so that it all looks clean and everything is where it belongs. Very nice. And finally, these well, this belt, too, it looks leathery. And these boots, for sure, it's kind of nice. It's like all the fun of a coloring book where you get to see something taking shape, but it's all you've got all these digital tools to make it really well done. Like, you can color perfectly within the lines in a way you only dreamed of as a kid, and it just works. One thing before I skip ahead that I really want to point out is that the layer order does make a difference here. So, for example, if I decided, oh, I just noticed that there is a metal buckle on top of the leather. So I could move metal above leather. But as you can see, what that did is now the leather I have on top of this metal, we can't see it. So if you run into little puzzles like that where it seems like things aren't adding up. All you have to do is just make another one. I'll just do metal two. I mean, it's just that simple. And now I'm free to add in these little buckles, which I think these little coloring details really do make a difference, even when they're very small and even a little bit tough to see. Like, if we do steel toe boots, for example, it also lets me clean up a few slightly messy margins there. But that's the basic idea. If you need to edit something, just create a new layer with Photoshop, especially, there's no limit on how many layers you can do. So if it will make your life easier, just go for it. Super easy. Okay, I'll skip ahead a little bit and just have the rest of this basically blocked in, and we'll take the next steps from there. Okay, cool. I've got this pretty much completely blocked in. I've added color for her hair, for the cloak, and the pants, and I think it looks pretty good. Now, remembering our lecture on color theory, complimentary colors tend to look good next to each other. So I have very deliberately gone with a lot of warm kind of orange hue colors here. And at the moment, it makes this look very one note. It seems like it's kind of all one thing. It's very brown. But what that does is it gives us an opportunity for some really nice contrast. If you remember your color wheel, things on the orange side of the color wheel are compliments with blue. I'm going to look for some areas to add in some blue pop. First, I'm going to do that with the eyes. So let's do a different color on top of the skin layer for the whites of the eyes. But for the actual irises themselves, I'll call this eye color. Let's try something very bluish. Let's really make these eyes pop against the orange and brown elsewhere in the image. Might even make those brighter and more saturated. There we go. We're onto something there. I think that looks pretty cool. One other thing that I wanted to point out is the hairline isn't really defined by lines. It's sort of left without lines. And I think that's a good look. What I like to do with this is this is the one area where I like to smudge the margin a little bit. So if I use my smudge tool and just kind of kind of polish that back and forth, maybe smudge a few little individual strands, it just gives a nice sense of texture, and it gives us sort of a nice soft landing between hair and skin. One little bit of polish I wanted to point out. Okay, what else can we do to add some blue to this to kind of balance out all of these very warm colors? One thing I thought is that this wrap on the back here, we could make that something other than just brown like the rest of the leather. Maybe we can make that a blue thing, too. So if I just select this part of the leather layer and hit Command U, I can do a hue saturation adjustment on this specific part. Which I really like. It gives us this little bit of something different. With those two steps, I'm already feeling a good bit of balance. It's feeling a lot more interesting. It's got some color dynamics going on. Let's take this further. Let's take this one color cloak and add some accents to it. Sometimes fantasy style clothing like this has some really nice detail work on the cloth, it's woven like a tapestry. I'm doing some little rough spun edge work on this scarf part. Maybe it's knitted or something. Maybe there's some weaving here. It just gives me a nice little bit of blue accent. I'm just doing this free hand with individual brushstrokes. This is one way to do this. Just kind of do it loosely and see if you can come up with something nice, and I think this is working quite well. I will continue this out to the edge, I think, but I'm sort of just experimenting here. I kind of like the loose hand wrought look here. Let's maybe do a little more of this stuff here. And it just gives this s of brown, a little bit of interest, something to kind of jump off of. Maybe a little bit of line work to anchor that. And notice I turned smoothing way up because I wanted this to be a very steady, smoothly arcing line, not have any wobble if my hands are feeling, you know, less than perfectly steady today. Smoothing is there to kind of hold your hand through it, which I love. Cool. I think that is coming a long way, but what else can we do here? Maybe we can do a bit of a pattern along this. For this, I want to show you a few photoshop tricks on how to get a more geometrically precise pattern. This is really cool. So if we just make one kind of arcing line, maybe something like that. Okay, I'm going to copy this by dragging this layer down to the plus sign, and I will now move it over just a little bit. There we go. I have now where there was one line now there is two and I will select these two layers and hit Command E to merge. Now it's one thing. Now I'm going to just repeat that process. Copy the layer, use the move tool, which is V for your keyboard shortcut and move it over a little bit, and then copy. So you see how we're kind of multiplying. It's like one becomes two, two becomes four, and we just keep merging that and then copying it. It's this repetitive process. But as you can see, you can very quickly go from a single mark to this whole pattern, this whole array of marks really quickly. And the possibilities are limitless. I mean, there's all kinds of different patterns we could make. And if I just hold down shift, I can make straight lines that kind of anchor these. And it just looks like this nice sort of woven pattern that I really like. But of course, this doesn't really fit the shape of this cloth or anything. So we are going to well, first, I'm going to make a copy of this so that I have the original in case I totally mess this up. But if we go to free transform Command T, I can rotate this and move it a little bit. That's already pretty close to fitting, actually. It's not perfect, though. So I'll hit return to kind of lock that transformation in. But if I hit Command T again, this time I'm going to hit Control and bring up warp. This lets me bend these little edges around a little bit. I can make this thing seem like it's round, like it kind of curves around this far side, and it gives the whole cloak more dimension. It just makes it seem round, a really powerful thing. You can use surface details to communicate volume and texture. I'll simply erase away these parts that are outside of the line. You could use a mask and hide those. There's never just one way to do something with digital painting, which is really cool. But I think these two little accent bits really help. Awesome. I think our general coloring job of this character is pretty much done. So what we're going to do is one last polish step, really, is add some volume. Let's do one of those multiply layers to add shadows like we did with Stegosaurus. So I've created a new layer just underneath line art. Actually, I'll put this at the top. It can be on top of linear. I'm going to name that shadow. Now, I will command click our base silhouette so that I have a selection of the entire character's shape, and I will fill that in with a cool grayish blue. This usually works quite well. And you guess it, we're going to set that to multiply. So what this does is now it makes the entire character look like she is in shadow, kind of like nighttime mode. But what we're going to do is selectively hide that mask so that we can show highlight. Basically, it's like this. We're having high light and shadow on certain parts of her. It creates dimension. It casts a light source on her. What I'm noticing right off the bat, though, is that the shadow is way too strong. So I'm going to lower the opacity quite a bit. I want it to be something that is there, but it's not super noticeable, if that makes sense. A little mask use refresher is if the mask is all white, then the mask the layer will be completely revealed. If the mask is all black, then everything is hidden. I might actually work from a completely hidden mask and paint with white to sort of add shadow, if that makes sense. I don't want too much of this character to be in shadow. I just want little bits. So I am going to do it this way. That way, I'm not painting out giant percentages of the painting. I'm just kind of doing it on the parts that I think need it, if that makes sense. So it's sort of which parts of this image, this character would be in shadow. This handle would be kind of dark. The fingers and the blade or the handle would be casting some shadows on this part of her glove. It's sort of a figure out where the shadows would go, kind of a challenge. It's really fun, too. It's like Making this pretty flat cell shaded looking approach to coloring a character into something that looks much more polished, much more finished, much more professional. You can really spend some time making every wrinkle of clothing have some of this accent. I find that Less is more is a really good rule of thumb with these just because your viewer can kind of just get a sense of what you're trying to show them and then connect the dots a little bit in their own mind, the result is usually better. So Less is Me, I think, is very much a good rule to follow here. Looks like this part of the blade would be sort of sharpened, so there's a plane that's facing a different way. Her cloak is likely casting a bit of a shadow, and anytime there's a far arm or leg, we can just leave that totally in shadow. It's really cool. I'm going to bring smoothing back down just because some of these brushstrokes feel like they're dragging a little bit. It feels better. But you get the idea. It's just figuring out where shadows are. Which planes of these structures are facing away from this light source, which I imagine to be kind of here, sort of up into the left a little bit. A little bit of shadow under her nose, but not too much. I find if you like, overshade a face, it can start looking very sinister, very fast. So be especially restrained when adding shadows to the face, especially on a female character or a kid. If it's a man, specifically an older man or somebody who you want to look kind of hard and tough or weathered, you, you know, go nuts. You can't over render that. But if it's not that use some restraint, fins it a little bit, save those steps for those grizzled old men characters or old warriors. Notice I am kind of doing some midtone work where I pull some shadows into the light zones, and I do the opposite. I pull some light off into the shadows, and it just makes these little bits of detail. It adds so much information. I love that. And it's especially fun to see what an impact those tiny little moves can have on the overall effect. It's disproportionately powerful for how little work it is, and I love that. Okay, a little more shading on the bottom of this boot. We can fine tune this all day, so noodle these things and really finesse them to your preference. But for now, I just want to show you the main idea and then just turn you loose. Hopefully that gets the point across. One last bit of polish is just like with the Segosaurus. We can do a bit of highlighting. I don't want to do too much of that. I just want it to maybe affect the shininess of the metal. So I will once again command click. Let's fill in maybe with something a little lighter like this. Okay, filling it in. And I'll set that to something like overlay. Yeah, I think that's about right. And add a mask, fill it with black so that this mask is hiding all of that shiny overlay. Alright, so now when I paint white on this overlay, it will reveal this fun little highlight. And I can just add some little gleams to anywhere that I want this metal texture to really shine or we can add little scratches to make the metal seem textured. All kinds of fun ways to just communicate that metallic look. Maybe on these belt buckles, I can add a little sheen or on the steel toe of the boot, we can make it seem like it's metallic. Little details like that can really go a long way. Maybe a tiny bit of highlight on the hair. Actually, I really like that more than I thought I would. It makes it seem more shiny and like it has luster to it. Cool. Final bit of polish. And again, just like on the Stegosaurus, this is kind of an optional thing. We're going to do one of those bloomy glows. So if I set this new layer to lighten and then airbrush in or use a gradient to kind of make a little glow, it can give you a nice little atmospheric bit of drama to make your character seem important. It's sort of like she's standing in front of a sunset or something. It just adds instant drama. We're going to add a cast shadow at the bottom. Super optional, but let's go ahead and take this one all the way to the finish line. With the radial gradient, I then free transform and just squash it, and I'll put this little circular soft shadow somewhere under her feet and reduce the opacity pretty low. Just something that's there, but not super distinct. Maybe I'll change the shape of this a bit with one of these free transform tools and make it kind of fit. Want it to be solidly underfoot here. Guys, that's about it. We have a really nicely polished, very crisply colored character, and this is a very efficient way to work. One final thing I want to point out is that at this phase, even after all this work we've done, any of these individual layers can be changed. So if I go to the cloak, for example, and hit Command U, I can make it neon pink. We can make it anything, and that multiply shading will still apply. Now, I don't specifically want to do that, but I just wanted to point out that you still have tons of options here. As a concept artist, this is incredibly efficient because what it lets you do is show your client multiple looks. We have designed this character, but let's say we want to show our client that she could have five different hairstyles, a bunch of different clothing options. It lets them see a lot of value, and you really only did the rendering once. So incredibly efficient and useful. Hope you find that helpful and I hope you have a final product that you're really excited about. 15. Recap: Congratulations, my fellow artists. You have completed digital art fundamentals. I hope you got some results that you really love, and I hope you're starting to see the power that this medium and that these core principles can unlock. You are formally invited to join the DPS Discord community. It's this really cool and supportive place where you can share work and get feedback. You can network with other artists, and you can participate in live events. I'm always lurking around there to join artist hangouts. So definitely check this out. It's free. Free is my YouTube channel. I'm constantly making new content, tutorials, demos, art challenges, even live stream, a lot of cool stuff to learn there, or just chill and watch a fun painting take shape. If you want to take some more serious art education next steps, if you want to start digging into specific art topics, check out the Skill Builder package. It is an affordable monthly subscription that gives you access to a huge suite of courses on how to design and paint pretty much everything, characters, creatures, machines, environments, how to paint people, faces, figures, pretty much everything. So this is perfect for artists looking to take that next step, starting to dabble in something a little more serious. And finally, if you are looking for professional level skills, if you are trying to get hired in the industry, definitely check out my 12 week mentorship Concept Art Academy. This is my master program. It's designed to make artists valuable and hirable to art directors. P level design skills and an entire painting module that will show you how to render with style and realism. In fact, if you liked the value rendering exercise that we did in this course, that actually came from the Concept Art Academy, exercise library, where I have a how to step by step on how to paint pretty much everything. Are weekly live classes. There's an exclusive design house community just for students enrolled in this program, where you'll get constant interaction and feedback from me. This program really works. Alums are launching careers, but we keep class sizes very small. So grab a seat if this sounds like it's for you. I'll link all of these resources, but if you have any questions, just contact us at digital painting studio.com. Helping artists is how I like to spend my days, so don't hesitate. That's it for now, guys. Good luck with your artwork. Paint something cool today.