Digital Coloring Workshop

1. Introduction: Hey, guys, I'm Ed Fechuk and welcome to my how to color digitally course. Now, this one's a little bit different than some of my other courses. This one was taken from a workshop I did with my students, and so it's a little abridged, a little short, but very intense. I think you'll like that. I think what this course does is take you through a little bit of a crash course in the art of digital coloring. If you've ever wanted to learn how to use that app on your iPad or the tablet you've got or anything like that, now is the time. I will teach you from the basics 2. Page Setup: All right. So what we're going to do is get into it. And I'm going to keep an eye. I know this is live, so I'm keeping an eye on the comments and I'm going to try to answer questions and stuff when we get into it. We're going to joke around a little bit. Today, I am not endorsing Pepsi. Today, I am endorsing whatever the hell I've got to miss, and that's my mystery juice. I'm not going to tell you. Alright, so we've got a bigger screen here. You know what? I think I could go even smaller. There you go. Yep. I think that's perfect. So what am I going to do here? Huh? Well, I'm going to drag a file over. Let's take a look at this file. Damn. That's some kick *** work. I wonder who did that. Who the hell would draw something so amazing? Who would draw something that amazing? Alright, it's Clayton. Um, it looks fantastic. He sent me over this, this sketch sample that he did a little while ago in a workshop, and I've decided to riff on it for this live workshop. I am going to do something here, though, and the reason I got Clayton to send this to me is because he's like, Do you want me to clean it up? Do you want me to have cleaner lines on it? Do you want anything? I'm like, No. If anything, I kind of wish it was a little sketchier and rougher because of what I'm going to show you guys here, right? So, first off, I'm going to open up a new document. And roughly the same proportions with a resolution of a minimum 300 DPI. Now, I could bump that around to 350. If I'm going for a big print job, like, this is going to be a poster that I'm going to print for my comicon or something like that, I might go higher 600 DPI or something, but I'll admit something to you. My IMAC has been struggling in the last year or so. And so I work within what it lets me work within and stuff, right? So I think I'm going to set a DPI 300 and do a basic color expression here, right? Nothing else. Nothing strange. Nice and simple. And for those who don't know, if we look up in the top corner, it's kind of almost clipped a little bit, kind of pointing that away. I'm working in Clip Studio Paint. But a lot of these approaches, lessons, whatever. They'll translate into various different programs that you're working on. I just realize I'm not looking at the comments at all, so I should pop over and just check it out. Hey, Arthur's in. Nice. Welcome, man. Okay. Okay, so now that I've got this blank canvas, I'm going to grab the sample that I was given. I'll just select it all, copy it, and bring it into my blank canvas. It's a pretty good size, matches up, proportional. Good stuff. Okay, so you can see I've got in the bottom, right, I've got my layers. I've got my blank paper in the bottom. I've got my line sample from Clayton, and then I've got a working layer on top of that. What I'm actually going to do is move this line sample up to the top. Usually, when I'm coloring digital, 90% of the layers that I'm going to be coloring with are going to be under my line art, okay? That means or below my line art, however phrasing we want to use here or whatever, right? So bear in mind, that's kind of my approach right now, right? Okay, so I've got color sample or clay sample here, and I've got these lines, and let's take a look at the lines. This is not vector art, right? This is not the type of clean lines that I might be able to blow up and shrink for logo work or anything like that. You can see a lot of pixelization rasterization here in these lines. And that's perfect because that's how most of the time when I'm coloring, this is what I've got to deal with, right? So that's what I'm going to show you how to deal with this. 3. Flats: So there's a few approaches that I want to show of how to deal with this, okay? First one is going to be using the fill bucket. Now, Hmm. Trying to think of how I want to what I want to start with here. What I want to do is on the layer section here, I'm going to hit the little light the little lighthouse thing or whatever that signifies that this layer is going to be my line layer is going to be the layer that I reference everything towards and stuff like that. So whenever I'm selecting things or anything like that, it's going to be looking at this line layer and saying, Okay, that's what we're referencing off of. Just in case I'm not on that layer for my selections and stuff, that's what that should help me with, right? But I'm going to show you something with the fill bucket tool that will kind of explain why I don't always use it or anything. So I'm just going to grab a blue here. And this is not what I'm going to do, but I'm going to do it anyways. I'm going to show you if I was to use my fill bucket tool and I can come over here and just going to look in my tool properties and stuff, I could see the tolerance, the closed gap, the area scaling and stuff, referring to I'm going to refer to the lighthouse over here. So everything should be roughly working, right? And so I'm going to fill this cape. Let's see how that works. Oh, but I made a mistake. Before I do that. I've got to come to my line layer and throw it on multiply so I can see through this stuff. Okay? Now, coming back to my layer, you can see I filled the cape, filled the cape, filled the cape, fill the cape, and I could even hold it down and try to fill this cape. And you can see I'm kind of holding down and filling this cape with blue, right? And this can sometimes work can sometimes work really well. Do you think it's working well? There's a problem. Look at all these white spots, right? This is where it gets really frustrating. So if I'm going to use the fill bucket, what I often find is sometimes I have to kind of go and select inside here, kind of fill this section or whatever, right? And then that gets rid of all that ugly white little missed parts and stuff. Does this work? Does the fill bucket work? Yes. Do I love it? No. I'll occasionally use it in my process, but it can also it has a massive drawback. So you see how quick that was? I can see if I can do it even quicker. I could just boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. Hoo. I think I went out that lines. That I did. You know, I can use it. ****, did it again. Trying to see where the actual There we go. Okay. So is this fun and easy? Yes, it actually is kind of fun and easy, right? But there's a lot of chance for things messing up with it. So I don't necessarily love it, so I'm going to junk that for right now. I'm gonna create another layer, and I'm going to say for this layer, I'm going to call it my flats. And this is how I'm actually going to do this, okay? So when I'm coloring a figure like this, I want to separate it often from the background. And the easiest way I've found is selecting around the figure. There's two ways to do that. There's the magic wand, and with the magic wand, I want to click on Apply connected pixels only. So that means I'm going to be selecting everything that is not this figure. I want to select around the figure, right? Anything that's not the figure. And this can get a little hairy, literally, I have to come in here. Start to add to the selection, selecting the hair here, you know, and this could take a little discerning. I'm trying to figure out which parts are actually hair here. Hard to tell sometimes, right? I don't know what Clayton's got in his mind. Maybe that's not hair. Maybe it was. Hard to tell. That's okay. There's this little clip here. Anywhere else? No, it looks like roughly that's where not the figure is, right? Okay. So what I'm going to do is if I select like that, I can see that everything's dancing around the edge here, right? You can see how my selection is dancing around the edge. I like it, but when I fill, there's going to be a little bit of legacy pixels that are picked up from this, right? So what I'm going to do is expand, click on here and expand my selection by one pixel and just see how that looks. Oh, there you go. Now, so my selection brought myself more into the line there, okay? It brought myself more into line. And that's what I want, because when you're dealing with this rough line art and everything like that, you don't want to be partially into it. You'll show up those legacy whites or legacy whatever colors are hanging out and stuff like that. So you want to be more into the line art. And I could even expand one more and see if I like that more. Yeah, maybe. It might get kind of ugly around the hair here. Let's see. Yeah. No, m, n. Let's try that. So what do I have selected again? I've got everything selected, but the figure, right? So I'm going to inverse the selection. I'm going to inverse that selection. And now in my flats, I'm going to pick kind of a gray tone here and I'm going to fill. Now I'm going to take the selection off and just say, Okay, what am I missing here? Did I mess up on anything? Number one thing I can tell is it also selected this signature. So I'm going to cut that out. I don't want that. And my magnetic glass, so I'm going to turn off for a second year. That's a different lesson for a different day. New feature on Clip Studio Paint, the magnetic lasso. Kind of interesting. Can't say I love it, but Okay, so I'm just going to kind of snoop around and see if there's anything any legacy stuff that I don't like. I think these are individual hairs, and I think they should have been not in this selection. So what I'm going to do is actually take my Lasso tool and come in here and select. So this is almost like drawing. There we go. And I'm going to get rid of that. I kind of go around and make sure that, like I said, everything that is colored on this flat should be. And anything that I should be seen through to see the background behind, I should be able to see. Right now? Damn. Actually, that looks pretty good. It's workable. Right now, this is a basic flat background for this character without any actual colors to it or whatever. But this here is what I'm going to work off of. So before I go any further, I'm going to hit Save. Because how many times have we been in a project? And I'll just write. Uh my workshop. Yeah. So I want to make sure I save just in case my computer crashes in case things mess up, whatever it is, at certain stages, save, save. Okay. Arthur, hope you're holding onto this and anybody else who joins, guys. I'm not going super fast here. This is a nice smooth lesson into digital color. Okay. So now that I've got this, I've shown you how to use the Lasso tool. I've shown you how to use that Sorry, how to use the magic wand and the Lasso, right? I've got this flats. I could do a few things off this flat, but what I'm going to do is create a new layer. I'm going to go layer layer settings, clip to layer below. I would advise you put it into hot keys. But what that does, it means that anytime now that I'm drawing on this layer or coloring, it will not show anything else other than it's clip to this flat layer, right? So I can go like this and it's just only going to color on that figure. And that's what I want, right? I want everything to be based off of that one flat character layer. So now that I've got this, what's the fastest way to progress, right? Like what's the fastest way I can get in here and get everything going the way I want? Well, like I said, earlier, one is the bucket tool. I'm going to give this guy kind of a reddish cape. So I'm going to do the bucket tool. And remember, with this, I've got the lighthouse reference for my line art. I'm just going to see what this does. Okay. Mm. We can see there's some bleed over, not necessarily loving all of that. But it's not horrible. And at this point, I'm often looking for, what is the quickest way to get things done? The bucket tool is bloody quick. It's got problems with it, but it's still super quick. So we're trying different techniques so I can show you a few different ways. And like I said, when in doubt, clean it up, and I'm not doing a good job cleaning here, I'll zoom in later and clean it up a lot. But get rid of those whites. You do not want those whites. So whether you clean up with taso if that's what you feel you're relatively fast with, right? And I'm decently fast here. And these are decently clean lines, but not crazy clean lines, right? Or if you feel like even just coming in with a little pen and just touching things up, these little sometimes you get these tiny little spots that you feel like, Oh, I can just come in here with my pen and touch things up a little bit, right? Do that, too. This is trying to give you different options for you to explore with your workflow. Huh? There we go. So you can see if I take the line away. Ah, that's a good way to check. See if there's still some of those legacy annoying little white spots left, right? So that's another way is to get rid of that line layer, come in, clean them up this way. And like I said, you could either do it with a pen or with a selection tool. Now, one thing that's helped me here is Clayton has closed a lot of his lines. I'm not sure if you guys know what that means. Um, but closing the lines means, like, there's no open lines for when I'm filling, an example would be, and this is I hesitate to do this, but I'm just going to do it quick. I Clayton, for example, had left this part open, when I'm filling, it might spill into this area, right? So you've got to be careful about when you're inking and everything like that or when you're drawing to try to close out most of your major forms and stuff, right? It just helps you in the long run, helps you as you flow through things. So that's I think I've kind of done Ah, okay. Lost my color. So how do I get it back? Well, one, I jumped to the right layer. But I've messed up here, right? Where's my color? There we go. And if I didn't have it, all I have to do is grab my color picker, grab it, and I've got it again. Okay. So now I've got to decide on the look for him as I'm just reading through, any questions? No. Oh, the gaps in is ponytail all hair, too. Don't. See? I missed some of that. Oh, well, okay, well, I'm sticking with how it is now. Okay, so now I can go in and I'm gonna give him blue jeans. Faded blue jeans. There we go. And my general process is the fill bucket tool. So I'll come in and do this. But like I said, instead, if you feel that coming around and doing something like this is your jam, if you have that nice patience for the steady line as I just draw around all of this, honestly, it's a really smart way to go about things. Then we know that everything inside of here is going to be totally filled, right? I don't have those stupid little white legacy things or anything like that, right? And I should almost show you guys. Let's see. So now, in Lasso Tool, I'm still getting used to this, but in Lasso Tool, they've added a magnetic part to it that Look at this. It's like you're drawing on this, and I'm just going to kind of come over here. And it helps to stick to the line. It's guiding my hand just a little bit to stick to line. And if I can show you something after you'll see when I am not on the line, I don't know if you caught it, but I'll maybe do it again and show you guys. When I'm not on the line, I kind of did this already, but let me zoom in a little bit better. So when I'm drawing this, it's that red when it stays on the line, but if I miss the line, it changes color. Okay? And if I go like, outside of a line, it changes color. So it's an indicator that I'm off the line and stuff like that. So that's one of the new functions that Clip Studio Paint released, I don't know. A couple of months ago, I think, with their version four, right? Okay. The other cool thing about, like I said, setting this that it doesn't that's its own layer and it's linked to the flats here is that when I'm dealing with something like this hair, what I can do is just give a big selection. And this is where that magnetic thing might piss me off. I'm kind of going out of bounds here and doing my own thing. But I'm doing this big selection, and I'm going to give him So blonde hair. Okay, so that did that. And notice how there's nothing up here because like I said, it's clipped and locked to that underlying that underlying layer, right? Okay, look at that. See that green that pops up there? That's pretty interesting. I'm still getting used to this clip studio paint new function when it comes to the Lasso tool, but it's an interesting guide. Okay. So I'm gonna give them, you know, a skin tone. There we go. And you know what? When it comes to sometimes smaller things, like, I might just come in and do it by hand. And you can see how that bleeds out, right? Like, I got to be a little bit have a little bit more finesse in what I'm doing here. There we go. His little eye patch, right? And I might lighten it for these little clips he's got going on. Do the whites of his eyes. Ah, I have no idea what this character is, so give him funky blue eyes. What I'm going to do is color pick his hair, and most people their eyebrow is a few shades darker than their hair. So that should roughly translate. Okay. Yeah, not great, but so far so good, right? So I'm going to come back in here, select these little bits. And when you zoom out and zoom back in, you can get a better hand on sometimes, like if you're missing something or whatever, right? So you'll find when I'm coloring, I'm bouncing back and forth, bouncing in and out, bouncing in and out, 'cause you'll miss things. Like, you get that tunnel vision when you're to up close and everything like that, that you just get too focused on the minute and got to peel back, look at the big picture, see if anything's out of sorts, jump back into it and stuff, right? Yeah, Clip Studio Paint has Version four that's out. It was out this year. I think in the spring. It's got some pretty cool stuff to it. For me, the puppet mesh hinging is maybe one of the coolest parts, but I'll be updating my course with that stuff. Okay, so let's see what else I've got here. I've got shoulder pads. I don't know if I wanted these as necessarily red. So I'm going to use my selection tool come in. See if I can I can kind of see what Clayton did here. Like, you know, when you're not the original artist of the linework, some of it is not guessing, but educated guessing what you think the artist was going for. Okay, let's say I mess up here and I don't have this, right? What I could do is hold down the Shift button, and I'll just add to the selection. So that happens. Sometimes I get a little tired as I'm doing a circle or something like that, and I'm like, Okay, I'll flesh it out, flesh it out, flesh it out, and add to the selection. So even this, like, I could come in here and I could add in this part or whatever, right? And just add to the selection. Um, You know what? This has got this kind of cool. I'm gonna give it a darker red here. There we go. Yeah, I like how that looks. And as I bum around a little bit, I noticed, like, Okay, I can color pick a little bit occasionally I miss little pieces or whatever and stuff. One thing you can do if you want is and it gets really ugly, is you know how I did the first flat layer in gray? Well, if you want, do it in, like, a neon green or something like that. And then you'll notice anytime anything is not colored, it will definitely punch all the way through with a very, very stark contrasting neon green, which is actually great because then it'll help you, like, catch it a little bit easier and stuff, right? Okay. So sometimes I like to just come in, clean it up a little bit. And look at this. Already, this is pretty damn cool looking. Yeah. Um hm. Were we thinking any questions so far? No. Hey, Joshua, welcome to the party. I am going to come in here. And this is where I get a little hinky. I think this is armor, so I'm going to kind of you can see how it's not totally closed in or anything like that, right? It and watch this. I'm just going to loop this. I don't care. It doesn't matter because I'm going to go back and clean that up in a little bit, right? So I'm just kind of getting the form down of this figure. And I'm kind of presuming that that is his skin. So I'm going to grab the skin sample, come down here, fill it in. Okay? And you can see this glove cuff thing. Don't worry. I'm going to clean that up later. But like I said, as I'm going along, sometimes I notice where I messed up, especially because I'm live here, I'm kind of, like, not doing as much attention to detail as I might normally, but that's okay. Okay. So that's skin on that side. I'm going to presume and say this is skin on this side. And there's a bandana there, but it still goes into his form. And like I said, I could go in here all I want. It doesn't matter. What's gonna happen is I'm just gonna go clean it up when I do that. Oops. When I do that glove. And there we go. And as you're in each section, you can kind of notice and say, Oh, there's some ugliness happening in here. Honestly, there's a lot of different ways to approach flatting. Find the groove that suits you. If you like the Lasso tool, use that. Just constantly use it and stuff like that. If you don't like it, use something else. I don't care. It's like, some people will do their entire flats with this, just coloring in. They like the coloring, right? So if that's the name of your jam, do that, right? I'm going to grab this. And for this character, for today, I'm going to keep the colors pretty simple, okay? Like, as in the flats pretty simple. So I'm going to do the selection tool of this glove. And you can see how parts of this glove, the linework had holes in it. And that's how the bucket tool crept into it and filled some of it with that cape reddish orange. So if I was to try to fill it with a bucket now, it might spill back into the cape or something like that, right? So not loving that. There we go. Nice and simple. If I was doing this for a project, obviously, what I would be doing is having the reference image off to the side or even somewhere stuck within this showing me previous color samples. So do you see how I kind of cut across there at the bottom? I did that because I was running out of room on my elbow stroke, and it's just as easy for me to do that, cut it a little bit short, come down. Jump back into it, holding my shift key on a mac and just adding to the selection. And that's all I had to do there. I could even come out here, right? Because remember, there's nothing out here. Okay, there we go. Not bad. Um he's got this bandana here, though. Any particular color? I feel like I should be doing something different with this bandana, but I can't think of anything. You guys got any suggestions for me? You can see where the blue kicks in because it doesn't love the linework. The linework's not strong enough in some of those areas, right? So I'm gonna do something grayish here, just as a bit of a contrast. Yep. Yeah, I'm trying to figure out what Clayton's got going on there. I'm not too sure. And then I just realized over here I'm missing I do this. Missing this part of the cape behind the clothing in the elbow or in the underarm. There we go. Okay, honestly, flatting takes a while. Um, it really does. Like, this is gonna take many minutes am I? Holy. Hot damn. I'm at 32 minutes already. Geez. And I'm pretty decently fast at this, right? I'm also talking my face off and stuff, right? But, like, flatting Okay, I'm trying to figure out what where the belt is here. I feel like something's coming out here. I'm going to go with this as the belt. Now, Clayton might call me wrong, and that's okay. I probably am. And what can I do up here if I want? I could just do that. I'm gonna go with a bit of a more golden belt. For now. And, if I was spending a lot of time on this, each buckle would have different colors and stuff. And depending on how much time we have left, I might actually come in and add textures and everything like that, right? Okay, so I'm going to do this shirt and you can see how in a lot of ways, I'm not really being that careful. The kind of relying on the selection tool to guide me a little bit here. But I can see how, I kind of flub down here, so I'm going to come and kind of clean it up. And he is going to have more of a white shirt. Let's give him something contrasting. There we go. Yeah. But I do like that gold, so I think this chest plate will be mostly gold. And again, like, if I was doing this a certain way, what I would do is send it off to Clayton and say, once I've got the flats done, before I do anything else, I might say, Hey, what do you think of these flats? Any changes you want on this, anything you want adjusted or anything like that? So why did I just cut across like that? Honestly, my arm was tired and I felt like my stroke was gonna start to fade. So instead, I kind of reset myself, and I can come back, start fresh, shake my hand off a little bit, and redo the selection. So I'm going to come down here, select this gold and fill on that. Okay. I don't like that arm band. Clayton, post up if you got any ideas. Um, actually, don't worry about me running low on time, Clay. I'm I'm gonna do this whole thing. Like, I'll show you guys what my plan is with it. I'm gonna do uh gold booties. I don't know why, but it seems like the thing. I feel like I need to have more dad jokes in this. Like I'm kind of slipping. And you can see when I slip too, when that line that I'm trying to follow turns blue, gives me a good indicator. And you see it did it up here and you can see how I'm a little bit off, right? So I'm going to come back, come and fill it. And I saw it went blue down here, too. Gonna come back there. That's what I wanted. I want that middle of the line there. And then I'm going to come down to the rest of the booty. I'm sure Clayton's like it's not a booty. It's an armored something something, something something, something, something, something. Okay. And all I have to do is this there. Yeah, that works. Kind of, that gold is reminding me of Thor's special armor or something. Okay, so do you see how this knee plate is not connected? So if I tried to fill that, that wouldn't work. So watch. I've got a blue I've got this selection. It's nice and red. It's telling me it's a good line, and then it'll disappear here, turn purple, and then I've got to kind of just carry it on myself. There we go. And do you see how now, it'll be even easier for me, I can just come straight down here, draw this straight across, fill that booty. Alright. So roughly 35 minutes in, and I've flatted this image, not with spectacular detail. Like, if I wanted to, what I would do is I could come in and, for example, uh you know, do little details of nuts and bolts and rivets and all these different things and stuff like that, and really just change things up and stuff. But for time's sake and everything, I like where this is at. So I'm going to maybe mostly leave it where it is. If I got time at the end, I'll come in and do some texturing. We'll see. But overall, my main concern was just showing how to approach from start to finish. Good enough. And what do I do? I it safe, right? Because Oh, the arm band should drop down to the top of his forearm armor. So take out that flesh, but you've left the form the arm band. Looking at the notes. The armband should drop down to the top of his forearm. Oh, so here, maybe, take out this flesh part. I can do that. Luckily, the dude who drew it is in this chat. Good enough. Yep. Makes more sense, roughly. Okay. So I've got flats. I'm good to go flats, and this is layer one attached to those flats. Now, I take a breath and say, Cool, and usually go get a drink. I didn't have to go far. 4. Shading: Now, the first thing I do is I'm going to do a shade layer. So I'm going to once again, create a new layer, go up here, layer layer settings. Op. Where am I now? Clip the layer below. And one of these are going to be kind of a midline dark tone color, and one of them is gonna be white. Okay, so what I'm going to do is decide what kind of shade I want to use. Now, most people, when they start digitally coloring, what they do is they drop it down to black, grab the freaking air brush, and start shading. Look at me. I am shading now. Do you see the shade? Everybody, look at my shade. Here, I'll make it even better. I learn a new thing, and I shall put it on multiply, and I'll shade even more with my black. And it looks like ****. We do not want to shade with pure black. I think it looks like crap. So instead, what I like to see people do is shade. I'm going to do the shade layer, so I'll mark it as shade. Set it to multiply. And I'm going to pick a color that I think I sometimes adjusted. But let's say a darkish blue. I won't come over here, I'll be on this end of my tonal value spectrum, okay? So I'm going to grab it somewhere around here, and I'm going to fill the entire thing. Okay, that's actually kind of funky looking, right? I don't think I want it at 100%, or if I was to just show you what it looked like at normal, this is normal, so I could actually work with it being in normal, or I could work with it being in multiply. I'm going to hit multiply and I'm going to drop it down to about 50% ish. Okay. So now I've got 50% multiply. It's still a heavy shade, but it doesn't really show anything yet until I start to add highlights or take away some of the shade. So I'm going to go with an overhead lighting scheme on this for this particular picture. I just like how it might look with the draping of the cape and stuff and everything, right? So if I'm going to do an overhead lighting, what I do is I use a lasso and I come in and I kind of grab where I think. That light might hit. And sometimes I adjust, and I'm like, Okay, the light would hit here, I'm looking at where would that light hit? The light might hit some of these creases, maybe this ridge line here, maybe here. Light would definitely hit somewhere out here. Light would probably hit somewhere here. Like I'm thinking this light is coming down, right? The light's going to hit some of the shoulder, this bicep. And I'm doing this quite rough right now. And there's a reason. It would hit most of this chest. It would hit pieces of this diaphragm and the abs, right? So I'm kind of coming down. I would hit some of this bicep. It's hard because, like, here, it would actually be where the light is touching. This flap, maybe, maybe not, right? So I come in and I'm adding in light in a bunch of different areas, And again, you know, we can get a lot tighter with it. We can get a lot looser with it. But roughly, let's just say for this small section here, this is what I would do. Now I take the white and fill. Okay, cool. Already. Huge step up, right? I might come in to the abs a little bit more, maybe section off some of this belt buckle that that's where the light might be hitting. Right? And I just kind of go through the figure, and I'm like, Okay, well, where's all this? Where would the light hit from above? Like, I'm constantly thinking, Where would it hit from above, right? And I'm going to do this very loose, very relatively fast without care, but with some care? Partial care? Partial tear on the thumb here. And what helps is if you have a good understanding of three D shapes in space that you can figure out, you know, where light would be touching, where it wouldn't be touching, things like that, okay? So, roughly, like I said, this is just if this was a professional printer or anything like that, I'd be spending way more time on this, but I'm going to show you how just with a few small changes, it will already look very, very cool. So I'm going to do these knuckles Okay. Let's just leave it at that for right now, up top here, right? Maybe here. Okay, now, I haven't done the head yet, just dealing with this kind of torso, right? What I don't like is this cape, where it's hanging, would have a nice massive cast shadow. So what I'm going to do is the cape is right here and it's kind of casting a shadow over top of the torso. Do you understand if everything was falling this way, if the light was falling this way, this cape would likely be casting that shadow. Just like this plate of armor would cast this shadow here, and this plate of armor let's see if I can do this. Would cast this shadow here, right? And this Deltoid might cast a little bit more of a shadow here. And his hair, now, I haven't even done the face yet or anything like that, but his hair would definitely be casting something there, right? So you can see I've do a little bit of that, his head coming forward, and even the hair, I might do a couple little things here, and imagine the hair is projecting itself just a little bit. Right? There we go. So you can see how the drop shadow, the cast shadow from the cape, from his hair, all that kind of stuff, right? So I'm going to come into his face now and do the same thing over here. So if I was to try to follow that hair, this is what might be seen by the light, right? A little bit of cast from the hair there. But if I really want to and sometimes I grab my pen, I come in, and I'm like, Okay, well, this eyebrow would be casting something here, right? This eye patch would have a little something, something under it, right? The nose might have a little bit of a shadow. This cheekbone would have a little bit, right? And I can come in here, do the hair even with just a brush, right? Look at that on the eye there. That looks pretty cool. That kind of stuff, right? And there we go. Now, from a distance, this does not look anything spectacular, but the details are getting there, and how cool does that look? Yeah. Um, Arthur, thanks for hanging out, man. We'll catch. And you can watch these recordings at a later date. Okay. So we've got the torso. We've got the face roughly shaded. I can do one of a few things with the hair. I can come in with a pen depending on how confident I am with my strokes and start to do this, right? Do individual mad strokes trying to hit the highlights of choice. And that does work, right? And if sometimes, honestly, I right handed, so my stroke is going this way. So this is a nice easy way to do it. And especially if you really want to finas the brush, it gives that nice natural look to it. You might have to come in and clean up a couple spots or whatever. But I like the tapered look messing up there. Hmm. Sometimes it takes a little Finneas to have the exact look that you're looking for, right? Okay. Can I switch it up. So some people have, like, pivots on their tablets. I have to tap tap tap tap tap tap Please forgive me. It's an older tablet. So that's one way to do it. The other way is to come like this and highlight with the Lasso tool, which is also very, very workable, right? You could see how well this plays out, and I'm kind of getting myself twisted up a little bit. Looking not bad, right? I think maybe if I look at it, the light is coming from the top. So I might only have maybe this last section in here to kind of highlight there. Okay. So there's the hair. And what am I going to do? I'm going to hit Save again, right? Now, this is the approach I would use for the entire body. I would come in here and what I would do is come in and, like, hit some of these folds in here, nice fabric folds, you know, play around with it. Have a lot of fun, hit each of these little details all in the mechanics of it all, right? I might come in, do a better line here, things like that. There's so much shirts I like that erratic back and forth thing, right? Okay. There's so much fun interplay you can do and stuff, right? That I'm going to leave most of this because the time, almost at an hour. I'm not too too bad, but, uh, I want to get onto some other things here. So what I'll do is just kind of have big sweeping selections here. You can see I'm roughly following the original linework. All right? For here maybe let me do a bit of a I'm guessing this is more of a goldish medal, right? So if I really want to, I could do like a little squiggle to give a little bit of that reflective thing, right? Going on. And I could do it through this whole thing. And then to clean it up, though, what I would do is fill some of these points with shade. I'm throwing shade. That's right, people. Just to clean up a little bit of those wiggles, right? Just to make it look like it's actually part of whatever form is going on here. Come down. Oops. See, that's why I got to turn off that magnetic thing. Top of the boot. There we go. Honestly, this is where it's fun. Like I said, when it comes to the flatting, it can sometimes be a little tedious. But once you start to get into this stuff, it gets even better. Okay, roughly, there's a shade layer thrown down on this fine figure, right? I don't love how the gloves look. If I was to spend more time on it, I would go in and clean it up a little bit and stuff, right? So, bear with me. This is going to be just our first Oh, can I do this in coloring scale for Black and White mag? Hell, yeah. It's easier in black and white, man. Or I can convert to black and white if I really want to. Yeah, absolutely. Okay. So like I said, depending on how much you want to get in here, you can get really fine and, like, just put in small details in the armor and stuff like that. Like, it really depends on how much time you want to spend in this and stuff, right? Okay. So there is my flat shade one. And usually I do so I'm going to relabel that and put it shade one. I'll be honest, in some of my pieces that I do, sometimes I've got two or three shade layers. It really, really depends, right? Like, so it's not always clear and super easy and cut and dry. Like we'll do it layer by layer here. But I think you'll see, like, there's so much room for more, more, more until you overcook it, right? 5. Coloring Highs SS: The next one, I'm going to come up here, I'm going to go layer settings, clip to layer below, and this one is going to be high one. Now, there's a few different ways of approaching this, but what I usually do, remember how I had like a dark shade and then a white, that white is going to be black now, and that dark shade is going to be instead somewhere up here in the spectrum of things. Now, I could go blue, but I might go greenish. Redish? I don't know. Purplish. Let's go greenish, my original salt. So I'm going to go this as my highlight, okay? So I'm going to select all and Oops. Didn't want that. Fill the entire thing black. Looking mighty black. Come over here and go screen color dodge or glow dodge. It depends on what I'm aiming for here, or even lighten. Going to go with color dodge right now. And you see remember when I shaded, if I was to change this to normal and bump it all the way up, you can see it's blue and it's white. It's got two colors to it, right? So if I want to, I could come in here, select all the white. Now I'm going to switch this back to multiple I didn't have to switch it out or anything like that, drop it back down to 50% or so, right? Come over here, and now I'm in high, right? So whether I have that highlight on or not, I've now got selected all those white spaces that the shade was not touching. So I've got two things I can do here, two things. I can either fill with that highlight and have it all blown out like that. Which sometimes that can look kind of cool. And we'll see when I do even more effects, right? Or what I can do as well is take an airbrush, soft airbrush, low medium hardness, brush density, 20%, stabilization, so I want continuous spring. So what I'm going to do is take this and just kind of go like this. Just touch on what I think might be. Now, see, I didn't like that. I'm going to back that away. I like this to an extent, right? And I like it in the hair. But I got to be careful with this face here because I don't want it going on to the face. So I'm just going to make it a bit smaller there. There we go. Whoops. Don't mind the *****. Here we go. You can see how if the light is coming right from above, I'm playing with that a little bit, right? And I can make it even bigger and just have fun with it. And it depends on the material. Maybe some material is more reflective than others, but how cool is that, Ca do the top of the feet here actually. There. So pretty bad *** looking, right? Like, I've done one shade and one highlight, and it's already super punchy, super cool, right? I can adjust the color dodge, bring it down a little bit, so it's not so punchy. I can adjust to, like, something more reasonable where it's not blowing out, but it's just kicking a little bit, right? Like, there's a lot of room for adjustment there and stuff, right? I can go back up and reselect. And if I don't like how that looked, I can kind of come in a little bit more. Oops. Now it's too powerful. I flow a little bit better. There we go. Okay, so right away, you know, that's pretty damn cool, right? You know, I've got one shade, one highlight, and this is where a lot of people leave it. And this is solid, right? So I want you to understand that when I'm doing a piece like this, I might throw in Like I said, two or three shade layers, two or three highlight layers. Okay. Instead of doing that and just showing you how deep you can go into it and how I might highlight more on the reflection of this than in the pants and things like that. I think you guys can kind of understand that that can change things, right? I'm going to jump to different types of effects that I think would look pretty interesting. 6. Adding Details : So I am going to come back down to the flats, and I'm going to create a new layer about that flats, and I'm going to say details. Okay. So in this, what I might do is come in here, maybe even a bigger selection. So remember, I'm back below Oh, no, I want that above my normal colors. Below my shades. I'm back below my shading, okay? And I'm going to come in here, grab a bit of an orange or something like that. Go to grab my airbrush. Where's my airbrush right there. Here, really light. I'm going to put that there and maybe just a little bit of blush on his cheek. And then I might even come and back that up a little bit. Okay. So now, do you know what I mean? Like, I can come in here and fade out this, but it just gives enough that it gives a contrast. And if I want to You know, I could give that little red nose or whatever that anime fans seem to love or whatever, right? I can also do that, for example, if I'm going to select all the skin, and I just selected all the skin, well, what do people have for skin sometimes? They have a tan, right? And the tan kind of often falls on the outside of the arm, something like that, right? So he might have a little bit of a tan or outer arm. Then he does his inner arm, right? So I can come in and do something like that if I want, right? And that'll have an impact, right? Okay? So I've done that for the skin tones a little bit, right? And if you want, you could even come up here. I'm going to re select again. And I'm going to go back to airbrush and maybe something even smaller. And put some freckles in or something, put some texturing in, right? It depends. Like, I might use the spray here. Holy ****, that's big. And then what I would do is maybe use a bit of a smudge tool. And kind of smudge it out or something like that. Depends on how detailed I want, but I can get to the point where I'm drawing pores. You know what I mean? Like, you can really get into it and be drawing pores and stuff, right? Like, you can get so deep into something with texturing. Another example would be his pants, right? Now, maybe I want, I want to have some texturing on his pants or something, right? So I'm going to come here and just put some of that in there, right? And that can give just that little bit of extra show that this is fabric compared to this is metal armor, right? You know, I want to differentiate between, like, more of a an fabric or something versus something sleek and shiny, right? Okay? So details is another one that you can do. Up to you, up to you how much you want to add in. 7. Adding Whites: Another one that I do often is white, but I do it above the line layer. So I'm going to go white above the lines. New layer above the lines? I'm going to save because saving smart. And so white can be as simple as this coming in and adding a punch to the eye. It could be a highlight to the nose, right? It can be if I wanted to, I could put it above the armor. The reason I put it above the line layer is because just in case I'm on top of some blacks or something like that. I want to be able to punch through those blacks, right? Okay, so you can see how white can definitely have a pretty cool impact on how much it punches a highlight forward or some metallic surface, right? So you can even you can draw it in by hand. Right? Or you could clip it in by a selection tool or something, right? And it depends on how far. When I say you can overcook things, you definitely can punch things too far, right? Like, you can make it look like the person just stepped out of the water or something, right? Another place to put that would be the hair There you go. Something like that, right? And of course, it just punches things even further forward, right? Uh, no. This is what I would consider the basics for digital coloring. 8. Bounce Lighting: Uh, yeah, no. This is what I would consider the basics for digital coloring. You can do these shade high is basics. Then you add details and maybe some whites, and now I'm going to show you another one that you could do. And this one can go above or below the color layer. It really it's kind of an individual preference thing and stuff, right? It's going to be a either a rim light or a bounce light. Okay, so I'm going to create a new one and put rim bounce. This is where it gets a little bit more slightly more advanced. You can do one of two ways with this. If we've got one primary light source here, right? It's coming from above, right? And that's kind of how I did it, even though I didn't really flesh it out in the cape very well or anything like that, but fundamentally, I've got one light source from above, seems really, really strong. But if I want to add a second light source in, that's also possible. So why don't I do a second light source from the ground up? Let's say he's standing in on a freaking alien planet and he's standing on a blue water surface or something like that, right? So what I can do is take this and either add do it this way. Yeah. And I can start to ops I want to see. Now I forgot to clip it. Layer settings clip to layer below. There we go. So he's going to be standing on a blue surface or relatively blue reflective surface. That means anything that's kind of that the surface can bounce and touch, I'm going to give a blue a bit of a blue rim light. Hi. So this is just going to be nice and not overly powerful. But you can see how now this is starting to bounce off the ground. So it's not going to be all encompassing. I don't want it to wrap itself around him entirely or anything like that. But you can see how cool this would be, right? Where it's really going to play out is to make these hands punch. Look at how ugly that is. I really screwed up there. If I was doing this again, I would go in and clean this up a little bit here. That's okay. I should have paid more attention. For now, I'm just going to come in here. I do these knuckles and stuff, right? You can see how That bounce light punches that hand forward, right? And what I would do is come through and anything that kind of can be kind of seen from looking up at him, I would do that exact same thing too. I would come through and do to let it punch a little bit harder. Look at that, right? So this is getting now into a little bit more advanced lighting techniques and stuff, right? The cape would be hell of fun, but it would take me hell a long time to do. Like, it would take a lot of finsse. I would not bring it too far up. His face will not be touched by it. Generally speaking, his face will not be touched by it because the cape would be blocking anything from really getting to his face, right? Okay. So this would be a rim bounce depending Like rim lights is usually around the edges and stuff, a bounce is when it hits a surface and reflects back. So actually, I'm going to change this to rim right now, and I'm going to show you a better bounce. Now, the next one, I'm going to do, again, layer settings, clip to layer below is going to be the bounce. So again, remember, he's standing in water, right? I've got this blue highlight going on, and I want to show that he's kind of standing on this water reflective surface. Maybe he's Moses, he's standing on water or whatever, right? So what I'm going to do is take a gradient foreground to transparent, come from the bottom here and come up. And now it looks like he's standing in something and it's reflecting, right? And then I'm going to ease it out. I'm just going to have that nice little slight taper. So it's not overpowering, maybe about 23 or something like that. But you can tell there's a difference between what's happening up here and what's going down here. Now, if I want to, I could play around with the layer setting so I could go color I could go, like, a hard mix or something like that. And I could really have kind of a cool impact here, right, and just see what Like, it depends on my overall vision for this for this piece and stuff, you know, like, am I looking to make it really, really funky? Am I looking to bring it to print? Is it supposed to look like a 1980s comic book? You know, this is where you really kind of make a lot of choices of Finesse and how you want things to look overall, right? Okay, so this would be the bounce. 9. Color Overlay: One more is going to be a color hue. I'm going to drop a color over this entire thing. What color? I haven't quite figured out yet, but let's start with this. There we go. I'm done. I hope you guys like this. Oh, can you guys still hear me? A. Okay, good. I'm still rolling. Okay, so I've layered this color hue on top. I'm going to drop it to color. And I'm going to kind of play with it and say, Okay, well, I kind of like that. Look at that faded nature to it. I'm going to put that at 50%, actually. I want it exactly at 50. And I like this original orange hue to it. I think it's a cool vibe. It gives a very sepia type of vibe to it. But I want to just double check that that's what I want. So I'm going to go tonal correction. Not that. Yeah, hue. I want hue and I want to mess around with my hues. So I'm going to come all the way over here and just start to play with my hues and say, Okay, well, what what hue do I feel truly matches the vibe? Now, I'm not going to change this character. This character is who it is, right? I don't know this character or anything like that, right? But when I'm looking to print, publish, put something out there, I'm looking to express something, right? Looking to express a mood, a vibe or something like that, right? And so this dropping a color hue over top of the image can definitely give vibes, right? Here is kind of a futuristic steam punk look or something like that, right? That greenish blue. All of these have a message behind them. Everything we've done has had a message, right? The question is, what message do I want to give? The message I like the most is my original one, but I kind of like this slightly red version. There we go. I think that's exactly where I want. Right there is a bad *** picture, okay? Now, if I want to, like I said, I could back this out even more there it's zero, there it's a little bit, there it's powerful, right? Depends what you want. The other thing that I've done in the past has been to make this entire thing normal and there it gives that faded comic look to it, right? So some type of color overlay on top of the image played around with a little bit can really have a huge impact into the piece, right? And you can go through and you can start to adjust things and, you know, you can say, Okay, well, now that I've got that, maybe I want to bump this just a little bit more, something like that. And you can play with so many things here. 10. Wrap Up: Honestly, guys, I think at an hour and 20 minutes or so, this gives everybody a very, very, very good understanding of the principles of basic digital coloring. Like I said, for some of you, this might be a review, but for a lot of you, this is going to be pretty new stuff and so hopefully I went along at a good pace for all y'all. We started with flats, learn different ways of attacking flats through selection and fill tools and stuff like that. We got into laying down the individual colors and being careful with it. We could be more and more careful, less and less careful. All right. We added a basic shade layer, which you can add more if you want. Like, I would come in here and drop even. Here's an example as what I mean by more. Just going to come in here, multiply. Here's my blue somewhere in there. I think I was somewhere around there. I would come in and I would for sure if I was to add another one, I would for sure put another one right here. Okay. Because that needed to be there, right? I would maybe come in here and I don't know if this is drawn right or if I colored it wrong, but I would maybe come in here and add another. Do you understand how there's always ways to play with it to add more detail, more um more emphasis on something. There's always room to do something more when you're coloring. But be warned. You can definitely definitely definitely overcook something. And just like a cake, when you overcook it, it's going to get really, really ugly, right? So watch how much you go back and start to fiddle and stuff like that and everything, right? Like, go in, add things, subtract things, play around with it and stuff. But realize sometimes done is done. Your cake is done, right? So don't overcook the cake. But all that I've shown you here from the shade shade two, as well throw that in there. To the highlights, you can do highlights one. Highlights two, highlights three, right? Lots of options there. To the rim, to the bounce, and then to the overlays. Guys, if you get this down, and that was me coloring this image in an hour, you know, like, I could've done it faster when I'm not trying to teach it. I've done a lot slower when I'm trying to be better. But yeah, that should be your homework. Pick a figure. An entire figure, one that you've drawn or grab one from your favorite artist online or whatever. And actually, that's a better challenge because then you're not dealing with the clean, crisp digital lines that you've drawn. You're dealing with something you pulled off the Internet and stuff, and that's why I chose this one, right? And that's your assignment. Color an entire figure using at least these layer options. You don't have to go shade two, shade three, all that kind of stuff. But at least these basics. And then let's see what you got. Okay, guys, at an hour and a half, Ish, I think we did a pretty good job with this. I actually really like how this looks. I think it turned out. Realty bad ***. So hopefully you liked it, too. Not a lot of questions, but that's okay because honestly, I wasn't really paying attention. I yeah. I keep looking at it. I'm like, That's not bad. Not bad for how quickly I did this and everything. Guys, it was really cool hanging out with you. I'm going to try to do these live workshops about once a month, and I love it that I get to hang out with some people live, but I also love that whoever wants to can look at these lessons at a later date and get a lot from them. If you want to know more about digital coloring, feel free to ask me, but here are the absolute basics for you. Thanks for coming out, and thanks for hanging out with all the people that make How to draw comics. Very, very cool. Thanks for everything, guys.