Transcripts
1. Intro: Hello there, my name is Chloe Rose and I'm a full-time artist, YouTuber and teacher here on Skillshare. Now, I've been digitally painting now for over eight years and I love it and I love to share what I know with all of you. After the incredible response that I had to my first digital art class I uploaded to Skillshare and having so much more to teach, I wanted to upload and create another class for all of you so you can learn more and learn as much as you can about digital art. Today I'm going to teach you how to digitally paint your very own beautiful stylized story book or movie scene from either a reference or your imagination. We are going to be covering everything from scratch, from finding your ideas to developing color palettes, sketching out the scene, to discussing lighting and shadows. I'll give you a brief introduction to the color wheel and how to use colors harmoniously in your piece and then I'll give you in-depth step-by-step showing you how to colorize and create your piece. I'll teach you how to blend, refine and re-add depth to your piece whether you're a beginner looking to start digitally painting or you've been doing it for a while and maybe you want to change your technique. We'll learn new things. I know you'll take a lot from this class, so I hope you decide to take it and I look forward to seeing what you create.
2. Shadow: First, we are going to talk about lighting. Now lighting is everything. It's important to remember that in any piece you're making and trying to give a sense of realism to, you always have a discernible light source and accurately portray in your piece. Otherwise, it will not only be unrealistic, but it will give the viewer the feeling that something isn't quite right. Light sources create highlights and they create shadows. It's important to remember that you need to master this if you want your piece to have depth. Now in general, a light source can be virtually anything. Usually you'll find that your light source is the sun but it can also be the moon, a fire, a lamp, or some form of artificial lighting. It's up to you to decide the scene or story you're trying to create to decide for which source of light you are using. Unless your piece is completely black, there is going to be a light source somewhere, no matter what or where it is. It's pretty obvious that the further away an object is from the light source, the darker it's going to be but you also have to keep in mind how the light source is affecting the shadows. An important factor to remember is that shadows generally will follow the direction of the sun rays. For example, if I have a tree here and the sun is positioned here, the rays strain this way and the shadow strain that way too. Now imagine yourself in the right. You try to find shelter in the form of a roof or umbrella because the rain cannot reach you when you are underneath something that's blocking it. The sun works in the same way. If you're having a hard time imagining shadows, imagine the sunlight as rain. If something is blocking it, a shadow is formed.
3. Reference: So today we are going to be looking for a reference or different references we can be using in our piece. Now, I love to use Pinterest. I feel it is much better than Google images because you can find a whole bunch of different types of things, and then you can put them into categories. For example, I'm thinking for the piece I want create today. I want something that's going to be bright and happy. So if I search something along the lines of landscape, I'm trying to find some kind of points of reference rarely, because I'm unsure on the types of color that I would like to use in my piece today. As you can see, there are a whole bunch here, and I'm already seeing a handful that I really, really like. So I personally really love the way that the sun is shining through the trees like this. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to save this. I'm going to call this board Concepts and I'll have a board called Concepts. I really love the color of this. I think that is beautiful and I'm not really sure what that is, to be honest. Wow, that's an actual place. So I've really liked the way that this is hanging down. I'm going to put this into my concept board as well. I actually really loved the way the purple is popping with the blue in this piece. I think that's really, really nice. I'm going to do is I'm going to save this, but I'm going to create another board and call this Colors. Now, basically what I'm doing is I'm trying to put different references into different reference points. If I'm looking for something with inspiration for colors then I can go to that for colors. Notice how this piece for example, has like an orangish floor and then a bluish-green base. Those are complimentary colors working really, really lovely together. The thing about this piece, you can tell that while the lights are really, really bright. The heavy shadows in the decrepit buildings, and the darkness in this piece make it seem very, very lonely. As you can see it's just a little boy in his own. Heavy, heavy shadows, even though there's bright light over here. That piece is done beautifully. So I'm going to save that. I'm actually going to save that in colors because I like the idea of the colors in that particular piece. I'm feeling like I want to do something that's a little bit more purply blue. I think that would be quite nice. So the plan for me today is I am going to take one of my favorite scenes from a Disney movie, and make it my own with some of the elements that I have found on Pinterest. For example, I absolutely love this particular scene, and I think it would be really fun to recreate this. But I want to add my own color to this to make it a little bit more bright. I'm going to go to my Pinterest folder here. Go to my boards and then I'm going to look at some of the concept pieces that I have found. I really love the glowing effects we have here going on. I love the trees in this piece. So I may recreate something similar to this as this particular scene. What I also love about this is if you notice, the composition of this is beautiful because while this is directly central, it's framed nicely with a little bit of black. A blurred border here which I will show you exactly how to do. This is something that is very kind of important especially for doing concept pieces, to have like something mainly focused. Yes, this is a piece I'm going to be working from. I'm going to be taking some of my images here that I found. Then I'm going to attempt to recreate them. May give it more purply affect. Something else before I go that I would like to show you is if we take something like this. If I find an image that I love the colors of in say, Pinterest or on Google. But I'm not quite sure how and which colors to color pick. This one's just a combination of gray, pink, and purple. I like to go to Filter, I go to Pixelate, and then I like to go to Mosaic. Then I also like to bring the cell size up to about that size. Then I have like a color palette, a custom color palette that I can keep picking from instead of going through, and trying to find specific colors. This can be a nice color palette that I can eventually use if I choose to. I definitely recommend trying that. Yes, see you in the next video.
4. Simple Color Theory Tricks : If you're making a pace and you feel that it's lacking in color or it's not really popping, more than likely it's because of the colors that you're using or not using. Now, I'll briefly touch on this subject here, and hopefully it will help you. So basically you've got the color wheel here and you start off with the primary colors. There are three primary colors, red, blue, and yellow. Basically, these are the basic colors and every other color cannot be made, unless you're somehow using these colors. So for example, we have the primary colors, then we have secondary colors. Secondary colors are basically the colors that you make from the primary colors. So if we mix red and yellow, we get orange. Orange's secondary color. So if you mix blue and red, you get purple or violet. So that is a secondary color, and lastly you mix blue and yellow, you get green, and that is your last secondary color. So the three primary colors and three secondary colors. There's also things like Atari colors, but I won't cover that right now. I can go into detail about that a little bit later on and there's much better explanations of those than what I can provide you. But for today, we are going to be utilizing our colors in our piece. Now something that can help make your work pop, of course, you can use red-violet, violet-blue, violet and blue. Those all complement each other, look really, really nice. The reds through to the oranges. They look nice together as well as do the greens through to the yellows. They all look nice together. But something that you may, if you're not experienced with the color wheel, something that you may not do, something that is quite important is you can use complimentary colors in your pace. What complimentary colors are is they are the colors that are opposite each other on the color wheel. So for example, red and green are complimentary colors. For example, hair dressers is use a color wheel all the time. If you have red hair and you were trying to cool it down, you don't want it red anymore. You'd have to use a dye that has a green base to it in order to make it neutral. Something as well with complementary colors is if you mix them together, more than likely you're going to get a neutral brownish color. If you have a red and you want to mute it a little bit, add a tiny bit of green, and it will make the red more desaturated, but also darker, desaturated isn't the right word. But if you add a little bit green to your red, it will make it slightly more muted and more of a realistic red. If you're using it in a piece that's supposed to be realistic. Same with blue. If you want to have a blue sky, but bright blue is just not realistic at all. If you add a slight bit of orange to that, it's going to mute down your blue while still keeping it blue. If you were to mix equal parts of blue and orange, then it would be more of a brown color. Yes, if you're acrylic painting, instead of adding black to darken a color, just add the complementary color to it. That will allow you to just have a nice darker color without adding the black to it. So what I want to talk about in this particular video is how you use complimentary colors together, not obviously mixing them, using them together. For example, in the piece that I'm making in this particular class, I am mixing both violet and yellow. Those the two colors that I'm using in this pace. You probably wouldn't think to use violet and yellow in a piece together, but they work so harmoniously together and that is why they are complimentary colors. Same with red and green. If you're doing a green forest, if you add a little bit of red to it, like red flowers, that's just going to add that little bit of extra pop that you need and it's very, very important. Yes, again, you could say blue and orange. Add blue, and orange together, you have a sunset with blue water, orange sky, beautiful, looks great. So that's it for today really, in this particular video. Hopefully that's somewhat helped you to get a grip on that type of thing. Yes, I challenge you in this piece that you make for this class to use these complimentary colors somehow, and see what you can make.
5. Sketching Everything Out: So I have opened up my Photoshop CS6. I have my image here, I have Photoshop, so all I'm going to do is just grab and drag it in. Then I'm going to grab, hold of this tab, and then separate it from all of this. So basically I have my reference to the side and then I'm going to go ahead and open up a file that is the size that I wanted. Now before we begin, I would just like to just quickly go ahead and say that I am using a Mac, as you can probably tell. I'm not going to use any fancy keyboard shortcuts because I think that makes it confusing if you're not heavily experienced with Photoshop. The main one that I will end up using is Control Z, which is an undo button. Well for me, I tend to have to do Control Option Z to undo multiple strokes. But that's pretty much it to be honest. So we're going to go ahead and open up a new files, so we go to File, New. Then we're going to go ahead and look at our width and our height. This isn't something that I'm going to be printing, so you don't have worry too much about some of these. I do recommend if you're making an image that is an original, that you own the copyright too, that you're going to want to print, you're going to want to change the resolution. So basically 72 resolution or 72 DPI, as it's called, is good for just for screens basically. That's a good quality for screens but if you are going to be printing it, then you're going to have to change this to 300, otherwise, the image itself is going to be bad quality. Now, for width and height, I'm probably just going to keep it around, let's say 4,000 by, let's go with maybe 2,500. That might be a good size. See, yeah, that's a good size, I like that. So this is what it is. I've zoomed out as you can see. I'm just going to drag this out, so it's separate from the closest books. Sorry, I have a little of my YouTube notifications on, so if they keep popping up, that's why. So this is a good size I think, and this is what I use to zoom in and out. You can also use the keyboard shortcut. On a Mac, it's Command and minus to zoom out, or a Command and plus to zoom in. I'm actually not sure what it is on a Windows computer, but for easiness, you can use the little magnifying glass here and go in and out like that. So what I first want to do is I want to decide on my color scheme. I'm thinking I want something that's quite atmospheric, it's quite atmospheric, I think in general. But I don't really want the colors to be like this, I want the colors to a little bit more bright. So we're going to go ahead and just look our image here and decide on a main background color here. You can go ahead and use this one of a very dark green color like this. You could pretty much use anything you wanted to just like a main color in this piece. To be honest, I think I'm just going to go with a generic color scheme for now, and then I can change it around a little bit as we go, because that's really the way that I like to approach this technique. So I think that I'm going to approach this with maybe a blue or just a bit for green here. Doesn't really matter, we'll just pick wherever we like. So we're going to go ahead and insert that into the paint bucket tool. Use the paint bucket tool and insert it into the background layer. So I like that color. We're going to go ahead on our last panel here. This little button here creates new layer, and basically what layers do, is you can draw on a separate layer, draw every one. Then you can remove the layer, you can draw beneath the layer, as very handy, it's very helpful. So definitely recommend using that. So for brushes, I'm just going to mainly stick to one or two brushes. I'm going to use the default hard round pressure brush here. This is great for so many reasons. It should be already built into your Photoshop, but I'll also leave a link to my favorite brushes. Basically, as you press harder, the line is thicker and then if you press lighter, it's going to be thinner. So I pretty much use this in all my drawings, it's just really really handy. Now, I'm going to go ahead and lower my opacity, and my flow. These affect the transparency and how they build up upon each other. You just need to mess around with these little bit. Start sketching out on the layer above the background there, make sure it's on the layer above the background because otherwise, you'll be drawing on the background, and that wouldn't help you. So I'm briefly just going to do my best to try and sketch out what I'm seeing just very very roughly. You can color it in with just blocks of color if you prefer. I personally like to just use lines to just really get those full-on shapes. I just find that the best way for me to do it, but everyone is different, just do it however you feel it best for you. So yes, I'm going to go ahead now and just sketch out the basic shapes of the house. As we approach drawing more, it's going to be a lot easier to reshape it to be more accurate to the reference. But I'm not too concerned about that just now because I'll say it's just gong to be rough, not too fancy, not too perfect. Try not to worry about too much at this stage because details should always come at the end. I'm also not trying too hard to make it super accurate to the reference, because I want to give it a little bit of my own style, so maybe make it a little more shapely, I suppose is the word, because obviously this reference I've chosen is a more realistic cartoon, whereas what I'm going for, is going to be more of an animated style cartoon. So I'm not going to worry too much. I'm just going to do what I feel is best for this. I'll just keep going ahead and sketching it out. Also take note of the horizon line position. Now you cannot see the horizon line in my reference picture, but we know it's there. As human beings, when we are looking straight ahead in real-life at world around us, the horizon line is always going to be directly ahead of us. Even if you're in a plane, the horizon line is always going to seem to remain the same. It's always going to be straight ahead of us if we're looking straight ahead of it. If we all stood flat against the beach, the horizon line is always going to be straight ahead of us, unless we're looking at a different position. This is why in art, it's important to make note of your main subject in the pace, and how we were looking at it. Like for us, we are looking somewhat downwards towards the house. That is why the horizon line on this is quite high up in the picture. Hopefully that makes sense. But basically, you just always got to analyze the positioning and the camera angle of what you are portraying. If you stood on a beach, for example, but you're looking down at the sand, you can still see horizon line above you in that regard, but we know there is always going to be straight ahead. I hope that makes sense. That's what I'm trying to portray here. Always keep in mind the way that you're always are positioned towards subject. So soon I'm going to do for this right now is super rough, as you can see, which is fine. Just what I want, it makes it easy to work with later on when I'm refining it. So now I've finished our outline. We are going to talk a little bit more about the colors we want on our image and just move on from here.
6. Loose Planning: If you remember, we had these two images right here or we chose a few, but these two in particular. I loved the colors of. What I'm going to be doing is looking at these as points of reference for my color scheme. I really love purples and these bright orange colors. I think it would be nice to have the cottage being quite warm and then the outside to be quite cool. I think that would look rather nice, so what I'm going to do is just pull these out like this. Get my images back up, select to disappear on me. We're just going to go from there and experiment a little bit with our color scheme and our strokes. The first thing I'm going to do right now is, I'm going to add a little bit of darkness to the background because I always tend to like to start with dark to light, so if you look, there is a lot of dark colors in here. Also, in general, not in this particular image, but in general, you will notice that in most landscape pieces, the closer the object is, the darker a bit and then it slowly fades backwards, it will get lighter. This right here is a very good example of that. For example, these objects are in front of the sun, like the sun is back here. These objects are closer to us, so there's no light hitting them this way, so they're darker. The further back the objects get, notice how this is lighter than this in shade. This hair is lighter because it's in the background as opposed to save this here. In general, things will slowly as you can see in this one as well. It's dark here, the sun is back here. The further it goes back, the lighter is. For example, on our image, what I would like you to do really is start off with sienna color dark, blackish color. Then just have this be very, very dark like this [inaudible]. In general, you're going to want to have closer to you. It's going to be dark like this and the more it goes backwards, you can have this like a bit lighter. Like say that's a bit lighter and then the further back again, that these trees are going to be even lighter again. That's just a general rule of thumb that works really, really nicely in most concept pieces because it gives a sense of depth, so the further away, the lighter that you find the trees are going to be. Hopefully that makes sense. You can see as I'm working on it, what I mean by this. But for now, I'm going to make this a little bit more atmospheric if possible. Here is an example as well of a piece that I recently did. It has a similar actually composition to this one where the trees, the live stream through the trees in a different direction. As you see the trees that are closer to us as a viewer are darker and the further back I got, they are slightly lighter and then they're very light back here. It just gives that sense of reality and depth and it's very important. If possible, that you tried to include depths if that's the type of style that you are going for. Usually a cartoon style won't necessarily be this way. But in general, that's how it's going to be. What I'm doing here is I'm just going to add a little white sand. This is going to be covered up and not look like this at the end. But this is just to remind ourselves whether like sources can be so the trees are going to be shadows. This way, the sun rays stream this way. As I mentioned, strategize who go the same direction. That's just there to give us a little reminder, wherever light sources. I'm going to go ahead and pick a color, let's see. I'm going to have this dark green color and that's going to probably let see how dark that is. I want to keep this as light as I can without making it too desaturated. But remember that the lighting is not going to be hitting the trees this way, so we're just going to use a brush to just create that bit of color there. I'm just doing this currently at a 100 percent opacity. Usually I go in with a few different types of opacity, but I think this will work for this a little bit better. Something I'd like to point out with your pieces and it's something that I personally struggled with at the start and it's something I know a lot of people tend to struggle with as well, is worrying about making too dark or too light of a color in their pieces. What I mean by that is, like this right here is a pretty much a solid black color right here. Because of that people would be afraid to put like a solid white color here because they feel that that's too much for contrast and it's not going to blend well. People are so focused on blending, they don't think about the lighting as much. Just keep that in mind that you need to be saturated with the shadows and highlights as possible. I will talk through that more as we go. But just keep that in mind. The plan is to just continue on now with this color per week. To be honest, end up darkening this a little bit. I think what I'm going to do is, I'm going to bring my opacity down a little bit. It'll be easier for us to put in here. But for now I'm just being very, very rough with everything. Just like I can get the basic shapes of the trees out there, like that and then the ground. I want it to be quite nice and bright, so what I think I'm going to choose is probably a color a bit more like this. If you are very new to color picking, I completely understand that it's not easy. I will show you a few different techniques as we work on this, that you can use to change your colors around a little bit to what works best for you. I'm just going to go ahead and use a few different little squiggly lines like this. Again, very rough this is just with a very, very basic default brush. We're just going to carry on doing this until we can get our colors right, and of course this is going to be covered with shadow anyway. It's not really important to color that in. But I like to do it anyway, just so I can have what general idea down. What I want to do here is I want the river to be nice and bright. I am not going for super realistic look on this. I also want to follow off the techniques to make it realistic but at the same time, I really want to give it a more cartoony effect. This river here, I absolutely love the colors in it. I think I'm going to do is I'm going to color grab from here. Can we dark on the shoreline because it's called a shadowing. Going to darken these trees up low but they're a bit too light for my liking, I'm going to add some dark contrast in there. What we're going to do in the background here is it's very dark but I want to make it quite light to instead of making it super dark. I'm going ahead, grab my layers panel, go to the background layer, make another layer, so it goes underneath everything I've just been coloring in. Then I'm going to grab a lighter shade. Thinking more of a mint color might work better. May be like this. I am going to bring up the size of my brush and then paint in the background area little bit. It's now got the basic color in there. We can now solve mess around with the background, so I'm going to want to add some trees to the background as well. They're going to be lighter than these ones because again, it's further away, so the color is going to be a little bit lighter. Just quickly mention actually the reason why this particular piece is not following the whole, the further away the lighter it gets, composition I'm talking about here is because of the position of the sunlight because of the mood of the overall piece. The reason why I'm doing it in this is because I'm changing up a little bit, I'm putting the Sun back here but I'm having it instead illuminate more of the background [inaudible] so much vegetation and foliage hare that it's covering up a lot of the sunlight, so everything's getting darker as it gets further away. I might end up changing it as I go. But for now I'm just experimenting with the way that it looks. The reason why I'm having the lighter background, and this doesn't follow that rule is because there's so much foliage in this particular piece. There's lots of leaves and there's lots of trees that are being blocked by other trees. There's a lot of shadow in this, also the sun in this, if you notice, this is all illuminated by sun and the rays are this way. The sun is more back here facing the front of the house. I'm having more back here, so it's not so much hitting the front of the house. The reason I'm making mine over lighter is because if I'm keeping the sun here, the front of the house is going to be very dark, which I don't want. I am from having it here. I'm just lighting the whole piece. Even at the front of house to be darker, it's still not me super dark where you can't see it. I really like it when trees are eliminated from behind. I think it looks really nice. As a general rule of thumb, usually the trees or object is always going to be darker than the background. Keep that in mind as well. Then we're going to go lighter again and have smallest trees because they're further away so that can be thinner and smaller, and then [inaudible] there as well. I'm going to go ahead and this area here is very dark. I'm going to do that right now. I'm not going to make it fully black but I'm going to get it pretty dark. You arrive at the top and then just put that color in. Give it a bit of a jacket shape there. Worried about this a little bit more later on, I'll give you the technique that you use in order to keep this all blurred, and our focus. Now is looking okay for now. We've got off somewhat depth figured out. We've got no shadows yet on the ground or anything, which is fine. What we're going to do now is we're going to start drawing over these rough shapes. We create another layer, the top layer. We're going ahead and we're just going to pretty much scheme these trees up.
7. Lighting and Shadows: I'm going to talk a little bit more about how to create lighting and shadows in this space. I think what I'm going to do now firstly, is work little bit more on this graph for I worry more about these trace. I have this green here. I'm going color-pick a bit, and I think I'm going to grab something that's a little bit more subdued, and then I'm going to go back and make it a bit brighter later on. I'm going to zoom in. Remember it's Command on the Plus symbol if you have a Mac. It's Control, and the Plus symbol if you have a Windows. Now, I'm just going to dissolve, stir working my way in here with my brush, try and neaten up a little bit with the more subdued green color. Again, you really want to solve and mess around a little bit with the color, with your capacity, with your flow. I'm now going to use this brush here, which is a little bit more rough. It's textured, it's really nice. I will include it in the bush set with this class. But I really like this brush. It's really helpful to create a nice texture on and the thing that you are painting. I'm going to go ahead and use this for my shadows right now. Really any form of texture brush will work for you with this. I just really like this one. I feel that it can do a lot of different things, but if you don't want to download brushes or you're not too sure how to do that, then you can definitely use any form of texture brushes. It's totally personal preference. Another thing to remember is really whatever kind of brushes you use and how we use them will help you to develop some sort of style to your piece. Now as you can see, I'm adding shadows to the lower part of the tree, the rays, remember what the direction that the sun rays are going to be flowing. They're going to be flowing towards us, and now we have this. Something that maybe you won't know about so much is that at the base of the trees, you shadow is going to be darker. So basically the shadow starts to be more concentrated at the base of the object, and then fades to be lighter as it gets further away from the object. As you can see, I'm representing this a little bit at the base of the trees. It's not enough just yet, but I'm giving that as a self guideline for myself so that I can see what I will be doing when I'm refining this later on. As you can see, put it together a little bit better. It looks more pulled together. Now we're going to continue. I'm going to talk a little bit more on the trees, grab this color right here, the dark that I had, that I initially to the trees in width, and add a little bit more shadow to it just to give it a bit more depth. Again, you can color pick or you can grab your own color. But I'm just adding a bit more darkness, and maybe a little bit of texture because in general trees aren't usually smooth, and completely just on texture. I want to add a bit more texture to it, and that's what I'm doing with my texture brush. As you can see right now, I'm adding a little bit more texture or basically just adding some roots to these trees, because obviously trees like this are going to need the roots to be showing, think Winnie the Pooh, for inspiration for this. Notice as well the texture in the tree trunks. We're going to start adding this end with this short little lines. There's few ways to do this, this is just how I feel that I'm going to do in this moment. I might change off a little bit later on, but I'm just going to add this texture lines. For now, again, as a bit of a guideline so when I really start refining this piece, I know how I want it. If you want smooth trees, that's totally fine as well. Some people are okay with that. I personally wanted a little bit more texture. In this moment, I'm not really sure if I like this too much at the moment, so I may change this again later on, but it's totally up to you. I really want to shape this to be more cartoony, animated down the way that it looks in this reference picture, hence, why I'm going with more crazy brighter colors, I just want to make it a little bit more stylized. Again, this is personal preference. You may want to just totally color pick from the reference, which is okay as well. Now I'm going to do because as you can see, I've done this color balance color. Now anytime that I try to paint over, I'm going to have a strange color repair because it's going to be color-balanced. What I need to do here is I'm going to find the image. Basically it's going to work exactly like a traditional painting. Right-click on the layer, click "Merge Visible". You need to hide the background fast, and then hit "Merge Visible". But basically what this means is I can now work and column on this piece as if it was a traditional piece. This is something that I think gives it more of a natural, nice charm to it. Again, personal preference some people just like to continue using laser layers because that works for them. It's a bit easier if you do that for sure, but some people like to give it back. From one layer to charm, if you want to call it that. The other reason why you need to flatten your image every time you color-pick basically is, if you're color-picking, and then making the layer drawing on to be a color balance, basically, if you try to then color-grab that same color, it's going to make the color a different color because it's color-balanced if that makes sense. The only way you can really get around this, the way that I'm doing it is to flatten the image. For now, as you can see I'm just really working in the background. I'm going to create a layer right now, so I'm going to have something that I can work on above this flattened image and the purpose for this is because I'm now going to be adding some lighting strikes, and because I'm going to be blurring them, I only want that particular layer blood. If I was to add this to the same layout, it would blow my entire image, and that's not what I want. I'm going to take a white-collar, soft-round brush, and then create some light strike. Then go to Filter, Blur, Gaussian Blur, and now I'm going to pull up the blood on this until I find something that I like. I want something that has a bit of line to it, like real sunrise do, but obviously want it to be quite blood. What I'm going to do now is take the Eraser tool, and then I'm going to remove the color from these trees like this. It creates a nice effect to the trees. Now what I'm going to do is work a bit more on these trees and the ground as well.
8. Refining: Now we're going to just work more on this piece overall. I'm just going to show you the techniques that I use, but obviously it depends on what you decide you want to create. But all of the concepts and basic foundations of this and techniques are all the same depending on your style and what you want to do. What we're going to do is, I think I'm going to work on darkening some of these areas. I really like the color so far, but I need to go back and change the color balance some point. But for now, I'm going to leave it. You can do it as many times as you want. It depends on your pace, I have been doing so. Especially if you're very new to color picking because it can be quite difficult at first, so it's nice to use color balance to really change that. I think what I'm going to do now is work more again. I'm going to work more on the darker areas. What I'm going to do is look at my reference piece. As you can see, it has a lot of these dark areas to really substitute where leaves and foliage and bush area is. It just nicely represents the amount of trees that are there. I'm going to use a lot of dark purples in this piece. What I'm going to do is, I'm going to color pick some of the dark areas of the shrubbery. Change my brush. Yeah. I think I'm going to stick to my default brush, I'm just going to rinse it a little wet. I think it's definitely always easiest, especially if you're new to this, to work on this with a default brush, one or two brushes not going to crazy because it can get quite confusing at times. Especially again, if you're new. I've made a new line here. I'm going to bring my opacity down and I'm just going to make squiggly little lines here, which I can build up because I have really pulled down my opacity. That's what I like to do. I like to lower my opacity, and really build up my color. I think it's a great way to do this. As you can see, super-messy, doesn't look that great just yet. But this is how I want it for now. It's supposed to be behind these trees, which is why I'm overlaying on the trees. But what I'm going to do later is fix the tree so that it appears to be behind. Now, if you don't find your image like I did, you can just go to Layer Behind. But obviously I flattened it because of the color balance issues. I like to work in a more traditional sense to give it rougher style, make it more of a traditional sense what you'd have with acrylics or watercolor. So yeah. It's totally up to you if you want to flatten your image. I always like to at certain points. I'm going to go ahead now and use a darker color to really blend this in. Again, not making it super neat, I just need to make it look like a rough-shaped idea of what I want. For now, I'm just basically doing the darker colors. Now I'm going to grab the brighter color, and make it look a little bit more like it's highlighted by the sunrise because the sun is shining through them. As you can see, I'm using a jacket effect. It just really depends on the colors you're using and just building up, building up to look more like a tree. Because honestly, what it looks like at the moment is not a tree. But the more you build up, the more colors that you use, the better it's going to look, the more it's going to appear to be blended, but more like a tree. I'm not sure if I'm going to keep these here, to be honest. So I might get rid of them, but the right side I'm liking so far. It's not too great, but I'm going to keep that as it is. Just keep working on it and blending back and forth with different colors. I'll take a smaller brush now. I'm going to show you how I would do the highlights, like the real proper bright highlights. I've got a really small brush. I brought my opacity up a little bit, and then I'm just making some squiggly little lines there. Nothing too uniform, not really going to get into that too much now because again, I'm working on basic shapes, not the final details. But that's how I like to do the highlights really squiggly little lines and carry on like that. Adding some darker little squiggly lines in here helps as well. It just helps to bring it all together. We're really not going for a specific shape for this, it's really supposed to be different parts of different trees. What I'm going to probably do in a bit is give it a bit of a Gaussian blur to blur out the background a little bit. For the background, I really like to have a globe, if that's the right word. I think it just pulls it together quite nicely and it makes it appear like there's a lot to be seen in the background, but you can't quite tell what it is. As you can see, there's a load of trees in this reference here. You can't see it, but you know there's a lot of trees because of the way they've used the blocks of color. There's really no right or wrong way to do this. It's just whatever you feel visually works for you. You will know in your mind if what you're making doesn't quite look right, and in that case, you need to go back and analyze what's missing or what you need to add. Remember, your pieces are never going to look all that great during the process, it's only at the end that it's going to look any decent. Now again, the reason why I have this area here darker is because the sun is further away from it. We'll do something similar over here as well with lighter purple. But because it's more concentrated on the left, the sunlight is going to make everything brighter. What's on the right is a little bit darker because the sun area, there's more trees, there's more blocking it. So there's less light getting there, so it's going to be darker, if that makes sense. I'm going to darken these trees up a little bit because these trees are far away, they're blocked so they're going to be darker. I've created all this so far with just one brush. It's simple enough to do. Again, I recommend you don't worry too much about your brushes. Just practice with what you have, especially if you're new to this. You can start using them if you want to, but I always feel that you should just practice with the program first using different brushes before you start downloading and worry about more brushes. If you look at this corner here, we're going to fade into it. As I said, we're going to have lighter on the left and fade to darker on the right. So the shadows here are going to be lighter because the pieces on this side is overall lighter. If we take some shadows from this tree, and then use them here, it's not going to look right. The shadows don't fit because it's just too light. The shadows are going to be a lot darker on this tree. As you can see, I'm just going to add some darker shadows in here. As you can see, visually that looks much better. So you need to always keep an eye on how your lighting is going to affect the piece. What part of the piece is brighter than the other side. Sometimes it's all the same, but this needs to be very, very dark. Right at the base, remember what I said about the shadows, the shadows are going to be a lot darker towards the base. The shadows are more concentrated, if that's the right word. I'm just going to add some shadows in here. Once you have a nice color palette in here, you can keep going back and forth and color pick. So you'd have to keep coming up with new colors. Try not to give up. Don't struggle too much. If you are struggling, use your Color Balance tool. Then you can just solve. Start adjusting and messing about with your colors to see what works for you, and if there's anything you want to change. Now, this tree here is a little bit too light. You see it's quite a lot of highlights I put in there. Just too light. The whole area should be darker because it's dark on that side. So what I'm going to do is, I'm going to color grab some colors here, and then darken the tree up a bit. It's just too bright. I think I'm going to end up darkening this a bit more later on because it's going to need to be a lot darker than what it is. There we go. Now we've darkened it. I like to really work with my opacity and build up. I don't like to use a solid dark color because then you don't have any way to blend. Once I have a nice base color down, I like to just take my opacity, bring it down with a different color, and then blend over the top. What I will do with this tree here is keep it more of a solid color and not have too much texture to it because it is going to be darker. I think solid colors will work best for this. It's just too far away from the sun and there's too much in the way of the sun on the tree to allow it to have so much light color. I think it's still too light, but we'll go back to that later on. Now I'm just going to add a little bit of highlight here on this tree. I think this one's definitely going to need to be darker as well, but again, we're working through this. We're just adding our rough basis is by no means the final part. This is all going to be just rough, keeping it simplistic so that towards the end, we can make it more detailed. I'm really going for a more animated style, so I'm not really liking the texture too much. Have a little bit, but not too much. I'm going to keep it more rounded and work like that.
9. Lasso tool and Making Trees: Now I'm just going to keep going around with the background. There's not a huge amount more for me to say about particular area, so I'm going to speed this up, and you can see what I'm doing. But basically the plan is to have some to this over here not too much because I like it open, but that needs to be a bit forestry of trees. I'm going to have little different shapes here to represent the leaves and the foliage. It's going to be a lot lighter obviously on this left side, in the middle side as opposed to the right. If you want to watch as I speed this up, then hopefully, it make sense. As you can see here, I'm just pretty much going back and forth with the colors. Just putting down one color, bring that intermediary color, and then just blending it out. It's just very much so blending of different colors until it really looks how you want it to look. So try and make it looks semi decent together. I'm not going to have too much foliage around this area because it's just parts of reference for me. But for now, it's really just back and forth thing with the colors really. I'm just really trying to represent the rest of the forest without carrying too much. Just little circles with the default brush. Again, if it looks a bit messy, that's fine. This actually technique I'm going to to showing you towards the end that are used to blow this out. So don't worry too much if it looks a little bit messy because of the way that I'm going to be finishing this off. So just keep going around with what you've got. Again, little circles build up, use your opacity, use your flow, whatever feels most natural to you to build up your forest. On this tree here, I'm trying to get the look of a shadow being cast on the trunk from the foliage above. The way to achieve this is to, firstly, you need to obviously darken the way leaves are shaped on the tree. I'm going to then go back with brighter parts to show where there's no leaves, if that makes sense. Where the shadows being cast is also going to be darker, and when there's no leaves, it's going to be lighter because it's nothing blocking it. So it's really just a matter of going back and forth with actually seeing a little light that's something in here to represent where the leaves aren't shadowed, and then the dark parts where the leaves are shadowed. It's definitely not a five-minute job. It takes all the background you can, if you prefer to use a gradient. A lot of people stopped doing this. I'd prefer hand painting in sometimes. It's just, again, as a matter of getting a feel for it and what you'll pass no preference, actually isn't how you want your forest. What I'm going to do now with the background trees, instead of physically painting them, I am going to make a selection in the shape of the tree that I want, and then I'm going to fill that selection. This will give it a really nice smooth line. It looks really clean and cool. Why do you really like painting everything? I feel like it's nice to have different elements of smoothness and lines. So I'm going to grab my Lasso tool, which is this option right here. You might have on a different option, but you just hold it down, click, go to your Lasso tool, then I'm going to just make a selection on the right layer. Just down best I can and the shape that I want. Picking me anyway, you can look references for this if you need to [inaudible] just being a bit rough with this. As you can see, I'm just going up around like that. Then I am going to take the Gradient tool. I'm going to grab a color. Then the second color, you click the second color down the bottom pane. Pick a darker color at the base, then you can say at the the bottom left, there are two dark. One light, one dark color. The gradient, I'm going to make it a little bit darker. But yes, the bottom left, you can see two colors. This is going to be made into a gradient when you click the "Gradient" button. So I'm going to drag it into the selection, deselect it. Now, you have a nice clean line. On this layer, I'm going to go to the end of this layer and then get rid of the tree that was already there, just to get rid of that, I need it up a bit. Now, you can see I have a nice clean cut tree. It looks nice. This is the thing, I mean, by really working with what you have until you figure out what you want. I didn't go into this with any expectations or knowing what I really wanted. It just working as you go along and seeing how you like changing things around. There's no pressure to have expectations. The more it pulls together, the more you can figure out how you want it. Again, using a different gradient, we're going to go with a lighter gradient. This time to pick two lighter colors and then drag down the gradient. You can see the changes there. I could change around these two colors and pull it in, select, deselect, and now I have a lighter tree. I'm going put in another tree here, probably. Actually, no, I'm going to change the color of this, and I really like it. Yeah. Again, changing the two colors. Then that's maybe a bit better. Deselect. Sorry, that was a bit further away. Hence why it's lighter. Might do another lighter one again. So there we have it. We can light up a little bit later, but for now we've got those, it's very strange looking trees, we will fix them a bit more maybe later if we don't like them. We can select them and then use this Selection tool to select the tree. Copy it, Edit, Paste, and then you can drag it and you have two of them. So you can move the same kind of tree elsewhere if you want to. Just experiment how you want it, drag it down behind. Just really figure out where we want things and if we want another tool. I'm not sure if I want this one. Yeah. Looks a bit messy, but that's fine for now. So that's what I'm going for. Let's finish up the background and clean it up a bit.
10. Fixing the House: So now I have worked on the trees a little bit in this area, still needs a bit of work, but these ones here in particular and these ones in the background, do need a lot more work, they need a little bit more help, but as you can tell, I kind of flip flop a little bit from one area to another. I don't just work on one area or one layer on top of the other. In an ideal world, you might find that your work load is easier on you if you work on either one section or one layer at a time, but really it does come down to personal preference and how you work best. I kind of work a bit all over the place, but it's up to you to experiment a little bit with this. So I think what I'm going to work on now is the house because, I've not touched it yet. I've done everything in the background, but the house does not have anything yet. So I'm going to go ahead and make a brand new layer. You can also name your layers as well. I mean, I recommended, I suppose I've never made it a habit to name my layers, but you might find it helps you a lot. Although a lot of the digital artists I know, don't tend to do that. So if I go back to my reference now, as you can say, that it's quite simplistic, but it's a cute little cottage and it's nice and rounded. I want to keep that rounded shape and that effect in my piece. So what I'm going to do now, is I'm going to go, and let's see, I've got my layer open. I am going to figure out the colors that I want. Now, make note of how the sun is shining on the house. The back of the house is getting illuminated unlike the reference here, the front of the house or the reference is illuminated at the front because of the position of the sun. However, the sun, for my piece, the sun is behind the house. So the outer rim of the house will be lit whereas the front of the house will be more dark. Keep an eye on where your sunlight is, where your shadows and highlights should be. Always keep of a mental note of where these things should be. So I'm going to color pic now. I think I'm going to change the color of the roof a little bit. I'm going to have it more of a warm, sort of yellowish color, maybe a bit more mustard might be a bit more orangey mustard color, I'm not sure. I think I'll go with this color for now and I'm going to go ahead and sketch out the roof shape. I'm just going to do it in one big block of color. Once I've done that, I can really just start experimenting and seeing what sort of shades I want to use between lighter and darker colors. Now, this is kind of like a thatched roof, so it's made of straw of hay. So don't be afraid to mess up either. It's going to be messy. You might be doing a house, you might be doing a car, but no matter what you doing, just understand that you're going to make a mess and that's totally fine. All principles I talk about do work the same. When it comes to things like this, I really do like to just block in the color. Then from there I can blend out into different colors with a lower opacity brush. So if I'm just working on this for now, it's just a matter of getting the colors down to be honest and just not worry about it. I'm going to use some colors from the tree. Now to get these shadowy areas that are underneath the roof frame. As I say, I like to kind of create main objects in blocks of color with bold color because my focal point in the piece is the house. I don't feel that anything that's done with lower opacity the entire time it's going to turn out well. You always in my opinion, you want to start out blocking a color in, and then using the lower opacity after. Don't ever start with lower opacity, it's something that's going to be transparent. This is a mistake I see a lot of new artists make. They block in color with a more transparent effect, and it never turns out well. You have to have blocks of color as well. Again, I'm really not worrying too much about the colors for now. It's more of an experiment. It's too bright at the moment. The sun is not hitting it straight on, as I mentioned, it's hitting it from behind. This is all going to be changed around, and it's not going to be exactly like this, but as you can tell, I'm not worrying about that. I'm just sort of blocking in my colors. It's something I worry about towards the end. I just really want to give my piece just have a decent idea of where things should go and then worry about the colors more later on, just keeping a conscious effort of where the light should be, and then we can always fix it later on. Okay, so I have the basic shape now, all I've done is just stick down some colors. Now, really, all it is, is a matter of cleaning it up, adding details, fixing the lighting, and pulling it all together, but right now all we have the basic shape of it. We have the basic splotches of color, and that's really all we can do for now. So gradually it's building together and hopefully you can follow along. So during this time of me stopping my recording and starting again, I've been playing around with the colors a little bit. Now, this just looks so unbelievably plain and desaturated to me. So basically I went around and messed with the hue saturation, which is this option, here, color balance, and the brightness contrast option, and the levels as well. So all these for here, you can kind of see what I've been doing. This is what it looks like now, as you can see. It's a lot more vibrant. I really like the colors in this. It's more bam in your face. I think it looks so much better when you switch back to how it was before. It looks so dull and desaturated and like it just needs something. So basically as I say, I went to levels, messed around with those, this helps with the lightness and the darkness of the shadows. This is a really helpful thing to use. So that turned out like that when I fixed the levels, I then went to hue and saturation. It's very basic. Basically, you can change the tone of color. You can change the saturation of the color, like the brightness, the intensity, then you can sort of fix the lightness. So once I used that, this is how it looked. Next I went to brightness and contrast, which is brightening and changing the contrast, it's very simple. Great feature though. This is kind of what it does, it increases the intensity of shadows, played around with that. Then I managed to kind of get this effect once I've done that. Lastly, once I changed the color balance, I've shown you this optional ready, but once I messed around with that, you can change the tones, the mid tones, the shadows, the highlights, and you can just really play around with those a lot and once I did that. This is what it looks like now. It's a nice bright purple color and I just think it looks really, really nice with the kind of piece that it is. I highly recommend that you play around with color a lot as you work. I think at least two, three, four, if not even five times whilst you're working. You really want to mess around with the colors. Don't do it just at the end. Do it whilst you're working, then you can muck around with colors a bit more. If you want something a bit more natural, you can just color pick from your reference or if you want it more vibrant, like I've got it, then you can just try the color balance and all these effects. So I'm going to work a bit more on this house. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to zoom in. Look how rough that looks, oh my gosh, it looks so rough. Which is fine. We're going to also fix up towards the end. So yeah, I'm going to zoom in on my reference now. So that I can see that a little bit better. Now I'm going to really fix this up. So I'm going to go ahead, I don't want this whole face too bright because as I said, the sun isn't going to be hitting it because the sun is behind it, not at the front like is on our reference. So in theory, really the outside of the house should be bright whilst the front should be darker. So what I'm going to do is I'm just going to work with let's see, going to color pick the front of house. Going to go with the more beigey color. Let's see, look at my brush. See how this color looks, make a new layer. This is too bright and pick a different color now, something a bit more gray maybe, and then try this. It's kind of the same swatch already to be honest but, it's more beige. I think I'm going to work with the chimney a little bit actually. This definitely needs to be darker. Now, a house itself is very higgledy-piggledy , which if you don't know what that means? It just means it's all over the place. So I'm not worrying too much about how it looks, also the architecture has to be somewhat accurate to look like it would stand up and be right, but, this is like a cartoon house. There's lots of animals that live inside and seven dwarfs and Snow White. It's a very, very old house and its got a hay roof, so I'm not worrying too much about the architecture of it. Color picking really is trial and error, especially when you've got a lot of color down on the piece already, it's easy to just color pick colors that are already in the piece. So it works harmoniously. Obviously if you've only got a couple of colors in there, you don't want to keep color picking. This is going to be very, very plain. But once you have a nice array of colors like I have, then you can definitely color pick to enhance it. My thinking process behind this is having something a bit more magenta purple with its complementary color of green. So that's what I'm doing at the moment. Something else to note as well. I have the windows as being black. This is important because you need to think about this. For example, if the front of the house is in solid daylight, then chances are, there's sunlight coming through the windows and providing light. For example, right now, if you're sat in the dark because it's nighttime outside, you have some lights on in your room more than likely you've got illuminated light from your computer screen. So basically, if you were out drawing an outside of a house in the dark, you would see some sort of glow from the windows. However, because this is a daytime piece and it's quite bright, there's not really going to be any light or fire or anything inside the house. So I'm just going to keep the windows as being very, very dark, as if it's not inhabited, as if someone isn't home. That's kind of effect that I'm getting from this. So just remember to really think about things like that. If you're drawing like a car, for example, if it's someone in it, it's going to be glowing inside if it's dark outside because of different buttons and stuff. Side of the roof is going to be concaved, it's going to be darker. There's not really any sunlight hitting it or any form of light. So it's going to be shadowing as well, this little corner here, then I'm shadowing. That is going to be darker even more so because not only does it not get hit by the sunlight, but it's also shadowed by the other side of the roof as well. So it's going to be even more shadowed than the opposite side of the roof.
11. More Refining: I am just going to keep on working on the house here, and it's pretty much just a whole combination of different brush sizes. I'm going to be sticking to, again, just the default hard brown pressure brush, and I'm going to vary the size a little bit, vary the opacity. You can watch and see what I'm doing. It's difficult to explain fully what I'm doing. It's more of a watch and learn type of thing, some of this. That's pretty much it. I'm just going to experiment a bit with the color as well, and this shadow here, which is working nicely. It's an example of what I'm going to be doing more. This needs blending. It's too harsh of a line as you can see, so we're going to blend that in a little bit better. I'm going to pick this. I'm going to go ahead and grab my brush and change the opacity, and then I'm going to blend this in like that. Then we are just going to just blend this in. Keep color grabbing that intermediary color. Pick that second shade that we made, and then we will blend that out. Varying intensities of opacity really helps to give this a more natural effect. Again, remember you need to do that on a solid color. That's how I find it works best for me. This chimney definitely needs darkening. The base here is very, very dark. We have a little fence, which we'll add in a little bit later on, and just need to work on the shapes on the side of the house and just loosely put them in like this. Now, because the house is the main focal point in this piece, we are trying to get it as detailed as we can. I like to always make the focal point the most detailed, and then gradually build out from there. What I'm doing really is just building up on the shapes, not worrying about the details too much, but working on the preliminary part first. As you can see, it's literally just a matter of going back and forth with colors trying to blend. This along the roof here, as you can see, especially in this area right here, this is going to be hitting right with the sun is. The sun is going to be hitting that area of the roof because it's sort of curved upwards, hitting the sunrise. So we're going to keep grabbing a lighter color just to represent how the sun is hitting the area of the roof, and as it dips down the groove here, the sun isn't going to be hitting that so much because it's groove down, the sun can't reach it, so that will be not as brightly colored. It's going to be a bit darker. As you can see, it's slowly coming together, still very very messy, but it is slowly coming together. The biggest lesson really in this class is that you need to make a mess before you can make something tidy. Again, details come later. Remember to master that and it can be messy. This is like a beautiful old shoed house style, and I'm trying to represent it as best as I can. These beams, what are these called? Just try to make sure these are the right color because, obviously, that's a real big element of this house to give away the style and how it actually is supposed to look. The high roof, we need to really try and represent a little bit better as well because we want it to be stylized, but we want it to also accurately portray the era that it's in. You really got to notice all of the details, for example, this slants inwards like this, these little beams, so we need to do that a little bit later on, and its darker on the shadow area to show that it's kind of 3D. So we will add in that right there just to give it that nice effect. Let's see. This window is slant. I am going to tone down the grass a little bit because I feel it's too lime green. Not lime green, but it's just too bright. I like the whole purple-green aspect, but I just don't want the grass to be too crazy. I feel it's a bit psychedelic, maybe that's the right word. I'm going to try and see if I can figure out a color I like better just to tone it down a bit. Something like this maybe will work better. I'm thinking of changing the color balance again just slightly to cool it down a little bit, and I don't want it to be too crazy. I think that tones it down just enough. I think that's going to work better than what I already had. I prefer the way this is looking and I prefer the grass color as well. For this part of the roof, because it's facing into the roof, I need to lighten this a bit more than I did before. Going to highlight it a little bit more. You can see the effect that the sunlight is hitting it. The more I do this, the more you can really see and tell how the sunlight is going to be affecting this. I'm going do it along the top of this roof here as well because this is very much so hit by the sun, and also this point here as well on the outside. Notice how that gives off an effect of the sun. These two lines here represent the tray on the chimney here. As you can see, there's two lines that's basically from the tree if you look on the reference. I've put them up purely because I do plan on adding a tree towards the end. I've just put it there as a preliminary because obviously I have a reference to look at. Don't have a tree yet, but when I do have a tree, it's going to be easier because the shadow is already there. As you can see, we're getting there now, slowly but surely. Still needs a lot of work but this is what it's like, It's back and forth. Keep on working really, just keep going with it. I'm going to work more on the grass again. The house is obviously still not done, but I've got some nice basic parts down. Going to colorize the grass more. Shadows are already difficult when you're working with objects that aren't just wrapping down like the trees. For example, this has so many different angles and little arches and different shapes. Yeah, it's going to be a shaped shadow in the way that the house is. Obviously, it needs to be at the right angle. What I'm going to show you now is a little bit of a trick which isn't totally accurate. If we select the house, we're going to Copy Merge, then we're going to make a new file, paste it into this new file. We're going to go to Image, then we are going to just flip it horizontal, my bad not horizontal. Go back Image, flip vertical, not horizontal. This is what we got. We're going to select this. We're going to copy it, then we're going to go back to our image and paste it. We're going to take our mouse top. It's going to be similar to this. As you can see, I'm just going to erase some of this bottom part. It's not any help to us. Get rid of that. That's how it's going to look for now. Then what we're going to do obviously, it's not straight up and down, the shadow. So that's the shape we're going with. We're going to use a transform to reshape this. I've grabbed my mouse again, and I'm going to go to Edit, Transform, Skew. This gives me the little nodules that allow me to do this, to really pull out the image and structure outwards, and this is what I'm going for. We can envision how the shadow and what shape the shadow would be in. It's going to be somewhat like this. I'm going to play around with it a little bit more. It's hard to explain. This is the best way that I can represent to you, and it's a trick that you can use. We'll just make this a little bit smaller. There we go. I'm going to readjust this. If you're having trouble, try this technique. You might find it is helpful to you. It's helpful to me when I work on things like this, just to envision it. Again, go to Image, sorry, not image, Edit, Transform, Skew, and that will just allow you to fiddle around with the way that it works. That's a technique you can use if you're having trouble imagining how a house would look or your object is going to look. What we can easily do from here is widen the base to match the base of the house because obviously, it's going to be meeting. Then you're going to create a new layer. Then you're going to turn it down a little bit on the actual house layer. Go to New Layer, like this. We're going to paint over the shape of a house. There we go. That's what the shape of the house will look like. We're going to fill it and it's not perfect, it's not exact. But if you are new to this, it's a great technique to use.
12. More Refining Part 2: The house isn't done quite yet, but as I like to do, I like to go back and forth through things and I'm going to fix up the shadow a little bit here. As I mentioned, shadows stir off a lot darker at the base here and then they gradually become fading out lighter. I'm going to go ahead and grab a darker shade for the base of the house. Just the base of the house like this, and then I can fix that a bit later on if it's not bright color. It's going to be quite a dark shadow for now. I'm going to just fade out a little bit now with this green color. Something to note as well is how the house is shadowed onto the tree, it's going to shadow up here onto the tree and have a curve. I will show you what I mean. I'm going to grab a dark color from the tree for the shadow on the other side, and then I'm going to just apply that all the way down on the lighter side of the tree to really represent how the house is shadowing the sunlight. It's the shadow onto the tree basically. It's very much an experimental thing, you're not going to know exactly how the tree would look, but that's how I'm going for now and I'll blend out a bit better later on. Really the emphasis is to just try to emphasis where the shadow is going to be really more than anything. I'm going to grab this and so far everything has been done with this one little brush side, that's literally it. We're going to keep working with that and blend out and continue with that. I want a combination between these two colors, so I'm going to grab a lighter color here, bring the brush-up, bringing capacity down and then I'm going to just slightly give it that darker color, so I can get that intermediary color. Grab my color picker and get that middle color, grab my brush and then I'm going to blend that out like that, and that can be our lighter shade. As you can see, even though it's rough and strokey I'm gradually just building up that color blend. Just shaping our shadow there as well. If you zoom out, you can see it looks much better than it did before. It's step away to go and it's put some blending and color into the water, but there's some stuff I like to leave until the very end. I'm really not liking this bright green star here, so I'm going to just take a color and fix that up. Something a bit more natural but lighter. The water will be fun today because I just really enjoyed drawing water to be honest. I'm going to get rid of a lot of these harsh edges, of course. But I think I'm going to go with this lovely blue color here, really lovely color. I'm going to pick from this a tip and I'm going to see how it looks in the water here. Now I'm going to go back in and fix the shadows here with the trees because they're way too light. I'm going to grab this greenish color and then just pull them out blend them out and we have that nice gap between shadows because we're giving the illusion that the sun is streaming through. The water is not going to be giving a reflection because it's running water, it's total still water will be more of a glass fact and have a reflection of the house, however, because it's a moving body of water, this is just going to be some blue colors blended in. But if this was just a flat lake, then I would absolutely put a reflection in there but because it is moving, I want to represent that and have to start movement represented. I'll have to zoom out and in to just look at how everything is appearing and how the shadows and the shapes are looking. I want to know if they're looking as good as I think they do when I'm zoomed in because often I zoom out and they don't look good. Sometimes I will say like to flip my Canvas around or flip upside down, so what I'm going to do here is I'm going to just pull my, I am not really liking where this tree looks, so I'm going to pull this over to the left a little bit, fix that because zooming out, I was able to see that floor and I need to bring the shadow in more like that. Always good to get a different perspective, whether it's walking away, coming back to it or if its literature zooming out. Another way, as I mentioned before, you can gain perspective by flipping the Canvas. You might notice a lot of artists, if you actually paints do this. You go to image, image rotation, rotate horizontal, and it pretty much just flips it, so it looks really, really strange, but it gives you and your eyes time to adjust to try and fix how it's looking and as you can see, it just looks really odd. I think a good way to gain motivation on the piece really is to, if you are working on the same pace for many days, it's nice to readjust it like lived on hand, mirror image X, it allows you to feel like you're working on something a little bit different because you can get it bored after a while working on the same thing. Give it a try, it might help you feel like you can preview what played a little bit more. Now I'm trying to transition this into the water a little bit, so the color is obviously going to be green, sorry, it's obviously be blue, not green, and so what I'm trying to represent here is just continuing naturally into the water. It's not going to be green because obviously it's not the grass it's going to be more of a tale dark, teal color and I'm going to apply that dark shadow here to represent how the bank is curved downwards and it's 3D, otherwise it appears like it's just the same level and that wouldn't have happened. That's what I'm going to be doing. We're going to take that darker color again and really just try and blend that out. Low opacity and then blend the two gives them more 3D effect and more depth.
13. More Refining Part 3: I am going to talk a little bit more on the shadow here. Shadows are really difficult to perceive when you have really strangely shaped object. I personally try to work with what I have and visualize it as best I can. But I'm just going to keep reshaping it until I feel that it works. How it shows, you could have known in your mind what looks right and what is more natural. In theory though, everything should be streaming diagonally like that. For example, it's streaming this way so the top of this really should be going down to a point about like that and then work it's way. So I think I'm going to somewhat move the shadow over a little bit. This point here is actually supposed to be like the area there, which is this point here is supposed to be more here, and this right here should be more where the tree is in this area. So it's slightly off. This tree is too lit up in this area. The house is blocking it, so it's too lit up in its entirety. I'm going to go ahead and darken this up a little bit. It should not be that light in the slightest, it should be in mostly shadow. Again, I'm using a plain round pressure brush, nothing fancy. This is how my style is, I suppose. It's more smoothed out and streaky and I always tend to use this brush to be honest. I'm just going to keep using this and this needs to be darker as well because small peak and a round edge. So that's there. That peak is for that. This peak is for that. This peak on the chimney, falls onto the chimney, but also goes past the tree a little bit around this area here. It's very much, again, trial and error. Learning shadows is a difficult task. When you remove the light, everything is pretty much blue light and then you have the sun and that adds light to areas if that makes sense. I might make a video talking about this a bit more because it's hard to explain in this, but basically, working with shadows is very important. It's something I recommend that you study and look into so you can really get principals down. I am going to do these shadows to really finish off, is to not have too much shape. Shadows in general are very fuzzy. They don't have a solid line. Again, it can be that way if you are making a certain style, but the way that I'm doing this it needs to be more faded out and blurred into the ground. This line here is just way too harsh. That's going to be way too harsh. In reality it would be more fuzzy and blended outwards and I'm just going to keep blending that outwards. There we go. It's pretty much sorted. You can just keep blending them out. It's just to harsh. You don't want anything too harsh. These areas back here we are going to blur and this area here in the front as well, we're going to blur that as well. So we're not going to worry too much about the detail. Is more color we have to worry about because our main focus is going to be on the house. That's what's going to be most detailed. Everything around the house is going to be more focused like when you take a photograph and you focus on a face and everything else has got a bokeh background or blurry. That's what I'm trying to go for in this piece. So I use the Gaussian blur tool to achieve that. I'll show you shortly how I do that. These trees here look rather strange. What I like to do is use my selection tool to select the area that I want our focus. I look for the layer that is on. This is why you should keep track of your layers if possible, people. So I forget this is layer [inaudible]. Going to filter Blur, Gaussian Blur, and I'm going to pull this little lever up and down to see where I feel that it works best. I'm going to make out of a focus, which I really like. All of this area as well, I'm going to make this blurred as well and out-of-focus. Confine the layer, we're going to select it, go to Blur, Gaussian Blur, blur out the background. Its a good idea to name your layers for these purposes. One of the examples I can give you where naming your layers, taking the time to do that is important. But honestly, most of the time you're going to forget to do it unless you really make an effort to make it a habit when you first start learning. But as you can see, it's now blurry. I can do the same in the section. If you have all of your stuff on one layer, that's totally fine. That's why I'm using the selection tool because I can just select certain parts of the canvas. You can get the effect that we're going for with this pace. Nestle blurred bokeh background and now what we're going to do is we're also going to blur out this foreground here. This is going to have flowers on it and some trunks and I've not done that yet, but I will do that shortly. But I think what I'm going to do now is work more on the water, I think. Water needs some work. Slowly getting there now. If you see this right here, this part of the bridge is going to be darker because obviously it's in shadow. This tree right here that's going to shadow some of it as well. That shadow is going to pull out this way because of the way it's angled in front of the sun. You can really envision where the sun rays are going to be. Also notice how when something is straight up and down, the shadow is going to start smaller and then widen outwards. If you're working with a triangle like this, the shadow is going to go into a long point like this. However, when you are using a trunk or a stray object is going to start out thin and then just widen as it goes out, like that. I'm going to a sketch how the way that the waterfall looks here, because I forgot this was here and I need to add that in. Just using some block colors and I'm going to use some little darker strikes just to represent the water flowing. Again, notice how I'm not using the same color on the water that I am on the grass. They are two different surfaces, two different colors. Obviously I'm using different colors. So be very conscious of that. Right now I'm just using a small brush to really try and achieve the flow. Maybe add some rocks in as well. That's just going to be dark brown potato shaped objects. Just add them in like this. Again, start off with the basic simple one color shape and then we fix them and the colors later on. Things like rocks really aren't the easiest thing in the world. But even now I am learning how to paint them but these are very simple rocks and stones so they're quite simple to make. Starting off with those potato shapes and then we'll use a dark color to really accentuate each individual rock and their shadows as well. Now grabbing the darker color, going to lighten up the areas that are going to be more exposed to sunlight as well. This area here is as you can say is going to be more exposed to sunlight. That little corner there is going to be exposed to sunlight. Probably going to make this a bit more gray. I'm going to blend them into the landscape a little bit more because they look a bit strange at the moment. There needs to be more rocks for sure in this area. We need to fix that. We're going to change up the color of the grass a bit as well. Now I think what I'm going to do is get a brown color or actually no, I'm going to grab the color from the roof and add in that pathway all the way up to the front of the house. We're going to work more on this now and keep going with it.
14. Adding Focus: I am just going to add in some random colors here. Notice how this is our focus and blurred. We're going to add few little colors in like we did in the back and we're going to Gaussian blur art. Then we can really fix this whole area up to bring it together. I'm going to go ahead and color grab some bright colors. I'm going to go with some greens and reds. I'm going to use a textured brush because that's easiest for me to use. Again, I'll include this in the brush pack. I'm just going to really just randomly place these different colors like if I was trying to make this and focus I'd mostly do a much better job than this. But I'm just going to vary the colors I'm using to represent flowers and greenery and bushes and moss. You really just want the colors place down more than anything. Just basically representing a forest. I really like this texture brush. It's really nice to use when you're doing something rushed and rough. You don't have to worry too much about it. I'm going to get some bright red now, I think because I feel that will just have that nice bright texture that we're looking for and maybe a bit on the left as well. Really that's just going to represent little flowers and some really pretty things here. I'm going to add a little bit of green, I think. Maybe a bit more yellow. Small vibrant flowers really stand out. Basically, the aim of this is to try and frame the whole place. Trying to just basically represent how far away we are from the house and just to framing it nicely. If I just go to Alias tool now and just select this area on this brand new layer that I've used, just like this, I'm going totally select everything. On different light, everything else. Otherwise, it's going to be blurring stuff that we don't want blurred. Make sure that you've done this on a separate layer. We've selected that, so we're going to go to ''Filter,'' Gaussian blur'' and we'll see the level to which we want this blurred. I think I'm going to go with something similar to this. It's quite a good level of blue color. If I deselect it, that's how it looks. I'm really liking the way this looks so far. If you do have any harsh edges like I have, you can go ahead and grab this really soft diffused brush and then just grab a color and then just blend outwards a little bit to just get rid of that harsh edge. We're almost close to being done, to be honest. I'm really happy with that.
15. Final Finishing Touches: The rest of this piece is now going to be sped up. I got everything down what I wanted to. I got all of the shadows in the place I wanted them. I pretty much got the colors I wanted as well and just had everything flat out. Basically what I did now was used all of the techniques that I've taught you in this class to just clean up the piece overall. A lot of the strokes are very visible. There was some very harsh lines that were not blended. As you can see here, all I'm doing is simply blending in using that intermediary color, just blending the shadows into different parts of the grass, of the trees. I also felt that the trees themselves needed quite a bit work on them because if you haven't noticed, they stick out quite a bit in an unnatural way and this is supposed to be quite an unnatural piece. Yes. But I still want to follow a lot of the physical real-world laws, if you want to call it that in this piece and I just was not happy with my trees. I wanted to keep going and changing the colors around. I highly recommend that you spend some time during this with your piece now, once you've got all of your basic parts down, you're happy with how it looks, but you feel it's not working, try darkening up some of the shadows as you can see on these trees, what I'm doing right now, they needed darkening up. They were too bright. They needed darkening to blend properly into this piece. Again, I'm keeping to the whole darker on the right side further away from the sun, thing that I was going for to begin with, and basically I'm just adding in some little leaves using that all small brushes. Using those small wiggly movements that I talked about prior. I'm just flipping back and forth, basically blending my colors in, constantly color picking from the colors I already have because I already have quite an overload of colors in my piece. I didn't want to start adding more into the mix. I basically just kept color picking from my piece and using every element that I've already taught you so far. I was fixing up this piece entirely. I had to add in the ground, the pathway a little bit better. I have to add in the bridge as well because that's something I hadn't added in. That was pretty much just me adding in some little shapes and blending them out. That's literally all it was. For now I'm just going to continue on, as you can say, blending out my shadows, my trees, and I added a little tree in front of the house, like I said I would and battling to work as well as you can see, but everything develops from simple shapes. We start off with your simple shapes. You can start off with lines if you prefer. That's often how I start off with my portraits using lines. For this, I use a combination of both lines, sketches and blocks of color. You add any block of color, take your brush, a smaller size, lower opacity, or a lower flow and from there you can blend it, add more color without making it look too unnatural. As you can see, I'm just simply going along right now. Adding in, I was darkening the roof up a little bit because it was too bright. The tree was covering that area of the house, but I had it super bright. Again, always keep your eye out on what the sunlight will be hitting. You can see the top of the roof is very much illuminated. It looks illuminated simply because I added a pale yellow, which is what the sun would do to a yellow roofed house, it's going to add that nice pale glowing effect. Always remember that your light is going to depend on what it's hitting. If your roof is a deep brick red in order to really illuminate what the sun would represent on that roof, it's going to be a pale pink. To make that look like it's glowing, add out a pale pink. As you can see, I also really added a lot more yellow to the roof of this piece because I wanted it to be colorful and bright and really glowing. Overall, this piece is just, its shape. That's all it is. Shapes being conscious of your shadows, of your placement of the sunlight, and also your placement of your objects basically, and how they are going to be blocking areas of your overall piece. Thank you incredibly much for taking this class. If you have any questions whatsoever, don't hesitate to ask me in the discussion down below, check out the brushes set that I provided to download. Those are free for you to use. Again, if you have any questions, that would be great. I will answer them as soon as I can. I would also love to see your projects. Your projects are basically going to be your own scene. You can copy what I made or you can make something entirely of your own. Make sure that you share it down below. I really look forward to seeing what you create. Thank you again for taking this class. Take care of yourselves and I will see you in the next one.
Chloe Rose, Artist, Youtuber, Youtube.com/mschlosey
