Digital Painting in Photoshop - Create Amazing Concept Art

1. Introduction to this Class: Hello everyone. My name is Robert Marzullo. I'll be your instructor for this class, Digital Painting in Photoshop, brought to you by Skillshare. In this course, we're going to take a basic pose and we're going to create a character design, step-by-step. I'm going to walk you through my process for rough sketching an idea down, working through concept changes, and then refining it. I'll then show you how I prepare the sketch for digital paintwork, and then we'll start to lay in our base colors. As I walk you through the process of digitally painting this character from start to finish, you're going to learn about all the tools that I use within Adobe Photoshop to create my digital art every day. With this course, you're also going to get the art files and textures, as well as my brush pack that will allow you to create all sorts of effects. I'll be showing you ways to speed through your work and enhance your workflow. Also how to break down the work so that you can make edits more easily in complex scenes. I'm excited to teach you this course, and I hope you're excited to learn it. Let's get started. 2. Layers and Groups SSE: Welcome back. We're going to get started with those course, and the first thing that you need to do when doing anything in Photoshop or any program is understand the interface. What I'm going to do is go through a series of tools and we're going to address some of the tools as we progress to the course because I'll be honest, photoshop is so vast that if I was to sit here and try to explain every tool and everything that it did, we would have to cover multiple courses. It's just that powerful. What I'm going to do is I'm going to go through the basic settings first, and then as I progress through some of the paint work, I'm going to show you a multitude of things. First off, the very first thing is the file new. Whenever you get started with a new document, you're going to go to File New or Command N as you can see there, a lot of these will show you the shortcut commands. Later on in the course, I'll show you how to create your own. Hit "New" there, and then you can name your document. We'll just call this painting, and I like to work in inches, but you can see you've got your different abilities or different units of measurement to use there. Let's go with, I like to usually work at about 16 wide, nine tall, 300 DPI, and there's lots of various sizes that I work at, but that's one of my default settings for digitally painting. It's a widescreen format. Works really well. RGB, that's fine, you can pick from RGB, CMYK, grayscale, whatever you want to work in. I prefer to start in RGB, and 8 bit, 16 bit, 32 bit, I usually work in 8-bit. There's just tons and tons of settings as far as displays and Pixel Aspect, I work in square pixels. You'll have to delve into this if you really want to know what all those does, but like I said, we're going to address things as they apply to what we're doing. Nine by 16, hit "Okay" and there's our Canvas. It's going to give us a background that's locked. Just go ahead and hit a new layer right here, and if you hover over it, you can see it says create new layer. You can hover over each one of these and understand a little bit more about them. That's one of the really great things about Photoshop. It does help you out a little bit there. Now, that we've got a new layer, we can start painting. There's a couple of ways to generate a new layer. You can use that icon there. You can drag a new layer on top of that icon, and it will make another one and hit Command "Z" and go back. You can right-click and go to duplicate layer and create a new layer off of this one. You also have the option through here to actually go ahead and create a new canvas with the same size with whatever is on that layer. We'll get into that later, but it's a nice option if you've got something painted and you want to create a whole new canvas with that layer, you can do that really easily with what I just showed you there, so right-click duplicate layer. In this case say we just wanted a copy of that you'd hit "Okay" and there you go, so hit Command "Z" or you can drag this layer to the trash right there. Once you've got a layer, you need something on that layer for it to really allow you to use some of these other controls here. Let's just go ahead and do a sample. I'm going to be showing you some basic ways to construct some beginner paint work and blending modes, and then we'll get into the more advanced stuff later. Hold "Shift" with the selection tool, with the, let's say Elliptical Marquee hold "Shift" and it'll give you a nice perfect circle there. Once you let go, if you notice when you go into that selection area, it changes and you can move it around. Now, if you click outside there, you're going to lose your selection. Hit Command "Z" to go back. Notice that, you go inside there, you've got your selection. Let's go ahead and fill this with a color. Let's just pick a red, and just like that with the bucket tool, whatever colors here, we can click "Fill." Now, you can Command "D" to de-select, to just click off of it. But the beauty of this is once you've got a shape like this, you can just lock transparency over here. We're going to be using this a lot to do our paint work because it's a huge time-saver. I'm going to go to something like this chalk painter brush, and I'll show you the settings of it real quick. You're going to go to Brushes right there and go to Presets, go to this icon right there, so you see it's a brush icon, if you hover over it, it's going to say brush. Looks like a little can of brushes hanging out of it, and I've only got transfer set under control, pen pressure and pen pressure and Opacity Jitter and Flow Jitter, nothing else. What this does, it gives me this effect right there. Then the only thing that would be adjusted. If you go here, you can look at the spacing down to five. Now, I do have some spacing on, so that's about it. If you take this all the way down, it'll be a completely smooth brush. Now, for brush lags on you, you've got to be on the lookout for the spacing here, so just be aware of that. Now, I'm going to take, and scale this brush out. I'm using the bracket keys to do this. The bracket keys are the ones that look like this. I'm going to back out here, and I can use the bracket keys to scale the brush up and down. You can see it moving over there and you can adjust it here as well. Now, by pressing real light with this brush, I can start applying some paint, and notice how I'm not going outside of that edge, that perimeter shape. It's a huge time saver. I can also play with the opacity a little bit if I want to slowly work up my shadow here. This is more of a hard brush effect, but it's nice because you can build up this texture as you go. Then once you've got enough of your range of your color, you can just hold "Alt" select and you can start to blend back. You can really control the texture that you're applying and get just the right effect. It's really neat way to paint. We're going to be doing more of this. I'm going to show you the way to blend your paint with a smudge brushes and the way to use different brushes with blending techniques like we're doing here. I'm basically just clicking Alt and then sampling that color rather quickly and you see it right there in that little inner ring. Then I'm painting it back. It's actually a very quick way to paint, doesn't seem like it at first, it takes a second to get used to, but this is actually the way that you end up with the most control, and it really is probably even quicker, but I know a lot of people get really used to the smudge brush. Just like that, we've got some range. I could select the background, I could brush in a little bit of white in there. Just a tad and then blend that around. It's a little too strong. But, just real quick there I can get a 3D shape going on. Depending on how realistic I want this, I just keep repeating this process. I can pull the brush strokes in the other direction, add a bit more texture that way. Just remember that texture is really important for your paint work and it's a lot of building up. Or you can really want to think about things like underpainting and adding more and more paint over top. Just because it's digital painting doesn't mean that it doesn't have some of the same rules. In fact, it has a lot of the same rules, if not all the same rules as traditional paint. Now let's talk about the layers and groups a little bit more. Essentially, once you start getting in the habit of creating artwork like this, lacking transparency, you're going to start to build up more and more layers. For instance say that you drag this with the move tool, this is your move tool here. You hold Alt on the keyboard and drag over. You can make a duplicate of your artwork really quickly. That's the quickest method I think, and the one that I employ the most for recreating things within the scene, just entirely fascinating. Hold Alt and click and pull over, command Z to go back, command Alt, Z to go back more than once, so just remember that because within photoshop, you can really only hit "Command Z," once, and then it won't work again, it'll go back and forth, but if you hold command Alt, Z, you can go back multiple times so just be aware of that. Hold Alt, drag it over so now you've got this extra layer. You can double-click here, and we'll just call this red ball 2. You can double-click and rename right there. When you start to get layer-intensive, so you start to get all these variations. Let's save and keep in mind, you can right-click over something, find the name within this row here, click it, and then you can jump layers that way. That's why naming your layers can be effective. There's a lot of times when I'm moving really fast that I won't name as many layers, but it is going to be harder to decipher if you don't name them, when you just have layers 1, 2, 3. I mean, you can obviously look over here, and keep in mind this is easier to use when there is a lot more selected area or a lot more solid fill. If you're working with liner, this right-click method becomes a little bit more difficult to employ. As you start to get more of these layers, you're going to be more prone to want to use groups as well to organize your work. This is your group icon right there. Create new group, just simply click on it. You can click "Hold," and drag in places in a hierarchy. Double-click here and just call this paint work or whatever you need to call it. What you can do is you can drag these into here. Notice that it'll just stagger over a bit. It's just like a hierarchy in the way it works. You can do this as many times as needed and build as many files inside of files as you need to. When you need to conserve space over here, you simply hit that arrow and you condense it down. Now the beauty of that is it really saves space and it really organizes your work. It's just a huge time saver in a lot of ways if you get very complex scenes, and you have a hard time digging through all these layers, this is the way that you work through it. After you're done working on a certain area, so let's say that we wanted to duplicate this group, we can just drag it down to this create new layer icon, it'll give us a backup copy. We'll just call this, it says copy, but we'll just give it a numeric value of two. Now what ends up happening is, say these were entirely different files. For instance, I'll go into here and I'll edit these really quickly by just go into something like image adjustments, and we'll talk about this more later. But I'm just going to quickly change the color of these just so they are different in some way. You see that's real easy to do by using that slider. Let's change the size. Let's take command T, hold "Shift," to size it up proportionally, hit "Enter," right-click here, or actually we'll just click here, command T, hold "Shift," scale proportionally, move it up. See we're starting to get a little bit of a solar system thing going on here spacing. Now I can condense that down and just as quickly as that I can toggle through each one of these. If I want to just work on the, well call these planets now I guess, I can take those off and I can work on these back ones. That's really how layers and groups can really help you. Again, the more complex this thing gets, you can just add more or less of these. Now once you got it to a certain area of edit and you're ready to say not have as many groups or as many layers, you can also just be on the group itself, hit "Command E," and see how I just turn that into its own layer, they're together now. That works with anything that's in there. You could have 50 files in there and you can hit "Command E," and merge those all together. One of the things that I actually like to do because I'm a little bit more apprehensive about just condensing down my work too early on, is I will actually drag a copy of this. Hit "Command E." I've now merged it down, I can create another group and just call these backup files or whatever and then just drag these into here. The reason why I do that is because it allows me to still condense the work down. I keep the backup file at the very bottom there, and then merge things together when I need to, and keep in mind you'll take the visibility off when you want those to be entirely not in the way. Essentially, if I have both these on and I'm sitting or hitting this and nothing's happening, it's because this other one is actually behind it, it's still visible. We can see now it'll disappear. That's essentially the way that I work when I'm doing more complex scenes. [inaudible] I said, if it's something not so complex, I tend to paint more just on one layer. But if it's anything with backgrounds, multiple characters, things like that, then I tend to use the layers and groups, just like you see here. It really helps me organize my work and move in a forward momentum as I'm creating. I showed you what command E does if you're on a group, but I need to also show you what it does on a layer. If you're on a layer and hit "Command E," it actually just keeps merging with the one below it. You can do that as many times as you need. Just be aware of that, if you're on the group, it merges a group. If you're on the layer, it merges with the layer below. Also if you right on the layer, you can actually color coat these. You could color these any color that you want to help discern them from one another. If you're on the group and you right-click, it will actually change all of the items in the group to the same color. That's really the way I use it when I use this. That's another great time-saver and another way to distinguish layers and groups from one another. 3. Custom Brushes and Settings: Now we're going to talk about the brushes and settings because this is actually an area you'll need to start with. A lot of people get hung up on this. I want to get this right out of the way because this is what gets you started with digital painting. For instance, say that we've got this brush here and keep in mind, you can get this in the bonus content, so you'll have access to all of these. But let's start off with this real pencil brush. A lot of times you're going to start off with a sketch. I think the trickiest thing is for people to get a good line from thick to thin. That's the starting point. That's the part where most people struggle. Now as you start to paint more, you realize that you use less of that, but in the beginning you do use it. Let's show you how to get to the brushes. You can either go to the icon here. Keep in mind that you can also get to anything by going to window, brush, brush presets. If you hit F5, that's a shortcut command. It'll open up this little icon here. Once you're into the brushes, I [inaudible] a real pencil brush that I've created here. I'll just go through some of those settings. Even though you just see these options here, and you can toggle those on and off. This is also an option up here. If you start with brush tip shape, again, you've got some spacing here. You can actually condense down the brush and you could tilt the angle at which it rotates. If you actually grab outside of this area, you rotate it. If you squeeze this, compress it down or around, you could change the tip. It doesn't really matter too much on the brush I'm using here. In that if you have shape dynamics, you see it goes from an untapered edge to a tapered edge, quite harshly and strongly. That's going to depend too upon your tablet and the sensitivity. But most pressure-sensitive tablets will have these options. You can quickly get a brush that now goes from this thin line with max pressure to a thick line. Actually let me add a layer of now we're drawing on the background there. Back into the brushes and there's just tons and tons of settings in here. I don't know that I need to explain every single one, but I'll go through the ones that I think are most primary to getting good at utilizing these brushes and do what you going to do. For this type of brush, I'm not going to use any size Jitter. Then you'd give into minimum, maximum how the Size Jitter is applied, whether it's through the pressure, the tilt, the stylus wheel, the fade, things like that. Most of the time I'm using everything under pen pressure, control for the angle Jitter again, the options and these are going to be determined to on what your tablet supports. That's why I don't want to get into these too much other than pen pressure because you need to be aware of what type of tablet yours supports and there's lot of different options on the market. I'm using a wacom tools for this particular session. Scattering is going to be more for paint work. But you see if you start to move these sliders, you'd get this nice scattering effect. This can be really great for brushes that are for texturizing and stippling. If I scale up the brush with the bracket keys. You can see it's basically just taking the tip of that brush and it's scattering at about. You can control things like randomization of that effect. The count in how many there is, the jitter of that count, the way it's applied with the pressure of that tilt all these things, whether or not it scatters on both axes. Now it's got more of a space style fact because going in both directions as it scatters. Lots of neat things there for an actual just drawing brush or disable all of this. Essentially for a drawing brush, I'm not going to use any of this, except a little bit of texture because I wanted this to have a pencil feel. I'm going to scale it back down so just a slight bit of edge to it. Let me go back and make sure I've got, one of the things you have to be aware of to is that, if you make any changes to your brush, you do have to save it out to make the actual changes. But you want to be aware of any little changes you might be making as you progress through this because it's really how you're going to learn. You save variations of your brush as you make changes. Again, you can change the scale of it and you've see their effect on that little thumbnail it has. You're not going to see it as scaled down but if I sizes up, you'll start to see the difference. Lots of neat effects within there as well. Essentially for a drawing brush though, the main things that I'm worried about are going to be the shape dynamics, set the pen pressure, texturing. Again, this is just because it's a pencil. Transfer I like to set because what transfer does is it gives you the soft effect to a solid effect again with pen pressure. If this is off, it just going to be solid the whole time. It's going to be more like an inking brush at that point. Just keep that in mind. If you want something that's more of an inking style, you're going to tick this off. If you want something that's more of a painterly style or at least has the ability to go from light to dark, then you're going to want that on. You can see opacity Jitter and flow Jitter are both set to pen pressure. Simply put, as light as I press, I get almost no paint or no markings and the harder I press the more I get and then vice versa as I let back off. That's really the most important thing for a drawing brush, like for a sketching brush, I generally work really light. I want just to be able to get those lines in place and sculpt something out, start to get an idea down whatever it is. I want that ability to sketch. That's really where this type of brush is very powerful. Now when you get into painting, you want a little bit different of a feel. Let's go to this chalk painter here, one of my favorite brushes to use. If I press on the screen and I start to bear down, this is what I get. If I press really light, I can almost get it. This is actually just the weight of the pen. I actually like it to get lighter than that. I actually like to adjust my settings where when I press the very lightest, I get no paint. The reason why I want that is because I want to really slowly work up my digital painting. I want to be able to see everything unfold and we'll discuss that more as we paint some stuff later on. But I want you to be fully aware of how this works. Essentially that's all done with the transfer options that we just looked at, pen pressure here. Now, you can get into shape dynamics with this type of brush by going into here and setting pen pressure and you can see the effect there. But to me this is no longer as much of a painterly brush it is, but it's going to create artifacts from these tips. That's where a lot of people struggle I think. If we were to do that exercise before we're trying to paint, it's going to work but we're going to get these artifacts and textures to the side of our painting if we're trying to do an oval paint or something like that. Not saying that's a bad thing, sometimes you might want an effect like that. But it's a lot harder in my opinion to control because of that artifact. The moment that that's taken off, it becomes a lot easier to blend and get things just the way you want it. I think this is where a lot of artists start off wrong. I know I started off wrong there, because I just assumed that I wanted that nice shape dynamics pen pressured to everything, and it actually hindered my digital painting, so I just wanted to make sure I touch on that, and help you out if you face that same issue. Keep in mind if you hit this right here, you'll get back to black and white, if that's what you want, or you can click each one of these, and grab whatever color you need. One of the other things I want to show you real quick; so you've got your brush going, and you want to make some adjustments to it, say for instance with this brush, you want to get rid of that artifact that you see there, that texturing. That's because I've got some spacing inside. Let's get something warm, maybe you can see it a little bit better. Say you want to get rid of that artifact a little bit, we want to go over to here and we want to turn our spacing all the way down so we've got a completely smooth brush now. Because we are getting ready to do some blending in, and want this really smooth effect, for instance. Now, you've made this slight change to your brush, nothing too major. You could get in there, you could apply texture to it. You're going need to just go through each one of these, and really mess around and see what they do. But this is more of a beginner course, so I just want to show you the basics to each thing so that we can get you up and running in painting. I'll dive into all this later and mess around with that. But, essentially, this is predominantly what you're going to use. Let's say we've got it here, we've turned our spacing down, and this is the new brush, even though we didn't make a lot of changes, but we want to save this brush, that's when you go in to here, and you click this icon here. Notice, it looks a lot like the new layer icon, and, I guess, you could probably get to it right there as well. That's the neat thing about Photoshop. There's a couple of ways to get to everything, but use that icon there under the brush presets roll down there. Let's just call this Chalk 2. I'm just going to put test. I'm going to end up deleting this probably. I'll hit enter there or 'OK'. Now, if I go down to the scroll down, it's right down here at the bottom. Now we got my new brush shade. That's something you want to be aware of. Every time you make a new brush and you get the settings just the way that you want, it's as simple as that. Now the other thing to be aware of, is if you go into here, you've got lots of options like Load Brushes if you find a cool set that you like somewhere. Save your current brush. Save that on your hard drive. I like to go into the Preset Manager, because now what it allows you to do, you can reorganize, you can rename brushes, you can delete brushes. You pretty much do all that right through here. Say I want to take this brush here, I can right-click on it, I can rename it, and I want to call it testing or whatever, hit Enter, and I could change it. I can drag it and place it in a different order of my set. There's lots of neat things that you can do there. I could take just one or a set of brushes by holding Shift or just by clicking Command, I can select individual brushes like this, and then I can right-click and delete those. Let's go and delete this, because I really don't want it anyways. You can really organize and keep your brushes the way that you want, and that's really important again for workflow. These brushes, if you don't do it right, can become an absolute mess. Now, if you're going to create a new brush, generally, I'll work off a new canvas at about 2000 by 2000 as I create a brush tip. Let me go and show you that real quick. If we go to File New, let's go and put this to Pixels. Again, I work at about 2000 by 2000. This is really subjective to what type of brush you're creating, but applying this works good for what I do. I'll create a new layer real quick, just like that. You want to work off black and white. Let's just create something, because this is really can be a complex topic in itself, so I don't want to get too far off into this, because it is a whole other ballgame really. But, I do want to give you the option to be able to create your own brushes. Because as you get more and more into digital painting, there's certain instances where you want to create your own brush tip just to experiment, sometimes, just save time. These can be as simple as a stock looking piece of art, like a tree silhouette, or something like that to save you time from painting trees. Or it can be something like this, where it's more texture based. What you do, is get some artwork in place, and you can adjust the art, play around with it, really experiment. You also want to experiment with a erasing parts of it and really changing the effect throughout. It's one of those things where it takes a lot of practice to get good at making brushes, but once you figure it out, you can save yourself a lot of time, and you can share your brushes with your friends and things like that. Fellow art guys and girls. It can be a lot of fun. Let's go, and take this, and let's say that this was the brush tip we wanted for whatever reason we saw from the edge. A lot of times you want more of a soft edge so you don't get too many artifacts as you're painting with it, and then we go to Edit, Define Brush Preset, let's just call this texture test. Texture test. Hit Enter, and so I just switched right to the brush I'm using. Let's go back to our canvas. Let's select a different color. We're set to white that's why. Keep in mind if you had x that flips the swatches over there to your left, so the one that's on the top is the one that's being used. Now I can paint with this. I'm set to eraser, that's why. Let's go back. Let's find our new brush, texture test right there, and there it is. Now, what happened is it took that brush tip and it just place it. You see, it's just blobbing down colors, so it's not very effective. But if we get in here into our Brush Settings and we start to play with these same settings, let's go to Transfer first, let's go and turn the spacing way down, unless you like the artifacts, and you see right there we've got a nice little, almost like that chalk brush we're just using. It tapers off or it doesn't taper off, but it blends off with the opacity real nice, and it gives us some nice texture as we build up. That's a good brush, and it probably didn't look like much at first, but that's how brushes are. You have to learn what the effect will do. You could almost make this into a pretty good hair brush, but I'll show you later on how some of the hair brushes work. But just like that, we've got a custom brush, and you just really used that effect. You see, I've got tons and tons of different brushes that I've created. Again, you'll get access to these so you can mess around with them. Then, you can just get in here and see the different settings I've adjusted, and get a better idea of how these work. 4. Using the Selection Tools: Now we're going to go over the selection tools, and if you go to this icon right here, click and hold, you'll see you get the rectangular or the elliptical. We'll start with the rectangular. If you were to just draw on the canvas and click and hold there, you can designate the height and width of this particular selection, and once you release, that'll lock it into place. Now if you hit Command D or click off somewhere, it'll unselect. But keep in mind that if you hold Shift for the first selection, it will constrain to both sides, the height and width evenly. Now after you've done that and you hold Shift again, it'll add a little plus sign there and it will not constrain, because it's allowing you to select whatever additional selection you want. It doesn't keep constraining it unless you designate that. We can now hold Shift and keep clicking and dragging and adding more selections to this. We can likewise opposite of that hold Alt and we can now subtract from that selection. Now notice up top here as I'm holding Alt or clicking Alt or Shift, it's jumping back and forth. These are the same things as what we're doing here, but they actually lock it into place. If we leave it to add to selection like that, we no longer have to hold Shift, it'll just keep adding as quickly as we can draw it out. Just like that. You can still use Alt and subtract from that selection, and you can also use the subtract from selection here, and again, it's going to just keep subtracting as quickly as you can draw. Just like that. If you were to click and hold again, you can get to the elliptical, the single row mark key, and just really play around with these and see what each one does for you. We're going to focus on the primary ones that I use the most to create. I'll sometimes use these, but not as much for digital painting as much as design work or maybe I'm making a doorway or a window or something like, that so things like this would come in handy. But a lot of the character design stuff, I'm going to use a lot more of the Lasso Tool and the Polygonal Lasso Tool. I'm going to show you those. If we go to the Lasso Tool, just as it sound, you can draw something out and create whatever shape you want. Again, because it's set to add the selection, I can keep adding to whatever I've got here. I can hold Alt and subtract from that selection. Just like that. Pretty easy. Let's go back to the regular selection where we'll de-select each time you grab a new selection like this. Also, before we get too far into it, I do want to show you what feathering does. If we were to select it right now and fill this with a color, just like that, you're going to notice if we de-select this and zoom in really close, it's got a pretty tight edge. Now that edge is going to be based upon your resolution in your canvas size, but if you want something that's got a little bit softer edge, that's where feather comes in, so you can basically take this and, let's say, a 25 pixel feathered edge. When you draw out the selection, it's going to look the same until you fill it, and then you'll notice you get quite a different look there. Very soft and blended edge versus a hard edge. You could take the feathering and you can really play around with that. Try 100 pixel, draw a selection. Again, you're not going to see much of anything now. If you didn't notice, it didn't leave that little jag at the end. Watch this. When I let that go, it actually softens that edge of that selection as well, but you're going to see it more once you fill it and that's what you're going to get there. Let's go ahead and hit Command Alt Z to go back multiple times. Just so you're aware the other way to go back multiple times is going to be your history and you can get to that by going window history, and you can go back multiple times through here as well. Just be aware of that. I prefer to use Command Alt Z, though, when I'm working, and I also prefer to make sure there's just an active layer so that I can delete whatever I'm working on out without having to go back and worry. Now let's take the polygonal tool and let's do a few selections. Let's make sure our feather is back to zero because I generally work off that. With this one, you can click and make angles and finish the selection and you do all neat things with that. I would say this one is probably the most usable with the Lasso Tool being a close second. But what a lot of artists fail to realize with this particular tool, is they always think that it just has to be all these geometric shapes like you see here and it's not really the case. Even if you have a sketch, you can get into a sketch with this really easily and just slightly click around, and if you're just careful enough, you can pretty much get a smooth edge. But it does take some practice and you do have to be pretty up-close to whatever it is you're selecting. Pretending like I'm doing a face here. You've got to be careful because if you click too quickly, it'll finish it. But you figure out where that ranges for your motion and what your hand cannot attain with this, but it's a pretty great tool. Same rules apply. You can finish some now, you can hold Shift, hold Alt to either subtract or add to that selection. Now one other quick thing I want to show you about selection tool which is really powerful. Let's say we take the selection and we draw a little bit of a weird face shape here. That's how you can tell that feather was still on. Hit "0," hit "Enter" because we want exactly what we see here as horrible as this may look. There's a top part of our face hold Shift and the bottom part. Not too bad. Anyways, this is the selection that we want. Keep in mind that if you grab the basic primitive shape here and you go on the inside of it, width this set to normal, it will actually move it. Notice how once you on the outside of it, the icon changes because if you click here, it's going to de-select. Command Z to go back. But if you go inside the selection, you can now move it. That's pretty great because there's times you want to be able to move your selections around and create some effects. But there's other times where you want to be able to save the selection, because you don't want to have to create it again, maybe it was cumbersome for you to create it the first time. That's when you're going to go Select, Save Selection, give it a name, we'll just call this Bad Face, New Channel, hit Okay. Now I can hit de-select, I can draw, I can paint, I can do all this stuff and not worry about it because if I really need it, I can go Select, Load Selection, scroll down here, there it is, hit Okay, and there is my bad face. That's a really important thing to remember because when you get to complex scenes, you want ways to save your selections, you want ways to itemize your layers, and it really helps you progress forward and not lose your work and just streamline what you're doing basically. I want to show you the Magic Wand but I'll be honest, I don't use it a whole lot in my work, so I'm going to just show you a very simple way that it works and you'll have to experiment with that one on your own and see if you can utilize it in your work more. But I'll be honest, the ones I've already shown you are the ones that I use primarily. Then we're going to talk about Quick Mask and also the Pen and Path Tool. Most of the ones that I find a lot more usable for my workflow. Say you had this eye shape. I'll just draw a bad eye there. We've already done a bad face might as well do a bad eye. Keep in mind, quick tip, if you ever want to do a perfect pupil, you just choose a round brush and make it real large and there you go. You don't have to try that out. Likewise, the iris too, but I'll just go with that. Say I've got this eye shape here in place and I just want this outer edge selected and I don't want to sit there with the Lasso Tool and drag around it or the polygonal. I can use the Magic Wand and I can just click around it, and you'll see as long as there's a decent resolution to the canvas, it picks up pretty well. Now the only thing I'll tell you if you do click Contiguous to take it off, it's going to go through this selection and pick up everything around it. But again, I'll be honest, I don't use this that much because its got its strengths and its got its weaknesses. I really like to be specific with my selections and designate them myself, and I'll be showing you all the ways that I do that as we progress through this. That'll complete this lesson, let's move forward. 5. Using the Quick Mask Feature: Another way to select things in a very powerful way is a quick mask. What I'm going to do here is, I'm going to designate something else. Let's just draw, Mr. Smiley here. For the crude artwork, but, it's really about the tools at this point, not the cool artwork, not yet anyways. Let's say Mr. Smiley here is a pretty rough selection. In fact, let's say, that around Mr. Smiley, we've got a soft, brush effect like this. This presents a little bit of a problem with selections because, let's go and increase the size of him. "Command T", hold "Shift". We'll scale them up horizontally. The reason why this presents a problem is because if I was to take the lasso marquee and draw around it, and that's all I'm going to come up with it. Now, I could probably play with that feather and get the soft edge, but it's just too tricky. A lot more effective way to do this is to actually just take any kind of Selection to start off with. You could probably take the elliptical. Hold "Shift," drag through the middle of it, move it around. If you wanted to could actually hit. Make sure it's set to normal right there, and then move it around, if you wanted. But really what we're going to do is we're going to hit "q" on the keyboard for quick mask, just like that. What's happened here, you get this pink affected area, or maybe non-affected but this is the masking. The only thing that's exposed right now is the middle of this. I basically just added more selection to it or more mask by painting through it. Any brush with dark to light now affects the mask. If I hit eggs, and I flip these, and I now have white here, so it's going to subtract from that mask. Or I guess another way to say it is add to that selection. The beauty of this is that. You could take now any brush, in this case a soft brush, and we can just softly, manipulate that selection. We have the pressure sensitivity of the brush, we have the softness of the brush, where the control of the tablet, all those things to really just get that selection right where we want it. Then after we got it into place, you hit "q" and it's going to go back to a visual representation of that selection, and if we were to make sure we're on a different layer, [inaudible] layer, and let's go ahead and fill this with a color, let's just say red. You can see that it didn't just fill right to that edge, it gave it a little bit of a soft blending the way that we use that brush. You can hit "Command D" to deselect. You could go to the Blending Mode here and set it to multiply and all suddenly, you've got a red smiley with a bit of a soft edge. This is just a real basic example of what you could possibly do. There's lots of more detailed usage of that type of Selection Tool. But that quick mask is very important and it's very great tool to be able to execute your work, effectively. Let me show you this again with another, demonstration of it. Let's say for instance that we wanted to now select around the character from the opposite side and we wanted to now crop this to have a hard edge, so we don't want this soft edge shadow. Again, we can designate any kind of selection. Doesn't really matter what q for quit mask, or if you notice right here if you have over top of this, you're going to get Edit Quick and Mask Mode. Go ahead and click that, so that's the same thing. That's a wonderful thing about Photoshop. Is, there's always multiple ways to do each task at hand. Now, we've got this Selection in place, but again, we want a hard edge that Selection, around that edge. Let's take a hard edge brush, hard around the work, and if we were to draw with this, we could see that we are, in fact, subtracting from that selected area. We could just brush around this, and notice that if I press lightly, I'm getting a little bit of transparency in that transition. That's because the brushes self, you go over to the brush icon here, [inaudible]. It's set to transfer and you've see the blending, that soft little blending that occurs. We want to disable that just temporarily, so you got that nice hard edge going. Then you can now really have a focused edge as you press down on this tablet. In fact, no matter how light I press, I can't get that transition now. Just keep in mind, if you wanted a very clean edges, zoom in and take your time with it but per brevity sake, I'm just going to plow through this. Let's say that's the hard edge that we wanted to our little smiley guy here, minus that one, I hit "q" again. Now, this is a thing. Once we're back on this, let's go back to the smiley layer. Now, we're on this. Keep in mind, if you click this, it converts these back to black and white. That's what I just did there. By start to draw, I'm on the inside of the smiley right there. If I hit "Command Z", I want to be an outside of that. I can do it two ways, Command Shift I, and it now inverted that Selection. Let me go back and show you that again. We're back on the inside. I can also go "Select, "Inverse" , and there's a shortcut command. I'll do that again on the outside of the selection, and you can also see if you pull back and you can see right there. But if I pull back, it shows you that dotted line on the outside and on the outside of this to show you that you're in that. This is the affected area. Make sure we're on the right layer, hit delete, and there's a hard edge that we needed, "Command D" to "Deselect". Again, lots of opportunities to make the Quick Mask tool. Work to your favor, and we'll explore that further as we progress through this course. That a complete this lesson, and let's move forward. 6. Using the Pen and Path Tool Part 1: We're going to cover the pen and path tool now. What I want to do is take this character art that I've drawn and if you get up real close, you'll see through my sketching process, I've got quite a bit of artifacts and just some imperfections because I usually don't clean it up all the way when I'm going to paint it anyways, and that's what we're going to do with this. Let's go ahead and grab the pen tool right down here and you see if you hover over top, you'll get the P for the shortcut command and you can kind of start anywhere. Let's start right here. A couple ways you can do this. I like to actually click to each point and then drag just a little bit and you can still zoom in. You can hold "Space" bar. You can move around anyway that you need to jump back to the tool. You can hold "Command" and go to each one of these points, not only the main point that you put down, but also these Bezier handles. So I can hold "Command". You'll see it turns to the select tool right here, the direct select, which you can also get to by hitting "A" button. The neat thing about using the command tool when you're on the pen tool is it jumps back and forth. Hold "Command", move that around. Whenever I hold "Command" again, I'll move this to the very edge. Whenever I want to start an entirely new curve, a new direction, I hold "Alt" and I click once, and see I just eliminated one of the handles. Now what happens, I'll go back and show you the difference. If I hit "Command Z", puts the handle back. If I was to come over here and pull. That gives a slight bit of artifact, swoops down. That's because it's trying to make too steep of a transition. So I hit "Command Z" and go back, hold "Alt", click once. It eliminates the handle. Go to the next longest point to the curve change, click and pull on one motion. Hold "Alt", click, hold "Spacer" bar, move. Now, I've got a nice little curve here, but if I go all the way to here, it's not going to get that little point there. So I'm going to go ahead and do that regardless and I'll show you how we can add this point. So I'm going to go to this spot right here, click and pull. I may even have to move the screen down. You'll see it almost gets that ban, but it doesn't make the transition from the steep change right there, because it's doing one smooth curve all the way down. Hold "Space" bar, move back. If I hover over this line, it'll turn to a plus sign, see that? I can go right to about here, click. I've just added a point, hold "Command". I can move these. If I hold "Alt", I can move just one side. That's really how you can get this little bit of a pointed angle. I really don't want that there, but I just wanted to show you based on the artwork, how you could really put that. By holding "Alt", you could really put a steep angle right there if you wanted, and then again by holding "Command", you can move these interactively. Now, since I've already clicked at all once, you'll notice that these are now divided. If I click it again, it releases that, and now it's just a single point. So it's going to be a very steep angle with no control points. If I hold "Alt" again and drag it out, I can bring those back and now there is one handle again. Lots of ways to edit the way these handles work and you can get these lines just the way that you want them. Lots of control, very specific. Okay, so let's press on. Go to the next point. Again, I could go to this point if I'm really looking to get that added bend. I could also go all the way down to here and just add that point. I'm going to go ahead and hold "Alt." Make sure that point's already released, which it is and hold "Command", Mover that to about there, hold "Alt" again, and actually I'll try not to. Let's hold "Space" bar. I think we'll be able to get that bend, just fine. Yeah, we are, command. There is a little bit of playing around in filling this out and then what ends up happening is you start to pick up steam as you get used to it. I use it too a lot, but I don't use it enough to where, let's hold "Alt", release that handle, to where I'm entirely memorized by the process or have the process memorized, I guess. Hold "Alt". I always have to find my way again. But what I notice is that after I start using it again, it all comes back really quickly and I start doing it almost second nature. But I do have to always re-familiarize myself with it. Just be aware of that. I've heard other artists say that it's a tough tool in the way that it's set up, but it's really effective, highly, highly effective, in fact, one of the most under appreciated tools, I would say, inside this program. Again, if you're ever scared that it won't make the bend, well, for one, you can just try it anyways. But if you get there and it doesn't make the bend like you want, then you just basically start again, do whatever you got to do there. We can hit "Alt", drag out another one. Generally, you're going to get a little bit better result by doing that method. So just clicking "Alt", getting rid of that one handle, dragging off the next. I'll just repeat that process and I'll actually do this a little bit quicker. I'm not going to call out every single adjustment, but I'm using command, alt, click all, release the handle, space-bar to move down. Click and pull "Command" to adjust the handle. Move the point, click "Alt" or hold "Alt" and click, I should say, and so on and so forth. Again, you'll just start to see yourself pickup speed through here. I can obviously make that transition, no problem. So I'll just go here. Pull, hold "Command". Hold into place. Hold "Alt", drag this one side, command. I'll just keep tweaking these as I go. Now, another way to do this, I've seen a lot of artists do it, a different way where they actually click around this really quickly with a bunch of straight points and then go back around and added it. You're welcome to try that as well. I just want to show you the way that I use it, and this is exactly how I use this tool. Now, the neat thing about the path tool is that it comes with a lot other options. Not only are you creating a way to make a very perfect selection, you're also creating a way to create paths, stroke the path, so you can actually create a line. If I wanted to add this line that you see around the character, I don't for this particular instance, but say I did, it becomes really easy to do because I can actually generate a line from this path. I can also fill this path. There's just lots of options. I have to take the time to create this. Again, you're going to get a lot faster with this over time. It may seem cumbersome at this point, but it's really not that bad, and you start to find shortcuts and ways to place these points even faster and use less of them and things like that. If you've ever done vector graphics, it's real somewhere to that process. Hold "Command", pull that "Command", move back. If you notice, I'm not calling out every particular movement now, and I'm certainly moved just a little bit faster. If you do happen to drop the line like I did there, best way to do it is hold "Alt", drag it back out, and then start again, and that'll make sure that it connects and keeps that lines on. Some more grabbing the artwork there, let's go back to the pen tool, hold "Alt". Okay, so I actually dropped the selection, I dropped the pen tool. It's a little clunky at times, but I'm probably just a hair out of practice. I think what ends up happening too is you get in the habit of just using things like the lasso tool at times, you can create selections just with a well drawn line as well. There's lots of ways you can use the polygonal tool, but none of them are as crisp as what you're going to see here. So again, it takes a little bit of time to set it up, but far more refined. So if you're doing a very detailed illustration and you need it to just be as clean as possible, mind you, you have to have really good resolution for this to take full effect. But if all that's in place, then nothing really beats this tool. A lot of times I use this for just hide detailed illustrations. I'm going to add a point right here. Hold "Command", move them in place. But also just anything that's very technical, this is a great tool for as well. It also works really well for body lines of cars. You can place the body line and stroke the path and get a very nice line in place with a good amount of control. All right, so hold "Alt", get rid of that one. I'm probably being a little bit too critical, and one way to eliminate being overly critical on digital art is to zoom back. The fact that you can zoom in can be a really great thing, and it can also be a huge hindrance. So you've got to really keep an eye on it. Like any great tool and ability, it can sometimes be your downfall, and I think that zooming in with digital art definitely works that way. I think I can go ahead and make this bend here. Yeah, it should be fine. Hold "Command", move that in place. Yeah, see, I was afraid that would happen. That was too short of a bend or too steep. Hold "Alt", click once. Click and pull. Hold "Command", move that in place. Hold "Alt", click once and just rent-on repeat. Like I said, if you're really unsure about what the lines are going to do, you're just really better off holding or clicking each time, it really does seem to be a lot more controlled. You can also just click and pull it a little bit like go over of it and just grab the handle. Again if you hover over it. Now let me show you one more thing so I don't forget, you can click over it, add the line, and then if you hover back over it, you can subtract the control points. Sorry, not the line. Again, hover over it, add one. But if you need to get rid of it, you just hover over again and you can subtract it. Click here. Okay, and I'm going to quit calling this out. I think I've said that enough times now and we need to move forward pretty quickly here. Let's go ahead and just jump through this. I can hopefully show you that you can pick up speed with this. I really just like the way that you can go back at any point as needed, it's really great that it has that ability. If you've come from any illustrator background, then you'll be right at home using this. It works a little bit different than illustrators Pen tool. But I've done enough vector graphics over the years that pretty used to the way Bezier handles work. They're all a little bit different from program to program. I do find it a bit strange that even if they are different from Adobe's programs, but I've dealt with so many of them over the years that I'm pretty used to that. You basically just get used to the fact that each one of them control just a little bit differently, but they all have the same concept in mind as far as curvatures and control points and things like that. Get rid of that one side. We had just tons and tons of opportunities with this particular one. The really neat thing about this as well is it basically will work with any brush. If you're going to stroke the path, any brush that you use, keep in mind, I just use Command and we selected the line. If you happen to drop it for whatever reason, just use Command. I've dropped it right there. Hold Command, select it again. Hold Alt, move it around. Command and move around. I should say, but hold Alt to make sure that you're actually starting another point that's connected to it. Because you can't accidentally have two floating lines as well. Here if I want more of bend there, if I take that and it's still connected, but it looked like too sharp of a bend. That should be fine. Again, we select that. Okay, almost there. Real quick on this very end part, I'm going to show you what I meant about some people just clicking around. Some people will just go like this. When you get to the last one, same thing, you can actually click and pull to finish that out, but then they'll go back. They'll select each one of these and say, well there's no Beziers or controls. You have to hold Alt and pull. I don't know that that's quicker or not as quick. I don't know, it's just not the way I do it. But I just want to show you that there's multiple ways to anything in this program. At least two ways, always, at least two or three that I've noticed to do almost every action. Here, there's no handles hold Alt drag those out. Just like that. Hold Command, move that around. Okay. There's our selection around our character, okay? I don't really need to go back around and re-edit because I did that as I went through it. I do need to create a shape here. But what I want to show you first is that if you go over to your past now, this is the path we just created. You need to drag this right onto that new layer looking icon. It will now create it as a path you can also double-click here and name it. Let's call it silhouette. I think that's how you spell it. Now we're going to create that next shape. But if you don't drag it there, sometimes it won't hold in this path section. Just keep that in mind. But the beauty of it being here now is it's there for good. We don't have to worry about it. Okay, so let's go ahead and create another shape right here real quick. Same thing, and I won't call it out this time. We've done quite a bit of it so far. It should be good. Again, just hold down shift, click, Alt, click drag, Alt, and select to release it. Command to move it. Click, hold Alt release. Click and drag to finalize last point. Just like that. Okay, so now let's go ahead and take this and hold Command. Click and drag around it, make sure we've just got that selected. Hit Command X, Command V. You saw it, cut it right out of there. That's what I wanted to show that it's in there part of this one. Now, let's go ahead and create a selection out of this. There's a couple ways to do it, one, you can just click right on this. We've got to be deselected off that those. Just hold Alt, click off or Command and click off. Okay, so now if we click this, just like that. Let's take the Pen tool hold Command, click and drag around the entire thing. We've got it selected and right-click while on the Pen tool of canvas or on this canvas, alright? Create, make selection. Let's leave this to 0 anti-aliased, just like this, hit okay. Now, we've just taken that path and made a selection. Let's go back to our layer here. Let's go ahead and take our background, which is the flattened version of this artwork, Command C, Command Shift V. That will actually paste it right back into place. Now if we take this off and we zoom in here, you can see that it got rid of a lot of the imperfections outside of there. If you go into here. Start getting rid of some of those little art effects. We've got this on a nice, solid floating layer and we still have our path to be able to edit and create more selections if need be. We can also just create a selection off of this now by going select Load Selection. It's already set to layer one transparency, which is this. Hit Okay. We've got a nice little selection there as well. Lots of ways to edit the work, they're rather quickly. Yes, it did take some setup at the path, but it's well worth the effort. 7. Using the Pen and Path Tool Part 2: Okay, so now I want to show you a little bit more with the pen and path tool. Now for instance, we've got our selection here. Just to remind you, one last way to save this selection is just go, Select, Save Selection. Let's just call it Silhouette 2, something like that, "Command D" to deselect. So now we've got multiple ways that we've created the selection or our character. We have the Layer which we can lock transparency when we're going to be doing that, to do a lot of our paint work. We've got our Paths, we've got our Select, Load Selection layer right there. So there's just lots of ways to make sure that you don't lose that ability to edit the shape of the character. Now, back to the pen and pad tool. I want to show you some of the other neat features of what you can do with Paths. Let's go and take this again. Let's grab the pen tool, hold "Command". Click and drag around the entire perimeter. Let's go ahead and right-click on the canvas. We're going to go to Stroke Path. Let's make sure we're on the right brush first because what it's basically going to do is take whatever brush were selected and it's going to stroke a path around the edge of that. So let's try this good line brush. We're not really sure what effect we're going to get here. Let's go ahead and take the Layer and take the visibility right off. Let's go ahead and drop another Layer and place here. Just a color that we can see against. Let's try a light blue, blue, gray there. Okay, let's take a dark, and over top of this, we're going to go back to the pen tool, right-click, Stroke Path. It's also going to ask you if you want to simulate pressure. It's also going to allow you to pick any one of these tools. I'll be honest, I just pretty much use the Brush tool. So we're going to stick with that. I do want it to simulate pressure. So I'm going to show you the difference. We're going to hit, "OK". I'm going to hit "Enter" to release that. Now what it's done is it's basically grabbed a starting point, I would assume some around here for each one and it went around getting darker, as it pressed around the perimeter till it finished out. Same thing here. So a pretty neat effect. It actually gives you a nice weighted line all the way around, so that can be kind of neat. Let's hit "Command Alt Z" to go back. Let's see, went back too far. "Command Z" to go back again. Apparently we lost that, but we'll just go to here. Go back to path, because remember, now that we've created this path here, it's always kind of safe guarded. Click the Pen tool, hold "Command", click and drag, there we go. I had to click on there again for some reason. Let's go back to layers, a Layer over top, and let's try it again. But this time we're going to right-click, Stroke Path. We're going to take off "Simulate Pressure". I'm going to hit "OK" and then "Enter" to release. You see it gave us a nice heavy weighted line all the way around and pretty clean as well. Remember the cleanliness is going to be directly related to the size of the file and the amount of resolution you have. So if I go to image, image size, this is a 12 by five at 300 dpi, 20 meg file, which is pretty good size but not extremely high res. You can go a little bit larger if your system can handle it. Then as you zoom in because it's raster base, you won't get as much pixelation in this area. But again, the more you zoom in, the more it's going to occur because it is raster based. So keep in mind that when you do a Stroke Path like this, it's directly related to the Brush size that you're on. If I go back again, go back to Paths, back to the pen tool, hold "Command", "Select", I know this is real exciting. Try to stay with me. Click that again and make sure it's selected. Make sure we're on that floating layer, we are. Now lets go back to the Brush. Let's jump this down to half that size or somewhere around about, let's say seven pixels. Let's also jump down the Opacity, see if that works or not. Let's go back to the pen, right-click over the canvas, Stroke Path, Simulate Pressure is off, hit "OK", "Enter" to release. Let's zoom up, and you can see it actually knocked down the Opacity as well. Now that's not really a big deal because we could just bump down the Opacity off the Layer as well. So lots of areas to control that. But you see it's really neat. It gave us that nice smooth line, half the weight of what it was before. So lots of ways to edit there. Now one last thing I'll share. I'm going to hit "Command A" for Select All. I'm going to hit "Delete". We'll go back to Paths again, "Command D" to deselect. I'm going to click this. I go to the pen tool, hold "Command", click and drag. Now I want to show you one more use of this. So you can basically just go here. Go back to the pen tool, right-click over top, and go to Fill Path. Now whatever color you have right here or contents, you can hit Black, Foreground Color, Background Color, which is going to relate to these pattern, all this neat stuff, we'll just go with Black. Blending mode, transparency, all this stuff. But we'll just hit "OK", and it's going to fill that. Hit "Enter" to release. Now we've got a nice silhouette of that character. Again, look how clean that is. There's just lots of ways where using the Paths tool is just highly effective for creating these types of designs and patterns and silhouettes and whatever. But really again, we don't need that because of what we've already created here. So we're good to go. Even though this does have some of the rough lines inside. By the time we start painting, we are going to be able to eliminate all of that. We have that nice crisp edging that we want it. So if we were to take this, drop it behind here by clicking and dragging. You can see that's a nice clean edge, just like the silhouette that we've created here. Look how perfectly that lines up, identical. So there's no flaw when using this tool, it's just very very precise. All right, so that's predominantly how I use the pen and Paths tool. It's very vast. There's a lot into it, just like a lot of these things in Photoshop. It just goes on and on and on. But I'll show you one other quick way that you can make good use of this as well. Let's go ahead and draw another Paths. Let's say that we wanted to do a cool kind of comic book border, simple as that. Actually let's just add a little bit of distort to it. So if we click one of these points, we can drag these around. Click and drag around this point. Hit Select and move it around like that. You also have these quick keys up here. The same thing that we've already done, create a selection out of it will make a selection. It'll bring up that box that we've seen before, hit Cancel, mask, it'll chop out the existing layer. So you do that real quickly. You can also grab "Command" and move each one of these points with that selection now, so that's kind of a neat way to create a quick chopped out background. Let's go ahead and hit "Command Alt Z", and go back. The one I wanted to show is Shape. You can click Shape and it's going to stroke that Path. Then also you can hold "Command" and you can edit the shape. So you can grab just one of the points. You can move that around. So you've got an editable shape that you can kind of play around with the border and do something cool with. There's just tons and tons of opportunities to use this tool. You really do have to delve into it. But that's predominantly the ways that I use it for my digital paint work. Let's go ahead and press forward. 8. How to Blend Digital Paint: Now we're going to talk about blending some paint. We'll just use our superhero looking guy here, to do this. What we're going to do, we'll start off with the silhouette right here. Keep in mind you can get an extra layer if you need a copy to drag and just drop it right there. It'll copy it back quickly. Pick the visibility of the previous layers if you need to and we can lock transparency here. We'll be using this feature a lot. This is really a great time saver for digital painting because you can't paint outside of the confinements of that perimeter knowledge is really helpful. With blending paint, we're just going to pick some random effects here and nothing too detrimental to our painting. I'll just grab this chalk painter brush and with blending paint, I typically will do it a couple of ways. One way is to just put some paint down that we want to build a light source up on the top of the character here. I'm just gently blocking in some paint there. As I start to zoom in, there's a couple of ways I could maybe segue or blended side could either just keep building it up. Now notice the opacity zone 52 percent, something that you do have to be aware of is that based upon your tablet driver settings, you have the pressure sensitivity of the tablet, and then you've got options right here for flown opacity. It's really going to depend on those, it's going to depend on how heavy-handed you are. The way that I like to do it though, just so you know, you should practice getting your brush to where with the lightest amount of pressure you put down, you almost don't get any visible paint. That's at least the setting that I like to work within. I almost can't get no paint even with just the weight of the pen, but I can almost get there. What that does, that affords me the most range for painting, light to dark and I can slowly work up the paint process. Also, when I go to blend, if I hold all, I can select any of these colors. You'll see that slider change as I progress through it. I'll hold all get the dark there and I can start to paint back. If I press lightly enough with the larger brush, I can generally blend pretty well, and each time I can blend a little bit softer. If you notice there, I almost get this cell shading effect, which is really nice because sometimes you want to build texture into your work without blending it all away. Because if not, you would just use a soft brush because you can- for instance, you can get this transition that you see here really easily with a soft brush. If you don't want any texture and you want it to just a very smooth airbrushed look, then you wouldn't do it this way anyways. You can, but really you would just grab a soft brush like this, you can play with the opacity settings but again, if it's set really low, it's pretty easy to work with. If you make the brush large enough, you're going to get a nice smooth transition wherever you want it. You just got to play around with that paint back and forth. But again, I don't have to worry about the edge of the painting and I can just softly blend this in and I can get some nice gradients. But generally when I paint, I guess I'm after a couple of things. I'll do a little bit of this, but I'm after a little bit more texture. You can always drop texture and, and I'll make sure to cover that, in this course as well. But there's something to be said for just painting and getting this nice buildup of texture by using different brushes, and just sometimes letting it just happen. Like just finding, like happy accidents. You would just sit there and paint back and forth and see what you see. Sometimes you get some really neat effects that way. That's typically how I blend a gradient or something like that. Now the other way that's real popular will talk about the smudge tool. Now with the smudge brush, this is another real popular way to do it. You've got the blur in the sharp. Blur can be nice here in there just as it sounds. Blurs the edges of the fade or whatever you're working with. The smudge tool is what people really use a lot of. I've got one brush dubbed Mr. Smudgy for lack of a better term. I'll show you how he works. Essentially if you take this brush, and let's pick something right through here. If I blend back and forth, you'll notice that it actually pulls the paint, it creates a different texture and artifact on its own. What's the shortcut command, I really don't use it, but I think it's 'M' [inaudible] marquee tool. Well, anyways, just click it there. What it does is it just basically moves that paint around, and it wouldn't seem like you can get a nice blend with it right away from what you're seeing here. But if you keep changing the brush size and just slightly dab it around, you can actually smudge this till it gets to be just about like a soft brush. It just takes a little bit more work. Again, if that's what you're after, I would just use the soft brush, but there's opportunities here where you can create some pretty unique effects by pulling color around. That's usually why I use a smudge brush when I do use it. I can almost direct things and if I press hard enough, I can get a pretty hard edge line. There's opportunities where that can sometimes help, because you can pull a certain color to an area. You can play around with it and just blend one side. You can get pretty good just with the smudge brush. In fact, there's lots of artists that I've seen and some of them do some amazing work and they blend everything with their smudge brush. Now to me, it's got its time and place in your work. I wouldn't say I would use any tool exclusively just because there's so many different things you could do with them. But for instance, say I wanted this jaw line right here, and instead of painting it and I for some reason just wanted to blend it in, I don't know. I can pull this shade literally pulled up there, and then move it around, and I can create that jaw line. Maybe not to perfection, but I could get it there and you see rather quickly. Then I can softly blend this down because I want a nice gradient for the shadow under the neck, under the jaw. Then I can take this tone, bring it right back over to here, push it out to the edge. You see I can manipulate that paint pretty well just with this particular brush. It does work. Now, one of the things that does make it work, because I modified this over and over again. Let me show you those settings, or else you may not be able to figure out what makes it work. On this particular brush, I have some scattering, see right there, and you just copy these settings. I have some transfer opacity jitter doesn't apply to smudge brush for some reason. Basic tip shape, I have some space in there. That's what gives you those thumbnail that you see there. Now, if I take the spacing all the way down, watch what it does there. It takes at low bit artifacts away, so it gives a little bit different effect. You need to really mess around with the brushes and see what each thing does and make sure that it's the right setting for the way that you work. But that's really how you get these just the right way. I actually like it the other way. I'll go back by clicking Off The Brush, we're going back to it. You can see those are my settings that are saved. Let me show you the effect of another smudge brush. Let's go to here. Instead of this one we're going to pick, where is this? Smooth blender right above it. The smooth blender, remember I'm using the bracket keys to scale my brush up and down interactively. You can also see it there and adjust it there. You can also just sit here as well. Just remember there's always different ways to skin a cat. If you look at the brush tip, it's just a a blob there. If we go to the settings once again, I've got scattering on both axises, and you can see it's at 20 percent and that makes it spread this way and this way. Horizontal and vertically. Now if we go to transfer pen pressure there, brush tip, a little bit of spacing, and that's about it. Let me show you the difference that you get with this type of a smudge brush. You'll see how it's still pulling paint around, but it's actually blending a lot more smoothly, leaving just a little bit of texture, but not much. It's actually again back to a little bit of a soft brush feel. Again, when you want that ability to move the paint around, but just get a little bit softer transition, still leaving some texture but not nearly as much. Go ahead and try some different brushes and really you get a feel for this. Then just remember if you change anything, say you're messing around with your smudge brush here, and you change it back and forth, some of the settings within the brushes here, just remember that if you jump back and forth from these brushes, it's going to back to the original setting unless you modify the brush and then click this icon here. That will actually save you a new version of whatever brush settings you've changed. Just make sure you name them amply so that you can distinguish them from the rest. I get too messed in here. Then you can go into the Brush Preset Manager, where is that at? Right there. You can rename these simply by clicking, right-clicking and Renamed Brush, so you can organize your work a bit better. That's really it when it comes to blending. Again, just get in there, experiment, have fun and see what you find. Let's head over to the next lesson. 9. Sketching the Concept Art: Now we're ready to work on our art fall here. We're going to start sketching some of the details of our character over top. What I want to do first is create a little bit more Canvas size, image Canvas size. You see this little dot and these arrows pointing out means that it's going to expand from the middle out. Let's go ahead and take, I don't know, let's say width. We want an inch more on each side. Let's push that to seven. Height will do the same let's make this 14. Now, if you were to click any one of these, it'll expand from that area outward, but we want the middle, so we'll go back to that and hit "Okay". You see it just gives us that edit room to work with. I do want the background to encompass the whole area, so I just simply go back to that layer. I just double-click this and name it background BG. Hit Command T, I can hold Shift, or I could just pull each one of these areas out past the edge like this Command T while you are holding Shift and T will actually are holding Shift while polling will actually do it all to scale, hit "Enter" to set that. Let's go back to our character. Let's name this character lines that. Now, what I want to do is only getting here and draw some details. I want to put some armor on the sky and start working up our artwork. I'm going to hit a new layer here, just like that. I'm just going to call this sketch. I'm going to pick pencil brush like these, like this real pencil. The pencil brush. I just want it to be where it'll give me a thin line and a thick line if I press harder. I also want it to be a little bit more of a sketch. I have transfer set and then I can also play with the opacity if I need to. But this'll work for what I'm after. What I want to do here is just lightly sketch into my ideas and not worry too much about it be imperfection, or use the bracket keys to scale the brush down, pretty refined, pretty small. What I usually like to do is just start off very loose and just conceptualize. Won't like this big hulking shoulder pad. I want some asymmetry here, so I'm going to just put a smaller one that points down over here. There's some strap going across the side here, maybe a polish there. So really just conceptualizing, just getting some ideas in place and seeing what might look cool. I'm going to give them some big gauntlet type armor right here. I keep it very rough with any of my drawings in the beginning. Just to let the ideas flow. I feel like if you tense up too quickly, you will eliminate the creative process a little bit. I'll just keep it very rough, very loose. Also using an and tools for, as I previously mentioned. It's a little bit more prone to lend to that loose sketching process, which I actually like and a lot of regards. We'll give them some helmet now has face is completely forward facing and straight to camera or to the viewer. I'm going to probably take advantage of that and do a little bit of cheating. I'll copy one side. I tried to take advantage of any areas like that where I can I practice symmetry often on my own. But if I'm working on client work and I've got a deadline. I'm going to definitely take advantage of things like that. If it makes it look more correct anyways, it's more impressive than I'm going to use that in my work. I'm not going to feel like I'm cheating or doing something wrong and that's up to you as an artist. But I definitely think it makes more sense to get the work done and make it look more impressive. Using these tools to your advantage as a big part of that. Again, getting some of this idea in place, maybe to get back to being a little bit more rough about it. I want to show the breaks in the armor, figure out the design of that. The beauty of drawing on a separate layer like this is I can really play around with it and not be too stressed out by the process. I can just throw ideas in there and it's not a big deal. Actually, I don't like the spikes here. I'll take those off. I'll just using the eraser tool for that. What I like to do is build up as much information as possible before I see to refine. I'll get in all little details, little ideas I'll play around and try different things, different shapes before I start to take it any further and clean it up. What we're probably going to do is align some textures on areas like this and this. The arms and legs will put some texture over that. I'll show you how to make good use of the layer system and the blending modes to do that as well. A couple little separations here in this little chest strap thing. Probably do some weapon, sword, ax, something like that. I'll just play something for now. Maybe it'll be a ax. Trying to figure out the shape that I want to see there, obviously. Maybe you want to sort over here. We'll just load them up to the gills from lots of weapon try to work with. Let's say that this is our concept. That this is what we're after. Again, I'll try all different things are given this huge belt buckle thing or whatever. I'm always messing around with ideas at this stage and trying to get as much in that concept as I can before I take it to the next level. You see it's not pretty and it doesn't need to be. Let's say that's our conceptualization sketch or idea. Now, we want to refine this. Now, since this other layer is floating behind it, you got a lot of opportunities there. You can take this and you can jump down the opacity. Keep in mind too, if you're worried about excellently drawing on something, you can right-click. Or actually you can go right up here and just locked the layer. Now no matter what you do, you can't draw on there. It's got that little no smoking symbol. That can be helpful so that you don't accidentally start working on that layer. I'll use that one a lot. You could do that to each one of these. Now you can only work on this sketch and the rest aren't visible, so chances are you're not going to accidentally drawn those. But now what this allows you to do is really jumped down the opacity of these for instance. I'll actually take the visibility. I'm going to create one more layer right here and drop in some white. I want a little bit of this blue, but not as prominent as it was. I'll jump that down, I'll lock it again and go back to my sketch layer. I can focus on the line work here a bit more. What I'll generally start to do is just once I'm set on an idea and I'm pretty well content with this. I'll start to soft arrays. I'll make the soft airbrushed for large and I'll just gently soft arrays and just so you know the settings of this one, it's at very soft brush to pretty standard, but just so you're aware of all the settings that go into this one. Copy those down if you need to and I'll just gently push that back. I'm basically we look at it like I'm pushing that information back, and then redrawing it forward until I refine it. Again, I'm still open to manipulating it and changing ideas around. But it's a little bit more to the point where I want to take it. Then now I'm thinking more about clean up. I'll try to get a little bit smoother lines in place. But still not totally against making any changes especially, if it's something that's really going to improve upon the art of it. Then I'm always open to change when it comes to that, obviously. Here's some of the separations of the segments in the arm or try to figure out the design of this move is a piece on the back of the hand area of something. I don't know. Again, just conceptualizing little divides for were the fingers bend. I also don't want to get too awfully the tilde where this piece just takes a huge amount of time to render. In fact, as we progress through the art part of it, I'll probably start to time-lapse some of it if it's redundant, and I'm just simply showing you home drawing and painting. Because obviously I want you to learn from that as well, but I want you to understand and take more time to learn the program and how it works. You can create your own art. We'll get some of this thing there. Now keep in mind, I don't know if you could tell, but I really struggled right across here. I'm pulling sideways across my tablet. Just hold R rotate the Canvas hold Space-bar, and really move it right to where your mechanics are well-suited. I always stress that because with these types of tablets, I feel like it's very important if you're not drawing directly on the screen, it's not a bad thing that they're still fantastic devices and you can do amazing work with them. Some of my best work has come from this and tool saw for tablet that I use. But you just have to do little work rounds like I just did there, which didn't take any time at all, but I can do a better line point downward. It's a little bit of understanding your own mechanics when it comes to painting with that. I do a lot of repositioning the Canvas. I sometimes even move it to a certain area of the screen where I can draw better and I've got a better control of where I'm at on the device. So just a quick tip there for you. What I'm going to do now, this is all going to be redundant and I'm actually going to play around it. I really don't like that shoulder played there. I'm going to play around with the concept of it. I might as well time-lapse this all narrowed over top. I'm just going to refine what you see here. It's going to be the same process, going to be soft erasing information down, redrawing it back in with the pencil brush and really trying to clean this up, and then if I have swayed is something else will stop and talk about that in more detail. 10. Refining the Sketch: Now, we're going to time-lapse through this and this is sped up quite a bit, but really it's all redundant in the way that I use these tools. Essentially I'm just soft erasing the information down and you'll see that I redraw it back and forth and I'd try lots of ideas. I just really play around until something sparks creatively and I draw things over and over again. I start off really rough and I've had people comment on that before and say, "Wow, you just start off with a really bad sketch." But I actually like that. The more that I spend time drawing and sketching, I feel that the bad sketch leads to more ideas. If you can learn to keeping the sketch really rough, experimentation seems to happen a little bit better because if you were fine too much early on, you kind of commit yourself to that idea, I think. Notice there that I flipped the canvas, so that's another great way to check your work and your sketch and look for imperfections. You get that by going to image, image rotation, flip canvas horizontal. I do recommend rotating the canvas and not the layer, you can do both of those. There you see I changed the shoulder piece and I started to like that design a bit better. You can see again, checking my work and moving things around and changing shapes. Drawing in a bit of the face there, again keeping it very loose and sketch like and very rough. Changing the shape of that center plate and just continually moving things around. Now, I also start to notice flaws in the work here that I'm also thinking about fixing during the paint process. That's another helpful thing to know, is that when you do study your sketch work and you do refine it, to also be thinking about the next level of whatever you're going to do. In this case, I'm refining the sketch line to give myself a paint-by-number approach to the digital paint work, but I'm also taking mental notes of what I can just rectify in the painting itself. There's a lot that happens as you get better at drawing and painting. You just start to skip steps or you at least remember or notice areas where you're going to be able to fix things so that you don't have to refine it all the way or you don't have to carry it to a full level of cleansingness or whatever. You can just look at it for a moment and go, "Well, when I get to that in the paint work, I'm going to do this and this and it will save time or it will clean up the bad sketch I have here, whatever the case may be." Again, just cleaning up. I want to take note to express that one of the neat things about working with the Intuos Tablet, because I'll often times get a lot of students that swear by this antics, and they just have to have that to do great artwork and they don't feel comfortable with these types of tablets. Hopefully you can see that by this stage, after doing those few rough sketches that I'm able to start cleaning it up and still get a pretty decent line. I basically use the Intuos Tablet sort of like I was sculpting the artwork, less like I was drawing it traditionally. I basically just keep getting the line a little bit closer through the soft erase and the redraw process, and I'm still able to get to a level of line quality that I'm pretty happy with. Now, I do leave this a little bit rough since again, we're going to take this to paint. But I have taken art projects to fully cleaned up lines and even inks, which are obviously really cleaned up lines all with the Intuos Tablet. It's just something I want to make sure that students are aware of so that you don't feel that you need the Director Surface Tablet to somehow produce good art or explore your art ability to the finest level or degree. You just have to spend enough time with this particular device and you will get there. If you don't believe me just look up plenty of amazing artists that use this type of tablet, they do some fantastic work. Again, just noodling around, sketching around, I usually keep a backup of my sketch copies as well so that I can watch the progression and the changes that I make, and that's also to help me decide whether or not I'm making good decisions in the design of the work. I'm a big advocate for staging your work and looking at each individual stage in increment, as well as getting up and walking away from your work and then coming back with fresh eyes. You're able to spot flaws a lot quicker for some reason when you do that. It's just like flipping the work, you're basically forcing yourself to take a fresh look at your work which is really important. Here you'll notice I actually draw the face out and I use the layers, I create a selection and I flipped the layer and merge it back together. I think that's a really important thing to do when it's just very symmetrical anyways and if it's straight forward facing towards the camera, is very easier to do it, just makes sense. I really recommend doing that because one of the things is that if you do it early on in your sketch, so this is still the rough sketch stage, it's refining the sketch but it's still pretty rough. We're going to do a lot of paint work over top of that and that initial sketch is going to be gone. There's going to be lots of opportunities for me to add asymmetrical value to it anyways. I wouldn't use it too much as a crutch as more, I would think of it as a good workflow or time-saving opportunity. But again, if you do it early in the sketch, there's lots of ways to still add that hand finished look and that asymmetrical value by the end of the painting. Now the line work is pretty much done. I'm just making some final adjustments, adding in a little hints of texture and things like that. Generally I won't even refine something quite this much if I'm going to a painting, but I wanted to really illustrate the entirety of it so that when we get to the paint process, you can understand what I'm doing a bit more. But it goes back to a confidence thing. As you create more, you'll start to forego the need to draw everything out. In fact, lots of painters don't draw nearly this much to start their paint work, but I thought it'd be helpful for this lesson or this course. Now, working with the pen and pad tool again, and getting that nice clean edge that I want to see in the painting and allow me to delete the excess sketch lines that are around the perimeter of it. This isn't something that you have to do with every painting by any means but again, I would definitely invest the time to learning this tool because it's just so versatile and powerful and if you struggle to keep nice clean edges to certain aspects of your work, then this tool will definitely help you with that. What I'll do here is after we create this, I'll create the selection again. I'll chop out the work, I'll flood fill behind the line work and that will give us that nice floating layer with a clean edge that we can lack transparency with and start to add in our digital paint and effects. The main takeaway that I want to stress with this particular lesson is if you notice it started as a really bad sketch, and I'm not saying that's some amazing sketch now or render work, but it's come a long ways from that rough sketch that you've seen. Really allow yourself to stay within that rough sketch and let ideas unfold naturally and just loosely build up on it. You can use layer and layer opacity, you can use a soft brush to gently erase the lines and build up over top of those. Just really take your time with the ideas and hopefully you'll be able to express them more easily through that process. That's at least what I find that helps me. So lots of rough sketches, lots of conceptualization, and don't throw anything in the trash bin or the recycling bin too quickly because you might be able to save it. Now we'll take this line work, will start to add in some paint and effects and see what we come up with. Let's move forward. 11. Using Liquify and Warp to Edit Your Artwork: Now, I want to show you some ways to edit your work using the Liquify tool. This tool is very powerful. It's just one of the neatest tools I think in Photoshop. I definitely want to show it to you now. One of the things that I think makes it easier is, once you flood fill whatever you're working on, even your line work, generally, I think the Liquify tool works better once you're already painting, but you can still make some huge modifications within the line work at this stage. But it does work better if it's filled and lock transparency is not on. Just have a setup like this and I'll show you. We're going to probably need a little bit more canvas to work with on this particular exercise. What I'm going to do is go Image, Canvas size, and I go from center out, width, let's just bump that up to 14, hit "Okay". That will stretch it out to the sides, zoom back, grab this background color, hit "Command T", actually we have to take a lock off. Command T, hold "Shift", we just drag this out. You see the opacity is low there, we'll bump that back up. Now we've got our workspace, and let's take the character here and let's just make a copy of them. We have parity of a couple of them, but better safe than sorry. What I want to show you, assume one of these character for any reason to be just different in a body type. We wanted them wider, we wanted them more hawking, British type, whatever. You can actually get away with that sometimes with liquefy. What we do here is just called Filter, Liquefy, and keep in mind that based on the file size, if this part runs slow for you, this is a pretty taxing part of Photoshop. But if your computer is running slow, just bump down your file size. Now, the one I use the most is really just this Forward Warp tool. I just pull things around. But the beauty of this is, if you just slowly move things around and you want to play around with the brush size. So the brush size is going to be your area of influence. I would say a little plus sign is going to be more influenced than probably the side of it. Slowly pulls if you're off to the side. That can be good for small tweaks. Sometimes you have to actually select a certain area just to make sure you don't say, "I'm hitting the leg there." But it's not really that big of a deal because after you are better with it, you start realizing you can just bump down the brush size and really get in there and tweak it anyways. I rarely even need to make selections, but I'll show you how to do that as well. Say if I just want him to have bigger arms and I get in there and I just widen these up a bit. What it ends up doing, is it ends up allowing you to take a step back and look at your work. I can fix this. I don't have to redraw this, I don't have to change this, that and the other. It just gives you this more room for edit, so that you keep moving in a forward momentum with your work, which is always important with any illustrative process, definitely digital painting because there's so many ways to edit that if you really start to explore these options, you save yourself just tons and tons of time. So it's really important. That's just a few little tweaks. Let's hit "Okay" there just to show you the difference. The thing I like too, is now once you're here, you can hit Command Z if you're on a PC, and you can just go back and forth that see these little increments. So a lot of times I'll even take something, and I'll hold or drag over, and I'll make a copy of it, and I'll watch the incremental changes that I make just to make sure that it's heading in the right direction. Notice that it just brought up the layer that we're on, now both of them. Now, the other thing is, you've got these other brushes, reconstruct, just so it sounds, I'm probably going to put it back. I'll be honest, I don't use these, and I'm only going to explain what I use because I just feel that it's going to be more appropriate for the way that I paint. That's really was the purpose of this course anyways, it's how I use Photoshop for painting. So you've got this swirl, which could be fun for some painting and effects. I don't know about characters, but we could try it. You've got to expand and contract, or in this case, Bloat and Pucker, that's what they're called, but I call them expand and contract just because it's what seems right to me. If you press and hold, you can give them a little hand there. I don't know if anybody wants a really tiny hand like that, but you could do it. Then you could take the expand and say we wanted them to have these big hulking hands. We can do that. Again, we've got to watch the area of influence on the other parts. But just as quickly as that we can give them a lot larger make it starting to look like certain characters that have those big bullish hands. Then you can just come back with the Move tool, and I want to call this one Forward Warp, and you can just bump this up, like I wanted this upper leg to have more of a ball there. So I could push that back out pretty quickly. That was too much. You can still use Command Z and Command Alt Z, inside of this sub tool. Let's hit "Okay" there. So you can see the transition that we made really quickly. Again, I'm not saying that this is going to revolutionize the way that you draw, you're going to be able to take a bad drawing and make it a good one. But you can definitely make quick edits. Then you can take it a step further where, say I want to just modify this arm, but I don't want to worry about let's say legs, I think that's about the look that I wanted there. Let's we want them to have these bigger hulking legs to go with these larger arms now. You can also just select just an area. Let's draw a lasso selection around this leg, go to Filter, Liquefy. I don't have to worry about hitting that other leg. Now, I only have the room to edit to where that selection stops to the box stops pretty quickly. But, I can modify quite a bit right here. Again, I don't have to worry about hitting that other area. You could take that a step further and you can, as you notice before when we entered into that sub tool, it didn't grab the other layer. So knowing that, we could take this area and we can hit Command X, Command Shift V, and that will actually paste it back into place. Now you do have to be aware of that little artifact right there, but that's easier to clean up. Then now when we go Filter, Liquefy, we're going to get just that leg, and you see we've got a lot more canvas to work with. So now we can zoom into here, we can really modify just this leg and we don't have to worry about hitting anything else. We just have to worry about merging it back together once we get there. But you see, it adjusts the line work, it adjust the overall shapes really nicely. So lots of cool ways to edit your work there. You see just like that, we're able to change the proportions of this character in a really non destructive manner. Now, I want to show you another great way to edit your work. Let's go ahead and merge this back in and you could really just simply clean this up by, maybe just a slight bump up. It pretty much hides it. We'll just hit Command E there. I want to show you the Warp Tool now. The great thing about the Warp tool, let's say that we do just want to select this leg again here. Let's go Edit,Transform, and Warp. The Warp tool is like Liquefy, but it's right inside the interface here. It allows you to make a quick selection and move things around. You can move just the perimeter like this, you can grab the middle and move it around. It's probably a little bit more user-friendly as far as your system resources, I would imagine. I don't ever think I've used this and its tags a system has slowed anything down. But it's a great way to jump in a certain area and really modify something. For instance, say you just have the shoulder here and you just want this to push out a bit further, you could just really quickly get in there, make a selection at the Transform Warp. You can see it's actually creating the area of influence where I made the selection. Now, since I have an object here, it's selecting the perimeter, but my area of influence is still there, so if I pull out here, it's a lot slighter of an influence, if I pull here, it's a lot more dramatic. Command Z still applies in this range, but it's a really great way. A lot of digital painters use this to do quick modifications in their work. Again, you still have to worry about the artifacts a little bit. Which in this case you would have to make more of a selection and paint that back in or just get in here, hold all, select the corresponding color, and brush that back in. But still, huge time savers and lots of ways to manipulate and move your work around. I'll tell you Warp works really great for things like, really both of them do, but say you have eyes here and one's just a little bit tilted, you can actually use Warp to get in there and move that around. Again, you're going to want to play with the way that the area of influence works. Say I'm trying to bring this side up, to balance out, it seems there's a slight slope there. Let's try that. I can get in here and I could start manipulating this just a little bit, try to bring this side up. You have to play around with it and see how it works in your own fashion or your own style or whatever. But it is very powerful. It works great and allows for some really quick edits. Enter Command D to deselect and then paint that back in. So between those two, you should have lots of room to manipulate your work and save time. That's really the main purpose of this little exercise here. We've already talked about the Quick Mask feature, but it actually works really well with the Warp tool. I'm going to show you what I mean there. If you noticed as we warped the part of the face, and you can see the little artifact that we got on the edge, there's actually a way to eliminate that and not worry about that. If you've got lots of paint work going on, lots of details, maybe you want to edit without having to do too much clean up in those areas. This is how you can do that. Let's define a selection in the face like this. Let's take Q for Quick Mask, and remember you can get to that by going here as well. Also remember with quick mask, you paint with dark to light to apply and take away the mask. So let's go ahead and try to designate the area in which we want the mask to influence. Right now we're using white to do that. That's opening up the mask. You want a picture at the pink as the area that's all masked currently. Then we'll hit X on the keyboard to flip to the opposite color or just click this watch here, and then now we can paint that back. I want to just influence the face area. A little bit of soft edging to the sides. There's that Q for Quick Mask to release. Now again, it just looks like a basic selection, but if we go to Edit, Transform, Warp, it's actually going to warp with that soft selection. Let me go back and show you something else with that. Let's go ahead and hit Command X. You can see it caught with that self-selection, Command Shift V will paste it back into place. We've got a little bit of artifacts there, but not much. Now if we go Edit, Transform, Warp, as we maneuver this, we can try to be aware of that fade and try to cover that as well. So there's lots of ways to edit that work with those two tools combined and get some really nice effects. You can see there's still a minimal amount of clean up but not much. You'll get better and better at doing it where you'll be able to do it without any clean up at all. Again, it creates that soft selection, you can warp with that effect, and lots of ways to edit your work as you go. That'll wrap up this lesson. Let's move on to the next. 12. Applying Base Colors: Now we're going to start adding color to our warrior concept art here. Let's go and take this, make sure it's on light transparency. Again, that makes sure that we can't go outside of the confinements of the edge of our sketch here that we took the time to make that nice little perimeter shape with the pennant path tool. You really don't have to do that. Just to where there's lots of ways to paint. Some people like to paint just the shapes in place and then sculpt them with the paint. There's plenty of ways to do this. This is more of align artist's approach that I like to use because it allows me to really segment the work if I need to. I'll talk a little bit about that. Essentially let's set up the work. We've got a layer here. Let's get rid of some of these other layers just to clean up what we're doing. I want to show you how I use groups to really modify and keep track of everything. I've got all my different stages here that I really don't need in the way. What I can do is select by clicking the first one holding Shift and clicking the last one, clicking the Group icon, you'll see it condensed them all down in there. I can call these something like Warrior Backup, something like that. For these ones, I take visibility off, so you don't see those now. You don't see them now because if you were to expand this, none of the visibilities around here. What you can do is you can even make little adjustments like this where you take each one of these move them around. Put a visibility on like this. Make yourself a nice little progressive sheet or something. Make the rough sketch really is small. Now that is impressive. You can stagger them up and down like this, Command T, hold Shift and that scale proportionally. What you can do is now when you toggle this on and off, they all come on visibly. Just little things like that. If you need to create a mood board or something in the background for inspiration. We can take our modified pause here and see how many we've gotten here. There's a few of these, probably don't need all of these by now. But say we do. We'll just keep them in here. Grab each one of these, hold Shift group icon, just call them Backup Files and we'll call those Backup Poses. Just like that. You could put groups inside of groups and gone as far as you need to really clean all this up. The silhouettes here, I don't think we'll need those but let's just hold Shift, grab both of these, drag them right into Backup Poses just like that. Now we've got our warrior color and we'll work on this. Now with this, there's lots of ways to do this. One of the ways that I like to get started is set the brush to multiply. I'll pick something in the design that has the most areas of color. In this case it's going to be the gold armor. I want these gauntlets, the boots, the helmet, all those different little pieces to be gold. What I'm going to do is I'm going to base coat all of it like this, even though I know I have to get back in there and slight paint different areas opposite colors. I'm actually going to bump down the opacity just a little bit, here one more time. Now the neat thing about multiply, is that it darkens everything correspondingly all together. Essentially it's giving me the darkness that I want or the shade of gold that I want to start with. It's also keeping the line work just for now. I want to blend that out later but I want some of that line to work from. Now, the other thing that you can do is this. Let me go back twice, hit Command J. I know a lot of artists will do it this way, which isn't a bad way as well. You can go Warrior Lines and then you can take this work color. If I take this top one off, I've got it locked. I can set this to normal like this and I can paint this. Let's set the opacity all the way up. I can paint this and wash away the lines like this. I can merely uses the top layer. I could set this to multiply, so it'll basically take the underlying color and just apply the lines and then I can play with the opacity of this. This is another great way to do it. If you really don't want to fight those lines as you're painting. Because sometimes it can be a bit of a hindrance as you're blending and smudging and painting. You've have to get those lines out of there if you want a nice painterly look. I sometimes will paint and leave lines to get a nice mix of painterly and comics. It's really the way that you work, whatever style you're after but this is a nice way to work. We'll start off this way because you can still always select parts of this line work and merge it to the lower layer anyways. Now that we've got our base color, let me darken that one more time. Again, I can take that and I set it to multiply, I can hit this real light. If I wanted that dark or I can play with the opacity and the amount of influence that it has. But I just have to remember to go over the whole thing so that everything is a nice consistent tone. We'll say something like that. Now, if I want to get in here and select different areas, like say the shoulder plate for instance. I can do a couple methods. I can use just the selection tool here. I like to leave it to add the selection right there so I don't have to hold Shift but if you leave it here, just remember to hold Shift. You can still hold All to subtract like we talked about in the selection lesson. Then what you want to do is just get in here and select just the shoulder plate. Now, if you're not as confident withdrawing selections. Believe me, I do mess up like I just did there. You can zoom in further or you can use the polygonal by holding Shift and go into here or just hitting L to toggle between those. Whatever you're comfortable with. But if you get in here, just remember it's not a race and it's not something that's has to be perfect. Now because we're working with these on their own layers. You don't even have to worry about the floating space. I'll show you, I'm just going to skip over areas like that because we're going to use lot transparency to rein in our color. I just want this part of the shoulder plate. I think I actually am going to use the polygonal tool. Let's go ahead and go to that. Make sure it's the add selection so I don't have to hold Shift. I just simply given here and click around. It's nice too because it will actually move the canvas foil like that. Move down here and click around. As well you can hold space bar and move the canvas like this. Again, see what I'm doing there, I don't have to do this. Let me go back. Actually I don't want to do that and I'll show you why here in a second when I start this out. Over here, right? Let's go back and I actually want to click around this. Reason being, I don't think I'm going to be working off the line work as much. But you want to get in the habit of going outside the line work. In case you need to blend back into this layer, you can do that. If you go right to the edge of it, then you're going to create an artifact. Not a big deal, it's still easy to fix but let's just do that. Now you see this selection of just the shoulder plate. I've got lots of opportunities here to adjust the color. Keep in mind if you really want to segment your work, you can do that. You can just hit Command X, Command Shift V. Now this is on its own layer. You've got the ability to lock transparency. But keep in mind you're going to get layer-intensive over here. You're really going to have to use your groups and layers to organize that. But it will give you that extra level of edit and segmentation within your work. You really don't need to do that unless you just think you're going to keep going back and reselect in that area. If you're not, you're okay with making selections. You would just leave it in place like this and you can adjust the color even with hue saturation sliders. If you want to hurry up and just quickly mess around with some base color, player out the saturation, the light and dark and just give something in their relatively quickly, these can be great for that. You can see we're just able to adjust that, get a base color going rather quickly and you can even save this selection. You can just go Select, Save Select, and just name it, Shoulder Plate, whatever. You don't really have to have the layers over here if you don't want. If you're not against that, again, you're just going to hit Command X, Command Shift V and you'll have it over there to work with. Because it is nice for your quick edits. Let's go ahead and let's just hit Command X, Command Shift V and we'll start naming these. We'll just call it Burgundy Armor. I'll just name them by color. Let's just go ahead and repeat this process and let's get the shoulder plate over here. I'll use a polygonal tool. Again, I don't have to worry about the outside area as much. I am just getting here, select. I think that's part of the armor right there. You just have to make these decisions. Again right here, I can go right off of there and remember to do that. Double-click or finished a selection there. It's got this little piece right here. If I want it to match here, I don't want to use that slider again because probably not going to get the same color. I can hold all, select this color. Just go to color for the blending mode. But we've got to make sure I'm on this layer and let's put this at a 100 percent opacity. Again, this layer is going to confine that. If you notice when I painted outside here, it went to that parameter selection. This will now confine it. But I'm not getting that same colorization that I've got over here. I've got to try to fix that. Let's try and multiplied just to darken it a little bit and that's too much. Let's pump down the opacity. This is really why you want to do it all at once, that's close enough. I'm going to be painting it anyways. But this is really why you want to grab all the areas that are going to be this color or roundabouts. I think I want some of this material here to be that same color. Let's try to think about any other areas and I think that's about it. I should have grabbed this as well. Let me do that. Constantly making mistakes as I paint, so bear with me. My life is just one big series of mistakes. Sorry, that sounded depressing. Now it's actually a great thing to make mistakes. You're probably thinking, well, why is that? I don't want to make a bunch of mistakes. Mistakes are great, because they actually tell you what not to do again. So an integral part of the learning process, and just as important as success, sometimes more so. That's a hard thing for most people to wrap their head around. But yeah, I enjoy mistakes because it tells me what not to do again. In the art profession, that's huge. That's life in general. Now let's do this again with multiply. I think I'll have to repeat the same process, enough screen would work. So we're going to play around with a lot of these blending modes. Darken your institute that does multiply. That's pretty close right there. Now I'm going to hit Command X. Commands Shift B. I want this to be part of the burgundy armor and I don't want to retype that every time. Keep in mind if you grab the top one and hit Command E, it's going to actually get rid of your typesetter whatever. Hit Command Z to go back, but if you hold Shift, and slide both of them, and hit Command E, look at the magic, it actually retains that information. So little things like that are just time savers. So you can see we've already got that separated. We've got our lines over top. We've got our flats, as I like to call them, it's more of a comic term, but it's probably crossed the board really. We've got lots of errors that are gold, and now we just got to get in here, and figure out what's not gold. This the lay. We're going to do some texturing there, so I'll show you that. Now the other thing to keep in mind as you're doing these selections, you don't have to click right through here anymore. For instance, if I'm just going to grab this bicep shoulder area, I can go right through here because, this is on a separate layer now. Remember, we've itemized that. It actually gets quicker as you go. Let's go and do this. Let's select through here. We do want to stop here I believe. Think so. I'm still not completely sure if I want this to be a skin tone, or the mesh. I think this will be a skin tone. Cause we've got to have a little bit of that in there. It's going to be too much material. So let's do that. We'll do this for the skin tone. So again, I don't have to hold Shift, but if that's not toggle on at the top left, I'm going to hold shift, just get in here. These selections don't have to be perfect. You see the line work is definitely not perfect. Again, there's lots of ways to edit that. So it's not a big deal. If it's a little bit off. So we come in here, we go right through the goatee there. This is actually a bit of that armor holding the chest plate on. Again, I can go right off, piaging there, but I need to come back again, because I want to preserve that gold helmet piece. Hold Space to move it. If you feel this needs to be a little bit more perfect, then you just zoom in further. I think I've already mentioned that, but I will reiterate stuff from time to time, just so I make sure I get the information across. We could use the pen and path to do all this, but it's more time consuming. You really don't have to have that level of detail on all of this. But, the nice thing is, once you do separate components of this, you can do things like drop shadows a lot easier. You can control the refinement of your edge. There are going to be parts of the painting where you're going to want the edges to be blurred quite a bit, and blend into one another, but you can do that as well. It's easier, in my opinion to go back in that direction, and blend edges out, than it is to constantly get back in there and repaint hard edges to the work. So it just depends on, I think I'm going the wrong way here. We're doing the face, not the helmet. Forgive. Talking and working at the same time here. Now let's take ALT, and subtract this area here. Double-click, just like that. So no harm, no foul. So we want to make sure it's just a skin tone. Down here would be skin tone, but I'm actually going to show you how to do some texturing right there. I'm going to leave that. Now make sure we're back on the lock transparent layer, the base layer, pick some fleshy based skin tone. Really doesn't matter if it's correct at this stage because again, we're going to be editing it. We're going to be painting over top. You just want something in the room. More or less, you just want something that's more distinguishable from the other colors you've got in place. Let's take something like this. I should be using my slider over here. Let's try this. To normal, or actually multiply. Pretty dark, but that's alright. We could use, let's try a screen. You really want to play with these blending modes as well, to yellow. Let's just go back to this, this is fine. You want to play with these blending modes, and we keep in mind, the blending modes are here, and there on the layers. So lots of room to manipulate, and do things here. We're going to hit Command X, Command Shift B, or we just call that skin tone, and rents a repeat. Now let's do some of this armor in the chest plate. Actually, I think I'll just picture what I want to do here. This is all going to be gold. I might do some of the smaller pieces, so let's go and do the legs. This is going to be that part I'm going to show you how to texture. Let's go and click through here. Then I can jump right across. I don't need to worry about that edge. Now we've got this as a separate layer so we can go right through this. We do want to preserve the shape of the hand here, a gauntlet, or whatever we want to call that. I'm almost right there, got to love those. One thing here, is you want to make sure not to double-click too fast cause it'll close the selection line there, which as you've seen before, isn't a big deal to fix. But you got to be aware of it. Hold ALT. Get rid of that little bump on the finger there. Oh, sorry. Hold Shift. I don't have to Hold Shift because it's already pre-selected, or the add selection is already on. Here we go. Goodness. Now let's go ahead. Let's just do this with a slider. I want to show you multiple ways to do all this stuff and well, just told us we're not on anything. Let's go back to this. Your saturation. You can also use color balance. Let's find a blue, and let's de-saturate that quite a bit. I put lightness and darkness right there. I don't want anymore of that blue in there. Let me see. The pouches are going to be a brown leather. I think I want a little bit on this top helmet piece. Again, what I'm going to do just so these are lined up, not that they really need to be. I'm going to make the selection first, like this. Make sure that lock transparent layer, and let's go ahead and do that again. Just double-checking this to make sure I don't have anything else that needs to be that color. I'm almost wondering if we want to make these parts of the armor here the same. Because if not, that's going to be too much gold. We'll make this more of a steely light gray. Let's go and do this image. Use saturation, get to our blue. Right down the saturation of it. I tried to work is desaturated as possible, especially in the beginning stage because I tend to oversaturated my work. That's going to depend on, again, the style and what you're after. But there's a hit Command X, Command Shift V, to pace back into place. Double-click here, name this blue tone. We'll go ahead and stop this lesson here, and we'll head over to the next lesson where we can finish segmenting the work and naming our layers. So let's move forward. 13. Applying Base Colors Part 2: Let's work on applying some more of this color. Now another thing I want to show you too is you can always take, let's take all this and let's keep it altogether. Let's call this group Warrior Color. Everything is condensed down into that one group as we work. You can also hit "Command J" while you are in the group. Immediately get a backup, hit "Command E" and it will give you everything that we had here merged into one layer. Now we can move this over and we can lock transparent pixels here and then we can do some quick base coloring. It doesn't have to be pretty but we can figure out some of the different things we might want to see in here. Let's just try color. Let's say kind of a blue gray or more of a gray really, right through here. Make sure our capacity is at a 100 percent here. I will just use this to a quick color mock-up. Maybe all this middle area and again, it doesn't have to be pretty if you go over, you can just hold all grab the other color, go back, things like that. This is honestly how even a lot of people will paint. I just like a little bit more roamed at it and I tend to stick a little bit more heavily guided to my line work. This way over here is the way that I do it but really no right or wrong way. You could do a bit of a trim color right across there. You can really experiment here rather quickly, which is nice, see what it looks like if this area here is blue-gray. Let's say we want what else? Probably use that for the X set here. These colors don't have to, again, be the exact color because we have ways to add it on but if they're at least segmented from the next corresponding color, you can do a lot with that and you'll see as we start to add in our effects and some things like that. What else? Lets pick the Brown that we want for the leather that will also be the more dark here. Let's try to go to Darken or Multiply. That is a bit too dark but again, this is just our representation of what we're after. Pretty much the leather pouches here will be the brown, the sheath or whatever it's called for the sword. We could get in here, we could say that maybe this side pieces of that brown. It is really up to you how you want to design your character. But it's nice to do it like this because you can judge it as a whole from a distance. It's actually probably more helpful to have more small, when doing this. We'll get some of those brown and probably the lighter brown into the handle here as well. That gives us our base idea of what we are going to work with here and then we could take this hit "Command T," scale it down, put it over to here as a reference point, and then go back to our primary one and jump in here and do some more. As we've seen here, we want to use a little bit of this gray metal effect through here. We'll go and create those selections now. Again, we can go right through the arm here because that's already separated. We can actually go right through all of this. Lets just jump right through here. This was part of it. We do want the separation from where it hits the sword. We go through, right through all this, all through this. It should be zoomed in a little bit closer to get this right. Actually you could go right through all of this here. Since we still have to color this belt a different color, you can actually go through right all those here just like this. Let's hold this over here, like that and what do I multiply? That's going to be too dark. Let's just go to color. Rush that all in and what other part? We wanted this little part in there to be gold, we'll separate that after. Let me show you, we'll hit "Command X," "Command Shift V" and we'll just call this Steel, we just really want to just be able to distinguish them from each part. Now we want this belt. Actually, we want the middle, this whole middle and this bottom plate to be gold, so not a problem, but just get in there. We are going to select the middle plate, this template and actually the side pieces, all of this and this lower shield there, or whatever that is. Let's go and select those metal center there in the bottom. We will just select through here. There is not a line right there, but we will just imagine the shape for now. I was trying to get in there and figure this edging out. Pan back and check it. All right, so let me speak on- excuse me. Now we need to get the middle here and the bottom there. Now that, we could actually use an elliptical and the same rule applies. We're going to hold shift and draw that out. You have to play with it and get it just right. Or just create a basic selection because we can edit this back in with paint. So back to here, this bottom piece. Whenever we're trying to get a smooth bandwidth plug-in all tool, just smaller intervals of tiny selections and tiny clicks. You can get pretty good where you can still make it look as if it's a smooth curvature. Again takes a lot of shorter little intervals to do that in practice. Let's see if that's the gold we need, Let's select the golden color here. It doesn't have to be identical, but our lines are pretty good, so that's so nice. That's what we're after right there, command X, command Shift V. Again, we want this to go with the gold, so where is that? Burgandy skin, blue, install all the gold armor at- that's why with color there, let's call that gold armor. That's done. Okay, and then we'll drag it above this one or below and merge them. But if we hold shift and click both of them hit command E. Now we should have all the gold on more armor or layers. Now we've got the leather pouches. Let's jump in. We'll do the leather pouches, the sheath of the sword and the side little pieces here. I'll click around this. I want to really go to that next color, because that's where my edging is created. Just like that, what else here? It's part of the sword. So a little bit of setup is involved here obviously. This is probably why a lot of artists just tend to go right to painting and cleaning up their edges with the paint work. So there's really strengths, you know, pros and cons to each method. But I think that if you get in the habit of doing it this way, you'll pick up speed and you'll actually get a higher level of refinement or a more controlled level of refinement. But it really does depend on the type of style that you'd like to execute within your own work. Space bar to move, and almost there. Okay, this is going to be a darker brown. Let's go over here, pick something darker, and ran colors. It's probably going to be too light. See that one outside of there, like transparency or pixels as a non. So what happens, just so you're aware, every time you're merging layers together, that will come off and you've got to re- select it. Then we want to go with something like multiply or darken, pre-multiply. I'll go near the opacity, so it's not too dark. There we go. This is really enough separation and selections because what ends up happening, if you were to toggle all this off now, we'll start with the line work. Get that off. If we're to tackle each one of these off, you can see that there's a lot of separation and the things that aren't separated. For instance right here, we have just the ax head that hits the helmet, but it's not a big deal. I could easily paint through there. You really don't have to keep separating. It's really to whatever level and refinement you want, and how much you think you'll be using the masking essentially that we're creating here. Let's put the line work back on. Let's just do the ax head, that should be enough. Really, more than enough. Now you can also see right here that this area blurred behind there, that's not a big deal. We can get rid of that and the other material masses. It's not really an issue, but it's real easy to fix that as well. You could actually take just the burgandy armor here. Go select, load selection, hit okay. That's the other neat thing about doing this. It allows you to make your selections really quickly. Now you can toggle that off. Go back to the gold. You could just hit delete if it really bothered you. Just keep that in mind that each one of these is also giving you an ability to create selections, which is nice. All right, so let's go back to the ax head there. Let's just select that. That'll be our last separation that we need to make. Let me just use the mouse. Sometimes I'll get in the habit of using the tablet to tap and click around. But I still feel a little bit more control, or at least for me anyways, in this particular exercise of using the mouse. I don't know if it's just because I've used the mouse for so many years doing this before I got to the tablet. But for whatever reason, I do find more control this way. So alt, I guess that doesn't matter, that's outside of it. There's a piece I want to fix right here. That should be good. Okay, so now again, we can color this. We could even just go Image Adjustment, Desaturate, just as quickly as that, we've got something close to what the ax head might start out looking like. Command X, command shift B. Just call this ax head. Okay, so now as we step back and we turn the visibility back on all of these, let's see what we got. We've got a pretty good representation of what we had over here for our mock-up. Few little differences like the change in the handle of the ax, and things like that. But things that are going to be real easy at this point to paint in now. We've got a nice separation. We've got everything grouped together, we've got a mock-up that we still play around with if we want to try effects over here before bringing it to our finished product. Now with that, let's move on to the next lesson. 14. Painting the Gold Armor: Now that we've got everything in place, we're going to start applying some digital paint. Let's start with the gold armor. We've got it right there, we've got locked transparency set on, so we're ready to go. Again, the beauty of that is that it won't go outside of the confinements of the edging. What we want to first do is designate our light source here, and I generally will start. Let's say we've got multiplier, we've got a brown here so that'll work. I'll probably bump down the opacity pretty low because I just want to work up to this. The way multiplier works is every new overlap stroke will create a darker area. You just got to be aware of that, there's lots of ways to do this. You could start with brushing in some of this texture like I'm doing here, and I actually want to overlap this and create texture. I'll generally just scribble around almost, so that I'm just building up the effect that I'm after. I want lots of little random bumps and scratches by the end of this. One of the ways to do that, I think, is to just slowly scribbling the texture. Not be too critical at this stage at all probably, and just really get some information in there. Texture is one of those things where you probably want to err on the side of creating more, not less, because you can always brush it back rather quickly with a soft brush or whatever, and it's a lot easier to do that than maybe apply it later. I mean, really, it can go either way because actually what I'm going to show you, we're going to texturize the legs here, and I'm going to show you how we create a pattern. We'll warp that into place and texturize that material so that you can go in either direction, but again, err on the side of more, not less. Again, because we have this separation that we've created, we can really paint pretty easily. You can start with your plane changes and you can do these larger bulk shadows like this. You could say that one side of the mask is going to be considerably darker than the other, the edging of it. You just have to figure out your shapes as you do this, but since there's all that separation and divide, it becomes real easy to get in here and add these shadows, these plane changes, because it's ultimately how you want to think about painting. You want to think about it a little bit like you're sculpting and subtle plane changes. This area is going to be considerably darker. There's going to be a slight transition there, and maybe even another slight one over here, depending on where the light hits, and then can you get in there and start building up the edging of whatever the material is. So you have to think about the thickness of it, again, how the light hits it, and all these things. It's like sculpting, the more you can get sculpting in your mind as you do this, I think the better and just slowly work up the forearms. I'm trying to figure out the light source and try to pull from reference, even though I would say good luck finding a reference of something like this obviously, but you learn to look at reference of other things and pull just one component of it. You might look at something as simple as a still life of a lamp, and be able to see a certain lighting component of it that would look really cool in your painting, and that takes time to really recognize that. It doesn't happen immediately, so don't beat yourself up if you're not immediately able to see the correlation there, but over time it does naturally occur, and it's a really neat thing because you'll start gaining inspiration from pretty basic things that you wouldn't imagine in the beginning would provide any real inspiration. You see I'm just doing a bit of scribbling, sometimes it's not turning into much and other times it jumps right out at me and starts to make sense, but I'm just trying to get a little bit of that texture in there. I will also talk about how to use the brushes to apply a little bit of texture in a variety of ways like noise, patterns and things like that, to get this texture built up. But I just want to keep playing around with this until I see the direction I want to take with it. I'll get a little bit of bezels going on by adding these shadows to the one side, and again, I'm trying to figure out the amount of curvature or depth that I want to see on each component of this. I will bounce around, so if I get to a certain area and I'm just not being productive and I'm not seeing it as well as I'd like to, I'll jump around. I also try to generally work from a distance for as long as possible and get in the bulk of the information. I think that this is helpful when trying to apply your shadows in your facet, just getting in there and doing large passes and working from big to small. It's always a good idea. Again, I'm thinking about plane changes, so maybe I want the bottom of the knee guards to be considerably darker than the sides just to help define that change. I also don't want an even shadow say here and here, because that's not really how light works. So what I want to do is get, say, a good shadow there, but then a larger probably transitional shadow there. Little things like that help to convey depth. You want to really avoid everything being this singular pass or singular waited effect over everything, that's a sure far way to make it look flat and not interesting. Let's try to get a little bit more separation from the segments here. Notice I haven't started blending out any of the line work yet. Now we do have it on a floating layer so we can always check it like this. That's probably what I'm going to do, I'm just going to keep working up the underlying paint, and then will either blend the line work right in or just get rid of it and finish it off of the paint, but it really depends on the style. Like I said, I tend to do a lot of comic book/painting mixes, so I like to use or keep some line work, but in this particular instance we'll probably do away with it. Notice I'm not just painting in one direction either. I'm really open to painting red against anything that I'm putting down and brushing right over it, even if it's just ever so slightly, because that's what creates texture. I don't want lots of textures in this. I'm constantly scaling this brush up and down with my bracket keys as I go, but the only thing I know that I don't want, is everything to be completely smooth and too evenly distributed with the light and shadow, and the texture and the glares and all that. I'm really trying to move that brush size around, paint some things back and forth, and get some ideas going, and some texture going. We want to try to get as much variation in their early on as I can. Also, keep in mind that, you're not stuck with anything, especially with the way that we've itemized and separated the work. If this was bothered me and I didn't like it, it would be as simple as going back to normal mode or any of them really but, and holding all selecting them and just brushing it back. Well, obviously with a full capacity, I could get right back to where I was in a matter of seconds. So it's not a big deal. Let's go back to multiply keep doing this, I also try to grab some different colors as I'm working. I'm always testing things. Let's jump that back opacity down. Another thing that you want to avoid is everything being the same color. You don't want this large, consistent color through anything at all, but it's another way to really make your work pop is to just practice blending in different colors and taking notice of all those subtleties and shifts of color that you see and everything around you. When doing stuff like this, throw mood board up. Mood board is simply a bunch of images that would help you to reference what you're looking at. All kinds of collage together and just have that on another screen or print out or whatever you got, that can provide you some more needed inspiration and reference. It doesn't have to be exactly what you're looking at. In fact, that's probably not going to happen very often. There's some base texture, pretty messy, but that's all right. Then what I want to do there is just take and I can even go back to my line work. I'll make one other copy of that just to be safe. I'll drag that copy to my backup folder there just get out of the way. I can take this and I can slowly get rid of some of the stuff that's in the way, some of the sketch lines, just so it makes a little more sense, I could create a selection of each of these areas as I'm getting more completed with that area and use that selection to delete just part of the line works. A lot of ways to get that stuff visually out of the way and keep moving forward. I'll just lightly brush this stuff back as I don't need it as much anymore. I will use my soft brush to do that. Just always be aware of what layer you're on. Jump back and forth like that. If you don't want to make the mistake of painting on the wrong thing, just lock the layer and you'll be good there, so you could take the background here, lock that, and you don't have worry about painting on it. Another thing that we can do, and I tried to do early on as well, is get in some different textures with even some of these brushes. Let me bump up the opacity a little bit more. I'm going to pick this dirt brush that I got or created. It's really just a bunch of little random dots. You can brush this in by hand, but sometimes you can make a brush that helps to put that into place. Let's try a dark here. You don't want to really brush in all evenly like that. You can and if it's early on in the painting, it's not going to matter as much because you're going to do a lot more paint over top. But it'll give us a nice little randomized effect and probably do some areas that are a little more prevalent or visible and other areas that are a little bit light. Let's throw out the armor here. Again, it just adds a little bit of grit in texture to that armor. As you apply the paint over top, it'll start to look a little more believable. You need lots of texture to make things look rich or vivid, or any of those things you need a bit of that all over. You see, I'm not being very picky about where I put it. I'm just making sure it's in there at places. Let's see, while we're here, let's try and see. I've got a bunch of brushes here. This black textural one might be all right, but we've got to knock the opacity way back. This is nice because it can provide a little bit of almost like stained effect. I want it to be very subtle. At this point, I'm going to see it just adds a little bit of inconsistency and dirt and grime. We can bring this amour back to be in more specular areas, but you also need that dengines to help it look like armor and to give it that variance and the material. Watching this in there randomly, see the brushes twisting and moving. I have it set towards very inconsistent effect or something like that. This sort of thing can be somewhat addictive, you see somebody comes out cool when you're doing it, you want to apply more of it, more is not always better. But sometimes you need to err on the side of more when it comes to the texturing and then paint back. Let's go ahead and there's another one that I'll end up adding which will be like scratches. I'm not exactly sure where that, but we'll find it. It's that buildup and those different things that you want to get in there. [inaudible] brush and a lot of times I'll place the effect and then go back a couple of times and see if it's good or bad. I still want to be aware of the roundness of the form. So we can go back to a soft brush, something like this with multiply and keep rounding out this form as we go as well. So you are not really making sure to get some areas pretty dark, on the one side. We can always add bounce light to bring it back and which we probably will because the armor is so reflective, you're going to see a bounce light here and there. This is the part where we just dingy it up and make it look pretty ugly. Also keep it in mind, saw on its separate layer like here. We still have our image editing ability. We can play with the levels. Levels will allow you to bring out certain parts of the dark and the light. That's highly powerful to do. You can really up the contrast that you see within that. Check the work by hitting okay and then go and Command Z and see in the difference. You can also go into here, I like to continually play with the saturation and knock that back because if you don't, it'll just end up being two bright animated. Unless of course that's what you're after. You'll see we've got up a bit. Now, we'll move onto the next lesson and we'll basically add some more light source to this and bring it out to another degree. 15. Adding Highlights with the Dodge Tool: Now we're going to start adding in a little bit more light source to the armor. I'm trying to paint as much of this as I can before moving on so we don't pen ball around too much, but I'll be honest when I paint, I generally will go from segment to segment because I seem to work better by contrast. So what I mean is that, as I apply more effects to one thing, it'll expose other areas within the painting and within the composition that I need to work upon. So that's just me, but for the sake of the course, I'm trying to do as much on one element before I jump to the other, just so you're aware. So with the gold armor here, we're going to pick more of a red, reddish burgundy somewhere in there. Let's try overlay with a soft brush, and there's our par setting and flow settings, and I just want to slowly push in a little bit of a different color. I want to make sure to again get a variety of color in even this armor. Because if you don't want it, it'll just appear to be too flat and too unrealistic. So just a little bit of red in there. Now, we're going to add some specular highlights. So if we were to just jump in here with the dodge tool, this can be a great one to immediately pop up a light source. So what I'll do is just get in here, hit a few little areas, and you have to be pretty careful with this because it's real easy to overdo any highlights, but definitely with the dodge tool here, it's really a strong effect. So you got play with the exposure and this loss will be related to your settings on your device. Notice I'm still trying to work from a distance, but I'll probably jump in a little bit closer now. But you see I can rather quickly get in some light source. I'll probably do a little bit more to the background so that we can see a bit more comparison to that as well. If you notice, I'm using a spatter brush just so it gives me a bit of inconsistency to that light source into that edging just because I think it adds a touch more realism with the way that the armor will be. Then here I'm going to try to bring the light further over. So I'm perceiving that it would actually catch on the top of this foot peace and then spread over. So light's always moving, shadows are always moving. It's good to think about them as not as stationary things, but they're always moving around. Like I said, with the bounce light, I'll probably do a little bit of that back here. It is not as strong as I have it there, but a little bit anyways because it helps to really round out the forms and it helps to convey the fact that this material, even as tattered and beat up as it is, that it's specular, that it has the ability to reflect little bits of light. Just like skin, once we get to the skin will talk about that as well, but skin's actually really reflective and I think a lot of people ignore that when they do their skin painting. I at least don't see it that way. So still toggling the brush up and down with the bracket keys and just playing around with the fact. I'm trying not to be so evenly distributing this light, but it's definitely something that's easier to do. It gets real easy to just give every edge a little highlight. It's harder to think about the way the light would actually move around the character in the design and just hit certain areas more greatly in dissipate and not hit other areas at all. So I'm trying to just find that bit of flow to that. But hopefully you can see how that little bit of light source does quite a bit for the armor and it'll start to liven it up. Now we can probably zoom in here a bit. Back to the dodge tool. You can really get the same effect by brushing it in with paint and using like screen mode or color dodge mode. But I like the dodge tool, it seems to work really well inside Photoshop here, so I gravitate towards it. Now, we can also jumped down the exposure quite a bit and we can play around with just using the spatter brush inside some of the larger areas here because you don't want to get in the habit of just making the specular highlights on the edges. You want to picture where it's coming into the form or into the larger area. Again, this is just like texturing, even though we're doing it with the light source and we're doing it with a different brush. It's all texture and it'll all help to build up the realism or effects that we're trying to create. Again, hopefully you see just by a slightly dab in that, I'm getting a little bit more that speckled effect. Likewise, you can take this brush really small and you could just draw some scratches in there, some lines right across to it. So you could draw these out and get some scratches and some gouges in there. Now, once you get to a part where you are more sure about the highlight you want, so maybe you're doing the trim work here, you can just bump up the exposure and get a more deliberate series of lines. So it's constantly playing with the exposure and how much I add based on the area that I'm working in. Since we're here, I might as well mention the opposite of this will be the burn tool, and the burn tool is just going to darken the area. So we could apply that as well if you want to bump up some contrast there. The way this work is that you can control each component shadows, mid tones, or highlights. So you really need to play around with it. The burn tool all usually leave it to shadow or mid tones. Usually don't shadow the highlights, but you can. You just want to play around with it and see what works best for you. But you can see, it gives that little bit of contrast rather quickly. Back to the Dodge Tool, and really not worried if I overdo these just because I can always paint them back. But I do want to really explore the roundedness of these shapes. It's funny how even a very tiny highlight can do a lot for an area. It doesn't have to be that strong of an effect to really help to run this stuff out. You're going to want a little bit of bounce light back here. Something, I could think about this being on the highest point of the material, maybe a few little highlights in there. You can almost as dub this brush too, it doesn't need to be as much of a pole or a stroke. It can just be a little bit of a sponge effect or a dub. That's what's really neat about portions like this one. This is actually one that just comes with Photoshop. There's not much, if any modification to this. Just to show you, this is all you'll see when it comes to the spatter brush. A little bit of the edging of the material here, and remember we can rotate this need be for a little more control. Another thing I want to show you is that if we take the Dodge Tool with another brush, let's set it to this rippled glass brush that I have here, and notice if I scale this up, it's a bunch of little speckles and spatters. But what's really neat about this is it allows you to get in there and add a good amount of texture with that light source. So you start to think about texture as more than just applying it with a dark brush. You can play with light, dark, anything that really it's just a build up of the effect. The more you overlay texture in this way, the more depthy and the more realistic things will tend to look. It's always good to err on the side of probably more than less. I know a lot of my beginning paintings, everything was just smooth and lacked texture. I would always get comments from viewers that were like, Well, it's a nice butt off. You just put some texture in there, it really pop. You always got to listen to that constructive criticism that's how you get better. But if you notice this rippled glass brush does a really good job of bumping up that effect really quickly. If I was to press really hard to see it, this nice variants in the surface. I'll start off real light with disks. I don't want to overdo it, even though it's pretty easy to paint back if that happens. I also got to be very aware of where the light sources in there, if you notice this is kind of bouncing around. I'm not being as specific as I probably should be yet. I'm just adding texture and getting some of the light source in there, but I have to be careful not to just pinball around and have light everywhere. It does bounce, but it is from a fixed point. It will bounce off the ground and hit back up on the arm on the other side, things like that. But we have to be aware of where it's at. One of the things that you can do is just create another layer and let me first up the canvas size. I'm going to go canvas size, let's go to 16 by 16. Another thing I notice, I can actually change this from RGB. So go" image mode" and put this to RGB. Just make sure not to merge the work that you've done thus far. What ends up happening, and it'll make the file size smaller. A lot of times it's industry standard to work in RGB and then convert to CMYK for output. But it probably depends on what you're working with. But for most of my work that's been the majority of what the expectations were. So I'll move this layer again. I'll go and lock that back into place, and now we can take this. Remember if you grab the group, hit "V" for move, you can move everything together in that group, but you've got to be up on the main Group tab here. Now let's add one more layer inside here. Let's double-click here, call it "LS" for light source, and you can just draw the light source. Now a lot of people will do something like this. There's nothing wrong with that. But it doesn't really tell you exactly where the light sources is. What I would say is get in a habit and you can save these out as you create them if it saves you a bunch of time, but get in the habit of maybe being a little bit more dimensional with it. So presumably this will probably be pretty rough, but we'll just get it in place rather quickly. Try to be a little bit more dimensional about it. In maybe an arrow or something like that. Whatever you're good at visually reading from your own scribble there. But if you do it like this, then you're more prone to see it as an actual position in the sky or in the room or whatever you're drawing. Versus just doing that little flat arrow, which doesn't tell you a whole lot. I would recommend just doing it like this. Just it does take a second to make this little dimensional arrow. But, there's a lot greater understanding of where that light sources is. Now the other thing is this, you can also draw the light source out, perspectively like this, because it works like perspective in really map out where the light is going to be hitting, and then you just have to assume that once it hits the area that it hits, say here, that it's going to round over that area and then you got to decide how that affects it. Try that, remember you can jump down the opacity. This is just very light, it's there. It's not in your face, but it's definitely there as a reminder. Back to the armor here, this should give me an idea how the Dodge Tool works. Now we're going to jump in and add some more texture and variants with the brushes and some of the blending modes. So let's move on to the next lesson. 16. Adding Texture on the Gold Armor: Now, I want to start painting in some additional texture to darken up areas of this and I also want to keep focusing on working in enough paint where I can get rid of the lines. You can merge those in and blend them if you like. Sometimes it can be a hindrance though, and if you don't plan on keeping any type of line works, probably not the greatest idea. But let's go and set this to multiply. What we can do is start to brush in some of the separation that you see from the segments of the armor. We can get some of that in there. It really doesn't have to be much, just enough where you can start to do away with that line work. I try to brush in areas like this as much as possible. What I mean by that is it's really easy to get in the habit of tracing the line work versus using a larger brush and brushing it back in, which I think adds more quicker than tracing over your existing lines. I'll try to be real soft with this, add some different effects. Again, it's set to multiply, so it's darken everything, which is what we're after. I've got a little bit lower Opacity. So if I overlap strokes, I'm still building in a little bit of texture. You're just scaling that brush back and forth, getting some of the separation. Now for me, I generally will tilt it like this. I'll hold R, hold space bar and move that into place and then start to detail some of this. As I do this, I'll get so much of it in place and then I'll toggle on and off the line work to check to make sure that it's standing on its own. The more that it starts to stand on its own, I'll just do away with the line work altogether. Now, the other thing to remember is that when you go to your line work, you got to make sure you just hit the eye. Don't accidentally hit here and then start painting because it's a good way to start messing up and then you've got to go back and touch up and fix things. But if you just hit the eye icon, it won't jump on to that layer, you'll be good. I'll rotate it back. Now, another thing I'll tend to do too if I do jump over here, if I take the visibility off and it looks like there's enough information there where I can read it, I'll actually start to erase with the soft erase. I'll erase some of this information out. Now, I will again make sure I got a backup, so let's check my backup here. I think I've got one right there, but we have the lines. Now, I do have a backup of itself. Always really careful about that. Let's set this to a soft brush and just get rid of some of these lines as we go and always check it from a distance to make sure it reads well. Back to the texture. What I want to do is take another one of these brushes at the multiply and let's try. We could try the rippled glass against the [inaudible]. You can try it a couple of ways. You can dab it. Then hit Command Z and see how it works. Actually, I'm on the line work, so I have to go back a few. Same mistake I was mentioning. You can dab it and see how it looks. If you're going to dab it, you probably need to hit it a couple times. You can see right there. It adds a nice little bit of grunginess to it. So I would recommend stamping that around here and there. You can try brushing it in as well. Yeah, that's looking good. That's what I want. I want that little bit of dirty, griminess to the armor. That's what it seems to be doing. Now, again, you don't want to get in the habit of using the same brush for everything. But if it works, it works. The main rule to live by is, if it looks good as you're doing it, then it's good. You can check everything visually, but just to be aware that multiple brushes generally will bring out the look of something better and give it a more enriched look than just one brush as a singular pass over everything. In fact, one of the things I have to be aware of is that I don't give all the armor this same exact texture. It's better than no texture, I guess, but it's not going to look as impressive as it could. If I can figure out a way to give each one a subtle and nuts and sometimes not so subtle difference from one another. But I am liking the way this is grading it up. Still trying to size the brush up and down as I use it to give some variants to even this one brush. Just so you see the settings with this brush, you can see the brush tip shape right there, gives you a thumbnail there, transfer, and spacing. The more spacing you give, the more artifacts you're going to create through the passover of the brush. Just be aware of that. If I was to drag this brush through, I'm going to get some nice little log gaps there in the texture because of that spacing. I actually like that too, but not as prominent, maybe real light. Again, I'm thinking about it more in the sense of as I build up on this. Not so much as it sits right there. Now, let's look at it from a distance, check the work again. I really got to punch bag some of these highlights because they are just too prominent everywhere. I've got to think about what areas wouldn't catch light from this angle. Again, the light is hitting here, coming down, maybe catching some of this top of this plate here. But I've got to be careful not to overdo it. It's real easy to do. Just glancing over these areas really lightly trying to knock back those highlights. Now, the other thing about this being on its own separate layer like this, is we can get into areas like adjustments, hue saturation, not that back or oversaturated. That's crazy. Knock back the lightness and darkness. You want to really play with a lot of these sliders. I'm also going to show you how to do adjustment layers, which are more effective, but you want to be aware that you can knock some of this back and play around with different things here, add a certain tone. The really neat thing about color balance, and we'll get into this one, is you can control each one of these areas. Sometimes just by adding a little bit of blue in the shadows, you can get a nice effect. So you can really do some neat controls with this right here as well. Now I'm going to go back to the chalk brush, one of my favorites right there. I want to keep showing the divide and painting in some of the separation of the armor. I'm going to work on that. I'm going to leave that window open. This is my way to hurry up and get that line work out of there, and then just focus on painting to show the separation. You'll notice I'm using a little bit larger scale brush than what the line currently is, because I want to try to figure out a way to paint some depth in there. I don't want to just trace that line and create a new line. Whenever I try to do these paintings, I keep in mind, I come from a very line oriented background doing comics and things. So I was very used to always leaving the line and a hard time sometimes eliminating that from my work. But with paintings that I study and especially ones I'm very impressed with, a lot of them will totally eliminate the line. I try to do paintings in that regard and then sometimes I do paintings where intentionally I leave a line and even paint a line in.There's lots of ways to do this stuff and you want to experiment and develop your style. But when painting generally, if you're going for a painterly look, you're going to get that line right out of there. That's what we're going to shoot for a little bit more on this one. Then again, if it works without the line and we can see all the separation, I don't need to see every single separation because I can obviously remember what I was after when I created this, but we'll get rid of some of that. That's fine. Get rid of some of that and then just keep moving forward. Again, I'm going to rotate by holding R, drag that into place. I want this nice little segment or opening right there. I'm going to try not to completely trace my work, but if no other ideas pop into my head as I'm doing this, then I will do that. So I think of it that way as far as the ideas are in place with the sketch. But obviously if I think of something better, then I'm going to run with it. But if I don't, then I'm just going to rely heavily on my sketch. One of the things I tend to do with my art creation process is when I'm sketching good and ideas are flowing, I try to sketch out all my ideas that I can get out in that amount of time. So there's certain components of my art where I can be a bit mindless, I guess. It sounds a bit strange, but there's other times when I'm drawing well and conceptualizing well and I need to get out as much of that as possible, especially on a project. I tend to do that a lot on larger projects. I think we all do that as artists, but I would at least mention a little bit about my process when it comes to things like that. Again, I'm going to check line work, makes sure that stands on its own. It's starting to get there. There's a few little parts that I need to probably add in what the gauntlet there not much, but again, I'm pretty sure I could remember it and not entirely lose it. But I'll just draw them in since we're there, I should say paint them in, and just those little separations and a lot of this will take effect when I come back again with another final level of highlights. So it looks a bit flat still, but those highlights should bring it back home. I think I want a bit of a shadow right here on this separation, right across here. I'll take the Dodge tool, see if I can get some of these highlights in. It's neat too, if you take almost any brush and scale it down, you'll still get a fine point on it. I was always like that's neat. You don't really have to have a specific brush for a fine point. Some are better designed for that, but pretty much any brush scaled down will work. For instance, I've done pretty much full paintings with just the hard Rom brush, or soft Rom brush, and you can make them work for the entire painting really. But as you progress through this more, you'll start to want to create more and more custom brushes for different areas of your work which seems to happen almost naturally. What I want to do here just to get the armor to look a little bit more dimensional, because I want to catch the edges of some of these areas and the armor. I'll just little bits of, could be this top edge before it changes planes or whatever. Select that, figure out if there's a plane change on this peak, I almost drew that in there, but now that I'm looking there, I don't think I want that in there. We're going to just try and to get a little bit more effect in there. So when I take these lines off, it stands on its own. It's still not quite there, still looking a little too murky. But we'll just come back to it, like it does read good from a distance, which is fine. But I want it to read good and I want it to read well without to the line works. So I'll have to keep building up texture and then working on that. Now, let's just keep shading in some of these other areas, keep working on getting into details. I feel like I probably should time-lapse this again because this is going to be a lot of repetitive work here. What I'm going to do is time-lapse the next part and I'm going to do what you see here in detail through the gold armor area, and then we'll jump on and slow it back down and talk about some of the other areas of the V-R work. I'm not design redundant, but essentially I'm just going to paint back and forth on this, add little bits of texture with that Ripple Glass brush and maybe the Dirt brush, whatever brush I've got that has little bit of noise pattern to it, and then sample from the existing color palette and paint in some white source, and really try to sculpt this so that I can get rid of the line work and press on. There's really no rhyme or reason to this and then keeping the light source and mind and defining the planes of the objects that you see and then pass that. Maybe worried about little bits of color shifts with the light and things like that. But all that can be edited later, it's not that pertinent that you really worry too much about that. I think it's more important at this stage to sculpt the work and really define the planes and the forms that you have to really explore those. So I'm almost thinking of value at this stage, even though I'm working in color. That'll complete this lesson. Let's move on to the next. 17. Adding Texture on the Burgandy Armor: Now, we're going to start adding effects to the burgundy type armor and a little bit of fabric there. Probably perceiving this would be more like a leather sheath of some kind. We're going to have locked transparency set. Again, just like that on the burgundy armor. Let's go ahead and start with a soft brush. Let's set it to multiply. Let's pick a little bit darker. What we want to do, again, thinking about our light source. It's coming down, hitting here. So it's going to hit stronger here and glance around, stronger here, but less is affected. Here as well up here. Let's start with that. Just with the large brush, we're just going to immediately define that little bit of light source. So it's obviously going to be pretty dark underneath here. Again, if this is applying too quickly and affecting too much area, just jump down the opacity here. Whatever, it's not a big deal, but we want to make sure that we slowly work up to that. Even though we can paint back and forth if need be. I want to show you too how with even a soft brush, you can get your more fine lines. Well, it's not always that particular on what brush you're using, more so on how you use it. Get the soft brush in there to show the separation of these lines so that we can get rid of that line work rather quickly. Also, use this to show, let me rotate this, the drop shadow that you're going to get from the other pieces of armor, for example, like this here. So if you really scale this brush down really small, it becomes even like a pencil brush. So it's not really that specific. I think they work more specifically when the brushes are larger than when they're smaller, but again, you just have to experiment with them and see what works in your own style. A little bit of drop shadow here from that armor plate. Likewise there. Then what we can do is come back with the Dodge tool, but we don't want to really use that texture. It's not that it's a bad thing, there may be some texture in this, but again, I want to try different textures as I progress through this so that I don't get this overly unified effect. We're going to try this dirt brush. You might want a little bit of texture just like with leather, you're going to see a little bit of bumpiness to it. That's what I'm perceiving here is more of a leather type material. Bump up the exposure, so see that a bit quicker. Not overly apparent, but it's there. I think that it's important to do that as well. Maybe you don't see something as directly affected as you might think, but still put it in there. Sometimes that's how you work on your subtlety. You can almost tell that a lot of what I did with the armor is a little bit too much at this stage, so I may have to paint back. Then there's a nice comparison or contrast from this texture to this. You can tell that it's quite a bit different, even if it's only smaller, it does give a different effect. We'll go with something like that, and then I'll get up here and shade this. In fact, first I want to check and see if I can do away with the lines here. I want to stay pretty consistent with that given the line work out of there as we progress. I think that stands on its own. I'll tighten it up a bit further, but you see it's pretty much working there. I can go back to the soft brush, refine some of the the edges a bit more. Again, right there, notice I just made that mistake. I was actually painting on the lines. Right there, you got to be real careful when you're jumping back and forth like I just did there. Actually, I went to the gold armor, making mistake after mistake here. Burgundy armor, there we go. Which really this is more of a burgundy material than an armor. That's probably the only drawback to multiple layers like you see me doing here. Keep in mind that really even at this stage we could start merging layers together. I'm not going to yet because I want to show you some different effects as I progress through this. But lots of artists, as they get more confident with their painting, will tend to use less and less layers. Now, there are some artists out there that they are fantastic in their regard and they use lots layers. It's really just based upon you and your decision-making as you produce your art. But I do like the opportunity to be able to edit the work, like we're doing here. But there's, again, no right or wrong way. There's tons of ways to get this stuff done, but I do like the separation. Now as I work into this, I want to make sure my opacity is pretty low so I can softly build up to this. I have go to still throwing lots of texture, but I want to first get these transitions in where these little bits of light and dark shifts great answer whatever through these little areas of the work so that I can again start thinking about getting rid of those lines. We rotate this space bar to move down. I'll generally put like a small shadow on the edge of anything first to give it more of a depth, and then I'll sometimes come back and highlight even over that edge. But it seems like it always works better if there's this tiny little shadow on the edge of everything and it looks more realistic than a line on the edge of everything. The other thing that I tend to do is say, I'm using the soft brush like this, I'll try to go through all of it across the similar attributes like in this case the shoulder blades. I'll try to do all the soft brush effects on the shoulder blades before switching to the texture brush. As much of that as you can group together, the better because you tend to get a more unified look or uniform look if you do that. Double-click here to straighten out the canvas. That's already looking better. Obviously, looks very flat or not as interesting as it could because it needs some texture. Again, set the multiply. We don't want to use that Rippled Glass, for reason of stipple. I think we used the Dirt Texture on the other one. Let's try the Stipple Brush here. Just grunge it up a bit, bearing up the size just a little bit. Let's try something else too, because it just doesn't have enough look to it. Let's see what this rock texture one does to it. Again, this isn't always specific, just because it's a rock texture brush, doesn't mean you can't use it here, and then also you can try playing around with different darknesses and color shifts. Really, I just want the darkness on this. We're going to come back with some highlights and we'll try to brush up on some additional color. Let's try a light source of sometimes a bit more reddish orange to it. Let's set this to screen mode and see if we can punch in a little bit of a light source to bring this out a bit more. You can see I'm still using that rock texture brush even though, another brush would probably make more sense, but just seeing if some of this little bit of texture that I can put back in, we'll add some areas of interest to it. Also I can come back with the Dodge Tool and let's try our chalk brush here into dodged toolset. That's too strong. Or let's just try it with the stipple brush then and bump down the exposure. Now again, this will probably look a bit strong at first and I can always paint this back, but what I'm trying to do is just get a little bit more depth and roundness to that, even if it's a little bit too much at first. Again, keep them away with light sources. I'm going to draw or paint right through those spikes and then I'll come back and re-colorize and shade those differently, but for now I'm thinking about the area behind it more than I'm thinking about those. I'll just ignore those temporarily. Again, I can make that brush really small, hit a couple of little highlight edges just to get this difference in raised material. I want it to look like it has a bit of a rolled over edge in some of these spots, so making the brush really small helps with that. Also just dabbing the brush around, trying to pull out some texture. A little too strong. But again, I'll paint that back, but starting to give it a little more life anyways, and that's what I'm after. Now to give this a bit more effect because it just, again, it looks too plain jane. What we want to do is take, and let's add in a bit of an orangish red. Actually let's just scrap it over here so you see it visually. Probably something into here. Try this out. What I want to do, I'll grab a soft brush so I don't really want a texture on this part. I just wanted to do a little bit of color shift in there. I don't think screen it's going to subdue some of it. Let's try overlay. Generally overlay will brush in some color and it will actually pump up a bit of contrast at the same time. What I'll usually find myself doing, is I'll use this to liven something up, but then I usually have to punch it back with a correction layer or knock down the saturation, so it's just up to you and what style you're after. You see it. It gets very saturated pretty quickly, but it does give it more of an effect and doesn't look so plain, it almost looks like there's more of a sunlight hitting it or something like that than it did a moment ago. Little things like that can jump it up and keep in mind since we're on a separate layer like this, we can still get into here, we can mess around with things like color balance and color balance we can take the shadows and put a little bit more blue into them. Not quite that much, wanted just keep it real slight. Now we can jump into the highlights and bump up even more yellow, if we want to see more vivid effect of that. Lots of rooms added to that. I'm going to back out of that for now, but I just want to show you it's there and that's also the really neat thing about keeping all these separate because you can manipulate each one of those components with these various effects. Now I want to add in a little bit more separation and be able to get rid of that line work, so let's go back to the chalk brush and let's set that to multiply. Let's rotate the screen here. I just want to paint in some of those separation to this. I want a bit of a shadow here. Right here. I also want this bit of ridges that we got going on here so I can get rid of those lines. I'm pretty dark underneath all here. Again, using that darkness on the edge to beef up the the depth of each area. It's just like this. If I put this glance of shadow across there, it immediately makes it look like each one of these are a lot thicker of a material going across. I'm going to stay away from the spikes for now because I'm going to go back and color those. I guess I can show you that real quick right now. Just stay on point with what we're doing here. I'll add this bigger shadow underneath each one of these perceiving that they protrude out of the material, so there would be a bit of a shadow on the bottom. It will also be a bit of a drop shadow from each one of these, so I could start to get that in as well. But as far as coloring them, I can switch the color of the swatch right there, set this to color mode, and then jump in here and we're going to have the opacity all the way up and change the color of each one of these real quick. You see the texture goes right through from the Burgundy to this and it's also why the separation isn't as great as it needs to be to convey that these are raised spikes. You'll see after we start to paint in a little bit more effect to this, these will start to look a bit more impressive, a bit more separated. There's really lots of ways to do this. You could have just made a selection around each one of these, and then cut and paste them on top, giving you another level of edit if need be. I really don't feel a need for it though. Then just go Normal. Now, if we brush it in, you'll see it's going to get rid of some of that texture because we want it to look more separated from the background or from the shoulder pads there. I'll probably jump down the opacity a little bit. Again, we want a little bit of a highlight over here but we want it to be really light because we still want to convey the darkness, that it's receding away from the light right there. Same thing here. A little bit of highlight but not as much. Maybe a little bounce light on the other side of it to make it look more rounded like that. Maybe a little bit more shadow on this side. I'll just keep playing with those. Again, check it from a distance, make sure it reads all right. I think those shadows are a bit dark on the spike but we'll fix that. Now, when working with Normal mode, once you get enough of these colors down, you really just start selecting from your existing color palette. I think I've already mentioned that, but I'll say a few things over and over again. That's one of the neat things about painting this way. Once you get enough variation, you can just stick to the brushes. I've got my hand over the keyboard over the Alt and the Bracket keys, and you can really start to paint rather quickly just with this method. You don't have to keep playing around with blending modes like I've done thus far. You can literally just select from everything here and just keep painting back and forth and get your effects in place. Now, let's go to our lines and see if we can erase this. I'm going to lose a little bit of detail, but not a big deal so long as it's enough to read well and I can keep refining the paint work. I think it is. It's a little light but not too bad. Then again, I can just use the Alt key and grab the surrounding color and tighten up the edges. Then here, well, I'll grab the light source of this, and I just want a little bit of a light source to show this rounded edging that I'm perceiving right here or something like that. Here, obviously, it's going to be a lot darker but I still want to get that in there first, and then paint it back. That way, you're forced to make a decision on how prevalent it is but it's still there so I guess that's just a choice really but I think it makes sense to do or at least paint it in there, and then see if it works, and then paint it down. Again, brush this back. It looks like it recedes around the spike there, so on and so forth. We'll keep tightening this up. I'm trying to get a better edge on these but also remembering to check the work from a distance because sometimes you spend all this detail work in a certain area, and then you realize as you pan back that it's not as necessary as you thought it was from a close-up shot. So same thing, let's tighten up over here real quick, and then we'll move on to the next part. Let's grab a darker tone, set to Multiply, make sure we're on the right layer. Again, I want to make these ridges look a bit thicker so I'll use the larger brush to do that. Grab this, set this to Normal mode. I normally use Normal or Color mode. But in this case, I use Normal. I'll get those spikes a little bit brighter. The good thing about using Normal mode is you don't have to switch your blending mode nearly as much but you do have to have a little bit better idea of your paint work because you don't have the blending mode there helping you to maybe do light over dark or whatever. But there's times when I really like using Multiply because it seems to affect everything evenly. The only bad thing about Normal mode is it will paint through certain details, so it'll cover up some of the work, so you've got to just be aware that. Now, let's go back to the line work, erase this, and I can still make it out. I've obviously still got to round it out more. It looks a little flat and misshapen right there, but then I can go back with the soft brush. Let's go and set that to Multiply. Make sure we're on the burgundy there, and just play around with. I'm figuring out where that shadow should be. It actually over-saturated because I should pick more of a dark here, so I'm probably going to knock this back quite a bit and then paint it back forward. It'll start to make more sense in the next part. We're going to now approach the steel-like armor on the chest plate and the side pieces here. This area is going to end up being textured, but we're going to address this right now, so let's move forward. 18. Adding Texture on the Chest Plate Armor: Now, we're going to work on the blue area, and actually chess players, it's going to actually be the steel area right here. Let's go and lock transparent pixels, right there, a light transparency, I believe is what comes up, and a lot transparent pixels. Give me if I ever get the terminology wrong, there's a lot to remember what the stuff vast program. What I want to do here is first start with a soft brush again. I'll leave it set to multiply. Pass it at 50 sounds good, maybe a little lower. I can slowly work up to this. What I want to do is just brush in some larger shapes the shadows. Get that go on. Now, keep in mind areas like this where, this arm plate connects to the back plate there. If you're not getting a nice transition in there and you don't want to paint back and forth, which isn't hard to do obviously, but just remember you can grab your polygonal tool. You don't have to hit the edge here, you just have to focus on the area where they connect. You don't have to worry about here because it's an floating layer. Go to wherever you want. I'll actually go right up here because, I want another transition right there. I'll use this as a two-in-one effect. Then I'll grab the assault brush. I'll get the shadow that comes from under the arm, helps round out that side plate. I'll also get the little bit of a shadow right in here while I'm here. I'll do as much of that as I can, also get these little segments whose divider pieces like that. That I will show up a little bit better when I come back with the highlight, but I get rid of the pencil on there. I wanted a hard edge line right there. Actually want one on the bottom here too. I'll make another selection for that. But I'll just do a gradient. Or I could grab a solid hard edge brush and hit that all it wants to, but should be fine. I can even scaled on this brush a little bit more. But I'll just create one more selection for that is when I go back. Now the other thing is, as you get better at doing this, you'll realize your opportunities where you create a selection like this. Then you hit Command Shift I, and it just inverted the selection, and you may come over to another area of the paint work, started to work over here. Because this always reminds me of my old airbrushing days, when I would use for a skit and mask to take things off and start painting a sign or a custom graphic or whatever I was working on that day. But it's the same idea, just that masking that allows all these other opportunities to do your work. You can get in here and worry about just this area now because you've got this isolated. You try to get as much information, with that as possible so you can get all these shadows on there, income back with the dodge tools or set this to a soft brush. Get some little highlight right there real quick. Again, just taking an advantage of the fact that it's separated there. Now if you think you're going to come back and work with this area a couple of times. That's when you go select "Save Selection" and just name it, Chest Plate Lower for something, just whatever descriptive enough for you enter. Again, you can de-select now and you don't have to worry about it if you need it, It's there, ready to go. Actually can do that in a couple areas now, obviously, if I would have segmented the work a little bit more than I wouldn't have to worry about that anyways, but there's really not a lot of reason that you have to do that over and over again. Because there are lots of ways to paint through stuff as well. That's again, I want to keep this particular course more on some of the basic guides and some of the things that you can do it if you're not as confident with full on digital painting and rendering. But that will come with time. As you get better at it, you'll just think of these little work rounds and you won't need some of the stuff that we're talking about, but that just comes with time. We also want to shade up from this area. If we pan back, and whenever you shade something from the bottom up, even if it's just a segment like this, but definitely with the whole body, it will tend to make the light will, it'll push light source up for one, but it'll actually make the character or subject matter appear taller. That's what we want here. We want to, I want to have a little bit of shading from dark to light as it comes up, so that he appears pretty Stalin, massive or something, but, so now rotate again when we get these. Just played some place where you got this selection here. I just want a little bit of this hard edge line right here. Again, I'm going to try to slowly click around so that I can hopefully get, a little bit of a smooth edge. It doesn't have to be perfectly smooth. But and again, I can go right through that gold armor, because it's not connected, it's floating layer. Once I get here, I can just finish out the selection. Double-click here to straighten it out. Then just brush this in a little bit darker at the top edge. Then Command Shift I. While I'm here, first, I'll put a bit of a transition from dark to light like this. I can even get to some of the edging from the chest plate here. I'm just going to probably be a transitional shadow from here to here. It will also hide some of that bad edge work that you see there, which we're going to touch that up, but that's just something you get from separating it and clicking around it and things like that. Probably going to small transitional shadow right across here. Then grab the Dodge Tool again. It's good, just a bit a light source. It's probably always best to be pretty far out and do the dodge tool because it's just more of a powerful effect. You really want to see it from a distance, I think, but depends probably on how good your as in your range for that thing. But for me it seems to work better for distance. Command D to Deselect. Again, if you think you're going to get back in there and do multiple changes there probably helps to save that, but I think we'll be good there. Let's go back to the shadow, and I want to get more shadow right here I'm picturing that this piece is raised. We're going to get more transitional shading right there on the edge. It's definitely way too smooth but that's one of the drawbacks to the soft brush, you got to make sure to get in there with your texture. Because if it's all soft brush, it'll just look way too airbrushed and just way too smooth to be realistic. Now let's take that and we're going to do a really fine texturing. Let's do it with both the Multiply and let's find a really dense stippling. Let's try that. That's probably about right there. Make it a little smaller and glance across here just to give it a little bit more to look at. Then what we're going to do is do the same thing with the Dodge tool set to the same brush. Let's try that. Let's find that same brush. Dense stipple right there. You can just punch up a little bit of light source. It needs to be a little bit stronger up here and a little bit more like a path, it seems to look a little more impressive on this kind of segmented look. If you do more of a path right through the middle of the segments and we'll come back and highlight some of those. Let's take this now and go to screen mode. Let's select the highlight color and let's grab the chalk painter brush. Again, I want to get in here and just bump up the effect by grabbing the top edge. What I usually picture here for shadows on things like this is that this part right here would be a segment and the light source would catch just the top of that segment. You're going have a small light source here, a shadow there, small light source here, shadow there. Just repeat that process. Then also making sure not to really do it to repetitively, which is easier to do. I'll usually do a couple of areas with some other little bits of light source. We'll get some on the edge here of this maybe. It's almost like it's going around the anatomy a bit. Again, this is a segment so there's going to be a light source on this edge and a drop shadow from the previous segment. It just helps to pay attention to little things like that because it's amazing how just simply placing the light source or shadow wherever you want can come back to bite you. This doesn't look as good, get some of those in there and see if we can get rid of the line. No, it still needs to be there for a second longer and basically disappeared right there. Let me finish getting in some of these highlights. Again on the top edge of this, and I don't know that you would see it as much. I'm going to make sure I'm not on the wrong layer. Where is it? Yeah, probably not a bad idea too as I'm working on this to bring the layer, I'm working on up, it will probably a little easier to keep track of. It will bounce light over here. Not sure if that's going to look good or not, just try it. Always experimenting, always trying new things. That's just the way I work. Let's go over here. On this side, I would probably try a little bit of an edge lighting, a rim lighting like this. Let's play them back to see if that works. I think it does. Again, just to round that out, its a bit too flat, definitely do one up on the top of the chest plate here, more of a small glare. Then I might even try one where it has this harder edge, the transits. Again, I can always paint this stuff back if it doesn't work or hit undo. Now, I just want to make sure I reiterate command Alt Z will get you multiple undoes. If you just sit here and hit Command Z, you're only going to get one undue. But command Alt Z will give you multiple undoes and just always remember that you've got your history. You go window history, it pop-up over here. It's this one. Lots of ways to back up and you're only going to get so many of them. Make sure you're not going too far into the realm of experimenting before doing some undoes or making a backup layer or whatever you got to do. A little bit of light source here, and maybe a bit isolating here. It's starting to take effect. Now what we'll do, we'll move on to the next part where we're going to do a little bit with the legs, the head play and the belt here. That will wrap up this lesson. Let's press on. 19. Creating a Pattern for Your Textures: Okay. Now we're going to go ahead and work on the legs here, and what I want to show you here is how you apply a texture. So far we've basically applied texture with brushes and dabbing it around and things like that. There's obviously a lot you can do with that and you can take it a lot further. Another way to apply textures is create a predisposed or pre-design texture and apply it and warp it into place. I'm going to go ahead and show you that. Make sure we're on the light portion here because it will generate a selection based upon that, then what we're going to do is create a texture. Let's just go and start with a new file. Hit "File New" set it to Inches. Let's just go with even something like four by four or five by five. Just something that's a good resolution. I generally will try to make these textures pretty good resolution because you never know when you might need them again. What we're going to do here is we're going to make a nice, easy pattern to follow. We're going to take a cross-section here, like that. I will just use medium gray that way if we decide to use a dark, we can't see it and if we use the light, we can see it as well. We'll just go ahead and fill that, "Command D" to deselect when actually you don't want. Lets go back because I want to make sure that it's on its own layer. We're going to duplicate this. We'll go ahead and fill that "Command D" to deselect. We've got to on its own layer and hold "Alt" and drag out a copy. Now, I want this to be spaced evenly, so the only thing you really have to do there is space one out the distance that you want them gaped. Let's say, right about here. Hit "Command E" to merge these together. Hold "Alt", drag it across, and now what you'll want to do is just overlap these and drop the Opacity, at least that's the way I find easy to do. Go ahead and zoom in, hit "V" for move. Drag that over towards, just basically overlapped it like this, and zoom in as far as you need too. It doesn't have to be perfect. But, you know, it's perfect because you need it. Now when you bump up, the opacity, I'll generally just take the middle one and delete it. Create a selection, hit "Delete", hit "Command E" again, and then repeat this process. It takes a second to get going, and there's probably other ways to do it obviously, but this is just the way that I've felt comfortable doing. It. Hit "V" to move alignment just like that bump up the Opacity, and the neat thing is whenever you do this type of thing, the first few take a bit, but then you start to pick up speed because they're doubling, so take the selection delete that middle one, like that. "Command E" to merge together. Move Tool, hold "Alt", drag it across to the overlap. Just repeat this process until we've got them going all the way across the screen there, and again, they don't have to be perfect, especially because this is going to be such a small pattern that I doubt we're going to see any inconsistency there, but if you plan on using this pattern for more and more things "Command E" to emerge. Then obviously you want to spend more time perfecting it and being very meticulous, and it really is a great time-saver. I will use a lot of my patterns. In fact, I've already got patterns like this saved. But I want to show you the process so that you can make your own, and actually teaser view, maybe the opacity down at this point because you'll know that the next one over needs to be deleted. Then just before you merge, makes sure to bump your Opacity backup. "Command E", V to move now. Then also to get the same spacing to the edge, you can just simply move one of these off Canvas, and you don't have to worry about if they're not lining up to one side because you can hit "Command T", hold "Shift" and drag it down. Okay, hold "Alt" drag this over again, and drop Opacity one more time. Zoom in, hit "V" for move and get that overlap there, and we're almost done with this particular part. Okay, and bump back the opacity and "Command E" to emerge. You see it almost lined up perfectly right there to the edge. All we need to do is hit "Command T" and move one completely off camera or Canvas or whatever you want to call it, hold "Shift" and just bases until both of those ends are just slightly of the visible area, and that should be plenty enough. Almost something like that, and if we need this to be a lot denser of a material, we just repeat the process and scale it down. I think this is going to be suitable, but we'll see how it looks on the material and then make adjustments if we have to. Now what I want to do is hold "Alt", drag "Command T", rotate. If I hold "Shift", it's going to snap as it rotates so I can get a perfect 90 degree right there. Hit "Enter", and you can check it by using the edge of the Canvas, and we get this nice little squared off grid effect. Now I'm actually going to turn these to be diamonds, but for alignment purposes, I'd like to do it like this. Again, I want spaces to whether just off Canvas, hit "Command E", and actually just to be safe, or to safeguard our work, I'm going to take both of these hold "Shift". I'm going to group these, call it pattern one. Drag these down or just hit "Command J", but it'll make a backup now of everything on that layer, hit Command E to merge those together. Now what I've done is I've got a group with the separate layers for editing. I can toggle those off and I can group them together like this, and if you notice there are on-off floating layer with no background, which is nice because another thing I want to show you is if you go into Layer, Layer Style, you've got all these neat effects that you can apply to just the Layer Style. You can also get to those through here. But I prefer to just go Layer, Layer Style, Bevel & Emboss, and it's going to bring open an edit Window, and there's just lots of great things that you can do to the layers here. This really takes some practice and you got things like stroking the outside of it, which will put a basic outline around it. We might want to do something like that for a bit of depth. You can add Drop Shadows to it. You can control every component of the Drop Shadow from the distance, the Opacity, the way that it contours the drop shadow. What you're doing here is just a lot of clicking around and checking the work because there's just so much in here, but really play around with that. You can apply textures. You can just do all sorts of neat things inside your integrals, outer, inner shadows. For this particular one, we're just going to do a Bevel & Emboss with a Drop Shadow. Because if you notice, it gives us a pretty nice dimensional effect, and as long as you leave this here without rasterizing it, you can always go back and re-edit it by double-clicking there, and then change these around. Now once you're satisfied with it, you can rasterize or merge it to another layer. If you Rasterize Layer Style, it'll actually convert that to now just a flattened layer. But it keeps all that information in there. I prefer to keep it with the fx here so that I can still jump in their manipulate it if need be. Now, let's go and take this over to the other layer, kind of check and see if it does the effect I'm hoping for, and you see it's got some artifacts or some our access work around the edges. We'll just go ahead and select this. Hit "Command Shift I", "Delete", sorry, "Command Z", "Command Shift I", which will invert the selection, hit "Delete", and now we are ready to rasterize this because what ends up happening if you paint on this layer, everything that you paint on this layer will actually have that same effect to it. It'll have that Bevel and Drop Shadow as you paint. Which actually can be kind of a neat and fun thing to do, but we're not going to do that here. Let's just right-click here, "Rasterize Layer Type". We'll get rid of that Pattern 1 tab. We'll just call it Pattern 1, and now we're going to size it down and also rotate it, so "Command T", rotate like this. I'm just dragging around, hold "Shift", scale up proportionately. We'll see if this pattern is going to do the trick. Now what I want to do first is I want to kind of, I'll add some effects into the paint work for the legs, some shadows and things like this to make this look more realistic, and chances are I want this to be quite a bit smaller. I'll probably want something more into those range. Okay, so let's escape out of this and "Command Alt Z" and get back to here. Let's see if we can tile this. Now. To tile this properly, we may need to go back to our previous Window, but let me at least give it a try. I'll delete the very edging, and I believe we are going to need to go back because we want a nice clean pattern and we might get some artifacts on our edges as they overlapped. You really needs almost slice it before the edge and then have this bar bumped up to the other side for good tile. Let's hold "Alt", drag it over, see what we get. V for move, the one good thing is it is going to be small enough to where it may not matter. There's a couple of ways to tile one is, if you get just the right seaming, and hedging then you can generally do pretty well at that, the other way is to overlap and use a soft erase. I've been able to get both effects to work at times, but let's go and do this, let's drag this over top, let's take visibility off here and here and that'll allow us to just see what we're doing here, v for move. I think that just by talionis, each way will be adequate. Let's go ahead and bring this one up. Again if we are to zoom in here and look at this, the best way is going to be to clip it right before the end here, basically we want the selection to be about right here, and up or down or I guess either way. Let's go this way and drag across. Like this and stop, hit Delete, Command-D to deselect, V for move see if that overlap will work. You also want to play around, sometimes you can get the overlap to work simply by putting it in front or behind the other, you can also drag down to the next level and see if that works and that actually works the touch better. Again if you can't see any noticeable artifact there, it's definitely not going to show back here. Although I can't see a bit of the drop shadow too much from back here, so let's fix that. Still you see it, but that may not actually hurt us, so let's go and try it, command-E, there's our pattern and let's go back to our character now, let's bring this back in over the blue tone command-T to scale down, hold shift. It's pretty small, see if we rotate it, it'll probably fit. That's a lot closer, I mean, it doesn't have to be perfect and we're going to purposely stretch this around a bit, so I'm going to show you that now. Let's go and take this over, hold all for copy because you know I like to make copies and let's scale it down even a little bit further to about right here. Now what I want to show you is that this material look okay like this, you can go to things like multiply for the blending mode, you really want to play around with these overlay, sometimes you can combine a couple of them and get some really unique effects, cause you want that look on definitely not dissolved. You want that look where it looks like it's blending in and shading away, you're going to get that a couple of ways, one, we're going to add some shadows to the material themselves. We're going to lock transparency, we're going to grab a soft brush, like this, set it to multiply, set it to a bit of a dark, like that, lets drop this pattern out of the way visibly for a second and let's jump down the opacity here just for a nice light approach. I just want to get in here and softly paint in some shadow and start rounding out the form again the soft brush is good for things like this because if you're not trying to texturize, it'll still allow you to get in all your shapes, the shadows and do some blending and things like that so go and get that in there. I want to picture that they're shaded a little darker at the bottom coming up, also that there's a bit of drop shadow from the armor, from the hand, things like that, so I want to get all of that in there, probably tone it down a little bit more. If you need to, you can generate a selection in between the legs here so that you can get a difference of hedging right there. Continuous scaling the brush up and down just to get these shadows in place and I want them to be efficient on their own without that line work so I'll be getting that line work out of their shortly. Drop shadow from the knee plate. Now keep in mind too, you can do old things like this, for this knee plate, you could just trace this out doesn't have to be perfect, but you can trace it out like this, grab this tool, the shape, go inside of it and move it over, down like that and just kind of perceive a drop shadow. Again, the lock transparency is going to make sure you don't paint on anything else and you brush on a drop shadow. Then you could probably even, no, I guess the shapes are different, I was going to say we could use that over there, command-D to deselect. You see you get a pretty neat little drop shadow there so it's not always going to work and maybe that's not as good as it could be, but there's little tricks like that as well. You really want to make use of the fact that you have the ability to generate selections inside of the area of the lock transparency feature and by the work being separated, I don't have to worry about hitting the gold armor there or anything like that. Probably more shadow here and through here. Again we're really trying to just round out these forms before we drop in that texture. I can also come back with the highlight source, dodge tool or paint in with screen mode or even normal mode, and bump up a highlight here. I can try just a little bit of dodge on the front of this and this is more of a texture brush, I'll make sure I don't go too crazy with this because I don't want the textures to conflict. Although as I add it, it may make more sense to add more texture, again do a little bit of balance slide, but I'm going to wait till I get the pattern in there for that. We could also go back to our line work and see if it looks okay now on its own, there's enough information in there, seems to be, so get rid of that. Now let's go back to our pattern drop down into place and we're going to generate a selection but first we want to warp this, so what we're going to do is again make one more copy just to be safe and go back to this, let's go edit, transform, warp. What we want to do is we want to play around with this pattern and try to get it to look as if it's wrapping around the leg more. If we were to just drop it and place the way it was, it will look very flat, very uninteresting and what you can do here really is if you really want it to look truly convincing, it's going to take you a little more time, but you can actually segment it based upon the shapes of the muscle of the anatomy, so it really depends on what look you're going for and how much detail. For this particular exercise, we're just going to warp it into place, like this, just give it a little bit of shift in hedging. As it goes around the leg, we want to perceive that they get pretty much smaller like anything in perspective and that they're going to be larger on the front of the leg. I'm just going to manipulate these a bit, move them around and I'm really just doing this visually, but it's going to be more interesting than if I didn't take the time to do this. Notice that I can pull not only the bezier handles here, I can pull these control points, I can pull anywhere inside this ROM, I just can't pull outside of this air of influence. Let's hit enter there and checked the work. Let's go and generate a selection by going into blue tone, select, load selection, click okay. We're going to hit command-shift-I, now we've inverted the selection. We're going to go back to our pattern, hit delete, and you'd see it overlap to the leg there, we want to get rid of that, so command-D to deselect. You could just take a hard erase or just take your selection tool. I'll just draw through here, hit delete. Now we've overlapped that pattern, but you see it doesn't quite blend, it just kind of sits on top of it. From a distance maybe that's fine and again it's going to depend upon what you're really after. The other thing is once you merge it into here and you start applying effects and you can definitely paint this back. The other thing is you can just play with your blending modes, you try multiply, you see now multiply actually allows it to blend back a little bit more, gives a lot more realism and then as you paint forward, you can definitely bring that out. I think we'll probably be satisfied with multiply, but like anything else, it's good to play around with these effects and really see what's in here. Experimentation is the best way to learn any of this and there's lots of neat things that you can do with this. You start realizing with these blending modes that if you design it a certain way like that looks pretty neat all on its own, it actually looks a lot more raised in the highlights and that's color dodge, you might even want to go with that one. On the life that one looks very flat and not Interesting, boring, silly, you just make these distinctions as you go through here. That one looks neat from a distance, a little more subtle. Keep in mind too, that's the other part after you scroll through these, I'm not going to go through everyone's because this lesson's probably getting a little bit long already. That's neat to and from a distance. We'll pick one of these. Then the other thing to remember with this, let's say we go to color dodge is that you can also play with the opacity. Getting it just the way you want and now we'll repeat that process on the other leg here. 20. Creating a Pattern for Your Textures Part 2: Now, let's repeat that process on the other leg. We've got our other pattern here. Just drag that over. Hold Alt, give ourselves a backup copy. I think we scaled it to the right size before, but let me double-check, let's see if I can see and scale it down a little bit more, which you also have the ability to scale it as you're warping it really. So let's try that. Let's go to Edit, transform, warp. So same thing, we just want to try to bend this around the shape of the leg as much as possible. I'm going to just pull that right around the edge there, and then move the areas that I want larger to the forward-facing part of the leg. I think even somewhere like that should look fine. Enter there. Let's go ahead and create a selection of the Blue Tone layer. Go to Select, Mode selection, hit Okay, Command+Shift+I, go back to the pattern, want it to be on this one, hit 'Delete', Command D to deselect. Again we have to make sure it doesn't go over the other leg there. Let's just grab a soft erase. Now, the other thing is you can actually use a soft eraser as well to make it look like it's blending into the shadow or creating a shadow. I'm going to leave that off for now, but I just want to show you that while we're there that you can actually just erase parts of the texture as well to make it look more realistic, which we may still end up doing. Let's check the Blending mode. Let's do Color Dodge for now. Again we have the opacity drop to 68 percent. So let's go ahead and do that around about, and you can just type it in here, it's probably easier. Here and there we go. So we got them both about the same. We do want to add more shadows around it to make it look a little bit more believable. We can either shade the blue tone or we can merge these together now. The great thing about doing it this way is now if we do merge all these together, they'll have the same edge transparency that we had with the original one because we took the selection, we've got it all lining up. So now what I want to do, we'll come back to this. We're going to add some shadows to the the belt and the head play here. Let's make sure that's all on this layer. Now the belt appears to be on a different area. So let's go ahead and adjust that. Find out where it's at. Let's see where. It's got to be one of these still. So what we're going to do, I'll just show you how you can easily merge that to the other layer in case you need to, so you can go right through the other selections. Grab just this area, hit Command X, Command Shift V to paste back into place. We want this to be part of the blue tone. So we're going to put it above there. Hit Command E and you'll see it merge them together as well as cab the name, so we don't have to retype that which so is nice. So let's check them from a distance. We've got the legs, the belt, and the head piece on the same layer, which is good. So now we'll go to the belt piece here and make sure it lock transparent to set. So again, remember to always check that because generally, when you merge, lock transparency will get disabled. So then you'll start to paint and go outside of a confinements, which is what you don't want. So let's go to our Chalk Painter brush up top here, and let's set the multiply. Then let's start getting in here and adding a little bit more depth to the belt here in painting in some of the separation so that we can get rid of that line work. I was just softly going over the lines, building up some transition, make the brush larger, gets some larger shapes as shadows in place. I'm not worrying too much about the overlap again, to me that's always like building up texture anyways. So it's good to overlap the brush strokes there and get a little bit of that texture going on. Likewise, to pin it down further and then bring it back with highlights. So that's a repetitive thing that I do. I like this separation I'm seeing right there which I think I sketched and could have just been an accident, but sometimes accidents will turn into neat little designs. I go with that. Go with the flow. So let's try that. Let's see if we can get rid of our lines now soft erase. Let's turn to work on its own, go back to the blue tone and keep painting. What I want to do, I'm going to hold an arrow and rotate. I want to picture what the depth is going to be like on the edge of this belt, and these pieces here. So that's when I get that shadow and place it like that. I can also think about that. Let's go to normal mode. I can come in with maybe just a little highlight, very thin and just the edge of that, and help to visualize the depth of these pieces as well. So it's really just working up that process and then trying to see into it and say,'' Where would I hit?'' ''Where do I want the depths of this object?'' I think I mentioned before trying not to make every object the same depth can be tricky because it's really easy to get into rots with your work, your paint work or whatever else. Although subtle differences make a world of difference really. So you got to just try to get in there and see the difference and say, maybe this piece would be thinner than this piece and then showcase that in your work. You'll start to build up more depth and more interesting looking concepts because of that. Let's go back to this to multiply. Don't think I want a bit of a drop shadow and on this ridge right here. Then as I start to paint more of this in place, I'll start to refine the edges and the way that they interact with one another. So right now, it's still has this very segmented layered look because they're all just placed next to one another. So you bring those together a little bit by the drop shadows, but then we're going to bring those together in further as we merge them together and do one final pass over of the paint work. So let's go ahead and shape this down a little bit more. So I want to hit it one more time with the Dodge tool and that little bit of texture that we got going there. You can even take an area that's got a bit of a light source like this and add texture with another brush. Through that, and general you can get some nice edging. Go in a little more of a steely look going on there. Let's pump up the exposure and let's go back to normal mode, click on screen. Let's put a little edge highlight on some of these segments here. You see, I'm causally just try new things here and trying to see what sticks. I can apply some paint in their and maybe smudge it back a little bit, move it around, try to shape the paint a little bit. Okay, now we'll come back to that and I think that this will start to stand on its own lot better. We need a bit more shadow on the gold armor, so we jump back to that. Set this to multiply again, pick something in the darker, scroll there. What we want is a little bit more shadow coming from this to help give that some base value or some connection to the rest of the work there and I've probably shade up as well, so it's a little too consistent this way. It had a little bit of shadow coming up on this. Likewise, while we're here, let's go ahead and get this pouch. You see that's actually connected to the armor. I'd probably make a small selection around this, let's choose the "polygonal tool." Right through here. It's not connected to anything over here. It is connected here. We're going to get a little bit more meticulous right through here. Finish this selection here, Command X, Command shift V to paste back and a place double-click here, just call this "pouch" This still looks a bit different to golden with the rest of it. Let's go into "image adjustments", "hue", "saturation." Let's get this to look a little bit more brown if we can. It may even be able just stay the same golden color or give it a little less saturation and a little darker. Let's try that. Lot of transparency. Probability need to fix that edge on it. Just paint in some similar tone here, a smaller color. I'm going to set this to normal, a little bit of aging there.Okay, a little better. Now let's get this head piece plate here thingy. Let's go to blue transparency set. Again, after you've got enough going on with the rest of the paint work, you can really just use that palette so you can grab some of the light source here. There's a brush, some of that end, figure out where your light's going to hit on this, grabs some of your shadow here. That's where it really starts to pick up speed. I was seeing no explaining this is, I slowed down a bit to try to figure things out and explain it. But when you're just painting and getting in the mood, in the zone, you'll find that you pick up a lot of speed because you just start grabbing from your existing work. It all starts to flow a little bit better. As well as if you're trying to get in some quick form and here you can just go back to that "Burn tool". Maybe shadows or midtones. Jumping some awesome dark there. Try to rom this out. Go back to the "Dodge Tool." Get that light source and apply it rather quickly. There's some edge like and again, as you get enough of that in place where you can see the design a bit better. You can jump over to getting rid of some of that line work as you progress. Constantly trying to clean this up and then get it to stand on its own. Back to the "Shadow." Must want something a bit darker like this. Just scaling the brush down really fine when I want to give it more crisp edge, a bit of highlight on this side. I'm starting to get there. Now, this part looks to have a little bit more of a blue tench on that up there. We could either colorize that. We could grab a soft brush and we could select some of this by looking at the swatch, making sure that it has a good amount of blue to it. Set this to color mode. I would probably keep this pretty light at first because you don't want it to over saturate it. But you can brush and just a little bit of that blue in there. Hopefully you can see that. I want to err on the side of a less at this moment because they'll probably be desaturating parts of this as we go. Same thing with the belt, this should be on the same layer, colorized mode. It's a little bit of that blue in there, there's real light. Slowly work things like that in there not jump too fast on any one thing. Let's go back and shade the legs a bit more and then we might even merge these together and see what kind of effect we can get there. But let's go and take this to a darker blue. Let's set it to multiply. We'll go ahead and merge these together now since they are edited in the way that we want and we don't really need them as separate layers anymore. One more thing I want to show you before we progress any further. One of the most important lessons that you should gain from this course, if nothing else, save and save often so I'm going to hit Command S for quick save or I can go to File Save up here. But yes, always save variations. I don't know if you noticed the numbers changing up here, but I'm actually saving variations ever so often because it's part of a course and I want to be able to share the artwork and things like that, but always save, I can't stress that enough. Nothing worse than creating a piece and working for too long without saving. Just wanted to make sure I got that in there. Now we can take this emergent down or we can erase it. I think we're going to go ahead and merge it. I'm pretty precautious, you've probably figured that out by now. I'm going to select both of these. I'm going to actually create these as a group. Just call this blue of texture or blue armor. Good enough. Then Command J to make a copy, Command E to merge those together and take off the visibility of this one. Now what's happened here is I've got everything from that blue layer that we've worked on with the texture merged together, I should say from the legs to the belt to the head piece. I want make sure that doesn't conflict with what I have got in the other one, because they're the one we are calling steel, so that's good. Now, but notice that the lock transparency is off. I've got a reselect that. Now I'm just going to get in here and I'm going to try to shape these a bit more. I'm going to use Multiplier. First of all, I want to do, I want to show you just how I test things sometimes. I'll just paint pretty abruptly right through there. Notice as heavily as I painted that down, it kept some of the light source. That's really one of the reasons why I like using Multiplier. I'm going to go all the way back there and I'm going to brush this end. I want to keep little bits a hint of that texture even as I'm trying to push this information back. Some areas I will paint over top of that as well but for right now I just want to slowly shape this and get it to go backwards a little bit. It's probably going to be doing it from a distance. Always make sure to zoom in, zoom out, really check the work from a lot of visual angles, as well as flipping the canvas. But since we've got a lot of our design into place and I don't think it's as necessary to flip the Canvas now. Now what I want to do, I've painted a lot of that information back. I want to even get some of it to look dark even through the pattern. I'm going to change that blending mode to darken. Maybe even just normal. Normal should definitely wash it away. That's a little too light. Let me go a little bit darker. What I'm trying to do here is just really knock back some of that texture. Normal modal will generally do that because it will cover everything pretty much. Let's even try darken. I just don't want that texture to be visible all over the place, which is what it feels like it's doing there. Then now what I can do, I can take the Dodge tool and pick up on just some of those highlights. I'm going to use a soft brush again like this. I'm going to see if I just glanced through a couple of these areas. If this helps effect and might be too strong, but I'll usually do a few areas, check it from a distance and a little bit to across the surface. I think I need to try it a bit smaller. Something like that, see if it works. Still a bit too strong. I mean, it definitely makes the area look specular and glossy, but a little bit too affected in that one area. Lots of ways to do this. We can either, you've got to be aware of how many applications of that you go. I basically put myself in a corner and that's where that back-ups really nice. If I got rid of that, went back because I basically went too far where my amount of undoes won't allow me to go back. I really don't want that in there, so I'm going to delete that. Hopefully this is at least a good example of why. It's sometimes a good idea to make these backups Command E to merge those together, get rid of the visibility. Let's try this one more time, lot of transparency. To multiply and to a dark. I'm just going to speed through this instead of explaining again, since this is a bit redundant now. Yes, often create backups, especially when you're experimenting. Then be careful not to apply to many effects all at once. For the fear of locking yourself into a certain direction. Let's try that right there. Let's try the Dodge still again, but I'm going to actually bumpy exposure way down. I just want a little bit of this and you can try different brushes as well to see if this works out better. I think I want a little bit. I'm going to back for two buttons. I'm going to try to just err on the side of subtlety because you can always go back and add more later. Let's just stick with that for now mainly because I don't want these specular highlights just all over the place, which is what I feel like it's getting into be. That gets us our armor shaded. Now what we'll go for is the skin tone. Let's press on. 21. Painting the Skin Tone: Let's go ahead and work on the skin tone. Let's see what we've got here. We need to lock transparency. I'd like to actually start off with this under normal mode. I'll actually use the hard round brush right here. Scale this down. I'll pick something into little bit of a reddish orange. That's actually a hair lighter. Let me start with the light tone first, so I'll paint in a little bit of light source. I like to really slowly workup skin tone, really anything but skin tone. It's easy to get wrong I think, but I'll just start off with a little bit of light source just to round out the form. Again, don't be so critical because you can always paint back but just start to get a little bit of that information in place. I like using the hard round brush because it gives me a little bit of blending. But it gives me a little bit more of a cell shaded look that I like to put into my skin tones anyways. A little bit highlight on the nose. You can see I'm just trying to define some plain changes. Whenever you study digital painting, it's always good to study plain changes of the face and think about sculpting the face. I'll just roll gently, putting in where the light source generally will hit on the face. It's pretty consistent thing. When you study faces and do portraits, realism, you'll notice that the light hits in a lot of similar areas, even in very different lighting situations, it'll have some consistencies. Obviously if the light's in an entirely different area, it's going to change the way the face is lit, but it does react similarly in a lot of ways and you can start to pick up on that through repetition of studies. A little bit of bounce light the other thing to pay attention to is skin tones as it is reflective. You do get some bounce light, you do get some of that specularities, to the skin things like that. Just so you're aware the settings of the hard round brush. I think I've already showed it, but I will just flip through those so you're aware of it. Really good brush to blend with and to just paint in general. Actually, I recommend starting with this brush. Wish I would've, I started with a lot of the other brushes that apply a little too much texture. The neat thing about this one is it gives you a nice little bit of texture, but a good amount of blending. That's with me not doing any additional blending where I use the ALT key and select the different tones. The other thing that you want to do, will do this with a soft brush is you want to get a little bit of red in there to make the skin look more live. It can be a bit of a rose color up in here. Let me try something. Something through here a little bit. Let's try this with color mode, or that's a little too pink there. Let's go back down to the other end of the spectrum and get a little bit deeper version of this, something in here. But you want a little bit of this in here like in the nose and cheeks or on the eyes, will always make your characters look a bit more or a lot more alive. You would just want to picture that there's a little bit of blood flow going through that skin there. If not, it'll look quite fake. Again, you can drop this in here real lightly and paint back and forth. Even if you overdo it, nothing to worry about, you just paint back and try to soften it up a bit, but it's better than it's in there. Probably early on in your painting, it's always a good idea to get that in, practice blending it back and forth. Let's just try that, just a few little areas a little bit. Probably a little more prominent in the face than anything, but should be everywhere because if you notice without it, it looks as really bland. One of the things I always recommend to people when they're studying skin tones. Take the ALT key like this and go over a photo or whatever you're studying and really watch that thing transits to different colors. You'd be amazed at how many colors are really inside of skin tones. That's why I think a lot of people fail to get anything close to realistic is because they're not really paying attention to that. Then for the shadow, blues usually work pretty well for the shadows. Maybe something a little bit desaturated like this. Let's try color modes, join with the darker colors. I don't like color mode as much, it'll soften them up or make them more pinkish. We could try darken, that's a little better. We try multiply. That's even a little bit better for the shadow. It's real light, it doesn't look like there's much blue in there. But that's really what I want. I don't want it to be overly prominent. Same thing, I'll just start giving some of this in here and try to further sculpt out the face. Punch up the light source by adding the shadows. You want a pretty good size shadow off the side of the face here a drop shadow from the nose. This can be done with the hard brush, hard round or like you see me using here, the soft air brush. You can really use these two exclusively and get a pretty dynamic painting. I would try not to use any one brush even though you can as well. I think I've already mentioned that, but you can definitely use one brush. I've seen amazing paintings just with the soft brush. It's not the brush as much as the painter and the approach that you take. If you were to use just two brushes, I would definitely say the soft air brush and the hard round brush would be the two that I would go for. Although, I do like my chalk brush because it provides a texture that I like in my work. The other thing is as you're starting to do some of this and get this in, your going to watch out, see it's got a little bit of purplish hue on there. I'll try to be aware of that. I have to get a little bit of this in place. You can again switch to more of black or even a brownish tone like this, and get some of that in there as well. You're just really trying to bump up the contrast, get some variation in there. In my opinion, never stick with one thing too long, for fear that you'll get just a repetitive thing going in your work that you don't want to see. You want to have some good variations, some good liveliness to it. Again, like we talked about before in credit selection you could do this with the pen and path tool. If you want it to be really straight, I always struggled to get just a perfect selection like I'm after, but something in there like that. Then you can brush in a bit of a drop shadow there as well. Start off for a light and check the work. You could get that on both sides and go through here. Again, just a little bit of drop shadow and things like that. Always check it from a distance, make sure it's working. Now, what I'll do is go back to the hard-round brush right here and set this to normal mode. I'm going to select the brightest source of light on here, and I'm going to bump it up just a little bit more. Then I'll start out with a pretty thin brush and just try to get a little bit more roundedness to some of the anatomy here. Just bump up the light source a little bit. Same thing on the face. I'll just be very careful to try to not overdo it in putting it to have some of that in there. Then after I get about this much in place, I'll just sample from what's here. It's like I spent a little bit of time getting a nice variation going and a nice palette on the canvas. Then I spend the rest of the time manipulating it, and just grabbing from what's there, and try to figure this out and a little bit of light probably right there. Again, I can start selecting from what's there now, and just push this around, and blend, and sculpt it a little bit more, as well as grab the blending brush. If I want to smooth out some of these little transitions, I can do that. Probably don't want to get rid of all of them because I do like the texture they provide, but get some of those out of there. As well as we could start looking at the line work and seeing what we can get rid of by softly erasing that back and making sure that it works on its own. You could even soft erase it back and then jump right back to the painting, and then get in a little bit more of the contrast that the lines were providing. I always like to get a little bit of a segment of the muscles in there, but I got to be careful. It's really easy to overdo that and make the anatomy look really fake. This is an animated character, so there's a little more room for forgiveness, but just a little goes a long way when it comes to segmenting anatomy. As you can see, that's already on the side of too much, but a little bit of the line works to the left right there. Get that all there. We're going to check it from a distance. It looks a little too yellow, so that's why I got to get back in there and select some of this pinkish reddish tone, and you go back with a soft brush to color or you're going to lighten, see what that does. Get some of that back in there. Again, it's really playing with these blending modes and seeing what works in each given situation. They're there for a reason. There's lots of opportunities to manipulate them and use them in certain areas of your paint work. Did I just put that on the line work in there. Forgive me, a little mistake there. I actually noticed it as I came up here to paint. Back to the skin tone. Again, that's why you got to really be careful of jumping on layers. If we have to, we can also go to color mode. We can also make sure to get a little bit more red in there. Just so I don't make this mistake again, I'm going to go ahead and get rid of all the line work except for the beard there for what we're working on. I may need a little bit more of it in the face. Now, sometimes I will merge areas the line work ends. Let me just show you that example, so you could select just this area. I don't know about the beard. Let me grab everything from here up. Command X, Command Shift V. Because it was on a flooded white background, you got to set this to multiply. Let's bring this over to the skin tone. Hit Command E. Or better yet, let's select both of them. Hit Command E. That's weird that it did that artifact, but we can fix that real quick. We could obviously just select around this and delete it or erase it. But since it's right in line with the golden armor, we can do a couple things really. One, we could just drag the golden armor above it, but then we're going to get some different issues there. We're going to go and leave that back here, but we're going to create a selection off this. Just go select, mode selection, hit "Okay". Go back to the area where we've got the problem which would be on the, where's it at? We lost our name for the skin. Select right there and we got to be careful because see how it goes through the arm there. It's going to delete that if I hit "Delete". That's not what we want. We want to hold Alt, get it off any of the area that it's going to negatively affect. Really just to be safe, what we could do. That's really the only area we got to worry about because it's the only area where it's hitting the skin tone. But we could actually just hold Alt and select everything except what we need it to affect, just like that. Really all we need it to affect is the mask area here, so as it's selected around there. Remember you can also check it visually by hitting Q for quick mask if that helps you to see it, and just hit delete. Now we're back to where we need to be. We got the skin tone there with the lines in place because I just want to show you how you can sometimes use this. Now, a lot of times you want to paint this stuff out. But certain instances when you want the contrasts in there, you can go right to blending the lines. I can just use the smudge brush to blend them in. But I got to be aware that now they're actually part of the painting. If it starts to negatively impact, I make sure to lock transparency again. But if it starts to negatively impact the look, like maybe give it too much of a dirty look in some areas, then I got to start to paint over it. But I want him to look a little bit more edgy and dirty, whatever. Just a little bit more murky of a skin tone, I guess. I'm not really worried about that. It's not that big of a deal because if, for instance, if I don't like this bit of shading there, I'm just going to select a neighboring color. Set to normal mode and start to paint it back the other way. But I definitely want the definition that the line work's given me. I'm just going to select this next shade. I'm going to go back to that hard round brush right there. Select here. I haven't quite decided what I want to do for the eyes yet, but I can just select some of this right here. Start painting that in. I almost thought about keeping the eyes white. I'm making it look even a little bit more fantasy based. I always liked that look, and then also, I thought it would be neat to make him a blind warrior. But that would be cool if he's that powerful and that strong where he can even do as well in battle without sight. It's part of his magic. I'm always thinking of conceptual stuff as I paint this, having fun with the ideas is a big part. I'll just select middle areas of this and blend them back and forth. You know you can do little things too. Like little bits and bounce light under the nose. Generally you're going to think more about this type of detailing on a close-up shot. But it's always helpful to mess around with the idea and see if it works. If you check it from a distance and it just doesn't make sense and looks distracting, then obviously get it right out of there. You can even just slightly paint over the line work, and then even select the color that it makes from that transition. I want the eyebrows to be dark so I'll select that dark. You can see it takes a little bit more time whenever you do leave the line work in there. That's why it's really pretty much helpful to eliminate it. Just paint in front or behind of it to get rid of it. It seems to save time and be a little bit more realistic anyways. But not entirely necessary. There's lots of ways to execute this type of work. I want to get a little bit more shadow on these areas. Just holding that Alt key, selecting an area of the painting and painting back and forth till I get the look that I'm after. Now let's take a little bit of light back here as well. Now let's check this from a distance and we need to get a little bit more shading going on around the face I believe, so let's take the soft brush. To multiply, let's pick a dark and let's get that face rounded out a bit more. I'm just going to start painting through here so I can get the drop shadow on the neck. Really got to make it look like that face is behind the helmet. I'll set the dark and then the beard here. A lot of times with hair like this, I'll just do a bunch of smaller strokes and texture building. Something with a beard up here. Mustache. Now a good brush for this is going to be the spatter brush. It's right here and any brush like this, that's got a bunch of little blobs there along with these settings will give you a very nice hair effect. Just be aware of that. I've actually created a lot of them where there are a bunch of tiny little staples, and what it does is it saves time because you're actually looking for the overlap that you get, and the transition from the overlap. You can do hair rather quickly when you've got a brush set just the right way. You get that texture in there really fast. Like anything else, get some base paint in there. Get some tiny little transitions or little hairs coming up the chin like this, and then come back with a light source and go to screen with a lighter orangish version. Actually, let's just pick right there from our palette. I'm going to start to get in some of that smaller strands so you can really just size of the brush down, and then start to paint back and try to build up some depth and some texture there. Then another good technique as well is to just take the Dodge tool, and then after you have painted back and forth and you've built some dark and light into this area. You can really use the Dodge tool and the Burn tool and things like that to push it around. I'll just grab that [inaudible] some wire right there. Then the same thing with the skin tone, you can make areas look a little more specular. We can also get rid of some of that line work by pushing it right to the edge. Again, we're going to have to clean up the transition of the edges. But we'll do that as a final pass over the whole thing. Then we need a bit of shadowing under the nose too. So let's go back to the hard round. Select a shadow tone, set to normal mode and we want to just get that plane change onto the nose right here. You can see it's starting to come together, just just tweaking and moving things around and getting it just right. Lots of blending or sampling from the existing color palette and painting back and forth until you get the shapes right. Now I'm liking the tonal shifts to the face, but not as much to the arm. I'll select from some of this palette of colors there and I'll incorporate some of that into the arms. That'll wrap up this lesson. Next, I want to show you how we're going to add a little bit more depth to the skin by adding some texture to it because skin does have some noticeable texture as well. We'll try to make this look a little bit more impressive and then we'll move onto the weapons. Let's head over to the next lesson and finalize the skin. 22. Painting the Skin Tone Part 2: Another thing to do when creating skin tone is to give it a bit of texture like anything else. So what we want to do is just take a small stipple pattern. We have got lots of brushes for that but one that I'll generally use is the dirt brush or stipple blender, even though it's a blender brush or dense stipple. Let's try dense stipple. So what happens is that if you just take a little bit of the light source and through the lighter colors, we'll start with the normal mode. Go through the lighter area and I'll zoom up so you can see a little better. You get just a little bit of transition there. This is one of the things that helps to make it look a little more realistic because skin is not entirely smooth as it would appear to be in this. Same thing, we can grab that and pick even a brighter light source and just bump that up with the texture in place. So it's probably not as needed in something like this where we're going to be further away from the overall character, but it's helpful to note that you need to get some of that in there. So same thing, come over here. This can also be done with the dodge tool as well. Put a little bit in the transition there. We are going to bury it here. Another thing I want to show you while we're here, I want to show you how to clean some of this up. Even right here, the armor has gone over the edge of where it's supposed to be. You can use the polygonal tool. Get in here like this or whatever tool you like. You can even just draw this. I'll show you that in a minute here. You can just do this and further define where the edge of the skin will be. Let's hold "Alt" and get rid of this little piece over here. Through here it should be fine. What I want to do is, on the skin tone, I want transparency. It should be in front of the gold armor, it is. Let's take the hard round brush again. You do this in a couple of ways. One, you can just blend the color over. It's probably the quickest way really, so I'll show you this way. You can just pull a lot of this information right over. It doesn't have to be perfect right now because you'll be able to clean it up, but you can easily grab each one of these. The other way that I was going to show you is just to use the Alt key and select each one of these areas, but this is probably a bit faster. After you get enough of that in place, you just want to make sure that it's solid to the edge so that you don't ruin a lot transparency when he put that back on. So if you hit "Command+D." You're going to need to get in here and maybe use the Alt method with a smaller brush and clean up your edges. Something like that. Anywhere where you see any kind of weird overlap and we'll be addressing that in a little bit when we clean all this up even further. That should be part of the line work there. As we get in there, erase this steadily, just getting rid of those lines. Go back to the skin tone, check it. A lot of transparency and then you can continue to paint it, but you clean up that edge rather quickly. That's really what we'll do to areas like this where there's this hiccup here. Here, I would rotate the screen like this to figure out exactly what I want to see here. So this blue plain needs that come up further and there needs to be a smoother transition from the shoulder right there. Also that could be from all the skins in front so we'll fix it with the under skin. So one way to do it is to just first crop the shoulder downwards the way it's supposed to go. Like that. Fix the blue armor. Go here and unlike transparent, and let's fix this edge. This has texture to it. So if you're really worried about it and you don't want to paint texture back in, you can actually copy and drop into this selection. I'll show you how to do that, just so you don't have to brush back any of that texture. You can just grab a neighboring area, something like this darker blue here. I'm going to grab that, "Command+C," "Command+V." V to move. Place that over here and we'll get rid of the other layers. We'll see if we can probably just fix that with eliminating the armor there. I'll show you this way since we already started. We've got this piece here and that almost looks right by itself, but if you needed to, you would correct the edging by creating another selection. Like I said, it actually fits right there. The only thing that doesn't fit is this old transitional line. So we take a software brush and just slowly erase back so it blends a little more. The line is probably from the line work right there. So we'll erase that just so it doesn't look like some bad paint work. There's a little piece of it right there. So hit "Command+E" on that. If we put the gold armor back and see how it crops in, it looks strange. Just do a selection of this. So I will select, mode; selection. Hit "Okay." Go back to the gold armor and make it visible. Don't hit "Delete" because it'll probably affect something else. Just take it and erase right here and make sure it's not set to Light Transparency. So notice if it's on Light Transparency, it converts it back to white. We don't want that. So on Light Transparency, erase this and we just want to expose that armor right in that area. We might even want to eliminate that bit of skin right there. Let's rotate it back and see. It might look a little bit better so let's do the same thing with the skin right there. We need to make those converge a little bit more believable. A little better. Let's fix that as well. You see that there's a little bit of clean up when doing it this way, but I still feel like it saves more time than not. So here we are going to clean up just this bit of where the weapon goes, that's on the gold layer. We use smudge brush to just pull this color down. Command D to deselect. We'll probably fix this part by doing it one of two ways. It'll probably looked more correct if this just converges to the shoulder right about here. Let's try that. We can select that, and just go to the Skin tone, and just move that over. Pretty easy to fix stuff like this once you get going with it. It just takes an understanding of how the layers are set up, and then jumping back and forth quickly from these tools. But I guarantee you, you do pick up a lot of speed, and you start to notice things more as you progress through it to make it all come together. Now, let's go ahead, and add in a little bit more effect to the arm here. I took in too plain, so let's go back to the Skin right there like transparency, and I think we just need to add a bit more darkness to it. Now, I want to show you another way to add in your blending it. Up until now, I've pretty much been painting on a lot of the layer, and things like that, and there's other ways too. I just want to show you that. Let's take something from here, a darker tone, reddish brown, and let's just create a selection again. So Select, Load Selection, hit "Okay." Let's add a layer over top, and let's take probably a soft brush but just this, we'll blend in a little bit of darker value in here. I just want to shade this armor, it's looking to flat across. If I give it more shadow to the back, and the beauty of using the layers to do it this way, is I can actually over apply the effect, and that's really what I want to show you. I'm going to really put this in pretty heavily, and I'll show you why here in a second. We can get a little bit of that bounce light in the back of the arm, or you could even say there's going to be a little bit of shadow from that armor coming up this way, a little bit. Definitely a shadow here from the armor or something like this, and maybe even a little bit over the top areas, so it looks a bit brighter at the middle of the arm. Now, from back here you can tell it just looks way too overdone obviously. Same rules apply. We can use the opacity because it's on that separate floating layer. Keep in mind, if you don't like looking at the selection, you can hit "Command H," and it's still there, but you don't have to see it if you find it obstructive, but you've got to remember to release it, or you'll wonder why you can't paint anywhere else. We'll do that. We'll play with the blending mode as well. Let's try multiply, so it get darkened up a lot. See what darken does. We could see what color does. Actually, an adverse effect, overlay, like you saturated. You will again have to play around with these, but sometimes you can get a pretty neat effect with using these blending modes combined with the layer. For this case, we could probably just go with multiply or darken, and then tone it way back. We can even make it a bit darker like this, and then practice soft erasing it or blending it. That's another thing. You can now blend with a lot more confidence, I guess, because you don't have to worry about the underlying paint. Another way if you're new to blending, new to digital painting, that's where these layers are just really going to save the day for you. If you are less confident about what you're doing trying to test the effects, then you definitely want to use layers to help you do that. Now the only problem is if you don't have this selected. I'm actually going to hit "Command H" again to bring the selection back visibly because that's all they want you to be aware of. If this wasn't selected, then this effect wouldn't work nearly as well for you, because you're going to be pushing those paints all around, it's going to go outside of a confinement of the lock transparency. Well, you can see with this, we can get away with it a little bit. We can really test the effect, and see if we like it which I think it's looking better. Let me pan back, and then toggle on the visibility on and off. It's definitely better. I think it's too strong. We can bump this back even further, or we could leave it all the way to opacity this way, and come back with the soft erase, and maybe bump down the opacity of a soft erase, just to slowly knock this back. Maybe we want this to be more intense at the top, but less intense down here, so we keep erasing this back. Since I've got the opacity pretty low, I can slowly work up to erasing it all away. I can check it by going visibly there, and just slowly push that back. I can really just pace myself, and see it coming together more. I think that's a big part of getting a digital painting to look good. It's just a really slowly work up to this information. So now that we've got this, we'll leave the opacity set to full, or repeat that process over here, because we obviously want a uniform type of look going on here. Same thing, I'm going to come in pretty heavily with it at first. I can get in here, and just add this effect wherever I think it needs to be, and probably a little bit over here too. Then come back with the erase one more time, just as slowly work it back and forth, and let's get rid of the selection now. So Command D to deselect, toggle on and off the visibility, and we'll check it from a couple of distances and make sure that I like it. Yeah, I think it adds a richness to the skin, and it's basically a little strong, but I think this piece is going to err on the side of a stronger colorization. I'm actually going to go with that. I'm going to hit "Command E," and it merges right down into that layer, and we're good to go. Now, we're going to detail the weapons, and then we're going to get to the edge, clean up, and I'm going to show you how we're going to pull all this all together so that we don't end up with these weird looking artifacts to our edge work. Let's press on. 23. Detailing the Weapons: Now we are going to go ahead and take this group, condense it down. Let us go and move it over so you can resize it. The beauty of having this in one group is we can do things like this and not worry about losing information. Now if you did generate selections, you have to be aware that once you move something and you go to reload the selection, it will pop up in a different spot, it will be in the previous spot from when you moved it. It is good to decide on where your stuff is going to be as you start to create your selections. I will talk a little bit more about that as well. Now we are going to work on the weapons. What we want to do here is locate those. I think they're under gold, armor except for the axle head which is right here. We'll start with the ax head, transparency. Let's go and bring that up to the gold armor there. Now we can actually take this pattern copy now, put that into our backup files. Any of these loose ones that we no longer need, making sure I am not getting rid of anything that I need here. But the visibilities toggled off, so chances are they are no longer something we need currently. We put them all under here and back to the ax head right there and lock transparency is set. With this, I just generally will start to brush in some texture, so I will start with the chalk painter brush at the multiply. I will grab a dark and half opacity is fine. I will just start to block in some defining shapes. Again, I'm trying to define the plane change first. It's almost immediately what I go for on almost anything. I'm still conceptualizing a little bit, but I am pretty much just going to go with everything that is in place. I want to think about the thickness of the object. How much of that thickness you are going to see right there? I want to think about end dense, so end dense, we are going to have a pretty heavy shadow on the one to be in a highlight right across there. I will get some these little cracks and give it more of an interesting look, but maybe not so many where it looks like it is going to fall to pieces, that would not be a good weapon. Now my weapon of choice anyways. Some little cracks in there, so as little imperfections. Again, we can immediately start to think about what textures is going to have. Now, you notice this ripple texture is throughout and it is getting too redundant. What we need to do is make sure that this has some texture like that, but not the same exact stuff, so let's try. Let's see what we got here, we have already used rippled glass, we used the dense stipple. Let's try rock texture and I have said so big brush. What I am going to do is I will just see, you can see it is just cracks and rocks or whatever. I will just throw some of these in there. I usually dab that end like that. Pretty heavily even. I think what I want to show you here is how you can start more heavily like this. That is not a problem.So if you take your texture too far, for instance, you like all that is just too much. It does not look like anything that I was after. There is no reason you can not just go back. You can even take this same brush with a few lighter hits and actually added more texture. Or you can go to normal mode, back to one of your other brushes. Let us try the stippled painter and just start to brush in some lighter, push them as areas back basically. There is really no way to really ruin what you are doing in digital painting, which is great. You can always paint back and forth and sometimes you will find some really great ideas in that process. Or you can say that you want to keep a few of these and accentuate some edges or you can just entirely get them out of there. You can dodge some the areas for light source. You can create a selection of an edge like this. Then dodge that edge and give it a little bit more defined transition and make it look more like a sharp angle right there. I think that is really one of the most important things to get good at with all your paintwork is using a variety of degrees of angle change in your work. Really thinking about how much something rolls over at a edge or how steep that edge of that peak might be and doing that with your lighting, with the shadows and your facts and all that. But again, you do not have to worry if you over details something in the wrong way, you can definitely paint your way back out of it. Now let us try a chug, brush, and let me select a little bit of a ton here so I am also going to paint some of this texture back out. I am just going to select the neighboring colors. We are using all to do that and just try to knock some of this information back just because there is just too much of it. A lot of times when I am doing this part, I am literally just picking pieces that I think look good or by eliminating parts that I think do not look good, getting to what I think does look good. I also want to get rid of my lines now so that they are not confusing anything that I am saying here. Again, once I get enough in there to work with, I can select from the existing color palette. I will switch to multiply so I do not wash away some of this texture. Notice, I am moving the brush back and forth in different directions. I am not painting all in the same direction. I think that goes without saying but it essentially helps you to get more texture involved in more randomness to your texture. Again you want to avoid tangents and repetitive effects. Just never looks as interesting. Generally, you are never going to see that in anything that is not just machine built, you are only going to see true repetitive effects probably and machine or engineered things and yes, his ax head would be man-made or whatever, but it still would have more randomness, so it would not be machined. This is the way I say it. I think that is the way it is. Still trying to get a little bit more edging and stuff going on so I will put these little imperfections here and there. I will bring out some of these cracks here and there. I like to paint through and over even something that I create with a texture brush. Even though I did create this texture brush. It is more likely it was one of my drawings anyways, but I still like to paint through it. It has a little bit more of a hand-on feel vibe to it. Well, it knows him just going around somebody's edges and chipping away at them. You can do this as well with getting up close here, take and lock transparency off, set your eraser to hard browser, uses good line brush, make it real small and then just set it to a 100 percent opacity too and then just change the silhouette of it. I will just get in there and chop it out or whatever. Just like that. Just tiny little imperfections will make something look a lot more realistically. This definitely does not look right and then it probably would not come nearly as sharp to the edge like this, so you can knock those corners off. Probably fix this right here just by pulling that back and that is still got to be painted back. But you see hopefully how those little indents to the shape of it add a lot of character. Yes, it is certainly going to get a good rocky vibe to it. Apply all the light source little more, a little bit of bounce light. Now let's get some of the other areas. I think those are on the goal now here. We will go back to the gold armor, light transparency. Actually, let us go and erase the rest of the lines. I think there is a few more left in there. Yeah let us get those out of there. Back over here, gold armor. Let us take this and get a little more variation or set to multiply there, shade this at the bottom and a little bit to show a drop shadow from the character. We do got to be a little bit aware of how it meets the helmet and I still want to detail the helmet a bit further. It is not as impressive as I would like it to be, I was waiting to get as much of this information in place. Then when I go back to show you how to pull it all together, we will do some final detail work. I am almost thinking maybe bringing plane change across up this way. I do not know how that would look yet, but I am just testing this out. I think it would actually look better. It just looks too flat and I might even do a plain change here. Something like that as well but we will test that in a bit. I guess that I am going to probably do all that when we pull the edges together. First of all, I want to get the shadows in place like this. Try to bringing out some dimensional field to it. Take the Dodge tool, run a light source right through here. There's a lot of ways where you can really just use the Dodge and Burn tool as well as a few paint effects and quickly get some ideas into place. I've seen artists doing it. It does have a very pretty good look in a short amount of time. It just depends on what you're really after, I suppose. Let's take this band here, let's make it more of a brown. So a leather look, more a bit lighter. Let's set it to color and bump up the opacity, will just colorize these. I'm looking for, let's try multiply maybe, more better. Okay. A little bit of that and tie a little bit of light source over here. I definitely want the stronger one here, so I just want this to look real specular. So I give it that really bright hotspot in a couple of places and then we can come down here, add a little bit of texture to this. We can get in here with one of our stipple brushes. Let's try this dirt brush to add a little bit of texture in there, and then come back with a little bit of light source across there. Okay. So now, let's grab the chalk brush again. Let's grab a little bit lighter tone, something normal and just glance across that side through here just for a few little more texture and light source through these areas. I'll try to give it a pretty tattered up leather look and pan back and check the work, it's getting there. Okay. So now, let's go back to the lines and get rid of a lot of this. Make sure it's working on its own and yeah pretty much discern it. Again, there's going to be some touch up and there's going to be some more edge work to do. But if it makes sense without the line working and get it out of there, then do it. Okay. So now, over to the accent here or the handle, I should say. If you want to change the color here, you know, again, we can colorize this or we can just go right to color adjustment, even color balance. But I'll just use the hue saturation and because it's selected just that area, that's all it's going to affect. We could make this a colored jewel of some kind. Probably, go with the blue. We've already got plenty of color and our character here, so we'll do like a light blue. You can play with the saturation at the same time and the lightness. We'll go with a little bit lighter like that and back make sure it doesn't look too awfully bad. I think because there's so much color, let's just go and desaturate that. Actually you can do that right here. So Command-Shift-U and I'll totally desaturate it. Then what we can do now is go with black and white. We'll just go and paint through this. It does. So again, getting our edges back in there applying changes. We can do one right across here. Not quite that abrupt to that dark and then light source. That's probably the benefit of working in normal mode. You don't have to jump back and forth on these blending modes. But I want to show plenty of the blending modes because I think in the beginning, if you really use those to your favor, you can do some really neat effects until you get more confident with your painting. I think that working in normal mode is overall probably even better. But I think it requires a little bit more knowledge for all the other components like color theory and how to really paint certain effects. I was trying to get some kind of diamond looking shape in there. A little bit more edging right here. Again, we can use that Dodge tool to change the shape of this a little bit, and get the lines out of there. See I'm using that smudge brush to really just pull things around and reshape things. All right. Let's go with that for now. I almost think it's too bright, so let's go and reselect that. Let's jump back in here and turn it down a bit. I'll just put one small highlight, something like that. Yeah, it's better. Not so in your face kind of thing. Okay. So now the handle, a little bit more to that and we should be good with this part. Again, we'll come back and tighten up a little bit more. So let's take one of these darker colors, set to multiply and brush in some texture here. So it's like wood texture, wood grain, things like that. I just really skill the brush up and down and really just add a lot of random kind of brush strokes in there and try to build up. I get them on a texture. You could put those little swirly lines and things like that. But for this type of handle, I would really just go up and down, but not completely up and down. Hover top to bottom or whatever and put in some little bits of angle and different widths of the line weight, or brushstroke, whatever you want to call it. But that's really just scribble that in there until it starts to look pretty convincing or whatever. After we get enough of that in place and hit the one side like that, rounded out a bit more. Remember, you can go across the other direction too as well. Seems to add more realism to it. We can just bump up the light source with a quick Dodge tool like that. If you want to show the plane change more right there again, you just make a small selection or the shift in the two pieces and then decide which side you want to paint on. Then Command-Shift-I to reverse it and paint on this side. Maybe highlight this edge just a little bit more. Deselect and generally you'll start building a line right in there which will help bring it out a bit more. You see I constantly painted things back and forth, painted up, highlighted up, shaded down. I just repeated that process. Okay. So there's a little bit into the weapons. So now, we're going to head some of his beards here. Our minds will do that real quick. So let's take the skin and the skin just needs to be above. I guess we just need to unlock the transparency and then paint down. So I'll select from this. All right. Brushing some of this start with a 100 percent opacity to hurry up and get some shapes in there, just like that. Then select from some of the light source, start a normal mode. Just like that. Easy-peasy. All right. So now, I'm going to show you how to start tightening up the edges of this character and bringing it all together. Then we'll get into the adjustment layers and I'll show you lots of neat ways to edit the work that way as well. So let's move on. 24. Cleaning Up the Edges with the Blur Tool: Now we're going to talk about blending the edges. We've got a lot of the paint work in place. Obviously if you zoom up close, you could see the edge work still need some refinement. It all needs to be pulled together. More shadows need to be added here and there. But one of the reasons that we set it up this way is that, so we could easily jump back and forth and edit components of it and keep the line quality where we need it. Another way to do that now that we've done all our setup is to just basically, I'm going to get rid of that light source for now. Just basically take the work and edit it with, let's make sure that we can see everything without our line work in place, which will install, toggle that on and off to check it. But what we can do now is take each one of these and create a selection. Then we can actually merge these down. I'll show you how to do that. Let's just go to "Select" "Load Selection". Hit "Okay". There's our skin selection go "Select", "Save Selection", Skin. We're going to do that for each one of these Command D to de-select, "Select" "Load Selection". Hit "Okay", "Select" "Save Selection", Burgundy Armor, command D to de-select, so on and so forth. I can see the gold armor does go behind the arm there, but it's not a big deal because we can still subtract that selection from the arm. For instance, if we go back to the skin just to make sure there's no overlap, we can go "Skin", "Select", "Load Selection", "Subtract from Selection", hit "Okay". Now you can see that it actually just itemize that area for us. Now if we went back to check the work, again, you can have acute for Quick Mask and just isolate that area. Maybe toggle it on and off to check to see what you've got selected and what you don't. If we go for the gold armor right there, then that's what we want, is actually hitting the wrong one there. Likewise, you can see a little bit artifact or change right there, but that's not a big deal. Easy to edit that. Q for Quick Mask and now we'll save this as our Gold Armor. Select, "Save Selection", Gold Armor. Command D to de-select, Axe Head, select "Load Selection" "Okay". That one's pretty simple. I probably don't need that, but "Save your Selection", Axe Head. Again, this is more of a specific kind of method and a little bit more detailed than you're really going to need, but I would rather show you more details unless providing that you might end up needing some of his information. Not necessarily, but you will. You might just be able to get by without a lot of this, but the information is here if you need it. That's the main point. Blue Armor select, "Save Selection", Blue Armor and plus, it just helps to note that you can add and subtract and intersect. If you see these options here, you really want to play with those as well because there's just lots of opportunities to save yourself time and then it's just as easy as go and "Select", "Load Selection" and clicking down and you see all these Skin, Burgundy Armor, Gold, Axe Head, Blue Armor. We can do a potent steel, which really, again, I don't know that it really matters. We have just that part but in fact it doesn't because that's going to be pretty easy to clean up right there. Just brushstrokes over top. I'll just jump to this one. "Select", "Load Selection", hit "Okay". "Select" "Save Selection" and Steel. Actually I'm going to do this and I'll show you why, we're going to make one overall selection, which we could merge these down and just select the outside with the magic wound tool. But just to make it a little bit better, we're just going to do it this way. See how it comes out, "Select", "Load Selection", hit "Okay". Select "Save Selection" type Pouch. Now we've got everything selected and you probably know me by now I'm going to duplicate this. I do that a lot. Duplicate group hit "Okay", Command E, and that's our backup. This is our warrior all merged together. I'll just go to type right here Warrior Merged. I'm going to keep my backup copy just because I like to safeguard my work. Now say I want an entire selection because that comes in handy as well. Now remember, we can just lock transparency and paint over this or we can just go select "Load Selection" now that it's all on one layer. Let's check that. That's actually totally true. That's actually pretty crisp. Now the thing I want to show you. I just want to illustrate a little quicker or explain it. What I wanted to show you is that you've got to also keep in mind that now that you have all these, if you had to, for whatever reason, say you painted all around this character and you start a blending and some background elements, but you just want a reselect him. You can now go through each one of these a little bit monotonous but not too bad, and just click "Add to selection" each time. You just go down the list at Add to Selection hit "Okay". I just want to test this and make sure it's going to give us the same results that I was hoping for. We stopped on that one. Add to Selection. "Select", "Load Selection", "Add to selection". How do we do still yet? I don't know. Select or more "Add to Selection" Pouch. Q for Quick Mask to check it. Yeah. Basically this is a true selection. But honestly, I think the other one is true, so we're good there. Now, you could even take the time to save this out again, but I really don't think it's necessary. I think we'll be fine with generating a selection offer here. But since we're here, let's just go ahead and do it. I really don't plan on painting the background into the character, but it's always better safe than sorry. We'll call this Warrior Entire Select. Just like that. Just like that, we've got lots of room to edit our character and work through this. Now what we can do is start to clean up these edges and because they're all together, and we can lot of transparency, we can do lots of things here really. One quick way is you can actually just blur the edges. I'm actually going to take that. Well, let me show you, if we were to blur the edges, you can do it a couple of ways. One of the ways is Command J and put a slight blur on it. "Filter", "Blur", "Gaussian Blur". A lot of slender than that. Let's go all the way down to like 1.5 or six. This is going to be determined based on the resolution of your Canvas and what file size you're working with. You can see it softens up those edges and brings them together, gets rid of that little white fuzz. Now the only bad thing is it doubles down the rest of the image. What you've got to do there is just come in with the soft erase, stay away from your edges and just bring back your detail. This is just one way to do it. I'm going to show you a couple of ways, but this is really an effective way to do a lot of things like when you're digitally painting, there's going to be times when you want some areas to be just soft and other areas to be pretty heavily detailed and things like that. This is a really neat way to do that so that you just don't have everything in your scene and focus. This really helps on larger, more detailed scenes, but it can apply here as well. Areas where it recesses and a shadow generally, I won't have as much detail there. I'll just erase some of the higher points, higher surfaces, and just areas where I want more focus to be. You can see it's really easy to do. It doesn't take much time. You can really control how much blur you have in certain areas just simply by using this overlay method. It also forces you to look okay at the fact that when you pan back, a lot of this information doesn't need to be as detailed as you might think. This is where doing this makes sense anyways, because if you have something that's entirely and focus all the way through, it sort of loses its luster, doesn't have quite the same effect. I'd rather just have a few choice areas that have the high detail and the rest I have a bit of a soft blur. Now the problem is what this is that you've got to make sure not to merge it to early on. Because then it becomes a destructive approach. You just got to take your time to analyze it. Then when you're ready, merge it down. Then you can check the work even from right about here and see a little bit difference in clarity, mainly the edges. Gets rid of those little artifacts of the edges that you see there pretty quickly. Then you can combine that with the other way that I'm going to show you, where we actually paint over top. Just remember that if you want to blur just sections of your work, create a backup layer. Remember that you've got all different types of blurs. I'll generally gravitate towards a Gaussian Blur, but there's lots of them to choose from. Just play around with these and test them out. As well as other affects, any of these effects really you can just throw in. If you want to add some noise, which noise is just little dots and things like that. You can really just play around with these effects, but always test them on a backup layer than erase it from areas that you don't want it in there and then merge it down and create backups to save your work. That'll complete this lesson, I'm using the blur to clean up the edges. Next, I'm going to show you how we're going to clean this up and further tightened up the work by painting over. 25. Cleaning Up the Edges with Paint Work: Now we're going to do some paint over methods but one thing I do want to show you, there's one other way to blur this. I'm had Command J to make a copy and we can't forget about the blur tool over here. If you click and hold over, it's going to be what the smudge tool and you can really smudge as well, but you're going to move more paint around. Blur is going to give you the same effect to what we just illustrated. I actually like to use the way that I showed you better than this because I feel like it takes a bit more time to go around every edge like this with the blur tool, where I think it's a little bit easier to erase there, but it's good for if you just need to blur certain areas. You can notice if I come in here real quick or pull untied, I guess I can really blur that edge. Keep in mind you're going to get rid of some of that texture, but that's going to happen with the blur anyways. But you just really want to take your time and build up to this and again the benefit of this one is you can use any brush that you want. You can develop brushes that work really well for this. You could just use a soft brush with different strengths settings, all sorts of neat ways to play around with this and get some blur effects, so there's that as well. Now I want to show you the way that I employ most of all and that is to just paint over top. Let's go and get rid of this layer. I'm going to start with the one without the blur for now. I can live transparency and I can just start to paint in here. This is really what I do is because after I get enough of this information in place, I generally will just start going in here and grabbing areas of the paint work and adding final touches. I may add more light source, more shadows, whatever, but I'm just generally trying to pull it all together and make it look a little bit more impressive Before I call it said and done and this is just the way I do it. Again, there's lots of ways to get each and every task done here on Photoshop but, you just kind of have to figure out what works well for your style of creation. I'll just select different areas of this. I'll punch in some different light sources are really, I'm using this as a way to just clean up. Now, you can see I'm painting right on the layer. If you don't feel comfortable doing that again, that's back to creating another layer. Do things like rotate Canvas, make the mechanics of it easier for you. This may seem like it takes awhile to get in here and do it like this, but it, you know, like anything else, you'll pick up speed as you start to figure out what you're after and start to make quick choices. Another thing that you can do is actually just select big areas, so say that I want like this area right here to be more in shadow, so I want this to have more of a kind of a crust at the top here or peak. I'll just select this or really don't need to worry about back here because I'm going to do more of a gradient. Grab the shadow, grab the darker tone and again, you'll see me use a lot of the existing paint at this point. I mean, I may still grabs something from the slider, but I don't need to as much and one thing I want to show you to like if you don't like the line that you get right there, you can just come right back with the soft brush and just blend that back while you're here, so now it's all about just working within the painting. Bump that down. Also making little adjustments and trying to, again pull it all together and I'm really not being so worried about painting over everything like it was the beginning because there's enough information there now. A lot of times you want your paint work to blend into itself but I do like the ability to edit the work and itemize it in the very beginning stages and get it all kind of working and in place. Just seems to work better for the way that I create. If you need to, we still have our selection, so you just got to remember not to move this around. Until you're really done with all that, don't move the character around as you are painting because you still have that ability to go select mode selection and pick any area of this, and hit, okay, and you're ready to start patent and just that area. For now we're just going to focus on cleaning up the edge work though. Again, select from existing areas of the paint work. Actually on lighter colors you want to leave it to normal or screen. I'll try to clean up some of these little bad bends with the selection like that. Now you got to keep in mind too, as you're changing these edges, your selection is going to change with that, so you've got to be aware of that, but really I don't think we'll need the selection tools anymore. I just wanted to show you how to save them. But every time you reshape an edge like this, that selection is going to be off just a little bit. You just got to be ready for that. If you go to add some more paint work affects. Again, we've got live transparency set so we can have an edge like this. Now, if you need to change an edge like this, you see all this and here looks very gamer or like basic old-school game, [inaudible] blocky. If you take this, unlike transparency, I'll generally put a layer in front or behind, I guess it doesn't matter. Usually I'll put it behind those. Let's do that and say I want to change the form of this a bit. I'll take a solid brush, just [inaudible] I feel like I always have a little bit more control with the brushes than I do the selection tools and the beginning of his more than selection tools. Again, you can get in here with dependent path tool if you felt comfortable with that. But if not, you can just simply take it. l usually take an off-color that I can see against everything that's on the canvas there and I'll just reshape this a bit. Let's take it and make sure we're at a 100 percent opacity. Let's try to bring this in, smooth out the bends here a little bit and really just put some round over it would probably be adequate. We just don't want a little sharp angles. There's really lots of ways to do this. You could actually even just make a selection with our Warrior select and then just do a round over expand selection. I'll need to probably show you that because I don't think we've covered expand and contract on the selections. That's one of the neat things about, there's just so many different ways to edit the work. It's just really allows you to do so much. Again, say that's the changes that I wanted. I'll just try to refine those. Again, if you need more level of refinement, you're just going to zoom in further but I will say that this is good enough. I think that'll work. For right where it meets, there might need to raise that back, so let's do that. Let's again, we want to be on a solid brush, toggle it down a bit and I do want the arm to meet in the same place, right here. It's going to look a bit strange. You have to see into the silhouette a bit. I think all this is fine. I just wanted to change these shapes and really just to show you how you would change some of these shapes and probably take a little bit more off right here. Now we take that and we can just simply merge it into this one. Let's take that and go command E live transparency again and now we can just take something like a smudge brush or anything really. You can just grab and select the paint, but you just pull all this out to that edge. Add some new paint if you have to, whatever to clean it up. But rather quickly you can fix the edging in here. You're going to have to bring the armor or up all the way to here to compensate for that connecting point. Like that. Kind of move this soft round so it matches a little bit of texture, bring that shadow up so it doesn't look like a flat edge. This part should actually be gold or it, there's [inaudible] grab some of the darker part of the gold there, get that shadow on there. Hopefully you can see it. It's pretty easier to do. It's pretty quick and painless and just like that, you can change that edge. That's going to look a lot better than the previous. See I went from being very blocky to a nice, smooth or kind of rounded edge. That combined with the pain affects will start to really pull it together. Let's just get in here and keep checking edges and trying to manipulate it. Again, let's grab our brush. Let's go back to the chalk painter, my favorite. Let's fix this, play here. Like right here, what I see is again, this edge looks like it has no depth. Just very flat, so we can select a little bit of a highlight color of the little lighter maybe start getting in. I'll start with more of the light source side, kind of get a feel for it. This doesn't need to be as bright of a light source, but there needs to be some evidence of transition here to show some depth to this chess plate [inaudible]. Probably a little bit of light source through here and back this way. Do you see I'm starting pretty heavy, but I'm going to paint this back. I've got to start somewhere basically. I'm like I always tell people if you don't know what mark to make, just make one. Just get started, is the best piece of advice I can give. Because if not, you'll just sit there and look at it all day long and never get anything done. Sometimes you learn by doing. I actually learned by doing quite a bit. Even if you make a bad mark and a mistake, that's good information, it tells you what not to do again. That's better than just sitting idly by doing nothing. I know that's common sense, but it's always good to put as much information in these courses as I can. For instance, I've got it all pretty heavily lit and pretty overly rounded little let or whatever. But also I have to do at this point is just come back again and take a soft brush, maybe even somewhat texture, whatever, depending on if i want to bump up more texture into this, I don't really think I do, but selecting a darker tone and coming back and just knocking this information back. But again, I have to be a little bit more aware that I can bleed over into the other areas. Not a bad thing but because one of the other things that's going to help pull this together is an overpass of shadows that isn't so segmented. What I'll tend to do now as I do this is, I'll separate something like the arm here, and then I'll brush in a large shadow. I might take the selection and go like this and bring it to a larger shadow this way, so that's multiply. I just isolated that, but then I also have to be careful as I do this that I don't create an artifact on the edges. It's real easy. Again, reminds old school airbrushing where you create a first kit and a mask and think everything was fine and you start spraying away and you create a weird line in your painting. But it's always easy to fix, just keep painting back. Just a little bit of shadow here around the shell. I want a little bit darker tone under this arm so again, I can create a quick selection here like that. If need be getting a little tighter. I don't have to hold shift because it's already set to automatically select. Just freehand drawing this one. But if I'm not feeling as competent with my freehand, that's when I go to the polygonal or the pen and path tool. Again, shadow under here on this a little bit, little too dark but better than not having it. The other thing I'm going to be showing you here shortly is how to edit each one of these areas even with color. We're going to use some adjustment layers and refine this a bit more and give it some more variation in the color, saturation, and things like that. Right now everything is just heavily saturated and it gives it this overly fake look. This is an animated character concept obviously, but I do want it to have a little bit more believable vibe to it. I'll show you how we can get in there with our blending modes or adjustment layers and correct that a little bit. Let's do some work up here on the helmet because this is looking pretty strange still. I'm going to bump back the opacity here and try to bring out some of these edges a little bit more and blend some of them back. I try to not create the selections as much as possible on a lot of this, unless I really just paint something down too far, and then I need to bring back the edge work with the selection. Because at this point, we've spent so much time building up the paint width edges, then now it's time to really just soften a lot of this, so I don't want to keep continually putting in more hard edges. Separation can be created pretty easily just with a few overpass approaches. I really have to always create selections on every single thing to make it read well. Grab some of those lighter tone and again punch up some of the ridges. This looks way to, and actually let me go back to my chalk brush here. This looks way to flat or the helmet looks very flat and lack luster, doesn't have any depth to it. What I'll probably do is get in here and try to overdo the depth a little bit and see if I can figure some of this shape out. Seems like some of the things that I paint, I'll just tend to not see the depth right away or not give it enough depth and I have to compensate by over painting the other way. I'll still try to figure out the shape that I want to see here. I don't want this to be entirely flat and that's what it's coming across as. Let me try to dodge the air a little bit, see if I can figure out how we want to shape that. Again, painting in this information and almost in the hopes that I figure something out. I know what I want to do here. I also check it from a distance. I picked too, that's why sometimes texturing to early on can be a bit of a distraction, but I wonder how I'll be getting in there, I want to explain the process of that. But you really want to have a pretty firm understanding of the form of the shapes that you're trying to build into your work. I still want to add the shape like this, and then I'm not really seeing what I would do up here. But almost adding it where this is like a thicker piece like this. Again, defining the plane first. But I'm not sure if that would look as good as I'm imagining. Almost like it would just because it wouldn't be so flat, but then I would have to do something maybe right through here. I'm not entirely sure on that part. I usually experiment and try different things until something sticks, until something clicks. I go, that's what I'm looking for. I wouldn't say never, but it's hardly ever a very concise idea from the very start to the very end. There's lots of conceptualization, there's lots of experimentation, reworks, all that stuff until I get to what I want to call it, a finished product. Given like this, I'm just smudging up the edges and make it look a little more impressive than it does next to perfect. Now, one of the things I can do too, that would probably help because there's random repetitive pattern going throughout is just putting in some other details as well along here. Let me grab my scratches brush here. Let's go ahead and just put this on other layer, but let's go select load selection off this previous layer so we can't go outside of the confinements of that. We'll just paint this with normal mode at first and see it's going to go into the face there so that's one of the reasons I wanted to create this selection so I could actually put this in and erase back. If I wanted to be very precise about this, I could use the selection from the skin to erase this out, but I think I can pretty much see where it's going and that's not too much work to just sit here and erase them. Again, I can erase this back. I can play with blending modes, I can put a drop shadow on that layer, whatever I want to do. I'm probably just going to leave it at this. Let me try one blending mode, at least to screen like that a little better, drop the opacity. All right there. I double-check, make sure aren't missing a little artifacts and probably use a soft erase to blend it back just a little bit and erase so it's not all over the place. But little things like that, again, at a lot of life to it, and then I can get in there, and I can shade some of those edges as well and bring that out even further. Now Command D to deselect. I usually check the work visually like this few times, and then Command E to merge down. Now I'm going to do some repetitive work to this. Essentially, I'm going to take the information I showed you here and I'm going to go around and just the pinball around. I'm going to to select from the existing palette, and I'm going to keep painting in the edges. I'll go to narrate the next lesson and speed this up so that we can get the edges all cleaned up, and then we'll get to the color adjustments and adjustment layers. Let's press forward. 26. Cleaning Up the Edges with Paint Work Part 2: Now we're just going to tighten up the work a little bit more. I'm going to put a little bit more of a background for contrast. I'm going to take the normal brush. It's a chalk brush set to the normal bonding mode, and painting right on top of the layer now. We use the nail picker a lot, and you'll see that little color swatch pop up as I do that. I'll switch primarily between normal and multiply, and sometimes screen, and sometimes the dodge tool, to bring out the highlights. I really just repeat this process and try to tighten up the edges, make more adjustments. You see I'm painting in some texture as well, really trying to sculpt the work a bit further. Essentially up until this point, all that other work was just to get texture and get to shape the artwork down. Then I look at it at this stage like I'm really fine tuning it and really bringing it to another level of refinement. A lot of changing of the edges there. I'm using the blur tool to blur the edges. Just remember, when you go to blur the edges, you need to take lock transparency off. Then that works really well to just control certain areas that you want blurred instead of blurring the whole thing like I showed you previously. I'll brush in lots of texture, lots of overlapping brushstrokes when I do this. Just keep that in mind. You'll notice that I paint back and forth. I paint not just in one direction on any objects or surface, I paint in multiple directions to build up texture. I may primarily paint in one direction, say for that wood handle or all around the ax, but as I progress through it, I'll create brushstrokes in other directions to add more variants and more texture. I constantly zoom in and out so I can check the work from a distance, because if I stay zoomed in for too long, I just won't be able to really see what I'm doing and really take it all in, so I zoom back to gauge the work a little bit better. I'll be using the smudge brush occasionally to move things around like I'm doing here with the phase. It really goes to whatever I'm comfortable with at the time. I've definitely got different ways for painting and texturing variety of surfaces. Whenever it goes to the face of the anatomy, I generally will smudge a little bit more, because I feel like I can move those existing tones around and sculpt the work. Here, I'm erasing just little bits of the perimeter of the shape, just so I can change the shape, and then there you see me creating a quick selection with the lasso tool to isolate that area. Keep in mind, I still have my selection saved so I can generate selections that way as well, but it's easier to quickly select it with the lasso tool and keep moving forward. Again, just selecting different tones that are already in the Canvas. At this point of the painting, I feel like there's plenty of colors already existing in the Canvas for me to pull from. It doesn't mean that I won't try to introduce some new ones here and there if I see fit, but there's plenty of information on the Canvas, and using that alt picker and paint method can actually get really quick because you're not jumping around to different tools. You've got everything in front of you and you're just going back and forth from a couple of primary tools. I'll try to fill out the handle here, and using multiply, and the chalk brush to darken areas of it. I just really like the multiply effect because it gives you some good contrast. Now, here you'll see me generate a selection, copy one side and flip it. The reason being is I noticed that the handle had a little bit of asymmetry to it, and I wanted it to be symmetrical. I also notice at that point that it was tilted, kind of funny, so you see me playing around with the tilt. That's another thing. I'm really open to cutting the artwork, and replacing it, and reemerging it, because, for one, it's all painted, it's all solid. There's lots of rooms to manipulate the work that way as well. Just be open to that. Just really cropping the work and thinking of it like just pieces to a puzzle. There you see me knock down the saturation. I generated the selection with the selection that we had saved, and then I knocked down that saturation. I'd been meaning to do that for a while now because the red was just to prominent. A lot of the areas of a character is still too prominently saturated. But I just got sick of looking at that quite frankly, so I wanted to tone that down. But also be showing you in the next lesson how we can take this and make modifications with the adjustment layers and doubling down or dumbing down the saturation as part of that. If you're like me in the way that you create, generally will have too much saturation going through all my work. So I have to be aware of that and knock it back before I call it a finished piece. But adjustment layers are perfect for that, as well as creating the selection, and just jumping into the hue saturation slider. You can knock it down really quick with that as well. Here you just see me grab little bits of the highlight tones like that yellow in the armor, painting some of it in there. Here when I got to the blue armor again, I generated the selection and added a layer over top so that I could paint freely, but not be painting on the actual layer of that blue armor. I'm just painting on a floating layer which offers again another level of edit to the work, just bouncing around and testing that out. You can see I got that layer set to multiply. But I wanted to really dingy up that blue edge, just too polished and too smooth, like one airbrushed highlight, and just didn't look very convincing or good. I just decided to grunge it up a bit. I would say that's one of the things in digital painting that took me the longest to get used to, is really getting in there and throwing in texture and grunge, and messing it up almost, is what I felt like when I first started digitally painting. I always felt I was messing up the artwork by doing this. But really, this is what brings it out, this is what gives it the realism in the effect. You've got to put lots of little textures, lots of little grunge, if you will, or whatever you want to call it. To make it have some realism and depth to it. It really does create depth. Just get in there, touching up those edges again using that blur tool occasionally, I also started finding myself using the smudge brush quite a bit for even the edges. Just be aware of that. It's really nice because you can push the edges around, especially if you take lock transparency off, you can push the edges around and mess them up a bit. For things like the metal and the little chinks in the armor and things like that, but you can also blend and blur just like I'm doing with the Blur Brush. They both work in that regard, it's just a Smudge Brush is going to move paint around a lot more, so you've got to be real careful with it. Remember, if you ever feel like the brush, you're fighting it or it's fighting you in the way that it's working, play with the flow, play with the opacity, bump those down, as well as look into your Driver Settings for your tablet, and you may want to push that back as well. I always have my tablet set to Firm, so that I have to apply more pressure to get paint, so I'll just add a little details here and there. Funny thing about this part is I really struggled with what I wanted this to look like, and that happens sometimes, it's like some areas, it just flows out, and other areas I don't know what I want to see, so I just keep painting back and forward dark to light, and really hoping that something will drive something loose mentally, and I'll come up with an idea. I think I've already mentioned this in the course, but it doesn't always just happen, it doesn't always just work out. You just got to keep pressing forward, and adding artwork and taking things away, and that's why I really enjoy digital because of the layering and the editability, it can allow me to get through those mental blocks and not freak out about it. They're generating a quick selection with the Lasso Tool, giving it a bit more edging so I can shade it, and I have a flat looking edge right there, which I think it still needs to be a little bit more of that effect right in that area. Every time I'm going to crispen up these edges, I'm just using a series of dark to light, but I'm peaking from the color palette, so I'm obviously picking color and hue as I'm doing it, but it's really just dark to light. It's a series of subtleties and different edgings combined with texture. You can get into all of the vastness of what it really is, but it really boils down to that. I'm always looking for the ways to round over certain objects, and the ways to make certain objects look more specular, or are more flat or whatever, by just pin bowling around and adding those little highlights until it starts to make sense, or highlights and shadows, I should say. Creating a selection here, painting over this and making this into another pouch, and then I end up hitting "Command Shift I" for invert selection, and using this to paint in the other direction on the gauntlet there. Again, always remember that every time you create a selection, it can work on both directions, from the edge of that selection, so you might as well take advantage of it. Then another thing I think I'm coming up to here, this hand has been bothering me the whole time. It just looks very misshapen, and it also looked too high up in comparison to the other hand, so pretty soon you'll see me start editing that. Just using the Dodge Tool occasionally to bump up that light source, and then picking from that light source to paint with. Usually when I'm painting with a light color, I use normal mode, and then when I'm painting with a dark, I'll usually use either normal or multiply for the blending mode, but generally multiply just like the effect that it gives as some painting the dark. There just see me picking away using the Smudge Tool to actually blur and move around the edges a bit. Again, it adds that little bit of grunge, and then here's where you see me start to edit the hand and I start with the Liquefied Tool, but then I quickly go to cropping the artwork and placing it. Again, this is what I was talking about with thinking of your artwork like puzzle pieces, because the more you do this, the quicker you'll be able to edit and make quick changes to your work, and blend it all back together, really saves a lot of time. The more you can think about edits, the more your art will start to improve because you won't just settle on something, you won't go on, put all that time into this, and I want to move it around. That's actually why I waited to edit the hand, I wanted to show you that you could pretty much paint all the way to the end or pretty close, and then still make edits pretty reasonably. That's really the key ingredient with digital painting, you can make edits so well into the painting that you're not so worried about it, you're not pitching work and you're not, I just messed that up and I going to start over, you should never, almost never start over, in my opinion. Then I select the arm here, I cut and paste and actually put it behind the character. The neat thing about that is you can manipulate the size and position like you saw me do there, but you can also use that to shade better, so again, it's like itemizing the work really helps to make your edits and do some of your effects. Here I actually made a copy of legs and blurred those back, because that pattern was just a little too well-defined, and you see me shading it down there, testing some blending modes, actually working with a layer over top. Really just trying to fill that out and see what I want to see there, and then adding some Dodge affects to it. I end up just wanting to highlight a few of the little strands that you see in the material because the highlight I put on there was just too much. That's the unfortunate thing about the Dodge Tool, as cool as it is, it's real easy to overdo, and I find myself being guilty of that. It's because it does such a neat effect to the work, it's almost too easy to want to overdo and you got to be real careful that. But again, like I've mentioned before, you can always paint back. Even if you find yourself over rendering something like that, it's not a certain stone, you can paint back, and you can always save copies of the work to test it. Here again, using that multiply, and if you notice I'm just bouncing around as I add that texture. I don't have any really set motion, I'm skipping around. The only thing I'm thinking about is not creating lines with the paint work, so I'm not tracing every object to me. I'm going around each object, but I'm making sure to vary up the intensity of the highlight, skipping areas and really trying to perceive what it might look like in this ROM as tattered up, kind of metal look. That's about it. In the next lesson we'll be handling Adjustment Layers, so let's move forward. 27. Using Adjustment Layers: Now we are going to talk about adjustment layers. This is really more of the post-processing, the end of what I will do to any digital painting. If I get in here and zoom in, one thing I'll show you is that if you take the progression of when we started just before the time lapse and you go from here to here, to here, to here, you can see the progression. I will oftentimes take something like this and just look at it to study the way that it was shifted as I progress through it. Be aware that that's a great way to train yourself and get to see flaws and get to see which direction you might have taken in your own process and learn from that. Okay, so I'm gonna hit Command J, Command E and let all merge together. Let's call this Render 4. You get to your adjustment layers right here. These are great because what's going to happen here, anything I applied to this, it's going to affect anything below the hierarchy. Okay? If I click on this and I go, let's say that I want components of this to be less saturated like I talked about before, that, one of my problems is I generally will over-saturate. This is how you would correct that, so you go to Hue saturation. You could drop down the saturation, you can also mess with the brightness and contrast. We will just say, some kind of about, maybe there. Now what I'm doing is when I go back to layers, you can get in here and do all kinds of things, just so you know, you put more red in there, more yellow, whatever, and you don't have to look at it, if you notice it's affecting everything, right? You don't have to think of it that way. I'm going to show you why. So you can literally use this to just drop in a color or contrasts or whatever to a specific area. Let's say that that's what we're after. Let's say we want to get to, about right here, on the left saturation, just waiting to see a difference. Okay, we go back to layers. Now if I toggle this on and off, see there is a pretty good difference from what I just did, and it's going to affect anything below that. But whatever was only trying to affect this one thing, and it also affects the background layers way down here. The way that we get it not to do that, or we can either generate a selection of our character, okay. You could go to this mask and you could just paint this away. So what's going to happen is this works with dark and light. If you paint this with black, you can see it disappears right there. It's basically getting rid of that mask. Now there is a color to our character. It's only affects in the background now vice versa, if I take that back, see that there's nothing there. Hit Command Shift I, lets see if we can just fill that. Now we basically eliminated it from affecting the background, so that it's got the mask around the character. I'm going to Command D to de-select. So the reason why this is so powerful is you can basically really control things to a finer degree. Let's go ahead and grab the soft brush and let's say we just want some saturation where the light source is more prominent in just a few areas. Saturation tends to work a little better if it's subtle or it depends if you're going for more of a realistic or dark vibe to your work, then you want less saturation generally. What I'm going to do is just paint with the soft air-brush, set the black, and you can see over here. It's pretty small thumbnail, but hopefully you see that. You can see it here. I'm just basically brushing away some of that mask, exposing some of that saturation below. I will just hit some of these areas. The nice thing about this is you can really just slowly work up to it. So you can really gauge how much of this you want, when you are painting, if you are like me, you lose sight a little bit and you get someone to the painting process. You might not be seeing all the components as clearly as you'd like, because there's a lot to it. Like I might bump up the saturation. I want the eyes to appear like they're glowing. I'll give a little bit more saturation there. But you can see just that alone, provides a completely different effect. It gives a lot more realistic interpretation, I would say, I think it looks a lot better that way. So again, just play around with it. I generally will hit the highlight areas first, and if you really want that one side to just kind of have a more evident saturation, then just brush that end just like I'm doing here. and watch what you do here. Now let's take this and try another one. Let's say that we want to create some sort of back-lighting. So we want this back-light edge to have a bit of, we'll try a blue, see whatever works maybe or reddish tom, but probably a blue since we've got so much red in here. But let's see what happens. If we add another adjustment layer, and this time let's go for, let's see, we could use gradient, we could use hue/saturation, vibrance, color balance. I don't know. Maybe, let's try and hue/saturation. I'm going to bump up the saturation. I'm actually just paying attention to the color on the backside of the character. So what we want to go for a blue, right? Let's do a blue, maybe cool yellow or something. Blue is a little too deep, but right about there. Let's jump down the saturation a bit more. Let's try that. Looking pretty smart feel there. Let's go to layers. We're going to first delete, we don't want it to affect the background, so we're going to select Load Selection, Warrior all and remember you could have just generated off here, but we haven't saved there as well, and Command Shift I, we want it to affect the background, and we're going to fill that with black. So that releases it from affecting the stuff in the background. It's just over the character now. Also we got to be aware, see what it did with the hand there, that's because I edited that hand. Really, what we do want to do is, go back, get rid of that selection, we want the updated characters, select, Multi selection, hit okay, here we go. Command Shift I, go and fill that, or don't fill it on the character layer, goodness. Okay, fill it there, and the way you check is to just toggle that on and off, it should only affect the character. Hit Command D to de-select. Then now what we want to do, is paint with black and a soft brush and just get rid of everywhere we don't want the blue. We want this to be a bit of a back-light. We're just going to air-brush this all away essentially, and just leave a little bit of it to the back and on the edges like that and try to create a back-light on this character. You can really just take your time with it and you might even find that it looks pretty cool on other areas not just as a back-light, but we're going to try to use it as just a back-light on this particular instance. But this is where this adjustment layer is so powerful. The really great thing about it as well, they're entirely non-destructive. What you see me doing here is exposing part of this, but I can paint back in the other direction simply by hitting "X" and then brushing back ends so I can go into some cool light up blue eyes. We always read some of those. Just maybe leave a little bit of that on the edge. It really lends itself to experimentation and just an effective approach to applying a number of things that it doesn't have to be colored. It can be contrast, it can be the levels in the work which is basically contrast, but the curve balance, all this different things that you see right here. You really have to just jump in there and play around because there's lots of ability. Posterize, as a pretty cool one. Exposure, brightness contrast is really popular, commonly use. You've got to just jump in there and play around with them and see how they fit to your workflow. But definitely worth the investment of time there. Again, trying to just get in there and size and then brush down. I could be zooming in too, I just want to do as much from back here from a distance. I'm like in it a little bit on that other side, but I may get rid of that. Let's see. since I'm really going to eliminate most of it, I pretty much go to start in the other direction. First eliminating all of it and just slowly painting back. I'll show that here in a second. But again, you don't want to think about light as bounced light. You want to make sure to have it hit some other areas, not all, just on one particular side that does have the ability to bounce around. Then you can toggle this on and off and check the work and the effect. Let's go ahead and zoom in here a bit and try to tighten it up. I think it adds a bit more realism. You can be the judge of that, but I think that's what's doing here. If we take this and again flip it and go back to adding more of it to some places, and you want to test the effect out and you just simply have to use X to go back and forth. Maybe if we have a little bit of it reflecting off the spikes here, make it more prominent in some areas. I'm just going to try to see where I want it. It may not even go with this color. I'll see it right there. I do have to be careful that I don't generate artifacts because I'm painting on a floating layer. If you have a problem with that, just remember that you go back here, Select, Load Selection, hit "Okay". You can go back to this adjustment layer and then edit this any way you need to. You're just confined on the inside of that character. Remember as well that you can hit "Command H" and hide that selection. If you find that a little bit distracting, I need to clean up that little area there, so I'm going to hit "Command H, Command Shift I", it will get rid of that little bit where I went over. Command Shift I, again, Command H to hide. You're seeing text to the side, how you change colors of things rather quickly. Let me play around with the effect. I'm going to take a mighty one outside there too as well. So let's fix that command H, command Shift I. What I'm going to do because I probably do that in a few spots, I'll just make the brush little large from a distance here and glance over all of that. De-select. Just a little bit. Now, you can see we've got a little bit more of a mood to the character. We could probably even mess around with our blending modes a bit and see what else we can get with that. We can really combine effects, play around with it, explore every option, because there's lots of options when it comes to working. Actually I like that a little bit more. I don't know why, but that has a little bit more of a cinematic vibe to its many ways. You can see right there and then, we can just keep layering this effects so we can add as many adjustment layers if we want. You just got to remember whatever one there over top, this mask will apply that way down the hierarchy. One last thing about adjustment layers is that, like I said before, they're totally non-destructive in the way that they affect the artwork. Then also if you double-click here, you can go back in and you can further edit the work. Say I wanted to really punch up the blue that I've added and really power them up kind of thing just to see the power radiating off the character, I can do that. Just again, lots of ways to get in here and edit. Maybe I don't want it to be blue and I want to see what some other color effects look like. That's real easy to do. Now keep in mind whenever you make adjustments like this, I would actually stack them side-by-side as you start to make these revisions because you can really see it a lot better that way and makes very good display anyways, good presentation. Yes, so that'll cover adjustment layers like this bluish purple just a little bit. Maybe just blue. That'll cover adjustment layers, I'm going to give you one more bonus lesson on this particular exercise. Let's go ahead and move forward. 28. Edit for Portfolio Piece: One last thing I want to leave you with in this particular exercise is the finished work. When you get to this point, you're tweaking the work and I'm making a little adjustment layers and things like that. You get to the point you want to make your nice little presentation to show the client or for your portfolio. One of the things it looks cool to do, is take the existing work like this. We're going to go ahead and group these together, call this Render four and command J, command E. Again, that gives us a copy and flattens it. We hit B for move. Now, that I'm moving this. I'm going to lose position of my selection layers. That's why we've got to keep this backup one. This is again, just my end presentation piece I would do. You take something like that. Hold "Alt", drag it over, hit "Command L" for levels. Anything about levels besides being able to adjust your contrast, remember you can do it with adjustment layers. You can actually just turn it to a quick silhouette, by dragging that all the way over hit "okay". This serves a couple of purposes. One for any our game design. People love silhouettes and I love them too. They're pretty cool, but you can drag one off to the side like that. Gives it a little more to look at and we'll probably do as a smaller rendering like this. Smaller, almost 11 by 17 scale. We can select here. With the selection and plays, hit "Image crop." Let's take our silhouette again. I'm going to show you how to make a quick drop shadow. Just hold "Alt," drag it down. Drag it behind our super guy weird dude. You want the same size starting out, will probably shift the size, but make it the same size for now. That would make a quick flat drop shadow. Remember, you could do a Gaussian Blur on that, which I'm probably slaughtered in the name, but forgive me. Gaussian Blur here to bump this over. You get a nice soft edge. You can obviously do something like that. It isn't a bad effect. You can drop opacity there. Just builds up some depth. I'd use a different effect for this one, let's try another one. Just gives you some options. Command T, hold "Shift" to scale proportionally. That doesn't have to be exactly the same size. Edit, transform to store it. Then just scale this down and try to line up the feet. Keeping in mind that you're distorting it prospectively as well. What I'll generally do is make it look a little bit like there's a ground plane behind them, but I like to show the silhouette. Cause we flattened it out too much. It's hard to really make it out. But keep in mind if it's tilted like this then it's resembling of the ground plane going up. Try something like that hit "Enter", drop that behind our character, and we can bump down the opacity just to give it a little bit more of an effect, we can take a solid brush. Set to black. Make sure on a 100% opacity. The good thing about drawing this way is it's still going to be shaded because we bumped down the opacity and the layer. I'll make it look like it meets the feet. Sorry, I didn't mean to rhyme there and erase some of this edging. I'll generally try to figure out what it might look like as it comes here. It seems like it would clip a little bit more like this, but I could be wrong. Command R Z to go back. So something like that. You can see it gives us a little bit of an illusion of depth pushing backwards. You get a little bit more of an effect for your presentation, which is always nice. It's not always just about creating good art. You want to showcase, it really well and show as many of your strengths as you can when you're presenting your work. So that completes this course and I really hope that you've enjoyed it, gained a lot of perspective on what you can do with your own work to improve. Hopefully you'll be out there making some great art of your own with the techniques that we've covered here. I will be interested to know if you have any questions and if I can help. As well as if there's anything I can add to this course content, let me know and I'll make sure to update it with new lessons and bonus lectures so that everybody can get what they're looking for, out of this type of course content. I really appreciate the support. Good luck with the art, and I hope to talk to you soon.