Digitally Painting a Black and White Portrait in Krita

1. Digital Portraits Intro: Digital painting is a fun and creative way to make art. In this intermediate class, I want to show you how I paint portraits using crita, but I do it with a twist. I make portraits and character studies from screen grabs that I take while streaming movies and TV shows. Many of the techniques that I teach in this class can be used with other software as well as with natural materials. I've been painting portraits for years, and I recently discovered a fun way to explore painting portraits digitally. I've often searched stock art websites for interesting portraits to practice my drawings and paintings with mixed success. But one day while watching a movie, I paused the movie to grab a snack, and I thought, what an interesting face. And it was at that moment that I realized that I had an endless supply of dynamic faces to work from. In this class, I'll show you how I combine two of my favorite activities, watching movies and creating digital art. I'm actually really excited to do this class because I can't wait to see what interesting images you all create while watching movies. When I see a face or an expression that I like, I capture it with a screenshot. Just imagine faces with dramatic expressions and long cast shadows. Characters that I'm emotionally invested in. Whether I love them or hate them, I feel an emotion which I think influences my work. A character in pain, a character sensing something ominous is about to happen. Happiness, sadness. These are just some of the moments that I strive to capture in this course. We'll start with a screenshot to work from. I don't trace the images myself, but I'll show you how to trace an image if you're not quite ready for the challenge of drawing from observation. But I will also show you how to draw from observation using visual measurements and corrections to create a portrait. This is my preferred method because I think the imperfections that come about when drawing this way or painting this way, give the drawings and paintings a unique hand drawn quality. I'll show you how to block in the lights and darks to give depth. Then I'll show you how to blend those shapes to give form. I'll show you how to create the look of traditional oil painting or other natural media. We'll be working in black and white in this class. In order to keep things simple. I'll save color for a future class in graduate school. I studied painting oils on canvas. So I'm a bit partial to the look of traditional art and I work hard to achieve that look in my digital work. And that ability to create an organic look with digital tools is what I hope you will learn by the end of this class, as well as how to create a portrait from observation. I'll be teaching the class using the free open source software called Rita, but these techniques can be used with other software. My name is Aaron. I'm a professional graphic artist and I teach digital art in a pair of junior colleges. I hope you will join me in my digital painting class and create unique and dramatic portraits with me. 2. The Project: In this video, I'm going to show you how I select photographs, how I typically would watch a segment on a streaming service like Netflix. Here you'll see how I'm watching a drama. And then I'll pause it and I'll take a screenshot. And that's how I find my reference. And that is what I want to be your project. I would like you to use that technique by watching a streaming service because that's what makes this fun. Everyone will have a different image that they'll come up with. And if you're nervous about doing a portrait take maybe you do a profile because profiles are significantly easier than a head on or face forward portrait. Because, you know, you only have one eye to draw and the profiles just tend to be easier. But for the project I want you to, I would like you to choose your own image and from a series or a movie that you like, something that you're connected with. And then I'd like you to post that at the end. But for the rest of this video, what I'm going to do here is show you a movie that, well, a series that I've been watching and how I take screenshots and how I end up using those. But after that I'm going to change to a different photograph because of copyright, copyright laws. I'm not exactly sure how much of this, of these images I can use. I'm just going to show you a very short segment and then I'll show you how I select the photo that I'm going to use. But then after that, I'm going to end up using a photograph that I found on Pexels. Dare I say, if you want to use the same photograph that I use, I will upload that as well. But again, for the project, I'm hoping that you will do something different or maybe even do both. Anyway. Here we go. Kai erosmas. Thank you. 3. How I Choose A Subject While Streaming Shows: These are the images that I've narrowed it down to. Actually, this is not one of the pictures. I know I said this was about portraits, but I don't know. I have this thing for instruments and especially wood instruments with the shapes of them and hands, but these are the ones that the shots that I grabbed that I kind of like, I really like this one. I want to say that's a contender. That's a contender. Anyway. This is the, well, it's a TV show, a Japanese show called Quartet. I sometimes watch Japanese shows because I lived in Japan for a bit and I do it to try to see if I can, you know, pick up some of the Japanese, although my second language skills are pitiful. Anyway, I think this is sorry for that tangent there, but I don't know I'm liking that one just because it's unusual. But this one was going to be my pick just because I like the shape of that instrument there. So let me see where I can get rid of that one. Again, this one I like mainly because of her hands, but her face is in shadow. So much shadow that I think that might be counterproductive for this project. We have this one actually. I'm going to eliminate this one. Why? Because teeth are difficult. You'd be surprised at how difficult teeth are. So I'm going to eliminate that one, although this one's a rather plain expression. But let me check the other one out. I had two of them actually. The one where she was looking down was the one that I like the most. Let me double check those again. Yeah, I'm going to go I'm going to go with the one where she's looking down slightly. All right. So we have a winner and hopefully you have picked out something found a show that you like and that you have picked out something that you like as well. 4. Choosing A Copyright Free Subject: So this video is going to be a bit redundant. All right? Because I already chose a photograph and, you know, found an image that I wanted to work from. But because of copyright considerations, I thought it's better not to extend that, that time where I'm working with these images from Netflix. I've decided here to switch it out with an image that I know is free and clear to you. Something that I found on Pexels. These are images that I've downloaded and I've gone, one thing that I have noticed is as I was going through the images, I wasn't really liking them very much. I mean, they're nice, but they don't have that same punch as the images do when I'm taking those screen grabs from movies and TV shows. And then I realized that I like this image here. But then this was actually from a production, a play production. So the lighting is a bit different. It tends to be more dramatic and the actors tend to have more dramatic faces. Okay? So that's something that I realized, because I think this is the one I noticed at first. And then I started looking through those and then I went from to orchestras and I could find, you could get some really nice dramatic lighting. I like this picture here, but her eyes are closed, so I didn't want to go with that one. But typically with a studio shot, a studio portrait, you're going to have that three point lighting. A light here, a key light, a soft light, and hang on. Is it a key light? A secondary light, I forget what you call them. And then a hair light. I prefer the more dramatic images, and this is the one that I settled on. This one right here, I was torn between this one I kind of like this because of the way her eyes, the way she's looking off to the side. But I didn't like that her head was cut off. I wanted to show more. So this is the one we're going to go with. I will make this photo photograph available to you. I'll put it in somewhere where you can download it, but I would like you to at least try the process of watching a movie. And you can either take a shot with your cell phone, but get in close and, you know, pause it and take that picture. Or you can watch a movie on a computer like I'm doing and take a screenshot. But the advantage of that is you are emotionally invested in these characters. And you grab the scene that catches your eye. So give that a shot. But if you don't want to, you can follow along, you know, directly with me by using this photograph. 5. Where To Find The Example Photo That I Use: You can find the reference image here on the page under the Projects and Resources, and it's right here. 6. My Drawing Tablet: Now I'm going to use a drawing tablet. This is called a Wacom drawing tablet. This is sort of like the, I guess, industry standard. There are plenty of others that you can use. This one costs, I think this is, gosh, about $400 But you can probably spend about $40 and get a decent drawing tablet that will serve you well. There we go. I seem to have misplaced my, my stylus, the pen you just draw on this. And for some people, drawing on a tablet that is disconnected with the drawing surface is disconcerting. You can get these tablets where you plug it up to your computer and you can draw on the secondary screen using your computer. This isn't like an ipad. It's not like an ipad is going to be different, But yeah, you'll need to plug that in and that will cost you a bit more. If you've never used anything like this, I think you'll be happy with it. It should still get the job done and you can draw and it'll give you that pressure sensitivity. The problem is like if I draw here with this tablet. So let me make sure turn it on. All right, so here I'm going to draw with a mouse. I'm going to right click to get my pop up palette. I'm on the brush tool right here, and there's a pencil. And if I draw, that's with the brush. And then if I draw with the stylus, it's significantly different. As you can see, it's pressure sensitive. Okay. And I can't do that with the mouse. Okay. So that's why you want to draw with a stylus or pen and a drawing tablet. All right. So I'm going to erase that now from here. I just want to show you how I 7. Setting Up To Trace: I want to show you how I start out with the drawing and we're going to be working in Rita. And I'm going to open it up here. I've already installed it. This is the latest version which is 5.2 0.2 It looks a little bit different than some of these other versions. All right. So you can see right here it says open image. And I believe this no actually new image is what we want. And this would be create a new document as well. So same thing. So I'm going to click right here and I'm going to go with either a 4300 or US letter size document. And then we can crop it to fit the image. But I'm just going to go ahead and go with four right here. And again, 300, if you choose 600, that there's nothing wrong with that. But just be aware that it's going to draw more on your computer. It may slow things down. If the computer is going too slow, it's not keeping up with your brush strokes. You might want to consider going down to 300. And for some of you, 300 might even be too much, you might want to drop that down to 200. I wouldn't go much below 150, but you could go lower. But just pay attention to how it looks, but this is still considered a high resolution image. All right, 4300. And then I'm going to hit the button right here. All right, so we have this here and I've moved this over to the side, because I like to draw from observation, and that just means the image is off to the side. And I'm going to look and I'm going to draw. Draw. You know, you've seen people where you see where they'll take the pencil and they're, you know, doing this. That's just them making measurements to try to size up the image and make sure the relationships are right. That's the way that I'm going to work. That's the way I prefer to work because I think the images have a, a bit more personality because of those imperfections that it introduces. It's more challenging because if I only work this way when I sit down with a piece of paper and a pencil, it's going to be a little bit more difficult. Yes, I can print something and trace it, but just sitting down and drawing, I want to keep those skills intact too. This is practice for me. But if you want to just jump right in and get started, I'm going to show you how to trace from the photo, and this is the way I would do it. So I'm going to move this down. This is the image that I have selected. And I'm just going to click and drag and drop that you see here. It gives me the option to insert as a new layer and I'm going to click that. Okay? You see it cropped off some of the rest of the image, but that's okay. Okay, so now we have this image here, and now what I want to do from here is since we're going to be tracing this, I don't want it to be so dark because my drawing, you know, the brush strokes will get lost. So the first thing I'm going to do, you see it's layered here. It's on the top layer. I'm just going to click right in the middle where it says opacity. It doesn't need to be exact. And that'll get that opacity down to around 50% I can click and adjust it if I want, but roughly 50% is good. And you'll see this image is on top. We'll need to move that below our drawing layer. Okay, And this right here, well, it says paint layer. Okay, so we're going to click, hold on this and drag down. I don't know if you can see how it's highlighting. There's like a blue line showing me where it's going to go and then I release and it drops into place. Now this little icon right here, that is a lock. And I'm going to click on that just so it locks in place, so that I won't move it around by accident. Then I need to click on the paint layer and I'm ready to go. 8. Tracing An Image: From here, I just want to show you how I draw again. Make sure you're on the paint layer. The way I typically draw is I just sketch in the shape of the face. Okay, we just start to bring everything in. I typically don't like to just trace one unless you're really good at it. You're going to have these really wobbly lines. Like you can do it and get some speed in practice, but I find that it has a nice organic feel by drawing these straight lines and letting them know overlap and then going back and erasing from here. Again, we're just knocking in the shapes. I'm not going to keep going with this because I'm going to spend more time doing the drawing from observation. Again, it's good practice when you're not on a computer, it has more organic feel. Then once you get to a certain point, you can just turn the visibility of that layer off and check your drawing. It's always a good idea to turn that off anyway and check your drawing. I'm going to end this here. The next video, I'm going to start observation. You watch that, You can see how, how I approach that. You'll see I continue to build on this sketch and different techniques that I'll do there. But again, if you just want to get your likeness or you don't want to spend a lot of time getting everything just right, you can do this tracing. All right? So I will see you in the next video. 9. Setting Up To Draw From Observation & Searching For Brushes: I tend to switch back and forth between my mouse and the pen. It it just depends on what I'm doing. All right. I'm going to open up Rita, and we're going to get started and we're going to get started now is setting the document up and drawing by observation. Actually, since we're drawing by observation, there's really no set up. We're just going to start drawing. Okay, I'm going to go click New Image. And I'm going to choose here again, we're in Crit 5.2 0.2 I am going to choose predefined either four or US legal letter. Yeah, 4300 is the pixels per inch. You could go 600 if you want that extra super high resolution. Maybe you want to make it larger. But I recommend going with the 300 just because it'll be less taxing on your computer. And 300 pixels per inch is considered high resolution. So the first thing I want to do is make sure we're all in the same spot. Okay, I'm going to choose a workspace here. This is the default workspace. And I may change some things up as we move along. I consider this to be an intermediate class, so I'm not going to go in too heavily on interface and how to work with Rita, but I'll throw bits in here and there that explain how I'm doing things without spending too much time because I'm going to assume that you already are comfortable with Krita. All right, here we go. So I'm going to go to window and my work space, I'm going to put it on a big paint. Let's see what we get here. All right. Big paint works. I'm going to move this over. You see right here. Okay, I'm just going to adjust a few of these things here to my liking. I like a bit more room here where the brush presets are. I'm going to hover my cursor right there and just slide that up here. I'm going to drag that up. Uh. Oh, I seem to be missing my layer. There you go, the layers. All right. They got a little loss there. Actually, I'm going to move this up a little. I don't need that much room for the advanced color selector, and I think that's good because I'll be needing these layers later. All right. N I'd like to have the extra space spent here, so I can see the brushes here. Advanced color selector doesn't look like this. If you don't have that color wheel, I don't remember what the default is. If you click on this little icon right here, this will pop up and you can just click right here. And you can choose a different color wheel or something if you're more comfortable with a different look. And I'm just going to close that up right here. This is the image that I'm going to use. This is about the area that I'm going to use. I'm probably going to crop off some of this bottom actually, I'll crop that later. But basically, here's the crop tool. If you want to crop it now, you can crop it down. But what I'm going to do is I'm going to come over here to my brush and okay, the brush is selected. And then I'm going to right click. And when I click it, it will pop up. All right, I'm going to choose a pencil. If I right click, you should see enough tools in the pencil. I'm going to put a thing down here, a little icon, and maybe I'll see if I can find the lesson where it goes into one of the previous lessons that I've done where I explain how you can change things, where I deal with the pop up palette and making changes like how many tools that I have here. Although I will say that if you go to the settings, that would be over here. Rita preferences, open that up right here. You'll see if I scroll down here, pop up palette, that number right here, say maximum number of brushes in presets, I put 20. And again, that's the pop up palette. All right. I think the default is maybe ten. I just put 20. Okay. All right, so you can leave it as is or change it. All right. So I'm just going to click on a pencil right here. But if you also, you can come over here to your brush presets and maybe the tools options here is selected. Just make sure that the brush presets is open. Right here. It's this bar here is all you can change to different brush presets. And I have different I'm using different brushes. I've installed a lot of different brushes. If you are interested, I talk about some of that in the other lessons as well. I'll put that here if you want to go back and look for that. But if you want to search for some of the brushes in the defaults, you can find that right here. It says search. Say I want to search for pencils. I'll just put that there and type in pencils and see it just eliminates everything else. There's a brush that you begin to like do that. You can also add it to your pop up palette and that's using tags. And that'll be in the next lesson. 10. Organizing Brushes: Here. I just very quickly want to show you how you can organize your brushes. Say I like this brush right here. This marker. I'm going to right click on that and you can see that here's the name and it says AP marker, dry copy. I've already copied this one. But if I want to assign it to a tag which is a group of brushes that I want to save, I just again, I right click. And I can choose right here, assigned to tag. And then here I can go through and choose any of these sets. Right here, say I want to make a whole new set. I'm going to come here and I'm going to choose Tag right here. I'll click tag, and I'm going to make a new tag, and I'm going to call this practice. All right, and then I'm going to hit the plus symbol and it's saved. Now when I come back here and say I want to save this brush, I'll right click Assign to tag. And then I just look for that tag that I just made. Here it is Practice. And right there that is labeled as practice. I'm going to add an eraser. I'm going to write click Assigned to tag Miss time is just showing up on the other side. And I'm going to choose practice. And maybe a brush, nice low watercolor brush here assigned to tag. And I'm going to put that also on practice. So now I have three brushes, okay? So now if I just want to use that brush set, I can come right here. You see where it says all? I'll click right here, Hold, and then I'll just choose practice. And there it is. And there are those three brushes that I've just put in there. Now one of the things that I really like is you can right click out here and you see here's my pop up palette. I can come over here, you see this thing that looks like an old fashioned tag that you'd see maybe at a garage sale. I can click on that and then click right here where you know this old fashioned tag. And so I can just choose my practice palette. And boom, there we go. This is the set that I made every time I add a new set, something new to the set. Let me take this back to all. Let me right click on that airbrush assigned to tag, and I'm going to change that to practice. There we go. It's not here. So I'm just going to right click and right click again. No, it didn't, Did I do that right? Let me try that again. I'm going to try this air brush again. Let me see. Make sure I got it assigned to tag. I don't see the practice tag. I think that means it's already set. I can't find it. So I'm going to right click on this one assigned to tag. And this one I am going to choose Practice. Okay, so now we have five items. I'm going to click and then try right clicking again. Nothing. All right. Let me, let me click away. Pick another tool and come back to my brush and right click still. Nothing. All right. I'm going to change my tags. I'm going to pick traditional. There we go. And go right back to practice. And there are my five brushes or five items, so that's something that you have to be aware of. If you add something to the tag, you have to change it and come back, I guess. All right, here we go. So that's just something to remember if it's not showing up. Change your brush group or tag set and reload it. That's just something to remember. All of your tags are not showing up in a brush set that you've created. Choose another brush set and then come back to it and everything should show up. And let me just check to make sure that showing up here and I will go down to practice. There you go. Since I don't need this, I'm going to delete this tag and poof, it's all gone. Oh, now I'm curious what's going to happen here. I'm going to choose a different tag. Set Digital now, let me go back, right click, and it's not there. All right, so that's how it works. 11. Starting With A Sketch: I'm just going to go ahead and click on a pencil and I'm going to sketch out how I want this to compositionally appear. I'm just sketching out this little peak in her hair. All right, here, just to get a sense of how I want it to go, then I'm just going to draw her face again. I'm just eyeballing it and there'll be lots of corrections. You at least I'll never get this right on the first time. I mean, I've seen some things on Youtube where these people are drawing what they call it, the Xerox artist, not me. I got to draw, correct. Draw, correct. Okay, so now I have this and again, I'm just knocking out the composition. Here's the muscle in her neck, right here. I'm going to try to put in that violin and what I'm doing here is I'm just trying to get in the major areas and then I'll start to narrow it down. Okay. I'm just going to imagine her shoulders are right here just so that'll help me, but I don't want to go too heavy with this. All right? So that's mostly blocked in now. I need to go back and start refining. That's what it's all about. And trust me, I will never get this on the first shot. One thing you can do is if something is off and you just really want to check it as we did and how I set up the tracing, you can, after you get everything blocked in, you know, and sketched in, you can go and copy that and drop that picture on onto the drawing board, scale it up and position it as best you can. And then that'll give you an idea of where things are off, you know, so you'll get the practice of working from observation, but then you can fix things up after that. So here I'm going to try to imagine the shape of her head so you can see it's coming down right down. I'm sure you've seen that. Like it looks like if I draw a line straight from that peak in her hair, straight down, that's the angle. And that's one of the things that you might want to try is like I'll hold the pencil up or my pen up and line it up to the tip of her hair and I'm putting my thumb to take a measurement. Although I really don't need a measurement right now. I'm just trying to get the angle and that's the right angle. And then I bring it over here and I can see that my angle is just a little bit off. Okay. And then I will come across, I'll try to get her, her eyes are pretty horizontal. Okay? And then I'm just going to guess where they are going to go. I just keep going back and forth like this. Then one thing that's nice that you can do is you start looking at the shapes, not just like her eyes and things like that. Like I'll look at the shape of her forehead. I might be tempted to draw the eyes here. And then if I look at the shape of a forehead, I can see that, okay, I need to alter that to get that shape just right. And I just keep adding bits and pieces. And I'll move down and try to guess where I think that nose is going to go. I'll look here. Whoops, Accidentally clicked outside the software. I'm going to zoom in a bit. There we go. Move that up because I'm actually not using all that. There we go. All right. So now I'm back here over in Crita. Maybe need a little more room. There we go. I'll just draw. I think I may skip ahead a little bit and add some commentary later rather than try to talk about everything that I'm doing here. I think I'm just going to speed this up and I'm going to do commentary later. 12. Useful Tools & Techniques: In this video, I want to show you a few specific techniques that I use when I'm digitally painting that will come in handy. I'm jumped ahead here because after I did some recordings where I go through and record the videos and I wanted to show you them at high speed because it's going to be well over an hour that I'm working on these. So I don't want to spend too much time having you watch all of these videos. So I'm going to speed things up and then I'm going to talk over them. But because everything is so sped up, a lot of things that I do won't be clear. So I just wanted to take this moment, this video, to explain some of the techniques that I'll be using in the video to follow this one. If you've watched some of my previous videos, my previous classes with the still lives and things like that, I use some of these same techniques. If you get to a technique and you already know how to use it, just skip forward a little bit. So the first thing I want to do is I'm going to show you my desktop because I'm using a lot of key commands and I want you to see how I'll be working. All right, so the first thing I want to do here is let me delete this layer. I'm going to open up at, I'm going to open up a new document. So I'm going to go file new create. Okay, now I'm going to come over here to my paint bucket tool and I'm just going to put a nice little background so that you can see what's happening. Now I'm going to hit this little plus symbol right here to add a new layer. And this is where I'm going to be drawing. I want to show you how I will be working. The next thing I'm going to do is come over to my brush tool and then I'm going to right click to bring up the pop up palette. I've used the tags here. This particular special group of brushes, I just created this, so I had a variety here to make this demo. Okay, so I'm going to start off with this brush right here. Let me right click again. So you can say that says dry marker, although I sometimes duplicate markers and it says AP, that stands for my name. And I will duplicate them and make changes. Like sometimes I will save extra brushes like this one maybe has a different opacity than another similar brush. You can see over here, they're fairly similar. Okay, anyway, what I want to show you is say if I'm drawing, actually let me reduce the size of my brush the way that I use the size of my brushes. I can come up here and change the size up here. I can right click and come into my pop up palette and change that here. This little button right here, that chevron. I can click on that and that gets rid of that side menu. But I usually keep it open so I have access to flow, size, and opacity and angle. Okay, but there are better ways to get to that. Here's my brush. I'm going to come up here to the top here in this tool bar and click on the default you see right there. I can click on that default, that black and white button, and I get black in the foreground. So I can draw off black, and the background color is white. So now I can draw, okay, now say if I'm drawing a nose, I'll just sketch that out. I'm going to reduce the size of my brush here. And that's going to be the nose here. Not a great nose, but not the way I'm drawing it. Okay, I've drawn in the basic shape of the nose and say that I want to create a shape, there's a couple of ways that I can do that. One way I can just draw directly on top of this layer. Or I can make a duplicate layer so that it gives me a little bit more freedom. What I'm going to do here is I'm going to click here and make a new blank layer. And now I'm back to my brush tool. I'm still owning my brush tool. I'm going to make this larger and just to show you how I'm working, rather than come up here and use the size or right click and come in here and change the size here. When I change the size, I usually use my keyboard and I'll hold the shift key and I drag to the right and I can drag to the left. Okay, drag to the right and drag to the left most of the time. When you see me working, you'll just see my brush get larger or smaller and it looks like magic. It's because I'm using this key command. All right, so back to this nose. We're going to draw this shadow. And I can come in here and I can draw this shadow. But you can see it's looking muddy tool. I can right click and come in here and choose an eraser. And I erase, and you see what that looks like. Click, I stay on the same tool, There's this little eraser button right here. I can click on that, or I can hit the key on my keyboard and you see it toggles on and off. When I erase with that, you see it has that pressure sensitivity. And I can, with the same brush that I am creating, it has the same texture. Sometimes you want to have that different texture of your brush and other times you want to have the exact same texture and controls that you have on the brush that you're using. All right, so. Okay, so here I can hold the shift key, drag to the right to make that large. I can click on the turn that off the eraser was on and I just fill this in. Okay. Then I can use the eraser and I can just come in here and trim the side of this very quickly and knock in a shadow. It's easier for me even to come in here with a very small brush and trim those edges, but at the same time, it doesn't have that scribbly look. You see it's just like it's one smooth stroke and that's typically the way I work. But the key here is I'm on a new blank layer. If I was working on the same layer, this wouldn't work the same way. Okay, so once I'm happy with this, I can select this layer. I'll right click and merge with layer below. Okay, now they're merged and now I can use blending or however I want to work to push that around. But now that I'm on this, you know, it's merged with the layer below. If I go to my eraser, you know, and I try to shape that, I start erasing my sketch. Okay. So it's just something to be aware of. I hit undo and I unmerged that. So I'm going to erase that. Actually, slide my brush to the right erase. Okay. And I want to show you something else that I do say that I am okay. So I'm going to do this again. Actually, I'm going to do this with that. You can see it's right here. These multiple pencils, just because you see this has a nice texture to it. So then when I erase on this, it has a nice texture, even texture like a big fat piece of charcoal, as opposed to, you know, me using a bunch of scribbly pencils. Okay, so that's the advantage of this. Now something I want to show you is say, I'm working on this and I'm going to paint with black and white, just to show you what's happening here. So one way that I like to paint is I have my brush and you can see up here, the foreground color is black and the background color is white. If I paint with black, who I'm tapping the X key to flip them. You notice up here they're flipping back and forth. So I'm going to paint with black. All right? I keep doing that. All right? I'm going to paint and say I'm just painting in here. Then I'll switch and then I can paint with white. But you see how it's blending. Actually, I'm going to switch over to this brush. I like this one better. It's a bit smoother and I'll add texture at the end. But you can see I'm just painting, adding gray, black, white. Okay, so the point that I'm making here is that is one way that I can work, okay? But say if I work with the black and white, I mean with the eraser, I'm going to hit undo. Get rid of these. Actually, let me just delete that layer and start over, make a new blank layer. Now I'm painting with black, switch that foreground background, if I'm painting with black. And then I want to come in here and start adding shading and things. I'll just hit the eraser. And then I can come in here and lighten that area up here, shape that area. Okay, so those are two different ways that I will work. And it just depends on what I'm after. And it also depends if I am working on a layer that is merged or if I'm working on a separate blank layer. Because this eraser is very useful when I'm on a separate blank layer. And then I get to a point where I want to merge it with the layer below. I'll merge it right click, merge down and emerge with layer below. And then I'll make a new blank layer. And then I can continue working with that brush and I can continue using the eraser. But if I merge with the layer below, right now I'm going to click, I'm going to merge it twice. Merge with layer below. Right click once again, and I'm going to merge with the colored layer below. Now if I come in here and I start using that eraser, you see I'm erasing to the layer below which I don't want to do. This is another way that I will work, is I have the brush and here I will just sample colors. I can either come over here and hit that eye dropper tool. I believe the key command is I, it's okay, the eye dropper is to sample a color. But I usually just when I'm on the brush tool, I'll hold the command key. I'm on a Mac and you see I get the eye dropper, I release it, goes back to the brush. So all I have to do here is I'll say if I want this kind of gray color, I can sample it. And you see how it's giving me a completely different look and see, rather than erasing these edges here, I can paint them out. Okay, now I'm going to sample out here at the light blue, reduce the size of the brush. And then I can come in here and add some highlights. Say I do want to add some white. I'll flip that. Add a bit of white there. And now I can go back to the command ear control on a PC and I can sample colors that you blend. Now I'm painting with three colors. I'll just sample the black here. I do a lot of this, make the brush larger if it's a little too dark. And this is the way I like to blend colors as well. Say if I paint a color here, I can take the black and I just do it light. And then I'll sample that color here until I get a color that I like and then I can mix over that. But let me try this. I'm going to use some black, paint it in really heavy. Then let me try it lighter. I can just keep sampling these colors until I get a color that I like. They blend in until I get something that I like. For me, it just has a bit more life to it. Whereas, if I say, come down here, let me sample from here. Make black. And then I will make some. A lighter color. Lighter lighter. If I come over here, I'm going to write Click, and you see here's this blending tool, this blending stub. I can use that and just blend things here, but you see how mushy it gets. Sometimes that's the effect that you want and other times you don't want that really blended effect. I typically prefer the more rougher look that you get from here. All right, so there's one last thing that I want to show you. It. So it depends on the brushes that I'm using. Like if I'm going to write Click, I'm going to go back to my this marker brush. And I'm using a higher end drawing tablet and it has tilt control. And if you, that's one of the things that you should look for tilt control. But it is not 100% necessary. Most, even the cheaper tablets will give you pressure control. But the tilt control is this where if I take the brush, you can see I'm not actually touching the drawing board, but I'm just rotating it above. And you can see how tilting my brush is this, Tilting my pin is rotating my brush. Okay? And that's something that really makes working like this very useful. Another tool, if you don't have that ability, you can tilt your canvas and that will help solve some of that problem. But let me show you. I put this brush here because you see it doesn't tilt, okay? It doesn't have tilt control. What I can do here is I can right click and I can choose right here, the angle of the brush. I can click here and then now I can change the angle. So see if I want a thin line here, but then I right click and I can rotate it out to the side. Come on, there we go. Now if I go up and down, I have a nice thick line. All right. There's a couple of different ways you can do the same thing. So you can see the brushes horizontal. I'll right click. And as I said before, if I rotate my canvas, now if I drag in this direction, I get that nice thin line. And then I'll right click. And then I can click right here and it resets that angle and then I can get that thick line. Okay. My preferred way, I think this is a good way to work once you get comfortable with it, but I think it will take some time for your mind to wrap around it. But what I like to do is you see up here in the tool bar is there's these little things here. Although I sometimes call this the Options Bar in Photoshop, they call it the Options Bar and these are the tool bars, It's a little confusing. But this bar up top right here, you see it has the size. You can control the size of your brush. But since I can control the size of my brush using my shift key, I don't need this. If I click right here, this opens up and I can change the opacity, which is here. And I can change the flow and there's rotation in this pattern scale thing. I'm just going to click right here. You see where it says rotation? And click now the rotation is up here, so I don't have to right click to go into the pop up palette every time I need to change the rotation. Now if I want that angle, I'll just click right here. Drag that straight up. I can also manually type in, type that in if I'm a numbers person or and then I can rotate and then I get that horizontal view. Okay, and again, the combination of all these things and the rotating the canvas I think would be quite useful. All right, so those are all the tips that I wanted to show you going into the demonstration of the actual illustration. So hopefully it'll be a little clearer what I'm doing as I'm doing it, but that's really the meat of everything. Hopefully, this will prove useful when you're working on your pieces. And some of you might just find these extra little tips useful enough. And you don't need to watch the demo of me doing the actual painting. Me personally, I enjoy watching other people work and see how they do things. And so it's up to you if you want to do that or if you want to jump straight into your project anyway. I'll see you in the next video hopefully. 13. Ugly Painting: All right, so try to get that Once you start getting things in, once you start blocking in bits, the mouth, the nose, and things like that, it becomes a little easier. Because when you're starting from nothing, there's no reference. But once you build reference, it definitely becomes easier. I can right click, bring up the pop up palette, grab an eraser. Use the right bracket key to make that larger, and then I can start erasing things out. This is an area that I always have trouble with is the area between the mouth and the nose. I always misjudge that difference in getting where I get the mouth. I always have the chin. It's always too small. Let's see how it goes. I like to think in shapes, like there's the roundness of that chin. Okay, here's the bottom of it right there. Watch the shadows. The shadows can help too, because they help make shapes. I can see there is this shape right here. I'm going to try to draw that shape. All right? As I'm drawing this, I can see that the shape of her cheek is off. I need to start shrinking that again. The more you drawing, the more you start to see. I try to look at the whole thing. Now here's a little trick that you can try. I'm going to write, click here. You see that button right there that will flip the canvas and says mirror review. That's just so you can see what it looks like. You can see like, maybe you could see where things were off, but I can't see them. As the artist, your mind tends to play tricks on you and you don't see exactly what is off. I'm going to write click. I like to turn my body to get the strokes, although that brings me to another point Is another way you can do that is if I right click here, bring up the pop up palette. That's what this little dot is for. I can rotate my canvas so that I can get a stroke without having to contort my body too much. Then I just click right back there and it will go back. All right. Now it's always a good idea to look at it. One thing I like to do is to zoom out. That's another way to get a good look at it. So I'm going to zoom way out. Take a look. I think I've blocked in things like I'm seeing now that her nose is a little too big. And I'm going to trim that down the size. You see how I'm drawing the shape? Sometimes I don't even draw the bottom side of the nose. Sometimes I just like that swipe the of a brush and that tends to work. But yeah, this is helping. Now I'm going to start trying to block in some shapes. I'm not sure if what I want to do with this the layers just yet. So I'm going to make a new layer and start blocking in some areas. Because sometimes that helps because honestly, I'm feeling a little stuck. I'm going to click on the little plus symbol here and that'll give me a new paint layer. Now I'm going to write Click, and I'm going to choose a different brush, this little four pencil thing here. I'm pretty sure that you have that. I'm going to increase the brush size here. That's a nice one because you can fill in areas really quickly. See here, make sure, again, I'm on the new layer. So if I decide I don't like what I'm doing, I can always come back. I'm going to squint right now and see if I can see the dark areas and I'm going to just start darkening in these areas here. If I overdo it, it's not a problem. The squinting to place things and I'm just going to come across that knows right here. And I'm going to really darken that up right there, because I'm just going for the shape, okay? The thing is when you're painting or drawing, there's a stage, you know, and some people call it the ugly stage, where it just looks like total garbage until you know, and then it starts to come together. All right? One thing is I tend to lose things. You know, you'll draw something and then I'll start to lose them. Then they start to come back. You have to bring them back, you'll take them away and then they start to come back. Reduce the brush size. I can change the brush size right here, The opacity of it and the flow, that's the amount of paint coming out. Or I can just change the size right here in the opacity. It's just a lot quicker to get to. Another thing that I forgot to mention is right clicking and going to this brush tool to the eraser. If you are drawing, say I draw that there, I can just click on this little eraser right here and it erases with the same brush. Whereas, if I go to the brush tool, I mean to the eraser tool, it's a different, you know, it gives me a different kind of brush. So I'm going to go back to the pencils and start erasing, and then I'm just going to start trying to bring out this, these things. All right? A problem I'm having right now is you see that when I erase on top of these lines, the lines aren't going away. So I need to merge these two layers at this point. Okay? You don't have to. It's up to you how you are more comfortable working, because I can just turn them off. But see then it loses all structure. So I'm going to merge this layer to the bottom layer. So I'm going to right click and choose. I'm going to write, Click on this layer and choose Merge with layer below the sketch. And this charcoal, it's all merged. Now I'm just, I'm going to try to start bringing things together where I see a highlight here. Now I can just go back and forth and try to darken this up. One thing like I darken that too much, I find that a larger brush, I can just kind of sweep over that, reduce that brush size, take that to an eraser, and then sculpt away. Sculpt that away. Okay. And here. All right. I'm still an eraser. I'm just going to dig in here a little bit to get that eye, and then I'm going to erase. Okay? So I'm going to dig in these dark spots, hit that eraser again. I'm going to go back and forth, back and forth again. If you're tracing, you may think, oh, I'm tracing. So this is just going to be easy and you'll lose things or you'll trace it and then you'll find it seems like it's going to be easy. But even tracing can be more difficult than you would think because you start to cover over those lines. And then maybe you turn that off and on to take a look at it or you'll drop the opacity if you have that image below it. Okay. So I'm starting to get enough built up where I'm starting to find I'm getting to that point where I'm starting to feel comfortable. Like if I want to drop in the hang on the eye, I'm just doing a quick measure of checking. Okay, Those eyes are pretty much straight across and that's not what I've drawn again, like you may see that these eyes, I go to the tip of the eyebrow and it goes almost straight across and then go here and I'm coming way over here. I'm going to have to fix that, hit that, eraser, trim down, come across so that it's not so much of a difference. Okay, that Eso. I'll just hit the white right here For that white of the eye. One of the things that I like to do when I'm drawing is sometimes you see how those eyes just appear rather than drawing in the eye. I'll often just black in an entire area and then bring the eye out by, by doing the opposite. I'll bring in the light part of the eye within the dark. It seems to have a bit more life to me. Okay, now I'm just checking the height. Still not getting that measurements not lining up right. But let's see, I'm going to come back to this, maybe reduce the size of that brush. Don't be, don't be tempted to start drawing things out line by line. Just think shapes in shapes. Okay? Think shapes and never marry anything as far as, oh, that's perfect. Because then you end up working around it and that'll destroy something just as well. There's a quote by Picasso where he said something to that effect. If you see something in a painting, destroy it. I've tried that. I don't like it. You know, you see something, but just don't hold it precious. If you have to destroy it, okay, you have to sacrifice the beautiful stroke for the whole. All right? This is starting to come together. It's just getting through this stage of getting things right to look like something. It's painful, all right? I think I let me flip this canvas and see what it looks like. It still looks like a person. I can see there's an angle here. You see the curve of the eye, but the white of this eye is just going straight down. But I need that to come over a little bit. There we go. Now I'll come back and paint that back over. I'm starting not to groove on this brush so much right now. I'm going to try something different. Again, whatever floats your boat. One brush that I really like, this marker. Which one does it say? Hang on, let me see which one is it? I like this one, but you can see it's plain, but it doesn't have any texture. But it's really good for just blocking things in. Oh, now I'm starting to see, look at that nose, The eyeball comes down here, the wide of the eye comes here. And I got the nose all the way over here. I don't know why switching that brush seems to have given me a bit of a heads up that something's off here. And I know you all have that marker brush for sure. So here you can see I'm just painting in the top of the lip and I'm not worrying about the bottom. Okay. So then I can come across, I'll hit the eraser, and then I just erase and cut that away to get the bottom. Okay? And this looks hideous. Oh, this looks hideous. Starting to look like the joker here. All right. You know what I'm going to do? I'm not used to talking while I draw, so I'm going to stop talking, work on my drawing. And then I will narrate this. I'll play it back at high speed and narrate because this is difficult. All right? I'll talk to you. We I'll be talking to you anyway. I'm not going anywhere. We, Lisa won't seem like I'm going anywhere for you. This is something also I just did by instinct. You hold the shift key and if I drag to the right, I can enlarge my brush and drag to the left and reduce that brush. I don't have a lot of desk space, but this is basically what I'm doing. Hopefully this is on camera to the drag to the left. All right, I'm going to cut this here in the next video. It's just going to be high speed with me talking over the video. All right, see you in the next video. Oh, one more thing. And it's a good idea to get away from your work sometimes stepping away, you step away from it. When you come back, you'll see things that are right or wrong. Okay? So I'm going to step away for a little bit and I'll be back in a second. 14. Speed Painting: In this bit here, I just want to talk about what I call the ugly state of a painting. It doesn't always happen, but it quite often happens when you're working with something. When you start out, it goes through a period when it's just ugly or it's not working and you just have to fight through it. And I'm going to go ahead and start this video here. I paused it and I'm just showing you the piece. And I was very unhappy with this when I stopped, although I'm going to hit the button to start it out. Here we go. When I was working on this, I was struggling and I was using a different pencil. And this is the moment when it started to come together. I switched over originally I was using it was that I forget, I'll put it, I'll post it here. What the name of this brush was that I was using, which was that group of three pencils is what it represents. Okay. And what I switched to was the marker. And for some reason, the marker just works for me. Whereas the pencil, I like the look of it. I like the texture of it, but it just wasn't working with me working for me. I just feel like I have a lot more control and things do what I want with this particular brush, this marker, the thing is, I wish it had more texture, but it just works for me. So I'll work with this and then my plan is to add texture later. So here you can just see I'm working along again. This demo here was about 53 minutes long and I really didn't think anyone would really want to sit here and watch me and listen to me talk for 53 minutes. Just kind of rambling on about whatever I was doing. So I figured I'd speed things up to about 6 minutes and talk over it. This is one of those things you could even skip if you want because I'm just using all those techniques. The same techniques that I demonstrated in an earlier video when I did the nose on the blue background. Here you can see I'm just painting erasing. If you watch how I use the layers, sometimes I'll create new layers and then I'll merge them down. Like right now, I'm, I'm selecting the shape and I'm using the Warp tool. I'm going to transform selection. Then I write click and I choose transform, I choose Warp. And I can push things around. Sometimes I'll do that, I'll go to free transform, then I'll write click and I'll liquefy. Those are just different ways that you can use digital painting to your advantage. These are things that you just cannot do in real world painting. Some of the things that I talked about in the video is if you watch the eraser, you'll see the erasers going on and off. I'm adding things with eraser. I'm painting and then I'm erasing. And painting and erasing. And sometimes I will flip from, you know, painting from black to white. Black to white. It just depends on what I'm after. And again, right now, I'm just seeing that eraser flash on and off. Um, and I'm erasing the disadvantage of erasing it as everything. Well, it's not necessarily a disadvantage, but the difference is it erases everything. But if I take those same things and I duplicate it, like right now, you can say I'm working on a separate layer. I like using the eraser here because I can make shapes and if I don't have to worry about messing up the drawing or the painting that I've already created, I'm sitting here adding a little highlights in the eyes. Usually, I save those to last, I guess you might say. I was getting a little greedy. I put the highlights in and they just didn't work. You can see there's no real highlights. Well, there aren't any highlights in the original image. They really don't belong. But sometimes I do find highlights can bring a piece to life. I don't know if you notice how I'm flipping the canvas from time to time. Again, this is very high speed, but I'll flip that canvas by flipping the canvas. Then I think I talk about this in the other video and show you how I do that. You can find that flip tool in the pop up palette, but it gives you a way of seeing because your brain makes adjustments to things and you think you're seeing what you're not actually seeing. You think the proportions are right and they're actually off. I think Davinci, it was a book. I read a Vinci's Notes to artist I believe was the name of the book. And he said that something similar to this and he used a mirror to look at his work when I'm painting, it's been a while since I've actually painted in the real world, but I would always keep a mirror on my canvas. So I would step away from the canvas and hold it back and, you know, look through that mirror to get that reverse image which sort of separates the changes that your mind has made from, you know, what you're looking at. You can also do this by by distancing yourself from a piece, like in a digital painting. I will shrink it. In real world, if it's a smaller painting, I might prop it up in a room, on one side of the room and then walk away from it. I remember when I worked in the newspaper business, there was an illustrator. His name was Earl. He used to, you'd all constantly hear his drawing hit the floor. Bam, bam, bam. He, he'd work on it and then you'd just throw it on the floor. And that was his way of getting some distance to see his work, to get a fresh look at it. You know, sometimes you go away and you look at, you take a and you watch something. Sometimes when you, when you just spend some time away from a piece, it changes the way it looks. You come back the next day and you see all those mistakes that you didn't see before. Here, you can see started adding a little texture once I got the image the way I really liked it. I added texture, to be honest, I think I liked it a little better when it was when I stopped using that marker tool. But it does have a certain look to it, so I added the texture to make it look more natural. And in the next video, what I'm going to do is I'm going to show you how to add texture. I've done this in another class here, but I'm going to do it again here. I'm just going to very quickly show you how to drop that in and add a lot of texture and really make that piece come alive. 15. Adding Texture: Here I'm going to show you how to very quickly add some texture. Again, I talk more about this in a previous lesson. I'll, I'll post which course I go into texture more about down here. What I'm going to do is I'll make this available to you. This image right here, it's image, whoops, that I found on Pexels. It's an image that I found on Pexels. I'm just going to grab this and drag and drop, and drop it onto the image, and I'm going to insert it as a new layer. All right, so that's the image. Now what I'm going to do from here is change the blending mode. Right here you can see where in the layers panel where it says normal. I'm going to click on that and hold and I am going to change this. I think overlay might work. I'm going to try soft light and overlay and see what we get. Actually, I think I like overlay, but let's see what soft light does for us. I like overlay better. All right. Just so you can see what's happening here. I'm going to turn the visibility off on this layer, off and on. That's it off and that's what it on, so you can see off and on. It really adds a nice bit of texture to your image with very little almost any work, and this digital painting is done. 16. Thanks For Taking The Class: Hi. Thank you for taking the class. I hope you enjoyed yourself. And please if there are any comments or suggestions that you might have, please let me know. Also, I hope that you uploaded your project to the project area. I can't wait to see it anyway. Once again, thank you and I'll see you in the next class.