Transcripts
1. Forest Fireflies Intro: Hi there and welcome to
this Skillshare course. My name is Avraham and I'm a professional illustrator
painting scenes of nature. It can be a very
relaxing experience. This course. Together we're going to create this very soothing
toilet seen for fireflies will be using the app Procreate on the
iPad to do our work. But you could really use
any drawing software. What's cool about a nature scene is that you can play
around with it. There's no right or wrong way, but how to draw these
trees in that way. I hope you have fun
experimenting and coming up with your own
version that you like. So if you're ready
to get started, I look forward to seeing
you in the next video.
2. Drawing the trees: So to start, we're going
to create a new canvas, clicking the plus sign. And we're going to
use a canvas that has 4 thousand by 3 thousand
pixels with 300 DPI. That gives a very
high resolution. If we want to print it later, because it's a dark scene, we're gonna make a background
which is relatively dark. So let's go, let's go into color wheel and get
a pretty dark blue color. Now we're going to
do the color drop and click and hold on the color and drag it into the canvas and it'll fill up the whole
screen with that color. So now let's create a new layer. On this layer, we're
going to put our trees because pretty dark green. For the brushes. We're
going to the airbrush and the medium brush and
the recent picking the medium brushes because I want the edges to be
slightly undefined. Let's make sure it's
at full opacity and medium-sized brush. To start off, we're
gonna start with the trunk of the tree and beginning with some very
thick, big thick trunk. Just one idea to keep in mind is that as
you're drawing that the branches of
the tree actually tapers as it gets taller. The bottom of the tree
is gonna be wider naturally than the
top of the tree. Just understanding
the tree branches are usually not so straight, so we don't have to worry
about straight lines. They can be as
normally as you want. As we move up the tree. We're gonna make
some branches which are obviously going
to be thinner. And don't worry, it doesn't
have to be so exact here we're just King's
basic shapes, the tree. The branches also are going to get narrower and
smaller as you go up. And if I make them
brushes small, so like always widen it
up but over the branch it a second time,
a little wider. You can make your tree is curvy normal
street as you'd like. Now for balanced, Let's create another tree on the right side, again where I start
with the trunk, which will be wider and as we
move up, it'll taper down. On the top will make the
main tree here to the right. So we'll make that
branch a lot thicker. We can create some more smoke branches coming off from it. No large branch that will connect between the
two areas of our canvas. I'm just going to
make, again a branch that tapers and wider at the bottom curve here and
there as it goes along. For good measure, let's
add in one more tree, this one, Let's make
it pretty straight. Just a little leaning
to the right. And that will balance with
the different trees are being left on the other side. Let's give you the branch. Maybe a second branch
will have this one. We'll draw as if it's going
behind the tree to its left. Little bit overlap. We've finished with our trees. Let's go in, add
in some foliage.
3. Adding grass and foliage: New layer we're going to add in some foliage is because
we went to B again, it's made the background will go under the organic brush
set and choose snow gum. We will pick for the color a little bit later of
the green color. So we'll just paint some of these leaves on it,
fill up the area. And what's cool about these is that it will give a whole
bunch of different colors. Have a little bit of variation
in it, which is nice. We'll go for a
slightly darker green. You can add layering some depth. Now let's go for a third
pass of even darker leaves. The idea is to have a full
background full of leaves. We see the different textures. Since a dusk type of situation, let's also put in a
purply color to represent the tones of sundown and
those purpley leaves, we're going to make
another layer, and this won't put on
top of our green layer. Add some real
intensity. This layer, we're going to change
its mode to Multiply. Yeah, that's really dark now. Let's have some of the sunset shining through the background. We're going to pick
British yellowy color. And we're going to
create a layer behind all the leaves and trees
that we've created so far. For this, we're going
to switch back to our airbrush and this time choose the soft brush because we want the edges of the sun to
be very diffused and go for a large size brush and
reduce the opacity. So it's a little more
delicate. Looking good. So let's make it a little more intense the sun by duplicating the layer and then merging
it to soften even more. Let's go to the Effects
and Gaussian blur. Looks good to me, around 30%. And let's see if I
can get even more intense by duplicating
the layer. Now we're going to go
to the bloom effect, and that's going to really
make the color pop. Now let's coincident
leaves in the foreground, in front of the tree trunks. And we'll go back to
deep purply color. And let's go back to where
organic slogan the brush. Since these leaves
are even closer, we'll make sure that they
are a bit larger than the green color through in a
few scattered leaves here. Now we've got our
trees, the background. Let's work on the
foliage on the ground. So to start, we're going
to create a new layer. I made my own brush that's
sort of like blades of grass. And you can download them
from the resources section. We'll go for a dark crafts color first
because we're getting, we're going to do some
layering and these will be the grass in the most
background of our scene. Laid down on this tall grass all around longer than I wanted to. So let's first create another layer and go
to the Selection tool, selection tool with rectangle and make sure color
fill is selected. And then we're going to
create a Dropbox here. The whole area that we
wanted to be our ground. And since color fill is
selected as soon as we let go, the whole area will be filled
with a color and aggressive will seemingly disappear
because it's in closer crash. But since our color
feels too active, we go back to the
color area and then play with the colour
of the selected area will lighten up a
little bit so that our dark or dark tall
grass will stand out. Now that we've got a good
solid base for our grass, Let's go back to our
actual grass layer. Choose another, Let's choose a darker
green for our graphs. And continue filling up all
the area as much as we can. I'm looking at it
actually, I realized that some of the gas
in the background, we can't see it because the leaves that we have
here are covering them up. Let's turn that off
and you'll just see, whoa, that's pretty dark. Now. Let's put a few more, little more grass in
for good measure here. Now that we have our
grass down here, Let's go turn our leaves back on so we can see them
and then start to erase a little bit so that we can reveal more autoregressive
in the background. We're gonna go for the
race and the eraser tool. We're going to
choose the brush and the soft brush because we don't want the edges to
be so apparent. Going to gently go back
and forth on that layer of the leaves to reveal more
of the grass beneath it. Continue to balance out the
foreground and background of our grassy layer so that they look like
they're connected. Now I think we have our scene. We have the trees with
leaves and wheatgrass. Pulse left now is to add
in our lovely fireflies.
4. The fireflies!: Let's go create a new layer. And we're going to go to luminance and was picked glimmer ticked at the
standard one that's there. For color. Of course, we want to pick a
nice bright yellow. So the original
glitter has a jitter of 15%, as you can see here. But I don't want it to her because I want the color
to be very uniform. I don't want different hues of yellows and reds and showing up. I made a duplicate of this. And I went and turn
the hue down to 1%. So it basically
doesn't change at all. So if I choose one
color like here, this blue, It's
only very similar. And now instead of
drawing a long line, we're going to draw
a very short line. And then we're going to do, we're going to click and hold. We're going to draw a line, but we're not going to
look up in line. We're going to hold
it until it gives us the line edit options. And then we're going to
stretch out our line. These little pieces separate. I think these
capacitor five plays. Let's just duplicate that line, will typically will duplicate that row and pulls them
down and pull it down. Now have even more fireflies. Will click on the arrow,
which is the edit layer tool, and make sure we're in
three forms so that we can just squash this layer down
a little bit and it won't, it won't keep the
dimensions uniform. Now let's create another layer for the firefighters are closer by and I'm pressing
down a little bit harder so the glitter is larger. And again, the same
thing of press and hold and get
the line effect. And then we can play
around with it. Here. I'm going to scale
them in a uniform way. So the 13, they're
circular shape the circles and make these fireflies,
they are really close. One more layer, we're going to add a few more fireflies
in the background, pressing very lightly
so they're small. And let's put them back there. Duplicate that a few times to make them bright
because if you press lately so small but
they're not so intense. So by duplicating the layer, we can get the small effect, but have the intensity
of the fireflies much brighter for the ones
that are furthest away. Let's add in a little bit of Gaussian blur to show
that they're further away and not as clear defined
hold and drag to the right. And I usually like to go to obviously blurred and then
pull back a little bit. If I was at five to go back
to 3%, something like that. Now our next layer, and let's go see how much you
want to blur that one. Again, pulling out far
and then going back. And it looks like 3% is d,
the number we're going with. Even though one, Let's see,
even the one that's close by skipping this dreamy look. So let's call blur that as well. Now we're going to
merge those layers together and let's add some depth by removing
some of the fireflies, not all of them, but some
of the firefighters in front of the trees going to our eraser tool and we'll
use again the soft brush. Zoom hit zoom in here and
just the sum of them. The most part we'll
get rid of the really small patches of color because I want it to look like the larger fireflies
are close to us. The smaller ones should be behind the tree so we
shouldn't see them. And because of the
sun that's coming in, Let's go add in a clipping. Let's go add in some highlights to the branches themselves. So for that, we're gonna
create a clipping mask. New layer. We're gonna create
a new layer above our branches and make it
into a clipping mask. Wherever you draw will not go, will not be, will only be
visible where the branches are. And let's go back
to our airbrush. Lets go back to
our soft airbrush. Lowers, make it a little
bit smaller brush, and we're going to start
drawing in where we think the light might be
coming through the, peeking through through
the trees and eliminating certain parts of the
trunk and branches. Imagine that the light, obviously the light is
coming from above and below. So let's imagine
that the light is hitting the top part
of the tree branches. This area here where
the one branch goes behind the other tree. That's a little bit
complicated because we have to pretend that the tree is blocking
or obscuring. The one closer tree is
obscuring the branch behind it. Carefully draw in the
highlighted parts there. They'll also help
us give definition to the nearer tree because that part will have darker parts around it where the
light is not hitting it. Notice I had a little
bit more into the trunk. Some textures that we can see, such a big dark green area. Now to help the tree trunks themselves blending
with the background. Let's go to that layer
of a tree trunk. And we're going to erase
some of the tree trunk. So the grass and the layer
beneath it will show up and to cover to look like it's coming
part of the trunk. So what's gonna make sure every front
gets a little bit of that grassy coverage and treat our lipid to
pronounce for me. So let's go into make a small adjustment to push
them back a little bit. We're going to decode
the effects and the curves and make sure that
we're affecting the gamma, which is all three colors, not just the red or green. Pull it down in the middle so that it makes the color
just a little bit darker, a little more subtle. Let's check it out. Before and after. There you have it. A pharmacy scene with fireflies. I hope you enjoyed this class. I picked up a few
new techniques. I would love it if
you shared with me and the other people taking
this Skillshare course, what you've created in
the project section. And if you could leave a
review of this course, it would definitely
help me a lot. So thank you for joining me
in this Skillshare course. I look forward to seeing
you in the next one.
Avraham Nacher, Photographer & Procreate Artist
