Easy Abstract Dog Portrait – A 10-Day Painting Journey

1. Introduction: Are you looking to level up your painting skills but struggle finding a subject, getting started or completing a piece? We can easily overcome those issues together with my fun and relaxed method, especially created to help you find your creative spark. Hey, I'm Nathan Brown. I've been a professional artist and illustrator for 25 years, and I absolutely love to share my knowledge through teaching. I'm the creator of these best selling products along with these top rated courses, all of which were created to help improve artistic skills in an easy and relaxed way. I've created this quick learning session to help anyone in developing a relaxed and easy painting process or for those who just want to enjoy painting a fun and abstract subject. I've divided the sessions into bite size ten to 15 minute paint along so that you can enjoy taking one a day or follow along at your own pace. So whether you're an experienced painter or an absolute beginner looking to develop your skills, this session has something for you. We'll start by deciding on a subject, finding a good reference. Then we'll move on to studying that reference and deciding what's most important for our composition and color scheme before we start painting. We'll take a relaxed and easy approach the entire way. And once you're done, you'll have a beautiful painted subject featuring the perfect blend of realism and abstract elements. Plus, you'll have the knowledge, experience, and confidence that you can carry on to future paintings. Now, I'll be using the iPad and Procreate for this session, and we'll include the brushes and canvas that I'm using. I'll provide my sketch for you to paint from, along with instructions and insight for you to create your own sketch if you prefer, so you can join in whatever your skill level. Now, I'm so excited for you to join me in this session, so grab your iPad and get ready to create a beautiful abstract painting. 2. Choosing a Reference: Hey, there, and welcome to the first video for this paint session. I hope you're excited and ready to get started on our painting. But just like every journey starts with a single step, so does a work of art. So we're going to take an easy and relaxed approach for this one. So let's start off with just deciding what to paint and begin the hunt for a good reference image. So grab your iPad and a cup of coffee, and let's get started. In this first lesson, we're going to be taking a look at deciding on a subject and then choosing some reference images for that subject. Now, first up, if you have trouble deciding what to paint, I have a few things that I do that I can recommend that might help you to narrow down your decision. One of those things is, for example, if it's an animal, maybe just try to narrow it down to the animals that maybe you find in your area, in your country, maybe in your home state, just to give yourself a little bit of confinement in your choices. Now, another method that you can use that's kind of similar is to just use the alphabet. Start with an animal that begins with the letter A, and then after that, move on to the letter B and so forth. Instead of just leaving things wide open, this just helps you to narrow down your choices. Sometimes when we just have unlimited choices, it makes it hard to make a decision. Now, for this particular painting, I chose a dog, specifically a Jack Russell Terrier. And I'm going to be using the website unsplash.com, and this is a great resource for royalty free photography that we can use for references for our paintings. Before we start scrolling through some of these images, let's make a quick checklist on some of the characteristics that we're looking for in a good reference image. So first up, we want to find images that are in focus. When images are out of focus, it makes them hard for us to discern some of the details that we want to see, some of the harder edges and softer edges that we may want to differentiate. That just becomes harder to see in an image that isn't in good focus. So we also want to find images that have good lighting. And when I say good lighting, we want the subject to be lit well, but we also want to be able to determine the source of the light. So the direction that the light's coming from, maybe it's creating a real nice highlight and real nice shadow shapes. And I'll show you what I mean by that here in just a bit. Does the image catch our eye? So if we're scrolling through these images, there's going to be some that catch our eye and some that don't. So the ones that catch our eye, we want to pay particular attention to because we're seeing all of these images of this particular dog, and some are going to stand out for one reason or another to us. So those that do stand out, we want to pay particular attention to. Is the image a good angle of the subject? And for dogs, I have a particular type of image that I look for or a particular angle that I look for. I don't like images of dogs or cats that are from an above angle. It's not that I don't like them. It's just that I feel like that's how we usually view dogs and cats because we're standing up there on the ground. I usually look for an image that is more at their eye level or the camera is at a lower angle. And last up, do we have any sort of emotional reaction to the photo? Is there anything in the image that makes us think, Oh, you know, this one is special because it makes me feel a certain way. And if, yes, we definitely want to add that image as a contender for a painting because there's something about that image that stands out on an emotional level. Now, I've already done a search here for Jack Russell Terrier, and this is a really cute, kind of smaller bid size dog that just has some really great color variation. There's a long hair version and a short hair version of this dog, and they're both pretty interesting and the dog looks like it has a lot of personality. So right off the bat, I'm seeing some really good images, and I kind of want to go through some of these and talk about why I would choose one over the other, what I think makes a good reference and what I might pass on. Now, this one I really like. I think the dog has a really cute expression on his face, but this is at an angle that we look at dogs all the time. We're standing up. They're on the ground, and we're looking down on them. And that always stands out to me as something that I usually pass on because this is an angle that I always see smaller dogs. So I like to find something where maybe the camera is lower or at the dog's eye level so that it's unique in the way that we view dogs. This is a perfect example here. I think this is a great photo. The camera is more at the ground and it's more at the dog's eye level. And I think right off the bat, this just makes, in my opinion, a more interesting painting. Now, I also like the lighting on this dog because we've got a light coming from this direction, and it creates this nice highlight shape on this side, and then there's a nice shadow shape on this side that I think is something that would be really interesting in the painting because he's got brown on both sides of his face here, but because of the lighting, you can see that that brown on this side is a lot lighter than the brown on this side, even though they're the same color, but because of the lighting, there's a nice variation. This one's pretty funny with the hat. I think that's a pretty nice photo. I love the Bowtie love the hat. The lighting looks like it's coming sort of from behind. So there's this nice highlight or rim light on the edge of the hat there. Now, his eyes are sort of more in shadow. They're not in direct light. I don't think that's really a problem for this painting because I think the interest would be the hat and the bow tie, but it's just something to consider that maybe his eyes are not as well lit as they could be. So we might have to adjust the lighting in our painting to account for that. The puppy's really cute. Here's another one that's looking from above. So even though I like the photo, I probably would pass on that one just because it's a typical view. I really like this one. This looks like the same dog as before. I like the three quarter view. I like how his ear is going off to the side there. Kind of creates this nice shape into his head and this three quarter view. And again, we've got that really nice lighting. So we've got this light shape. We've got this light shape on his shoulder and back and then a really cool shadow shape. I also like how the collar. We can add that collar into the painting to sort of show the roundness of his neck there into his shoulders. So that's a nice touch. I like this one because I like the lighting. I also like the long hair version of the dog. But if we zoom in here, we can kind of see that really all of the detail is out of focus. So it probably would be kind of hard for us to get in some of the details, see some of the detail that we want. I mean, it could be painted. I think it could be used, but just that bit of soft focus or elements that are out of focus would make it a little bit more difficult and we don't want to make things more difficult for ourselves. I think that one would be a pass. Okay, I really like I like this one. I like the longer hair version. The hair is kind of playful and would be fun to paint, I think. The eyes are in focus. There's also this nice little highlight in his eyes. He's gotten the lighting from the side again so that this side of his face is well lit. This side is in shadow. His nose and mouth are a little out of focus. But that's probably okay because I think the eyes would be the focal point and they're nice and sharp. So this one might be a contender for a painting. I really like the interesting lighting on this one. I don't think this is the same kind of dog, though, but I do like that interesting lighting, how the shadows break up the light shape. But I don't think that that's the same kind of dog. Okay, after scrolling through several images, my mind keeps going back to this one. I really just like that ear, how the ears peeled back there, and I really like the shadow shapes. And I think that for this particular dog, the three quarter view is kind of interesting. And I think that we can probably pull an interesting shape and crop this particular photo in an interesting way to give us several options for our painting. Let's go through our checklist and just see if it meets some of our needs in that list. So is the image in focus, first of all, so, yes, it is a very sharp focus. We can zoom in and we can see all the detail that we need to see that we might want to capture in the painting. Does the image have good lighting, and can we discern the direction that the light's coming from? So I would say yes, because it's clearly lit from this direction because we can see the shadow shape on the side of the dog's face and chest here. And clearly there is a light source coming that's lighting this side of the dog. And does this image catch our eye? Well, yes, it does, because this is one that stood out to me that I chose and clicked on. And as I was going through other images, my mind kept going back to this one because this one stood out to me among the others. Now, is it a good angle of the subject? We're not looking down on the dog. The camera it's at a slight upward angle, but it's a little bit it's closer to the dog's eye level than being shot from above. So I do like the angle of this particular photo just because the camera is down much lower. And lastly, do we have any sort of emotional response to this image? Sometimes that's sort of tough to say yes or no. But in this particular one, I'm kind of looking for something that makes me think of personality for this dog. Something that I'm just have some sort of connection to. Now, I've already mentioned that I like his ear going back because it really looks like he's looking at something off to the side here, and I like how his eye. There's this shape here that makes it look like maybe his eyes is sort of like asking a question or there's something there about his eyes that he's paying attention or he's inquiring about something. Now, that's a very subtle detail that may only stand out to me, but the more I look at it, the more I'm finding compelling aspects of this image that make me want to paint. So I'm going to link to this one so that you can grab it, too. And in the next video, we're going to start looking at maybe some rough sketches and just some general ideas to get us more familiar with the dog in this photo. 3. Getting to Know The Subject: Okay, now we found a good reference image that we're excited to paint. But let's not rush into it. Remember, we're taking a relaxed approach here. So let's take some time to study and get to know our reference image a bit so that we're more acquainted with our subject. The more we understand our reference, the more easy it will be to create a successful painting. So let's dig into the details of this image together and see what we can discover. We've got a new Canvas open in Procreate, and it is 4,000 by 5,000 pixels, and it is 300 DPI. I've got the reference image imported and it's on its own layer. I'm going to go ahead and select it there and just scale it up so that it fits in our canvas a little better. And inside the collection of brushes that come with this course, I'm going to be using the sketch kit pencil. I've got this bright orange red color selected just so I can see my lines over the photo. I'm going to add a new layer and I'm going to start by defining some of the areas where the light is hitting and kind of analyze the way that the lights interacting with the subject. We know that the light source looks like it's coming from this direction. And it's hitting the top of the dog's snout here and the top of his head and sort of the forehead area between the eyes and the ear. So the top of his nose is sort of a flat plane here, or we can simplify it to a flat plane. And so if it's flat there, the light is the strongest before it curves around and the light starts to fall off as it curves around his nose or his snout. So we have that plane. We also have this area here between his eyes, which I'm going to call the forehead. Before it curves around to the top of his head. Analyzing these forms, it really helps helps your painting, it helps your drawing ability just to take the time to go through and see how the forms or how the light is affecting the forms. So his ear is also catching quite a bit of light. It looks like this area here because I'm going to say that his nose or his snout, it looks like it sort of comes over and then kind of comes out a bit before going down and then curling up underneath here. So there's this area here where it looks a little bit lighter than here and here. So that's just a small little touch that we might be able to integrate into the painting. Now, it also we have this really large area because this light's hitting here, and then we have this really large area where the light is hitting his body. And because the light's coming in here like this, it's also probably bouncing back up. And adding this little bit of light up under his chin. And I feel like the same thing is happening over here that the light is passing by, hitting something, and bouncing back to light this little area here. And it's not as strong as this side, but it's lighter than this middle shadow here. Okay, it looks like this ear is also catching just a little bit of light, or the fur is definitely lighter in that area. So there's a couple of cool shapes there. Also this brown fur extends a bit over the eye, so it's a little bit lighter than the black fur next to it. We've got a little bit of lighter fur here that may be catching light, or it's just lighter fur than what's back here. Okay. Just doing this little bit of analysis here with our light and how it's behaving, there might be a little bit there and maybe some little bit lighter touch there that may be coming from some of this bounce light. We also have this little shape here on the nose that's a little bit lighter. The tip of the nose is catching more light than this dark area here. Okay, so just doing this little bit of light analysis is going to help us in our painting. It's going to help us in our sketch because we're going to understand exactly how the lights working and how it's creating highlight shapes and shadow shapes. Alright, let's do a sketch study or two of some of the dogs features just so we can familiarize ourselves a little further with some of the detail. So let's start with this eye, and we can see that there's a lot of soft edges inside the eyeball here, like his pupil, the edges are really soft. The hardest edge here is this black, which is probably a shadow created by the skin overlapping the eyeball. So there's this black edge here. There's this specular highlight, which is this white highlight that has a harder edge underneath. And then there's this little bit of lighter brown here. I think probably in order to capture the eye accurately, we're going to need to consider this black this highlight and this little bit of lighter brown here. Let's do a quick sketch and see if we can do that with just a pencil drawing. I'm going to open my reference here in an app called Vizref I'm going to shrink it down just a bit. Zoom in on the I and I'm going to turn this one off. I'm going to create a new layer, and let's go with black and the same pencil that we were using. My background layer here is set to a medium to light gray. It's not pure white. Okay, let's start by just sort of roughing in this eye shape does not have to be perfect because this is just a study. Our lines don't have to be clean. We're just trying to familiarize ourselves with some of the shapes of the dog's features. This is just loose and fun. Nobody's going to see this. But us Okay, so what I have here is I've got a couple of black shapes. So I've got this dark lid over the eye. I've got the pupil and then the shadow that is falling into the eye. I'm going to wind up just combining those all into one shape, most likely. I can already tell that my eye might be a little bit too wide, but I'm going to show you a cool way to fix that as well. Let's see. There's a little bit of a highlight right there before the eyelid turns under. Let's make sure we count for that. I'm looking at that darker fur down here. Let's go ahead and shade in some of this darker area. Now, for the softer lines, I'm using the edge of the pencil and then for the sharper lines, it's more the tip of the pencil, just so you understand the different marks that I'm getting there and how those are made. Lightly shade in some of that there. This a little bit darker. Okay. Just to finish off our little study here, let's go ahead and grab switch our color to white. And let's just get in a little bit of our highlights here because our background is gray. The white is going to stand out a bit. A little bit of lighter tone there. Then right here, there's a little bit of highlight and then up here above that lid, I'm add that. Then we've got our highlight there that's that bottom eyelid. I'm going to switch back to black because I want this area right here to be a little bit darker. I was saying that my eye felt like it was a little bit too wide. So a real easy way to fix that is the liquefy tool, and I'm just going to drag in and just push the shapes just a little bit. Feels a little bit more like the reference. That's probably a little bit better. Okay, so this is just a rough sketch where we're just studying features and we've got some shapes in here of darks and lights. So when I create the final sketch that I'm going to be using for the painting, I'll want to take probably a rough like this and then tone it back. I'm on a new layer above, and I'll create more of an outlined sketch that will look something more like this so that I'm actually tracing over my previous drawing. So we'll have something more like this to paint from. So we won't need those tones and values. We'll just have an outline sketch to work from. So sketch studies like these and the exercise that we did before finding all of the planes and understanding how the light works and the reference, that really gives us a good idea of what's happening in our photo. It gives us something to study and something to familiarize ourselves with what's really going on. It helps us to see like an artist and to really take a informed approach to our painting. So now that we've taken the time to become more familiar with our subject, and the next lesson we'll be laying some groundwork and start some planning for our painting. 4. Exploring Composition: Alright, so far, we've picked a subject. We found a good reference photo, and we took some time to study and analyze that photo. So we're getting a lot closer now to slinging some digital paint. But don't forget that we want to make this painting as easy and relaxing as we can. So let's take a few more minutes to do some planning for the overall composition. I'm going to show you how to generate some quick thumbnail ideas so that we can explore some different options really quickly with very little effort. And this will go a long way towards helping us to visualize what our final painting might look like. So let's try it together. So in order to get started, I've got a Canvas open in Procreate. Again, it is 4,000 by 5,000 pixels. I've got the reference image cropped and in a smaller size here in the corner. Okay, I'm going to create a new layer, and I've got this sort of red orange color selected here, and I'm going to be using the pencil brush again, to do my sketching. Okay, the first thing that we want to do is create a rough sketch of our dog that we can use in our thumbnails. And to do that, I'm just going to create a rough trace of the dog. So this doesn't have to be perfect. Just needs to be just a rough outline to help us visualize the dog in our thumbnails. So I just want to get the eyes in and just some of these different shapes, the nose. I don't want to spend too much time, needs to be enough to help me see and place the dog in different positions in the thumbnails. I'm going to go ahead and get the whole dog here. Okay, that's probably good enough. Actually, he looks kind of sad. Alright, I'm going to go ahead and duplicate and merge those two layers just so that the line work is just a little darker. Move that little line. All right. So now we've got a rough sketch of our dog to work with. The next thing we want to do is create a rectangle that's going to represent the canvas edge for our thumbnails. And we can do that by creating a new layer, and let's just see if we can just create a continuous line and using this rectangle as a guide. I'm going to hold it. And from up here, I'm going to choose rectangle and then shape it just a little bit. Doesn't have to be perfect. These are just thumbnails, so they definitely are not going to be perfect. There's a square or rectangle that I'm going to place down here to do the first thumbnail. Now, the first decision that we have to make is the overall orientation of the canvas. So it could be square, it could be rectangle. It can be portrait like we have here, or it can be more of a landscape orientation. So because our dog is already kind of in a portrait sort of shape, he fits into this shape better than a landscape or a square, I'm going to go ahead and just use a portrait orientation for the thumbnails. Now I'm going to go ahead and copy or duplicate this layer, and let's take a look at maybe some ideas here for the first thumbnail. I'm going to scale him down a bit and just put him here in the center. And then, so if we were to paint the entire dog, he's kind of floating here in the center. So we might want to have something that anchors him. Maybe it's a little bit of ground for the background, something like this that sort of sets a background and a foreground that he's sitting on, or maybe we want to do a more of a design element. So we could do something. Let's see. Let me shrink him down just a little bit. And I think I just want to work on the same layer that he's on here. Okay, so maybe a design element could be a rectangle here, maybe something that just sort of anchors him in the composition. And again, this doesn't have to be a rectangle. I'm just giving this a try just to see how it feels. And again, that's the whole point of these thumbnails is just to try something out. Because he's got the light coming in from this side, I'm going to go ahead and shade in this triangle because I think if the triangle were a solid shape, then he has the light on his side here, and then this area would be in shadow here, kind of like it is in the reference. So it gives us dark, light, dark light, which is just kind of a nice design element, alternating between light and dark. So that is one option that we might could consider. I'm going to just outline this a little bit stronger here. Here's one idea, one possible outcome that we could try. Let's take a look at doing another one. I'm going to duplicate my rectangle here and drag it over, and I'm going to go ahead and merge those two. Let's duplicate our dog again and drag him into the thumbnail. Okay, for this one, maybe we want to paint him a little bit larger on the canvas. Maybe he fills a little bit more space than we did for this one, and maybe our background would have an edge to it. So there'd be maybe white canvas and then our background, and the dog is cropped within that background. So let's just try that and see what that might look like. So if I've got this area that has an edge to it, so this just so the white canvas would almost act like a mat. And then let's just size him down just a bit so that he fits within that. And then I'm going to erase his feet here. Okay, I think that's kind of interesting. I like how his ear might break the edge of the border. So maybe this is filled in solid or a darker color than the puppy or the dog. So there's another possible outcome we might try. Let's do another one. All right. For this one, let's try something maybe a little bit more abstract with the dog's overall shape. So let's duplicate the dog. And let's see about maybe just doing let's remove let's see about maybe just doing the upper half. We're going to remove go to remove his lower half here. And maybe we just want to create some sort of a shape here that just kind of leads our eye down. So we're just kind of we've created this shape that's just maybe a little bit more abstract and maybe it kind of blends off in the bottom. So we know that, again, the light's coming from this direction. So some of this side is going to be in shadow a little bit. So maybe we add some darker paint here and maybe it just kind of goes to the edge. So we have that alternating dark, light, dark light, which is just kind of easy way to create a kind of a design element in the painting. And also, we know that the light is going to stand out against the darks. So that's just an easy way to arrange elements. So maybe we do something like this where we have just these background strokes that are just filling in this dark area, and they're kind of going off in the direction that he's looking, and maybe we want to bring some of that down this way, we'd probably have to create maybe a little bit of a rim light over here, if we needed to break that up, I don't know. So there's another possibility, though, that we might want to consider so let's go ahead and let's duplicate the border again and I'm going to combine those. I think I want to go ahead and scale these down to make room for one more. For this last one, let's go ahead and create a duplicate of the dog sketch again and I'm going to drag it to the top here. Now, I kind of like this one because I tend to paint things a little bit more abstract anyway, and I feel like of the three options so far, this one is probably going to be the most abstract because it's going to give us a bit of room to play with the background and kind of combine and blend some edges, have some harder edges up here, and probably some softer edges down here and just gives us a little bit more room to play with some abstract elements. So in my last thumbnail, I think I want to do a variation on this idea. So I'm going to go ahead and drag the dog here, size him down a little bit. And I'm going to remove its bottom half. So now let's see. If our dog is the light again is on this side, this side is more in shadow. We have this large white area here. So maybe or real highlight area here. So maybe the background is darker down below. And it's going to give us some room to kind of so here we have light, dark, light, dark again. We're going vertical this time instead of going more horizontal or diagonal with our levels of light and dark. So I think that that would work pretty well, especially given that we could blend. We're going to blend some of this down here and probably some of this down here, and the real main focus is going to be his face. So it could be that this gets pretty dark down here. And then there's maybe a mid here, and then lightest at the top for our background. Something like that. Then it would give us some areas to play with a little bit of rim light or highlight along the edges as well. So looking at all of our thumbnails together now, I think I feel the most strongly about this one, but I'm just going back and adding just a bit more contrast to some of the elements just to really take a good look and see what I like the most. I think this one feels very it feels very designed. It looks maybe a little bit more like an editorial illustration than it would be for more of a painting style that I want to use. So I think that this one, while I like it, I don't think it's quite right for this painting. Again, this one is interesting, and I think it would be really cool to have some brushstrokes visible in this border piece here. I think that it could be a really fun way to paint the dog. I like the up close cropped view. I like how the ear could potentially break the border there. I feel like this one's pretty nice. This probably my second favorite. This one, again, I think that the diagonal design would be really nice. But overall, I think I like this one the best just because it's going to give us a lot of room to play with some of these borders and some of these soft edges and some of the harder edges in his face that'll end up being the focal point. And I really think that the dark to light is going to work really nicely with this particular reference, just because we've got light, the dark of his fur here, and then the light on his chest and then into the dark background. So we've got that alternating light to dark again. So in the next lesson, let's take this thumbnail, and let's explore some different color options for it before we move into our final painting. 5. Testing Color Options: So now we have an idea of what the painting will look like. So let's run with it, right? It's so tempting to jump right in, but let's stay cool and relaxed and do just a little bit more planning. That way, this painting will come together like magic. So, what about the colors? There are so many options. How do we decide? Let's take the same approach and try a little bit of color testing on our thumbnail. Again, this is quick and easy and it will help us out a lot. It's like we're making a guide for our future selves so that the overall process will be less stressful. I've got my reference image here, and I've got the thumbnail that I chose here. And I'm going to go ahead and make a duplicate of the thumbnail so that I can do multiple iterations if I want to. And I want to start with just filling the background in with, like, a base tone color. And I think I'm going to go with something like this kind of drab green color like in the reference photo just to start out with. So here, let's try and go we've kind of got this yellowish orange. I'm going to push it a little bit more towards green. And maybe try something like that. So I've got a rectangular selection here that I'm going to drag out. And I want to be on a layer underneath my drawing, fill that, and I'm going to stretch it to fit the bail border. And I'm going to go ahead and take the drawing layer and I'm going to switch it to a multiply blend mode so that my lines are a little darker. And I'm going to create a new layer above the background base tone. I'm going to start to kind of choose some of the just colors that I see, the base colors that I see in the puppy. And I'm going to use the perfect painter brush. Scale it down just a little bit. First thing I see here is this big highlight area which looks like it's a bluish very cool gray. Again, this just needs to be real quick. We don't have to spend a lot of time on this. This is just to give us a general idea of our colors. We don't necessarily need to spend a ton of time on this or get real detailed and try to make it perfect. The shadow area here gets a little bit darker. Side of his nose there. And then there's kind of this brownish tan color on the side of his face. And then we've got a lighter tan. And then we've got the darkest dark, which is probably not quite black. Okay, so what we have so far is the colors that we basically see in the reference, all of the base colors that are fairly accurate to what we see in our photo. So what can we do to add a bit of abstract colors or some colors that we don't see in the reference just to sort of enhance the painting a bit. So what we do have are some oranges. We've got a variation. This background is probably kind of a yellowy green, and we have some blue in our shadows. So we have this sort of orange, blue and yellow, and I think we can probably use those as a bit or add a bit of punch to the overall color scheme. So the first thing let's do, and I'm going to do this on a new layer. I'm going to take this color, and let's just try darkening this base a little bit, this lower portion. And what that's going to do is enhance our lighting that's coming in. And I'm going to take the smudge tool, and it's the same brush, the perfect painter, and I'm just going to smudge a little bit to just soften that edge. So now we can take I'm going to sample this background color and maybe take a variation of it that's maybe more yellow and a bit lighter and maybe just punch up the lighting just a little bit, the border around the puppy. Now, maybe taking maybe some of this blue. Sample the blue there and maybe punch it up some a bit more. And again, I'm just being real loose and playful with this because it's just an experiment to see what might work and what might not. I'm going to blur some of that. It may go even darker with this blue and bring it down in to this area because I think this brown and this blue mixing together is going to make it really deep, dark, almost black without quite going black. Now, if we look really close here, there's our drawing line set to multiply is creating this really like a brighter orange or, like, a deeper orange color that if we sample, we could probably make it more saturated but brighter and maybe add that in. I'm gonna do that on a new layer just in case I don't like it. So just add a bit. See, that's cool. That was an accident, but I like it. Take the smudge tool again and just sort of blend a little bit of that in. See, I think I like how this really saturated orange is playing against this yellow. Like the yellow is the brightest light, and the orange is maybe a bit of the bounce light. And it works real nicely with the blue. So that's kind of a cool way to just enhance the base tone colors. Now, it looks more like an artistic representation of this photo instead of just duplicating what we see in the photo. It's like we've added a bit of a abstract element, and I like the way that those colors are playing together. So just out of curiosity and just for fun, I'd like to see what a little bit more color modification would do to our general idea here. I really like where this is, but just for fun and just for experimentation purposes. Let's go ahead and let's merge all of these, and we'll duplicate those. Let's drag that over and see about just doing maybe a curves adjustment to this. I'm going to add a few points on the curve and just kind of see a little bit of enhancement of the colors might do. I don't necessarily see anything that I like there, so I'm going to undo that. Let's also try a color balance. Let's change the mid tones, maybe to be a little bit more red, and we'll go a little bit more blue with the shadows just slightly. And on the highlights, we'll push towards yellow. Looks like all this is really doing is just enhancing or brightening the colors that we have. So I'm going to go back to midtones, and I'm going to push them way more red. Bit more yellow. The shadows, let's go really blue. I'm gonna push a little towards green as well. All right. Now let's try a hue saturation. I'm gonna push the hue. Let's go all the way, see what we can find here. I take the saturation down a little bit. I'm really not seeing anything that I like more than our original, but it's worth giving this a try because sometimes you do these little color adjustments and you begin to see things or color combinations that you might not have seen otherwise. So it's always fun to do those little experimentations to see if there's anything that you like better. So let's quickly recap what we've done in the past two lessons. We created some thumbnail ideas based on our reference photo, and we explored some different options for the overall composition of our painting. We selected this one, and we experimented with just some basic color ideas and some ways that we can add some abstract bits or enhance the colors that we chose from our base. I think this one gives us a pretty solid game plan for our painting, and this is going to help us to make some decisions and to give us a good basic starting point as we begin to put the painting together. So in the next lesson, let's get started doing just that. 6. Creating an Underdrawing: Okay, it's time to get started with our painting. Now, I like to start with a sketch. This can be a really loose and rough sketch or a more detailed drawing. Or you don't have to sketch at all because I'll provide mine for you in the resources folder for this session. In this video, I'm going to show you how I develop my sketch and give you some pointers on making your own if you choose to do so. So let's dive in and take a look. We get started on the initial stages of our painting. I want to go over and talk about some of the different ways that you can start out on your painting. Now, I like to work from a sketch. Sometimes the sketch is a bit loose, and sometimes it's a little bit more refined. You can certainly start from a loose sketch like this, or you can define some of the details and make sure that you have in some of the shapes and designs that you want to pay attention to once you begin the painting. Now, sometimes I will completely cover my sketch. Sometimes the sketch becomes part of the painting. Sometimes I will delete the sketch layer once I have enough of the shapes established. But I want you to know that there is no right or wrong way to start a painting. So you can work from a rough sketch. You can work from a really tight sketch, or you don't have to do a sketch at all. You can begin to block in some of the shapes that you see with just a large paint brush. So let's take a look at what I have here and how I built up this sketch. Now, I'm going to include this file, along with the resources so that you can have this initial sketch, and you have the layers and everything set up so that you're ready to paint and the next lesson. Now, when I'm doing my sketch, I like to consider different kinds of shapes. So to me, there are construction shapes like what we see here, and there are design shapes which I'll pay more attention to in a more refined sketch. So what I mean by construction shapes is that we might have the overall, like, construction of the forms and things that we see. So for example, this circle this circle here, this circle here, his nose, his eyes, his neck here, this overall shape for his body, this little square here and maybe kind of a triangle that comes off for his ear. This little those are really construction shapes, and they're just basic shapes that I'm using to define the forms. Now, from this rough sketch, this construction sketch, I'll usually go into a more refined sketch. Now, again, you don't have to be this detailed with your sketch, but I tend to sort of dig in and I really like to draw. So sometimes I will just begin to define all of these shapes, and it's like building a roadmap for me, and I really like to dig in and just refine my sketch to a point that the next stage almost becomes like a paint by number where I'm just looking at the sketch and I'm just filling in shapes or I'm just adding color to it. If I turn off the rough sketch, you can see more clearly the defined sketch where I'm really paying more attention to design shapes. Now, what do I mean by design shapes? So for example, if we look close at his eye here, you can see that there is a shape here of darker fur around his eye, and next to it is this bit of brown fur and then white before it goes to dark again. So if we look here, I've tried to identify that same shape, which is right here. And what I mean by designing these shapes or identifying these shapes is so that we can paint in that dark as a shape because it's really easy, and I hear this a lot about painting fur, and our tendency is to want to draw each individual strands of fur. And that becomes a little bit too busy. It becomes a little bit too much of a distraction too detailed. It's a lot easier to just define the shapes that you see. So, for example, this bit right here is some of this fur that we see here where the white is transitioning into the dark. So this shape here is this bit of brown fur above his eye. So again, here, this dark shape up here is defined right here. And I try to define I try to design these shapes as much as possible. So instead of just going like this, I might try to make it a little bit more designed. So it's got a little bit more shape to it. And this reads a little bit better. In the final painting, it makes things a little bit more clear. It makes things a little bit more or easier to define these transitions that we see between dark and light fur. Now, another thing that I want to point out is I tried to enhance his expression a little bit in my drawing, and I hope that that will transfer to the painting as well. So I tried to increase the size of his eyes just a little bit and that he's looking up, and his nose is also a little bit bigger and a little bit more extended, just because I wanted to try and enhance his expression as much as possible or just bring that out in the drawing as best I could. So now that we have our sketch ready to go and we've talked about some of the different ways that you can get started, I think we're ready to start laying down some paint in the next lesson. 7. Blocking in The Initial Colors: Guess what? It's go time. Get your digital paints out and your coffee ready. And this one we'll be laying in our first layers of paint. I think you're going to be surprised at how quickly and easily we'll build up this painting because of all the initial planning that we did in the previous videos. But I could go on and on. Instead, let's get painting. Alright, now we are ready to begin our painting. So again, we've got our sketch file here. This is 4,000 by 5,000 Pixel Canvas. We have a few layers here. This is from the ultimate Canvas creator. This is the Brushstroke Canvas from the paint media set. Now, I've got my reference images open over here. This is an app called Visref, and I've got my little thumbnail image that we created just to remind me of the general idea for our composition and for our color scheme. Okay, the first thing that we want to do is to tone our background because it's easier for us to paint in our darks and our lights if we're working from a mid tone versus this dark white background. So I'm going to turn on those canvas layers, and you'll be able to see a slight bit of canvas texture. And as soon as we fill the background, you'll be able to see even more brush strokes come to life. So for our background, I'm going to choose sort of this medium yellow, sort of olive green color. Right about there. And when we do that, we can immediately see all of these brush strokes that are revealed once we choose a background color. Okay, so similar to what we did earlier with our thumbnail, we want to start blocking in some colors into our sketch. So I'm going to do this. I'm going to go ahead and delete my rough sketch layer because I don't really need that anymore. And I'm going to create a new layer below my drawing. I'm going to start with the whiter color that we see in his chest there. And I'm going to select a blue and again, get that kind of warm or not warm, but cool gray, cool light gray color. And I'm going to go with the perfect painter brush from our brush set to start blocking in these colors. And it's okay to do this really rough and loose and maybe leave a few open spaces in between the brushstrokes, because those will be filled in in a later step. Okay, looking at the reference, I think as the form of his chest begins to turn, it's going to shift a little bit darker. I'm going to bring my gray down just a little bit. And I want to get a little bit of a warmer gray. I'm gonna shift this over here to this orange yellow because I want the shadow here underneath his neck or on the left side of his neck and chest to be a little bit darker and a little bit warmer. Go ahead and bring that same color up onto his nose here or his snout. So I'm looking for all of the places that I think that this sort of gray tone comes into play. I'm going to switch back to my lighter color here, my lighter bluish white. This part on his nose and the end of his snout here. Okay? I'm going to grab kind of I'm seeing kind of a burnt sienna sort of reddish brown color there. I'm going to see if I can get something similar to that. And I'm going to paint again, I'm painting all of this onto one layer so that these colors can be blended and smoothed into one another. I'm looking for places where I think that this color matches what's happening in the reference. Okay. I'm seeing some places where it looks like the color gets a little bit lighter. So I'm going to just bump my color up just a little bit. It creates a little bit of variation in a couple of those spots. Then let's get a little bit more yellow, maybe a little bit lighter or more saturated, more warm. Filling in these lighter areas of fur that are on his head there. Taking a look. Let's go ahead and let's drop in a darker because there's this darker fur behind his eye and his ear. Let's get that in and then we can re evaluate. And I'm just eyeballing the colors that I see in the reference, I'm not sampling colors or anything like that because I think it's a little bit more interesting when you kind of just use or try to pick a color that you're seeing versus sampling the actual color that's there. I think there's something about it coming to life a little bit more when you are using the colors that you think you see versus the actual colors that are there. Again, I'm just using my sketch as a guide. If you chose not to use a sketch, you're just kind of blocking in these colors as you see them and just eyeballing it as best you can. Size my brush down just a little bit to get the nose back up here because there's actually a couple different shapes I think in the nose that his nostril is very dark. Go a little bit lighter here to get this part because there's a little bit of a highlight on his nose there, and actually I've defined that a little bit in the sketch, so let's see if I can capture that. I need to go even lighter. Always come back and paint a highlight in a later stage. Again, this can be pretty rough. It doesn't have to be perfect. I'd be like we're taking oil paint on this initial stage, blocking in some shapes a little bit lighter on my gray. See if there's anything else, get my darker color back in here on the mouth. Okay, we're probably looking pretty good so far. Let's see. I need got a couple areas here that are a little bit lighter than the dark. There's this little transition of hair right there and right there that's not quite as dark. Go even lighter on that. Now I'm just looking at it. I'm just going to zoom out a little bit. I see a little spot I missed in the nose there. And looking comparing it to the reference just to see if I've kind of blocked in. I think I could probably go a little bit lighter up here. And the same kind of highlight is right over here. I think I can define this area just a little bit better. Gray. Helps to kind of zoom out like this and just try to see it as a whole. Now that I'm zoomed out, I can kind of see this area below the nose could be probably a little bit darker. So I'll grab that gray, sample that gray and maybe go lighter because there's a bit of a gradient right there, so it probably needs to be blended just a bit. Okay, there's also looking at it. I think this area here could be a little bit darker. So let's try that. I'm going to size my brush up a bit because this is a larger area. I notice I'm not erasing. I'm just painting over what was there. Et's go a bit darker than that. Not too terribly worried about being super precise with my color selection, either. I'm just kind of eyeballing, getting in what I see. I believe his collar is red, but I'm just going to sample this color from his fur and just add that little bit there. I'm going to take the smudge tool with the same perfect pain or brush, and I'm just going to smooth a little bit of those brush strokes that I just added to darken that shadow. I think that will work pretty good. I'm gonna smooth that just a bit. I think I'm going to go ahead and take a look at this now, study it for a bit and just evaluate what I've done. Taking a look, I think the eye could use a little bit of refinement at this stage. So let's go ahead and size the brush down. I just want to darken in that pupil area there and get a little bit of that detail I can still see my drawing. That should give us a pretty good starting point for our base colors. So the next one, let's take a look at addressing a bit of our background and maybe bringing in some of those additional colors that we had in our thumbnail. O. 8. Painting an Abstract Background: How are you feeling so far? It's coming together, right? We haven't even done much, and I already like it. Now, let's see if we can add some cool abstract strokes into that background. So in our thumbnail, we sort of had this darker color that came up, and let's go ahead and see if we can add that in. So I'm going to just sample my background color here and let's make a darker version of it that's maybe a little bit more warm. Let's go ahead and we'll just take the perfect painter again, but we're going to need to make it larger. And let's do this on a layer that is underneath our blocking in of our dog here. So we're just going to make it even larger than that. We're just going to lock in some of this area down here with some dark color. And we can take the smudge tool, same brush, scale it up, pour a little bit of that in so that it got a little bit of a transition We can also go ahead and let's make a backup. So we'll duplicate the blocking in stage here, and we'll turn that one off. And then on this one, we can go ahead and start to just blur a little bit or blend a little bit of our background in or our blocking in of our dog, we'll blend it into the background. I'm also going to take the flat unloaded acrylic brush here for the smudge tool and use that brush a little bit, do some smudging just to give it some variation. I want this to be bit bigger, about 75%. Now, in our thumbnail, we had this glow or this yellow in the background. Let's add that in and try that. Let's do that one on a separate layer. And maybe let's try putting it underneath the dark, see how that works. So let's grab let's sample the background again, and then we're going to go quite a bit lighter, maybe slightly warmer. And I'm going to go back to well, yeah, let's try the flat unloaded for this and just to give us some variation in our strokes. And we're going to add this kind of across the middle here when the brush will need to be quite a bit larger. So this is a really good brush to just put in these real big broad strokes with. And it's also going to peek through in some of those little openings that we made in our brush strokes on the dog. So we can go ahead and bring those up into the dog's head as well and just let that fill in. I think that would be nice because it's adding a really nice highlight. I'm going to take the Smudge tool, and I've got that same flat unloaded. I'm just going to blur some of those just so that they blend a little bit. I I'm going to sample the background color. I'm going to go back to that layer. And I'm going to try. I'm gonna try this distressed palette knife because I think this will give us even more. Yes, that's going to give us even more variation. So I'm going to size that way up. Yeah. So this would be as if the paint were still wet and we took a palette knife and just kind of swiped it across the paint. So what we're going to do here, let's go ahead and combine those two layers so that we can do some really nice Do some really nice blending and smudging with that brush. So I'm just giving it some quick, real quick strokes. It has a really nice organic look to it. I'm going to sample the yellow again. Do the same thing kind of into the Into the dark. And I want to do the same thing, actually, coming back to our dog layer. I'm going to do the same thing, but I want to use the smudge tool and that distressed palette knife. To make it larger. I use the brush now to add some of that color back in. All I'm trying to do is get a really sort of organic looking transition between these colors. I'm pretty happy with how this is coming together. So if the stroke is too strong or it stands out too much, I just remove it or undo it. I think that is a pretty good starting point. I'm going to add a few more strokes up here around the ear size my brush down a little bit. Let's see if we can bring in a bit of this orange and maybe some of this blue to start to add a bit of abstract color, a little bit more color interest in what we've got so far. Before we do that, let's do a little bit of experimentation. Let's create a new layer above everything else and go with maybe a sort of a neutral orange brown tone, something similar to what we have in his face here. And let's switch this layer to color dodge. And I'm going to change my brush over to the airbrush, the precision tip. And the opacity is really low here, and the brush size is up around 50%. So I'm going to start to just kind of spray in some little bit of color here with this color dodge layer, and it's going to give us a little bit of a highlight, and it's going to vary up the colors just a little bit for us. Give us a little bit of color variation. And it's real subtle because the opacity is down so low, and I don't want to get real heavy with it. I just want to just dab a few colors here and there. I really like the bit of orange glow that it added right here. That's actually what we're going to try to enhance here in this next step. Right, let's go ahead and make another new layer on top of everything else. And let's get a really hot orange red color, similar to what we had here in our thumbnail. And let's switch back over to the distressed palette knife. Size it up a little bit. It's around 30%. And let's just see if we can just tap in a little bit of these palette knife swipes of just really intense color. I'm kind of focusing in this area, maybe up here in his ear, this ear as well. I'm doing these little taps because it's kind of like little flicks. It's hard to see, but it's just these little scrapes of color that I'm adding here and there. Don't worry about if it's super subtle because we're going to enhance it just a little bit here in a second. If you don't like it, you can always just tap and undo and try different directions as well. Sometimes I'm tapping so lightly that nothing goes down. That's okay, too. Okay, now let's see if we can handset a little bit with another layer. And this time let's go let's try the smaller brush three down here. These are some brush strokes, paint effects. And let's just try let's just drop one right here in the middle. And I'm going to take the eraser, and it's set to the perfect painter. And I'm going to brush this pretty large. I'm going to just erase like, most of that and just keep the little bits that I want. So see how most of it got erased, but there's these little bits that are still there. It's just giving us a little bit more of that real bright orange effect. So I'm dropping it in, but erasing most of it. Let's go ahead and sample this yellow here too and maybe do one in yellow, but I'm going to do it on a layer above our color dodge layer, get it a little bit lighter. Same thing. I'm going to erase quite a bit of that. And let's do a variation. Let's try the thick paint swipes, maybe over here, whoops and erase some of that. And again, it's just giving us this or it's enhancing the sort of abstract nature of the painting. So it's making it look like some of these brushstrokes were put down really quickly and loosely, and it's just giving a real nice abstract feel to the overall painting. Let's also add maybe a little bit of the blue color. Let's try that. I kind of like it without the blue, but let's just try it and see how we like it. I'm going to drop this onto a layer above the color dodge layer. And I'm gonna switch over to this thin glaze, and let's just see if we can be real subtle with it. I'm gonna make my blue a little bit darker. Yeah, I think that will probably be okay. I'm going to erase a little bit of it and just make it kind of subtle. I think we'll leave it at that. Just a little touch of blue. Part of me wants to add it a little bit over here, though. Yeah, I think that'll work. Just a little hint of blue down there in the bottom. 9. Defining Some Details: It's looking really good, and you're doing a great job. We've just had some fun adding big bold strokes. Now let's zoom in and focus on some details in the dog's face. It's our focal point in the painting, so we want to put most of our detailed work there. Remember to stay relaxed and take your time. There's no need to rush this step, so let's tackle it together. Okay, so now if we zoom in on the face here and we take a look at our reference and kind of zoom in there as well, and we may have to turn off the drawing layer. And we can see that some of our details are kind of fuzzy. Like I didn't really detail the other e there, and there's a little bit around his mouth that needs to probably be touched up. Maybe some stuff up here that we just need just to get right and to get balanced out. So in order to do that, I'm going to turn my sketch back on so that I can see that. And I'm going to get a layer above everything else. And I'm going to go I'm going to go with the perfect painter brush, but we're going to need to size it down some so that we can get these details in. So I'm going to start here with the nose. And I'm going to turn my sketch. Actually, I'm going to turn it off for just a second to make sure that my shape here is correct here on the edge. So if I set my eraser, it's already set to perfect painter, as well, and I might need to make a little adjustment there because I want that edge to be pretty well defined. Oops, I'm going to need to be on the going to need to be on the initial block layer. Size that down a little further. It's just some space that I got a little bit carried away with. I'm just going to adjust that. I'm going to get back onto my detail layer and I'm going to just sample colors out of the painting. And probably going to need that brush to be a little bit smaller to get that in. Okay, we've got this little bit of a highlight there on the nose. So I'm going to just grab a lighter gray color. See if I can just paint that in real lightly. Got another detail. There's a little highlight right there. Get something to get a couple strokes to kind of represent that. So we've got a little bit of a darker shape here. So I'm going to sample a darker color there and just kind of add that shape in comes down and almost connects with the mouth right here. And then it looks like I need to define the mouth shape a little bit better. And because of the nature of this brush, it's still going to look like an oil brush stroke or an acrylic stroke. It's not a real fine detail brush, so we're still going to have that sort of painterly look. Okay, so I completely missed this shape here. So I'm going to go ahead and add that in. That shape kind of curves around to the nose here. Since the mouth has some detail in it that's important, I want to make sure that my shapes are looking pretty good. So there's some of these little whisker dots, get some dots in to represent those. I don't want to be too detailed on them, so just some little abstract marks will probably be enough. And I'm going to set the smudge tool to a perfect painter, as well, just so I can kind of smudge some areas if my marks are too strong and kind of blend them in that way. Okay, so if I turn the drawing off the mouth is looking a little bit better. Let's go ahead, connect that little shape there. Connect those. So I need a little bit of a transition color. I'm going to grab that gray there and just add that into the edge. It's just little subtle things sometimes. Like there's this bright white, there's this darker gray. But then in between, there's just this little triangle of transitional color there. There's just a little bit of lighter gray. I need to bring my sketch back to figure out kind of what's happening here. So it looks like this white color needs to connect a little bit better. We need to have this gray. So a little bit too much of a gap there. Looks like this gray. I'm going to sample a little bit lighter gray needs to come down and connect all the way back here, where we've got this darker color. Again, I'm not being super, super worried about detail. I just want to get those make sure that those shapes are represented. Okay, so for example, this is a bit darker back here, and I kind of want to carry that over. But I don't want to go this dark, so I'm probably just going to sample this and then just make it a little bit darker. And then I'm going to size my brush up. Probably just going to take some of that and blur it or smear it smudge it, and I've got a little bit darker area here, so I'm going to sample that. Just make sure that that's coming down. Again, just kind of blend it with a bit of a smudge. So what I kind of like to do sometimes is just make a large smudge like that and then just kind of come back and touch it up just because I think it looks cool and it's kind of fun to do. I think it helps it helps the colors blend a little bit better, I think, because if we were doing a traditional painting, then we would be using some larger brushes and some smaller brushes, and we would be smearing and moving paint around. And that's kind of that mixture of small strokes and big strokes kind of helps to represent that process, I think. O. Okay, so now we've got a bit of a darker transition here that probably needs to happen. So let's just grab this darker brown color here. Here with that. Filling in a few colors where there's a little bit of my too much gap. Okay, we definitely need to address the eye over here because it's just completely non existent. So let's get We're on the perfect painter brush. Let's get this dark color. And we're going to need to size this down pretty good. And I want to represent the black here that's the skin hanging over the eye. We need to get the pupil in there. Some of this dark color that's going around. Again, it doesn't have to be spot on perfect. It just needs to be a nice shape to represent the eye. I'm going to soften a couple of edges there. This is just sort of moving paint around. Okay, there's a couple of little highlights that are happening here that are really gray, not exactly white. So let's get those in. Down here as well. Adding a little paint and smudging it in just a bit. Okay, so that's looking pretty good. Let's look at the eye here, and I think we've got some dark that transitions over to light. So it's a little bit darker on this side over here. And that's just a really small detail, but I think that it plays a big role in the finished piece. I think it'll look a bit more realistic in the eye. So I think I want that color to be a little bit more saturated. I'm going to get that black sampled again so I can get that. Detail back in. Little more saturated bit there. So that his eyes match a bit better. 10. Final Adjustments: Okay, now let's take a step back and see if any more details or adjustments are needed. We're getting very close to wrapping this one up, and I hope you're as excited as I am to see the finished piece come together. Alright, at this point, I think I'm going to go ahead and turn off the drawing and just take a look at what we have and see what needs a little bit more definition, if anything at all. So if we zoom out on our reference, we can make kind of a comparison and just make some adjustments. I think I want to add a little bit of a harder edge, maybe here and here. It looks like the mouth needs a little bit. The highlights a little strange to me here, and maybe just define that white stripe there and a couple highlights in the ears. So not too major. Maybe it's dark on the neck area there, just a little bit too. Okay, so sampling some more colors here. Let's drag size up our brush. Add a few colors there into the neck. It's probably a little bit too dark. So I'm looking at this area of highlight underneath the neck Shadow. Then we sample this darker color. Collar in a little better. I'm gonna take our orange that sampled. Bring that in for the collar there. And let's see. Let's take this white. And let's cover up that orange bit. Let's take this bit of highlight and add kind of a shape there to the ear, just a couple strokes. Y. And let's take Okay, so here's kind of a good example where a little bit of shape is being lost. So this dark kind of comes down and connects and sort of defines that line right there on his head. So I need to address that in a way where this shape is not necessarily lost to the ear there. So I'm going to sample this dark color. And let's see if we can kind of connect. I don't want to just draw a line because then that would stand out even worse, I think. So I think just something like that will help. There's also a bit of a darker tone in here. There Oh. What's that? Speaking of that, let's take a quick look at the nose. How is this happening? So I guess my palm coming down on the painting is creating some stray marks. Those are easy to get rid of. If that happens to you to take this gray so now out here, it's turning underneath there. So we need to define a little bit of shadow right across here, and that can just be done with just a few strokes. I'll just blend those just a little bit. Okay, his mouth is also a little bit darker there. Just little details. I'm going around at this point and just adding these little bits of detail. And I'm making small adjustments. Yeah, I can see that this shape here is a little too large in comparison here because it's kind of it's a big deal because it's changing his expression. So I definitely want to address that. Again, I'm just sampling colors that are already existing in the painting because that makes it a lot easier to make these adjustments. If I start bringing in new colors at this point, I might have to begin adding them around in different places to make it feel balanced. I go to darken this. There's a little bit of a shadow here and here. A lower the opacity on the brush and just see if I can darken this area under the nose. Okay, zooming out and studying a little bit more. I think I'm going to make an adjustment to his edge of his head here. And then I'm also going to adjust the shape of his ear. And I think that's probably about it for our detail layer. In the next video, let's take a look at making a few more enhancements before we start wrapping things up. 11. Going From Good to Great: Alright, the finish line is close on this one. Let's see if we can make a few more adjustments to really give the painting an extra kick of movement and color. This is my favorite point in the process where we can call it a success, but still look for ways to push it from good to great. Okay, taking a look at our painting now, I feel like there's a few areas where there might have been some black paint that might have gone over the edge or some white paint that might have just gotten in with some of these orange brush marks or palette knife marks. So I feel like there's some areas here where we can just add a few more of these little abstract sort of details. Let's take a look at adding another layer on top of our details layer. I think I'm going to go ahead and combine these initial abstract layers that we did, but I want to leave the color dodge on its own layer just to make things look a little bit more simplified here. We're on this layer above everything else. I want to take let's try our distressed palette knife again, sample this black and maybe just add a couple of little scrapes I'm going to erase some of that. Some areas if I don't like where it lands, take some white as well. I actually think I want to add the white with an effect or a paint effect here. Let's try this. Let's go back to the smaller brush three, and I'm going to drop this on its own layer and I'm going to size up my brush, as back some of those marks gives it this little bit of abstract brush marks. Let's see if we need to add a black over here. I'm going to go with one more white here and there. Most of that gets erased, but it does make everything look a little bit more uniform, a little bit more abstract, a little bit, again, it was painted really quickly, and I think that's kind of part of the look that we're going for. So let's also see if we can maybe add a bit of a brushstroke type border using this orange all the way around the edge as if maybe the painting had an orange underpainting and we didn't fully paint all of our strokes or all of our background to the edge. So let's get back to this orange color. And let's drop this on its own layer. Let's take the flat unloaded brush, and let's just add some paint around the edge here. Again, a lot of this we're going to remove And let's try. Let's take the eraser with the flat unloaded brush. I'm going to size it up. Got it around 60, 70%. I'm going to erase some of those marks that we just made. Now, on the same layer, let's take the turpentine wipes. Actually, let's do it on another layer because we're probably going to need to move it around some. Add one there. We'll merge it down. New layer. Take another one. Rotate it. Leave it there. Maybe one more merge those. Right there. Merge that layer. So now we have a little bit of a painted border. I think it's maybe one more final adjustment with our brushes. Let's try Let's go on a new layer. Let's take this same orange, and let's go back to our airbrush and just see if there is maybe a few areas that could be blended just a little bit with a light airbrush. Let's see. Our opacity is down around 30%, let's just lightly brush in or I guess we would be spraying in some light airbrush orange. It makes it look a little bit softer in a few areas. That's probably enough. It's super subtle, but it does make a big difference as far as blending some of our colors together. All right. Now let's do one final color adjustment on the entire image. So let's three finger swipe down and choose copy all. And then let's make sure that we are on the topmost layer, which is our layer group, the canvas layers, and three finger swipe again and choose paste. And that should put a layer on top of everything else that's everything flattened. Okay? Go ahead and close our reference. And let's let's do a color balance. Let's start with the shadows. Let's push them a little bit towards blue, very subtly. And let's go with midtones a little more towards red, or the highlights, probably can leave those where they are slightly towards yellow, just very, very slightly. Okay, now that we can look at our painting in this final stage, there's one more little tweak that I want to make you aware of that it's available to you in case you want to use it. So sometimes when I'm layering on paint and I'm paying more attention to how the paint's going down versus maybe the details of my sketch or the proportions of the subject, things can get a little bit out of whack. For example, I feel like maybe the side of his head is maybe a little bit extended a little too far, and maybe his lower jaw here is a little bit too rounded. So what we can do is, let's first make a backup. Of our layer there, and we can do adjustments and liquefy and then size our brush appropriately, and we can just do a little bitty push without distorting the painting too much and just make some little fine tuning adjustments there. I think I may even bring his eye up just a little bit, make that little tiny little tweak. All right. Now, looking at our final finished painting, let's talk about all the things that I really like that we've accomplished here. So I love the overall abstract nature. If you zoom in, you can see all these brush textures and all these abstract marks, and it really gives the painting depth, and it's a nice representation of the subject. I think that we've done a really good job of capturing some of the details and the focal point around his eyes and nose. And then as the painting extends out, the details become less sharp. And there's all these just really pleasant brush strokes and just these wipes and things that I really love to see in an abstract painting. All right. This concludes our painting for this session, and I'm really proud of you, and I'm so grateful for your willingness to try something more abstract and colorful for this subject. So thanks for painting with me, and stay tuned for the next video where I'll be sharing some final thoughts and some next steps. I'll see you there. 12. A Final Word: You so much for hanging out and painting with me. I hope you really enjoyed it, and you found some new skills along the way. Over the course of this session, we explored the different things to look for in a reference, how to study and become more familiar with the subject, how to plan for composition and color, how to sketch an under drawing, and how to develop the painting from initial layers to final finishing touches. I hope you feel confident to take on your next painting and keep challenging yourself to continue improving. Thanks for letting me be a part of your artistic journey, and I'll see you soon.