Easy Cartoon Backgrounds with Kit-Bashing

1. Introduction to the Class: Welcome to this course on cartoon background, the sign. My name is Martin, and I'm so excited to share everything I know about a topic that is not commonly talked about. Keep bashing backgrounds. Keep bashing involves using pre-made assets to build an illustration from the ground up. My goal is that by the end of this course, you are able to keep batch something of the level of what you're seeing right now. Even if you're a complete beginner who can draw. And that's the thing this course is ideal for complete beginners want to get started in the world of illustration and more specifically, back on the sign. But who feel like the main barrier is that they can draw there are two reasons. The first one is that we are going to draw everything with a keyboard and mouse. You want neither inexpensive tablets at all. We're going to use the fantastic free vector restriction program, Inkscape. And this type of program allows us to draw everything use in a normal, everyday keyboard and mouse. I've included a full mini-course that will teach you not only everything you need to know to use Inkscape, but also the principles behind vector illustration in general. And the second reason is that we're going to illustrate by keep bashing our backgrounds, we're going to use a fairly beefy list of pre-made assets that I will provide. We will assemble this background that you're seeing now. Well, not only know the fundamentals and cod that you need in a very concise and practical way without you ever having to grab a pencil. Now, if you could only use the assets that I provide a venue will be quite limited, no matter the quantity or flexibility of them. So I've also included a few lessons on how to expand and even create your own asset backs. I want you to learn as much as possible from this course. If you need any help, please don't hesitate to contact me through the course page and I'll respond as quickly as possible. I'm incredibly excited to get started, and I hope you are too. Let's dive in and have some fun. 2. The Method and Some Explanations: In this lesson, I want to explain a bit how the course is gonna go. I wanted to go over what's gonna be in the curriculum and what can you expect out of this course and how we're going to proceed? So what you're seeing now is the project that we are going to be making throughout the course. By the end, you should be able to not only replicate this a sin, but also make our tone backgrounds in a similar quality to what you're seeing now. Now, as I said in the intro, in this course, we'll be drawing and illustrating using keywords and mouth. This was made using just a normal everyday keyboard and mouse. We are program called Inkscape. The program that you're seeing right now, except is a free open-source vector illustration software. In case you don't know what a vector illustration is. I'm going to go more in depth in the Inkscape section that's coming right up. But it is a type of illustration where you draw using the mouse. And it's different to the way a traditional pixel base illustration software like Photoshop, e.g. works. Because here you basically are building a drain by modelling it like a 3D modeling application. But obviously into the, that's what allows us to illustrate with the keyboard and mouse. Working with vectors is generally used for simpler illustrations that are heavily shaped based like e.g. graphic design or more relevant to our case. Cartoons. In my opinion, if you are a beginner interested in getting into background assign, maybe for animation, for games or whatever. There is no better way to get us started that learning the basics through the use of a vector program. I know it is a bit unusual to say that, but I do think that working with keyboard and mouse, it really helps you into not getting bogged down in. Unnecessary worry is like if you have a tablet or if you can or mudra, which is not as important as you think, as you'll see later on in this course. So in the next section, I'm going to include a full mini-course I made a while ago on the basic concepts behind both Inkscape m vector illustration. In general. It lasts about an hour or so, and it's very complete, at least for illustration purposes. Save costs are a lot of features regarding graphic design that we don't care about. So I left them out. I must admit that isn't exactly the industry standard. I'm sure professional productions either go for Adobe Illustrator or some of the vector tools in Photoshop. But the great thing about ink say is that it is much simpler and faster to numb. And what's more. Once you learn the methodology of vector illustration, you're gonna be able to transfer that knowledge to any other major application that you want later on. Once that you have a firm understanding of the problem that we're going to use. I'm going to show you a very beginner friendly system. I have to build really beautiful looking cartoon backgrounds super easily by taking advantage of the tools in a better software. Here's the key of that system. This is a pack of different generic Catherine assets that I made for you. With this back and abit of reactivity, you should be able to build your background by throwing together some of these acids. Here you have clouds, bushes, trees, stones, mountains. Pretty much everything that you may need for a nature scene. Of course, it is nowhere near close to be the complete set of assets you might need for everything, Go type of illustrations. I can possibly make a pack for any possible type of diagram. But one of my main goals for this course is to get you to the point. You can modify the items, draw on top of the illustration to create unique elements. And even create your own packs from the ground up, like e.g. a. City park or a decile pack. And I'm going to show you how to do that next. So this is more of something to get you up and running while you master the program and the system. Plus, believe me, when I tell you that you can do a lot, even with much less assets than this most backgrounds you will make and will require only a few of these add best. Now, here's the thing. There's more to a beautiful background that just throwing assets together and see if that results in something good looking. You need to understand certain theories and principles to help you come up with the best possible looking background. You need to be able to come up with nice-looking color schemes to create interesting focal point. Now how to guide the eye to important areas of your composition and understand and draw the correct elimination. You'll notice that the assets don't have any light or shadow on. You're going to have to have that yourself. And for that you need some basic knowledge or friendly. So as we move on with the course, I want to throw in some theoretical information as we apply them to practical background get bashing. Now this eureka topics could take an entire course on its own. So I can go in depth into any of them. However, because we are working with cartoons here, we don't really require an in-depth knowledge. That's the great thing about cartoons, where it's just a bit more leeway for artistic interpretation on these concepts. So that means that we can get around by learning and understanding the theory. But maybe only the condensed version, the 20% that gives us the 80% of the results. And with that, you can actually get pretty far. I wanted this course to be more practical, more hands-on. I originally envision a very dense and complicated the curriculum that on a three, either not serve the premise of the course at all. So in this version, we are going to appeal to a project that will show you everything you need to know how to use this method, including the theory and the practical tools. It's really impractical and a waste of your time for me to talk and work in real-time for the four to 6 h that the project takes to complete. But I don't think that you can benefit the following along the illustration, along with the theory lessons, demonstrated normally in ten to 15 minute lessons with fast-forward and a few timescales. But I've included the entire real-time version of it. If you want to follow. If you do, I would strongly recommend you to first watch the lessons, internalize the theory and the two Senate and maybe testing them on your own. And only then move to follow the real-time version. And of course, once you finish the course and everything has sink, then I recommend you to immediately practice making your own backgrounds. Following the same process is only by experimental that you truly learn. I can promise you that by the end of the course, you'll be able to make backgrounds similar to what you're seeing now. But you need to put the work to get results. So follow along, do the exercises, and get ready to put on a lot of practice. And this will be especially important for the next section, which will be being saved me, Nicholas talked about except is the base for all our illustrations. So you have to be quite comfortable with it. So we can focus on the more complicated stuff, the main subject of this course, the backgrounds. In any case, if there is something I can assure you, is that the entire course is going to be super fun. So let's get started. 3. Introduction to the Inkscape Mini Course: Hi there, I'm Martin. And in this mini-course, I want to show you the basics of how to use the amazing free vector illustration software, Inkscape. My idea is to create a fairly quick and easy introduction. Not only do this after Inkscape, but also to the wonderful world of vectorization. You see vector illustration is considerably different than the original drawing. That is a whole new set of concepts. You have the lung that and the fact that you have to learn how to use a fairly complicated program means that usually Inkscape courses tend to be really long and dense. Sometimes you don't want to learn my whole program to take a more exciting course that uses it. And that's what this course is all about. To get you up and running with the basics of not only Inkscape, but also the principles behind vectorization. Of course, if you want a more in-depth view of the program, I encourage you to check out my other course on Inkscape. Or if you prefer, I've left you in the file resources, a list with some of the best free resources to learn all about Inkscape. The links ranged from full hour long YouTube video tutorials to 20 min up and running Britain articles. So with that out of the way, go to inkscape.org, download the latest version and salad NICU in the next lesson. 4. User Interface: In this lesson, I want you to get familiar with the user interface. This way. By the end of the lesson, at least, you'll have some general idea of what each of these bars and buttons to, or at least how they are organized. Because I know all these tiny buttons altogether can get to be pretty confusing, especially if you've never worked in a vector software before. But the first step is getting the program. Inkscape is a free open-source software, which means that you can download for free the latest version in the official page and save that. One style. Does it go to the section that says downloads? Then you'll see a list of multiple download options. Just pick the one that fits your predator system, then download it and install it. Once we opened the program for the first time, this is what you're going to see. This is the default user interface. So what I'm gonna do now is going to be going one by one and give you a we can loose idea of what each of these UI elements do. Later on as we move on with the goddess, I'll go more in-depth into the relevant bars and buttons. The first array element you're gonna notice is going to be this big white area with this black rectangle in the middle. This is the drawing area. This is what you'll be making your illustrations. This area is way bigger than it looks in, extends infinitely in all directions. So you have a lot of space to draw whatever you want. As far as the black rectangle, this is a guy the brand creates by default in all new documents. So it's going to appear in every new document you create. This guy is here because instead is a vector illustration software. And these types of programs are mostly used for graphic design. This guide is made for the creation of PDFs, dad's brochures and that kind of stuff. Where it's helpful to have a clearly defined border. But for what we'll be using it, digital drawing, you can safely ignore it and draw whatever you want in the white area. This highlighted bile, it's called the common sweater. And it has a lot of shortcuts to the most common actions of the program, like open and save files, copy, paste, new document, and that type of stuff. This vertical bar, it's called the snack bar. And it has a lot of options related to snap in. So you can position shapes with more accuracy depending on the type of drawing you may want it enabled or not. And you can toggle snapping on and off with the first button. I recommend you that for now, disable snapping altogether, at least while you're still learning. Because it can bother you later on when you start to move shapes around, the shapes that snap into every cent accidentally. So I recommend you to disable it now to avoid future problems. This element right here with a lot of tiny squares, it's called the palette. If you have a selected object, you can give it a color by clicking on any of these swatches. If you use the scroll bars, you'll see that you have a ton of colors to pick out the ballot is the status. Well, this bottom shows a few important options regarding the document. Likes selected colors soon, current layer. And it even shows you some really nice deeps and shortcuts as you go using the tools. The ruler is this element that stuck to the left and upper side is the drawing area. This element marks the position of the pointer with a ruler and numbers. This ruler can get to be useful if you are working in something related to the graphic design area. For illustration, it's pretty much useless, as well as the scroll bars, they are completely useless. They allow you to pan the document. But as we'll see in a minute, the best way to move around in the document is by using shortcuts. Finally, the two most important elements in the user interface other than the drawing area. The total box, which is this vertical bar that has all the tools you'll be using to draw anything. Later on we'll be seeing the most important tools so you'll get pretty familiar with it and then use it to control as well, which has the options of the currently selected tool. So they kind of work together with the toolbox. Sadly, enslaved doesn't offer much as far as UI customization goes. Or the elements are basically stuck where they are. So you'll have to get used to it, like it or not. However, you do have the option of Haydn, each of these elements we just saw, if you go to View and then Show Hide. See this list with the names of all the elements by next to the name. That is this checkmark which shows which ones are activated. Just to show you, I'm going to hide them all so you can see how the interface looks without an element. Now all the elements have been hidden. All but the drawing area. Is pointless to hide. And of course, the main menu. If you have space problems due to the low resolution of your screen. Or if we want this slightly bigger drawing area. Or maybe if you're going for a more minimalistic UI. There are a few elements that I consider to be safe to hire for almost all drawing projects. The commons, while the one with the shortcuts to the basic actions, that's safe to hide. Worst-case scenario, you'd had to make a couple of extra clicks to open the main menu without those shortcuts. It does so safe to hide the ruler and the scroll bars legacy, those elements are not the most useful for drawing and illustration. And if you want, you're going to suffer the status well, the sum of the deeps and circuits that shows when you get done can be helpful for a beginner. There's one less customization option. This allows you to switch the position of the command bar and the snack bar. If you go to the View menu, then here you see these three options, default, custom, and while. That default option leaves the comments about on top and the snap, but on the right, particularly the custom option leaves both bar on top and the white option both on the right vertically. It's not much, but it can help you in case you're working in a low resolution screen and you don't want to hide anything. The rest of the options of the program handled by using docker will dialogues. In Enscape Dakota, Dylos are floating windows that you can open and close and can be docked to the right. And they have comments and options related to a particular area that are at dawn of dialogues. Pretty much every big important area of the program has that dedicated dialogue. Branching from the, branching from color selection to document the options. We'll go more in-depth into particular the ILOs as we move along. But for now I want to show you how the UI works. So I'm just going to open a random dialogue by going to the top menu. You can see when a menu will open up a dialogue, when it has these three dots at the end. So I'm going to open the objects dialog. This dialogue contains information about the individual objects in the document. By default, the first time you open a dialogue, it'll be dark to the right of the main windows. Remember that all the dialogues are floating dialogues. So if you click on the title, you can drag it off. You can live with float in there. Then if you want, you can dock it right back by moving into the right side. Keep in mind that you can only dog Dylos to the right side. You can not dug them anywhere else. If you open more than one dialogue, then start to stack into columns, one on top of another. That has no more vertical space. When you stack multiple dialogues, the body of the dialogue will automatically, this little bar with the dialogue with data will appear. If you click on it, the dialogue will swap with the one that's showing. If you don't need a dialogue anymore, you can close it with the X button in the title. Close dialogs will retain the options that you may have set. You can also click on this little arrow in the title and convert it into a vowel on the right, that's vertical. This will help you to save space and keep the dialogue they're ready to be opened again. Now if we wanted to show it, just click on the icon. We find in this lesson, I want to show you how to use the shortcuts to move in the document. When you're drawing, you are going to have to constantly move from one side to another as you go building your drawings. So it's very important to learn the shortcuts. So moving in the document becomes second nature. Lucky for us. We only need to know two circuits. They are really easy to learn. To pan the camera. Just hold the middle mouse button and move it. You're going to see how the guy that rectangle move side-to-side as the camera moves. If you have an actual drawing in the document, you will see it moving as the view of the document changes. If you don't have a middle mouse button, you can also use the space bar. The other type of camera movement is the song. The song is extremely important. Remember that we are working with vectors, which means that you, the resolution independent shapes as you draw, you will be constantly wondering too soon to work in a particular area, to add detail. Assuming it's really easy, just hold control and move the mouse wheel up or down. Depending on if you want to zoom in or out. It really nice detail is that when you are assuming in your Zoom to the position of the pointer, if you want to go to a particular area, just move the pointer there and zoom in. If you don't have a mouse with wheel, you can zoom in and out with the plus and minus keys. Though this way you only assume to the center of the document. And that's it for the user interface of insane. Hopefully the program won't look as intimidating. Now. Of course, as we move along, we'll be needing to learn how to actually use some of these options. But by then, hopefully you'll be ready to learn model of the program. In the next lesson, I'll be showing you every sound related to the creation and handling of objects. 5. Objects: Before we begin with the tools you'll be using to draw. First, you have to understand the way to build your drawings using Inkscape. As you may know, in CEP is a vector illustration software. And vector illustration is considerably different than traditional drawing. In traditional drawing, using either pen and paper or a drawing tablet. You draw using lines that outline the shapes you want your drawing to have. This way is by far the most flexible way to draw. You can make a square or cube or figure with the same level of effort. On the other hand, when you draw with a backdoor software, you build your own shapes. And then you just stack them one on top of another until you build your final illustration. This workflow is meant to be used to create what vector softer were originally made to do graphic design, where most of the illustrations are made of flat and simple geometrical shapes. And this way of working strongly influences the type of drawing you'll be making. Flat and graphical, cartoony drawings with simple forms and silhouettes are way easier to make with the tools the program has than complex, expressive, three-dimensional ones. However, the benefit of working in a vector software has more to do with convenience than artistic potential, is way easier, faster and effective to use the mouse directly on the program to draw a simple, cartoony character. Now I'm drawing it on pen and paper and then scan and refine the image to them. Draw on top from the beginning. Maybe with an example, things will be clearer. What you're seeing right now is a tree that I drew for a course of mine on background design using Inkscape, which by the way, you can get here on Udemy on my profile. This tree is built off for different shapes. First is the trunk, which is simply an elongated triangle. Then the branches which are also elongated triangles, then the leaves, which are triangles that I call the edges a bit. And then the shadow, which is a slightly more complex shape. As you can see, the tree consists of geometrical shapes, scale, skew and modify it. But 100 per cent simple geometrical shapes stacked one on top of another. The great thing about working like this is that it is extremely easy to create variations. E.g. this is the end result of the project of the background design course. All these trees that are in there are copies of the original that I just changed the color them modify the position of some other funds. And the basalt is that a large part of these words were made with a single tree in minutes. The real way to draw this way, you need two things. First, a way to create your own shapes. In the case of the trees, the different triangles and the shape of the shadow. And second, obviously a way to manipulate those shapes, to move them, rotate them, duplicate them, and stack them. E.g. in the case of the three, I just drew a single shape for the leaves and the other ones were duplicated, moved, and scales into position. In this lesson, you're going to learn how to do the second, how to manipulate objects. But in order to manipulate objects, first, you need to be able to create objects. Luckily, in FAPE comes with four geometric shape tools that allows you to create objects fast and easy. They add the rectangle tool, the ellipse tool, the Star Tool, and the spiral tool. As a side note, there are also the tools that allows you to create your own custom shapes. But they add a bit more complex and we're gonna be seeing them later. So click in any of them in the toolbox. And you're gonna see that the pointer changes. Now it has the shape of the tools that you picked. In my case, it has the shape of the rectangle. Now you can draw your shape. Simply click and drag. Once around. You are going to see these data, the murky with this tiny shapes in the borders. This means that the shape is selected. This tiny shapes in the borders are the modifiers. And they allow you to make some basic modifications depending on the shape. In the case of the rectangle, if you click on the squares, you'll be able to change the width and length. And if you click on the little circle, you'll be able to round off the edges. Both operations are very common and you're going to be using them all the time. Each shape tool has different basic operations. I recommend you to play around with each tool and see what each does. You will be surprised to know how useful and flexible can be a simple rectangle, an ellipse. Doesn't pay attention to the huge amount of objects that have rectangular or elliptical shapes. Then you start using these tools to draw. The first two tools, the rectangle, an ellipse tool. You're going to be using them in 99% of all the drawings you'll be making. Because as we'll be seeing in the next lesson, they are very easy to modify and easy to use to create different shapes, as well as the other two, the polygon and the spiral. Usually you'll be using them whenever you need a style or a spiral. So they have a limited use. Now that you know how to create objects, we can take a look at the main tool for handling them, the objects selection tool. This tool is one of the most important in the entire program and you'll be using it constantly. It allows you to do pretty much everything you may want with objects. You can select them and place them, move, rotate, scale, duplicate. In a lot of other essential operations that you'll be using in all illustrations. Let's just start with the most basic. Select the tool and click in any object in the Canvas. If you don't have any object, a few with the shape tools. Once you click on one, you will see this dotted rectangle with these arrows and the coordinates. This means that the object is selected. There are operations that are only possible to make when you have a object selector. To unselect an object, just click outside in any empty area of the canvas. It is also possible to select multiple objects. This is really useful to apply an operation to multiple objects at the same time to the list, just click on an empty area and drag. You're going to see this rectangle. All objects that are fully covered by this rectangle will be selected. Alternatively, you can hold the Shift key and click on new objects to add to the selection. The move an object, click and drag. It's not necessary that the object is selected beforehand. You can just click on an object and move. It is also possible to move multiple objects at the same time. To do this, first, select the object you want to move, and then click on any of them and drag. The objects are going to maintain the relative distance between them. One of the most common operations there'll be doing is to delete objects. Delete an object first selected, and then hit the Delete key. It's very common that you'll want to duplicate an object or group of objects. It's really easy. First select the object or objects and then hit control D. An exact copy of the selected object is going to be created on top of the old one. And it's going to be automatically selected. So it looks like nothing happened. But if you move this object, you'll see that the other one is down there. The little arrows that appears when you select an object are really important. They allow you to scale an object in the direction of the arrow. That is to stretch or shrink in the direction of the selected arrow. Simply click on any of the arrows and move the mouse. If you click on a selected object without moving the mouse for a second time, you see a different group of arrows. The arrows in the corners, we're gonna be able to rotate the object no matter which one you pick. The rotation pivot will always be in the center. The arrows in the middle, the one that points to both sides, allows you to skew the object from the center as well. And this was the basic operations you need to know about the object selection tool. But there's one more essential operation to manipulate objects that you need to know. But it isn't the two contrasts. Well, if you remember from the previous lesson, or tools have a group of options that are displayed in this bar right here. Even the shape tools that we saw a minute ago had options in this battle. Though not the only one that was worth to mention. The object selection tool has a couple of important options worth checking out. And just like everything I'm showing you here, are recommended to stop the video and get to play and see what you can discover. If you let the pointer on any of these options, a tooltip will appear telling you more or less what each does. However, the ones that we'll be seeing now, these four buttons over here that are grouped by these separators. These four buttons allows you to change the stacking order of a selected objects. Let me explain you. As I said a minute ago, when you draw using vectors u dot creating shapes and then stacking them one on top of another. Each created the object has a stacking order number. Which identifies which object is on top of which. By default in CEP places the last created object on deposit stack. But as you may have guessed, I mentally you need to change the order of a couple of objects, e.g. in the case of the tree I showed you in the beginning, the trunk is on top of the leaves and the branches on top of the trunk. And the shadow is on top of everything. But didn't originally made it like this. To me, it was easier to draw the trunk first and then draw the leaves accordingly. When I draw the leaves in save obviously put them on top of the trunk. I had to move them below by using these buttons. First and last button of the group allows you to move the object to the bottom or top of stack. Very useful if you have a lot of objects. And the two in the middle allows you to move a position up or down in the stack. These four button lets you draw without the need to keep in mind the order in which you're dry shapes. Practically every illustration you'll ever do will need you to arrange the stack position of a couple of objects. Now I want to show you a few really important and useful shortcuts to use with the object selection tool. Now, I won't be going over all the shortcuts because they add a lot. If you are interested, you should check the manual. But I am going to show you the essential ones that you'll be using all the time. It's possible to move the selected objects with the arrow keys in the keyboard. This will move the object just abit. This is great to make some minor adjustments to the position of objects. However, if you need, by holding Shift, the object will move a greater quantity. It's very common that you may want to select an object that's obscured almost completely way or another. You can select an object directly below it, selected one by holding the Alt key and clicking where it should be. Even better. Move the mouse to be on top of this text objects. Hold the Alt and use the mouse wheel to highlight the object you want. This one's are really important to the creation of shapes. You can make the scaling of an object uniform. This is useful for maintaining the proportions when scaling, just hold the Control key and a scale using any of the arrows. If on the other hand, you are rotating or rescuing an object with the other group of arrows. Holding Control will snap the transformation to a fixed angle. This is most useful with the rotation, since it will snap to common angles like 45 degrees or 90 degrees or so. Then if the Shift key, when scaling this will automatically change the scaling pivot to the center rather than the opposite side of the selected level. If you listen, shift to rotate or scale, where the pivot point is already in the center, then it will move it to the opposite side rather than the center. The Shift key can embed the period composition from center to Cornell and back. Of course, you can also use both Control and Shift together. A very important detail is that both the Control and Shift shortcuts work at the moment of dragging to create a built-in shape. So you can easily drag it perfect circle with the ellipse tool. If you hold Control or drug or rectangles from the center, if you hold Shift or create perfect squares from the center, if you hold both at the same time. Before and in this lesson, I want to talk very briefly about a very important subject related to objects. And that is color selection. Because color works slightly differently in a vector softer replication. And it may require a quick explanation. In Inkscape, all shaped objects with no exception have these two properties, a field and a border that surrounds that feel. To these two properties, you can assign them color, gradient, patterns, textures, and you can even make them invisible. But some of these options are a bit more advanced so far. Now, let me show you how to give your objects fill and stroke any color. In order to do that, you're gonna be using the palette element is releasing. First you select your object, and then you click on any of this lectures. This is going to assign the color to the object's field. There are a lot of juice. If you move the scroll bars to see that you have hundreds of possible colors. Pretty much every color you may ever made. It's also possible to assign any of these colors to the stroke instead of the field. Just hold shift and click on any swatch. But there's one of these swatches that has this weird symbol. The first one, the white one with this red X. This swatch has a unique function. By assigning this swatch to either the fill or stroke of an object, you will make it invisible. As I said a moment ago, all objects with no exception have fill and stroke. So it's not possible to erase either, but it is possible to disable them temporarily. And that's what this swatch does. At least deal, you select another color and the fill or stroke goes back to the visible. With the substance. You have a lot of control over the appearance of a shape. But the pilot is more useful to quickly change colors. For a complete control over the way the shape looks. You're going to have to use the fill and stroke download. This dialogue not only allows you to pick between all possible colors, instead of the p, select the swatches of the palate. But also allows you to change the stroke size, opacity, and other appearance related properties. To open the dialogue, go to object, Fill and Stroke. The first thing you'll notice is that this Taylor has three tabs to change the fill color and other identical for the stroke color. And a last one for the properties of the stroke. The first two tabs have exactly the same options, but depending on which one you use, the color will be set to either the fill or stroke of the selected objects. Let's take a look at the options. So select an object and click on the first tab. We're going to start by changing the field. The first thing you'll notice are these ten little buttons. This will set the type of painting that's gonna be applied to the fill or stroke. Don't worry, in real life you'll only be using the first two. You can safely ignore the other eight. The first button with the x is just like different swatches palette. By selecting it, you disable the fill or stroke. Depending on the WOR. The button right next to it applies it a color. A bit like if you were to click in any of the other swatches palette. But the difference is that now you can see a group of options to pick the exact color you want. These five protons here will change the mold with which you select a color. But I'm telling you right away, 99% of the time you'll be using the one that says wheel or the one that says HSL. You can forget about the others completely. For now, pick colors using the wheel mode. This color selection mode will display all possible colors, like the classic color wheel with a hue on the outside and the saturation and lightness on the inner triangle. The last tab, the one that says stroke style, allows you to change the size of the border, and a few other options. Again, there are a lot of options here, but the only one we care is the first one, the one with a label that says width. Here you can set the stroke width you want with an input right next to the input. That is this drop-down menu with different units with which you can pick the width. Picking the right unit is important. I recommend you to always pick the one that says bx, that is pixels. I believe that is the most comfortable and unpredictable unit to do any purely digital work. There are a couple of sliders that are independent of the W pick. One that says blur, another one that says opacity. The one that says blur will apply a blur to the selected objects. You're not going to be using this option to match, except for a specific cases. The slider that says opacity is a bit more important. It allows you to apply transparency to the entire object. With this dialogue, you're gonna be able to give any possible look to your shapes. Steal the pilot has its place though. Usually you'll be using the palette to make super quick changes and the freelance stroke dialogue to do more deliberate changes. And also to change the stroke width, which can be done with the bullet. And that also you need to know about objects from now. What you've learned in this lesson is the base for everything that will come later with the knowledge you have now, you can try to make some basic illustrations. Of course, you still need to learn about the other half of vectorization, how to create your own custom shapes. So for now you'll be a bit limited of what you can do. But practice is essential. So I'm going to leave you in the resources and except document with exercises designed to help you to completely mastered everything you've learned in this lesson. I strongly recommend you to at least check this file before starting the next lesson. 6. Paths: As I said in the previous lesson, knowing how to create and manipulate objects is half of what you need to be able to draw in Inkscape. The other half is knowing how to create your own custom shapes. Inkscape brings in these four basic built-in shapes that we saw in the previous lesson. But no matter how flexible the rectangle an ellipse our sooner or later, you're going to need a unique shape to draw something you want. In this lesson, I want you to learn everything regarding how to create and manipulate paths. Paths, or the way Inkscape handle the creation of your own shapes. The way Beth works is going to need a quick explanation. But I want you to know that paths, just like built-in shapes or objects, they can be manipulated with the object selection tool. So everything you've learned in the previous lesson applies to any past omega1. This lesson. Just like in most vectorization software, bus are made of Bezier curves. A Bezier curve is a type of curve that's defined by the position of two nodes and the position of two handles attached to each node. By changing the position of the nose, you change the starting and ending position. It handled affects a certain quantity of the form that takes depending on its position. This way, by changing the handles, you can give your curve any type of possible curvature between two points. You can even make a completely straight curve if that makes sense. Don't worry if this feels a bit confusing. Once you start creating and manipulating curls, you're going to see that it's way less complicated than it seems. But that's the way a single curve functions. What's interesting is that it's possible to attach one curve to the end of another and repeat this deal. You close the shape by attaching a curve, joins the beginning and ending of the chain. And this way, you create your own custom shape that's built by multiple groups where each column is a different section of the path. There are a few tools that allows you to build path directly. You have the pencil tool that allows you to create paths by drawing them as if you are using an actual pencil. This tool is most useful with a tablet to draw more naturally. Then you have the calligraphic tool. Again, more useful to create interesting looking strokes with a tablet. But the most important tool, not only in SAP, but in most vector illustration software is the pen tool. This tool is by far the most flexible and powerful of all the tools that creates paths. Because it allows you to create paths node by node. And because of this, you can build your own custom shapes with rate control and accuracy with the mouse. Something that will be really hard to do with a traditional illustration software. So pick the pen tool. Now, every time you click on the Canvas, you're going to place a node. Once you place the first node, you see this red line following the pointer. This line is there to help you visualize the shape the curve is going to take when you place the next node. You can place as much notice as you want. And when you went to finish the path, click on the first node, the one with the little white square, or to close the path. Now you no longer gonna be able to edit the path with the pen tool. The shape is finished and ready to be used. By default, the pen tool disables the handles when you click to place a node. The nodes create these completely straight Bezier curve. Later on you'll see that this behavior is really useful to sketch shapes fast. But it is possible to place a handle when creating the nulls in such a way that you introduce a curvature. When placed in a note just click and drag. You will see this handle that moves with the mouse. Pay attention to their previous realization line is going to show you how the curvature is gonna be when you release the mouse. It's also possible to leave the path open. Simply place the nulls we want. And when you're done, right-click. This is going to finalize the path addition in the last place node. Now you can leave it like this, or if you want, you can append more sections by clicking on any of the n, also with the pen tool, the ones with the little white squares. Whenever there is an open path, you can always keep adding more sections. Open paths are useful for a couple of things, but mostly to create lines. Here's an interesting deep when creating a path with the pen tool. When you create a node with a curvature due to a property of the nulls that we're going to see in a moment. Sometimes the node is going to force a curvature into the next section. You can see this in the previous section line. So if you want to create a straight section connected to a curve section, a good tip is to de-select the bath. To end the editing in the last place, dealt with the curvature. Then continue appending your straight sections. From that end. With the pen tool. You shouldn't be able to draw pretty much everything you do with a real life pen or pencil. And this is the power of the pen tool. It gives the control and flexibility of a real-life pen or pencil to your mouth. But the real power of the pen tool really starts showing when you use it with another tool, the null selection tool. They're not Selection Tool. It's just like the object selection tool. But for paths with this tool, you are going to be able to do things like create, delete, and move nodes in a path, change the curvatures and change the properties of individual nodes. In other words, it allows you to completely edited path after it's been created. As you rarely are going to draw a perfect path the first time around with the pen tool. This tool and return a path. It's a very common operation that you're gonna be doing all the time. That's why, just like the object selection tool, this tool is one of the most important tools in the program. To be able to edit the path. First, you need a path. So create a quick path with the pen tool. This is important because the node selection tool won't work with built-in shapes unless you do something to them that we're going to see later. To select a path is just like with the object selection tool. Click or drag a rectangle to select more than one. You're going to see these dotted rectangle indicating that selector. But you're also gonna see the notes that makes up the bath. Now, if you click in and out your selected, you can see that it's selected because it gets blue. Now, just like with the direct selection tool, you can click and drag to move the node, select multiple notes and move them all at the same time. Of course, it's not possible to rotate or scale an old. After all, a node is a single point. You can also try some of the Object Selection Tools, circuits. One especially useful is the Delete key. To delete the selected nodes. Even more important is the possibility to add no sway path. You can add notes in any location of a girl by double-clicking. This will, of course, the binding curve. When you place the nulls into two curves. This way, you can completely change the overall shape of a path. But the one operation that really gives you a complete control over the path is the handle manipulation. When you click on a note, you're gonna be able to see the handles of that node. By clicking in the little circle at the end of the handle. You can move it, allowing you to completely change the curvature. Once you start to play around with paths, you probably noticed that a couple of things. First, that nodes belong at those three curves. One show a handle. And second That's some handles are stuck together with a curve right next to it. So when you move one handling one side, the other side moves to the opposite side. Let's start by checking what's the deal with straight curve notes. Straight curve nodes don't have handles because they are Melinda. There is no curvature, so there is no need for handles. This raises a big question. How do you introduce a curvature to a straight line if you don't have the handles. Well, another awesome property of this tool is that it's possible to edit the curves super easy and fast with no need to use the handles. If you move the pointer to a section free of nodes, you're going to see how the icon of the pointer changes. And it shows this handler. If you click and drag, you'll see how the curvature moves. Depending on where you will have the curve. The movement will be different. This is exactly the same as going handled by handle, fixing up the gulp. What's model? You can see both handles adjusting as you move the curve. I strongly recommend you to do most of your editing by using this method because it's way easier, faster than an intuitive, even if you do have a bit less control than when using handlers. Now, let's see why sometimes moving a handle in a curve affects the gut right next to it. In order to make drawing certain shapes easier, it's possible to change the way a note the incisions, the curvature from one curve to another. You do this by using the right node type. Let me show you. Take a look at these three paths. I created. These heartless shape. Has these sharp corners and bend the lines. Pay attention to the nulls and you'll see that they have these diamond shapes icons. This icon will indicate to you that the nodes are of Cornell type. With Gunnar type nodes, the curvature won't carry through the node. That is, the curvature in one curve won't affect at all the other curve. Obviously, this type of node is used to create corners. Though there is nothing keeping you from trying to create a smooth transition. This type of node is also used for strike Carlos. Since each curve ends in a corner. The final shape is made entirely of smooth surfaces. You can see that they are smooth nodes because they have this square shapes. Instead of the diamond shapes of the corner melts. Gradient something like this with Garland nulls will be a nightmare. Instead, all nodes are set to smooth. Smooth, no other forces. A smooth transition through a null. No matter how much you move it. It's impossible to create a gardener using this null type. When you move the handle from one section, the one in the other belonging to the other section moves as well. They are not independent of each other, like with the corner type, this type of nodes you're going to be using for pretty much everything. That's another corner since it helps you to make soft and elegant curvatures through. I know at the moment of drawing your path. Instead we'll decide automatically the type of nodes based on the shape of the bath. But if you want full control over the curve after it's been drawn, you need to be able to change a node to any type. If you have selected the node selection tool and check the two controls while you're gonna see a lot of options that aren't important right now, so we're going to skip them. But these four buttons over here allows you to set the node type of a selected node. But like you've seen in so many cases before in this course. In reality, you'll be using the first two and you can completely ignore the other two. If you're curious about what the other two do, they change the null type to a small variation of the smooth type? They are rarely needed, so they are not worth your time. The first proton is the common type. When you set a smooth nodes to this type, nothing appears to happen. But if you pay attention to the icon, you will see that change to a diamond. Now you can move the handles and the curvature won't get past the North. The second button is the smooth node type. When you said that corner node to smooth, this will introduce a curvature based on the angle of each car. This is important. Sometimes, rather than start making your path from Cedar with the pen tool, you'd like to start with a built-in shape. But if you try to modify something with the no selection tool, you see that once you select it, it won't show you the notes and you can modify anything. It just shows you the modifiers of that tool. This is because technically this built-in shapes, I'm not paths. They are special tools to be able to use them as paths. First, it's necessary to transform them to a path that is a special command that does just that with the shape selected. Go to object, and then object to path. This is going to transform the object in its current state to an actual path. Now you are going to be able to see and modify the notes and currents as if you made it yourself, but you no longer have access to the shape modifiers. Boolean operations are an essential part of most illustrations you'll be doing. They are used to simplify some of the work. At the moment of creating some of the more complex shapes. Boolean operations, like the name implies, worked by following the classic mathematical Boolean formula. Take into shapes, path or built-in shapes as input and outputs a single path. As a result. There are a total of six different types of operations. However, for illustration, you only realistically need three of them. The other ones aren't really that useful or not worth the extra energy in leveling them. I'll be skipping those. Their union is just to join two or more shapes into a single path. Just delete the shapes we want to join and go to Path union. Or they're really easy to remember shortcut Control. And plus, this type of operation is mostly used for two things. First, to create organic looking shapes like bushes are clouds, by performing a union with a lot of simple objects. The other common use is to create complex mechanical shapes made of simple forms like goggles or robotic parts. The difference operation will take two shapes. And the resulting shape will be the shape below minus the area where they intersected. To perform this action, select two intersecting shapes and go to path difference or the shortcut, which is Control minus. We will often use this operation to gallop or delete a section out of the shape. The intersection operation is similar to the difference operation, only that it will keep the area where two shapes intersect and delete everything else. Use it, go to Path intersection or the shortcut Control asterisk. This operation is mostly used to limit a shape, the silhouette of another, often to create shadows or highlights that fit perfectly in a complex silhouette. So as you can see, everything you can do with Boolean operations, you can do manually. But most of the time it will be really time consuming and tedious. So take your time to get comfortable with each operation. Use the shortcuts instead of the menu and do all the exercises I left you in the exercise document of this lesson. This was the last piece of information that you need to be able to create any type of illustration that you may want using Inkscape. Of course, there are a lot of program features. I haven't showed you tools and comments that are pretty useful but maybe not essential. I strongly recommend you to check the exercise file for this lesson and make them all more than once if you need it. It's really help you to get everything you've seen in a practical way. So don't skip it. For the next lesson. I want to give you a quick overview of a few features of the program that you could experiment with, as well as showing you a few important tips that I've found to be essential to any type of illustration. You see an X shape. 7. Tips for Using the Program: In this final lesson, I want to do two things. First, I want to talk very quickly about a few features of the program that we didn't cover because I thought that they weren't essential to most illustrations you'll be doing. Second, I want to give you a couple of what I think are really important tips that will help you avoid a lot of headache in the long run. First, I want to start with an essential tip that I think every Australian culture now, I believe that in most tutorials, for the most part, everyone forgets about one of the most important parts of working in Inkscape. Switching between the two selection tools. And switching between these two tools is one of the most common actions you'll be doing when drawing. At the end of a day's work, you'll end up wasting a ton of time moving the mouse to the toolbox to switch to the right tool. A little like when you are learning in a 3D program. And everyone tells you that you should get used to the keyboard shortcuts to their manipulator tools as early as possible. Otherwise, it will be forever a slave to move in the mouse all the way to the UI. Every 2 s. The default shortcuts are a little bit awkward for my taste. The toolbox is set to the function keys F1, F2 of three. So I prefer to set my own custom shortcuts. You can edit the default shortcuts. If you go to Edit Preferences. Here you go to the interface. Keyboard shortcuts. The tools are in the contexts list. You can search in the search box. I recommend you to set the selection tools to something like a and S or Q and W. Something that is not as separated from the rest of the default non toolbox keyboard shortcuts. And since you're there, you might as well set a couple of shortcuts to the next most used tools. You'll be using the pen tool a lot. So I recommend you to set a comfortable shortcut for it. And very important, a tool you'll be switching to constantly. The dropper tool. The dropper tool allows you to sample the color and set it to the field. Or if you hold shift the stroke of the selected object. This tip has to do with the color mode with which you select colors. If you remember, in the freelance stroke dialogue, you get to choose from five different models to select color. In the lesson back then, I told you that you should concentrate in only 2 mol the wheel and the HSL mode. The wheel doesn't need explanation. It's just the will of colors. You can see the relationship of colors and then set the saturation and value once you pick the hue. However, I think that you should get comfortable with the HSL mouth, since it's the most important to picking colors for our illustration. In R3, say classical theoretical representation of color that uses three variables, hue, saturation, and value. The heel is the actual color. Can be blue, green, greenish, yellow, etc. The saturation is how pure a color is. The less saturated, the higher quantity of gray that color has. Saturated colors are very vibrant, while these saturated colors are far more pale. And mentally, if you crank down the saturation of a color, you'll reach full gray. Value is how light or dark a particular color is. At no lightness, the color becomes black. The HSL color selection model, which stands for hue saturation and lightness, which is the same. That value maps this classic representation by using this color selection mouth, you can compare whether the hue, saturation or value of the colors, e.g. to imply a surface in shadow, you can sample the color of the surface in light and then lowering slightly the lightness slider. This type of comparative color selection is something you'll be doing all the time. So I recommend you to get used to handle colors using this model. Okay, he goes to a few of the features of the program that we didn't cover. Some of these features are quite important for some styles or types of illustration. Though I wouldn't go any of these features essential to all illustrations. That's why I decided to leave them out. If you think you could use any of these features and would like to know more. I'll leave you in the resources, a list with the best links to learn more about Inkscape. Remember when I told you that you can not only add color to an object, but also other types of paint. Well, in common illustration, the other type of pain that you will most likely use will be the gradient. A gradient is just a way to create a blend between two or more colors in a linear way. Often used to generate some subtle effects like the sky change and colors are some basic lighting. In Inkscape, you can create, edit and apply gradients to both the fill and stroke. Radians are created by using the gradient tool in the toolbox. Then you drag on an object. This will create two stops. Each stop is going to have a color assigned. To assign it a color. Just click on stop and pick a color like you would normally do with a common object. Depending on the options set in internal controls while you create a linear or elliptical gradient. Right next to these options, there are two buttons that allows you to set two. What are you going to apply the gradient to the field or stroke? You can move the position of both stops. This way. You'll be changing the direction of the gradient. And you can do this with either the gradient tool, whether node selection tool. It's also possible to add more stops with the gradient tool selected. Double-click on any section of this line that joins both stops. If you'll remember, in the objects lesson, I talked about the fill and stroke Diana. And that at the moment of picking a paint type, you get to choose between these ten little buttons. Well, a few of those were to assign a gradient as a paint. Begin any of those gradient buttons, a few options will appear. But given that most of the options shown in the fill and stroke dialogue, I've also shown in the gradient tool controls. I've found that it's not necessarily to think about the options in the freelance drug dealer. In fact, I recommend you to completely forget about them and handle everything through the gradient to controls. We didn't cover the snack bar. And that's because snapping, It's not something you'll be using in all your drawings. But it is important and it can help you with some types of illustrations. By clicking in the very first button, you'll enable or disable or the snapping functionality. As I said in the UI lesson. By default, these three buttons should be enabled. This will give you the snapping that you want. So I would recommend you to not touch anything here. If you're feeling adventurous and you want to play around with this file, you can just leave the mouse on top of a button and get a nice tool tip that will tell you more or less what it does. Once a snapping is a naval, shapes will snap to each other. You will see this little x just before the shapes. More. Snapping works with both objects when you are working with the object selection tool and nose. When you're working with a no selection tool or when you're creating a path with the pen tool. Clipping allows you to limit the visibility of a shape to the silhouette of another. After the clip is done, you can edit the clip shape inside of the node selection tool. And no matter what, the changes won't show outside of the silhouette area of the object. In illustration clips that are often used as a more robust way to create shadows and highlights than using the intersection operation. To create the clip, you use two objects. First the object you want to limit the visibility or the target object. And then the object that you want to use to limit the other or the clipping path. The clipping path has to be above the other in the stack order. Then you select them both and go to Object clip set. My favorite method, right-click Set clip. Once it's done, these two objects will become a single glyph shape, which you can move, scale, rotate, and do pretty much everything you can do with other objects. But now you can edit the shape inside with the node selection tool. And the shape won't show outside of the equilibrium path. If in the adult selection tool you have this button too good on, you can edit the clipping path itself. To unclip. You can go to Object, clip, release or right-click, bellies clip. Old shapes you added it will keep the changes, whether it is the equilibrium path or the target shape. Then it's also a similar feature to clipping masking. Masking has the same functionality, but with the difference that it has a few transparency features to make clipping is simpler, so I prefer to use them over masks. The effects are modifications that change the behavior or looks off a path. Some of them can be very useful to open the path effort dialogue, go to path, path fx, to Allied Path effect to a shape. Simply click on the plus icon in the bath effects dialog. This will bring up a list with all path FX available. Now you just select the one you want. And the effect will be applied to the shape. It's possible to add effects to build in shapes. But this may transform them into path depending on the effect. To delete the path effect from a shape just to click in the minus icon. Any modification you did with the effect will be lost. Almost all path effects enables one or more control, handles or curves on the shape to manipulate the parameters. You can see an access these controls within our selection tool. If the object is selected, then the effect options will be shown in the Pacific dialogue. With an effect active, you can still modify the object and nodes. However, depending on the effect, this may bring buggy and unpredictable behavior. There are a lot of path fx, icon possibly go through all of them. But the truth is that you don't need more than a few for most illustrations. Effects are something you learn better when you add experiment by yourself. And that was it from the goddess. The goal of this course. Although then prepare you as fast as possible to take other Inkscape dependent courses was to at least left-click wanting to know more about these fantastic and extremely powerful free vector program. And Libya in the resources link with the best free resources I've found to learn and master Enscape. So if you want to know more, now at least you have a strong foundation. I believe that with what you've learned in this mini-course is enough for you to go and tackle any of my other courses. Knowing more of the program will only make you a better and more confident artist. Saw the time spent learning more about it is never wasted. 8. Inkscape Techniques 1 - Boolean Operations: Before we begin with the brush act, in the next few lessons, I want to show you some of the basic tools and techniques that we're gonna be using all throughout these gods. Pretty much every cent of what I showed you here. It's common to all vector illustration, not just came out. So if you've never worked with a vector software before, it's gonna be especially important to get familiar with these concepts. In this lesson. In particular, I want to start with one of the most important features of vector illustration, Boolean operations. I know that about Boolean operations in the mini goals. But then I showed you the mechanics of how to use them, not what they are actually useful in illustration. And this is what this lesson is all about. But before that, let me remind you really quickly what our Boolean operations. Boolean operations are a group of tools the program has that work by making two or more shapes, interact, and outputs a single path as that assault. Boolean operations do not need to be performed with custom paths. They can be used with built-in shapes like ellipses are rectangles, but the resulting shape of the operation will always be a path. An important detail is that Boolean operations only work with shapes with them or Gustaf, but not with other types of objects like important images or groups. There are a total of six different operations that say bring sin. But in practice, only three of them are really necessary for most illustrations. They are the union, the difference, and the intersection. With that out of the way, let's begin with a union. The union will join us, select the shapes into a single path. Often used to create organic masses of objects like clouds or bushes. Creating organic shapes like these can be way faster than using the pen tool to draw the silhouette manually. And it gives you a lot more fine control and flexibility. Take a look at this cloud. If you pay attention to the silhouette, you'll see that it's actually made up of multiple ellipses overlapping. This is something that will be really easy to do using a union. So take the ellipse tool and draw a lot of ellipses overlapping to build the silhouette of the Cloud. Now pick the object tool and select all the shapes. Go to Path union. What are the really easy to remember shortcut, Control and blues. Now the Cloud is a single path instead of being made or multiple ellipses. Now you can see and edit the notes with the node tool. Now, I'm sure you're thinking, why couldn't we just leave all the ellipses together overlapping each other? Well, for once, it's more uncomfortable to control an object made of a single shape. But the most important benefit of having a single path is that we can modify the silhouette of the shape, since it's a path. That is something we cannot do if there are a bunch of separate the shapes together. Now, if you select the note, don't. You can play around with the path and make the silhouette much more interesting. Like I said a minute ago, the union is perfect to build objects that have these organic bumpy silhouette like Laos or bushes made of ellipses. But it can be used to build pretty much any complex shape that's made of multiple, smaller, simpler shapes. In another command use will be to create mechanic looking shapes like goggles or man-made objects. The good question you should be asking yourself is if you need them multiple shapes to be a single path for whatever reason. And if they do, build it with a union, the Boolean difference will generate a shape. That's the first shape. Minus alleles we intersected with the second shape. In other words, you need to cut out or carve a shape by using another one. A couple of important difference with the union. First, you should only use two shapes. The difference does not work well with more than two shapes. And second, the shape that's going to cut the other one should be above in the stack order. Let's go back to the example of the Cloud. What if we want to make the classic loud with a flat bottom? We could go in there and add and remove nodes manually and then adjust the buttons so it looks flat. But that's a lot of work for such a simple desk. The best way is to use a Boolean difference to cut out the lower parts of the globe. The rectangle tool and draw words. You want to adjust the shape carefully. It may be helpful to change the rectangle color so you can see better. When you're done. Go to path difference or the shortcut Control and minors. Remember that this cloud shape is a new shape result of performing the difference with the other two shapes. I'm telling you because it may seem like it's the same object as before. Gas, it has a similar form and it's in the same place. But if you perform a difference with a built-in shape, initially will be graded in the same place. That looks similar, but there is a path and does not have the built-in modifiers. Also keep in mind as you could have used the pen tool to make the shape. Now, here's an extremely common use for this ablation. And he's creating a shadow or highlight. Let's keep going with the Cloud. What if we want to add some sort of highlight on top as if the light is hitting the top part of the silhouette. This is something very common. You'll see a lot in illustrations. Again. We could go in and do it manually, really slowly and really carefully. But that will be slow, inaccurate, and tedious. So for that we're going to use a difference operation to create the shape of the highlight. Now the first step may seem a bit weird, but you have to duplicate the cloud shape two times. You'll see why in a minute. So select it and press Control D twice. Remember that duplicate them will control the, recreate an exact duplicate on top. So it looks like nothing happened. But there are three exact looking clouds are stuck in the same place right there. For the next step, it will be very useful to change the color of the top duplicate. So you can see whether what you're going to do next. Now the Cloud directly below this doublet Cloud, It's gonna be cut down and it's going to become the highlight. Just this top red clouds. So what's showing through of the crochet below the form of the highlight you want when you're happy with the result. So mode shapes and perform the difference. There are certain shape may not be visible because it has the same color than the backlog. So give it a nice whitish gray. Just to clarify, if it's not clear, you needed to duplicate twice because our Boolean operations produce only one output shape. So we need to regenerate the highlight shape with a copy. So we could also keep the original cloud shape below. At the end of the day, difference are basically used to cut other objects. To me, it's easier to think of it as the scissors of the Boolean operations. Only then instead of a couple of ladies, you use another path to good. What's below. Finally is the intersection operation. This operation is used to limit the shape to the inside of another. Often to create shadows or highlights that are shared in a complex model. Or to create patterns that need to be limited to the inside of a complex shape. For the sake of simplicity. Let's continue with the theme of the clouds. Let's say that I wanted to create a nice-looking shadow that give some traces of volume. Notice that the silhouette of the Cloud is actually fairly complex. The easiest way to create this type of highlights or shadows that are made with the pen tool. And I've not created by using the technique I showed you a minute ago with the difference operation is to use an intersection. It's super easy. Just another shape you want with the pen tool on top of the cloud. And now very important, when you get to the outside area, continually shapes so it covers completely aside, the shallow is going to go. We're going to delete the excess. But the important thing is that the shape of a lapse completely aside. So it won't show any holes once you perform the intersection. Now it's time to actually perform the intersection. But just like in the previous case with the difference, want to create a new shape on top of the cloud. So duplicate the cloud shape with Control D. Now the glove copies on top of the shadow we made. But that doesn't matter. The intersection doesn't care about the stack order like the difference does. So these duplicate and the shadow shape and go to Path intersection or use the shortcut Control and asterisk. The resulting shape will fit exactly to the inside of the cloud shape. The important thing here is that in illustration is very frequent that you have to draw a shape that's one on top of another and needs to be constrained to the inside of a shape below, not just in the case of shadows and highlights. That's the most frequent case. But there are other uses. And that's all you need to know about using Boolean operations in practice. Boolean operations are some of the most common operations that you'll be doing all the time. So I strongly suggest you to really wrap your head around what you've seen in this lesson. Play around and practice on your own. The list concepts becomes second nature because they really are an essential part of all bacteria recession. One last thing. I believe that just like with the main four tools, you should as soon as possible, started using shortcuts instead of the menu. So get used to performing the operations using the shortcuts. They are quite easy to remember and they add essential to work in a comfortable pace. 9. Inkscape Techniques 2 - Groups and Clips: Okay, now let's continue with the tools and techniques of vector illustration with a couple of really important features to handling groups of objects. First of all, I want to talk about groups. You can group multiple objects so they handle as if they were a single object. This will help you a lot when you're dealing with an illustration filled with objects. And you have problems selecting a group of shapes that are meant to be a single thing, like e.g. this cloud is made of three different shapes. The base class shape, the highlight shape, and the shallow shape. But the three shapes makes up a single thing, a glove. If we were working in a real life composition with a ton of nearby objects dragging a rectangle to only select these three shapes may not be as easy as you would like. So the solution will be to group these three objects. So select them all and hit Control G. You'll see that the three outlines that indicated that the three objects were selected becomes one. Now you can make any manipulation as if these three shapes where they single one. However, at any moment you can double-click on this group and then you'll enter the group. You can see that you've entered a group because you will see this. We'll text in the current layer, drop down in the status bar. These drop-down displays the currently active layer. But when you enter the group, will display the name of the group. They will text is the default name, accept gifts, the groups. Now that you've entered the group, you can modify the shapes as if the group never was created. You can modify the individual shapes, edit them, delete them, and even create new ones that will belong to the group. After you're done it in the group, you can double-click in any free place in the canvas to leave the group. Again, you will see that the wheel, the exchange back and it will display the layer name. All changes that you made to the group will be kept. If at any moment you want to ungroup a group, you can simply select it and hit Control Shift G. A couple of notes about the behavior of groups. First, node tool bypasses any group against that. This is a feature to simplify the editing of the contents of a group. So he doesn't have to enter first if you want to quickly adjust something and say a second. And this is important, you cannot perform Boolean operations with groups. The program won't allow it. This behavior can be a bit of a pain when building more complex shapes because grownups are really useful to handle the complexity and organize objects and Boolean operations and some of the most common abbreviations you'll be doing. For this reason only, I tend to avoid using too many groups if the object I'm drawing is manageable. I talked about glyphs and they inseminate tutorial. But just like with the Boolean operations, I didn't went into the actual uses for illustration or the more important details. I'm assuming that you've watched that lesson or that you have at least familiar on how to create clips. So I'm not gonna go over the basics here. We watched that lesson if you forgot about how to create leaves. However, as a quick refresher, clips allows you to limit the visibility of an object to the silhouette of another object. If this description sounds a bit familiar, it's because it will feel a similar purpose than the illustration, but with a couple of really important changes. First, clips do not generate a new shape like the intersection. It just limits the visibility of the target shape. So you can still edit the clip shape inside and have way better control of how an object looks. And second, while the intersection between a Boolean operation. Only once with paths. Clips work with pretty much everything. Paths, groups, important images. You can even use groups as clipping shapes themselves, which is tremendously useful at times. As you can imagine. This opens up a lot of new possibilities. Let me show you an example. If I wanted to add this pattern to the Cloud using an intersection, I will have to dismantle this pattern and group it and move each path into the right position. Then perform an operation with each of the shapes one-by-one, being careful that the overall patterns and not get destroyed in the process, it will be a ridiculous amount of work for such a simple desk. Luckily, glyphs can be used with groups. So first, make sure the pattern is a group. Select all shapes and hit Control G. Now put the pattern on top of the cloud. Duplicate the Cloud, and perform a simple click with it. Because the grid pattern is a group, you can enter the pattern group and easily move the shapes, modify them, and even add new objects with a fever flu and the silhouette of the Cloud. It's really powerful. Another common use would be to use them as a way to add bitmap textures to our path. Since clip work with important images, all you have to do is to put it on top of the shape you want. Duplicate the bottom shape and perform the clip with the texture. Now you should play around with the opacity and maybe add a blender effect or something to make it look nicer. All this power the eclipse brings in may make you think that you should use clips only and completely forget about intersections. After all, every time that you can do with an intersection, you can do it with a clip in a more flexible way. Well, in practice, there are a couple of inconveniences that eclipse brings in. One big example is that just like with groups, using clips with Boolean operations is a bit tricky. The difference with groups is that you are able to perform the operation, use the clip only has paths. But the problem is that since they clip function is to only hire parts of an object, the operation will be performed with a full shape, not only with the visceral part. On the other hand, if I clip is made with a group, the operation will not perform. If you're working in a more complex drawing with a lot of shapes, it may end up being a bit complicated to identify which object is not letting the Pollyanna relation to execute. In practice, I tried to be as careful as I can both with groups and clips because they can seriously complicate you in the long run. So my recommendation is that you should try to at least not use them in completely unnecessary places. As a rule of thumb, I always use intersections for simple and quick shapes that I can remake in a minute if I want. I use clips for the more complex shapes. And of course, for every time I need to clip a group or an image. This way, I minimize the amount of clips as much as they can. And the drawing is a bit cleaner. 10. Inkscape Techniques 3 - Light and Shadow Basics: In this lesson, I want to talk very quickly about the basics of light and shadow and how to apply those concepts to your ink saved illustrations. We can think of an object as having two types of color. First is the local color. This is the actual color that the object is painted. Red, yellow, greenish blue, or a combination of multiple colors. Then is the illumination color on top? Let me explain. In real life, when light hits a surface, it makes its color lighter. A red surface director hit by the sun will have a lighter shade of red than the rest of the surface in shadow. And let's same if the color of the surface is yellow or greenish, blue or any other color, you may think how light that surface will be depends on how directly the light rays are hitting the surface. That is, how much a surface is pointing at the light source. Our brains are programmed to quickly and effortlessly identify different shades of lightness of one tone as different planes in an object. This way, by giving your objects the right shade of a color. You can imply volume. Now, in real life, most objects with round surfaces, that is, non man-made objects have surfaced that transition softly between light and shadow. But since we are working with a cell shaded cartoon style, we can easily to stylize this light and shadow areas in easy to draw shapes like this one. Now, how many of these have elimination shapes you create depends on the stand you're working. In some cartoons, you'll see three or more light and shadow shapes. That simplifies elimination but gives a lot of dividends. In some others, you don't even see any separation between lightness areas. That depends on the style you're going for. Of course, there's more complexity to light and shadow. But for our purposes, that's all we need to know for now. So to summarize a highlight, we will have the same color than the local color of the object. The lighter and the shadow will have the same color than the local color. But LCA. Okay, so let me show you how to apply these theories using Inkscape. They can look at this red circle. I want to imply a light roughly coming from the top left side. So very quickly I'll draw a highlight on top where the light rays in the area will be hidden stronger in a shallow shape below roughly where the light rays will then be hitting the area directly. Of course, both using the intersection technique that we saw in the previous lesson. I start with the shadow. Remember, the shadow has the same color than the local color, but darker. So I selected make sure I'm in the field tab. And here they've got their decision to make. Which one of these five color selection moles or use. If you watch the lesson, that I say that I always recommend using the HSL mole, since it takes more than I believe better for illustration in general. In the HSL model, you have the same colors than in the other moles. But the difference is that you select the colors by selecting the hue, saturation and lightness by separate, using separate the sliders. As you can imagine, this works like a champ for us. We have a separate slide that we can use to handle the elimination, the slider, which Kansas the lateness. So what I'll do is to use the eyedropper tool here. The default shortcut is the sample, the local colors, so they are the same. Now, go to the slider and start to slightly lower it so the shadow is now way that it goes down. Of course now we'll do the same for the highlight, but instead, I slightly move the slider app delegate a lighter, well, one little note here. Remember that we are working with highly stylized cartoons here. So there is no needs to be physically exact with the colors. Just eyeball which shade, darker or lighter you think will fit your shadow or highlight. Any of them. Look okay. Now can repeat the same step with these different colors, circles. The method is the same. Just sample the color and move slightly the slider to one side or the other, depending on if you are making the highlight and shadow. A couple of things. First, because I've used any of the other color selection mode to set the color, is because it is way more comfortable and easier to use a slider to control the lightness of a color individually from the other properties. But there's no reason why you couldn't have use any of the other moles. If you know what you're doing. At the end of the day, what you want us to keep a similar hue and saturation, but lower or higher. And you can do that with any of the other color moths just not as easily. The other issue is that this method of sampling the local color and then moving the slider only work when the highlight or shadow is going through a surface of the same color. If you have an object made of multiple colors, then we have a problem. Well, let's me show you a quick technique to quickly make light and shadow shapes that will affect equally all colors. For this, we're going to use a nice property of digital colors and that is transparency. First, of course, make the highlight and shadow shape. Now for the highlight, give it a completely white color. Now in the HSL dialogue, you see for slider with the label a. A stands for alpha. That is the transparency of the color. Lower the transparency quite a bit, almost to one-third down. There's no formula here. Just play around with the slider till the highlight interacts the way you want with the colors below. As you can see, because the color is white and transparent, it's adding to the other colors white and give me a pretty good effect of being a highlight. Now, I think you know what to do with the shadow is the exact same process. Only this time you should use a full black instead of white. Again, play around with the opacity until it looks good with all the colors below. This methods of using black and white colors with transparency also has the advantage that you can change the color below and both the highlight and shadow will adapt pretty well. So you can make the highlight and shadow shapes once. And then play around changing the local color and experimenting and see what looks good. But remember, different colors have different natural lightness. So the alpha transparency that looks good in one color may require adjusting in another color. Remember that generally shadows looks better than highlights using Smith. One quick thought here. I'm sure you're wondering if you could just use these black and white transparency method to create highlights and shadows. Always and completely forget about the color method I showed you first. Well, you certainly could. But the problem is that when you're using this method, you're not picking the actual colors. You are Tintin, other objects scholars. So you lose a lot of control over simply being able to pick the color you want. E.g. it's very common that on top of making a highlight later, also adjust the hue just to make the colors more rich and very hidden. Same with the shadows. If you're working with a color with transparency, you can still select the hue that will influence the colors below. But you're going to need to go back and forth and waste a lot of time experimenting, trying to get the resource you want. Then another way is to add shadows and highlights that look slightly better by using bled moles. But that's a bit more difficult to implement and doesn't look that better in my opinion. In other words, sometimes it's easier to simply give the high light or shadow a detect color, especially since adjusting colors, it's not a particularly slow process. So as a rule of thumb, I prefer to always use the red color when I'm working with simple objects where it's easy to go in and change colors quickly. And I use the transparency method when there is a ton of highlights and shadow shapes. And it can be difficult to go in and adjust things one by one. Or when it's a single object made of multiple objects of different colors. And it will simplify the things a lot. 11. Revisiting the Asset Pack: Now that you have knowledge of Inkscape, I'm probably an idea how the assets are made. I think it's wants to go in and explain a bit what everything is and how you're supposed to actually use some of these assets in a real life scenario. First of all, all complex assets are grouped together, made of multiple shapes. Since you will most likely going to have to edit them, at least submit. Remember that you can enter the group by double-clicking. After you're done editing, you double-click anywhere on the canvas to leave the group and the changes are saved. I tried to create groups in a way such that if it's easy as possible to make changes and variations. However, a really nice tip that you should remember is that the node tool by buses any group, you select a modify objects inside groups super quickly. In any acids where I grew up, I didn't colorations by using the opacity shadow metal. They talked about the many cars. So you can easily change the overall color and the other planes will change to the right color automatically. Like in the case of the rocks. I wanted each of the assets to be as easily adaptable as possible. So I avoid using shadows and highlights in general, buoyant force in a time of day. How a lot of some objects needed some indication of the planes to do correctly. Like in the case of this man-made objects. Just remember that you can easily flip them horizontally and rotate them. And worst-case scenario, you shouldn't be too hard to go in and redraw a shadow plane. I also tried to avoid as much as I could clips, and instead, I use Boolean operations when possible to make it easier to handle. But for those assets that are meant to be flexible and that are meant to be modified. I had to go four clips. I originate by giving the assets a gray color to encourage you to work with your own colors. But it looked horrible. So I decided to actually give them some genetic colors that should work out to the box for any datum landscapes. But as you'll see later on, you'll definitely want to replace them with around as soon as we can. So now let's look at how to use some of the assets. The first thing you have to keep in mind when you send this asset is the three golden rules of good version, which at scale, flip and most importantly, overlap. So just by doing this, you can get an almost infinite amount of variation without even touching the geometry of the assets. Clouds, bushes, mountains, shapes, glass shapes. And a lot more can be constructed by putting different versions together using these three tools. For as long as they share the same or similar color, they look like a new, unique version. That doesn't mean that you'll never going to have to go in and make some changes to molded into the exact same thing. But modifying an asset should be your last reasons. Not because it is particularly complex or difficult, but because it can be time consuming. Some of these assets are meant to be used to build shapes like this. Merge trees. Having a sort of mercy line of trees is super common in cartoon nature scenes. This asset is too short. So what you're supposed to do is to use the three main tools to construct it in the exact shape union. You probably notice that some of the assets are less detail than others. Like in the case of these trees here at the bottom. This is one of the key things that you need to know about backgrounds. The furthest thing that are in the background usually will have less details unless there's a good reason for them not to. We'll see more about these later. This has to do with some of the principles of composition that we're going to see later on. Almost all of the assets here follow the pattern of the more detailed elements in the first row, and the less detail go in the second row. So this tree is at the top with the trunks and the interesting silhouette sugar, somewhere in the foreground or milligram. And the ones in the second row should go somewhere in the background adding noise to the composition. If you are creative, I'm sure you can find a way to make it work whatever you want. Some of the objects are meant to be dressed up or add detail to the composition. This objects over here and meant to be sprinkling in different places to add noise or feel in a space that feels too empty. Objects like these flowers, grass shapes, and mushrooms. I meant to be placed on top of the ground or on top of other assets to detail an area rather than to affect the overall composition. Then there are some gram shapes. I didn't want it to pollute the asset back with other assets that in context. But this ellipsis here and meant to be ground. We're supposed to use the objects on top, not the actual ellipse. E.g. this way we lanes that meant to be placed on top of a grand idea to help you communicate that this is a surface. You should just copy the way reliance and put them on top of what's supposed to be left. In this case is consider using the splitting tool. Especially if you want to go for a more dense area. Though, I don't like to use it because then it becomes too much water to remove assets where you don't want them. I prefer to work manually, but it's up to you and doesn't sit for explaining how to use the assets. I don't want to say a couple of things before and in this lesson. First, I will be adding new assets from time to time. So always check when the course updates. And second, later on, I'm going to show you how to build your own asset-backed like this one, maybe with other themes or whatever you want. But that will come later. For now, get comfortable with the assets and group them, study them if you want, or just play around and see what you can come up with. 12. Making Your Own Assets Part 1: If you can handle Inkscape and the basic techniques behind vector illustration that I showed you in the ink type section. You shouldn't have any technical problems expanding or creating your own asset box. However, I do realize that maybe you have some questions regarding the creation of pacs outside of the stations. And I want to answer that here because I want to show you a hands-on the process of creating your own bag or expanding the packs you have from the research phase to the finished asset. So this lesson will be about things you have to keep in mind at the moment before starting to draw your assets. And in the next one, I'm going to demonstrate how to actually draw them. The first thing you have to define before starting to draw is the style you're going to work in in the asset pack. I went for a fairly generic and modern cartoon style. That was in part because I loved this style of cartoon in part because like I said in an earlier lesson, a cartoony style works pretty good with the tools of a vector recession software. However, keeping in mind the limits of the program, you could have a completely different range of styles, from the most abstract and simpler ones to them more photo-realistic and complex. I guess every cent works if you are consistent, I would recommend you to always favor the most simplest styles you can, if only because they simpler style will usually have assets that are easier and faster to modify, which as you will see, it is something essential to elevate a kid bashed illustration. What I'm saying is basically that you should pick a style and make asset consistent with that side. If you want to work in a different style, make separate pacs. As a beginner, I wouldn't encourage you to build your own one. That's something that takes an enormous level of experience. So leave that to the professionals. For now. Steal the style for my cartoon you like, or other illustrations. And that leads us directly to the second point that I wanted to talk about, how to actually make the assets. Let me go straight to the point here. You should copy assets from finished playgrounds, copy trees, clouds, mountains, bushes, maybe more specific things like a moon and the sun on a building. If you like something, you should copy it. That's how I build this asset tag. I pick the very few artists that I liked and that I felt were more or less in a similar style. And then search one by one through all of their published illustrations, finding assets that I could use. Doing this SO has the benefit of immediately demonstrating how artists use a limited amount of time. Assets, even across different illustrations. You will see that an app this make usually the same type of three are the same type of Cloud or same type of mountain over and over again. And what really changes is decomposition and maybe a couple of unique things either specifically for one illustration. What's more? You'll also realize that even different artists into use very similar assets between them. Not in all objects. Different styles necessarily need different look in assets. But there's a large quantity of objects that you'll see repeated through different but similar styles. Let's look at these trees. They are basically the same. One cartoon was made in the 60s and the other in the 2000s. Obviously what is at play here, it is just playing Google inspiration. But it comes to show that at least in some assets, even the pros steal from each other. However, there is a bit of a gray area here regarding what constitutes through theft and what's Fairplay. Obviously taken a part of someone else's work is pure theft. Even if it's a single asset. Anyone, if you change the colors, get capitals as symbolic in nature, which means some things can get quite similar looking. Nobody has a trademark and style. As far as I know. Basically I'm saying that directly tracing over the work of an artist to get an asset is theft and can even get you into trouble. But making a copy that is not exact, it's perfectly fine. Just pick an asset that you like and then make an effort to not copy it exactly, but pay attention to the way it works. Mentally deconstruct it and build a new one just like that. But it's the way I built the asset pack. So you can see that I did not install any of these. I just created instances of popular assets that I saw all the time. Those are the two main general concepts to keep in mind at the moment of starting your own packs. But I want to talk about something extra here. I want to talk about tracing real life pictures to get specific things in the project. I did this. I just saw the picture of idea and put it in the background. Now, I'm sure you have a few questions regarding what we just talked about. But first, I want to discuss why it's useful. Even if you're working in a cartoon background. Sometimes you want some little details that just does not want a dime or the pain to draw it entirely on your own. A few examples will be some animals in the back. In the case of audio press or maybe a few birds flying in the sky or a school officials in the water, then there will be some small but very specific objects like a beehive or a section of a ruin, or maybe some other small object. The final units, you can give it some type of texture, not using the image directly as a texture. Though that's something you could do a bit clumsily in Inkscape, but doable, but rather using it to get the shape, texture, pattern, or even just using the automatic failover feature. And then there is the legality of everything. Is it legal to trace over a picture, even a section of one? Well, I don't know much about the legality. I'm pretty sure that you are only 100% safe if you trace over royalty-free, copyright-free images. In either case, there's usually not gonna be a lack of good images to trace. Especially because you should absolutely keep that race material to their minimum, at least to not mess up with the capitalist style. Remember, you only want to trace over to add specific details. You're turning something far in the background to find free and royalty-free images. I would recommend you pixels has more than enough pictures of iris and zoom in here. But there are a ton of other sides to get free. Totally legal images to trace over. You just have to search for them. Also, one last thing, I personally think it's perfectly fine to trace over material as an artist. As long as you keep in mind that it won't make you a better draftsman. However, the practice of designing and building background, we'll make you aware that at least for long as you keep working, I think there is no problem in employing a few trace assets here. And if I could give you one last tip is that you want the most flexible possible assets. You don't want quantity. We want quality. And by quality I mean flexible and easy to edit assets. And to do that, I would say to find the generic assets, those assets that can be used and reused in different contexts. This depends on the composition, but usually an illustration will be made of generic assets that feel the space and set them all. And then some specific and unique ones for the focal point or the center or the main idea of the composition. Of course, I'm talking in general terms here. In real life, there are cartoon backgrounds made entirely of unique assets and some other will be made entirely of generic ones. Just remember that here we are working with them mentality of kid bashing. So the more useful assets are those that are the most for your server, the most generic ones, ones that can be combined to create new ones. So don't go about copying assets mindlessly. Think about the way they are gonna be used. Weight. We're done with the principal concepts of kids machine. Now I'm sure you really get to see how to approach the creation of a new asset in a practical way. And we'll see that in the next lesson. 13. Making Your Own Assets Part 2: It occurs to me that you may want to make an environment other than just a forest the scene. While I chose that for this team because the assets that make up a forest or universal enough that you can easily adapt them to different themes. I realized that maybe you want to make something that requires more specific assets. Maybe you'd like to make it a CD or a snowed station. In this lesson, I'm going to demonstrate how I go about adding new assets to our back using that in office now, sin. And of course the first step is always gathering references. I'm gonna go to my Pinterest account and search for snow cartoon illustrations. I'm aiming to find illustrations as similar as possible to the style of the rest of the assets I have already made. If you go for a different style, reference as similar to that style, sometimes it may be hard to find exactly what you're looking at. This happened to me here. I could not find illustrations in the style that matched the assets pack the best. But that's okay. That just means that we may have to improvise a leader at the moment as Ryan, I would recommend you to gather anywhere 10-30 images, title search for individual things you think will make good assets like an S3 or rock, or in this case maybe an isosurface. Remember what we said in the previous lesson? Always prefer things that don't genetic and real server. One thing to keep in mind is that since we're not making a one-to-one copy of anything, you can always make modification to something to either make it fit with the style you're going for. I'll make something more generic and they also well, okay, so he'd are important in turning except all the images I gathered. Each one of these hazard, this one interesting thing I think can be copying. The second step is to make a deeper scout and pinpoint exactly what you're saying. You can transform into an asset. I like to organize them into different categories depending on what I want to take out of them. Like rocks or trees or mountains. And of course eliminate any unnecessary ones. So here's what I got them. From this image. I like this long tree in the background. I think they look great and a bit creepy. And they can really use not only in some winter scene but everywhere. The other theories also look nice. There could be a bit difficult to make with a vector tools. You can make it work by renewable creative, like I said before, but I will leave that as an exercise to you. Continuing with the theme of trees. I love this creepy trees and branches, right? Not only for winter scenes, but also for other creepy backgrounds. Trees, these trees look awesome. We may need to adjust the style because it is not that picture of roundly. This one has a more cartoony style. If you don't like to, things like this arcs. They are a super-fast and nice ways to draw a mass of trees, especially here, where they work like ministries. Similar to our mercenaries, acid, but less detailed. It comes to show that you don't need something super detail at all to make for a great use of an asset. And the second thing I like about this image, how this snowy mountains, mountains, they are so simple yet they make the composition work. I love them. Again, showing that it's not the complexity of an asset. What makes them great, but the contexts where you put them. Another awesome cartoon image. There are a lot of things that I love about this and that we can take from the three-step polyester and even the gate. But what makes my imagination flow the most are these big snow cover rock surfaces. I think they would work great to put somewhere in the middle ground of Israel composition. Just like they are here. Small drugs covered in snow. Because you, some of those other types of details that can be hard identify as an asset. Many of these conversations have a signal transition from the trunk of the tree to the ground, which is something that happens all the time in real life, is going to be nice to have some of these to detail two or three. I guess you can make a version of each story with that asset on our probability whether a more flexible is to make the snow independent of which three. So it's up to you to shape it where you want it. I would rather Borealis would be nice to have, though that may require a slightly more advanced knowledge of illustrating an example. Winking here while directing you to some of my other courses. Maybe some cabins. This one are nice and generic, perfect for reusability. Great. All of these items will be great to add to our collection. But I'm not going to show you how to draw each. Instead, I'm going to draw three of them to demonstrate the basic picture try and techniques and how to transform these into nice and reusable assets. This is not going to be an in-depth lesson on how to draw with vectors. But I think all of these assets here then to be easy to draw. So let us start with something really easy. Let's make this bigger rock with the snow on top. Remember, we don't want to make an exact copy here. We want a rack of the same type, but different. When you drag using vector shapes, you have to separate between the different shapes of an object and treat them as separate things. In this case, this rock can be thought as made of two shapes. The rock shape and the snow shape on top. Let's just start. Let me get the rock first and then other snow on top. Let's draw an arc with the pen tool. When building this sort of Alex, I find it easier to just round spiky shapes and introduce the curvature later on. So just make a triangle. And when you're done, select the node and go to the smooth knows Mouton in the tool controls. And now you have a note you don't need anymore. I don't wanna pictorial station is that nodes in curved sections I getting in the way. And if you can, you should delete them. If you want to make this shape even more complex, like the one in the background. Remember that you can add notes super easy with the node tool by double-clicking. When you're done, you can sample the colors from the illustration itself. Though later on, if you're going to move it to an asset pack, you may want to go for a less specific color scheme. Okay? And now for the snow here in the reference, this now is made with these arches. Remember what I said about making an actress? I find it easier to just draw them as triangles. So hidden gonna make a shape with triangles and draw well outside of the rock area. Now the classic technique to remove the excess, you should be familiar with this technique. If you don't remember how it goes for watch things happen equals. Now repeat the same steps to smooth the corners, remove the nulls and adjust them so they look all the keys in the reference. Pay attention to the details of how the shapes and drugs and 100. Something doesn't look as you expect. It is almost always because you haven't paid as much attention to the small details in the reference. One final thing, this rocks indicate detail with a line that goes over them. I know that this is a particularity of the style of the reference that is not in the style we are working on. The assets I made don't have this type of lioness textures. But just for the sake of getting familiar with the process, Let's have it. This is just a quick line made with the pen tool to indicate the smaller changes in the surface of the rock. There are some other things in the reference that we could implement that in our version, like the texture or the more complex no pattern or patterns. But this is just a demonstration. I'm going to leave the decision to include those details to you. Just keep in mind that the asset doesn't have to be something that has to fit in the illustration you took it from. An again in should be its own thing. Let's move on with a slightly more complex asset and make one of those tributaries that I like so much. The only difference with these assets is that the shape is a bit more detail, but that's about it. It should be easy to make. To tackle this type of complex looking object. You will need to simplify it mentally. Think about the big shapes first. This way you can assign the way it's gonna go easily. In this case, if you think about it, all of these trees can be simplified with a simple triangle. The main trunk is a triangle. And the branches as well. They are not exact triangles, but triangle like things. You probably get what I mean. So let's start from there with an I in the proportions with the pen tool, make the triangles that makes up the tree, the trunk and the branches separator as different objects. It feels right as a separate object. It is much easier to edit and make variations later on if you want. Remember, we don't want an exact copy of any particular tree in the reference. We want one of its type, one that could more or less be one of those. We have the big shapes. Hitting may find it useful to give it color and remove the line. With the node tool at multiple nodes all around the surface. Moved into sculpt all these bumpy shapes at the site. But important, keep the notes as coordinates so they are easier to handle. Keep them up to the last step. If you ever accidentally make another smooth and accidentally introduced a curvature. Remember that you can transform any node into a corner node type by selecting a node and double-clicking on the corner. Now, giving you a straight section once again. Now you can probably see how similar it looks to what you want. Only that it is a bit choppy. The choppiness. We are going to finally introduce the curvature. The trick I have to draw these in a controlled way to use the Shift key while dragging from the null to pull the handle out, giving you much more control. You need to do this from the two handles that makes up a segment of a curve to fully effect this section. And we are done with the tree. As you see, this wasn't as difficult at all. This process of working with a straight section. Two then at the final step, introduce the curvature is the main way to draw this organic looking objects. And then the final example I'm going to show you how to draw man-made objects. Constructed objects require a slightly different process. They usually will remain a larger quantity of shapes. But the good news is that they tend to be much more geometrical and therefore much easier to draw and modify. What's more. Concerted. Objects tend to be much easier to make variations because they add themselves, get batched together. You'll see what I mean in a second. Let's make one of these cabins perfect to add to a farm with the ground on a snowy station. The key to draw this constructed objects is to hyperfocus on the different shapes that makes them up. Draw the shapes by separate and then assemble them together. Here you can see the roof, the walls, the doors and windows are all rectangles, like I said, super easy to draw. After you're done, you assemble them together. Remember that it's super easy to mess around with the proportions and make some quick variation. And as a quick tip to do that, try to be smart at the moment of grouping the different sections of the assets together. E.g. this shape that makes up the chimney can be grouped together and in this way can be used for other variations much more easily. Like I said a minute ago, keep bashing the asset itself. That's it for making your own assets. Hopefully now you have a bit more of an idea of how to approach adding stuff to your collections. There is no escape to draw in if you vote is to make an illustration. Not even when an asset back. So it's always good to practice and in more and more stuff. Having said that, I'll be adding more items to the back. So make sure to check the resources every once in a while. 14. Introduction to the Project: In the next few lessons, I'll be constructing a background from the ground up using the asset back. My goal is not only to demonstrate how to use the back, but primarily to teach you the theory and tools necessary to create a beautiful and polished background. This requires a bit of art theory, as I mentioned in the previous lessons, along with some practical tips on how to apply it. Each lesson will focus on one of the primary steps in borrowing rate and a police background using the assets. First, we will explore a sketch in where I'll experiment with various compositions and select our preferred one. Next, we'll move on to the refinement stage, where we will start again from the final image using the sketch we made as a guide. From there we'll tackle color, assigning the final palette. Finally, we'll address light and shadow, adding elimination to complete the composition. Maybe some details as I'm going through this and other topics. And you don't usually work linearly when illustrating. These are the steps you need to follow for pretty much every illustration, any CEP, I wanted to take this opportunity to demonstrate how to use the asset back correctly. As we proceed through the project, I will begin each lesson by introducing a simplified and practical version of the theory and tools that we'll need to complete the task at hand to keep the lessons short. And to the point, I decided not to go for real time. Instead, the lessons will be sped up and throw down as necessary to demonstrate how I use each technique. This way you can watch this lesson repeatedly and hopefully internalize how to apply each theory EN tool. If you'd like to follow along. I also included the Realtime lessons which will run for approximately 5 h and our uncommented. However, I strongly recommend you that you first watch the normal lessons and pay close attention to the theory and those we discussed before attempting to follow along. And only once you are comfortable with the concepts presented in the lessons, you try to follow along. 15. Sketching the Background: Let's get started with the project. As I mentioned in the introduction, the first step is to create a sketch or a thumbnail to visualize and get a better idea. Holiday illustration is going to look, but at least put us in the right track to develop an idea. I want to expand on this point and explain why it's helpful to create one or more sketches before assembling the final background. If you try putting together something with the asset back leg, I suggested, you probably realized that it's not easy to come up with something good or interesting on the spot. Even with the process of kid bashing, you still need a good composition to build upon. Just like with a traditional illustration. That's where making a quick, easy to make a sketch or thumbnail comes in handy. Glucose sketch tons and tons of compositions and iterate and improve over time. And in the end you are bound to get something better than just rushing in. Now, in this lesson, I want to show you the sketching techniques in Inkscape. But if you're more comfortable with pencil and paper, I recommend you to go for that. It's much easier to sketch out concepts on paper than on Inkscape. But if you're more of an editor type of artist who prefers trying things out undefined from their insight may work better for you. I'm only going to draw a single sketch and move on because I already have something prepared beforehand. However, I strongly recommend you to make at least six quick sketches to refine your ideas, see what works and what doesn't, and improve your RDS through practice. So what makes a good sketch? The study of what makes good illustration is essentially composition, which deals with how to arrange multiple objects in a way that looks good. Composition is, say, complicated and fairly advanced topic. But it's super important for any type of illustration. While it's impossible for me to cover the basics about composition in this course, I can give you a list of practical tips to get you the most results in the shortest time. The first, and in my opinion, the most important tip I can give you. Think of an idea for your illustration before you start the sketch. The illustration should always try to communicate an idea. You don't need to have a B cell concept at this point. Just a general idea will suffice. You will explore the visual concepts with the sketches. For this project. My idea is a mysterious resting area in the middle of the forest. All my sketches will be about that, trying to communicate that. Lastly, I strongly recommend you that you search for references. It's impossible to come up with something good if you don't inform yourself of what the pros are doing in terms of composition value and colors. If you want to improve the quality of your illustrations, find similar illustrations and put them next to your own under Canvas. Take inspiration from them and even steel small sections if necessary. I must warn you that I already know what I'm going to be doing. I've already drawn the final project. And that's why you don't see the references here. But when I was coming up with the project, I have plenty of references and usual to in fact, just to show you, here are some of the actual references I used to come up with a sketch. So remember, if you want to create whether your sessions gather more references and try to replicate what you see in them. Let's begin the sketching phase. And except now that we have a clear concept in mind, I prefer to start with a guy of the area, what I'm going to be working. So I can have a clear understanding of the limits of the illustration. I recommend you to do the same. I'll just make a rectangle on the canvas. And with the rectangles to select it, I set the resolution in the term contracts. I will work at 19:20 by 1080, which is the most common HD standard for video. However, you can work at any resolution and ratio you prefer. Make sure that the drop-down is set to be x. So the values are handled with pixels rather than the default millimeters. And then you just set the input that says W2, 1920s. And the one that says eight to 1080 to change the width and height. Now that you have set the guide layer to start with a sketch, if you have no idea where to begin, let me introduce you to a technique that has helped me enormously in improviser and stuff. I call it the layer metal. Most illustrations have a foreground, middle ground, and background. We've got the foreground to all objects that are really close to the camera, mental frame, the composition, or give it some depth. That middle ground is usually the edit, whether things are happening in-between the foreground and background. The background is whether things far away are. However, you can see that most objects are layered into more than these three layers. A middle ground may be made of multiple roles of three hills. The background may have multiple layers of mountains and clouds. The foreground usually will have a single layer, but it still can be more complex. When they're building a background with an asset back like this, it is easier to think in terms of layers of rows of objects. Build one layer at a time, usually from the front-to-back, but it can also go the other way around. This way, you only think in terms of the current layer. You only worry about the placement of the assets in relationship to its layer. And then once you've already placed. And if you are careful with this method, the illustration kinda builds itself. So let's start with the foreground. If you did your homework and have done some references with you, you'll notice that the foreground is often used to frame the rest of the composition and to help it give it some depth, like I said a minute ago. So it's super common to have some assets in the corners. Again, look at the references to see what's common to do. Here. I'm going to place two big objects at the two bottom corners. Now whatever the small details, just paste them in their rough location. Remember this is just a sketch. We'll re-allocate every sand later on. The middle ground is usually the most complex one, made of multiple layers or rows. This is usually one of the important things are happening. So let us start with the main idea for the whole composition. Which if you remember, what's like a resting area in a dense forest. But first, I'm going to add something super fun and interesting that you see often in the references in the woodland forest. This heals that overlap. They really help if depth and they really look good. Now I'm going to move on to the main idea. Here. I felt that some ground coloration and maybe some three stamps for sitting will make for a great best scenario. Remember, we're sketching here, so everything is subject to change later on. Now we need to indicate that this is a dense forest. And I think this hill over here can do that. Here. They're going to be a lot of trees. I feel that with all these trees and decide something is missing on the other side. If you look under study some references, you'll find that a very common technique to do when you have a ton of objects of one type on one side, is to add one big object of the same type on the opposite side to balance things out. I like the idea of a big tree here on the right. Moving down a layer. Another effective compositional trick is to add some sort of wall that closest of the view and create a sense of claustrophobia. And I'm going to do that by using these assets of all the three smells. I will build a wall by duplicating this asset over and over again to the span of the entire length of the composition. And now we're starting to overlap the layers. Remember which areas service route through the overlap ones and assign it accordingly. Note that I have grouped all the three objects to make them easier to handle. It doesn't feel claustrophobic enough. So I'll add another layer of trees behind it, always making sure that they are visible through the overlap. The layers provide the nuclei Visceral. We'll finally the background. I will keep it simple by choosing one of the big assets, like the mountains and placing a few of them behind everything else. It's common for the background to have multiple layers. So I'll add the one of the Cloud assets to the back behind the mountains. To complete the scene, I'll add the blue sky and a few washes here and their functions will serve as a reminder to add them at the size stood in the final illustration. And we are done with the sketch. It is a bit distracting to have all of these trees coming out of the frame. So I chop them off a bit. Later on, I just decided to go for a clip, which was probably the smartest thing to do in the first place. So hopefully you can see how easy it is to sketch out something quickly by just throwing some asset together. If you think in terms of layers, here, I will recommend you to do this over and over again. Practice making tons of these sketches. And only move on to the next stage when you find your absolute favorite. Remember, this way of building sketches with layers is a suggestion. So one thing the way you want and in the way you feel enhances your creativity the most. One less thing, if possible, using pencil and paper, since it is soft and more comfortable and faster than working in Inkscape, it is true that making this sketch took me like 5 min to complete. But you could do it even faster with a quick and easy Pencil one. 16. Refining the Sketch: Alright, it's time to begin the asset could bashing of the final illustration. Let's take a look at the sketch we created in our last lesson as a guide for what to do next. I don't like to start from serum. I think it's always good to refine something with the rest of the illustration as context to see the whole better. I just think the heels and the sky are pretty good as I am. So he didn't just make a duplicate of the whole sketch. And I'm going to go replacing the assets and we're making the different areas one by one. Let's begin by focusing on the area with the trees in the sketch that these were placed haphazardly. I want to create a natural-looking section of trees in a forest. There are three important tricks to keep in mind when placing objects to make them look natural. These roles are really important. So you shouldn't follow them to the letter. Otherwise you risk the entire composition to look bad. First, avoid mechanical looking distribution of objects. Like placing an object exactly in the middle between two other objects, especially when they are similar. For instance, if you see two trees, make an effort to avoid placing another three in the exact middle of them. This rule as two applies when you align two objects horizontally or vertically. E.g. a. Bush that aligns perfectly with a three. In this example, as you can see how it looks like the objects were placed deliberately, not created organically by nature. The second rule is to overlap as much as possible. Can we are working with cartoons. They are flatter than normal. We don't even have a perspectively is set up. The only way to imply depth and S is to overlap things. This of course is something that's more important for things that are meant to be relatively close. One thing you'll see me do is to place a lot of bushes, willow trees, or patches of grass in front of rocks. Or three slightly overlapping other threes. If it is possible to overlap something, do it. Remember to follow the previous rule? Never put something that aligns perfectly in the middle of something like a bush that is centered perfectly below a three. The final rule is to avoid tangents at all costs. Tangent so good when two or more objects touch or nearly touch at the borders. And this includes, say, a special case of the objects contacting with the border of the illustration. These tangents call attention to themselves. Remain the viewer that the drawing is two-dimensional. Always be on the lookout for accidental tangent because they can draw in another way is fine composition. It may be challenging to keep these rules in mind, the beginning. But with practice, you will do it automatically without even thinking. These concepts will be essential throughout the rest of the illustration and in any illustration in general. So make sure to internalize them so you don't even have to think about them. On until a restriction. I duplicated the trees from the leaves. And I ended up removing the foliage because it was distracting. To create a realistic forest with trees in front and in the back. I made the trees in the front larger and thicker, and those in the back smaller and thinner. Always keeping in mind the three rules of placing objects. I space them apart and adjusted the thickness. You'll notice that I also give each of them a smile inclination. This was in pretty much all of the reference images. So again, always inform yourself with references. Then I place the leaves on top. This process was slow and time consuming because I don't want them to look like copy paste them. I made sure that the scale of the leaves much in threes, and I added a slight rotation to each one. I even modify the shape of a few of them using an L2. This is something common that will happen with pretty much any type of nature composition. You have a ton of objects that are duplicated from one single asset, and you have to go in and make a small modification so they don't look like duplicated. Okay, we're almost done with the trees. Now I'm going to go for the three that is closer to us. And here's the thing. In general. Objects that are closer to us should be more detailed than the ones that are far away. Especially if you have the same objects repeated in different places. These three at the front, it is too close to us to have those big simple leaves. They are too distracting. What we need to do is to have a version that is more detailed. Well, here we go right back into the concept of learning and adding new assets to our back. I'm going to search in one of the references that I've gathered to see if one of them has one type of foliage that is more detail and walk for these three. I think that this one will do the trick. I really liked this leaves. I think they are basically an HD version of the leaves I already have. So they'd worked perfectly for the front three. Let me repeat what I said in the asset making. Listen. I'm of the idea that tracing over this section of someone South can be considered as some sort of theft. However, copying a type of acid, it is not some not going to trace this leaves. Instead, I'm going to make my own version just by looking at it and improvising something. And it is done. And I realize these new foliage asset could work really well in the bigger trees in the back as well. Now, the row of trees, I think they look more or less correct, a couple of integers, one third, my main problem with them is twofold. First, they can be a bit taller. And second, some of the trees look too simple. I want to align them a bit better and just play around so they give this feeling that I mentioned in the sketch of a world that makes the whole scene feel a bit more claustrophobic. I also went in and edited a couple of those trees in the center that are the most visible ones. And that will give me the most attention. So they have to look a bit better. Then there is the backlog here to just play around to see what works. In fact, it is something that you'll be doing a lot in vector illustration. Just playing around with the positions and eyeballing what you like the most. And finally the mountains. The thing that I don't like about the mountains is a scale. They look just a bit too big. So what I'm gonna do is to make the pig smaller. And this will affect the scale of the mountains. I'm also playing around a bit with the location. I think we are done with the refining. Like always with any type of illustration that's always the potential for improvement. Might read Dutch, a few small things as we move along. But for now, I'm happy with the way everything looks. 17. Adding More Detail: We are done with refining what was the sketch. And now we have a nice illustration, but a bit empty. In this lesson, we're going to add some objects to dress up the scene and make it look more natural. So hard with dressing up the scene, mostly with bushes and rocks, but mostly wishes. We're going to add a ton of them. And here's another concept that we will help you out, make it better matrix since I got it grounding. When you present an object and there's nothing around it, it will give the impression that it's floating up in the air, or at least in an undefined position in the ground. But the moment you put another objects next to it, overlapping it, we get enough information to make the two objects feel connected to the ground. So if possible, right below every 31 some objects overlapping it. In this case, a bush will do the job just fine. This is a resource that you see all the time. Once you start paying attention to the references. Anyway, a really nice way to start dressing and the restriction is to start by grounding the most important objects in the scene. In this case the three at the front and the ones at the back. Also notice that not all trees have bush right below them. That will be, we'll always use the headwind dressing. The dressing. Sometimes I know that right behind the tree would do the trick just as well. The bushes through serve the purpose of Grandin, another bigger object. Sometimes you just want some bushes. In some places. In this case, I felt some bushes here on the right and on the left side would look nice. Even though there is only a limited amount of Bush acids. You don't really need that much. You can always scale, rotate mirrors or plain straight edit some of the bushes or any other assets if you want to. Crashing illustrations is all about being crafty and resourceful with the things you got. And believe it or not, the fact that you have a limited set of assets will make you more creative by forcing you to find interesting solutions. E.g. here, I wanted some different type of push. So I got a cloud and change its color. Once again, I took an idea from the references. And that idea is to reinforce the wall of trees by placing a big bush right in front of it. Here's another nice little detail that you can use that related to the concept of rounding. If you place this small role of glass coming out of the ground overlapping some objects, it really gives the impression that the object is really resting on the ground. You can use this with other objects, not only with glass. E.g. you could use this grant bumps in the asset pack and a small object that has the same color than the ground will extend the grant of it and really create some nice effect of grounding and setting up some scale. When you send these small-scale random technique, always keep in mind three things. One, follow the three rules of placement. The place, the patch of grass right in the middle of a bigger shape. Visit with one of the sites and be aware of its alignment to extend it all the way through the object. This is a bit of a personal preference, but I feel like it doesn't work as well when you overuse this. And three, be especially wary of the size. Remember that this is supposed to be a small patch of overlapping ground. It should be more or less consistent in size. The budgets indirect should be smaller than the ones in the front. There's no need to be super accurate though, just being aware of their relative sizes. Another thing you'll see me do with this small patches of grass is to add them to a cold area. So it overlaps with the area with the other color. Again, this is something you see often in these sorts of things. If you look at the references and it always looks great. Proxy for your friend when dressing up a scene, especially smallpox, they helped add variety and occupies space. You'll notice that I decided to finally take out the central area. The most important idea in the composition. Here I was putting drugs in place and I noticed that I could use the stones to imply something is happening there. Hopefully the viewer with ask, what are those frogs for? Good people sitting there or standing there? What was the purpose? This is an integral part of the composition. You want the audience to think and feel something about it. Also, the centerpiece of the composition should be the one with the most detail. Detail brings attention. And you want the attention to go to the focal point. So here I'm going to be adding a ton of stuff to this slug and to the area next to it. I want to add things that aren't in the rest of the composition. E.g. this mushrooms. I'm not only unique to this location, but also the only place in the entire composition that has the color red. That's sure to call attention to it. This idea of adding unique stuff to the focal point rotten me an idea that I didn't have in the original version that I made. I decided to throw in a few of the basis in this idea immediately intrigued me. Why they will be basis in the middle of the forest. I don't know, but I hope that we will ask themselves that question as well. And I decided to roll with that concept, expanded and try new things related to it. As you'll see later on. Okay, I'm more or less satisfied with the entire composition. I still want to make some more refinements here and there. But the bulk of the dressing was done. Before moving on to the final touches. I want to have the final colors of these Thracian. So next lesson, I'm going to show you how to pick a missing colors. 18. Adding Color: Picking good colors, probably one of the most important stages in any illustration. It's not something that's easy to do without some knowledge of theory. In this lesson, I want to show you my metal to easily get amazing colors. Now, there's a lot of theory regarding color, like color schemes, color temperature, the HSV mold value groupings, that sort of stuff that I don't want to get in right now. However, I will stick to the cross premise and teach you the most important practical elements to get you started as quickly as possible. So here are some of the fundamental guidelines and rules you need to pick the colors. First, you need to understand the concept of color distance. You will probably notice that here in the fill and stroke dialogue, you have to color selection modes. One is the wheel that has all the hues and the wheel itself and the triangle with the saturation and value. This is the most effective way to see and pick colors quickly because it allows you to see all the variables at the same time. However, down below, you have another model which works slightly differently. These two color selection moles are connected with developers often say basically wanted to give you two ways for you to select the same colors. If you change the color on 1 mol, the other will update. But going back to the last color selection model, what makes it useful for us is that it separates very clearly between the three main variables that define how I color looks. Those are hue, saturation and value. As a quick summary of what each of them does, the hue the first slider handles the actual color. Could be red, blue, green, yellow. There is a saturation. This handles how much gray color has. At full saturation, the color looks as vibrant as possible. Hello saturation, it looks a bit dull. And finally, there is value. This one controls how dark the color is. At high-value, the colors becomes as light as it could be. At rebellious, it becomes black. This color selection mode is really useful for illustrations because it allows us to easily compare how much distance exists between the different variables of a color. Distance is super-important for the colors to look right with each other and look at them honestly, take a look at these two groups. We have different boxes. I've only change the hue variable. This is duration and value is the same in both. But notice how the colors in the upper group just doesn't work well together. While the ones in the lower work just fine. This I only change the hue. The main difference between the two groups is the distance in the hue. You can see it here in deciders in the group below, because the distance are not that far away. There isn't that much difference between colors. And they work together. They harmonize. This example. I just repeated the same thing only this time. The only variable that I changed, it was this saturation. And again, notice that the squares with the most distance between saturation didn't work nearly as well as the ones with less distance. And the same happens with the value slider. Just think of distance equals our money. The second thing I want you to keep in mind is the concept of color schemes. And I don't want to open a can of worms now. Color schemes that are super complex subject. So for now let me give you the most important info about them. Keeping in mind that we just talked about color distance, we talk about colors in an illustration is useful to limit yourself to a range of use. Usually spending no more than two different ones. And then just selecting within that range. If you pay attention to the work of the process, you'll immediately get what I'm talking about. In this example. If I sampled the colors from the illustration, you'll notice how all or most of the colors come from my limited range of the hue slider. And occasionally you see colors that are far outside of the hues that dominate the composition. These are often called accentuating colors. And these two can have a range. So to summarize, when deciding the colors for your illustration, think in terms of the main dominant range of use you want. And maybe arrange for a few exception colors that are going to have some contrast or accentuation somewhere in your illustration. Relating this to the previous concept we talked about color distance. The recent to pick a hue range is all the colors are super harmonious. If we pick random colors, then there will be no security that they will fit nicely together. Okay, So here's the thing. I also want to take this opportunity to show you a bit of a foolproof method to pick the right colors. To start picking the right colors, we're going to steal the colors from a successful composition and adapted to around stealing colors. It's one of the few things are these are allowed to directly copy from each other. And it is a great way to build the color foundation to build upon. So here I have this amazing background from professional artists create swatches. I love his style. We're going to import this image to our document and sample a few of the most important colors. I want to start with the sky and ground and mountains. You can see that I do the type of mountain from the Southeast and some of the trees in the back because the composition is so different to mine. This no big trees or bushes here. I'm going to have to improvise the rest of the colors. Here's where the concept of color distance comes in handy for as long as you don't pick hue, saturation, or values that are too different from the colors are ready in the illustration. You'll know that they work nicely with it. But of course there is still a lot of experimenting and fine tune into the hair. As in any illustration. You can see how in a matter of a few minutes, I managed to change the whole feel of the illustration. A couple of things. First, I should have probably pick the colors at the beginning. In the sketching phase. That's the best place to do it since coloring a sketch is faster and we'll give you a more accurate preview of what you want. But here for the sake of the course, I wanted to talk about color separate from everything else. So the next time you want to draw an illustration, consider doing all of these at the sketch phase and start from there. And second, this is more of an exercise. Now, they always make more than one version. Especially if you're at the stage of sketching. But even now, it shouldn't be too difficult to do it. Just look at how fast I change colors. Just make copies of your illustration and try new color schemes. Maybe a different time of day or a different station. What different colors? To me, this is one of the most fun stages in any illustration. Okay, we're done with the color. But remember, you're never really done with the fine tuning. Another, the final colors are selected. I just wanted to be with a gestation. The final path, which is often one of the most time-consuming moments in the entire drawing. 19. Finalizing the Illustration: Now it's time for the final touches. This stage can take a long time because you'll never treat them with touching things up. Even when you're done, you'll always find little things that you'd like to fix or change or add. Still, I consider the stage of the final touches because technically the restriction could we just finished as it is, maybe with a few quick fixes? The next trenches we're going to make. I'm not technically necessary, but they will add on to the final illustration. I felt the central piece of the illustration needed something else. So I decided to bring in a few more of those bases and other items. Here. I'm just playing around seeing what works and what doesn't. This is a common thing you'll be doing all the time while you're sitting, at least when you're illustrating using an asset back, just trying things out. New asset scholars locations. It sounds super easy to do and say. And you should take advantage of that. Because I wanted the area to give the impression that was some sort of meeting place. I decided to add a log and prepare it in a way that looks like it was used as an improvised sit in object. Again, being creative with the assets you have is really essential because you're not going to draw everything the same way. They have varied based I improvise that from an existing asset and it worked. It looks completely different when building backgrounds like this, being created with the things you get is essential. Because no matter how much assets you got, it always want to be missing the exact thing you want. Now I'm playing with the idea of removing all together the foreground and putting something else in the corners to occupy the empty space. But it just hasn't worked out. This happens sometimes not already as will lead to something great. However, that failure did lead to a new better idea to as basis all pile up together and the borders in the foreground, those implying that something is going on with that area that goes beyond the centerpiece, maybe a remnant of some kind of ruined. I like the idea and I decided to go with it, adding a few more basis to the background to reinforce that concept. But now it runs the risk of feeling like this was some sort of this post area for the local shop. So I came up with ADF either in a wild animal in the distance will make it feel like it's really somewhere deep in the forest. But a wild animal is a very specific thing and a fairly complex thing to draw, especially if you're a beginner, I'm going to do is to show you a little treat that vector artists use hidden there. And if you use it sparingly and strategically, it will hugely improved the quality of your restrictions. So here I am in the royalty-free stock site pixels, which is political. And it has a decent amount of material. He didn't want to search for an image of an animal. I want this case a deal. I want to import this image to Inkscape. I'm going to trace over it. It doesn't need to be super detailed. Trace over. Just a rough quick work with the animal will be in the background. When you're done, you can copy the sign and imported into the project. So now with the deal done, I'm going to put it in the right side looking at the focal point. And I've got to make it merged with the background. I don't quite want it to call attention to itself. Otherwise, it will be fighting with the central piece. Another illustration part of the composition is basically fully done. I will be fiddling with some stuff and maybe trying some things out. It's always easier to try new stuff when you got everything almost done because everything looks finished. But here's the final trick that I'm going to give you one, making backgrounds. You will notice that I flip the entire illustration horizontally. This is a very well-known trig illustrators use all the time. And the idea is that it helps you see the image in a new light. And this helps you spot any mistake your brain has gotten used to. Likely doesn't seem to be large mistakes I can spot at the moment. One problem with this trick is that your brain gets used to this image pretty fast. So as soon as you flip it, brush to find any mistakes and fix them, immediately. Flip the image frequently all the time from the beginning stages to the end. Other than that, I'm just adjusting the phenyl things to the drain and trying new stuff here, minor things that they call the amended to try, but still we're done. You can see that this is starting to look critical. The final lesson in this project is gonna be about adding light and shadow. And this is what will give it that nice finish thrill. 20. Adding Light and Shadow: Here we are almost done. This lesson we'll be adding light and shadow to the recession, as well as adding just a few extra details here and there. But before we delve into light and shadow, I want to talk really briefly about the basic theory we need. I already talked about light and shadow in the submucosa. So I don't want to repeat myself too much in this lesson. When the light rays hit a surface, it changes the color of that surface. It will make the lighter of a higher value. Now, it can be a bit more complex than that. And we'll get into that. But for now, just think in terms of value. In this example, we can see how the idea in light has the same hue and saturation, but the value has just incremental. Remember then the last slider in the HSB color mode is the one property they can control how light or dark a surface is. Depicting an object with areas of light and shadow. The most common trick you'll be doing is to sample the color from either light or shallow. So they are the same. And then slightly move either up or down the B slider to increase or decrease the value of the color does implying a plane is either in shadow or hit by light. So remember this two-step process, sample the color and then move the slider either up or down a bit. Feel it feels like it's in light or shadow. Now, here's the thing in real life where the light interacts, not with flat plains, but we found this surfaces. The shadows have nice and smooth. And while some styles of cartoons use this type of smooth shadow, this style of ketosis we are working on. They go for a sterilization of the separation between light and shadow areas by making it super hard and clearly visible. This is something called cel Shading. And I personally think it looks awesome. There is a nice little trick that's super easy to do. And it's usually employed more in shadows and highlights. Just make the shadow shape on top of your shape you want to draw. And then instead of giving a color, you send it to completely black. Then remove the alpha slider, the one that controls the transparency. Because we are making a black shape more transparent. We're darkening whatever is down below those low and its value. Like what a shadow idea does. This method also works great for any asset that made of multiple colors, not just a single one. Because the shadow shape is transparent, it will lower the value of anything below it. Going back to the project, I want to start by creating a highlight area on the right side of the trees. Lose implying that the sun is coming from a low angle at the right, like a sunset. Which works great for this color scheme. I went far. I'll be creating a new shape right on top and use the two-step method to do it the right color. I'm going to do the same for all the other trees that are closer to us. But now for some shadow areas, this time I'll be using the shell trick. I basically just run on top of everything really quickly and set the color to the shadow. A couple of notes here. First of all, I'm using a little technique I mentioned in the lesson of the money goes. But let me remind you. It is a feature called pasting the style. If you copy a shape with contrast, you can paste the style that is the fill and stroke colors to another shape while keeping the shape geometry to select it and then hit control shift P. This is super useful to paste the exact color and transparency of the shadows super-fast. And the other thing I wanted to mention, you can see that the shell is not entirely black. In fact, you can see that the color I picked was anonymous black brown. This is a common trick to make the shadow look better. To live with a bit of color to show through. This only work if it's subtle. And to me it makes a clear difference. Other than that, I'm trying to be consistent with the location of the shadows. This is a low under light source. So I tried to be as consistent with the angle when drawing the shadow on the floor. But remember to not sweat it. This is a cartoon. You don't need to be super accurate for as long as it feels right. Speaking of shadow shapes in the ground. I so notice how I add a shadow shape on the back heel, just American smooth shadow shape to the ground. This is meant to imply that the light won't penetrate too much in that area. Because of the three density. It is certainly not realistic at all. But it looks good because it adds detail to that area. The highlights in the bushes and also something that's not entirely accurate. But it still works because it's subtle and not distracting. Okay, one last trick I like to use contextualize. This is a type of shallow that formed by the contact between an object and the ground, this one. So we plugged the ground in shapes that we talked about previously. They can pass down further the objects and give it dimensionality. We have done with the lightening. Now for some final finishing touches. Again, this three over here is just too big to not have any type of texture. So I decided to at least add a couple of situations by using a line plus the deeper Stroke Path effect. Not necessarily at all. Great thoughts, some detail within hurt. Check out the resources file to learn how to use the path effects as an extra. And finally, to truly end the illustration, I feel entire composition feels a bit dull. I feel there's not enough contrast. So I'm going to go into some of these acids, enter saturation with the slider. Either want to go overboard with this. I just want to add a bit more life into the whole thing. Now we are truly done with the illustration. Of course now I look at it. I feel like there's 1 million things that I would like to improve. But that will happen to you with every single restriction you'll make. You'd never really finish it. You just stop working on it. I think it looks pretty good as it is. For a few extra words and guide on where to move next. Please check out the conclusion to the course on the next lesson. 21. Conclusion to the Class: Congratulations on finishing the course. Hopefully you enjoyed this introduction to the wonderful world of background, the same, I'm sure you feel ready to tackle the next big challenge. Here is you can go into ways depending on what was, what got you hooked. If you enjoyed vector illustration and drawing with keyboard and mouse, I have quite a few courses on drawing and rendering using Inkscape. If you're a beginner, I would recommend you to check out character design within CEP to learn how to design and illustrate collectors and daily with keyboard and mouse. Or maybe to the vector rendering to really push the limits of rendering and finally send sketches using Inkscape. If on the other hand, you are left one thing to learn more exclusively about background design. I do have a course on that. In fact, this one is a bit of a remake of that one with an emphasis on the asset pack. Of course, suddenly I haven't found much content on background, the sign that it's not aim that concept art and traditional painting. If you have any question about the course, please don't doubt in contacted me through the course page. So I can answer as fast as possible. I'm always looking for feedback and ideas for a second and dwell. So please don't be shy to contact me. And I guess that's it for now. I really hope this course has been of some help to you. I see you in the next one.