Environment Sketching in Procreate : Drawing a Digital Landscape

1. Introduction: Ever wondered how to create the beautiful fantastical environments that we see in video games like Journey or movies Like Up? Hi, I'm Gargi, a concept artist working for Sumo digital Newcastle. From studying in Zidi School of Design in Singapore to learning from concept art Masters, I've worked for Truva Interactive, Rockstar Games and Accenture Malaysia on diverse projects. The very foundation of environment concept art lies in learning how to masterfully sketch environments using color, lighting, and mood. Concept sketches are meant to explore different design possibilities in an environment and are one of the most crucial stages in production. In this class, I will teach you how to create such environments from start to finish, how to translate an idea into an image by following a professional yet simple workflow. We will start the class by craftily gathering references or taking inspiration from nature, followed by an understanding of how to block out our environment while paying attention to shape language, composition and design principles. By the end of the class, you will have a thorough understanding of how to generate an idea, create reference boards, how to use quick menus and shortcuts and procreate, along with creating your very own customized brush set. To conclude, you will have learned how to create a finished environment sketch. Learning this skill will allow you to create environments with more efficiency, as you will have all the tools necessary to explore as many design possibilities as you can. Without much further ado, let's get started. 2. Class Orientation: Kurt Voniga once said, practice any art, music, singing, dancing, acting, drawing, painting, sculpture, poetry, fiction, essays, reportage, no matter how well or badly, not to get money or fame, but to experience becoming, to find out what's inside you, to make your soul grow. I have believed this to be true for as long as I can remember. My primary reason for becoming an artist was to experience such a becoming in spirit. The main project for this class is to create a finished environment sketch. Sketching is an art in itself. To have the knowledge and understanding to suggest details visually is a skill that is acquired after much practice and training. Often in production, one of the main tasks of a concept artist is to produce several many sketches to narrow down an idea and explore design possibilities. That is why it is an absolute necessity to have all the skills necessary to create quick sketches or mood pieces. The class will be divided into three main sections. One, idea generation and reference gathering. Two, blocking out your main shapes with attention to composition. Three, painting in important details using color and light. There will be a thorough demonstration through every phase of this class. As we begin, I will show you how to effectively take an idea and give shape to your imagination using reference images to plan your sketch. Once we have that sorted, I will demonstrate how to block in some basic shapes to create a balanced composition. We will have a neat value structure while keeping in mind the concept of big medium, small, the very crux of our design fundamentals. Then we will learn how to use light and color to paint in some key details which will add material variety to your painting. The tools we will need for this class is an iPad, Procreate and PUF. Procreate is one of the most intuitive painting softwares that promotes a very smooth workflow with its quick menus, shortcuts, and brush customization. PUF is a very simple and user friendly application for assembling and categorizing your references. Alternatively, you can also download Miro and use it. It has template options like the use of sticky notes, custom shapes, arrows, et cetera to craft your ref boards. I mostly use Miro professionally for more complex environments, but for a single environment sketch, I'd much rather use PureRef as it's faster. However, feel free to choose whichever you please. As a project resource, I will add a link to my brush set for Procreate and show you how to create brushes on your own. I will also teach you how to categorize brushes according to the very specific needs of the painting. As we go through the lessons, you will have a greater understanding of why different brushes are used for different painting purposes. I would recommend trying out Procreate on your own and familiarizing yourself with it if you are an absolute beginner. Try using the brushes, the quick menus, quick shape, the selection tool on your own. Becoming comfortable with the software is key to having a good workflow, which is of utmost importance for a successful painting. It's important to focus, but it's more important to enjoy the process and have fun. Let's dive right in. 3. Idea Generation and Reference Gathering: In today's class, we will be learning the very first steps of concept creation, research and reference gathering. This is one of the key phases in idea generation. While this may sound simple, learning how to effectively go through this step will speed up pre process to a great extent. We will mainly be using Pinterest and Google to collect references, and you can use either PureRef or Miro to assemble and categorize these references. The goal in today's lesson will be to have a set idea for our sketch and have a ready reference board for. Is one of the first steps in learning and understanding design. Knowing how to effectively create reference boards, understanding how to draw inspiration from images, and combining them together to create a new fresh design is the ultimate goal. This is an extremely useful tool, especially for beginners, as they are often unsure about how to use references to facilitate the design process. Sometimes when I don't have any ideas, I'll just go to Pinterest and I'll start browsing through concept art, inspiring locations, interesting organic designs in nature. And as you can see, like, I I do love to create these little boards of inspiration for myself. If you invest enough time in researching on Pintrest, then it automatically recommends pins for your feet, which is quite handy, I believe. At times, it also happens when I start researching in Winterest Like, this is the topic that I've chosen for our class. And when I started researching for temple ruins, I had this idea that, what if, you know, these temple ruins were to be in a magical, sort of fantastical snowscape? Like, if I could mix those two ideas up, um, and that is what led me to gather some more snowscape references. And if you notice here, I have gathered two sets of each. Like, I have some concept art references like this, which will inform my color and mood. And then I have some real world references which will be informing the design of my sketch. So this is pure ref, and as you can see, I've started, um, categorizing and grouping the reference images that I collected. And like I was saying before, I always collect two sets of references, one, which is mainly real world, which will inform my design choices, and one, which is primarily for the color palette and for the lighting, which is going to inform the mood, which is mostly made up of concept art. And often I also use screen grabs for mood references. A good resource for grabbing such screenshots from movies and stuff is shot deck. Um, as you can see, there's many ways in which you can filter out your results. Like, you can add time period. You can add the kind of lighting you want. Like, for instance, let's just let's give it a try. Like, let's give let's try for low contrast, maybe sight light, and let's give time of the day as night and, Uh let's see what else we can maybe choose composition as well. Um, actually, let's leave that. And the search item would be, um, let's go for snow. Whoops. And, like, as you can see, starting to get something. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. But it can still, like, give you some really interesting compositions. Maybe we should type snowy mountain. Oh, there you go. And this is a great way to just, you know, quickly get some really, some really nice mooreps. I really like the colors here, so and then you can get several more like the silhouette division here is really beautiful. I can't decide which one to take. I think I'll take this. Just really lovely composition here. The leading line over here is just really. So you can simply if you like something, you can simply just copy it, go back to your PUF, and you can just paste this in here as simple as that. There's a really easy and quick way of arranging your image. If you just select the group that you want to arrange or clap up together. And if you press Control P, then it just arranges them together for you. And that's why PRF is just a handy tool. And as you can see, I've written down some small little notes beside the images of what I like about the particular image or how I want to use this particular image in my sketch. So the way to do that is you press Control N, and that gives you the note. I just have this one separate one, which has a red sort of background to denote that these are my notes for the paintings. And for the headers, basically, I have just a career background. So you can just type then whatever you want. Like, um, perhaps damage or bruin. That's what I like from this image. And it just this sort of prep before you do the sketch really helps you not get lost. Even then, while you're doing this sketch, there have been many times when I've gone back and I've done more research or I've collected more references for something that I couldn't properly gauge or when I was stuck somewhere. Alright. I just going back to Shot Deck, like, that's what this is. Go check it out, browse through for yourself. It is a paid membership, but you can still, give it a try. I do believe there is there is a free trial, but this is just such a handy resource that I have gotten a subscription for it. Anyway, let me just add this one last image. And also, you'll notice that I haven't added too many references because I've always noticed that once I start sketching, I always end up needing more specific references. So and then some of the references I had gathered initially, um, are not just handy anymore, which is why I tend to start with a small set of references like this, which gives me a basic idea of how to go about things, what kind of composition I want, what kind of colors I want, what kind of mood I want, India. So just to go through the board in detail, I always have an overview section, which is just a general idea of the kind of sketch that I'm looking for, which is going to be as simple as temple ruins ruin temple in a snowscake. That's it. And then I go a little deeper into the temple design, and I start looking into what kind of shapes will or what kind of an architectural design do I want? Like, for instance, I really like the shape language that's used here. So initially, as I was gathering references, I was thinking, Okay, maybe something like this or this. But then once these got my eyes, I was like, Oh, yeah, definitely, I would like to go in this direction. And given the opportunity and the time, I would like to explore all of these, but yeah, sometimes you don't have the time, so you have to narrow down in your reference board itself, which is also alright. And then I want it. I'd like to have it's good to have actually some references to inform the terrain, some real world references, just to, you know, have something to go back to to see how the snow accumulates in places, the relationship between the snow and the rock, how the shadow gets cast, what are the hard edges? What are the soft edges and things like that? Snowscapes and different kind of lightings, different types of snow terrains, like The rocky terrain here is much more than the snow versus some of these other ones. So this gives me enough information to then start adding these sort of little details or starting my sketch with this information will help have a better output. And then, lastly, of course, the mood drifts, which are very important, like what kind of a Mura I want. Like, for instance, I really love these colorful Northern lights and also some other, like, sort of magical thing that's going on here. These are all references from various artists gathered over Pinterest. Um, so, you know, the colors here, the kind of cool warm contrast here, the little streak of lighting here, which I was mentioning before as well. And then the composition in this one, the fog in this one. There are little little things that I like from each of these individual images, which will inform my color palette and lighting decision. The other thing that I'd like to show you is that alternatively to using pure if, you can also use Miro. It's quite handy. There are some templates that you can choose from. Then there are also, yeah, what I generally do is I just go for shapes and lines. I take a border like this, and then I there's sticky notes that you can add, and, you know, you can just start typing in your notes here, whatever it is, um, damaged. These are the only things that I can think of since I was, uh, researching ruins. So, you know, when you have an image, and, like, let's say, this is the way I would do it, if I add an image here, and then you can always bring these to front. And basically, this is how I'll collect my references, and then you can really you can get very, very organized and mirror. Like, you can divide your board into different sections, and you can sort of then drag it across. I don't know why is usually doesn't create so much of a problem in moving, but, yeah. You know, technology. Sometimes it works for you, sometimes it doesn't. So in any case, So this is how basically I would prepare the basic structure for my board, like, have a few columns in there, have some spaces to write, you know, the similar way in which we did. So you write overview. And then or you don't have to write overview. I mean, this is what I have been doing for years, and then just categorizing your refs, like sometimes it can also be set dressing, whatever it is you're doing, whatever is your And then in a similar way, like, you continue that and you keep it's very simple. You just copy paste your images from wherever it is. Like, if you're using Shot Tech, then um, you take the image from Shop tick and you simply you have to click outside the rectangles. And then you just add them here. Well, that's not a temple design, but you know what I mean? Whatever, I guess this will go under your mood refs. But more or less, this is also a very handy tool, but we were because we are going to do a small sketch, I'd like to use PureRef because it's just very fast and quick to sort of drag and drop images. I like to use pure rep for that. But if I'm working on a really big project with a very big scope, then I would probably use Miro. There's also other things like arrows and stuff in Miro, which are also quite handy. But, yeah, it's very user friendly. Give it a try. Give it a go. All the tools that you will need are here on the left hand side, and it's really handy. It's really simple. Go check it out for yourself. Um, right. Back to PRS. Um, yes. And the other thing that's also necessary while you're categorizing and, you know, writing down your notes and placing your images into categories in PRF is you really get into the mood of the sketch. You really get into the sketch. Like, for instance, while I was doing this, I was thinking, and all these colors, sort of inspired me like maybe my snowscape temple ruin has a touch of fantasy to it, perhaps. And it's nice to have that also written down. Because when you do sit down to sketch, all of these ideas, getting into the mood, getting into the story, helps. They all help. So to summarize this lesson, we want to have a few rough ideas about what we want to paint. If we are unsure, we can always go back to Pinterest. Once we have narrowed it down, we will start our research and not hesitate to mix up a few ideas together and then gather our references accordingly. We must also remember to collect two sets of references, one real world references, and one mood references. The mood references can be from movies. It can be concept art, anything you want. Uh, once we are done with that, we need to assemble these references together either in a Pref or a mirror, whichever you prefer. And remember to add labels and notes to mark what we liked about a particular reference and how we wish to use it. Our thought process during this time should revolve around bringing our idea to life. Some of the most important questions I generally ask myself at this stage is, what sort of elements could I use to make this scene believable? What more set dressing elements could I use to make my scene interesting and to facilitate storytelling? Even while gathering references, one of the other very important things I always think about is the concept of big, medium and small. Uh, big, medium, small and large shapes and how they are balanced in a scene determines how successful your design or your painting is. We will go into more details about this in the next lesson. I hope you enjoyed this lesson and that it helps you have a better understanding about idea generation and reference gathering. See you in the next lesson. 4. Time To Start Sketching: Welcome back. In this lesson, we will start sketching our environment based on the ref board we created and the ideas we generated in the last class. Before starting to sketch, I always keep my reference board open either on a desktop or on a laptop. The main goal of this lesson is to create a rough environment sketch while paying attention to composition, the big medium small theory, and shape language. I'll be starting off with a five K Canvas, as that's one of the industry standard resolutions to work with. Depending on the complexities of the subject matter, I'll either start with a rough line sketch or block shapes out accordingly. For this design in particular, I decided that it's better to just block it out directly. One of the key factors I keep in mind while sketching is not to be afraid to make mistakes and try out new things. If it doesn't work, I can always paint over it. As you can see, I've also started my sketch in black and white. I just find it easier at this point to completely focus on the value structure and the composition and not worry about color at all. And hence, it's just easier to focus on the shapes, focus on my values. You'll see me flipping the canvas over and over again, every now and then. It's mainly to make sure that the composition is balanced. And this is one of one of the most important techniques that I have adapted to my workflow. It refreshes our eyes and allows us to see our work from a fresh new perspective. Zooming in and out is also a great practice to incorporate while sketching, as it will allow you to see the sketch from far away and to ensure the composition works well. The focus point gets the attention that it deserves and all our big shapes work well with one another. Designing the flow of the composition with a division of the space into foreground, midground, and background is key in sketching an environment. And you can see, as I start to make different variations, that's one of the key things that I'm keeping in mind and I'm trying to establish very early on, that is the flow and the balance. Foreground elements in a composition are mostly used as blockers to guide the eye, whereas the midground element is where which vainly formulates the focal point. And the background is basically meant to give context to your entire scene. I guess I'll be making about four of these small thumbnail sketches before I start to choose one, and then we take that further and add more and polish it further, basically. There is also the theory of big medium, small, in case of composition that I think I'd like to mention, this is one of the most important tools that we use while assembling our designs. It's tried and tested over time by artists. This principle adds a certain aesthetic balance to a design that makes it very pleasing to the human eye. Um, in terms of the main silhouette, you'll notice in my sketches as well that when we balance a big shape with a medium shape and a small shape, it's basically what's adding the balance and creating what we call good design in concept art. There are some key things you can keep in mind while sketching. One would be primarily the focal point and how the composition is created to sort of lead the viewers eyes towards the focal point. You can see in all in the two sketches that I've done so far and even in the one that I'm making right now, the idea is always to make sure that the eye is guided to the focal point. Few compositional tools that we generally use to do that are a lot of the way we arrange foreground, midground background elements, sometimes lighting, like you can see in the first sketch, the trail of light that has fallen, that kind of connects the midground to the foreground, and that's what's leading the eye there. In the second sketch that I made, it's the way the shapes are arranged, and it's also the value structure that's kind of leading the eyes, the big cloud, the big swirling cloud, and the second sketch is the eye to it. And the concept of the golden ratio is also can be quite useful when it comes to composition. We generally always tend to keep our focal point at three fourths, with respect to a landscape canvas. And C curves, S curves are also pretty effective when it comes to leading the viewer's eye and keeping our subject in focus. You can be pretty quick and swift with your brush strokes. There's no need to have any perfection. There's no need to zoom in any more than I have than you can see in the canvas. And it's all about sculpting and building in the shapes. It's all about shape language and how to balance that primarily at this moment. You'll also notice that I try to use different kinds of shapes like sometimes I'm trying to balance triangular shapes with more circular shapes and trying to create a variety in the edges that I'm making like hard edges versus soft edges. Primarily, though, it's pretty much about the very basic value structure. At this point, when you're making these kind of variations, when you're making these kind of thumbnails, and this is something we quite often have to do as a concept artist where people want to see variations. You're art directors. They want to see variations of the same subject. Like how many options, how many different designs can you come up with. So this is a very important exercise for that as well. And the thing is the first sketch that you make is always a bit predictable. Like, there's generally nothing new about it. At least that's how I feel with whenever I make these kind of options. It looks like a very tedious process, but it's actually so much fun. In any case, now you can see I'm just pretty much working out small tiny details, just trying to add those little highlights, trying to make sure that there is that the value structure and the value grouping is paired well and that everything works well. This one is turning out to be a real favorite. So I'm spending more time on this than I did on the other ones. As you can see, I'm struggling little bit with deciding what to do with the foreground element. And I might just leave this as is and and leave it for later. I can figure it out on the later stages as well. It's not that crucial at this stage to have everything figured out as long as it's mostly working. There's something interesting in it. There's something fresh and as long as the composition and the main value structure works, that's more than enough for this stage. And I'm going to try a few different ones and see if there's any way I can make it work, I'm struggling a little bit, but that's normal. It's normal to have these kind of struggles with tricky compositions, especially like this one where balancing the foreground with the background is a bit tricky. And I'm quite happy with where this is going. I'm quite happy with the shapes. I'm quite happy with how the architecture is looking. It's working well. And if it works on a small scale, then it's going to work for sure, even on a larger scale. But yeah, the main thing is it has to work in a small scale. And moving on to the fourth one, as you can see, like, at the very beginning itself, like, I'm going to try and define The leading line so that immediately the composition is kind of set. With whatever shapes I'm laying in there, I'm keeping in mind that my foreground values have to be darker. My midground values are in that midtone range. And then, you know, of course, the background has to recede. And this is also that the sense of depth is created. Because the last thing you want is for your sketch to look flat. We want to give that impression of the depth in the scene. And hence the value structure is always built in that sense that your foreground is the Tarkes, the midground is mostly with mid tones and highlights, and then the background is further much receding values. And I'm just trying to define what would be the main what kind of architecture? What kind of shapes would be in the main midground? Sometimes at this stage, like, looking at references will really help you. So sometimes I would just pause and just do that. Like, just pause, go look at some references, maybe try to find some new references, get some fresh ideas. And sometimes if working on one area I mean, I'm not getting any results out of it. I'll just move on to another area and work on that. And as you keep doing that, you always get, fresh ideas of what to do and how to make the composition work. Experimenting with different types of shapes. That's perfectly fine. You can do that. You can start a sketch completely different and maybe take one really small element that you like from it and we can simply get rid of the rest, flip your canvas, flip the little bit that you drew. This phase is about exploring, it's about trying new things, so don't hesitate to do that. Now it's all about just defining those highlights and defining some basic lighting is basically all I'll do in this stage. Like, really basic lighting, just enough to draw the attention to the focal point, and that's about it. Then just a little bit of definition for the trees here and there. I think too crazy. Yeah, you can also, you know, use big soft brushes, and you can create a multiply layer, and that can be used to create some like an overall value adjustment. Like, I often do that for the foreground, just to have that. And you can mask it. And with the mask, you have more control over that. In the end, I ended up deleting it. But, well, I decided it was better without the multiply. Yes, you can also use curves. Uh, curves is a very good way to adjust your values at the end. And with the curves in Inprocreate, there's control over your red, green, and blue channels, as well, which we'll explore more in color. And these are the four sketches. I will take my favorite one, which you all know which one it is. And then I am going to try and finish this one off. And I think there's a lot to explore in this one in terms of architecture. So this will be a good learning experience for you guys and for me, as well. Since this is pretty rough, initially, it's just going to be about fixing the very basic things like right now after you know, zooming in and getting into the actual canvas size, of course, a lot of it is too rough, it's too loose and it's too blotchy. So we want to start out by defining some of those shapes. Now, this phase is mainly going to be about giving definition and giving context. Like, for instance, the foreground element, they're rocks, right? So they need to look like rocks. They need to represent rocks. And that's what we're going to do. We're not going to go crazy. Into, like, defining them in a hyperrealistic way or something, but we're going to make sure that when somebody sees this picture, they can identify it as rocks. In trying to do that, you might need to study rocks or something or look at references a bit more, and that is the process. You might have noticed that I'm cropping stuff out. I'm cutting stuff out of my original image, and I'm dividing them into layers now. And that's basically what I'll be doing is I'll be separating some of these elements out into different layers so that I have more freedom to paint in different layers as we, you know, try to finish things off. And then I'm going to just cut out the background. And this free hand tool is just perfect for doing that. You can just tap in with your pencil and it just moves along. And then once you connect, it just makes the selection, and then you swipe three fingers down, and it gives you the option to cut or paste or copy and paste, whichever you prefer. I even use it just to make small selections so that I can paint, you know, with a big brush. So that's also very handy. It's not always to just divide things into different layers. At this point, I'm just sort of trying to define the silhouettes a bit more in order to finish up the sketch and just trying to see how I can find some leading lines, like, as many leading lines as I can to lead the viewer's eye to the focal point, which is the ruined architecture. Trying to create some more interest in the value structure there in the foreground. And as you can see, I always use, I mainly use the round brush, and then I use the smuge brush. And at this stage, basically, those are the only two brushes that I'm primarily using. It's just mainly the round, and occasionally, I'll use the airbrush or the soft brush, but it's mainly the round and the smug. I don't like to use the soft brush too much because it tends to make values very muddy. Now, once I'm happy with how it's feeling in black and white, I'm going to start to take it in color, so just making sure that everything is in order. I'm mainly trying to focus the tightening on the central architecture because that's where the eye is going to be going. That's where the viewer's eye is mainly going to be focused on. So I want to make sure that that part is a bit more tight and bit more defined. You know, just trying to find some interesting shapes, some, like, an interesting distribution of values. It's important to keep that layer structure, like your foreground, midground and background separate. It's just going to give you some freedom, especially later on when you want to introduce things like atmosphere and fog and all that. And as you can see, I'm always flipping the canvas, again and again to make sure it's balanced. The other thing I wanted to say is, if it was just a sketch, I would have probably left it like, maybe in the stage it was before with perhaps a little bit more finishing, but because we're going for a finished concept sketch, I'm going to be tightening up some of the areas here. Still gonna be quite loose and not as defined as a finished concept art, but even in a finished sketch. And I will try and finish it a bit more than than a regular finished concept sketch would be finished environment sketch would be, just to show you guys, the kind of suggestive painting that we can do to finish. It's important to study architecture a little bit, as well when we're trying to add that definition. This is based on Rajasthani temple architecture in India. And this is one of my favorite style of architecture. As far as Indian architecture goes, everything is it's really beautiful, but this one, especially is my favorite. So just trying to do justice to it, tightening up some more areas and defining the snow and the rock some more making sure that path and that leading line to the Fort to the structure is solid and just giving a little bit of definition to the temple itself. And I'll keep noodling on this until basically, I'm satisfied with however much I've defined. Small things like painting the reflection on the water, painting some strokes to indicate the flow of the water are good indications of the material. So that's important. I decided to paint in a small little boat to give it a little bit of context. And that's how we're going to work through this entire piece to finish is by taking it in phases. So the first phase was about figuring out the composition. And now this second phase is going to be about defining things, defining the terrain, defining the architecture, rocks, boats, water, structure, mountain, cloud, sky, everything. So thinking about the lighting at the minute, like, the trail of light, like, how do I want the light to hit the structure so that it flows better? With the composition. And then I'll just get started with the color. I'll just paint the color in by layer so that it's easier on and have an overlay layer and a clipping mask onto the layer that I'm painting so that I can just use a big soft brush, and then it's easy. At this point, you can just experiment with different kinds of color. Use a clipping mask, use the overlay layer, and you can even try different blend modes as well. And with the overlay, the trick is you have to keep your colors pretty saturated, but you can, of course, move the saturation and value bar around to see and try to get that perfect color. It's all about trial and error at this stage with color. And this is kind of the phase where I try to relax as much as possible as well. Try test out different kinds of colors, test out different values. Once I've pretty much added color to every single layer, I also do an overlay layer at the top, at the very top where I can just freely add in color. It's nice also to sort of merge everything and then go ahead and do some curves on it. This is a good stage to do that. As soon as you introduce colors into a black and white painting, it's going to really change the look of the painting. So that's a good time to actually merge all your layers down. And then it's all about painting in with these colors. It's about trying to have that balance. At this point, you can try out different kinds of brushes as well. So I'm trying out different ones to see what gives me that kind of flow that I want in the sky. Yeah, at this point, I'm just experimenting with colors, honestly, seeing what sort of looks nice. At any point, you can go ahead, make a separate selection of the foreground or midground or background and try the hue saturation variations because you can toggle between a lot of choices there. And then, as you can see, I'm doing another overlay now on top. The one thing I keep in mind while doing color is having a balance between cool and warm colors, between complimentary colors. So that's important. I'll also add some changes to the value structure as I go on in color. And now with the hue saturation brightness, I think I've kind of achieved what I wanted to with the color. Sometimes I do. I'll just add a block of color and test out these different kinds of blend modes. Sometimes you can get something really interesting with that. And then I'll just leave that quite happy with where it's going now. And then you can always merge everything together and do a little curves on it. And you can get lots of interesting results with these curves. You can sometimes get really nice, interesting experimental color palettes, like and you can create color variations as well in this way. Like, I just make a copy, make another hue saturation variation or do a curves pass on it and see which one works better for you. I'm quite satisfied with this. This is a very good place we're in in terms of a colored sketch. And you can also notice, like how extremely zoomed out I am. And this is actually a good enough read for me. And anytime I have trouble making a decision, I'll just flip the canvas. And now it's just about finding that right value structure. And you can use curves. You can paint stuff in. I'm trying to see if lights on or off is better. I think lights on looks good for now, and I think I'm happy with this. And we have some options as well. This is how you can make different variations, and then you can choose which one you like better. So that's our vinyl colored sketch, and I'm sure that you have many nice and interesting options as well, and you can choose whichever one you like, and we'll push that for a polish. Let's summarize some key giveaways from this lesson. Don't be afraid to make mistakes. Flip the canvas horizontally and zoom in and out to get a fresh perspective. Have a black and white adjustment layer to check your values. Create attention to focal point by using compositional tools, lighting, and atmosphere. Using big medium and small for creating an aesthetic design. Separation and overlap of foreground, midground, and background, remember, gives us an opportunity to create interesting shape language. Think about the key giveaways while you create your sketch. Remember to take a break, go out, take a walk, get some fresh air and clear your mind if you feel overwhelmed at any point. If you are stuck somewhere, go back and have a look at your reference board. Try to find your answers there. I'm sure you will create a beautiful sketch at the end of this lesson. Remember, the idea is to never give up. In the next lesson, we will go over adding suggestive details, material, feel, lighting, and mood to our sketch. 5. Final Polish: Hello again, and welcome back. In this class, we will learn how to add some suggestive details and material finish to our focal point, additional elements, and anything else we feel needed in the painting. We will also define the shapes and silhouettes in some areas of the painting while adding some atmosphere and fog and refining the lighting overall. In a sketch, I always look at details and materials in terms of lighting. It's very important to be quite suggestive with these when it comes to sketching. We don't want to get too absorbed in details. So we'll be keeping the canvas fairly zoomed out during this process. Of course, when you go further into it, you have to zoom in to take care of little details here and there, but mostly keeping it zoomed out, like how I've kept it right now is good enough. We'll be using a few blending modes as well for refining the lighting in our scene. Um, you'll see me use it later. The ones I use mostly are overlay multiply add and screen. We'll get to that a bit later. For now, I'm basically just tightening up some parts. It's a similar process to what we were doing before, which is tightening areas. We'll keep certain things loose and certain things will be tighter. It's mainly about focusing on shape language and keeping in mind the flow of the composition. Similar to what we did before, but right now we're just doing it in a more polished way. This is where I'll also be using some texture brushes to get the desired strokes that I want. And these texture brushes is basically what I'll be using to denote material change and shift in material here and there. It's going to be very subtle indications, nothing too crazy. And more refinements of shapes, checking the values again and again. I've got a black and white layer on top that I can turn on and off to check the values. I'm flipping the canvas again just to make sure that everything is flowing well, making sure everything is well defined, defining hard edges to soft edges. Speaking of the different blend modes that are there, at this point, I can add that screen the blend mode is useful when you are adding fog or atmosphere in your scene. The layer opacity can also allow you to have control over how dense you'd like the fog to be multiply is mainly used for adding shadows or darkening your seen in parts. I use overlay. And add sometimes for adding lights and lighting to my scene, which you'll see me do later. In this stage of polish and refinement, it's important to remember to not get carried away, which is quite difficult to do. You'd probably see me getting carried away a bit here and there. But as long as you stay zoomed out and you can't possibly get carried away that much. So that's the main idea here. That's why you'll see me zooming out every now and then. At this point, I'm just adding more interesting values and trying to create more depth in the scene, trying to create a better value structure than the one that I currently have. And then with the main structure, I'll, of course, be going in and tightening that a little bit more than it is now. Just making sure it has enough interesting information, enough indication of materials and just focusing on different areas, doing the adding some little lights and shadows and highlights wherever needed, just to define things a bit better. It's important to be bold with your strokes. Try to use as big a brush as you can, and mostly just make sure your strokes are impactful and that you're not scratching in the details. And it's not necessarily necessary to paint every single spec of the detail. For instance, we can suggest reflectivity of a particular material by a simple stroke of our brush. With some specular highlight. We can indicate a material like how I've indicated the snow here or even the water. It's mainly just the reflection that's doing the work there. Even defining the edges of any shape, depending on how rough or how sharp or how smooth can help to suggest the material as well. So edge detail is important. Trying out different different lighting techniques also help. Like, at this point, I'm just I want to see if I cast some light out the door onto the snow, how that would feel, finding some parts a bit more foreground background, adding some textures where it's needed, adding some shapes, making sure that the shape language works well with the architecture. I wanted to give that feeling of a ruined scape, so I think it was quite important to distribute the structure as well. Like, it shouldn't I didn't want it to be contained to that central space. So I thought it might be nice to distribute some of that structure around around our environment and just focusing on different areas, doing the adding some little lights and shadows and highlights wherever needed. Trying to work on the foreground, I realize that we need a different foreground to make things work here. I realize I quite like the scene as it is right now, but the only problem that exists at the minute is the foreground element. So I'm just going to redo that after I fix certain other parts. And sometimes it's nice if you can switch off certain layers, and work on the other ones. And now I'm just going to try out different kinds of foreground options, different rock formations. I'm quite happy with where this is going. I just need to figure out the value structure for this one. In testing out the value structure, kind of realized that it would be nice if I add some more of that frosted ice visible from underneath. But now that I've added something new, it's important to balance the scene out, redo the value structure a little bit. And that's kind of like a back and forth process that you have to do whenever you add something new to your scene because it's so close to the camera. I think it's important to detail out the foreground a little bit more than maybe other things that you could leave like background elements. Of course, your midground element, which is your focal point is something that needs to be detailed. But the foreground element also deserves some attention. Not a lot, but some. And now I'm just trying to define the value structure of the ice a bit better, trying to make it feel as much like ice as possible. It's fun to paint ice. But yeah, this here is going to be a little bit of back and forth for me. I'm trying to understand what I'm doing is it's a negative, positive value shift with these icebergs, so just don't want to do too much, but don't want to do too less either. And I'm also trying out different things and seeing how that works. It's pretty much about shape language at the minute. Like what shape language feels the best. And these icebergs are also acting a little bit like leading lines to the main structure, so that's nice. It's nice to have a human character in there for scale. So I'm just trying to decide where to place the red hooded figure, the mysterious red hooded figure approaching our architecture. Going to start doing a little bit on the water now and just drawing the boat again, defining the shape a little bit more. It was a bit more loose. And once you've drawn that in, you can always adjust the scale later on. Like, right now, the scale isn't correct, but, yeah, I can always fix that later on. Sometimes it's better to draw it a bit bigger, and then later on, I can always reduce the scale, which, as you can see, I did. Now, back to the architecture, just decided it might be nice to add some more snow in there. Would give a little bit of visual depth as well, depth in the value structure. And now I'm just going to keep repeating this process, trying to see how I can visually enrich this sketch to move it a bit more towards polish, just to give it some more visual information, details of visual interest. But yes, nothing too precise, but mostly suggestive details, indicative details. That's going to be our focus. And the entire time thinking about the lighting, that's pretty much it. It's nice to go really, really zoomed out sometimes just to see how the painting is looking in a very small thumbnail format, you can spot a lot of mistakes by doing that. I wanted to spread out the architecture a bit more by adding some more elements. And sometimes it's mainly the process of trial and error through which you kind of realize what looks good and what's not. So you have to try things and be prepared to fail. That's all what concept art is about. Having the bravery to try out new things and fail. And it's good. It's a process, and that's how we learn and that's how we get better. And just defining this architecture a little bit, I think having this architecture here makes the entire set a bit spread out. Like we've got one on the right, and now we've got one on the extreme left. So otherwise, I feel like it was too huddled up in the middle altogether. I'm quite happy with where it is at the minute, but I feel like it still needs that extra push. And honestly, how much you're going to push for to push this to a finished sketch level is it's really up to you. You can always, like, cut parts out and paste, and that's how you can cheat in painting. Like, you don't have to constantly paint the same thing over and over again. Like, if you have something similar in your image, then you can always make a copy of that area and then use that painting information. And it's not necessary to paint that again. And now I'm just adding those tiny little juicy details that make the architecture really pop trying to see what kind of details might look nice here. Might be a bit too much right now. And yes, it's true. I am detailing over here a little bit, and you don't need to. But it's not necessary for you to do that in a sketch, but I just wanted to show you that if you would start to detail what it would look like. And sometimes you'll notice I'll be rearranging my layers and cutting and pasting things. And it's mainly so I can move my brush more freely and use big bold strokes. So you can do that if you want. I find it easier a bit after a certain stage to paint in layers. Sometimes you can paint without layers, but painting in layers gives you the freedom to have bigger brushes and bolder strokes. Oh, I'm pretty much just going to be tightening up this architecture. In order for it to have the desired visual interest, as I say, and this is a matter of fact, going into details, which you don't need to. Even for a finished sketch, you can keep things a lot looser than this, but I thought I would just show you guys how I would go on to detailing a little bit if I have to from the loose sketch stage. And it's tricky to detail you need to be sure that everything is balanced, that all the values are balanced, that everything that it's not becoming too noisy. So once I'm done detailing, I always take out some of the details, so to speak. It's that whole process of pushing and pulling and knowing when to stop, which I'm not that good at, but hey, we learn. I thought of adding a few of those imperfections and overgrowth plant growth just to make it feel more real in the scene in the foreground. Just pretty much going to be fixing the shapes a little bit, tightening up certain areas, adding some more definition to places, making it feel a bit more ruined, and just adding some small details. It's still really suggestive, but some small details, and not entirely happy with where it is at the moment. I feel like it needs something more, something feels missing. So I thought I might add some visual interest here and there where it's needed. Even on the mountain in the back where you use a brush, your big brush, overlay some texture. It can be any texture brush, and then you can even check out, clip it to the object which you are trying to texture, and then you'll get interesting results as you cycle through the blend modes. If you do a curve pass on it, change the lighting, and then you can always add a layer mask to that and take stuff out, or you can erase it or you can color it in. In this case, I think it was better to instead of the layer mask, just alpha lock the layer and paint it in. I'm trying to make sure that the details are not as harsh, 'cause I don't want that to supersede the architecture in any way. At this moment, I'm going a little heavy on the texture bit, and I'm adding small details here and there, which I might take out later on, but I just wanted to see how it looks, and there's no harm in trying things out you can always paint over it. So I don't hesitate to experiment when it comes to that, and neither should you. And now I'm just going to be fixing up whatever little bits of architecture need more refinement, whatever is looking too awkward and too loose. And now I'm mainly just going to be looking at very, very fine details like little highlights here and there, balancing the value structure, painting over whatever feels like too much noise. Like I said before, this is already finished enough, but I'm going the extra mile just to show you guys how to get those crispy details in. Bear in mind that this is still not heavy detailing. This is still suggestive details. Well, at least according to me, anyway. No, I feel like the scene was lacking in contrast a little bit, especially in terms of leading the eye to the architecture. So I'm just going to try something a little a little experiment with lighting and with the ad layer. And you can get some lines values. And I've basically turned the black and white layer on, just to see just to make sure that the values are well defined. And this is a bit harsh, and sometimes it's nice to go a bit extreme because you can always take it out benefits of digital painting. I'll keep switching between black and white in color while I'm at this stage. And then once I'm more or less happy, I'll start taking it out a little bit, bringing it back, taking it out some more, bringing it back again, switching it on and off, just seeing whether it's working, whether it's looking better or not. These will be the final steps. So trying to see if I can define anything better. And like I said, I'm going the extra mile with this. But even then, I think defining the lighting a little bit more was quite necessary here. And I might take it. I might push it back. I might pull it back a little bit once I'm done with this. We are nearly quite close to finish now. Everything's almost set. I just might push back from some of the details that I have, but before that, I'm just going to nitpick a little bit more. Trying to see where I can add a little bit of that light and just seeing how that feels, it might not work. And yes, my favorite things concept art birds. Concept art birds are always fun and just trying out, trying to position them. So, yeah, it's never too late to try things out. I'm also going to adjust the values some more, try to bring back some of that darkness that was there towards the right side, especially cause the lights coming in from the left. So the right side. And it's a kind of sunset lighting or sunrise lighting, if you may, either or works. I was thinking more sunset, but in any case, it's important to make sure that, um, my values are in order, because I change something and also making sure that not everything goes into dark cause for instance, the foreground bit, it won't catch that much darkness anyway. So just fixing the value structure once again in black and white, making sure that feels good. Quite happy with how it's looking at the minute. Yeah, I'm quite happy with where this is. I might end up removing some of those details, and you all will get to see the final painting. Here's the finished concept sketch. Hope you guys enjoyed the demo. As we finish up the painting, let's summarize some key takeaways from this lesson. Do not get lost in painting details. We will only suggest details to indicate a material. Interpret details in terms of lighting. For the areas that are in shadow, we can completely skip adding any details at all, and that will actually increase the depth and richness of our painting. Use a big brush and bold strokes, blurred edges versus sharp edges to create contrast in your sketch and guide the eye to the focal point. Enhance your lighting and colors with blend modes but don't overdo it. No matter what subject matter we choose for our sketch, we have to remember what's most important, the focal point, the balance and flow of the composition, overlap of foreground, midground and background elements to create interesting silhouettes and shape language. Lighting, mood and atmosphere are simply tools used to enhance your sketch. It's very important that the sketch is solid in terms of design fundamentals before we move on to this stage. I hope you guys enjoyed your final lesson for the class. I will be happy to answer any questions you may have in the common section, eagerly waiting to see what you come up with. 6. Conclusion: Congratulations. You made it. I'm proud of you for making it all the way to the end. Always remember, art is a lifelong learning curve. The more you practice and repeat the process of design and painting, the better you will get at it in time. The one thing I hope you will take away from this class is never to be afraid of taking risks, making mistakes, and failing. Failure is one of the most important steps in the path to real success in art. I had a lot of fun in teaching this class. Thank you so very much for taking part and for taking the time to learn from me. I hope this class has added some value to your skill set and that you found it enjoyable. I'm looking forward to seeing all your amazing work. Take care, and all the best for your future. 7. Bonus Content : Create Your Own Brushes: I'm going to be demonstrating a very simple and a very quick way of making brushes and procreate. It's fairly simple. There are a lot of these options, you can see here on the right, and that just gives us control over many different features of the brushes. So as you can see, there's stroke path, there's stabilization, taper, shape, grain. Rendering wet mix, color dynamics. All these gives us a variety of attributes. Taper gives you control over the basic shape of the brush, and this would be the actual shape in itself. And as you can see, the shape source library has multiple options. And the same with the grain, which is our next attribute. And yeah, with the grain, as well, it's exactly the same. You can import any of these multiple grain source files. And guys, I can't stress this enough. Go check it out for yourself. Oh, yeah, you can also import photos. So you can take if you find a picture of an interesting texture, then you can use that here. These are some of the other options that are there. You can control color. Like, you can have a brush that changes the hue saturation and value of your brush with an Apple pencil, there'll be some ways to control the pressure to control the brush opacity. These are the brush properties, so you can mainly control the maximum and the minimum size. Of the brush, that's mostly what I use this one for. With these brushes, having control over how to use them, making these brushes on your own. And having certain specific brushes for specific uses will always have you at a bigger advantage as compared to other people. What I mainly do while creating a new brush is, I always duplicate one of my old brushes, and then I take it from here. So we are going to change the shape and we can try out with a photo. Uh, just to show you guys how that works. I tried this thing out in the past based on a class of another instructor, Nikolai Lockerson where I arrange some coffee beans, and I took photos of them. So these are some interesting options I had. Then once you've added that, remember to double tap to inverse the values, basically. And then once you're there, you can try out the different shape behavior options. Most of these things, honestly, I have figured it out by trying them. You can flip their axis. You can mess around with the um with the actual shape by adjusting its angles. Then if we move on to the grain editor, the grain editor will basically define the actual texture of the brush, so go ahead and pick whichever one you want. And all this will, of course, depend on what kind of a brush you're looking to create. As of now, I myself don't know. I'm just experimenting. I've got all the basic brushes that I need, so I'm just trying to see if I can come up with something interesting by messing around with these settings here. Um, yeah, you have movement. You can mess around with scale. You can even change the green if you don't really like it after messing around with the settings, really have to give this a try. There's so many interesting options that can come up. Within rendering, there's these couple of rendering modes that you have, and honestly, give them a try. I can't stress it enough. You can find such interesting combinations, and you can end up creating a really nice brush. I'm just going to show you how the color dynamics works. Basically, the hue and the saturation is obviously the percentage controls how frequently those changes occur. And then there's obviously the color pressure and those things that you can tweak. And as you can see, I have given it quite a bit of a hue shift, which is why it's changing so rapidly, the hue. So now if we want to tone that down, we can bring those values down and we can adjust them accordingly. Like, if I bring it up slightly, 2%, it doesn't really make much of a change. So we can actually go back and we can bring some of those values up a little bit. Same thing with the others. If you find that the value drop isn't as much as you'd like to be, you can change that as well. The world is your playground here, really in procreate. There's so many things you can do. There's so much control you can have. And these settings, they're just so easy. The UI is extremely user friendly. It's not complicated at all, because I now have the stroke value jitter on with every single stroke, it's giving me a slight alteration of value. And these kinds of brushes are I find they're really good for foliage when you're painting foliage, so Go give it a try. Now, coming back to the brush itself, I want to try out. I want to show you the size jitter, which is basically the variation in size and opacity that you can get. That's what lies under the dynamics column. So the size jitter will allow you to have control over those specifics of the brush. Then with an Apple pencil, you have the size variation that comes from the pressure of the pencil, opacity, flow, and bleed basically shows how much of the texture you allow to bleed into the brush. And yeah, I forgot to mention that. You can clear the drawing pad by clicking over there and checking that button. You can also change your preview size, but I generally try to keep it at, like, between 30% to 40%, whatever is default. This is the angle and the tilt of your brush. Like, what sort of angle do you want it on? Try it out. Experiment with it. Make some really goofy, weird sort of brushes. Giving it a little pressure taper and see what that feels like, and then you can try it out on the drawing board. I guess, I'm going to try and change the grain here. Honestly, at this point, I'm just experimenting. You can search for a particular texture as well by just typing in the kind of texture you want. I'm just trying to show you guys as many options as I can, what all you can do with the same kind of textures, how many different varieties of brushes you can make with just a handful of textures just by changing or tweaking some of these options and these values here. It's all about trial and error, and that will actually help you understand which of these options, like how do these options work? It's much more fun to use your own custom made brushes for your work. Then as you can see, at every point, I'm testing it out with every little change that I'm making. And I'm seeing mode works in mode doesn't it's all a big experiment. So I'm just trying different things out. It's all about trying different combinations of things. Of course, you need to have a basic understanding of what does what. But after that, honestly, it's all about exploring and trying out different things. If you take the rotation up to its very end, it becomes it actually follows the stroke. So that's really good for certain kinds of brushes, especially, certain kinds of softer brushes, but I didn't end up going for that in this one. Different kinds of rendering, like I was saying, so it'll be nice for you guys to see this light glaze kind of a brush. So this is giving me, like, a nice, even noise texture, like a light glaze of a noise texture. But I'm gonna try out the blending and the flow and mess around with some more of these options to see what more interesting results I can get. Here, going back to the shape and seeing if there's anything I can do. I'm back to Apple pencil where I can mess around with the opacity and with the size jitter. And with the bleed a little bit more. I felt like I could mess around with the bleed some more to give it a more noisy flow. Or I'm more noisy scatter, I guess. So yeah, quite happy with the noise scatter now. And then going back, I'm going to tweak the maximum size because with noise brushes, like, you'd want to have a broader scope with them, so it's good to increase the maximum size. And I have it right now. I have the brush size. In the middle of the maximum size, if I had the brush size as the lowest possible size, and if then I increase the maximum size, then it would be even bigger. So these are some options you can mess around with. Just just wanted to show you a little bit about how air brushes are made. And you can actually look into uh, all these different brushes that are here, and you can see what kind of settings have been used to actually give these brushes the properties that they have. Like, for instance, the fall of stroke on this airbrush is important. It gives it the quality that it has. And there's actually no order in which you need to test out these features. You can go in any order that you want. I'm just going to remove the color dynamics for this one, because I don't want it in this one. And it's nice in your free time to just experiment with making different brushes. It's fun and you never know what you might come up with. And I absolutely love texture brushes, so it's fun to make them as well. And they're so handy. The reason why I go back to the main file is just to check the brush tip or the brush stroke as it appears and to see how it looks that itself can give you a lot of information. Just tweaking the maximum size a little bit here. I like the rakiness that's there. And the bleed of the texture as well. It's quite interesting. Again, like I said, the main reason for me making these precious is just to show you guys all these options and how all these options behave, what options you should or can use when, but by all means, experiment. I reduced the count jitter and the count, um, and it gave me this really interesting texture. It's kind of like a broken, damaged surface texture. Then if you're not satisfied, there's other options you can try out. There's things you can take away. You can try out different rendering styles to see what works better. At least that's what I do. Until I'm satisfied with a particular brush, I'll try out the different rendering styles that are there. Yeah, maybe mess around with some stroke properties until I feel quite happy. Yeah, I'm just gonna mess around with the fall off a bit, give it a bit of a fall off so that it has some nice trails. So yeah, some nice custom brushes we made today. I hope that gives you guys enough information to now go and create your brushes. But if you're confused, you can come back to this video, but give that a try. The one last thing I forgot to mention was that you can sign your name and you can give your brushes some names over here, and Naga, have fun making some brushes.