Transcripts
1. Fake a Watercolor Photoshop Section Intro: their creative explorers. Welcome back, I say, Welcome back. Because this is part two of my Siris on how to fake a watercolor. This is the part of the chorus where I am taking you into photo shop and we're going to play with the mask that we created in the first part, Illustrator part creating the brushes and creating our composition. We've got a composition toe work from. For those of you who didn't do the illustrator part if you wanted to just dig in. I have provided the composition it's below in the project files. You could grab that and you can just start right here with us. Okay? It's up to you. Although I do impart a ton of wisdom in that first part. So I encourage you to go back and do it if you haven't done it yet. So a little boat? Me? I've been a graphic designer and artist for over 40 years. I talked graphic design, fine art and theatrical design in high school for 30 years. See up 30 years and I'm still here. So I hope you're ready to follow along with me and we'll get started in the first lesson right away. So fire up your photo shop, but let's go. I'll see you there
2. Lesson 1 Importing Mask and Initial Set Up: you guys, welcome back. Here we are ready to get started in less and one. So what we're gonna do is we're going to import are composition that we created an illustrator. We're going to bring in a few backgrounds. And now we're gonna get started with all the techniques that are going to help us make this look like a riel watercolor. I've just poured myself a fresh cup of coffee, so I am ready. So if you were in my part one to this class, you would have created something like this. You would have learned all about making these brushes, and you would have completed this composition and you'd be ready to go in this lesson, which is the first lesson in part to car fake a watercolor. Siri's Someone switched over here into four to shop. And this is basically what I ended up with. And I'm gonna walk you through all the steps of how I created this, and we're still going to make adjustments to this. What we're trying to achieve is a look similar to this or this or something like this. So I'm gonna start by creating a brand new blank document I usually set up my documents 48 by 32 at least, But for the purposes of this course, I'm going to set it at 24 by 16. If you set your document at this size, most of the settings that I use throughout will work properly. So I'm gonna hit, create here, created my new blank document and save it. Keep it is a photo shop layered file. For now, I tend to go to a much larger image and a higher resolution for art licensing. You really need to have large files that don't have to be enlarged. So not about my blank document. And the first thing I want to dio is import that lay out that I had an illustrator. I'm gonna go under file to place embedded, and then I'm going to locate my file, which would have been in part one of my course. So I've located my template just gonna hit place. I met with this usual dialogue box for importing into photo show. Just click OK and should be pretty close to the right size. I think I set it up for that size when I was in the Illustrator I have a short cut for this , but I'll just resize it manually and hit. OK, That means my vector has been placed in position and ready to go. So usually what I do at this point is I make a folder. I call this original vector, and I place that master into that folder. You never know when you might have to go back to your original. Oh, I always like to leave a version on here completely untouched, going to duplicate it at the moment one of the mouth, which without my folder again. And get me this background layer. So now this master is still a vector. So I'm going to right click on it and I'm gonna rast arise the layer that makes it into a bit map I can use for everything I'm doing here in my photo shop program. So first steps first, I want to be able to use this as a mask and in order to make it a mask, what I want to do is have it so that everything that's in black is actually going to be. We'll see through to either the background or whatever we put inside this practice or any of the any of the black area. So really, what I need is for this to be inverted. But what I'm gonna do is I'm going to invert it. But first, before I do that, I just want to point something else when I important Vector. One of the things I've noticed is it doesn't come out as pure black and pure white. It's a little bit grayish. The first thing I'm gonna do is adjust the levels. My shortcut for that I'm not sure if it's a default shortcut, but command l brings up my levels. If not, you can go under image adjustments and go to level Seth second from the top here. So you can see here that pure black, it's not pure black, So I just quickly used these eye droppers. This one is for pure black, laconic, and the black gets blacker. And then use this book on the white and you'll see that the white gets whiter. No, I know. I've got pure white and pure black. Look, okay. And of course, this is still a layer here, so I wanted in verdict. So the shortcut for that, for me, is command, I I find that under adjustments as well in Virg. So now that I've inverted, I've got this verse image, obviously of my layout that I had created an illustrator. So this is going to become our mask that I'm going to select all and copy. I'm going, Teoh, throw those two into the original folder, going to make a new folder, That folder. I'm going to apply a mask, and I'm gonna do that down here. So I just click on this icon at the bottom of the layers palette. It has created the mask layer here, and in order to get into that mask clear, I just option click right on it. Now it just looks like we're still in a blank page. But trust me were on this mass player. So now I just based and my mask is now available for me to use on this folder or anything that I put into this folder. So I'm going to just click out of it for now. And so I'm back to my blank page. It doesn't look like there's anything happening here. What l do you I will paste a water color texture. I've got this water color texture and there's a couple ways of getting these. First of all, you can create them yourself or you can actually purchase them. Check out places like Creative Fabrica Creative Market. There are so many more gonna select all I'm going to copy and I'm gonna go back into my document is the folder I created with the mask. So now when I paste, my watercolor is pasted and shows Onley through what were white areas on my mask. This texture would have to be enlarged. I have, ah, keyboard shortcut for that for fit Teoh campus on. And I think it was a script that's fit to canvass script. You can find that online and you can load it through your script editor. I'll walk you through how to do that. Here you go to browse, have located or purchased or downloaded the script from somewhere, and the script would be in your downloads folder and there you, which look on it and insert it. And from then on it would be available in your photo shop. So here we go. We've got something in our documents and we can tell that our mask is working As you can see, that particular background was pasted into the folder that had the mask. And so will Onley show in the areas that were white on our mask. I am going to go and grab another texture. So I'm gonna grab this texture here. I'm going to select all copy and then go back into my documents. And this time, other than pasting it into the folder, I'm going to pay sit outside of the folder. So as long as I'm not in the folder, you can see now I'm gonna be pacing above this original folder paste. And in this case, my background is now pasted in the negative areas. It's not in any portion of the mask. It is just simply sitting there as a background. I'm going to get it to canvas. And now we have the first our background layers. All right, so of course we don't want to leave it just like this. This does not look like a real watercolor for other color to look, Riel, we need to have edges of all of these completely textured now. As you recall, we did some texture ring our illustrator documents, so the edges aren't nearly shirt like they would be. We had just brought in the street vector with no brush applied. It still does not look like a real watercolor. A riel water color would look like this. So in order to achieve this effect, we're gonna have to do a little bit more work on our mask. So in the next lesson, that's exactly what we're gonna do, So I'll see you there.
3. Lesson 2 Prepping Mask and Adding Initial Textures: So here we are ready to get started in last in two. So in this lesson, what we're gonna do is we're gonna work on our mass to make it look even more realistic. So before we get started, I'm gonna let you take a look at this riel watercolor edge. This is show you kind of what we're trying to emulate. There's a lot of darkness right at the edge, almost like an outline. There's pooling of color or within the painting. You can see that there's a lot of double lines and things like that where the original watercolor artists would have layered the watercolor. So this is the kind of thing that we now want to do to make our fake watercolor look like a real watercolor. So I'm gonna keep this one open for reference. What I want to do now is I want to take you into the mask layer. So I'm option clicking on the mask. And what we're gonna do is we're going Teoh mess around a little bit with these edges to make them look a little bit more watercolorist. Sh so not sure what happened here looks like in my original illustrator documents my brush applied to the inside of some of the shapes rather than the outside of some of the shapes. The first thing I'm gonna do is I'm going to work on those a little bit and I'm going to do that by selecting all of the white. So right now I'm using my magic wand. I'm selecting one of the areas of white. Then I'm gonna go under select to similar that will select all of my areas of white. What I'm gonna do now is I'm going to go under select to modify, and this time I'm going to feather it slightly Miss feathered by one click. OK, hit delete to fully clean the edges. So I had to hit three times around that fully clean the edges to save the selection because it's gonna come in handy for me when we do some of the other steps. So I'm gonna go under select save selection. I'm just gonna call it One is I'm lazy and I'll remember that. But that selection saved if I ever want to retrieve it. Did you select here to show you what happens? De selected it. I can go under load selection. I can choose one and that Ah, re selected yet felt me having to do that Hold magic wand bit. So, no, I'm going to show you how to add one of the brush edges that I like that will get us a little bit closer to having this look like a real watercolor. So you can't add a brush to a selection, just the straight selection here in a photo shop. So what we're gonna have to do is convert this selection into a path. And one of the things I want to do is I want to expand this selection a little bit so that when I apply the brush, it doesn't shrink everything and make it look distorted or smaller. So again, under select, I'm going to go to modify. And this time I'm going to go to expand, haven't keep or short gather that command comma. Think I'm minutes try expanding by four. So that's just expanded slightly into the black area. Which is fine because I really still want this black deck. Allege Teoh be there. What I want to do is actually apply A brush overlaps this black area that feathers out a little bit further from this black area going to go here to my paths. Pallets in my paths. I can go to the fly out menu on the side here, and I could make a work path. Tolerance to pixels is fine for me right now for what we're doing. Look okay. And I've now created a path, as you can see here will enlarge a little bit so you can see for sure that I've got a path . So this is actually a vector path, which is ironic because we just Roddy in a vector and then converted it and then reconverted it. This is what we need now, In order to apply the brushstroke that I want to apply, there are a bunch of great brushes. I don't know if you've ever bought tools from Kyle Webster in Voter Shot 2018. So they're still loaded as tools. Photoshopped 2019. You'll find these brushes. So one of the brushes I would often use would use one of his watercolor brushes. I have actually found a new one, and it's made by a Canadian guy. So to support Canadian, I have purchased his brushes and these were called root brushes. This is his entire selection of watercolor that I have loaded into four shop right now of my favorites. He has this cool little extension which you can get information about how to load your extensions. You'll see that I've got them. I've got fruit brushes right here, and it gives me this extension, which allows me to quickly pick the brush that I want. Okay, The brush I really like right now is this lamprey brush on and here in my brush settings. This gives you a good example of what it will look like. And that's to me Very realistic looking watercolor. You could use default settings. I would suggest personally that you do a bunch of experimenting with your brushes and you'll come up with some really great settings that will work for you for now. Just gonna use straight default settings that he had. So I think this is a good time to take a little break. And in the next lesson, I'll show you the application of the brush to the work path. We'll add all of the things that will take our document one step closer to looking like a really watercolor. I'll see you there
4. Lesson 3 Initial Brushwork and Paint Pooling: either guys, What we're gonna do in this lesson is worked with some really great photo shot brushes that , in my opinion, really emulate riel. Watercolor. You ready to get started? Let's get to it. So I hope he took a minute to experiment with settings and such For now, I'm just gonna use the straight default settings of this groups. Lamprey brush. I set my brush size to about 14. Remember that four of that will be within the mass. Because remember, we moved our selection for pixels before we started. Once I've got that brush selected. This is the size you can kind of roughly look at it and see. Yes, that would be a good size. You're gonna go Teoh the past palette again, and you're gonna stroke your path for this one. I'm not simulate pressure. I'm just going to click, OK, and give a minute to do a little bit of this, calculating me chance to have a sip of my coffee. And you can see this is applied a lovely watercolor edge. A little more texture than what I had originally. I really like that there is still a little bit of a grayscale there. Actually, I think I'm gonna undo this one. And I'm gonna go back to my brush size and I'm going Teoh, reduce it in size a little bit. Could actually go nine pixels stroke the path again because I want to show you another setting for the brush that I think we even had more of a realistic watercolor Look to it. So now I am applying the brush exactly as is nine pixels wide. You can see it applying in the background there, and I'm gonna go back to my brushes. Now, I'm gonna do the 14. I'm gonna go to my brush settings and I'm gonna go back to my scattering and I'm going Teoh , adjust, increase my scattering. You can see down here by the preview of my brush. How this adds even more of a duckling to the edge. Go back here to stroke my path and let's see what a difference that makes. Well, that is Major Deck Ling. Now I think I got the brush size too big, so I'm going to undo that. Quickly Changed my brush size. I haven't 14 was You could see there is a little bit of experimentation that goes on. This is part of the fun of learning. And, you know, depending on what size and resolution that you've got your document, that can make a big difference. I'm going to gold nine. So I'm almost the size of that first brush. But it's just because of the scattering. The scattering is having my brush spread further, I guess just same size of brush just increased scattering. And I think that's the effect that I really watch. Remember what we're trying to dio is kind of emulate, thes sort of edges that we see in what a real water color would look like. It was enlarged, All right, so I think we've accomplished that. We're done with this work path. We're going Teoh, go back to our layers and let's take a look at what that's done. You look at that edge are inch looks very close to what this really watercolor Edgewood look like, Don't you agree? But the problem is we don't have is pulling going on yet in here. So this is the next thing that we want to do is we want to create this pooling effect. So in order to do that I am going to load my selection that I saved earlier, and I'm gonna go back into my layers and I'm going to create a new layer above the layer that has the water color in it. We're gonna make work path. I am going to stroke the path and let's just see what we think of that path. Now back to layers you can see on this layer. I've got this rough brush and I want to cull Arise that So it works a little bit better with this bluish green color that I've got my cactus. So in order to cull, arise this line. I'm gonna go under hue and saturation it colorized. And as I go lighter, you can see that color that I've chosen being applied. So if I want to go or of a teal color I used the hue slider change the color. I can use saturation too. Make it brighter or dollar. I think I'm going to keep it a little bit less saturated. Obviously lightness, lightens or darkens or anything under the middle is gonna be black. But anything above middle will have that color being applied going to keep it boat that level of darkness and what I'm going to do is use. Multiply So it blends with what I've got underneath, so hey, hey, hey. Looks like we're getting even closer to our watercolor edge. Remember, this is our goal, and I'm really starting to like this. It's getting there now. I really wanna have some extreme pooling going on inside here, so that would give the effect of the water coming up to the edge of where have painted If I was doing the traditional watercolor something like this where it gets gradually darker into the very dark edge. What I want to do is I want to increase the size of my brush. I'm gonna go back to my brushes. I'm gonna change this to be about I'm guessing is 30 pixels wide Load my selection again instead of having to go to the menu each time, I could just go here into the channels and then I could go to pass, make the work path, and I bought my selection. They're gonna make a new layer. I'm going Teoh, go to my paths, make a work path and then I'm gonna stroke my path this time with the brush. Now I'm gonna do one without simulating the pressure. And then I'm gonna do one with simulating the pressure so you could see the difference. So this one is without it. This is going to give us a really large pooling or the edges of her image. I'm going to select a color first, and then you'll see that with this color selected when I stroke my path, it'll stroke it in that color rather than the pure block. And that saves us the step of having to go into the human saturation controls and color the path. So of course, we know that this color is too dark. So we're gonna dio some fooling around with the blending modes. I'm gonna name these layers or I start getting too confused. I'm gonna call this one tight outline. I'm going to call this one, believe one. Because sometimes I do more than one. Well, I am for sure gonna do one which shows you simulating pressure with my brush. And for this I'm going to experiment with these blending bolds quite often. Use multiply because that kind of shows through the bottom color. And I am still gonna go back and mess around a little bit with human saturation after all. Course. You know that we can do this with adjustment layers. I'm choosing not to because I find my layers palette starts to look too confusing when I've got, like, all these layers and adjustment layers on them. So I'm just going to just go straight in and do my adjustments this way. Let's slightly smaller size here. And she was a color. So this pooling is not bad. I'm gonna do is, uh lighten it a little bit and brighten it a little bit I think we're gonna do is we're gonna do two or three different brush sizes and we're gonna fill this up a little bit gradually. So, like, right now, there's this really light sort of mid area of are our CAC Ty And then we've got this dark pooling And then, of course, about the super dark edge. And I think we're gonna do maybe one more pooling that feathers out from this medium color to the background colors. We're gonna click, OK, and let's look at the example again. So I'm going to make one more layer here, take another look at our watercolor sample. Just gonna look around here for a bit. You see call. Sometimes there's these sort of muddy, dirty bits that happen and that happens with the original watercolor. When you are painting wet and you go to do your second coat of this color, this green would have been still read enough that it would have bled into the new area that you brushed in color. What we've done is we've left some gaps along the edges of our items, so this wouldn't actually happen. I explain that in later lesson. It's a technique that I have seen used by order artists like Cat Co Collect. She leaves a gap around her items so that there is no bleeding between them. So this is where we're gonna start making our watercolor look really, really. And I'm going to also use that simulate pressure. You're going to see what happens when we do that. This new layer, let's call it stimulated rusher and alternate color. First of all, increase our brush size one more step. So let's go 48 this time and let's choose our alternate color already kind of a purple color. It'll make sense later on. When I start, Teoh do some of this sort of thing where we change into some slight changes in color. Like in this area here. How I've got some of this purple coming into the cap time. I want to be able to do that. But what I'm gonna do is somebody already take advantage of adding some of that different color now. Okay, so I've increased my size of my brush. I'm gonna go back to pass and stroke my path. So I'm gonna hit, simulate pressure and click, OK, and what I'm gonna do is show you I'm gonna turn off some of these other colors so you can see what's happened. When we've done the simulate pressure, you'll see that some areas have no brush applied. You'll see it right now. Looks like you see how some areas here we've got super dark color here and in some areas it's super light. So cool, like, kind of like that, like look, let's look at all that. So you see how it's got some areas light some, then some don't even showed it all command h. And it's just simply highs. That path for now, let's try some other blending modes for a sec and just see how that works. Let's try multiply first so you can see the effect that to me makes it a little bit too dark. I am going to try one of these instead, and the one I abused a lot before is linear light again. I can use my hue and saturation to do some adjustments on the color he saturated. I think we'll be darker. Want sure like that. So I'm gonna undo instead of linear light. Let's try overlay. You know what? That feels more like what I was looking for. So I think that's what I'm gonna leave it out. So we are getting much closer. Teoh. What looks like a real traditional watercolor? What do you think? So let's take another look at our riel watercolor edge example and one of the things you'll notice really with this modern watercolor technique that you see here is a lot of this sort of thing happening where you've got layers built up. This this artist would have started with a very thin layer off the color on back with another layer, which would have built out some of these varieties re timed, the paint dried. It would dry the slowest around the edges because that's where most of the water or paint with deposit. If we're trying to get this sort of a look, what we're going to need to do is go in and kind of mess around with our mask. So this seems like a good spot to stop this lesson. Holy cow. It's over 10 minutes. Anyhow, we'll see in the next lesson where we're gonna add some brunch details to our mask.
5. Lesson 4 Add Grunge Details: Hey, guys, welcome to lessen. For So what I want to do in this lesson is to even work a little bit more on our mask to make it look more realistic. I call this grunge defying. So that's my next step is to go back to my mask, layer my mask itself. So I'm gonna option click into this again. And so give me a chance to fix a couple things that I could see were happening. One of them was this where the original vector would not have been selected when we were doing the stroke in for a shock to apply the watercolor brush. So that's a problem. I mean, that would make it obviously look victory and looked like it had been just manufactured. So we want to get rid of things like that, and we also want to make sure that we've got some of these sort of unquote flaws happening . So the way we can do this is right here in the mass. We can paint with our watercolor brushes and anything that we painted in black obviously will mask and anything that we paint in white will expose. So we're going to do both. So right now I've got black selected, and whatever I paint is going to come out in block or is this is a grayscale brush? Totally amazing. I love it. So I'm going to first for now, painting black and shortcut for that. As you can see, I'm switching back and forth between foreground and background. The shortcut is just X on your keyboard, so I'm going to black going Teoh, reduce the size of my brush and this I'm doing with my bracket left bracket being smaller, right bracket being bigger. And I'm just going Teoh randomly go around and add some of these little areas done with my brush. Like I said, quote unquote flaws. Let's take a quick look at what that's doing to affect our actual image. So can you see in here where I've done some of that painting on my mask? It's showing up in my actual image, So this is just one of his amazing brushes. Let's take a look at some of the other ones and see what they do. What have I used before? You know, it will be a good one. Cool brush, because I don't know if you can see it's gotta build up. You can't make any changes to it. If I uncheck, it wouldn't build up like this, getting darker and darker as I layer it more. I'm gonna leave that. I just love it when I do get that was out of there, make my brush smaller, but you see how it's just It's just so lovely for I mean, it's feels really natural. And I think that this is going to be one of my favorites. I love it. That just reminded me Say everything I'm gonna do is I'm going to purge my memory as soon as I assumes that stops. I'm gonna go under edit to purge, and I am going to purge all that's going to free up some of my application memory. Woody Hannah. I must have had a lot. Not only does it save all of my levels of undo, it would save everything that I've I copied and pasted and things like that. So that's why it just gets to be really memory hungry after a while. So my memories have all been purged. If I was counting on my histories, they would not be there and now I'm going to who also saved my document. That's one of things. When I was teaching, I would literally every 10 minutes in class say to people, Everybody save save now because there were so many times and it was so heartbreaking when a student would lose all of the work that they've done for the entire closet. Be five minutes before the end of class. They would have worked 55 or 65 minutes and lost absolutely everything. So save, save frequently. Okay, so let's continue a little bit of this, creating flaws like this build up. I think that's going to give me a lot of realistic can kind of edges. I'm taking this opportunity. Teoh experiment a little bit with these groups. Brushes. That's what I'm looking for, some really textural inches. Why not spend too much time on this? But enough that it's going Teoh make a difference. This is one thing. As a graphic designer, that you always have to balance out is whether you could afford to take the time to do certain things. So you noticed. So I used E for keyboard shortcut to get me to this eraser and the eraser I like is Kyle's natural edge. So that one I'm gonna use for any of you everything that I need to do here is an area I want to fix back to. My brush with B is a shortcut, and I'm just going to go over this line a little bit so that I can look a little bit more natural. Here's another one of those little speak ease, like anything that had come to an interior point had that little spike. So I'm getting rid of all those going in and widening some of these. I use a, uh how blood. I don't know what everybody else is using, but I'm just using a pretty old run of the mill into a was tablet. If he's got this one set or up. Yes. How many of you have used traditional watercolors? I'd love your opinion on whether or not this kind of a process is actually viable for you. And I know for me it has been because I can produce a lot of layouts in the amount time it would take me to dio a watercolor. In the traditional method. The artwork that I'm producing, I generally work in dimensions of 48 by 32. So you don't just imagine the amount of time it would take to paint a whole bunch of paintings that size. And you know, that's what tells you whether or not it's viable for something like art licensing. We have to create a bunch of layouts or you want to create a bunch of layouts, especially if it's something that you have found successful, something that actually sells. You want to get as many out there as possible to collect your licence royalties, right? So if that's your goal, then this is an excellent process. And I also think it's great for me anyways, is taking thes layouts or taking elements that have created in Photoshopped. I want to create a repeating pattern with it. Definitely for me is a lot more feasible to produce them in this way. Definitely interested in how other artists would use something like this and whether it's something that they find successful or not. I've noticed down here that I've got this outline and I want to get rid of it on the edges of my documents. So set my marquee to zero, and I'm just gonna be some of that old. That would be something that would not look very realistic. Having watercolor to the edges of the bottom here. Something like this. I'm going to take away some of this was lunch point here. Sure, that looks really realistic. So back. Brush it down a little bit. What? These gaps are these areas here. Event is in. The rial media would be in preventing it. From when you're painting in this area that the color would bleed into this area for us in photo shop, they allow us to make a selection with a magic wand. Tool areas are kept separate by these gaps. So again, I've dragged this lesson on. And so I think this would be a good time again to pause, take a little break, have a little stretch and then we'll move on to the D feels I'll see in the next lesson.
6. Lesson 5 Adjustments and Other Tidbits: guys. Welcome lesson five. So are you impressed so far with what you've done This lesson, What I want to cover is using the navigator to move around on your documents so you can clean up the mask really efficiently and using feathered selections to adjust color that lead to more work on our pooling. Just basically double checking my whole mascot this time just to see that I've got everything the way I want. I don't know if you guys use this very much. The navigator in the right, tend upper right hand corner. I've always got this open. I think it's one of the most awesome things in photo. Shaw and there are other programs that I use that don't have it, and I really miss it when it's not there. So if you're moving around on a large document, it's so much easier. Just move this little square around than to try Teoh. Reduce in size or use your face bar hand shortcut to try to get around on your documents. It's just one little tip to share with you if you don't use it already, so I always have it open. Is my top tab here in my palettes, and I like it do, For the reason that it shows me my entire document If I want to see it, you can use this to enlarge or reduce your view as well. So I can be useful. Just about. Always use shortcut keyboard shortcuts for that. But any of these little shortcuts that you use or that you know, help your efficiency and increase your productivity here, I'm just using shortcut with my space far in my hand, two of my move tool and erasing little bits here just to make it look more natural. I think I've got all of it. I'm gonna continue doing this. I'm gonna speed it up for you because you don't need to see every little thing I do here. I'm just going to go through and continue with some of this adjusting on my mask so that we could make it look more natural. You guys can watch this in us function. Okay? We've got enough natural edges here that I think we can go back to our document on and have some fun with our painting. Click back into my document. Get out of my mask and people can take a look at one of the spots and you can see some of these more natural looking edges that I've got over here. And, of course, we had originally applied that tight outline, and so you still see a little bit for that there. So I think this is really starting to look a lot like our natural example here. Yeah, we're getting a lot of this sort of effect. Natural edges and bleeding and that sort of thing happening. I'm pretty happy with what I've got so far. How about you? How is yours looking? One of things that do you want to change? Is these some of these, like this? Cooling here to me looks a little bit too perfect, like to consistent. So I want some of this to be a little bit less consistent. That was this layer yet the pooling pulling one. So I'm gonna go in with my brush. I am going Teoh option click Where want to match the color? So I'm auction clicking and that we'll get into that pooling Lear and I've sampled that color. And now I can go along and use that fabulous lamprey brush that brute brushes brush, and I'm gonna go through and I'm going. Teoh, take some of this a little bit less consistent. Doesn't show up so much on, you know, if if it's close to the color it was there, like right here. This doesn't seem too bad to me, but I'm allowed a little bit, but it really shows it. It seems to be glaring in a place like this where my background was quite light. So that's where I want to kind of have it blend a little bit more. And really, I can enlarge my brush so that it almost feels that area, you know, helps to darken it. I think everything that we're doing in this way also adds to the real nous of our water color. This has become my new favorite Russia, I can tell you that. So I'm still consistently sticking Teoh this color palette. We haven't really played around with this color, which is a kind of ah, or purple e blue. So I'm gonna do a little bit more. This one is surround a bitch really anywhere. That the background was really light like we just worked on this area down here in the right corner here. It also looks to me like it's a little bit too dark. I want to show you another method. So I'm going to enlarge right here. And I want to change this color but not have to go in and brush all of it. What I'm gonna do is I'm gonna set my feathering to vote 300 lazy. So I put 3 33 in there a recently feather This election is so that it wont be a hard edge that happens anywhere. It will be a got blandy kind of an edge. So long this pooling layer and I'm gonna go into hue and saturation. And I'm gonna research your settings by holding down my option key and clicking on the council here. So you see, when I rest my option key, it changes to reset. So every set that back Teoh Exactly what you see on the screen here, you'll see if I move this hue changes on Lee. What's within my selected area? What I want to do is go lighter in this area. I wanted to match and blend a little bit more with the background, so I'm going Teoh lighten it considerably. Maybe within communities factory. And you see that now it has reset that whole area for me. I didn't have to go in and brush. That was a really quickly to do it. You select there and I am still gonna brush some in there. Just because I toe look really inconsistent. That's what's cool about having the mask is it doesn't go in these areas. Doesn't go anywhere that isn't open on my mask. So I could look how cool that IHS. And you know, it plays well into some of these textures that we had from our original background that we paste it in. You know, we can tie in that setting that I had in my human saturation will stay there now until I reset it. So I'm going to select this area here. That's another kind of a lighter area hit option command you and it's lightened it for me because those are the settings I just previously used. I think I'm going. Teoh actually use the tone of it to be a little bit more of a greeny Teeley color. So I'm really just affecting those areas, and that's something I'll use also for the background at some point. So I'm ready for moving on into next lesson where we're going to do a ton more painting. I'll see you there.
7. Lesson 6 Adjusting Colors and Painted Details: you guys welcome back. What we're gonna do in this lesson is I'm gonna show you how to use selections to help you grab some details from your background textures and use them elsewhere. I'm gonna show you how to use the selections to adjust colors and how to feather your selections and address attract from your selections. Let's get to it. I've done a couple of things here in the background to set up for recording, and I am just been explained them to you. These are just some additional things that I want in my document. So remember we had the goal that we wanted to add some of the colors into the background, and I'm gonna show you are really quickly to do that on a hole there is more green than anything else. So I think the first thing I'm gonna do is I'm going Teoh change the hue of this to be green, though under human saturation. Of course, I'm gonna reset because we don't want that. Lets just slide this along until we find something that is quite pleasing. I think if we went to kind of ah Keely Bluey Green, that's gonna be very nice for the base is color that we watch it. Okay, here on. Let's take a look at this again here. I've got more of a yellow green, but I think I've changed my mind. And I wanted to be more of a t lea kind of a color. We had set the feathering pretty high on our lawsuit tool. So I'm going to Maybe I'll change it to 2 22 on. Go through and do is just select various areas and affect the color in that area. So I'm going Teoh, start with purple kind of area I've got here on this practice to the right and this center cactus. So for that, I'm collecting with my last very loose selection and holding down my shift key to get the plus sign. Can you see that on the molasses you tool? The only areas are going to be affected are those that are within the lasso tool. So I'm gonna hit my human saturation again, and I'm going to slide my hue, slider, two different positions and see what I can find that I like. I think I need to lighten Andy saturate a little bit going for a little bit less of Ah, harsh contrast. E layout. I want pretty simple color scheme. I don't want too much variety. So I am going to De saturated quite a bit. And honestly, I think I've got too much selected here. Somebody council I'm gonna de select and I'm gonna do some smaller areas, I think were oven accent of this purple more what I'm looking for for some of the selections. I'm going to change my fathering a little bit here because I can't get a small enough area selective and go back under the huge saturation slide right over to hear example is visible where I wanted it to be. Kind of a purple, he saturated and quite lightened. I quite like that going for a much more subtle color scheme than this original here. One of things I really like is some of this texture that's coming through from that one background that I just pasted in. I'm going to make a copy of this one, and I want to take a better look at it up here because there are some absolutely delicious little bits in here that I think we can use on some of our plants are not that interesting . It so I've got my feathering set at about 1 55 I am going to copy a section of this turn that temporarily off, and I'm going to paste it into my mask clear and smooth this around a little bit. Re sizing Just I just felt like this plant here didn't have much interest. So I'm going Teoh color this a little bit more of the greeny teal color. So I've added some interesting here just by using that background again. Says what it looked like without it. And this is what it looks like with it. Think I'm going to use Multiply So that plans with that background and I'm gonna change the opacity a little bit. I'm going to repeat that process two or three times. I'm grabbing elements from that watercolor background that I have copying by the feathering set so that it softens the edges piecing itch into the mass group and that I'm moving it around to where I think it will do the most good and changing the blending mold. I've done a couple more adjustments and I think I need to make a second Teoh, add some of this yellow here under human saturation. Bring my hue slider over here a little ways, slightly less saturated yellow. I think I like that. The pooling still works with that. Okay, So I really like how this is all coming together now. So take a couple minutes now and at some of the detail in this way, just practice with using your selection tool and experiment with different sizes of feathering to see what really works. And then I'll meet you in the next lesson where we're gonna do most of our finishing details. I'll see you there.
8. Lesson 7 Soft Background Effects and Details: here we are ready to finish up our bits and pieces that are gonna make this watercolor looks super real. We're going to start by adding a subtle background. I'm gonna explain in detail how to do the background pooling, and both of these will include a little more work done with blending modes and human saturation. I wanted to show you how I added thesis oft background effects that are in behind our watercolor. This shows just the blank I imported Ah, watercolor laurel that I had done recently and pasted in the background and changed the human saturation of it to make it really complement the background. Then I checked it out to see how it looked with my background, and I found that it was much too busy here a the bottom. I added a feathered strip of color at the bottom, and I've reduced that capacity to 81% over here. So it does show through slightly, but it makes it just less busy looking at the bottom here. After I did that, I went through and added a few painted details. Did my first level of pooling out of some yellow background details that I did some heavier pooling and added a few more painted details and this is what it ends up looking like. So I'm now gonna explain a little bit more about the pooling. So I don't want to do now is just explain to you in a little bit more detail how to create the pooling in the background. So what I'm gonna do to create that background pooling is I'm gonna go into my mask layer option clicking on my mask over here and use the magic wand to select the white. And I know that that's what we had saved us a selection that we've made a lot of changes here. So I wanted select a fresh copy of the whites and going to span that selection slightly so for I think will be suitable for what I need. So, you see, it'll overlap a little bit into my image area. I'm gonna temporarily hides foreground, so you could see what I'm doing. And in the background here on the pooling layer going to apply this Ray Greene Russian, which I sampled from the background. So I'm going to go to the paths, make a work path, have been a stroke that path with the brush that I just created without simulating pressure . So I've created a nice little shadow which will end up being my pooling. So go back to my layers, make selection, and I'm going to quickly see that that's when I'll call to okay, doctor layers. So can t select um receive as well get rid of this work path just to keep our document running nice and fast and from back comes back on. And this is the sort of textured cooling that I was after. What I want to do now is spend it into the background what's really just a light pooling? I've set this to multiply, and I was going to do see opacity make it super light. But I think that really compliments that color, and it really gives the whole painting more depth. Honestly, I think I've taught you everything you need to know to create this kind of a watercolor effect. You're going Teoh, put your heart and soul into it and you're going to come up with a fantastic looking watercolor. And I just want you to know that really every individual case just requires you to do a little bit of experimentation, and I really enjoy doing this apart. I really enjoy bringing in some of my older artworks as backgrounds to give that sense of depth. So have some fun experimenting with that sort of thing. That's what's so great about this particular kind of project. It takes you from graphic design to find Arch. This work that you create is fully salable. I've sold many of these through art licensing, so it's something that you can create and make some money from. I think it's something that can enhance any decor.
9. Lesson 8 Adding Authentic Final Details: Hey, guys, Welcome back. I'm super excited about this last lesson. This is where we're gonna add all the bits and pieces that make your water color looks super real. Let's get to it. So in this lesson, what I plan to cover is using the various paintbrushes that I love learning about buildup techniques for water color paint. I'll show you how to make quick selections, and I've got some more information on techniques to help speed up your process when you're using your masks. What I want to do now is take the brushes. Just add some actual watercolor painted details in here. Grab that lamprey brush. I'll probably switch several times different brushes here. Keep an eye on what I'm doing. I'll be switching out colors. I'm going to time lapse this for you so that you don't have to watch as I do every one of these details. I'm sure you'll get the idea. I'm gonna use a combination of the group brushes and child Webster brushes. So here we go and make a new layer. Gonna call this one painted details. But I'm trying to do when I'm doing this painting is to do some of the shadows and depth that we're missing because we didn't actually paint this. So where you to have two of these branches connecting? You would definitely have a shadow area, so I'm painting that in. I'll go in and probably do that on you much everywhere. One branch joins another. This is where your artistry can really make a difference. I sample colors from the immediate area that I'm painting that helps to really tie it in so you don't have it looking like Wait, what's this color doing here? Like it really, truly belongs to that area and you know it's watercolor, so there's a lot of transparency, and with transparency, there's a lot of freedom to overlap or Hilda players. So something like this to the detail starting to look a lot like the original example. I think most of these brushes are set to build up because that's kind of what watercolor does. It builds up. We build up with layers as you're painting. If you've never had experience painting with watercolors, you might want to take some time to just study some watercolors, maybe even read some instructional material that talks about shell watercolors or can really build up. This one builds up great. One stroke do strolls is enough to get a shadow happening. This I don't like. So I'm gonna go back into my mask and I'm just going to erase that. See, this is a natural shadow we had already created with our cooling and stuff. So if I blend in from that layer, it look really natural. You can play with your sizes to get something gradual happening. So I've got a really big brush size here, dark and my color slightly and then go in again so you can see here how that works. It's built up when gradually from light color, medium color, medium dark and then dark. This is another thing that I have not explained. This is to do with the brush settings, so we worked with the blending molds here in the layers palette. But you can also specify the way you want your brush to work with the background. I have had it on multiply this whole time, and that's the look that I really want that I just wanted to point out that you could actually go in here and affect your brush as well with the blending mode, so I'm just gonna keep working at this. But I really like doing at the end is just taking a look at the before and after in adding all this detail because at the point when you're doing it, like right now, it's kind of hard to tell what kind of ah overall effect it has been at the end. When you watch it, it's really astounding. The difference that it's made to add all of the shadows and just create that depth pretty much showed you every one of the different techniques that I use to complete this. And I just wanted to show you a couple more things with the painting off camera. I did a little bit more detail painting, and of course I did that in my four grounds group on this painted details right off for a second. Turn it back on and you can see how that's given it. Some really realistic details. I'm just gonna quickly review some of the things that I did here in order to achieve some of these areas of depth. The shadows, but I did is quick selections, just with my lasso tool So in a spot like this, let's say I wanted to put a shadow around the bottom of this leave. I would just do a quick selection. She was a brush Scheller that I want. I think I'm gonna go with kind of this deep green right here, and that quick selection allows me to paint, and it's just within the selected area that's being affected. That's a quick way to get. Some of these are kind of edges. I'm going to change that to actually know feathering and do another spot for you to do this leaf right here so slickly selecting using be for a short cut for my brush and I'm brushing in some of that shadow. So that's one quick way to add detail. Another thing that I like to do is to go back into my mass option, clicking in their to access it, and I'm gonna grab one of Kyle's brushes. One of his, uh, spatter brush is that I really like, and it's kind of hard to see. You can actually add a little bit of spatter just with his brush. Batter often happens to really watercolor artists. If the brushes stiffs kind of flexes in a spot, and it just throws a little bit of extra paint. The effect of that is that that's what you achieve love that does not look reach. Now. If I didn't want to actually just go right into my mask every time, by option, clicking into it, I can hit my back slash and it's going to give me a mass. It masked the area that we originally had Mass. Now, whenever I paint, it's only going to paint within that area. So that was a very quick access. Instead of going and option clicking on the mask, I just hit my back slash kind of cool because you can you can see the immediate effect of it. That's one thing I forgot to mention earlier. Another one of the brushes that I really like that Kyle has is a supreme spatter, and I just used it. So if you see up in your brushes, it'll show you little thumbnails of the last few brushes that you use. So this was the Supreme Batters. I'm gonna try that one, and you can see it's adding, adding my supreme spatter, and you'll note that right now I am just painting in black because I am on the mask. Clear. Actually, go back with these brushes as well to add some of this kind of detail into the background. And I'll show you that in a second. Another one I really like is his gua sha Go go. That one gives kind of ah, rough edge washes of water based paint very much like watercolor accepted some chalk out it , which is what makes it thicker. Goes on but a bit more opaque. Used to be a standard thing back in the day, I was trained to paint with wash A lot of advertising was done with hand painted rather than photographed pieces, And we would hand paint with this squash and get some really great flat spot colors. Okay, I'm ready to do some stuff on my background, So I'm gonna get out of my mask and I'm gonna get out of that layer, and I'm going to switch to my background layer, add a layer called painted details, and I'm gonna probably use the spatter. A swell I'm gonna sample of color may be a great green again. A little bit bigger. Not that color. I've got to get up into that background gri and I'm just spattering a little bit of that on the background. You can see that here, this other green that you see in this area that's that same brush. But I've painted it in the mass. Take you in there like you see it. So when I paint with white on this mass, it will show up my documents. Cool. Hey, so many things you can do with masks. It really is just about experimenting with these things and learning. The more you do of this kind of experimenting, I mean, this first time going through with somebody explaining everything is great, but really, it's so much more fun. Or I found it really fought any ways to do this experimenting, finding out what all fishes do. And there's hundreds and hundreds of brushes being sold. So I just want to take you quickly into how to add some of this background detail and really have fun with the brushes
10. Lesson 9 Flattening and Correcting Your Final Image: Hey, guys, a bench of your thrill to finally have a finished artwork in front of you. I just wanted to explain the last couple steps I do before I submit this for art licensing . I always make sure I flatten my document at the end, and I'll explain that in this last lesson. And then I take a couple minutes to do things like adding a surface texture and adding a little bit of noise or possibly doing color correction and levels correction. I just wanted to give you that last little bit of information before we say goodbye. So the last thing I want to do, which I recommend that you do is to first of all, duplicate and then flatten these layers. I am going Teoh duplicate my foreground elements. Command E flattens it. I'm going to right, click on the mass and apply the layer mass. So this is a complete copy. All in one layer off are finished plants. I'm gonna do the same thing with the background elements, but it gets a little page icon at the bottom that has duplicated it. Demand e flattens. It dragged that up here underneath the foreground during everything else off during all of this on is a nice chance to have final look at what you've created any last minute details that you might want to touch up. I'm sure Uncle. Back in and do a bunch of stuff off camera later on before I get this ready to submit to my art licensing agent. Now, what I'm gonna do is I'm going to flatten these two together. Mandy and I have everything on one layer. Having everything on one layer makes it easy for me to add paper texture. So that's the second last thing I'm going to dio to click on the effects down here at the bottom of the layers panel and I'm gonna click to pattern overlay. I'm going to enlarge in the background here so you can see as I make that change. I think this one is a watercolor paper. So I think I'm going to use this one. So I've got that paper texture selected. I'm going to just make some adjustment here just so you can see that's affecting the backgrounds. That's the scale of the texture of the paper. This takes a lot of experimenting on your part I know from experience that I set this at about 100% for this size of document. In this resolution that I have chosen $300 per inch multiply is often what I use. I played with the opacity. I don't want it to be too prominent like this, but I don't want it to be to settle. It is just a matter of experimenting and maybe printing off a few and checking out what it does or how it affects your image and then just click, OK, and that's applied. That gives it a really authentic looking watercolor paper, sort of a look. And the last thing I always do is I go into my levels and I make some adjustments, kind of brightens everything or increases the contrast getting on the look that you're going for. I'm kind of going for something like this, so I'm gonna click OK, and I'll show you the before and after. So this is before the levels were applied. This is after the levels were applied so you could see that just kind of brightened everything so that I would save this and this would be what I would submit and I am definitely gonna be submitting this one once I'm done. That was a lot of work. Although you have to stop and think about how hard this would have been to produce in a 48 by 32 watercolor actual national media, this would have taken days and days to dio. In less than a day, you can produce a piece like this. It might take you mawr the first couple of tries, but I can usually get at least one and maybe two of these done in one day, and that's the goal. Faster you can get them done. The more you can admit, and the more you can submit is, the more likely you are to make multiple sales. And that's always the goal. When your license artist as a graphic designer, you could produce this kind of technique with flowers seashells really with anything that you can create a nice silhouette with old. Think about all the different ways that you can use this technique. Thanks for sticking it out and learning all these tips and tricks. The basic concepts that you have learned how to create a mask, how to create a selection or use that selection to make a path to stroke the path. How to apply a brush to the stroke path out of work inside and outside of your mouths and all those other little tips and rush tricks and painting tricks that you learned along the way. I really can't wait to see the kind of designs that you come up with using this technique. So please be sure to share your artwork sharing here below in the project section. And if you do happen to share it on social media, please hash tag be delores NASCAR and slash skill share. I hope to see you in all my classes. Take care. Bye for now.
Delores Naskrent, Creative Explorer
