How To Color Comics - Digitally

1. SS Introduction: So you want to learn how to color comics, say, well, this is the course for you. Whether it's the old classic look that you're going for or the new modern high gloss finish. I will teach you how to color comics like a pro. I'm Ed for Chuck and I'm a professional comic book colorist. And in this course, I'm going to teach you all the stages from a to Z of how to color your comic book. We start off with understanding how different line work can be worked into a coloring project, whether it's pencils, inks, or digital links. Then we get into understanding how to do flattening. Those are the flat colors as well, is I take a lot of time explaining different lighting concepts because really, lighting is one of the fundamentals for understanding how to color. After that, we get into different shading techniques, from cell shading to smudge two gradients all the way into a more digital painterly effect. We also get into some special effects from burn and dodge tools to color overlays, and even texturing. This course is primarily done digitally. I'm using Clip Studio Paint, but you can use Photoshop or Procreate, or almost any other digital art program. Heck, I actually think this, of course, would be useful for somebody working. Traditionally. There's a lot of great fundamentals in it. So are you ready to learn some tips and tricks from a pro? Some little trade secrets? Well, why don't you join me and jump on in. And let's get coloring comic books. 2. SS Getting Started Formatting Lineart: Okay guys, Are we ready? Are we ready to get coloring comics? Well, unfortunately, we're not going to start with coloring. We're going to start with the Lionheart. No, I'm not going to teach you how to draw comics. That's not what this is about, but it's about understanding lines first and then how we're going to be able to color them. This is really important because knowing what to do when you're handed a piece of paper with some drawing on it or something I got and how to make it pop is what this course is all about. So this changes according to how things were drawn. We've got a lot of different targets, some stuff off to the side here we've got pencils, nib pens, big pens, brush pens. And all of these might change or frustrate a colorist. We're gonna get into that and into how we might change and adjust our techniques a little bit according to how things are drawn. But let's start with this. Let's, let's just say on a piece of paper or on a sketchpad or sketchbook or something like that. You've got a drawing and you want to color it digitally. You want to bring it into Photoshop, Clip Studio, Paint, procreate, or any other program that you're using. How do you do that? Well, the easiest way, the best way would be to skimped. Hopefully you've got an amazing scanner and you can just lay the drawing down, scan it at a high resolution, pull that image out and bring it into your drawing photo editing, program and stuff, right? If you can't, if you don't have a scanner. The next one that I do not recommend, but it's possible to use your phone. Please. Go to camera. Please think of this as a last resort because the quality of what you're going to get over there is going to be probably more frustrating than just redrawing it in a drawing program or whatever, right? So take that image, scan it at a higher resolution, and see what you come up with. See, see the quality that you can pull out of them, the best quality that you can. I'm going to show you some differences as we go on how it looks, scanning drawings versus inked versus digital inks. And you can see how working digitally in most of this progress will make things heck of a lot easier. But if you don't, there's still workarounds. There are still lots of ways to do it. Again, get yourself a scanner or if you're getting drawings sent to you as a colorist or whatever, make sure they are scanned at 600 DPI, something like that, something really high-quality that brings you the best workable, raw product. You need something that you can work with. And once you've gotten as much data as possible, then you can bring it into your photo editing. Or you're drawing software and start to adjust levels. And that's what I'm going to teach you how to do now. Okay. In front of me here, I've got a lot of different samples to show you from some artists, friends of mine. This was a contest that are random, Spider-Man. So you're gonna see the same script done out a few times. And this is from Mike van or a good buddy of mine, great artist. But as you can see, he submitted some pretty rough pencils. These are still sketch. They're really tough, really tough to deal with, right? Like there's a lot going on with this. This is not the roughest pencils you could deal with, but they're also not the cleanest. You can see a lot of unfinished lines going on. Unfinished character work and stuff, right? But he's an amazing artist. It looks great. Great approach to the script. Just realized that this, as a colorist, might take some work, you might have to get into it. And I'm going to show you how to get into it. A little bit cleaner lines would be this submission. Right? You can see how the lines are. Still pencil ish, right? You can still see some some roughness in them. But they are cleaner, easier to deal with. Even cleaner still would be this submission of inked work. You can see how there is a lot cleaner lines here, a lot easier. To deal with. And especially once we get into how to select lines and all that kind of stuff, you're going to see why this gets even more and more important than the sample that we can be working on. From my buddy Dominic Here. Lot of great lines going on here, a lot of great things going on here, right, but great submission. But also you can see how as we get in here, it's going to be there's no sketching left. There's very few of these little tails and stuff like that. This is gonna be something nice and clean the color. So not from worst but from rough to clean. We want clean. We want preferably clean to color with the cleaner, the better. It just eases us. He's been harping in trying to figure out how to split into this, where to start that kind of stuff. So first thing we can look at here is how to clean up a scan a little bit. Once we've got this rough scan, depending on the program you're using. I'm using Clip Studio Paint right now, but Photoshop, all of them have something similar. You want to go into some type of tonal correction. Maybe even brightness contrast or level correction. I prefer levels, right? And what we can do is start to adjust. So you're going to see how that made it worse, right. So I don't I don't want that I want to back that away. I cleaned it up a little bit. Maybe darken the lines but lighten that up and just play with it. You play with these levels. Sometimes you could use a bit of a curve. Alright? So I want to, this is taking up the mids. So I think I want to backup the mids as much as I can. It seems darken up the lines. Here we go, But now I'm starting to lose the lineup. Alright, so I want to back up just a little bit. And that's a little cleaner, right? I don't necessarily love it. I might go in and for example, I might go in and clean some of this up if I want to, if this is really bugging me, right, I can come in here. And this is where it gets really tedious. And that's why if you're not doing your own stuff, you have really good communication with the line artist of what their expectation is, right? Do they expect really? Are they going to give you something really mucky that you have to deal with? Or are they gonna give you something clean? That's easy to just touch up? Coloring at this stage is the cleanup duty of dealing with the pencils and stuff. This is this can be you can see how tedious this can be, like coming in here, cleaning all this up. Now you might not want to, you might not want to clean this up. You might want to keep this kind of authentic or whatever it is, right? You know, you a little bit of that sketchiness field to it. It's up to you. And that's something. Again, if, if the line artist is somebody that's not you, then that's something to discuss. Okay. So you can see how this got cleaned up and you can see the original the cleaned up scan and you can punch it even more. You can sit there and play with it for hours and really punch, punch, punch it. I could maybe even go on top of this at another layer and I can multiply it, back it out and see, you know, there's a lot of things that I can play with here. Trying to adjust and say, Okay, well, I want to eliminate the, a lot of the gray tones, the sketchiness as much as I prefer, right? Or as much as I prefer discussing with the artist. But still keep keep the quality going. Yeah. The original, which is I would almost describe as dirty. It's a dirty sketch. Write. Little bit cleaned up, and you can spend how much time you want to spend cleaning this up. Like he could really take hours. I don't like spending a lot of time, so I do my line work digitally so that I don't have to spend all this time. It's really up to you. It's up to you how much time you want to invest, adjusting the levels? Yeah, that's all I'm going to say on this level adjustment. Okay, so the next thing I'm going to talk about a little bit here is getting rid of the blue line. Now, when I do sketch on paper and stuff, what I do a lot of is blue lines sketches. And a lot of the paper that you're gonna be working on can be BlueLine already. The bordering and all that kind of stuff to shimmy you away from the edges will be blue line. So if we look at this, maybe this was a cheap printout, right? But like there's a lot of BlueLine boards that actually have, that are already blue lined in it. It formats it for you for print and I'll, and I'll show you this later when we're formatting a little bit, right? That we've got all this blue line on here. Blue lines are awesome. I like I said, I love sketching with it and stuff. But then when we scan it in, we're dealing with that blue line ugliness, right? So how do we get rid of it? Well, it depends on the program you're using. So I'm going to teach you a few different ways. Me using Clip Studio Paint. And that's my primary. I love it because it's inexpensive and no subscription. If you can buy it for like on deep deal for like 20 bucks or something like that. 30 bucks. And you've got it. It's an awesome drawing coloring program. But I'm not advertising for Clip Studio Paint. I use Photoshop for years. I really love Photoshop. I just don't love Adobe's pain model. Okay, So in Clip Studio Paint, what we can do is we go with two Edit, Tonal Correction, tone curve. So remember, I'm aiming to get rid of this oldest blue stuff, like all the blue border outline stuff again, right, so I'm gonna come down here, go read, and then grab this and drag it all the way up the left-hand corner, drag it all the way. Okay. I'm not loving it so far. They come down and go green and do the exact same thing. Okay. Now that that's, that's not looking pretty at all. Not at all. But that's where I'm at. I'm all yellow. I'm going to come back down to tonal correction, hue saturation. And I'm going to bring the saturation all the way to the left. There we go. Okay, so now what does, what does that do? Is it got rid of all that cyan blue line, right? And made me great great homes. Maybe two gray actually, depending on how I'm working. I actually like working in not stark inks. I like this kind of gray. But for a lot of people, maybe they want to punch it. So what I would do is come over back into here Tonal Correction and go to Levels. Where am I here? Level correction. And then I can start to adjust from there. I can bump it up and just nudge it a little bit wherever my comfort zone is. And right there is my cleaned up getting rid of the BlueLine in Clip Studio Paint. Okay. If you're gonna do it in Photoshop, the process is really actually simpler. I think for shops got a simpler process in this image, the drop-down image mode, and make sure you're in RGB. Okay, That's, that's the first key for Photoshop, right? Then you go back up into image, dropped down to adjustments. And then the cyan, you'll, you'll see a little window pop up and you just kinda pull that slider not to the edge because whites it all out, but backing away from that a little bit. And that'll get rid of all that blue for you. And it's really that easy. That's how easy it is. If you're working in something other than Clip Studio Paint or Photoshop, maybe Procreate sketchbook or whatever. Google it. Honestly YouTube will teach you for like there's a 100 different programs out there. So I'm not going to teach you a 100 different ways, but they've all got this kind of adjustment where you can back out the blue sketch, the blue line. Okay? So like I said, what I recommend is first thing when you scan something in, scan it in at a high-quality, clean it up and adjustments in the levels than if there's blue line, drop it out. And then you've got a clean version that you're ready to call her. Okay, guys, let's take a look what's next? Okay, so next up is dealing with difference of lines. I've got a few samples up here of semi inked with pencils, anti-aliasing, all this different stuff. And this is, if we zoom into these, you can see how, how this might change when we start to color it, how this might look. Okay, so we're, we're looking at the difference in line quality here. You can see how pixelated it is. This is anti-alias, this is getting into smooth, smooth lines. We're dealing with a mock pencil here and stuff I got. So now when we start using selection tools and selection tools and fill tools with coloring are really important. We're going to see that. Sometimes this doesn't really work very well. I just used a magic wand and I selected around the circles. So let's just zoom in. And we can see how when it comes to the pencil, they're still gonna be this whiteness, this white border area where it bounces back and forth just a little bit, right where it's not so clear. That selection can get a little rough. Some of, some of the pencil line is outside, this is selection. Some of it's inside the selection, some of the white is inside, some of it's outside. And it can get a little bit sketchy. My dad joke for the day. But when we get into things like getting more of a vector image and getting rid of that. Look at how precise that is. That's an ugly jotted line, but selecting it is easy. Okay, So I'm going to do a fill here. Let's see. I'm going to just fill with my bucket. And we can see so we can see how the cleaner, the line, the cleaner this fill is, right? Maybe. Alright. So we can see how there's, it is exact that fill is exactly touching the line, right? But as we move over to the different types of lines, we can see how sometimes it's a little unclear. Oh jeez, yeah. Here it gets, you know, there's white speckles in there, right? This can get, No, No one's not bad. That was a digital free handing. From a distance. It's not bad. But as we zoom up close, it's a little ugly. So keep in mind that when you're dealing with different types of linework, you might have to draw in some of the fill. You might have to get in here and the hand fill it. If you want. Certain types of things, certain types of quality of filling that right. Pencils, coloring pencils is gonna be tough. I'll teach you different selection modes and all that kinda stuff for coloring pencils. I'm just trying to really prepare you that when you're bringing in different types of line art into coloring, the type of liner, the quality of line art, the quality of the scan, all that. It's so, so important, right? Either frustrate you, make life easy for you. Okay, so let's talk about setting up a file a little bit. So I'm gonna go file new. And I've got presets all in here. Some of the presets that I want you to really take a look at here. The basic ones are just the measurements. This one I've got set in inches, seven inches by 10.5 for height. This is because I have been using problem as a printer. Problems accompany in the US for printing. And so a lot of my clients use them, I recommend them. They go to Sublime and this is their page requirements. I've already looked at their measurements, and these are the measurements. And I've looked at the border measurements, they're bleed measurements. We will discuss that in just a little bit here. Now, when it comes to resolution in color, you can have different types of colors, but 350, I think, is a minimum, a minimum for coloring. Okay? You can punch hire four hundred, five hundred, six hundred. But realize the higher you punch on this, the more you're going to bog down your computing system. If you've got a brand new top-of-the-line computer, you can chug through a lot. If your computer is a little bit older, I realized that high resolution and digital paints, different painting and coloring techniques might really chugging slow down your system. So you got to experiment and find out. Just understand that when you go into low resolution, it can look really ugly, okay, Be very careful dropping below 300. You don't want the little 300 for print. And if people are coloring things, often they want it for print. I'm going to set up this comic and we'll just say color, color one. Here we go. Now, we've got a bit of a border here. These are bleeds, right? So when I'm importing the scan line art, I've got to realize that this edge can be trimmed off in print. And I don't want to have anything vital on that extreme edge that can definitely I don't want anything out there. I can color into it and that's fine depending on the format, the format of the piece of art or whatever. But realize that anything on that little outer portion could easily be gone. Okay. So let's say I want to bring this one that I've already cleaned up from Dominic, right. So I'm going to select all and I'm going to copy it. And I'm going to bring it over into here. Paste it in. It's not size, right? So I'm going to transform and bring it into the sizing and format that I want. Let's see, I start to bring it in, okay, my width, everything looks good. Now, now that I've got it in this dimension, what do I want? I've gotta be careful that I haven't quite expanded it on this side. Right? Do I want all of these lines going bleeding all the way off? Yes, I think that's the way the artist wanted it, right? I gotta be careful with this bag though. So let's see if I can nudge this just a little over. And that bag might get clipped off when it's when it goes to print. Anything else? Nope, this looks pretty good. Do I liked the bottom and top ratio? Maybe I might bring it up just a little bit. And that looks like everything will be within the print. The bag is my only worry, but I can't really do much on that. That's the artist's choice to breed so close to it. Hopefully an artist knows and understands the trim line on a print. Okay, so this looks pretty good. There I go. This is now ready to start coloring. Except for one thing. If I start coloring, I'm just going to be coloring over it. So here's where I want you to first start setting up. Once you've got your format of the page. Once you've got the linework imported in and it's all set. I'm gonna go to that line work layer off to the side here. And I'm going to set it to Multiply. Now, why is that? Because multiply, whether it's in Photoshop, Clip Studio Paint or anything, shows darks. But everything white or light becomes transparent. Somehow. Watch this. Let's say that same thing. Now. I can start to color this. Right here, is where the digital coloring magic begins. 3. SS Flats: Hey guys, we're back and in this unit we're going to talk about flats flooding. What does that mean? Well, that basically means laying down flat, solid colors that have no gradient rendering to them or anything, right? So in the old days, that was how comic books were colored. There, there wasn't a lot of ability to print with a lot of variation of color. So it's nice and flat. Made it simple. I'm going to show you how to do that because it's really, it really is the first stage and learning how to color. So we'll get into it. We've already talked about formatting the page. You should be good on that. Setting up the file so that you're ready to step into this step. So let's get to it. Okay Guys, I've got that sample page that we've already adjusted right in front of me here, right, this nice Spider-Man by Dominic. And we can take a look at, we've got a whole bunch of things going on here. Just so you know, these these little blue lines here are not on the actual document themselves. Those are on the file. So that helps me just keep a gauge of that bleed area, that trim area. But it won't go into the print. Okay, so we want to lay down these flat colors, right? What does that mean? What does that going to look like? Well, I'll tell you what, if I just take a big selection tool here and bring it over this box, right? And let's say do a light blue. That's what it might look like. That's nice and flat. That's nice and simple, but that's not exactly what we're going for here. We're going to get a lot more detail going on. Just to be clear though, on the Layers. And remember, I taught you how to set this up, but I want to refresh. I've got my lines. So I'm going to label this off to the side and put it as lines set to multiply. So what this means again, as a refresher, multiply means that the darkness, the dark parts of this, show anything that's white or light. I can draw underneath it. So think about that. I've got this layer sitting here of my drawing, right? And it's like an animation cell. When we use Photoshop in these types of things, that when we color or do things underneath it, they'll show through whatever areas that are allowed. This line art, it will always stay on top, but anything underneath, all of this will be showing underneath. Okay. So that's, that's what's happening here with this. I know sometimes it's hard to wrap your mind around what these layers, how they act and everything. But as we work through these programs, it'll get a lot more comfortable. Okay, so I've got this line layer, but I want to color it underneath the layer underneath, I'm just going to label as flats. Nice and easy. Part of me does this, this is what I like to do sometimes is come in and fill this entire frame, this and just say, okay, well, that's my starting point right in and do it that way. And you can see I'm fudge, they're a little bit. There we go. And that kind of it's a nice starting point. So I know it's all kind of blocked out and everything like that. I can do that, but that's not what I'm gonna do here. Instead, what I'm gonna do is show you some of the tools for filling and see which one works for you. Again, I'm working in Clip Studio Paint, but a lot of programs, their sensitivity for this and your flow, how you work change a little bit. So I'm gonna give you a few options here and see what works for you. One option is to go to the line layer, take something like this magic wand tool, and select. So now I've selected everything in her face. Like I can even zoom in a little bit. Let's see if I zoom in. I selected her face. You can see how it's selected. All that white. That's interface, right? See how it cuts off around the year here. Those, those pixels are a little close together, so it didn't like to extend that. So if I want to, I can press Shift and I'm going to add to my selection, I can start to add in here. Notice how even in these small little areas, and I'm going to zoom in even more. It's missing gaps. And this is your nemesis as a colorist, is where you might miss these things, right? So this is one technique. It's the magic wand technique. And let's say let's pick her skin tone. That's good enough. I'm going to come down to flats and I'm going to fill that. And now we can see, okay, that's not bad. It looks like it did pretty well, right? It's missing a couple of points. So if I want to, I could come in with like A pen and just touch up these few points and it's missing. That's one technique, the Magic Wand technique. You will see. And you can adjust your magic wand to its sensitivity just a little bit. You can say, Okay, well have it less sensitive or more sensitive. So the amount of pixels that expands or contracts from can be adjusted. You can go over here in the magic wand tools that depends on your program settings. And for this one it says close gap. The area scaling I can, I can adjust for that, right. So it kinda, when I select an area, it can pump it a little bit or it can contract a little bit depending on your style. So that's something to play around if you want to use the magic wand to use this as doing your flats. Something happens though when you're using the magic wand and most of these Phil tools is when we take away the lines. We've got this, we've got a lack of color, flat underneath that. If you're working on an inked page, especially digital inks and stuff, right? And you're going to just use those inks as they are without any type of adjustment to lines or color holds. Talk about that later. This is absolutely fine because what's it going to look like? Yes, it looks good. But if you want to do different styles of coloring, this might not work for you. This type of thing might not work for you. Okay? So instead of doing this magic wand select tool, I'm going to back out of it. There we go, back all the way up. And I'm going to start over. Another one to use is a Lasso Tool. This one gets a little crisper, but it takes a little bit more of a steady hand. So if you're using, actually I've seen really good colors. Do this with a mouse, but depends on your style. What you do is select around the area, drawing around the area that you're going to be coloring. Okay. So I go around the area like this, come around the chin and I'm basically almost redrawing this, right? I'll come around here. Let's say I get a little bit like on a little bit messed up. What I can do is just bring it up to that meeting point. Press usually it's a Shift key or something depending on, again, the program. And what this does is now it's going to add to the selection. So I can just start to add to it and can make that loop. Now I've encompassed everything in there and then I can come to that way. I don't have to be bouncing between my lines and my flats. Right? I can fill. So what does that do them? Well, it actually filled it. This is a better way to do flats. This is probably the best way. It's a little bit more tedious. And if your work, but if you're working on your own project and you know how you're going to handle line art. You can get away with the fills, filling a bucket fills and that magic one film. But if you're doing work for somebody else and you don't know how the end product might be, like if you're just doing flats and that's your only job. This is the way to do it. Okay. So we'll come back the lines. So I've got this nice filled face. It works. Another technique. So, so far we've done Magic Wand. This one is lasso tool. Another technique is the bucket fit. Now the bucket fill. Again, you've got adjustments off to the side that you can use for this, right? I've seen some programs are really bad with bucket fills the whole it's like a paint bucket. What you're doing with this paint bucket is pouring it. Pouring it so that it fills into these lines. You're just kinda pouring it in. And depending on the program, There's depends on your bucket sensitivity, right? So sometimes some programs I pour it in and awesome. It spreads out it, it pixelate this way and it makes a square that way or something like that. Clip Studio Paint is really good for this. So I'll show you what I do. I go to the line, my line art layer, and I hit a little thing up here. And this is called, well, I call it my lighthouse, but it's actually setting as a reference layer. So now when I go back to flats, anytime I'm doing any action on flats, what flats actually looked like at this point is just an empty layer. Alright? With so far what I felt. But what I want my computer to recognize is I want to work on my flat layer, but reference my line layer. So I'm going to take this bucket, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. You can see how Gs that. I got a little bit easy, right? Like really easy. It's even easier. Let's say I'm going to do Miles, skin tone. Kind of bump them. Maybe they're boom, boom, boom, like that. Watch this. If I press down with my bucket, drag it and fill it. And it just kinda especially like, let's say I'm building back here. I don't know. Let's go with gray. If I want to fill it, I can just start dragging it around and starting to fill everything that I go over, cross over our class so that, that bucket drag and fill, especially in Clip Studio Paint, is really good for just dragging it across the image. And especially if you've got a lot of little sketch lines are smaller lines and it will just fill all those slots. But again, the bucket fill is my cheap way of doing it. What's going to happen when I back out? This is going to look like that. If I'm working on these ink lines and this is all I'm doing. No problem. But if I was doing something funky with those lines later and stuff I get and I want to select off of this if I want to use my color. And we'll get into this as I get into shading and highlights and the pole, that kind of stuff. This is not the professional way to flat. I kinda want to emphasize that, right? Okay, So two main fast techniques. The using the auto select like a magic wand and using the bucket fill. Fast, furious. For me, the bucket fill wins every day, especially in this program. For doing it proper. Use your Lasso. Occasionally you might have to come in. And this happens right? Take a pen or something like that. Color. Color select. You see what I did there? I grabbed a little stopper. The diver selected that color and got in there. And then I'm just going to use my marker to kinda fill in. Because like I said, I'm, I'm kinda got these gaps here that I don't necessarily want, right. So I'm gonna come in here, fill it on up, and clean it up. If you do the lasso, you don't have to do this. If it's really clean line work, you have to do it even less sketchy and all that kind of stuff. It's going to take you hours. So just keep that in mind, that look in here it even. So what's happened here? I'm going to back that out a little bit. You can see how this line work is not actually using a heavy full thick ink. It's a little transparent there. So what happened was if I start to color underneath it with these flats, how they should be. It becomes darker. Like I said, for the most part, with the ink that I'm working at right now, this type of image from this resolution wouldn't eat it, right? So this is what I want you to do. I'm going to send you this page. And I want you to go in and start to flat it. You can use markers, like you could color it and if you want, you can use the bucket. I want you to use them all. I want you to get in there and really take a look at which technique works best for you. See which program you're using and say, okay, you know what? I love? The bucket. It's just, it's so fast, it's so furious. That's going to work exactly for me. Okay? That's what I want you to do, is use all of these. Actually, I'm going to go and just choose whatever colors like you can look up character model sheets for these guys. This is spider Gwen and Spider-Man, Miles Morales, one frame and just ON Rhino down at the bottom. And I want you to fill this flats. Only. The only part that might be tough for you is, how are you going to do this background? Check this out, fill it like that, right. Come on. I got is it Is it that do I want to put a what do I want to put back there? I'm going to leave that choice for you right now. Filling this big empty space behind the panels here. How do I want to do that for now? Just pick a flat color. We'll deal with it later in different effects and all this kind of stuff, right? But for now, pick whatever flat color you want back here, It's up to you. Okay, so that's your assignment for, so far for this unit is to flap this. And it's going to take your wow, like honestly, for me, I'm a little fast. I think something like this takes me probably about 2030 minutes to flat this page. It's got some details to it and stuff like that right? After it's flatted. This is how it should look. It should be really simple, right? I've even seen flat pages where the colors are all wrong because they didn't know the colors, right? They send it out to a colorist up a flatter. And they just picked, pick pink, purple, orange, enough colors to separate all the oldest selections. And then the professional colorist comes in and starts to fill in and polish it and all that kind of stuff, right? So that's the assignment for this unit, flat and E flat, this page. It's not always fun. But it's got to be done. 4. SS Lighting Basics: Hey guys and welcome to this first unit on lighting. I know it's kinda strange to start it off with a bit of a head shot, but it will make sense as we go along here, I want to talk to you about how we can look at lighting and look at the objects around us to help us understand better so that we can learn how to render better. Okay, so first off, I'm going to grab an everyday object. Not so everyday, but kind of everyday stuff, right? It's a lacrosse ball, white, simple, plain. And already you can probably notice something. I've got one major light source. I'm back. You can see a glaring off my head. You can see it glaring off the ball right? Now if I kill the lights in here too much, it's gonna be really hard to see anything. But why don't I try that? Oh, now it's just a monitor. But now I'm going to show you that I got my phone out. I'm going to show you how I can move it all around. You can see how if I get further away, it kinda dissipates a little bit. As I get closer, it gets a lot harder. So watch this cut line, the division between the light and the shadow, right? As it gets closer, it gets far more intense. And as it moves away, it fades quite a lot. Right? So what I want you to be able to do is save this video and reference it back when you're doing exercises later about lighting, okay, under lit and all over. This video is going to help him more than you expect, because we're gonna be talking about lighting objects from a lot of different angles. From behind. Look at that rim right? From in front, from up top, and from even underneath. Spooky. The key point I really want you to understand is that objects like this. You've got around the house, whether it's a lacrosse ball or whatever it is, right? You've got access to it. So I want you to be able to think that you can use it to understand how lighting works. Let's get into the unit. Okay guys. So let's get into this a little bit. We're going to do some different examples of when it comes to lighting. Just lighting some basic shapes and see how it flows, right? Let's see. I'm going to pick something darkish color that we can kinda feels a little darker. Start to color some stuff in. So well, actually, let's, let's flip this a little bit. And let's say my light. I like to decide this first. Where's my light coming from? Why don't we pick something simple? The left, okay? So the light's coming off from the left side here. Alright? So if the light's coming off from the left, we can see that it's coming in this direction, right? Let's, let's, let's say it's a big light source off to the side here. And it's all coming this way. Okay, If that's coming this way, how does that play out? That means it's going to hit here. It's going to hit here. And it's probably going to hit somewhere along here, right? What does that also mean for where it's not going to hit not going to hit on this side. It's not going to hit on this side. It's not going to hit on this side. Okay. So I know that seems really elementary, but bear with me. I think it's worth really looking at a lot of shapes and figuring out where would like touch and where would. All right. So we're going to look at this and not only is it going to hit on the sphere here, right? But when it hits spheres, it kinda hits circular, right? And depending how close this light source is, it can be a very hard and definitive line or it can kinda blur as it goes out. And again, this will kinda, like I said, either blur, Let's see if I can smudge this out so it looks like it's, there we go. We can do it this way. If we want to cheat just a little bit. For these curved surfaces, we can have some kinda smudge effect. We have this cylinder here and then we have the shade on the back end of it. And of course this line, this cut line, because it's a rounded curve, would generally kinda blurry a little bit. Alright? Okay. But what happens when it's a solid line? The light wouldn't be touching here. It might touch a little bit just on the edge here. You might get some highlighting on the edge here. Okay? And it might, depending on how high it's coming from, it might come a little bit here. And you might get this kind of almost like a gradient effect with shade coming from the backend here, right? And then that's where you might have it kinda blending out. Okay? So even on a flat surface, you can have light as it fades out into the into the shade. Alright. Okay. What else goes on though? Well, we've got this, this ball is going to cast some sites, some type of shadow. Here. I'm using a select tool, but I'm just being lazy, right? The ball is going to cast some type of cast shadow here. So I can fill that if I want. This cube is probably if it's all the light's coming from up this way, It's probably going to cost something along these lines down here, right? So we've got the shadow, the shade that's on the object, and then we've got this cast shadow. Why don't we come down? So what I'm hoping is that you're practicing along with me. Now there's different ways you can practice. You can grab just a pencil. And that's what we're gonna do for this next one. Imagine we've just got a pencil. I'm going to select the pencil tool and I'm going to make it big because it's going to take me awhile. And I'm going to once again choose a light source. But this time I want the light source to come from this way. And you know what, it's going to splay out a little bit. So it's, it's coming from one light up here. Well, how would I do that pencil? If the light's coming here, chances are, it's gonna be down here. It's coming up here. The top here is gonna be lit. Maybe. It's going to come and start to come down the cylinder this way. And then if it's coming down again here, depending how far this is ahead of this, there actually might be a bit of a cast shadow on there. Depending from the cylinder. Definitely this one's going to be all black dope. But it depends on might be a little corner down here, might be a little corner over here. Then if I really want to, can, you know, here's going to be that cache shadow from the bowl. Here is gonna be the cast shadow from the square. And here's going to be that cache shadow from the cylinder, right? And like I said, it already kinda cast it up here a little bit. Alright, cool. I'm hoping once again, you're practicing along with me and this is really what it is, is just trying to get used to how light might fall on different shapes. As we go through this course, it's going to get harder and harder. So I know this seems really elementary, really simple to start, but that's where it should be. It should be elementary and simple to start. You guys should be just doing something basic, just practicing, even holding objects, like I've shown you in the video. Just object in your head and rolling it around in front of the light. Now what if I bring the light little bit closer? Really close, right? So it's going to be, let's say it's kinda, kinda making this 3D here, kinda behind here. It's gonna be beady-eyed. So that means the light is going to touch on here, touch on here, touch on here, and it might sneak through and just touch on there. You understand like the light is going to touch, touch, touch is going to touch all these things that might come in-between these two objects seems like there's a bit of a gap. I might just kinda touch on this stuff, right? So where's the cast shadow then, or where's the shade? Well, it's gonna be all back in here for sure. We know this one's a for sure, right? We know back here is a for sure. Alright. We know back here, somewhere back here is also for sure. It's below here. So this one's going to be for sure here too. Because it's behind this object, behind the square, then we know that this is going to be colored in up top here though it looks like it's slightly above. So it might or might not. It might just be touching on there. Cool. And then we've got the cast shadows back in here. But it's going to be a little short because it's coming this way. So it might, might come to sway like cast shadows coming back here from the sphere. And then this one might carry through and then we wouldn't see it on the other side here, might carry this way, but it depends, or it might actually fold just slightly onto the sphere. Right? Okay guys. This was simple shapes and simple lighting. Just one light source on simple shapes. And I know you're thinking that was simple. And that's the point. I want to start you off easy. But as we go through this lighting series of units, you're going to find it's gonna get more and more complicated as we add to it. So start here, maybe print off a few copies of this and play with it yourself. Move the light source around. If you've got similar objects at home, place them in front of you and see how they react to different angles and intensity of the light. But for now, just stick to one light source. And let's get it done. 5. SS Lighting Basics Part 2: Hey guys, we're back with another unit on lighting. Listen, I know this is seeming simple, but it's about to get more complex now, right now, this is practice. But as we move forward, you're going to see how this practice will help you really understand how to render for comic books. In front of me, I've got an egg both on the screen and in-person. And I've set it up so that I can can I have my light from my phone changing and around the egg. So I've got a freehand and I'm just adjusting to it. This is something that you could do at home. I think something with a very simple object, set it up, even if it's an egg, and just find a way to light it and move that light around so that you're practicing. The first one we're gonna do is let's go straight up on top. So if the light source is coming straight up on top, that means the shade is down here. And then shade is a little bit harsh there. That's a little bit better. That's what I want. The shape looks like this as I'm looking at my little reference off to the side here. Okay? What if we move it off to the left than the shade moves off to the left, right. And you can see how it curves with the shape of the object in this case. And if I move it left forward than the shade kinda just comes around that side. Light source up top light source. Kinda left. Light source forward left. Why don't we keep moving it around. If I move it straight in front of us, you'll just see a little bit of shade on the sides there. Because that light source is basically where the viewer is. Now listen, I'm hoping that you're following along. I don't care how you're following along. Meaning, if you wanna do crosshatching or whatever style rendering you're working on right now, whether it's markers or ink or whatever, that's totally up to you. So you're rendering of this lighting is your choice. Right now. I just want you practicing. One thing you could practice to that I really enjoy is kind of a subtracting method. You can shade in, again, whether whatever method you want and then erase. So where do we want this? Let's go with light source down. Lower, right? The light source is here and it spreads. And I find this easier because especially with curved shapes, it seems to flow a little bit better as I, as I take away things, right? So let's do that for a couple. Let's fill it on in. And where do we want this? How about top center? So I'm going to start here and I just start fanning out from there. Right? There we go. Cool. And like I said before, my little face video, that when the light source is super close, super close to the, to the object, you'll get a much harder line, right? And you can soften, adjust a little bit if you want. But you'll see how it's much harder line as the light source comes closer to it. As the light source gets further away, then you get this really, I'm gonna see if I can you get this really soft. Oh, that's not working. But I think you get the point. You get this really soft feel to it and maybe all mashed up a little bit. There, there we go. So here's an example. Oh, that's even better. I like that. Here's an example. Left one is when the light source is really close to our object. This middle one is more when the light source is far away. So that's the shading edge. Gets a lot softer, right? Guys? This is what I want you doing. I want you just playing around finding the style that you like to deal with, whatever style rendering it is. And then practicing on these eggs, finding a light source where it would hit the object, hits right here. This is very light, light source and then maybe it starts to spread just a little bit, right? Spreads out and out and wraps itself on that shape. Okay guys, So what you should be doing is having your worksheets printed out, maybe print out a bunch of them, and just work these light sources pen at all around. It used to it from a bunch of different angles and get used to this single source of light. Because once you master this, and I don't think it'll take you very long. Then you're gonna go on to more difficult shapes and objects and more difficult lighting approaches. So get this down, get it down quick. And then let's move on. 6. SS Lighting Advanced: Okay guys, we're back and you're already bored with simple lighting and simple objects, right? I know, I know. It's simple. It's easy when you really have to have that down before you move on. So we're going to keep with that same pattern right now, doing a simple one light source. But this time a little bit more complex of a shape. And what do I have in front of me? Well, as you can see, faces, right? Some, some classic busts. Not those types of busts. Of what we're gonna do here is just do some basic shading and see where the light would fall from different lighting approaches. It's always good to practice on faces because we got a lot of shapes going on at faces. We've got the nose jutting out, often casts a shadow. We've got some sunken eye pockets. Obviously the outline of the jaw, all of these things are really important when factoring it, right? The first one we're gonna look at here is a bit of an ambient light, just it's kind of all around. And you see this when people are outside, mostly, there's kinda just light everywhere, right? It's just a general light source that is not harsh, hard, and one-directional. So what you'll see with this is see if I can get this working a little bit. There we go. You'll see just a little bit under the jaw. You will see a little bit in the cheekbone lining. This section here, for example. You'll see just a little bit maybe in the eye, under the brow. And then you'll see, you know, as it flows and hangs into the hair and stuff like everybody's got a different hairstyle, right? So that's not that important, but you'll see just a little bit and then behind in the back there and stuff, right. Let's see if that makes sense. Okay. So you'll see those main areas. And of course you can come in, clean it up a little bit. The one thing that I like to do, especially when I'm shading, sorry, I forgot the nose, just a little bit under the nose. One thing I'd like to do, especially when shading is making sure that like, let's say for example, I have, I can actually go over the entire eye. And it gives us this kind of form, right? And then as I erase away, there's still that form there, right? Okay. There we go. Nice and simple. You can come in a little bit more and get some grooves going on in the year or something like that. Right. But this isn't really that complex of a lighting situation. That's just this general that's kinda why I picked it to start. Okay. So we've got that. Let's go down to another one. Let's go to the three-quarter side. So let's say it's forward to our left a little bit. You can do one of a few things. Remember how it was talking about, like kinda just shading everything in. Then subtracting if you want. Why don't we do that? Okay? So we'll shade everything in and then just start subtracting if the lights here, then we know that it's going to be coming here. It's coming from this side. Pretty much. Most of the left side is gonna get some lighting to it, right? Okay. We're going to have to get smaller here. The bridge of the nose is gonna be lit. The lips, the chin. Maybe some of the hair here, right? Maybe depending on the cheek shape, could be here. You know what, I erased a little bit too much on the nose there. But the cheek has got some their worlds above the brow a little bit more and might touch the hair just a little bit on this side. Alright? So you're imagining where all the light is going to touch as it's coming from this forward left. Okay. It might come, like I said, loop it into lips here and stuff and the nose. And of course, like I said before, you can come in and do the eyes a little bit. Alright. Okay. So that's forward left, that kinda three-quarter. What's another one? Straight above? Do we want to subtract? I kinda like subtracting. You know, I mean, I think for me, subtracting is one of the easiest methods. So if you're on, if you're working traditionally and you've got pencil, paper, that kind of stuff, shaded lightly, and then come with the eraser and just start going at it. So if it's coming from above here, I want the top down. So might as well start with the top here. Do the hair up top, right? As it touches all of these very cool curls and locks that that's the right. It's going to come not directly on the forehead because there's gonna be a little bit of a cast shadow from the, these locks, right? So there's gonna be that. Then it's going to come into the brow. We've got the brow they're going on, right? We've got coming down into the nose and maybe just a little bit up into the brow here. We've got the cheeks. So it's good to know the planes of the face here, right? And this is, this is good practice for that. Actually. We've got the cheeks, we've got this part of the mouth and there's gonna be a little, little bit of a cast from the we've got the top of the chin here. And depending on the size of the jaw, it could be like a manly jaw type of thing, right? What you can do actually is once you've got this all in, you can start to blend a little bit, smooth it out a little bit. How do you blend traditionally, wall depends what medium you're working with. You'll learn this in the other units that sometimes you don't. A light hatch might do it for you. Sometimes bunched up piece of paper or your finger might smudge. And again, it depends what kind of medium. So looking at this, I think I want to have the nose cast a little bit more of a shadow here. Little bit of light in the eyes. And then where's all this going to fall? I'm going to show you with my select tool if I'm looking at how the head is, that means that this is going to be covered by the chimp, right? So what I might do instead would be something along these lines. Just to show you what's going on here. There we go. So you can see how this hanging cast shadow comes down from the face. You can make it longer if you want. If you want to cast it down just a little bit more or something, it could be hanging further down. You could do a little bit of a highlight sometimes on the side here. But that is top-down for the lighting. I really hope you're practicing along with me. Alright. Let's see. If we've got a top-down. Bottom-up. This time we will start with just this. And that means we're kind of going the opposite, right? So we're going to have shading in here, right? Shading all in the back here where the light might not touch. Maybe shading on the the top of the brow, shading on the top of the chin, shading and where the collarbone casts a bit of a shadow. And shading on the back here. Something along these lines. Okay, and then what we can do is come in and clean it up. It's probably no shading there. But you know what? There would be shading right above this lip here, right? Maybe above the eye as well. Slightly there. Okay. And then you can come in and whatever tool you're using, you know, start to clean up the parts that where you think the light would be touching the leg would be touching the hair that overhangs here, right? The light would be touching the bottom parts of the eye. Light would be touching the bottom part of this nose, the bottom part of this lip. Maybe down in here, the light would also be touching, right? So what this is, is just getting used to the form of the face. The light might be touching a little bit on the cheek, depending how soft we want to make these cheeks and everything, right. A bit of a brown. Alright, cool. Maybe in the eyebrow here. This is something that you kinda keep working back and forth and just saying, well, does it look how I want it to look right? Does it give the effect? Maybe if it's too harsh, I want to blend it out a little bit or something. Maybe it's too, too harsh or too light of an effect. Maybe I want it softer. I want it harder. You can come in with a harder pencil or something. This is something you can experiment with. Lot last one, why don't we practice with this one? And you know what, I'm just going to fill it on in here. There we go. I'm going to subtract, right? We're going to use that subtraction method. And let's say it's from behind. So that means the light is coming from behind. It's going to touch all the things that might be somewhat impacted. It's a very strong light from behind. Okay. So you can have a bit of the cheek getting hit, right? Maybe up into here or even it's, it's a really powerful light coming from behind. So it's wrapping on the sides here just a little bit. The neck. There we go. But you'll see that through the face. That light doesn't really touch much. It might touch a little bit on the neck. And there we go. Okay guys. So looking at this now, they're starting to look more like three-dimensional forms instead of just flat, right? Understanding lighting gives form. That's the whole thing. That's what this entire course is about. Rendering will give form to whatever it is you're working on it. If you're rendering a correctly, then that form becomes believable. You start doing it correctly and everybody is like, Oh yeah, that looks exactly how I expected. That's actually something now. Okay. Think about that before you get into rendering though, before you get into the techniques that are coming, understand this lighting and lighting will definitely help you make it more believable. So the first one, we've got this kind of ambient light, right? Second one, we've got front, our left. Third one, we've got what does that look like? An overhead right. Fourth one down. As we come down, we've got the bottom lid, right. Then the last one here, bottom left, is actually lit from behind. All of these are ones that you should be practicing. And if anything, I would print out the sheet a couple of times and just work that that light source from different angles. One light source. That's all we've got, but now we've got a more complex shape to play with. So print this out, keep working it. And when you're done, when you think you're ready. Let's go on to the next unit. 7. SS Lighting Advanced Part 2: Okay guys, we're back with another lighting rendering unit for you. And this one's a big one. So who better to have a big unit width then the big man himself, the Hulk. We're gonna take a look at this little hole combust and do a whole bunch of things with it. Okay? Lighting. Of course, we're not going to be drawing on this. We're gonna be lighting it. I'm going to use a few different techniques. Nothing new stuff we've already covered, but now we've got a more dynamic figure. And so it's gonna be kind of a more complex situation going on here. I'm gonna do kind of like that Phil and take away technique. That's kinda my preference. So I just filled it with the whole shape. Normally what I would do is just say, okay, well, you know what, I've got? I'm going to use a lighter brush here. I've got light coming in from the forward, forward, our left, right. So what would I do? I would just start shading or lightening it up. Right. You don't like the light is all coming. And if I wanted to, I can kinda come a bit bigger, right? Lights coming on this side. Alright. Maybe on the top here along the rim. There should be a bicep there, but that doesn't really count, right? So, you know, that would be one way and I could even get more detailed into the face. I could drop down the size of this and kinda cheekbone at a bit of that. But some highlights in the hair, right? So that's how I've been teaching you, you know, that one light source from one direction. But when we switch it up, That's what we're here for. We're going to have two light sources. One is gonna be forward left, one is going to be forward, right? And they're the same color. So we're adding a second light source in here. And we're just gonna kinda follow that same pattern and just a little bit, right? And there we go. This almost as resembling like a backlight. Now we, we kinda talked about that a little bit lit from behind type of thing. But it's not. We're actually got to actual different light sources coming in. We've got forward left, and forward right. And we can play with that a lot and see how it, how it feels and stuff. And there we go. You can put a little highlights in here. Sometimes we might catch. Okay, so nice and simple. Two light sources. Let's see what happens when we fill this guy in again with shade. And I know you're thinking you'd like, Okay, I get it to light sources. Let me guess he's gonna do three nu naught. Let's do it this way. Let's say one light source is above, right? So it's touching everything up here. Got his hair. Got a bit of the brow here. Alright. Bridge of the nose. Maybe tuck the chin, some of the cheek, that type of thing. Alright. Got the top of the PEC, maybe a little bit of the AB here, maybe a little bit on the stone. That's one light source, right? We're gonna do a second light source. Let me do green from down below. So the second light source might be down in here. It's down here. Right. And then lights under the under group, right? Lights under here. Lights under the abs. Slightly. Alright. Maybe even we can come in and put a little rim under his jaw, on his lip. Maybe the nose, maybe a little bit in the eye. Right. There we go. So that's a second light source. We've got the blue coming from up top. We've got the green coming from below. Now the question is, why would we have a second light source, right? Like, where does this usually come from? Sometimes it's an artificial light that can happen. That's actually pretty common, especially we go into a building or something, there could be multiple light sources. It can definitely happen that way. They can be different colors sometimes. But another time, it's actually not what you think it is. It's gonna be something called Bounce. Let's do this again. We'll do the same thing and I'll make it a little bit simpler. The light source, the primary sun is up above. So this primary sons, nice and simple. It's coming from up above. But that's sun, that directional sun coming from up above hits whatever's down here. Actually, I'm going to do this for us. Let's see if I just had a cool idea. No, you're not probably going to like it that much, but that's okay. Let's say that this pedestal that he's sitting on is this ugly. Whatever off pink purple color, right? So you sitting on this pink purple color, we've got light coming down. It's kind of an off yellowish white. What happens? What happens when there's light? Hits here and bounces back up. Well this is what happens. You get this reflection off of that and the light will be called bounce lighting. We'll catch in a rim these things down here. Okay. So what do you wanna do? Sometimes you could do it in a bit of a gradient. You can do it a bit of a soft brush here or whatever. And you'll find that this makes a lot more sense. So this light is coming down. It hits whatever surface you're on. A, bounces up just, just a bit. Obviously I'm not being careful here, but you get the point that it will bounce up and hit whatever shapes and forms would be down there, right. So that's a bit of a bounce light, bounce light, bouncing off a surface and grabbing the color of the surface. That's what often happens. So you don't notice it always in the daytime if you're walking down the sidewalk because the light is off white, the sidewalks off white and everything just kinda gets off white. But you'll really notice it if you're standing over something very special. So let's do this again. And let's go with It's kinda off sunshine. One brush. The light's coming from above. Nice and simple. The light's coming from above, but he's standing in water. So what happens then? Well, just as you would expect, It's this blue type of thing. And sometimes you could do it running like this. Sometimes you could do more of a, just a general gradient that starts harsh down here and kinda filters up here, Right? Okay. You can have it. Blue is a harsher one. The glow and the glow just kinda barely touches by the time it gets near the top or something. Something along these lines. And then, you know, it depends on what you're doing with it. But like if it's water, you can have this kind of swirl effect, right? That the water has a bit of a pattern to it or something, right? You can do that kind of thing if you're working digitally. If not, it's a little tedious to do it your own way, right? But it can be done. Okay, so that's another way of doing it, right? That you have this bounce light, bouncing off whatever surface it is, liquid or solid and coming up and you can see it kinda dancing around on the figure. Okay. Let's see. I keep using this nice gray to colour in. And I think it's good if we keep practicing different lighting. Look at the colors that we can use here. What happens when we have more of an orange-ish red and we can get a little bit more into it, right? It's coming from this side. One thing you can notice is laying can fade out and it can get a lot harsher as it comes closer to the light. It comes as it gets really close to that light source. Just as we talked about all light sources, it gets a lot, lot harder, harsher, more defined, the colors stronger. And depends how you what you've got going on. Do you have do you have markers you're using? Can you smudge with it? Can you blend? Are you using digital or digital process? There's a lot of things that you could do to blend this out. Okay? So play with different colors. Obviously, we're looking at this and we're thinking, oh well, the sun's touching or some kind of maybe a sunset. Something pretty harsh for this lighting that has this impact and where would it touch wood it touch the neck, touch the chin here, but maybe touch this other brow wouldn't do little highlights and in the face. And then, like I said, if you've got something, you can come in and smudge just a little bit, maybe that gives the desired effect of what you're looking for, right? Another thing that can happen sometimes is the light source is not off the figure, but instead on the figure. So again, I'm going with my base shade here. And you can do it any way you want. I'm just for simplicity sake. And the light source. Let's go with blue here. The light source is the eye. Let's say he's got these electric eyes or something, right? And they're shooting all over the place. There's electricity, There's sparks. And obviously I will take more time with this or whatever, but we can do it for. Teaching sacred something along these lines. Then this is the one light source, or we can have two. Why don't we go with this? This is the one light source, right? And so what happens? Well, things become lighter around that source. And even more so as you get closer to it, it could get really light. Then what happens is everything that that would kind of touch gets lit up. Everything that though that would come close to touching, would just be again touched by that light. The shadow would be maybe harsher down here, right? But pay attention to what's causing that light. Maybe some little highlights up in the hair somewhere. That can be you can add that up in the hair. You put some definition in the nose, the lip, the chin, that type of thing. Right? So the light source doesn't always have to be off the figure. The light source can be on the figure coming from the figure, whether it's like Iron Man's Chest, something along those lines, right? And of course you could add a secondary light source. You can add whatever. Just keep in mind that it can come straight from something on that figure. Alright, what else do we got here? I'm going to come in and shade. Sometimes what you can do just as you're starting to figure, and especially if you're using pencils and stuff like that, is you're going to have no color. I've been playing a lot with color here to show you guys something, right? So I'm going to color pick this and you can see where it is off to the bottom left-hand side. And all I'm gonna do is move that up a little bit. And let's see, where should we have the light source here? Let's go with left. I like left of diseases. So the light source is going to be here. And I can just kinda almost make it simple like this. The light sources from the left. And now I'm going to keep bouncing back and forth and say, well, let's see, make it darker on this side. There we go. He making a darker. There we go. Right? And I'm just going to build up the tonal values. And like I said, you could do this with markers, with pencils, whatever you're working in it, if you're working in a very similar range of it's just one monotone color, right? You can bounce back and forth between this and kinda do that way. Alright, come all the way down to almost black. And just keep working that tonal value. And maybe for example, I'm doing a little trick here. That's digital, but I'm selecting this tool. And then I'm going to come and fill this in as if it's a cast shadow off this head, right? And then if I wanted to, I can come and blend it out just a little bit. Depending on how close you want that shadow to be. Realistic, right? So that's, that's one way of doing it is just using just one color and just running the spectrum on the tonal value of it. You can see we've got lots of options here. A lot of things that we can do here and that's for better or worse. You know, we, we can play around with it. Sometimes you can get really funky. And let's say for an example, let's say I add this green in here. Green is coming from this side. Now I'm going to, this is a purely digital trick. But you can kind of replicate it in traditional ways, sometimes with, with markers or pencil crowns each, each rendering technique is going to have its own little tricks to it, right? Or each rendering approach. So we'll see what happens here is what I'm doing is creating a layer, filling it with black and then switching it to something like color dodge. And then coming over this again and you can see how it burns it out, right. This is obviously using harsh whites, something along those lines, but you can really catch almost a liquid field to it, right? To the highlights. So I know when I use markers, I use a gel pen or white gel pen to give this liquify type of feeling, right? So imagine if you laid down some light color and then you liquefy a white gel on top of it. That's a similar effect that you can be doing here, right? There's a lot of cool things you can be doing. One more thing that I'm going to show you guys. Just as we wrap up here. Is it Listen you we could go over lighting schemes again and again and again. You know, for at nauseum paper thing, right? Like there's so many lighting approaches. I've taught you two different ones. Oh, you know what last one I want to teach you here is a more of a rim light. This one is, let's say once again, we've got a normal light that's coming in from the left, right. So I kinda highlight or erase some points and stuff I got most of it's coming in from the left and maybe even come over here and put a little bit of darkness into this side that's coming from the right. It's really dark on this side, right? The head casts and stuff, right. But let's say there's a really harsh, harsh light on the other side. So what I can do is just use a very small thin line and do a bit of a rim here. Do not call this a rim job. This is just a rim lighting. Okay. So it would just kinda almost like a backlight or something. It would just touch on certain points. If anything, sometimes it just covers the outline of of the, of the character. It doesn't always, always come in here. It depends this as this section is optional and stuff, but a lot of times it'll just run the outside of it, giving an almost a halo effect, but with an actual lighting scheme behind it, right? Okay guys, if we look at all of these approaches, you can see that we can have the same color twice from two different light sources, but same color. We can switch it up and have two different sources, different colors, right? We can have a bit of a bounce light reflecting off of a surface and then carrying that color up. We can have that same thing with something like water or fire. It's gonna have this kinda moving effect to it, right? We can start to play with the intensity of the light as it gets closer to the object or to the subject we're lighting. We can have throw the lighting on top of the subject and have a rating radiating outwards. We can play with tonal values a lot. That's another approach. We can start to liquefy and use really harsh highlights. And that also has a pretty cool effect. Very wet looking. Then we can use a rim light. Again. Photography is really where it's at, studying photography and all the different approaches to lighting. It's mind-blowing. It's awesome. And this are nine examples that'll help you in trying to understand how you're going to approach your rendering for whatever subjects you're working on. I hope this helped guys. This is a really, I don't know, There's tons of valuing here. And I'm going to include this worksheet so that you can practice. I want you to print it out maybe a few times. And just first-time you just get used to the forms of the Hulk folding over the muscles and that kinda thing of lighting and stuff. Maybe try it once with just one light source. Try the whole sheet again with two light sources and moving them all around. And then try it again with a bunch of different effects and see how it works for you. And see what kind of knowledge you pull after that. Because I guarantee if you get this down when you're working on your bigger pieces. It's gonna be kinda mind-blowing, fun with it guys. 8. SS Lighting Texture and Tones: Okay guys, we're back talking a little bit more about lighting, actually, a lot more, but especially how lighting is impacted by Textures. Okay, you can see we've got a whole bunch of stuff in front of us here. I divided it up into different panels for us for a little bit of ease, but it's still going to take us a little bit to get through this unit. So if you have to break it up a little bit, I've got nine panels here. And if you want to take a break after each, that's no problem. I'll also attach this printed out or rather for a printout. And then you can follow along if you'd like. Okay, it'll make more sense once we get into it. We can see panel one is wood, penalty was concrete, brick, some foliage, some leaves. Then we've got some snazzy latex here, some metal. This is leather or my leg if I don't use moisturizer. Sorry, that's my one debt joke of the day, right? We've got some lighter tone skin and some darker tones skins. And I've included all these kind of for reasons, right? So the first thing I kinda advisers, sometimes we get thrown by colors. Colors can throw us off when we're trying to understand how light impacts things. And I get it because we've already talked about how colors can be added to a rim light or something like that. And it's awesome. It's fun to play with colors. But one of the best things to do is attack. And by just the tonal value, if you can get just the values down, then the colors can come after. So why don't we take a look at this. Let's come up here and we'll take a look at the woodwind first. Zoom in a little bit. And what do we see? Well, let's see. I'm going to say, You know what? I could cheat. I can cheat and say on right here I'm going to color pick. And I'm going to say you can see off to the side of the screen just a little bit. It's in close to white, but not quite rapid too much here. I've set up this panel here, just something that we could work on together. So if I want to, I could I could do is one of a few things I can come in here and start to draw in the individuals or even bigger and just color it in with a white and then come in with something dark, right? Like let's see if I might come something like that. I can come in and start to extend it down. You can see how like if I come over to few times, it starts to match that color a bit, I can come in and start to use a little bit of texturing that I want. Sometimes it's spotted, sometimes it's more of a shade. If I keep doing this. Eventually, what it's going to start to look like is I've got would get these wood grains and paneling coming down here. You can change up and have some light gray come down. And so what, what this exercise is trying to do is help you to follow the patterns that you see. Just understanding the tonal value, it's important to get that tonal value down, right? So as we back out a little bit, this is what I want you to do, is to try to see if you could copy this. Now how you want to do it is up to you. My personal suggestion is just pencil. Pencil. You've got a great range of tonal value you can do it with. But if you're not comfortable with pencil, if you'd prefer ink, Let's see what you got, right. Okay. So we're gonna come over to the next one that's concrete. And again, I'm going to color pick and I'm going to say, okay, well, here's my off-white. I might grab, depending what you're using as your resource, like your material. Look at how that just blend it in, right? So I've got this, but then what happens? I'm just doing this little corner here because I know you guys. When you're following along, you could do pretty much as much as you want or as little as you want. Well, I've got these specs going on here, right? So I've got these dark specks, irregular shaped. Alright, so I'm going to grab all the way down here and a black and do some irregular ones here and kinda see if I can get them in. Then I might come into a lighter one and just start to do some of this patterning. We can see these dots going on. We can see them starting to carry over n, right? We can see how they sometimes trace and almost squiggly line. You can see some little hooks. You can drop the value down just a little bit. And I'm going to say, when you're working digitally, there are some cheats on this. There's gonna be some ways to make it easier on you. There are certain brushes you can download depending on the program you're using. I didn't wanna do that on here because the lesson I'm showing you is not how to to just do these little specs. That's not the lesson here. I hope I'm not trying to give you that lesson here. I hope what I'm saying showing you here is that you want to try to understand how to mimic some type of texture using understanding what is going on with the light. So what do we think is happening with this when we talk about the lighting, how it's impacting here, chances are the light is hitting these high points in this group for an example. And these low points, these little points here, well what are they? This is where the light isn't hitting or there's some texturing and some coloring in there, right? Okay. That's good to understand. So let's say we start to shift the light. We start to shift it. And let's say there's some highlight of a secondary light source and it's only touching the ridges of things. We can have it touching just a little bit of the ridge of each each high point of this, right? And it's not showing up really well there maybe I should go with more of a orange or something just to kinda show you. So maybe it's only going to touch this much, alright. It's just going to touch along the ridges of each hybrid. Okay. There you go. Alright, let's keep going on brick. Bricks it interesting. So what are we going to do? I'll do a color pick for something in the middle here. Try and middle for an example. See if that helps at all. Just kinda color it in. If you're using traditional stuff, traditional medium, you can start to color lighter, little bit harsher. Here's the brick. This one is formed this way. And then what happens? There's some patterning going on here. This is where the light is coming in here, right? So there's some patterns going on. We can see that below it. There's some darkness, right? We can see how that brick starts to outline down here. And then there might be some texturing, some more highs going on, coming down. And this really is just about working in the textures. Feeling comfortable with it, seeing if you like how it feels, if it's looking the way you want, you can you can do this by, if you haven't got a pencil, by the pressure you're using, you can do it by if you've got a, like a lighter pencil, like even a white. I know that crayon packs comes with whites that we never seem to use that much, right? There's a lot of ways you can get away with starting to add color to things, or rather the tonal value, starting to really mess with it. Here we go. So what you would do is just start to work these patterns. You can imagine maybe there's another brick somewhere in here. And then you can start to kinda build it up on the top with a light's hitting a little bit. And as you zoom out, it starts to look like that brick. So this is a nice exercise for you to keep on rolling on. This one is gonna be tougher. What would we do? Honestly, what I would probably do is maybe I would pick low kinda coloring. Then pick, there seems to be about four values here. There's this one. And maybe I would come in and start to do some of these these types of values. And of course, depending on how much time you want to spend on it, you could spend a lot of time and maybe get into it that there's a dozen different values or something. Then we pick a lighter one here. Maybe there. We can see how the shapes might take form. Alright? Maybe looking at it and saying, well, if the light sources coming in from top-right, then that's where that's where I know a lot of that light is going to touch the leaf. For an example. Might do a couple of highlights there. And then maybe grabbed this last one. What we could do with this one is kind of run a rim just as if the lights just barely touching it, right? And that starts to give it that three-dimensional form. Cool foliage. This is something that I'm kinda practicing along with you. I hope you've got your sheet out and I hope you're playing with it. That with whatever medium you're doing, you're kinda messing around a little bit, right? This one should be fun. Usually what I like to do is I go dark on this sort of thing. Alright, let's bring it on down. And that's looking mighty ugly. But then there's gonna be this light gray going on here, right? Here we go. Seems to be coming on the top here. Two seems to be coming in on that one. And what you can do, it's not here, but what I like to see is a much smaller, let's say it starts around here and go even smaller than that. And higher than that. See, we can go something like this, right? And you can depending on what you're doing. Like I sometimes use a liquid gel, right? If you're looking to smudge, you can add some extra white in there and then just kinda drag it along, right? But what you're doing is basically looking at, okay, the light is coming from a certain direction. It's hitting in one area. And that's gonna be the high, right? That's gonna be the super high. We've talked about this. But because this is such a dark surface, that high gets really concentrated into a thin band. And it only highlights on these these little ridges that tend to happen and stuff, right? Okay. So we can, you can see how that works with, with all these highs, right? It's very wet looking. And digitally, a lot of people will use a finger, fingertips smudge tool. Let's see if this can come in with a smudge. Look, right? You could do this actually with your fingertips depending on the medium. And so you can come in and some white and then kinda come and smudge it out and it looks all that liquidy look, right? Okay. So this is highly dependent on the medium. But really the fundamental is the same that you really want to focus on. Where's the light touching? Where isn't it touching? And how can I get from a to B, you know, the, the tonal value, how can I drag it along from the darkest of the value to lightest and doesn't make any sense according to where the light source is coming from. K, This one's tough because usually what we do is we use some tricks for it. What I usually do when I'm doing this kind of brushed metal. What I usually do is I'm I'm working digitally most of the time, right? So what I'll do is something like I'll grab an airbrush and I'll go really light. That's too much. Let's see. More like this. I will go something like this. You can see these white speck starting to come. Let's see if I zoom in. If it makes a little bit more sense, right? Then I'll do that same type of smudge thing that we were talking earlier. And I'll kinda just drag them out. Sometimes. It can be more I punch it forward. Let's see. The more I punch it forward and I can just smudge it. Alright, I can start to drag it out and stuff. Another one. Let's see if I blend it. I can fingertip this and drag it, right? And so you start to get this, you work up and down from there, right? That I'm not sure, sure if it's showing up on the screen really well. But you can kind of have these dark specks, have very light specs. You can concentrate them a little bit more in a very specific row. Right? That type of thing. And then like I said, you start to drag it out and you get that brushed metal. Look. The point is sometimes what you might wanna do is overall through the whole thing, you might want to add another kinda overlay of where the light might hit. And so you can have almost as cross-section of light that's swirling over it as we still got this overall thing going on. So it might be darker down here, darker down here, and then this band of light going across it. As you can see, you can see how these band of lights are here, right? It's goes from light to dark to light to dark to light to dark. And so you can kinda mess with that. This is really dependent on the medium. If it's a pencil you're using, it's tedious digitally. As I showed you. I can just come in and do the specs and then drag them all out. Right. Okay. Let's go on to the next one. My dry skin. Again, you can sometimes get a lot of brushes that do this. I actually enjoy this. There's a few ways to approach this. Well, you can do is like once again, pick the low, come in, fill it up, and then get, get even more detailed. Start to draw each individual type of line. Let's say I was going to do this and I've come in here. And what do I do? I just kinda continue this in. I come in and I start adding all of these snaky patterns of veins and stuff like that. They're actually nothing. Sorry. This is just a close-up tracking of the leather skin. And so you can kinda do this. I've done it. When I was doing animal skin, I would come in and have a bunch of flow going through it. I remember doing a rhino and then what was worked out really well is this cross-section hatching and stuff, right? So what you can do on this is do it almost looks like this funky mountain range right now. Then you can go darker on it. Kinda trace under it a little bit. Maybe with a smaller one. Give a little bit of a trace under give it some volume there. So it looks like it's sitting on something a little bit more. You can even add other ones in behind right? Then. So what are these? These are raised and lower parts. And what does that mean? That means the rays parts are having light touch them, right? So that means you can see how this goes from light to medium to dark to really dark, right? So we can go even smaller here. And on. This light part is just touching where the light would be hitting it. You can keep doing these cracks to your heart's content. This is extremely tedious. Generally speaking, I don't think you'd ever do like a character sheet with something like this on here. But you never know if you want to render some type of animal texture or something like that. And you've got a couple of days on your hands, then this might be the way to do it, right? You can add, you can do it sometimes by just like look how long. This is a light color. But I'm just lightly touching it and texturing it, coming over it. Just going with the sweep of how the texture might look. You can get away with this a lot with pencil because pencil pressure is key, right? So you can come in and do that type of thing. Okay? So like I said, you can either use a kind of a cross texturing that I've used for animals before. Or you can get even more tedious and just go in and do every single one and snake it all out until it looks exactly how you want it to look. This one is interesting. We've got two different skin tones here. Very clearly, if I color pick this one. Let's, let's actually pick a dark spot, not super shadowed. Well, why don't we go, Let's go with medium. So there's her medium. We can see if I try to plot this in, this is her medium. That's actually pretty dark. Let's try again. Yeah, that's probably close to her medium. This is her medium. This is her dark. And then where's her light lightest maybe up on the cheek catching all that light. Right. Okay. Does that look about right? Now What percent of this face falls into dark? Geez. Maybe just under the chin here. Little bit by the AI, little bit by the mouth, tucked behind the ears. That's about it. Even the cleavage isn't that dark room. Okay. Let's go over here just a little bit. And we said we wanted to medium first. Medium is somewhere around here. Surprising No one that the medium is a little darker here, alright, fair bit darker. The dark. We can kind of go back here. Maybe. The dark is quite dark. And where's the light? Light might be. I don't want to go into her eyes. So I think this reflection here, reflection on the cheek usually. Right. And there we go. Okay. So what does this tell us? Tells us something that everybody already knows. Different ethnicities have different tonal values for their skin. It's nothing shocking, nothing at all. But what is important is that you understand where this person, where you can use a tonal values to color and match them, right? So if I come down here and I'm trying to work this chest a little bit. Let's see if I bump it just a little bit more. I can kinda try to lighten this chest here. Okay, so I'm gonna come in here and I might bump it down a little bit. Here's a bit of a shade coming in. Right? So, you know, like hurt, her skin tone is going to be a majority in this spectrum, in the lighter spectrum, whereas it, I come down and i'm, I'm working on this girl's tones here. I'm going to come into the shoulder. Do that. Come on this side over and that's even darker. Maybe it helps to pick, but I'm just kinda picking to save time here. If it's really you doing it, you're gonna be experimenting a lot more. So I'm gonna come in here and then you know, what I'm gonna do is shave at all or shaded all the way across. And I'll come down, pick this kinda mid and come up with it. And those are the tones, right? So same kind of thing. It's not the face, it's a little bit off. We could see that, again, surprising nobody, that the caucasian girl on the left, scarlet JO, she's got lighter skin and the lovely lady on the right has darker skin. The one thing that I would advise, we're not talking about texturing right now for skin texture. What I do with skin texture sometimes is kinda what I did before. I use a bit of an airbrush, but again, it depends on what you want to use or what medium you're using. Sometimes I'll come in and just do a little bit of texturing. So it can be a little bit of texturing here, and I'm gonna come up here. And a little bit more texturing in here. Then all even come and just was too much. Might come and just smudge it a little bit. Our skin has pores, right? So what you might wanna do is just texture a little bit, smudge it out just a little bit so that the skin has some type of feeling to it. Like same thing if we were over here, you can see how this has this stipple like the skin pattern to it and stuff, right? So what would you do? You can come and kind of start to add in a bit of texturing here. Okay, and then maybe just lightly, if you're working with pencil, I use my finger to swatch it out just a little bit, right? So this would be something that you could work on again and again and again and try to find the pattern that you want for the level of detail that you want when it comes to rendering. Okay, So this is a rendering, of course. In this section we're mainly talking about light. So with the wood, with a lot of these we talked about not just the patterns, but where the light might touch the pattern, touching the pattern of the wood on the highest ridges, touching the pattern of the leaves and the leaves that reach out for the Sun type of thing or the light or whatever with the brick. If the light is coming from above, then the top of the brick is going to have more light to hit the bottom of the rubric is going to cast that shadow with a latex. Where's the directional light coming from? And if you can, depending on the medium, give it that liquefied form as it, as it wraps a little bit on that rubber latex brush metal. Even though the brush metal has that streakiness to it, it can still carry highlights, highs and lows through it. All right. When it comes to skin, whether it's leather, animal skin, Rhino or whatever or human. You want to have a bit of texturing to it. Hopefully not too much if it's a live human, right? But you want to pay attention to those tonal values and stuff, right? Then after you get that all in, this is just tonal values. Then you add in color. Okay guys, I really hope this unit was interesting for you that it's something that you can practice along, whether you're practicing on the sheet that I'm providing or whether you're practicing on some of your own sheets, right? That you can really experiment and say, well, when light is hitting light, what's the reaction? When shadow is hitting light? How far does it go? When light is hitting dark? What's the reaction? How much does it spread? How sharp is this line? How sharp is this line here on the latex? And when dark, when the cattle or when the cast shadows and all that. How much does that spread as well? I think this is a great thing to experiment because let's say you've got a hero that has, I don't know. The left side of them is a black super suit and the right-side of them is a light super suit. Well, how would you go about thinking that? How would you approach it? The light's going to hit it. But how that clothing I'll let costume reacts to it, is going to be totally different, right? That white latex is not going to have a heavy shadow on it. That black, the dark part will. But in turn, also, the light latex is going to be all whited out when it comes to any light hitting it. But the dark side might just catch it in a few areas. So hopefully as this course goes on, you get a lot of practice. A lot of different ways of grabbing onto how light hits a form and how you decide to render it, right? This particular unit here was to talk about how it might hit different textures and how you can express that in that tonal value. Okay guys, this was a good one, and I hope you'll learn tons from it. And I hope you keep practicing. 9. SS Cell Shading: Hey guys, we're back and this time we're gonna get into shading, particularly cell shading. Okay, so what does that mean? Well, the term comes from animation cells because this was a very easy way to shade those animations cells. If you guys, we've already talked about this a little bit when it comes to layering and stuff. I got we've got certain layers when we talk about graphics programs like this, whether it's Photoshop or anything else. Where you can imagine. Maybe you want to imagine like a flat base right now, Here's your flat base, right? And then you could put a transparent layer over top of it. A transparent layer that reminds you of those old, old overhead projectors or something back in school nowadays, I don't know if the kids have them, but some of you might remember this when you can draw, is draw on that transparent layer. So everything that's not drawn on or colored or whatever can be seen through. Right? If you color the whole thing, well then that's now a solid layer, right? So think of your base layer. The base background is this solid layer, right? Then anything we're putting on top, we're going to just maybe color this one section or do this one thing to it, right? Okay. So right now we've already got flats done, right? I showed you how to color the flats of a comic book page, okay, flattening. And then we went through a lot about different approaches to lighting. So we're gonna take those flats, take what we learned in lighting, and now put it together in our first cell shade video. So literally that cell shading, but we're actually going to be shading here. Let's jump in and see if it makes sense to you. Okay, so I've got the flats in front of me. And on the side here you can see I've got the layer that says flats. What I'm gonna do is create a new layer. So I can just create a new layer, right? Once I've got this new layer, There's a few things I can do with it. What I can do here is what I like to do here is actually lock this layer to the layer below. I've got, I'm going to type into it. I'm going to just say shade one. That's really easy to help me organize what I'm doing here. So I've got this shade one and it's just sitting above my flats right now. Right? I can keep it there and that's fine. And you don't really have to do what I'm about to do. But what I sometimes like to do is clip it to the layer below. This gets a little funky and in how I'm, what I'm doing and stuff like that. But I'm gonna come over here and in Clip Studio Paint It's clipped to the layer below. Whether it's Photoshop or whatever you wanna do, You can search how to clip it. What does clipping do? Well, in this case, it doesn't matter because the flats or an entire layer, if I put green below it, you can see that it doesn't shine through anywhere or anything. Okay. So with with the flat tell they are remember how I talked about just being a flat layer, right? What if I only wanted two thirds of that layer to be my background and then I'm making it for t-shirts or something again. And I want to keep this transparent will now this layer that I just clipped to it, it doesn't clip to this entire thing. It just clips to the part that I covered in colors below or whatever. Okay? So you're going to have to wrap your mind around about how these layers stack on each other. You'll get it the more we get into this. Okay, so now I've got shade one, I've got the layer set. I'm going to start shading. I'm gonna come up here and especially look at this first panel on base. A lot of my shading off for this first panel. Okay, so I'm looking at this first panel and I'm thinking, okay, I colored in the flats and I did a good job. And it looks like the colors that I want. His skin tone is where I wanted. Everything looks good. Good to go. I'm ready to add shades. Mi well, I'm going to pick according to this first panel. This first panel is outside New York City. I'm looking at the skies kinda blew. The ambient light is going to be a blue hue. So I'm going to pick in the side here. Here's blue. But I wanted to add a darker bit of that because it's a shape. So it's gonna be a little bit darker. So I'm going to take this blue and run it somewhere in the middle of the blue. And that's where my blue is gonna be. This is going to be my primary color. Off the left here, blue, this kind of shade blue. And then off to the right is gonna be white. And I'll explain this in a second. So I'm going to take this entire page and select it so you can do it. I got a little hot key going onto that. I've selected everything or you can just hit Edit Select, and now I've got the entire page. I'm going to fill it all with this blue. Okay. So I've filled it all with this blue shade and right now, everything looks horrible. It looks even worse than we expected. I messed up. Look at this, you know what this should show you if I did my flats correctly, it should show, everything in this blue. Should show. Let's see if I can pronounce it. It's not a shirt, shorts or should show. So it should show everything in blue. But as I pan down, I can see how I missed a few pieces here, right? Anything that's white ain't right. Racial thing. So what I've gotta do is take a few minutes and make sure that I go through and touch this up. So we're going to pause this for a quick second. I'm gonna come in here, touch up a few things and make sure that this is a solid color. Okay. Give me a second. Okay. So I went in and I cleaned up those flats. This is one of the issues when I'm doing flats under some different types of lines, right? Like we've talked about this before, a digital lines versus scanned in lines. They don't always get so clear. So I tried to do it quick and I caught me, but now it's looking pretty good. So if I come into this first section here, like I said, I'm going to use this as my color and say, okay, well, it's kind of bluish tinge, right? So I'm gonna go in the shade layer and I'm going to look at this first thing and say, okay, well, where's the light coming from? Well, it's datetime, so I'm going to put the light up above, right? And what I do for cell shading is this, take my magic wand tool. It looks like a little lasso, right? Oh, actually, sorry, I take the lasso tool and I'm just going to draw along the line of where the top of the figure the light would hit. And I'm going to start to move in and take in mind some of the stylistic lines of the hair. For example, I'm kinda following some of these lines a little bit. I'm gonna kinda follow this and select it. So that's maybe where the light my head at first and now I'm going to press the ad to adding to the selection. So I'm going to, in this particular program is the shift key. And I'm going to keep adding and I'm just going to start drawing in here of where I think this light, it's, it's, it's a daytime light. So it's gonna be kinda all over here, right? So it's gonna be like that now. So look, it's got her top of her head, right. So what am I gonna do? I'm gonna fill that with white. There we go. That doesn't look all that exciting, right? So I've got that filled with white. I'm going to come below and start to do her face and the face. I'm just going to keep it almost entirely. As in the lights touching it almost all except for where the hair maybe falls over. And I might do that. So now I've got this heavy light source coming from above. I might come in here, clean it up a little bit. You can use if you want to, you can use the pen tool and just kinda come in and draw the shading. You could draw the light source or not. I use the lasso lasso tool because it can do a large area at a time, right? I like that selection of if I'm light is coming down on something, right? But if I want to come in and just kinda clean things up, I might use a pen tool and just kinda smooth things over a little bit. And now that I'm in here, I'm kinda like, Okay, well I'm going to come in and do some details in this ear. And now, if I was to say, well, that's the face, that's that's the head. I've now highlighted the head. But what does it look like? Does it really look like anything right now? Not really. It just looks like there's white. Sorry. There's white and there's this kind of greenish blue, right? That I've got going on. This looks like nothing right now, right? I go in and make sure I start to shade where the light might not be getting into. Right. Okay. So that's the face. I can do more details if I want, come in and get rid of this. If I want here. Smooth it out a little bit here. If I want to, I can get, give her a little bit more of a shade in the nodes, have a dropped down a little bit. It depends on how long I want to work this form, right? Like do I really, how much details I want to go into here? But like I said, this doesn't look like anything right now. This just looks like I've kinda got a little bit of a piecemeal thing going on here for, for white and blue. This is where the magic comes in when it comes to shading. In all of these programs, they all have layer adjustments. You can start to change how the layers interact with each other. So I'm gonna come over to the layer, drop-down that layer type, pull up the menu and go multiply. Now you can see what multiply does. It means everything white becomes transparent. So in the multiply function, multiply, color, burn, darken, linear burn, everything white becomes transparent. You can see it. It's kinda cool. Anything that's not white. Now I can show this is really good for shading. So I'm going to have it on multiply here and back it away. And now you can see how that's how we would start to shade, right? So what I'm gonna do is I'm going to start to do all like the sun would come and touch her here. We'll touch on the burger. Touch on this finger, touch on this finger. Touch the paper, touch the top of the chest there. Touch that shoulder and come over into here. So that sun might come there, maybe come on the shoulder or collarbone, top of this shirt. Again, that hot dog here. On the top of that finger. Maybe some of the folds on here. You can do these folds. I'm just thinking where the light is, light is coming down. I want the light to come down. It's downward. I'm going to start to fill. So I'm going through this figure and I'm just gonna be like selecting where I think if the light is coming from the top, where that light is going to touch. So it's good to touch. Maybe a band down the arm, right? Definitely the top of this hand but the knuckles here maybe probably the top of this arm and this arm a little bit. Alright. Anything that's coming down on. There we go. Maybe it's actually probably touching some of her chest underneath here. So in some of the shirt, maybe it doesn't just here. We can see how light filters down, right? And maybe even gives a little bit of a streak right. Here we go. So check this out. This is how easily we shade Glenn. We actually don't shave her so much as put the light on her where we're kinda shade everything in that we're dropping light on it. But there's a problem. Are her head cast a bit of a shadow. So what I often like to do is take that same magic wand. Can it come where I think her head would go. And sometimes you can add hair into the mix or something like that. And there were head kind of dropping this drop shadow down on. If I hang over, you can see that shadow. So I do that for Gwen. I'm gonna come over to do the same thing from miles. I'm going to come onto his shirt here. Tracing about where the top of everything might be touched by light. I'm kind of just having fun with it here. I'm just like, okay, well, I'll do that drop shadow thing later. I'll do that on his neck and everything later. Right. So I'm just going to say, okay, well, the lights all touching, all of this is dropping down on him. When we get city lights in the middle of the day, pretty much. It's everywhere. You can't escape the light. There's, we'll get into this as we go through this page and panel even more. But there's so much light during the day that you really not going to have a heavy contrast, dark shade anywhere, anything, right? So we'll be adding tons a light onto miles here as well. Maybe I'll come in here and do some of the wrinkly bands. We go. You can see how now. So I've got the shade set at 32, I can darken it or lighten it. It shows how much of a contrast there is during the day. There really isn't that much of a contrast. So again, the light's coming down. I'm going to do almost his entire face. I kinda like to do the entire face and then come in and do a little bit of details around the ears or something. Then what I do is come in and do shading with my pen a little bit. Like under the brow here, there might be a little bit of shading from that around the eye. You want to give some roundness to the eye. Under his nose. Here, under the lip. This shows often the size of things, the amount of shade that's cast. We'll show how kinda big thing. So if he's got a bigger lip, it's going to cast more shade or shadow. So this looks pretty good so far. I might put a little bit in that crease there. And now what I'll do is I'll come down and his head is tilted off to the side here. So I'll just kinda roll with what I think would be the drop shadow from his head there. So if we back out, we can see how these two are now shaded. If it's a high contrast, like it's dark and there's only certain amount of light. Well then we punch it harder and there's the highs and lows, right? But in the city during the day, maybe I put it at around. 20% opacity. And that's, that's how easily we can go through the layer. How we can view through the layer in this kinda gives the vibe of what I'm going through, right? Okay, so what I'm gonna do is go through this entire page and really just start dropping light. Let there be light. Put it all over these guys and just say, okay, well this is it, these background characters. You don't have to be as discerning, as careful as whatever as the main characters and stuff. You still following the basic principle that if you choose a light source, be consistent with that choice, right? Like you always want to be consistent in light source choice. But overall, I think that you don't have to stress too, too much on on background characters and stuff. Okay. So this is me slowly filling things in, showing where the light would fall on somebody's background characters and you know what? Especially I think we don't always want to show too much detail on these guys, the background because we don't want too much attention brought to them. The more attention, the more detail we show in shading, the more detail is given to those characters, right? So you can go out and render the entire page if you want, you can really go in depth, showing exactly every bar, every, every little bush, every little, little thing, how it's, how it's highlighted and shaded and all that. And if you want to like I'm doing here, it might look good. But it might be too much. It really loses it because that's not really the focus. The focus in this particular panel are these two, right? My advice would be kinda choose what you're doing and why, right? You know, like, where are you putting that light energy into your artistic energy into it as well, right? Does it have to be in certain places? And this is where you could use the Fill button to or fill bucket and fill some things, right? That first panel. All of a sudden, that's exactly what we want to give enough detail to these background guys, right? Like you can see there's light, right? But the main focus right now is this. This is what I want you to do. I want you to do this entire page and you'll see this is what it looks like, right? You're going to shade it. That is, fill the entire thing with the shade, and then go and drop the light source all over it. Now, generally speaking, on a city street in the middle of the day, the light source is going to be straight above you. Maybe you want to mix it up. What if there's an explosion? That center point of the explosion might be your light source, right? You can have it blowing out from there. And that can be pretty cool, right? So there is some leeway in this assignment for you to mix it up and move the light source around a little bit. But do it consciously, right? If you're moving it from up above, which is our main light source here. Why? Why are you choosing that maybe that big action explosion and you want to move it light source in the middle and then everything else on the outside is shaded. Cool. But make that a conscious choice. Okay? So this is shade shading layer one. With a sell sheet approach. We fill it, we start to etch away from using light. And then we reduce the opacity to a daytime level of maybe 20 to 30%, then we get something that is exactly what we want. Let's see what you got. 10. SS Cell Shading Part 2: Okay guys, that first shading attempt to kinda took a while right leg. It takes a while to work your way through the page. You can see now that I've got the entire page done shaded with a consistent light source, right? I'm done. I'm done shading me. Depends. This is the cool thing about coloring. Is that at each stage you choose and say, Is that enough? Have I done enough? Have I accomplished what I wanted to accomplish? I'm going to show you as we continue through this course how to keep doing more and more. So you could stop now and just say, Hey, I colored this common page and it's good enough for, for certain levels of print and stuff like that. I think you're good to go. But what I'm going to show you, this is just a little tidbit, but as we go through, you'll see there's more units, right? So what you can do if you want is add more shade layers. Remember how I did shade one? Well, let's make it two, see what happens. So I'm going to create shade to clip it to that mask or limited layer below and call it SHA-2. Now, what has shaped what I'm going to stick with the same blue hue, right? I'm just going to come here. I'm just going to say, You know what, I really like, how this looks. I like everything about it. But what I'm gonna do is I want a little bit more shadow, actually, just below the chin on both of these characters. And this depends on how the artists have been inking. You can see this, sorry, just dropped a little bit of ink on it already and stuff, right. So maybe I want it there. Maybe I want it here. Just to give a little bit more depth. The artist has already done it in lines, but just in case they haven't. Well, this is one way to do it and come in and add just that extra little bit of depth. Okay, so now I've got this, I'm going to fill it, but wait, that's the weird blue. Why why is it feeling weird blue? Because I didn't change it over to the multiply layer. And I can back out away. So I get back in to about, let's say somewhere around there, 30%. You could see how something like this and give it a little bit more. Now I've got two different layers of depth to this light. Right? Back away a little bit. You can see how without, with, without width. Now, you can go through the entire piece and add like shade one, SHA-2, SHA-3, and really keep layering the depth, right? This is just for cell shading technique, right? So you can have these layers of cell shading. When we start getting into learning how to blend shading, you don't need to do this. You're going to show the depth of the shade in a blending technique. Yet, right now, this was shade number two. And just an easy way to add just another layer of depth. You're shading technique, nice and easy. You don't have to do it, but if you want to, is there for you. Hope that helped a little bit. 11. SS Highlights and Whites: Okay guys, so far we did the flats, We've done some shading, maybe added some few layers to shading if you liked. But now we're gonna do something called highlights. And this, again, as we take each of these steps, this is a choice. Maybe you're like, You know what you've done. Or you're like, I want to flesh this out a little bit more, highlighting, we'll flesh that out a little bit more. So remember when we thought about our light source, like right here, I'm getting blasted by these lights. It's nighttime and everything, right? But when we're walking a city street at night, most of the ambient lighting is coming from above and around, right. So it's going to come down on that person. So if we're going to have any highlights, we can have them come from the top. I'm going to show you two types of highlighting. One, just being a normal technique, right? The cell shading technique, and then using whites after that and see how that looks. Okay, so I'm gonna make a new layer. And I'm going to lock it into the layer below. And I'm going to pick our number one favorite panel here. And I'm just going to say, Okay, well, I've got these guides and I'm going to focus on these guys. I don't like throwing highlights into the background much. This is a choice. We chose blue. Remember we have this blue as a shade, right? So we're gonna go with that blue, the light blue, and because it's kinda coming from the sky and it's a light blue sky. And we're going to bump it. Instead of shading. We're going to bump it into something very light base. So instead of something very dark for shading, we're going to go very light for highlights, okay, so near white or a bluish white or something, right? And what we're gonna do is let's say I zoom in here. What I can do is maybe think of, well, where's that light going to touch? Maybe here, maybe on the lips, maybe a little bit up here in the forehead. Right? Something like this may be in your maybe in the hair. I might have an error here. It depends. Highlighting works really well in reflective surfaces and stuff, right? So skin you would see, look at the lighting bouncing off knee here and stuff like that. But do you see how shiny it is there? Less shiny up my fabric. Certain materials bounced light and certain materials absorb light, right? And so like a skin or latex really balances that light ribbon. So we'll get into that a little bit. But I might come here and I might hotdog. Hotdog probably grabs the light more than the, the buttons, right? So what I'll do is I'll fill this with that light blue. And now it looks absolutely ridiculous, right? This is not what I want. This is looking really ridiculous. Instead of coming and change the layer two in this darken, multiply color, burn, linear burn, these shading type of layer adjustments, we're gonna go into lightened screen color, dodge and gloves. So I'm going to go into screen and then back this away. And you can see how this might be used in just I liked, right? So what this looks good on sometimes is hair highlights. The reflection in the hair. A little bit on the nose here, a little bit in the cheek, the eyes and stuff right. There we go. So if I want to punch it up a little bit, I can punch it even more depending on how high. It's sometimes works better on certain skin tones, right? For certain materials. Maybe I want to put it on the chest here. Maybe put a little put a little wiggle in it to begin it, right? I'll put it on his fingers here. Darker skin tones can often catch this even more. Right? There we go. You can see how cool that is, right? Okay. So what you can do is, I really don't like this up here. I'm going to actually get rid of it. I don't like that at all. Doesn't doesn't do well up in his forehead right there. Alright. So you can go through and just kinda add these little highlights. A little bit here and there. Just a little bit on his chin, maybe a little bit on the cheek to kinda cute, right? To test that light. Get on the nose. Usually the nose catches it more especially coming from above. Right? Sometimes on the brow. And like I said, if I want to, I can do the hair. Now right now, these highlights aren't really showing much because, well, to be frank, it's a daytime scene and it's a soft light that's over everything. Right. So if I wanted to bump the shading and then bump the highlights, you can see how the contrast can get really punchy sometimes when a very special kind of get them right here. A very dramatic mood. Well, you could have under, under lit highlights and it gives that a *****. Like that can be kinda cool, right? That's not what I'm going for here because this is. Street scene. So I'm going to back back mine. I didn't label it here. I like to label my layers one. So this is going to be highlights one and I'm going to back this shade down, back to around 25 or something, right? So highlights, I think around 1213, the opacity. Okay, so that's how that looks using a screen layer and you can use like a different, different types of layer adjustments to see if it's working the way you want, you know, where I would put those highlights more so is the rhino his his his rhinos XOs skin might be a little bit more reflective and might show these highlights the way that I want them to a little bit. I would use highlights sparingly. You don't want to have them all over figures and stuff. It just, it can be a little bit too much. So that just brings another layer of depth. Every time we add a layer of gradient of tonal value, we're adding a layer of depth into the characterization of our drawing, right? Okay, so I've got this, this is one way of highlighting. I'm going to put another one in here that I'm going to just combine in this unit here. What I'm gonna do something different. I'm going to put it above the line layer and I'm going to call it white. I'm putting it above the line layer for a reason because often I want it to go above the lines where this is going to show the most. I loved. This is in the eyes. So I'm gonna take white, pure white and my little marker and just draw two dots over his eyes, right? Maybe I could put that in his nose and maybe a little bit on the lip there and stuff, right. I would use this sparingly because it can be a little bit much, but especially on glossy surfaces like looking even in my eyes right now, you can see how it's all. It's catching those lights, right? So maybe on the lips, the lips can get a little glossy. The nose, the eyes. That would really work. So if I'm coming down here, I can go where I highlighted and put put little little white ticks or something like that, right? Okay. It can be a little bit too much sometimes. So be careful with it. You want to use it? Like I said, pretty sparingly. Yeah, I'm just kinda drop in these whites a little bit. It again depends on the fabric, the material that we're, we're coloring over latex. You're gonna put white squiggles everywhere, right? You know, like in something rubbery or something like that. Here. I can even do it here. Maybe she's this her tights. It might be that type of materials. So I might put some type of white squiggle here, something like that. Something like that, right? And that adds just this little bit of cool factor into a little bit of punch. Again, every time we're shading and rendering here, we're creating this variation in tonal value that brings more depth into the character, more depth into our heart rate. And so adding highlights. I should have put one on the cheek here where she's munching away. That's that's what we're hunting for here. Even on the fingernails if I want, they can be a bit shiny. Too much of it though. It looks like they just came out of water. I'm going to say this on Miles, his face. I think it's too much. It punches a little bit too hard, little bit too much. In his eyes, it's fine, but on his face it just punches too much on hers. The contrast isn't as strong with the lighter skin tones. So I think I'll leave it there, right? Like I said, for me, one of the key places is putting it in the eyes like just having this reflection on the glossier. Okay, so that's highlights. We can see it on the rhino, especially. It adds another layer. If we're gonna do just highlights in like screen mode or something like that. It adds another tonal layer to it, right? So it brightens things up, lifts things up. If we want from where the light sources coming. Then in addition to that, if you want to just Given an extra little punch, you use whites because when you see the whites and somebody eyes, I don't know if you don't know anything, it just makes it look more realistic. Let's try to think as I'm funny there. It didn't fly. I get it. But I think it looks really good on this. Just don't overdo it. That's my one morning with whites and guys. That's your assignment. I want you to take the shade layer at the new layer of highlights to it and start adding some of those highlights to it. This one's really easy, and this is again where it gets pretty fun. Have fun with it. 12. SS Dodge and Burn: I'm going to jump on above our highlight layer that we've got somewhere in here, right? And put another high too. Okay? So this is where it gets a little strange. Instead of filling the entire thing with that dark color, we're going to fill the entire page with black. The entire page is done in black. You can see it's back out, It's totally blackened. The ink layers are, the lines are sitting on top of it. So because there's was pencils, you could see that a little bit. But overall, it's all blacked out. Now I'm going to switch this to color dodge. And now it's absolutely you can see all the way through, right? No problems in that. Sorry, I wanted to get rid of that gradient that we end them for. Okay, so what does this do? What does this color dodge do? What I'm going to come over here and pick a very light color and you know what, maybe I'm going to play off it as red that's coming off of this a little bit and pick like this, this reddish that's coming off the lights. And what color dodge does is basically fuel. I like to turn burden and dodge because it's so harsh and brutal. I'm going to grab a very soft airbrush right now and kinda put it in here. You can see how it highlights in a bit of an airbrushing way, right? It's got this way that it's almost like burning itself into the whatever colors or below. So if I wanted to, I could bump this a little bit bigger and have a blending up here. These, these lights, maybe I'm gonna give them a bit of a kiloliter and stuff. And they're just giving this his face a little bit extra there. Right. So let's see if it's maybe coming on her foot. I don't think I'll see much because of that. That red on red. But this might work a little bit. There we go. And you can see this is what I call it a burn, that harsh, almost fluorescent burn between these colors. It's one of these layer options that some of the layer options are very smooth and blending. Others are quite stark, right? And you can play with them all as you're gonna jump, jump around on them and stuff. But as you can see, it gives a cool effect. More so than just airbrushing that color on top. Having that color dodge effect gives this extra little punch to it. And this is where you can use it for. Like for example, if a character has got like electric glowing hands, that's where you bring something like this and all of a sudden you start burning around it. You start dodging all around it and stuff like that. And you're gonna get that, that electricity to pop and really glow, right? So that's the way you can look at it as like that glow effect or something, right? And that's what we're looking at here, is it's got that fluorescent glow effect. So as I keep going through here, I can just kinda like put it on. You can see even how it lays down. It doesn't lay down evenly. It kind of builds on itself just a little bit. All right. There we go. Yeah, very cool effect, right? And if you want to, you can lighten it up. Go a little bit more white in there. There we go. It really gives that stark contrast that we've been talking about, right? Maybe that's okay, that's kinda cool. This is all just experimentation. That's what coloring is a bonus to see. Well, what looks good, what do I like on this? How does this look for what I'm trying to achieve? The color dodge, the burn that dodge the highlight. These tools and stuff like that. The glow might be something that you need to know, maybe not on this page in particular, I'm kinda like just really pushing the limits of this police light a little bit. And that's okay. But like I said, imagine you're coloring a page where there's fire or lightening or something and you need to have that magical glow coming off of it, right? That power coming off from it. Using this Dodge Tool by filling with all black than picking a light, very light white ish color. And using that, you get a really cool effect. Okay guys, I hope this helps you. And as always, this is one of the projects. Get in there and start dodging things and see what it looks like to you. If you'd like it, throw it on the rhino, dodge, a whole bunch of stuff all over him and just say, Hey, that was too much for that. That was perfect. 13. SS Using Gradients: Okay guys, we're back and I've got another shading technique for you here. This time, we're going to use a bit of a gradient. Okay? So what does a gradient? Well, basically, I think my kid uses the word on break or something like that. It basically goes from one tonal value to another or one color value to another. So imagine it just automatically blends that value into the next for you. A lot of these programs have gradients kinda programmed into them. Presets on them, or you can design them yourself. But I think that they can be used for shading in certain ways. So let's jump in, check it out. And then hopefully what this does is kinda just like what I'm trying to do is really just throw tools into your tool belt, weapons into your arsenal, right? So that when you encounter a project to coloring project, you're like, Yeah, this gradient tool, I'm going to use that and that's gonna do it exactly the effect I want, because there's no set line of how you have to do something. It's just kinda here's no color and here's a finished piece. And however you want to get there, it's up to you and the tools in your belt. So let's check it out. Remember how I said, I like to keep the original shade just in case I want to do something. Well, this is one of those reasons that I might keep something like that. Alright. So what I'm gonna do on this is showing you what it originally looked like. Do you remember this? It was the white and it was the shade color, right? In this particular instance, I went with a dark bluish thing, right? Okay, and then white. Now, let's say what I want to do is select this area or something. It's a good one. Where am I looking here? Yeah, I could do it here, doesn't really matter. I'm going to select this guy here. I can select the white, whatever I want to do. It doesn't really work as well on panels as far as I'm concerned because there's too much going on. But I love it in pin-ups, but I'm still going to do it here. So I'm going to select this. I'm going to come into the next, the next layer, right? I'm just going to back out here. You can see I've got the shade selected here, right? Okay, so this is all the shades selected in this panel. And what I'm gonna do on this next layer, take that away. On this next layer, I am going to do this gradient. I'm just going to lay it down from dark to light. Can you see how that works? It went from dark to light, now carried into the other panels and maybe that's not what I wanna do on my de-select them later or something, right. But from dark to light, I'm just looking at this panel here. That looks kinda cool, right? Let's see if I take that away. Throw it into multiply. And there we go. So down here is going to be darker than what's up here, right? The buildings are very light, but as things moved down a little bit, they get darker and I can even bump it a little bit more. And you can see the contrast there. Alright, let's go back to what it looked like just in the normal viewpoint. From this dark to light. I'm going to do that again and just put it maybe in the middle here, from dark to light, they're there. That's that harsher contrast, right? Oh, no. What I wanna do is go back and re-select. Sorry, I want to select and reselect that because I just want that shade in there. So I don't want to be doing this over top of the sky that has no shade to it, right? So I'm gonna do a tighter gradient here and just have that tight line there. What do you, what do you think? Do I want to maybe up here? Yeah, that looks good. Okay. So here's this dark dark, dark down below and then up in the buildings and appear as a lot lighter. De-select that, switched over to multiply. And that gives a kind of cool vibe. With this. I would break it into different panels and go through the panels and do it that way. So for example, what I might do is coming here and select this panel. So I would come from here, select, Select, select, and kinda go through what the edges of this panel might be. Another way to do this would be to select a panel. I can go through and just kinda run the edges of this panel. I'm just gonna do it really quickly for you guys here. With this kind of straight select. Tool. So I've got that right. And if I want within this, I'm going to take that away for a second, make a new layer just because I like to keep it clean. And let's say I drop that same gradient there. Okay? So I've got this gradient here, right? And that shows from dark to light, the light sources above. I kinda like how this looks right now. This is nice this way, right? But then what do I do? If do I just throw it on to multiply? Okay, Well, that kind of works, but it doesn't really give any form to the figures at all. Like it doesn't show the drop shadow under the chin or anything like that. It just it just a gradient, right? What I would do then is come to my shade layer, my original shade layer. Select all the white. I would select all the white that is not shaded, right? Come back up to this and fill it with white. Now I achieved kinda the same thing as like down here, as dark as it comes up here, the shading is much lighter. Using a gradient is a great tool to bring a nice smooth depth in your shading technique. So if we look at any light source, like I said, the simple way to do it would be just the cell shaded. It. Here's light, Here's dark. But then we start to, we can either choose to blend it and smudge it out, or we can put it over a bit of a gradient that it smooths from complete white to complete darken. But there's a lot of that transition in there. I like this as a technique in different ways in panels. It's tough because you've got foreground, mid ground background. You've got a lot of things going on. You could do this, for example, if you just wanna do the sky, I want to, for example, come, come back and just, just select the sky back here. And then maybe I want to throw a gradient on it. For some particular reason. Maybe, maybe that I think it looks good with just that gradient. There is a storm brewing in the background or something like that, right? That is a great way to use a gradient. You can see how that just change the mood of that page, right? All of a sudden, there's a storm in the background and it's coming for you. So use gradients but realize if you're going to use it, for example, on a multiply layer, well, what happens, the dark part of that gradient tonal value, that color will punch and hold and shade. If you're using a white, well, it's going to be see-through. So you can use these gradients as that shading tool. I hope this makes sense. It's just like I said, it's another tool in your tool belt that you can use some times as a technique and shading. 14. SS The Smudge: Hey guys, we're back. And I'm going to show you in this unit how to do a little bit of smudge technique. Okay, so what does this mean, this much technique? Well, usually when we're doing this cell shaded shading or rendering or coloring approach, it's a very hard line. Right here is we draw it in whether it's with a pen or with a selection tool or whatever. And here's that line, right? Like it's, it's, it's very strict, right? Here's the part that's shaded here is the part that's light. The light's coming from here. Right? And so there's the white part, especially when we do it on multiply layer, it becomes transparent. And then there's the shaded part, right? And that line is extremely fine. Especially if we're using that lasso select or something like that, right? But what if we don't like that? Sometimes for logo design or animation looks, That's great, right? But what if we want to move in a more realistic style? Well, the first step in that is using the smudge tool. And I'm going to show you how to do that. Let's get into it. I've got my, my piece here and I've got all these shade layers off to the side, right? I'm gonna go ahead and turn off the white, the highlights, the shade number two and go back to our original shade number one. What I'm gonna do here is I'm just going to duplicate it. I want to have two of these shade layers because I, I'm gonna do this technique on here, but I actually don't want it. I just want to do it to show you it, right? So I'm going to punch it up just a little bit. Let's call it right there. 35 or so. Then show you why we might do something like this. Okay? So when light comes down on an object, and as it's especially a cast shadow from that object, the closer to that object, the cast shadow is the more defined the line. And as it starts to disappear off into the distance, that's shadow becomes a little bit more fuzzy. So imagine if you will like a tower or building or something like that in the Sun beaming down from this angle. And as it hits the shadow right coming off of that building right there, It's quite defined. But as it starts to travel away from the building and it just broadens out onto the street and everything like that. It gets softer and softer. So how can we show that, that little bit of realism when we're rendering, right? Well, I'm using this copy layer of the shading, right? And I'm going to come in and I'm going to use a smudge tool. Let's see. Pause. Now in Clip Studio Paint, the blending or smudging tool has a lot of varieties. I remember what I was using Photoshop before. It was just a simple smudge. Right? Like you just smudge things. Now. You can do like kind of an airbrush, kind of fade and blend. You can do thumb, you can do kind of a watercolor, especially in Clip Studio Paint. It's really great for that. So I'm just gonna go with a simple blur and maybe make my brush a little bit smaller here. Looking at this here, we've got, let's say the shadows come, not say it is coming off of this arm here. Well, as I move it away from there, it softens up. Look at that before and I'm just going to back away. It's nice and hard, right? But as it moves away, and especially out here, softens, Look at that level of realism that you get, you get that nice curvature over, over the arm there. Let's see what else might we want to do this? On the neck here? It can get a little bit softer, not everything, especially on faces. This is when we talk about coloring faces and everything. We don't want a lot of harsh lines on faces. We want things smoothed out. And that looks maybe right on that sharp point of the nose. But then under the nose starts to blend a little bit. Maybe here and under the ear here, right? We can blend it out and you could see how that then starts to be a little bit more realistic, right? Where it's another good face we've got here. So we can start to blend it in here. There we go. This is that first step. Into a sort of painted and painterly look. Where instead of, we've got two basic tonal values of shade, not shade, right? We can see. Now we've got this nice gradient effect going on, right? Where it's a lot softer, where it needs to be. Especially on skin. Sometimes we want that to be a little bit smoother so it's not making her look extra harsh for him. Okay, so how do we do this? Well, like I said, what you do if this is the technique you want to use, you don't have to duplicate the layer or anything like that. All you have to do is start smudging. You lay down your cell shades, just like we've done. Go on in and just start smoothing it out, start blending it out just a little bit. Alright? I personally like to, even if I'm if this is my plan, I like to duplicate it and then just hide that original cell shape layer. You never know. Once in a while I come back to it and there's something I want to reference off of it or something. So I'd like to keep it around. And as you can see, it gives a nicer, smoother look. And if that's what you're going for, if that's the rendering style, if that's the coloring style you want, then that's the coloring style yet this is what you're making up. So here's that. That's cast shadow from the head. But maybe it's gonna be a little weak up where the light is hitting. It, then gets a little dark where it's really cast down, fades off. It fades off as we start to get away from it, just a little bit, starts to become just a little bit lighter. So this smudge technique is one way you can do this. Fake painterly style. Okay? Lay down your cell sheets, then smudge it out as it gets away from a source a little bit. And it gives this nice, more realistic rendering style. Guys, I hope this little trick helped you out. And once again, you've got it in front of you. You've got this file, you've got this sheet. I include it with you, right? With this unit and stuff, right? So you take what's already been done, all this work, just start to smudge it and practice a little bit and see, is this the look you're going for, even if it's not the look you're going for on this particular project, it might be the look for the next project, right? So get this technique down and then move on to the next. 15. SS Skin: Hey guys, I want to jump into here a little bit and give you a little tip when it comes to coloring humans skin, you know, it's really easy to just color, pick, and choose one color and the entire skin is that. And that's your character. And when it comes to simple drawings and simple rendering, you've got the right of it that you don't want to spend a lot of time. You pick a skin tone. And that stays true to the character. But when you're starting to get into more detailed rendering, then you've got to understand that there's more details to it, right? There's a lot more going on. As we look at my skin tones here, like I've been scanning. So like here, I don't know if you could seem like very much, but here is darker than under the arm, right? And of course that plays true for other ethnicities as well. If you look at somebody who's black, it's going to be dark on this side of the hand and much, much, much lighter on the pump. Getting deeper into skin tones are coloring skin and stuff. There is it can get really, really deep. And this is where you get to the the classics, like getting into how good it was. They had rendered skin over. As long as we've been doing art. There's a lot of techniques here. But what I want to show you is just two simple ones that I think can bring you from 0 to like, wow, okay, that really punches in a very short amount of time. So the first one I want to talk about is temperature. Temperature on the body. And as a man, I don't know a lot about this, but almost every woman knows about makeup and temperature and all that. So let's jump in and see if I can fumble my way through this first section. When we're looking at temperature on a body and on a face in particular, we can see a few things that stand out to me. Here is a thermal scan of a gentleman. And we can see that around the nose and through the cheeks. It's hot. As we get towards the ear. It cools off, the hair cools off. If I'm gonna be doing something using this temperature knowledge, It's gonna be around the nodes, especially in a little bit around the cheek and the eye sockets. I can even go one further and look at the overall human body and realized that the temperature around the chest, the head, and the sometimes in the crotch area can get very hot. Right? But as we move towards the extremities, they cool off quite a lot of the scan was a short down towards the feet. It's cooled off, the hands are cooled off, and any larger fat deposits also cool off. So the bump, It is cool. And if there is a bit of a belly, that's cool too. And we kinda know this. I'm not teaching you anything you don't already know. Like, you know that fat gets cold and we know that we blush, we get My get flush in this area and stuff. But we forget that when we're doing art. So let's say we're getting into this piece and I'm gonna go right above my flats here. Have this layer and I'm going to call it details are actually know what I'm going to say skin. Skin one. Okay. So this is skin one. If I can go and color pick her skin and say, okay, well, this is her skin. What I'm going to come off of that skin tone and heated up a little bit. So I'm gonna put a bit of orange there, right? And what did we say that the nose was quite orange then there's a little bit in the cheek and the eye socket, right? Okay. Now, this looks ridiculously clownish, right? And what if I, I don't know if it'll work as well for miles, but we could try that. We'll put it around his nose a little bit and then just a little bit in the cheeks. Right now it looks ridiculous, right? Right now it looks like somebody clown. What if I just fade it back? There we go. What does that thirty-four percent opacity. Maybe I could know somewhere around there. Now. That just brought a little bit of extra life to their face from without. Okay, it's nice. It's good. It's cartoonish, right? To a little bit life-like. If I look at Miles is face especially having just that little bit there. Now what if we want to do the opposite? And cool, right? So what am I doing? I'm going to use a bit of blue just on the outside of things. Just a little bit here and just cool it off just a little bit. And see if that what that does. I come back that away. I wanted around 25 or 30. We adjust it. But yeah, what does that do? Now? It makes it a lot more realistic. Now when I'm looking at Miles is face here, was his ears are just suddenly cooler. Isn't this region is just a little warmer? And that is what makes your coloring become much more realistic. I might put a little bit of heat down in her chest. Alright. And now all of a sudden, she starts to look a little bit more realistic, right? What do we think? Sometimes we can like it, sometimes we can't. We don't rather because it depends on the nature of the line art, the page that I'm trying to convey. It works. Sometimes it doesn't work. Other times, not because of the tech, not because of the principle behind it. The principle of sound. Skin moves blood, there's blood on the surface and it shows in different areas better, right? That principals doesn't go away. But how it applies to your piece might work better certain times and other times. Okay? So this is one technique is adding understanding the, the temperatures of the human body and skin, right? So again, we look at the scans here. The nose in particular gets hot and the cheeks and the face overall. The chest up here and everything by the collarbone gets hot. But anything away from this course starts to cool. And any large fat deposits, they're also pretty cool. Okay, so we've got that right. Another skin technique that I'm going to just put above this skin too, is let's see if I want to actually select her skin here, just so I'm working on. Okay, there we go. I've went down to the flats and I I selected I picked from that skin tone. And so now I'm just going to be working on her skin here, right? So I'm gonna go back to skin too. And you know, there's a couple of things I could do. I could our skin is not portable, mine's not perfect. But we can start to add in things like freckles if we want. We can add like this. Sometimes coming in with airbrush. And instead of being a smooth airbrushed, you can start to do some type of spattered. That's too much. Let's see if I make that a bit smaller. That's too small. The particle size, That's what I wanted. So right now, this looks pretty ridiculous, right? Um, I've added too much, and actually, I want to reduce this even more and maybe put it up there. There we go. Okay, so what, I'm going to redo this and just put a little bit of this in here, a little bit of this in here. There we go. Now, at full opacity, it looks too much, but if I back it away, now, what does that look like? Well, that looks like skin. Skin isn't perfect. Skin has texture to it. So you can use whether you want to draw every single dot, or you can use an air brush with a bit of a speckled spatter effect or something like that. And you could do it in a color, you could do it in whites. It really play around with it. Let's go back here and select it and see if I want to do that in white and see how, what kind of effect that might be. Yeah, just starts to give just that little bit of texture to it. Right? And that's what if I do it from miles? Let's see. Well, I'm not going to use the same the same color. So I'm going to pick miles is color and maybe go just a tad darker. And now I've added just a bit of skin texturing to it. Right? And does that not look, it's, let's see if I zoom in. It just gives that extra bit of realism to these characters. We started coloring and shading and stuff, and whether it was flats and it looked flattened symbol. Then we added one cell shade layer and started to look, oh, there's a little bit of form to this. That first layer of shades started to give a little bit of form. And then we start blending it and doing different things. And each stage that we go through as just a little bit more detail. This is just another choice of adding more detail. The choice is yours. Do you want to spend time rendering out everybody's skin tones and temperatures and all that. I don't know. It's up to you. But now you know how. And really, that's what this course is about, right? So guys, this is your exercise. Find different ways to add in temperature. Like I said, I used like kind of a warm and a cold and then backed it away or texture. Sometimes it could be dots and it would be freckles, it could be little scratches, whatever it is. But start to add details and then play with it. That's your assignment. Your assignment is to add some skin details. Have fun. 16. SS Painterly: Okay guys, this is big. Go where to start talking about this. You know, we've seen the progression of coloring, how we went from just the line art to flats. And then through the different levels of cell shading and blending and all those kind of stuff. And we've gotten to a pretty good stage. I liked this stage. This is where I normally bring my comic books to write. The workflow that I've shown you can help you come to this stage pretty darn quickly. We can see how the flats are the most tedious part of this journey, right? Like they are tough at times, frustrating, especially if you wanna do them really well. Selecting them really well. Well. The rest of this was easy. But now I'm about to make it hard again for you. We are going to talk about how to digitally paint. In some ways. This takes everything you've already learned and thrown out the window, then reach back, rabbit, pull it back in and try to make something up. I know you're confused because this is confusing. Just like if you've ever tried to paint, whether it's watercolor, acrylic soils, whatever it is, there are certain techniques that you have to learn. You've already understood because of the foundation that we're laying in this course about how different layers interact and all this type of stuff, and how we want to have lighting correctly and stuff. So you've got some pretty good fundamentals now, right? But how would we apply digital painting to something like this? Well, let's jump in and see how this would work. Okay, so I've got my page setup here and I really liked how this look, this is normally how I do a page, but I'm gonna get rid of it all. This is not what I want. I'm getting rid of my whites, I'm getting rid of my shading. I'm gonna get rid of my skin tones, everything and you just go back to my flats. I'm going to create a new layer above my flats. I'm gonna come over to Miles. And I'm going to select Miles, his skin tone on the flats. And I'm gonna go to this new layer and call it paint. Now, this can be done about a dozen different ways and similar to how we've talked about it, we can start to throw layer effects and stuff, but I'm just gonna go with what I know. The simplest one. Here's I'm gonna do a color pick. So I'm going to pick his skin tone. I'm gonna go a little bit darker than that. I'm going to grab an airbrush and start should grab the right airbrush and start just shading around slowly building it, right? Okay. This is hard to see, so I might even do a little bit more. And let's see, dropped down to 25 air we go. Okay, so I'm going to start to slowly move this in. Maybe drop this to a 15 pixel, come below his nose. And I'm just going to be basically painting with an airbrush, right? I'm just going to be smoothing it all in maybe a little bit. Under the brow here in the ears probably. I understand what I'm doing here because of, you know, we've already talked about, um, where the light sources, so that's what I'm working on. You can see how this is starting to render out, right? So I'm going to color pick and come up here and maybe do a little bit lighter. And think that, you know, there's there's some light touching this part of his head. There's light coming down. He's got this nice little nose. There's some light touching here on his cheeks. Maybe the lips good to get a little bit lighter. And I'm adjusting. I'm constantly adjusting the size of my brush here. A little bit on the nostrils, they're right up in the ear here. I might even go just a little bit higher, a little bit lighter. I'm starting to really push some of these values, right? And there we go. You can see, and if I ever feel it's gone too far, what I can do is just grab my blending brush. Remember we had that and just kinda start smoothing things out a little bit like some of these lines on his nose seem a little bit harsh to me, right? So I can start to blend them just a little bit. This is how you start to do digital painting. Basically coming in and working it. Working those tonal values, right? And like I said, you already know the light source. We've already discussed it. So you're good for it. Alright, here we go. Look at how long this is taking. And then if I want to, I can start to add just really lightly. I can come in here and reduce my density of the brush and add a little bit of that redness into here, right? A little bit in his cheeks. What do we think? Does this start to look, take away the selection tool. You can see how this now starts to take on a lot of form, right? And like I said, I can come in and blend it out if I'm feeling it's a little bit too harsh in some areas, it doesn't really have a harsh bridge to his nose. So it's gonna be a little bit smoother there, right? A little bit smoother over top. What I can do is keep working this. I'm going to re-select that just because I like to keep it consistent. Come in here. Maybe you put an even lighter bit. Little bit, right? And if I want to, I can actually come in here and his lips are gonna be just have a little bit of a darker red to them, right, but not too much. So I'm going to come back and smooth that out just a little bit. And this is where you get all your applying all those techniques you've already learned, right? What do we think? This? Again? This is a skill. I want to put a little bit of red coming from down here, right? This is a skill that you learn as you start to understand tonal values and all these things. So now that I've got this, this, this basic foundation here, I can come in and start blending it out a little bit, right? If I take away the lines and see how ugly this looks, sometimes it looks great. You can see, wow, I really built this upright. And what I wanna do if I, if I really want to do a full painterly thing, is I would actually use their lines as a reference and then paint without them there. Do I mean, like I would, what I would do is maybe coming to my line's layer back in a way, back way my lines layer and just keep working on it so that the lines are just kind of there. And I would just keep working, working, working. And then what do I do? Well, then I start to add in things like my skin texture and some of the highlights and those types of things. I might even come in and put it on my whites. You can still do all those techniques that we talked about before. When it comes to a comic page, this style of rendering is extremely tedious. It's hard, it's, it's fun. I love it. But look at how much work that took compared to cell shading, right? No, I can even come in even further and I'm gonna do say I want to select his eyes a little bit here just to show you even like how much work it takes on just the eyes. So I'm going to bring this a little off and just even the eyes to come in and give them just a little bit of form to them, right? It can take a long time just to give some roundness to the shape of the eyes. Alright. So what was I doing here? We'll have is eye color like this. But then what do I want to do? Maybe I could come in here and really in a small defined way, start to put in some of these details of the eye. Right? Again, look at how long something like this takes. It looks magical when you look at it. Like here's flat. Here is this painterly style. But think of how long that's going to take over this entire page or even just this one figure. Miles looks really defined. It looks like a painted image sitting here. And when it's just flat, right? Which style do you want to carry forward on your project? I'll say this when it comes to doing covers or pin-ups or something like that. As you can see in some of these examples. Painterly is a beautiful looking technique. I really enjoy it. I have fun with it. You can get hyper-realistic with it. It's, it's awesome. But for a comic page, this would take way too much the amount of back and forth and color picking and just the constant rolling with it. Just it's too much considering that you have to do everything on this page, even if you just do one character or the main characters in this rendering. So it is still going to add a lot of time to your work flow. Keep it in mind. Do it if you need to, you know, especially if you wanna do it for whatever project it is. And keep in mind all the lessons that we learned from lighting and so far and so far, right. But honestly for a page, I don't recommend it. It's just too much. It looks beautiful when you finally work it out, as we can see in some of the examples I've provided. But it's just, it's a lot a lot of work. Okay. So I like especially as a colorist, I like a short workflow. And that's why I'm discouraging you so much from this. But I really shouldn't be because it's a beautiful technique and it can really make a page pop. Let's say if you want to choose this and you choose one character, and this one character is the star of your comic book. And that one character is like Adam hue is just beautifully rendered. And that's your choice, right? Go for it. It's cool. But just I don't know how I can emphasize this enough. Fair warning. If you try to do an entire book like this, it's going to destroy you. It's gonna take you. That's a, that's a year-long project or something like that, right? So learn it, learn how to do it. And so this is your assignment here. Render just the two characters in this top path. Just see how long it takes from, from smoothing and picking him, picking their skin tones and the heat and then texturing and again, smoothing it out and then adding highlights. And just, it's like you're working. You're not worried about all the layer effects or anything. You're just working on that one oil canvas. Heck, you can even like I've seen guys do it this way, is they take let's see, they take a color and they take more like an oil brush. Let's see if I can get an oil brush that's the right size here. They take an oil brush and they just start, you know, punch it even more. There we go. They start doing something like this, right? Just blocking it in. Here's, here's the block. They start blocking in it. Okay, here's, here's the block of doing it this way. Then they'll go to a smudge tool and for example, use a fingertip thing or something and then start to smooth it out. So setting the tonal value of where things should go and then smoothing it according to need be, right. And you can get kind of a cool effect on this. This, this often looks like it's a bit of, Oh, I can try different smoothing effects here. It can look like it's been painted or something, right? You can see how it's smudged out. And you can drag things out almost as if you're smudging them with some type of real tool, right? Do it. That's your assignment. However you wanna do it, whether you want to color, pick and, and airbrush it, or whether you want to block it out and then smooth it out and stuff, I get it. It's up to you. I want you to do this for these two fingers. That's the assignment. Then don't do it. That's not your assignment. Do it for a pinup later or something like that, that's all good. But for now, just stick to even just these two faces and see how it works for you and say, Okay, well, now I know how to do it. That is another tool that I've got and I'll use it when I need to use it and have fun with it guys. 17. SS Textures: Okay guys, In this unit we're going to talk a little bit about textures. There's two ways to do it. The easy way and a hard way. I do not do it the hard way. I do it the easy way. The hard way is to actually go in and do your pattern scratching and everything by hand. Sometimes that is not always our way. It could be a quick way because you've just got a little scratch cat scratch on the metal. And I gave enough of a vibe that you wanted it to do. For example, that's a sheet metal or something, right? You just want a few scratches on it? Well, most of the time, the easy way is to steal it. Google is your friend or whatever browser, search engine you use or whatever. So what I did just now is I searched grunge textures. And you can search whatever textures you're looking for, concrete textures, stone textures, brick textures, whatever it is, pull up some images, grab them and pull them into your program. And then this is what we do. So I come in here. I've got this basic grunge texture, right? I'm going to select all of it, copy it, and I'm going to come into our sample file. Where am I going to put this? Where do I want to put this? I think I want to put it here on this wall. I don't really want texture there, but I'm trying to show you what I'm doing here. So see this wall going back here. That's where I'm going to drop that. So I'm going to paste it in here. Pause. Once I've got it in here, I'm gonna kinda made me back away just a little bit, just so I can see what's going on here. I'm going to transform it and bring it on down to somewhere that it would fit on this wall. You can see how I've got it on the wall. I've got it overlaid right there. We're just kinda faded back a little bit right now I'm gonna get rid of it for a quick second here. And I'm gonna go back into my lines and I'm going to select this wall. I'm going to select all of this wall as it carries down here. So see how I've got that selection. I'm going to go up to the grunge. I'm going to invert the selection. So I've now selected, not that. I'm on this grunge layer, and I'm going to de-select it. Now I've got grunge here. You can see I just kinda took away everything that's not the wall. And I've just got the wall there. But that wall is I don't want it to be white. I like the texture, but I don't want that, right. That's not what I'm looking for. So remember, what do we do when we've got white that we want to disappear? Multiply or some function of multiply, darken something like that. So there we go. I just threw it on multiply, and that just gave me some texture. And let's see, darken. What does that look like? I sometimes fool around with it. Now. Barely see anything there that doesn't work. Color burn. It's not bad actually. Maybe I'll back it away just a little bit. Now, you know what? I'm going to go back to that multiply. And that was the one I want. So now I've got texture on that wall. You can do the same thing if you want to come down and put it on the road here, the sidewalks, buildings, skin, would whatever you want it. The only thing I would advise is when you're grabbing these images often at these samples and stuff I get a texture. Sometimes. Be careful there can be watermarks and you want to watch out for that a little bit. But really, that's how quick that was. Like I said, the harder way is to draw it out by hand, but there's also a trick to that. Sometimes what you could do, depending on the program you're using. Procreate Photoshop, all of them. You could download brushes. These brushes can be grunge brushes or texture brushes. I've got a whole bunch of them here. What I do instead is just select that road and just draw a little hatches, draw little things in this, the brushes are designed to kinda randomly draw lines depending on the texture and everything, right? So that's a bit of a cop-out, but none of this as a capo, I'm going to check myself in saying that, that all of these are just a means to an end and the end is coming with the final colored product that you want, right? So how are we going to get there? Whether it's grabbing a texture from the Internet, whether it's creating a brush yourself, or whether it's hatching in a few lines yourself, whatever it is, do it. It doesn't matter as long as you get the work done. So that's your assignment. For this one. Choose something on this page or your own piece, whatever it is. And throw some texture audit your choice of texture. Do you want it to be kind of grungy concrete, a type of brick? Do you want it to be something metallic like sheet metal, you know, some some scratch metal. If you want it to be maybe on the skin, maybe you found a great skin texture that you want to lay on one of their faces. Just see how it looks. Whatever it is. That's your assignment. Bring some texture into this piece and have fun with it. 18. SS Rim Light: Okay guys, we've talked a little bit about adding different lighting effects into a panel or something, right? We've got some burn and dodge things going on, a little bit of gradient work and stuff. Sometimes it's very clear here as a primary light source and they won't do this. Here's a secondary light source, right? Like there's a bunch of different things that can happen here, right? As we're playing with light. Sometimes it can be backlit. Actually, I think I might do that really know. See if this is stronger. If the lights behind me, you know, what does that look like? How does that maybe that light is not strong enough, but there you go, you can start to see a bit of a riming effect, right? There's a lot of different things that happen when we start to play with light, right? So I want to show you another one in addition to what I've already shown you tons. And I'll show you another little trick you can use for lighting that I like. It's, it's it's used quite a lot, right? Okay, So this, I made a layer above our lines and I'm going to call it the rim light. Okay, So what I'm gonna do is I remember I added this red in here, right? Pretending. I'm thinking maybe the police car crashed after, after them or something, right? So what I'm gonna do is I'm going to, I can either select it or I can. There's a few things I can do here. I don't always have to do it this way, but this is the particular way I'm doing it right now. I'm going to select this right? I'm going to grab a red. And I'm going to grab a very small airbrush. Read. Smaller brush, ten, not, let's go 20 and just kinda run a line through here. Okay? So what is this doing now, as I'm starting to I'm giving it a bit of a rim light. You know, I'm I'm showing that in these things that would be touching just just how I did that with my hair there. That these lines that would be maybe coming in contact with the light source that's down below. I can do this for each one of these lines, right? I can have that they're quick little streak. And this gives it a, I find the selection tool combined with the air brush, gives it more of the effect that I'm looking for if I just did the airbrush on itself, what I want is this one harsh line and then a fade after that, right? So you can see what's going on here that if I did it with just this, it's not harsh enough, right? That's not what I want. What I want is that one harsh line that fades off, like fades off as it's going that way, right. You can see how if I want to backup this rim light, how that might give us a certain punch. So I've already got this one warm little gradient going on below it. And then I add a rim light to it, right? This, this effect can be really cool. If you want a backlight something or have a secondary light source or whatever. I really love rim lighting, especially like for certain powers, right? To be able to show that this red special effect or whatever is lining the character. So what do you want to do is like if the hand is here, then everything that that would just kinda come in visual contact with it might have that red, that red line going along it. That's what's going on here. This rim light. This is your assignment. You guys can work it if you want. You could work at here as as I've got it because of the police cruiser. If you want to put it somewhere else, you're welcome to put it somewhere else. It's up to you. It doesn't matter to me. I just want you to practice with a rim light. So what is the rim light? Basically following the outline rim of a character with the selection tool with some sort of selection. And then using the airbrush to punch that in there, right? Okay, guys, that's your assignment for this, I think you can have some, some fun with it. I like it down here because like I said, already established lists lighting, but who knows you might be doing something different with your lighting and stuff, right? Maybe you didn't do it the way I did it. Right. And that's okay. Like I said, I kinda figured that this thing blew by them and maybe it crashed behind them. And now the police lights are kind of giving this vibe going off here. Do what you like. That's the easy type of teacher in that way. If you've already got something different than you are, like, I want them grim like to be over there. Cool. Do It. Doesn't matter to me. I just want you to practice a rim light somehow, even if it's just like the lighting off of what is this P4 panel for and you want to practice it there. You didn't add the glows in whatever it is. Don't care. Rim Something, rim the back of Rhino or something and there's an explosion or fire behind them. I don't care, but just do that nice selection with a little airbrush gradient on it and see how well you can push it. Play with it, have fun with it. But do it. 19. SS Lighting Overlay: Okay guys, In this unit we're going to talk about a little bit of a lighting overlay. So what we're gonna do is in how I use it, is I always call it an atmospheric lighting, right? Sometimes we have this direct lighting that we can see as we can see the lighting here and here and sliding off to the side right. Then sometimes there's just this general lighting that's around. Right? And it can be directional or just kinda vague. I think when it comes to coloring and comic books, this is something that's very much overlooked. And it's really simple and it looks great in pin-ups. People do it all the time, but they do do it in panel work. Okay, so let's take a quick jump in and I'm going to show you this just a little quick trick for this kind of ambient overlay lighting. That's what I call it. I don't know if that makes sense. Right? Okay, So what I'm gonna do is on top of my lines layer and make a new layer and call it lighting. Vague. I know, but that'll work. Then I'm going to come to this first panel. And maybe I'll just do a quick square selection on the interior of this panel, right? Okay, so I've got this, I've got this nice selection. I'm going to pick blue because blue is the overall lighting. I can do one of a few things. I can grab an airbrush here and get it really big. And just kinda start streaking down. And you see what I'm doing. I'm kinda doing it over top of the, over top of the lines. And what that does is it fades out some of these lines. Now, sometimes I might want to do that. Sometimes I might not want to do that. It really depends, right? The back this away just because I like to get a bigger, bigger picture of it. Right? So let's go 400. I'm just kinda, kinda, that's too much. See that double stroke didn't do what I wanted to do. Alright. I wanna kinda just punch some of this into the background. Here we go. What this does is just kinda fade some of this, some of the line work back a little bit and give us a little bit of more punch to the characters in the foreground. I could do it another way though. We've already talked about adding gradients to things right? There we go. Let's see. I'm going to like this in the front, somewhere like that. So what I'm gonna do is foreground to transparent and just kinda work this way. I could do that if I want and then back it away. It might give that same kind of effect. I don't like how it's impacted impacting his hair there. So I'm going to back that out and I'm gonna go back with my original lines and just kinda know it's too much as if the light, the lights kinda coming down from above, right? Okay. You can see how this would work really well. In the lighting of a room. You've got you've already gotten your cell shade, you got this, but then you want to have, let's say this red overhead light just misting down on the characters, right? And let's see if we come down here to the bottom panel. And we could do something like that down here. And I'm just going to do a big select here and change it to a read because we've got these red lights and it's kind of a, a red light vibrate. And we're gonna go back to here and just kinda do this, right? And what I can do then is just kind of back it out. And it's just kinda got that little, little bit of maybe that's too much, just gives a little bit of atmosphere, right? So it doesn't have to be full on full opacity or anything like that. Opacity, opacity. But it has to just, you can use it to just give a vibe on it. Just a little bit of lighting that's just kinda hovering around. So much. So sometimes we focus on so many direct lightings like, okay, here's another way to do it. Direct light, for example, here to here, to here to here to here. There is a spotlight and read probably shouldn't been there. It's coming in like an aliens abducting this guy, right? And sometimes that works actually that might work from whatever we're doing, a spotlights, doing whatever it is it's doing, and we end up having this, this harsh cut effect like a very strong lane. Overall though that's not what I'm trying to get at with this. What I'm trying to get at is just say, here's a little bit of the for lack of a better word. The Moon lighting, mood, mood lighting. There you go. Try to be seductive. It didn't work. That's what she said. So you could see how just that little bit down at the bottom here added a bit of mood there, right? Just this little bit at the top. Just gave that the buildings punch them just a little bit in the back. And that's all this is, this kinda slight atmospheric lighting. That'll just punch 5%, 10 percent, just move things just a little bit. And it's just another tool you have. Okay, So this is another exercise. If you want to look through it or looked through another piece you're doing and say, You know what? I could see myself adding just a little bit of lighting over top the lines to manipulate what punches and what softens. Hopefully this helped you and hopefully use it. 20. SS Color Overlay: Okay guys, here's another little technique for setting the mood of a piece. Color, overlaying a color on a panel. Now, you gotta figure what does color do? Well, we've colored, so you're saying I colored. I know what color does. No, no, no, no. What if everything in that panel just had a nice blue hue on it? What's the blue gonna do? What does blue due to cooling? The calming, right? It kinda Melos things. What about read something hot? Alright, if you put this sheet onto a panel, how does that feel? Well, let's check it out. So we're going to experiment with this a little bit and we might not keep it, but it's sometimes good to look and just say, I like it or I don't. Alright? Okay, so once again, we're gonna go above the line layer. And I'm just going to call this color. This is a color overlay that we're gonna do. And I'm gonna do the exact same thing I did before. I'm going to make a selection and I'm using this first panel as our demo panel. It can be any panel you want or any piece you want. Really, it's not about this page as well, learning techniques. Okay, So I've got this blue and I'm going to stick it somewhere on the more saturated and the blue. And I'm going to have Phil, well, now I've got blue. Lose everywhere. I'm going to take this layer and do one of two things. One, I could either bump up the opacity all the way down. And that gives us certain vibe like look at that. Okay, So that's a little bit of warmth. And now I just removed that warmth. It's a cool panel. I don't mean cool. Cool, cool like cold, right? Or there's another way to do this. Bump it back up and use this color, this color layer. And I can move it down from there too, right? So if I want to come to see 20 or so, and so I can take that out or put it in. And now that I've got it there, I'm like, You know what? I'm going to bump it up to about 25. That seems like a lot. But I'm gonna go edit tonal correction and hue saturation. Okay, Now listen, it might be a little bit different with whatever system you're using, but adjusting the hue is what you're hunting for, right? So right now I've got this blue. What if I move it into more of a purple? Gives a kinda cool vibe to it, right? Like that purple. Okay. There's more of a red. Definitely more of a warm look at how warm it is and how what did that do to that panel? It brought that panel ahead of P2. That warmth on that panel brought it ahead. If I go back to here, now that panel punches back, right, I can even see it in the screen that I'm teaching here. That panel got moved backwards, right, as it should be because it's p1, depend on one. So it was moved back. Right. But I want to punch it for whatever reason. And I just brought that panel to the foreground. That panel just move forward on me. Right? Now I'm starting to get into the yellow is a little bit into the greens. It might be a mood thing. I don't know. I don't know if I want that really green. And then back into the blues. I don't know if I'm going to keep it that blue there. I'm just going to keep that blue there for right now and see how I feel about it. I'll go okay. So I'm going to keep that blue. I'm going to back away and just look at this page. But what does that do? Looking at P1 here, panel one, with that blue, I've now set it way behind p2. Alright, now listen, I'm doing this for a comic book page, but you could do it in a pinup or anything like that. You can set the background in a cooler color and the foreground in a warmer color and be able to just, just by district, not saturation, not tonal value, not anything else. Just by these color overlays. You can move something into the background and something into the foreground. This is a very powerful tool that a lot of colic, comic colorist use at the professional level. Another one that I might use here is this yellow. I might color over with yellow just a little bit. Let's see if I want to. And what this can do. This yellow is sometimes give it a retro a bit of a retro feel to it and stuff. I got it right. So if I'm doing like yellow, maybe even a little bit orange-ish or something. It gives me that aged look. Sometimes I can have that age look of a Western or something like that, something from history. So let's say I'm doing a comic book with some flashbacks. My comic books is colored normally. But the historical flashbacks all have a certain hue overlay on, right? Like I said, you could either use this color or you can just go buy a normal thing and look at that, that yellowish color overlay here would be great for like a historical flashback of something, right? So color overlays are a really powerful tool in sorting out what you want to bring forward and back and separating panels. So sometimes what's nice is when you have a page break and then you starts telling a new story. Like a good writer will give you that. I've seen a few writers as like mid page, new new chapter or section shift environment. And this is how you could do that shift. You can shift it from this previous one was using this color overlay. They don't have to be harsh. It can be really light. Like I said, I'm, I'm running at around 20% of opacity here, right? And this next one can be a different color overlay. And what that does is it helps shift the brain just when I'm looking here. You subconsciously or shifting things, right? So guys, a color overlay, whether you do it using the color layer modifier, right? Or whether you do it as just reducing the opacity on it. You can get some very cool effects with this. And think of it as a storytelling tool. There's your protein. 21. SS Line Color Hold: Hey guys, I got another unit here for you. This time we're going to talk about color holds, especially on lines. Okay, so what is this? Well, there's a few ways to go about this or go about the thinking of this. But basically, it means using something other than a black for your line. Why would we do this? Well, we're going to see once we get into IT stuff, right? But how do we do it? First off, that's kinda lucky, and that's why we're here. One way is when I'm drawing in the piece digitally, usually I use, unless I'm sketching, I might do a blue line sketch or someone got right, but usually I use a dark gray or black. So that's what I'm kinda got on the screen here. And this one I'm going to show you to start with. Once we've got this dark gray or black, it looks like a regular ink drawing like this. It looks semiconductor or partially inked or whatever and penciled. But there's something to be said about how dark lines sit over top of colors. Sometimes remember, we're inserting colors often below the line layer. Once in a while, we'll put them above the whites or something like that, right? But most of the time when we're coloring digitally, we're throwing that top layer onto multiply, right? You know, that line layer, right? And then all the colors, the flats, the shades, the highlights, everything is being stacked below it and they come under, right? So with that black layer on top, black ink, right? Depending how we're doing it. If it's black, it usually stays black even on multiply, especially what did I say? Like black stays white becomes transparent. But in this case, we're going to look at what if I change the color of my line art. Now when I, in the early units of this, I showed you how to do adjustments on that. So when you scan a document and remember I showed you how to adjust it. And you could do the los que sliders and stuff like that. And everything gets back in to 11, actually importing line art and stuff, right? So you know how to do it that way. But another way I'm going to show you here is what if your lines are digital? So why don't we jump on in all, take a little stab at this and show you some different ways that you might want to get it looking. Okay. So here I've got a commission that I did a little while back for armed guy. Right. And you can see I've got the lines set right now to normal. That means actually because I sketched this digitally, all that white is still transparent. I'll go way down and I'll turn on the flats. And we can see how the line work. If I'm going to zoom in a little bit, still looks black is great, is what I originally did it, right? And that looks kind of cool because if I, I've colored this before, so when I start to add all these different things to it, It's got a funky look to it, right? Okay. But I want to back all this shading away and stuff. Just looking at these flats. Now if I come up to the line layer, I'm going to select it. All right, so I've got a hot key here that I select and I'm going to fill, but I want to fill with something different. I can fill with kind of a bit of a purple or something right there. Now because these lines are normal, this looks kind of weird, right? Like I'll zoom in a little bit to show you this. Actually kinda looks funky, looks futuristic, but that might not be what I want. So what I'll do is I'll set this to multiply. And do you see how, if we come in even closer? How with gray below it? This pinkish purple state, pinkish purple, but with greenish blue below it. It changed, right? And with blue, and with all these different colors, it took on different hues, right? So this is one way to do a color hold on. A quick way to do a color hold on a piece. Okay. Is by filling this whole color it. Another way to do it with one. So I can, for example, let's see, I'm gonna kinda play with this here just a little bit more. Why don't I fill with a semi skin tone just so we can get a better feel of what this looks like here. We can see how this looks on skin. Skin looks okay, but what if I want to adjust it? So I'll go Edit. Tonal Correction. And I'm gonna go with some type of Q. So you've got to find whatever program you're using where the qs ad, right? And I can start to bring it into red, orange. You can see how the line arts, changing colors a little bit green, greener, getting into a greenish blue. Greenish blue getting into a blue, more of a purple, red. What I kinda liked on the skin was was orange. That actually looks pretty good, right? So that's one way to do it is just all the layers are all the colors. Rather, the entire line work one color, right? Then when it's set on multiply it, it'll have a certain reaction with the color that's below it. And like I said, though, it will react differently to different colors below it, it depends on, is that the desired effect you want. Another way to do this is to go in and let's see. Let's say, I don't like how this looks here. I don't like how this looks around the metal. What I can do is come in here and maybe choose a gray and actually do it by hand. I can come in here and all of because what I've done now is I've set this line layer, probably should've told you this earlier. I've set this one line layer so that it's locked on transparency. That means I can color onto it. And all it will do is color. What's there? It will not color outside the lines type of thing. What are my lines again? These are my lines, right? So it won't, you can see what I did here. I kinda went to him and colored this gray, right? So I can come in here. Color this gray here. And you see how like even though I go here, it's not going into the rest of it. If your program, Clip Studio Paint is great for this, but most programs have this type of thing. You can lock the transparency on a layer, and that means you're only going to be coloring what you've got on that layer. And this is a really handy tool to get used to in your digital coloring. Come up here. It looks a little bit better if I do it this way. And then I can come back and take a look at it when when everything is underneath, right? So especially like these eyes, maybe I want these eyes to be have a red line here, a bit of a red line here. What's already read. That's why it's not really showing up that much. Maybe I want more of a purple. See if that punches. Because I'm looking to see if I can get this hunching just a little bit more underneath, right? Maybe I want this scar to punch just a little bit more and so I can color the lines around it. What does this do? Why would we do it? Honestly, for me, this can give a more animated feel to it. The black inks often look more like a comic book. Because comic books traditionally had a heavy inking to them, right? If we look at the page that we were looking at originally, right? It's got inks, It's got darkness to it, right? But when we start to do this and we start to use different colors for our line art. It can have a great impact. Like I said, using a hand instead of it being all black and doubt will instead now I can use a skin tone to outline it, right? And that can sometimes give a very different effect. It can look a little bit more painterly sometimes, or a little bit more like an animation. So I wanted you guys to understand that this is called a line hold or color line hold or whatever. So what you do is you have your line layer. If you drew it on the, on a tablet or something like that, like it's a digital line work and stuff. I get digital inks or digital lines. All you have to do is lock that transparency on it. And then you can either fill with one color or start to mix and match color where you want to it will, to match the underlying flats. I'd like to do it after flats. Actually, just to be clear on this, I'd like to do it after flats because then I'd like to see what it's sitting on top of. The other way to do it is what was described in unit one. Going into when you scan your original, you scan it in, you're doing adjustments to remove. Remember how I taught you how to remove the the blue lines and all that and we can drop all these sliders and everything, right? Go back to that. And you know, once you've got that, you remember how to do that. Do you remember how we had it like the little everything all the links for red and then they were yellow and all that kind of stuff. Well, you can adjust that. You're going to just add in the hues and then color it. That's your assignment. I want you to do, whether it's your own lines. Do a color hold on some type of lines. So I'm, I don't want to set up the color hold for you, right? That kind of defeats it. So you can grab the lines that we've already got scanned in here. There's a document that's there for you already and that'll work, right? Like I said, it's in unit one, so it's already there for you grab those lines and instead of readjusting back to black or back to gray, keep it in that color or keep it in a color. And then see what you can do with it, right? Or grab your own lines and do a color hold. Okay. I'd really like to you to play with this a little bit because it's a great skill to have in your tool chest. And if anything, send it to me. I want to see what it looks like. Okay, so that's your assignment for this unit. A color hold on lines. Have fun with the guys. 22. SS Aging Paper: Hey guys, I'm back and I've got another unit here for you. This time we're going to talk about making a comic kinda looking vintage. Write those. I got a big comic book collection or my shoulder this way in all the boxes and stuff. And when you pull up those books from the seventies and eighties and stuff, they've got a certain look to the pages, especially now that they've aged, right? There's a certain very, we'll look to that. Part of that is how your coloring, for example, when you're coloring, get to the flats layer. Stop. That's the first one. If you want to really have this look, that's not what we're gonna do here, but you can get to the plus layer and then stop. And then do what we're about to do here. Okay, so let's take a look at how to do this aged type of look, right? First thing is you have your page and like I said, if this was truly going for that age, look, I wouldn't have all these highlights. I wouldn't have all this blending and stuff like that. So we can just kinda take care of that. Actually, you know what, I think about it? I think I'm just gonna do that over this, over the flat sheet because that's going to make a lot more sense here. So I'm going to drag the violin here, and I'm going to work on that page instead. Okay, So this is over a flat sheet and this will give that more of that look right? Next up, what we're gonna do is we're going to go on the Internet and search for like old paper or old paper texture or old paper examples are aged paper, something like that. So what I did was I grabbed this one off the internet. It's a pretty good resolution. It looked pretty decent. So I'm going to select it, copy it, and then bring it on over on top of here. So I'm going to paste it here and kinda transform it and drag it on over the papers so it's the right size. If I do this correctly. Bigger. Just making sure that I don't have any white spots on the edge there. And now it looks like an old piece paper. If accomplished what we set out to do, right? No. So on this piece of paper here, this in my layers, I'm going to make a few copies of it just because I like to have that going on. Right. And you'll see why, because we're going to do a few different things to these, to these layers. So this first one, what I wanna do is come in to edit tonal correction, go brightness contrast. So I'm going to bump that up just a little bit. So it looks something like this somewhere on that. So it's kinda little bit blown out, right? Okay. That's quite ugly. And I can't see anything underneath. You. Remember how multiply will let white be transparent while where he's got some white here so we can check it on multiply. But that's not really what I'm exactly looking for. What I'm gonna do is go to play around with it and do darken. Oh yeah, that's what I want because I want some of this still in the white, right? I want some of this showing through. But obviously this is way too punchy. So I'm going to bring it back to maybe about 25%, somewhere in there. Like I'm just kinda gauging it according to my eye, how it's looking on screen now, I want to see some texturing going on, right, But not, not too much. Okay. So next one. What am I going to do here? Well, I'm going to keep this as normal. But I'm going to back it all the way back, maybe around 15% or something. So what that's gonna do is it's going to soften everything right now. It's, it's, it's, the opacity is almost see-through, like I've got to 16%, so it's 84% see-through. But what that does is it adds a little bit of yellow over everything and maybe I can play with that a little bit more if I want. Alright. Okay. Next layer, I'm going to go to edit tonal correction, brightness contrast and do that same thing. I want to blow that contrast out. Alright, well, I'm gonna do something different here. I'm gonna go again Tonal Correction and then dropped down to hue and saturation. And wherever your saturation window is, I want you to get rid of it. So now this becomes black and white, right? You can see it, it's a grayscale. You know what, I might even punch this a little bit more. Do it again. Tonal correction, brightness contrast, and push that contrast even more. Do that once more. I'm going to come back Tonal Correction. Take the hue, I want it, black and white. Okay, now, now this is something that might look good on Multiply. Did look at for a second. But now I can back that out to around eight or something like that. You can see how it just adds a little extra punch to things, right? Okay. So you're just doing this in little subtle layers, trying to get this age look and you can adjust it only really like it. A 2% adjustment might be exactly what you need sometimes, right? Okay, So this is looking good. What I'm going to do though, is I'm going to select all. And I'm going to fill it on a new layer. I'm going to fill it on a new layer, all orange. Because when paper ages it often goes and this orange direction, right? And so I'm going to drop this back. And once again, this has this age look to it. It's, it's, the opacity is at 15% right now. And that might be giving that aged paper look that I like. That's looking quite good. I like how it looks so far. Maybe one more thing that I could do, There's a few things you could do. You could start to add grunge textures and stuff like that, but sometimes it can punch a little bit too hard, right? Even this down here. What I might do, for example, is I feel like this is punching a little too hard down here. Might come in and just erase it just a little bit there. That's not exactly I don't want it too much and I'm just playing with that darkened layer. There's just a few spots on it that are maybe a little bit too dark for me. All right. Not too bad, but I want it I want it stained but not drawing my eye, right? Okay, so on this on this last layer, what I wanna do is take my airbrush and do it kind of like you can do this a few ways depending on the brushes you have. You can do a soft soft airbrush and then kinda do a splatter dispersal so that it's more of a particle thing. Depending on, again, it's really good to get used to a lot of different brushes and play with all the brushes you've got. An air brush is great, but we don't want this smooth. What we want is to distribute droplets or particles or some type of texture. So what I've got here is a brush called tone scraping. But like I said, you can do depending if it's Photoshop, depending if you've imported brushes or whatever, you can do quite a lot with it. So here I'm gonna go with a brush that's like a 500 and just start. I'm going to bump that up just a little bit. And let's see if I can show you what's happening here. Can push the particle size to two and you can see how I'm dropping all this texture all over, right? You can see these little dots that I'm dropping everywhere. They're really hard to see unless I zoom in and now you would see them there, all these dots and there's all this texture. So I'm going to keep doing that through the whole page. Dropping this texture over things and stuff, or drop in texture. Dropping texture. And that's fine. So I've got some texture over this page. And now what I wanna do is switch it to multiply. So is this the look that I want? No, that's a little bit too harsh. You can see these droplets here are, are good but they're too harsh. I want to back them away. So there's texture there, but I don't want it to distract again. So all this is doing is suddenly adding H. That's the point of this whole thing, is to just suddenly add age to a piece of paper, right? Like I said, to review, we've got flats only. Then adding on various layers of an age paper, playing with the opacity of it, playing with the layer settings and seeing how that works right? Then going in and adding a little color overlay. And then on top of that, a little bit of texturing. These are things we've learned in previous units, right? And then what do we have? We've got a page, kinda looks like it's from the eighties. And this can be worked and worked and worked again. So you can spend a lot time on it and come up with the perfect look that you want. Here's a few tools for you just to help you achieve whatever it is you going for. Hope this helped guys. 23. SS Exporting and Review: Okay guys, I realized as I get to the end of this course, I'm a bit of a jerk because I was, I'm going to teach you how to save it and export a file here, right? But what I should have been telling you is at the end of each unit or the end of each section or end of 30 minutes or whatever it is. Save, save, save a lot. Save often have the command S or whatever it is hotkey that you've got going on and reach over and do it. I don't like to have an auto programmed in because sometimes messes with my flow and stuff, right? But almost every 30 minutes or something, I'm just like bang, bang, bang, bang, hit my hotkeys, saving files because losing 30 minutes of work, 20 minutes. Okay. I can handle that. Losing three hours or eight hours of a coloring job. No, I give up. It's too much. So there's my first lesson. That's my last lesson that should have been my first lesson, is safe, save and save often. The throne that in earlier, sorry guys. Hopefully you didn't messier. Looking at my page now, I'm really happy with how it looks. It's got the vibe that I want. Everything is really cool, so I'm going to export it. We won't. He talked about setting up file sizes and stuff at the beginning of everything when we're scanning it all. So I know that I've got a lot of information here and then I can export it in however much information I need because I've already created it in that information. So when it comes to this, I'll have to do is go File Export and dropped down. And it's got different type of file formats. Jpeg is my standard for flat images that export with right. Bnp and PNG I find are both really good if I have a transparent Us section that remains in this image. So let's say I'm doing a t-shirt design and I've got a logo, but the rest of it is transparent. Well, the BMP or PNG, I usually use a PNG for that, okay, and I export that, and that carries that transparency into the exported file. If I have a transparency and I tried to export it as a JPEG, no, fill it in as white, it won't work. Tiff. And then we get into Photoshop and all those kind of stuff. If I'm exporting it, that it maintains its layers. So if I've got a client that's still wants their layers, hopefully, you are labeling them as I've done here, right? So they're just random. Layer one, layer two, layer three. You've got like flats and highlights and shades and all that so that maybe your client wants to adjust, but this is ways to export. So I'm going to just go with a JPEG right now. I'm exporting it as a basic file. I'm gonna go color sample file final. And, um, JPEG itself, right? I'm going to save it. It comes here and it asks me, do I want a 100% of the quality that I was working with? Sometimes, no, let's say I want to send off something small to a client that's not really a small, but they're not able to print. I might send it at 5% or 10% or something. Now, don't look at it and that'll be fine. But they can't carry it to a printer. They don't get that version until I get paid. As an example, right? So you can play with this a little bit with the exporting quality, right? And the ratios and all that kind of stuff. Okay, so I'm gonna hit Okay, there, it gives me a little preview and I've now saved. This changes a little bit for whatever program you're using, whether it's Photoshop and Procreate, whatever it is, it changes sometimes. But the key point is choosing which file extension or which file type your exporting that. In my opinion, it's best to kind of establish that ahead of time of what the expectation is needed. If the client says, Hey, I need it in this file format, you better be prepared that you can export and that file format, okay? So just make sure that that's a comfortable option for you guys. This is also a little bit of review. I want to remind you what we covered. We talked a lot about importing an image, cleaning up scans, or the difference between digital inking versus like working with pencils and all that kinda stuff, right? It can, all of it can be managed by a good colorist. It's just how much of a pain in the it is for you. Cool. Then we got into working with flats, laying down a flats, different techniques in it. Easy to cheat, fill buckets versus selection tools and really laying it out. Professional, flatter. We'll do it really well for you. I've seen flatter. It's just like knocking out the park, right? Then we got into a lot of a lighting, understanding all the concepts of primary and secondary bounds, rim, all this thing for lighting off a different textures and stuff, right? And that, that foundation, that rendering and lighting foundation cherries you into starting to sell shade. Understanding shading, right? Then understanding how to play with that shading. Is it a hard line? Do we smudge it? Do we softened it? Do we airbrushing? Do we, do we use it more of a painterly style, right? Then what we can do is start to add different effects onto a layer overlays, color overlays, burn and dodge and all these types of texturing and stuff I got right. I've taught you about 20 different techniques here on how to approach coloring. But everyone's got their own way of doing it. It's up to you to find your your groove of what feels comfortable, what workflow feels comfortable for you. All I did was put tools in your tool belt. Okay, So now you know how to do these things. Now you choose maybe your own way of doing it, right? And now what do you want to achieve with it? I've given you tons of assignments here. You can use some of the files that I've attached or just a working file that you've got yourself, right? I hope you do these assignments. There's no way for me to check, but I really appreciate when you send them to me. When you send and say, Hey, I'm kind of confused by this or something like that. Send in any of that stuff. I love looking at the assignments guys. I also love if you really appreciate this course throwing in a review, it helps. Like all these reviews and stuff. I get the feedback whether it's on the site that you bought it on, or whether it's anywhere else, Facebook or whatever, if you like. This course of this course helps you. And I know it did legit. I know this course brought to you from a to Z and coloring comics, right? Then if you'd like it, please let me know. I really appreciate it. I appreciate the feedback. And that brings me to my next point is if you do have something like a question or whatever, you're like, Hey, I really want to know how to do this. Message me, asked me, right? And i've, I update my courses all the time. I put new units in, all that kind of stuff. And if you've got a cool question that isn't answered in this course, we'll be answering it for you. Whether I do it in a little bit of a text note for you or something or sometimes I'm just like, You know what perfect question I'm going to throw in a new unit. Okay, guys, this was a lot of fun for me as a professional colorist. I This is my jam, this is my zone. I get into it really easy. There's some, some nitty-gritty grinding parts and then there's some really fun effects parts and stuff like that. And I hope you can appreciate that whole process to bring you to a fully rendered comic book page. Hope you had fun with the guys, and I'll see you in the next course. 24. Coloring Thank You: Okay guys, that was cool. The totally remastered how to color comics digitally course. Looking at all those steps, that can be a little confusing. But if you follow me from a through Z, you should be on the right path for it. Tell you what though, if there was something that you felt that I skipped or something or maybe you didn't explain it well enough. You got a few options. I had a young one. Go back and review. Maybe you missed the step. Sometimes that review helps answer your questions for you. But if it doesn't shoot me a message, leave a comment and I'll pipe in and just give you a little, little easy answer for it. That's probably what you're needing, right? But tell you what. If you need something more than that? If you need something that a little bit more in-depth, like, you really have a good question here. I'm going to create a new unit for you because chances are, if you've got this question. Other students have this question too. I love creating new content for my courses. Heck, I love creating tons of courses. If you look on this site, There's like 20 something other courses I've got for you. Once you're done This one, I think you are if you're watching this, jump on into the next course and put those skills to the test. Also, I'm going to say, if you did enjoy this course, it helps me tons. If you leave a review, if you give me that thumbs up and just tell me I'm doing the right thing for you here. Creating content, helping you learn, right? Because I'll tell you what. It's fun for me. And I'm hoping it's fun for you too.