How to Draw Superheroes - Creating Comic Book Cover Art

1. Introduction Video: Hello, everyone. This Robert Marcelo and welcome to my class on how to draw superheroes creating comic book cover are in this class. You'll work with me through this entire piece so we'll start with rough sketch of oppose. We'll talk about how to make changes to that pose, how to refine the line work and how to adjust it on the fly to get the most out of it. So we're gonna be covering lots of the techniques that going to drawing comics every day, everything from backgrounds and perspective. How to detail the work. How did not get frustrated and bogged down by all the ideas that you want to put in there. You know, whereto make your focal points how to ink the work, so it's basically very comprehensive. Start to finish of this entire project. We're gonna talk about colors, ling and flats applying effects over top. You will see the interface of the software that amusing for the colors. But you're walking these whatever you want to try to explain it in a way that could be versatile. Eso By the end of this class, you'll complete a full fledged comic book cover. I love to see the work that you come up with. And I thank you for the support. Keep drawn, keep having fun and bye for now. 2. Sketching the Ideas: All right. So for these lessons, I want to show you Ah, buildup of, ah, art projects right on 11 by 17. So I'm working at 11 by 17 at 300 dp I because I am working digitally to show you this. But this would be a traditional comic book page with margins already marked. And just keep in mind that the best way to know your margins is to find out where your end result is. So if you're working digitally for digital comics, online comics, your margins may be different or not at all, compared to if you're doing in results with print media and you want to really make sure that the end result is what you're after so basically, you know, get a template from your end user s. Oh, no, you're printing. Basically. Ah, In this case, the safe area is all within. You know, this area like this, the bleed is right about here and then passed. This bleed is where the you know the cut's gonna occur. Someone there, But don't ever think it's right here, right here. You just gotta kind of think of it as safe areas, not the exact line. I mean, generally it's pretty pretty on, but you want to make sure that your bleed if you're doing artwork, that's right here. You wanted to really not be that essential to any kind of story telling, you know, So be careful putting a hand there if you don't want the hand cut off, put things like that but passed. This is called No Man's Land, and that's just areas that get edited right out. So again, I don't want you to adhere to that too tightly. I'll make sure that you got a copy of this for your own reference, but at the same time, make sure you know your end result. Okay, so first things first. I want a thumbnail out some concepts, so thumbnails a great because you really rough out the idea. So the reason it's called thumb nailing is because they're very small. So you do something about the scale of the page, and you can do however many you need to get your ideas down. But the beauty of this is that you're going to put this information in from a glance from a distance, and you're going to focus on just you know is little clarity, really. But just the rough concepts, the line work in the, you know, the composition, things like that. So what I've got this idea of that I want to see for this superhero project that we're gonna dio is just a character flying out towards camera. This isn't gonna be exactly what I'm envisioning, but let's just throw it out to my ideas and get the ball rolling. So I want to do a very extreme kind of perspective. I feel that's, you know, pretty dynamic and something that we can use is a cover shot. So characters flowing out towards camera, maybe one arms tucked back. You know, you just see a little bit of the fist here, One leg coming forward on the opposite side, one leg, going back, receding into space. So this is just one concept, and we could say we want the character flying. So there's a k back here. You know, we could you know, you could really get in here and start even design the suit, but you don't have to just get some kind of information. They're But I probably wouldn't do too much of the suit design at this stage, you want the broad strokes of the the image and then, you know, maybe some buildings or something to really help sell it. You know that he's in a city scape or something like that, flying really fast towards the screen. You know, some clouds, whatever. So you fit is little detail O. R as much details you want. Really? But the idea is that you're just doing it really quickly in your expressing your ideas you're getting, ah, good Siris of concepts down in front of you to look through and compare. Now the other thing I'm doing is actually fighting the urge to zoom in. So I try to work from a distance just to keep them small. Because obviously with digital, I could just zoom in like this and then no longer really working on per se a thumbnail, but so fight the urge toe to draw bigger at this. You know, it's not really a total necessity, but I think that you get a lot more speed by forcing yourself to do this. Eso Now with the next one we want to fight. The urge to do exactly what we did doesn't mean that you can't keep core similarities. In fact, a lot of times you will based on a script, a concept of a character. But you know, you'll have certain freedom like camera angles and, you know, moving the perspective around a little bit. So we'll try a perspective more like this, and we'll have the character flying off, you know, still kind of foreshortened coming out towards the viewer a bit, but I'm more of an angle. So again, just throwing some basic shapes just to get the concept down rather quickly. And it could even be a similar polls. But, you know, from a totally different angle, you know, maybe the building's air over to this side now pretty much have to be. I don't know if you could get a whole lot this way, they'd have to be Ford facing, You know, you could have the clouds go with the perspective, which would kind of enforce that speed, you know, some speed lines, maybe a little bit of the underlying street. If that fits in the perspective properly. So you see that just really quick. I mean, I don't know what that took, but it wasn't very long and that's the whole power of thumb nailing. So just really quick, really expressive and try to get as many variations off a similar script and concept. But you know, very up those concepts you know, so that you can really stretch the imagination without spending an abundant amount of time . Now, another thing to keep in mind as well as you want. Always take advantage of your thumbnails in. Utilize these with your client. So wherever your client is that it's a commission that it's a person, a person. If it's a comic project, maybe an editor writer, whoever but the thumbnail ing process will save you an abundant amount of headache back before I started doing thumbnails and probably, you know, sharing a few sketches along the way before I tighten up the work. I fought things a lot more, had more problems. But if you share your thumbnails, you'd be amazed what people can perceive through these and the the headaches. It can save you based upon changes being made here and not, at the end result things like perspective in the polls. So you might submit these 1st 2 and they would say, Well, they're okay But what if we had both fists coming out towards camera, So I like the perspective and shot one, but I want to fist coming out, you know, looking very powerful and energetic that way or whatever. You know, the feedback is so, you know, it gives you something to go off. So you're not just picking from your own ideas, which, you know, may not be their vision. So again, things like this are just worth their weight in gold as faras time savings and not getting frustrated through a project. So what you could do men is take that information and okay, we'll bring 2/5 coming out towards camera or maybe a little bit higher than camera, I guess are up in a way. Um, so you know, the arms you got a, you know, figure out where all this lands. But really, this isn't the part to do it. This is just the part to get the idea down. So don't worry about all the shoulders are in the right place in the forum. Wouldn't be perspectively just like this. You know, you want to fight that urge to worry too much about that. I mean, you definitely wanted to read eyes what you're trying to do, like the point of the face of the direction of the face, could just be a cross section like that. And that tells you that's an up tilt to the head. Not the characters got a down till so just simple shorthand techniques like that. So you go like this. And now it's very evident that the characters looking a bit straight on or even downward, like this, which can looks silly. But, you know, maybe not. It depends on what you're after for the narrative, but well, say something like this right here. So they're looking up. There's extreme foreshortening legs were going a very tiny back here. Maybe there pointed together. It's a little too straight, but, you know, this would be based upon whatever feedback you got at that point. Well, let's try, since we're coming up with this honor, almost 21 leg out, still on one leg bag. A lot of times, with the perspective like this, you'll actually hide that back leg, but we'll get into that part later. Right now, we're just trying to get the broad strokes in the head looks big but a well. And then some cape and some buildings again, just very loose. Very Messi, you know, but energetic. That's the main thing. You want to just really focus on kind of the composition and the energy of whatever you can get in here. So it's a lot like gesture drawing when you're doing figure drawings. You know, they're very quick, very expressive. So there's that next one. Okay, so now for this last one, let's go ahead and try something just a little bit different. So again, we're trying to really get a nice variety on the Siris of sketches. And remember, do as many as you can until you feel excited about the actual sketch of you. If you don't feel excited about it here, it's probably gonna be pretty tough to keep that excitement all the way to the end or inspiration. Or have you look at it but basically tried to feel like you've got something there like you feel. You know, this is a good idea to explore, and you want to see it to fruition, because again that kind of shows through it. The end result. Eso with this. Let's let's just try some perspective lines like this. And let's picture that, you know, this is Ah, yes, this could be at one point. But then, as we brought out another perspective, lines like this, it could be a two point or could set these off, decide and do a three point. So this could really be converted pretty quickly to either one of those. But what I'm thinking here is maybe the character kind of just floating up looking a bit majestic, so I would want to see, like, the chest kind of really bowed out and maybe the character looking down it, you know, some imposing danger or whatever. And so really, really kind of majestic polls where you just kind of, you know, maybe he's floating in the air and then kind of stopped and, you know, the cape would kind of come up kind of bounce up. You know what the movement and just kind of float there for a minute before he comes down. You know, that's just kind of what I'm picturing anyways. And then, uh, the arms coming out, you know, uneven. So it doesn't look too symmetrical. So one arm a little higher and then one arm down. You know, maybe, And then, you know, figure out the hand poses later, but for now, I'll just draw fists. But I'm thinking about the polls like this. They would be more open hand and a little bit of tell to the hips, and so it's not so straight up and down, one leg out and then another leg down. But then we got to think about this perspective as well, so we don't want it to be too straight up and down. So we got to keep in mind that the upper torso could be straight to camera, but it doesn't mean the pelvis and legs have to be. You know, they've got such a range of movement. It's very easy to move those around and not worry too much and tends to look more dynamic when they're not all just, you know, directly in front view of the person or camera, or we look at that. But you know, if the characters got here, that could be the hair could be blowing in the one with to give it another dynamic. So then, from here, you know, the buildings were just gonna look like they were seat down. We're seeing the tops of those or something which will again give that effect that this character is really up in the air and just kind of floating there. So something like that. So that now gives us, you know, four different examples, and I'll generally do something like this for the clients or something. You just make it easier to decipher and, you know, and that's what I'll submit and I might do 45 10 just whatever I feel. It needs to express it enough variety to get the ball rolling. And since this doesn't take an extreme amount of time, it's just a really efficient way to work. And then once you've got some approvals or at least, you know, use this, take this. I like this, but I don't like that. You know, you start figuring out where to go. You could scale this up and work right over top. I mean, it's definitely pretty rugged, but it's still there, still works. So with that, let's go ahead and move on to the next lesson. 3. Changes to Our Rough Sketch: Okay, so now we get to pick one of these and refine it and maybe make some choices if there's something we combined from one of the other. But there's really not a lot of information here, just a character flying out and the cityscape. We can change things like the perspective a little bit on the fly. But I think what I want to go for is probably the 1st 1 So let's just go ahead and itemize that one are separate, that one. I like to keep samples of whatever I do. So I'm just gonna take this one and make a copy of it and then get rid of the other ones and then scale this up and try to work through it. So what I want to first do is get in the broad strokes. So kind of like what I've been showing you with the other lessons is really getting at the main shapes. Lots of ways to do this. We could solve to race it back, and we draw through it. Um, one way, even on Ah, quick sketch like this is you can just take an ink pen and try to draw throughout his wall . So whatever you feel comfortable with, but all you're trying to do is solidify what's already here. Make your first Siris of changes and there's gonna be a lot of changes that gets you from this point to an end result that you're happy with. But you can sometimes draw through it and kind of pick out some of the shapes you're seeing in this rough sketch on. Really, the thing you're doing is just kind of checking the work and seeing if you can make this work in the way that it's kind of structured because since they are so roughly constructed in a thumbnail like this, it doesn't always mean that this will translate well to the drawing. I think as you get better and better, it starts to get closer and closer, and then often times you can just go right from thumbnails toe you're sketching and but sometimes you got to make some pretty significant changes on realign stuff, so sometimes thinking over it can hope to see that. But I think I am in a soft in this up more, some kind of just thinking about proportions right now on seeing if the's angles work because since I throw it in so quickly, there's no guarantee that these angles wall kind of pull together. So it's going soft. Theresa's back. Now I'm working on the same layer, kind of like if you're working on same sheet of paper, uh, and again, if you don't feel comfortable just thinking over it and then transferred it to another sheet of paper Just softer racial original pencil sketch, drover type Use the lightbox, whatever you got to Dio. But the main thing I want to capture is the four shortening, So I want to get that in pretty quickly to see if this is gonna work. So I'm slowly moving these fingers over so that they're not completely straight to the camera. Eso I try to pay attention to stuff like that because it tends to have flattened things out . So especially if hands are very dynamic in the way that they can twist in turn and contort . And they have a huge range of movement, some constant movement, fingers around just to see if I can make it look a little bit better than just my first attempt, I guess getting that four men now the upper bicep area upper arm is gonna get covered. Quite a bit, in fact, probably almost all the way, and you're gonna get the shoulder really taking precedence, so it's mainly form and shoulder from this kind of you. So again, this is back to what I was saying about learning to omit certain things. At first we just want to draw everything in, and that's where you'll see artists through a lot of this type of stuff where they got a hand, a form, upper arm and shoulder. And it's always in, you know, the same view, like they just have this forced habit of no matter what they dio. They've got to put them all together, and then they line them right up. So you just got to try to show the little differences an angle and the parts to get covered up. And believe me, there's there's a lot to go into that, so it's not something you pick up just immediately. I think you just have to draw lots and lots of for short imposes, and it starts to make more and more sense. So the chest, I kind of want this toe to recede over and then kind of almost perceiving that says there is more condensed in the four shortening and then we lose visibility of some of this arm. We'll keep nudging this around as we go, so it may end up being tucked more behind the body or a little bit more exposed. We're just slowly moving these shapes around as we progress through the drawing process. It seemed kind of drawing in segmentation as I go. Some adding, the stomach muscles is pieces, the side obliques. What little you conceive him from here in a piece, I have to figure out if we'll see much of the pelvis. It's in a pretty downward turn, so it's going to cover it up pretty easily. The lake coming out a little bit. We'll just throw this in with the big you know, cylinder shaped like this. It would be like the top middle of it we got. Remember that the muscles cut in and kind of point to the hip, So, really, no matter where they're at, they do that so you can always use that as a guide to kind of figure out where they might be in the scene and correspondents to the pelvis. So then we got to get in some. It's foreshortening, and at first I'm just gonna throw these in real quick. And remember about four shortening how we talked in the previous lessons about, you know, the majority of the form is gonna take precedence at the closest point to camera. So, for instance, upper leg instead of it looking anywhere near a halfway mark, it's gotta look a lot taller because it's closer to cameras. So it's gonna get Maura that real estate eso. It's just little things like that. And I think the head needs to be lower cause this body's tilted over. And it's not that the head couldn't be back, but it just wouldn't look as natural. So let's try to bring the head down. I'm also gonna try to scale it back a little bit to really make the rest of the forms of larger by comparison. Some, like that, gives us a star. It's definitely not corrected, its not ready to go to pencils or anything. But it's a step closer, and that's really what I try to do. Each time I revisit a piece of artwork like this, I just try to get a little bit closer a little bit closer. But I'm very much open to spotting a flaw in and making whatever changes need to be made to make it more impactful. Ardmore all presented, so I'm still looking for changes I can make. But I want to get in these based shapes now, even at this stage, we can really rough in some of the buildings as well. And I'm still kind of wondering if I don't want to bring. This was originally one point perspective, but I always feel like it looks just so plain to have the street buildings like that. You know, we'll see as we progress through this. But I'm thinking I might want to shift this toe where we've got a little bit of, you know, the buildings kind of angled something like this. We gotta figure out the perspective to do that properly, but I think it would add a little bit more speed to the shot, look a little bit more impressive, and we may want to lower the buildings to make the character appear higher. So that's kind of those things where you know, by comparison, what are we telling in the story? What are we telling the shot eso. Now what we're gonna do is is pan back a little bit and you know, you always want to check your work from a distance. So it's like zooming back to the thumbnail stage. And I can already tell that this arm is way too bubbly. The fist is too large, just, you know, there's a bunch of flaws in it, but like I said, it's just a process off getting it to a more find level. Each stage. Let's zoom this right up to the canvas now, so we got a full size and try to think in terms of making your biggest changes first, especially at the state, because you could save yourself a lot of time. So one of things I see is that I really want this fish to be well smaller, for one, just seems a bit too large, unless I changed some other proportions about it. But I also wanted to bring it, bring it over this way. So I want the effect that the arm is really coming out in a couple different directions. It's not just straight, so this helps me to do that because I could take the shoulder out. This where the bicep Here I can now connect it with the skinnier part of the form, and I really don't have to move much else. I don't think, but I'll have to change the proportion still, cause it still looks a bit bubbly on another thing that happens here with shoulder muscle, because it actually this one will come up and it'll connect over election. Look like it connects and the end of this one over here. So that's where you get that dividend, the shoulder there, actually side by side. But you'll see in a lot of perspectives, it looks more like they're connected right at that point, so I tryto keep that shape in mind. But I'll keep adjusting that as I refine it. But I'll need to figure out how toe cut out the anatomy here and make it look a bit more appropriate. One of things is, the risk from a view like this will just look like it inside of the muscles that go around it from this angle. So one of things you can kind of picture is a cylinder shaped like this right inside the muscles and the muscles swoop around it, so you don't really draw that all in there. But that's one of the shapes I try to visualize when constructing an arm. Polls like this from this angle and hopefully you'll see by the end of the rendering how that will start to make sense. So another thing is, we start thinking even a little bit about Shadow start dropping in some quick shadows and perceived with that is the legs are really awkward at the stages are gonna be the way they go. In fact, based on the body, you know, this being the center line of the body, um, chances are this leg will be pointed down a bit more, probably look a bit more accurate, and the other leg is just really oddly shaped. And Ben, I'm just I was just trying to get that curve looking that foreshortening look. But chances are this will all be eliminated and redrawn. You know, the the leg does rotate away from the body a little bit, but it's only got a, you know, a certain amount of range of movement. Um, before it looks broken or doesn't look believable, so we'll bring that back and then point the toe like this. Maybe this will work better, but I often have to draw legs and hands a couple times before I get him right, especially in extreme, poor, shortened shots. I think that it's a big part of this, and I think I've already mentioned this, but it's just really trusting your eye to spot flaws. It's not that you know exactly what needs to really go there, But if you just keep making these small changes, generally you can figure stuff out. Uh, but it's it's it's a process, you know. It's just a process of drawing over and over and over again until things start to make more and more sense and you spot flaws earlier. And then obviously, don't forget that. You know, just flipping the work is very important. So well, they're not your working. Traditionally, that means using a mirror. But if you're working digitally, you can just flip something, and I almost always assumes I flip something. You know, a bunch of areas jump out of the work like this, really awkward, shaped to the back of the arm, just immediately stood out something like that. I'll bring that in, and then this middle knuckle seems like it needs to be higher, and they need to be a slant here. It's still very crude in this, like looks even more awkward now once it's flip. So it's kind of funny how that turned out. Let's do this. Let's we got a picture where this It's pelvises like this. And then that's the leg. Remember, to like I said that the most well comes inside and points to the hip. So you kind of get that in there. We really want these shapes toe overlap, or I should say, under lap. But the top closest shape overlap to really show that foreshortening. And then, even though you can't really see it a lot from here, the inside of the knee points down to the ankle, and that muscle just kind of pokes were on the side. Try it that way, and then the foot I just throw in a foot shape. It's gonna be so far away, and I'm probably gonna shade it down like this. You're not gonna get much. You're just going to see the silhouette of it. So this is still pretty rough, but we're gonna keep refining it. And so now what I want to do is take this the next video. We're gonna keep refining the pencils, make some more changes and see if we can clean this up. So with that, let's move on to the next lesson. 4. Cleaning up the Pose: All right, So now let's go in and clean. This pulls up even further, and I'll just softer races down. I kind of pick out some of these shapes and refined them. So I really want to get this pose down before I figure out too much of anything. Like a suit design. You see, I can get through a basic cape in there, but that's about it. I want to make sure I get the polls are fine. And then it works out, and then I will come up with the concept. Now, generally, you're gonna know that concept to your character, right? So But in this case, I'm developing this character as we go might bring this thumb up a little more. It looks like it's too far down. So always be. Ah, you know, looking for ways to adjust it, make changes, Teoh. Clean it up a bit as you go. Each time we revisit it. I feel like this part of the farm is just too bulky, so I'm gonna try to thin that out of bed. Has add in some of the shape of the anatomy. Oh, boy. You probably just get the silhouette of the elbow times it looks more flat than pointing. So I'll try to get that and I bring this line in and I like to try to wrap the, um, tricep around a little bit. I gotta be careful. I know I don't want this to be too evident from an angle like this because, you know, you're just not going to see a whole lot of definition A to this particular angle. You're going to start seeing more definition and the rest of the body where it's more straight. But from here, you're just gonna get like edges of the definition. I think, and a lot of times artists will just shade in this whole lower area because, you know, it makes sense. Arms up. And this would all be in shadow anyways. Ah, and it saves a bit of time, so it's always nice. But if you look at a lot of arm poses, you'll definitely notice that the generally the bottom of the arms Aaron shadow. But it does depend on your style. There's a lot of styles out there where they don't render shadows, and they let the colors do that. So it just depends on what you're after. Okay, so now with shoulder here, I definitely would change the shape here. It doesn't look much like a shoulder, so I'm gonna bring that down a little bit differently and try to find the shape in there. I also want to use this to really pushed the character back. So most thinking like this perspectively for this side, even though I'm not gonna draw those lines in. But I just want you to be aware that a lot of times you have to think about the center line of the character and have to make sure not to draw like this chest. You know, the same distance over there. You're not gonna get any role depth in the pose, the or you're gonna lose some depth that you could otherwise keeping the polls. So what you want to do is think about each one of these areas of the body, uh, having its own perspective, in a sense, you know, not too awfully bad, like you don't have to think about every little segment of the body having its own perspective. But there's a lot you can attain by being aware that each one of these air moving in a different you know, era of space, basically. And you can really accentuate that misleading and start placing some quick ideas of anatomy . See, have already kind of done that with some of these lines. So each time I revisit the line work, I'll drop in a little bit more of that, and I'm just gonna silhouette that foot there. So I don't have to worry too much about detail on the inside of there. And I'm bringing this wrist line in. You see it right there. That's just my way to kind of show that I think I did it with ease rounded lines here that the risk is in front of these muscles. And, you know, again, it tends out pretty far before it gets up to the, uh, the fist There you will get some of the keep off to the side here. The neck kind of points down to the middle of the chest. No, you can kind of do this with different characters. You can draw collarbones that come up and kind of go to the sides of, ah, shoulders there. But I've also noticed with, you know, some pretty bulky, muscular characters that they get hidden quite a bit from the muscles. So it's really up to you in the way that you want to draw the character. But some characters I'll actually leave that part out just to make the chest look more defined. And again you see here in the Forum sale, this area looks short, abrupt, and this one's elongated and more back to the elbow. I think it's important to pay attention to that informs and even see it here versus here. I try to make this side a little more abrupt in this one. More elongated on that happens. I think I've already mentioned, but I'll reiterate. I think it happens all over the body. The more you pay attention to things like that, the more you can kind of get parts of the body toe look readable. Even if you're not entirely accurate with all the anatomy, that's probably a big one that needs to kind of be there or again. You get this overly kind of bubbly look to the character cause you'll have both sides being unequal, rounded shape or something that just doesn't read well. I don't need to chisel the side of the chest. I also need to be aware that since this arms up, it really shouldn't be the same shape. Who should come up higher, more abrupt on the sides, cause the ah, the arm will pull the chest muscles up and away from the where they attach on the chest. All right, let's get this head shape. And I also want to think about as ever find us. I want to think about the head shape. And you know, each time I get here, I want to look at it and go Okay, where Don't really want the direction of this had to be because obviously, as I refined the silhouette of the head, I'm kind of solidifying that right? So the first thing that tells me where it's going is the centre line that I established. This would generally be halfway down, but I'm kind of envisioning that the characters looking up almost in conjunction with where his fists is going now, if we were going exactly where the body is going ahead, would even look further up. But I'm kind of picturing that he's looking up in a way not not an entire perspective with leg but more with the arm. So maybe he's getting ready to punch something or whatever. But, you know, whatever we envisioned for the narrative, but he's looking in. The same direction is here, so I start with the center line of the face again. It's a bit higher because he's looking up halfway down from there, will generally be the nose, and sometimes I'll bring that up because I want to leave room for an expressive mouth post . So say I draw this character like he's kind of grimacing or, you know, grinning his teeth or whatever to common facial expression and comics. Obviously, I'll do something like that. And so I need to leave a little bit more real estate in this area for that expression. Or if not, if I do, the holes subdivide of halfway down, half way down from the eyes to the channels, the nose halfway down from the nose. The chin is the mouth on the later probably add some area to the chin space to compensate for that, so there's just a couple ways to look at it. I think as you do this more and more, you start toe, you know, maneuver without really mapping things out as much. But it's up to you and where your comfort level is now. Ivan decided exactly what kind of ah facemask. I do want this care toe character toe wear a mask. I think it's just a little more superhero esque, but we'll do like the positioning for the eyes so the eyes are generally the width of the nose, and then one I apart. You know the distance between the eyes, which would be the with the nose you would add over each side. And we do have to also compensate for the feeling of four shortening. You know your perspective, since the head is on a slight tilt away from us, but not much probably make guys pretty equal in a perspective like this. The main thing is that the face is actually pretty close to the side of of the head. So if you want this character look like he's looking over a bit more without a lot of rework, you could really just redraw this information a little bit closer to the side edge of the face, and you do have to compensate for the angle that you get from down here to the chin. Remember, too, that if you are building this up with your circles and you know, kind of Andrew Loomis method that you're gonna take the ear and you can find this plain or change or plain change, I guess I should say, from the ear to the chin like that, it is also going to be no one in the front of the face like this side of the had. So you want to be aware of these so that you don't get a kind of soft, overly soft looking field to the face. You just want toe, you know, know that there are some different angles in here. Some changes. I'll draw in a lot of these lines just to kind of position things and check the work. And then I'll, you know, probably not need all these soul racing back. But I still put him in there just to kind of see where I'm at. And then another technique has actually draw the eyes is ah Spears. And you can do that Even with that and the eye sockets, that kind of helps you place the eyebrows. Another one is to do a rounded line. We'll do this kind of rounded arc. I use a lot of arcs in the face as well. No, it looks pretty mad. Yes, so that gives us a little bit more refinement to the pose. You know, weaken. You think a little bit more about the key, but I'll add that as we go, probably more with suit design and you know, So we were getting closer and closer to what this character should look like. So, Ah, with that, let's move on to the next lesson and keep defining this character. 5. Adding Line Weight: Okay, so now I just want to clean this up. So I'm going to just tone back my layer opacity, um, and drove her top and really just go for some clean lines now. So I will tighten up on the artwork a little bit and attend to think about this is just like, you know, thinking about the line. Wait, kind of connecting the dots. It's already there. And quick, sweeping lines. So whenever you draw faster, you're generally going to get a smoother line, and sometimes you get a more energetic line. So you wanted, like, fly through these lines and, uh, you know, still get some variation of design and there But Dona, I would say don't schedule. It's probably up to you in the way you draw, but for me, I notice if I don't sketch them, I get a little bit more effect to him that I'm looking for and, uh, tend to like that. So just kind of throw him in there, basically work more with Thea the extension of your wrist. Now, where before you might have been using shorter, more abrupt finger movements and maybe some risk. This is gonna be a lot more rest, and I guess even the way you draw it could be elbow. But I don't I don't use my elbow a whole lot of these type of lines. I guess if the artwork was really large, I would like you can handle a painter works. They do a lot of, ah, your elbow in there for poles and then, obviously, things that are closer to camera like this leg or going to get a nice, heavy line, especially as they come out a couple ways. Look at line Way are. You can either put it on the outermost curve of the edge. Kind of makes sense because it would make it feel like that's coming out towards you a bit more cause it's curved outward, but then also the closest edges to the viewer. And then probably another way to interpret even, still is just the side of the shadow. But really, I guess that's kind of contradictory or Munich contradictory. But you're gonna basically place shadows there anyway, so maybe you wouldn't need to think about line weight in that regard, but, um but yeah, there's a few different ways to think about it. Think I'll avoid doing too much interior work. At this point, I still need to figure out where I want the placement of that muscle to go. So wait on that. Yes. So the other thing is line breaks, you know, on the outside of the character, they're gonna make sense to be a lot more connected. But when you get to the, um, the anterior, you want lots of line breaks, I think I tend to like that in my work anyways, just, um it just seems to add more designed to it or opportunity for design. And I think it helps with ideas like something about tracing every piece of the work makes it look very stiff. And then it Hendry's ideas. For some reason, I can't really put my finger on that one. But that's that's something I've noticed as I draw more and more that the line breaks actually helped me to come up with ideas and create, you know, creative sparks, I guess, especially as it pertains to the rendering, which we'll get to that later. But it helps in that regard as well again trying to make sure the lines aren't too overly even, that there's little bits of differences here and there, You know, some heirs or thicker smears with dinner. Ah, I like what one artists said and they said, Ah, keep the line moving. And I thought that was a pretty neat way to explain it. Thinking, remember, that was now. But, um, it was Ah, I was just kind of a cool way to say, you know, keep the line moving just basically again fight the urge to just make this uniform line over everything, cause gonna flatten the design out so you could have otherwise pretty dynamic design. But then you put this same singular pass over the whole thing, and it's gonna really kind of make it a little bit boring. You see, I'm drawn the shoulder and more boxy than it really is. But sometimes you get away with stuff like that doesn't always have to be identical to the way of muscle shaped. Um, I think that as long as you put enough curvature in there, then you might have a better chance of it reading properly. And then obviously, when you render it, you can make other choices. Kind of bring it together, But, um, when you um when you just make him basic plane shapes, they really stick out. But sometimes you can, you know, adding these cool little curves and angles and make it just a little bit more stylized. And it's kind of forgive. And I think in comics. But unless you got a very you're going for a very realistic style than you want to study or anatomy intensely and really shoot for that. But I don't go for exact realism in my work, you can handle things like those. It was kind of the bits of the ribs, and again you can use these little line breaks toe showed it from parts of it. And for the ABS, I'll usually do like a little bit of a stylized kind of look. I do like this word kind of angling, which they do kind of angle anyways, but it's definitely stylized the way that I throw him in there. The main thing here is, you know, really condense them down. You want to show that they're sloping inward, like a perspective like that, and it will help toe, you know, again make the chest like more massive, make that insanely large hands start to hopefully make sense, um, things like that. So hoping to see I'm really simplifying areas to as I go, so I'm adding in little bits of angle and designed to it. But a lot of it's simplified, and that's kind of nice because, you know, these drawings can be pretty complex and anywhere we can simplify the design and, ah, you know, make it cleaner in a sense, really helps out. Because if you get too much in the habit of just over rendering every single thing, uh, it could be time intensive. I love rendering and renderings. Probably my favorite part of drawing this stuff. But you gotta be careful with it, like too much of even a good thing is a bad thing, right? So you got a I can't really pick and choose how much you do with that. So simplifying can really help you out. Definitely help you meet deadlines and things like that. So and there's a certain amount of cleansing this you get to the work by simplifying, so that's nice as well. I think we all have to just very up the intensity of our rendering and our shapes and our designs of the work and really see what what matches her style in our imagination. You know what we're really looking for? I think we're all capable of, you know, a ton of different styles. But we have toe pick what works best for the way that we create and what our goals are. Okay, so here I want to try to fix this if I can, but I and we just hopefully solve it with these heavy lines, make it make sense. Ah, visually, that way. So let's try some nice big lines appear to really show that this is coming out towards camera for the viewer. Spring this back in a little more again. This is our trysts up or want to really condense this n word so that it looks like it connects properly to the shoulder or under the shoulder. I should say he'll bring this land up. And with fist here, I think I need to bring in this knuckle, but further again, even though I'm just really in a clean up stage, I'm still trying to make incremental changes and hopefully fix whatever I can. I think the other benefit of trying to fix things but then still progressing like, for instance, you notice I'm not sketching anymore, trying to fix things. I'm trying to fix things as I clean up the work. I think that's a big part of being able to complete work, because if you just keep, you know, saying, well, just redraw until trying to redraw until it's right. You know, that can eat up a lot of time in your schedule. So you have toe kind of, ah, keep moving forward and I think this helps to do that. So you're still adjusting the work and making changes. But you're also getting closer to the end result based on the process. So you'll see a lot of people that get really good at constructing some basic line work and then going right to NX, and it's just amazing to me. It's like something I really need toe hold, my own skills that better. And we should all strive for that because, you know, you gotta figure those artists don't have problems with deadlines because they're so used to inking off rough sketches or finalizing their sketch rather quickly, you know, and moving it on to an anchor. Something like that so that's there's a lot to be said for that. But I do tend to want to refine things, a bit more wrinkles and of the fingers some time. You get there a little lines in there, even though this isn't gonna be, he's everywhere in a glove. I'll put like a little line just to show the depth of the thumb there, so it doesn't look so flat. Okay, so there's most of that. You know, the base line work or whatever. Get in some for the keep here. My damn it looks off to see her. So the next journal clad, um, asteroid comes down from the ear, points down to the center of the chest, get pretty thin, and you'll get kind of Ah, we'll be there and you get kind of a you here. The body is really just a bunch of alphabets, and then we want to bring this jaw out just a little bit more, so it's not a tangent with the neck, and the jawline points to the here. There's little figured out the design of this. I'm actually going to just do this perimeter shape well designed. The the characters face next these. These are the tough curves for May Never have to draw to the side. So sue me deals a couple times, Get it right. You know, if you are working traditionally, a little trick for that is you glance over the area multiple times, kind of like like this, and then you draw it so you'll see a lot of traditional artists do that because just you're doing the same thing. Really? You're doing it in a different process, but it really does work. So, like, for instance, if I want to do this line here, my ghost over it a couple times and then I've got a lot better chance. Even though it was pretty poorly done, I needed to get this compound curve in there that I want to see, but again, just kind of glance over it a few times, get the muscle memory going, and then then go for it. Okay? And I think I want to bring this Keep lower. My bad. Okay, let's pan back and see where I am. And I was still a just. And ADM or line wait here and there, especially after I see it from a distance. But that's got it cleaned up a little bit. Mawr and, ah, you know, step closer to what I'm looking for. Okay, so now we're gonna proceed to the next lesson, and we're gonna go ahead and design a suit for this character. So with that, let's move on. 6. Creating Our Suit Design: All right, So now for the fun part, which probably isn't it, It's all fun, isn't it? But I want to design a suit concept over top of this character. So what I want to do is think about, you know, things like separations and line breaks and what I want to shade always think about in terms off. If I'm gonna design the character, what areas don't want a shade And ah, you know how I want to render this character. So I'm thinking something where we'll start with some small lines and just kind of get the ball rolling. I'm thinking some kind of segmentation that comes in word and then back out on then maybe down the side and maybe even down into the leg like this weaken, have a shoot back off. The reason being is it'll fight the urge to just do the spandex undies. You know, that's become less poppers of late. I mean, even capes or a little bit outdated. But, um, I've wanted throw cape in there for the dynamics of it, and a lot of superheroes do still have them, but, um, I think it goes while, you know, pretty nice with a flying character. And then as far as the gloves, Um, I think I'll do something where they kind of viene like this and come out like this just so they're not completely rounded. One thing I will say about suit designs, though. Let's see if it points to the middle here, it's gonna point to the middle here. It was kind of pull a landmark there. And then as it shoots out this way, it's probably going to get Mawr widened based on that extreme perspective. Okay, so but one thing I will say about suit designs is they could be great for directing perspective as well. So, like, we see here, it comes to the side of leg and back out right here to the end of this muscle, so side of the leg, and then back out towards the end of this muscle. So what's neat about this is you know, immediately we've got this extra line that helps, you know, paint that perspective basically, so ah, suit designs could be really need for that. Let's see, what else can we do here? We could do? You could get into smaller designs as well, you know, you could change the colors of the knuckles or something like that. Or maybe make those like metal. You know, there's all sorts of inventive things that you can do as you design these characters. You just have to play around concepts and see what you like. You know, you could even have a separate break back here. Um, one thing. You see, a lot of them, maybe we'll do. Some of this is you'll see a lot of these little techie lines in the suit designs. Now, we can kind of add those after the fact because there's so little you can even add those in the color. But what they're meant to be is like, almost like it's a more modern, maybe, carbon fiber soup, but it's got more of this little techie designed to it. But these air actually gonna be breaks for the way that we're gonna render it. So this area is gonna be darker. This air will be lighter. And for the mask, I think I'm just gonna go with something pretty basic. But I do want to separate. I want to show the mouth in this character, but that's about it. So I'm gonna bring that up and over. And I'm just gonna fight the urge to do something to traditional because you know what happens to whenever you're designing a character, you're gonna get a lot of naysayers, and they're going to say, you know all that So and so you just took that designer you looked at this, Um, So what you have to do is really think outside of the box and try to shift it. But you're going to get that anyways because so many concepts have been done at this point , Good luck. Find its up there's entirely original. You know, it's gonna look or resemble something out there. It's just the way it is. Um, I think for the eyes, I'm just going to do the openings for the mask, give him the white eyes cause that a lot of times I think what it does, it looks like the characters more, um, you know, in their secret identity or whatever. Maybe just some She ate in front of the nose, and I think I'm gonna dark in the mass. So what I might do is just sort of drawn in some of the highlights that I want to see. So my bring a highlight on the side of the cheek. There we highlight up here to the top of the the Brown and maybe a bit of edge lighting over here. A round of the top of the head, you know, headlining a room lighting. And a lot of times you just want thes. If you're going to do these lighting effects, I think you just want them to glance in and out of the design. It's really easy to want to just trace everything. I've even kind of done that here. So what I'll do is I'll eliminate little areas like all draw back into it. Just so it's not so overly repetitive and traced because again, that's really easy to dio and get in the habit of on. Then it kind of loses its appeal. I think they just want little bits and pieces of that, but obviously really depends on you know what you're going for? If this material is, you know, metallic, it's gonna render one way. If it's, ah, you know, some kind of just fabric, it's gonna render another. But I think the highlights have to be relatively, um, inconsistent. in a way like that, you don't want him to be uniform the whole way through. There's something like that. We'll see how it looks initiated, and we may have to adjust that. But and then all oftentimes go back, especially if it's a form of fabric. And I'll just do these like little thin lines that air just kind of almost like texture. But just no rendering. Basically, you know what there is like this are really just kind of perceived the shadows. I do this actually a lot as I start to render on Not so much. I don't look at it like I'm drawn the lines. Look at it like him picking apart the shadows because if I get too much in the habit of drawing just lines, it tends to look really flattened. Boring If I think about it, Maura's I'm drawing in the shape of a shadow tends to have a little bit more of a peeling effect, I think, and then we might do a shadow into the neck. Now you've got to keep in mind, too. If you don't want an overly rendered shaded look, just add stuff like this in the color stage, which you can even go back, color your line work. So it's it's really there's lots of ways to get there. But, um, Tim plea for a lighter, airy kind of effect, you'll leave more than out. The other thing is, you can put these old X is just where you plan on rendering that end, shading that end besides a little off. Okay, so now what I want to do is think about the Is there anything else you want to add to the design here? I don't think so. You know, we can do symbols and things like that. So much of that's been done. It's again, kind of hard. You know, I was thinking like a V in the chest, but I'm sure that's been done plenty of times. And one of these you could do is just look for the ones that do have it and then try to do it in a different design. You know, that's that's one step, then, obviously the meaning, because there's a series of things that has to occur before. It's truly, uh and Franjic upon somebody else's character type. But you you basically just have to make so many differences, you know? Definitely can't be. Same letter, Same name, you know, if there's got to be certain similarities, are certain differences for it to be okay. But I'm sure we could get away with something like this for now. Something like that. Just add a little bit more designed to it. And then based on the way that you render this, you know, you decide whether or not you're gonna see the chest lines through it. A lot of times of locals you won't. Okay, so now let's get in. Some of these shapes of, ah would say shapes of shadows. But I'm actually going to try to draw more the highlights based on this material being pretty dark. So I'm just gonna draw on some shapes for that. Definitely. Lots of ways to really perceive how you do this. I try to just keep it almost like I'm thinking about, um line way. I try to just keep it moving in angular in some areas, organic and others, but just not the same with all the way across. You know, if it's a thicker muscle group like the chest might bring it out to the side and then cut it back in. So just little things like that. And when you render, you can render out this way as well. So but I want all these areas to be a bit darker for contrast and same thing here. Since this is foreshortened and a lot larger, there's gonna be a larger highlight there as well. So I wouldn't put the same thickness of highlight here. Is he here to here so that it doesn't flatten out and make it look like this is just a big arm instead of something that's supposed to be foreshortened? Yes, it is heavy break there. And remember, you can always come back in with your You're rendering anyways, for these things get a little bit trickier because I don't want toe. I actually want to keep those shadows I put in there, but no b eliminating those. So I wanna make a highlight. That still resembles the shapes I was going for. So as I worked down to here, I can make this a lot lighter of a line. Something like that. I think you might get a bit of the side of this muscle here. Then again here. I want this nice, heavy kind of line. Weight or highlight? Who knows? I'm fighting the urge to make just a uniform shape as well. So I'm trying to put little angles in their little changes in direction. Uh, just a bit of character to it, essentially. And I'm trying to perceive if you'd see some of those tricep break right there. Maybe, Maybe not. I want to add something to the mask. It just looks too plain, Jane. So I wouldn't want to do is you bring this down, make it a little bit more like a helmet type. Look, bring this down over here. I'm still gonna make some additional changes as I render it, But I just This isn't looking as interesting as I hoped. So something where it drops down over here. You can add those points, Kenley. It just looks a little too familiar. All right, so you might be able to get away with this. It's gonna look a lot nicer once it's rendered because all this will fill in. But I think that adding the drop down right there will be kind of me. It could almost bring this a little bit more to the point just to kind of keep it those angles on then the other thing is, we obviously could just do some random markings to so we can again, kind of with those line breaks that talked about. But that can go for anything. It could be tribal patterns that could be shapes, just just whatever. Really eso Let's just do that for No, you know, we could maybe even bring this back where? I don't know if offend down the metal that would look to silly, I think shapes off to the sign. I guess we could add in pieces over top as well. So it could be a shape that comes off the, you know, the front. You'll see lots of characters with designs like that, um, music him off the side of the cheekbones. Something strange, like bad, But but yeah, we're just gonna go with the helmet for now, like this, And then I'll probably change some of the way that it highlights the eyes. Maybe more of an invitation. We could even do an opening. You know, if you wanted for that, Even if you have an opening, you could still dark. And it and you can shade like, You know, we're under the top portion around the eyes like this. Just show off some of the wrinkles at the bottom. Lots of ways. You can really work these things in there. I think the nose needs to come down further based on the position of the mouth. Okay, shape. The eyes are a little off to. So as I render it, I'll fix a lot of these things. Okay, so now let's go ahead and move on to the next lesson and work on some of that background. 7. Drawing in Our Background: Okay, so now we've got our character over the background that we originally sketched out, and we can move this character around. Well, if you're working to Julie, but I actually want to just bring this up and kind of tilt him like this, Almost like the hand is straight with the top of the page. Because if not, he's flying more up on to come out more like this, OK, so we can continue with the main perspective. The main perspective, really with him is head to the foot. You know, the arm is kind of coming out and, you know, still going with that perspective, but it comes out and over. But if we take with the original sketch that we have to get back to that, you know, that's kind of wonky and kind of, you know, a little bit crazy. Um, so we're gonna ignore that a little bit. It gives us a basis to start, but we gotta figure out where we want this to be. So one of the things I think helps of perspective is figuring out what you're drawn first. In this case, it's gonna be a pretty, you know, simple cityscape. So what I want to do is first to find one of the buildings and the perspective. It lies with them. So, for instance, if I take one of the buildings and I say OK, this is, well, the buildings that's closer to the character. And from here, if I was to draw the lines back and received them into space wherever they converge would be my vanishing point. So I could say the vanishing point is back here by the ankle, okay? And so that would be a low horizon line, which would make sense because the characters kind of flying up in the air. And we just want this feeling that we're looking up at some of these structures. So we kind of go like this. We find you can free in this, or you can ruler it all out. I recommend both, like actually, the more I draw, the more attend to do it freehand now. But actually ruler out the main shapes and then any anything I really need help with. So basically, if I start to get in here and do some trim work and it's ah, a little bit trickier than I thought then I will obviously go to a ruler. Now, notice. I've get this building at an angle. I just want to do that for, you know, kind of some dramatization of the shot. You know, just toe make it a little bit more fun, I guess. But, um, you got to be careful with that, because you gotta, you know, keep consistency in the way that you do this. So, for instance, I can't draw buildings going this way over here, cause then all of a sudden, it doesn't make sense if these air going like this and this isn't a two point perspective. Now, if this was a two point perspective that I could probably get away with some of these buildings angling in because I would make my next vanishing point down here off the page so I could get some of that in there like this. But then you got to be careful, because if you say you want toe had a street down here, you just got to make sure that all this stuff kind of coincides and makes sense, you know, In fact, you probably wouldn't want to put buildings that close across. So chances are you would keep with this initial, um, angling and maybe just get a building or two and like this probably make more sense with shot. So you just have to look at these shapes and figure out what works and what doesn't on. Do, you know, make your decisions wisely. I guess it pertains to perspective. You know, it's all throwing bass shapes like this. I might perceive that as being a road down there. City Street, you know, move sidewalk here based in the buildings and then put the buildings. You just have to remember that, you know, you got a fair amount of separation from building to building that they're not all aligned either. So one way to make a boy city, I think, is to make sure every building is aligned and every building has the same separation. It's just not gonna look accurate. But what you can do is, you know, in set some of your buildings even in set on a particular building that's there. So, for instance, you can have parts of the building. It come out and parts of recede in, you know, definitely makes sense for your doorways and things like that obviously, but you can do it with even just, you know, trim and edge work of the building. So the more you drawn, the more ideas start to occur. And you just figure out you know what you can do to make it look a bit more interesting. So then, like I said, I'll generally detail one structure will find the perspective like we've done here, and I'll start to detail one structure because it gives me a basis of what I'm trying to accomplish in a skill really, too, because what happens is the buildings are going to scale against one another. So if you draw one building with very tiny windows up close as you work back, you want to think about that transition of scale like he wouldn't want to draw a very large window opening here. And then even larger window opening over here just wouldn't make sense. So, um, if you start small right here and you get these kind of tiny little windows which were generally gonna make the building obviously look larger, then you have to continue on with that scaling as you move down. So it's it's very much cityscapes and building escapes of very much proportions, off scale, you know, relationships of scale. So let's get some shapes in here and try to figure out what this might look like. The other thing is to try not to be so repetitive. That's really easy to do that of buildings on. You could do a lot with trim work so you can do overlapping trim. Trim will give you drop shadows and mawr edge work so you can change the windows from Florida floor on some of them so that you don't get these overly again repetitive buildings . You can have some windows that are just, uh together. Some have cross sections and trim. You can do whatever you want. I mean, you can really just double triple stage tram, little trim pieces on top. I mean, it just you can do whatever you want. And then again, shadows air going to help you do that insect kind of a fact. And you can even make sense of organic shapes. So as you get a little more confident with it, you'll start doing like little, you know, squiggly lines in there, and you learn how to shade those and things like that But, um, I'll keep this rather basic just to get the core shapes in place. And you see, so far, this is all FREEHAND and I mean, it'll look off at first. But then, as you start to clean it up and read, Drover top, check your perspective. You know, instead of a ruler Aiken just in this particular program, I could just hold shift. Um, but I'll try to do that on Lee. You know certain spots. Let's get started and then work freehand, and you start to develop your ability to do that for more. A lot of times of buildings. One of things you can do is if you do stage something so say you've got these square windows here. You've got these rectangular windows with divides here, you might go back to that appear. So it's good to kind of, you know, you don't really want every floor to be different. It's I mean, I'm sure it happened in some building structures, but it's going to more rare. But if you do stage, things just kind of, you know, go back and forth with it, so that gives us a start on the first building and you know, And then, as we detail, it will get into things like, you know, adding little cracks and things like that to the ones that are closer. Now, the next thing you can do is you can add a shadow to the side of the next building. It just makes it easier. And it actually built step, so you can kind of place a shadow over there. You know, figure out if this building is gonna be taller, shorter than this one will go out and go a little bit taller. Can check perspective here. Just so you know, I added a white block out between my character so I could drop in these lines without drawn through him. That's that could be a need. Ah, little trick as well for Digital. And I'm thinking about the margin. So I'm gonna sketch that in margins roughly this area, right? It's make sure I don't have too much information there that needs to be kept assuming a little bit more. And then, like I said, as you work back, you want to just really make sure these windows get smaller proportionally a sexual side of the next building, and I think you want direction. This was gonna be the trim of this building, but it'll look like, uh, will still be in shadow. But you really want toe Get those shapes of shadows in place rather quickly to see. Don't, uh, details stuff you don't need. Teoh and all these building faces don't have to be rectangular. That can be whatever shape you want. You can mix into organic shapes there as well on you know, buildings don't have to all aligned either. You can tell an angle to it. You know, I think on this kind of shot, you don't want to really do that. But a Z, you're doing a, uh, bird's eye view looking down. You really want to tell your buildings every now and then. So they're not all just, you know, lined rectangle early or whatever. You know, horizontally and vertically, they definitely have some that are just built on, you know, curve streets and things like that. So it's probably about where I'll need toe softer race back because what happens is I tend to get pretty messy when I'm doing this. And I'm seeing a little bit into this that you probably can't see, because I've got all these quickly lines everywhere. But I tend to get some of this in place. And I'm you think you have, like, tram that I'm gonna add to the doorway here, trim pieces that I'm add below this window so it doesn't just look like a floating rectangular shape. It's the little things like that that I'll just keep picking at it as I go Mayor some windows back here, so on and so forth. So now I'll softer race this back. And, you know, we we've got our perspective back in place now, so get rid of that other layer. It's probably, uh, making a little bit more confusing to look at, too. I really want to knock this back is pretty messy and crazy looking at this point softer race that back pretty far and get rid of that blue line and hopefully nice you'd started make a little more sense. And then what happens to is I think I will add a little bit of structure on this side, at least one building poking over something like that one or two. And, uh, I guess a couple, because as they go back, this way they're going todo you know what? Actually, I'll established the street first, then work back this way. So that's a good way to do it. Because obviously we don't want to work down and imagine what's there when we get this foundation of the ground here. And then we just have to figure out how far these buildings go back before they kind of got a site and then another you could do back. Here is you could just do the skyline. What kind of caps It off basically, to do multiple levels of buildings back there. We're really tall ones in the very bag just to show it's a big city or something like that . Likewise, with back here, you could have something that's along the same perspective, but a very small, tall building, same perspective and same thing here. If you wanted, you could probably fit in a very tall skyscraper or something like that. So, you know, you just build these shapes on top of one another, but you got to keep checking that perspective because really easy toe throw something in there and properly. If you're not using force guides, a ruler and everything out But then, as you come back in here, you could start Teoh, embellish this a little bit more and say, OK, well, I don't want this trim just to be rectangular, cause that's pretty boring. So I want just this kind of edging. A lot of times, I'll draw my edging on the very edge. Imagine that, and then I'll bring it in word and shaded across this way. So it's almost like I'm building the shape on the very side, and then I just, you know, make it work as I shade over you could do like little designs here and, you know, make a look a little more believable on more interesting. It's kind of amazing what you can do just with little shapes. You don't really need something all that intricate, just better than a rectangular piece of trim going across. Basically, it looks like it's been, you know, done by a bricklayer or something like that, and you could do that all throughout. So what I recommend is is detail in the first building like that, and you want to figure out where you're at, like what you're is Victorian brickwork. Is this Ah, modern building is this? You know, whatever you know, you can look up all sorts of cool reference for that. But the main thing is that you detail this 1st 1 and get the amount of detail you'd like to see in this concept, and then again, work back and really simplify as you go back. And some buildings are just simple anyways, especially like the skyscrapers. You'll see they might have a cool shape to him overall, but a lot of it's just repetitive windows, so it's pretty easy to draw, wants you to find the shape. But then, as you get more into Victorian or Gothic architecture, you're going to spend a lot more time with the but these little designs. But there's little cheats for that as well. You just basically want to simplify it and then repeat it, and I, you know, even even those you can get pretty quick at if you're not overthinking it. I guess if you're not trying to put in, you know, like if you're sitting here trying to take your time and shade every one of these E I guess you could do that role too fast, too, just by kind of blotting it in. Just don't sit there and try to zoom in and really detail every brick or something. Think about it from a glance. You gotta remember where your focal point is anyways. And that's appear to this character. So the rest of its kind of secondary So you don't want to lose too much time, uh, doing all this crazy detail and again use your shadows to help you out because, you know, again you could drop in these shadows and eliminate a lot of unnecessary detail work. 8. Drawing in Our Background Part 2: all right. I'll just go ahead and keep detail ing this front building. And then after I get this settled, probably time, lapse the rest and fill in the rest of details just because it'll be a bit repetitive. So just think about it as getting in the base shapes. So even if you come up to the next building, you could maybe draw in some of the trim shape here. But just get in the basic primitive blocking in of all of this fight the urge to use just rectangles. Obviously, it can really mix up the shapes here, and then I have to block in. You're based shapes, working to each one with a little bit more detail in refinement and tried Teoh make it look more interesting. And just remember, trim is really just the way to do it, like you just trim and cut in. And, um, you know, it's funny how lines right next to each other can make something look more detailed than it . Really, Um, it really is. It's just pretty simple, like liking Shed this in and then if I don't add any line work here, it looks pretty plain. But as soon as I even add just these little dividers. It looks like brickwork going up, and a lot of it's just that way, like you just get in there. You know you can draw another end set line right here. Well, something that looks a little bit more detailed just by doing that, even though it's a bit messy telemetry set back and treat what I mean There. Another thing you could do is when brickwork comes down, you can add just a little wider break at the base. Just little things like that kind of go a long ways, and then, as you come up with these breaks, separations, whatever on, then you can get to the next stage of trim. Say it's here and headline it goes over. Break this, Ah, straight line there, even if it's a small segment and even this, like instead of going straight back, you can do that. But then you could also think about you know that, having a bit of angle and depth to it so you could come down, back over and then over. So again it just it's just term early, but it makes a world of difference in the design of it, and it's not hard to do if you think of it in terms of that where you're just kind of cutting these angles and then going across with, um and then here we can shade a lot of this, you know, dependent on how detailed you want to get without rendering. We could shade this and then we could come down with some nice shadow lines right there, some shade lines going up here. I do these a lot where I'll just put like these little plans going up might shade in the windows, sometimes its quicker, but it depends on the look I'm going for, and I might leave the cross sections highlighted, but that's a vice versa kind of thing. It just depends on what you're seeing at the moment at the time. Ah, la times. I'll save that for last and again. We can kind of render under this top edge on the lower edge of breaks, and we can leave that little segmentation and it looks like more detail, and it's really not that much. You see how quick that is not hard to dio on them for these windows? I wanna fight. Like I said, the repetitive nous. So gonna put a little bit of a shadow here in the bottom of this little bit of a shadow here in the bottom of this. And then I got to keep with the same alignment here. I'm using. This one does my guide and I might even use these. No, you know what I'll do. I'll do to Windows over here. So we'll be here going against this edge. This will be, um, a bit of separation. Pick back up into another window break here. So what I'm picturing even though you can't see, it just looks like rectangular shapes, Marty picture and that this is actually a larger raised area of concrete or brick work. I should say he and we'll share that side end like that. And you see, it doesn't make sense right here. Like if it comes up, unless I guess that trim could be in front of it. But another way to look at it is you just bring this up and over and bring this line up to this next top and then erase the slime bag. And this is another way that you can quickly stage trim on a design like that. So, Seo, now, a sudden this is raised in front of these other ones, and it was pretty simple to Dio. So it's just little things like that that you start to pick up as you do this. And don't beat yourself up because it it's nothing that happens really quick. At least for me. It wasn't backgrounds. Uh, I still struggle with backgrounds, but, you know, the value of them is that they really, really, really paint the picture and tell the story. You gotta have good backgrounds with their characters. Teoh make him feel right and will make him have a presence on the page. You know, you just drawn him over blank white canvases. It just doesn't It doesn't sell the idea. You know, You gotta have some kind of background to tell the story. All right, So what? The's divides? I think I'm just gonna go one in the middle. Maybe. I don't know. I don't even know if I want to have a divide now. And I've done a lot of this freehand now, so I gotta check perspective, too. So you gotta be careful with that. If you are going to do some freehand, you know? Be sure, toe, Keep your roller handy and just make sure that you're not getting to outside of the Rome of your perspective. Because it's really easy to dio. And then you got to go back and rework stuff. It's always a pain. I'm gonna bring this shadow and like this, and then I'm gonna use ah, Ridge line like this. But over here, I have to reestablish. This is an edge of a raised wall. So, actually, I probably want to bring that window over, I think. But I have to bring it over quite a bit with me. Let me go back, see if this will read. Well, if I just had this Yeah, I think it reads. Okay. And now the other thing here is I could go into here and I could maybe a race back and make this tram higher, right? So it's just another way to keep overlapping these trim pieces and make him not read is just rectangular. And, you know, you're not just connecting lines edge to edge. Because when you do that, it flattens everything out. You gotta have a little bit of overlap and depth and drop shadow again. You could do some little separations here and there. As you go, we could continue this. Ah, Sprick. Work up. It's funny to like, as you put a lot of this end, study other artists and you realize that, like a lot of the lines won't be that clean. In fact, they'll be kind of messy for even buildings. And I really thought when I got into drawing comics that all the buildings had to be perfect. I don't know where I got that idea, and I just I just did you know, some people do. Some people do very ruler doubt. Cityscapes just depends on the style you're after, I guess. But, um, but there's a lot of them that are very kind of messy. And I think I'll tell you, some of the artists I'd pick admire the most have very messy backgrounds, and, um, I thought that was kind of pretty cool. Once I started to pay attention to that. I'm like, Wow, maybe I don't have toe make every line perfect, which is takes an amazing amount of time. So no, really, make sure that's the spot. Want to use. I'm going to do just a couple of these lines out. Just I know where I'm at. And honestly, what happens to is you can put these in place like this, but then you can totally draw from. In fact, I oftentimes do. I'll start like this and put a few of these representational lines in place. You know, just so I got some continuity from the shapes, but then I'll draw right through him. So, like, I'm gonna actually, Yeah, I would leave that I can race. He's back there and there, but I'll draw right through him. So go over top and I'm purposely mess up this line because it's just too straight to clean . So but that's really s. So that's that's the base concept. I'm gonna time lapse just because it will be repetitive and the videos were just get too often long for me picking at this. But that's what accounts up. So get your base. Primitive shapes cut in and create some silhouette edges than work back in perspective, checking your perspective as you go and just adding detail and remembering that as we work back, we're going to simplify. So with that, let's move on 9. Drawing in Our Background Part 3: So now I'll go and refine this city escape a little bit more and again, I'm just gonna keep cutting into these shapes, trying to figure out different patterns and designs for Windows. If I find that it becomes too repetitive, I'll start looking at reference, and I also sketching a lot that way. If I get some ideas just by sketching, I can implement those. I can also fix a lot of things when I take this to ink, so it's not totally imperative that every line is, you know, exact. Especially since I know I'm gonna be the one thinking it. But it's up to you as far as what style and definition you like to see again. I really recommend the effect we draw on the edge of the building, especially if you're gonna silhouette it in like that because it gives you more reference for working into the structure. Perspectively. So practice little patterns and designs on your trim on the edge work you'll notice when you study buildings. There's actually a lot of little kind of hidden gems that you'll find in the reference some . Sometimes you see it, and other times it just kind of gets, Ah, I think, mixed in with all the other information. But when you really take the time to pay attention to it, there's actually a lot of intricate details in architecture. Even buildings that you would otherwise or assume we're pretty plain might have some pretty neat details. So I always enjoyed studying architecture. When I can, we're gonna throw like little people in here and there and just other little basic details again. I'm not gonna worry too much about them being perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but I like them in there for Adit flavor to the scene and contrast ing elements. So you know, it's kind of boring if you have all just buildings. Of course, you want to vary up to buildings, but another good way to do it is props. So things like, you know, adding some cars, adding some street signs just anything, really. But just stuff to make the scene look a little more interesting and more appealing to the viewer. It's still kind of chaplains and basic shapes and getting rid of those larger structures of the top. I just felt like there are more of a distraction now, based on the perspective I chose in the way that I chose to illustrate this. It doesn't feel like the characters up very high at all. In fact, he feels like he just took off and he's really low for a flying character. But I purposely wanted to do this because I want to show some of the lower details and the details of the building. Now for another project file, we could always do a character flying way up high. But then what happens with Cityscape is all these details get lost, and you're just going to draw more textures and patterns than anything you know, you could try to fit in detail, but you're not going to get the level of, you know, visibility that we're gonna get from a low flying seen like this. So you see him being very messy with it very loose, very sketchy, and that's, Ah, one of things where I think that as you do more and more that you realize that that's kind of where all your ideas happen. The more you rough things out, the more you start to just kind of play around with it, and, you know, you're quicker to change something because you're not trying to refine every line as you put it down. Now, when I go to in, quit this, I'll definitely be a lot more deliberate with my lines and really try to, you know, get clean all this up and make it make sense. But right now I'm just really exploring ideas and trying to get as much down on the page and and see if it helps or hurts the scene. But if it's loose and rough sketching, I don't mind racing something I don't mind, you know, just deleting it from the page and saying, Well, that I didn't work. But if I took say, you know, half hour to draw a car, that I'm gonna be really apprehensive about, letting that that sketch go even if it doesn't help scene. So one of things I see even at this stage of it is that I needed to introduce more variety to the shapes, so the shapes are looking very repetitive. The windows are looking to repetitive, so I'll make sure to edit that when I go through, and I think the work so you'll see me use the shift Click Command in this particular program. But again, that's just like rolling out of line. And I really fought the urge to use that as much as possible, just so that I could just try to draw Freehand, but definitely rule out your lines. If you need Teoh, you can also create a Siris of perspective, grid lines very light on the page and then draw over top of those. So that's kind of what I've established here in the beginning. But every now and then, I'll check the work with with a straight line. I just realized that when doing these cityscapes, you really don't have tohave. Everything is straight, as you would think, really. In the beginning, I drew everything with the ruler everything, and I just couldn't picture doing any type of building without ah ruler. But then I started to realize that after I ruled out the lines and I got the primary shapes in place, I really could draw a lot of it, you know, pretty accurately, because I had those guides there. Eso that probably just comes with confidence and completing lots of different scenes. But then I started to notice more lately that actually get better in results. If I don't ruler out every line s so I think in the beginning you need that assistance. And then as you progress, you just start to actually find yourself doing better without it. So I'll zoom in here a little bit softer race. Ah, a lot of these buildings are pretty, pretty crude and pretty beat up. Then I'll try to refine the shapes a little bit mawr and see if I can come up with any more ideas. And I did find myself kind of stagnating with the ideas. And that's kind of what I mentioned about the windows looking to repetitive. And that's a clear sign that I need to just pull up some of my old drawings or pull up some good reference, study some photos, even looking other artists you admire see what decisions they would make. In a scenario like this, I basically don't take anything off the table. I can never tell somebody. No, you just have to draw what you see in your head. I don't believe in that. I believe that all of its good food for thought and you never know when you're gonna find that next bit of motivational information. Eso take everything in visually that you can, you know, and don't discount simplified versions of what you might be after either. So look at things that you might see in Disney movies, or I shouldn't say simplified. But what? I mean that some styles often will resemble something cartoony or less than detailed than what we're looking for but the self. But the same fundamental rules apply, so you'd be amazed at what you can get from things like that. I'll sometimes find really good bits of advice, you know, in a cartoon or an animated flick when I didn't even expect to see it or get it there. So taking everything, you can let everything kind of guide you in a sense and would be glad that you kept your eyes and ears open to that kind of stuff. So that brings this part to a close, and you see, it's still very rough, but we're going to refine it as we go. I want to jump back over to the character now, refined him a bit more of since he is the focal point of the shot, and then we'll come back and we'll, you know, touch up the city some more. Then we'll move to banks and finalize the design. So with that, let's move on to the next lesson. 10. Adding Rendering to Our Superhero: All right, So now let's go back to our character and let's refine Ah, this a bit more on start, adding some rendering. We get this fully ready for inks will touch up the background, and I think I'm gonna still make changes to the character a little bit. One thing is, I'm feeling like I need to add this leg and a foot back here, but I'll do that after the fact. That's not too hard to add something like that, especially when we have the straight line here. So it gives us this nice, easy segmentation to do that. Eso Let's see here want to? I still want to figure out some things with the mask and helmet area, and I actually keep looking at this. Won't bring this V shaped down more, but it's going to start looking like an M. So I need Teoh. So does it matter, since it's really just assemble Anyways, this is a little bit more like that. I think any more on that. It's going to start looking like a I am unless I bring this part down further. Okay, so So there's our symbol in the chest. I think I'm gonna change the eyes in the mask. It's just not feeling as, ah, here s because I want. But I also want to show you what it looks like. Uh, you know, rendered. So what we can do here is just, you know, fill in some of this that and then we're gonna add some rendering lines off the edge of this. So I'm just gonna do an area this way, and then we're gonna jump right into inks because it's kind of redundant. The line works clean enough to really showcase it. But what I want to do is give you an idea for what the rendering will look like with some of the shadows. So a lot of times, I'll fill stuff in, I've got the time, and then I'll bring the rendering off like this. So depending on home, working on a certain piece, I do a variety of different rendering techniques. But thick to thin lines basically just noticed that line gets about that thick from where I'm at. So you know, if I go as light as I can press on the screen, that's what I get the hardest second press on the screen. That's what I get, but I'm really not generating the lines that way. I'm actually using a little bit of pressure, but I'm just feathering it. In fact, I do these lines the same way with my crown pens and pit pins. If you're familiar with those and you can get a pretty good line with a with a micron, I use I love like the point fives and the 0.0.8. So I actually tend to stay towards the bigger ones. And I use point threes from my tiny detail work and things like that because you generally want it again, have heavier lines in your foreground, and then your tiny little details, like stuff in the background, use like a smaller line to really push that depth. But if you get good at using those pins, you can get the same kind of depth really as a brush. But what happens is when you get really good with a brush or digital, because digital you can really resemble a lot of brush type work with practice. Um, is that you just get faster basically, and there are some lines, like getting really great with a croak well that are just hard to meet. But I still think that with enough practice, you can get amazing lines no matter what you're using. Because I remember the lines. I got it first with working this way, and they were horrible, and I just over time I compensated and learned how to use the The brush is better. So again, just using these tiny little rendering lines. I don't wanna go to crazy, especially this area where it's really meant to be black with a little bit of highlight or even at blackmail color like a dark blue or something like that. But but it's a darker color nonetheless, and that's why I've got more filling. But I still leave us and light source to show glares. And then, really, to help define the character. You know you want to show this definition of the superhero, so you put the highlights in places where you still understand the muscles. But there's lots of different ways to perceive the way to do highlights. You know, maybe we'll had some lessons on rendering and things like that just toe help in that regard . But basically the best way to do it is to study different materials and try to draw them and make them not necessarily look identical to what you're looking at, but have in effect, where you can tell by looking at all that's cloth. Oh, that's you know, those are wrinkles, those air, those air brakes, you know, and you just you render things differently to where they start. Teoh make sense in that regard. You run the bricks with cracks and a bunch of imperfections, really, and then cloth. You try to keep it smooth and flowing and overlaps and things like that in their styles, where people render cloth and it'll still look pretty tattered up. It's just that just a choice to and then with this area, want to perceive the shadow. I don't know where with that shadow to be, But a lot of this and shadow probably like all this just because this is a fall over. So to push this shape, our it would make sense that a lot of this will be in shadow, especially its underneath. And it's on the back of the characters, so there's lots of ways it's gonna catch shadow. Well, just fill these areas in and then do some kind of rendering. Now, with rendering like this, I probably would go with the the overall shape of it. So in the same direction, I don't always do this. In fact, I don't adhere to too many rules on directions of rendering. But in certain instances it makes sense because it it adds to this this effective, flowing or bellowing eso. Sometimes you gotta be careful cause you can render in such a way where it will actually fight the design. So maybe for this larger shadow, I could come this way with that. But again, it's It's one of those things where there's so many different ways you could render. I really just recommend practicing a nice variety and, uh, you know, seeing what what feels right when you're doing it. But just try toe, try to create lots of variation. Okay, so what else under the fingers? I think I already mentioned what kind of do this. This is like something I doing like almost every hand kind of silly, but it just seems to work. It's just defining the plane change, and again, this is underneath the character, so it makes sense. This is in shadow. I could really just black descend. I'll do these little taper lines. That's kind of another funny thing about doing this type of work. You find things that you just kind of do over and over again, and I guess that becomes your style as well. But you're kind of your like your rhythm or your your patterns that you go to like here. A. Put a shadow in here, shadow onto the fingers here, the pads air pretty separated, so there could be a shadow in there on. Remember to you don't have to do shadows. You can do separations when it pertains to anatomy so you can do a muscle here and instead of like, just shading right into the next, you could actually shade on the other side of it, so it creates a segmentation. You don't want to do it everywhere, but I noticed it works really well for certain things. Stomach muscles kind of look that way, so muscles generally they'll pull apart from one another. You're actually get an area of skin where there's a separation, but there's just certain instances where you want to do that. A lot of times it just makes more sense ago. Here's the bottom of the stomach muscle. I'm just gonna put a shadow there. It's just easy. And it reads pretty clearly, you know, so you don't have toe try to design it, I guess, in a certain way than the way you shape the shadow. And then generally under the If this is the sternum on the sternum is the ball in the front rights of this. The under the rib cage is a little bit, and for these top stomach muscles, I'll do the same types of lions coming down. You could really do these in any direction you want, but the main thing is, I'm trying to show a great Asian from the top to the bottom, so I'm gonna do thicker lines tapering down the thinner lines. If I did it sideways, I would just make sure the top most lines were the thickest, and they broke up into skinny lines as I got to where I wanted the end of the great Asian with Grady. And I should say, I guess is probably a couple ways to say that just like that. And then it just gives the effect. Hopefully, from a distance And what better when I think it that that top parts in shadow and I could really carry that down? Because again, this character, this is kind of leaned over. So it makes sense that some of this is gonna be in shadow like that, Uh, logo. Probably color this in. But I'm just gonna go ahead and fill the scent for now. Yeah. I don't want to show the separation of the muscles. A lot of times that could be distracting in the logo. I've seen certain logo's. It'll work, but more often than not, it's just better to fill it in with solid. It reads better. So you got to make sure that a lot of these, like little rendering things that you do, don't distract away from the end piece. So it's probably the trickiest part because it looks cool and it's definitely highly Ah, um, effective when used properly. But you got to really stand back from at times I'll actually get up and walk away from my renderings for a bet of the rendering stage and come back and look at it with fresh eyes. In fact, that actually works with any aspect of your are highly recommend doing that. Go take a walk. Go take a breather. Grabs food, Saudi pop whatever into and then come back and really take a look at it. And you'll be amazing sometimes. How things just change in that amount of time and you go, Whoa! I wasn't even seen this. I really need to adjust this. That and the other. It's kind of weird how that works. So again, Chad, onto the from here, shut on the side here. I could shade all this as well. You know, it makes sense that this would have a shadow on it. Like that shadow like this? Um, yeah. I don't know if I will drop him in there for now. It's also going to depend on the color choice. I go with this, it's gonna be a lighter color, but sometimes I'll just do this with wind work. So So now I want to render some of this because again, this is a continuation of this material up top for this area. I'll do kind of Ah, a little bit of a lightning bolt effects. What comes down the side of the rectus for Morris and down the side of this, which I don't I shouldn't say the name of that muscle because I don't know the name of this one, so I still probably vet out, so we'll just fill that in and again, This is really all stuff. I could just think and do that way, but just trying toe pick it apart and explain as much as I can through the process. The front of the need generally will be kind of boxy looking, and it's a lot higher than you know. We normally give it credit are see it as I guess, from an angle like this. It just doesn't immediately come to, ah straight, you know, abrupt end like that. But there's lots of ways to do it. You can just kind of hint to it a little bit, and then that will kind of clue the colorist and to which, in which case, it will be me, but into how toe Add some shadow to that so you can do like little lines like this. You know, a lot of times that that's enough, really. But it's up to you in your style, on what you're after. Then over here, I'll probably add a little bit of shadow just around this leg out like that, so it looks a little bit more depth. E has some depth, and then, like I said before, I want to shade this part in. So I want to really push this leg back. I could do this with just lines, a solid Phil combination of both. We'll take this foot, just make it solid. Close this part off, I think something like that. But then again, I don't want to get too distracting. So me just fill us in, sometimes better just just simplify, Okay? That's what I'm just trying to give it the effect that it's going back seating into space lines right here. You can also play some wrinkles, kind of a neat way to do wrinkles on across muscles. It's kind of like the same way to do veins, even though I don't really like to draw veins on my characters a lot. But wrinkles are pretty easy. You just go across the muscle and then incorporate a drop shadow where it's going across the most. I won't do it back here because it steers the reason you probably wouldn't see a wrinkle that far away, but you would see it more in the details. Up close was trying one right across the lake here, so you just go across it with the straight line and then a drop shadow in the debit. That makes sense. And then what happens is when you go to color, you can just highlight that one edge. So it's a really quick and easy way to incorporate wrinkles. And again, it's the same concept for veins. Put those where we need to and give that effect that there's a wrinkle there from a suit or something. So again, it's just a straight line in a shadow on the shadow side, wherever that is. And then, ah, race on the other side. So there's a highlight there, quick and easy, and I think for the most part, I could just take this think, because what's happening is tightening things up. But there's not a whole lot that needs to be tightened up, really. And a lot of this convey interpreted in the ink stage. Let me see what else I really need to fill in. And we could start income. This character. Yes, I just remember, you know, variety of line waits crosshatch whenever you feel the need. Teoh not gonna get too busy with this character on that, but but I do want to refine the face more. I think that needs it. So let's go ahead and jump into redrawn the face and kind of, Ah, finalizing that and then we'll move into thanks. So with that, let's move on. 11. Cleaning Up the Helmet Design: All right, so I want to try to clean up. The mask is just doesn't have the presence. It looks pretty clunky. Anyways, before I think it. I just want to be sure that I'm gonna like this. So let's go ahead and refine this. And I think that's what it comes down to. Like when ever go to think something. I just have to be a little bit more sure about it if I if I'm sure the concept that I could just think over what you see here. But if a months or other concept and I want that little bit of refinement to kind of help me through it. So that's what I want to do here. I want to figure out what really liking that. No shape apparel, Something different for that, I might just leave it out, actually, and and go with more. You know what looks like more of a solid mask? That's kind of what this resembles anyways, So maybe the openings for the eyes like this, remember, You know, just draw a center line to see your kind of aware where everything is and then build out from there, you know, disused things for alignment. So if he's come up, they should probably both hit in the same spot under the eyes or look crooked. And then, you know, it can be more narrow on this side because of ah, for shortening and perspective. So that makes sense. But yeah, they should probably hit right under the eyes. And these were gonna be eyes and set onto, um, you know, instead of the mask basically, so they need to look pretty human. Must, of course, this guy's an alien. Maybe Never know. Here, let's bring over this way down this way down. Try to get those shapes somewhere in the realm of being somewhere and as it comes down here . No, I actually draw better if I rotate trying not to rotate a lot. Well, I'm explaining a lot of this, but whenever I need cleaner lines, rotating the page helps tremendously for May. Yeah, I think I want to do that. I think a little bit more simplified kind of effect to the the home. It will be better. And since we got this kind of opening, we could do some wrinkles under the eyes, things like that. So little details like that temporary. Let's whatever. You know, we could say that this characters, you know, really beat up, you know, maybe get scars back there that you can see or whatever, but I'm not gonna go that far. But it's just, you know, there's all sorts of ideas that you could do just with the openings there. Obviously, And I think what I'll do is just when shade these with some, you know, give us another spot to kind of render pretty cool. So render that out, You know, a lot of time, especially when you're gonna be thinking your own work. You know, you can really just leave little cues. I mean, that you're gonna be the one finalizing it anyways. Really Don't have to render everything out. You can just kind of drop in some stuff that you understand. I think that happens, too. What? You work with an acre for long. Enough of write stories about that, um, where, you know, people just will skip steps because they into that person's work or they know that personal ain't their work and know what they're ah, suggestive lines mean, So it's gotta be nice, you know? So that you're not constantly fine tuning every single square inch of your design. Just get you. You both start, you know, understanding what certain accused mean. Okay, So probably gonna throw, like maybe a glare right there may be clear here. You just have noticed with the glare lines, you want to make sure that they don't resemble nearby shapes. So, for instance, you wouldn't want to do a glare line that's on the top of the brow because it'll look like eyes. So be conflicting, kind of, unless you may be shaded in differently, So just make sure to, like, change the shape enough where it doesn't It doesn't complaint. So my back local airlines there, um, you know, we could even get in and do some, like, little swirly lines through it. Something like that. Kind of seeing something like that up here, maybe, and we can get rid of these construction lines now. I think the symmetry is somewhat decent. I'm sure these shapes are a little off because and check those is well, I guess, but just kind of keep maneuver and those as we go to ink. And you can even do something like this Where maybe we open up this area here and do some rendering like this. So you do a little bit of, you know, cross hatching and shading down the side of this. That looks kind of cruel. Me as well. Just got to remember that all you're trying to draw when you do chrome is reflections, and what happens is the rise and reflects. So the darkest part of chrome is the middle because that's where the horizon is reflecting and showing all the detail. And you can have light at the bottom and top a lot of times with chrome. So we'll get into some other lessons. I think already mentioned it, but we'll get into some other lessons where we, uh, we detail some various effects, don't have those in. You guys can actually let me know what materials you'd like to see rendered and just kind of adding in little bits and pieces. And I think that's it. I think the rest can actually be worked out in the inks, so that's what they were going to take this character to inks. Now and then, we'll jump back into the background and tighten that up with thinks and get this ready for color. So let's move on 12. Inking Our Superhero Character Part 1: Okay, so now we're thinking I just make sure to add a new layer over top of the later I'm working on S Oh, this could be done with vellum. A light table. I converted to blue line and then ink over top to make sure that I've got a brush. It gives me a nice variety. So something is thin. Is that and this thick? Is that so? A ton of variety there. And basically, just recreate what I see here, but then try to add to it. So I think about it. Like if I was thinking somebody else's work, you know, How could I bring this out? How could I tighten it up? A lot of it is just solidifying lines. But then there's also making things read a bit more clearly or hopefully a lot more clearly if there's any anything that needs to be fixed. But I think overall this is tight enough, and then you'll see me adding a lot of like little rendering as I go just because again, it's my own design and I can get away with that. But I think that part maybe you want to be careful of depending on a live inked that person's work. You know, maybe I don't know. I don't do a whole lot of ink for other artists, but, um, I think that overall, as long as it just improves upon the work, it's a good thing. I don't know that anybody worries too much about it, but I can only imagine some of the stories that people could tell about that. But you know, at in little details here and there, you know, adding some shadows where I think they're needed. It's funny because once you start to think it, you can really see have you know, flaws in your pencil sketch where you thought it looked good in pencils. But then when you start to think, you realize it needs more in certain areas of ink, actually exposes quite a bit about what needs to be done. You want these nice, heavy lines again, either on the rounded shapes or heavier as they come out towards camera or both. What we got to remember, a lot of this is gonna be filled in so we can jump right in there and kind of connect the dots with that fill in for the muscle there down here. So what I try to do is, since I know that I'm going to just try to paint bucket, fill this, try to make sure as I'm going I'm connecting all my lines instead of having to go back and check everywhere, uh, and see if I did accurately connect the lines. But I'm sure I'll mess up because it's it's one of those things where you always think they're connected, but there's some little gap somewhere in there. But just, you know, filling that end is probably one of the nicest things about working digitally, I think, because just so fast to do your fills. But there's definitely pros and cons to each. I still don't feel like I get as nice of a line that somebody it's really proficient with Croke Wells and even brushes pretty close. But not, you know, there's just there's just a certain the fact that you get with Crow crows that are just amazing to me. But for me, it was better to go digital because I had never mastered the croak well as well as I'd like to. I get pretty good with a brush and I still use brush, synthetic brush pens. But I I resort to a lot of my crowns and Pippen's because they're just easier and portable and cleaner in a lot of ways. You don't have to clean a model and things like that and crow close. I would always manage to flick it across the page and cause a big, a big mess. Messi guy. Okay, so again, just kind of connecting the dots here. All at this point, all of this is on one layer. So as long as I just do something like this and connect over Aiken, start thinking of this in terms of, ah, dropping NFL. But then you could do this a couple of ways. You can actually draw selection, but I like I like, actually drawn around, kind of like him really doing it traditionally. And then I would grab a big marker to fill these other areas. And so that's what I do want to Matt comic shows and doing artwork. All I just use my big markers for hair is like this. Let's see, like right here. Since I didn't connect that line, that's where it would have bled through. So there's that and fill it. There we go. And then as I come up to areas like this, I just really want a, you know, re emulate what's there. But if I could make it better off, maybe maybe I see that the lines are a little too wobbly or they could be a little more impactful if they were just a little thicker or just by adding one or two more. It blends better. Whatever the case may be, you know, that's what I think of when thinking, you know, just like, how can I improve that? Would it look better with a little bit of cross hatching in this area, or is it too distracting? Just little things like that. So right here, Same thing. I want to bring in more of these lines. I don't think like two or three is enough right here. I'm just gonna draw these in trying to make him pretty thick, and then I something. By the end of it, then I don't know if I like bringing those lines straight out. So sometimes when I draw, I'll draw it in quicker, and I don't think about it as much. But then, when I'm making it. I changed things that just think would look a little bit better if these lines were on an angle from one another. Okay, so same thing right here. Think that. Then we try to round out the shoulder a bit, and I mean, really, all those. All these lines are, you know, radiance. You're just trying to soften up that edge. But since all of you have is black white, you've got to use cross hatching or stippling or whatever. But that's really all you're doing is you're just trying to convey different feelings with just think, no different textures, different amounts of, ah, rigid or softness, whatever it is you're trying to draw. And then, you know, obviously by the thicker line what? You're trying to move the shapes. So line breaks represent highlights. Heavy lines represent shadow or definition, little things like that. I also play around with different shapes of the lines. So, like, right here, I'm seeing that it goes straight and it curves over just a little bit. So I'll kind of try different things in that regard as well. Instead of just making just a simple curve like curve like that, it's kind of be boring sometimes. So sometimes you're gonna just a little bit of style by throwing a a different angle or curve. With that, uh, you look right here is a good example where, you know, it could've very easily just did it round and kind of downward curve to the muscle. But throwing in this extra little shape just adds a bit more character to it makes it a bit more interesting that combined with little line breaks or whatever, just little style choices that I could bring some lines this way to see if this I hope so, had some depth to the rib cage. There generally have, ah, segment right here for the obliques. I didn't have that and throw that in there, see if I like it. I actually kind of perceived that I didn't want this character being too overly defined, a little bit more simplified and not quite cartoony, but a little more animated kind of feel. But then, sometimes I'll start that way and then add in more detail as I go, just based upon kind of force. A. Have it because I'm just used to detail in a lot of you know characters and adding a lot of rendering into my work. But sometimes it's nice, very that up and change it up. So again, nice heavy line for the light here. Another thing is, you know, to use a different size brush or, in my case, working digitally. It means zooming out. So that's kind of a comparison I try to make with digital to traditional there a lot of ways of the same. But with Digital, you have to zoom out if you're working too tight to something, especially if you're trying to get this big sweeping curve. If it's if you're real tight to the work, you're just not gonna be able to get nice move, curve. I think then the other thing is, you know, getting it just in the right position for the way that you like to work like that. But I actually feel like this used to be pretty prominent. Keep bumping this up like them. Remember to you could make lines look real heavy by comparison by making other areas of it light. So So it's pretty light right there. I could purposely make it light right here as it comes down to the knee. I probably wanted pretty thick on the bottom of the knee, but I could probably had that thickness over to this side tapered off and have to get rolled then, like those. So it's kind of neat how the comparison will make this look real heavy on if it was the same all the way through. It would kinda look born. Definitely looks heavier like that. But I think it looks more interesting when it goes from pick that thing like that, you just kind of pick and choose where that might happen and maybe real thick right here on the edge of this muscle. Have it now and then quickly, pacto thick because it's gonna be on a shadow side. So lots of ways to really interpret how to do that. And you know the same thing here. Well, thin upon the top, a little bit thicker down here. It just helps toe make it not look so boring. These were almost like little wrinkles in the suit. I can't throw those in wherever well, sometimes you can get a nice line to I just slowly settle slowly and steadily, pulling the line lots of different ways to try to get the mechanics of it. Get this foot shape in here. Here. I don't have to worry about the line except on the outside perimeter. Since I'm gonna fill us in anyways, shape in there, I think I will use someone. Work right there and a little bit right there. Possibly someone of the me right there. So I'll just close off the rest. These areas and Phil get in a little bit tighter and makes you want to pull these lines from the bottom up. Some kind of perceiving the darkest point being the foot. So I'd like to taper these going up in away from that foot. Give me as I get quiet because I'm trying to concentrate. I definitely feel that I have to concentrate more. One of making seems strange, considering the drawing process. You're trying to develop a design and a character and all that, but concentrate more. One aching. Maybe it's a different part of concentration. I don't know. Okay, so no side of this leg can kind of thinking of the line as it comes up around the bend. Least that's what I'm thinking here. And here's the line break for the suit sign and let's foot plus back around. And also, you know, it's good to just step back and kind of see it coming together. Make sure getting what you're after look wise. I think that's about right. It's still a little early to tell, but, um, but it's definitely good to look at it from a distance. It would take a break, take a breather and come back to it, clear their, I think, couldn't see a little bit of, ah, side of the muscle here. We'll just throw that in for a little bit more design, okay? And again, over here with the other lions, All right, so I'm gonna go and wrap up here and will continue on to our next lesson and continue to think our character. So let's move on. 13. Inking Our Superhero Character Part 2: All right. So let's continue thinking. Let's ah, jump up here to the glove here. This has kind of a few different services, Really? And I want to add a little bit to it. So sure, you how weaken had some on the fly there. One of the other things that I like to do is add this little lines like this as a making, even though those lines weren't there tryto be pretty quick, Dad. Those in not worried too much about it. And let's see this bottoms gonna get filled in. So I do have to worry about line. Wait here. But then once it hits this next edge Lime, Wait. Yes, I know it will matter because we have the separation of the highlight. A room lighting right here. We'll try to get that in there with a few different curves. Trying not to be too plain about that, I guess Notice to you can move lines around Ah, little bit just by where you ink inside or outside of the line. So even though it doesn't seem like much, sometimes these details can be pretty. Ah, noticeable. And you can just if you want to thin this area out. Maybe bring your line on the inside of it, so you're basically just nudging the line. Sometimes that can fix things, and other times it's not enough. You gotta go back to a re drawer, do whatever, but sometimes you can fix some Samaras. That way there's another way to pull your lines to we pull into him. Obviously, you could do it any way you want, but you got to get better at that. I've noticed that certain brushes I can do that and with certain ones I cannot. So I just have to try that out once it works best for you, but I generally do better pulling from thicker side out. But I've also noticed a certain applications work differently for me on that. So when I'm working in ah, procreate on the iPad Pro, actually, I have to go thin to thick. It's kind of weird, but different APS work different ways. I guess so again. Here, I'm gonna try to use a couple lines and then a couple lines the other direction just to add a little bit of style to it and make it not look so boring. So just tiny little things like that can, you know, had a bit more detail here. I don't have to worry about the line. Wait just the edge of it. Because I'm gonna be fell in the Seine anyways. So again, just kind of get this line in place. It could be a thin line decline. It doesn't matter. Look, like it's somewhat rounding around the character, and then here I'm kind of perceiving that I'm gonna draw this highlight in, but then we're gonna shade it back a little bit, and I'll show you in a second. What I mean by that must be the break for the bias up, uh, can trying to check the edges as I go, so I can fill this end and not have it bleed off into the rest of the image in this little shape. Here is full speed. Kind of Ah, a bit of that other side of the tricep that you're gonna see on the bottom of the arm. Okay, let's go. An attempt to fill the same Now, there we go. Trip Any little miss spots? Yes. What I meant by shading and part of this highlight. It's really up to you if you want to do something like this, but you can sometimes even shape back into the highlight area and kind of round out the forms that way as well. So you don't have to just shade, you know, from the areas that are kind of open. And there's across. Actually, you could even shade in Samir highlight areas. You can do lines going across this way and with him separate. So just little things to kind of add a little bit of designed to the work. I have to be much and doesn't have to take a tremendous small time. It's probably better if it doesn't. Oh, things like that. Okay. And that's good detail, this hand known. So you see these lines of really messy and I didn't clean him up a whole lot. Uh, so there's a certain amount of practice where, you know, you got to find that sweet spot for yourself and go, Well, I can't know where I'm going with this. I don't need to Draught, you know, entirely refined for me to keep moving forward. Once you get to that point, it's really nice because you're you're gonna pick up speed, be able to just kind of and I don't want to say wing it because you're not really winging it, but you're you're just taking it, um, you know, through the finality are finality with confidence. But, you know, if you're not there yet, and out there, I spend a lot of time or finding things just to know what it's gonna look like before I add the Yanks over time. And, uh, there's nothing wrong with either way. It just depends on what you're after is faras speed, you know, Do you have to complete a page a day or do you have toe? You know, you're somebody wants to get to Page is out of date. I mean, that's to me. That would just seem insane, but I'm sure people do it. And then, um, are you Somebody just has to a page a week. It just depends on where you're at. I think that basically, on my good days, I can pencil in income page in a day. So that's that's pretty good for me on what I do with the creating my own comic. But, um, some people, they have to do more than that. And if I was just penciling. I could definitely do a page a day fully detailed or, um, maybe up to two pages. That would definitely depend upon what's on those scripts. And you know how many, uh, panels and what type of panels? Things like that. Okay, so what? This area? I also want to fight the urge to not detail every finger. The same sounds silly, but it's repetition like that that will take things from looking organic and natural and make him look mechanical or not as impressive. Hands are definitely that way. And like you see, I've got these overly repetitive shapes just like this, and it's OK, but it's definitely adding to the look that that's an animated hand. You know, that doesn't look as realistic as it could. One way you could get away from that is just throwing some Brandon Myers shapes like, you know, something like that. And then bring this one over and down and back up, you know, just change it a bit. The metal knuckles larger so we could say that this is actually a lower shadow, and it's gonna make it look larger than the one where the shadow comes up on the finger. So just little little things like that, You know, if you want Oh, try it out. Just try to make things look a little bit different from each other. You can generally make it look a little more organic. Obviously, the fingers you could get in here and do things like this and, you know, drawing the pockets of the skin and the wrinkles kind of mawr evident. I'm not gonna worry about that for this design, but that's another way to kind of do that, get in here and fully zone. But I think that's why it's still helpful to do realistic studies, especially as it pertains to anatomy on definitely hands, fish piece expressions. Things like that because there's a lot. There's a lot of information to pick up on and imaginative, imaginative drawing is great, but you've gotta have some understanding how the stuff works. That's what I have to go back into those studies. Um and yeah, there's just a lot of information there. I don't I don't know how you would just know it, you know, without doing some accurate studies over and over again. At least that's how I have to learn it and kind of breaking up the the line there intentionally and then putting a heavier line. There may be little doubt at the end, just tiny little things. Uh, you're the shadows. More of a drop shadow from the two pads of the and being separated and get in here and do a little bit of rendering here. Okay? And then with this part, we probably just keep some of these wrinkles or at least rendering lines going on that a little bit more designed to this area. Okay. And these were originally the lines for the knuckles that I had right there, but they actually kind of looked like good Claire lines. So I'm gonna kind of roll with that and, uh, put those in place. I'll just coming over him a little bit. But now they look more like glares off thes. No, Consider, like some Mom wants a brass knuckles, but metal knuckles on the end of his glove. Maybe just to add that extra will impact to the punch. Okay, so now the downward bulls here and just feathering these lines. See, I very rarely doing in one poll just so used to redrawn them over and over again like that probably would be faster to master a single, singular poll as I went down like this, but just not my not my style. And I also try to do a variation in the way that these thick to thin lines a line to one another. So if you notice there's Ah, White like gap between each one in some of the renditions or some of the rendering that I dio, I'll purposely close that gap so that it looks more like, um, I don't know how to explain it comb Sana, her teeth on a comb. But I guess this kind of looks like teeth and comb essentially just tighter toward they start filling in like this. So there's there's different variations throughout my work where I'll try to mix that up and then obviously cinema will do a crosshatch line going in their way. But the main thing is just exceed right here. See all these air rolled tight in this area. So the main thing is just to have lots of variety so that I think it just sits off the page better. It looks like you've got more tools in your toolbox kind of thing. You're not just doing this one concept of banking over the entire thing. Um, yeah, I guess that's just preference, but that's how I see it. Okay, so now I think that explains a lot of what I'm doing. I'm really just repeating myself and doing these things over. One thing I will explain before I jump into the grass is I also like to come back even in the cross hatching, and I'll do like little line breaks of white. I think that adds another effect will definitely do that in areas where trying to draw some attention and make it look a bit more detailed in the rest. So something else I do there and that can again be done with a white out pan or correction correction fluid. So I'm gonna time lapse the next part finishing king this up and we will get the background ready to go 14. Inking Our Superhero Character Part 3: - Okay , okay. 15. Inking the Background Part 1: All right, so now we're ready to ink the background, and I actually added a layer with some perspective guides just because I want to show you how bad my background was. There's a lot of areas that are actually off, so I probably should have started here. But like I said, you can kind of work on it from two different directions. Hold you have to do is as you start, Teoh, correct these lines, you know, maybe use these guides Teoh to be a little bit mawr tune in line with what you got to do. But, you know, honestly, if I think this, I don't know that anybody would have said anything, you know, it's one of those things were I want you to be aware of it, and that's why I'm showing you this. But I think I could probably think this and correct it a little bit, and no one would even know. I've seen lots of illustrations where they were inked like that. And once it all comes together, it seems to look a bit better. But I'm gonna try to fix more of it just because I think that it would, you know, show professionalism and try to make his correct as possible. So what I'm gonna do is take the the red lines and actually put those behind, um, other layer, just so it'll be a little bit easier to read when we go like this. Drop behind there and then I'm gonna tone these back just a little bit. I just learned that so intrusive, you know? But they're there for reference. And then I'm gonna go on top of the other layer and start aching. So I'm gonna do some of this in real time, and then I'll time lapse after I explain enough of it. So basically, now that I've got a lot of the information in place, it's definitely not refined, but it's there. I'll just go over top. And I'll actually tried to, um, make it a little bit. Um, I'm gonna clean it up, obviously, but I'm actually going to make it a little bit of more texture. Too rough, I guess because I want to add in, like, you know, broken break here and there. I mean, nothing towards the background, because it will just be to smaller, really distinguished. But as I work through these areas, you know, might chip in the rock a little bit like that and, you know, just make these little decisions as I go. So it's just like when I did the character. I wanna embellishes to make it better each time. But as I come to, if something's going noticeably off in the perspective, I can use that guide, and this one's actually pretty close to being on. Uh, luckily, because of the way this software is, I could just hold shift, get a straight line. We sail that line, looks just to clean and to crisper. At least that's the way I see it. That's what I'm gonna just take certain lines like that. So you know, I'm just gonna do it by hand. But as I get in here, I wanna, you know, puts messages on it. There is that initial line. I'll start with that, and I try not to make the lines themselves to awfully clean anyway. So I like I put a lot of variation on them. I think that the more you look at stuff around, just not as clean as you think it is. There's a lot of grit and grind everything. So right here. You see, this one's really off, so I'll start here. I guess so. I'll start over here where it's kind of even and then as I draw, just stick to that red line a little bit more and this gives me why with obviously. So as I come this way, I kind of just have to map it based on the distance of us, this grid and you can make these grids and save them even if they're on regular paper. Just just make him in. Ah, straight. And some with perspective, you know, vanishing points kind of thing. And then just use those over top of other sheets of paper so you can you can make yourself all sorts of neat little time savers. Did you get into this? So you so have a graphics business, and I realized I always needed to. There was a certain part of what I did. I always had to measure a couple inches onto aboard. And so I made a little wooden pattern with Ah, really, it was just two pieces of wood screwed together in a hole in it with a pencil and gave me a perfect two inch kind of like a compass, and I would just go around the edge of my sign boards with it, and it was It was a useful little tool. It's like such a such a silly thing. But it made such a world of difference, and you can think that way about almost anything but in arts and crafts and all that, it's highly important. You kind of figure out things that conceive you that amount of time. Okay, so he was able to crack that. I'm sure it's off here and there, but and then what happens is the hard part is just ignoring what's there. But after I've got this in place, I just start from the one side, only straighten this out of probably easier to see here, so I'll start from this side now and I know the pattern. But I have to ignore the fact that it jumps up here. So and I want to start condensed and then work my way out and then just start to space it. Now there's ways to measure this where you can get these perfect, but I'll be honest. I'm I'm not going to spend that kind of time trying to get edge work like this Perfect when I could just get it done. So, I mean, maybe that sounds ah, easy to some people I don't know, but a very time sensitive on this stuff. Because I've missed deadlines with foreign. It's not fun. So I do my best to, you know, get it done, make it look in a reasonable amount of time and learned to the next thing. Uh, nothing is worse than, ah, coming up to a deadline and then calling your client and saying you got a any more time, so just like that wouldn't get that in place. Make that correction, you know, keep moving forward. It's not. It's not that big of a deal. Like just because the lines are off, you just have to get used to look and throw him. And you Obviously the great definitely helps. At this point. Make sure these ones aren't even sold those out there Now. The other thing that I think helps is really jumping in and blocking in your shadows. I think I've mentioned that already, but I'm a big fan of that because it I don't know, it helps solidify the image rather quickly and it gives you ah, you know, kind of a basis on what to do next. It feels like you're moving quickly when you're blocking your shadows. I don't know what it is about that now I do want to do a little bit across at your here, and I'm not gonna do that everywhere, cause it'll it'll get messy. But we're pretty close up on the structure here, So I think I want to do that here. I just I really like cross hatching. Are shading like this. I think it adds a lot of flavor to the work, But again, you don't want to do it so much toe where it becomes distracting. So that's what I'm saying. I'll use it on the buildings that are close, but then I'll force myself to not use it, cause I'd probably put this stuff everywhere if I had enough time and energy. I guess I've got plenty energy, but not always enough time to do this part. But I just like render. I love the look of cross hatching and shading like this. I think it's just the coolest, so icing on the cake for me so some like, damn, and that's it. You know, I won't get to off into that, but I do like putting a lot of like, little rendering lines. Like stuff like those you hear. I'll put a shadow on the side of this is kind of another little brick raised off the other . So just little things like this can make buildings like more interesting and well thought out. They don't take hardly in extra time. I am a couple of lines there, a couple here and again, these air more just texture than anything. I'm just tryingto make the buildings look a bit weathered and interesting. But, you know, I don't want to spend too much time there. But you can do these little staples and dabs pretty quick over the final image. You know, you could see when you get it all done. It's really easy to go back and add a layer of that about losing too much time. Okay, so let me turn this again because I want to show you, like, right here, where it's, you know, it looks like this part's pretty close. You see, those windows are pretty close, so here I can just shoot over and do this. I mean, if it's close, it's gonna probably read well. And also I'm doing if I'm if anything is I'm looking at this line in this line, and I can pretty much just draw my own line and tell where this needs to go. So if I bring it this way and I look at where I'm at between these two lines and kind of see that it just needs to drop down a little bit, Yes, I think so. We shall see. And then here are pretty close. But, you know, it still needs to be adjusted. So I'll just that and again, I'm just really blocking in these shadows first, the neat thing to about perspective drawing is it all assists the other thing that the next thing. So as you get more of this down, there's more and more to aid you in the next part in the next part. So it actually does get easier. As you do it. The hard part's getting started like anything else. You just gotta start making marks and make sense of it as you go. But we all get so flustered in the beginning so we hesitate to make that first mark are we make reasons why we can't make the next mark in the next mark on the next block. You just got to keep pressing forward cliche. I know, but it's the truth. All right? So from that ridge right there and I gotta bring this line down and then just continue it. You seem able to straight that my lines pretty good. I mean, I could be ruling these and I get, you know, pretty much perfect lines. But you really don't have to mean less. Let's just want to And you really you know, let me put it this way unless you still need it because you've tried it this way over and over again. It doesn't work. Then let this part come organically and naturally don't force it. Don't ever force really anything but anything in art because, uh, there's certain times where you just need to kind of catch up as far as you know, seeing it. And I want you see it it becomes easy. So allow yourself that time. Don't get flustered. Don't expect it too soon. Just keep creating and you'll get it. Okay, so now right here. We gotta bring this over to show that height. That next piece shake down. This is gonna be thicker than this one because we're closer to this. Ah, window. Okay, so now let me pan back. And and the other thing you want to be careful while you're working digitally. You want to be careful not to zoom in too much, but I guess even traditionally want to be careful not to over detail and get in there all tight with your 0.3 micron 0.1 micron. You know, you got a get to space it out. So now let me, um, toggled us off if there's enough here even to see, But just checking the perspective kind of went off right there. Still, but a lot closer than the previous one. So I'm gonna just continue on with this eso Let me see if there's anything else I can explain before I jump into time lapse. Because I'm really going to just correct a lot of this. Um, you know, I'm gonna block in the shadows. I explain that will start there in each area. Then I'll work into the details are correct perspective as I go, you know, straightening out window edges and, you know, probably add little details, but not much. I mean, I'm probably looking for a close up detail. What you see here, you know, especially like what I'll do here. I'll do like a little bit of these straight lines and had some texture as I go. So it doesn't look like, uh, so Plane Jane everywhere. We'll do stuff like that. I might add a couple of these, like, tiny little cracks and separations, But again, Onley in the stuff up close. It's not gonna make sense. Add that back here. Um, yeah, and that's really it. I mean, if I think of anything else that needs to be explained, I'll stop and explain it, but that's really it's a repetitive process of that. Now, back here, I definitely have to add in more little, you know, separations in details just looks to playing in all this, so I'll make sure to address that as I go. But this is kind of what I'm shooting for right here. Eso with that all time lapse this and get it done. 16. L15 Inking the Background Part 2: - Okay , Okay, - okay . 17. Coloring Our Superhero: Okay, so for this part, I'm actually gonna show you the full interface. So this is the program I've been using throughout the course in the classes Manga studio five or clip studio pain. You can use whatever you want, but for the coloring and felt I should probably show this even though for traditional coloring, a lot of the same rules still apply. You're just gonna, you know, use a variety of techniques to get what looks like what I'm gonna do here. But, you know, you still kind of drop in color and you add tone over top. That's how I pain anyways. But the beauty of digital is you're able to really itemize it and drop your flats and something to go right here. Notice that the character and the background are all separate. And that's just the way that I built up the ink on. You know, people look at this and go Well, that's not how traditional artwork. So I can't follow along. It's actually not true. In fact, whenever I would make changes, I might end up making changes. This arm and I want to make sure to let you know there's times I made changes to my finished artwork, inks and everything. And I would just take a piece of paper and drop it right over top, just like that and ink over top. I've seen lots of artists do this in traditional, so it's kind of the same way layers work, so just keep that in mind. It's digital, emulating traditional, not the other way around. So, uh, you know, even though I'm using a digital software to do this, there's always a way to do it. Traditionally, um, so yes, So now with the flats, we just want to drop in the flat color to each area. I like to separate this in the layers because it just makes it easier. But there's lots of flat artists that will put them all on one layer and based on using selection tools that can still grab those areas. So whatever we want to work. But the main thing is, is that you just start painting in your base color. I'm thinking, like kind of a slate blue, greyish blue, and remember, you can always change this stuff as you go, but what I want to do is actually put this in between the character in the background. So I've got her character here, and that's gonna have to come up here. And I put ah, flood layer in between the character in the background. So I have to make sure that my my layers air set up properly. But generally, when all this isn't, you will just drop this all behind the line work so it's still behind the line work. But this particular layer is behind the character, so I'm actually gonna segment him a little bit. And you know, this is just the fun coloring part. So when dropping and flats, you just want to basically get behind the line work, and you want to get your base colors in place, and then you will generate selections from those and do all your color effects. I'm thinking something like this for the suit now. Like I said, it's pretty easy to make changes to this. So even though I'm starting with this is by no means me means that I have to stay with this . Basically, Aiken selected and change the color really quickly. You can actually change the color without even re selecting it with the sliders that Aaron programs like this. Like hue, saturation. It's all under filter. No, at it. Total correction, hue, saturation. Things like this, you can actually just sliders and make all sorts of color changes really quickly. So lots of ways to do it. But this is just one way that I wanna implement this. So first, I'm just going to take this Now, keep in mind, you don't have to Action. I went over there, didn't I? Okay, I'm gonna keep this. We gotta fear or the suit design ends. I think I'm gonna end it right here on the the chest. Yes. So the shoulder here, we'll just grab us a clear brush. That's what this bottom one means here, the same brush, but just to clear a transparent version. So what I'll do is I'll actually color all this. Um What? We want the breaks in the suit designed to be Yeah, and then I'll pick back up right here. So another way you can do it, obviously is Just grab some of the selection tools here, and you could just select the area of your quicker at that. You can just draw behind the the black line there with your selection tool and then fill it . So whatever way you feel most comfortable with actually to draw my men another way is just to draw around the very edge. This is probably the most efficient, depending on how quickly you draw so again. If you're quick with the selection told in this, that would be the better way for you. But I have to connect the areas. Make sure there's no open areas with a color. Complete. Thorough has got to remember the line work here is in Ah, isn't your very edge colors and then just drop that in. But you do have to watch out for artifacts unless you've got the brush itself set to no fuzzy ads or whatever. I just go back to clean it up because I actually don't like the brush when it set Teoh. That's setting where it basically is a full solid edge, like a little bit of softness to any brush I use, and also what I'll show you here in a little bit is how I soften up the inclines by putting a galaxy and blur on them for the same reason. I just don't like the overly digital feel that you get at the very end of the work. So I'll soften that up with the things like the Galaxy and Blur. Did I get the knuckles in there? Yeah, that's point. The knuckles are actually gonna be a different color, but what I'll show you there is you can actually just add a layer over top and paint right over that. No problem or again, you could select that area and just shift the color. What if you want to dio I'm gonna do a little bit of his real time. Explain some of this. I know it seems probably a little slow and boring at this point, but this is Ah, this is the rate in which I really the speed at which I really get this done probably a little bit quicker when I'm not trying to explain it, but still pretty, uh, be a slow process. But it does pick up speed. One of things that you can do is actually create a full selection of the character and then isolate areas and shift the color. That's another way was really have lots of ways to do this. And I know that when you're going for print work. There's certain roles that you want to follow. Eso you want to check your end result. I'm always going to say that in these types of lessons, like, um, for what I do, it seems to work fine. But I know there's certain rules to, uh the flighting process. We have to make sure everything overlaps properly. So what's ah, what's going? Drop in another color? What I want to do here is I'll just go ahead and label these based on the colors, so I will call it Just call this blue because it's gonna be inside the character it anyway , So we don't really have to get more descriptive in that, Uh, let's make the cape more of, uh, Marone or let's just read for now. But again, we can shift this, and I tend to start de saturated as much as possible, because if I don't, my colors tend to be overly saturated. It's all kind of start this way, and I slowly built up to it, so I always find myself having to de saturate the work at the end. I don't know why that is. Apparently, I just like bright colors organic. Probably just isolate the edge here. I have really hard time. Stand within the lines, as you can probably tell an artist that can't color. Imagine that. Okay, so where did I go? I know. Went out of this just a little bit back with that translucent brush. Fix them. And I should be able to fill the san after this part. No. Did I miss something? So that's the effect you get if you don't feel on an edge, I'm not sure why I missed it. It's probably somewhere in the shadow over here again. I kind of take it for granted. Now, this particular program does have an ability to reference the line work and do your fills much faster. I don't worry too much about it, Um, because I'm a glutton for punishment. But there is an effect where it does that you can look that up if you want to utilize it. But I just I just do it like this. Now the thing is to I don't want to make this too much about this particular software in this coloring process again, I wanted this to be generic for people that just want to learn the process s so you're just gonna implement whatever software, but keep in mind, all of them work in the same regard. I know it's hard, hard pill to swallow when you see somebody using a specific thing, and then you go to use your own software and you can't relate something. But just remember, they're all layers. They all work off layers now on they almost all, if not all of them use blending modes and whether or not they're called something different or whatever, but blending modes air. Just this little thing here, where you can apply an effect in the way of the color, reacts from layer to layer on, you know, reacts above and below another layer. So it's You may have to find a work around if you see something I'm doing years in a different software, but they all again reacts pretty much the same way. Okay, so now I have to figure out another color for the trim of the suit. And then I think the helmet is probably gonna be the same blue, too, but we're still kind of figuring this out, So let's go and add one more layer. Let's just call this trying to think what color Want to implement their red blue and maybe a grave for now. Light blue? Yeah, let's do that. I'm just gonna put healthy and then blue and pick the late Ah, great blue here. You mean I'm not the greatest with color, so we'll just, uh, figured so. We make it kind of thing. And again, even if it's way off from what the end result be, that just gives me an opportunity to show you how easy it is to change these things on the fly. Now that little highlight line actually needs to be the red, his wall. Someone adjust that well, when conclude this lesson here and we'll finish up the flats and the following lesson. So let's move on. 18. Adding the Flats Part 2: here for what I'm. Maybe the knuckles could be the lighter color. I guess we could. We could almost end up shading this where it looks a bit chrome crime, like basically with the tent in the shading. And that's really what I was picturing for the the knuckles on the suit like they were almost a little Adam piece of metal. Maybe that's what we'll do for these these parts of the suitors, while just having match so again, as long as it's over that other layer, it's really easy to drop in here. So my power, by keeping this line art as a floating layer. It's also really easy. Teoh color the line work after the the rest of the effects are on on there's that, All right, so now we've got our base flats primarily for the character without the helmet and the neck area, which will be skin tone. So let's go ahead and take the darker blue. Let's get that in on the home it here. Make sure on that darker blue layer where that's the only other thing you gotta worry about . If you're switching layers like this, you got to kind of keep track of that. But again, all this is really easy to add it. It's not a big deal. If you make a mistake and you put something in their own layer, you select it. You cut, cut and paste a copy and paste. But it's actually you want to cut it away from that layer. So you use Just remember all your cutting pace under edit, and you've got shortcut commands there to memorize command. See for copy Command V for paste. Could I believe his command X Yeah. Commit man X command be we'll give you Ah, cutting paste. Okay, so there's the helmet on there. Let's quit at the skin tone. Don't pick something oranges, tan or whatever. And again, almost never get skin tone right the first time. No matter what character I'm doing, I just drop it in and then modified as I go. But you think generally used this kind of base, really, for whatever character doesn't matter, and you can adjust it up down. Add more red at more brown Atmore. Um, you don't really wanna have yellow, but forget a really pale person, I guess. But there's actually even blue in skin tones which is kind of crazy, and it never realized that at first. But when you're doing specific mood lighting and things like that, um, give it a certain skin tones. You'll actually put a under undertone of blue, just kind of wild, but and I'm kind of trying to figure out if that spot right there needs to be skin tone. I'm gonna going to go with skin tone for now, but I think that's supposed to be the side of the Cape pretty bad. I don't know that with my own artwork here, but still trying to figure it out. And then I believe the eyes white for now. But I plan on making those glow almost picture like the character has, like glowing eyes. I thought that would be kind of neat. Maybe we get some of that glow to bounce off the the skin on the edges of the helmet. I always think of the need. Want to characterize powers, and it just kind of emanating from makes him look more powerful, more powerful, I guess. Okay, so now there's our There's our base, um, flat to whatever to the character. So now for the background, same thing. I'm gonna condense us down just to make it easier to see and these are actually should be together at this point, Merges together. I just ignore the perspective. Grids actually could probably just take that away. That's what I had in place before. But now I just want just the line work. So you see, that's all right behind the character. And I'm gonna add a layer beneath the background now and let's just call this. I guess we could start with Sky type the words guy. That'd be nice. And I'm gonna go with even more of a decent rated Great blue pretty light. Another way to do this is actually just to grab my selection tools over here. Just start with the whole background, drop it in like that and then build up from there. The reason this is actually nice is because you don't end up with all the little gaps of light as you're working through it on with background. You can actually do this pretty quickly with selection tools because you can just come in here with the straight selection tool and you can isolate the building. And since there's generally a lot of solid black fills. You can get in here pretty quickly and crab areas of it. I'm just gonna drop in some brown for the There is some kind of earth tone for the buildings and I'm just using space part. Move around, segment this area real quick part. We see the little hand that's just actually holding the space bar. The rest I'm just clicking around this with political tool space bar holding Last minute, Move around the screen room quick, and this is going to call these buildings Kant's polity buildings and really, it could even be a reddish brown, uh, actually gonna want to segment thes and changing as you go. But I'm just going to start with something just to get the, you know, the kind of broad strokes in. And then I can go back and edit this as I go. Eso no. With this, I could really just take each building section. You're going to notice there's a little bit of edging that I got to clean up, and that's actually part of the character. That's the way that I drew behind the building. So if I got rid of the character, you see is actually some artwork behind him. So let's see. Um, Let's just take him, actually the other way that you can do it. You can actually like transparency here. You can pick it entirely different color like that and you can actually draw it won't go outside of the edges. So I'm just gonna block in this whole next building with this color, ignoring the windows and everything, even that, like little sign right there. And this is actually supposed to be the ahead to the next building. So stop right here. But using that like transparency feature is a really great wayto to drop in color and effects without bleeding over into the next layer. I kind of go over it twice. Kind of my drawn it this way. I'll generally miss something. It's actually better to select it and then fill it and just do that for each building. Even if it's subtle, just some kind of difference for each one. And then if you want to isolate it, you can just simply select it. Command X command V. It'll drop it right back in the place. And I've got just that building on its own. Meyer. So It's always the colors. They're, you know, just enough. You know, they're different from one another. Enough to where the selection works. You're good to go. We'll just call. This is Brown Building. Well, that's quite a brown. More botanicas. I think that Titus Palmer Okay. And then again, these air kind of still together. So and then you know the great thing. Even you probably noticed this when I was thinking As you go back, things get less visible. So I really make the detail more scratchy. And, you know, it's not a does impactful or as important as the character so kind of let you know, the detail fade, a zit goes back. So back here I'll grab this next building will just show you what the selection tool is. Pretty easy. Let's go ahead. And you can also cut away with selection. I can use the last hole. You could do this with the political or the free hand. This is free, and I'll just cut in. Some of these details can not a huge It's not a real big deal, cause this isn't so detailed. Were you really gonna spot all these flaws, but try to get it as accurate as possible, and what I'll do now is just make this a bit darker, help the color and like that actual, even darker. I want to be noticeable and then command X Command v. There's another building isolated just like that. You know, when you see already, it's starting to build more depth with just these flats. That's really what we're after. We just wanna, you know, kind of start to feel out the scene, and then, as we make our adjustments with colors, will get more and more detail out of it. 19. Soft and Hard Edge Shadows: Okay, so now we're gonna start coloring the character or heading in the effects, I should say, because we very to get our base flats in the place, and that gives us a starting point. But now we've got to think about shadows and highlights and all that fun stuff. Now, one of the things I like to do is make sure that everything ad is beneath the ink Slayer. You could really just drag that all the way to the top. I'll just put that above this group, and I'm actually gonna rename the character our character color. So the more you can kind of separate this and make it easier to understand Here, it's gonna make your life a lot easier. You're gonna be able to flow through this without making too many mistakes. Um, So what I want to do here is think about how I want this character to be shaded. Now, if all of this is combined, it does become a lot easier to do certain effects. So remember that you can actually combine all this and make selections as well. Um, you know, so if your if your software doesn't do what I did there. I just right clicked on the group which combines contains everything, and it gave me one nice, unified selection. If your particular software doesn't do that, you would just combine the layers with a copy and then work from the copy to generate the selection. Or you could just freehand it in a race back whatever you want to do. But basically, what I like to do here is first think about the shadows entirely, so we'll just call this, you know, something like full body shadows or just called shadows for now is gonna be on the top most layer. So I understand what it's gonna be. And then I'm gonna set this to multiply, multiply. Just make sure that it darkens everywhere. So it doesn't just dark and colors that are darker than the shadow you're adding it darkens everything you know, to the point of and black Ever see. Black isn't gonna give me darker, but it works on making a nice uniform darkness over whatever you apply and what I'm going to uses the soft airbrush that the stronger, normal mode. I don't have to set the blending mode here because it's already set here So what I like to first start with is think about where the light source is gonna be Now, generally light source is gonna come from up above and the characters leaned over. So there's State as a reason there's gonna be some shadow on the abdomen so that this area is actually gonna be in shadow more because the light is hitting off the back of the character. So what I want to do is just kind of shade with a large soft brush, just a few of these base kind of ideas where the shadow is gonna be and noticed, too, that I'm shading from the bottom up. And there's really a couple of ways to think about lighting. Like, for instance, you could make the argument that all this is gonna be dark and from here up, it's gonna be light. Now that's pretty significant. I'm over illustrating what I'm trying to explain their but there's kind of this idea that the shadows air gonna be darker at the bottom and lighter at the top based on the light source. And then as you start to detail, you start to get in there and go wall. There's gonna be a shadow to the side of each finger and there's gonna be a drop shadow on this part of the palm, and that kind of comes later. But first, I like to immediately think about almost the broad strokes of it. And that is that there's, ah, shadow coming from the bottom up. Keep in mind to you can always make a character or creature building anything really look larger by shading from the bottom up. So just little things that you start to figure out as you do more and more of this and you can even start Teoh hint to some of the the segmentation of the body and the anatomy and things like that. But I would say probably not to get too far into that right now. Um, I like to do this in stages, and you can always come back and do what I'm doing here. But I find that if you had too many soft shadows early on, it kind of eliminates your thinking or your process for the associated effect. That's typically Mawr common and popular and comics. So I kind of start sparingly with this soft shadow effect. I don't want to get in. There is really easy to want to say. Why can make this look pretty cool by shaving everything with the soft shadow brush? And then you get this overly airbrushed look and it just doesn't breed as well for a comment page. I think so. That's probably all I need to add. Starting out for the shadow. And again, you can even think of, like areas like this of the Cape where it's gonna be Maurin Light. You can still put a bass shadow to the bottom, even a little bit of drop shot up right there, and picture that the light source is actually gonna hit right in this area more. Okay, so there is our base soft shadow and actually, just do that. Let's just call this Ah, soft shadow like that. And let's go ahead and figure out there's a couple ways you can do this. If you don't want to keep regenerating your selection and you are using this software, you can actually convert to selection layer. It's gonna turn. The character is kind of weird green. Just take the visibility off right there, and each time you tap right there in that little box. It'll give you your selection really quickly. So it's just it's just another neat thing about this particular program as it pertains to comic coloring. Okay, And another type of shadow. I caught cell shading, but hearted shadows, another way to say it. And what you're going to do there is basically draw in with a selection tool. I'm gonna use the last hole marquees, which is the prion selection tool, and this takes some getting used to. I notice a lot of artists will kind of struggle with this at first. The main thing is speed. You want to draw out the selection really quickly? I seen people to get excellent with the mouse doing this as well, but I like to use the tablet, so I'll just draw few these shapes. I'm gonna work this time just on the dark blue here I can hold shift, and I can add a few of these exam going right over the soft dead shadows, which I would seem almost a little contradictory. But it's not a big deal. We're gonna build up on this character as we go to really get a feeling of depth and you know some things will get overlapped, and that's okay. It's not a big deal, really. Sometimes you find some of the best shapes by overlapping and doing some of this. I'm just going to draw some of these shapes. And then let's just start here. I like to work on a little bit of time. As I progressed service again, I'm gonna add a layover top. I'm gonna call this hard at shadows. You can use abbreviations and stuff as you get more confident with this, I'm gonna set it to multiply again. And one of things I like to do here is actually just paint this and really could have been set to normal. I'm gonna show you why Right now, I'm gonna paint this and completely as a solid right and it's gonna look inked. For the most part, I'm gonna diesel light so commanded he's like, I'm gonna bump back the opacity here. And the reason why I like this effect is because it affords me the opportunity to see what it looks like in different levels like this. And then if I want Grady INTs in any specific area of this, I can simply take an eraser set to softer race. And I can push back some of these edges just by softly erasing. So it's a pretty versatile effect. You see, it doesn't take long at all. And I think that what happens here is you get a nicer overall look, because everything is not this, uh, the same great Asian or the same intensity all throughout. So you get a nice variation in the piece. So this is actually one of my favorite ways to do this. And you just want to start picturing, Okay, maybe there's a drop shadow that goes right across the leg like this. We could even play around and had this right over the entire lake because this is basically a shadow. Um, from the upper body, hitting this leg will try something like that again, we could start very heavy with it. We've already tone back capacity, So no matter how far I try to brush down on it were still subject to the 24 capacity right there. Mandy to de select. If I feel that that shadow is a bit too evenly distributed, I can just, you know, take back that line just a little bit here and there. Just a little subtleties like that go a long ways, and again you can really start to gauge it coming together. You can also pull back and hit command Z a couple times and see what it was like more solid . You don't make your judgment there. You can also go back and let the selection get back in place and erase it all entirely without affecting. You know, because you got to remember, it's still part of this layer here. So little things like that. And again, it's all about the little subtleties. And as we build this up with layers, it will start to be more and more impactful. Let's let's go ahead and add a little bit more. Let's go ahead and kind of crab right through here won't shift. What you need about this, too, is you can actually just kind of add pieces so you can if you find it harder to select big areas with confidence and accuracy, just doing little pieces because again, this is kind of ah, a style thing, your poor little bits of style out of us as you do it, you don't really aim for perfection. I think at least that's not the way that I approach it a little. Bits and pieces like that. You get a little drop shadows off the sides of these. Whatever again, I'll brush that. I'm pretty heavily at first. And you don't have to. You could really just brush from the back forward and let some of the top edges near the tip of the hand there be less pronounced or just go back and raise it. And you just want, you know, again, zoom back and see if it's pulling together. And the more you do this, the better you'll get at hedging off any problems that are occurring that are gonna look right. But at first I think it's just helpful since you have the layer here to add it anyways to just kind of let it let it lie and see how it comes together. And they make adjustments as you go. Just don't be so critical on yourself. So right here maybe grab underneath here something like this. And maybe I just want to test this one spot, see if this is gonna work before I you gonna move on to the other parts wanted something larger, I might work on smaller bits of it. Uh, again, I'm trying to show a little bit of forget the whole shift there. I'm trying to hold her show little bits of separation in the anatomy as well. So this isn't just coloring. It's also defining the artwork. It's sculpting the artwork as well. Just like that. We're just gonna continue through and keep doing that. This is gonna be actually a lot of fun. And it's pretty easy to do once you get the style down the year after, because you're just repeating the process. So you see, just like that, we've already got some hard at shadows. We're gonna keep doing that. We're also gonna keep mixing it up. A Sfar, Aziz, you know what definition? We want to see where our focal points are, things like that. And then we come back with the highlights. It'll start to really punch it up and make this character stand out. Eso that'll complete this lesson. Let's move on to the next 20. Adding Highlights: Okay, so now it's had some highlights and punches up a bit further. So General had probably work a lot longer on the hearted shadows throughout the entire piece, or at least the character. But I do want to kind of show you a few things, and then we're gonna pin ball back and forth and Adam all kind of, you know, piece by piece, but with light source one of first really think about where it's at now. Based on everything we've established so far, the light source is definitely from the top. It could be said that the light source. If you kind of let me see if I can come up with something you could see better. It's just the era. Have focused on the little arrow. It could be said that it's back here all the way up to here, even to here. In fact, the highlight down the helmet kind of says that the light sources up above his head, but not quite in front of him. Uh, you know, there's lots of ways you can interpret this, and you don't always have to color it exactly the way the line work is in the way they're established because the colors has a lot of power to really shift it. Certain times you have to follow along with the line work because no matter how much color , it's gonna almost look like a conflict of ideas. But in this case, as long as the light source is coming from the top, I think we're somewhat safe. So what I want to do here is Ah, as I highlight some of the blue. I'm actually just going to generate a selection from here. So select from layer creates selection. I want the light source to be up here and add a new layer. And I'm going to brush and, uh, pick like a later blue greyish blue and just brush in a little bit of a light source starting out just right up top here. So just with a soft brush for now, like that, at least with this area anyway. So it's a rounded object with the helmet rounded. Ah, soft lights were makes a little bit of sense right there. I can mess room with the blending modes and put it to something like add and you see, it turns it to Ah, you're one of the selection will Quick. It turns it to a nice bright highlight. Kind of like that. So I'm gonna put the selection back in place and figure out if there's anywhere else that I want to see. That with a light with a rounded light source so I could do the same thing I did with shadows and punch up a little bit of the light source. The front of the hand, the back of the arm. They're just little bits of, you know, nothing too dramatic because I want to go back in with the hard edge effects. But I can just work up a little bit of this light source like that, mainly keeping it all up top here. So now I can hit command d with the the selection. Get that out of the way we can jump in here and same thing we did with the shadows. We can figure out some light source. It could be like the sides of the finger here again, we can do some little design like elements as we go. My business, like that one. You know, based on where the light is, it could be on the edge. It could be on the front of the the fingers, you know, whatever. But in this case, I'm gonna start with just on the edge, the soft brush again, brushing with the selection, you know, also, we want to think about things like the focal point, like I mentioned and really building depth. So, for instance, if we look at that hand and we wanted to really punch up, then maybe we make the light source a little bit brighter to help us achieve that. And again, since we're working off layers, if this gets Teoh in your face and doesn't look right, we can always pull this back. But we'll go and start with a little bit mawr, considering that it's closer to the viewer. And again, it's a little bit more of a focal point. And you know, you're going to start with just little bits and pieces at first kind of test it out as you go, and it doesn't have to all be on the one side. In fact, I would say that if you do that, it's gonna look more boring. You just might put some of it over here, but less ah with a little bit less intensity. Maybe get a few of these little segments to the anatomy, something like that, and just glance across it real late and tested in a lower kind of intensity. And then, you know, that way you've got the one adds it's definitely more of a light source. But you got to remember, light bounces, so bounce light occurs everywhere. And ah, lot of these suits, air speculator. So you got also think about that as well. Like, how much of this, uh, you know, suit materials catching light? How speculator is it? But in this case, I'll just do a little bit of bounce light on the other side, and it's gonna look like it almost disappears from a distance. But I assure you, as you ADM or this it starts to really pull together and give you more to appreciate about the art. Okay, let's work on the chest here. So again, there's lots of ways to look at this. Let me show you. So I don't do too much of the same thing, but I am actually working on establishing edge highlights here, But on the chest, you know, you don't have to do everything again. You don't want to really repeat your steps over and over again so you could make the argument that on the chest uh, you know, you get a little bit of this edge highlight like this, like them. But then also that maybe the lights attracting you're catching in such a way. We get a nice you know, highlight like this is well, except for that MPs today, however, on there and then, you know, brush that end like this. You see, it provides a more unique effect. And I actually like that look better. I might end up going back over to here, but again, what I want you to think about is that everything doesn't have to be colored exactly the same way. Now it does make more sense that the hand being the same material is the suit here is going to be colored in a similar way. But the variations especially the subtle variations that you had throughout the work, often times will make it look more professional because I think we tend to as amateur artists, we tend to latch on to something we think looks good. And then we apply to everything on. That's something you gotta be a you know, a little bit aware of that. Sometimes more isn't always better as it applies to things like them. You see, I keep getting that weird little edge. So you got a kind of with this selection in ways you gotta let go before you get to the connection point. So I want to bring out this, uh, era right here. But begin, designate, that kind of brushed down more in the middle than the sides and de select. And that's actually look, I'm going for it certain to, uh, make the character pop a bit more now, Another interesting area here, you can select this top part of the leg muscle, and then you can also tried. Teoh, get part of this. A little wrinkle here. We'll see if that works. Yeah, a little bit notice. I'm keeping it. Keep getting that weird edge notice. I'm keeping it to the top of this Massive me right there. I could bring it all the way down here, but that would be more where shadow would occur. You can also use the all key and you can chop away if you feel that you went too far. But you like the rest of the shape. You can add it that way again, brushing your highlight real quick, disliked and just really repeat that process and start toe. Get the look here after and this really starts to pick up speed as you go. Because again, once you kind of figure out what's looking good on what you know you want to see in the work. It all starts to kind of make more sense. And you you move a bit quicker. I think whenever I explain it, I generally slow down a bit. See, I'm not trying to make these shapes perfect. I'm not going for an exact representation of any of these muscle groups. In fact, I'm just trying to, like, throw him in their brushing, enrolled quick and de select again. It's it's really nice No one that you have these layers, you can add it, so if something's not right, it's easy enough to jump back in and out. So what I want to do to is also think about this edge lighting like I talked about appear, so I'm gonna do that again on this part of the suit. It's like right here. I can just get in some of this educating, also known as room lighting. Try that and just want him here. Since authorities have already got the selection tool and again that thing about trying to pick up speed, I'm just gonna grab some of the other areas that I think would look good with a little bit more light source trying that right there again, I want to really punch up the light source on the edge. So if I hit this pretty hard, it's gonna give me a lot more light source. And on these other areas, I just want kind of a mimic of what's going on throughout the rest of the suit Mandy to de select. So it's starting to come together and you'll see Teoh, uh, what's neat about this, as everything else that you had in the scene contrasts and helps to reflect the character. So as we had Maura the shadows in the back, he's really going to start to jump off the canvasser. That's actually a lot of artists will start with the background first, but I really wanted to go through the different types of shadows that we're gonna be using throughout the peace with the character eso medical include this lesson. Let's go ahead and move on to the next. 21. Coloring to the Cape: All right. So here I want to show you how to make some color adjustments because I'm just not digging the color of the red for the cape in the light blue in the area. That's at generally when you fill in more black, that's gonna signify a darker color. So I want to try to shift that to a bit of darker blue. It's what we get there. So I've already got, like, transparency set for the red. I'm gonna pick a darker blue almost Ah, a navy blue. I'm like this And then again, with light blue here, like transparency there and we'll try it here as well, just kind of shifting the, uh, initial design of it now. So as we add these other colors in on, really, if you're adding colors over top as floating layers, you can really added a lot of this haven't go, but obviously, if you start adding colored layers over top, it might get a little bit more difficult. Not much, but I'd like to make the broad strokes first. So get these based colors and I'm already liking that more. It just felt like the Red was conflicting with the color that I was picturing for this character. So with that in place, we can now start to add in some highlights to the Cape. So I'm gonna add a floating layer over top of that for now, and I can actually generate a selection. Let's see if this is just the cape. It is what's going at. This is the cape right click, select from layer and create selection. And again it's there, floating layer for that, and I just want to add in some light source. Somebody grab a highlight color and I'll just use a soft brush for now, like them. And remember, we can, you know, also perceive that some of the light is coming through the cape and the the higher points, basically, or whatever would consider being the thinner points. You can also brush HMAS highlight on the back here, over here, so on and so forth. So the other thing we can do is we can combine the effect. So right now we're using a soft brush and brushing that in, but you can get a lot done with a soft brush is well on, then weaken de select and we can generate some selections, my drawing them in So again, kind of like associating brush and a few shapes there. It just helps give it a little bit more design. She wanna go a little bit later than that. So bad. I just want to be subtle and just remember layers or your best friend whenever you're trying to test something out. So if you're going to do this in your a little bit more unsure about what you might get, that's when you throw a layer in place, test the work, test the blending mode and then commit to it by merging it down. But since this is a floating layer, I can also just isolate this area in a race of bag. So it's not that big of a deal, so you can just trying to build some shapes in there. We do a little bit up here. I don't think you're going to see a whole lot of this, but we'll just go ahead and try it out. Experimentation is always a good thing. Yeah, this little bits and pieces here, and then we can go back. We use a small enough brush. We really don't have to generate a selection. Remember, too. If you do pain outside of the edge of a certain area to see you kind of get any end of this . You're just throwing it everywhere you remember. You can still generate a selection from each one of these layers and then reverse it. So say I go outside of this area quite a bit like that. I'm trying to do this edge lighting and I brush outside of it. I can just go back to the cape layer. Right click. It's like from layer creates selection. Hit command shift I or go to selection inverts selected area that had the lead. Nope. Sorry. Commands. I'm gonna go back to the floating layer and impolite. And there you go. You get rid of that imperfection there. So those again, there's just tons and tons of ways to clean up the work that you go. So that gives us the cape. With a few little highlights, we're gonna keep adding to that. In fact, I'm probably going to create one more selection. Those is right click. That was actually the way to generate a layer selection. Crease selection at one more floating layer. I'm gonna set this to add glow. He's the same color, same soft brush. But now what I want to do is just punch up this highlight with a bit of ah, you know, heavier, exciting. You can do it right on the very edge. You can do a little bit on the inside of maybe the cell shaded effect, you know, Where do you see? Um, do you think it would add to what I'm trying to do with this is really separate this character now from the background. So I generally had this part right at the very end, and I added sparingly because it's very easy to overdo it. It's kind of Ah, a bit too strong an effect toe add everywhere. It will actually lose the impact that it has. If you see it everywhere, something like that, just get those edges to pop a little bit more and you see that that separates him from the background just with that little bit. So that would give us some highlights on the cape and a little bit more dimension, obviously changing the color that I complete this lesson. Let's move on to the next 22. Adding Highlights to the Suit: Okay, so now we're gonna work on the dark blue of the suit design a little bit more and what I want to do there is what first have got a fix. Some of these imperfection. So just hold. Ault, If you've got these, select the darker blue. Make sure lock transparencies off. Do you want to be able to add new paint to that layer? That's what this is we're painting behind the line Work. Just fix all these little any imperfections like this. You could also think about how close you're gonna be viewing the work. One of things that I do at the very end is I actually blur the lines just a little bit to give it a more natural feel. We'll talk about that later, but so some of this will actually get corrected by that blurring effect. So you don't need to zoom in to heavily. But that's something you learn over time, you start to get a better judgment of what will be fine for the end result. But you see, there's some flaws over here as well, but that covers the darker blue material. I believe it might be a couple of missed, but again, if they're smaller, they're kind of auto. Correct. By the end of it. Okay, So what we want to do here is now lock transparent pixels, and this is going to be pretty simple of a process. So I'm just gonna paint right on this layer. First, start with later bloom. So we're first generating a highlight. Probably little bit more. De saturated doesn't need to be to ah, to saturated. But we cant was de saturate as we go as well. So what I want to do is first established where these highlights are gonna be. So if I want to propel this character off the page a bit more, I want the areas that are more dominant, more focal points toe have brighter highlights of the shoulder. You know, it's gonna kind of be all over the place on this because if you notice he's air, just edge lightings or room lighting that's left over from the thinking process. So you want to bring these out anyways you want probably have a little bit of bounce light on the back there, so it separates from the cape We all the way down the leg with that pretty strong right here because again, this is a part of the design where it's coming out towards the view or more so. It should be stronger by comparison to this back leg, just kind of throwing in this little bit of bounce like remember, light balance is all over the place some quick time. Another thing we can dio that's ah, pretty easy to Dio as we can turn the brush mode combined mode there to add glow and with the same exact brush, we can punch up a bright light source. So now what happens is we're making this material look more like the helmet with that speculate highlight. And again, you want to use this sparingly. It's kind of it looks Sony that, I think definitely beginning when you start figuring out effects like this, you just Wow, that's cool. I'm gonna put it everywhere, and it actually again. It will lose the impact based on that so you can you can add it everywhere, but you've got to definitely have areas where it's more predominant and you really want to use it sparingly. Oh, I actually just try to keep it on this side and you know what? The main point to be? The shoulder here want the head in the shoulder because those those of the highest points in the scene and then this light Because again, I wanted to look like it's coming out towards camera, so that should be enough right there. Check it from a distance and make sure it's not, uh, too distracting, basically, and that's it. So that adds a little bit more definition to that part of the suit and some stronger speculate highlights, and that will complete this lesson. Let's move on. 23. Coloring the Buildings Part 1: known this lesson. I want to switch to the background. So remember, we've got this itemized and separated where if we were to condense this down, this is just our character, the inks around a floating layer for that character. And then if we take the background, it's on its own group instead of layers. So what I want to do there now is jump down here and we've got the thanks right there. And we've got each building kind of segmented. So with buildings, I typically will. I think I've already mentioned this, but I'll reiterate I typically do a fade from the bottom up. Now you can use Grady ants, which I'm not really a good, uh, person. Explain this as much because I don't I don't really use Grady INTs like this as much, but I do want to show you how they work. So if we go to foreground to background, it looks like it's red white, But it's not actually just showing you the Grady in the color that you're gonna get is here . So you've got foreground background to these two swatches. I just hold Ault, grab one of the colors. Go to the other one and then change that color. So that's your foreground A background. It's not this That was confusing for me in the beginning. So I want to make sure to explain that if you are using this particular software and remember, this software is a lot like photo shop, but the the interface is quite different. But now what happens is if you lock that transparent pixel and pull this Grady int, you're going to get that and the dark should be at the bottom side. Should pull that in the wrong direction. And the way it works is if I was to pull a very short, abrupt line, it's gonna condense that Grady in, and you see that the majority of it at the bottom is now dark. But if I pull that all the way down and I'm past the building, I'm gonna get more dark to the The extension passed it. Okay, so if I was to start here and pulled way down, the top is gonna be highlight, and that's really the look I want. I don't want the the bottom of this building to be significantly darker because kind of a daytime scene, but I do want there to be a little bit more light source to the top. Least that's way. See it like if you want to make things look larger, shade him at the bottom. Light comes from the top, especially in the daytime. Eso things like that? No. If it's nighttime, you could say that the lights coming from streetlights at the bottom and you would actually reverse that. But you still have moonlight as well. So you just have to think about where the light sources. But that gives us this base, Grady in to start with and then as we work into this building, actually like to just use a soft brush most of the time. But I'll probably redefine areas this building that are just different colors like I don't want to obviously all be read like this. So what I'll do is get in here and say, Well, maybe this trim work of this break or move. This inset brick area is a different color, so I'll just pick, uh, try to stay very neutral on de saturated for buildings for as long as possible. And then I've got to figure out where I want these colors to go. It could be the brickwork here could be a little bit different. And again, I've got this with lock transparency, so I don't have to worry about going outside of these lines. I think all of this brickwork would look better. The color like this. Now, selections there gonna be a lot faster for the Especially since we have, like, transparency helping us. So let me show you that we're going to use the political tool that would be this one unless you're really good with the free hand. But I have to use the political in this instance. But you just go past it. Hears that line worked here, advantage. So you don't try to get every adds very crisp, and you should be able to just drop it in with the paint bucket and see it's a lot quicker toe work and then you just want to clean up. I'd really recommend cleaning up as you go, because if you don't, it's easy to forget about it. I'm sorry, actually did that with the transparency which is in a race, make sure the blending mold set the normal on the brush. So that's another thing you got to be careful of when you're doing this on the fly. It's really easy to forget little things like what this blending mold might be at. And then you're changing your base color a little bit, not a big deal. Still pretty easy to fix, but just be aware of it. And I think it's probably gonna look better. This is gonna be our brickwork, so that's going to stay the Marone. But we might even want to switch. Uh, this you will make more sense. The buildings always look a little bit more interesting, I think. Anyways, if there's ah a few different tones and saw all kind of a singular tone So again, let's grab that played in all tool click through hero Fast. I was much this areas we can, I would say, probably right through here. I believe that part for no, my miss This we go paint welcome And Mandy to de select. You see, I've still got these funky white edges to clean up. You can hold space bar as you've got this tool floating on the screen. You can't You don't want to click Every time you click, it's gonna drop another line, but you can hold space bar and you can maneuver as you go Let go and go back Teoh Clicking Space bar Move Click through, uh, drop it in Mandy to de select and zoom back. You see, just that alone gave it a lot more area of interest. You know, it's a lot more impressive to look at just a solid build. You see, by comparison to these other ones, that definitely has a lot more flair and, uh, look to it moments wondering if this area needs to be. Kendall looks out of place. Let me just fill that and see what we get. I'm actually trying to draw that all in with one cheap because the more you do that, the more you realize it's easier to just hit Command Z one time she can't command Z. Look at it, command, why to put it back. And you can do that as many times as you need, and I think it actually looks better, but just going to go with it for now. And we could really get in here and make the argument that other areas as well would be this color, you know, because we can always shade these to be different as we go. And if you feel like you're going to do a lot of edits to this color, you just select it with the Magic Juan and cut and paste it. But I don't think we're gonna have to do a whole lot of edits to this. But as it sits right now, it's just those two colors, and you could really get in here and paint behind the line. Work entirely. That way your selections are easier to generate. Just be aware of that. Take the magic wand. Now I could grab just that color hold shift, obviously divided by the character right there. And then I could grab a soft brush a little bit darker tone, and I could add a little bit of remember, this has to be the normal or multiply, and I got a little bit of shadowing here. I could bring this out with some drop shadows, especially under the areas where the the trim work is where it overlaps. They said If you think you're going to do some real detail work here, you could just wallet selected hit command X Command V rename it to I would call That can break against whatever is descriptive enough for you. And you can edit these entirely separate. And then lastly, with this part, let's just go ahead and define the windows. What? These will go hold shift. You have to let go of shift after you do your initial point. Because if you keep holding shift, it'll snap. See that? Just like go of it and continue. I'm gonna ignore the cross, divide bars for now and just get like a base color of the the windows in plays. A lot of times this will seem laborers, but you really start to pick up speed. The more you do this is the faster it gets. And be amazed how quick you concolor something after you know where you're going with it. I'm actually ignoring that line work that's going past the edge because we're gonna clean that up when we crop the image. Okay, so there's that again. We could just hit command X Command V and you see, that's the color were looking for. But that's actually the background color, which is actually good point, though. My head, command V and I'm actually gonna select from the sky color because that's generally what you're seeing is the reflection from the sky. So we'll shade that as well. But it's kind of neat how, when we cut that out, it looked like it made sense. All right, so commanded to de select. We'll click there will just call these windows and there we go. Now the other thing that will recommend If you start to get pretty detailed with your buildings, just keep in mind that you could take each one of these. They can be inside off. You know, whatever you wanna call these, like building colors. But you could just take everything from this first building and put that in its own group. So put a group over top. Just call this FL for front left dash building. I try to keep these shorts. I don't have to expand this out to see what's in there. Click shift or click the 1st 1 hold shift, click the bottom one, click and hold, and then dragged them in there just like that. And then you can have all those unified, and you can really itemize your work and make it easier to process where you're going with it, so that we complete this lesson. Let's move on to the next 24. Coloring the Buildings Part 2: Now we're gonna detail this, building him further and then all time lapse the rest of buildings because it's gonna be repetitive. Just keep in mind that as we work back, they don't need as much detail. In fact, they'll probably just be flat. Might even blur those a little bit as it recedes back in the space. But for these front building, especially this one, it's gonna receive the most detail. So we want to do is go to that area and there's just a few things we can do. We can add texture if we want. Texture can be anything as simple as kind of, ah dot patterns or whatever, but let's see if we go select load selection or right click hands like from Layer. And let's had a layover top of that. And let's just grab something that's already at a bit of texture from the right approach here. His middle dance Prisa stippled brush. So this is just a quick way to make the material not look so plain. Give it just some slight imperfections. Probably want to go with something a little more salad. This brush is actually a little too murky looking. Want something that's a little bit more specific in, uh, detail, I guess. Have a lot of brushes here. Let's see. My probably was metal dense. Let's just try that and it's probably set to add Let's go normal and extra. Let's go to multiply, Aereo. That's what I want, just something that's a little bit of, you know, kind of scrapes and scratches. Imperfections. It doesn't have to be all that impactful because the scene isn't very detailed. As Faras, this isn't very close to the viewer, but these little bit of imperfections can go a long way so that everything doesn't look so clean and overly consistent, especially with cities. And I got a lot of like grungy brickwork and things like that, and it has a lot of character, so something as simple as that can do it on. I'll make sure you got access to these are least whatever ones I use. This is my brush pack, so all right, so let's see, if we got I think we could probably add some of that to the the other brickwork as well. Generally I'll try to make it different from service to service so it doesn't blend together. You can also do things like add a slight blurred of the texture. But I kind of like the way it sets right there, and I think that's fine. So what we're gonna do now is actually add one more layer. Actually, name this before I had the next layer texture and add one more and what I want this to be that can do this with the G pen or a pencil brush. I want this to just be some added our shadows so we can just drop these in with kind of like we're drawing them in. And this is up to you in your comfort level. If you like drawing in your shadows, you can hold shift to get some of those in place like that, like you want to make sure that plane changes are noticeable. So you can do that by just again filling in the shadow in areas where you're gonna perceive any planned change or absence of light. So this is ah, plan change in the the life is obviously gonna hit the top surface more readily than this area. I just feel that and now I gotta be careful there because I have the opacity turned down. I should have turned that up first, So I got to make sure that whatever I do here, I put it down in one pass for that area. So nothing too dramatic, but I just have to be aware of it. So, for instance, if I go to do these, I'll just put one little pass, and that's really the way you want to draw this in. Anyways, you're kind of emulating what you would do with the selection tool. So you want one consistent kind of pole you don't wanna sketch this in? I mean, I guess you could if you're going for more of a texture kind of feel. But even though I'm sketching right there, I'm actually making sure to go over that area ample times. I could do a little bit of separation of the brick, but I wouldn't worry about getting two awfully detailed. You gotta think about in terms off, you know, how visible will this be? You could do angled shadows. That could be a bit of ah, cash shadow from somewhere else. That actually doesn't look like it makes sense, though. And again, you can do these old separations. But, you know, be be aware if its really necessary. You want to make sure that you don't waste time on something is just not really adding to the peace. So I think mainly just thes plane changes of the more important things toe to get in there . So let's Pam bag and take off thesis election with command D. Let's toggle this layer on and off, and I think that's about what I was after. So the other thing is, we could do that one more time. Let's call this hearted shadows. I'll just do hee hard edge. It just looks like he it's called Hard shadows. Hard us. Okay, so now let's do Let's see, what else does this need? A little bit of a light source on this as well. Someone had another layer. I'll go ahead and go back to the Let's see the tan break right click. It's like from layer creates election. I could really just draw these in Freehand anyways, but the selections easy enough to generate so I do it so we'll click on that will go to Let's see I don't want aglow. Let's just try at first Let's actually select the same color. Start with the soft brush and see if this gives us the effect we're after. Yes, so I don't like the way it bleaches out the other color. I wanted to just kind of isolates. Let me try. Had glow. That's a little bit better. So it keeps a little bit more that shadow in place. It gives me a bit of a light source, so we delete that. Let's go back and try that again. I want to start from the top, because again, lights coming from the top. So I wanna make sure it's more predominant up here. I'm just gonna glance across a few areas to bring out the badges. Kind of bounce around. Yeah, that's a little bit better. It just gives it a little bit more likely. Title this on and off. You see, it just makes it brings it to life a little bit more. You know, we could also take the same effect. You know, we want to use a pencil brush there. Let's go back to the soft edge. And we could also bring out some of this brickwork. So this really depends again. And how much detail you really want in this type of scene. But keep in mind that our focal point is our character. So although this could be fun to dio and, you know definitely can add to it at times, you want to make sure that doesn't distract and pull you away from the character. Since again, that's our focal point. But a little bit of this Conetta a bit of air of interest to the work, you know, you could bring out cracks by making sure to highlight the one edge that is, uh, kind of planning up. You know, the light would catch the bottom at, So you gotta remember that on the drive shadow is gonna be this top portion. It's gonna highlight the next edge, which would be the lower edge, if you could see where I'm kind of tracing that want. Seemed like it makes that big of a difference. But it does. You just want to find that top edge on each one of these bricks. If you're gonna do this, it's been a highlight like that. But again, I think that almost would be a bit of a waste. If anything, we might want to just get Mary like this and call it good. So again, that adds mawr effect to that building, and it just details it a bit further. So now let's jump over to the maroon section right here and let's go ahead and generate a selection. Had a layer over top of that. You see it carries through the rest of the buildings if it bothers you. If it's that set up that way, just hit Ault and you can drag through here. But it really doesn't mean that that's gonna do anything, because the other buildings air in front of it are You Just rearrange the layers as you go , but that gives us our Burgundy. Let's go ahead and set this one to multiply, so that'll dark and everything, uh, together kind of unified. And let's try a little bit of, ah, darker tone at the base of each one of these. We'll just kind of shading from the bottom up into each segment, misters to a little bit more divide on again. We can think about other things as we do this. So, for instance, maybe we drop the selection, grab a solid brush we could brush in some drop shadow right there if you want. No, that's obviously kind of dark. So if you don't like that because I just really looks like thinking and it's basically changing, the artwork just dropped back the opacity right here. Remember, if you do that, though, you have to apply it all in one pass. Well, it's not hard to dio and again, it's just kind of Ah, wait, Add a little bit more depth to, uh, to that area. I actually like it a little bit smaller. Now the other thing, as you could just hold shift, go right across here and then you can add it back out with the transparent. Something like that makes you like that better. It's a clean, clean effect there. Do that again, squint, Do these all at once, but that just come back with the erase and a solid clean those up. So pretty, pretty easy to do and really dont even have to clean it up outside of the sedge because we're gonna crop it anyways. That gives us, ah, a little bit more to look at with the Burgundy. You can also come back with the highlight source of this is our our shadows, another one for highlights. And let's just take a little bit later version of this De saturated, really, you can just de saturated to a gray and you can let the blending mode assist you on that so you can go to at glow for excellence is to this. Let's go normal here and adhere. It is pretty strong and you can even select just the existing color. It's still gonna still gonna mimic that highlight for you. And I would just place that here and there. So basically what I think happens here is you don't want to get in the habit of putting highlights on every single thing. It just tends to wash it. Our, it actually will make it look very spotty and become a distraction. Eso then for the windows will just go and lock the transparent. Here it's already done. We'll just grab the existing color so I'll show you how to do this just with the same layer . And just with the blending modes here, the same color we're gonna go to multiply. You see, we can shade from the bottom up there with multiply and a soft brush we're ignoring the term pieces for right now. This is definitely the quicker way to do it. So you're probably wondering, like what? When I do everything this way? The other way with these layers, even though it can tend to get confusing, offers more opportunity for edits. So that's that's why this way you've got to go in with a little bit more confidence of what you're going to apply. But it is a lot faster, so I can add in these drop shadows. So I'm perceiving the drop shadow from the brickwork onto the window a little bit. So right here just brush those drop shadows in like this. Those will get those trim pieces taken care of. We can also do it drop shadow from the term pieces as well. So, again, all this is on that layer Trump's shadows. Here. You could use a solid brush as well, but, uh, if you condensed down the soft broadsheet generally make it react like a solid brush, and then again and we're at that same color, we can just go toe aglow. No, and then we can dropping a light source and these, if anything, is going to be speculator. It's gonna be these so you can create a couple hot spots here. It's still try not to make you know, every window, a beacon of light. I wouldn't. Anyways. I was just have it look a little bit more subtle than that. Check it from a distance and that's it. So we're starting to get that building like feel. Obviously, we've still got our trim work there, and then we'll have that one completed. But now we'll move on to the other buildings and basically repeat all the steps here. Teach buildings all time lapse at married over top. So with that, let's move on. 25. Coloring the Buildings Part 3: okay. And this lesson, we're gonna continue to address some of the colorization for the background. And so every time the flats are in place, it's really a great way to start because it allows you to just think about more simplistic aspects of it, like plain changes and selections are really easy to make. You can drop in texture really fast, so I think the main thing is, get your flats and make the colors just noticeably different, like I've already said. And that allows you to do the magic wand selection and again select areas very quickly. Ah, and then from there, don't worry too much about the base colors being the exact right color. One thing I tend to do is start with the de saturated version or a mid tone version of whatever it is I'm imagining to color. And what that does for me is that I can just jump in and say at the very least, let me just add a dark and on light. Now, obviously that's something more complex, and I'll take it further than that. But for comment, coloring, especially when it's a busy scene. I think that you don't have to immediately start with any more than that, because you want to kind of do this. Ah, this pass across everything with a few mid tones. You know your mid tone, your dark, your light and then kind of sit back and see what it looks like. Because if you say, jump in and you just render something fully and you put all these intricate colors and all these details and texture, it can easily get lost. And you know, you got to think about the composition. You have to think about Holocene rex entirely as a whole, and you also have to remember that after you get these based colors in place, you can do a lot of after effects and those, you know, post processing in different coloring processes over top of the base color. You'll see what I'm talking about as we get to the later lessons, will start doing more of those effects to make the scene look more depth E. So you don't necessarily have to again render out an extreme amount of detail and noticed to him trying to de saturate as I go. So I tend to paint or color and colors will look really bright, really vivid, and I purposely de saturated pushed them back because if not, we'll end up with this very overly animated field to the work which isn't bad. It's all dependent upon the style that you like what you're after. But I tend to find in my work that the oversaturated feel just looks a bit too fake and two strange, almost Things just aren't is saturated, you know, Besides nature, nature obviously has a very bright and saturated colors. But when it comes to things that air no man made generally building things like that, they end up getting very tattered up and weathered and things like that. So you wanna you want to kind of keep that in mind as you do this stuff And that's where the imperfections air. Nice. So I like to create a lot of brushes where I have 10 a little scratches, dots, whatever. And you can draw in your weathering effects as well on and then notice as it goes back into the recedes into space. I'm not gonna worry about as much texture if any at all. In fact, in the very back, I'm not even gonna shade nearly as much. Um, I think that's just something that happens naturally. We we can't see as well as the distance recedes into space. So you have to emulate that with the amount of detail in your placement of detail. Plus, if you're going to get this stuff done on time, whether or not you know you're working independently or working with, you know, big company or whatever, you have to always be conservative with what it takes you to prove what and that's where focal points and the scene are so important because it allows you to say Okay, I'm gonna put the detail where I need to, and that's where this characters coming out towards camera and you'll see by the end of it , we're gonna blur parts of the scene anyways. So at the same time, it wouldn't make sense to detail all this work in the background. And then we're gonna add this quote blur effect to create motion eso again. It's kind of having this idea of where you're going with the piece on. I think that the more you create this stuff, it's kind of a little bit of what shows in a professional's work is that you start to think about the next two steps ahead, or even the end result. In the beginning. I think you're just thinking off. What do I gotta do now? And and there's a lot of confusion there. But as you get better at this stuff, you start planning for, ah, few steps down the road. So again, just putting in lots of little details, trying to make thesis een look complete on have a good overall vibe, and you can notice that a lot of those details are very crudely drawn, the very basic. But they're there. So the scene still reads in the way that I wanted to read. It's not that everything has to be drawn perfectly so that a complete this lesson. Let's move on to the next. 26. Background Effects: All right, so now we're gonna color the sky a little bit and jump back into we're gonna do it some post processing is what I call it really with the background that we're gonna go back to the character and finish him off. So, basically, with the sky, I wanna lock transparent pixels. This is a solid flood layer, and I want to take and highlight right in front of the fist. And the reason being is is this should push the character forward a little bit, so I'm gonna highlight there. I might even highlight a few of these effect lines just like this. Kind of pushed that perspective a little bit on. Then the back. Maybe a little bit of highlight right there. And then let's try a little bit of shadow set the normal mode a little bit darker, de saturated. Let's just kind of trim out some of the side a little bit. So I'm just kind of guessing here as faras What? I want to see their. But the main thing is that the highlight will help me Teoh push the character out, and it's better than just leaving it a blank. Um, kind of background there. So I actually think I want a brighter but not so much work goes to straight way probably just a little bit right there in front of the fist. I think on then. Now what I want to do is actually take the background and try to try to make this. You don't learn some of these imperfections. So if you look in the very back, I potentially made the background a little bit. Um, you know, kind of loose detail and light. It's get some imperfections or whatever, but it's not that big of a deal, because again, the focal point is right here where the character is. That's what we want to work on and wanted to propel backwards. If you put the same amount of detail in the same visibility everywhere, it becomes harder for the viewer to really appreciate it. So you wanna really good at picking and choosing your battles as it pertains to your focal points. So we want to do here is isolate the background. So I've done everything within this group here. I can just duplicate this, and that's gonna give me a copy of that. Just like that and then I can right click on it and go to combine selected layer. It will actually merge all of that together. This is really nice because you can do certain effects. And, you know, I've still got all my back up players right there. I can duplicate this again over top, and I can apply a certain effect and then erase it back. So it's kind of like using the correction layers, but I want to get too much into that. I want to keep this pretty basic, since this entire series of lessons isn't really focused on this software as much as how to create this type of art. Eso something like this could be done and pretty much any software. Eso Now, if you take this and go to filter blur, you can pick whatever blur you want galaxy and blur movable blur whatever you've got access to. But the main thing is that you're just putting a blur on it, and I was going to play around with the intensity of the Blur, and what I tend to do here is look at the very extreme background because I'm actually a race back. Some of this effect to the foreground. So I'm paying more attention about what it does back here. So I had okay there and again, This is just a bit of a test. I'm gonna take a softer race, and what I want to do here is kind of go with the perspective. Or you could probably just go around the page and I want to race back and bring back in some of this detail that I put into place here, but not much like France. It's just the areas that are kind of up close and then let the rest setback. So if you were toe, zoom in on this a bit, you know, you see, it's taking our visibility off a lot of that loose, detailed background. If I take that off like that, see, there's a pretty significant difference. So just softens up that background, and again that helps to make sure that the focal point is on the character. We're gonna do a couple of things to make sure that happens as well. Ah, and then after you're satisfied with this, you know, I like making copies and it's up to you. As far as how many copies you want to make certain things, but remember, we have the backup copy here that resembles this. But if you want, you can be really safe about it. Duplicate this one more time. Merge this with Command E. And this is, you know, background with blur, something like that. And then you could take the visibility off of the rest. And now everything's kind of tied together there. And another thing I'd like to do with the background is actually slowly pushed back the saturation. Because again, I want the most saturated thing to be on my focal point. Now I get if I want to control that with a little bit more effectiveness, I can duplicate this one more time, no longer worried about the blur. But I can take and go, you know, Hue, saturation. Drop this back pretty significantly again. Look at the area that you want to be the most de saturated, not the area that saturated. Because again you're gonna utilize these together. You can again a racist back and punch up some saturation so that you don't lose it entirely . Just in a couple of choice areas, whatever, maybe more of the sky. Because it was already pretty de saturated anyways, in areas where light might be hitting, you know, even the middle of ST. Whatever you just kind of picking to is there may be you want to show more of the green in the grass, whatever it is. And so that's another way to again kind of control that saturation and mainly because we want the character to really pop. So I want I want to make sure that he's the most saturated. So that's just some of the effects for the background. We're gonna have a few more, but that pretty much takes care of the background. Now, in the next lesson, we're gonna jump back to defining the character. We've still got to do a skin. Want to make the eyes glow. That's actually why I left him white like that, and I will start punching him up a bit more. So with that, let's move on to our next lesson. 27. Coloring the Eyes and Face: you know we want to do is clean up some of the imperfections with this flood layer real quick. So that's actually this one here. And I could just take the race harder, race and race back some of these edges. Just look for any of the slight imperfections I made that flood layer in place. I think I've already mentioned this, but I'll reiterate it basically, to separate the character and not worry about him combining with the back grown anyways. That nice, solid flood layer allows me to do that. I have to get the flats and pretty solid. You really don't need this, but it's still still in place. And actually, it's in place for a couple areas because the character has, um, the eyes and teeth are the white of that. So I'll just use that as we paint. And a lot of times you could go back with a final white like this, and you can purposely and in just little tiny little highlights or separations, generally gonna want to use it more is in a race of color if you want to keep your line work intact. But if you're not worried about that for your print work. You can just draw it in, especially if you're doing all digital. So with that, let's go ahead and pain in the eyes, and I want his eyes to like a bright blue, have them glow. So I'll drop in a based color like that, grabbing a highlight brush. So keep in mind, this is behind all the other colors. So this is gonna give us our initial highlight in the middle of the eyes. But it's not gonna project any light outward from there. To do that, we've got to make sure we're on top of the other colors. So let's just go all the way up to here. And this is already a highlight. Layer hasn't been named, so it's just to highlight that. Let's see if we just add it to this within the effectiveness. So now what's going on is this has had already set over here, and this is ACA low. So it's turned that to normal. It's, you know, it's got a different effect to it because you can't have both of these going, though, contradict each other. I'm not really liking. That's we might have to add. This is another layer, so we got a little bit more isolated control. Let's go ahead and do this with just a normal mode at first them. Then let's play with the blending modes or combined molds appear like that because it actually and we could actually do that by paying the skin and then adding this effect afterwards. But it actually darkens the eyes, which will make the glowing portion stand out more. So I like to just cycle through these for food for thought. Sometimes Littlejohn idea. Other times it's it doesn't work out, but you just gotta come play with. These is a lot of effects you can get with ease. It's looking like it's giving me exactly what I want there kind of like that. But then, after we darken the skin tone, maybe that'll that'll make that read better. So what I'm gonna do is actually take this off. This will be eyes I affect. Call it for now. Take the visibility off right there, and we'll finish detail in the skin. Let's go to skin tone now with skin tone. I'm just gonna use the associating kind of effect. Just started with that, so I'll just select areas of the face that are a bit higher. Any area that I perceived, my catch a little bit of light. It's holding shift and trying in these areas. Grab a highlight brush, selectee skin tone. Let's set the normal. So we've got to make sure this is to add or ad glow. I just want to bump back the density. So what? These highlights to be too awfully strong. This is one of the reasons why I like to add a layer. So it makes you gonna do that now because it just gives me that extra love of at it. I'm sure what I mean. There's some respect normal Mr The Aglow. Then I can go back with the race, so after race, and then just softly erase some of those edges. So I just feel like it gives me a little bit more control, another level of at it, and it seems toe seems to work out better, so there's that. Let's go ahead and one for darkens. This will be bright light skin and darken or shadows your skin. So as long as you name these something that you're you know you could decipher than the hierarchy alone Will will be good enough. But if not, you can create the groups. What's going to do this? It's kid a shadow here, shadow across here. You know, I'm going to set this to multiply this time. It's time upon this. And just to bring this chin out more, I want to do a shape our own here across the base, like that again, that drop shadow for the inside of the eyes, I think will help, especially with the glow effect we're gonna add. Make those a bit darker, a bit off cheek here. So, you know, you just really want to pick and choose how much detail you want to see him with this. But you can often times keep layering these effects and get some really need kind of depth . He feel to the, uh, there is your coloring king crab like the top lip here, you can do some subtle ones that aren't as kind of in your face, so you could do like a little bit right here and just lightly hit it. It doesn't always have to be is predominant, and you could do lots of different layers of intensity with this. We'll drop shadow right there and I bring out some of those drop shadow that 30 in place with the thinking, something like that. And then, of course, check it from a distance because a lot of this can be very I could get lost really easily. Remember, too, that the base skin tone is what all these shadows and highlights are working from. So since we're using some pretty simple overlays, we can change the skin tone and get some desired effects. You know, we could change the race of the character we could, you know, given lighter or darker skin tone pretty easily because we've got total correction. And again, those shadows are working off this weaken de saturate. You know, brightness, darkness, um, different coloring techniques, whatever. But I think we're gonna lighten it up a little bit and de saturate a little bit. It's less saw orangey, and if the cheeks were showing in the nose, I'd add in a little bit more red. But since they're not, I'm not gonna worry about it. And then that's kind of effect. I want to see for the eyes that they're more shaded in the blue and we could get in here and really do some power effects coming off the eyes, whatever. But that gives us the face of our character. No, we're going to do in the next lesson is add in some or highlights to the chest of the character and really bring out the chest, the hand, and tried to create some more depth. So with that, let's move on to the next lesson. 28. Coloring the Motion Lines: all right, so now we're gonna add a new layer over top. Let's just go in and set the blending mode to color dogs. And let's just start with a soft brush and brushing on the face of the character. This one needs to be set to normal. So we're trying to do here is punch up a light source. It's more on the front of our character. We want to separate him from the back home a little bit. See if we can do it without washing wear detail, though eso, that's where are blending modes or combined modes could help out. Yes, I like that a little bit better. Toggle on and off the visibility. Yeah, let's try that. So what's nice about this particular one is if you notice it's leaving the detail from associating that we added. So that's what I want. I don't wanna least any of that information. Remember, too, that we can do a selection by tapping right here and then go back to that layer and I have isolated just just the area that we want. This effect also make these look a bit more speculator while we're here and say the goal isn't this part to really just push him out and give him on some more depth from the background there with the back of the arm right there, picking little areas that I want to bring, bring to light a little more detail out care What's going test that now. So pan back and talking on and off the visibility you see right there that he's jumping out a lot more. Now there's other things you can do. You can actually place in a shadow, even though it's not. Let's first name this. This is highlight on the character was put. They are, and you can do other things, like a shadow behind him or even a highlight mind. So, for instance, to do that, you're going to scroll down, and you just need to make sure it's in front of the background. Remember, we did these effects here, so it plays a layer there. Just call it, um, shadow behind you. See, for mine character. We could set this to probably normal. Let's just start there and let's start with a Gresh black. It's always good to sample from the existing pallet that's there versus just grabbing black white all the time, but you could put like, a little bit of shadow toe one side. But I think, actually, what we're gonna want to dio is actually highlight. So what happens is you can kind of throw in. I almost consider this a fake highlight because there wouldn't really be a highlight here, but it makes sense for comics, too. I really try to build in that depth so you can put, like, just a little bit of highlight in front of the fist. This one's already kind of got it a little bit in front of the lake here and again. You're really just making sure that this character jumps off the page and sometimes it can be very subtle. And you see, if you put just that little bit of glow around them, it conveys what we're trying to do. It gets separates him from that background. So, like these silhouettes of the feet, they don't get lost as much now. But you have, like any other highlight, you gotta be very careful with this because it's very easy to overdo him, Probably already over doing it. Um, you know, you gotta let certain things fall into the background recede into space. You can't just put, for instance, you don't want to just throw Ah, big highlight around the entire character. Um, maybe in some instances, like if the character glows, admits energy, then it makes sense. But for this one, we just We're just trying to get that little bit extra three dimensional effect there. So let's again check it from a distance. Toggle it on and off. Yeah, I think it it separates him a little bit, definitely by the face and the shoulder in that forward lake. You don't lose that back leg as much in the background. So I think that's ah, that's gonna work a Sfar as any other effects. We can also separate the background a little bit more with a screen layer. So if we go above our blur effect that we have here had another layer already got it in place and set the screen mode and then just hold all select a color from the background. So the reason why this usually works is because of volumetric lighting. So the way lighting works is that things don't actually get darker in the background. They get darker and more visible to the foreground. So these buildings being dark like that actually don't look accurate. So we'll start brushing those back. And what happens is things that recede into space actually start to take on the color of the sky. More of the, you know, whatever the surrounding biometric light is generally the sky, that fog, whatever. So so you can brush some of that end from the background, generally get the effect that that's receiving into space. Now the only thing I don't like with doing this all the time with this particular area is we start to lose the shape of those buildings, that silhouette and a very background so you can actually draw those back in with the shape if you don't like that as well and use a radiant there. But again, I'm going more for making the character appear and feel like he's coming out towards us. The other thing that we can dio we can actually use that tonight back these lines, That helps us well, and we can actually drop in the speed lines with you. See, I'm going right off the edge of the page, but we're gonna crap that anyways, we can take these speed lines and we can play souls with a layer over top in a lighter tone . So a lot of these dark lines kind of are a little too visible. So if we go back up top here, put it kind of in front of everything, and we can either draw some speed lines and we can drop in another perspective ruler. So go to create perspective, ruler to a one point perspective. Grab that with the little box icon here and look for the place where all the lines converge to the closest point to tryto align. This doesn't have to be exactly there because it's more of an effect, but it should somewhat line up to the perspective. It's already there. We're trying to build off of that and create the effect of speed. Move this round, grab the little white handles to align that that looks pretty close right there, A little off, but not bad. So it's going to bring this to the very top. All extra doesn't matter. We can leave that to the bottom, but as we create the effect, we want that to be in front of every things will go to the very top right above the inks. And let's go ahead and take one of our brushes here. Make sure it's snapping to the line it is. And let's just go with a nice bright white because what we're going to try to do here is at the effect. So we're generating these speed lines, then we're gonna wouldn't blur these. I was gonna pick and choose. Mary is here, and you could try to draw these in with the soft brush is well, but I just find a little bit more control with the G pen to get the the thick that then that I'm after. And then, like I said, we'll blur them for more of the effect and then at a blending mode. It's kind of all those things combined, but right now I just have to the thick to thin effect don't want to see in it. And I mean, we want him down here. It's gonna snap to the wrong line every now and then. You could probably toggle off some of these control points, but we're not gonna add to many of these, so I'm just gonna finish it up like this all right, we'll get somethin. Ones in there like that should be good. And again, I'm I'm carrying less and less about the edge of the page now because we're getting ready to crop. So there's our our lines, Tad more speed lines basically get rid of the visibility of the ruler. Go back up top here. Let's call these speed lines and let's first try to blur these a little bit because we don't want these to be. So you see, they're very solid. They're actually conflicting with the character. We can erase his back, but let's quit. Duplicate it. Let's blur it. So filter, blur, probably galaxy and blur on this one, and then just blur these suckers up. Just remember that sometimes the blur takes, ah second to catch up, especially if you have a sewer system. But I want these so look soft so that it almost represents, you know, the idea of, like when whispering past the character. You know something to that effect. Well, something like that. Just a little bit more, you know, light and airy feeling. So title the visibility on and off and actually like it right there. But we could still just test the blending multiple quick. That's a bit much. And probably screen or normal actually, like normal, despite, uh, and now I'll see all of it as it goes in front of the character. It's not that big of a deal, actually, don't mind it, but if it's a distraction, you just take your softer race. Just erase it back wherever he felt distracting from look of the character. But actually kind of like it in front of the head right there. So and that's it. So that basically gives us our effect. And the only thing that I really want to see a little bit more of is some some more lighting to the background itself. So let's move on to the next lesson. Try to finalize this image and see what we get. 29. Final Touches: Okay, so when you add a little bit more color to the background, so go back to the background layers here at a layover top. Let's set that to add or screen. Let's try a screen first. Let's use more of a reddish orange or yellow, but I just want to get a little bit more of a feeling of there being some kind of sunlight in the scene. So generally that will cast. Ah has a red or yellow depends on the day and her time of day, I should say so that's that screen mode. Let's try, had or at glow just kind of have that hit against the buildings a little bit there. And if it's too heavy, erase it back in areas or turn back the capacity here. But just something like that, I think it's just a little bit more interesting. Then that is so just little bits of tweaking at the end. Eso now what I want to do is go back to the top of the layer, so in front of everything and let's go ahead and crop this down now so we don't need all that excess background. Just crab inside of the image there that it crop. Where is that? No one looks more impressive when you get rid of all that extra stuff from the sides. And what I want to do here is actually add a, um, in effect on the front. So generally, when I get done with a scene, for the most part, I'll start to add layers right in front of everything, especially for power effects. I noticed it works out really well. So I'm gonna duplicate everything that's inside this folder, and it's gonna take a second just because there's so much there, right click and go combined selected layer that emerge it all together so that I've got the background here or everything still intact there. But I've got all this as one layer. Now hear what I'd like to do now is actually duplicate this. So I got a backup, and what happens is when you paint on this and you change the blending mode over here, it provides a different effect. For some reason, if you add a layer over top over here, you just won't get the same kind of power effects. So what I like to do is set this to add glow or one of these off to check. But let's grab this blue and let's just breaking up these eyes now and miss effect. Probably. It's probably good idea toe. Do it from a distance, because what's gonna happen? You're gonna wash out some of that detail. So what? You might want to dio slots to this a little bit. Let's go to here and let's have that effects from a distance because I really don't want to wash out the eyes entirely, but I do want it to glow where it's noticeable on the outside of the mask. So let me zoom back. And so we got a little bit of this go around the eyes like this. I'm actually trying to draw around the eyes, and then we can do a little bit of light source kind of glaring off the edge of the mask to come back. I think we'll need to leave the edge like this, but what they need about this. If you keep hitting the brush in the same area, you'll actually burn it right down the white. So it's kind of like using a dodge and burn tool from Photoshopped in fact, that's that's almost identical what it is. But it is also introducing color as you do it, so you can get some of these little neat little edges and Claire's and things like them. What kind of finish? Some of this with that clear inside here. And if I was to press hard enough here, I can get a hot spot. If I keep hitting that, it'll turn the white so you can get some really neat power effects with that. I'll just use this opportunity like punch up a few more areas as I'm here. And I also wanna want to do like a little bit of a lens flare from the eyes, I think that'll. What kind of meat? So what? That just putting pressure down and then lightening up on the brush as I pulled to the the edge. Pretty self explanatory. But, period, I'd throw that in there about doing the other. You know, legislation kind of go too far. I'll just like that for now and then. Well, highlights here we could even try make in other areas of the suit a touch brighter while we're here. So, for instance, let's to a little bit on the fist, and you could really select these areas. But I'm just gonna kind of glance over this. We've got our back a player. If it doesn't work out, there's that. And we could, uh, think the emblem look a touch better because it kind of gets lost in there. Was trying to isolate that. Make it glow. I might need to actually select us to get the affect them after. Yeah, that's gonna do that so little to here. Go back, See if I can get a selection like that. Old and select were actually I need to hold shift on that part. Hold on. Everything else. It's like that old all here, you select. Eliminate all that selection. You back in here really tight now and check the work. Hold our to rotate. I'm sure there's some imperfections. Hold shift. Try to clean this up a little bit. Doesn't have to be perfect, but a little rework goes a long ways, and it makes you just gonna copy that some pace that de select and like, transparency should give me a little bit more control with the effect I'm going for Travis again. I want the edge toe Look, that cleaner you may have toe actually draw this in, but we might be able to do is actually draw it in like this at a slight blur to the edge. I think that should clean up. Look, because it's gonna be a glow. Anyways, Tobler will probably actually fix it. That's really a lot of what you have to do with this stuff is just think of all the different options that air there and try to implement them in different ways. And you can generally work through some problem areas quite quickly. I'm trying to get the effect that this is glowing. Some just slowly increase in the brush. I'm brushing around the edge, but you see, it's made this highlight a white. Now us. We're gonna take the lack transparency off the filter, blur calcium blur and bumped that up a bit. It's actually showing the era behind it, so it's not working like I hoped it would. Let's come back. This is where you have to hope that you got enough commands ease to get back before you started to go down the wrong path. What's That's gonna be fine anyways, because actually what we could do here now is fix it with one more layer. So we've got our base shape and I kind of like the glow around the edge. I think it needs to be a little bit more of this other blue. Um, but it does offset kind of nicely. So what I'll do is just had one more layer over time, and this one will have to be more of a solid layer. But I'll grab the other blue something into here, and this has to be to normal. Just blend that edge back. So again, there's just lots of different ways to do this stuff and, you know, provided you re approach it a couple different ways each time. You know, I look at it like a lot of this stuff is just problem solving, you know? But if you don't like yourself to get frustrated and you just keep keep trying, eventually gonna get it. And I always look at it like the longer you work on something the inevitable conclusion of success. But if you if you keep doing it and re trying and you're looking at it like, oh, I just can't get it I just can't get it. You're actually setting yourself up for failure, but if you keep an open mind and just keep working at it, you'll eventually get something like That's the beautiful thing about holding your craft. And this might be a little bit much for a logo, but I don't know. I think it's better than it not standing out. And then that's just the perimeter edge. Looks good from a distance without it, but I think I'll leave it for now. And then I'll try one more time with the aglow just cause I can't seem to let it like, Oh, the effect that I'm after think that in the future all superhero logos will glow. Just taking a guess, and that's probably too much, right? I was trying more time, a little bit less intensity, maybe even a little bit smaller. Brush size. Make it a little bit of that clover. Maybe we could work from the top down. It's almost there and there we go. I think I like that better. So at any rate, that's it. That's how I would ah work through a piece like this from start to finish, you can just keep going on and on with different layers and different effects and really tighten it up and do what you want. You know, keep in mind to another neat thing that you can do is again merges. Impose process even more so you can change colors. You can really stretch it. Just just keep in mind that if you keep going, if you keep making small, incremental adjustments, you ultimately get to the end result you want. Then, from here, you just out put it. If you save in a J peg, remember that will compress a little bit. If you save out as something like a PSD, it's going to stay in true resolution, which would be a pretty large file. But it'll it'll keep the resolution that you're looking for. So I hope you enjoy these lessons. Will be more on the way. Keep drawn, keep em fun, and I will talk to you soon.