How To Paint Photos In Procreate: A Sweet Goldfinch

1. Welcome: Hi everyone, welcome to how to paint photos in Procreate a sweet gold finch. I'm Jay Johnson and I teach people how to paint photos in Procreate on the iPad. I started this several years ago when I started helping photographers make their photos more artistic. And I somehow stumbled upon procreate, and got an iPad. And I've been painting my photos ever since. I love to paint birds and wildlife, sometimes floral, sometimes other objects. In this class, we're going to paint gold finch photo. The original photo is shown here. And there's the finished painting. I teach you in this class how to set up your canvas and test your brush. How to paint the detail areas, how to paint the whole body of the bird. The woods pace that he's sitting on. I teach you how to work the background to make it more painterly. I teach you how to do expressive brushwork and add color. I teach you how to enhance your dark and light areas of your finished piece and how to do some interesting finishing touches. And it's all done in this course with just one brush. In order to complete the class, you'll need an iPad with procreate installed. You'll also need an Apple pencil and you'll have to have a basic understanding of using Procreate and installing brushes. And you will need to understand how to get a photo onto your iPad. Because everybody does at different. So if I tell you one way, it might not be the way you want to do it. So it's best if you already have an understanding of those things to begin with. Provided with the class is the original gold finch photo that I took for you to paint. There's one brush provided, which is all I use to complete this painting is the one brush. There's one canvas texture overlay, which is optional, which I go into in the final video. Let's get started in painting this sweet little songbird in a unique and expressive way. 2. Canvas Set Up & Brush Test: Alright, so you have the photos that I've given you, the canvas and the bird downloaded and you have downloaded the brush and hopefully installed it into Procreate and we're ready to get started. You can check your photos to make sure they're here. There is the gold finch on the very bottom and right next to it this square canvas. Then let's open Procreate. Now in Procreate you may, you would hit this plus button to bring up your canvas. As you may already have a square canvas setup. Delete that one. And you have other sizes here. We're working for square on this project, which I do a lot of my paintings square. I just liked the format. I already have a square, 6 thousand by 6 thousand setup in here. But if you don't, I'm going to show you how to do that. Click the plus button. Again. I mean this plus button by new canvas, the black one. And it will bring up this and you want to be on dimensions. And I do, my canvas is at 300 DPI. I already have six thousand, six thousand in here. If you click with, you could change that to say 3 thousand by 3 thousand. And notice it says maximum layers have changed now this maximum layers that you'll get for our canvas size depends on your iPad. I'm working on a iPad Pro. The iPad Pro with quite a bit of memory and things like that, you can get a lot more layers. If you're working on a different iPad. And you might not have the ability to have this many layers. We don't need near that many layers. But my favorite size is 6 thousand by 6 thousand. But if you want to do 3 thousand, that's fine. But you just type in what you want and it'll show you how many layers ten is more than enough. For what I do. Then you would just, you could title your canvas if you wanted to type in 6 thousand, let's just call it 6 thousand Canvas. I can't spell. Then you would just click on Create. And then it will appear in your list. And it will also create the Canvas and open it. If you go back. There it is untitled artwork 6 thousand by 6 thousand. If you hit the Plus, you'll see at the very bottom it's added the canvas that I've started. So you need to create your canvas first and then OK, make sure it's open. Now, before we import the photo, I want to do a brush test. I do this with every painting, with every brush. We're using the rich Canvas thick five brush which I've given you. It's imported here, it shows at the top after you've imported, if you have not done this step and it gotten your brush into Procreate, you can hit the Plus button, you can hit Import, and then you can go pick the brush from wherever ended up on your iPad. And in my case, I come from a desktop with my brushes and with my photos. So I put them on my son does I expand drive which I plug into my iPad and I get thanks from there. It saves it in a file for that drive. There on the far right is the rich canvas brush. And you would click that and it would import it into Procreate. It may, depending on if you download directly onto your iPad, it may appear in your downloads. I've noticed with everybody's iPad and everything ends up differently. Where things go. The brushes imported, and now it's time to play with it. And we're going to be using the blender tool in this course, but there's nothing here on this canvas to blend yet. So let's use the paint tool with this brush first. And let's see what it does. And I have the size turned up all the way. So you can see it good. Let's just do a little short mark. There we go. Just a little short Mark leaves a little texture, leaves a little canvas. And that's just little short gentle strokes. The lighter you go, see when you go really light, it leaves just a heavy paint. Lifted texture. If you hold down on it, push real hard, it leaves a very dark texture. You can do short heavy strokes or really light strokes just by holding it very gently, stroking it. Now let's change color. Let's go over here and get some orange. Put down some orange. I'm just going very lightly across the top. You can see how it is leaving that textural marks right on top of from the orange, right on top of the turquoise. And then if you want to go strong, you hold down very heavy. You can lower the brush size and do much smaller marks. And see how it leaves that nice canvas texture on top. Now let's switch over to blending. Same brush, it's raised sizes all the way up. Let's just kind of pulled down and move it around, blending the turquoise with the orange. Now let's just gently pull, lift up. Very short strokes. Very gentle. It blends, but it leaves some texture while it's blending when you do it very lightly, stroking right or left. As to the left, Let's Get up here. Let's stroke this little orange part off to the right, see how it leaves that texture. And if you hold down and pull, it gets much darker. So with this brush, it's all in the amount of pressure you're using and how long you're holding it down. Or if you're doing a short little drag, short little sweep, where you're just tapping and sweeping and then lifting really quickly. But this gives you, by doing this before you start a painting, it gives you an opportunity to feel how this brush is going to work for you. And then you can go back to painting and add more, which we will do this project. But that kind of gives you an idea. And you can, you can scrub it to, you can hold down and scrub those colors together. I don't normally do that. I do short lift. I lived it very quickly and do short strokes. In most of what I'm going to show you, just very short tapping stroke at the same time. I'll go real fast too. To really get the look I want. And of course play with size. You go to a smaller size, you're going to get smaller. Blending. Smaller marks. The lighter you hold it when you pull. To blend, the more texture you're going to get in it. That gives you a little bit of idea about the brush and how it works. Now we can clear this layer. After testing the brush. Just click on it and click Clear. Now we're ready to import the photo that we're working from so we can get started. We will do that in the next video. 3. Painting Detail Areas: All right, We are ready to start with our photo. We have the blank layer here, so we're going to import the photo by clicking the wrench icon on the top left and click insert a photo. This will then open your photos and then you click the gold finch picture I've given you and it will appear there. There it is. Now, my photo isn't as big as this Canvas. Also. I think about what part of this I want to paint. Right now we have a very small bird on this blue wood, which I really liked the blue would. But we have a lot of background. I want more bird than background. Very first thing I'm going to do is resize this up. I'm going to click this transform era of there. And it's already on uniform, which means when I pull out from one corner or another, it's gonna keep everything uniform and not distort my picture. I'm going to pull down from the left corner quite a bit. And then you can hold down with your pencil on it and move it around where you want it. I'm going to decide how big I want this bird. And I want him pretty big because I want my focus to be the bird. So I just keep pulling and moving and deciding where I want him. I want some of the blue would I don't need him right in the center. I'm going to put him up toward the top a little bit more. I'm actually going to pull a little more and really bring him in. And I'm gonna put him off too, since he's facing to the right, I'm going to move him just off-center a little bit right in there. Laying out the picture like this. Let's make them just a little bigger. I'm running out of room here. But laying them out like this on the Canvas will leave this space here on the right of him. Later. If I wanted to import words in with my image and say make a greeting card or something like that I could do so. I just want him off-center a little bit. So click the Layers tab again and he's in position. If you decide you still want to make him bigger, you can make this a little smaller by squishing it, as I call it, with your two fingers and you can do it again. The same thing we just did. I kind of like him right there. And then click it again. Now I do like this layout. I'm going to duplicate the photo layer at this point. I don't usually rename my layers. You can click on the layer and click Rename if you would like. I'll just go ahead and do it and just call it bird. Now, you have to remember when we're using the blending tool to paint a photo, you're going to paint the colors that are actually already in here. If you don't like these colors the way they are, you need to fix that before you paint. One thing I do on most of my paintings is I will bring up the saturation because I shoot a lot of photos on cloudy days. That tones everything down. The blue is pretty saturated, but the bird could use a little more brightness. I'm going to do that. I'm going to click the Adjustments button, click hue, saturation and brightness and click Layer. And I'm just going to pull that saturation up and watch that yellow get more vibrant. I don't want his feet looking to read maybe about 70% and that just really enhance the color on everything that's before photo. This is the after with that adjustment. I do like those colors much better. You could also on the adjustments. If you wanted to play with some of these other things on your photos such as color balance, curves. If you wanted to sharpen it or any of that, There's no reason to really do any of that. At this point, but you could do some of those other adjustments, but whatever you want to, whatever you're going to do. Color wise, you're gonna be painting what's here, because you're working actually on a photo. So you want the photo to look generally like you want it to look later. I do like these more saturated colors. I just think that's much neater for what I like to do. We have that ready. We're going to start painting the bird by choosing the blending tool. I'm going to start. Always start with the eye area. I zoom in really close and usually you can see enlarging this photo really pixelated it. But that's not a problem. A lot of times when I start the blending, I like to go with a pretty good size brush and just kinda get over here on the background area and see what that's gonna look like. And I'm doing short strokes with a very large brush. Just to get a feel for how it's gonna look and you can zoom out. Most likely I won't keep this background color and we will change that later. But to get in around the detail area, smaller brush. And I'm just doing very quick short strokes with that tap and lift technique, which I showed in the previous brush test video. That gives me a feel of how it's working. And you can always turn your layer off and on to see what you're getting. I start with the eye. I'm blowing this up really big here, zooming in. I'm gonna get my brush relatively small. You see how blurry and pixelated the eye looks. I'm going to get on the blue highlighted area on the eye with very small brush, I think is about two or 3%. I'm do short criss-cross strokes, blending one color into the next. This area, in this little blue area. Then around his when he starts to get a little bigger, the areas I'm working on getting a little larger, I will raise the brush size. Now I'm in the black line area across the top of the eye. And I'll go back and forth if I pull one way and I don't like it, I'll pull back the other direction with the brush and stroke the other way. To me that's just creates interest anyway, to go back and forth and I do a lot of crisscrossing, bringing colors over each other with very short taps and very short strokes. Now we're getting into the main area of the eye here. I'll just kinda follow the contour of the eye. Just like when you're doing the feather areas, you'll follow the feather. You want to make sure to get it all painted the best you can. I'm just going all around the eye and now the underside of the eye. Stroking left to right and then right to left. And then pulling out from the eye a little bit right here where this white area is going around this top part in the corner. Then the very top and fought still following the contour, going right and left with short strokes. And you can go, you can get really messy with this and go as fast as you want. Do not try to be realistic. It's hard to not want to paint every little feather and every little detail, but you don't have to do that. The point of these paintings is to be expressive. This brush generates a lot of expressive marking. And just by going crisscross and left and right and very short strokes, you can really get some interesting texture to your piece. And painterly look, which is what we're after. I just keep going around the eye. As you get further away from the eye, you can raise the brush size up, but I'd like to scoot out, zoom out, turn the layer off. You can see their original now turn it back on. Zoom in a little more. I do this a lot. This enables me to see if things are looking good. Because I'm working with a very tiny brush, it's better to be zoomed in. Now I can raise the brush size now. If I want to. Or I could do these other fine detail areas like this line right here in the middle of the beak. The word the top of the beak meets the bottom. I do like to keep that detail in there. So any while working with a smaller brush, I'll just keep working on the detail areas. And here's the little nose area right above that. Here's where the dark area from. The AI comes down toward the nose. That's a little detail area I want to keep. And then there's this underside or the beat comes to the point. I'll go back and forth. Try to keep that intact with detail. And maybe around the edge of where the beak meets the feathers. Just a little bit. They're bringing some of that dark detail from the underside of the beak up. Because if we use too big of a brush where these little detail areas are, you going to blend them all out and you won't see any detail. There we go. Off on. We're making progress now another area of detail is the feet. And we have this little area of tail feather here as well, which could require a larger brush for that. So I'm just going to stick with this smaller brush and do the feet area right now. I do want to keep the detail of the toes. So I'll do that. And just paint most of the foot with this detailed brush, especially the toenails. And in his little toes. It looks kinda blurry because we're so zoomed in, go around the edges of his little legs and in-between the little toes as well. Now I'm not getting every pixel painted here right now. My main goal is just to get the toe detail in. So now I'm on the other toe. The other foot I mean, we have the foot coming down from the body, so we're going to get that in place. We got this little white highlight on top. We're going to keep that. So detailed brush is very good for these very small areas. And if it doesn't even look like he has much of a toenail here, you can kind of drag it out and make his toenail just a little longer if you want to. Just paint all these little toes. Areas. Very short little strokes. Now the feet are mostly painted. Then you can see when I turn it off and on the difference there. And we'll work on those some more later. So now I've got a few little spots here in the neck area where some black is showing. I don't want to lose that black, which I will if you go with a bigger brush. I'm going to paint these couple of little spots right now with the detail brush. Just to try to hang on to them. It doesn't matter if we lose them. We can always add paint later. But just those little spots right there. I want to make sure to keep now we're ready to start going a little bigger on the brush size and painting the rest of him. 4. Painting The Bird: All right, Now we're going to start going along with a little bit bigger brush. And remember I said, you don't really need to have every little feather, every little mark. But we are going to play with some brush size and I'm going to be sizing the brush a little bit differently as we go. At this point, I I usually work out from the detail areas with a little bit larger brush. And I'm going to work on this beak area around the little nose here. And I'm still using a fairly small brush. As an ally, you can turn your Canvas to stroke in the direction you're, you feel comfortable with. And I'm going along that first line. I did down the middle of the beak to try to keep that beak looking like a beak. I'm just kind of working outward from that line with a little bit larger brush. As I get further away from that center line of the beak, I will gradually raise the brush size going along the edges. This little black edge on the underside and pull it out too much. You can pull some of the background right up into it. All right, now let's raise the brush size a little more. Go with some really big strokes. Short taps, trying not to go out of the edge of the beak into the background. Because if we go out like this, That's not going to look right. I'm still going around the edges. The tip a little bit on the Background portion of it. I mean, a full little bit of paint goes out from the brush. That's great. But you don't want it to look like you've made a mistake. You want it to look like it's an artistic choice. I'm doing the underside of the beak, back and forth, crisscrossing this little orangey area right here. Little white feather area right there. Now let's turn it up and look upright. I liked this little peachy area right here. I'm gonna try to gently pull some of that out which shows a little texture when I do that. And this white area pulling to the right. Very short strokes. Going up around the edge of the head. Still around the nose but working outwards so I don't lose the detail of the nose. Now I'm zoomed in super far. As you zoom out. It helps to not only see your picture, you're working from better, but it also helps to see where you might want to add some more interests with your strokes by going a different direction, by doing lighter stroke and bring it a little texture like right there I just did working out from the eye. I did that one stroke over the eye little strong. So I'm going to double-tap or tap with two fingers and try to get in here and work on this without losing that ring around the eye. I think this is looking fairly good so far. Like I said before, turn it off and on. You can see where you are. Now it's tempting to want to keep all this little feather detail right here. You can work with a small brush and do that if you want. I don't usually like to do that. I like to go a little bit bigger on the brush and just crisscross. Actually lose the detail of the feather. I'm really just doing a lot of short taps around the bottom of the feathers on his head. Now, you could pull out some here on the edge into the background. Still working, going back to the eye area, I will jump around and go to different areas. Now I'm a top over the eye. Little short strokes. I still, I'm also doing part of the background around as I go around the edge of the head. Little short strokes crisscross. And as I'm moving back from the eye to the left, I don't do a whole lot of undoing when I'm working because I can always add in more marks later, which is later in the class. I will show you how to do that to add in some more interests marks right now it's just the main goal is to get the general photo painted. Then, then we can get more expressive. When you do these little crisscross marks here at the top of the head, you can actually bring some of those feathers out into the background. I'm painting the background some. And then I moved to the feathers around the edge of the head. And that makes the head look nice and fluffy, which this is a little fluffy guy. We want him to look nice and fluffy. And alternate again, this little black line right here is kind of interesting. I'm pulling on that. And if it leaves a mark or two, that's fine. I'm still going around that edge of the head and the background with little short taps, tap and pull. I guess that could be a technique tap and pull. Tap pool. There's that little black area I didn't want to lose from earlier under his neck because that gives him dimension. And as I get further out off of this head area, that will go with an even bigger brush. If you find it's not moving the pixels is good enough. You could push harder. Let's pull some white down there that looks kind of interesting. I really love the texture of this brush and it's when you're blending with it. It doesn't show as much texture as when you're painting with it, which we'll do later to add additional brush marks. So we'll get an even better texture in later. But right now this is just getting the general shape of the bird all painted in. Real nice. All right, Let's turn it off, off, on. Zoom way out. Even though we lost some detail by going to a bigger brush when you turn it off and on. You could still see that detail is there. I'm gonna go right around the top of this wing with the same brush size. But then I'm going to switch to a bigger brush here in just a minute. Since this little top of the wing area. These white feathers right there. Alright, let's go to a bigger brush. Got this area right here. Along the head, that top of the head, that's where it meets the wing where it's not painted. So we're just going to do some crisscross short taps, taps in summer tap and drag right through there. Even around the edge. Make him look a little fluffier. Pull that out into the background. Now, let's do this wing. These feathers that come over onto his belly. Just go across right to left or left to right, whatever direction you feel like going. But I try to keep in line with the feathers of the feathers are moving to the left. I'll stroke the feathers in that direction right to left if they're moving downward, stroke downward. But I'm not keeping the feathers as they are, but I'm keeping the colors as they are. And then they're transforming via the use of this brush. We've got this black area here. For this area, I'm gonna go a little bit smaller because I do want to keep that black in there and not lose it. This little streak of white. Pull it out, make it bigger. Then this tail right here where it's sticking out a little stroke and the direction of the tail, the gray, grayish white, the black, and then the body curves right here. So I'm gonna stroke in the direction of the curve right there. And then finish out this tail by stroking and the direction it's going around the edge of the body right here. But once you get the hang of this and how the brush is working for you, you can really go quite a bit faster. I'm going quite a bit slower than I normally would. We've got this one spot here that looks a little funny. So I'm gonna pull this dark little smaller brush and pull some of that dark and doesn't want to pull. So that may just be a happy action they'll fix later by adding brush marks over it. Get these white feathers little bit more choppy on their edges. Excuse me. Okay, now, let's take a look at what we've got here. Off on a zoom way out. When you zoom way out, you can see how it's going to look like when you have this printed and look at it across the room. That looks pretty good. Now we're going to work on the rest of the body and we're gonna go with a bigger brush. And just kinda quickly go across the body and finish out this belly area and going go also on the background around the belly. Short tap and pull. You don't lose your colors. Getting down close to these. The bottom of the belly. Were these feet are might have to go with not lose any of that have to go with a little smaller brush here in-between the foot and the body, crisscross and not lose this bottom edge of the belly. I can see some pixels spots when I zoom in that are unfinished. So I can kind of go over those. I'm not worried about getting every little pixel because we are going to add more brush marks. We're gonna go with a smaller brush and get here in this foot area. Because this foot goes back under the belly right there. We don't want to lose that. We start the blue would there to go around this foot, actually go over that foot a little more because there are several parts that are not painted in the foot. I did the detail of the foot, but not everything else. Start on that wood. And then in-between the toes where the blue wood is, I'll stick with that smaller brush. I don't want to lose my tote. Be awful When it to lose your toes. We don't want to do that. Now let's go over here to this other foot on the right and go around it in the blue area of the wood. And in-between the toes actually do the foot some more because there's some spots on top that I've missed. Some kind of working around that foot area. So I don't lose those toes. Working on top of the foot. Don't want to lose the toes. All right. I see some spots right in here that are unpainted because of the pressure variation on this brush. Sometimes when you put it down, it may do paint them, sometimes it may not. When it's blending in the blending portion of this. Because brushes work differently when they're used as a blender. Not every paintbrush makes a good blunder. Some brushes won't blend at all. How will we look in now? Pull some of these feathers on the right out. Give them a little more fluff. Off, on, off, on. Oh, we're looking pretty good. You can definitely still tell us a gold finch, even though we have lost. If you look at this belly area, especially we have lost a lot of those little fine feathers, but you don't need them. These are expressive paintings to leave an impression about what you're seeing, but not necessarily an actual rendition. Accurate rendition. This isn't I'm not trying to be photorealistic. I want people to be able to tell what my painting is, but I want it to be expressive and this is just the beginning on the expressiveness. Now let's work on the wood piece. This little fine line of black right there. I do want to stay, so I'm going to stick with the small brush right there in this top edge and then this gray line right here. Some of that to stay in place. I'm not going to leave every little line in place. There's no need for that. Main thing is don't wipe out the toes. Got this black area of the wood right up under his belly. That's the shadow areas I want that kept intact. Alright. Let's go with a bigger brush for the wood. Let's see how big we can get away with working under the feet area now. Still going in the direction of the wood. The wood kind of has its own unique texture already, which is helpful if you don't get every little part of it is helpful. I'm going all the way along the edges of the wood right now. Try not to lose the highlight where it's at. I like this little brown spot here on the left. Then there's the dark area underneath. This same size brush. I'm gonna work in that area crisscrossing and bring some gray in there because it's not like solid black. Bigger brush sweeping on that would over the larger areas, trying not to obliterate the fees little detail areas I've left in. Would this be an old piece of wood? Little happy accidents left in there to use a Bob Ross term. Kind of neat. If you make it move the brush in a certain way and it makes a certain mark. It's kind of neat. I'm just going in the direction of the wood. Short strokes up and down. That black line there. Sometimes you'll decide a certain line. It's just not important. You just wipe it out. You can always add another line later if you want to. Make the brush a little smaller. And work on this little area by the black lines and the gray lines. And kind of pull on them a little bit, expand out. Then go around the background of the edge that then this shadow area, thunder his belly, I think I'm gonna pull down on some of that pool and Chris criss-cross it. Light touches to bring some texture in there. The wood is very textured. Having a lot of texture in the wood is not a bad thing. But the goal here is to have the, the head, this area looking the closest to realistic. And then as you get further away from that, you can get a lot looser and more expressive even on the wood unless you desire it to be super detailed. But that's still even though I really messed that would up a lot, it looks pretty good. You can still tell that something interesting that the bird is sitting on. I believe next we're going to go onto the background and decide what we want to do there. So that will be in the next portion of this class. 5. Working The Background: Alright, now we're going to wipe out this background. I don't mean remove it. Now we're still working on the bird layer, which is a copy of the photo layer. This is how I do I work on one layer until this time to add accents and other things I might want. We're going to work on the background portion. And we're going to go with a big brush size at a 100%. Now, I believe I'm, like I said, I'm working on 6 thousand by 6 thousand Canvas. If you work with a smaller canvas, the brush may appear really big to you. To me, It's not super big right now. I'm going to start. I'm I'm gonna stay zoomed out and I'm starting with the top-left corner. And I'm just going to do that same tap and lift and criss-cross through the whole background. Being careful. When I get down close to the bird's head and feathers. Not really go over. I mean, if I make a little mess up, like they're told a little feather detail out. You know, if you bring the background down in, I don't like that. So I'll tap with two fingers. I think if it works there it goes. I'm just going to crisscross with this big brush. I don't want to drag like this because that just looks not good to me. I'm going to tap with two fingers and take that out and just crisscross short strokes all the way around the entire background. I pulled a little section of his beak out right there. I could lower the brush size and just kind of work around that and blend that. Now raised the brush size back. That's why I tried to go around the edges first with the small brush so I don't really get too close to the bird. But sometimes I'll have to still go back. Right now. I'm focused on the main background here and just get it all blended out. I'm doing hard short, tap and lift, crisscross, back and forth, Sumner down, some are sideways, some are up. I'm using the brush here at full opacity to, during all of this. If your brush doesn't show at full opacity. If you're not seeing the blend you like, make sure your opacities turned up all the way, which it should be. Moving down around this sidebar the tail, trying not to obliterate the tail. So I better stay away from the edge of him with the big brush and go back in those areas with a smaller brush. After I get the main portion of this done. Now we'll move to the other side of him. Go all over in the wood in this bottom corner. I don't like this light area here at the bottom corner. That's something to keep in mind. But also when blending, if you don't like, you can blend out the darkness from this section down in here. Little more. The key is to go back and forth, crisscross different ways to keep your strokes a little bit more random. So it looks very expressive. Rather than just a straight stroke. I got most of the background done. Off, on, off, on. But I do need to go around the edges of the bird with a little smaller brush. I'm gonna reduce that to about half the size it was. And get around this tail area where I see a lot of pixels that are unpainted. Now, when you take a photo like this on a cloudy day and you got your noise level is high and it's grainy. You're gonna blow it up, especially like we did. You're gonna see some graininess or pixelization. Some of that can add some interesting texture, but some of it can look unfinished. You want to try to really zoom in and find those spots, like right here by this foot. There's a lot of that showing around the edge pretty good. Here's some I don't know if those are marched from the brush. The background. There are some right ear on the edge of his body. Some of these are from some of these markings are from the brush. And the harder you press, the more it will get rid of a market if you don't like it. So keep that in mind. You can bring that feathers out. You can push them back in. Let's look around his head area. Yeah, there's some areas right here that didn't get blended good. And just around the edge of his body. We're gonna go around this head area that appear on top, over the top of his head. They will slowly disappear. And I find this very meditative to sit here and do this. I tried to go around and find, like here's some spots right here that are kind of missed. I've tried to get in there and you watch those spots kind of disappear. The goal with this layer is to really, Here's a spot right here, this terrible. The goal is to really just spend some time with it. Get expressive with your marks back and forth. And to get rid of the original pixels. The best you can. Here is area right here, this little, not so good. You'll learn all kinds of terms from listening to me a little not so good. That even make sense. Got my brush cursor turned on, which I don't normally do. But that way you can kinda see when I'm tapping where I am. Some spot right there. If you stroke one way and it doesn't do what you want to do trash stroke and the other way. That's why I do a lot of crisscrossing cover all my bases right off the bat, plus add that interesting texture from the brush. In there. There we go. All right, let's take a look at what we've got. Zoom out pretty good. Turn it off. So there's the original picture. There is our painted version. We're looking pretty good. Now I just have to decide what I wanted to do with the rest of this background. The problem is, for me is it still looks to photo in the background and I want it to look more painterly. You can go with the big brush and drags more of that color around. Or if you find a color you like, push that color like this bluish purple here in this upper corner. Pushing that toward that green. I don't really care for the green, but I really liked the blue. Remember the lighter the stroke. The more texture you'll get from the brush. Pull some of this blue down here, and you're getting into artistic choice now. You've got this little peachy area right here where it meets the green. That's the area where the light's coming to hit the bird. I don't really want to make that darker, but I might want this peachy area to actually bring some peachy texture marks over here into the green. If you just very lightly touch and drag, see how it's bringing some texture into the green. And then if it gets too strong, you can pull one of the darker colors over it. I really liked that textural look by pulling some of that peachy areas over peachy, that even a color. And I'll pull some of that down. And then this purple down here is really interesting. I'm going to pull some of that out, just real light. Touch and drag, pull some of that purple texture over here to the right. And even down over this black area. Then I want to pull some more of the black area down. I don't like this light area down here. The more black I can gently pull that way with light big strokes. Then I can pull some of the the gray down and then some more of the purplish area. I'm just using. I'm using the same brush, same size. I'm just using it in a different manner here. Instead of doing the short, choppy strokes, I'm doing a gentle grab and pull, pulling different directions. Like what I did right there, there. Pull some of this over. You can turn the canvas too. Very gentle. I'm not pushing hard at all. Pull some of this black up and over. Still pulling some more of this peach tone from the top over here to the green, dark green in the corner. I really liked the way that makes some neat texture over that dark green. You can get some more of this pinkish color from up there. Now let's zoom out off on. We're still got this little stripe here from the background and that's where this dark green is coming from here. That may have to be tagging care of in the next stage, where we're really going to dress this painting up with a little bit more expressive brushwork. 6. Adding Expressive Brushwork: All right, it's time to get some additional brushstrokes in now with paint instead of the blending tool. So we're going to add a new layer for this. We're gonna put our brush shows on a new layer. That way if you don't like them, you can erase them and you will not mess up what you've already done here. Generally, I like to start once again with the eye. You see this beautiful blue down here. Then he's got this little bit of blue in the eye. I want to bring some of that up. What I'm gonna do is I'm gonna put my finger on a color blue that I like, which then changes the color up here to that color. I just held down on it with my finger. Now my paintbrush is that color, but obviously the brushes to be. So we're gonna bring it down pretty small. Zoom in here to the eye, make sure you're on the new layer. I'll just rename this paint. There we go. I'm gonna try to make, oops, see, I've picked, I've held my finger down there on the head and my color has changed. We're gonna go back down here and find that blue I liked again. We're going to hold down on it. Now it's back to the blue. I like. Let's see if I can avoid doing that. I was trying to zoom in. Make sure we're on the paintbrush. Just make one little mark. Now that's kind of a small mark. Raise it up a little. Just tap in there and that gives a nice little interesting blue highlight. I'm also going to bring that blue highlight, that blue color into the beak, right at the top of the beak, I'm gonna make a couple of little strokes in there. And now we're going to blend this. Don't worry if the strokes look too strong and too blue, they're going to be blended. Where else would I like to bring this blue? I love this blue. Let's see. Make the brush a little bigger. The colors that are in shadow of the bird would have some blues and some grays. How about right here? Let's put a little, go a little bigger with the brush. Undo that. Right in here. Bring a little blue that's too strong. We needed to have a lighter touch with the brush. Very light. Stroking a different direction. Maybe even down here. And then this greenish area down here by the foot. This is my artistic choice. That is an accent color I like. It is one of my favorite colors. I'm even going to make a smaller brush and bring some of that little bit of blue right into this tail area and into this white bottom section of these white feathers. Now, this looks kind of stupid right now. But it's going to be blended sum. Now I want to bring that same blue, I believe into the background. It may be a little bright, I may have to tone it down, but I'm just going to make a couple of marks here. That might be a little bright. Let's tone that same color, blue down. So get on the color wheel. Let's pull the left and down a little. Go with a little different shade, That's better. I'm just showing real light strokes to bring in some texture. But you can do a heavier stroke. I'm just making some marks around in here where I want to bring some of that blue color in. Like I said, it will be blended. And I may even bring some down here in the black area. Right along side. No. Gentle or touch. Thereby the base of the wood? Maybe? No, not over there. I don't like it over there. We've got some blue in there. Let's go back to the blender and let's start with the background where I've added that blue marks and just kind of touch and blend very gently some of it. I do not want to wipe out all of the textural marks here. But I do want to. Kind of blended in a little. I'm trying to decide what I like here. Like I said, this is all artistic choice. By blending some of this away. I'm Tony it down, but yet it's still there. Then if I decided, well, it's too strong, I could erase with it. Let's go to the eraser. Make sure we're on the right brush. Unless just tone some of this down using the eraser. Sometimes you can just tap and get an interesting want to bring some more blue back. So I'm going back to the paintbrush. Appear in this top corner. Bringing some more N kinda helps offset some of that green I don't like. Now there's a gray tone in here right next to it. I hold my finger down on that to pick up that town. Now I can bring some of that tone over into it as well. So we have a more difference. And then here's some pretty purple here. Let's grab that purple. But let's bring it over to the right just a little on the color wheel and see if we can add a little more fun color in there. Now let's go back to the blender and cap and blend some of that. Then get the gray color next to the purple and bringing some of that in. This is why you're adding some more color variation in there. Starting to look kind of interesting. Let's blend some of this blue out on the bird that I'm not happy with. We put the blue mark in the eye and I really do like that. I'm going to go with a real small brush and just blend the edges of a little bit. Let's get on the beak. We made this mark and go a little bigger brush and sort of blend that in a little bit. See that's still a little strong looking when you zoom in and zoom out, it'll look different. Let's do a little erase right there. Right down the middle of that blue to help it down and blend it in a little. Now let's zoom out. Oh, that's much better. Back to the blender. Let's get this area right here. Bigger brush. Some of this I may end up just blending out a lot of like those little highlights of blue. Now that we've blended that a little, let's do color next to him, grab it. Let's go a little brighter. And let's make a mark. Now let's blend that. I will go back and forth with colors, making marks and blending on this upper layer. That looks kind of interesting. Let's get the blending done on this blue and his belly area. Go with a bigger brush. Tap, very short tap stroke. I don't want to obliterate it completely, so I'm doing very short taps. So I did obliterate that one. I didn't want to. Rather than blend this one, Let's just grab a color nearby. Let's lighten and brighten that color by going to the right just a little. And put some of that color on top of it, and then blend some of that. Then we can get this color over here. Kinda pull it around, lay some of that down. Blend that. Now whether you use the surrounding color as is like I just did, or whether you lighten and brighten like here and go to the right on the color wheel. You could even go up a little if you wanted to, and add a little brighter colors in there. Very lightly. Let's even bring some of that up here. Appear over. Oh, that's too big of a brush mark. Gently touched some of that. In there. I'll go back and forth between color and blend and changing brush size. In this stage, if there's a division that looks too harsh, I will blend blended out. I do like that little bit of blue showing this blue under the belly is a little strong. I'm gonna take the colors right around it. Go with the big brush and a very gentle pull down mark, which will add a mark switch. I add texture in those areas right there. Let's take this color as is. Whoops. And go Up and over just a little. Let's take this color as is and come down. A little UCI was building up. Let's take this color as is. And come note. Let's do this color up a little bit and brighten it and bring it right down over it. Let's take this one. Let's go a little brighter. That one. Add some textural marks in there. Now let's blend some of that bigger brush. We're starting to look interesting. You can turn it off and on. If, let's say you liked that, but it's a little strong. You can always click on the N, which will bring you up this layer mode screen. And you can adjust the opacity if you didn't want it this strong. But say you bring the opacity down to about 70. And like it there. You can keep it there. Right now. I'm gonna keep it strong until I make more marks. So we're just going to go through this background, adding and blending some of these colors. This color here at the top. I just chose it. That's in this reddish color, but I do think I want this bright area above the head to have a little bit more brighter color. So I'm gonna pull to the right and pull up a little brighter pink and go with the big brush and just make a few marks in here. They're real subtle. That one's not that one is not. I went a little too rough, undo that one. Now I undo, undo dt and did too many of them. Very light pull to add more texture. Coming really close to his head too. If some comes into there, that's fine. Then I could even go a little bit brighter as I come off this direction, giving it more interest. And I want to blend this. So let's do that. Big brush. Just gently blend, tap it. If you tap it, it's a gent real gentle softening around the edges are if you pull it, it'll blend it out. Remember you're working on a new layer so you go right over the bird and they won't hurt him because you're on that new layer. Let's take this purple, pink, but let's go a little, add a little bit of that in there. Let's get this purple from over here. Hold down. Bluish purple, little brighter. Bring some of that over. That's too strong. Let's bring it back more towards the gray side. That's a little better. I had little interest in color like that last mark, but let's take that off. You don't necessarily want to have too much texture around the bird to compete with them. I will blend out some of this I just put down, but I'll leave some of it to have those marks in there. Just close to him. I'm blending some out. That shows now a little bit more light coming across the top, which is where the light was coming from. Now let us decide what I want to do. I grab this black, dark gray, still on a big brush, makes sure I'm still on the right layer and I'm going to try to paint some of that in right down here. I'm going in with a little heavier stroke. Let's try to blend that a little bit. Just to darken this corner a little bit right there by the wood and make it stand out a little more subtle. I'll go back and paint with it some more and a little texture in there. Then this blue brings grabbed some of the blue and bring that right down over it. Like I said, that this point, this is all artistic choice, blending. Just to soften it now a little. Put some more back in with texture. Let's get this really dark black here. When that a little better. Get this purplish pink right here and actually bring in some of that over top of that. And then get the blue here and bring in some of that. Just kinda helps offset that piece of wood a little better because the bottom part of this needs to be a little darker than the top part. Now, also, I like to bring the colors from the objects and the background into the bird. But also like to bring some colors from the bird into the background and the objects that might be around. I liked this little golden color here on the wing. I'm gonna grab that. And down here on the wood, I'm going to actually stroke in few marks with some of that right there and right there. Right over here on this bottom portion. And then I will blend it a little bit. Because this little strong. Then this purple down here on the bottom. Actually it's a blue. Pull that a little darker. And bring a little Canvas is a little strong there. Bring that out. Let's go with a smaller brush. Bring some of those marks in there. Crisscrossing little overboard there. Blender, blend it out. What I did, I went a little overboard. Just add some different interests there. Maybe this part right here, this little edge. Let's brighten that a little. Coming with a small brush. Bigger brush. Add that little highlight in there and then blend the edges of it. Just a tad. Work it in. Put some more of it down. Right here. That's a neat mark right there. I kind of like that. And then over here on this underside, back here, see I'm actually is still in the yellow tones, yellow golden tones like I picked up from the bird. I'm actually bringing some of the towns from the bird into the wood. Maybe lowest, not the bright yellow. It ties in with some of his yellows. Speaking of the bright yellow, I would like to kind of enhance that a little bit. The head and belly area. So let us take this real bright yellow here. And let's make a couple of large March like that mark, like a mark, usually two fingers and pull it out trying to bring some more of this yellow in without overdoing it. Just like I said, this is artistic choice. Now let's just bring, rather than blend that as I do like the March. So let's bring some of that color from around those marks and just go right over the edge with the color. Oops, I went a little marks too big. I'm trying to get this a little area right here. You'll have to choose the color every time we go around the edge. If you're doing this, then I got a little bit too heavy with it right in there. I may actually blend a little bit of that. Then let's say let's get this color and come over this edge just a little. Let's get this color and come over this edge, this color and come down over the top. Let's go over here to this one, this color and come over this edge a little. This color and come over this edge a little. How about this delightful purple here and come over right up through the middle of that and maybe around it. Then this darker. You can just keep picking color and making marks. Here. Let's get this one. Go over this blue. Still a little bit more tapping it. Whoops, that's too dark. Let me too bright. Let's get some of this color and pull out a mark right there. Let's go a little brighter on that and add some dimension in there. Let's kind of in shadow and that's a little too bright. We got a little too bright and go back down a little. I think I got too dark. This is often own playing, very light touch. Let's blend this right here. That Mark I just made. Those, all those marks. We have a lot of blending. What's kind of interesting. There's where we started, there's where we painted the whole photo. And here's where we started adding some different colors and marks into the background and into the bird. I'm actually liking the way this is looking pretty good. I think on the next video we're going to go straight into, well, wait a minute, I see something I didn't blend. Little brush right here is the little blue is a little strong right there. This blue is okay right here. Really lose that. I just want to tone down this part. The underside. There we go. I'm nitpicking now. In the next video we're going to go onto the darks and the lights a little bit. We're gonna check our darks and check our lights and see where we need to add some of those in. I have to also, I'm gonna leave this at full opacity until after I do check my darks and my lights and see if I need to make any new marks with them. Then we'll decide on the opacity of this layer as well. 7. Enhancing Darks & Lights: We have our paint layer. Now we're going to add another new layer to actually paint in some blacks and whites when you're painting a photo. Well, let's just talk about what a photo does. Black is never just black. Traditional painting with acrylics and OLS and whatnot. You will see. Artists talk about this that I come from a traditional painting backgrounds. That's where I picked up on this. But to paint black, you don't have to use straight black. You use a lot of other colors in there, mixed to make your black. But here, these because I've got so many colors in there already. What I don't have is enough straight black or straight white. On this layer. We're going to call this shadow. We can't spell shadow and highlights. Shadow and highlights. Whereas I N symbol. There we go, no shadow and highlights. You don't have to name your layers if you can keep up with them. We don't have that many. I'm just doing that for the purpose of the video. Once again, we're gonna go up here, close in with the eye. We're going to go to our color wheel. And I was a little trick is whatever color you're on on the color wheel. If you double-tap with your pencil at the very bottom, real quick, like it'll go to straight black. Let's go with a small brush here at the eye. Let's make just a few marks around the edge of the eye. Loops, keeping in contour with the eye. And if you see, if I zoom in, you'll see now these are really black. Any areas where it looks black, you want to add some more darkness. Just add straight black. We're going to blend this little bit, tone it down just a little by doing a little blending. Pull some of that black on over. Blending. Pull some of the edges of it away and down. So it doesn't look so harsh. Just kind of move it around just like we did in painting the photo. If you get a little too much black, you can always erase it. Back off. Now let's turn that off. We got a little more dimension going on with AI. Now, Let's go with a little bit bigger brush and get this area down here on the bottom. Let's do too big. Right here. Adds a little texture in there and then you can, using the blending brush, soften that texture down. If you don't want that much texture in your, I zoom out and take a look at how that looks. It just adds is hard to see here, but it just adds that extra bit of dimension. Let's go back to the paintbrush in any areas that it could stand a little darkening. Just tap in there with a little bit of black. Don't overdo it with the black. Just make a few little taps. You can kind of see where I'm going here. With the black, even that line on the beak and underside of the beak here. And then go to the blender tool. Blend it in a little bit. Try not to blend it all out. Tapping. If you just want to blend a little, just tap on it real fast, a bunch of little taps. And then you can go with a little bit bigger brush down here in these sections under the feathers. You can do the same thing with this. If you want to come back over with the color next to it, you can do that. Beak area blended a little bit. Let's say, let's go a little bigger up here. Gentle strokes, we'll add just a touch of little black textural marks there. If you get too much. Blender tool, tone it down. Got a little too much right there. When you zoom out, you can really see if you've got too much and you see you can blend a little more and turning it off and on will be helpful. Just short taps to try to blend it in a little better. Just adds a little bit of dimension there that you kind of lose. When painting. This tail feather here up underneath this back TO when you're typing of photo. Wide-open. And your bird is sharp and your exterior parts, you birds, sometimes you get soft and sometimes will blur. And when they blur, they make a little bit lighter color tones. So we're going to add some black in here to compensate for that. Just some quick marks. Then we'll blend that. Tap, tap, tap and drag just to soften it a little. Give your tail a little bit more dimension. And if you zoom out and it's too much, you can always just keep blending on that to tone it down just a little bit more. This black right here by the wing. On the wing looks pretty black. But up under here on the the wood, I'd like to a little bit more black texture right there, just real. I went over the toe, lower the brush size and get in there. Remember we don't want to lose those toes. And then right here, this makes the wood makes the turn. Even right here. Under that foot. Right there. We got maybe to darken this a little right here. Sometimes it helps to zoom out and see where we are. And then other times, because I do want the width to take the shape, other times it helps to zoom in. Now this side right here is too dark gray, not enough black, so we're gonna bring some black in there. Then this side also bring a little bit more right up here. Now I'll go back to the blender tool. Tap, soften that black down. Just a little. Thunder here where we added quite a bit of black. Soften that down just a little. But now it's got more black in it than it did say. You can also pull that black even further. Now let's work on this section right here. We got a little too much blending. We're toning those down just a little up here. Little too much on. Zoom out. Now it may be a little strong. Once again, just blend some more. Because a lot of times when you lie that black down, it does get very strong, but it will leave an interesting mark or two. You just can't live without. All right. Let's turn that off on, on this area right up under him. Like to try to win that black down. Just a little. Soften that. Zoom out. Blend it a little more. Let's see what happens if we go with a big brush and pull that section down. Apparently I got a little too heavy with it there, which happens that I've blended it out now so it looks more like a shadow. Instead of a straight black. I'm gonna touch that up with something else because I'm not satisfied with that. Actually, before I get away from that, I'm going to put a little more black in there. And blend that just a little bit more in. And then I'm gonna do something else after a while on that. I will first with a certain area like this forever if I let myself, okay, let's do some whites. Same thing, whatever color you're on. Go to the top of the color will be white. Double-tap. Supposed to find the white. There you go. Get close to the white and double-tap and say now it's changed to white, that's white. Now we're going to add in some whites. Going to go with a small brush. I'm gonna go turn him around a little. Once again, we're back at this I this little rim right here. We're going to enhance that. I rim just a little bit. Put a little dot of white right there that catch light in the eye. We're going to put might have to go bigger. Little white right there a little bit all the way down the beak because it would be catching some light. Go a little bit bigger. Just kinda tap right there. It might be too bright, but we'll blend it. Top of his head feathers would be kind of bright because the light's coming from up here at the top. But those marks are a little strong than I just did. So I'm gonna back out and try to move my brush a different way and get in some just am going around the head, just a few light little touches and if I get too big of one like that, back it off. And maybe move the brush a different way. Maybe lightened my touch. There we go. Lightening the touch. Very light strokes. Now where else is there? White here on top of this wing. Bring a little white in there. There we go. Bring some right here on this outer edge that made a neat mark. Bringing some right there. This little white feather apart. Maybe bring a little on that title. Just one little stroke. Maybe even put a little down here, which I'll blend in. Now he's got some little white areas on the head. I'm just going to tap in here. Were the white feathers are and just were not really white because they're coming from the photo, so it's not ever solid. I'm just going to add in some marks and if I get a mark, I don't like we back it off. I'll stroke it a little differently. Then here. Then here, you don't want to do too much light on the underside. Because your light on the subject is coming from the top. You can see I've added a little bit of white there, which will blend. Now I'm gonna come back down here to this would wear this edges next to where I put the black. I'm going to put some white in this outer edge too. There's a little white right there. And maybe even go real big. And right down here on this lower part of the wood, add a little white. All right, now let's go to the blender tool and we're going to blend some of that wood area back down because it got a little strong on the left side. We're going to blend some of the right side of that would area too just by tapping, just tones it down just a little by just tapping. Now let's work on his body where I added all these whites. We're going to blend some of that little too strong of a brush there. Notice I have not touched opacity on this brush. You can. But I don't usually do that. Every so often I might. All these little areas I put on the face, I'm now just kinda tapping around some of them to soften the edges. A little bit of those marks was something like this expressive work. It's all about the marks. The marks is what gives the interest. I like to look at little marks individually. I will pick on a mark. Lot of times. Soften that, soften that. Down here at this tail, the bottom of the tail where I added a little bit, I'm really going to soften that. I just wanted a little touch of it in their soften that round this wing. Really liking the way that looks. Let's shut it off. I mean, this is minor, but it does make a difference in your painting. It does give it that added interest. Now I said I was going to work on this bottom part here, right up under here where I wasn't happy. I think I'm going to add a new layer. And I'm going to grab this dark blue right there. And I've got a big brush and I'm going to try to just tap very gently right there and tone that down a little bit. If it's a little too much, I'll bring the opacity down, play with opacity on that. Zoom, zoom in. See that's straight by. Now, brought the blue in. But if I bring it in too much, it's too much blue. Maybe about 60% now zoom out and look at it again, turn it off and on. I liked that, but I also think I want to grab a little bit of the brighter blue. Oops, that's too big of a brush. And just kinda know, back that off. Little brush. I just want to bring a little lighter blue in there. But the mark is not going like I want. So I was going left to right. Let me go right to left. Let me go down. I'm looking for textural marks now. Let's see what I think of that. That just toned it down a little bit. I do like that. Going back to the shadows and highlights layer, going back to the toes, we're gonna go back to the straight black, all the way down, double-tap till it gets to black. And we're going to the bottom of the toe would always be darker than the top. And you don't want to do too strong of Mark. Go smaller. And the bottom of the foot completely would have. And this is at the point to where if you wanted to add a like a sketchy layer, you could go with a real strong, strong or real small black brush and just get some little sketchy lines. You can do this on a, do that on a new layer. Of course, you could change the opacity of it. But that makes these black. I'll make these toes stand out just a little bit more, but I am going to blend it. All right. Go to the blender brush, small blender brush. These areas that I'm just brought in, I'm just going to tap on them and move them around a little bit. I don't want him to be super-strong. Want them to have some of it in there. I'm just blending it with a very small brush. The wonderful thing about this method of painting is nobody is going to move their brush the same way you do. Everybody who does this class, we'll come up with some different results based on how much time they want to spend on it. And how they move their brush as opposed from right to left, top to bottom, as opposed to how you might move your brush. So everybody's work. This method, no, nobody's will look exactly the same. Everybody's will have slightly different expressions from each other. Let's zoom out and let's turn that shadows and highlights back on. I'm looking lost a little black here by this one toe. Bring that back in. Let's blend that a little bit more softly than we did before. I'm nitpicking now. But nitpicking makes for good art. Because you're going to nitpick home something different than somebody else's going to nitpick home. There we go. Now I've got my shadow and highlights said at full opacity, but let's play around with moving the opacity back and forth. I'm just looking at different areas as I do this. Sometimes full opacity is a little much. I'll zoom back out and move that around. I'm thinking around 80%. That's just what my eyeballs said. Looks good. On the top layer where I added that little bit of blue on the wood, that opacities at 61. The shadow and highlights layer. I've got it at 79. The paint layer, I have it at max. A full opacity. Do I want to change that? That's before I add in my extra paint strokes and blended them. When I bring it up. It really adds some cool dimension and some extra colors. I think that I'm going to leave that at full opacity. I do want to add a few more marks, I think on that layer. I'm going to grab a color here from his belly area because I see a spot right here. I want to try to come down over that purple just a little bit. And right here, maybe come out just a little. You can always blend. If a market is too strong. Just nitpicking again. I really think he looks a lot more expressive than he did originally. And one way I like to do that is just merge all of that together. I just did. Turn that off. There's the photo There's the painting. Photo. Painting. You could totally change the color of the background completely if you wanted to. By going with a new layer like we did over top, where I added the colors. You could totally add a whole different color behind there. But just remember where the light's coming from. The light's coming from up here. So you would want that area to be lighter than say down here. I've got some really great texture in there from this brush. And I've got some really interesting colors in there. I think that makes a really neat painting from this photo. So there's only one thing left to do. And that would be to add a signature. Add a new layer, pick the color you want for your signature. Like sort of that blue right there. Go with a really small brush. Get down here in the bottom corner. Hold down on it strong and sign your name and that sometimes you have to resign your name. Then because the signatures on a new layer, if you say, Oh, I did it too big, which you may feel comfortable doing it bigger. You can get on the transform tool. Pull the signature down lower or larger. I kinda liked that the size I had it. You could also, if you don't like your signature where it's at on the transform tool and move it. But because I did it so small, I would have to be here, hold down on it. Come on. Now you're gonna move. You could move it everywhere, anywhere you exactly want it. I tend to like mine down here, but sometimes I put them right up next to the subject. Then you can merge your signature when you're painting by squeezing the two layers together. However many layers you want to merge, you grab your put your finger on the top one that you want to merge and your finger on the bottom one, and you squeeze them together and the other merged. So that's before. And that's after. And even though we did not paint in every little feather here in his body like that, we still have a very feathery looking painting because of the way the brush marks were done and with layers of different colors added in to give it that interest and dimension. We still have a very fluffy looking bird without painting every feather. And he's a little bit more expressive. I'm gonna come back with one more video showing you how to add the canvas texture on top if you would like it. It's included with the class. And talk about what other kind of things you could do to enhance this image even more if you wanted to on your own. 8. Finishing Touches: Alright, we have gone from this photo, this painting or whatever you've created, which by the way, I want to see. So be sure to share that with me because I'd love to see what you've done. Now we're going to talk about ways to finish this out. Now this has plenty of texture from the brush itself. You don't have to add any more texture at this point. Sometimes I publish my work with textures, a Canvas texture on top and sometimes I don't. Well, I've included a Canvas texture for you and I'm going to show you what kind of a different look you can get when you add that to the piece. So we're gonna create a new layer. And on this layer, you're going to go to Insert a photo. You're going to grab that square canvas texture that I gave you and put it on top. Now we have a very nice rich canvas texture. First thing we're gonna do on this is changed the layer mode to multiply. As you can see, a darkened it considerably an added all whole lot of texture. Let's duplicate the texture layer now. Going to get even darker. Unless put that on soft light. And as you can see now, it's really washed it out. Going back to the multiply layer. Turn off the soft light, going back to the multiply, Let's bring that down to around 30%. Range. Turn on the soft light layer and bring that down to around the 30% range. Now, you can turn them off and on. It's a little too light with a soft light layer. So we can fix that a couple of ways. We can bring them multiply layer back up. We can bring the soft light layer down. Sometimes you don't need you don't even need the soft light layer if you don't want it. That's how it looks like without it at all. Would just multiply. And you can see how that is added, the canvas texture in there. But the soft light, if you want it a little brighter, you can bring that, add that soft light layer and play with your opacity. You could also try if you didn't like soft light. You could try overlay. Hard light is going to be too bright. Soft light is very soft overlays a little bit more bold. I tend to like soft light. And that adds though, a Canvas texture through the whole piece. So if you zoom in, you can see that rich canvas texture in there and you can turn off the layers. Let's say that look at the background area here under the beak. You see how it looks kinda flat when you bring in that canvas texture. It gives it that dimension. That as if it was painted on real canvas. And if it's too strong. When you zoom out, like I said, you can always reduce the opacity even more. Sometimes I do a very low opacity and I'll just play with them until I get it to look, right. That's what I'm doing now. Then multiply one I've got on 22, the soft light one. I have on about nine. And turning them off that didn't alter my colors too much by keeping those opacities low. But now I do have that texture in the background. That is kind of interesting. You could also at this point, if you decide, well, I don't like the texture. In a certain spot, you could always get on whichever layer is causing an issue that you don't like and you could erase off of that layer. I don't do a whole lot of that. But you definitely could do that. Another thing you could do to finish it out, and this is all just your personal choice on whether you want to do these things is you could add another new layer at the top. You could paint a few extra brushstrokes on top, over top of the canvas layers. So let's say I've got this yellow right here. The canvas just showing the list. Say I want to add a brush mark or two on top of that, the yellow is not a very good example. Let's say, let's try the brighter yellow. Let's say I wanted to add some more than on top. You could see you sweep that over the top. And it's actually on top of the canvas. Before, after. And you can do the same thing with, if you've got too much of it, blending it in. That's actually on top of the canvas. And like the bright blue, I really liked the bright blues. Let's try to make a mark or two with that very light touch right there. That's a little too much. Let's go with, sometimes if you go with a bigger brush and you do it real gentle, you'll get those nice textural marks. They're like I just got, It's like it's picking up the texture of the canvas. Let's go down here a little bit and bring some of that over here. I'm just doing it real light actually is a little bit rough right there, so it will blend that out. Back to paint. Just real light marks. Then blend a little Were you don't like it or erase it. Just added a couple of little marks on top for interests. And you could do this in the background area to, whoops. Let's get on paint. If you wanted to add some more brushwork in the background, that's a little bright. You could pick one of the colors that's nearby and add a little bit more marks in the background. Wherever you might want to add them. Let's say I wanted to tone down this blue right here and come over it with a darker I picked a darker color and drag like that. You don't like what you just did. You can, oops. Erase that, erase some of that back off. I really did like the blue down there, so I didn't really want to go over it. I don't like that black there. This extra layer of adding a few more brushstrokes on top just adds another dimension to the painting. If you want to do that. You could have added the Canvas layers early on after we painted the whole bird and kept the Canvas layers under the actual additional marks we did. In the beginning. You could have done that if you wanted, but I don't always, in fact, I rarely add the textures at the end. Simply because my work is being printed on a lot of different product types and it's being printed on Canvas. The CAM when you print on Canvas, that's the way that's my preferred area. A way to print is on Canvas. You're already going to have canvas texture. You can certainly print this the way it looks on Canvas and it will be fine. But I just don't want to have too much Canvas interacting when I go to print. So a lot of times because I print on Canvas so much, I will not add these Canvas layers and I will just leave it like this. So when it's printed than this, these areas will pick up this canvas texture. But it just depends on what you want to do if you're going to print it on paper. Add the cameras layers, and that gives it that extra little painterly look. It's all up to you. Another thing you can do is I've used this one brush through this whole class. And as you can see, you can do a full painting with one brush. That's not a problem, especially this brush. But Let's say that you wanted to use some additional brushes. You could also add another layer and pick some other brush with some different kind of brush marks. Like I have some splatter brushes I made. And if you wanted to add stuff like that in with other brushes that you have, you could definitely do that and even add more interests to your piece. Once again, you could have the Canvas layers off if you want to do that, or you could turn them on. A lot of times I will put the Canvas layers on. Then I will save. The painting both ways. Let's talk about saving the painting. I'm gonna take I'm gonna leave those extra marks I made in. I've shut off this little splatter layer I did is just to show you what else you could do with other brushes. But let me turn to Canvas layers off. At this point, I liked this painting as is. And I'm gonna save it. I would go up here to this wrench, click on it. I would click Share. And you can save it in a procreate image file where you would have all of your layers. But I've already merged my layers and I saved mostly mine in JPEG. I click JPEG export and save image. Then I picked this up from iCloud from my desktop and download it on my desktop. The only thing I really do after I downloaded on the desktop, if it needs a little sharpening, I might apply a little sharpening and my editing program. Or if I want to boost the color a little bit more when I'm finished, I might play with the saturation a little bit. But mostly this is what it's going to look like when it's completely done. Now if I wanted to save it with the canvas, I can also save that one the same way. Jpeg, Save Image. Now I have both versions saved. So when I go back to my desktop, I can pick them up from the iCloud. I could also transform right from here onto my SanDisk. I expand drive. But I usually just pick them up from my desktop if iCloud is working, if it's not. There we go. There is the two files right here that I've saved. One with the canvas and one without the canvas. But I don't usually transform back to the Drive unless and get them that way unless iCloud is not working. Anyway. I hope that gives you some ideas about what you can do. I want to see what you do with this photo and how expressive you can get and color choices and things like that that you might make. Because you can choose any colors you want to make your marks. And you can also use this same technique with any photo of your choosing that you may have. You can, you don't have to have professional photos. To paint a photo. You can paint photos from your cell phone. If you want to. You can make them in any blow them up to any size you want because you're going to paint it all. It's the main thing to think of when you go into paint a photo. The photo blurry. Because if it's blurry, you're not gonna get the detail that you may want in your painting. But if your photo is sharp and clear, you're going to come out of it with detail just like we did here. I have say both of these, I'm gonna take all these layers back off at the moment. So you'd go from that to something like that with just a cell phone photo if you want to, you can do this technique with this brush on any photo and you can use the Canvas if you would like it. Thank you for watching. I hope that you've enjoyed the class and learned a few things. And I can't wait to see what you create.