How To Paint Photos In Procreate: Farmhouse Style Cow Painting

1. Welcome!: Welcome to how to paint photos and procreate farmhouse style cow pain. Hello there, I'm Jay Johnson and I teach people how to paint photos in Procreate on the iPad. I wanted to give you a little backstory on me as an artist and I love painting on this device. I've been painting since I was five and I've been a photographer since I was 13. My favorite mediums are colored pencil, soft pastels, pastels, acrylic in various types of inks and some watercolor here and there. I discovered digital painting or in the year 2 thousand, and I started dabbling in it with Corel Painter. Here's an interesting fact for you. The pine or software was originally acquired by corral and in 2001 to 2002 it was rebranded procreate painter. Interesting. Before its transition into corrals, full graphic, sweet, 22,003. I just thought that was interesting. I originally learned how to paint my photos using blending brushes in chorale. For many years, I switched back and forth between traditional and digital art forms. In 2019, I acquired a very serious allergy and I found myself unable to use many of my traditional art supplies. Due to the allergy. I purchased the newest version of corral pioneer with the intention of painting my photos digitally again. However, the software had changed quite a bit from my previous version. And there was quite a steeper learning curve. I just wasn't up to the challenge of re-learning that software. Someone suggested Procreate on the iPad for digital painting. I didn't have an iPad, but my daughter did. I tested out procreate on her iPad. I tried painting a photo using the brushes as blenders. It was an immediate success. It literally took me a half a day of playing with it to know that this was definitely what I needed. I purchased my iPad Pro that afternoon and I've never looked back. Many people have asked me since then how to paint their photos in Procreate two, which is what brought me here now to teach others how to do what I do. I love painting and we photos in Procreate on the iPad because there's no steep learning curve. I was able to create mini paintings using the brushes which came with Procreate as blenders. Before I ever purchased other brushes. I don't have to fool with a lot of computer functions to use Procreate, I can simply just sit down, pick a brush and start painting. I love the portability of the iPad. I'm not tied to my desk to paint anymore. I can paint in front of my favorite bird watching window. I can paint down in my art studio. I can take the iPad with me and paint wherever I go. I am passionate about painting my photos this way. In this application and on this device, my iPad has become my art studio I can use anywhere and I love it. I hope you will too. And I hope you can see in my classes how easy and how relaxing and how free it is to paint in this method. In this class, you'll learn how to paint this cow snapshot photo to create a fun portrait, which lends itself to a farmhouse style of core. I teach you how to set up your canvas and test your brushes. How to bring in two photos to paint together. Had a match to saturation between those two photos. How to soften and paint the background. How to paint the cow and the flower using the brushes as blenders. How to fix problem areas such as backlighting, using painting. How to add detail and enhancements. How to add real paint texture to finish out your painting. I also go over the editing tools in your photos library, which can help you to make adjustments to your beginning photos before you start painting, as well as your final painting. If you desire. In order to complete this class, you will need an iPad with procreate installed. You will also need an Apple pencil. You already need to have a basic understanding of using Procreate and installing brushes. And you will need to understand how to transfer photos onto your iPad before starting the class. Provided with this class is the original photos to paint, which is the cow and photo and the photo and my portrait painting brush set. Let's get started pining this week cow photo. And let's give her a lovely tulip to how adding just the right amount of charm and whimsy to our farmhouse style art. 2. Set Up Canvas & Brush Test: We're ready to set up our canvas to work on our cow. I've got the photo reference, photo, reference photos installed, brushes installed. Now it's just time to set it up to set up a canvas. I hit the plus button up here on top. Once I go into Procreate the new Canvases you set up, we'll be down at the bottom. I've already set up the 6 thousand by 6 thousand before, which is the size I work in. So I'm just going to delete that so we can do it again. You don't have to do 6 thousand by 6 thousand pixels at 300 DPI, you could do smaller number like 3 thousand by 3 thousand or 2 thousand by 2 thousand depends on your iPad, the amount of space you have, whether you want to go that high resolution. I have a lot of space on this iPad. So I like to work high-resolution because I do big prints of my work. I'm gonna click on the plus button by the words and new canvas, which brings up the custom Canvas and make sure you're on dimensions. And as you can see, I have DPI set at 300. You would just type in the width you want here and the height there. And make sure your DPI is at 300 CEO, how good quality? Now if I were to do 3 thousand by 3 thousand, watch the layers, change the amount of layers. You can have. C, I could have 55 layers. I don't use that many layers. I usually merge my layers as I work. I'm not worried about the maximum amount of layers, but this is the way I'm going to set this up as a square and hit Create. And it will automatically go to it and open it. But it will appear back here when you hit the plus button again, you'll see it on your list so you don't have to set it up every time. You can come back and just click on that. And if you want to, you can swipe it and edit it and rename it up here. Just type, click on untitled canvas and type 6 thousand pixels or whatever you want to call it, or square canvas. Let's just do 6 thousand pixels square. There we go. Save. Now it's got a name. You don't have to have everything is untitled. That's not that important to me. I don't usually name them sometimes I do, but anyway, we have it set up. Here. It is in Procreate once we click on it again. Now it's time to take a look at what we're gonna be working on today. The layer automatically that's opened up for you. We're gonna go to the wrench tool and click Add. And I have the photos in an album. I put the photos for this in an album. I'm gonna go to Insert a Photo, click on albums. And cow. There's the photos. The cow we're gonna be working on. Is this cow right here. Now this cow is not 6 thousand by 6 thousand, but I'll be able to stretch it out. I'm gonna go ahead and bring in the tulip photo. There it is right there. So I'll just click on it as well. On a new layer. There it is, the tulip and the cow. We're going to use both of these. But I wanted to show you a little something. Let me get back out of this and go to photos and the albums. All right, so this is the cow we're gonna be working on that I've just imported on a new layer and there's the tulip I'm going to give the cow. And I wanted to show you some inspiration here. I'm thinking farmhouse style worksheet. I do a search for farmhouse, art cow, something like that. I came up with these that popped up on Google. One of my favorites is this one right here because of the real painterly look. And I liked the, the Golden it, That's kind of nice. I like this one, the simplistic look, but very painterly. The one with the flowers on the head. I like it, but I don't think it's for me in this lesson. Same here. This one got my attention with the flowers hanging out of the mouth. I kinda liked that. I don't want to put my cow in a chair or at a tub or put glasses on them. Here's some more with the flowers on the head, which is a really cute idea if you wanted to do that. And you have some flowers or clip art, you could put that on top and paint those in with your subject. It just depends on what you want to do. In my case though, this one got my attention the most. This is a very painterly cow. I mean, because it was a painting, it's done very preterm labor is very simplistic and very simple background. And I love the flowers hanging out of the mouth. And I thought, well, I want to do something like that. But you have to find the viral photo. So I found this on Unsplash. I have a lot of firefighters on my own, but this made me think I really need to get flowers on the stem like this if I want to put them in the mouth of an animal and clamp them to a tripod or something outdoors and put a backdrop behind it and shoot it. And that way I will have different flowers, but like this on a single flower on the stem was what I was thinking. I didn't have any single flowers on the stem that would work with the cow. So I went to Unsplash and I found this tulip and I just turned it around so it could look like it's hanging out of the cow's mouth. That's the one I've chosen to use with a cow in this lesson. Let us go back over here to procreate. As you can see, I have the tulip there and the cow there. Those are the two we're gonna be working with. I'm going to shut off the tulip for right now. I'm going to go to the cow layer and I'm going to resize it to fill my Canvas. You can do that by clicking on the arrow. Let me make this a little smaller. Click on the arrow. You'll get your little resizing tool. It's on uniform. I don't want to distort it or free form this, I'm just going to grab a corner because it's already a square image. And then grab this corner and pull it out. Now my count is in place, you just click on the layers and it's in place. And then my tulip is right here. And we'll deal with that tulip later. We're ready to start working on the cow. And we're going to be using my painting portrait. Portrait painting brushes. The Smooth paintbrush the canvas brush the impressing me, brush the fan brush, and the masking brush. We probably won't use the masking brush in this because I'm not going to replace the background. I could soften this background with this masking brush by using it as a blending tool like this. Just kinda go over it and circles and soften it. Which is a good way to, in fact, let's just do that. Let's use this as a softening. Let's just show you how this brush works. And then it kind of softens all the way around the cow. Of course, I should've started that on a duplicate layer, but I didn't. But that's how it works as a softening brush. I'll do that again in a little bit. I just wanted to give you a little rundown on these brushes. How they work is blenders. The smooth paint one is a thick paint stroke with feathery ends, which is great for doing for if you push on it real light, you will see some of the photos still appear back there. But if you push on it real hard, it gets real thick. I like to do criss-cross strokes with this a lot like that. That's how that one works as a blender, which is what we're gonna be doing in this lesson. The canvas brush, turn up the opacity on that. A little bit larger size. The canvas brush has a really nice canvas texture when you're using it as a blender. I, when it's time to add texture. This is a good brush to bring into play. When blending. These can all be used. His paintbrushes to which we will do. The impressed me brush is a very unpredictable brush. If you push very hard and drag, you will see that it let me raise that up. Push hard and drag. You'll see the leaves a little choppy bits behind. If you do it very lightly and drag, you will see that it leaves some interesting paint texture. I don't blend a whole lot with this one until later. This works great as a paintbrush to add thick texture accents. After the fact. Then the fan brush. I don't usually use this as a blender, but if you were to do so, when you drag it, it puts a nice canvas texture and it's real spectrally great for areas where you really want to add some more texture. That's how those work as blenders. And that's what we're gonna be using in this lesson. I already showed you the masking one. So the first thing I'm gonna do is duplicate my original photo layer so I don't mess it up. I'm just going to turn off my original photo layer for right now. Don't need that on. We can do store. It, can show through a little bit if you paint very lightly, and it can distort what you're really seeing. If you leave this on, you may not realize your painting so light on the top layer with your pressure. So you just have to end the pressure of somebody you have to play with to get the look you want. If you turn it off, you'll be able to see a true picture of what it's looking like as you're painting. In the next segment, we will be starting to paint this cow and this background. And then we're going to bring in that tulip and get that in there. We will probably go ahead and bring in the tulip first. Let's do that first. That way we'll have our whole picture that we're going to paint. So stay tuned for the next segment. 3. Masking The Tulip: We're ready to bring in this tool up, and this is where we're going to do a little masking here. Let's turn the tulip on. We need to re-size the tool down. It's a little bit. Turn the opacity down first. We can position it and see where we want it. If you click on turn the opacity down so you can see and then click on the arrow up here and you can move the tulip around. You just hold down on it and move it around. You can use your two fingers to hold down on it and make it smaller or turn it however way you want. I have a I don't really want to show that you love hanging out the other side. I just want to show a little bit of it hanging down here. I'm going to turn it this way. Get the size, a little smaller. Position at where it might be hanging out in the side of the mouth. Maybe a little bit bigger. There we go. Like that. This top part that's covering his face, that's gonna be masked away. And all you're gonna see is what's coming out of her mouth. I said His while ago, I met her. Just click on that layer. Let's raise the opacity backup so we can see what we're masking. Zoom in a little bit. That layer is set in place now and we need to mask away. And we're going to use the Smooth paintbrush, a soft masking brush. I'm sorry, to do the masking. Again to get all this gray away. Now there are ways in Procreate to select all the gray and get rid of it. I don't normally do that. I normally just do a mask and paint away because then if I want to bring something back, if I'm asking way too much and I want to bring it back, I can I'm just going to mask it away. So you click on the tool of layer. You'll see the word mask. Click that and it should change your paint color to black. When you paint with the black masking brush, it will take away. And then if you switch to white, it will bring it back, which is really nice if you mask away too much. I'm going to make the brush pretty big. I'm going to start here at this top corner, holding down pretty good pressure. We're going to erase, mask away the leaf that's on his face because we don't want that showing. Let's get the rest of the background. Just kind of go around it with this big soft brush getting close to the tool, but don't go over it. If you do go over it by mistake, you can bring that back with white. Just get rid of all this gray obviously isn't going to be coming out of his nose, so we don't need that part. Let's make the brush a little smaller. Let's get rid of the gray and working on the gray right now. Come in as close as you can without going over. It's actually a purplish gray around the flower. Holding down. I'm putting quite a bit of pressure on this. Let's make the brush a little smaller. It gets us a little bit of of his Alpha of her mouth area. This gray. I'm not sure how much of this leaf here I want showing. So the mask around it for right now and then look at it and decide. Getting as close as I can. Brush is pretty smooth. So it's really easy to work with. Have to go a little smaller to get in there. Let us go down this side of the flower on top of the stem. Around the edge of the, look. I'm holding down on the brush, the whole town doing this. Unless I lift up to change positions, we find the mask and a little bit on these leaves, Let's see where I want it. Coming out in the mouth. The line of the mouth is right there. So obviously, I don't want the tulips showing at the top of that. I'm asked to weigh too much, masked away a little too much because it needs to meet up with the edge of the mouth there. So let's now change over to white on the color wheel. If you tap near the white and it's not exactly white, if you just double-tap on there near the White, they will go to straight white. Now we can bring this back, it right along this edge. See how much room bring back. All right, now I'm bringing back background. Now we need to go back to black and it should be hearing your history so you can just click it. But if not, you can double-tap near the black and it will go to black. And let's get rid of the edging. More of this edging. Now it looks like it's coming out of her mouth. We've got to get rid of the rest of this background from the flower. So let's go with a small brush and get in real close on the edge of the leaf. This part here. Then this area here. You can even turn your painting by using two fingers and holding down and turning it so you can stroke and the direction is comfortable for you. This part. Make sure we get all this background out around these leaves. The small masking brush. Work on this little area that is in the corner. The leaf and the stem meat. I like to zoom in really big here. I got a little nick in the stem here. I can go back to my white, bring that back a little and then go back to my black. It may be getting smaller brush there. Let's look around the flower. I still have some of the background showing right here. Go a little bigger brush. Go down around the edge of that flower. Make sure we've got everything off the bottom. Now let's look at it. I think that looks pretty good. So now we have a flower hanging out of our cows mouth, so that can become part of the painting. I'm going to turn the flower layer off a minute and just look. I see a spot when I turned it off. Right in here somewhere. There's a spot I missed. If you really want to make sure you've got your mask right, you can turn your cow layer off. And then you'll see the background color is white. So you can come see your mistakes here. You can come around with your brush. Just refine those areas. Little bit. Depends on how perfect you want to be at. Kinda blends in with the background anyway, when you do this, it's all gonna be painted. But if you have some obvious areas, now you could save this tulip in case you wanted to put this tool up hanging out in the mouth of another subject. Let's just do that. If you turn off the background color, it becomes transparent. So you can click the wrench and click share and click PNG. And it will save it as a transparent file in case you want to put it in another image at sometime you will already done the masking on it and just click Save Image and it will go into your photo gallery. Let's turn background back on our cow back on leaving the original photo layer is still off. I think I've got the mask exactly like I want. So at this point, There's no reason to have the layer mask and layer two separate. So if you just pinch those together with your fingers, now they are together and you could turn that off and on. Let's turn it off for right now because we're going to soften this background up around the cow using the same masking brush as a blender, will do that. Next segment. 4. Smooth Out The Background: All right, we're now going to start smoothing out this background. Why smooth out the background? Well, I want to, I want to paint the entire background at some point here. And all of these little grass pieces are distracting me. I don't want to see him. I kinda like the colors in the background, but I believe I'm gonna go lighter. In the meantime. I just want to smooth it out so it doesn't distract me. I've got the tulip layer turned off so that doesn't strike me. I'm gonna get on the layer we're going to paint, which is the duplicate of the photo layer. I'm going to go to my blending brushes and choose the masking brush. And I'm gonna make fairly big brush. Just kind of go in circles, holding it down quite a bit of pressure and letting up. Or I want to drag color from one area to another. And just kind of go around the edges first. You can use a big brush and not touch your subject and smooth all of this out. And I'm letting up here and there on the brush where I want to keep some of the color because whatever color you start on is going to come down. If you want to keep some of these colors you let up and you start again. Let's make the brush a little smaller. The piece of grass has got hanging out of his or her mouth on that side. I keep saying is not necessary to keep. So I'm just going to smooth that out. I'm doing little circles while I'm holding down on this brush. You can do straight strokes, but I like to do those circles. So wherever this brush size will work, I'm just continuing to work with that. Coming in as close as I can without going over. Now it's time to go a little smaller on the brush. Zoom in here. Around the ears, around the face. Go around the top of this ear, and around the top of the head. Not really worried about getting too close in here with these little hairs. The hairs are very backlit. And I don't like that. That's going to be painted. I don't want the backlighting. This painting in the top of the firm here across the back. I don't want the backlighting. I'll see if I let up and grab the blue and come down. I'm going to bring blew down. If I start on the lighter area and go up, I'm gonna bring the lighter color up. This brush is a good one if you want to make some really soft clouds in the background to really soften things up. Let's get down here with a little smaller brush and go in around the nose mouth. This is going to have paint added to it later. Right now I just want to smooth it out. Get rid of the distractions that smoothed out now. And this is, you can further smooth it out and play with your colors and bring certain colors down where you want them. I really liked the blue, not too fond of the green. And go with a really big brush. Really bring that blue noun tone down some of that green. I'm not too fond to that bright green. But this is a good brush to use. Let's say if you're editing a photo in Procreate on your iPad and you want to keep the photo as it is, but you want that background distraction tone down. You can use this brush to basically eliminate it. But yet keep the colors of it. Like you said, this backlighting going to have to work on that at some point because the backlighting makes it look to photographic. Unless I was, I'm going to replace the background with a very dark background to indicate strong lighting, which is a more dramatic look. I'm not after that with this, I'm after this farmhouse style. In fact, I'm just going to add a new layer. And I'm going to bring in this inspiration photo here. Just so I can see how that's a very matte soft finish. I really liked this work of art. I'm after a matte finish type of look and you see there's no backlighting here. So that backlighting is gonna have to go. I'm just going to turn that off and I'm going to pull it all the way down to the bottom. You just hold down on it. Put it under my original photo later and just use it as reference. I know you can open up a photo here is referenced and do split screen and all this business. And I don't want to do that. When I'm painting and painting, I'm not into a bunch of computer functions. Just like to use my photo and my brushes and do a painting. This is what we have now let's turn the to look back on. And there's our tulip. And at this point, we're ready to start painting the cow and the tulip. I'm going to take the to get on the tulip layer and my photo layer here. And I'm going to the while I'm painting on. And I'm going to squeeze those two layers together. Now they're one and they're ready to paint. Shoot, I forgot what I was gonna say. While it happens. This happens when you get older. You forget things. But I had I had something important that I was gonna say and I don't remember what it was, So maybe I'll remember it in the next segment. We're going to start painting The, Should we do the background first? Should we do the cow first? I think we should do the background first. Yeah, I think we should do the background first. We're going to figure that out. At least bring some poking into the background and then we'll work on the calf. In the next segment, we'll start working on the background. Some more. 5. Painting The Background: Alright, when it comes to painting the background, have some decisions to make. Color wise. What do I want to do? Well, I'm not a big fan of the green color. I do like the blue color, but I don't like the blue color where it is. I'm going to paint the entire background and the cow would smooth paint. The cow will be painted using the blender brush. The smooth paint right now on the background is going to be painted using it as a paintbrush. I'm going to click on the Paint tool here. Make sure I'm on smooth paint. And then if you just hold down on the color you want and let up, it will appear right here in your color selection. I'm just going to get a really big Smooth paintbrush. And I want to bring this blue down here. Just little criss-cross. Little green still there. Not a big deal. That stroke was too big, so I'm gonna lower the brush and get in a little closer. Let's go ahead and lower the size of the more. Get in a little closer without going over. Go around here. We're going to have a lot more strokes added to this. So I know it looks ridiculous right now. Just trying to get these colors in here where I want them. And using the smallest brush, I don't go over the two-loop. Go right up against it there. And then up under his her neck down the side of the tulip. I'm just doing short strokes, not pressing too exceptionally hard, is that's why you can still see the green. Behind there. The more structure go over top, the dark route will get. Let's go around here. Just kinda scribble. Do what you want. Mark wise, it looks pretty ridiculous right now. But as I go up this bottom corner, I'm going to bring it a little darker blue. So all you gotta do is go to your color wheel where it's at and pull it down a little bit. Let's add some with a big brush. Add some darker marched down here towards the bottom corner. Short, choppy, because this is gonna be blended. And even up here. Then let's select this blue again. And this time we're gonna go a little bit lighter. So go straight up to get a little bit lighter blue in there. As you get close. The cow has these lovely blue tones in her for. So I wanted to do capitalize on this blue and actually bring some of this lighter blue marks over the other blue. Now let's go a little even lighter on the blue. Goes straight up some more. If it's, the blue's a little too bright, you can even go to the left a little bit, which will gray it down some. Now, that's kinda dark, so we're gonna bring in some light. I'm going to eventually get rid of the backlighting up here. This top part will be painted in with some of the colors on the lower part to get rid of this. But the backlighting color is a nice white, which would work well to bring into the top of this image. I believe. So. Let's try it. A little bit of the blue in that corner there. And then actually come around here and bring some of this white. And I'm just doing very light strokes on top of the blue just to tone it down a little. Like I said, we're going to blend all this. Go even up here, a little higher light strokes. All right, Let's grab tan color in or a grayish tan. How about that? You can select any color you want for the background that I want to just bring some of these cow colors into the background. Just wherever you wanted to go. Maybe even down here at the bottom a little and tone down some of this blue. It's a little bit rich of a blue. I want the blue in there, but I don't need it quite that much. Lower the brush size and where this green is showing around the cone. Bring this color in there. All right, I'm gonna go select another color from the cow. And I'm thinking kind of a yellowish, creamy tans on which kind of dragging my wheel around where I might want it a little bit more to the yellow side and raise it up to be kind of light. Let's see what that looks like. A pretty color. Just have to decide where I might want it all kind of like it there. Maybe even up here a little bit. Just very lightly tapping in that color and event, sometimes I get a strong mark and that's okay. Where else could I bring that? And let's bring it right in here a little bit. Now let's go back to the white. Select that. Go with a big brush and kind of go over that a little. We have a good mix of colors and even come down just to soften that bottom a little. And then like that last stroke. So, whoops, I took away too many strokes. Sometimes that happens. That's a really nice background. This blue down here, I think I want to grab some of the dark, darker brown tones from the cow. So I'm just going to dark, they're darker brown. And actually make the brush a little smaller and bring some of that with that blue as well. Thunder here. This is all just personal choice on how the colors you might want in the background. I do like those colors. I will probably refine them more later. But right now that gives me a starting point. And I think I would like to actually start painting in the cow now to get the cow pain in the way I want. And then I will blend and refined the background some more. But this gives me a good starting point on the background and the whole image is a whole painting. I'm going to stop on the background right now. And in the next segment we're going to start painting the cow. And we're gonna work on getting rid of this backlighting because that's very distracting to me. It does need to be a little lighter than the cow for on the lower part, but it doesn't need to be that blown out and bright. So we're gonna have to work on that. In the next segment, we'll start actually painting the cow. 6. Reduce Saturation on Tulip: All right, Before we get started in painting, something is bugging me. I'm going to attend to this and I'm going to show you how to do it. If you wish to. If it doesn't bother you, you don't have to do this. The flower is too saturated and too bright. For the look I'm going for the cow is not as saturated. If I was wanting to do a really bright painting, I would up the saturation on the cow and match it to the tulip. But right now the tulip is too saturated and bright. In looking at my inspiration here, you can see that the saturation levels match everything's pretty much a mat soft finish and that's kind of look, I'm going for. So I need to tone down for me. I need to tone down the saturation on this flower. You can do that by clicking on adjustments and clicking on hue saturation brightness and clicking on pencil. It's, my hue is at 30%. I don't want that. If you double-tap there, we'll go to 50. I want my hue to stay the same. Everything's at 50. Now. You can take a brush. Let's take the masking brush. And you can lower the saturation down a little bit and let's just do it on the tulip part and go over it with the brush. That may be a little too low. So let's lower it a little more. Make the brush a little bigger, and just put the brush where you want to tone down the saturation. I'm just doing that on the tool. And then let's lower the brush size and do it on the leaves. Go over that with a brush. I'll overall the leaf areas. Then zoom out to get a look. That's quite a bit more desaturated than it was, and that actually is a better match, I think, for what I'm after with the painting. So all you have to do then is click on your layers tab and that will set that in place. I dropped that saturation down a little bit on that tool up and now I feel that's a better match. So that's just something you can do if you wish to, if you like it the way it was, You don't have to do that step. The next segment now, we'll start painting our count. 7. Paint Eye & Nose: All right, We're ready to start painting the cow. Let's take a look at our layers. We've got the painting layer on top, the original photo layer, and the inspiration underneath. And those are both shut off. We're going to go to the blending tool. We're going to use the Smooth paintbrush. I like to do everything with smooth paint at first and then bring in texture later. I always start even though the backlighting is bothering me. I always start with the eyes. Because if he can't get the I right, then it's gonna be difficult to do the rest of the painting. And I wanted to show you a little something before we actually begin on how to make your strokes. I'm gonna put a new layer on top and just grab that Smooth paintbrush and just pick a red, red color here so I can show you. You want a stroke in the direction of what it is you're painting. When you're working on the eye, you want a stroke in a circular motion to go along with the form of the eye. Like that. That's the way you want to do your strokes in that kind of motion. The nose is a very smooth surface. So you probably want a stroke. The direction of these colors here with a very smooth stroke. Same within the nostrils area. Very smooth strokes in the direction of the nostrils, the detail lines you want to try to keep accurate. But when it comes to the furry areas, this animal has short for and it's fairly choppy. I would do short choppy strokes and following the direction of the fur. Now this is when blending I would do this like here, the first coming out this way. And appear It's going this way. I will I will stroke the same direction and where it's coming down a stroke straight down. When blending. Then here in this little star area on the face, I would do this fairly solid blend and then I was stroke outward in the direction of these pieces of for short choppy strokes in the direction that the fur is going. That's the way you want to do your strokes. Now up here where it's kind of curly and matted, even kind of swoop it like that and follow it. Or you could even do like little scribbles when blending in through here. Because this is a more tight for area, It's kinda curly. The top of the head you'll stroke the direction that it's going. And very often when I'm working around the edge, I will pull from the background and stroke toward the same directions to bring that background color and the cow for color together along the edges of the ears. I would probably stroke this way because there's not a lot of for poking off there. But from in the middle of the ear where the first coming down our stroke, longer strokes like this when I'm blending. And then it can be a little bit more solid here in the center. And then follow these lines refer here. That gives you an idea of how to stroke the fur. Here I would go choppy, kind of downward because the firm is going downward like this in this area. Under here. Same way. Then anywhere that for might be coming out from the body. Just like at the top, I would pull down a little bit. When you pull out a little bit and then you pull back from the background, it blends the two colors together. Plus it gives you a little fluffiness factor. So it just depends on how fluffy you want your subject to be. Now if you were doing an animal with long wavy for most of the time, waves go like this. Think of an S with a tail like this. I might stroke that way on long, wavy firm. But on this short for it's best to do. Short choppy strokes are even if you wanted to go bigger and bolder with the brush and not even paint the details in the fur and go big strokes to block in those areas like that. And around the nose. Just depends on how big you want to go with your brush and how detailed the bigger the brush when you're blending, the less detail you're going to see. I often alternate the size of my brush and then later on I may decide, well, I want to go a bit bigger, so I would add paint with a bigger brush later on. So that just gives you an idea of how I'm going to stroke with the blending brush. Let's just delete that layer back to our cow layer. Go back to the blending brush and now we're ready to paint. And we're going to start with the eye. And we're gonna see if our brush sizes okay. I like to keep these little colorful areas. I'm just kind of stroking around. And then I'll move outward. Brush maybe a little bit around the line of the eye. Follow it, where there's a little highlight. I want to try to keep that. Do short stroke. Then around the outer edge of the eye, follow that curve of the eye. And then this highlighted area here, I want to keep. If you blend too much though like that and you hold it down, you're not gonna be able to keep your colors, correct. So I stopped when I get to a new color and pick up the brush and go again with a new color. I found if you stroke one-way and it doesn't look right, maybe try stroking back the other direction. I'm trying to keep all these little dark areas intact by using a very small brush. And sometimes if you get a really small spot, you can just tap and it will make a brush mark. Now some of these dark areas I'll have to adjust later on in darken up. Go follow the curve of the eye again. This underneath dark area that I try to keep that intact. Got some lovely purple tones in here, which may be interesting to enhance a little bit later. Little smaller brush up here around this edge of the eye. You'll notice your blacks and whites get less bright as you paint with the blending brush. And you might want to enhance those later, which we'll go over after we have everything painted. I'm even going to try to get this small brush around this corner of the eye and keep flowing around the edge of that eye. This black area here. We've got this little highlighted areas down here which I want to keep. We have this dark line right here. Try to keep that. Let's go with a little bit bigger brush and go around this top edge of the eye. Still going around the curve to show the eye how it's curved. I'm pressing pretty good amount. If you do it real light you will find like this mark here, real light. You will find that some of the grand shows through from the photo. If you press a little harder, that will go away. There's nothing wrong with a little bit of green showing because it does add some nice texture. But you don't want a big blocky, you don't want to paint all around this area and then have this big blocky section in the middle that's not painted. So if you see areas like that, you probably need to go back over them. Then this area up here at the top of the I work on some of that short strokes in the direction that first going around that top edge of the eye. You can go downward and upward. I liked doing the short strokes because you'd get some variation in color and brush mark. Then underneath here. And we can even start doing short, short strokes outward. Now it won't stay with this small brush except for in the small areas, I will go to a bigger brush because I like less detail. But if you wanted an exceptional detail, you might want to stay with a small brush. Now we're starting to get into some of this creamy colored for coming out here at the top corner of the eye. Let's just back up and look at what we've done and I'll do this zoom out so you can really see what you've done. Let me turn the original photo layer back on underneath and we'll show you that. There's the original with the eye area and there's our painted area. Original painted turn that photo layer back off. I think I want this little black area in the center of the I think I want to blend that out just a little bit. So I'm gonna get a little bit bigger brush and smooth that edge out, pull that dark color out a little bit. Just sweep it real gently because I'm now going over an area that I've already painted with pretty heavy pressure by just want to light blend, since it's pressure sensitive and you can sweep real gently over some of these areas to blend in those choppy strokes a little bit better on the eye area. There we go. I think that looks pretty good. While we're using this size brush. Let's go down and work on the nose a little bit. Let's get the dark area in the middle of the nostril first. Try. It helps to not have to redo as much dark later if you try not to lose your darks by blending too much. Because the more you blend your darks in your lives, the more they're going to disappear, our amine get lighter, more faded. So I'm following the curve around the nostril here with these strokes and picking it up so I can get advantage of the, take advantage of these different colors that are in here. Because there's some darker purplish blues and then there's some brighter ones up under here. At the bottom of this area. I'm doing more sweeping motion here rather than choppy strokes just back and forth though, I'm letting up and putting the brush back down. You can hear the tapping of it when I do that. All right, let's get this other nostril on the other side, starting with the dark area in the middle. I want to keep this little highlighted purple down here, so I made sure to pick my brush up and I'll keep this creamy colored line around it. Pick your brush up and do those areas by their self that you want to keep that color there. Especially around edges. That nostrils done let's do the line of the mouth. Because you don't want to lose too much of that darkness. We can come enhance it later. Up to the where the leaf is there. Yeah, you can enhance that later. Let's go with a little bit bigger brush on the nose. Maybe even a little bigger. Keep these blue areas in and blend the cream in with it, and follow the upper line on the nose. And then as you come down, you can make your strokes go downward. Just follow that curve around those nostrils. I don't want to show every little detail of for every little speckle. Make this brush a little smaller and getting this creamy area right here following the line of the mouth. Let's even work on this underside of the mouth. Once again, following the line. Now as I get away from that line, I will do the up and down choppy strokes to indicate that little furry area on the lip. I got a lot of colors in there and greens and rose colors. And just keep going around until we get to the edge of the flower leaf. And then finish out this left side of the nose. Blending it. Pull that dark up a little bit more. A few speckles spots in the center. Now I don't like the white line under the mouth. So at this point we can pull that for down over that toward the background. Because he does, he she does have little errors hanging off the bottom there. Then you can pull from the background into it and work that by going back and forth between the bottom of the lip and the background, you can get those colors blended pretty good. We can always add more detail later if we want. Because we've kind of lost her edge right there, but real easy to bring back later. When we do our enhancements. Let's go a little bit bigger brush and now this spur on the nose is real short and choppy, but I'm not in the mood to indicate all of that. So I'm just going to use a big brush and kind of block in that color there that I don't want to lose and go around down here. Am still going in the direction of the fur. I'm just using a bigger brush to block it in. All around this nose. Little short strokes. Now I'm going to grab this dark area in the nose with this bigger brush and I'm gonna sweep it upward, more. Sweep this downward area under side area of it, and just sweep across the top and bring that blue down a little bit. I really like that blue that this is, I'm just doing this real lightly now with the bigger brush, just sort of blend those choppy strokes. We've done the eye and the nose. Let's take a look at that. There's before and there's after. Four after. 8. Paint Upper Face: We're getting somewhere. Now, what do I want to do next? I don't know if I want to do the flower quite yet. Just work my way up the face. I guess with this brush. There's some white right here. I'm gonna go with a smaller brush and pull this white across the top of the nose. And this white on this outer edge. Still highlighting. So I'm going to go with a bigger brush and pull that darker color out and then pull the background in. You just kinda have to, when you have something backlit, you have to work with it. But by pulling the color out in the background in, it gets a little bit softer and subtle, more subtle now, with that same brush size, I'm gonna work up the face, but I'm pushing the strokes upward and pulling them downward in the direction of the fur, letting up on the brush in various areas so I don't lose or blend all of this color. Let's keep going up the nose. I still got a little green right here. I'm gonna pull some of that background over there. All right. On up the nose, face area, down, pushing up, following that for direction. Letting up on that brush when the colors really make a drastic change not in-between every piece of fur. If you did this with a very small brush, you could keep all that fine detail of the firm, but I don't need it in my work, so I don't do it. Figure if you want to see the detail, you can see the photo. You're getting up to that star area. Working on the for under that right now. Now here we have a little change in direction. Let's pull the brush size down and keep that little bit of finer direction going there. Keep some of those dark parts following the direction of those pieces of fur. Got to feel a little dark areas right here where it gets this yellow color near the I work on that, getting back towards the eye. As I work away from the detail areas like the eye and the nose and such. I will go back to the bigger brush and I like to do that as I work away from something like this, get bigger with the brush to loosen it up. All right. Let's continue. On this side of the face here. Since I've got the small brush selected, I don't want to lose this edging over here. So I'm gonna do this area with a smaller brush to nice low creamy area right here. There's a hint of an I right there, and here's some eyelashes right here. I'm going to pull that out and then pull the background in. Just to kind of soften that up a little bit with that highlight from the backlighting. Still working with the smaller brush. Following the for getting close to the star area. Back over here on this left side or the LID area is keeping that small brush going, working very quickly. This brush and enables you to go quick or very slow if you wish. I'd like to go fast. It encourages a looseness that I'm after getting up here to this star area. So I want to work on that while I have this small brush, that is an important area, that needs to be a little more detail. So the small brushes appropriate, I'm just going to do little circle in the middle. I'm actually gonna go a little bit smaller on the brush and start pulling out from the circle in the direction of the fur. Then here we've got a little creamy first I pulled back on that. It's a back-and-forth, back-and-forth. Then even pull some of this circle colored down with that small brush. Because this is what's gonna give him that her I keep saying that that little star shape in the center of the head. And if you need to grab your canvas with two fingers and turned, go in the direction of painting that's most comfortable to you. You can do that. Sometimes it's easier to paint one direction than the other, down and up and then it is side-to-side. See here. Pull out some more of this with a small brush. Pull out, push back. If I see too many speckles, I'm not putting enough pressure on the brush, so I will increase my pressure. Here's a real dark area for right here. See if I can keep that, pull that in. Here's a dark area right here. Try to pull that down in there. Are star area is looking pretty good. I think I'm ready to go with a little bit bigger brush and get a little looser with it. Now, as I move outward from the star, will do the right side. Going toward that. I still following that for pulling back and going out. Kinda left to right. Working my way toward the top of that, I butt lifting up on the brush so I don't lose these colors. Wanted to mush them all together. The pixels are your paint on this type of image. You don't want to blend all your paint colors together. So by lifting up on the brush in-between some color areas that keeps those colors. I see a few little speckles there. Let's lower that brush size and get into some of these little areas with a little heavier pressure. Just fine detail here. Around the outside edge of the eye. There's a little dark area right here, and I'll use that little brush. Now. Anywhere there's really dark. Just tap in there that little brush. Don't lose too much of it. Now let's go back to a bigger brush. Continue for outward from the star this way, forward and back, down and up. Because I've turned my canvas. See I've lost some of that dark using a bigger brush, but that's okay. We can always bring it back in later. I don't do a lot of undoing. If I make a mistake, I will keep going and then just fix it later. Which we can do with our enhancement layer. When we get to that. Let's see how we're looking here. Pretty good. I've been doing this for the photo layer on. Let's just turn that off. Turn that photo layer off now. Sometimes you get it a little bit more accuracy with it off. Let's work on this side of the face before we get to the top. Once I get to the top of the head, we're gonna start messing with this backlighting. Let's go ahead and finish this area. While we're on the same size brush. Just trying to follow the direction curves of this curly. For up here. Up here, it gets kind of messy so you can really get sloppy with your brush. It won't matter because it's kinda messy anyway. I'm just working my way up away from the star area. Following the fur is the most important thing here. Because it'll give that sense of realism. We want to get a little bit painterly and abstract here in some ways. But I also want to be realistic. I saw a term years ago called abstract realism. And I mean, this isn't really abstract. This is pretty darn realistic right now I've gotten a lot more abstract. And when you get more experimental with the brushes and other brushes, you can really have fun with some abstract work. Which if you've seen some of my other pieces, you'll know what I'm talking about because I've done some fairly really abstracted pieces. This little area right here is bugging me. Working our way to the top of the head here. Keep this dark area here. Some stick with this small brush. These little fine white hairs, they're not really white. So it really doesn't matter if I blend them down and really soften those up with brush marks, brushstrokes. Well, I am going to have to fix this backlighting pretty soon and this is not real bright. We see how I'm blending it at, softens the real bright white down. It does that. It'll soften your darks and your lights down. When blending. The micro more powerful when we want to pull them back. If we wanted to do have them there, we will do that through an accent enhancement layer. I'm just getting really messy crisscrossing, tapping here, going down towards the eye, trying to get everything painted. Then we can get to our enhancement layer. Come down around this I keeping those darks because we're getting to a line on the face where it's gonna meet the side of his head. We don't want to lose that her head. I did it again. Why I keep saying his I think when you don't know the animal personally and I didn't this this photo was shot from a car. There were getting getting in there pretty good on that face. Now I think we're going to, I'm gonna stop this segment and we're going to do the next segment. And we're going to work from under the eye and the side of his face and work outward toward this back. I'm gonna save this backlighting ears area for the last I think, because I'm really going to have to fuss with that. In the next segment, we're going to continue on with the side of his face and neck here as it moves into his back. 9. Paint Side of Face & Neck: Alright, keeping with this same smaller brush, I'm gonna work on these dark areas here where it's real kind of fluffy looking little short strokes in taps in here. Around the right side of this I, where it meets the ear. There's a dark area here. This area where the head meets the neck is important. You don't want to lose that dark because otherwise you won't see that division between light and dark. I'm going to keep with the short, I mean small brush and short strokes. This area. And work my way down from top to bottom, going upward and downward and even a little outward with some of these strokes. There's a little dark area right here. But you want to keep that where the dark meets the light. Working my way back up that same line. All the way up here. Let's look at it right here. Keeping that dark, keeping this dark line. Even over here on the side, we'll tap in there a little bit and keep those dark spots. Then under the neck here, we have a pretty good dark area. Just right at the top of it. I'm going to use this small brush. Then I'll go with the larger brush later. I'm actually going to go down the line. Let's go down the entire dark line. With that small brush. We can get a little looser as we get away from the face. There's a dark line right here. Tap in there, and then tap the lights around it. Crisscross. Then there's a little darker orange right here. I'm going to sweep this area in the direction of the jawline. Come out from there a little bit with that small brush. We've got this area right here by the mouth. Go the little smaller brush there. Next to the tulip. There's quite a difference between light and dark Sarah, around this edge where the tulip is. I'm actually even getting into the tool up a little bit there. I don't want to try to go along that edge. And then this dark area right here. We go. Go up here a little bit more small brush. All right, I think we're ready to get a little bit bigger brush now and work the rest of the side of this face. So we're gonna go a little bigger and appear by the I. We're gonna start with that. Following the direction of the fur, up and down, up and down. Then over here on the gray area. Working those colors. Right now we have some larger blocks of color. We've worked away from the eye with the smaller brush. Let's erase the brush size a little more and get a little bigger strokes in here. Just work our way down. Still following the direction of the fur back and forth, back and forth one way and then the other way. You might get some little happy things that happen like this little light in the middle of the dark, that's kinda cool, so I'll leave it still might need to go a little smaller down here along this edge. You just have to play with your brush size and the different areas. To get to what you like. Go back up in here with a smaller brush. Let's get this side of his face here. Same size brush up and down, following the fur. That might look a little too buzzy right through here. Just enlarge the brush size and gently sweep over some of that, which will soften it. We're ready to move on to the neck area under here. Maybe a little bit smaller size. Same thing, direction of the fur. One way and then the other way. We have a little white rim showing that backlighting under the neck. We're going to pull right out into that with the strokes. As we move downward. Right into that white rim. Because we want to lose that. Just work our way down to the bottom. Then we come up with some of this dark working away upwards. Now, let's go a little bit bigger brush and actually get some of this background area in here. Up alongside the Tulip, trying not to go over the tulip. Then let's pull that background into that white rim under the neck. Just pull that background color in and you'll notice the very look. And it's losing some of that white. As you go downward and pull it in toward the fur. Then you can go pull the firm back out some more and just keep working until you get rid of the white, the really white rim. You and work into the background was some of this blending. There's a hint of the white rim. Little smaller. You could further work on that if you wanted. And pull some of that. Ferdinand gives him a little fluffy look. Pull some of that background up into it. Even up here under the face, we still have a little white. So let's make the brush a little smaller in this peachy color right here. Let's kinda bringing some of that and bring the background up against it, just following the contour of it. Getting a little messy now, which is fine. Then just further work, this little section of background blending it in here. Keep in mind you don't want to go over your tulip. There we go. This peachy color here, it looks a little choppy. I don't want to go away, but I'm going to stroke a little bit different direction. Grab some of that and kind of make it a smoother, rounder stroke. I see some speckles in here were areas where I didn't use enough pressure. Will go ahead and fix that. I'm gonna go with a little bigger brush and just kind of maybe even bigger swoop, some of this swoop new art term to smooth that out and blending what I've already done. Even right here. Whereas dark up here, plus swoop some of that down. Swoop it outward this way. Little too choppy. There we go. Following around the edges. Pulling your, you're actually painting with that color that's there and working those colors together. And even up here, It's a little choppy, little smaller brush swoop, that swoop that dark. Got some backlighting up here by this ear. Pulling some of that dark outward. With this smaller brush. Let's pull some of these base pairs back out, back down. Sometimes when you're zoomed out, you can see better where you're choppy areas are and where to work on your fur. But remember it doesn't have to look exactly like the photo unless you just are going for super detail. So I'm just kinda going over all this face stuff with this brush and doing some real light swoops and sweeps to blend those strokes a little bit more. All right, let's look at our original photo. Okay. We're getting somewhere now. That's time to do the rest of this neck. We're going to take a little short break and we'll do the rest of this neck area inside of his body here in this next segment. 10. Paint The Body: All right. Let's continue on with this neck area. Let us see what size brush I have here around this ear. And we're gonna stick with this size brush. We have some really strong lighting here. I'm going to pull blend from going from downward to upward into that lighting. Just to tone it down. Some. We're gonna have to probably add a little bit more further. Eventually. Now we can go with a smaller brush. And around the bottom edge of the ear. Pull the color down into what we just pulled up. Which will make some more further there. I know this looks real structured right now because I'm using a small brush to do some of this. Even top, pull some of that dark out. We're going to have to add some color in here at some point, but right now, little bigger brush and pull from downward, upward into what I just did, makes it a little bit looser. When you use the bigger brush. Still got quite a good highlight there though. Some of this gray up in there. Let's get the dark around the edge of the ear and pull some of that down with this bigger brush over those small strokes. That looks a little better. We've still got a highlight there though. We're going to have to tackle that. At some point. Beneath it. Keep pulling the dark down in the gray up then it would eventually go away but just takes a little while getting there. Little bit bigger brush, pull up in there to kind of loosen that up some more. That's quite a bit better there. You can use the blending to your advantage by pulling one color into another to change the entire. Look. Go on this top edge here. I'm following the for going outward now. Then here's going downward again. Up and down. Looks a little better. I'm ready to go to a bigger brush and sweep out, swoop out this area in through here. I can get a little sloppy with this and kind of go every which way with the brush. Kind of curving to the right, curving to the left. Down here. I'll just kinda go upwards then out to the right, and then back to the left. Good fast way to finish out that section. Move on down into the lower part. This is where you want the eye to go, is where you want the detail. This arm losing a lot of detail. But I don't want the eye to be centered on this area anyway. Then as you get down towards the bottom, you want to keep this dark. So pull from the dark into the lighter areas. As you come up from this corner. See a little area of under the chin. It's a little choppy. Make the brush size a little smaller and kinda settle that area down a little bit. Few strokes in there. Now let's zoom in and see if I've got speckles in here, which I do in a few spots, will just work those out. Make sure you get everything around the edges. Appear. We we clearly have an area that's not done with that brush out pull outward from the edge, inward. Just looking very close for these speckled areas. Still have some right in here and I didn't get there we go. Then that area is pretty good. So that's before. And that's after. Let's turn that photo layer off. I keep forgetting to do that. All right, let's work on this ear. See what size brush we have. Pretty good, pretty good size. The ear for kind of lays smoothly across the top. Of course, where it's backlit. You can pull down from the background into that to tone that backlighting down. Same with the bottom of the ear. It kinda just curves around. There's a few little pieces that are coming off the bottom of the ear. We can fix that later if we want to add those in. Just following the curve of the ear. Starting to look like in oil painting in a way. Once we get some texture in there. I'm gonna go in the direction of this for keep, keep the dark the best I can. I may have to add that back in later if I lose it. All of this for up and down, swooping it in the direction of the fur. Worked on that background. A little. Air is pretty well done. We've got this strong backlighting here. We can make a smaller brush and pull some of this gray into that. And then pull from the ear, the dark colors of the ear back into it. Pull the gray again. Just trying to tone down that backlighting with blending. Pull from the dark area again into that white. Let's turn this way and go with a little bit bigger brush and pull outward with the gray tones. I love this feathery ends on this brush. It makes wonderful for whether you want to do. Short haired animal is short for a long-haired animal works either way, just depending on the brush size. Got that backlighting tongue down pretty good. The top of the ear, we don't. But we're going to blend in some of this lighter background with that, which we'll tone it down. Eventually, we're still gonna have to add color into some of this to really tone it down. Zoom out so you can see a little better. Go with a little bigger brush around the ear. And kind of come from the background and bring some of that color up in there and then come back down over it. Little golden area right here. And I'd like to extend that out a little bit, blend that in a little more. Little eyelash there. Which will probably have to add. Can't really see that eye, but you can see the eyelashes. Let's look at the photo. We've lost a little dark spot right in here. We'll fix that later with our enhancements. Alright, let's finish. Let's do this other ear. While we're working on this. Start with the dark area. You can kind of get messy. This one's a little more nappy looking. You can kinda get messy along the top edge of this one. To indicate that actually pull that dark upward into the white. More. Work on that middle dark section. Lots of little crisscrossing tap marks. And then here were the first longer pull out, pull in, swoop it. We got a little feathery look there, but let's go a little bigger. Brush and feather in some of that dark and feather out a little more. We'll have to add some detail in there. Pull some of this background along the top edge of the ear and the back. We'll have to add some color there to fix that. I'm just gently pulling some of that and it looks like he's getting a haircut. Goes a little smaller brush and pull out, tap and there's a little dark areas. Little short, snappy strokes here. As you blend that highlight, it will tone down. But if you blend all the background into this top part where it's super white, you're gonna give him a real big haircut and she has a lot more for. Then we'll show if we pull the background down in too much a little bit of light there is not too bad, but especially because I've put the lighter color in the background up there, that might actually work. Maybe. We have our cow pretty well painted. Apparently I left the photo layer on again. We have him pretty well painted. This area right here alongside of this eye looks a little choppy. I think with my brush size I have. Let us go a little bigger and just gently sweep over, tap and sweep over some of that. It will little too big, toned down. Some of that choppiness. It's not quite as choppy. I really liked the way at the top of his head looks nice and choppy though. Because that firm has real curly and tight up there. All right, How are we doing here? I think we might be ready to paint some of this tulip. When we paint the tulip, we're gonna have to work some of this blue background I've put in. We're gonna have to work that up closer. So there's not this light-colored rim around the tool up. And that's somebody who think about we're going to do this, that tulip with a smaller brush. We're doing pretty good. I think we'll do the tulip Next and work that background around the tool up some and then we'll do the rest of the background blending on it some more. Then we will start on our enhancements. So let's take a short break and we'll come back and do the tulip. 11. Paint The Tulip: All right, We're ready to start the tool. I'm going to erase the size up here so we see good. Let me go with a pretty small brush and let's get this area blended around his her mouth. The stem edge of this leaf here. I'm going to blend the background right up into it. I'm following the direction of the leaf. Even when I do the background area, coming toward the leaf and going doing strokes in the same direction as the leaf. Trying to turn this white rim down around the leaf. Gonna have to bring this blew up a little bit closer into here, right up into the white. Go with a little smaller brush to get in this little corner right here, down the center of the stem. Notice how the white is toning down with the blending, which is good and don't want that to be super bright. Do this leaf. Pulling the background toward the stem. All right, I didn't get the middle of this leaf, so we're gonna go with a bigger brush, dark and light, back and forth in the direction of the curve of the leaf. We're going to pull this blue little bit further towards the leaf. Let's work on this blue under his her Chen. I'm going to say he is throughout things. Just get used to it. Alright, back to the stem and the flower. Pull this blue as close as you can up against that stem. Which really tones down that white. Which is what we want to do. We don't want that white in there. And then let's do the bottom area of this longer base here. Pull that blew up in their follow the direction of the leaf. I'm actually coming right over into the leaf a little bit. When I do that with these larger brushstrokes. If you see too much white coming in and stopping, grab the color and pull that way to get a little smaller brush to get in here. Now let's actually work on the leaf. With that small brush. Pull from some of the dark and pull from some of the lights, they will maintain the color shading. You could even extend your stem out a little over that white by going right along the edge. And then pull a blue back again toward it. Just working that white rim out. Got the bottom of it. So let's do that. There's still a white room showing a little bit, so he needed to do a little bit more of that. Pull that blew up closer. This blue up here. Closer. Let's see him pull some of this darker blue with a bigger brush right up against it, even going over it. Let's get the rest of the stem. Smaller brush. Now we're ready to work around the flower area. Same thing, pull the blue tightly up against it. You lose some of your stem, pull it back down. Start working the edge of the flower too. As we go around this. Once again, sweeping strokes in the direction of the flower. Pulling that background right up against it. Those background colors we put it in. You can even come right over into the flower. Working on tone in that white rim down. Get around this bottom edge a little bit smaller brush. Actually start working. The tulip itself. Now, as we go around these petals, needed to turn your Canvas, do so. Whatever way you can make the strokes the easiest. Let's go a little bigger brush and pull some of this darker color up in there. Can do crisscross. Give it some variation. I'm just come right over into the flower. It'll darken that edge. And we're going to blend the flower next anyway. See that made a nice little painterly section right there that actually liked. So I'm going to try to keep that. Let's actually start up here at the top. I've turned it upside down, so the bottom of the flower, but top of the screen, get this yellow area and pull in the direction of the petal. The lines in the tulip actually look kind of like the same lines is for, which is kind of neat. While we're working with this size brush, Let's get around this edges of some of these petals here. We go bigger on the brush. Might even have to go a little smaller in here. Because you want to show the separation between the petals so you don't want to mix your colors up too much. Little short strokes in here. I'm trying to keep that edge. Keep that darker edge in there. These little lighter specks. So you can see the division between these petals. Turn off. Sweep this dark color up, toned down, this white. Bringing some of the blue back in. Keep this edge here where that petals lighter. Zoom out. See what we're doing. Keep this light yellow edge here in the center. The best we can. Keep this yellow edging and pink edge in here. It's a red to lipid only looks pink because of the white. I'm going to pull some of this color down into this white. Then I'm going to raise the brush size up and sweep upward and downward right here. And then I'm gonna pull back down to give the illusion of the lines in the petal a little smaller. That's really tone in that white highlight area down. Then this red underneath. Let's actually sweep that up gently over that highlight. Let's tone down this by sweeping from here, down, from here down, and then even bringing the blue over the edge a little, there's a little light, they're still so let's go a little bigger brush and pull more of that blue towards it. And then let's pull the dark blue in upward around it. Now we can do the big brush on the rest of the flower. This brush I'm using now, size, it is still following the direction of the petals and keeping the colors separate by lifting up on the brush. And just doing a nice variation. This little dark red section, I don't want to lose that. That's an important part of the color. Pulling down. And then let's pull up and then down, and then up, down and up. Wow, I think we've got a tulip bottom rim around the tool of the blue's a little bright. So I'm gonna go with a little bigger brush and pull the dark blue up toward it. And around the bottom. I like that little streak or read it did out to the side. That would happen if this was real paint sometimes. So I like leaving those things. If I can blend out some of this lower background part. Still think we need to pull some of this dark up here. Here's another little fun painterly street. Those fun painterly streaks I like to leave. Sometimes. They just appear depending on your pressure and how fast you stroke. All that. Let's pull some of this dark up in here with a really big brush. And I'm starting to get looser now with the brush and a little bigger because I'm into the background blending, which we do need to do. We got this one dark section here that's bugging me. I'm gonna pull blend that a little bit. Just kinda scrub it. In there. Came over the edge of the flower a little, grab the yellow and pull that back out. Push some of the orange backup. Real loose sweeping strokes. There we've got a subtle up. Let's look see where we are. The original photo. We added the tulip mastered in, painted the softened the background first and now we've painted everything they were at this. But we still need to do some more blending on the background before we start adding our enhancements as a new layer on top. But it's starting to look very painterly now. I like the way it's going. I guess we'll take a short break and then we will further blend this background. Before we go to the enhancements. 12. Add Background & Fur Details: All right, let's work on the rest of this blending of the background. Now this we can do with a really big brush and I like to do this zoomed out. I'm not going to blend it completely. I'm just going to smooth out some of these areas where I feel like it needs it. Just kinda move this color around and I'm kind of putting the brush down and scrubbing it just a little close to the pretty girl. You might want to use a smaller brush. Just scrubbing, moving, putting the brush down and scrubbing a little. And then it was I get further away. I'll do some bigger brush. We're going to add some more texture to the background. So I'm not really worried about keeping what was there. If you go around the outside of your subject, you can kinda like on the edge of it. You can pull some of the subject color right into the background just with a gentle little tap and sweep. Just kinda working all around under this flower. Still. Bring the background and the subject together. Just by working around the edges of it. Even made a mark there. I didn't mean to make you can even pull, since we're zoomed out, you can pull some subject features out a little more and pull the background in. The background is just, I don't even know what the word I'm looking for is. It's whatever you want to do. Could have duplicated this layer multiple times and kept the ones behind it. But I've find pretty much all I'd all I want to do is fix it myself, so I don't like to go back and redo kind of fix things as I go. Go with a big brush and kind of smooth this out. Tone it down a little bit. Remember when you blend any color tones it down. Which is why we do the enhancements we do later. Bringing some new color in. Just scribbling very lightly though, not pressing like super hard, just enough to blend down. What I've already done. Let's get here to the top section. Work on this blue corner. Blending that in better with the white. When you scrub this brush, you won't have the real feathery ends is when you sweep it. That's why I kind of liked to scrub that I'm doing this very gently. Going across the top, get this upper-right corner, pull some of that blue down and scrub it in with that creamy yellow that I put in there. I accidentally just hit it undo. Putting two fingers down. So be careful with that. Come right up to the four on the top and pull towards that hair. It looks like here, but we're going to add some more hair there. All right, We've got a pretty smooth apparently look now just by going over that background really carefully. Now we're about ready to excuse me, start the enhancements. And I'm going to start where that's bothering me the most, which is the top of the head. To do the enhancements, we're gonna do a new layer, and now we're going to actually paint with the paintbrush, but we're going to use the canvas brush. You can do a little scribble with, say what your brush size is set at and what you might want it set at. Just tap, double-tap to undo. I'm just trying to figure out some good marks because this is on a top layer. We can blend, we can mask the way we can reduce the opacity if it's too strong. What I do want to do is I want this creamy color here, sort of a grayish yellow. I want to get some of that and then I want to go a little bit more to the golden side, I guess on the color wheel. I don't want to put some for up here over this white area. We're gonna do this in a few different shades. I'm trying to stay pretty. I'm going to go around the ears too. With that same color. I'm trained to stay pretty low key on saturation and not pick a color that's too saturated. But I need a little bit more for and some division that appear. We've took away hair, so we need to add here. I've done the yellow color, so let's move it over to the Orange family. See what that looks like. Might want to go a little darker than that. Let's pull down over quite a bit more, some more like that. I'm going to turn it upside down. Because sometimes it's easier to stroke from downward strokes. I'm going to try to leave the little yellow bits, yellow gold bits at the top of the ears. Just bring some of this color in underneath that. Closer to the head, actually into the top edge of the ear. All right, let us see where I'm at here. That might be enough hair to pull out. Let's do a little blending now with the canvas brush on what we just did. Obviously, we don't need it super huge. So let's bring that size down. Let's just do a little test here on size and one that outward over that white in the direction that the fur would be going. Might look pretty good, but I'm going to do the same upside down business because I feel more comfortable pulling downward, a little bigger on the brush and pull these colors outward, downward. Just remember that the fur on top of the head is kind of crazy so you can go every which direction with your blending. It just basically trying to tone down that white a little bit. And this is just the first layer in doing that. Feel the brush maybe a little too small. Let's go back over some of that and pulled toward the head and pull away from the head. Both ways. Then this ear, turn it back and see where we are still looks a little choppy. At this point, I'd like to work on bringing some of the colors that are actually in the ear into this top part. Various ones. I'm just holding my finger on it to select them. As I go along, there would be some of this color here coming out. I'm going to do that all the way around. That colors kind of prevalent. So when you stick with that, scoot over a little bit, Let's see when bringing some of this in here. Now we go back to this color and pull some of this color in. And then this darker loops, this darker color. Pull some of that in. I'm gonna get this yellow again, hold down. They're going to come over this way when I'm gonna go a little brighter with it. Little bit bigger, brush around that top edge. A little bit more to give it give her a little bit more for that area. What other color might be good? How about if we pull a little color from the two-loop, maybe even a little bit of this yellow right here. Let's see, I might be a little strong. It's sort of a greenish yellow. How about we brighten that up? Get a little brighter color up there. Not too much, just a little. Now let's work on blending some of that same canvas brush. Given a little messy hair day look here. Pulling the darks out, pulling the lights in and you can even pull from the background if the yellow is too much. I just wanted to integrate a little bit of that to look yellow in there to help tie everything together. Since we added the tulip, those colors weren't in the original cow photo. I thought it'd be nice to have them in there. Just kinda work your way around blending that. Given that little messy hair, do look. The yellows too much pole from the background down towards it. The yellow may be a little too much. Here's what we're gonna do. Let me grab this color and we're going to go to the right just a little bit. We're going to put some more strokes over that yellow that we can then tone that down all the way around. Now, blending same canvas brush back in. This is just a lot of back-and-forth and playing To you get to the look that you like while toning down the white. Let's go with this exact color and a little bigger brush and just kinda sweep that around those edges and go over them a little bit. Won't even need to blend that. A little sunny yellow hairdo there. I'm still not sure about the yellow. I'm going to tap over that yellow a little bit more with this color I have now. Then I'm going to grab the dark color here. Play with putting a few little taps so that in a few spots around these ears, oops, did too much. You can actually blend. I don't like those two strokes. I'm going to undo that. Let me just blend what I just put in. A little bit. I'm getting ready to get messy now with some of this like this rusty orange, but it needs to be enhanced. So go to the right on the color wheel and maybe even up a little. Let's see. If we add a little bit of that in the ears too big of a stroke. Even bring some of that down in here. Over here. Maybe even up around here. Now let's blend it. I have to go a little bigger on the Blend. Blend it in when you it'll soften it, but it'll still maintain some of that color in there. Looks pretty good. I'm happier with the hairdo now. Now this little bit of creamy yellow, Let's see if I can find that. Because I just thought I want to bring some of that in to the ears with some this to be small, wispy little strokes. Let's see how that works. Let's kinda nice. So let's do it over here on this ear to go in the direction it would go. Then I have to make that blend or a little smaller and blend it both ways. Bring this dark gray up around here too. Just a little bit more. If you blend too much, you're gonna show that white again. So keep that in mind. It gives some wispy little hairs on that ear to because this is on a new layer. I can show you. That's where we started. And this is where we are. We've given this cow a little bit more hair layer gonna turn off. There we go. A little bit more hair. Not quite as bright on top. Now if that's too much, all you have to do is click on the N and adjust your opacity. Which I do think it's a little strong. I might pull the opacity down to about 80. Let's turn it off and on. Zoom way out. You can look at it from a distance. Still might be a little strong. Let's pull it down. 70 range. Off on. I think I like it at the 70 range. But what I think I'd like to do is this. I've had not wanted to work now. This dark color right here, I think I'd like to bring some of that in there. But I don't want to mess up what I did here. So I'm gonna do that on another new layer. And I just want to bring some little pieces. It's actually a dark gray out a little bit. Just to make it look a little fluffier in a couple of spots and maybe even along the top edge of this ear. And maybe even right there. Now let's blend that down a little bit. Just personal preference here. You might have liked it the way it was, but I felt it needed a little bit of this color. Brought in in a few spots. Here we go with opacity and let's do, let's do about 60, almost one. There we go. I like that that little top part of the hair needs to be for needs to be very messy and choppy. I like what I've done there. I'm going to squeeze these all together. So now we can look at our photo and our painting. All right, it's time to do some more enhancements. I do realize that there is a spot. Ipads getting fussy. There's a spot right here under this eye area that should be a little darker. Going along with that same color brush. I'm just gonna put a little dark in there with the canvas brush still and blend that in a little bit. Kind of scrubbing it. Zoom out if you can't tell when you're up close, how much you want and if you need more, add some more. I just felt there should be a little shadowing going on there that not able to go on. And I'm zoomed out now because I want to see at a distance how this is looking at if I've got too much or not, blended it out too much, Let's backup. Here's a little shadowy area there. I did that right on the photo layer instead of as a new layer. So let's do a new layer and add a little bit more trying to see where it needs to be. Right in there, I'm in the right spot. So let's just kind of gently scrubbing, work in it. Let's go back down to this layer and blend that up just a little bit. Back to this layer. Squeeze those together. Got a little shadow area there. Now. Now it's time to enhance the rest of this to loop Beauty. Someone to take a short break now that we've worked on the serious problem areas. So we can start having a little bit more fun with the enhancements since we've got all the details taken care of. 13. Paint Enhancements Part 1: All right, We're ready to start enhancing this little lady. I know you might think what needs enhancing, it looks pretty good. I think it looks pretty good. But you notice what I did here at the top that really enhance those. The curly for up there. And I wanted to bring some more of that kind of enhancement in. I need to do a little work down here around the tulip. And I need to darken all the dark areas and maybe brighten up the lighter areas and then add some texture to this beauty. I also wanted to take a quick look at the original photo. Looking right here down this side of the nose. There's some brown and green and gray. And it extends down pretty far. Looking at this, it looks like that is somewhat needing a little attention right there just to define that edge a little bit. That's another enhancement I'm going to do. Down here in the bottom of the mouth. Just little things that need to be worked out through the whole image. To get extra special. Let's add a new layer. We're still going to be painting with the canvas brush. I'm going to go down here where it's dark. We'll start with enhancing these darks. I held down on the color wheel to select this color, that's the color it is. And I want it to be a little bit darker, so pull it down. Let's just kinda work on this right here. I don't need that small brush marks because I'm just blocking in a little bit of dark which will be blended. Now this layer will look pretty horrible. When I get done doing all this. I'm going to look at the original photo again. They're just studying this area right here. I think I think I need a little more dark here. Just to define that a little better. Darken that nostril a little bit there. This upper edge of the nose. Inside this ear. This is enhancing the darks is what we're doing here. Even a little bit up here. These little areas inside this ear, word be the most shadow. Right here on the side of the face. Then maybe even pull some of those dark over here, down in through here a little bit more. All right. Now I'm going to get that dark brown looking at for the grayish side. How about that? That's not quite as dark as the black, but I'm going to get a bigger brush. Notice there may be a little darker. Let's go with this color. That's right there. Bringing us down. Add a little bit of dark in there. Make the brush a little smaller. And bringing some of that dark down here. Under this nostril inside the ear a little bit there. Maybe in with this black on this ear. I'm just dancing around in different locations. Make the brush really small. And let's actually add a little bit more dark. This, I further define that even on the outside edge, the eye, they're just little areas I see that I might want to pump up that darkness. Now let's I'm going to add, I'm going to take this color here from above the, I raise it up willows, a bluish white. Just want to put A little bit of a highlight there on the rim of the eye, which I will blend all of this out. So I know it looks really strange right now while I'm on this color. I'm actually going to bring in a little bit of that in a few spots. Don't need that on the nose. I don't think. Of course I have to make sure to go blend all of this. There might be a little much, they're just maybe just need a little, just a little tiny bit there. I'm working on enhancing some of the highlights. Now. Let's look at this mouth area here where there's this line. I think that needs to be a little darker. So let's grab that color. Pull it down, go to a really small brush there and just kind of sweep that in there a little bit with a very small brush around this edge. There's some little dark at the bottom here of this chin area that I think needs to be extended just a little bit and darkened. I'm just going to work on pulling some of that around. Then even on this side of the tulip here, maybe even do a larger stroke there. Maybe even under here because this is gonna be the underside of the face. And I think I might even want to come down and bring it a little darker there. I zoom out all the time to see how I'm doing here. Let's work on this tulip. Now, we put the tulip, the cow's mouth. We masked out the tulip to put it in there. What we did not consider is that if this tulip leaf and stem is inside this cow's mouth, this section right here next to the math is going to be in shadow. This is very bright. We need to get that get some dark green in there to get that in shadow. And I want to, I don't want it to be super bright. I'm going to pull the green to the left and then down. I want to use a smaller brush in here and get some scribble, some shadow color in here to further enhance the dark areas of the leaf and the darker green areas of the stem. Get a little smaller brush. Now let's even go darker. Pull it down. Put the very darkest right up against the mouth, hits the leaf. Bigger. Pull some of that out. Right here to this whole stem needs to build darker. This gets some various shades in there which will blend nicely and bring that same dark in with that other green, but maybe not quite as much. Then who really needs some division here between the stem and the leaf? So I'm gonna do a very thin dark line there. I'm going to take this bright green, pull it over to the left, a little too dull it down and then brighten it up, doling it down because I still feel that the leaf is a little bit too bright. By bringing in some of this color. In here you will see more of the curve of the leaf. I'm going to grab the dark green again and go around this underside just a little bit. Kinda connect it up there. Now my tool, it looks fairly messy. Actually bringing some more of that dark green down in here. Trying to create that shadow which will look better when I blend it. Just have patients. That's what you need to remember on this. And this layer is all, it's all on this new layer. So if we do these enhancements and they look a little strong, we can always adjust the opacity down. I still wanted to do the same thing on the flower. I want to grab the red color that's there and darken it a little. And maybe even move it to the left a little. When you move it to the left, you're moving it towards the gray side. So you're toning down that brightness. Just get some more shades in here. The darker area. Then let's do the orange. Pull it down until the left. Just to get some little bit of different shading in there, maybe a little bit on that brush right there, tap in there. And then we have these brighter areas like that. We need that line there to show the division and petals. But it's not quite bright enough because we lost some brightness. So we're going to bring it up. We'll bring it to the left a little. You don't need it to be pure white. If it was pure white, it would just not look as good and bring some of that over here. Even in this little pinkish area. Right there. Let's go back to the dark because I missed a spot under this petal that would put this lower panel and shadow because we've changed the orientation of the flower. The flower was originally straight up and we've changed it to go this way, to hang out of the mouth, which means the lower part of the flower is going to be facing the ground, which means it's going to be more shaded than this upper part here. On the upper part. I may even brighten this a little by pulling this up. Maybe even pulling it more towards the yellow. Maybe even more, little more brighter even right there. Bring some of that up. Let's bring a little bit of this pretty yellow into the top edge of the stem as well. We did not work on this side of the face yet. We're gonna get this dark brown here. And we're going to work on I just feel like there needs to be a little bit more division there. I'm going to play with some color here. Bringing more to the orange side and bringing some of this color in here. Because I just, I love that color. And it's present in the ears. And I want to bring it into more of these other areas. Put a little here under this nostril. How about this side of the face? How about over here a little bit. And even in here a little, I'm just kind of blocking some of this color in trying to get a little bit of a color variation going on. Maybe not right there, but maybe right here at the top. Maybe even bring a few more strands of for appear in these leaves. Leaves, ears with that color. Maybe a little too many there, space them out a little bit so we can blend them. Maybe even right up here a little bit. Just playing with color, bringing in a little bit richer color. I think the blues in the cow's face already tie in pretty good with the background. I, if the cow did not have the blues and the face and the background was blue. I would bring some blues from the background into the cow. I would like to get this darker blue here and bring a little of it maybe over here and it doesn't look that dark when you bring it over here. Just to show that a little too much there. Just to Show some of that color over there. Then maybe on this shadow side of the face. Just playing with color. This is before we started doing any of this enhancements. And now you can see the color is really starting to pop. It's not blended yet, but it's starting to pop. Would like to grab this color off the nose and go a tad brighter. And just make a mark somewhere in here. Right across the top. And marine some of that up here too. Just to give some variation, which will help give the illusion of all the firm without painting every little bit of it. I'm just adding little bits of color where it needs to go. Okay, let's blend this in. So go to the blending tool canvas brush. Same thing as when I started the painting. I'm going to start with the eye with the smallest wondering brush that I can get away with and blend in some of this color I've added. If I don't get every bit of it and you see a little bit of the canvas texture. That's fine. Because that's why we're using the canvas brush to add a little bit of texture. That looks pretty good. And zoom out if you're not sure and blend a little more if you need to. Let's take care of these ears. Find out where my paint is. I'm just blend out some of these strokes appear this dark area and I can kinda scrub with this brush and blend it in and then feather it out to when the canvas brush works well either way, this smaller areas just lower the size of the blending brush. About when did that one all the way out. Going in the direction of the fur. Let's take care of this side of the face where it's really been bothering me. Blend this color in. These colors. Don't want to blend them away too much. But you do want them blended some some of these areas of color I've added to the nose, the face. Blending these with the canvas brush the same web blended the whole painting with the smooth brush just up and down back and forth following the direction of the fur. I've got some more of edit. Oops, I missed a swap to my paintbrush by accident. Blending. Some more of added right here, more of this color right here. Pull that star, black on that star out. A little more. Really enhance that. That's pretty good. Let's do this other area over here. And then these colors get some of that rich orange in there and then the dark areas. And you can kinda scrub inside there if you want. Because that area is kind of what I call nappy. Were the first kind of shorten all together. Then on the front of the ear, grab some of this darker color and this got this bright orange in here. Move that color around. Under this I, or I put the white and not white but lighter blue. Then we have this area. Around the face here, I'm gonna go in the direction of the face. Now remember, this isn't affecting what's underneath. This is adding to it. Don't be scared to really go go after it with a blender. Go with a bigger blender and pull. Need to add some more dark there. Amount of blended too much. Some of that blue in there, this brown, this dark color here I've put at the edge. Some of these blues pull them down. That's the direction was going. This orange color down here. Scrubbing that in a little bit. Then we've got the really dark area right down here. This bottom curve of the face. This is just round one here on the blending, I'll usually do a little bit more. On this layer. I'm getting kind of messy now what you can do at this stage, all right, let's take care of this nose area. You might need to go with a smaller brush to blend this in. I darkened it on the top a little. Then I put this little white light blue highlight in their darken. This nostril, added a little that pretty orange color here. Darkened around the other side. We have to blend this line on the mouth. We're going to go pretty small. Blend that in a little better. Then a little bit bigger here at the chin area. Just tapping and scrubbing as I'm going along there because that's kind of a fuzzy little area. Could actually get a little bit bigger brush and pull some of that out toward the background, which gives it a real fuzzy look. Still working on that math area. These got a little fuzzy look or she she could grief. 14. Paint Enhancements Part 2: Let's take care of the tulip. This dark green in. Gotta be really careful with this little line right here where I laid down some shadow and highlight together shadow on the stem. Blending in nicely though. All the way down to the flower. Then this leaf. Let's work on this one here. Got to get this dark shadow area under the math. Playing with brush size. I don't want to go too crazy with a big brush right there. Trying to spread this these different greens around and get a nice, I'm looking for a smoother blend. If I got a little too much dark, I can pull from the lighter area back towards it is leaving the nice canvas texture in there. We're going to go smaller on the brush for this little area right here. The highlight area, even smaller. Edging. Here. I want to kind of blend this around in a curve. I'm just turning the painting around to make it easier. For the way I want to pull down and stroke that. Loops. Zoom out, look at that. Now we've got a little shadow going on in that leaf zooming out and let me know though it was a little bit too harsh right here. Now let us look. Because the leaf is kind of twisted there at the end. By playing with the darks and the lights a little bit, you can see that a little better. This yellow along the edge of the stem. Try to blend that in a little bit better. Slavery, some nice little bits of canvas texture which I really like. Let's work with the actual tulip. It, since I'm on the small brush, I'll work with these smaller areas. First. Blending in a little bit of the darker shapes. Do this lighter bit right here. This lighter bit, this petal dark, and then light into dark. Then go a little bigger. The brush and blend the larger portion of the petals. Get some good color variation in there and some texture at the same time. When you're using this brush like this. I think that's looking pretty good. That's before those enhancements and blending. And this is after you can just definitely see some difference there. And you can come back and refine any areas that might stand out to you and bug you when you do this. It's looking pretty good. I'm going to turn off the look at this layer. I think we need a bit more light to break up some of this medium brown right there. Yeah. Let's add a little bit more to this. Let's pick the color that's here. I want to go more toward the Golden and lay down some just a few little marks there and maybe even come upward here. Show the folds. Then blend that brushes too small. Just kinda give some good variation in there. And that's what we're after at this point. It's just some variation in color tones. Look flat by doing this flat. That adds just a little bit more lightness. Actually liked that color. Where else could I put some of that color there? Very top up here. Put a little dab of it right there. We're else kind of put it, do it a little bit of work here at the top of the ear. Blend that in a little bit. Else. Could I put it? I like this color. I want to put it in some other places. About there. How about little bit over here on this ear. And maybe even right here, sweep, blend that in. Just blend it till you think it looks good. My advice for the day. Looking at the bottom lip here on, we need a little bit of dark speckling. Right in here. We're going to grab the color of this there, go down dark and just do some a little bit of speckle there. Even make this a little bit more shadowed. Right here. Right here. Even that line darken that a little bit more. A few speckles there. Now let's blend it a little bit, but not too much. There's no set formula here. I'm just going to scrub this a little bit. Tap and scrub. Just to get some variation in there. When I zoom out, I'll look at it and see if I've screwed up or not. The great thing is it's on a new layer for screw up. You can mask it back off and do that again. Needs to be blended a little bit more to the heart, blended some more. Zoom out. I think we need to bring in a little tiny bit of this light color. Right here along the top edge of the lip. And under almost under this dark line on the lip. And then even right here. Back to blending. That lovely canvas texture. I'm just loved this brush. It's one of my favorites. There. I think that's looking a little bit better. Just turning things off, trying to get the right thing turned off. I still need a little bit more of the dark color down. And then just under here a little bit, I'm just gonna do a little scribble. And then a little blend went in dark. I mean, went in dark when in doubt scribble. Just see what happens. You can do that. Actually, if you wanted to create a sketchy look, you could scribble a little bit. You could actually do that on top of your image at the end of it, which is completely backwards on how you're doing it. If you're painting it for real, a real painting, because real painting you would sketch first and then paint. I mean, you could do that here or two if you were painting from scratch, which we're not painting this photo, still fussing with this underside of the mouth. Feel like the line. The math is a little too strong. Grab that yellow color. The same color that's there, not changing it at all. I just want to sweep over that dark line a little bit. Maybe adding, I'm going to undo what I just did because I went too far down into, I just want the edge of the canvas brush to come over that kind of softens that line without blending it some more. Actually my poll that dark color down later. All right, What have I got here? For? After, before, after. Before I screw anything else up on this layer, I'm going to, I'm happy with the way this looks, but I have some blending over all I want to do. So I'm gonna squeeze these two together on this layer now under this mouth, when the canvas brush where this dark area is, whoops, let's go with the blending brush. Canvas brush. I want to pull that dark line down a little bit. I know this looks kind of choppy. But after I pull it down, I'm gonna sweep somewhat to the right and then back to the left, which makes it look like there's more of a shadow there, which is how it should look instead of just a direct line there that's better. And at the top, now I'm going to use the Canvas brushes, a blender on the photo layer itself to add some texture in here where I want it. So at the top of the nose and I'm just gonna grab certain little areas and sweep it, see how it leaves that nice canvas texture. I'm not pushing very hard. But by sweeping outward around a little bit. It helps blend everything as a whole. But while adding texture, nice texture I just added just by using this as a blender. And you can use the canvas brush as a blender through the whole painting. But I like the mix of the smooth and the canvas. Because when you're painting on canvas, you're gonna, you're gonna see areas that are thicker paint and they're very smooth. And then you're gonna see other areas where the canvas actually shows through. So I'm trying to emulate that with the way I work. I wanted to just generally add a few areas where touch with the canvas brush and just sweep some color around. It helps to input that canvas texture throughout the whole piece. Instead of just where I placed it, I'm just picking a few areas to really do it. Do this. Not pressing hard at all when I'm doing this. And you can go with a little bigger brush. Really input some of this texture and you can press harder. The harder you press, the stronger it will be. Just touching certain areas that I feel could use. Tab a little canvas. And I'm working my way around. Check these ears, center of the ears a little bit. The same thing. And the edges of the ears. Watch this, go around the edge of the ear a little bit and you pick up that canvas stroke when you do that. Kind of in the area to see it is right along the edge of something. This top half where I got some of this really messy firm will meet with a smaller brush and work on some of that original off. That's one. Meet them you can do to really add some dimension is use the Canvas brush as a blunder on the final part of the painting to bring some of that texture in. I'm actually going to go a little bit large on the canvas brush and do some of that here on the background and a few spots. Because that way everything it'll tie together. Oh, I forgot the flower. Let's do a little of this on the flower. Well that's too big of a brush. Bring that down. Just some little simple strokes. Not too many. Because you want to enhance here. At least I do loops that Su Bei, undo that, come down. I just want to enhance what's going on. Do a little bit in the background to an up against the stem. Left, a nice little canvas bit right there. How about this upper background? In a few bigger strokes in there? I think this cow is looking pretty good here. I think we need to add some overall texture though with this impressed me brush and maybe even the fan brush. Let's take a look where we are. That was before. This is where we've gotten. Just to look at my inspiration again, that was my inspiration. This is where I am, so I think that's pretty cool. I've gotten this far. I hope you guys are going to have fun trying to paint this cow. I don't paint a whole lot of cows then that may be why it's taken me a little bit longer here. I've realized when you paint something you're familiar with that you work with all the time. That it's really an easy subject and you just know everything, which way things go, how things work, how to paint it. But this is not something I've painted regularly. This animal. This is a little, a little, a bit more of a struggle, but I've really enjoyed figuring it out and playing with different things I can do here. I do see right in here, I'd like to add a few little feathering bits of color out. I could sit here all day and do this honestly, but I know you guys are probably tired and maybe you've started doing your own already, but I could just sit here all day and play with this. I know that's really not feasible. I'm still fussing with it. I just need to stop. At some point. You just need to say, this is good enough for this piece and then put it down and then start and work on another piece. But I'm still not done with this. I want to add some texture with this, impress me brush and the fan brush to really pump this piece up a little bit. And I'm going to do that on the photo layer. But I'm going to duplicate this photo layer first. So if I screw it up, I won't have to go redo all this. I don't want to do that at this point. We're going to take a break and we're gonna come back with that final, final touches. To make this piece pop a little bit and finish out my farmhouse cow where the flower, I don't know what else to call this yet. Tulip thief comes to mind. That might be what it's called. I tend to just think of ideas while I'm doing it and I like cute ideas for names. Will be back in the next segment with the final touches to finish this one out. 15. Finishing Touches: All right, ready to finish this little girl out? I think she's looking fabulous, fabulous with her little tulip. That's just so sweet to me. And I just want to do a few more things to really tie everything together and play around with a little bit more texture. I've added a new layer on top. I wasn't planning on doing that, but I am because I would like to bring some of this tulip color somewhere into the background. So I'm trying to pick a shade here. How about that reddish shade right there? And let's go to the fan brush. And let's just see what this might do. If we just dot a little bit of that along the bottom edge right there and maybe even just off to the side a little bit to get a few speckles in her. Maybe over here on this side, I'm just touching it. I'm not really doing anything. Stroking wise. In a few areas. Let's see. Let's touch touch near the top corner right there and just get a little bit in the corner. Let's kinda cool. Now I want to go over that with the same brush with the blue which I just grabbed from the opposite corner. Just kind of touch it, tap it. Bringing some of that blue in there. Down here as well, right on top of it. Then down here, I only get the darker shade that's behind it and bring some of that in. And I went over her for a little bit right there. Don't like that. But I can simply go back to the masking brush, which I mean the canvas brush, which is on the blending layer. And I could just using the canvas brush, just blend that down. I got a little too much over her for there. You can blend any bits of it down. It's just a little thing to add some interest. And we got it up in her fur on the side, right side, tapping on that all around this side where it got on her. That brings a little bit of that color in there. It got a little on the tulip though. I don't want it on the tool. This is optional. This if you don't want to do the fan brush, that's fine. I'm going to click on that layer and make a mask and go to the masking brush. And it's selected black when I did that and work got on the tulip or too close to it. That layer, I'm just going to mask it off. See, it's coming off the flower now. Around the stem. Little bit on her for now it's off the tulip, but they're just brings a little bit of that tulip color into the piece. And going, I'm going to squeeze those together now because I've masked that already. I'm going to merge this down. Just, it's just a nice little canvas, the accent, bringing some of that to lip color into the background. Just for fun. But on, I'm going to duplicate this layer and turn off the other ones. So I'm gonna go with the impress me brush as a blender. Now the reason I duplicated the layer is the impression may brush can be kind of unpredictable. You might think it looks great close-up and then when you zoom out, it's not and you can mask it. You can change opacity. But what you don't want to do is do a whole bunch of work with it and then say, Oh, I don't like it. I liked my painting the way it was before. By duplicating it, we've saved that the way it was before. And I'm gonna go with a large brush. Size and I'm going to grab here this top corner and just gently pull and push. Some of this background paint around. You can see some of the texture appearing. Want more of this lighter tones to go up. So I'm trying to drag it up, but I'm not pushing hard. The harder you push, the more texture you're going to get. But you could end up with a solid stroke as well. I just go different directions with this. Because when you go different directions, it creates just some interesting looks. But you can see that texture appearing in there now as I'm just pushing it and dragging it, not pushing really hard. I can't describe it. You just have to play with it. And when you drag a different way, it makes a different texture. But that's got some interesting texture now, I'd like to do that over the whole background and just kind of pull areas around where I want it to get some of that flow, that heavy paint load and I'm gonna do this on her too, but right now I'd just like to do it on the background. A lot of times you can practice by doing it on the background with this brush and then later add to the subject. This is just a minor detail. Once again, this is optional as well, and you might not want to do it at all. I just liked the unpredictable marks it makes. As a blender. Just moving around doing this in different areas and go one way and then the other way. And if it doesn't leave a very strong mark, I don't force it too much because maybe it's not supposed to and you can double-tap and undo if you do a stroke you don't like. Well look at there is pulled some of the color from the tulip because I touched the edges of the tulip into the background by doing that, just dragging it slowly around the tulip area and it actually got some of the texture on the tool of I liked that. And let's try it in the, where the green is. That could do the same thing with a little bit of green. Don't know that I like it with the green. I might want to pull the, whoa, I don't want to pull that much blue, I hope for the green. So we'll double-tap that and maybe do a smaller brush to get in this section where the blue is, you just have to play with it. There's some texture went over there. It's just fun. This is the fun, The fun part of this brush and I'm starting to get into her. Do a little bit on the leaf here. See if I can get a little bit of fun texture there. As a blender with this. I already got some on the flower, but let me try some more. Too much texture on the flower. But it's nice to have little bits of it appear that you just have to with this brush. You just have to play with dragging it and see what you like. Dragging in different directions. Now let's actually go to her and work on starting on her edge and pull outward. Then working up into her body. I'm pulling downward. And then I'll pull upward and kind of sideways. Then I'll pull downward again to the other side. But it really adds what I like, which is a thick painterly texture to the piece. And just work my way around doing this through the whole piece. Different directions, very gently. Pulling. I don't really want to blend color. I just want this thing to lay down some textural brush marks. Let's see what I'm doing with this area here where I've got some of this red. See if I can go with a bigger brush and pull some of that around and then pull it back the other way. Yeah. I'm liking that. Even up here. Pull in some of the white areas around oh, I like that mark. You'll get a mark you like. If you do, stop, don't even touch it anymore in that spot. Let's see what it does on the ears. Don't know about that. There are pulled from the dark instead. Get a little smaller brush here around the top of the ear. The bottom of the ear. Let's kind of neat right there. How about this area here that I was fussing with earlier so much. I liked that unpredictable Blue Market made right there. Work on the face area a little more. Now, one place I don't use this brush a whole lot is the I. I do sometimes, but the eye is supposed to be really smooth and glassy looking. I tend to, once I've got the I the way I like it, I don't mess with it too much. Don't like that. Mark. Just go different way there. You'll know what you like and if you do one you don't like, you'll know it and you can take it back off. But like I said, you're doing this on a separate layer. So by doing that, you're protecting the actual original painting. I didn't like that, mark, so we're double-tap. Get that back out of there. Let's see if I can make a smaller brush. Work some of that texture up in here. In just a few spots. You won't see heavy texture like this when you do a real painting that won't be that heavy everywhere. Which is why I'm just doing it in certain areas that I just, I skip around and the same as with the canvas brush. Skip around. And if you did over the whole thing, it would. With this texture, it's not gonna make sense. I'm just going around different spots that I feel like might want to play with it and get some good unpredictable marks. Let's look at the difference now. This is, that's what we did just now. By playing with that brush. That's what we did before. You'll see it just adds a little bits of texture and moves color in an unpredictable way, which makes it look even more expressive to me. I'm not real sure I did add the red in the background, but I think it's still a little bit too strong. I'm going to add another new layer on top at this point and play with using the impressively brush as a paintbrush. And we'll start up here in this top corner and grab the blue. And I'm just going to swipe down right there like I'm putting a little bit more blue paint over top of that. That tone that down a little bit. Here we go. It's got a little bit of red in there. Still. Okay, let's get this blue. Oops, I just tap that and that that appeared. But I don't want that to appear. I want this darker blue color down here. Just pull up. Like you're laying that thick paint on top of that now. Then over here I want to get this darkest color. The darkest color. That's interesting. Maybe even get a little darker in here. Has some really nice texture. I like what it did here, but it's a little dark. So instead of masking that, I'm just gonna take a little bit of the nearby blue and come down over it, which will tone it down. Now let's pick a few areas on her that we can paint. With this brush right here. Now, that's too strong of a color. Go a little bit lighter. You may have to do an undo. I don't like that. That's too bright. Back it up, double-tap a few times. Let's go down a little bit further on there. That's more similar in color. Then even this cream color here, maybe across the top of the lip just a little bit. There we go. And this orange color. Grab that and maybe go a little darker. Just a little bit. No, that's too dark. Orange color again. And just go a tad darker. Still too dark. Maybe I'm pushing too hard. Just kinda wanted to. All right, that one is not working. Like I said, this brush is very unpredictable. How about we just use the color of this there to enhance? All right, let's go a little bit bigger. Let's go over here and get this color. Let's get the yellow. And I'm just pulling colors from in the painting and tapping it nearby. Tap, holding it down and dragging it very gently. Even this dark here. You can pull it outside ways to if you wanted to. I don't like that, so I'm gonna pull it up. Where else can I play with this? How about this creamy Teller right here? That's too strong. Let me go to the canvas brush because I do like this right here, but except for this little spot right here, I'd rather blend that out. You can blend this out to if it's a little too strong, wherever you've put it, you can blend it out. How about up here on the ear? Get the orange color, tan color go a little brighter. And maybe do the same thing over here. Then where the dark color is. A little bit of that in. Sometimes just tapping can leave an interesting mark. And then if it's needed to be blended and just go back to the canvas brush and blend some over it. We're getting some unique painterly effects here. I'd even like to try this color over this I. You get a little bit of that in there and then blend. The part I didn't like. Over here. Let's see how that looks. I'll actually like that. You can actually use this brush to create a really interesting background texture. Just laying down some of this purple color into the background right in there. And then I'll go with a canvas brush. Sort of sweep down over that a little bit. Just so a little bit of it shows playing with a little bit of light. How about this color right here and bring this down a little. Note. This color maybe I push too hard. If you push too hard, it will and drag it will leave too strong of a mark. And if it's not doing the mark you want, try going the other way. This color right here. Hello. Little smaller. There's two little spots right there and we're trying to work on covering up. I'll fix that in a minute. Let's go back to I forgot where it was. Enhancing with this, you can see the difference. Now does this loop pretty pharmacy maybe, but farmhouse backgrounds are usually kind of light. I might want to get this lighter color appear near the top and go The biggest brush I can with that. And bring it up over. You still see a little hint of the red. Then down here maybe even come down a little bit. You still see some little hints of the red I've added from the tulip. But a lot of it is covered up now. But overall, I really do like this piece. I think she's turned out really sweet. I just see a couple of little tiny things I want to fix. I'm going to merge this layer down, merge, merge down. So that was before, after we finished the painting and added the little red. And then this is what the texture impress me, brush added in there. It just really gives it some energy. When you do that in a little bit of unpredictability, which I think is pretty cool, gives your eyes something when you're looking at close to dance around and look at only have a couple of little things on this final one I want to fix. There's a couple of spots. I'm gonna get on the canvas brush right up here. I don't like how strong that hole was. I'm just kind of going over that gently. Then there's a spot down here. There's these two marks right here. I don't like I'm pulling canvas brush is too big for these. I don't want to lose all that cool texture I got. I just want to pull that over and downplay some of those those two marks for some reason that was bugging me to see those there. You'll find stuff like that when you're using these various brushes, you'll find stuff that stands out that when you look at it from a distance. And that's why I always say zoom out and look far away and see what you've come up with. Because when you look at a distance, things look different than when you're really up-close on it. Only other thing I could see is the inside of this other nostril could stand to use a little bit of this dark color. And I'm nitpicking now. This, this one too. I'm nitpicking only because I'm gonna publish this and I want it to look the best it could be. For what I could do. Blending a little bit more, that canvas brush, trying to darken nostril a little bit. On the inside of it. I think I want to blend some of this gray into the top of that knows a little bit better. Okay. Now, I'm happy where there. Let's add a signature. I do that with a canvas brush by go, really, really small. I'll pick a color and I usually sign down here in the bottom. Right. I'm thinking about picking something like this. A little bright. That's easy. What I say about right move to the gray side, to the left. Still bright. Move down a little bit. That's better. Then once you've done your signature on a new layer like that, you can reposition it and resize it lower. And you could also adjust your opacity, which were moved over here. She could see it. You can adjust the opacity down a little bit so it's not so strong. You could even blend your signature with the canvas brush. The canvas brush has more of a square end and sometimes I like to blend that out to make it appear as if it was little bit faded. There we go. Let's merge that down. There's my final image. And there was the previous painting, which is just fine as it is. All of this final stuff with the texture and the fan brush and everything, that's all optional. I just like to add a little bit more energy to my pieces. And when you add texture, it adds energy. It's amazing. But let's look at the original photo where we started from there. Now here we are. Now let us look at the inspiration. There's the inspiration, farmhouse style cow with flowers in the mouth. And here's my finished piece, farmhouse style cow with one flower in the mouth. But for my first farmhouse style cow I've ever done, I think that's pretty good. Now you can save this by clicking on the wrench and then Share and JPEG. And of course it will still save it in your procreate gallery so you can go back and make changes or work on it some more. I've saved it. But if I want to adjust this, I can do this now that I've saved it. I can either do that here in Procreate or I can make adjustments right through the photo album or what do you call it? We're in the iPad. Photo adjustments. Let's just go there and see. I should have saved it down here at the bottom. There it is. Right there. I would duplicate this. Well, I'm sure there's a way. I just don't know how select this. Not let me duplicate. I don't know how to do that from here. But you can edit from here by clicking Edit once it's in your photo gallery. And you could adjust your exposure. Wanted to brighten it up a little bit. You could do that. You can adjust brilliance. Same thing, brighten that. I do like to brighten and sharpen a little bit. You can adjust your highlights and your shadows individually. If I wanted to make my shadows a little darker and put more contrast in there, I could do that. You could adjust contrast here. This looks more pastel. This looks richer. You can adjust brightness. Black point saturation. You can adjust the saturation. You wanted to tone it down. On saturation. You could do that or you could really heavily saturated warmth if you wanted it. Warmer. Tones are cooler tones. If you're doing the painting like this for a environment, you might look in the environment and say is the color warm in this written, is the wall color warm is the color cool. You might want to adjust the art to fit the environment. You can play with the tint. Totally change the hues of everything. Sharpness, of course, you can adjust and make it really, really sharp. Definition. If you just play with these noise reduction we don't need because this is no longer a photo, it's a painting vignette. If you wanted to add some darkening around the corners. You could do that. Kind of nice. Sometimes to do that to some artwork. There's just a lot of different things here in this editing that you can do that I just realized recently. And so you can edit right here on your iPad and then save the image and take it inhibit printed. Or you can send it back to your computer. As is like this. And you can edit on the computer. Sometimes when you see it on the big screen of the computer, you may see a few more things you want to change or a mark you might want to clone out or something. But I think overall, this is a fine example of a farmhouse cow. And I hope you guys have fun playing with painting this. I'm sure. He says, I don't paint cows very often. It's just not a subject I'm familiar with. I'm sure some of you will do a better job than I did on this. But I'm for me, I'm pretty happy with this. I hope you guys try to paint this. Have a good time with it. And if you don't want to paint this cow, would that flower pick your own animal that you might want to paint? Say if you've got a right angle where you can put a flower in the mouth as if it's picked up a flower or holding some flowers or something. Get creative with that. See what else you can put that the animal might have picked up. And try combining two images together like this to create an overall painting from a simple photo like that, just a snapshot I took from the car as we stopped by a field one day. So see if you can take something like that and create something like this using some of the techniques I've taught you in this class. As always. Thank you for watching. I appreciate it. And I hope you guys enjoy painting your photos in procreate as much as I do. You guys have a great day.