Learn Digital Art from Sketch to Painting: Krita Basics 2024 | Duplo | Skillshare
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Learn Digital Art from Sketch to Painting: Krita Basics 2024

teacher avatar Duplo, Designer, Artist

Watch this class and thousands more

Get unlimited access to every class
Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Watch this class and thousands more

Get unlimited access to every class
Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Lessons in This Class

    • 1.

      Intro

      2:03

    • 2.

      Installing Krita

      2:48

    • 3.

      The Interface

      7:09

    • 4.

      The Basic Process

      3:52

    • 5.

      Basic Functions

      5:58

    • 6.

      Drawing & Painting

      10:45

    • 7.

      Krita's Brushes

      15:55

    • 8.

      Getting More Brushes

      6:19

    • 9.

      Creating Shapes

      8:52

    • 10.

      Selections

      6:47

    • 11.

      Other Tools

      7:01

    • 12.

      Layers

      8:30

    • 13.

      Image Editing

      4:48

    • 14.

      Vectors & Layer Styles

      5:39

    • 15.

      Artwork: Sketching

      8:53

    • 16.

      Artwork: Colors

      14:41

    • 17.

      Artwork: Texture & Detail

      22:21

    • 18.

      Artwork: Final Adjustments

      17:18

    • 19.

      How To Get Getter

      19:58

    • 20.

      How To Find Inspiration

      10:40

    • 21.

      How To Use References

      8:23

    • 22.

      How To Stay Motivated

      10:56

    • 23.

      Conclusion

      3:08

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About This Class

If you want to make digital art as a complete beginner, you've come to the right place!

I'm Duplo, an experienced artist and designer from Germany, and I've put this course together to help you make your first artworks.
Using the completely free software Krita, I will guide you through the beginning of your digital art journey.

I'll show you how to install and set up the program, how to navigate and customize the interface, how to use all the tools and functions, how you can draw and paint, what the best practices and most useful shortcuts are and how to get more brushes.

After that, we'll make an artwork together that covers all the basics of Krita. We will start with a simple sketch and define the composition, then block in colors, add textures and details in different styles and make final adjustments.
Along the way, I'll give you many tips and insights what I think while making the artwork.

In the last section of this course, I'll give you some general art advice to kickstart your journey.
We're going to discuss how to get better, how to find inspiration, how to use references and how to stay motivated.

I think this course will help you see through all the chaos of digital art advice that is out there.

If you're interested but not quite convinced, just watch the first few lessons and see how you like it.

Have fun!

Download Krita: https://krita.org/de/download/

Download my brush bundles: Duplo's Brush Bundles

Intro background beat produced by White Hot and provided by https://freebeats.io

Meet Your Teacher

Teacher Profile Image

Duplo

Designer, Artist

Teacher

Hi, I'm Duplo.

I am a passionate digital artist and graphics designer from Germany who likes to create unorthodox art and innovative systems for design, graphics and development processes.

Over the past years I've created many many designs and artworks that express my love for the matter, and worked on several big projects including games, courses, websites and classic art projects.

I especially enjoy landscape painting, abstract art, web design and teaching my skills to others!

Apart from that, I have become somewhat of a productivity expert and I've spent a lot of time figuring out how to manage time, how to break down big projects efficiently and how to optimize development processes.

My goal with my online courses is to share my knowledge ... See full profile

Level: Beginner

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Transcripts

1. Intro: Digital art is something beautiful. Imagine being able to create any visual you can imagine from simple sketches and drawings to abstract artworks and patterns to full on paintings in the style of the Old Masters. And all you need is a computer, a drawing tablet, and a free software. Hi, I'm Duplo, and I'd like to welcome you to my complete beginner, digital art course. This is an efficient quick start for anyone who wants to learn how to draw and paint digitally. From my own experience, I know that with all the information out there, it gets very confusing what you actually need. So with this course, I want to give you clear guidance without wasting any time. As an experienced artist and designer, I've been using the free software crea for many years now. I've made texture packs and game assets, sketches and thumbnails, logos, and web graphics, and many, many paintings in different styles. A with Creta. So here I want to share my passion with you by explaining everything you need to know about this awesome software. I'll show you how to download it and how to set it up, how to draw and paint, how to use layers, selections, shapes, and many other tools. Then we'll put that into practice by creating an artwork together. I'll guide you step by step from sketching the composition and blocking in colors to your first finished painting. Along the way, I'll give you many tips for digital art and insights what an artist thinks while making an artwork. And finally, I'll give you some general art advice to get you started. We'll discuss how to get better, how to find inspiration, how to use references, and how to stay motivated as an artist. By the end of this course, you'll know all the basics of using Creta. You'll have practiced by making an artwork, and you'll have a sustainable strategy for your art journey. So you'll be ready to go out there and create anything you like. The only things that you need are APC and ideally a drawing tablet of any kind. And that's it. So yeah, I think it's going to be fun. If you're interested, see you in the first lesson. 2. Installing Krita: Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the course. In this lesson, we're going to take care of the very first step that you need to complete if you want to learn and use a new software, which is, well, you need to download it. So in case you already have Creta on your PC, you can just move on to the next lesson. But just so we have everything complete here, let me take you through the downloading process real quick. Let's go. If you type in Creta in your search engine of choice, then you will most likely find somewhere at the top. Click on it, and then you can go to download, where you can select the version of Creta that you want. I'm going to click on the Download button for the Windows installer, because that's my operating system. But as you can see, you can also download Creta for Mac or Linux. So just download the installer that fits your operating system. Once you've downloaded this Creta setup thing, then open it up and click ons. And then the setup is loading, which usually shouldn't take too long. Okay. Once it's done, you can choose your language, and let's go with English here because I'm not particularly familiar with the other two. Then just click on, Okay. Okay. And then we have this license agreement, which you can read if you want. But yeah, let's just click on Accept and next. Next, next, next. Then, of, read everything and agree. Then click on next, and then you can choose if you want a desktop icon. I want one, so I have this checked. And then let's click on Install, and then it's pretty much done. The installation usually takes a few minutes or so, so I'm going to speed this up. And here we go. We have successfully installed Critter. So we can click on Finish and open it up. If you want, you can now delete the installer, the file that we've downloaded, because we don't need it anymore. We only need our beautiful new software, creer. And here it is. This is the Start screen of critter. As you can see, I still have my recently opened documents here because I already had critter on my PC, like this artwork that I'm currently working on. But don't worry about that. Let's move on to the next lesson to explore the basic interface and find out what all of this stuff means. See you there. 3. The Interface: Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Creta. This is the Start screen, the thing that you see when you open up the software. As you can see, you have your recently opened images and documents. You can click on them and continue working on them. Then here on the right side, you have some news about Creta, like updates and all that. But you can also click on this icon and disable the news. There is less confusing stuff on your start screen. But pretty much all of this is completely unimportant as we just want to click on new image to make a new image. And then you get this little window where you can make all sorts of adjustments. Most importantly, you can type something in at width and height to define the resolution of your image. Let's just set it to 1,000 by 100. We will talk a bit more about these other settings here, but right now, we're just going to click on Create. Ev, this is the working interface of Creta. This is what you see when you work on your images. Now, first of all, if this looks different for you, then don't worry. You can change pretty much anything about this interface. And we'll talk about that in a minute. But first, let's clear up what all of this means. Most importantly, the white box in the middle is your canvas. This is what you can work on, where you can place your brush strokes and shapes and where you can add and edit images and all of that stuff. When you're done and you save your image, then it will just be this white box and nothing else. So this canvas is really important. You can make it bigger or smaller and zoom in and out by scrolling with your mouse. Or you can also press plus two sum in or minus two um out on your keyboard. But I think the scrolling wheel is more useful, so I always have my mouse right next to my drawing tablet. If you want to move the canvas around, hold down the scrolling wheel and move your mouse. Or you can also hold down space and mouse click and then move your mouse. But I think holding down the scrolling wheel is more practical. Then you can press numbers on your keyboard to rotate your canvas, four to rotate it left, and six to rotate it right, and if you press five, then it goes back to normal. Alternatively, at the bottom right, we also have a few options for this. We can rotate the canvas with this little circle, and we can zoom in and out on this bar. But let's be honest, using the shortcuts and hot keys is way more useful. So try this out right now and find the method that you're most comfortable with. Move the canvas around, som in and out, rotate it, and neutralize it. These actions are very fundamental to the digital painting process. So you better get used to the method that you're choosing. You'll have to navigate your canvas all the time. Okay, once you got that, let's explore the interface. The elements that make up the interface of Creta, these boxes on the sides are called Dockers. The most important ones that are probably on your screen right now are the toolbar on the left, and on the right, the color selector, the layers, and the brushes. The most important thing that you have to know about these dockers is that they are very flexible. So if any of this looks completely different for you, and you're panicking because you're wondering if you've downloaded the wrong version of the software. Don't worry. Here is how you can change that. For example, I can click on top of this color selector and move it into the middle, and then I have it as a separate window. You can make it bigger or smaller by pulling these sides in any direction, and you can do the same thing with the other dockers as well. You can pull them to the left or on top. Or over each other. And if you do that, if you pull two dockers on top of each other, then you have them as parallel windows here that you can access like that. This is useful because you want quick access to certain dockers, but there is not infinite space on the interface. You can imagine if there were like ten different dockers, then it would become a little bit messy. So having them as parallel windows like that is a very nice way to keep your interface organized. For example, I have my brush presets right next to my tool options and my undo history, which all three are dockers that I need in my drawing and painting process. But I don't want to see all of them at once all the time. So I just have them like this and I can quickly access them. You can always make a docker a free window again that you can move around. If you click on this window icon. You can slide on these sides and make them bigger or smaller, and you can right click on the toolbar and change the size of these tool icons. Also useful to know. By the way, if some of these dockers are missing for you, then you can click on settings, dockers, and there you have an overview of the different options that you have. You can activate, already activate them, you can move them around and arrange them differently. But I would say for this course, it's the best if you have the same dockers activated like me, and you have them arranged in a similar way because these are the most important ones, and this is pretty close to the default interface of Creta. By the way, if you click on this icon up here, you can access different workspaces, which means different arrangements of these dockers. I recommend that you first save your arrangement of dockers and give it a name that you can remember, for example, I've called Mine Duplex Standard. And then you can also check out these other options and always return to your basic interface. And I shouldn't forget. You can also go to the settings and there you can find a bunch of different themes for Creta, which changes the colors of the dockers and the interface and all that. As you can see, you can make it very bright, very dark, or very colored. I personally pretty much only enjoy critter darker, so that's what I'm working with, but you can choose whatever you want here. And yeah, that's pretty much everything that you have to know about Crea's interface. Now it's time for you to adjust it to something that you like. I would say, make it look somewhat similar to this and make sure you have the same dockers activated as me, and especially get used to navigating the Canvas, and feel free to practice it if you need to. When you're comfortable, move on to the next lesson where we explore the basic process of using crea. 4. The Basic Process: All right. Before we start covering all these awesome tools and functions. Here's a quick lesson about the basic process of using Creta. First of all, if you start Crete, you basically have two options. You can make a completely new image by clicking on here, and then you get this like image creation Window, or you can click on Open Image, and there you can select any image file from your PC that is compatible with Creta, which is any of them. As you can see, there are many different file types that are supported by this free software, for which I'm very grateful. If you don't have Creta in full screen or you have a second monitor or something, then you can also pull images into Creta, and then you have them as a new document. You can always close a document by clicking on this cross icon at the top right. But if you change something about an image and you, for example, draw something, and then you try to close the document, then Creta will ask you if you want to save it. So you don't accidentally get rid of your hardwork, which is very nice. If you make a new file altogether, you have many options in this window. You can change the resolution, as I've told you, right here with these numbers. You can change the color space, the amount of layers, the background color, the background opacity, and all kinds of stuff. You even have different presets for different types of documents here that you might want to check out. But for digital drawing and painting, I pretty much always just leave everything as it is, and just make a clean white canvas. The only thing that I'm usually worried about is the resolution. Do I want a big, detailed image? Do I want a smaller image? Do I want it to be square, or do I want it to be 16 to nine or whatever? This always depends on what I want to make. So let me just click on Create so I can show you that you can edit multiple documents at once. Yes. Pretty cool, right? You can, for example, just click on file, new and make a new file, or you can open one up? And you can repeat this. You have many different parallel documents at once if you are a passionate multitasker. Or you can also pull an image into Creta, and then Creta will ask you how you want to insert it. For example, you can make it a new layer in your current document, or you can open it up as a new document. And like that, you can work on multiple documents and close them or save them however you want. Pretty simple. You can save an image by clicking on File and Save or Save S or Export, which is basically the same thing. And there you can choose the location where you want to save your file. You can type in a name for your file, and you can choose the file type. As you can see, there are many different options from PNG and JPEG to vector files. If you want to keep working on your image and you're not completely done with it, then I recommend you always save it as a CRA document, which is at the very top here. That way, your layers will be preserved, which doesn't happen if you save it as a regular image file, like PNG or JPEG. So that's pretty much it. I recommend you practice this at least once, open up a new document or make a new one, move it around, save it, and just get super used to the process. If you feel good with this, then move on to the next lesson where we finally explore what you can actually do with Creta. 5. Basic Functions: Ladies and gentlemen. It's time that I introduce you to the most important functions of Creta and show you what you can actually do with the software. And well, it's a lot. So let's do it step by step. First of all, the most fundamental action of digital art, which is well drawing and painting. In Creta, you can draw or paint something if you have the brush tool selected, which you can do by clicking on this brush icon up here in the toolbar. You can also access it by pressing B. Then you can select your brush down here in the brush presets, and there are many options, which we will, of course, explore. And then if you click and drag your cursor over the screen, then you are performing digital art. Nice. You can change the size of your brass strokes up here, so they are bigger or smaller, and you can change the opacity of your bras strokes, how dense they are here, up here. So if this is lower, then your brass strokes are a bit lighter. And you can select the color with which you draw or paint on the color selector. You can move around on the color wheel to change the hue, and then in this triangle or square, whatever it is for you, you can change the value and the saturation. Later on, we will go more in depth about changing this color selector and generally drawing and painting, and how you can do that. But for now, just notice, this is the brush tool, and this is how you can draw or paint. Now back to the basic functions. If you don't like what you've made, and you regret what you've done in RTA, then you can press Control C on your keyboard and undo an action, just like in pretty much every other software. And you can, of course, also redo an action by pressing control shift C. Alternatively, you can also press these two arrow icons up here. They do the same thing as these hot keys. But the hot keys are just more useful, so you better remember them. In general, undoing and redoing is something that you do all the time in digital art. So this is really important. It's so important, in fact, that I have mapped these hot keys to the buttons on my drawing tablet, which is something that I highly recommend you do as well if you have buttons on your drawing tablet. Just go to the software of your tablet, and there you will most likely find an option to add hot keys. All right. You can also view your undo history in the undo history Docker, which you can activate. And there you can jump back to a certain point in time. For example, if you draw a few lines, but you only like the first one, then you can either press undo until you arrive at that point, or you can just go straight back to it in the undo history. That's basically how it works. Of course, the undo history doesn't work infinitely. Like when you have a big artwork with thousands of steps, then it doesn't store all of them here. But it's quite a few. If you don't like what you've made altogether, then you can press delete on your keyboard, and everything on your current layer disappears. Okay, let's move on to the other tools that you have in Creta. Just a quick overview. You can create perfectly straight lines with a line tool. You can create different shapes with these shape tools. You can move around and transform layers with these tools. Then you can create gradients, select colors, and added images, and you can select areas with these tools down here. Then you can always change things about these tools in the tool options, which are right here. And you can create and move around different layers on the layer Docker. Of course, we will explore all these things more in depth later on. But this is basically what you can do with critter, the most important tools and functions. If you're someone who likes to work very precisely, then you can activate a grid with the grid docker, which you can of course find in the dockers. There, you can click on Show grid, and you can change the X spacing and y spacing of your grid. But I personally rarely use this, so let's close this docker again. What's also an interesting function are the mirror lines, which you can activate and deactivate with these icons up here. And what these mirror lines basically do is they mirror everything that you draw or paint on this line. And you can move this line around here, or you can make a horizontal line or you can activate both mirror lines at once. And yeah, that's certainly an interesting function. Then you also have the option to activate wrap around mode with this symbol up here. And what rap around mode does is basically, it makes your image repeat infinitely, and if you draw or paint over the edge, then it continues, and you come out on the other side. This function makes creating textures and patterns very comfortable with Creta. And you also have a hot key for activating or deactivating wrap around mode, which is Shift W. You have a few more options for this. If you click on view and wrap around mode direction, there you can choose to, for example, only have it wrap around horizontally or vertically, if you want that. Okay. Now you have a nice overview of the basic tools and functions of Creter, and you know what you can do with it. In the next lesson, it's finally time to dive a bit deeper on drawing and painting. 6. Drawing & Painting: Okay. The first tool that we're going to cover in depth is the brush tool. I know there are other important things in digital art like layers, selections, and creating shapes. But at the end of the day, the thing that you do most of the time is still drawing and painting with your brush. So you should know very well how to do that and which tools and functions you can use in Creta to make your drawing and painting process easier. In order to get a good feeling and a good routine for this, I want you to participate in this lesson. So open up Creta and follow my instructions. First of all, let's make a new image by the size 2000 by 2000. Nothing special here. Only a big white square that we can fill with some brush strokes. L et's zoom in on the top left corner and select the brush tool. And then let's select a very basic brush like this one that should be in creater by default. Let's just draw a few simple lines in different directions in the top left corner. If you have a drawing tablet, you should immediately notice if you have pressure sensitivity or not. Pressure sensitivity means your lines get thicker or thinner depending on how much pressure you apply on your drawing tablet. This is very important for digital art. If it doesn't work for you and your lines always have the same thickness, then try selecting a different brush because not all of them react to pressure. But if it still doesn't work for you even after testing like five different brushes, then go to settings, configure tool bars, and there you can search for use pen pressure on the left side. Click on this arrow to the right and apply. And then you get this little icon here, which lets you enable or disable pressure sensitivity. And if it still doesn't work, then there is probably an issue with your drawing tablet or your settings. And unfortunately, I can't cover that in this course, because there are many different drawing tablets and many different drivers for them. So you'll have to look up how to activate pan pressure for your individual drawing tablet, which usually should be quite easy. Now let's return to the brushes. If you flick through a few of these, you'll notice that they react differently to pen pressure. Some of these brushes vary in their size, and some of them vary in their opacity, which means how dense they appear. With this brush, for example, if I apply less pressure than the line gets lighter and lighter and not thinner and thinner. And some of these brushes combine these two effects, like this one where the line gets a bit lighter and thinner if I apply less pressure. So this is individual for every brush. But you can always have a little preview if you look at these pictures of the brushes. There you can see what the line will look like. But of course, you can always make manual adjustments to your brushes by using these sliders up here, as I've shown you in the last lesson. So you can make all of your brushes, very big, very small, very light, or very dense. You can always reload the original preset of a brush by clicking on this icon up here. You can also make adjustments to your brushes by clicking on these arrows next to size and opacity. And you can also change size, opacity, and flow. Flow is almost the same thing as opacity, I think. But you can also make adjustments to the rotation of your brush, which comes in handy when you have a directional brush, like this one, which is a tall rectangle, if I use it by default. But by sliding on this rotation circle here, I can change the angle of the brush. It's a neat function, but I almost never use it because for most brushes, it's just not necessary. By the way, you can also change the size of your brush by holding down shift, clicking, and then moving your mouse. You don't always have to go up to the slider, but there is also a hot key for this. But honestly, I prefer the slider. Now, not all brushes add more paint to the canvas. Some of them also remove paint, and we call those brushes erasers. For example, these four brushes at the very top. With those, you can remove paint in different ways. Some of them are more smooth and some of them have harder edges. But if that's not enough for you, you can also just click on any brush and transform it into an eraser by clicking on this eraser, I can appear. So if this thing is active, you can remove paint with the shape of the brush that you have currently selected. The hot key for activating and deactivating eraser mode is E. Just try this out. Just paint a little bit, and then press E and remove the paint, and then press E and add a little bit more. It's a quite comfortable process like that. Then if you click on the icon next to the erase icon, then you can lock the transparency of your layer. Sounds confusing, but it's a very useful function. If you have this active, you can only draw or paint on stuff that's already there. So if I change the color, then you can see I cannot add any new lines or shapes, but I can only paint on top of the existing lines and shapes here. This is very useful for adding textures, highlights or shadows to existing objects because you don't have to worry about painting over the edge. You just can't do it. You can also lock the transparency by clicking on this icon on your layer to the very right. Draw and paint a few lines and try it out. All right. Now let's talk about colors. As I've told you, you can change the color of any brush with the color selector up here. You can change the hue by sliding around on the color wheel, and you can change value and saturation inside this triangle or rectangle. But you don't always have to use the color selector. You can also select any color from the image by holding down control with the brush, and then clicking on it. You see if I want this color, then I hold down control, click on it, and then I got it. That's a very useful function that I'm using all the time. If you want to change the appearance of this thing, then click on this icon, and there you have a few options for the color selector. For instance, you can click on this image, and there you can change the shape and the type of your color selector. I personally prefer the triangle. But there are also other options like the color model type and a few things that you can change about the interface of behavior, shade selector color history. So you can play around with this, but I think it's pretty good by default. The color selector also shows you a little color history here on the right side, where you can see your recently used colors and jump back to them. You can also access a few more color settings on this icon up here where you find another color selector and also a few pre made color palettes if you're too lazy to find out which color you like. And you can also switch back and forth between foreground color and background color, which basically just means you have one color saved, and you can always switch it in. All right. These are things that you can change about your brush throats, but there is also another way to access most of these options, which is right clicking with your brush. And then you get this Quick Access window, which many artists really like about reter. This is very practical if you get used to it. By the way, I have mapped right click to a button on my stylus. So I can easily open up the quick access window when I'm painting something. So by right clicking with your brush, you can quickly change pretty much all the important things about it, like the type of brush, the color, the size, opacity, and angle. And you also have this reset icon here. By the way, on the top left here, you also have your foreground and your background colors, so you can quickly switch back and forth between them. So you can make all the important adjustments to your brushes by just right clicking with them. But furthermore, you can also use this quick access window to change things about the canvas. For example, you can zoom in and out on this bar, and you can rotate your canvas by sliding around with this little ball here. And you can mirror your Canvas by clicking on here. Then you can activate Canvas only mode by clicking on here where all the confusing stuff on the sides disappears, and you're completely in your flow. And you can pretty much only access options by right clicking, and there you can deactivate it again. But yeah, maybe you really like painting in this mode. By the way, the colors around the color selector are your color history, and you can clear it by clicking on this icon. Now, the brushes that you see when you press R click are dependent on the tag that you have activated. You can change that by clicking on this icon, and there you can select different sets of brushes. Like sketching, inking, painting, you see, there are always different types of brushes. But you can also customize that by assigning tags to your brushes. For example, you can right click on a brush, assign to tag, my favorites. And then if you right click, you can access your favorite brushes, which is very nice. So you can make your own custom set of brushes that you can access by right clicking. I recommend you practice this a little bit and get used to the functions that I've shown you in this lesson. Just make a few brush strokes with different brushes and different colors and adjust them in different ways. This is essential to the drawing and painting process. So you should get very comfortable with the method that you're choosing, whether you want to make your adjustments by right clicking or by using the dockers. It's up to you. So in the next lesson, let me introduce the brushes a bit more in depth, and let's see which brushes there are in Creta. 7. Krita's Brushes: Now that you know the basic process of drawing and painting in Creta, we can talk in depth about brushes. So in this lesson, I'm going to show you which types of brushes there are and what they are useful for. Yes, technically, you can go out there and just try out all the brushes yourself and eventually find the ones that are useful to you and that you like. But I think this lesson will save you a lot of time. I'm going to give you tips, which brushes I think are best in what situation, and we're going to practice using them. So we will paint our first forms and shapes here. So once again, I want you to participate in this lesson. Let's make a new document, but the size 2000 by 2000. Very nice. We're going to fill this page with lots of brush strokes and shapes. So let's start very small and som into the top left corner. Select the brush tool, and let's check out these brushes. At the very top, we have the four erasers, which remove paint from the canvas. But as I said, they are pretty unnecessary because you can transform any brush into an eraser by just pressing E on your keyboard and activate eraser mode. The next brushes, however, are ones that I use a lot because those are the air brushes. These fall brushes apply paint in a very smooth way, and they don't have a hard edge. They are very big by default, so let's make them a bit smaller and paint a little bit. As you can see, these brushes are very useful for creating transitions and smooth background textures. If you use two different colors, you can make them flow into each other with one of these air brushes. I especially like this one on the right, and I often use it for adding smooth highlights and shadows to existing objects. Okay, once you've tried out these air brushes and filled a small portion of your image, something like this with a few brush strokes, let's move on to the next ones. These are the basic paint brushes, and they are a bit more normal, just a round basis and varying size and opacity. Some are a bit more smooth and some are a bit more dense. No special textures here, just clean brushes for your digital painting. And this one automatically tills as you paint with it, which is quite cool. So try out these brushes and create a few brush strokes with them. Then we have a few more basic brushes that are just a bit more soft. Then these light purple ones are wet brushes, which means they mix paint very smoothly. Let's make a little color transition here, so you can see how they work. There are more wet brushes in Creta, but these are the basic ones. They make you feel like you're using water colors or something, which is very nice, so try them out. The slight blue one, as you can see, doesn't add any paint to the canvas, but it just makes existing paint more smooth. All right. Then we got the first brushes that have a little bit more texture, so a more unique look. And they also have different shapes, as you can see. With these brushes, as you apply less pressure, you can see more of their texture. Let's paint like a few little brushes here with these green brushes. Just scribble with them and let the textures of the brush do the work. It's quite easy to create something like foliage with these brushes, if you just use different types of green and overlap them. Then we got some even bigger texture brushes that are very rough and yeah, they can be used to add more texture to existing objects. Or to create something like background textures. But for creating shapes, you're better off using other brushes. Like, for example, these wet texture brushes that we got next. They act like the wet brushes that we've used before, but with a little bit more texture. As you can see, if we make a few little color transitions here, then we can make them look very artistic by using these brushes. They are very useful for creating traditional looking digital paintings. Just use a few different colors here and develop a feeling for how you can mix them because that's very unique with these wet brushes. All right. And then we have the clean and classic sketching brushes, these pencils right here. They produce very thin and precise lines that look like pen and paper. Let's draw a few straight parallel lines here to develop a feeling for these brushes, because you will use them a lot as a digital artist. I especially like this one, which I often use for sketching before making an artwork. It varies in size and has a very traditional paper like texture. So by varying the pressure on your drawing tablet, you can create very different looking brush strokes with this one. Let's paint a few round circles and basic shapes here. Very nice. And then these last two sketching brushes are more useful to produce textures. Let's use this one to fill out some of these shapes. Like that, you can make your digital drawings look like traditional pencil drawings, where you have like cross hatched areas with nice colored pencil textures without having to actually cross hatch. So if that's your style, then you know how to do it with critter. Then this very special looking brush here is the clone tool. With the clone tool, you can't add any new stuff, but you can paint over stuff that's already there and replicate it, so you can extend it with the clone tool, which is quite weird and quite unique. But, I recommend you just try this out and see how it works. Sometimes this may be useful for extending an existing texture with very low effort, but it's not super precise, so I rarely use it. Then you have these brushes that produce an extra texture when you make a curve with them. So let's just paint a few curves here, like very smooth and rounded brush strokes. And yeah, you can see these brushes are more useful for stuff like atre or producing abstract art. Okay. And then we have these ink brushes for the comic artists. Very thin and precise ink lines with high contrast. Let's paint a few straight and round lines here, just to see how these brushes react. A very common way to use them is to first have a rough sketch with the drawing and sketching brushes that I've shown you, and then using these ink brushes to define them. By the way, these two bigger ink brushes are very useful for calligraphy. So let's write something here like digital art. You see, we got this very authentic ink texture, which is quite cool. Then we got these markers that apply paint like real life markers, so very clean and continuously. Then we have three more erasers because why not? And then we have the dry paint brushes. These are, in my opinion, really important, and I use them all the time. Dry means that they are not wet and they don't interact with colors that are already on the canvas. So with these ones, you can just paint and create really nice shapes that have a little bit of texture, just like brushes with bristles. Let's make a few shapes here with different colors to see what these edges look like. They're a bit different for each of these brushes. I especially like this charcoal brush, which I often use for blocking in colors. Then we got two more solid markers here, very simple. And after that, we have a few more special air brushes. They react very uniquely, as you can see, these two, for example, have a glowing spot inside, so they are not that useful for painting, but more like special effects that you can try out. So yeah, the brushes after that are way more important in my opinion, and those are the textured dry brushes. Like the dry brushes, they can be used to block in colors and create textures, but they have a little bit more texture. So they look a bit more unique. And as you can see, as I move my brush in different directions here, we get this very chaotic looking surface on our canvas. And yeah, I especially like this brush on the right, which is useful for painting like waves or foliage two. So, these brushes are really cool, and you should definitely try them out. After that, we have also quite similar texture brushes, but they look more like chalk and charcoal. If you want textures like that, then check out these brushes. They are also pretty cool. Then we have a few pattern brushes with which we can create very geometrical looking patterns. These ones are a bit more consistent, and those two are a bit more chaotic. I'd say this is more useful for special effects and design and not for painting necessarily. But what's definitely useful for painting are the wet brushes, which we have right here. Wet brushes are, I think, always marked by being purple in some way. So these wet brushes react to paint that's already there on the canvas, and they try to mix in very smoothly, as you can see. And they are quite interesting and have a good variety. Like some of them, like these ones, have a bit more bristles and are more rough and create more texture, and some are very clean. These brushes are very practical for mixing paint on the canvas and creating traditional looking artworks. After that, we have a few more simple ink brushes that are useful for calligraphy and comic art. I don't really know why there are so many different ones because they're all quite similar, but they are there. And then these blue and green ones here are watercolor brushes, very cool. They basically act the same way as the wet brushes, but they are even a little bit more wet. So you can create very traditional looking background textures with them and mix paint on the canvas with different shapes and forms. As you can see, we got a good variety of different types of water color brushes here. And yeah, these green ones are also very interesting, as you can see. You can quite quickly create very detailed looking textures with them. But it's difficult to create clean shapes with them because they don't have a defined edge, so they are more useful for just adding textures to existing objects or backgrounds. All right. And then we got the blending brushes, which are the white ones right here. They don't add any new paint to the canvas, but they are also not erasers. So what do they do? Well, they manipulate the paint that's already there. With these first two ones, you can make it look more smooth and pull it a little bit. And then we got this knife brush here and this other knife brush with which you can pull the paint over the canvas and enhance your textures to look more traditional. Definitely a top tier technique to make your artworks look a bit more natural, and I often use these. Then there are these adjustment air brushes which are a bit more unique, and you can manipulate paint that's already there or like lighten up areas with this one. Then we got a few more random brushes that are not so relevant, and then we have the move tool, which lets you manipulate pictures and move stuff around. Look at this. It's quite cool. Then two more wet oil paint brushes, one has bristles, and one is a knife. So you can also pull around paint with these brushes and make very traditional looking artworks. Then we got more brushes here that I don't really use that often. You can just try them out if you want and see what happens. We've already explored most of the categories. These are mostly just variations of existing ink brushes or texture brushes or stuff like that. Like right here, we got a few more of these brushes that have a little bit of an extra texture when you make a curve with them, and then a few more texture brushes. And these light blue ones also only pull paint, so they don't add any new one, but you can just enhance your textures with them. Then a few more wet brushes and many, many patterns and textures. I would say, just try them out and fill your page with different brush strokes. We don't really need to go into depth in these brushes. You will most of the time just use these dry paint and wet paint brushes if you make digital paintings, and these sketching and inking brushes, if you make drawings. And these textures here are pretty much just add ons that you can use after you're done and like lower the opacity of your brush and just add a little bit of texture. But I wouldn't use them too much because your artworks become quite repetitive. For example, if you make mountains by using this mountain brush, then it will look stupid very quickly, and same thing for the grass and the leaves here. So here, this is my take on the brushes in Creta. As you can see, you can try them out even more and explore them more. But I've introduced all the ones that I think are really important and that you should know about. The most important thing is that you get used to the process of using a brush. They all work a little bit differently. Like with some, you have to apply less pressure and with some more pressure and stuff like that. So you should have used all of these brush categories at least once and made a few lines or shapes with them, just as we've done it in this lesson. You don't have to use all of these brushes. This is pretty much just about knowing which options you have. So you know in Creta, there are texture brushes, wet brushes, ink brushes, sketching brushes, and you know where you can find them, and where you can access different variations of them. So if you want to create something in a certain style, then you should have an idea whether or not you can do that in Creta, as I've shown you these different brush categories. So there are many options here, but still, you might arrive at a point where you need a little bit more and you want something more unique. So in the next lesson, let's talk about how to get more brushes. Let's go. 8. Getting More Brushes: Okay, you guys. Now you know what the different types of brushes in Creta are and what they are useful for. You've hopefully scribbled along with me and gotten a good feeling for using them. And you know which brushes I generally recommend. However, these are not all the brushes that I'm actively using because in Creta, you can import more brushes, and that's what this lesson is about. If you open up creater and go to settings, manage resource libraries, then you have an overview of your brush bundles here. Brush bundles are like sets of brushes that you can download. By default, you should have these two brush bundles here. The critter default resources. And the ones below are the ones that I'm additionally using, and you can download them in the course resources. I highly recommend that you do this right now because they are quite awesome, and we are definitely going to use some of them in the picture that we will paint later. So go to the description and download the file that says, Du plos brush bundles or something. Then you can click on import here, and there you can search for the place where you have stored your brush bundles and then click on Open, and they should appear here. Then you can click on each of them and just activate them right here. You see, I just deactivated my brush bundles here, so I can just show you the default ones. But now if they're all active again, which is marked by this white box around them, then they should appear in the brush stocker. If your newly imported and activated brushes don't show up immediately, then just restart Creta, and then they should be there. So yeah, let's see what we got here. Most of these new brushes are just variations of these existing ones. We got more basic brushes, more sketching brushes, more texture brushes, and some of them are really cool like this golden knife here, which produces these very interesting looking brush strokes. But what I want to specifically talk about here are these RGBA and RGBA wet brushes because they are very unique. You can filter for them if you click on this tab and search for RGBA and click on it. Boom, here we go. And these brushes are something that's really, really cool about Creta, because they are pretty much the most traditional brushes that you can get digitally. If you paint a little bit with these, like with this one and then you som in, you'll see that these brush strokes basically simulate very thick paint, and they have lots of texture. And every single one of these RGBA brushes is a little bit different. So this one, for example, is very thick and very dense. And then we have the super rough knife, which basically produces three separate brush strokes. Also interesting. Then we have this brush, which I really like. It produces many individual brush strokes that have slightly different hues and values and just creates this very traditional oil paint look. And this one as well, it's also quite cool. And then there's this RGBA rock brush, which creates like rocks. I don't really know why, but it exists. And then the best of them all, these purple RGBA wet brushes. Pretty much the best brushes in all of digital art, in my opinion. These brushes are insane. They have this traditional RGBA texture like these other RGBA brushes. But additionally, they are also wet like the red brushes that I've shown you in the last lesson. So they automatically mix paint on the canvas and act like wet real life colors. We got this basic one. We got this very dense knife, We got this one, which is very chaotic, and that one. And the last one here is super wet. Like, this is pretty much the most traditional brush that I know that exists in digital art. And this very last one is not really a brush. It doesn't produce any brush strokes, but it transforms existing brush strokes into these oil paint brush strokes. So that's also quite cool if you want to give your artworks a more artistic look after you've already finished them. So here, you should definitely download, activate, and try out these RGBA and RGBA wet brushes. Make a few textures with them and try to create these color transitions and enjoy the looks of them. Later on, we will, of course, use them in our project. But for now, just know they're there and look forward to using them. So that's it for brush bundles. But if you are a really, really hard digital art nerd, and all of this is not enough for you, then you can also make your own brushes with the brush editor. You can access it in this icon up here. There you get this little bit confusing window where you can create and save your own brushes. You can choose your baseline brush here on the left side at presets. In the middle, you can edit your brushes. There are all kinds of settings, and on the right side, you always have a little scratch pad where you can check out your brush. The thing is, I don't really want to get into this and waste time explaining all these options here, because in my opinion, it's not really a part of beginner digital art. And the options are already enormous with all the brushes that I've shown you, and especially if you download even more brush bundles. A better brush does not make you a better artist. It's more worth it focusing on other aspects of art like getting used to the process of using these brushes, knowing the shortcuts in Creta and generally being good at art. And that's what I want to focus on here. But if you really want to get into it, you can also play around with these settings and make your own brushes. So I would say that's finally it for brushes in Creta. We've talked about them a lot, but they are, of course, not everything that you can do in the software. So in the next lesson, let's explore some of these other tools. 9. Creating Shapes: The next tools in Creta that come right after the brush tool are tools treating shapes because it's quite difficult to draw perfectly straight lines and triangles and circles. As you can see. That's not it. But luckily, Creta has provided us with many tools with which you can do that. So let's check them out. For this lesson, just as for the brushes, we're going to fill the page with many tests. So you get a good feeling for the tools. So participate, making your document size 2000 by 2000, and let's into the top left corner. First of all, we have the line tool with which you can draw perfectly straight lines with the brush that you have selected. So this line, you can just pull it in any direction, always has the shape and the texture of the brush that you have. So if I do this with a very rough brush, then the line looks very rough. If I do this with a soft brush, then it looks soft, and so on. Obviously, you can also adjust the size, the opacity, and the color. Same thing as for the brushes. Also, the line reacts to pressure. So if you vary your pressure on the drawing tablet while dragging a line, then you will have an according brush stroke, which depends on the brush. So sometimes the line gets more opaque, if you have an opacity varying brush, or sometimes the line gets more thin or more thick. So yeah, just try this out a few times, make a few lines in different directions with different brushes, and you'll see that it's quite simple and easy to use this line tool. By the way, if you hold on shift, wild dragon a line, then you can only select from a few angles, like perfectly horizontal, perfectly vertical, perfectly 45 degrees, and stuff like that. So this is useful if you want to create parallel lines. Nice. The next tool is the rectangle tool with which you can create, guess what? Rectangles. Once again, the sides of this rectangle look like the brush that you have selected. You can make a perfect square by holding down shift while dragging your rectangle. So let's make a few of these. And if you hold down control and alt while dragging it, then you can rotate your rectangle or square. So let's add a few of these rotated rectangles to get used to the function. All right. Now, in the tool options, which is docker that you should definitely have somewhere, you can find more options for this rectangle. For example, you can choose to have your rectangle filled with your foreground color or background color. So it looks like this. But you can also fill your rectangle with a pattern. Different patterns can be selected at this pattern chin up here, and you can see we have a little selection of different types of patterns, like rough textures or more geometric patterns. And whatever you have selected here will be the inside of your rectangle. If you have it set to fill with pattern. In the tool options, you also have a few settings for this pattern, you can rotate it to have it apre at an angle, or you can change the scale. So if I make the scale very small, then the pattern is very dense. And if I make this very big, then it's not dense. So you can always adjust this and play around with these patterns. Then you can also choose how you want the outline of your rectangle to appear. By default, it just picks your foreground color and your brush, or you can also choose your brush with the background color, but you can also set it to no outline if you want a very clean rectangle. And if you set it to not filled and no outline, then you have no rectangle at all. Awesome. So just make a few rectangles with these options, like me. Then you can also lock the width or the height of your rectangle. If one of these is locked, which you can do by clicking on the slock icon on the right, then you always have a rectangle with the same width or the same height. And if you lock both of them, then you're always creating the same rectangle. Then if you fix the ratio, then you always have the same ratio, and if it's set to one that you always have a perfect square, Plus down here, you can also choose to have the corners of your rectangle rounded a little bit. So it's a bit more soft. So check out these options and create a few different rectangles. Then let's move on to the next tool, which is the ellipse tool. With this one, you can create circles and ellipses. And honestly, at this point, there is not much to say about this tool because it works pretty much the same way as the rectangle tool, just for circles and ellipses. It takes your brush. You can rotate it by holding down control and t. If you hold down shift, you are creating a perfect circle, not a perfect square. And you also have similar options for it in the tool options. So you can change the outline in the film mode and you can lock with height and ratio. So let's simply create a few circles with a few different settings here. Some round ones, some ellipses, some filled ones, some with different outlines, some fixed ones, stuff like that. Just so you've done it once, and you can never be confused about this tool. Okay, then the next tool is the Polygon tool with which you can create your own custom geometric shapes. So if you click with it, then you have the first corner, and you can click again and again and create edges and corners until you click on the first one again, and then you have your shape. It's pretty simple. Once again, this one takes your brush, you can set it to be filled, and you can change the outline, and that's pretty much it. You can create your own custom shapes here according to your needs. After that, comes the poly line tool, which works pretty much the same way as the Polygon tool, so you can create custom shapes. But you don't have to finish the shape. You can just hold shift and click, and then you have your finished line or shape. If you set it to be filled with something in the tool options, then very interesting things happen. But yeah, just try it out. Then we have the Bezier curve tool with which we can create these very smooth and rounded basier curves. I almost never use this. This is more for vector design. But we also got similar options for this one. And then this one, the free hand path tool makes your lines more smooth. So just try it out. It feels very cool. And this is also more useful for vector graphics, but we'll come to that later. Then we have the dynamic brush tool where you can change the mass and the drag and the tool options. And I can't really explain this. It just changes the way that your brush feels. So just try it out. It makes your brush feel more light or more heavy or like a bit slower or faster. It's very weird, but certainly cool. And then our last shape tool here, which is not really a shaped tool is the multi brush tool, which multiplies your brush around a certain symmetric point. So you pretty much automatically get like beautiful snowflake patterns or mandalas. If you have this activated and scribble a little bit. In the tool options, you can show this origin point and move it around. You can rotate the thing, you can select the amount of brushes that you have, and you can select the type of symmetry. So snow flak symmetry or point symmetry, which is a little bit different. So yeah, just try it out and see what happens. So at this point, we have a beautiful, messy page with many different shapes. And you should understand quite well which options you have and what types of shapes you can create with Creta. So in the next lesson, let's move on to the next set of very important tools that you should definitely know. 10. Selections: All right, we have to talk about selections. Selections are a fundamental aspect of digital art and design, and they are useful in many different situations. Basically, a selection allows you to mark a certain area, and then you can only edit this area, and nothing else. In order to select an area, you must use one of these selection tools that are down here. For example, this rectangular selection tool. With this, you can select a rectangular area, and then if you pick a brush, then you'll notice you can only draw inside this area. And if you try to create a shape, then this shape will also only appear inside this selection area, which is marked by these moving dots. You can always unselect by pressing control shift and A. And then the area is gone. It's not the most simple hot key. So I recommend you practices a few times. So select an area and then press control shift A, and repeat this a couple of times. So you remember what this hot key is. It's quite important. Now, what happens when you have a selection and you try to make another selection? Well, that depends on the tool options that you have selected. But default, I think it replaces your current selection. But if you go to the tool options of any of these selection tools, then you'll see that you can change this. These are the different actions that you have. First, there is replace, then intersect. So if you overlap two selections, then the intersection of them is the new selection. Then we have add, so we can just add new selections, then subtract, so you are basically just unselecting areas, and then symmetric difference, which means your selections react like this. If they intersect, then this intersection is unselected. I recommend you always have it set to replace or add because those are the most common ones. But no matter which option you have selected, you can always add a new selection by holding down shift while making it, and you can unselect by pressing Control shift A. Simple as that. Now, for the rectangular selection tool, you have simular options here as for the shape tool like fixing the height with ratio or rounding the edges. Then of course, you also have an ellipsis selection tool, which works just like its shape counterpart, and the polygonal selection tool too. You can select areas with geometrical shapes just like this. But if you want to select a completely custom area with rounded edges, then you can use the free hand selection tool. With this one, you can just draw a selection area, however you like, and if you let go, it connects to your starting point. Nice. So these are the basic shape selection tools. For these next two selection tools, we will need some colors. So let's paint a little bit here with a few different colors, ideally texture brushes or wet brushes. So just like that, few color transitions and stuff like that. All right. If you use this contingent selection tool, then you can select an area based on a color. So I can select this blue area without having to use the free hand selection tool and trying to draw around it. And if we use this one here, the simular color selection tool, then everything on the canvas that has this color is being selected, and not just one continuing bit. You can adjust the sensitivity of these two tools by changing the threshold in the tool options. If the threshold is very low, then only this very exact color is being selected. If it's a bit higher, then also colors that are similar to your color that you're clicking on are being selected. You can try this out. I think by default, it's somewhere 10-20. All right. Then you can also grow your selection by adjusting this lider here, so it's always a bit smaller or a bit bigger than the selection would be by default, like this. Or you can make the edges more smooth by sliding on this feather thing here. So if I select an area and I try to draw inside it, then I always have this like transition on the edge, which depends on the amount of feather that I have set here. But by default, I would deactivate it and set the grow to zero. For both of these tools, you can also choose if you want the color to be selected from all the layers or only from the layer that you're on. But we will talk about layers a bit later. All right. And then the last two this baser selection tool, which lets you make these smooth, basier curves. I almost never use it. And then the magnetic curve selection tool, which makes these weird dots, and yeah, it's also something that you will most likely not really need. But you know it's there. So these are the selection tools that you have in Creta. What I should also mention is that when you right click on a selection, you have a few options for it. And you also see a few keyboard shortcuts, like pressing Control A to select the whole image, deselecting, re selecting, or inverting your selection. Inverting it means that everything is being selected except the thing that you had originally selected. This is quite useful if you want to select everything, but not one part. Then you can just select this part with whatever selection tool, and then simply invert the selection. Then we can also go to transform and click on grow or shrink selection. So the selection is a little bit bigger by a few pixels or a little bit smaller. Very simple. If you have something selected, you can also just go here on select, and there you also have most of the same options. So, here we go. That's pretty much it about selections. They are quite useful, a little bit difficult to wrap your head around in the beginning. But once you know how they work, you can do so many cool tricks with them and make your digital art process easier. I. 11. Other Tools: I. Okay. In this lesson, let's have a look at some of these other tools that we have in Creta. When you have a selection and you want to fill it with a color, but you're too lazy to scribble all over it with a brush, then you can just select the fill bucket tool and click inside it. And then your whole selection area is filled with the color that you have selected. By the way, you can delete everything inside a selection by just pressing delete, and then everything inside the selection is gone. Plus, you can also move around a selection by having one of the selection tools selected, and then moving the edge. Also useful to know. Let's return to the fill bucket tool. The fill bucket tool, if you have nothing selected, just fills your whole canvas with a color. But you can also change that in the tool options. For example, you can set it to fill contingus area instead of selection right here. So let's paint a little bit with a few different brushes and different colors. All right. And then we can use the fill bucket tool, and we activate this option, fill contingous area. And then you just fill the area with that color that you click on. And there are pretty much the same settings as for the contingous area selection tool that we've discussed in the last lesson, that you don't select an area, but you fill it with a color. So you can change the threshold here, the spread, and you can also choose to have it filled with your background color or with a pattern. So the fill bucket tool is a very nice one. Then you can create gradients with the gradient tool right here. A gradient is basically a color transition that starts with the color that you have selected and fades to transparency by default. So if we take this tool and we draw a line, then along this line, we have a color transition. If the line is very short, then the color transition is very short, and if the line is very long, then the color transition is very long and smooth. If you hold down shift while dragging your gradient, then you can only make it perfectly horizontal or vertical. So by default, your gradient just fades to transparency. But you can also change that up here on this icon. You can access different types of gradients and color transitions like this one, and here, there are pretty interesting ones. A common way to use these gradients is to have an area and select it, and then using a gradient to add simple highlights or shadows to it. All right. Next to the Gradient tool, you also have this manual color picker tool with which you can click on any color on the image and select it. So if we make a few brush strokes here of different colors with different brushes, and we use this tool and click on them. You see, we always get the exact color. But as I've said, you can also do that if you use the brush tool, and you just hold control while clicking with it, which is way more useful than always selecting this tool in my opinion. So if you want a color, just hold control and click on it, and that's for sure, the best way to go about this. Then these two tools are advanced ones that we'll talk about later. And this one is the enclose end fill tool with this one, you can select an area, and then it fills all the brass strokes inside this area. It's kind of weird and not really necessary. And then we can use this tool to create a perspective grid, which is also kind of weird and not necessary. I mean, it can help you. You can move around these points to create a perfect perspective and use it as orientation if you want to paint something realistic. But I recommend you just learn how to paint and draw in perspective instead of using this tool. It's a bit confusing. You can always deactivate this perspective grid by clicking on this bin icon. All right, then we have this tool with which you can measure the distance between two points. As you can see, we get this little window here, and it also shows you the angle. So that's something for precise measurements, if you want that. Then what's also a cool function in Creta is sampling the screen color. You can go to Edit and click on Sample screen Color. And then look at the color selector as I move my mouse. You can click on any color on the screen and just use it for drawing and painting. At first glance, this might seem a little bit unnecessary, but you can pick precise colors from outside Creta. So if I minimize this and click on Edit Sample screen color, then I can take the precise color of my desktop background or any image that I have opened on my PC. So that's quite cool. And then those two tools at the bottom are just for summing in and out this one and moving the canvas around with this hand here. But I've told you right at the beginning, the hot keys for this because they are way more useful, use your mouse to navigate the canvas and here fine. Then another interesting function in Creta are blending modes. Blending modes change the way that your colors are added to the canvas. You can access different blending modes up here on this bar. For example, if I set it to lighten, then I can only add lighter colors to the canvas. As you can see, I just can't make anything darker here. Or you can set it to erase, and then you only erase everything. But yeah, I'd say this is also something that you just have to try out yourself. It's not really an essential part of digital art. So yeah, if you need them, here are the different blending modes. Let's set them back to normal. Last, but definitely not least, one function that I use all the time is the color window. You can open it up with control hue, all the time, and then you have this little window where you can edit the colors of your image. You can change the hue, the saturation, and the lightness of your image. So if you finish an artwork and everything is just a little bit too dark, then you can lighten it up here, or you can make it less saturated, if it's too colorful, or you can slide the hue to see how it feels with different colors, which always gives very interesting results. And if your image doesn't have any color at all, you can click on cool Ise and add a default color that you can, of course, add it with these sliders. Yeah, I absolutely love this function. So whenever there's something wrong with your colors or your image doesn't look right, press control you, play around, and maybe you can fix it. Okay. That's it for the other tools of Crete that you should know about. Now let's move on to the next big topic. 12. Layers: All right, by now, we have already covered quite a lot of stuff. The last big aspect of digital art that's missing is layers. Layers are an essential part of the process, and if you know how to use them, then they make your life as a creative way easier. Because layers do not exist in real life, it's often tricky to understand them at first. So here's what they do. Basically, layers are different overlapping work spaces that are separate from each other, but work together to create the image. In creer, if you add anything to the canvas like brut strokes or shapes or you select something, then this is all happening on paint layer one, as you can see on the right side at the layer docker. There we have paint layer one selected, so that's what we are working on. Below this paint layer one, you have the background layer, which is responsible for this white color. And because you're always working on paint layer one by default, you cannot edit this white color away by doing anything with erasers or something. It's always there because it's on a different layer. If we select it, however, then we first have to unlock it on this lock right here, and then we can edit it. We can erase it, and then we have a transparent background. Or we can add brass strokes. And these brass strokes, as you can see, up here underneath the brass strokes of paint layer one. You see, I just can't paint over the stuff here because I'm on a layer below it. And that's basically what layers are most useful for. You can make a layer visible or invisible by clicking on this I right next to it. So if the background layer is invisible, then we just have transparency, which is indicated by this checker pattern. And you can change the opacity of a layer by sliding around here when you have a layer selected. So everything on your layer becomes more or less opaque. L et's select Paint Layer one, and then click on this Plus en right here. And then, as you can see, we have a new layer. That's called Paint layer two. If you add a new layer by clicking on Plus, then it always appears on top of the layer that you have selected. If you double click on a layer like this, then you can type in a name for it, like sketch or color or you name it by a subject that you want on this layer, which is a very useful tactic to keep your layers organized. If you want a layer below paint layer one, then you have to click on the background layer. And then on plus, Or if you can also just move all your layers around by dragging them just like that. So let's paint something on this new layer here. And then we can move it to different parts like behind paint layer one or above it. And that's basically how it works. Basically, all the actions that you can do in Creta only apply to the layer that you have currently selected. So if I press delete on a layer, then only the stuff on this layer is deleted and not on the other layers. And if I press control you to open up the color window, then only the colors of your selected layer are being changed. So that's something important to keep in mind. Then let's see what else we can do with these layers. We can move them around by using this move around tool to drag them. Or we can also transform it with this transformation tool, like changing its size, rotating it, or distorting it. Just pull these sits with the transformation tool and see what happens. By the way, if you want to scale an object up or down, while using the transformation tool, then you can hold shift to maintain the relationship of the sides. So it doesn't get distorted. So whenever you're not too sure about the position of one of your subjects or parts of your image, then always put it on a separate layer, and then you can move it around, make it bigger or smaller, rotate it, change its position by using this transformation tool. That's why this is one of the most useful tools in Creta for sure. But if you forgot to do that, you can also select an object with one of the selection tools, then press Control C to copy it and control V to paste it, and then you have it on a separate layer that you can independently transform. Whenever you copy or paste something in creer, it always appears on a new layer that you can then dit. Often, it makes sense to delete the old object if you want it on a new layer, like you select something, press Control C to copy it, then delete, to delete it, and then control V, and then you have it there on a separate layer. Then if you want to merge it with the layer where it came from, press Control E. If you press Control E, then your layer is always merged with the layer below it. It's actually quite simple and convenient, so make a new object and try this process. Just draw something, copy, delete, paste, move around and transform, and then let's merge it with the layer below, and there we go. Feel free to practice this a few times. Once you feel comfortable with this, let me show you some of the other options that you have. If you select something and you press right click, then you can directly access that transformation tool without putting your object on a new layer. Or you can directly cut it to a new layer by clicking here. We can also right click on a layer, and there we find a bunch of options like copying and pasting them, removing them, which is shift and delete. And here, there are many things you can do with layers. You can also change how big they are here by clicking on this. I can hear, which you can also do for the brushes. If you click on layer up here, then you also have a bunch of options, like copying, pasting them, very classic, but you can also transform them like mirroring them horizontally or vertically or rotating them, just like this. If you click on this bar, then you can also activate different blending modes for your layer, which I've shown you earlier. You can always add multiple layers at once by holding down control and then clicking on another layer. Then we get both these layers selected, and we can transform them together like this. If you click on this arrow next to the plus, then you also have the option to create a group layer. Then if you can pull other layers into this group. When layers are in a group and you added the group layer, this one, then this applies to all the layers in the group. If I make this invisible, then this group is invisible. If I move it around, then I'm moving around all the layers of this group. So here, that's just another option to addit multiple layers at once. This is useful, for example, if you paint a character, and this character has different elements like the clothing or the heat or the skin or a sketch that you want to add it separately on separate layers, but you also want to be able to move around this whole person. So it makes sense to have your character layers in a group layer. So you can always move around the whole thing, but still added the layers separately. So that's the important stuff that you have to know about layers. Later on, we will, of course, use them in our project. So you can see them in action, and you can learn how to use them in a smart way. But I got to ask from you a little bit more patience. Let's finish off everything that you have to know about Creta. We're almost done, so see on the next lesson. 13. Image Editing: So by now, you know pretty much everything that you need to know about digital art. But with Creta, you can also do some image editing, and that's what this lesson is about. I'm going to open up an image. You can also open up an image. It can literally be any random photo from your PC or a drawing, whatever. It really doesn't matter, but I think this looks really nice. So let's see what we can do with it. If we click up here on image, then we have a bunch of options. For example, we can view the properties of our image, like how big it is, what the color space is, and stuff like that. So here you can just view information about your image. But then we can, of course, also transform the image, and we have simular options here as for the layers, just that it applies to the whole image. For example, we can rotate the image, or we can mirror it horizontally or vertically. And what's also important to know is that we can change the resolution of our image by clicking on scale to new size. Here you can adjust these numbers. So if you want your image to be higher resolution, then you can just type in a bigger number here, and as you can see, height and width are connected by default. So it automatically adjusts width, if you change the height and vice versa. Notice, however, that just up scaling an image here does not make it look more crisp, but you can add more detail, which is useful for painting. Then what you can also do is resizing your Canvas. If you type in a number here, then your canvas gets cropped to that new size. It doesn't get scaled up or down, but it just gets cut. But a more simple way to do this is using the crop tool. With this one, you can select a rectangular area, then press enter, and then that rectangular area is your new image. All right, next up, we have the Smart patch tool, which is a classic image editing tool. With this one, you can draw over an area. You can just change the size of this, and then Creta tries to edit it out and adjust it to the environment. So if I make a dot over this little light here, then it's gone. And this actually works quite well, especially with smaller objects. If you try to mark a bigger area like this fence here, then we have to wait a little bit because the program calculates what it has to do. But yeah, it doesn't really know what to do. Like, this is a quite complex task, so it doesn't look very good. But if we mark a small area like maybe this rock here, then it actually looks pretty smooth or this green part here. We can patch that out quite efficiently. So if you want to edit images, this is a quite useful function. Okay, then let's talk about filters, because in Creta, there are many of them. So if you click on Filter, then you have many options, many subcategories, and I'll just show you the ones that I think are useful to know about. First and foremost, if you click on Filters Adjust, then you can open up the color balance window, which you can also access by pressing Control B. And here, you can really fine tune the colors of different parts of your image. Like, you can adjust only the darker colors and move them more in a certain direction or the hues of the highlights, and, yeah, you can adjust stuff like this. And this is quite practical if you're not super happy with the colors of your image. Then you can click on invert, and then you have all the opposite colors of your image, which is also quite funny. Then under the artistic filters, you can find the oil pain filter, which I really like. You can adjust the brush size to something like two or three usually, and the smoothness. And then if you click on okay, then it usually loads a little bit because this is a complex process. But then we have this nice oil pain filter, which makes your images look more artistic. Pretty neat. Then we have filters that make the image more blurry, or we can sharpen the image, we have more adjustments for the colors. So yeah, there are many options to edit images in Creta. I think it's best if you just play around with this if you need something. It doesn't really make sense to introduce all of the different filters here because there are way too many. I'd say the most important thing is that you know how to adjust the colors by pressing control to add hue, value, and saturation, or control B to adjust the hues precisely. And, that's it for image editing. 14. Vectors & Layer Styles: All right, to finish off with the basics of treater, let's talk about vectors and layer styles. And before you ask, let me explain what the heck a vector actually is. A vector is an independently scalable graphic that's usually made up of very simple objects like lines or geometric shapes. The appearance of a vector is based on a mathematical formula and not on colored pixels. So it can be scaled up or down and always looks the same, and it doesn't get blurry or distorted. Here's a quick example. If I draw this line with a brush and I swim in, you see that it has an edge, and now if I scale this line up with the transformation tool, then you can see the edge has become very blurry. However, if I draw a line with this calligraphy tool, then this line is being projected onto a new vector layer, and if I scale it up or down, then it always has the same edge. And this is also the case if I make this line very small or I heavily distorted. Now, if you try to paint on this vector layer, then you'll see that it doesn't work. The only thing you can do here is add very simple lines or shapes. These vector elements are not for drawing or painting, but for designing something like a logo or icons for websites, things that will be used a lot and with different resolutions in different situations. So that's what these vectors are for. The closest thing to drawing that you can do in a vector layer is use the calligraphy tool, as I've shown you, or the free hand path tool, which makes your lines more smooth. And what's also interesting is that you can adjust these lines and shapes by using this added shapes tool. If you use this, then you see you have these little dots, and you can move them around and make very fine adjustments to your vectors. So if you want to do logo design with Creta, this is how you do it. You can make your vector shapes be filled with a foreground color or background color, but not with a pattern because that's too complex for a vector. All right. I think now it's finally time to talk about adding text in Creta. If you add text in Creta, then this text is also on a new vector layer, which is why we're talking about it in this lesson. So let's add some text with this text tool here. Just mark an area where you want your text, and then you get this little window here. And we get a new vectoral layer for our text. In the window, you can type in your text here. You can select the font, you can make it thick or cursive or add an underscore, and you can change the color here. So all the basic text editing things. Then you can always addit this text with the transformation tool. Move it around, make it bigger or smaller. It's a vector, so it always has the same edge, and you can edit it very well. Nice. If you want to change something about it, just use the text tool and double click on your text. And then you get this window again. All right, these are the basics that you have to know about vectors. Obviously, this course is still mainly about drawing and painting in Creta, which we will finally start in the next lesson. But I think it's still useful to just know a few things about these vectors. By the way, if you want to save your vector file and use it for a logo or something, then make sure you click on Layer and save your layer as a dot SVG file, which is for vectors. If you just save this as an image, then the vector properties of your objects are gone, and you just have pixels. So if you want to make logos or icons, then always export your vectors like this. All right. And now I think it's time to talk about layer styles, which is a neat add on in crater. It's not super necessary, but you can achieve nice effects with them. You can access layer styles if you click on layer and layer style. And there you find a bunch of options. These are basically all effects that apply to your whole layer. For example, you can make everything on your layer have a drop shadow by activating this. Just make sure this is checked. And then here you can adjust your drop shadow, like the opacity, the scale, the density, and stuff like that. So everything on your layer has a drop shadow. Or you can also make something like inner glow, inner shadow, outer glow, which are all interesting effects. Or you can overlay a pattern onto your whole layer. And if you add something to a layer that has a layer style, then it automatically gets adjusted. So right here, everything that I draw or paint automatically has this pattern. This works for both normal and vector layers. So I recommend you play around with these layertyles to not forget about their existence. And then that's finally it for the basics of Crete that you absolutely have to know. In the next lesson, let's get to the action. 15. Artwork: Sketching: All right, ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the practical part of the course. No more new tools and new functions that you have to remember. Now it's time to actually make some art. So in the following lessons, we're going to make a painting together, starting with a sketch and then getting more and more detailed until we have an actual artwork. I believe everybody can create something that looks great here. We're going to make a simple but effective composition, apply fool proof design principles to make it look nice and use all the basic functions of Creta. So by the end of this, you'll have practiced Critter a good bit. You'll know a few very useful design principles, and you have a nice overview of the different options that you have and the process of creating an artwork. What's very important before we start, you don't have to do all of this at once. So don't get overwhelmed. I have separated our creation process into several lessons. So you can easily just do the sketching today, blocking in colors tomorrow, and so on. It's very important that you take your time for each step and follow my instructions. I mean, you don't want to develop the habit of rushing in artwork before you've even made your first one. So yeah, let's do it slowly and step by step. Open up Creta, and let's make a new document by the size 2000 by 2000. We want a big square image here. At the very beginning of pretty much every artwork, digital or traditional comes sketching. So thin gray lines that indicate where everything goes. This is very important because by sketching, you are defining the composition of your artwork. And you'll know exactly where to place your brush strokes later on. Let's double click on O layer and call it Sketch. And then let's start. Personally, my favorite sketching brush in Creta is this one, so I'm going to use it, and I recommend it. But you can also use a simular brush. Just something that produces these light gray lines. So pick one that fits and select black as your main color. Let's indicate a tree on the left side of our picture. But before you start, first watch how I'm doing it. So you know where this is supposed to go. I'm starting with very smooth and rounded lines for the tree trunk that indicate where the tree grows. So it leans a little bit to the left. Let's make a few rounded branches here that predominantly grow to the left side, so it looks like an old tree. And now it's a bit too far on the left, so I'm going to use the transformation tool and move it to the middle. When you start with a subject, you don't really have to be that careful with where you place it because you can always move it around. That's one of the cool things about digital art. So I'm just indicating more and more branches here with very light lines. Notice that branches always split up more and more the further they grow. And now as it looks pretty solid and usable to make an actual tree, I'm indicating the foliage with round shapes that I'm putting on top of these branches. In my opinion, that's the best way to sketch a tree. Indicate the branches with very light lines and round shapes for the foliage. Just like this, very, very lightly. Nice. Now I'm indicating the thickness of the tree trunk and the branches, also with very light lines. I'm just drawing an old thick tree trunk around the lines that I've already made. Very wide at the bottom and many curves. As you can see, I've left a little bit of space on this horizontal branch here that grows to the left. So I'm drawing two round shapes that indicate some birds that are sitting there. As you can see, they are nicely framed by the branches around them. There's a little bit of empty space behind these birds, which will make them stand out later on. Very classic, very simple compositional technique. So this is why you were supposed to watch me first before you start yourself. Sketch a simple tree on the left side of the painting, curve branches, light lines, a little bit of foliage, and two birds sitting on the left side of it just about here. And let these birds be framed by the branches around them so they can nicely stand out. That is your first task. Nice. Once you got that, let's continue the composition by adding some ground. Your tree should start relatively at the bottom of the picture, but not completely at the bottom, so we can add some diagonal ground here. It just drops down a little bit, and let's add some nice stones here. I think this is not too hard. Then using the line tool, let's add a horizon line. Approximately at the bottom quarter of the image, just like that. We want to have a thin line that indicates where our horizon is. Remember, you can hold shift while dragging it to make it perfectly horizontal. Nice. That's going to be the sea. And then right on the horizon, let's add a flat rock that has a bit of a curvature in the middle, just like this. And right in the middle of that curvature is where we're going to put the sun with a small circle. So the sun is a little bit framed by that rock, just like the birds are being framed by the branches. If you want, you can indicate the sunlight like this, but you don't have to. I'm just doing this to get a feeling for the shape of the sunlight and really internalize where it comes from. All right. Time to fill out the empty space at the top with another bird. This one is not sitting, of course, because it's in the air, but it's flying to the left to these other birds. So two round shapes for the body and the head and two very simple wings. Don't care about details. Don't care about anatomy. Just notice there is a bird and it's flying to the left. I'm going to make these other two circles actually look like birds, too. Then let's maybe indicate a few roots at the bottom of our tree. Now, this is pretty much the finished sketch. We have a foreground, we have a background, and we have a few different focus points. Now let's adjust the sketch a little bit with the transformation tool. I'm going to make this a bit smaller and move it up, so the foliage doesn't go over the edge, that looks bad. The composition is just a bit better. And this bird here is also not perfectly placed, so I'm going to select it, then press copy, delete, paste, and then I have it on a new layer, and I can move it around and see where it fits best. So if it's at the very top, then there's a bit too much empty space between it and the sun. And if it's too down low, then there's not enough space between the bird and the other elements. So right here, I think it's actually quite good. But you can also put it somewhere else if your taste is different than mine. Luckily, there is no exact rule of composition that tells us where to put this bird. But personally, I always feel like a focus point like this should have a little bit of space around it. So I don't want to put it too close to the edge or too close to the sun or too close to the tree. So it's somewhere in the middle here. And we even have a little triangle between our three focus points. The sunset, the two birds, and this bird. These are the points of interest, the things that the viewers will look at first. Having a geometrical balance between them is a safe way to make your image look pleasing. And I think this is a very solid sketch here. So finish it off and make it look somewhat similar to this, and in the next lesson, let's add some color. 16. Artwork: Colors: So now we have a nice sketch, and we know where everything goes. We have foreground background, and a few focus points, all indicated with light scribbly lines, just like a sketch is supposed to be. Now comes a really important step of making an artwork, which is blocking in the main colors. And when you start adding colors, it's very important that you don't only think about your subjects. You know, the sea is blue, the tree trunk is brown, the foliage is green, and so on. Just thinking like this is not enough and will result in very cartoony pictures and not artworks. You always have to think about what you want your colors to achieve and how you can use them to create contrast and make certain things stand out. Right here, it's actually very simple. We are looking toward the sun, and it's very low down. So the sky and the sea will be very bright and orange like a sunset. And the objects that are directly in front of us, the tree, the birds, and the ground will be very dark because from our perspective, they are blocking the sunlight, and we are standing on their shadow side. So the nice thing about this is that through our selection of the subjects and the composition, we automatically have a clear separation between foreground and background, foreground being very dark and the background being very bright. So it's going to be very clear what's going on in this image, which is always nice. All right, I'd say, let's start with the background. I always like doing this because then we have a nice baseline, and the mood of the image is set through the baseline color. Let's make a new layer and call it background. And then let's move that layer below the sketch layer. So when we paint something, we can still see our sketch. As you can see, if I make some brush strokes here, then we can still see where the sketch is and where everything goes. This is why I recommend that you always have your sketch layer at the very top, and you add your colors below it. Now, if I press right click, then you can see that in this quick access window, I already have all the brushes that we're going to use in the painting. We got the sketching brush here, and these other ones will come in handy later. If you want, you can make a new tag and pause the video and add all these brushes to that tag that I have here, or you can always just select the brush that I'm currently using. And you see where it is down here. So let's start with this big air brush for the background. Then let's go to the bottom right corner of the color selector, so we have a chroma, a completely saturated color, and let's select orange that is a bit more on the red than the yellow side. Naturally, the sky gets brighter and more yellow, the closer we are to the sun. So we need the starker orange only in the places that are a bit further away from it, so just like this. Then on the color selector, let's shift the hue a little bit to ward yellow, but still orange and add it around the sun. Move your brush in a circular way and release the pressure on your drawing tablet as you move further out. We have a nice and smooth color transition. All right, let's move a bit more toward yellow and repeat this. The sun is the central point of this color transition. Move your brush in circles around the sun and apply less and less pressure the further you get away from it. And now let's go completely yellow and paint just around the sun. And then let's go to white and make the brush a little bit smaller, about 200 pixels. And then we add a little bit of a bright spot right where the sun is. Let's make a little bit of a color transition, but not too much. Nice. If you deactivate your sketch layer, then it should look something like this. A very smooth color transition from orange to white, with the white being just a tiny little spot here. So that's our baseline. Now, let's add color to the ground, for which we're going to make a new layer above the background layer called ground. For blocking in these colors that are a bit more defined, it wouldn't really make sense to use the air brush. For this, we're going to use the charcoal brush, which I really like. So let's go to orange, make it a bit darker and deaate it. So we have this light brown. And then let's just follow the sketch and fill out this ground with brown. Efficient way to do this is to first paint the edges very precisely with a smaller brush and then making the brush bigger and just filling out the rest. Nice. Now let's make the brown a bit darker and make a little color transition from the bottom. Because at the bottom, the ground is going to be especially dark because this is a bit of a three dimensional structure with all these stones, and no sunlight really reaches down there. But, we are just roughly blocking in some colors. Now, let's make a new group layer above it and call it tree. A group layer is useful here because we want to separate our tree into different parts like the tree trunk, the foliage, the birds that are sitting on it, but we still want to be able to move the whole tree around and addit it as a whole. So, let's make a new layer inside this group layer called tree trunk. So we got these layers here, tree and tree trunk. So that's a great example for when a group layer makes sense. Let's select our tree trunk layer, dark, saturated brown, and this brush. Let's make it a bit bigger, and then let's paint the tree trunk by filling out the shapes that we've indicated with the sketch. You'll notice that this is a brush that reacts to pressure very intensely. If you apply low pressure, then the brush strokes get very thin, which is absolutely perfect for painting trees. We can make these branches grow thinner very easily by just releasing the pressure on our drawing tablet. I recommend first painting the main branches, the big ones, and then making your brush smaller as you get more detailed with the branches. Make the branches round and curved. Always keep in mind that branches grow thinner and thinner, the further they grow, and they are not just two dimensional. We also have overlapping branches like this one that grows behind the tree and comes out on the other side here and a few other ones. I'm predominantly adding branches on the left side of the tree because I think that fits the composition better. And keep in mind that you still want the birds to be framed by these branches. So please don't make any branches grow over these birds. In the end, it should look something like this, an old tree with rounded branches that get thinner and thinner. Now, let's make a new layer on top of our tree trunk layer, so it's automatically in the tree group, and let's call it birds. Then using the same brush and black, let's add some color to our birds. Just a little bit, like a little tail, round shape, and yeah, just indicate some birds that are sitting there. We're going to add details later on. But now it's just important that you see the color of these birds, which will be black as they are facing away from the sun. Nice. Now comes one of my favorite parts about painting trees. Let's make a new layer inside the tree group and call it foliage. Let's select this RGBA wet brush, which is absolutely perfect for painting foliage and very, very, very dark green, just like this. Set the size of the brush to about 50, and then let's paint the foliage, just on top of these branches. In case you're wondering how I'm doing it, I'm using very, very short brush strokes. I'm going like dup dup dup dup dup dup dup, to build this foliage up with very short dots. And actually, let's move that foliage layer below the tree trunk layer, but still in that group because that fits a bit better. And then let's continue. Notice that foliage always grows out of the ends of the branches. So always add your foliage in the places where there are many, many small branches. Don't make the foliage too dense, because we're going to add more layers to it with a few different shades later on. But just add many, many short brush strokes on top of the ends of your branches. It's really cool doing that with this brush because it produces these very rough, very detailed brush strokes. If you apply very light pressure. In the end, I'm adding some very, very light brush strokes outside of the leaf bundles to create a bit more detail, and then this looks pretty good. We have a nice tree that is very dark. However, even though the sun is behind the tree, it's still a little bit on the right side. So there the tree will have some reflective lights from the sun. So let's select our charcoal brush to block in some highlights. Then, which color should these highlights be? Well, I would say they are on the tree trunk, so brown, but a lot of light comes from the sky. So it's also mixed with orange. So I think somewhere around here should be right. So let's go to the tree trunk layer, make the brush a bit smaller to just about 50 pixels. And then on the right side of the tree where the sunlight hits it, let's add these highlights. Just some light vertical brush strokes on the right side of the tree. Don't worry about painting over the edge because we can erase that later on. Just think about where the sunlight comes from and add these highlights. So only very few on the left side of the tree on all these branches. And most of the highlights are just on the tree trunk here and a little bit on these branches on the right side. Don't worry if this looks ugly or rough because we will transform these brush strokes into a very nice texture with blending brushes later on. So the only thing you should worry about right now is the positioning of these highlights. Think of this tree as a three dimensional structure and add them accordingly. Okay, here we go. Let's go down to the background layer and select white. Now, with the same brush, very small, let's paint some horizontal brush strokes below the sun. They are the reflective lights in the sea. Just a little bit, becoming lighter, the further down we go. Now, let's make a new layer just above the background layer and call it rock because our background rock needs a little bit of color too. Let's just fill it out with very dark gray, almost black. Make sure it frames the sun nicely and extends below the horizon line just a little bit. Then with very low pressure, let's add a few reflections of that rock to the sea. Very smoothly. Now, if we deactivate the sketch layer, it already looks pretty nice because of the high contrast between the dark rock and the bright sun. Our picture's biggest strength will definitely be value contrast, which honestly should be a part of pretty much any picture. Great. Now, the last subject where we need to fill in some colors is our flying bird. So let's make a new layer above the tree layer, and call it bird. Yes, I know that's already many layers for your first digital painting. But honestly, I just think that's the best way to learn it. Layers are super useful to structure your images and make adjustments later on without messing everything up. So I think you should get used to putting new elements on separate layers right away. I know it's perhaps a bit confusing for you to have that many layers, but I'm not ashamed to throw you in the cold water here. It's gonna do you good. If you look at speed paintings by professional artists, for example, then you'll see they have even more layers. Like they would put all these different stones on separate layers and the reflections of the sun and everything. So yeah, I would say this is still quite simple and excellent practice. And funnily, our layers immediately come in handy because I think as we filled in the colors, this bird doesn't really look right anymore. It's too close to the tree. Sometimes something looks right on the sketch, but if you fill in colors and you adjust the objects a little bit, then it doesn't really fit anymore, which is the case here. So let's use the transformation tool and move this bird around to a place where it fits the composition better. Which is, I think right in the middle here. So now it has approximately equal space between the sun, the tree, and the edge of the painting, which makes it look very balanced. And then let's go to the sketch layer and delete the bird sketch because we don't need it anymore. And it's in the wrong place. Nice. Now we have our finished composition with well positioned subjects and good value contrasts that make clear what's going on. So in the next lesson, we can add some textures. Let's go. 17. Artwork: Texture & Detail: Okay, now comes the usually biggest part of making an artwork, which is adding the textures. We have defined the composition and added the main colors, so now we can make the whole thing more detailed. And I think this should be your approach to making art most of the time. You work in layers of detail and not subject by subject. Object by subject would be, for example, you paint a human, very detailed and finish it, and then you add a tree next to it, and then you add a road, and then you add the sky, which is admittedly a very natural approach if you start out making art. You know, you paint a subject and finish it, and then you just feel like adding something else. And this is fine if you can make it work. But what's really, really important in art is always composition. The way that your elements are arranged on the canvas. So first, developing the composition and really paying attention to where to put everything and then working your way to what the details is a better approach to my opinion. So first, sketching and the composition, then blocking in the colors and values, then adding textures and details, and then making final adjustments. Just as we've done it here. That way, it's way easier to get into a flow because you don't have to worry about the composition anymore. So here, I would say, let's just try this out in practice and add a texture to our ground. For this, we're still going to use the charcoal brush because it just works very well for that. But before we start, we have to really become aware of the light sauce, which is the sun. Let me draw a few lines here to show where the light goes. It hits the rock like this and like that. And it also hits the tree. So the tree has a shadow behind it, just about like this. So we have to include this in our texture. So, yeah, let me undo these lines and switch to very dark brown, almost black and pretty desaturated. So let's just add some rough shadows to the parts that are probably being blocked by the sun. Right here in the middle, it's a bit lighter and on the bottom right and the top right and the bottom left. It's pretty dark. All right. Let's select our baseline color from the ground by holding control and clicking on it. Then let's make it a bit brighter and the brush a bit smaller, so we can get more detailed. Then let's just create a few color transitions on the edge of the ground and paint a few stones. We are defining the stones with these brush strokes. So your picture does not have to be exactly like mine. Like, you can also put stones in other places or make your stones more flat, so they have more light on them, or you make more shadow. This part of the creation process is relatively flexible. Just be aware of the light source, and make the ground on the top edge where the sun hits it a bit brighter and on the bottom darker. And then you can experiment a little bit with different light gray or light brown tones and he these stones. Also, let's not forget about the shadow of the tree, which goes around here. Oh Notice that stones are pretty chaotic and random objects. So don't get too caught up in creating them. And don't stress yourself out about making them super realistic or giving them special shapes. This is a beginner digital art course. So just make a few color transitions on these stones to make them look somewhat three dimensional. You see, my stones are not super special or super fancy either. The main point of this is p just that you develop a feeling for using a texture brush to create highlights and shadows and being aware of where the light sources. What often happens when you work on something like this is that you add multiple layers of brush strokes. So at some point, everything might be a bit too bright, so you add darker brush strokes to the whole thing, like, I'm doing it here. And then brighter brush strokes again, a bit more organized. And by doing that, you are slowly approaching a texture that actually looks good. You often just can't really predict when that happens. You just have to keep going, and at some point you like it. Feel free to deactivate the sketch layer from time to time to see what it actually looks like. In the end, we will, of course, deactivate the sketch layer altogether. So it makes sense to like glance at your picture without it once in a while to see where it's going. And yeah, right now, I think this looks pretty solid. We got a nice and smooth ground with a few rough stones that just fits the atmosphere, and the colors also fit with the sunset. So make sure your ground looks something like this, and then let's move on to the next critical step of the painting, one that I really like. We're going to add a texture to the tree trunk by using a blending brush. Yes. Which means we don't add any new brush strokes, but we're just manipulating the ones that are already there. So here, let's go to the tree trunk layer. And actually, before we can start, we need a few more shadows on this tree. So let's switch to black. Take our charcoal brush and just add a few dark brush strokes on the left side of the tree trunk. Just a little bit. So we have more contrast between the highlight and shadow areas. All right, finally done. Now we can switch to this blending brush knife thing here. A totally underrated brush, by the way, and we're going to use it a lot in this painting. So look at this for a second. Before you start yourself. It doesn't matter which color you have selected. You're always just pulling the paint that's there with this brush. So by moving the brush back and forth in the shape of the tree trunk, up and down here, I'm creating this really nice oil paint like texture. So I can pull these highlights around and extend them or I can go to the middle of the tree and start there and pull a little bit more dark paint to the outside if it's too bright, and just keep going like that for every branch and every part of the tree trunk. So try this out and see how this brush reacts. Once you develop a feeling for it, you'll notice that this is actually pretty overpowered. You can just scribble around without focusing too much and make things look nice. And it's a different style of digital painting that I wanted to introduce you to. We've done the hard work and put the highlights and shadows and shapes in their place. And now we can take our time and relax and scribble back and forth to add a texture. What I recommend is that you always follow the curvature of these branches and the tree trunk with the brush. So we have a nice bark texture. And on the smaller branches. You can of course, make the brush smaller. Also, if you paint over the edge a little bit, that doesn't really matter because we can fix that. Just really try to follow the shape of the tree trunk and the branches, and don't add too many highlights because the sun is still behind the tree, and it just hits it a little bit from the side. If you do the step well, it will be one of the best parts of the finished artwork. Take your time and complete the tree trunk. Once you're done scribbling the highlights and shadows to every part where they are needed, let's switch to the selection tool, this free hand selection tool specifically. Then, as you can see, I'm selecting the areas where I've painted a little bit over the tree trunk and just delete them. So we have a clean edge. For this, it really makes sense to in in order to spot the mistakes. And then I'm using this blending brush to pull a little bit of paint onto the ground. So it looks like this tree has some roots. The root is a detail that I had not planned in in the composition, so I have to out and see if it fits, and nope, it doesn't fit, so let's take the freehand selection tool and delete it and try again. This is a natural process of ma. And for that, it's really advantageous to have different layers because you can do many adjustments without interfering too much with the other parts. Like, I can easily delete this route without having to worry about the stones beneath them. Except once it's done, of course, it needs a little bit of shadow. So for that, I'm switching back to the ground layer, taking the charcoal brush, which is the one with which we had painted the other shadow. And I'm just adding a little bit of dark shadow here. And yeah, now it looks pretty good. Obviously, your process doesn't have to be exactly like mine. You don't really need an extra root here if you don't want it. But I just wanted to show this because it's a great example for adding something, adjusting it, and then making adjustments to the environment, so it fits. So yeah, that's digital art. So once you're happy with your tree trunk and you've added all that texture, and it has relatively clean edges and connects to the ground nicely, let's move on to the next step. And that is adding more detailed foliage. First of all, let's make a new layer above the tree trunk layer and call it foliage two. So we have two layers of foliage, one in front of and one behind the tree trunk. That way, we can make the whole thing look nice and three dimensional. And then let's select this RGBA wet brush with which we had painted the first layer of foliage. And then let's pick green that is a little bit brighter than the one that we had used before. Just about like this, you can just look at my color selector and replicate the color. And then watch how I'm painting these brighter leaves on the foliage two layer. I'm moving my brush in different directions, and I'm making very short brush strokes, so we have this illusion of leaves, and also it looks very chaotic that way, which is exactly what we want for this foliage. The important thing is just where you place your brush strokes. So look at the sun and analyze where it hits these leaves. So that's just a little bit on the right side for each of these bundles of foliage. As you can see, I'm always switching back and forth between the foliage and the foliage two layer, depending on whether I want the leaves to be behind or in front of the tree trunk. Always just a few highlights on the right side of these leave bundles. The further we move left on this tree, the more rare these highlights become. As you can see on the very left side, there are no light brush strokes because pretty much no light reaches there. So that looks pretty good. Let's shift the hue a little bit toward yellow and make the green a bit brighter. And then let's paint another layer of highlights, even more so on the right side. This is, by the way, a pro trick for making more realistic highlights and shadows. Shift your colors in the highlight areas a little bit toward yellow, and in the shadows, a little bit toward blue. This pretty much always makes your colors look better and more realistic. If you have strong highlight and shadow areas, like right here. So whenever I'm painting leaves here, I'm not only switching back and forth between brighter and darker greens, but also between greens that are more on the blue side and greens that are more on the yellow side. And the yellow greens are more in the highlights and the blue greens more in the shadows. It's just a very slight shift, but it's definitely worth it, so do it as well. Right here, for these very bright highlights, this is pretty much yellow and not even green anymore, but it works. If I just make a few brush strokes on the very outside of these leaf bundles. Then it looks like our sunlight is being reflected in the leaves. Then if you've added highlights and shadows to all the parts of the tree in places where they fit, you can either say that it's fine and you're done with the foliage, or you can add a few more layers, like I'm doing it here. Just a few more dark brush strokes and a few more light brush strokes until I like it. Often in digital art, you just have to add multiple layers of something until you end up with a version that you actually like. For example, here, I thought the foliage was a bit too bright, so I've added more dark brush strokes, but now it's a bit too dark, so I'm adding more highlights. And this goes back and forth until it looks good. It is definitely recommended in digital art that you keep the style of one element consistent. So don't use like three different brushes for different layers of the foliage or the tree trunk, but use the same brush and just vary the colors, as we're doing it here. Experienced artists can use multiple brushes in a texture like stones or foliage or sand, but it's not that easy to make it work because different texture brushes in combination can quickly look chaotic. So if you start out with digital art, I highly recommend that you always use one brush for one part of the image, one texture brush for all the foliage, one texture brush, for all the stones, and so on. By the way, right here, I'm noticing that my bird has a little bit too much foliage behind it, and it's not really being framed by it anymore. So I'm going to the foliage layer, using the selection tool to delete the foliage, and then I'm adjusting it so it doesn't overlap with a bird anymore. Why did I comment on this? Well, you always have to keep the composition in mind and make adjustments if necessary. But all in all, I would say this tree looks very good, and it fills out the left part of our image quite nicely. So once you're happy with your tree, and it has nice contrast between highlight and shadow areas, let's take care of the background because we need a little bit more texture there too. By the way, I've made the sketch layer invisible for most of this because we know where everything goes by now. Now, let's select our rock layer with this background rock and lock its transparency, so we cannot paint over the edge. Then let's pick the soft air brush and select colors from around the sun to add a few more highlights to this rock. So I'm going with yellow, just one click like this, then a bit more orange to the sides. Also just one click and very low pressure. And then let's go to white and add just a little bit more here. And just like that, the sunlight looks quite a bit more realistic. If you compare it with pictures of a sun that sets behind a rock. Nice. Now, let's make the sketch layer active again and go to the background layer. And then with the rectangular selection tool, let's select the area of the C. So everything below the horizon line that we have made on our sketch layer. Just like that. Then let's select dark, deep blue, just like that. Using the gradient tool, let's make a gradient from the bottom to the top because even though we have lots of reflected sunlight here, the sea is still a little bit blue. Let's select the rock layer and merge it with the background layer by pressing Control E. Then let's finally add a bit more texture to the sea. For that, as you can see, I'm tilting my canvas a little bit to the left by pressing four, because we want to paint some straight horizontal lines here with this water color brush. And for me personally, it's easier to paint parallel lines at this angle than horizontally. So I'm just adjusting the canvas to fit my skill set better. So here, with this water color brush, let's add some parallel horizontal lines to the sea with a few different colors like orange, yellow, and dark blue. Dark blue, of course, predominantly on the bottom left, where we are the furest away from the sun. Then let's blend all these colors together into a nice sea texture using our blending brush. Also just horizontal lines and drag this paint around the canvas. We get this nice sea texture. Just go over every part of the sea and make it look very smooth using this awesome brush. By the way, you, of course, don't have to tilt your canvas like me, but I just like this angle for painting these horizontal lines. Maybe for you, it works best if your canvas is rotated by 90 degrees or not at all, or in the other direction. Digital art is all about using all the tools of a software to make your process as easy as possible. And this doesn't only include different tools and hot keys, but actually pretty tactical stuff like just rotating the canvas to an angle where you're personally able to paint better, like I'm doing it here. So that's a great example for this. Now, as you can see, I'm adding a few more layers of paint by switching back and forth between the watercolor brush to add more colors and the blending brush to blend them in with the others. So I'm always adding a little bit more white, a little bit more yellow, a little bit more orange, or a little bit more blue. And then I'm using the blending brush to go over it and make it look smooth. The thing is, we actually want quite a bit of that dark blue here. And the reason for that is not only that it fits with the sea, but also color theory. Because for this image, we're actually following a color scheme. So far, we've only used very warm colors. If you look at the color selector, then the only colors that we've used for our image so far are between orange and green, which is a very small range of so called analogous colors, so colors that are next to each other. This results in the clear and warm atmosphere of our image. There is not a lot of contrast between the hues, but between the values. So the dark and the bright parts create the tension in our image and not opposing colors like red and green. But now we can actually add this dark blue and spice our image up because dark blue is the complimentary color to our analogous colors. Because we have this very small range of colors that fit together, we can actually add a singular complimentary to them, which is this dark blue, which perfectly fits with the sea, and we're still following a color scheme. So the whole thing looks harmonious. Okay. There was a small glimpse into color theory and how you can use it. I teach a separate course in it because there is way more to color theory and way more different color schemes that you can make use of. But I thought I would include this here and just talk about it for a second because it's very important for digital art. Your colors just have to fit together. And right here, we're using many saturated colors, but we've used our color scheme and good value contrasts to make them work. So, here we go. As you can see, I've gone back and forth between different layers like adding more orange, adding more blue, until I like it. This certainly would have been faster had I used a reference for the sunset. But because I am the reference for you, I didn't want to open up another image as a reference, because I think that would have been a little bit too much to follow. This way, as you can see, it still worked out quite nicely, and we got some colors that are maybe a bit too expressionist to be realistic, but they still work because we followed a color scheme. So make sure your background layer, the sea is smooth. You have your sunset right here with the very bright brush strokes, then a little bit more dark blue here on the bottom left, that fades into the other colors, and a little bit of reflections of these rocks here as well. If that's the case, then you've done a very good job. In the next lesson, let's make a few more final adjustments and add a bit more details. 18. Artwork: Final Adjustments: So it's time to finish off our artwork and make some final adjustments. It already looks pretty nice because we got some nice colors, composition, and we have different textures. But there are still a few things that we need to take care of. So let's do it. First of all, let's look at the whole thing and see how everything connects and which parts need a little bit more work. This is something that I recommend you do regularly while working on an art work. As soon as you finished one part of the creation process, zoom out and analyze the whole thing. Does everything still fit together. And right here, I must say, as we have now added a more detailed texture to the tree trunk, the foliage, and the sea, the stones can't really keep up anymore. Our ground is far less detailed than the tree. So it needs a little bit more work. So let's go to the ground layer and paint over it using this watercolor brush. With this one, the cool thing is, as you can see, we can just select the color from the ground that we want and scribble over it so it gets this really nice and smooth watercolor texture. And this texture fits very well with the tree and the sea. So I'm always just selecting the color from the ground by pressing control and clicking on it. And then I'm scribbling a little bit, trying to follow the shapes of the stones and trying to keep the sunlight in mind. So no big changes to our composition and lighting, just more texture and more smoothness. I'm pretty sure you'll find it quite comfortable to do this with this brush. Once you've made the whole ground very smooth and soft using this watercolor brush, let's add a bit more individual detail to these stones. For that, let's make the brush a bit smaller, just about like this, and let's switch to very dark brown. Then let's add just a few random dark lines to all these stones that we have here. I mean, these are stones, so we can easily do that without thinking too. We just want to develop a few more layers of detail here. Nice. Now, let's actually switch to some brighter and more yellow orange. The stones are pretty flat, so they actually reflect some of the sunlight. So let's make the brush just a little bit bigger, and then let's paint a few brush strokes just on the top edges of these individual stones. But only the ones at the top, like the ones at the bottom don't have much sunlight on them, so we can leave them out. Let's not make this orange too intense, so it doesn't look too unrealistic. We just want a few smooth reflections here. Apply very low pressure on your drawing tablet. All right. I guess this works. Once your reflections look something like this, we can move on and add more interesting detail to our stones. For that, I'm switching to black and making the watercolor brush pretty small, so about ten pixels. Then as you can see, I'm lightly scribbling over all these stones, and I'm adding a few random brush strokes and curvy lines to make it look like these stones have nice pattern on them. But in order to make it look good, we have to work with a few different colors here. So first, I'm adding black brush strokes everywhere, and then I'm switching to a lighter gray and adding a layer of lighter gray curvy lines, just like that. And as you can see, it's pretty chaotic, but it still works because we've already defined the lighting and the composition, and it generally looks really nice. So if we add random detail to these stones, then it doesn't even look out of place, but it just creates a little bit more interest. Once again, as I've told you in the last lesson, we're working with different layers of brass strokes here. We always want a consistent style for one element of our image. So whenever you add like a type of detail to your ground, which means, for example, you add a layer of small black brush strokes, then first add these brush strokes to the whole layer of stones. Before you move on to another thing, like adding lighter brush strokes or making the brush bigger to make everything look smoother, like, I'm doing it here, and so on. You always want to do one thing at a time and finish the whole layer before you move on to another thing. This is how you can avoid an inconsistency of styles. For example, when there are some stones that are more detailed than others. And so far, we've worked exactly like that for everything that we've done in this artwork. So I hope you can keep the habit of working like this. Nice. Now, one thing that we have to fix as we've added lots of details and reflections to these stones is the edges. As you can see, they're a bit too smooth. So I'm taking the free hand selection tool, and I'm selecting just a little bit off that edge like this, pressing delete, and I keep going like this until I've fixed the whole layer of the ground. It's just the same thing that we've done for the tree trunk. Sometimes, depending on the style in which you draw or paint, you don't have to do this. But right here, I actually want very clear edges. So that's what we do. All right, I'm adding just a few more layers of brush strokes to make these stones look as nice as possible. And now, as we've already fixed the edges, and don't want to do it again, let's lock the transparency of our layer just like this. So we cannot paint over the edge. All right. Now I'm adding just a few more longer lines to create more detail, and I'm trying to follow the shapes of these stones a little bit to make them look a bit more three dimensional. I'm first doing this with black and then with white to have a little bit of variety. And I'm always applying very low pressure on my drawing tablet to not make it look too intense, but just a little bit more interesting. The thing is your process for painting more details on these stones does not have to look exactly like mine. This is just an example and recommendations for how you can work by applying these different layers of bras strokes. You can perfectly stop at any point where you're like, Okay, this looks pretty good. I like these stones, and just leave. But I'm just showing and commenting on this very long and chaotic process of painting these stones because it's a realistic example for what it means to make digital art. Often, you just have to add many different layers of something until you like it and make many adjustments. In the end, I want just a little bit more contrast. So I'm adding a huge black shadow with the smooth airbrush to the whole bottom part of the ground layer. And now I'm finally happy with it. It has a little bit of texture with different colors of brush strokes, nice reflections from the sunlight and lots of shadow at the bottom, as it should be. If that's the case for you two, then well done, and let's move on to the final thing of our artwork that's missing. Which is, well, our subjects, the birds. So let's go to the bird layer and switch to this brush right here. Make sure you're on this layer inside the tree group, and it makes sense to zoom in quite a bit on these birds because they are quite small, and we want to give them some nice details now. So you should have two rough silhouettes of birds sitting there right now with a little bit of a beak and a tail. So let's fine tune these silhouettes a little bit. So I'm using the free hand selection tool to make the shapes a little bit more clean. And then actually, I'm selecting this bird and copying, deleting, pasting it, and then I'm moving it a little bit closer to the other bird. Because in my case, that looks a bit better. Might be the case for you two or not. Just look at the composition and decide if you need to make some adjustments. That's why we have everything on different layers. In this case, I think it just looks better if these birds are very close to each other because that way they are framed a bit better by the branches. Nice. Now, let's use our ink brush and make it a bit smaller, so we can add precise brush strokes to our birds. Just a little bit of light gray to the beaks and the bodies. Of course, we want to add this light gray especially on the right side where the sun hits our two fellers. Then let's make these color transitions a little bit more smooth using our water color brush that we had used before. And then let's pull the paint around with the blending brush, and let's pull it a little bit outside these birds. So it looks like they have smooth feathers. Other than that, let's not make these birds too detailed because we'd have to study their anatomy, and this would be a bit out of place in a beginner digital art course. We just want some very basic black birds that are sitting on this tree and have a tail ab and a little bit of feathers on the outside. The light gray parts should be just a little bit on the right side. All right. In the end, I'm fixing the silhouettes with the free hand selection tool once again. I'm just making the beaks a little bit more pointy. Then let's paint a little bit of a dark shadow beneath these birds onto the tree trunk. Just like that. All right, that's enough. Let's take care of the other bird in a very similar fashion. This time, I'm actually adding highlights with the watercolor brush straightaway because I've noticed that it's more practical than the ink brush. For this bird, I'm once again working in different layers of detail. First, I'm putting the beak where I think it should be. Then I'm adding a few light brush strokes to make more detailed feathers. And I'm making my brush strokes generally very dynamic here because this bird is in motion as it's flying through the air. I can't really explain too much here because I don't know that much about birds, but I think this silhouette right here looks pretty all right. So make sure yours looks something like this. And then let's once again switch to this blending brush. So we have a very consistent style in our painting. I'm going back and forth on these wings to make them look very dynamic. You should understand very well how this brush works by now. Treat the whole bird with it and make it look like it has many feathers that point to the outside. It should have just a few highlights, like a few brighter white brush strokes. The light still mostly comes from behind the bird where the sun is, but also a little bit from the bottom where the reflections from the sea hit the bird. So I have just a little bit of white on the bottom of this bird that fades in nicely with the black. And here, now I think this actually looks like a bird. You can, of course, adjust it with a transformation tool and make it bigger or smaller or move it around. But I think it's very nice here. And now it's time for the final adjustments of the painting. This is something that you pretty much always have to do because there are always things that suddenly don't look right anymore as you progress with your painting. Right here, for example, I think the tree trunk needs a little bit more contrast. So I'm adding a bit more bright yellow orange on the very right side with the water color brush. And then I'm blending it in with the blending brush to keep the style of the tree trunk consistent. And then I'm adjusting the wings of the flying bird a bit more. And now at the very end, you can actually experiment a little bit with the layers. That's why they are there. For example, you can adjust the size of the flying bird and move it around if you want to improve the composition. But right here, it looks very good, I think. Or you can change individual aspects about the tree, like the positioning of the whole thing by moving the group around. Or you can also go to like this bird layer and maybe make them a bit smaller or bigger, which doesn't really work because we've added a shadow beneath them. Or you can also do stuff like going to the ground layer and pressing control u to open up the color window, and just see what it looks like with a slightly different hue. Maybe it looks better if it's a bit more on the right side or stuff like that. You can also experiment a little bit with filters, and, for example, sharpen your background, to make the edges look a bit different. Or you can go to the adjust color balance window of a certain element to precisely adjust the hues, to make the lighting more realistic or more pleasing. I recommend you pretty much always check out these options after you finish an artwork because oftentimes you can really fine tune your colors and potentially even fix mistakes. One thing that's also always interesting is mirroring your image by going to image and mirror horizontally. Vertically, it wouldn't really make sense here, but horizontally, as you can see, is actually pretty interesting. The thing is, many artists regularly do this while making a painting to spot mistakes that they wouldn't be able to spot otherwise. But personally, I just do this for the sake of the composition. Right here, for example, I actually like this image better with the sun on the left. I don't know. It just feels different, but very good. So, yeah, these are all adjustments that you can make. And in Creta, there are many, many, many options that you can check out, and I've shown you all the important ones. So finish your image and make sure you like every part of it from the colors to the textures to the composition. You can adjust all of this if you have different layers, which you should have if you followed my instructions. So here we go. Let's save this image somewhere as a dot PNG file. And that's it for our course project. I hope you enjoyed it. And if your picture looks somewhat similar to this, then I have to say in all honesty, huge respect for participating. This is already quite a task for your first digital painting. We've done and discussed pretty much everything that you need to know without studying a reference. We've sketched a simple but effective composition. We've blocked in colors and created nice contrasts and followed a color scheme. We have added texture with different brushes and different painting styles to our subjects, and we've made adjustments using all the different tools that retter offers. So I hope you have a good idea now what the process of making a digital painting looks like, what an artist thinks and which tricks they use while making an artwork. And I hope you're proud of your work. 19. How To Get Getter: All right, ladies and gentlemen, that was the practical part of the course. I hope you enjoyed it. Right now would be a good point to end the course. You know, we've explored how to use Creta, and we've made an artwork together. So now you can go out there and do whatever you want. However, because this is a beginner digital art course, there are a few more things that I want to give you before I sent you out there and year on your own. So here are four more theoretical lessons where I just talk and give you some personal advice regarding how to get better at making art, how to find inspiration for it, how to use references, and how to stay motivated as a digital artist. Depending on your experience level with art, digital, or traditional, you may already be familiar with some of these concepts and strategies, but certainly not all of them, because I got quite a few things to say here. You can sit back and relax and just listen or take some notes, which I actually recommend because these ideas will be very helpful if you start out making digital art. So let's start with the probably most important point, which is, how do you actually get better at making art? Well, as for all things, you just get better at what you do. So if you make lots of digital art and just keep going, you will eventually get better and better. This is how the world works. But in order to get the most out of this concept, you have to ask yourself, what do you even want to get better at? Do you just want to get better at abstract art? Make abstract art. Do you just want to get better at line art? Make line art. This is the thing. There are so many different styles of art and so many different aspects of art that you could get better at? And you certainly don't have to get better at everything. Like, at some point, you have to choose. There is probably nobody in the world who is a master illustrator and comic artist and realism painter and makes lots of deep abstract art as well. We all have our preferences, and that's fine. If you only want to make patterns, you don't have to care about perspective. If you only want to make abstract art, you don't have to care about the human anatomy. If you only want to do flat comic illustrations, you don't need to know anything about lighting. And if you just want to draw realistic objects from reference, you don't need to understand a damn thing about color theory. So how you should get better and what you should study is dependent on what you want to do. And you'll have to research what exactly that is and how you can practice by yourself, because there are just too many fields that I can't talk about here. But generally, there are four stages of improvement that you should follow. And I think they apply to any field of digital art. Number one, master the process and using the software. That's pretty obvious, right? Knowing everything about composition and shape theory will just not save you if you don't know how to make shapes. So no matter which field of art you want to eventually get into, at the very beginning, comes just understanding the software, practicing it, and really knowing where everything is. And by the way, this doesn't only apply to Creta. Also if you want to work with Photoshop or procreate, for example. I mean, that's what the majority of this course was about. Understanding and practicing the, in my opinion, best digital art software, which is Creta. So why am I bringing this up here again? Well, I just want you to take this step very seriously and continue with it even after you finish the course. Before you really get into art and study perspective and try to make these beautiful artworks, make sure you are really comfortable with using the software. So for the first few hours or even days of using Creta, just dabble around and make different sketches and get in a lot of volume. Don't care about the quality of your first images. Just make new documents, save them, try out all these tools that I've shown you. Use different brushes, create different shapes, select areas, and see what you can do with them. Apply some filters, get used to putting stuff on layers, and generally just find out your way of making digital art. Yes, in this course, we've gone over everything important at least once. But don't expect that you can remember all of this, just because you listened to me for 2 hours. Play around with Creta, make a few experimental artworks where you try out different tools, and then rewatch some of the lessons of this course to see if you forgot something like a shortcut or a more efficient way to do something. So before you develop any inefficient habits by making art yourself, really make sure that you understood everything that I've said in this course. It can cost you a lot of time in the future. If you just forget about this one shortcut that lets you undo stuff, for example, or you forget about the existence of group layers and just mess everything up, or you forget about the existence of these color editing windows, and you try to paint over certain parts of your image. And you spent 10 minutes trying to achieve something that you could have done by pressing control you in 2 seconds. I've taught you an efficient approach and many shortcuts in our artwork section, where we've covered many aspects of digital art. But it's definitely not a shame to go back and rewatch some of these lessons just to make extra sure that you don't forget about something fundamental. And you should practice all of this by making some random artworks first, where you try out all the tools and all the ways of using Creta. And once you got that, and you're relatively comfortable with using the software, and you're starting to actually make some nice looking artworks, then you arrive at 0.2, which is try out different methods of creation. And this is already about finding your art style and your way of doing things. So it also makes sense to spend some time at this stage of improvement. In a practical sense, this means that once you finish one of your basic artworks, go over it with a different brush and transform it into a different style. If we take something like this, for example, which is, you know, not a super fleshed out artwork, just something that you might make at the beginning of using Creta, then we can actually select a different brush like this one, for example, and just scribble over the whole thing to transform it. Just select the colors from the image and go over the whole thing. And as you can see, the texture already looks a little bit nicer or a bit more detailed. The point of this is mainly to explore different styles of painting and find out how you can create good textures in digital art. By just scribbling around with a brush without actually making anything with it, you can get a rough idea how it functions and what the brush ks look like. But you don't really know if it actually works for you in art. For that, you must have used it to make an actual artwork. I mean, my recommendations from the brushes lesson still hold true. But there are lots of brushes that I told you to check out. So you still have to find out which ones you want to use yourself. And the most efficient way to do this is to go over very rough sketches and compositions of yours and transform them into artworks by scribbling with different brushes. A huge mistake that I made in the past was always using the same few brushes because those were the ones that I knew and I could rely on. You know, why would I start a new artwork with a new brush? And I don't even know if it's a good one, and if it actually works. I just didn't want to take this risk because when making art, I only want to focus on creating good shapes and a good composition and not worry about the brush all the time. But the easy fix to this that I've heard nobody talk about yet is what I'm telling you right here, which is to transform your existing compositions. And the really efficient thing is, you can do this multiple times for one picture. For example, this Kingfisher that I painted here in the background. I went over it with a certain type of brush to make it look more detailed. But then I went over the whole thing with a different brush. You see this a bit more rough texture brush, and I actually like the texture of that one better. So I didn't just say, Okay, this Kingfisher looks nice. I'm done. But I used the opportunity to quickly go over the whole thing once again with a different brush, and I immediately discovered that this brush is actually better for painting birds because we get this really nice feather texture. So by just making one picture that's relatively simple, I practiced two different styles, and I know which one I prefer for painting birds. So the next time I want to paint a bird, I know that I can use this brush right away, and I know that it will look good. So you don't have to make a new artwork every time you want to try out something new. Use the simple things that you've made to experiment multiple times. That way, you can extend your repertoire, and you just know how different brushes work, and you can choose from them, and you can find your art style. One time, I went over an artwork of mine with the blending brush because I didn't really know how this blending brush worked. You know, it doesn't apply any new paint to the canvas, so it was a bit weird. But once I got behind how this brush works, I was actually pretty mind blown, and I immediately saw its potential. So I went back to this very rough composition sketch that I quickly made a few years ago. You know, it's pretty much just a color and shape practice with a nice composition, super awesome colors, but it's not detailed at all. But I went over the whole thing with this blending brush and scribbled everywhere and created more detailed shapes without thinking too much about the composition and the colors because they are already there. And I actually managed to transform this into a nice looking artwork. And now I would actually define this blending brush as one of my core art styles because I absolutely love using it, which is why we've used it extensively in our course project. I just wanted to show it to you. So, yeah, I hope by now, you understand what I mean with this point, and that you can use it to efficiently discover your art style and just be familiar with more ways of making art. But even if you want to make something very different like abstract art or illustrations and comic art, you should still experiment with different styles. In abstract art, for example, you can try to make an artwork with many shapes, one with the shape tools and ones with the selection tools. And that way, you can approach the most comfortable and most efficient ways of making art in your style. Once you have a good overview of different options in different styles, and you know roughly what you want to make, then it's time to move on to step number three, which is isolate skills and dive deep on topics that interest you. This is where you really get better at making art. This means that you pick something that you want to get better at, and then you focus on it extensively for a certain period of time. You learn everything about it, you dive deep, and you practice it. These topics that you want to dive into are completely individual to you. It just depends on what you want to make, which art style you have, which field you work in, and stuff like that. You can focus extensively on creating better line art for a whole week, for example, or color theory, contrast theory, composition, perspective, lighting. These are all topics that deserve your fully focused attention as an artist for some time. More or less, depending on where you want to go. If you take into consideration all the different styles of art, there are countless subtopics that you could dive into, and you could benefit from if you knew about them. But you certainly don't have to get better at all of them. Don't worry. For the start, as soon as you somewhat know how to use the software and how you can draw and paint, I would recommend you dive deep on the basic skills. So things like composition or color theory. If you, for example, learn everything about color theory in a day or a week, depending on how long it takes you, then you can always benefit from that, and it makes literally all of your pictures way better. No matter if you're doing design or abstract art or impressionism or illustration, if you spend some time to really understand color schemes and color psychology, then you just got this topic checked, and you can always go back to it and use it for whatever you make. And that's the thing with this point of improvement. You always focus on one thing, really understand it, practice it, and then you have it in your repertoire. And this can also be things like you spend a whole week just drawing and painting trees and learning everything about them. So whenever you need trees in an artwork in the future, you know exactly what to do, and you have many options. That's why I made a whole detailed course on how to draw and paint any tree from imagination. You can learn things very well if you just focus on them for some time without getting distracted by another topic, So you need to choose, which are the skills that you really want to learn, and which ones do you need for your field of art? This is, of course, individual, but I would say the ones that you are most likely to need are color theory composition, perspective, the human anatomy, if you want to draw or paint realistic humans, and contrast. Contrast, by the way, an insanely underrated topic, and I'm working a lot currently to develop theory for this field. Because in pretty much every case of design and art, it's literally the basis of visual interest. But that's another topic. So one thing at a time, you should isolate skills and dive deep on topics that you need for your art. There are plenty of them, and generally, you should move from more basic ones to more specific ones. So at the beginning, study, composition, perspective, lighting, color theory, or human anatomy. And then as you get more specific and you need specific things for your artworks, you can do stuff like study the anatomy of dogs, if you want to draw really realistic dogs, or you spend some time studying master expression as painters, if you want your next painting to have heavily exaggerated colors. This is the process of learning about art, and there are many different resources that can help you with this step from courses to YouTube tutorials or real life mentors. There are many highly specialized artists that understand a lot about one topic of art that you can learn from. And that's why you're never really done with this step of improvement. There are always new skills that you can dive into and add to your repertoire. Except if you're really happy and you don't feel like you can learn anything from anyone, then you can pretty much only self analyze and find your way of making art, which is step four. At some point, you can pretty much only ask yourself, do I like my art and does it achieve the right things? This is where really experienced artists that have their own art style are at. Imagine Claude Monet at 60-years-old. He probably didn't dive deep on architecture in order to be able to draw and paint any house and add that to his repertoire. But, you know, he had his style. He knew what he wanted to make. And at that point, it was pretty much just self analysis and improving his own style. I mean, I don't know, it could be the case that he suddenly switched the style in private and learn from somebody else about certain topics, I didn't study his biography for this lesson, but you get the point. At some point, you just improve on your own work, and you don't feel like adding anything new. And that's fine. But I would still say for most of us, we should constantly switch back and forth between Step three and step four. Analyzing ourselves and asking ourselves, are we achieving the right things with our artworks? And occasionally, if we feel like it or we need it, diving deep on a skill or topic to add that to our skill set. And yeah, I would say that's pretty much it for how to get better at art. That's my take on it, and the path that I recommend you follow. This lesson is a little bit longer than I intended, but I hope you understood everything or at least most of it. Anyway, let me summarize it real quick. The first thing that you have to do if you get into digital art, master the process and using the software, so you can avoid inefficiencies later on, and you don't have to look up stuff while making an artwork. Get as comfortable with the process as you can and use all the tools that Creta, for example, offers to your advantage. That's where this course is probably the most helpful. Then try out different methods of creation and experiment with different styles. Use simple sketches and compositions of yours and transform them into artworks by using different brushes, ideally, multiple different styles for one artwork. That way, you can find your own art style and your way of doing things, and you're familiar with multiple styles that you can always switch in when you need them. So I tried to cover a few different styles and methods of creation in our course project. So if you participated, you're already doing pretty good on this step. Then comes the big face of isolating skills and diving deep on topics that interest you, which can range from color theory and composition theory to very specific things like drawing and painting cats or plants. There is an infinite amount of subtopics in art that you could study and which ones you should study heavily depends on what you want to do. But if you focus on one skill at a time and really try to understand it and practice it, you can improve a lot as an artist. And then pretty much the only thing that's left to do is self analyzing your work and asking yourself if you're achieving the right things with it. But most of us will never arrive at the point where this is the only thing that we do. So we switch back and forth between stage three and stage four, sometimes even stage two, because if you want to get Batort art, there is always a way to do it. There's always something new that you can learn, and that's the best thing about it. So that was my approach for how to get better at digital art. These are the four stages that I recommend. Maybe you need to try them out in practice to really understand what I mean here. But yeah, I hope you enjoyed it, and you found this helpful. Time for the next lesson where we check out how to find inspiration for your artworks. That's also a very interesting topic. 20. How To Find Inspiration: All right, you guys, quick lesson about how to find inspiration for digital art. First of all, let me define inspiration real quick. We're all on the same page and there is no confusion. To me, inspiration basically means you look at something or you experience something, and then you're like, Oh, I like this. I like this pe or I like this idea. Now I feel like making somesel. Inspiration means you experience something, and then you feel motivated to create something yourself. So, yeah. Inspiration, you know, is very nice when you have it. You know, if you try to make something creative without being inspired, it's not going to be the best results. So how do we find inspiration for digital art? Well, first of all, of course, you can be inspired by literally everything from your own thoughts to nature, relationships, past experiences, movies, books, random images that you find on the Internet or even music, which apparently works for some artists. So this is the first thing that I want to give you here. There is a pretty much infinite amount of ways to get inspired by things, to make digital art. So don't ever feel like you have to do something to get inspiration. You don't have to make a pinterest moodboard. You don't have to follow any famous artists on Instagram or Twitter. If all you need to do to feel the urge to create something is to go outside, then do it. That's one of the best things about art. What you feel like creating is completely unique to you. So you don't have to listen to anyone's techniques to get inspiration. And your method to get inspiration can also vary from style to style. For example, for abstract art, you listen to music, for expressionism, you look at expressionist painters, or for realism, you look at photos, or the other way around, like, you look at a photo and you feel like making an abstract artwork out of it or stuff like this. So everybody's approach is unique here. And honestly, I would say finding inspiration is not necessarily the biggest problem of people who want to be artists. We have ideas, and we feel like creating stuff all the time. And the problem is more that it's too much, and we don't know what to create first. Or we just forget everything. If you want to be an artist, but you really, really, genuinely lack inspiration, and you don't know what you should make, then there is pretty much only one advice that I can give you. And that is, put down your phone, go outside and experience new things. No, seriously. I mean that. The problem that most of us have is probably not the lack of creative input, but the abundance of it. With all the social media, we technically look at so many different scenes every day that on their own could be inspiring, but they don't really inspire us anymore, because, you know, if you scroll down just one more kilometer there might be something even more inspiring. You'll probably get the point, so I don't want to go too much into the social media rant here. Just notice there are many beautiful things in the world, and sometimes you just need a bit more space in your head to be able to see them. Don't be afraid of being bored once in a while, and ideas will fly to you. I promise. And yeah, that's pretty much my best advice for how to find inspiration. The rest is completely up to you. If you want to look at photos or real life or artworks or movies, whatever works best for you. But what I want to talk about here a bit more is how to actually use inspiration once you have it, because that's the critical point. Inspiration is very perishable. So you need to take action right away if you want to use your inspiration to create something. Or if you can't immediately start creating, if you feel inspired by something, you need to store your inspiration, so you can actually remember it. So in a practical sense, this means that if you see something that inspires you to create art, make a quick sketch in a sketchbook, so you can remember it. Or what's probably more practical for most of us, just take a photo. I know this sounds very trivial, but I really want you to take the step seriously. Don't underestimate how quickly we forget about things. If you have an idea for an artwork by looking at something, save it immediately. Copy the link to the website, save the image, take a photo of the real life situation before you start thinking about anything else, like how to actually make the artwork. First, save the idea, so you have it stored. And then you can do whatever with it. You can make a pinterest, moodboard, or you can just add a folder on your PC where you add different images or text documents with linked websites. And yeah, that way, you will always have many options if you sit down to actually make art. Another problem regarding inspiration that I want to help you solve is that you know that when you have the inspiration to make an artwork, but you just don't feel like you're ready to actually do it. Like, you have this one super awesome scene in your head, but you just know that you won't make it into an actual artwork because you're either lacking the skills or the patience for it. Think about how many times this has happened to you. You have an idea, and you're just like, Yeah, maybe one day, I'll be able to actually make something like this. And my advice to not lose out on your creative ideas here is to simply do it anyways. Just make sketches and compositions of your ideas and save them somewhere. So you can return as soon as you feel ready to actually commit to them, or you feel like you've learned enough to now actually make this into a nice looking artwork. This can be as simple as scribbling a little sketch or blocking in colors for an actual composition. Not everything that you make has to be a fleshed out detailed artwork. You can also just experiment a lot with color and composition, save your ideas like that, and return to them and make them more detailed if you feel ready. This perfectly ties into the advice that I've given you in the last lesson. Focus on quantity first, make many artworks, and master the process and using the software. Before you try to make anything too overwhelming. And the best part about this is that whenever you lack ideas to create something new, you can just go back to these sketches and compositions of yours and continue working on them. Composition and colors are already there, and that's already a big part of constructing an artwork. So there was another little tip for how you can make your process easier and how you can use your inspiration. The last thing that I want to give you in this lesson is a framework for how you can transform your inspiration into an artwork. Like, how should what you actually make relate to your inspiration and your experiences in the world? For that, you have to know that basically there are three different ways to make art. Number one, you just make something that you like to see that you like to look at. This refers mostly to things that you draw or paint directly from reference. For example, you like the looks of a certain rock, then you take a picture of that rock, and then you paint it later on, or if you find a picture of a squirrel on the Internet that you find really cute, and then you paint it, like I did it right here. Some artists actually only work like this. They just look for things that they think look nice, they study them and they recreate them with their art. So that's the first and most simple way to make art. You just share what you find beautiful with other people by recreating it. Then the second way to make art is to make something that you would like to see, something that does not exist, but would be nice. So fantasy worlds and characters or expressionist artworks with exaggerated colors or things that could be real, like a landscape, but with perfectly arranged elements. You can do this without a reference because it's something fictional, or you do use a reference for help, but you change it in the artwork. For example, you leave out elements that would not be fitting, or you exaggerate the colors, or you use different references to make up one composition. This is probably the most common type of artwork that people like to make. Just create something that you would like to see that doesn't yet exist in real life without your help as an artist. Then the third type of art that you can make is if you make something that you would like other people to see. So that's when your artwork has more meaning that you want to convey to other people. You want to show them something, or you want to move them or stuff like that. So art that you make specifically with the purpose of showing other people something, whether that's more realistic or more frictional. So what do these three ways to make art have to do with inspiration? Well, whenever you have inspiration, I want you to think about these to determine what you want to do with your inspiration. Do you feel inspired by something in nature that you just want to recreate, or do you want to change it slightly? So it represents something that you would like to see? Or do you want to use it to convey more of a message? And you make something that you would like other people to see? We all have our preferences for which types of art we want to make. But it always makes sense to think about the purpose of your art as soon as you feel inspired to make it. This will give you clarity and focus once you start the creation process. So that was my take on handling inspiration in art. This was maybe a little bit abstract, but I hope you found it helpful. The next lesson where I share some tactics for how to use references will be a lot more practical. See you there. 21. How To Use References: L et's talk about how to use references. References are incredibly useful tools in digital art. And I'm going to say it right away, you should most of the time, use a reference if you want to draw or paint anything that's supposed to look somewhat realistic. Especially if you're starting out, you have a approximately 0% chance of painting a good looking dog if you don't have a dog to look at while you're trying to make it. Even if your ultimate goal is to draw or paint things without a reference, you have to practice using a reference first. Otherwise, it's not going to happen. Everything that you create will look fictional and abstract, even if it's supposed to represent something real. So yeah, just use references, and that's pretty much everything that I wanted to say here. However, there is a bit more references than just that because there are many different ways to use them. I have this little extra lesson about using references here in this beginner digital art course, because I believe that knowing the right techniques for using a reference is one of the fastest ways to improve at art. And it's going to save you a lot of time if you know how to use a reference correctly. First of all, the most important thing to understand about references is that you don't have to recreate them exactly. A reference like a photo is just a tool to give you guidance to show you what something is supposed to look like in terms of colors, shapes, anatomy, lighting, and stuff like that. Just like this, squirrel that I'm painting right here. Without the reference photo, I would not really know how big the head is supposed to be in relation to the body, or which colors it should have exactly. But like this, I can perfectly measure all the shapes with my eyes and try to recreate them. So it looks like a squirrel. But in the end, my painting does not have to look exactly like that photo. For example, this is my finished painting here, and it looks pretty similar to the photo, I would say, but I could have also changed the background color if I like this color scheme better, or I could have painted the squirrel a lot smaller or put it on a different type of tree. You see, you only have to use your reference for the parts where you actually needed, like, in this case, the anatomy and the colors of the squirrel, which I would have totally messed up without the reference. But other than that, I could have played around a lot more with this image if I wanted to. In this painting, for which I used that reference photo, I changed a few more things, like these flowers in the foreground, some of these houses and some of the colors. So I used a reference to create the scene and have a more realistic look, but I also changed a few things to make it more pleasing to look at, like these flowers here that I added to improve the composition. Here's the thing. If you look for a reference, don't just look for things that you want to recreate. A reference is not supposed to be a strict guideline, but a tool that you can use in a very flexible way to give some parts of your paintings a more realistic look. So this can help you a lot if you're in search of a fitting reference. It doesn't have to be exactly what you want to create. So you can use references for orientation and make your paintings look a bit different. But what you can also do is adjust your reference. This can range from simple color grading or cropping to a complete rearrangement of the elements. Some artists actually like to work that way. They use different photos, and then they added them together to create a perfect reference for their paintings. Or you do it a bit more simple, like I did it with the reference for this painting. As you can see, in the beginning, I first cropped my reference photo to have a composition that I like better. You can, of course, also do stuff like, use the Smart patch tool to edit out areas of a reference that you don't like, and then draw that. So yeah, remember this point before you go out there and spend 1 hour searching for a reference that has the perfect colors and the perfect composition. Be smart and adjust your references to your liking. Think about them as tools to help you and not guidelines that you should follow. All right. Now let's talk a little bit about how to actually use a reference for your work and how to break it down. When using a reference, it's all about finding shapes and reconstructing them, how you see them. First, you spot the bigger shapes and recreate them, and then you spot the smaller shapes and recreate them. So you work in layers of detail, just as I've taught you in our project section. So, for this squirrel, I first indicated the big shapes like the body and the head just with some rough drawn circles. Then I fill them with color, so the average color of the body and the average color of the head. And then I create smaller and smaller shapes the further I go. And at some point, I just stop because I don't have time to create a four k perfect photo realistic squirrel here. And this is not necessary. I mean, you've seen the end result. It's still pretty all right. I hope. But yeah, the point is that you try to see the shapes with their colors and their edges and try to reconstruct them. And the size of these shapes depends on the layer of detail that you're currently on. So in the beginning, the shape for the body might just be this one orange circle. And then as I progress, the shapes get smaller and smaller. This is, you could say, the secret of painting from reference. Don't look at the subjects. Look at the shapes, depending on what layer of detail you're currently on. So in the beginning, just see there is an orange shape here and there is a white shape here. And then as you progress, still don't think about painting individual fingers. But just look at the shapes. Just see, Okay, there are some tilted orange rectangles here. Let me place them in a similar spot on my painting. You should constantly try to find the shapes that you need on your layer of detail, measure the distances, and placements with your eyes, and try to find the right colors. What you should absolutely avoid is selecting colors from your reference or even stuff like drawing over the reference. Please don't do that. The point of drawing or painting from reference is that you get way better at seeing and reconstructing these shapes with all their attributes, like their size, colors, all the distance that they have from each other. If you directly go to the reference and select the color, you don't learn anything. And another problem with that is that you can't even select the right color from a reference in most cases. Be references are usually photos, and those are very, very detailed. If I zoom in on this texture here, then you can see that it's actually made up of very, very different pixels, many different colors, like darker, brighter, more or less saturated. So if I just select the color with a color picker, and then I try to paint a similar shape, then it looks very different actually. Because I just selected a random pixel from this texture. But if I use my eyes and try to find the average color of this thing, and could be something like this. Let's see. It's actually a lot closer. You can learn a lot about your subjects that way. And one day, if you've painted many different squirrels with a reference, you can maybe even paint one without a reference. So adjust your references, use them as tools, break them down, try to see the shapes and reconstruct them, and don't cheat your way through, and you will learn a lot about drawing and painting. That way, references are flexible and effective tools that you definitely use a, especially as a beginner of digital art. Thank you for listening. S. 22. How To Stay Motivated: Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the very last lesson of this course. Congratulations for making it so far, and thank you for listening to me for such a long time. I really appreciate it, and I really hope that you found this helpful. Now, last but not least, I want to talk about a topic that is a bit underappreciated in my opinion. And that is how to stay motivated as an artist, because that's the thing. You just see so many beginner artists give up very quickly. And that's a shame. So let me finish off with some personal advice, and let me give you a few strategies that you can implement in your life to make sure that your art stays fun. I haven't actually mentioned this in the how to get better lesson. But obviously, if you really want to get better at something, it must be fun. You must want to do it and be motivated for it. And in art, this is a big topic for many of us. We start an artwork, and then suddenly we just lose motivation, and it doesn't feel fun anymore. We put it aside and just forget about it. Or we just don't start making an artwork because the idea of putting in all that work in order to complete it just seems so overwhelming. You probably know that. I mean, at least I know that very well. And here, let me just begin with the tips. Step zero for staying motivated with art is to make art that you want to make in the first place. I know it seems unnecessary that I mentioned this here, but you do see people that feel like they have to make certain types of art in order to get better. And then they quickly lose motivation, or they just feel like they suck it art altogether. For example, you feel that you have to first study anatomy and paint realistic humans. But if you don't want to do it, you don't have to. You can also just explore other parts of art first. And then eventually, if you feel like it, go back to the human anatomy. Here's the thing. If you look around in the art world, you see many people do similar things. And it's very easy to feel pressured into doing it as well, even though you actually don't want to do it. For example, if I type in just normal digital art on YouTube, then you can see pretty much every single video here has this manga or anime type of art on the thumb nail. You see, they may slightly vary in styles, but they all have, like the same big eyes, small nose, flat skin. And here, to me, personally, this is just kind of funny. But I can imagine that if you're a beginner at digital art, and you see literally everyone paint in this manga enemy art style, then you might think that this is the way to make digital art, that this is the standard that you should practice and do as well. And that's just wrong. You don't have to do that, even though everybody else is doing it. That's the beautiful thing about art. Maybe you have an art style that doesn't even exist yet, you know? So this is the thing that I want to give you here. Really, genuinely, just make art that you want to make and don't feel pressured into doing anything. If it's just abstract art, it's fine. And if it's just drawing without colors, it's also fine. Yes, it's always good to expand your horizon and learn new things, expand your skill set and all that. But you will want to do this anyways at some point. If you just draw a bunch of trees, then this will get boring at some point, and you will want to, like, learn to draw in perspective, so you can place multiple trees in a composition next time, or you actually want to paint one with colors for one. This will just come automatically. So take your time and don't stress yourself out about having to make certain types of art or having to learn certain skills. Yes, I've given you certain recommendations for which topics you should study at the beginning of making art, like color theory, composition, perspective, lighting. But there is no perfect order in which you should learn these things. So just start with the one that you're the most interested in as soon as you feel like it. Don't take art too seriously. Yes, it is something that you can excel at. But there are many different ways in which you can excel at it. It might be deceiving, but the industry is always open to new styles. Even though if you look around, it might not seem like it. So if you want to stay motivated, just get really good at what you want to do, and you will stand out as a competent, unique artist sooner or later. That's the first thing that I wanted to give you here. Then the next point about motivation is a bit more tactical and practical, because this is about how to stay motivated while making an artwork. And the thing is, if you make an artwork, it's very easy to get totally overwhelmed by all the tasks that you have to complete. If you have a plan of an artwork in your head and you see the finished picture in your mind, it's often intimidating, and you don't feel like you're ready to do all of this, which is why you lose motivation very quickly as soon as you sit down to make it. And this is understandable. You know, most good artworks are big projects that have many different layers of detail, many different tasks that have to be completed from the sketch and thinking about the composition to finding a color scheme and putting in all the textures, and yeah, there is a lot to do, if you want to make a really good artwork. And the solution to get these artworks done anyways is to just think about one task at a time. Break down your big projects into very small steps that you can handle. It's very, very, very important that you get used to this mindset. So let me give you an example here. If you sit down to make a new artwork, and you have an idea in your head, don't think I'm going to start making this huge artwork. But think, right now, let me sit down and sketch the composition and find some nice shapes that I could use. This is the way to do it. Trust me. If you immediately start thinking about the whole thing, the whole project, you will lose motivation very quickly because that's overwhelming. But if you always just think about this next simple task that you can complete rather easily, then you are very likely to actually complete it. And not only that, but you are likely to exceed your expectations and keep working, which is a very nice feeling. For example, you sit down to block in some colors to the background of your new sketch. That's the only thing that you intentionally want to do here. You are likely to complete this task now because it doesn't require that much time and effort, and you can easily move on to something else if you don't feel like making more art after that. But you'll see as soon as you sit down to complete this task, and it's done very quickly, you are already in the flow of making art. And sooner than you realize, you've added a more detailed texture to a part of the background. And this happens to me a lot. I use this tactic all the time. Always, very low expectations. I'm just going to sit down and make something, even if it's not much. And then I get in the flow, and I sit there for an hour adding very nice details to a painting. By the way, this is not exclusive to art, but it's a known and proven productivity tactic. But it just applies very well to digital art because you can always break down your big paintings, your big projects into very small individual tasks. You always have the expectation to just complete one of these tasks. Like, I'm just going to add a few highlights to this painting and then move on to something else. And sooner than you realize you are in the flow, and you are making great progress in your art. And this perfectly ties into the next point about motivation that I want to talk about, which is, just start. Action comes first, motivation comes later. Just make something. You know, you don't always have to make a masterful painting. If you make it easy and just value consistency over quality first, then you can get better very quickly because you make art more frequently than many other people. Just start to make something, and the motivation will come. A very good tactic to stay motivated for art is to just make it a daily habit. Habits are very powerful. And if making art becomes part of your daily routine, you don't even need motivation anymore because you just automatically find yourself creating something. Just try it out for a few days, make a quick sketch every morning, and a day like four or five, you don't really have to think about it. There is no more resistance, and you just keep going, Alright, time for the next sketch. It just becomes an automatic behavior of yours. And that's how you can get better very fast. Or you invest all that effort into a single painting, and you just do one small task for it every single day. And after two weeks, you maybe have a really nice artwork. So yeah, make your art as easy as possible and value consistency. The good thing as a beginner, you can get good very, very quickly, and that's one of the biggest motivators actually. Sem progress in your own ability is just so motivating, and it's awesome to witness. So, yeah, that's my $0.02 for how to stay motivated when making art. And I hope that this was very helpful for you. Remember that if you absolutely motivation and you have zero interest in creating art, then it's fine to actually try out a completely different style. For me, that's always abstract art. If I don't feel like making anything too complicated, I just make abstract art and just put colors and shapes on the canvas that I think look nice, which is cool because there are no standards in abstract art, no anatomy or lighting or perspective, just pure creation. So yeah, maybe this can help you too if you absolutely ck motivation. Just keep going, make art that you want to make, value consistency, break down your big projects into small individual tasks. And I'm pretty sure that art will be a very positive thing in your life. Thank you for listening. 23. Conclusion: So, my dear students, that's it. That was Du plus Beginner digital art course. I hope you enjoyed it, and I hope you found this very helpful. And congratulations for making it through. I know it was supposed to be a short but complete overview for getting started with digital art, but it has probably still taken you some time to get through it, especially if you participated in our course project. So thank you very much for completing the course. Now it's on you to go out there and actually use your knowledge to create things that look nice. Remember the outline that I gave you in the How to G Better lesson. It's totally fine if you just play around with the software in the beginning and experiment with different styles. Digital art is supposed to be fun, so take it easy and step by step. Everything that you need for the start is in this course. And I really try to not make it too long or too short, but cover all the topics that I think are really important and you should know about. So you can go back anytime to any of these lessons if you think you forgot something. But if you think that I forgot something, and there is a lesson missing about a certain important tool in Creta, or you want another lesson of me giving you specific tips about digital art, then get in touch with me. Use the website to ask me any questions. I'll be happy to answer them. And of course, you can also upload your finished artwork and ask me for advice to make it better or something like that. I'll see what I can do. And yeah, that's basically everything that you need to get started with digital art. I know it always seems like there is so much more and unique tips and tricks and everything. But actually, if you get really familiar with the basics that I've shown you in this course, just drawing and painting, using layers and everything, then you can go such a long way without even consuming any other content about digital art. Just try it. Just do the things that I've told you for some time and see how it works. If you stay consistent, I'm pretty sure you'll be able to make epic art works sooner than you think. So don't overcomplicate things, and don't search for shortcuts on social media. It will drive you crazy. Just get started and create something, even if it's not the best artwork yet. If you feel ready, you can, of course, dive deeper on topics that interest you and add that to your skill set. And for that, you can, of course, check out my other courses, like this complete course on color theory that applies to any field of art and design. So yeah, I think that's everything that I have to say here. Leave a review for this course and tell me which section you liked best. Was it the section where I introduced Creta? Was it the artwork section, or was it the theory section? I'm very curious about your opinion here, and I'm also open to criticism. If you have anything that I could improve, I'll be happy to implement it in the next course. So here, with that being said, I hope you have a good day and have fun creating.