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.