Learn Medibang (desktop app) in a day: Digital art for beginners

1. Intro: My name is Teo, and I'm an artist, graphic designer, and urban sketcher, in this course, I'm going to teach you how to create digital art using MDibankPaint, that's running on the desktop, either with Windows or Mac OS. This course is suitable for beginners because this app is actually quite easy to learn. You can learn it in a day, but it's also rather capable app, so it's a good app to learn. Now one thing you need to know about this app is it runs on iPads, Android tablets, and desktops. This course covers MibankPaint on the desktop. If you want to learn how to draw with MDiBankPaint on iPads or Android tablets, do check out my other cost because the user interface is very different for MDibankPain running on desktop versus running on a portable tablet. I will not be able to cover everything with this app because there are just too many things to cover, but I will show you the essential tools and techniques that you need to create an illustration. I will show you the UI and explain where you can find the tools, how to select colors, what colors to use, how to work with the layers, how to create line, how to navigate around, how to paint within shapes, how to create shadows. How to add details so that your artworks look more three dimensional. And also I will give you a project so that you can practice on your own to get more practice. MinibankPaint is a fun app to use, and I like it. So I hope you will enjoy this course. Now before we head over to the first lesson, I have a favor to ask from you. If you find this course useful, do leave a review for this course so that you can help other students discover this course. Alright, let's start the first lesson. 2. Software requirement: Come to the first lesson, and this lesson is for those who do not really have the software, MDibankPaint installed on your computer. To find the software, you just have to do a search online for MDiBankPaint, download, press Enter, and look for the download link. Let's go to their website. Now, there are actually several versions of MDibankPaint, so for the desktop there is the Windows and MacOS version. For iPad, there is MibankPaint and MibankP. For Android tablets, there is MibangPaint. So what we want is the desktop version, either the MacOS or the Windows version. Now, at the time of making this video, there are the paid versions sold from Microsoft webstore and also the Steam Appstore. And there are the free older versions, the MacOS version and the Windows older version. Now, if you want to buy the app, which used to be free and ad supported, but now it's not free and there is no ad. Let's take a look at the pricing first. This is the Microsoft Store, and this is selling the app for 72 Singapore dollar, which is around $57. If you look at steam, the price is actually lower. It's 42 Singapore dollar, which is around $33. So do compare the pricing on the Microsoft Store and the steam store first before you purchase so that you can save some money. I have already purchased the app. From the Microsoft store. So there is no longer the purchase link here. Another thing you may want to know is MibankPaint also sells subscription plans which can give you different amount of cloud storage. Now, if you have purchased the desktop version of MDibankPaint, you will get a minimum amount of Cloud storage. So you don't actually need to purchase the subscription plan. But if you want additional cloud storage or more brushes or textures or materials, then you can consider getting the subscription plan, but this is not necessary if you already have the desktop app. In the next lesson, I want to talk about the hardware that you can use for drawing with Mibank paint. 3. Hardware requirement: This lesson, I want to talk about the physical hardware that you need so they can draw with MinibankPaint, and I'm talking about pen displays and pen tablets. If you already have the tools, then you can skip this lesson and go to the next one. In order to draw with MinibankPaint, you need either a pen display, is what I have here or a pen tablet. A Pen display is essentially a monitor that you can draw on. This has pen support, so I can actually use this pen to well, not just draw but also to do other things. So this needs to be connected to the computer and the computer needs to fed the video output to the pen display so they can see. Pen display obviously will have pen input so they can draw. Now, pen displays are actually more expensive compared to pen tablets which do not have the display. This is more affordable and this has to be connected to a computer so that you can draw on the pen tablet while you look at your computer monitor. This pen display that I have here happens to have a touchscreen. So touch is a nice feature, but it's not necessary because for my tutorial, I will be talking about how you can use keyboard shortcuts instead. So if you are using median paint on a Windows touchscreen device, that's great, but touchscreen is not necessary. 4. User interface: Welcome back. Let's look at Mibank more specifically the user interface and where you can find the tools and the commands to help with creating art. The UI for the desktop version for Windows and Mac OS is very different compared to MDIbankPaint on iPad and Android tablets. For the desktop version, you get the menu bar at the top here. And when you click on a menu, you can see all the options for tools and commands that are available. And some of these options may have a keyboard shortcut associated. For example, if you want to use the Brush tool, you can actually press the keyboard shortcut B, and if you want to switch to eraser, you just press E. This is a very quick way to switch between brush and eraser, and it is very helpful to learn all these keyboard shortcuts which can help you work much faster. Now, if you look at some of the options here, you may see a letter in brackets. For example, with color bar here, there is this letter B. So if you take a look at this option here, color, and then there's bracket C, to assess this menu, you just press the keyboard shortcut, alternate. Let me just click away. Alternate C, and this will pop up and you can see the letter B. So when you press B, this will switch the two to this color bar. If you want to switch it to some other tool, you can press alternate C for this manual and maybe change it to the color wheel, press W. This is really quick for switching between tools. By the way, if your UI does not look the same as what I have here, for example, if some of your palettes are missing, by the way, you can actually drag the palettes out. For example, some of the palettes are missing. Maybe the color wheel is missing. You can go to Window initial line and this will reset the UI. Now all the palettes are at their default location. And while I'm at it, maybe we can remove some of the palettes that we are not going to use. Let's drag out the reference palette, close it. If you want to re enable those palettes that you have closed, just go to Window and enable them again. They are not gone. They are just hidden. We do not need brush size, so let's close that. We do not need this color swatch palette, so let's close that. Now, the color wheel here is too small, so let's move the cursor to the intersection here and Oops. By the way, even though this pen display that I have supports touch, the desktop app does not support touch shortcuts. So to undo, you can use the button here to undo or keyboard shortcut Control Z. So move your cursor to the intersection, this line here and drag to resize all the palettes here. So now we have a larger color wheel. Okay, so brush settings can be useful. So let's leave it here, and we have the brush options here at the bottom. Now, this menu is kind of small, so maybe I want to move the cursor to the intersection between these two palettes, and there will be a small double arrow that appears oops. By the way, if you drag out the palette accidentally, don't be afraid just put it back. So when the double arrow appear, just drag it up. You know what? Let me just put this here. Maybe it's easier to drag the bottom here down rather than drag it up. Under the menu options, there is one row of additional icons and shortcuts. Now, these are actually options, additional options for some of the tools that you select. For example, with the brush selected, I actually have selection for grids for perspective grids or rectangular grids or other type of grids so that when you draw, you can have some line assist. Now if I switch to the gradient or the field tool, you can see the menu bar here. The options here actually will change. If I switch to eraser, this will change again. If I switch to the selection tool, this will change. Depending on the tools that are selected on the left side, this will change and give you more options which you may sometimes need to tweak or adjust. If you want to get more drawing area, you can hide the UI by pressing the keyboard shortcut. Tap and this will hide the pallets on the left and also on the right if there are pallets on the left and right. To bring back the UI, just press tab again. That is pretty much all you need to know about the UI, how to navigate and where to find the tools that you need. In the next lesson, let's create a file and talk about file management. 5. Creating a new file: All right. In this lesson, we are going to create a new file and look at some of the options that you can get when creating a new file and also how to manage files. Let me just close this file that I have by pressing the keyboard shortcut Control W. It may prompt you to save, so I don't have any changes to the art, so I don't have to save. Talk about preferences. Go to FL, look for preference and settings preferences. The keyboard shortcut is Control. Click on it. The options that you see here are slightly different compared to those that you can find with the iPad and Android version and you can actually leave most of this at default. If you're using a touch screen device, you may want to enable gestures so that you can use finger gestures. Another setting that you may want to change is how to zoom by dragging. I'll show you this later, but now you can leave this as default. Setting that is missing from the preferences is there is no pressure curve adjustments. If pressure sensitivity for the pen that you're using is not working as expected, you may have to adjust the pressure curve using the driver for the pen display or pen tablet that you are using because you cannot adjust the pressure curve using the app. So to create a new file, just click here menu, file new or press the keyboard shortcut Control, which I'm going to do so. There are two options for creating new files. You have standard or comic. Now for comic, there are comic settings, and for our tutorial, we'll be using standard. So here you can choose between the different units to set. We will use pixels for both the width and the height. Or you can choose from the preprogram canvas sizes here, which sometimes may be faster. And while there is this drop down list with all the presets, so for tutorial, maybe let's create a 4,000 by 3,000 pixel Canvas. And you can set the background color. In this case, let's have it as white or you can have it as transparent, and I think you can leave all the other settings at the fault and click Okay. So just follow me, create your new file first and press Controls or go to the file here to save. And save this file somewhere on your desktop. The file name I want to use is Toy, and you may see the file format, MDP. That's the MDBankPaint file format. You can choose to save in other formats, but if you want to have all the features of MDBankPaint for the file, save it as a MDBankPaint file. Let's click Save and now you have a Wow Canvas. Now, instead of saving your artwork to your internal storage, there is an option for you to save your artwork to the Cloud. So you will have a minimum amount of Cloud storage with minibankPaint. So if you want to save it to Cloud, just click here, save to Clouds and enter the file name and options. Once you have saved your artwork to the Cloud, you can go to the menu option here, open from Cloud to find your file. Saving to Cloud is useful if you work on multiple devices such as you're working on your desktop, but you also need your file on an iPad or Android tablet so you save to the Cloud. These are all the artworks that I have on MDBandPaint Cloud. This is the list view. Let me click the icon view. These are some sketches that I have created. I have some character sketches here with red as the main color. O MidbanPaint on my iPad, I can go to Cloud and open the same file. This will download the file from the Cloud and now I can continue working on my tablet. This is actually very convenient because I can actually bring my tablet out for sketching and then come back home and close this app, once I save the file, close it, and I can continue working on the file on my desktop. Cloud storage capacity is limited, so once I'm done with the file and I no longer need it on the cloud, I will just download that file and save it to my computer and delete the file from the cloud. In the next lesson, we will prepare a reference photo that we will be using for our drawing. 6. Working with reference photo: Let's take a look at the reference photo that we will be using for this tutorial and I'm going to open the reference photo using MDibankPaint. Let's press the keyboard shortcut Control O, or you can go to the menu file open. And you can download this photo from the link that I have provided or from the download section. So it's here, let's open. Okay, so this will open as a separate file, and I want to draw this lion, but I don't need the extra toys by the side. So by the way, notice I'm using touch. Now, you don't have to use touch if you do not have touch support for your tablet. So to zoom in and out using keyboard shortcut, it's Control plus and Control minus. Control minus will zoom away. Control plus will zoom in. But for the Windows version of this app, sometimes you may have to press Control Shift plus instead of Control plus because there are some bug that prevents Control plus from working. Another way to zoom in and out is to press Control Space bar and drag up or down. Oh. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. This is smooth scaling. So let me press Control Zero to fit the artwork or the photo to the screen again. If you don't want that smooth scaling, you can actually press Control K to go into the preference and tap here Zoom by preset and hopefully that will disable that with smooth Zooming. Another way to zoom in and out is to press Control Space bar and click. You can press Control Space bar and drag like this. Notice the Zoom is no longer smooth and this is in steps. Another way is to press Control Space bar and click click click, click Control Space bar alternate to click click click click. Yeah. Let's say I want to zoom into this ring here, I can actually Control Space bar, click at this ring here. This will zoom to the place where I am clicking at. Another way to zoom is to press Control Space bar and draw hoops. So you can draw scroll up and down. Those are the different ways of zooming in and out. And you can press space bar to move around. Yeah, so Spacebar is actually the hand tool here. Or you can press H for the hand tool and you can move around. But generally speaking, when you're using the brush and you are drawing, you will want to press Space Bar to temporarily switch to the hand tool or the move to to move around and to undo its Control Z. Okay, so those are the ways you can zoom in and out and move around the canvas. Let's crop this lion because I don't need the extra toys. Let's press. Let me see where's the select shortcut. But we need the rectangular selection tool, which is M. Try to remember all the shortcuts here. Go to tools and look at all the shortcuts and sorry, look at all the tools and their corresponding shortcuts. To select, it's M. I can draw a selection here. Please follow along, draw a selection here. And now I want to go to edit and crop. Remember earlier I said that you can actually use your keyboard shortcut to access all this menu. There is no keyboard shortcut for crop, but there is this letter M beside. What you can do is you can press, let me just press aways. Let me do a selection first. You can press a turnip E to co up the edit menu and then press M, which is the letter beside crop. And this will just click here. Okay. This will crop the photo to remove the unwanted parts. Now you can save this file, save a not save. If you save this will overwrite the original. If you save a, you can save this as a copy. So we'll just rename this Ty lion. I will save this as a JPAC choose the file format, JPEG, and save. You can adjust the JPEG resolution or compression here. Click Okay. Another way to save this is to go to File export, and you can also choose JPEG here. You can also export the artwork or the photo into different file formats. JPAC is universal, and JPEG is very useful, so you can choose JPEG here as well and choose the size and resolution. There are many options here that you can twit. For our tutorial, I will not be able to go through all the different options for all these file formats because there are just too many things to talk about. Now that we have a reference photo that we can use, we can actually close this and bring our reference photo onto our artwork. So let's press the keyboard shortcut Control W to close that file. So this is our blank canvas. You know what? Let me try and remember to use only keyboard shortcuts so that you guys can also follow me and use keyboard shortcuts, which is actually the more productive way to work with MibankPaint. Okay, so to bring the reference photo in, there are two options. You can go to File. You can import image to new layer and look for the file that you saved earlier, which is the toy lion and open. This will bring the image onto a new layer. A new layer is created for the photo. If you want to move this around, you can click here on the move tool. This is the directional move tool or the transform tool, you can move this around. Now, the downside to creating or importing an artwork like this is let me just draw something really quickly. The downside is when you zoom in, control let me just use the keyboard shortcut Control Space bar. If I zoom in, notice I no longer see the reference photo, so This is the downside with importing a reference photo like this. So what you want to do now is to click here on the photos layer or the layer with the photo, click here at the trash can under the layers palette, delete that layer. So we will import the reference photo using another method, go to Window. Click here reference to open the reference window here and click here to open. Oops, that's the wrong button. By the way, there are just too many buttons and some of the buttons are quite small, so sometimes I may click the wrong button. If you click the first button, which is to import an image from the Cloud, which is what I do not want, I can see the Cloud icon now. Click on the folder icon, select the JPAG, click Open this will open, will, in this case, a tiny photo here in the reference palette so what you can do now is you can resize the reference palette. This is a vertical photo, so just resize this palette until it's vertical. Click here, which is the feed photo or feed the art to the canvas. And again, resize resize the canvas here. I think the touchscreen is is misbehaving. So just resize this. You may not need to resize, but it's good to resize, especially if you're using a display that is kind of small. So you can resize this to something that is much smaller so that it doesn't block whatever you are drawing. So now when you are drawing, as you zoom in to draw, you can still see your reference photo. 7. Let's draw: When it comes to creating digital art, there are many ways to go about doing the same things. For example, if I want to delete this quick sketch that I have on the canvas, I can actually press the delete button, or I can press this clear button. This is the one with a lot of little dots in a circular manner. I can press this or I can select the eraser eso two here. And select the thing that I do not want to erase it. So there are many ways to do the same things. So creating digital art is sort of like a puzzle. You have to find how you can create and after a while, you will get used to the workflow and it will be smooth. It's more about practicing, experimenting and finding your workflow. Let me just do a select O, Control A, and press delete. That's another way to delete. I'm going to hit the keyboard shot card B to have the brush tool selected, and make sure on the layer palette you are drawing on the correct layer. If the layer palette is not visible, go to Window and click layer, so that's visible, and I usually have my layer palette at the bottom right side. Now there is only one layer and I'm going to create another layer for the color. Maybe another layer. Maybe layer one, I can rename it as draft. Click on the settings icon, the very small icon there. That will open up this option where you can rename the layer. So let's call this draft. For the second layer or the layer in the middle, I call this color. Or you may call it something else. Try to name the layer. Try to make the layer name descriptive. Maybe I should not have called this color. Maybe I should have called this body. Because later when we are drawing, we may want to have a layer for the head, a layer for the whiskers, a layer for the details, a layer for the leg, different layers for different objects. And you'll understand why later on. For the top layer, let's call it line for the line art, press enter, and now we have three layers. Okay. Let's click on the draft layer, select your brush here or press the keyboard cart B. I'm going to select a light blue color. The blue color doesn't matter, so just follow along. Just, um, you know what, create a draft for the lion that you see here. By the way, I'm choosing a toy to draw so that you don't have to worry too much about copying the exact look. What I want you to focus on when following the tutorial is to know that some of the tools exist, some of the workflow exist. Yeah, that is more important than replicating the exact look, especially when you are a beginner. So just create a draft of the lion first. Okay, we have bigger leks here at the bottom. Use Spacebar to move around, Spacebar and click to move around. If the image is not in the correct place, you can use the move tool here. And you can click that, or if you don't know the keyboard shortcut of the move tool is actually V. Sometimes I would actually forget the shortcuts because I use too many drawing software and the shortcuts the keyboard shortcuts are actually different, sometimes different across different apps. Press V and you can move this draft to different areas on the canvas. So let me just put it here. Next, I want to reduce the opacity of of the draft layer. And I can see there is this purple thing that's going on. So it seems like I am in selection mode. So if you see dotted lines and you see the white canvas and there is purple, it means you are in the selection mode, so you may want to go to select D select. Yeah, that's keyboard shortcut Control D. Okay, so now we have a draft line art, and we have set the opacity down so that when we are drawing, we won't be too distracted by this. And now we should draw. Oh, by the way, I forgot to tell you about the pen that we should use. If you have selected a pen earlier, great. But if you have not selected a pen, maybe let's take a look at the brush palette now. These are the different brushes that are available. So the brush that we will use for this tutor will be pen. And I have some favorite brushes here. To test the brushes, select the line art layer, select the brush that you like, and just test. I'm going to switch to black here. And under brush preview or brush settings, you can increase the size of the brush so that you can see how the brush actually looks. Or you can increase the brush size using the keyboard shortcut square brackets. So this one is to increase brush size. This will decrease the brush size. And using keyboard shortcut is actually much faster. Okay, so this is the solid pen brush. Let's try the ink brush. Yeah, so just test different brushes and see how they look. And if you want to clear the brushes, just click here to clear. I mean, control space bar to zoom in and take a look at the ink brush. This looks like a nice brush. There is texture, it looks nice. If you want to download more brushes, you can click here on the Cloud Download and look for more brushes to download. Some of the brushes are free, some are not. One of my favorite brushes is called fill. By the way, when you have located all your favorite brushes, it may be good to do a screenshot of all your favorite brushes and save them somewhere so that when you reset your UI, or reset the brushes, you will still have that list that you can refer to in the future to re download those brushes. So I'm going to look for the field brush that I like, and it's here. I hope I can download this because it says here it's premium and usually premium means it's not free. So it says here that double clicking will enable add a brush. So Okay, it's downloading. I actually added the brush accidentally two times. Let me just delete one of the extra brushes. This pop up will appear, click Delete. If you accidentally delete a brush that you actually want, you will have to go to the brush library to find it again. So Field brush is a brush that I use quite often, so I'm going to click on this and drag it all the way up so that it goes to the top. Where is it? Oh, it's still at the bottom, drag it all the way to the top here. And, for our tutor, we'll be using the pen and the field and we may use other brushes as well, maybe the airbrush or the blue brush. Okay, there is the airbrush here. Maybe we will drag this up as well. Yeah, drag the brushes that you use more frequently up and you can actually create a folder of your favorite brushes. I will highly recommend you ducate the brushes and then put them in your favorites folder. I accidentally dragged out the brush preview palette. Anyway, this is not useful, let me just close this so that I can have more space here. When you click on some of the brushes, you can actually see additional settings at the bottom, so you can actually tweak those settings. And one of the settings that I tweak very often is the brush size. Let's draw now. If there are any straight lines on the line art layer, just Control A to select everything, Control X to delete. Control X is actually to cut so that you can paste, but you can also use Control X to delete stuff. There are just many ways to go about doing the same thing with digital art. Let's select the brush, select the pen, and let's select the correct layer, the line art layer, and draw. For this lion, we have the face like this. If you want to undo, you can press Control Z or use the button here. For touchscreen, there is no double tap undo, which is quite unfortunate here. Okay, so it looks like my line is not that smooth. Let me just undo a few times. Yeah, just try to draw a few times. Anyway, you don't have to copy exactly what you see. I just want you to get a good feel of the workflow. Okay, so just try and draw the different shapes that you see. Let's have the main. We have the body which is smaller. And when you're drawing, try to close up the lines don't draw like this where there is a gap, try to close up the lines so that there is clarity so that your drawing is easier to read. We have the hand here. We have another hand here. I'm using the space bar. Space bar, click to drag to move around. It is very easy to move around the canvas like that. If you want to zoom in and out, it's Control Space bar. Control Space bar will let you zoom in. Alternate space bar will let you zoom out like this. Practice the space bar movement. Nops Okay. So, we just need to draw the basic shapes just to understand the workflow. Okay, we can see that my body is kind of big, but it's okay. Maybe I want to delete the face here so that I can draw a bigger face. Maybe I can do that. I'm going to select the eraser Lasso tool here. Now, if you look at the manual for two, there is no keyboard shortcut for eraser Lasso. This is a tool that I use quite often. So you can actually set a keyboard shortcut to some of the tools that do not have keyboard shortcuts. I'm going to control, sorry, I'm going to click here and I'm going to go to preference and settings and look for shortcut settings and look for two because eraser Lasso is under two. This window is a bit too small, so let me just track this and look for eraser Lasso two, which does not have a keyboard shortcut. I'm going to click here, click and did, and now I can input my keyboard shortcut. I'm going to put R. I'm going to have it as R and press Okay. For the eraser two, the keyboard shot cut is E, and for the eraser lasso, I have it as R. Now I can press brush to change to eraser to change to eraser and R to change to the eraser lasso too. This will allow me to select what I want to erase and erase it instantly and switch back to the brush, press B. Now I can maybe draw a bigger face. I'm actually not sure whether this is as big as earlier. Okay, this looks, I would say, good enough. Remember, it doesn't need to be precise. Draw the shapes as you see. 8. Colouring: Now let's color the drawing. So we no longer need the draft layer, so we can actually click here on this little circle here to disable the visibility of the draft layer. But the draft layer is actually still there. So if you still need to drop, you can enable this layer. But if you no longer need this draft layer, you can just click the layer, select the layer and click here on the trash icon to delete it, which I will do because I no longer need that layer. Okay, so let's color. So for the lion face, it's yellow. Let's select yellow. So the color wheel that I have here is, I mean, looks like this. You can actually switch to different color palettes. So there's the color bar, and there is the color wheel. I like this and there is also the color wheel triangle. This is also good. Let's just go with this. So let's select a yellow that looks kind of like this yellow. Or you can actually eye drop. So click the eye drop here and click here. Once you click the Eyedropper, this will highlight and you can click anywhere on the reference photo to select a color from the reference photo. For example, if I click here, you can see the color is black. If I click here, the color is yellow. If I click here, the color is red. So let's go with the yellow. Before we color, let's make sure we are working on the correct layer, the color layer. Select the color layer and I'm going to select the field bucket two here, or you can press the keyboard shortcut G to switch over. Now, some of these options will appear. What you want to do is to select there are two options here which are quite important. For reference, you can use Canvas or layer. If you choose to fill with the layer reference and you have the color layer selected and there is nothing on the layer right now. This is what's going to happen. It's going to fill everything. What you want to do is to click here under reference, select Canvas so that you can look at the canvas and all the layers so that you can look at everything to determine how the field bucket should work. I want to fill the face and now it's filled. Now, after you fill, please zoom in and have a look and see whether the color will go to the edge. So let me just undo this because I actually have the setting set here to expand to three pixels. If you fill, and you can see some white edges. So you can see some white edges here. It's not that clear, but it's a bit of white because if I switch to the brush tool and I color, I can actually add some color here. So if the color does not fill up to the edge, click here to expand it by a few pixels. I'm going to expand it by three pixels, and I'm going to control minus to zoom zoom down, and now I can fill this and just fill all the different parts. With the yellow as necessary, we have the red, press the eye dropper, keyboard shot is I and select the red and switch to the field bucket G, click here, and now we have this. I realize that the head should be bigger, but it's fine, we should leave this as it is. Okay, so I have a straight dot here. Let me sometimes to find out where the straight dot is, you can enable or disable the layers palette. So the straight dog is actually on the line art layer. So let me press R to use the lasso eraser and delete this. Okay, let's move back to the color layer. For this lion, I actually use line art to draw the things that affect form. For things like the eyes which are actually on the face, it's not protruding, I will not use the black line to draw that. Instead, I will I will draw a shape instead. Let's press the keyboard shortcut B to go to select the brush on the color layer, we can draw the I. Let's just draw Ops wrong color. You can press D. You press D, the color will reset to black and white. Oops, this is black. You can press, what's the shortcut? You can press X to switch between the primary and secondary color. The color at the top is the primary color. The color at the bottom is the secondary color. You can press X. I actually wanted to press Shift X, but that's a shortcut for another app. Let me press X to switch to white and now I can draw the Is. Okay, so if you have to undo, just press Control Z or the short cut. So let's fill the I with white, press G again, click inside the area, click inside the area. So this will only work if the line is enclosed. If the line is broken, let me show you what happens. Let me press. If the line is broken like this, it's not enclosed. When you press the fuel bucket, the color is going to leak out. So it's very important to close the line properly like this so that when you feel it, this will feel properly. This is not smooth. We can zoom in, control space bar to zoom in and smooth this out. We can switch to black, press D, and this will switch to black, and we can throw an I here G, fel bucket. Bush G, brush X for the white. And here. So by using keyboard shortcut, you see that you can actually work really quickly. Okay, I want you to save your file right now, Control and save it. So you should make a habit of saving your files every once in a while. Next, let's draw the purple belly. So another way to use the eyedropper is to Press turn it. When you are using the brush, you can press turn it to enable the eyedropper temporarily. So let me show you. This is the brush and I can press alternate and I can click here on the purple to select the purple color. If the purple is not to your liking, just use the color wheel here to select the correct purple. So for the color wheel here, you can select a lighter purple, darker purple, or saturated purple. Let me just zoom in here and draw this. I think this looks good enough. So let's press G and fill this. If you want to make this bigger, you can press brush and draw another shape here and press G to fill it again. Yeah, so to feel it again and again. Now, this purple is actually replacing the yellow behind. Because if I want to, let's say, erase, let me press the eraser button here. If I erase, this will actually erase to the white canvas. If I want to have more orange or yellow back. I have to press a turn it. I drop this and just try and pin this back. If this happens, it means it's in eraser mode. Sometimes when things are not working well, it could mean you are not using the correct tool. I selected the wrong tool and undo, switch to brush. Let me just try and smooth this out with the yellow brush hoops. This looks fine. I can press D X for the white label here. Press G to fill. So next, I want you to do the same and draw the nose and mouth and the whiskers. Let's add more details. So we can see some color stripes here for the leg. Let's zoom in. And let's just let me show you a technique. So I'm going to fill this with yellow. I'm going to press I for eye dropper and G to fill this with yellow. So now I'm going to create all the what's that? The different colors. You know what? Maybe I can undo and redraw the leg to make this longer so that it's easier to see. This is where working with layers is going to be very useful. Now, if I disable the color layer, you can see the line art, but I cannot disable the legs. I want to make the legs longer, which is to say that because of the drawing that I have here, all the lines are connected, I have to erase the leg to redraw the leg. Let me go to the line art layer and press the R for eraser less. Let's redraw this. Let's just erase this first. Let's perform some surgery to erase and redraw. This is you can see the erase is not perfect. But it's okay. You can actually go in and press the eraser to E and try and smooth out this. When you press E, or you can choose the eraser here, you can adjust the brush size. Try to smooth this out. You may not need to do this, but you can do it if you want to sometimes to smooth out the line to make it smoother. Okay, let's click a new layer. Let's create a new layer. Let's call this link. Enter, let's have the leg below the line art, which in this case, I'm going to call change it to a different name called line body, and the leg, I'm going to call it line leg. Okay, now I can switch to black, press D, press B for brush, and draw a longer leg here. Oops. Is it working? Okay, I have the eraser selected as a brush, so that's why it's not working. Let's draw a longer leg here like this. Okay, I still have some space beneath, and let's draw this feed here like this to give the illusion that this fit is actually behind this part here. Okay, let's enable the colors. You can see the colors are wrong. So press R for the eraser lasso. Select this. Oops, I deleted the wrong layer. So always work on the correct layer. So that is how you perform some corrections if need to. Okay, so now I'm going to press B, sorry, B. Actually, I'm going to press I to select the color yellow, G to feel the color here. Okay. 9. Alpha lock: Now I'm going to teach you how to use the Alpha lock feature to make coloring a bit more easy. To color the stripes here on the leg, you can actually let's just choose some random colors here. You can actually just color like this. Oops. Notice the color actually spill out here. If you color like this, the color can actually spill out like this. To make sure I am coloring only on the correct area and within the selected area, I can enable Alpha lock. Alpha Lock will lock the Alpha channel. Alpha channel contains data regarding the opacity for pixels, color or paint on a layer. I'm going to disable the line art so that you can see the pixels or in this case, the paint or color more clearly. The colors that you see here are actually on a transparent background. But this transparent background is made to appear white so that it's less distracting compared to the real transparent background, which you can enable by going to the menu, view transparent background. So when you have that enabled, you will see checked marks, and this is actually the real transparent background, which you can see can be quite distracting. So let me just press alternate V T for the shortcut to make the background white again. When you have Alpha lock, this will lock the transparency, so you will not be able to draw on the locked area. And when you have the cursor over the locked area, it will show you a cross. So now you can only draw on existing pixels. So now I want to switch to a different color. Let's have red, and I can paint here. As I paint across like this, I paint from outside across. It doesn't paint outside because I can only paint on existing colors, which is here. This allows me to paint within areas very easily. And this is great for coloring precisely within areas. As I reach the bottom here and I color, notice the color will still spill out. That's because I am painting on existing color and there is existing color here. At this area here, I will need to be a bit more careful and try to paint slower so that the color is within the line. Let me go back to white and paint here. Maybe I can add a white here as well. Yeah. So this, I think, looks good enough. And now you can do the same for the other leg. So let me just color just with a few different colors. Okay, so this is what we have so far. I can see some orange here, so I will want to maybe eye drop the orange, press I, click here for the orange. We are still using Alpha lock, so let me press eye again. I lost the color when I zoom in. I can paint here. If the brush is too small, just press the square bracket, the right square bracket to make this larger. Yeah. Like this, or you can do this, use the green too and feel it like this. That's pretty quick. By the way, after you're done using the Alpha lock, it's a good habit to disable it. 10. Cut and paste: I want to draw the colorful ribbons that are coming out from the exterior of the yellow face, and this is going to be a bit challenging because the yellow ribbon is supposed to be coming from underneath the face. But with the line that I have here, I actually want the yellow ribbon to go across this. Let me show you what will happen if I create a new layer on top of everything. Let me select a different color here, select the brush and draw. Yeah. You can see as I draw, this does not look good. I want the ribbon to come out from beneath the black line and go above the black line here. This is where using layers earlier will help. Sometimes before you start drawing, you should try to think about the sequence of drawing so that you can create the look that you want. Now I have to think about how I can extract the face and have the face above the lion man, which is red and later I can create the ribbons between these two layers. Maybe I can extract the line art. The line for the face definitely needs to be extracted. What we can do is disable the colors first, go to the line four D, and we can use the lasso two here. It's here and we can select the line art like this. We can press sorry, Control X to cut the line art, create a new layer and control V to paste. This will actually paste onto a new layer. Actually, I don't even need to create a new layer. I will paste onto a new layer. So to make this layer clear, let's call it line face. So for the layers for the layer beneath, let's call it ribbon since the layer is already there, and let's enable the colors again. It may seem like nothing has changed, but we now have the line art for the face on a different layer. Now if we try and paint the ribbons in, let's use brush, a green brush and paint the ribbon in but notice as I draw, I am drawing below the line art of the face but above the line art of the body. I can draw like this and I can use G for the field bucket to fill fill. Do this for all the other whiskers. No whiskers, sorry, the ribbons. Yeah, draw all the ribbons that you see using this method. It is good to have overlapping elements because they will make your drawing look more three dimensional. Okay, so I need to add another viscer on the bottom right to balance this out. GG, that's the field bucket. I realize I had forgotten to draw the year, so let's draw the years on the face layer. If I draw it on the face layer, the years will sorry, the line will be above the ribbon. So I will want to draw it on the line body layer so that I can draw the year behind like this. This one is a bit clearer and go to the color layer and use a turnip for the temporary eyedropper and color this or just use the fill bucket. G, color this. And I noticed there is some darker gradient, darker color inside. So let me make this darker two oops. Press brush for the correct two and color the year this. Okay, this is what we have so far. 11. Clipping mask: Now I want to show you another tool called clipping mask. I can see some pattern on the purple belly and the pattern was drawn with white. If I switch to a white brush and draw, Notice, it's difficult for me to draw the pattern because the color will spill out of the purple. So this is an issue and you have to figure out how to solve it. Let me just undo undo, undo, undo. The reason is now the purple is actually on the same layer as the yellow. So what we can do is we can use the less. You know what? Let's use the gradient and see if it works. Use the gradient to, select the gradient to. Press turnip to get this yellow and fill this purple. That will remove the purple, remove the white label as well. Create a new layer on top, call this belly and select brush, turnt to get the purple again. This purple seems to be a bit too dark, so let's have a lighter purple. Okay, this looks good as in the color looks good. Press G for the fill bucket again to fill this and maybe I want to extend this out slightly. Okay. I think this looks good enough. Okay. So now that the purple belly is on its own layer, we can draw the white pattern. Let's press D X to switch to white and select the Alpha lock to draw. So we're just going to draw very simple patterns like circles. I think leaf pattern, but we can draw circles. You can use Alpha lock to draw within the shape. This will draw onto the existing pixels. But let's see if we want some different pattern, maybe we want to switch to a star. We want to try to see whether stars or circles will look better. If we do this, we won't be able to switch to the star. We have to duplicate a new layer and draw the stars. So what you can do is you can create a clipping mask. Click here, new layer, and we will name this ball circle and click here, clipping. This will push the layer slightly to the right. This will clip onto the belly layer. Now anything you draw will only appear on the existing pixels of this layer. It looks like Alpha mask or Alpha lock, but it's a bit more versatile. Let me show you why. Let's draw some circles, patterns. You know what? Let's have a lighter purple, not white because the label is white. Okay. We have some small circles, big circles, small ones, big ones. Okay, this looks good. Let's say we want stars instead. So we want stars, create a new layer. Clip it. Let's call this layer. Star. Hide circle the belly with the circle and draw on the star layer. Let's just draw some stars. Oops. So now we have a star layer and a circle layer. And when you draw outside, you will not be able to draw outside because this is clip onto the circle, the belly layer, so you can only draw on within the area of the belly. If you don't like all these designs, you can create a new layer, clip it again and create a new design just to test out different designs. So for this design, we will have triangles and squares. So this is very flexible because you can enable or disable those layers just to test out different designs. So maybe let's go with triangle and squares. And now I want to draw the label on top. For the label, let's create a new layer and do not clip this time here and just rename this layer label. And now we can switch to brush. The easiest way to switch to a white brush is press D X for the white, and throw this shape here. Okay, so let's see if we can use the field bucket G to fill this Let's use the brush to touch up the rest. Okay, so there are some words on top. You know what? Let's just write whatever you like to write. So let me just reduce the brush size. Let's write name of the app, perhaps maybe bank, and you can, you know, add some colors here for design purposes. Yeah, add some colors. So this is on its own layer. So if you need to change if you need to change something on this layer, you can actually change it very easily. So working with layers gives you the flexibility. So if we don't need the layer, we can disable it. The toy that we have here so far looks flat because the coloring style is flat. Maybe we can use some shadows to make the toy pop a bit more. For the shadow, I will want it to be below the color layer. Let's create a new layer called shadow and drag it below the color layer. There. Now I'm selecting a brush. Maybe I can have a big brush, use the slider here. Okay, we have a big brush here. This is nice. Let's select a shadow, maybe 50% black there. Yeah. So I can add a big shadow behind like this. Let's have the light source coming from the left. So the shadow will be on the right. Like this. We have shadows here. Here, oops. Yeah, I think it looks okay. Doesn't have to be very precise, remember, as it's just a practice. We need the shadow for the ribbon as well. So let me just reduce the brush size for the brush and add some ribbon design here. Use the fill bucket to fill this. 12. Blending mode: Now that we have the layer for the shadow of the body, let's select a 50% shadow here, and draw let's create some gradation on the right side, like the shadow on the body. So if I paint like this, notice notice is just gray. It's not a darker shade of orange or yellow. So what you need to do is to set the Blending mode here. Go to the layers palette, select blending, switch it to multiply. Now when you add No, try not to add outside. Remember earlier, I teach you how to paint onto existing layer. In this case, you cannot use Alpha lock. You have to use some other technique to help you paint within the existing pixels here. Let me just undo to paint onto the existing layer without using the Alpha lock. You can control, press control and click on the existing colors that you want to paint on. In this case, I want to paint onto the body. I press Control and click onto the color body. And now we are in a mask. So outside of the purple area, we will not be able to paint, but we can paint on the highlighted or the unhighlighted areas. So we still have the brush selected, and now we can paint. So now as I paint, I can only paint onto the yellow body. Now, this shadow is kind of you can see the line is kind of solid, so it's not that natural. I want a natural fall off. So maybe I can use the air brush. Yeah, so notice as I apply the airbrush, we can see some shadowing effect. You may have to adjust the brush size. Yeah. So as I paint here, notice oops. So just paint the right side of the toy to give some shadowing effect. And this will make the toy look more three dimensional very easily. Yeah, so just paint onto the right side for all the all the toys. For the face, you notice as I paint here, it actually goes onto the face, but I actually wanted to paint the red area. So let's see what we can do. You know what? Let me just deselect everything first just to let you see whether the shadows actually work. Control D to deselect. With some shadow effect, now the toy looks more three dimensional. To paint the shadow on the red men, I will disable the layer with the ribbon. And I just want to paint the shallow on the red main. I don't want to paint it on the yellow face. So what I can do is press the wan, which is W for magic wand. I can also set the expand here to two pixels. So when I click on the red area, the selection will expand out onto the black so that now when I paint with the airbrush, I can paint onto the red and onto the yellow. If the brush is not dark enough, you can actually make it darker. Let's just paint here. I can have some shadow beneath the year as well like this. I think this looks good. Okay, let's control D. Now we can see the shadow of the face. Now, the face is actually, how should I say, kind of flat, we do need some shadowing effect on the face. Now here's the thing. If I press the one to select, um I need to be able to paint across on top of the whiskers as well. So we have another problem. We have to think about how we can paint on top of the whiskers. Or we can just paint, you know, instead of painting only on the red, we can also paint here. Yeah, this will work. Yeah, this will work. This works quite nicely. Yeah, so now we have some shadowing effect, and let's enable the ribbon again. Okay. So it looks good, looks more three dimensional now. To make the shadow even more convincing, we need some shadows beneath the ribbons as well. So we just want to paint onto the red. So same thing, press Control and click onto the color body so that we can paint onto the we can use the selection of the color body to paint our shadow. Put some shadows here ops, shadows here beneath the ribbon and make sure the shadow goes down as well. Yeah, we can have some kind of shadow here as well. This will actually make the drawing look more three dimensional. Yeah, this looks good. Oops. Remember the light source is coming from the left and the select to see what we have. Okay, we can see some shadow spill onto the face. So let's erase. Use the eraser two, I'll switch to erase or use the eraser Lasso two and select the area to erase, which is actually much faster. 13. Masking: This lesson, we will look at the layer masking tool. Layer mask, Alpha lock and clipping mask can give you the same result, but we go about doing it differently. For example, let's say I want to adjust the shadow, I want to remove more of the shadow. I can try to use the eraser. Let me select the eraser here and erase, but you can see the the eraser has the hot edge. And even for the soft eraser here, it also has the hot edge. So because there is no actual soft eraser to make this shadow soft, I will have to use some other tool. So I want to use the masking too. So let me just, you know what, paint hot shadows here first. Let me just use the lasso eraser to erase the hot shadows here first. Oops. Okay, that's good. Let me just erase all this. Now, bear in mind that what I'm doing now can be achieved by other means. For example, if you want to adjust a shadow, you can always repaint the shadow with airbrush, this and slowly get the look that you want. So to make this example clearer to see, I'm going to use the field brush with this 50% black wall. Grey, and I'm going to draw this area here, which is the shadow area. Now we have the hot shadow, and to make this shadow soft, I'm going to use the masking tool to hide the shadow. I'm going to click here and add layer mask. Now, make sure you select the shadow layer first, and when you click that a shadow, sorry, a layer mask will appear on the layer that you selected earlier. Now you can work on the layer mask. To work on the layer mask, I'm going to use a brush and I'm going to set the brush to maybe 100% black and see what will happen. Okay. So as I am drawing here, I'm actually drawing on the layer mask. I am actually masking out the shadow. Yeah, I can mask out the shadow. And if you see the adjustment is not what you want, you can actually just Control A, control X to delete the mask and now you're back to square one. This can give you final adjustment. Yeah, so this makes it easier to adjust the shadows. Or you can skip the layer mask and just use the airbrush to paint the shadow. So there are just different ways of achieving the same result, the same look. Layer mask is about hiding, about masking things away. So for example, if you want to make holes in the ribbons here, you can hide parts of the ribbon. So now I'm on the ribbon layer. I've selected the ribbon layer. I can add a layer mask and the layer mask will appear on top. Now let me just choose a brush, a pen, and draw with black. Black will mask, and white will bring back the mask. You can just test it all yourself. Now if I want to create holes here, I can just hide the pixels here by creating a mask here. Let me increase the brush size like this. Yeah, so see, I'm hiding the ribbon here and I can see through because there is a mask here. Of course, if you don't want this, it looks strange, you can just select the layer mask and click the delete button. 14. More on masking: Here's a bonus lesson on when you should use Alpha lock clipping mask or layer mask. Let me draw two letters. Letter A. Let me fill this on this layer, create a new layer and draw letter B using another color. Let's have B here and let me fill this as well. Okay. So Alpha lock will let you paint on existing layers. If I want to change the letter A to another color, be green. Let me select green. I can use Alpha lock here and I can select a brush and start filling this and turn this green. This is going to take a long time, so let me just use the field brush, select everything and turn it green. This will replace the existing color, and if I want to go back to blue I can't. I have to select blue again. And paint it. That's Alpha log replacing color. Now, for clipping mask, let me just create a new layer here and set this layer to clip. So let me switch to a brush and to a lighter color. For clipping mask, this is non destructive. So let me just draw circles here. This is the clipping mask with circles. And as I am drawing, it only shows up on the existing pixels. But this is actually on a different layer, so I can disable this and I can create a new layer and set it to clip as well, clip for this new layer, we have triangles, Hooks. I can create another layer and have a clip and this one will have stars. So this is non destructive. It's good if you want to test out different variations. And if you want to change the color of the letter A, you can still do so, go back, use Alpha lock and change the whole thing. Now, for layer mask, layer mask will hide things. Let's say I want to show more of the letter A, which is to say that I have to erase letter B or height parts of letter B. I can select Letter B here, select here, at layer mask. So a layer mask is created. Let me change to a brush that's black, and I'm going to use the black brush to hide parts of late letter B. I can create marks like this. This is quite interesting. Have a cutout like this. You can see as I draw, it seems like I am erasing, but I am actually not erasing. I am hiding because I can disable the mask and bring back letter B. So this is basically how the three tools work, Alpha lock, clipping mask and layer mask. 15. Adding details: So the drawing is actually already done, and if you want to, you can still add some details. So I see some shadowing effect here on the left side of the belly and some highlights here on the yellow body. So I have the belly here, the pattern here. So what I can do is I can actually have the shadow. Let me see if I can push the shadow oops. Yeah, I need to have a shadow for the belly itself. Let's create a Shadow. You know what? Let's create a clipping mask. Let's create a clipping mask. Let's create a new layer. Have a clipping mask for the belly. Yep. Rename it Shadow belly. And now we can use brush, airbrush, correct. Let's set the blending mode to multiply because it's a shadow layer. And let's reduce the brush size. It's a bit too slow, so let me just use the slider here and just apply some shadowing effect here. So this will only apply to the to the what's that? The belly layer like this. Notice the shadow is beneath the pattern, so we need to move the shadow layer above the belly pattern. Oops. Move it above the belly pattern. But not out of the clipping. If it goes out, just clip again, and this should go back. Now on the right side for the yellow, we need some highlights, click on the yellow body, the color body. Brush, use brush, and use the eyedropper, press a turnt for the temporary eyedropper, select the yellow here and select a lighter yellow zoom in and just what it's not that obvious. Let me just make it white. Just to have some highlights here. Okay. Just some little detail. Okay. Looks a bit more three dimensional. You can also add some shadows to the label. Okay, where's the label or the label is here. We can we can duplicate this layer. Okay, let's duplicate it. This is the button to duplicate. And let's call this shadow layer. Sorry, shadow label. And have this shadow beneath the label, and we can use the V two, sorry, to move two, which is the V and move the shadow beneath. You can see that this is a duplicate, so it's not exactly shadow. What you can do is use Alpha lock, click Alpha Lock, press B for the brush, or you know what? You can use the field brush. Let me use the field brush. And fill the whole thing, set this layer to multiply. This is the shadow for the label and press the V key to move the shadow back here. Zoom in and just move it closer just to give it some detail. Yep. Maybe we can. Another way to move is to use the oops. I actually wanted to use the arrow too, but that's for a different app. So yeah, just use the V key to move. Let's zoom out Control minus. You can see the purple thing again, press Control D to D select. Now we have completed the drawing. We don't need the reference anymore. And let's see where our toy is. Our toy is on the right side of the canvas. So if you want to move, you know, everything to the left side of the canvas, you have to select everything everything and press V. Yeah, it's really. To move it to the left side. So that's how you move everything. If there are too many layers, you can manage the layers by creating folders for the layers. Let's maybe put all the belly related layers into a folder. Click on the folder here, rename the folder, let's call this belly and just drag all the belly related layers. In. Let's see if we can drag everything in at a go at once. Yeah, I can. If I disable just now, yeah, it looks okay. Let's collapse the layer. Let's have another folder for the label. Select the two and drag it into the folder for the label. This will help with matching layers if you use too many layers. Oops, what did I press? Control Control T is the transform tool and unfortunately the UI for transform tool is not that visible. Let me zoom in for you guys to see. The anchor points are small. When in Transform tool, you can use this to move the layer or folder around. You can have the cursor outside here and there is a circular tool that appears to rotate. Or you can have this big white arrow here and you can click when the arrow is white and you can use this to scale the selection. Once you're done, press Okay. 16. Export and share your art: Now that you have completed your artwork, you may want to share this online. Before we share it, we will want to remove the unwanted white space. Press the key for the rectangular selection tool and draw a selection over the area that you want to keep. Go to Edit crop and click yes, and this will remove the white space. Now you can go to FL export and Export as the following file format. You can export as JPAP, which is the most popular file format or PNG. Now, one downside with the export format here is when you enter the resolution to export, it doesn't actually scale the other option proportionately. For example, if you adjust the width, it doesn't scale the height proportionately. So it limits to one of the two, which is not clear. So what you may want to do is go to edit. So there are these two options here, image size and canvas size. The keyboard shortcut for image size is Control turnt I, so with this pop up, you can resize the dimensions perfectly and make sure you constrain the proportion. Let's say I want to resize the artwork to 1,000 pixels white. I can do so here by typing in the number. Click Okay. Now when I export this, I can have the 1,000 pixel white J pack file. Now, do not save this file yet as MdibankPaint, because remember, you just resize this from a larger file to a smaller file. Let me just undo this and go back to the original resolution. You will always want to keep the highest resolution possible. But when you're exporting for web, you can reduce the width or the file size, the dimension, the resolution, but do not overwrite your original artwork with the higher resolution. Let me show you the canvas size. Now, the keyboard shortcut for this is Control attornt C. For Canvas size, you can do the same thing. But this also allows you to increase the canvas size. Let's say you want to increase the width of the canvas, maybe you want to draw additional toys by the left and right side. Just click here. Under with. Let's maybe have it expand up to 4,000 pixels up from what we have here right now, about 1,800 pixels. Click Okay. And now we have a larger canvas, hence canvas size. 17. Your project: This is the last lesson, and I want to give you a project that you can do to get more practice with the digital artworkflow with MinibankPaint. I want you to download this reference photo that I have also provided and I have a few more toys here. So just draw this toy and this time, draw it without the outline. I have drawn this toy with the outline just using the same method as I did earlier. But I want you to draw the toy without the outline because the look and feel of an illustration or drawing with outlines and without outlines is very different. And use the same techniques that I have taught you earlier. Use Alpha lock or clipping mask to add the details within shapes, have the layers overlap to create depth, and you can use Alpha lock or clipping mask to create uh, lines like this and use the color palette to create highlights and shadows. Yeah, try and recreate this toy using another style, a style without line art. And do upload your project so that I can see and maybe give you some critic on how you can improve. 18. Outro: So we have come to the end of the course, and thanks for following along. I hope you have a good understanding of MibanPaint the digital art workflow with this app, and I hope you have completed your project and do upload your project so that I can have a look and see what you guys have created. Thanks for watching. Do check out my other courses. See you guys in the next one. Bye.