Learn to Color with CLIP STUDIO PAINT

1. CSP01 PROMO KMR: welcome to my course on coloring with clip studio paint. Color can be intimidating for newcomers and pros alike. So here in this highly requested course, I'll teach you my techniques for coloring step by step from start to finish. My name is Kurt, and I'll be teaching this course. I began my career as a comic book colorist and 2011 and since then have been published in over 100 books from many top publishers. I've spent the last seven years teaching art online to thousands of students, hobbyists and professionals and a variety of art industries. I designed this course for those looking for in depth tutorials that will still have you coloring quickly. I know how frustrating it is, toe way through the time lapses and rambling tutorials you might find elsewhere, the ones that never seem to get around to what you need to know. So here there are lessons on all the major tools and functions involved as well. It's every step of the coloring process from Leinart preparation layer set up flat ing, rendering light and shadow and special effects. I've also included some work flows to show you how to get the most out of these techniques . In some real world examples, I'll be teaching methods I've honed over the last 17 years working with digital art. These techniques are simple, efficient, highly flexible and create a great finished product at any point. If you don't like the colors you've chosen, they're easy to adjust and dial in the results that you want As we go through the lessons. You'll also pick up tons of tips, tricks and shortcuts that you'll be able to take into your own art, whether it's for fun education or professional work. By the end of this course, you'll know how to tackle each step of the coloring process in several different ways. So if you've ever thought I like this drawing, I hope I don't mess it up when I color it. This course is designed for you. Take a look through the information below to learn more, and I hope to see you inside 2. Introduction: All right. Welcome, everyone. My name is Kurt. I am a countable colorist and art instructor online. And thank you for signing up for this course on coloring with clips, studio paint. It has been highly requested by a lot of my students in the past and somebody other courses . And this app for a long time intimidated me. There's a lot of tools. There's a lot of settings, and for me coming as a photo shop user for a long time, there are a lot of things that I found to be a little confusing and open this course to be able to demystify a lot of that because I found it to be really, really useful in. Now when I do have to go back into Photoshopped, sometimes they're things that I miss immediately. So if you're already familiar with the tools in the basics of you know how to use the AB, technically then you might skip to the to the process section a little bit later. But even as we go through the tools, I will be sharing a lot of my tips and tricks and shortcuts and things that I've learned along the way. So keep that in mind. The Thank you so much for signing up. I'm looking forward to getting started, so let's jump right in. 3. Setting up your workspace: So the first thing I want to talk about is the workspace itself. And one of the pros of using clips Studio is that it is highly flexible and how everything is and how it's set up and how it looks. And so you don't necessarily have to have yours looking like mine if you don't want to. But I will show you how I have mine set up and kind of explain why. But of course, feel free to do your own thing. These are called pallets, and I don't want this to confuse you because when we're coloring, you know, we talk about color palettes a lot. But in clip studio, this is, for example, the color wheel palette. This is the layer pallet, the tool property palette. So I will I will probably interchangeably use the term palette and windows. So again, don't let that get you. Ah, mixed up there. Now the way that I have minds set up, I am right handed. So I have most of the things that I click most often on the right side. Left handed, you might want to put him on the left on all of these pallets. You could just grab the name of the Palin. It'll turn red, you can drop it on the canvas. If you're someone that likes things kind of on the canvas, you can slide them into the edges of things and it will pop into the edge. You can slide it in between things like this, and it will pop up in the middle. And when you see it turn red like this when it turns the entire, you know, square here, Red, It's really making a new tab at the top. OK, now I've got tool properties and color history on these two tabs here, but I use color history quite a bit. What this does by default is to just show you the colors that you picked most recently. And I usually keep this pretty small because, you know, I'm not necessarily gonna go back and grab, You know, the color that I picked 50 colors ago, you can adjust the look of a lot of these particular you know, palates by like I've got mindset to size. Medium three. You can change it. You can make it larger. You can make it smaller. Just click on this little three lines right appear in the corner. Look on view, and you can adjust how that looks right below the color history. We have the tool properties, which are only going into a lot more specifics on each tool for this later. You also have the sub tools. This is You can think of this as well. They're sub tools, their tools within the tools you pick. So, for example, if I pick a last so I've actually got multiple different types of Lassiter's. Here I click on the fill the bar that looks like a bucket tool. There, you'll see. There are multiple types of of bucket tools as well. Again will go in a lot more detail in all of this stuff later. Another wheel that one's pretty self explanatory. There are a couple of different options for this, too. I have mine, said it HSV, and that makes it a square. I think if you said it to HLS, it makes a triangle. But I like the HSB myself, and we'll go into details on the color wheel later as well. Later, Window will spend the whole lesson on layers on the left side. We have the navigator I'm gonna go ahead and drop in a file. Just that we have something in here. This is one of files will be working on. During this course, I had an artist friend of mine, Rebecca Isaacs, draw this likeness of of me with the robot arm shooting a hologram of a cat so we can talk about special effects and things later. But the navigator is a good way to bank up from your canvas without having to back up from your campus. Even if I'm zoomed up really close on a campus, I can still get an overall Look at the entire picture in a lot of times were coloring it. It's useful to see and you know, is what I'm doing at this size, you know, working at that, the smaller side. So I have that open for mine. Not necessarily something you have to have, but I find it useful. There are a couple of different little buttons here. You can actually zoom in and out on your image here. With these buttons, you can go 100%. You need to see full size. You can fit it to the size of the navigator or you can fit it to the size of the canvas, which in this case, is about the same Yeah, fit to screen. If you mouse over the issue of illness, below the Navigator is auto actions and then these air. What if you're used to Photoshopped? These would be called Just Actions, and these are just different things you can automate. I'll be going through, and I'll show you how to make some of these in a lesson later and then Quick access. This is really one of the most powerful features in this app, and I'll be doing a lesson on it later as well. But it basically lets us move anything from the menus because there's some things that are kind of buried in menus up here. You can just drag them into this area and have him right there of able to you, and you can have multiple sets of actions as well and are multiple sets of quick access settings. I guess they're called and we'll be going over that later as well. I'm gonna go ahead and jump into the preferences and go through a few things that I've changed that you might want to consider if you go to file and then go down to preferences or control K, I believe is the default, and that will take us to the preferences, and I'll just start at the top. I think most of what I have here should be default. There are a couple of things I want to point out here. So now I am working on a drawing liken into a host. Graphics tablet doesn't have a screen on it, but it's just a regular growing tablet. And so I don't have any kind of touch features if you're on an iPad or something. This is probably gonna be checked if you want to be able to use your fingers as well. But I'll be using the desktop version so we're not gonna be using a touch gestures in the interface section. One thing I want to point out here. This is where you can go and decide. I'll what color that that you're part of blind. You. You can decide what color you want to have to be. You can choose between light and dark. You can also choose the density of that eso basically the good from the right and lines it up a little bit. Personally, I like things really dark. If you like him light, that is an option. I think this is blinding me, so I'm gonna put it back on dark. But that is where you can go to change that. Just go preferences in the interface performance. You should be good to leave this at the default, um, information that just shows up and your ah, when you install it, same thing with the cursor. Although if you do want to change what your cursor looks like, this is where you could go change that layer frames. Nothing really interesting here, White table. We're not gonna be using camera pass again. Not things we're gonna cover. I'm gonna skip on down to canvas now I've got mine. I think Well, the default is default, but I've got mine set to high quality. But if you noticed that it gets a little jittery or if you notice that your computer seems to bog down on high quality than just set it to the fault and that should be able to work, find, in any case now, in this section, one thing that I did do is I removed some of the options that are available here on scaling , because by default, if I click the Z or use the zoom tool and zoom up, you could just keep zooming up until, like, 3600% or something kind of ridiculous. And you end up with, like, you know, looking at pixels like this. So what you conduce If you go back to preferences and goto canvas and under scale, you can actually limit how far you can zoom in. Now I've got mine set to 400%. That is plenty for me. You somebody might want to be able to do more, but I couldn't understand why you're having a zoom up that far. Honestly, you're probably doing something wrong. So, uh, I removed everything above 400 even this might even be too high. But you can just click on any of these like the 0.78% I will probably never is amount that far either. Click, delete. And now it will. That. And so what this will let you do. You can only zoom into 400%. Won't get any bigger than that. You can't accidentally, you know keep clicking and zoom up into a pixel level like that. Now, you can still, you know, with the zoom tool. Draw a box and zoom even further. If for some reason you wanted to, you can draw a box and that will let you do that. Anyway, I'm gonna click on the fit to screen Zoom this backup under file Auto recovery. This is something you might want to turn on. I've got mine set to save every five minutes because I don't want to lose any more than five minutes of work or I get ornery. So, um I think by default, it said to 10 again, this is totally up to you. There is Ah, no rules here. But for May, I don't want to lose more than five minutes worth work, though. I've got Mindset to five on color conversion. I don't know what these things are by default, I've changed it and can't remember. But I tell you what I get mindset to. It seems to a pretty good job on the RGB profile. I've got it set to this RGB i e. C and all the numbers here and on the CME like a profile, which it, ah, well allows you to export seem like a files for print. I've got mine said to this U S Web coated swap meet to There are a couple that are similar this but is the one that's label like this. And this is the closest one that I found to the seem like a profiles that I use to print my professional work. And when they get sent to combo publishers like Image or any WR Bolt comics ever I'm working with Clip is limited and the ones that are available here, but this one seems to be the closest I've got mindset on that. I have this set to relative color metric. I think it's perceptual by default, but I've found that relative Olaru metric. I think it's how you say that word. That's what I've got mine sit on. And then for the I C. C library, I've got mine set to just the default. I didn't make any changes there. Last section is three D, which really won't be doing anything with three D in this course. You do have some options to go in and change the default figures, not something we'll be dealing with in this course, then another quick set up feature that I want to point out If you're like me and intend to sometimes work kind of quickly, I will sometimes accidentally grab one of these edges and like, change the size of my menus, which it's really that bugs May it probably bugs you. You go down a window if you got a window, and then palette Doc, fix the with of the palate dot Now this is not checked by default. I've got it checked, but if I uncheck it, I can go in here and change the size of these things. But if I don't, if I like where it is and I don't want to change it, which right now this is how I like it. I'm just gonna go back to window palette dot fix the with of the palate dark. And at that point you won't be able to accidentally grab this and change the shapes. These windows. You can still grab the pallets and move those things around, but it won't let you change the width of these, which could be annoying if you do it by accident. And then the last thing I want to point out in this section is on the workspace. Not a bad idea to go ahead and register this workspace as a material. And what this does is, um, let's see. You'll get this warning audio actions. This is basically letting us know that the audio actions don't necessarily come with this, and that's fine. So just click OK, and you'll have an option of where you want to save it. You just click on all materials and you can put this wherever you want. But I usually put mine in download. Just click OK, and that will save your workspace as a material. If you do say that into the download section of materials. If you go into clips Studio, which is actually what they call this, this window that opens on the desk time. This is clips to be a paint, a little confusing, but in clip studio, if you go into all materials and then download, you can see this is that workspace that I just saved. You click this little button right here. It will switch the sinking and will and you can sink that now as well, and it will go ahead and sink that workspace to the cloud, which makes it really easy to go back and back up later if you need to. That covers the basics on the workspace. Let's move onto the next one. 4. Opening & installing the resources: all right in this lesson, I want to go through the downloads that are available with this course to clarify any questions that you guys might have about these. We'll start with the exercise files themselves, therefore versions in here, and I'm going to start with one of the bottom. This is the exercise with just the Leinart. And this is a clip studio file so I can drag this into clip. This is the final I would recommend starting with if you're gonna follow the whole course step by step. This is where I will start. And I would recommend is the first thing once you get this open, go up to file and save as and save your own copy of this. In that way, you've got my original intact. So if you actually do something to that file, you'll always have that available. Of course, you can always come back to the course and re downloaded. That's an option to the next one is a flatted version of the file. Now, if you're a beginner and you're one to go to the core step by step, I would not recommend starting with this file. And there are a lot of tips and tricks and shortcuts that we're gonna use to even get to this point. So I don't recommend beginners starting here, but I don't want to give you guys an option that if you just wanted to start rendering, you've got an option to do that with this file. I also have an identical version of this that is a PSD file and not a clip studio file. So if you want to use in a different app like photo shop or some of the other APS that use PSD files, you do have that option. The flat colors air slightly different, but again, we can easily change those. Now, This last one is the finished version. This is the version that I actually created during this course I'm recording, You know this video after the end of it. But this is where we're gonna end up at the end of this course with all the lighting and special effects and everything done. I'm including this just as a reference point. So when you get to the end, if you want to see how yours looks and reference to mind, you can you can go into the layers and pick my colors and all that stuff, but I wouldn't necessarily recommend, you know, working from this final, I would recommend kind of doing your own. But at any point you want to go back and see exactly what I did or see what color I used, then that's an option. You will have this file available to you to download. Now this next section is totally optional. As we go through the course, I'll be explaining the setting for all the tools that I use. But I did include tool presets for not all the tools, of course, but some of the major tools that we use quite a bit during this course, things like the airbrush and auto select or the magic wine feel tool lasso Polly line. As we go through each lesson covering these sub tools, I'll be explaining my settings on those so you don't necessarily have to install these. The other thing that's important to remember about these tools is these air not, you know, perfect settings that are gonna work on every single drawing that you do, especially with some of the flighting tools, depending on the type of Leinart you're working with. Some of these settings might need to be tweaked, but if you do want to install these, it's really simple to do. I'll show you two different ways. So, for example, there's a couple of examples of the fill tool here, So if I go into the fill tool, we'll look at this in close and fill. For example, I can just grab this and drag it into the subtitle window. It's labeled in close and fill, too. If you want to rename this, you can right click it and go to settings of this sub tool, and you can go in and rename that you want to delete it just right. Click Delete Sub tool. You'll get this little pump up click delete. Same thing for the others if I switched to alas, so I can come in and drag this last so in and again you'll see it's labeled his last. So to you can rename that if you want. But that tool is the same tool that you get by default. Some of the settings are going to be tweet, but just to reiterate these are not necessary to install. You can set them up yourself as we get to the course. But if you doing installing it is an option. I've also included a link to a clip studio asset brunch that we're gonna use in the course again. I will explain that in the lesson when we get there and I want to reiterate one more time because people are gonna ask just because I'm including a tool preset doesn't mean that it's the perfect tool preset for every scenario. Once you install these, there still might be settings. And again, I'll cover this during the course. But there might be some things that we have just in here. So again, I don't want you guys to look at these as some kind of special pro. You know, tools. They're gonna solve all your problems. They're just There really is the convenience as a starting point. Many of these are really not that different from the default if they're different at all, and then the last one is the actions. I've just labeled this with my initials actions again, very easy to install. Just drag it into the actions window and drop it. It'll install it there now in mind. You can see, I already have these in stone. So if I go up and delete this set, are you sure you want to delete? Yes, that I can just drag this in and there they are, right back in there. I will spend a lesson on actions. At some point, I will talk about actions in a future lesson, but really easy to install of these. Now, the other way to install these it's the same for sub tools and actions is click on the little three linemen, you import sub tool, and then you've got the same tools here. Just click, though import those in same thing on the actions. Just go here, make sure, but mode is uninsulated import set. The process is the same. Now, throughout this course, I'm gonna be using the desktop version of Clips Studio, which is basically identical to the iPad version. But if you're on an iPad, the processes again, basically the same. First you're gonna download all the files and you can put them in a drop box. You can put them on your iPad Google drive. There's a lot of different services that are compatible really anything that is compatible with the files app. But once you get those downloaded, all you have to do, grab the file, drag it in. It'll of that file for you. Now, the first time I tried this, this is actually through the Dropbox service. It did take a second to actually install this little window. Popped up for quite a bit. So I don't know how well this works with dropbox, but if you download the files onto the iPad, you really shouldn't have a problem with this at all. You can also do this the other way by going into the menu, the little three linemen you import sub tool and then finding where you store that file, whether it's on your iPad or through one of cloud services. Any of those should work. So that explains the downloads. Let's move onto the next one. 5. Basic color terms we'll use: So even though this course is not really going to get into the nuts and bolts of a lot of color theory stuff because I covered that other courses previously I doing to cover some basic terminology just because I'm gonna be using terms throughout the course. I don't want to make sure we're on the same page. So this is the default color wheel that is included with clips Studio. There's three main color concepts that I wanted color here. The color cover here. So number one is the idea of brightness. Okay, you might hear me throw around terms like value. It uses the term luminosity in this app often for this. But if you hear luminosity, brightness, all of this stuff kind of means the same thing. And in the default color wheel, it's really measured by going up and down, and this is pretty obvious. But on the top side, you're gonna have all the brightest possible colors, and then on the very bottom, you're gonna have all the darkest colors now going left to right. You have saturation gray along the edge here. This is completely de saturated, and then as you go right, you're adding saturation until you get to the side with the fully saturated colors. Now, one thing toe. Understand here, when you're choosing values for a piece of art or something, your coloring the idea of value can really work in both directions Now, obviously, these air lighter values here and darker values down here. But you'll also notice that these more saturated values are also a little bit darker than these values on this side. So sometimes when you want a lighter or darker color, you can try going more saturated. It might not necessarily be I need to go straight down by adding black. You might go to the right at an angle, or you might go straight across adding saturation, and that value is still getting darker. And then around all of this, we have the color wheel, which really represents what's called the hue. Or you might hear it called the chroma in some places. But when we say Hugh really saying, What color is this? If I ask you what Hugh something is, this is red. This is orange, yellow, green, teal, blue, you know, purple all way around the color wheel here, and you may have heard that. Of course, you've got warm colors on one side and cool colors on the other, but keep in mind when you're coloring. If you're looking for cooler, it's all relative. If I've got these like blues and baby blues and light greens, this green starts to feel warmer. So don't think of warm and cool colors is necessarily, you know, two categories that are always absolute because it's really not the case. A lot of times, even if you have a really warm color like orange, the gray versions of that color you can. Actually I'll set one of these toe orange and this toe gray. Both of these colors are orange. The hue is exactly the same, but this is definitely cooler than this. We're not gonna do a whole deep dive on color theory, but those are the three million terms gonna hear me use quite often, brightness up and down, saturation left and right and the hue going around the color wheel. One other thing to keep in mind if you are coloring for comics or if you're actually coloring anything with black Leinart are mostly black. Leinart. Be very careful about picking colors in this area down here, because when your color start getting this dark, they start getting really close to the color of your Leinart. You start losing the contrast between the two, especially when you're printing. A lot of these dark colors look great on a monitor. Your monitor is also like a light bulb shining in your face, so keep that in mind. There's really no hard, fast rules on how dark you should get. But if you notice your colors or starting to blend into your Leinart, you're probably too dark. But that's enough of the basics on the color wheel. Let's move on to the next lesson. 6. Importing and preparing line art: that is set up a new drawings or a set up in new can. Is there really a couple of different options If you already have a drawing that you want to, you know, bring in Eclipse Studio, you can simply go into Finder or going to win his Explorer grab file and drag it into the middle of the campus and drop it, and that will create that new file. You can close this, right? Appear at the top. Where this Alexis. Because I'm gonna show you a different way. I want to create a brand new drawing. If you want to draw something and then color it in here, you gotta file new. You can also use the shortcut, their control or command, plus the letter in. And that'll bring up this dialog box now, this use of work or just some different templates that it has by default. The comic templates actually have the lead lines and things like that. If if it needs to be professionally done to be printed, we'll go into the illustration section. No, there's presets for this to a lot of different options here. You can manually change the with you can change the height, you can change the resolution. I think, by default, it's pixels or might be millimeters. But if you don't like the units that are showing up here, you can just go over to unit and change that two inches or pixels or any number of these option. I will say for anything that's going to be printed that you want to use at least 300 resolution your 300 d p I. There are some other options in here. You can pull down and shoes, or you can put in a resolution manually. You can just type, say, 400 for example, and then basic expression color. If we're gonna be coloring it, you want to make sure it's in color. Otherwise, it would just be black and white or shades of gray, basically, which is probably not what you're looking for. You can also decide whether or not you want a paper layer to be on the bottom and it defaults toe white. That's fine. You can do that if you like, or you can uncheck that and it will basically open and empty, transparent canvas. So if you want to see the difference if I leave this unchecked look. Okay. You're just seeing an empty canvas on one layer and it's completely transparent. If I close this and go back to file new and this time to use paper color, I click. OK, it starts with a white paper layer on the bottom, and then you've got your transparent layer on top. Either way is fine. There are also some pretty good comic templates under here to go back to file new and click on the comic option. There is a four commercial issue reset. And if you're drawing, you do typically want to start with a higher resolution. So I would say it's 100 pretty good for that. You leave everything else the default if you want. Look OK, but most of the time, if you're working with a publisher, they're gonna provide a template for you. Anyway, this is a good template to use, and you can turn off this the default borders by going to view brought Mark. Border. Not really something we're gonna get into in depth in this course. But I thought you might want to know about that. And this course we're gonna be working on this image as a kind of an exercise. So I'm just gonna drag and drop that back into the campus. And I've intentionally just left this a simple as possible because I want you guys to understand how to handle this, regardless of what kind of line art you're working on. For example, in this case, we have one layer. It's got the black line art and the white paper, and it's all in one layer together. Now there are ways you can color with this. You can set the Leinart to multiply. And if I make a new layer by clicking this little new raster layer option, and I drag it down below mine, Leinart, anything that I do below this is gonna show up beneath the inks because the multiply mode on the line are here, basically makes white invisible. It's not a bad way to do things. If you just want to get to something, you know, start covering something really quickly. But I do think there's a better way to handle it, especially if you're going to do anything like color the lines later, and it gives you a little bit more flexibility that I want to show you guys first. So I'm gonna change this back to normal. I'm gonna get rid of our other layer under here for now. Right? Click and delete their back to just this one. Image black and white, all on the same layer. Now, lips video makes this really easy to put these lines on a transparent layer, which is better. It's better for our purposes, though. If you go up to edit, you'll see an option for convert brightness to opacity. This is a very, very handy trick. You click on this. What you're going to see is that it's going to remove all of that white from the background . Now. We just got our Leinart on a transparent layer. This would be much easier to deal with or anything that is on a menu. Let's say like that Edit, convert to brightness. Or, you know, maybe there's something some view you want to toggle often on that you click on quite a bit . That's where this these quick settings can really come in handy. Now, I've already added a button for this here, so I'm gonna go ahead and delete this and show you how this works. If you don't have this open. Just goto window quick access. You can put it wherever you like, and it once it's open, click on click access settings or quick access settings. Actually, it opens up this this menu. Now, this is very cool, because what this does you can. It shows you the by default. It opens up to the main menu. This file edit animation. This is the same thing you're seeing across the top. If there's anything at all that you want to be able to just create a button for you just like, for example, that ah, what do we just used their The brightness to opacity go down to edit, which is where it was? Roll down a bit And here it is, brightness to opacity. I could just drag this right into my quick access Barbie here. If I go back to where we were. We were just one layer with the drawing and the paper, and now click this convert brightness to opacity. You'll see it does the same exact thing as it did by going up to edit and clicking it here , and you can see I've already dragged in a couple of different options here, and we'll talk more about these as we move through the course. But that's something that I've learned to use quite a bit is that there's something bigger than a menu and you don't want to have to go up to the menu right button Ford and quick access. I'm gonna rename this layer just by double clicking on where it says layer one I'm going to name it thinks I in K s the hit inner. Now, if I make a new layer by either clicking on the new raster layer option or shift control in , I can drag it below. And now, for example, if I fill this with white using the pill tool here, it now looks the same as it did before. Except now my extra transparent layer. This is gonna come in really handy later. Now, by the way, by default, whenever you create a new layer, it's gonna create it right above whatever layer you have selected. So if I delete this white layer just by right clicking it and click delete layer because this is what the only later we have right now in the stack If I click this new raster layer , and I put it on top of the one. But I'm currently on clicking that I could have talked today. You can see that it continues to make new layers on top. All you have to do to drag him down is literally click it and pull them down. You see that red line that's showing you where that layer is going to pop in? That'll be really useful. As we're moving layers around the stack here. We're gonna talk a whole lot more about layers in a lesson coming up shortly. But first, I want to talk about the tools that we're gonna jump into that next. 7. How to get around the canvas: in this lesson. I want to briefly talk about the tools Bulls themselves, actually just switching between the tools, and then we'll kind of go into each one of these a little bit more debt. Now I have all of my tools on the far left because, honestly, I don't really click them very often. You'll notice that next to a few mouse over some of these that they all have little letters next to him. Those letters are the default keyboard shortcuts, So if you look at my Kershaw, you'll see right now it's a last so and I can change it to a wander and auto select. It can change it to the bucket tool. I can change it to all sorts of different tool options without ever having to leave the campus. And this say, it was a lot of time having a go over here and, you know, click on things. Another are things around the workspace that I might click. But for tools, it's much faster to just use keyboard shortcuts. And if you don't know what these are by default or you want to know how to set these up, no final and then shortcut settings and that will open up to this window here. It might open up two main menu by default. If it does, just grab this menu and click on Tool and you can see all the different tool settings that I have set up or all the basic tools. And I have changed a lot of these from the default because I really don't want to lift my left hand off the keyboard. Okay, so everything has been mapped to my left hand, and I'm gonna use more anything else. And if you want to change these, it's very easy. Like if I want to set Grady int tool to a letter, I just click on Ingredient that it shortcut and they'll open this little box here I can click, say the letter I. Now it's filled that to box with I and click add it to create that shortcut, one of delete one. Just grab it at delete, and it's gone now. You can also create shortcuts for these sub tools within each one of these tools. So, like, for example, right now we're on the lasso tool, and the last so is actually just one of many different types of selection area tools. Now I So I have keyboard shortcuts. If I go into selection area, you'll see that I have shortcuts for the last. So here and the poly line here, I've got an E for last. So in the A, for probably like you don't have to sell yourself blank this but those air two types of lassos that I switch back and forth to pretty often you can actually go in and create shortcuts directly to the tools with in your main tool setting. The first tool is the zoom tool, and I use this tool all the time and you'll see me zooming in and out and pending around the campus around this course. And so when you see this happening on what you guys understand, why so by default, when you click on the Zoom Tool where you clicked the letter Z, which is, I think that actually is the default. He wore a shortcut for it. It will open up the zoom tool, and it's got a plus sign on it. That plus sign means we're right. Click. It's going to zoom. Okay, now if I hold down the letter not the letter, but the modifier, Ault or option? If you're on a Mac, you see that it switches to a minus sign. Now it zooms back out. I let it go. I can zoom back in now. You can also draw a box with this tool. Like if I'm gonna zoom up on his head, I could just draw a box. It'll zoom that up. Now I'm also panning and I do this. We're not even thinking. I'm also panning with the base bar, though, as I've zoomed up here and now I want to move over the cat's head. I hold down the space bar and you'll see that the cursor changes into a hand. But when I hold down that space bar, I can grab the canvas and move it around. I do this kind of subconsciously without even thinking now that I've done it for so long. But Z will bring up your zoom tool space bar will let you pan around, and it saves you a lot of time from having to zoom in and out when you're trying to get different places. You can also use the navigator for this. If that's more comfortable, like right now, you can see this red box represents the shape of this box here. So I can if I want to move down to his hand, I could just grab that box and pull it down. I can slide over to the cat's tail, um, to his head and you consume with these here, which I mentioned, but on the far right, there's also a fit to screen which will immediately zoom you back out to sea. Everything. That's something you can practice coming up, holding down, all to zoom out that may up again and then pending around the space bar. 8. Picking colors from the canvas: all right, this lesson that it's gonna be a quick one. I want to cover something that I use so much that I kind of take it for granted that I realized I didn't cover it during any of the other lesson. So in this lesson, we're gonna talk about the eyedropper tool. Now, there is a tool you can click on over here, but this is another one of those tools that I really never click on, and I would say most people don't. The reason for that is the default behavior and clip studio. Whenever you click the right click button on the pen, it will switch to the eyedropper tool. Now, what this does is pick the color from the campus, and this is something that you'll see a lot of digital artists do quite a bit, So I've got three colors here, just kind of show you how this works. So right now I am using the air brush tool. But if I switch to one of the pans, one of the other brushes doesn't really matter. It works the same in all cases, so as a hover over. And I'm not actually touching the Caymus Right now, I can right click and you'll see that it changes to the eyedropper tool and you'll see that the color over there on the color wheel is changing to every color that I choose. Green to red to yellow, white, whatever the blank and grab that. It's a really fast way to grab colors from the campus without having to go to your color wheel or in your color history. This is also really useful if you want to blend two colors and make it really ah, a smooth transition across here so I can grab this blue with the eyedropper. Just hold down right click to grab it and, like, pull it over and this brush has a little bit of a passage to it, and you can see where it's blending with this red. I'm getting colors that didn't exist before. I'm getting this kind of purple color here, and if I want this transition to be smooth, er, I can just continue to grab from these in between tones to make it a smooth as I want. It helps to have a little bit of a passing in the brush this way, too, and someone's going to ask that this is a pure paintbrush that is available for free in the clip studio assets. So this is a quick one, but nice the eyedropper tool. 9. How to adjust colors quickly: in this lesson, I want to cover a tool that is well, it's not actually much of a tool, I guess, technically. But it's the hue, saturation, luminosity, tonal correction if you want to be technical about it. But I really use it a lot like a tool. And so I want to show you guys quickly how it works. So first I'm gonna select this little blue dot that I have here. Now. There's a couple ways to find this. You can go up to edit and tonal correction and hue saturation luminosity. Or I have a keyboard shortcut set to control or command H, and that will open it up again. If you want to set your own, refer to the lesson on the keyboard shortcuts for that. So here's how this works. There are three sections hue, saturation. Luminosity, as you slide across, is sort of like swinging around the color wheel so you can see it's changing from the original blue into more purple, into more magenta into red into yellow alway across. And it will go basically all the way around the color wheel to the opposite side, all the way to yellow. Now, starting in the middle again and swinging the other direction. You'll get into more teals and greens and all the way down, actually into the same color on the other side. You can think of this as swinging from here to here and then back from here to here. So it's just swinging us around. The color wheel saturation does just what it says it does if you move it to the left. It's just like moving to the left on the color wheel were de saturating the color all the way to gray. Or you can pull it all the way of the right and you'll get the most saturated version possible. And in the last one, luminosity brightness. Moving it to the left makes it darker or going down on the color wheel. Moving it to the right increases the brightness all the way to white. Not everyone thinks about colors in these terms, especially if you're like me and you've done a lot more digital painting. The real painting I do tend to think in terms of the way the colors are laid out in the color wheel. So for me, this window makes sense for my process not everyone thinks about color this way. You might prefer to go into the color picker and visually see it, but for me it kind of matches my thought process and how I think about color. One more tonal correction I want to talk about is a levels adjustment. Now. This is found under edit tonal correction level correction. I've got mine said to control de, you don't necessarily have to, but that's what I got mindset to because I I tend to use this at the end of an image. And that's why you guys are seeing this on a pay that's already done. Now I'm actually satisfied without this page looks. This is the version that was sent to the printer. Here's how little correction works. There's three sections here. The left side, as you pulled toward the right, will darken the darkest areas of the image a little dark and everything to an extent, but it's kind of dark in the dark parts more. You can see that especially like if you noticed this bright area on his head, you can see it's not changing quite a ZMA uchuari, as the rest of his skin is. I pull this in here, right? The left side, by default is all the way to the right. But as you pull it to the left, it will brighten the brighter parts of the image and the middle. You can think of it as sort of ah contrast adjustment overall. So if you pull it to the right, it will tend to add more contrast. You pull it to the left, it will tend to remove contrast. Now, each channel can also be adjusted separately. So if I want to switch to read here cause by default, it goes RGB. But if I go to read, I can increase the brightness on just the reds, or I can increase the darkness on just the Reds. Not a lot of red in this image, so it's not making much of a difference here. Green can. You can see it really changes it pretty dramatically because there's a lot of green in this image. It's actually pulling it toward purple, and then you've got the blues, and there's a good bit of blue in this, too, so you would see the difference here. Then you have output at the bottom. This left side when you pull it in, it's actually just limiting how dark the entire image can get. So when it's all the way over to the left, you're going to get, you know, deep blacks. But if I move it in, it's going to start lightening this toe where it's only gonna get his dark is what I have marked here, not something I use very much. But if I get to the end of an image and I realized that, you know, overall, I think there might be some sections are a little too dark. Pulling this into the right will sometimes help with that. And by the same token, if something is too bright, pulling this in will limit how bright the image can get. So it's basically a way to limit the dynamic range of your image. And the closer these are together, the Mauritz gonna lose contrast in the image. Now. One other tip for using this. If you have a layer and you open up this level adjustment and make corrections and click OK , they are forever baked in. Unless you immediately click on do it's going to stay there regardless of what else you do there's no way to undo it after you've moved forward and save the image. So the way that I prefer to use this is with an adjustment layer or with a correction layer . Now I will cover adjustment layers of correction layers and a lesson toward the end. But if I right click this and go to new correction layer and then level correction, I get the same thing. I get the exact same options I did before, but when I click OK, you can see that this is on Lee on a separate layer and it's affecting everything below it . So a lot of times, if I wanted to just affect the colors of something and not the Leinart, I will actually put this in between the inks and the colors. You can turn this off and on. It's easy to adjust. You can adjust the capacity of the effect, so it's not a strong necessarily. There's lots of options you get. And again I would cover some of that more when we get to that section. Of course, these do include a mask is well and again, I'll cover mask later, but but this is a way to limit where that effect ISS. So if I wanted to go in and it not have it not affect this particular layer, I can adjust that with a mask, and I'll covered Mass later on in the course. 10. How to select with the lasso: The next tool we're gonna talk about is the selection area tool, which I'm going to call the lasso tool because that's about the only one that I use. And it's one that's I would say it's most commonly known as the last tool. It's very, very flexible, and it does a lot in clip studio. I'm going to zoom up on this cat's head here and we're gonna show how this works. Now what I've done. We still got our Leinart on the transparent layer, and below that I've just got a layer that's filled with white. We don't know how to use the field tool we're trying to cover in a second look the bucket. Make sure that refer to editing layer is checked. Make sure you're on this layer, which I renamed to flats and just fill it with white. But I just fill it with white, and that'll fill that layer with just one solid white color. But the lasso tool was for making selections, though If I draw a shape here and lift my aunt or my mouth, it's gonna close that shape. If I try. If I draw it, no matter what kind of shape that I draw by default. It's just going to create a new selection each time whenever it closes that shape the default behavior, you're going to see this little selection launcher they call it pop up. Now this is another thing that is highly customizable. If you don't want to show up at all, just go to view and then selection launcher. You can turn that off and that will turn off and on. There's actually some some pretty need options in here. The option on the far left will just de select it so it discomfort. Lee disappears. There is a crop which will prop the entire drawing into whatever shape you pick. If I zoom out here and draw a shape around his head and click crop, it will shrink the entire image and you lose it permanently. Just to make that clear, it will go away and just make that your option. It's not something I use very much, and let's see what else is on here. There is an invert selected area. So, for example, if I go to the field tool and for now, it's set to just refer to editing Layer and I picked a color, and I still it's gonna feel the inside of that selection. If I click on the invert selected area and Phil, you'll notice that it fills outside of the selection. It's just a way to, you know, basically flip flop your selection from you want to select what's inside you selected or what's outside. That's what this little button right here does. You've got expand selected area, which, if you click that you'll get this little window pop up. You can say I want to expand this by 10 pixels and it grows by 10 pixels, not something we'll be using. Very much drink works the same way. Like shrink, let's say 10 pixels and it shrinks it back down 10 pixels. Delete will delete the contents of that election. As you can see here, it deletes the white and we can see the transparency. I'm also using Control Z to undo. When you guys see that stuff come back, controls the by default will just undo the last thing that you did. Control Shift Z will Redux. Basically, you can see that here. We've got delete outside selection, which does exactly what that sounds like. Cut and paste. Copy and paste scale rotate. Not really. Things were going to use. There is a feel tool that's just on this bar by default. So it will feel with whatever code you have selected new tone again. If you want to put a tone in there, get that option. Now, These three over here, I added to the launcher, These air not in here by default. And if you want to do this yourself, this is Ah, hue saturation. The levels adjustment. Color balance. No. If I feel this with a color and then open up the hue saturation little button here, I can go in and shift that color without having to go into the menu. To do that, if you want to know how that's done, make a selection and then on the far right, you've got the selection launcher settings, and this works just like the quick settings that we talked about earlier. I'm gonna remove the hue saturation here for a second. So you see it disappears if I go into edit and all those options air under tonal correction , I believe yet here now if I want to add a hue, saturation slider to that window. I just drag it right over here and drop it down and you can decide, You know whether you want it. Ah, you know, in left side of this little separator or right side little separator, all these little options, their baby. But now that they're there, I can open up, you saturation. I can open up my level correction. Or I could open up the color balance all without having to go into a keyboard shortcut or the menus up here, which is kind of cool. The other thing that you can do with this lasso is if you've made a selection, let's say that I want to select this cat's head so I can go to my last so I can start tracing these lines. I'm going to show you the manual way here, but clip has a better way. We'll look at in a bit, select all the way around. And if you notice your hand kind of getting in a bind, just go out and close the selection because you can always add to it. You're gonna hold down shift if you really close right next to the cursor. There's a little plus sign popping up my press shift, we can just add to the selection. I'm just holding down shift right now and we're adding, You see, I messed up there. That's fine, because you can hold down all or option. You can see that That's changing into a minus sign. And I could hold down that and remove it from these areas. And again if this feels tedious because it is a better way, I'm gonna show you in a second. But you will appreciate it much more if you, ah know how to manually do it, though again Schifter an alter option to remove and that some of the basic functionality of how the last it works. Now I can switch to my field tool and fill that selection. The fill tool itself has a lot of amazing options. We're gonna talk about that when it is gonna get its own lesson as well. So they tune for that. But before we do this, a couple of things to know about the last. So So if you're going to add in your flat colors like this with the last, so a couple things to keep in mind, you've got all these different options over here. New selection, which is what it said to by default. This means that every time you draw selection, you're going to get a new one every single time. New selection. Now this add to selection option. Let's say that it's kind of the equivalent of permanently holding shift. So even without holding shift, I can add to these selections. Maybe you're doing something with a lot of little selections, and that's easier for you. That's an option. Same thing with the removed from selection. I don't really have to hold down anything, and it's removing everything now. To me, it's much quicker to just use the keyboard shortcuts for adding and removing from a selection, though again, I've got my selection. Hold down, shift. Hold down All that I can easily change them. This last one here is select from selection. I don't really use this it all in the last, so I do use it quite a bit when we get to the auto select or the magic one. But to show you how this works, if you have an existing selection and then you choose this select from selection, no matter what I do, it's going to choose the intersection of those two selections. That makes sense. So this is my existing selection. I'm gonna start a new one and you'll see that it's taking the first selection, and my second selection comes from that. Does that make sense? I'll do this one more time, though. Again. First I'm gonna make a new selection, and now I'm gonna make a second selection that cuts across all of this and you'll notice that it's on Lee going to end up with the intersection of those two. To me, this is more useful on the wine and again, we'll talk about that when we get to the Magic one. I almost always leave my selection mode right here. You shifted on to switch back and forth the second tool or the second setting on the last so I won't talk about his anti alias ing. And this is really important when it comes to doing your flat colors of I. Zuma really close here and I'm going to trace the inside of this flying here, and I'm gonna fill this with that orange again, switching to the field tool and just filling it and into de select. There's a couple of options. You can either click outside your selection, which is what I've been doing, or you can like this little button right here that says De Select, which is also available down here. But if I turn off my inks, I want you to notice something. I zoom up really close. You've got these jagged edges. No matter how close I get, even down to like a single pixel, the edges are jagged. This is what you want when you're doing your flat color when you're laying in those, because if you have it set to, that's what this anti aliases Right now it's said to nine. If you set this to, there's weak and, ah, what else is weak, medium and strong, and I'll show you the difference. This is with anti alias ing off. And if I used the week version and Phil, it does this little fuzzy action here along the edge here, there might be some scenarios where you want this, but when you're laying in your flat colors, this is a huge or can be a huge pain to try to deal with, because when you do switch to your auto selection tools. It won't always grab. Like you can see if I switch to that magic wand and click it, it's not grabbing those pictures along the edge. This is kind of a pain. I wouldn't recommend doing even weaker, medium or strong. Any of these. You just varying levels of of that. You can see that here. That really soft edge, maybe for your rendering. You might wanna have that, but not for the flighting stage. Now, this last section here on the last I want to talk about stabilization. Now, this is not a default option that even shows up. And I'm gonna show you guys how to change that while we're here. You see this little show? Sub tool detail, pallet. All this stuff here, this little wrench icon. If I click on that, what this does is it lets you show and hide what shows up in this box, though by default, there is no stabilization on a lasso or at least one last installed. It wasn't an option. What stabilization does that sort of smooths out your lines Really useful. You can see the little difference here between the jagged kind of Ah, shaky line, and this is smoother. This is really useful for inking, but I've really decided I like it even my last. So sometimes if you want that to show up over here, just click on the wrench, go to correction and click on stabilization. No, this isn't turning stabilization on and off. It's just making it visible so that we can change it so you can turn it off again, said it. Zero. No matter how shaky that your line is, it's not really going to do much good. Um, or you can turn stabilization on and it will. It will be a little bit slower, but it smooths out those lines, and it makes it a little bit. Ah, it's more streamlined. Basically, if you used to procreate, you've ever used that AB. They call it streamline in their brush settings. But stabilization is something that you may or may not want depending on. You know what you're doing. It does slow you down a little bit from making you know, really fast selections. You can see that It it took it a second to show up there, so you might want to put on zero if you're making a lot of, you know, intricate selections very quickly. But I found that I don't move that fast anyway, so you can play around with the numbers on this as far as how much stabilization you actually want. But the last does something I use quite often, and there's even more to talk about, so we'll cover in the next lesson. 11. Other selection tools we'll use: All right, So let's continue on with the A selection area tool or the lasso tool. We're gonna click on the next sub tool here, which is the last. So fill This one's pretty simple has a lot of the same option as far as anti Alias saying, except the difference here is that the last so feel does exactly what it says it does. When you complete a selection, it fills it with whatever color you have selected. That's it. So it's kind of a combination of the lasso tool and the bucket tour, the fill tool, one of the ways you can use this that I find to be pretty useful. So I'm gonna go to the regular last. So for a second I'm gonna quickly select this guy's head. It looks remarkably like me, and this doesn't have to be exact, and it's not perfect, but it's done. Go and clean this up a little bit, holding shift and holding on to remove. All right, close enough. Once I've got my selection done, I'm going to switch to the last. So, Phil now I don't believe last. So feel actually shows up here by default. I believe it actually shows up under the fill tool, which sort of makes sense. But it was something that annoyed me. So all you have to do in order to move this is to grab the tool like, Ah, well, go ahead. I'll move it back to show you how it works. Gonna pick the lasso, grab the lasso, feel to and drag it to the fill tool. And now you can see if I go to the fill tool Now, last so fill is actually showing up there. I find this to be annoying, so I'm gonna grab the lasso feel and drag it back to the actual lasso tool or the selection area tool technically and by default, it will drop it into this little second section here. We've got selection area and last, so fill. You can just drag this into the selection. If you don't like where a tool is, you know, you could move it wherever you want. It's one of the things I like about this that I mean, you could technically make your own little section with all the tools you want, no matter where they come from, which is kind of neat, but Now I've got my selection done. So if you will keep in mind that this last so fill tool is not actually a selection tool. It explains why, if I were to go in, even though I've got my selection already set and I do this, it fills within my current selection, which is kind of cool, though it's filling, and I'm selecting all the same time, Not the way I'm gonna show you guys to flat because Clip has better tools for it. But it is a neat trick that will help you out Sometimes it's especially useful if you have , like, a lot of little things that you want to fill. And the last thing I want to talk about in the selection area or the last letters section is the poly line. I've got a short cut for this one. I've got it set to the letter A in my case, and it will automatically Aiken jump between Letter E last so in a poly line, which I mentioned earlier. And this is basically just a point to point or political last. So if you're familiar with the Photoshopped term and this one works differently, so if I'm gonna click and I can raise my hand or your your mouse, and it will create a straight line. And then whatever I look on, it's gonna make a straight line to that point, and this becomes a selection. When I get back to that point now for the Poly Line, I do have mine said to add to quite a bit, because usually when I'm using it, I am adding to though I can go in and add to the selection. Or I can hold down Ault and take it away. If you hold down shift. The default behavior is actually make perfectly straight lines. That's why I o. R At 45 degree angles. You can kind of see how this is going around. If you need to make perfect line. That's one way to do it. I'm showing you guys all these different options for these tools because I don't want the the cool flattening tools and about to show you to become a kind of a crutch. And then you're not able to fix things the manual way when you need to, because even the tools that are in here they're really only work. When you're Leinart is very clean now. They won't work in every single scenario. So it's good to know these manual methods in case you do have to use them. You know there is one other selection tool that I will use every now and then. It's almost always I'm selecting panels, and that's the rectangle, and it does exactly what it sounds like. It does. You draw a rectangle and it makes a rectangular selection. Hold down shift and it will make squares. You can hold down all, and it will remove just like the other ones. And it has some of the same options as far as an anti alias sing and some of those things. But by default, I pretty much leave it here of there is an option to add to if you need to add to a selection, but you don't necessarily want it to be a square. Just click the add to option, and you can make rectangles that add to themselves because holding shift does like I said, like it makes it a square, which might not be what you want, but I bet you didn't know we could talk about last night tools for half an hour and still not cover everything. But let's move onto the next one. We've covered everything we really need to know for now. 12. How to make quick selections with Auto-select: all right for this next lesson on the auto select tool or magic wand. If you're familiar with the Photoshopped term, I've created two squares on a separate layer. You don't necessarily have to follow along with this. I just want to talk about some of these concepts and we'll actually put all this in the practice exercise here in a bit. And I'm probably gonna call this the Magic one is because it's a habit that I just about can't break. But it's called Auto Select Tool. We're gonna call the magic one. And just like the other tools you have the new and add and remove and the select from selection option. Now, the method that we're gonna use in this course to color this stuff and what we're gonna learn I pretty much leave my magic one on this select from selection option. Because if you click something right now, nothing selected. And if I click these squares and all of these setting their set up like this, everything is unchecked. Why did connected pixels area scaling refer anti leads? All this stuff is unchecked. Is going to select everything that is that color. If you change the applied to connected pixels on Lee. It will only select one of these squares because these two squares are not connected by anything. So if I select one and then I can still shift and add another wind if I want you or I can click, halt and remove, you know, individually select and de select each one. And the reason I'm able to leave this on select from selection is when there's no selection . It acts like it would if it was a new selection. So to me, it works best this way. You don't necessarily have to do it this way, but this will come in really handy later on when we start rendering. Because let's say that I want to render some shape in this area like this, but I don't want to go outside those lines. I could make my selection with the last so switched to the Magic one and click inside that square, and it will de select from all the areas you know that are left so that I could switch to a different color and render that and not have to work going outside the lines so it's much, much faster that way. The other setting that might come in handy for you. Here is the color margin and this sort of acts like I believe it's called Tolerance and most other APS. What the rights labeled has changed their margin as treating as same color. It's kind of confusing. What that means is, if I pick a color, let's start with this color here. I'm going to just see if this a little bit brighter and just filled this box with that color. Now this one is a little bit different from this one. So by default, if this is set to zero and I've got my one selected, if I select this, it's on Lee grabbing this color or if I still like this, it's only grabbing this color. But if I turned up my color margin and you can play around with the color of the amount on this, but you can see now it's selecting both because this color is close to this color. What this number is doing is it's basically a measure of how different that color can be read to be included in the selection. There's probably a point I do this really low Let's say six. You can see here. That's not enough for it to grab this pink. It's only grabbing to read, but if I turn this up more to 11 now, it's crabbing boat. I don't use this a time, but you might in your process. I did want you guys to know how that works, but to show you one other quick example of this in action in a way that I might use this working on a page. Let's say that I have a bunch of different circles here that are all rolled the exact same color, though. If I leave this applying to connected pixels on Lee unchecked and select one of them with the magic one, what is it like to a little select everything? And again, if I changed that to apply to connected pixels on Lee, it will only feel one of them. Well, sometimes, if you don't want to worry about changing this setting, I will use that select within selection feature that I might do a quick let's say I want to grab these three and I don't want to click three times. I might draw a lasso around all three, then switch to my auto select tool and select the color. And now it's on Lee selecting within the selection. That's what that intersect with selection does If I want to grab this one and hold down shift and grabbed this one, which to my one selected boom, those the only ones now that are selected. I do this a lot when let's say I'm zoomed way up and I'm working on a page that has a bunch of panels and the same color might appear all over the page. Well, instead of like zooming out or changing the setting or trying to figure this out, I'll just draw a quick selection around that area, which to the one and then select it. In that way, I'm able to just select those two without having to zoom out or change tools or change. You know, the tool settings that about covers what we need to know now. For the magic one, it's time to move on to the field tool, which does a whole lot more than you might think 13. Adding color to your selections: All right, So for this lesson, we're going to talk about the fill tool, and it is extremely powerful. And clip City. It's one of the coolest tools and much cooler than the bucket tool you might find in other APS. And in order to show off kind of how these concepts work. I'm gonna draw on my thing slayer. Just a couple of close shapes, OK? It doesn't really matter what shapes they are doesn't really matter. But I'm just gonna draw some shapes here. But that was on my inks later. So I'm gonna go down to my flat slayer, and if you'll remember, this layer is just filled with white. There's nothing else on this layer. Now, if I go to the fill tool and I pick a color like this blue and the basic field tool, I guess what would be closest to photo shops if you're familiar with that, would would just be to uncheck everything here. Okay, Uncheck this one or margin zero uncheck everything else. Capacities at 100 it is set to refer to the editing layer, though it's on Lee looking at the flats layer which has nothing on it. except this white color. If I try to feel this circle, it's not gonna do anything because it's not even aware of the circle. Okay, we only we don't have anything on the flats layer. It's only looking at the editing layer, which is what we have selected. No matter what I do, it's just going to fill the entire background. There's an option here, though, to refer to other layers, and this brings us to another feature that that clip studio has, which is called a reference layer. But if I go to my things layer and you see this little lighthouse looking icon here, that is a reference layer. If we check that and you'll when you check it, you'll notice right here, out to the left side, I click on the flats. You could be this little White House will appear next to the inks layer. So what? This is telling clips you got to do with this feel to? Is it saying okay, we're gonna fill stuff, but we're going to refer are inks layer? Now you can see what my settings are on this. There are some different options here that you can choose from in this case, I'm gonna have applied to connected pixels on Lee checked. I'm leaving this close. Gap closed at the moment. Area scaling. I've got said to about 10. I've got the darkest pixel on the scaling mode checked. Refer to multiple checked and make sure that reference layer is the one that is chosen here . Vector pants were not using anti. Alias is still off. Now. If I go back to my flat slayer, even though there is nothing on this layer except this white and I click into this box, it's going to refer to the inks layer and on Lee fill the contents of that box. I said box, but it's not really a box, is it? And I can click in all of these now, and all of these shapes are filling. Now, this one. We've got an open shape here. If I try to click it, you can see it still feels the entire drawing, not filling up our cat because it's that's a close shape, so it's not filling it up. This works. This is kind of like the paint tool, and Windows is very basic version. There is an option to try to get it to close this gap on its own. And this works with Leinart. That's not, you know, perfectly closed everywhere. If I put this close gap on and you can actually set the with, there's a couple of options here. Um, I'm gonna set it to the lowest one first and try that. That didn't seem to do anything. So I'm gonna go up to try the middle one not quite enough. So if I go all the way up all the way and cheese it again now it has automatically closed that gap force. That's what this closed gap thing does. If you've got a bunch of line art that doesn't make clothes shapes, you can choose this close gap option and that will attempt. Do you know, close that you can see it's not perfect. You know it's going outside the lines. You might have to go in there and clean up a little bit or make a change. There. It gets it does a pretty good job. So let's fill all of this with white again. So that's the second option. This refer to other layers. Now there are more options here. There is a in close and feel. Now, this one, it actually shows up looking like a lasso tool. This works the exact same way. So I'm gonna make sure that I've got a color over here blue and I'm just and again I'm gonna enclose and Phil, I'm just gonna draw around it and it fills. Now, this won't work as well. You know, when you have open shapes, it's it's not gonna fill with this because the shapes not closed. There are some options here you can kind of play around with to try to basically force it into doing it. Like if you choose, for example, this is on a white background. So if I choose the target color is white and transparent. Right again, I didn't like that If I turned the gap closing back up and tried again, did some strange stuff, but it came in pretty close. This one involves a little bit more kind of financial ing with the settings. Um, I tend and leave it on target, all colors. You're going to use this tool, but it saves a tremendous amount of time. So, like if I go in here and I go to my cat and I'm choosing the enclosing Phil and less. Erekat is orange, and I'm gonna draw a circle around him. I'm gonna make sure I'm on the right layer. This time I go to my flats layer, write us again and you can see it's filled in all that cat perfectly. Now what this won't do. Let's go back to our shapes. Here again. You have to completely enclose the shape. Okay? You can't do this. It won't work. It is looking for in close shapes and close shapes, you know, don't have any openings like this. All the lines connect if I try to cut across or something, It's not gonna work. Gotta make sure you get the entire close shape. You could even do multiple shapes, though. This becomes very, very handy when you are flattening. So let's get rid of all this stuff again. Go back to my drawing again. Make sure I'm on in close. And, Phil, now we can start going through. This cat is done. I can go. The hat, they The hat is blue Now. It doesn't matter if I cut across his ear. It's not a close shape. This not enclose shape this isn't either. None of these things air bullying, closed shapes that I'm passing through except for the hat it filled it. I'm gonna pause this here for a quick second because as I was editing, I realized that I need to clarify something here. When I say that this ear is not an enclosed shape, it's not an enclosed shape within the selection I'm making that is that is the difference here. So, for example, when I draw selection, it's looking for the entirety of the enclosed shape within the selection. So by the same token, as I said earlier, if I were to try to cut across the ear and fill it, it's not gonna work. But if I were to go in and select the air like this, it will. So when I say that these were not in close shapes as I'm selecting, I literally mean they're not enclosed within the selection that I'm choosing hope that makes more sense. Even like this arm, we've got tons of little close shapes here in all sorts of things. We can select all of this within close and Phil and again this area of his shirt is not closed within our selection, so it's not going to fill it. This is not perfect. You have to have really clean Leinart to do this, and this is really clean. You know, you might want to close the gaps in your line art, or you might have to do some of this manually, so I just kind of depends on the kind of line art you're working on. That's why we went through those manual tools earlier. So you guys can go in and you know how to fix these things that they're not feeling completely right now. You might be thinking, Well, that's pretty neat, but you know, there's even more to learn here. But there's another option called paint unfilled areas. This is again this is all within the fuel tool. Okay, The pain Annville areas works very similarly. Similarly, if I can talk except you have a rush instead of a Lhasa that for example, if I just brush around that entire shape, it feels this one not closing because of that, um, that opening there so you can shift this too in this example say white and transparent, that'll is really just telling you what it's looking to fill and right now in the background is white so we can set that toe white and with close gap check, it'll probably feel it. But if I uncheck closed, got doesn't work between these three tools, it really all within the field told, there's a lot of flexibility that you have when we actually start to flat this earlier. I kind of want to show you guys all these different options first, because it could be a little overwhelming if I just went through flying. That's where all these different tools so and you've kind of seen how each one works and we can actually start flighting this, but using some of those tools, and we'll get to that in some of the next lessons. But the key to remember here is this. Onley works in conjunction with that referral option when the next lesson, we're actually gonna flat these things completely using everything we've learned so far, and it should go a whole lot faster than having to manually flat all of this. So let's get going 14. How to flat base colors manually: I finished the last lesson saying that we would plant this entire thing using some of the things that we've learned. But I got to thinking about it, and I really think we should at least let some of this manually. Just so you guys are aware of how that works, using just the basic tools without some of the lips studio paint hopeful features there that we've learned about because not every drawing that you try to do is going to be this clean, you know, especially if you have art that has a lot of hatching, you know, like little hatch lines crisscrossing like that can really become a little more difficult to deal with. And I don't want you guys to come out of this course, not understanding how to deal with this in just about any situation. So we're going to use to tools to just flat this head for this lesson, and then we'll jump in and we'll do the rest of this with some of our new tricks that we've learned using some of these special modes. So the two tools are the last, so just the regular old standard dumb lasso. Ah, dumb as opposed to Not smart, which is some of the others. A little bit smart. Ah, And then we're gonna also use the fill tool case. We get the lasso tool in the field tool, and I'm gonna be using the keyboard shortcuts to switch back and forth. So I'm on the campus and you see that changing. Just know that I'm clicking those keyboard shortcuts and on In both cases, the lasso tool is set to new selection. Anti alias ing is set to none stabilisation. You can put it on zero. You can set some if you want. It doesn't really matter either way. And then for the field tool, everything is unchecked and off. Okay, except for the opacity is 100%. But we're on our flats layer. The banks is still said to reference from last time. I'm gonna turn that off. We have no reference layers. This is about as manuals you can get. So I'm gonna zoom up on his head and when I get pretty close and using the last So I'm just going to start over here and start tracing these lines right down the center, if I can, and then what I like to do is kind of loop away, and then we're just gonna hold shift and keep going. But it's hard to try to hold your hand in one place for this long race out this entire thing. So I just kind of draw loop around and we just keep holding shift to add to it, and I'm gonna trace out the beard. I made a little mistake there, but that's fine. Weaken which toe all her option and remove it. I'm gonna turn off this election launcher for now because, like, it gets more in the way than useful at this point. Just go to view unchecked selection launcher do that. But for me, it's easier to move my hand down than it is to move it up with control, you know, I mean, if I'm trying to get up and hold it, it's a little bit harder for me. This might be different for you. That's why I'm switching to going down again. You guys were really going to appreciate those special modes in clip studio. When we get done with this, you're gonna love how fast it is. And so once I get the whole shape done. That is the amount which to the fill tool. And it doesn't really matter what cover we choose. I'm just gonna choose Blue and there we go. We've got the head flood, at least the big shape done. Now we never have to trace this edge again. And what I mean by that is if when our tools are set up this way, let's say I want to change the color of the hat and separate the hat from the rest of them . I'm not gonna worry about retracing this. There's no need. I'm just gonna cut across here again, kind of loop around. All I need to worry about is making the separation that I haven't made already. Right now, I can zoom out and we'll select the rest of this. The Now, if I switch to say an orange and hit the film tool, it's only gonna fill to the edge of that shape. Okay, that's what I mean when I say you don't have to ever trace the same line twice. You really just have to trace the separations. And so again, now we're down to, you know, just his head. I'm not gonna worry about anything except tracing the ear out from the beard. Loop this around color, fill it. Race along the beard here again on Lee, worrying about preparations that we haven't made yet. Oh, that picked this color. I drop her. I'm using the right click button on the side of the pen to switch to the eyedropper to pick a color. And I realized these selections aren't perfect. But for this lesson, they don't really have to be. You're all saying the value and why a lot of prose used flatters for this. All right, so you guys kind of get the idea. This is not perfect, but what I would we'll go ahead and knock this out since we're almost done with it here, wish to like a dark brown and just change that. Don't even have to make a selection for this blue to change that color. I could just like the field till fill it. - But if you have to manually flat something that's kind of the best way to do it is to start with your big shapes and just continually get smaller and smaller. Um, I I again my flight is not perfect. It's not really the point for this lesson. I just want to show you guys how it's done. I was in the process of editing this lesson. I realized there's something I want to bring up for those of you that might be interested in doing flat ing professionally. Now, this is not a recommendation that you go out and try to be a flatter. It's It's a tough gig. It's a tough thing to get started. But in the comic book world, most professional colors do work with a flatter that does this stage for them. And the expectations for pages that are professionally flatted versus pages that you know just need to look good are sometimes different and so want to show you actually re flighted this quickly used to show you these differences. If I turn the Leinart off after flying at the manual way, you'll notice that there are, you know, perfectly alias de edges along all of these areas. Everything's very neatly separated. There's no straight pixels, and it's all very, very clean. I have not yet found a way to get this result with clips, studios, automatic tools, for example. If I turn this off that I did manually and turn this on which we're about to show you how to do automatically. It does look a little messy under the lines now for final projects. Whatever's under the lines doesn't really matter that much anyway, if you're gonna cover it up with black ink, or at least that's how I think about it, I can't speak for every colorist I know some have very different expectations about what they want, but that's something I want to clarify for anyone that has heard me say before in previous lessons that you know Hey, we need your flats to be sure they're very clean. This really only applies in very specific professional settings. The end result of this course is not affected in any way because I used the automatic flighting tools, but I felt like I needed that disclaimer at the end of this lesson. Let's go and move onto the next one 15. How to use the "automatic" selection tools: All right, so let's flat this using some of those fancy tools we've learned about in this application . So let's set up our layers first. So we're gonna set our inks reference like we talked about earlier. We're gonna hit the little lighthouse button on the inks, and I'm also going to lock go down our flats later. Would you just fill with white and and we'll start with the cat. So I'm gonna choose the refer other layers. So before we were using refer to editing layer, which would just prefer to flats. But I want to refer to other layers on my field total. I'm going to start with these settings. It might have to adjust these later, but managed to keep this on apply connected pixels. We're gonna keep that checked. I'm closed. Gap. We might need to turn this on later, but I don't see any gaps in this. I'm gonna leave that off. A color margin set to about 12 and area scaling a set to about 10 of the scaling modus set to darkest pixel. Prefer multiple is checked. Actually, just referring to the reference layer. Everything else is unchecked and the capacity is 100 but I think I want my cat to the orange. Let's see what happens. It looks like that went pretty well. What? Zoom up and see. I don't see any ray pixels. Uh, if you get really close, you can see there's a few little white pixels in here. When this happens, the easiest thing to do is just switch to the paint unfilled area version of this. I've got mine set to target all colors. Other margin, zero area scaling a six still. And I'm just gonna and over that, and when you paint and we'll fill in those pixels, I'm hanging around with space bar as I use. This tool looks pretty good to me. All right, so we've got the cat down. We'll go ahead and scoot over here to the hat and again making sure that refer other layers is checked on the bucket tool and Phil, and you can see that there's a couple of gaps here. I'm just going to switch to the paint unfilled areas. Bill those in and they will continue on back to the refer all layers. Look it and change colors. Here. The colors you select do not matter much. At this point, we can always change those later. You can see it's not filling in his eye correctly because of those big gaps. So we can fill that in manually. I'm gonna go ahead and fill those with the regular lesson and will switch to the beard barker color. Make sure you refer other layers. I keep clicking the wrong one. Now again, you can see it's leaving little stray march through years. So I'm gonna switch back to that paint unfilled area Bill those in and the settings on this target all colors, color margins about 11. Well, very scaling a set of six. These air not ah, magical settings that we're gonna work on every single piece to keep that in mind. I've tried these techniques on a bunch of drawings, and I don't know if I've ever used the exact same ones twice. And this is actually why, for a long time I just mainly flatted everything because I thought that this would actually , you know, actually take more time than actually manually flighting it. But I've changed my mind about that since then. All right, for the eyes, I'm just gonna manually select these because big gaps here that we're probably not gonna be ableto dramatically still. Hold down, shift for the other one editing layer to feel there s a little bit brighter. We're gonna change this. Apologies if you hear the bird outside of my window. So I'm gonna I drop her the skin color, Choose the refer to other layers. Feel tool, See if we can keep going. I'm actually not even following my own advice here to start big to small. But this lion artists clean enough. That seems to be working. Justus quickly. I dont flat much myself, son. A little rusty atrocity and clothes and fill for the rest of this just to see if it works. It looks like it added a lot of artifacts in here. I'm going to change the color margin to 16 and try this again. And I don't see those artifacts this time and just try to refer other layers to feel the rest of this and to change his shirt gray, turning on the close gap to see if that helps us here. Any time you have one that over Phil's, try playing with that close gap option on there and that might do the trick. All right, so I wanna get Zoom up here and kind of look around, See what we're missing. I ain't the unfilled areas again. If you can't find all these little white pixels as well as I can, I have more practice than need. It hurts. It's likely that I dio All right, So let's do this arm. What if we can use paint unfilled to do the whole thing? We got everything. Except for this part. I don't feel that part name is finicky. At times when it change the color of this hat using the standard book it tool, I'm gonna select this hoody and increase the saturation a bit to separate it from the metal arm a little bit more. I was looking at this again. I think I want to add a little bit of variation to some of these ah, shapes that are in this arm here and actually change some of these colors. I'm gonna make sure I'm on the refer all layers bucket tool. So I'm gonna pick a slightly darker grey and turn up the close gaps setting. So it let's me fill in these shapes that aren't completely closed. I have closed Gap turned all the way up at the moment. Now this tool is filling areas that I'll need to go back and correct. But this is still faster than manually tracing it with the lasso tool. - I'm going to switch to the poly line for some of these sections. It might be a little bit easier when the lines are pretty straight out, sometimes switched to that tool and switch back to the regular tool to fill these. And let's clean all this up with the regular feel tool. And if this takes you ages, that's fine. When I first started, it took me a long time to, but I've been using these tools for about 18 years and how 100 Photoshopped this little circle is meant to be projecting the cat holograms I'm gonna change. This will make this glow in a later lesson. All right, so I think you would agree this is a significant Ah, faster way, Teoh Flat. Then do it manually again. I wanna remind you, don't get frustrated if you're not able to do some of these automatic flighting tools on every drawing because it really won't be possible. I just don't want to that the wrong expectation here. This is a very clean drawing with really clean lines, lots of clothes, shapes. So it's kind of a perfect example for you know what? I'm trying to show you guys today. Let's move on to the next lesson. 16. How to use the painting tools: right. So in this lesson, before we get into actually add light and shadow in that kind of thing, we should probably run through the drawing tools. Now. I'm not going to look at all of these tools. There's tons and tons of options. And honestly, whatever you're drawing or painting or brushing with, it doesn't really matter that much. It it's all up to your own, um, style and you know kind of how you see things. So there's no right answers here. But I didn't want to skip that section entirely before we started using some of these things, though. Ah, so that's the first drawing tool on the list is the pen, and there's lots of options for this. The G pan is very popular for Anqing, and there's many different versions of types of pen. There's a calligraphy pin. This one's got a little bit more texture on it, and in the pen section there is also a section of markers. Now I do use this mano philp in actually have a shortcut set to this because this is basically an alias brush. OK, it gives us hard edges on our lines, no matter what we do. And so a lot of times, if I need to clean up some plants or if I want to draw something without any anti a leasing at all, then that mono fill in mono pan is actually a pretty good option for that. But there's all sorts of brushes in here. There's felt tip pens. There are marker pans, dot pens. There's a flat marker right below the pen. Is the pencil tool actually have both of these on the same shortcut, so pressing be just toggles between both there. There are pencil tools, lots of, um, mechanical colored pencil. Again, this kind of specifics on this stuff doesn't really matter that much under the pencil. There's also a pastel section. If you're looking for, like, a kind of our coal, look to your drawings to add some texture again. None of these air rushes we're going to use, and these lessons necessarily blow The pencil tool is the brush tool. Lots of options under the brush tool. You got watercolors, realistic watercolor, big paint, India ink, lots of options. I would recommend getting in here and playing around with these brushes and just kind of see what happens This is an opaque watercolor. What is considered smooth running edges don't wanna bore you guys to death with all of this realistic brushes have a little bit of texture. Tomb that kind of look like water color paper. This at least that one did. Big paint is you've got your oil paint brushes, NATO and in the last section ah is the last we're gonna look at here. Is the airbrush actually use this More than anything? It's just a regular old soft airbrush. And I used this in conjunction with the lasso tool. A lot of times all draws shape that I want to render and then use the brush. This is a really common technique and comics, but you can use this in any type of art. Now, if you aren't happy with any of the particular brushes, I will say there's one area that I found to be a little bit lacking, which is the blending tools. And I'm gonna show you guys how to get new tools. And there's a lot of free ones available for this. I'm going to make a new layer briefly and draw a block here. I'm gonna fill one side with red and the other with yellow, and I'm gonna switch to the blend tool. The first option is just the blend. You confined this over here. It looks like the two little rain drops over here. It just sort of it feels very digital. Okay, it doesn't really feel like it's blending much of anything to me. There's a blur option, which literally just blurs, which is interesting, but it's not really mixing. It's just blurring this as if you put like a Gaussian blur over the whole thing. Ah, fingertip, we're getting a little bit Warner Order warmer, but it's still, um, it's not really mixing so much as it is just pushing color around, which might be what you want. In some cases, on it was copy Stand, which I'm not even going to bother with. So I'm sure you guys have to get better tools or at least some tools to play with. If you go back to clip Studio, which is if you're on a desktop, this is what opens whenever you first double click your app. Then you launched clips of your pain. From here, there is a section called Cliff Studio Assets, finding brushes and more. That sounds like us. Let's look on that. I want to find a better blending tools. I'm just gonna go up to the search here. I'm going to type, blend and hit, enter and by default, it's showing the newest. But I want to look at the most popular. So I'm going to scroll until I see something that looks interesting. This one is called pure Paint. It is popular and free. If this is not here, when whenever The point that you're watching this video, then try a different one. This is not, Ah, magical special brush or anything. So I'm gonna right click or just click that Actually, it brings up this and I've already tried this once. I'm gonna read, Download this and should be downloading. Now I'm on Go over to manage materials and in the download section Here's that Pierre pain . But I'm going to take this and drag it into my blending tools. This is kind of what I had in mind. Lo opacity. It is ah, you know, blending. Go live it harder, Really pulling. And you can choose. You know how much it mixes the colors. Like if I pick Red and C is pulling more that read in, but this feels more like a blender tool that I might actually use. If you ever feel like you need a new tool just going to the assets and try some of those around, there's a lot of free ones. So these air play around with one of the other neat things about this app is, let's say that, you know, I also want a copy of this pure paint in my airbrush section, for example, toe paint with I could go back in to manage materials and drag this into the airbrush section. Now I can use this pure paintbrush without switching to a different tool. That's a very quick rundown of all the brush tools, and I wouldn't spend a whole lot of time on it. But honestly is one of those things that there's no magic trick for it way around with it, finding the ones you like, the one that suits you, and I'm sure it worked just fine. Let's move onto the next one 17. A quick way to change your brush size: There's one thing I want to briefly cover in file modifier key settings. This is where you can go in and customize how you want your modifier keys control all shift to work with all the different tools that are available in the software. Now, there are a lot of these. Okay, I will tell you the only thing that I think that I changed here was the ability to change the size of the brush on any of the tools that you know have a brush. For example, if I goto last so this sub to here become brush and then click on. You know, one of these brushes here. I don't remember which one is default. To be honest, it has been a while since I set this up, but I went through all the sub tools that I use and make sure that all what set to change brush size. So I did this for all the different brush tools or the for the airbrush. That song airbrush I use all the time. You see this right here, where it says all change brush size. What? This does when you have a brush selected. Now I'm not touching the canvas right now. Hold down, alter option and then hold down the right click button. I haven't touched the tablet yet. I'm still floating above it. What this does it lets me change that brush size. When I let it go, it'll stop so I can increase it and it's really big. I can decrease it and it's really small. It takes a little bit of practice to get used to. But again, this Onley works if you're not touching the tablet and making this very clear, because I got a lot of questions about this on one of my YouTube tutorials about this while you're not touching your tablet, press Alz or option on the Mac right click, and then you can change. This photo shop does this same trick, and I'm really glad Clip Studio allows this because it is by far the fastest way to change brush eyes. You can very quickly make it very big about having to worry about brackets or right clicking options and all this stuff. So actually, the only thing that I changed in the key modifier settings, but if you do want to go in and make adjustments cities, this is where you would go to do it 18. Shadows: part 1: All right, so in this lesson, we're going to get into what's really to me the most fun part of coloring, which is rendering. Or you might hear it called modeling. But we're gonna be adding light and shadow to the drawing that we have here now. There are as many ways to do this as there are artists. Okay, so I don't want you guys to watch this lesson and think, Oh, this guy's a pro and he's got it all figured out. This is the perfect way to do this, and everyone should do it this way. That's not at all what I'm saying. I'm gonna show you guys what I figured out. That works best for me, that it works very efficiently and it gets good results. This is not the, you know, end all be all of rendering options. You know, if you have a different way of painting or a different way of doing this, it's perfectly fine. There is no right or wrong when it comes to this. Before we get started. Let's change this white background to something a little bit more neutral and easier to look at, like a darker gray and I'm also going to shift these colors around a bit. His skin looks a little bit that little bit dead to me. So I'm gonna add some saturation. You get a little bit worker. There's no magic trick to picking colors. At least just your flat colors getting in the ballpark. And it's easy the way that I'm gonna show you guys to work today. We're not really going to do much with the base colors. We're gonna keep these separate. We can always go back. Even if we've added light and shadows and a bunch of stuff. We can always go back and change what color is underneath. And that could be a huge help when you're going in tow, you know, editing drawings or need to change something way that I work. Even odor comes back after I'm done and says, Hey, I want this hoody to be yellow. It won't affect any of what I'm going to do with my light and shadow. Now, up to this point, we have had our thanks layer as our reference. We no longer need it to be reference. We actually need our flats to be the reference I'm gonna click on the flats layer and hit reference, and you can see the little lighthouse icon disappeared from the inks. Now we have our flats labeled as the reference layer. Now I want to copy this or actually duplicate this layer. So I'm gonna duplicate my flats. And does it duplicate the reference? Yes, it does. I'm actually going to remove the reference from this new copy. I'm also going toe lock that flats layer just like the ink. So we don't accidentally change this on this layer on top. I'm gonna rename this two colors, and that would just let me separate the flats which are not going to change from these colors, which I might want to tweak later. One point now, the way that I've found works best and again. This is kind of my take on it. It's best to start with your brightest light source, rate your shadows for that, and then we'll move on from there. And I intentionally when I had Rebecca Isaacs that the artist that drew this when I commissioned her to draw this, I told her to not put any shadows on the drawing at all. Because I want you guys to be able to light this and as many different ways as you want. If you want to make him backlit if you want to light to be top down if you want the brightest light. If you want him in the dark and have the cat, we'll hologram that were kind of use. Have that be your brightest light source? There's really no wrong answer here on where your light goes, but to keep it interesting, we're gonna use, at least for this lesson, I'm gonna use kind of a top down you because I want to get some shadows on this face and under here. And that's a little easier to understand, too, especially for new to this. Now, in all the different you know, types of rendering that there is a really to me boiled down to two main types. There's the methods that involve, like using a lasso to create an area, say of highlights here and then, you know, driving a color and filling that in with another brush. And there's also just rushing. Okay, just adding your your light into the you know, whatever is there with the brush. I want to keep this is flexible as possible so that I don't end up with baked in light and shadows in my colors. I want to be able to change these later. So I want to make a new layer when I click on this new raster layer not defect earlier, and we can call this Let's call the shadows and you can paint shadows in normal mode if you want. You can paint shadows in any mode, but for the sake of simplicity, I'm going to change the blending mode of the new layer to multiply. If you aren't familiar with the blending modes, I'll briefly explain if I choose this kind of bright blue here and normal mode and paint. So I'm going to change the blending mode of the new layer to multiply. If you aren't familiar with blending modes all briefly expelling. There are a lot of different types, and each one blends a little bit differently. It just gives you different effects, and the same color can look very different, depending on which mode it's in. But if you pick a really dark color with multiply mode, which is also darkening, it's usually too dark and too close to the line art, and you lose the contrast between the colors and lines. So I'm going to pick a Kulish purple, which should play well off the orange, and it fits. If he was in a cooler environment, I'm going to switch to a magic wand and make sure that it's set to election for referred leaders. This is gonna act very similarly to the fill tool, referring to the inks. Now the magic wand is going to refer to the flats. But even if I'm on this new shedded earlier, I could make this election and then choose Choose the shape of my plants down here. Now, one other thing you're gonna notice me do. And it's almost a reflex I had do it without even thinking, is to hide these little marching ants selection things you see here and the way that you do that. If you go down to view its selection border, I've got mindset to control G. You consented to whatever you want, but if I uncheck that you can see that it disappears. The control G for me is just toggle ing that selection. It's still selected. Unify switched to a tool in pain I'm just not seeing that selection because this is really distracting to me. One other note as an assigned kind of a pro tip notice all these little stray pixels in the black here. This stuff used to bother me more. And if you're working with a colorist as a flatter, they might not actually want you to leave this like this. I've kind of come to the conclusion. If it's under the blank, it doesn't really matter that much. So I'm not going to sweat it. I'm gonna start by selecting the hat and hiding the selection and then switch to We'll use that new, pure a paint brush here. I'm gonna paint in some shadows underneath. We would get it along the that. Maybe I'm really trying to treat this as if the lights coming almost directly from the top , maybe a little bit in front. By using that selection, I'm able to not worry about going outside the lines. You know, I can paint all day and not worry about going outside the lines. The other case that these reference layers come in handy. Let's say that I want to draw in the shadow on his face from this. Remove his hat with the last. So it wasn't using reference layers. I would have to be really careful and make sure that I stay here and maybe draw my, uh, you know, draw my shadow and then trace this around. That would take forever. I'm still going to draw this out. I'm not gonna worry about anything except the shape of this shadow on his face. Okay, Something like that. Now, if I switch to my magic one and I've got that intersect with selection check that I told you guys about earlier, I can now click on his skin and it's gonna shrink that selection down within the selection of already made. This is usually helpful. Gonna actually add his eyebrows and eyes back to the selection with less. So now we can fill that with the brush or the Piltel. We can also use this technique when removing selection. So let's say that I want this more from the front lighting. And so this is all gonna be in shadow, something like this. Now, I could switch to the Magic one, pulled down all our option and remove this section and leave everything else when the next lesson will finish out the rest of these shadows 19. Shadows: part 2: for the sake of this drawing and honestly, for the sake of time, I'm going to be just selecting from the flats layer with the magic one and into switching to a brush and filling in my shadows. It's like the T shirt. Build this in beard, come down a little bit here and I could switch to the jacket. I need to make sure that apply to connected pixels on Lee is unchecked, so it will select the entire jacket here. Now, if you're not crazy about thes shadow colors, we can always change those. I'll show you guys at the end because I do want to shift some of these around. I'm gonna lower the capacity of this a little bit. Remember when I am painting here, the jacket is still selected. You're just not seeing it because the selection borders are hidden. This show was coming out a little darker than I want. I accidentally changed the color at some point, so I'm just gonna go undo that and color pick from the shadow on that layer with shadows. I really just thinking about all the little areas all of these planes that are facing down these these wrinkles. This is what this would face down. There's a pretty neat trick in clip where if you hit the letter C, it will switch from your color, new transparency and you can actually remove. It's like you would an eraser without having to switch to the eraser. I really like this feature a lot. And you said, see again to go back to your color, not through here again it to show you guys a different way of doing this. I want this to be a really clean selection. Let's de select my selection, clicking this little button right here. Then you can use it to the Freehand lasso polygonal lasso Polly line. They call it Hold down shift ad until base bar. Well, downshift again and shipped again. One thing to note here. I'm just holding shift at the start of these selections with the poly line and then letting it go. If you keep holding it, it will only make lines at certain angles, like 0 45 90 degrees. When I can switch Teoh, say a your brush. It's like that. All the jacket again, back to my painting brush. I downloaded right , so she's in the hand will use in my state brush now, because this is a hard, smooth surface. I don't want to use a pain t textured brush at all, so I'm gonna switch back to the last. So for this arm holding down all our option to remove from this section. And I know I've said this a few times, but don't be discouraged if this takes you a lot longer. It does take practice and study to get a feel for these tools and where light and shadows fall. Now I'm switching to the magic wand, holding all or option to remove the selection from the background in the jacket, then switch to the airbrush and fill that in. Now I'm going up to the shoulder. I want to get a soft shadow on the bottom to help separate it from the hand. Then you can just switch to the wind and intersect mood to shrink the selection down to what I need. Switching to the soft airbrush to paint that in. I decided to leave this area and shadow instead to make these fingers look more round. I'm gonna make a clean selection on the bottom side, so I get a good clean shadow in between the fingers. But I'm gonna let that shadow fate up, because when light is coming from the top on around surface like that, you'll get really soft transitions between the light and the shadow. You'll notice I'm not filling in the whole area that I did. It would make that edge hard. And that's not you know what's happening here. I want to keep it soft. Now, at this point, I don't want the shadows on the arm to be quite so saturated. So it's easy to change that. I can just select the arm, make sure mom my shadows layer and then open something like hue saturation to shift that color. And like this looks like, you know, a cotton hoody. So you really don't get these, like deep saturated shadows on things like that Again, I'm just gonna choose the putting itself, but in my shadows and just take some of that saturation up. But the reason I'm shifting some of these colors to be different is because in the real world, services reflects light differently. You know a cotton hoody is going to reflect light differently than skin you know skin tends to actually be a little bit warmer when it's reflecting any light because there's blood under the surface. And whereas metal might not reflect light quite so warmly because it's just not alive, there's no blood there. There isn't any what we call subsurface scattering, which I'm gonna cover in a lesson coming up for the next lesson, I'm gonna continue one with the rest of these shadows. If you don't want to see all those details, I want to move on to the light. That's fine, too, but let's go ahead and move onto the next one. 20. Shadows: part 3 + ambient occlusion: all right. In this lesson, we're gonna be finishing up the shadows. My original audio that I recorded while I was doing this corrupted somehow. So I'm gonna be doing a voice over after the fact, but I'll try to keep it as tight as possible. What actually is happening on the screen? So here we go. We're pretty much picking up directly where we left off before. I'm still adding some details to the shadows and start to tighten things up a little bit, putting in some more detail in the face and the beard. I'm still using that pure paintbrush we downloaded earlier. I'm still doing just like I was before. I'm using the magic wine to select the skin and using the brush to filling those details. Now, here, I'm gonna lay down in that same you know, purple color that I've been using the entire lesson. But I really didn't like the way that it looked on. The teeth just kind of looked odd. So I went in and made a lasso selection around the mouth and then used the one tool in intersect mode to select the shadow within his mouth. And I'm gonna shift that just a little bit more toward the blue and away from that purple. At this point, I decided I really didn't like how gray his shirt was. I wanted to brighten it up a little bit since there's so many dark colors around it. And so I just went down to the base colors and Brighton those up. This is a huge time saver, especially think I mentioned is done earlier lesson. But you can always change the color of anything, really, at any point without having it impact your colors. And because I lightened the T shirt, I also light in the shadows there and turned them just a little bit more toward blue because a white T shirt, I think, in this scenario wouldn't have those deep purple shadows going back to the face and realizing I really end of anything. Haman knows. So adding some shadows underneath the nostrils a little bit here. Same thing on the mouth. If you struggle with faces, there's an app called Handy Art Reference Tool. Thank you reviewed it on my YouTube channel if you want to check it out. But it's great if you have issues with you know deciding where to put light and shadows on faces. It's a very tough thing here. I'm going in and cleaning up some of these shadows on the hand. They're a little rough from before, and so I'm just kind of getting it in line with some of the detail everywhere else. Now, I'm not putting as much detail as I did on the face everywhere. This is a pretty common technique that you can sort of control, how much detail there is by having more detail in the areas. People are gonna look, you know, faces and hands and things like that. Whereas on like the bottom of his hoody, I could be a little bit rougher because those areas don't have to be quite at detail. This is a huge time saver. When you're coloring, I'm pressing. See, while I'm brushing to go in and kind of remove some of those shadows instead of switching to the eraser tool that we have got the same brush in either case there. At this point, I decided that I needed to soften this shadow on his had because, you know, hats round and you know is it's turning away from that light. That would be a bit of a smoother transition. So I was I believe I used the blend tool here to kind of, ah, smudge that a little bit and just blend it together. I originally tried to peer payment of a little bit too rough, I guess. Too much texture. And so I switched to the actual blend tool that's just called Blend. It is basically a soft airbrush and did the blending with that. Even after doing this, long as I have, I still make decisions Sometimes that I have to go back and and undo or redo that never stops. All right, so at this point, we're gonna move on to the cat Now, the cats kind of a different lighting scenario here because the cat is actually a hologram , you know, he is emanating his own light source here. Instead of having him lit from the top and kind of, you know, from the front, like I did with the guy, I'm actually gonna put just some soft shadows kind of all the way around him. I do kind of lean the shadows a little bit more toward the left side, but these shadows air less about showing like where the light would be and more about just kind of bringing out shape of the cat. So you'll see here, even in the areas on the top and on the other side, I'm putting a little bit of shadow on that side to to try to create some sense of form there. I don't actually know what a holographic cat looks like, So I'm doing my best here again . Here, I press see to paint way some of this with the transparency. That's one future, this app that it took me a while to kind of wrap my head around. But I tend to do a lot of erasing with mask anyway. And so, being able to just stay on the same tool in the same brush, no matter what this scenario was came in pretty handy. Now, at this point in the drawing, everything is kind of one color. As you can see here, you know the shadows for each part or just one color. So these shadows air. Very simplistic, but this is a point where you could say, Hey, we're done like this is a very simple, cartoony drawing Totally works. We could leave it and move on. And that's kind of what I tried to do with this is leave every stage at a point where you could kind of walk away from and say, This is good but I'm making a new layer here. Another shadow earlier. I'm also setting it to multiply, gonna call it mawr shadows. And this time I'm gonna not quite USA's much color. It's a very gray might be completely great, but it's just a really gray de saturated color because these shadows, we're gonna represent something that the computer rendering world caused ambient occlusion . You might hear this throwing around if you're familiar with game engines at all. Ambient occlusion is called that because it's the light is being occluded from all the little surfaces, the little nooks and crannies like here, where that hat makes the skin and you'll see me switched to the skin in a second and where the skin meets the hat, I'll add some shadow there because in all those little crevices, these are areas where the light really can't reach very well. Even the reflected light. It's not getting into the little corners of things, and so it just adds kind of an extra layer of lighting detail. It's really easy to do. You really don't have to think too much about your actual light source here. It doesn't factor in quite as much. Now. Of course I am, you know, gonna be conscious of the fact that, you know, my light source is from the top. So I'm not gonna put this on, you know, anywhere where the light is. So the ami inclusion shadows are still staying within those shadows that we created last time. I'm really not doing a whole lot of new shadows on this part. But what happens here physically, as the light bounces and bounces and continues to bounce, it just gets weaker and weaker and all these little corners and so So That's also why I kept most of these edges pretty soft. You won't really see too many hard edges when it comes to these kind of shadows. And if you haven't noticed yet, I tend to kind of think of light and shadow almost like a computer would if you're in a three D program doing a pass of shadows and doing a passive Amy inclusion and the second will come in and do some lighting passes and not everybody thinks this way. This is how my mind works. Maybe some of you guys work that way, too. But like I said at the very beginning, you know a lot of ways to do this, and that whole area of the arm there is facing down. That's why there's There's mawr of that shadow there, and that's why it helps to kind of you can see these things in three dimensions. That helps quite a bit. We're coming to the end of this video. Sorry for the technical mix up here, hopefully didn't notice too much. Hopefully, it wasn't too much of a problem. Let's go and move onto the next one. 21. Highlights: part 1: right in this lesson, We're going to start adding some highlights. And as I've said several times already in this course, there are a lot of ways to do this. But I'm gonna show you guys away that I think works pretty well. Let's make a new layer on top of the shadow layers. I'm gonna rename it to highlights. Now, for this first kind of passive the highlights. I'm gonna think about the highlights on Lee from this main light source you're on. We're gonna have this hologram glow, but it's not going to be brighter then. This primary life source that we're using now that has raided all the shadows. The one trick to kind of making your highlights look pretty realistic is to make sure that they are contained to the areas that don't have shadow. It seems pretty straightforward. All the highlights I'm going to make are going to be within these areas that are lit. We're not gonna have any light in the shadows for this yet. Okay, so you can think of these shadows is kind of ah, off limits. At this point, there's a different kind of light we're gonna add into those sections later. But for now, we're just going to think about lighting the areas that are already lit with brighter highlights. And this will make sense when we start doing it just to show you a couple examples of ways you could do this. So starting with the hat now, the light is coming from the top. So this brim is actually gonna reflect a lot of that light bag, And it's going to be, you know, one of the brighter areas here. So I'm gonna zoom up and I'm going to use the political last, So just select basically the top of this brim, and I'm kind of avoiding that area of better here, getting this lib. Here we go. And now I can switch. I can hide that selection and switch to some brush like maybe the airbrush. And in this new highlights layer that we've selected, you can use normal mode. You can just, you know, go in, pick color and make that a highlight. You can use screen mode. You can use add mode, you can use hard light mode. There's a lot of different options here. I kind of like the way hard light looks personally, and so I'm gonna pick a kind of a bright orange color. So on this highlights layer in hard light mode. I'm gonna brush in some highlights with hairbrush for the top of the hat. I'm going to select the area with one and brush this in and from here you can adjust that color if you want. Now for the skin when you use a trick that you can use to make selections from your layer window. If I want to select the contents of this layer, let's say I just want to select my shadows. I can hold down control or command and click the picture and it will select all of my shadows. You can see they're selected now. Now, when you already have something selected, If you hold down control and Ault or command an option on the Mac, then click the picture on the layer. It will remove the pixels on that layer from your selection. We can kind of use this to our advantage. And so I'm going to select the skin. I'm gonna go to my original shadows here, pulled down control or command and all, and option me. Try say that again Control and Ault, we're command an option that's a little bit clearer, right? And then click the picture and you can see that it's removed That selection that's on this layer, these shadows from my selection. So not only have the highlights selected, I'm gonna hide this so I don't have to look at it and I'll try the same color. And I'm gonna switch Teoh soft brush here and I'm just gonna start painting in on the news little bit brighter on the tip here. And then the cheeks would actually catch some light to so using this selection technique means that it's easy to keep my highlights within the lit area and out of my shadows. So in all the planes that are facing up toward our light source on making those brighter that's why, for example, only the fingers are getting some highlights here, but not the back of his hand, because it's not really facing our light source. Hair doesn't necessarily reflect the same way that skin or clock might. So instead of using a soft airbrush alone, I'm gonna draw in some highlight shapes with the lasso and then use the soft brush to fill it in. I'm gonna follow the contours of the hair here and in all the areas that would face the light source more. I'm creating these little strips of highlights again. This takes some practice, so take your time. There's no need to try to keep up with me in real time. Pause the video. Take all the time you need, so the top part of the mustache would catch more light in the top of the beard. Would, too, and having some highlights that have harder edges like this will make the whole drawing look more interesting. I'm still staying out of the shadows. At this point, I'm switching to a soft airbrush with a color that's not quite as bright or saturated as what I used on the skin. Notice that I'm not just filling the entire selection. I'm only painting this selection with about half of the airbrush so that it fades out at the bottom. And if you don't like the color you used, select the beard and then shift that color around. After the fact for the shirt, I'm going to select it with the Magic one and then hold down Control and Ault or command and option while clicking the shadow layer thumbnail to remove those from the selection. Then just use a song airbrush to brighten it a little bit for the jacket. I'm gonna I drop her that blue, make it a little bit brighter, little less saturated. I'm also going to shift this little toward yellow because of our light sources warm more in the yellow side. It's going to start pulling that blew toward the yellow on the color wheel. I'm switching to that pure paintbrush again here, also lowering the opacity. The highlights on the jacket aren't going to be quite as intense because, you know, material like this is just not super reflective. I'm still staying out of the shutters. We're gonna add a different type of light to those later in . The next lesson will move on to letting this arm 22. Highlights: part 2: for this lesson. We're gonna move on into adding highlights to the arm. I'm gonna zoom up on it. We've really got to different types of different color medals here, and I think I want to treat him differently. These these dark areas, I'm going to leave like a flat, matte black. You know, Matt, as an m a T t E, which is just really flat. You know how Maybe it has a little bit of a rougher texture on it, more of like a rough plastic or carbon fiber. Maybe something's gotta lotta texture. There's not that reflected. But for these lighter gray areas, I think I want to make them really reflective. So we're gonna make some really bright highlights on these. There's gonna be kind of two stages on this. We're gonna start by selecting that color. I'm going to go to my shadows and remove those control plus old or command and option on the shutters thumbnail in the layers. And now we just have the highlights on the lighter metal. I'm going to switch my color to a bright de saturated kind of yellow color and use the soft airbrush to start painting these areas. It's gonna reflect more light on top. So I'm making sure of that. And you can see that by de selecting those shadows at the beginning. It makes this part a whole lot faster. Now, this plane here is not really facing our light source completely. Maybe just there along the top here, where the knuckles are. That's kinda what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna pass it along here as this area here is just not might do a little bit of a highlight there and again this area down here not really facing our light source except for maybe a little bit through here. This plane is probably facing up. It's already starting to look different. Star is starting to look like it's a different material. But if we really want to make this, like, really shiny, then I'm gonna zoom up close and get a brighter color. I'm almost white here. I'm gonna start making what they call speculum highlights. And these air little reflective highlights that are almost like speculator literally means mirror. Like I believe if my memory serves me properly, I'm going to start making some shapes that I think would reflect the light from above into our camera or we're looking through, so to speak. I'm going to use the soft airbrush to fill these in, and this time I'm really filling the entire shape. This area on the wrist is not facing up like some of the other, so it's not going to be quite as bright. So by varying how reflective these different services are, we're creating the illusion that they have different textures. And if you want to make it even shiny, er just stick within these little speculum highlights you have here. And maybe you make a little smaller section and make it make it pure white. Really starting to feel kind of kind of crow me here right now. I don't want to do any strong highlights on the darker metal here, but I do want to try to create some texture there like it might have. Ah, bumpy surface. I haven't actually tried any of these brushes, but I'm liking the way this brush looks. I'm testing it out here, so I'm going to select all the darker metal and pick a color that's just a little bit brighter than that. I think this will give it some texture and doesn't make it more interesting to look at. And again, I'm staying out of the shadows for this and treating this like it's a little bit of light being reflected off the surface. Now for the cat again. He's a hologram. Accidentally rotated my campus. By the way, if you ever wanna rotate, you came is not something I really talked about. But the letter R we'll let you grab the canvas and turn it around and around. And then if you hold down shift, it will kind of pop into all the different angles for the cat again. He's just kind of glowing as a as a hologram. So I'm just gonna go to my highlights id like a bright yellow maybe, and back to my salt airbrush. I don't really have a complete plan for how this is gonna turn out, but before I think it's working, OK, we'll see what happens. We get to the special effects, really start looking like hologram. Alright, so I've got all of our light sources in there. I think now, at this point, we've got the hat, we've got the skin. We really haven't done anything with the eyes yet, but it's in the shadow, though we're gonna. We'll cover that in just a second when we get into the reflected highlights. Now again, this is a point where you could call this drawing. Say it's done. I don't want to add any more detail. You could have done that after the shadows. This method that I'm showing you as faras lighting goes, you can really stop it almost any stage in this, and you're just having varying levels of detail in the color. You know, if you're doing something really cartooning and you just want to drop in some shadows and call it done, that's awesome. If you want to consider this done as far as your this remained, highlights go. It could be done. But I want to give you guys the options to be able to take your colors a little bit further and add more and more detail. We're gonna continue that in the next lesson. 23. Secondary highlights: in this lesson, we're going to start talking about reflected, like, really, what to do in the shadows, because one of things that I noticed with a lot of beginners is that it will have a tendency to make sure that the important parts of the image are well lit because they don't wanna have big shed of areas like the underside of his arm, because just don't really know what to do in those areas. The way that I think about light, you can really break it down into what is basically the light part of the image and the shadow part of the image, and I really treat them completely differently Now. There is some areas you might have some splash over, and I'll talk about that in a bid. But if you remember in the last stage, all the highlights we did were limited to the areas that were already lit for this lesson, the shadows where we're going to stay. You can think about it that way, with light sources that appear in your shadows. It really just depends on what's in your environment now for this. Of course, I really don't have much in the way of an environments. We can make up anything we want. But the sake of the lesson I've got this bright sunlight. So let's just say that we also have a blue sky Now. We were on the planet Mars. Maybe this guy would be red, but we're going to stay on Earth with a blue sky. I'm gonna make a new layer over here above my other highlights and we're gonna call it secondary. And again, the surface texture matters. There's gonna be some surfaces that are more reflective. They're going to reflect more light. There's gonna be others. I don't know if, like, much at all, but this time I'm gonna select my shadows like control or command clicking my shadow picture over here. And then I'm gonna switch to the magic wine and select the hat. Now I'm limited to using this intersect with selection, option the shadows on the hat And let's say again, if you're in a blue sky, let's pick a bright blue color. You can leave this on normal and color That way, if you want, I'm gonna put it back on hard light, though Now we're having a blue line hit an orange surface. And when that happens, those air opposite colors on the color wheel. So you're really not going to get a really strong blue lights. I'm just gonna add a little bit of this and it's really coming out gray, which is fine. That's that's That's really all I want. I don't want this to be a super blue light back there because most of the time when you mix two complementary colors, you end up with something kind of in the middle of the same thing for the skin. I can re select my shadows by control or command clicking the shutters, pushed to the magic wine like the skin and what makes us a little bit more saturated. I'm staying in the shadows. Well, I can't help but stay in the shadows right now, But I'm staying in the shadows and I'm just thinking about this being another light source that's coming from behind us, and I can always press, see to switch to the transparency and paint some of this away. I think I actually want to switch to the soft brush for this, so I'm gonna undo everything I've done, and if I want to remove some of this blue light. I'm just pressing C to switch to the transparency and basically just erasing it. I want to make sure I have that shadow from the brim of the hat. Even from this direction, I'm also leaving just a little bit of space in that transition from the light to shadow here will address this a little bit more later for the hair again, I'm going to switch to the last. So like we did on the beard, I'm just thinking about where the light would hit if our light sources behind and above us and contained to the shadows switching to the airbrush toe, fill that in now for the shadows on the front of his face. If you'll remember, we're gonna make this cat a glowing hologram. Now we established earlier. He's not brighter than our primary light source. He's not brighter than the sun, but he's probably our second brightest highlight on this side. So if we want, we can select those shadows again, like the skin again, Then go back to that orange color and I'm putting arms light in all the areas that are facing the cat again. It's contained to the shadows because the sunlight is overpowering. That light from the cat turn on a flashlight outside in the sun. You don't follow what I mean here. But every point you really should ask yourself if you're in the shadows, what would like that area? And that's the colors that I'm choosing here. Sometimes it's with light coming from behind us. Sometimes it might be coming from a holographic cat. Sometimes it might just be reflected light off of something on a surface. So, like especially when we get to this section in a second, we could go ahead and do it. Now, if this is a really reflected metal, you're gonna see this blue bouncing up and reflecting up here and not so much on these Matt Services but on the chrome surfaces begin, I can choose my shadows control. Click the shutter earlier wish to the one Select my chrome areas. Now I can switch to similar blue to what's on the, uh, here? Pretty bright art painting that in then appear so I don't have to ah, have to get the airbrush to follow this shape. So I'm gonna just select this. Yeah, reflective. That looks now because you've got that blue coming off there. Now I feel like this blue on the bottom is a little too bright, so I can just switch back to my airbrush switch to see on my color to go back to transparency and then just lightly brushed that away to lower the effect. Now, in these kind of flat black areas, maybe we do want to add a little bit of that. I can select that area. I'm really just gonna make this a very slightly lighter, slightly bluer color. And it's just not intra collective Now, when some of these shadows like under this hoody here really not going to get a whole lot of reflected light, you know, maybe a little bit off the tee shirt, but not that much. I'm not gonna worry about that. But down here in this shadow, you're really gonna get what you're gonna get some reflection off of the shirt itself. And so maybe I make a selection along this sleeve here and switch back to this blue color I was using. They were getting blue reflecting off of blue, so it gets a little more saturated in a little bit brighter, all right, so it made a lot of headway with our lighting and we're almost done. There's a couple of things I want to point out. There's some small details that will add in the next lesson, and then we'll get into special effects and some of the other medical parts of clip studio that we haven't covered quite yet. 24. Subsurface scattering: in this lesson. I want to do a quick run through on something called sub surface scattering. I wasn't gonna cover this because it's really not specific to doing anything in clips studio. But it is something that's useful, and I noticed that it's something that if I was painting this, I would do it. And so I won't explain how this works. What I've done is I've drawn a really ugly top down view of this guy's head, so this is like looking straight down his nose. Here's his nose, which is crooked, and his eyeballs focus on in this area right here, because this is basically where this light is turning into shadow. Hard to draw this in. This would be the light side and it would turn, and she actually I'm doing this backward. This would be the light side. It would turn in a shadow going this way, the lights passing through like this. It's easy to see there is more light passing through the skin in the transition from light to shadow. Then there is on the plains of the skin that are facing the light source. There's more light here, so what happens is the skin is absorbing this light. It's bouncing around the redwood cells in the skin, and it's getting warmer and warmer and warmer in this area as that light burns in a shadow . Not so much here, not so much there, but right in that transition. When you have skin that is transitioning from light to shadow, the skin tends to get a little bit redder and a little bit warmer, a little more saturated right through that transition. But what I'm gonna do for this I've got kind of a trick for this. I'm going to make a new layer. I'm gonna set the mode overlay and weaken relabel this as SSE sub surface scattering. I'm gonna color pick this kind of mid tone that's in between the light and the shadow going to make it a little bit more saturated, a little bit redder. And now I'm gonna soft airbrush make sure that just the skin is selected and right along this edge, when widely, bring in some of this warm you much difference that makes almost immediately early starts to make the skin look a little bit more alive. Now the reason that I do this in overlay mode is because overlay mode doesn't really affect highlights very much doesn't affect the shadow side quite so much. It really just is really great for mid tones. Now, you would also see this in areas like, uh, in the nose through here, especially the tip of the nose. It catches a lot of this and you might get a little bit of this reflected light off of the cheeks here. So I'm gonna warm up some of those areas just above the eyes that are facing mawr down than up. I'll also warm up the lip here a little bit and the ear And where else do we have transitions like that down here is very, very subtle. Now, I'm not going to do this in, you know, the material in the hat shirt, all these things, the metal, because there's no translucency there. The skin or the services there don't actually have any sort of sub surface scattering even happening. That was a bit of attention, but I think it is important to understand it will help you guys out when you're coloring skin. Let's move on to the next lesson. 25. How to add special effects: in this lesson, we're gonna talk about some special effects and finally make this cat look like a proper hologram, or at least try to. Now what we're gonna do first is we're gonna change the color of these lines because in my mind, something's a glowing hologram. It's not gonna have black line and I have a lighter colored lines and this is a good idea to know how to do. Because you can do this when you want to make a background look like it's further away, you might change those lines into a lighter color. Or, if you have, like, some sort of special effect like this a lot of times changing the color, the lines can actually pretty useful. And we set this up early on, and so it's gonna make this pretty easy. We're gonna use something called a clipping mask and ah, no, no relation to clip studio. This something that's in photo shop. It's in procreate credit gambits, and I think it's about any major art app is gonna have a clipping mask. This will be easier to see on a new layer first, so I'm gonna make a new layer and just paint a red dot on it. Now let's say I want a paint on this dot but I don't want to use a selection, and I don't want to worry about trying to stay inside the lines. I'm going to create a new layer on top of this layer with that dot and click this little button that says Clip to layer below. It's right to the left of the reference button here, this clip to Lear below. I'm gonna click that button, and I want you to watch what happens with this new layer. Now remember, we've got our red dot on this layer and an empty layer above it. That empty layer. I'm gonna click that clip to layer below, but and you see this little pink thing appear. This little red line indicates that this layer is now clipped to the layer below. What does that mean? It means that no matter what we do, it's going to be contained. Do the layer below that when you clip a layer to something else. Whatever is on that layer, that's the only place you can draw. If you have pixels that are filled with something, that's where you can draw. This is a big help for a lot of reasons when your when your coloring, if you did want to say, for example, makes some kind of selection through here and don't want to worry about, you know, going outside the lines. If it's on a clipping mask, you're not going to be able to go outside. Even if your selection goes outside, the clipping mask are a great way to really limit where your colors air going. Now it's important to remember if we actually went in and let's say that I went down to my red dot layer again and fill the rest of it with white, our Aida blind. You you make it great. Well, now all the pixels in this layer have data, which means if I go to my clipping layer, I can paint everywhere clipping mask on Lee clip to areas that have pixels, and these gray things are pixels. Now, if I don't have that gray there, I go in and remove that gray. You can see the clipping mask still clipped to the areas that have pixels. This is why we put our inks on a transparent layer so that when we got to this point, we can just make a new layer. I'm gonna call this color holds because that's actually in my world of comics. That's us. How they what they call when you color the lines color holds. Watch what happens to show you the difference in the clipping mask one more time. So if I draw a selection around our cat here and there's no clipping, mask it and I feel this with a color. It's just going to feel everything. But if I clipped this layer, the layer below try again. It's now contained just the inks that are on that layer. The super easy way to color your lines so you could make any sort of selection you want and fill it. You could choose a brush and brush it in. You can do anything you want, and it's not going to leave these lines now as long as your own. This clipping Lee. Let's select our cat again and let's try something not quite so intense. I'm gonna dark in this thatcherite it a little bit now. I can't kind of looks like he's, you know, sort of like a special effect or something. At this point, I think I'd like to lighten him up a little bit more. So I'm gonna go back to my highlights layer, get a soft airbrush and go with a lighter color. I'm also going to warm it up some by going back to that overlay layer with a darker, more saturated color and just hit those edges again. Now I want to make a beam of light coming out of his wrist Hologram projector here to really make it look like the hologram is coming out of the arm. So I'm gonna make a new layer on top and label it s f X special effects. I'm going to use the poly line to draw this shape, but loop this around, but we won't be going out this far and then reconnected to the other end. I'm picking a bright orange back to my soft brush and create a little Grady int coming out of this projector here. Gonna make it brighter closer to where the beams coming from. Now, these edges look a little too hard for me. So I'm going to de select the selection, then go to Filter and Gaussian Blur. You can make this effect as strong as you like on one of the highlight layers. It doesn't matter which I'm gonna brighten this up a little bit in this recessed area here . I'm selecting this line as well. To go to my color holds layer and paint that with a brighter color. And I'm going to select this little area from the base color and make it closer to white to make it look like it's really glowing. We can also take a soft airbrush with no selection and make a little bloom effect here on the SFX layer. And you could do similar tricks to create things like flames or lightning or energy bolts. One last thing to do here, I think. And that's give the cat itself a glow around the edge. So I'm gonna select the cat, then expand the selection by going to select expand selected area 15 pixel sounds about right to me. I'm going to do this on another hard light layer on top so I can easily change it if I need to, without affecting the other things we've done. Now I'm feeling that with a color and again running that Gaussian blur filter Now, this whole effect feels a little strong, so I'd like to lessen this glow in the middle. One way to do that is using a Met that we haven't discussed yet, which is to use a mask, so we'll cover that in the very next lesson. 26. How to use layer masks for editing: in the last lesson. We added this glow effect, but it's a little bit much. It's a little bit strong, and I really don't want it to show up everywhere. And so there's a couple of ways we could do this now. We could permanently, you know, delete from this section using the eraser. I could get a soft airbrush and I could paint with transparency, and it's going to start bringing that white back out of there. But that's a permanent change. OK, if I make this change and decided later is I would like that the way it looked before. If I don't immediately undo that, I'm not really gonna have any option to go back and change that later. That's where a layer mask comes in really handy. Let me show you how a mask works. I've made a new layer, and I'm gonna paste a copy of Van Gogh's Starry Night. Just as an example, Control T brings up the transform tool, which I rarely use, but you can grab a corner and pull this down to make it bigger press enter to finalize that . Now our whole pieces covered with the painting. I'm now going to put a mask on this layer. So to do that, just click the button right here. It's a little box with a circle in it way a mask works, for example. Right now, this mask is filled with white. It's filled with an opaque 100% opaque white color, and it doesn't really matter what color you put in the mask if it's a completely opaque color, like if I put in this gray or if I put in this black not really doing anything because all of these colors are completely opaque. But if I hit the letter C and switch to transparency and then go to, like, say, in my soft airbrush, I could use any brush. But I go to let's use the pier paintbrush and I'm using transparency. I can now paint transparency. You can see what's coming through underneath there. I'm gonna use the software brunches cause it's faster now. This is not deleting, okay? It's just hiding this area everywhere that you paint with the transparency. It's just hiding that section. You can see that's big black area in the middle. It's just hiding it. The information is still there. This is one. The reasons why a layer mask is so helpful is because all I've got to do is click on my mask and just get away from the transparency pick Any other color. Long is it's opaque. I can use Black Aiken white, and now I can pull that painting back in the mask is just a way to temporarily masked off something. And I use masked all the time. I'll give you guys some other examples of these later, but for now, we're gonna use a mask on this glow that we made. We've got our glow, which is a little too strong. I'm gonna put a mask on it. Use transparency. You can either click this or hit the letter C my soft airbrush. I'm gonna start painting this out in the middle of the cat here. I've still got that glow loan edge. You can even see the cat shape over here on the mask now, but starting to look like more like he's emanating his own light source. Now, at this stage, because we have all of this on different layers, we could go in and change any of this. So if I wanted to go in and grab like the base color for the cat and make it a different color. Become more yellow, make orange, but where it is, make it less saturated or saturated. But all these options, because for them, underneath all the other work that I've done, same thing applies to like the hat. I want a big This had a little bit more century. No, I am still not quite happy with this cat. There's one other thing I want to try. I'm going to remove the glow from everywhere except outside the cat. So I'm gonna use the wind to select the cat hit delete to remove it from that cat Global earlier. So we're just leaving that glow on the outside, and now I want to double that glow effects. I'm just gonna hit control J on thatl aerial. Duplicate the layer. We do have some strangest note, though, going on in the lines now so we can fix this by selecting the inks by control or command, clicking the ANC's thumb now in the layer window and then just hitting delete on both the cat glow layers at the top. Anyone get here eventually, but it's something I never tried before. You guys got to see me Figure it out in real time. We can merge these down to these two cut and global ears. Birds with clear blue. Apply the mask. I'm gonna pump up this glow by selecting the background from the flats layer and in using a soft brush around the cat on the SFX layer with a more saturated color. All right, so at this point, I'm actually pretty happy with the way the cat looks, But But he's pretty bright. And I don't think the orange light from him is infecting the gentleman quite as much as it should. So I'm gonna make a selection of the man itself and then go back to that overlay layer we made earlier in just with a big soft airbrush right in this area. Gonna paint that with orange. And like I said earlier, the neat thing about overlay is it's not really going to affect the values much. The dark parts will just get a little bit lighter. The mid tones will get a little bit or injure, and it won't really affect those highlights very much. It's gonna tent it all orange a little bit, but that's kind of what I want, and now we're ready to move on to the next one. 27. How to use correction layers for adjustments: All right, So we are in the home stretch. There's a couple of tweaks we're gonna make and then we'll start talking about some of the I guess you could call it post processing features in the software. At least that's how I use them. To start with, I realized two things I want to change on this before we go any further. I wanted dark in these highlights on the cat a little bit there, just a little too bright to me. I'm gonna just select the cat using the magic one. And I'm on the highlights layer, which is where the brightest part of this is. And I'm just gonna hide the selection opened up hue saturation with the shortcut were used the quick access or could have been you and lighten it just dark in this. If you made years is bright, is mine might want to do that. I'm also gonna grab that pure paintbrush again and just paint in a little bit of texture like it might be for So it doesn't look quite so smooth. I'm just drawing little lines in here, kind of following the contours in the direction that hair would go not a step. You necessarily have to take what I thought it might look cool. And the other thing that I forgot to do was his eyes. I really do anything to his eyes, and I'm really not gonna do much. Except for I'm gonna highlight a little area on the bottom side of both peoples. Then on the highlights layer using that same bright orange kind of fill that in. So it looks more like the light from the cat is reflecting their We can also push this little highlight here a little bit more toward white. Really Make the eyes stand out. All right, So let's talk about correction layers. And next there the layer window. If you right, click really anywhere on any of layer, you'll get an option to add a new correction lier and these air like adjustment layers if you're familiar with with those from photo shop, and they affect everything below the layer that shows up in the layers stack. So, for example, if I just wanted to impact the colors on this and nothing below the nothing above the inks I can go to, my inks are actually the core hold in this case, right click new correction layer and say color balance, for example, and anything that I adjust here. I pulled this toward red. It's actually not impacting any of the special effects that are above it, but the good thing about correction layers is that they're completely reversible. It's just a layer on top. It's a separate. Later, she can easily turn them off and on, and I'll show you some ways that you might want to use these. I'm gonna go to the top of the layer, stack a right click new correction layer, and I'm going to choose code balance. And that brings up the color balance here. Now there's a There's three different ways that you can affect each of these three different areas, so you have shadows, half tones, or you might also call these mid tones and highlights. So if I want to kind of affect the overall feel of the image without making it much darker , a much lighter, eat this on half tones and keep brightness checked. What this does is it kind of limits how much it affects how bright the colors are. For example, if I wanted to show all of these colors a little bit toward red, and I can start pulling this over and you can see that the entire image is starting to shift a little bit more red. And if I wanted to make it orange, I could add some yellow go any other way, and now that's affecting the entire image. So this is a nice way to kind of create a whole different change on your color pilot without having to go in and really change much of anything specifically that you've rendered here. You can switch this to shadow, for example, and say, I want to shift my shutters toward blue, but I don't do this is often because you can see it's actually darkening this quite a bit, even though keep brightness is checked because blues just a dark color. And this is not actually a bad look because, you know, we've got our entire image, you know, kind of being lit by this orange cat. But one of the neat things about direction layers is that they also just by default include a layer mask. What this means is, let's say that I like this look and I want to keep it, but I don't want it to be in the background. That's where this mass comes in. I could just click the background, gonna hide the selections. We don't have to look at it, Which to my field tool. Make sure it's said to refer to other layers, and I'm gonna change this to transparency is on the mask. If you'll remember, transparency will hide those areas of the layer that's on the layer mask. So in this case, we can actually remove this effect from the background by filling the background with transparency. Now you can see if I control Z to toggle that often on you can see the difference. But now this effect is Onley affecting our guy here and the cat. Now the other thing this is doing, though, because we've basically added an orange tent to the entire image. It's really killed that blue Okay, that that blue is almost You could see how similar it is to the great background. Now it's not effect. I really want. I can turn this off to disable the effect, or I could go in and just minimize that effect. So let's say that I go to my soft airbrush. We're still set on transparency Over here. I could just sort of paint this away in the areas that are on this side, the image and to do anything because I still have the background selected. He select that and then sweet story airbrush, and now we can paint it in. You can see that that is starting to come back to being blue Now I do think I'm gonna keep that effect. It's pretty subtle, and it's really only affecting the cat. And, you know, some of the area now by his face, another type of direction layer that I used pretty often is the ingredient map, and this could be a little confusing. But what this does by default, it's picked just a black and white grading map. So what this means is the darkest parts of the image, the darkest values on the image. It's set to a black color, the lightest part of images air white. There's all sort of different types of grading maps here, like this. See Peotone one. Here you can see that it's mapping the darkest park to the black, getting toward the mid tone, just starting to get orange and it on this, saying that starting to get yellow, you can click any of these little arrows to change those underlying color. So, like if I grab this yellow, make it more saturated, you can see that those brighter areas air now a lot more yellow. You can also drag these little arrows around like I can pull this little partner this way. That's a quick way to get a neat pile it to kind of start from. I know some artists work with it that way. They'll sort of put a great amount down first and then paint on top. I don't do that a ton personally, but it is an option. And remember, these are not permanent changes. All you have to do is turn the map off and you're right back where you started. It's also interesting to kind of play around with the blending modes on these you what you can come up with. They're not all going to be home runs, but you can get some interesting effects by playing around with some of those layer blending modes. You can also adjust the capacity, not something I really want to do in this image so I'm just gonna delete this layer. One other quick way to kind of tie all your colors together or kind of shift. The overall mood of something is to make a new layer and try to soft, light blending moon. I'm just gonna fill this entire layer with this kind of medium orange that we're seeing here and you can go in. I can change the saturation to see how much of this I want it to effect. But the more century to the color is that you use more. It's going to impact the image, but you can see as I kind of slide this around just about any color that I pig. It still looks pretty decent because it's allowing a lot of those underlying colors to come through. But it's a really quick, fast way. Go in and really completely change the overall feel without having to do very much. And again you could use a mask and control exactly where this is happening. Let's move onto the next one 28. How to export your work for web & print: All right, So let's say that we have now arrived at the end, and I'm actually pretty happy with how this looks. I'm ready to put this on instagram or send it to the printer or whatever is gonna happen with this piece that I'm working on this lesson. I'm gonna break down how to do that. If you just want to save this to post on social media or put on your own website or something, you really only need a J peg for that. The clip actually makes this really easy. You goto file export its export single layer. And in J pic open up a window you can save this final into. It's already got our file name in here. I'm gonna click. Save this is gonna bring up a couple of options. The first is the preview. The rendering result on output. This just means that it will pop up a little window and I'll show you when we get to that point that I can show you what it's gonna look like. I have really found this to be necessary. Next is quality. If you're worried about final size, you might want to lower this down. But the lower this number is, the more likely you're gonna have artifacts. And it's just not gonna look that great output image. I usually ignore all of this because I don't use draft files, text file story information or polio information any of my work. I will go into a little more detail on different layer types. In a lesson coming up here, I usually leave all of this unchecked expression color. I leave this on RGB. This is sort of the default for any sort of use on the Internet. You go into advanced color and there's some more options in here. I've never really messed with it. I just kind of leave everything on the fault there. I do usually leave the profile checked. I don't know what difference it makes, but I leave it check anyway. And there's also options to re scale this. So especially if you're gonna be attaching this to maybe an email or you just you don't need to send it at the full size, which in this case is it's a pretty big file, you know. It's almost a little over 4000 pixels, tall and wide, and it's Warner d P I. So if I just want to put this on the Internet, I might lower this down all the way to say 1 50 or something for this section. You can leave this an illustration or comic. I haven't really been able to tell much difference either way. So I'm gonna leave an illustration and click. OK, here's that preview that we're getting, in case you want to see that you can pick that box. If you don't want to see this, you can just leave that unchecked on the previous screen. You'll also get the file size here, which you can adjust at this point to. This is about a megabyte and 1/2. If I lower this toe 80 you can see it pretty dramatically changes the file size. If file sizes a problem, you can see there's a huge difference in 90 and 100 so that 90% quality were at 400 kilobytes Kilobytes. I changed to 100 were at three times that amount more than three times that amount. That's probably a pretty good idea to set this to 90 or 95 or so. Just click OK, and now you have a file you can share on Twitter or Instagram or whatever social media exists at the time he currently watching this course. Now, if you want to export your file for getting printed, that's a little bit different. First, we have to make sure we have one flattened file and we need to set the mode to see him like a first off. As I have it, I make sure I say my file again. Just control s that will save this file and save all the layers in tact. Next, you can just right click anywhere in the layer stack, click, flatten image. And this is going to squash all the layers down to use one layer and get rid of all the other layers. Next, we're gonna go to file in an export single layer. I would recommend a tiff file That seems to be the standard. If you're doing something with a common but publisher, at least your own publisher might require something different. But I'm gonna shoes, tiff and click save. We've got our rendering result checked. If we want everything else is pretty much the same. But the expression color we need to change this to see him like a for the advanced settings again, I'm gonna leave these exactly like they are not gonna worry about it in bed. The profile, What we said it to very early in the course was that swap file, which to me does a pretty good job. You can change the resolution. You can set it at the original resolution, which which is probably what you're gonna be doing if it is going to be printed again. Leave this on Illustration and click. OK, there's how it's gonna look and click. OK, at this point, what I would do the gun do to get our files stacked back because you don't want to save this as one layer because you won't be able to go back and get your you know, and changing of this, you're gonna lose your ability to make all those edits. So it's really important to make sure that you control Z. Bring your layer stack back or, if you're really paranoid, you could just save this as a different file. First, you go up to file save as you rename it toe, see him like a version or something, and then then make your changes that we don't have to worry about accidentally overriding your file. Once I know I've got on my layers stack bank, I will save it again and we're done. Let's move onto the next one. 29. How to use the gradient & eraser: but for the remainder of these lessons, I'm going to be going through some of the parts of the software that I don't necessarily use regularly. But they are things that are good to know and I think worth knowing we're gonna cover some of that. Now, the 1st 2 we're gonna cover is the Grady and Tool. We just clicked that tool, bringing all these colorful options over here. There's lots of different modes for this particular tool. There's foreground to transparent. Now what this does, it takes your foreground color in this case, this orange. I'm gonna pick something different here like a purple. And to use this tool, you're gonna put the cursor on the screen somewhere. It's hard to see right now, but it's it's up here at the top left. I'm gonna drag a line across, and what you're going to see is it's gonna create a Grady in from the top to the bottom, using this purple color into transparency. Now, if you make this line really long, let's all the way across the image. You'll get a smooth, radiant all the way from the top all the way. The bomb and the angle will change depending on the angle that you pull the Grady and down . So if I go to the very top and pull straight down the great, it's gonna go from top to bottom. I started the bottom and drag. Tom. This is probably the most common one that's used is the is when you are taking a color and just dragging it into transparency. The other thing to keep in mind here is how long you stretch this line also makes a difference. So, for example, if I start on the left and drag all the way to the right and by the way, you can hold shift to kind of jump to the zero and 45 degree increments, I'm gonna drag this all the way across. Now we have a perfect radiant from this purple on the left, all the way to transparent on the right. If I shorten this, it just shortens the amount of space that the grading covers. That's the only difference. So this is a good way you can get really short radiance. You get really long radiance. Now this is the straight line version. There's also a circle version, and in a lips version. The circle draws a circle instead, but it's still the same thing. We still get a solid color into transparency. This would actually be a good place to use this. If we change this toe like a yellow color that we've created like a little round glow effect, I could make it small. I can duplicate it a couple times is also an oval option, which changes to a shape like this. Which could be interesting if, let's say that I wanted this to look like it was Ah, I'm kind of lens flare something. This is actually a two step process. You start in the middle where you want your grating to start term. In this shape. Yes, I want it to be like a little thin bubble like this when I lift my pen. Now it's rotating. I'm going to say what angle I want, So if I want a straight across, I could just hold shift. It will snap, you know, all the way around the clock here and then click again. Here we go actually looks pretty cool, so I think I'm going to use it, make it really small. There's also some other options. And these create really interesting effects for not effects that I would ever really use for EJ process their defaults to do not repeat, So you just draw big radiant and it filled in. But you can also set it to repeat it will duplicate it over and over. This reverses it, so that's the foreground, a transparent. We can also choose foreground to background weaken. Set those two colors here. Just click on the top one to set the foreground orange, for example, and click the one behind it, and we can set it to something else. Now it's just blending that one into the other. All the same modes available. Circle, oval, etcetera. I recommend just playing around with the options here. This one is a quick way to make stripes, because the closer that they are, the more striped it's gonna make pretty handy. This one alternate stripes with foreground and background, the tool I want to touch on here real quick, and it's kind of funny that we did this entire piece without ever even don't even know if we mentioned it. But is the eraser tool. There are so many options for nondestructive work you know whether you're using a mask or transparency itself, which I guess that would actually be destructive. But I've just sort of made a habit over the years of not using the eraser tool. But it works just like you would expect the eraser tool toe work. You can go into anything like, let's say, the glow on this cat here and there's a hard edge eraser. There's a softer edge, which puts a little bit of a edge on it, and there's a couple of different textures. There's rough textures. There's a vector eraser, which none of these options or tools. I really use that much if you do want to use them, feel free. But they're pretty straightforward. I just couldn't get through the whole course without at least mentioning the fact that the eraser exists. Let's go ahead and move onto the next one 30. How to use the filters: this lesson. We're gonna talk about the filters, and the first thing we're gonna do to make this work is we're gonna flatten all this toe one layer, going to show you guys a different way to do this so that you don't have to actually get rid of your layer stack for most effects, things like blurs, mosaic filters it really any filter you want to add? They don't really work that well. If you're just trying to pick, you know, one of these layers and make it work So there's an option. That clip has you can right click and you see where it says, Sorry, this is cutting off a little bit on my screen here, but down here at the bottom, it says merge visible to new layer. What this does If you click on it, it will take whatever you see in your layer stack and put it on one layer. I think it'll pop up right about whatever, Larry, You're on merge. Visible to new layer. Yeah, and it appeared down here. Now, if I isolate this layer by clicking older option in the eyeball, it still looks the same because all of the contents of the layers below it, or on this layer by itself. If you're going to do some kind of filtering effect, a lot of times I've found it's best to just start on one layer like this. We can go to filters. Don't run through these real quick, Most of these air pretty obvious. Blur blurs. It doesn't blur very much by default, I found. So I don't really use that option very much the same thing with Blur strong. Yes, it's blurry. I wouldn't call this a strong blur, so I'm gonna undo that and go to built her blur Gaussian Blur. Now this one, you'll notice it has a little three Eclipsys. I think that's called ellipsis. What? Any time you see that, at least in Windows, it means there's another box coming. So if I click this, we've got this little box here and we can adjust the strength of this effect. Now this actually blurs. Okay, Like what? I would expect a blur to look like, and it it goes across the screen. Your computer. It might be a little slow, depending on how your computer is. I've got a pretty fast computer and mind still takes a second protest to show up, but this could be useful. You know, if you want to create some kind of out of focus effect or something, that would be one way to do it. And you can control where this effects the image with a mask. Let's say that, um for whatever reason, I wanted the cat to be blurry, and I wanted this guy toe not be blurry. Let me crank this up even more to make it really clear that the cat is blurry and click OK and will take a second to load. This is actually hurting my eyes. So I'm gonna put a mask on this by clicking a little create layer mask button and choose transparency by clicking the letter C or clicking this button here. Now, I could paint this effect out. If you want to create, like, a soft focus effect, let's delete this and I'm gonna remake that merge visible to new layer and I'm gonna duplicate that layer. I'm just gonna hold down control or command Hit the letter J. I'm gonna blur this layer name way. Yes. OK, then you could just lower the opacity that layer you get sort of that. Ah, it kind of reminds me of glamour shots. Any of you guys are old enough to remember those. There's a couple of different kinds of blurs here. There's also a motion blur and a radio blur, though motion blur. Let's say that I want this cat look like he is moving quickly. I'm going to select the cat Blur Motion blur, and this includes an angle. Okay, so it zero, it's actually going side to side. I turned this up. Actually, changing the angle of this border appears, and you can adjust how much of this appears also, And there's also options toward to disco both ways or one way when we can lower. The strength of this was also a difference in box and smooth. I don't really know what those differences are, but it does look different. Okay, and now we've got a motion word Big cat. Not a bad looking effect. If I put it in lieu capacity almost like he's blushing or something, maybe I'll leave it. But this next one is interesting. It's called a radio bore. They got a blur, filter, filter, blur, radio blur, and I'm gonna center this on his face. You guys can see this effect, and this is a very PC intensive effect. So you might want to cancel this if you have a slow computer. This is a pretty big file. So my computer is pretty fast, and it is taking its time as well. I want to go and click, OK, and let this render out when the time lapse. This section is taking so long. All right, so we finally got our effect done. Now, again, this is a pretty dramatic effect, so you might want to lower the intensity of it. I've also used this before by putting a mask on the layer and then switching to transparency and painting it out of the center. That creates an interesting effect, kind of like a zooming effect. The rest of these filters, I'm gonna recommend you guys play around with. There's a lot of distortion filters that again I just never really use, not something I would consider when coloring. There's also on artistic filter, which can be interesting. But again, plenty of stuff to play around with here. I recommend playing around with it, which is what I would have to do. And also there is. There is one that I use pretty regularly called the mosaic filter. If you want to hide some part of the image or, you know T something without showing the entire thing, this is basically the same. As, you know, It's kind of like your censoring the image Let's move onto the next one. 31. Auto actions + Quick access settings: in this lesson, we're gonna talk about auto actions If you're more familiar with Photoshopped, these were just called actions. I have started using these a lot more with Clip because there's so many things that air kind of in your in menus and in different windows. And I like to click a little. It's possible, especially when you're working in, you know, in deadlines and in a kind of production kind of environment like I do, it really makes a big difference to actually have no as few clicks as you possibly can. And even if you're not, there's some things that are just simpler to set up with an action. One of the things I brought up early on in this course was, when you name your layers, you keep them consistent. Now, I don't really name many of my layers consistently, except for two of them. That is the ink slayer in the flats layer. When you use consistent naming, that means you can set actions based on those names, which is really, really useful. I'm gonna show you guys how to make some of these that I have set up here, and I'll actually include these actions as part of the course, I will export these. You guys have able to use those if you want, but I do think it's important to know how to make things yourself. Now. One of the first things that I made once I figured out how important that reference layers are with this software and how much easier it makes things. I wanted to make that simpler. So I've created actions to set the Inkster reference layer and set the flats to reference layer. Now, there's two modes on this action window. The first is this. Ah, but mode. Now, right now it's checked. I'm gonna uncheck this and you'll have to uncheck this to really make any changes to it. Change it from the button mode into this mode, and this is actually where you can record new actions. I'm gonna turn off all my reference layers for now. When unlock this term at all. Right now, I have no reference layers I'm gonna is recreate this set flats to reference as an option for you guys. I'm gonna right click just in the empty space here. Or you can also hit this little pull down menu where the three bars are and click add new action, and we can rename this to Michael. It's set inks you ref the to just so I can see the difference in the two and click Enter. Now we've got our action name, but it's not doing anything yet. It's only got a name. We're gonna click record start to record auto action. Now I need to do the steps that I want this action to do. The first thing it needs to do is selecting Slayer. You can see why the name is important now. I need to click the reference to set a reference layer, and I'm gonna go ahead and lock it to now. I can stop the action by clicking this red Square. Now, if I run this action, watch what happens over here. It selected the ANC's, and now that inks layer is marked as reference and it's locked again instead of having to make to click. That's what that button modus for. I'm gonna go ahead, delete this because I've already got this action. The delete button. If I click the three lines and click button mode now, it runs just by clicking at one time you could see some of the other actions that I have in here. There's one for just make hard light layer, and if I click this you can see it's adding a bunch of hard, light layers. I just use hard light so often that I needed a button port and make this even faster. Let's say I don't even want to click this button. I want to set a keyboard shortcut to run the action that's done and file Berkut settings and go down to the petting area and change it to audio action am or actions. Those the ones that I have now I've already set my hard light make hard, lightly, er, action to have four. So even if I'm in the middle of my canvas, I can click at four and you can see over here it's making heart light layers without me even clicking the button. We'll use this, so if I want to make a quick rendering layer, it have four. I've got a hard light lier, and I can drag that to the top. Maybe if I want a special effect or I could render down here below but just saves a little bit of time and you can set up as many of these as you want. I got a couple others here. I've got one to copy to a new layer, but something I use pretty often this one requires a selection first. Like if I select the hat and then run this action, it copies it to its on lier, and it actually locked transparency to we're gonna talk about in a second. But basically what that does is it prevents me from being able to go outside of those lines without a selection and without using a clipping mask again, I'll cover that. The next lesson also got a button for brightness to capacity. Actually made this before I knew that you could just drag it into quick access, but we'll talk about quick access in a second, but that's how the actions work. They're really simple to do. And if there's anything that you find yourself re doing over and over and clicking certain things, then in action for it, save yourself a lot of time over. The quick access actually touched on this early on. This is really simple to set up. You can basically put any tool or any setting into this box. Like, for example, let's say for whatever reason, there was some tool that I just would prefer to have. In my quick access, I can look on quick access settings, but in my tool menu, get a specific, as I want say that I want Ah, Pierre Paint blender to be there, Drag it in. Let's say that I often use a Grady Int map correction lier. I go into layer new correction layer there is great and that drag it over. And now when I click that button, But this is just one set I really haven't set on mine up yet the way that I want, But I know a friend of mine that's done some flighting for me as a colorist himself. He actually has one set for flattening and one set for coloring, but you've got tons of options. Like I said, any tool, anything on the menu that you need quick access to. But in the quick access, there's also a lot of options to change how this looks. I think this is the default if I'm not mistaken, but I can click on the little three lines here next to it, but of you and there's a tile. You know what all these symbols mean, which I don't. So I don't use that one. But you go to view and there's a tile medium again. Takes up a lot of space. Not really. Something that I'm into using is also lists in one column or two. I actually like this better because you can see the whole thing in one go. But you can see the ones that I've got here. Like, for example, I've got ah, mosaic on this list. Just because I don't just to keep you having going to the menu, I can just click Mosaic, pop out the music filter. Then I can go in and set that up. I keep running into accidental things that I think that I like. Just remember that if you want to make changes to this, you do need to get the quick access settings first, and that will enable this to be able to be moved around. You can see dragging these things around. You can put him in different orders. You can give them their own little section if you drop it right on the line. All the ones I use most often, I'll probably keep up near the top and there we go. Let's move onto the next one. 32. Selection workflow for pro colorists: all right in this lesson, I want to show you guys a quick workflow. I guess you would call it that. I use that I'm working using some of those tools that we've used. And especially if you're coloring sequential books or your coloring comics that have multiple panels, there's a couple of things you can do with your selections that will really make coloring just easier. Now, One quick disclaimer here. A lot of these tricks are really about speed. And if you're, you know, on a deadline and your coloring for publisher, you having to do many pages a day, that's a really big deal is to be efficient and to work as quickly as you can along with, you know, making sure that you're covering well. So if you're here to learn clips, video to color for fun and you can take, you know 10 hours a page, don't sweat it if all of this seems like you know a little too much. But if you're coming at this from a professional angle, thes things will save you a ton of time. By the way, this is a page from Dark one, published by Vault Comics and Dragon Steel Entertainment. It was created by Brandon Sanderson, drawn by Nathan Gooden and colored by Me. But I'm gonna turn off all of my layers for a second, and we'll start with this bottom layer if I'm going to flat myself. This is actually my first step, and the way this is done, I'll show you very quickly. Turn at all. I'll first fill the layer with white just so we don't have to look at the transparency and to fill in the gutters with a color. By the way, pro tip. Most of the time, your gutters should be white. That's these things between the panels. They get colored a lot. I see a lot of beginners coloring. Um, they should probably be white most of the time. So then I will select the rectangular lasso and select all of these panels, and this is said to add to selection at the moment. I don't know if this is gonna be exact, but it's going to close enough and fill it with the color. Doesn't matter what color is. Then I'll switch to a different color and make sure that I check apply to connected pixels on Lee on the field tool because I don't want to change all of these panels. I just want to change one of the time. So I want to change the color to something else. Fill it, change it, fill it, change it, will it change it, fill it changes, Philip. So end up with a layer that basically just has the panels and slightly different colors. You'll understand why I'm doing this in just a second. The next thing I'll do, which again? I'm not gonna do this in real time. So we've already kind of established how to do this. But I make a new layer on top of that, call it foreground or f g and trace out each character built with color. And he's gonna be the same color. Trace it, fill it. You do this entire section because if you're working big too small, you're gonna be kind of doing this. Anyway, once I have that done, I will select it so that I just have my foreground selected courses up to you what you call foreground or background. I consider foreground, usually to just be the people you are the focus of whatever that panel is But now I want to feel the reverse of this. I want to fill the background with a color. So instead of having to redo everything, I'm just gonna hold down shift control or command hit the letter. I that will flip flop the selection. So nail noticed that everything except the people is selected. But I need to remove the gutters. So I'm gonna go to a magic one, hold down all our option, make sure this is unchecked. Apply to connect the pixels and then click the gutters. So now I just have the background selected. I will fill that with a color. So to recap quickly got our panels all separated. We've got our background on a separate layer, and then we've got our foreground on a separate layer. Now, at this point actually flat the rest of this, I would probably just turn off the inks, and then you can right click on a layer, or you can go up to the little three linemen you here and click merge visible to new layer . What this does is going to create one layer with all this information on it. This is what this looks like. I'm gonna use this as a basis to start my flat ing. So we just call this flats, Call it flat V two. Since this file already has a flat slayer and then from here, using the tool we've already learned how to use, I would start making selections big to small, throwing these in. Maybe we separate these. Fill it in and on and on. Same thing on the characters. Select the hair, fill it. It's like the skin. Fill it. Okay, at least if you're doing it manually. If the line artist clean enough that you can use the automatic tools, Of course, you could try that too. So let's just say that I flat this entire thing and this is where they end up. So now you're thinking OK, well, what was the point of all of these other layers here? These other layers are here to make selections easier. So let's say, for example, I'm coloring this second panel and I want to put like, a glow effect. I want to do some rendering in this background here behind these two characters. If we select the wall, you can see it selected the wall here and down here and down here. I don't want to select those areas so I can quickly switch to my panels. Make sure that intersect with selection is set on my magic wand, which mind stays there and then click that panel. So it's intersecting between that original wall and the panel that we made down here. This saves a ton of time because now I could just make a layer and do all my rendering back here. Or maybe I want to do some lighting on the characters. Control, click the picture of the foreground. I've got all my characters selected. I can pick a color, probably hide my selection first. So then it's just a matter of, you know, grabbing a brush and painting. So let's say I want to darken him in this panel because I've got this light shining on the wall when I make sure he's actually darker than its skin is right now. Well, I can make sure my my magic wine selection for referred layers is checked glances, a reference. I click his skin. It's hair and I start clicking on this stuff. It's a bunch of clicks Number one, and then I've still got it still selecting all of this because I used the same colors jumped down in my panels. Refer to editing layer. Click that selection inside. Now it's removed him for everywhere else. Now a faster way would have been to have my wine set to the editing lier control. Click the foreground to select all the foreground, then go to my panels. Grab panel one Now on Lee. This character is selected in this first pound, so those are a couple of just real world scenarios that show off some of those selection techniques we learned earlier. It'll save you a lot of time with a little practice will make you a whole lot faster. Let's move onto the next one. 33. Layer palette options: all right, coming into the home stretch here, I want to go over all the remaining layer options. We've covered almost everything, but I wanted to go over it all. The one place. Make sure that we've covered everything here. The first. Let's cover some of the options for the window itself. So if you click on this little three fine menu here, you'll get all the options that you also get when you right click on a layer. I really only use raster layers personally, but you can create folders here, which is not something we really done. So, for example, if I wanted to put all of my rendering in one folder, I can click on this layer. I can either hold down control and click all of them, or I can just, well downshift and click on the bottom one right click and create folder and insert layer. Now the default behavior is kind of odd. It's gonna make the folder mode normal, and you can see it's really kind of screwed up the way that are drawing looks. So if you go up to normal and click through what that means is, it will make sure that all of the individual layer modes will come through. Basically, I don't know why it doesn't do this by default, but that's what it does. The folders can help too kind of short in this stack, you can also ungroomed layer folders. So I've got this folder selected. I can UN group, and it will spending all that count a lot of these we've already seen on the right click menu, But there's also a thumbnail size. You can adjust the size of being. The actual thumbnail itself is you have a tonal layers, and you want to make sure that you can see him all at one time. That is possibility. Don't know if I don't like that better. Maybe I'll leave it that way, and then you have just going. We'll go through all these buttons here on the top left. You have color coding. Let's say, for example, I want all of my rendering layers toe have a certain color. That's what that does. It just sets it to a different color where you can actually set your own custom color. If I was a photo editor and used 100 layers, maybe that's something that would interest me, but really doesn't for me. Next you have the layer blending modes. There are lots and lots of resource is available over how these modes work. I don't think there's anything better than going in and playing around with him yourself, but all the modes that I use regularly you guys have already seen in this course. Next you have the capacity slider and what's cool about this. You can actually adjust multiple layers at one time, like I've still got all of these selected from before, not something I want to do. But it basically just sets the opacity of the layer. How much of that layer actually comes through, How much of it is visible where you self explanatory the clip to layer below we've already talked about that creates a clipping mask. We use that on the color holds. If you unclip that on a layer that has a clipping mask, you can see what that does reference layer. We've talked about extensively. This toggles that often on this oneness set as draft layer, and this is not something that I really use personally making new layer and set this to draft mode right here set his draft layer, and I'm just gonna draw this. Now, let's say this was a sketch. Okay, Let's say I had a sketch in this drawing and I wasn't going to actually want to show up in my final product. If you use a lot of draft layers, they can be useful because when you actually go to export of file, So if I go like export A J peg of this, I want to make sure I show you the output on this. I'm gonna check this box. Look, OK. You'll notice that the draft players not showing up, you can have as many draft layers as you want. Most people would use this, I would say for sketching or, you know, maybe some perspective lines or something. But they're just a way to have a linger that's not going to show up in the final product. That way you can turn them off knowing without having to worry about them showing up there . Locklear does exactly what it sounds like it does. It locks the layer, and you can't do anything with it unless it's unlocked, like transparent pixels. This sort of acts like a clipping mask without the mask part. But if I make a new layer now, by the fault, of course, I can pick another layer and paint on this right. But if I click this lock transparent pixels option looks like a checkerboard with a lock on it. It will only let me paint on pixels that exist on that layer. This is also a quick way toe. Stay in a line, sometimes without using selections. I'm not using any selection here. Nothing is selected, but I can't color outside of that layer because the transparency is love. Ah, here you can enable and disable a mask. I don't really have a ton of mask on this one. I do. In this top layer, though I can disable that, it'll turn at all. No, the mask area will show it in like a deep purple color again, not something really use that much. There's also a change layer color. Now this one's a little bit different. But let's say, for example, that I wanted to make sure that I could tell the difference between, say, two different in clears. Well, if I just hit this inks later on the unlock it and hit change later color. It will temporarily change all of that to this blue by default. You can go in and change that color any way you want. It doesn't actually change the underlying layer. It's still black under here, but it's temporarily made it blue. I don't really use this very much, but that is what that button does. You can turn it off and on, and it creates this little shape down here. Next. We've got the show earlier in two pains. So if we have a whole bunch of layers and show layer into pains will split this now it appears at the bottom, I think, by default. But if I drag this up, we're basically looking at two different versions of our layers Now. We didn't duplicate him. These air just views. But let's say that I'm working at the bottom and I'm using my colors and plants often. But I also need to get to something at the top. It's just a way to have both of those open at the same time. New raster layer we've used several times. This is just shift control or command the letter in, or you can click this layer to make a new layer. Next is vector layers, which I don't do anything with personally. But if you're into using vectors, you got to use vector layers layer folder again. You can just make a folder and move that wherever you want. You can select players and put him in the folder. Remember, you'll probably have to set it to through if you want it to work right, transfer to lower layer. If a hit transfer, watch the little symbols down here, I'll zoom up in the edit. It just literally moves the content down one layer. But if we click on combined to layer, it blends those two layers together. Very useful. Get the mask. But nobody talked about this one. But this will let you create a new layer mask and then right next to it, it will merge. That mask back in this button creates the mask. If I have used it, I'm done with it. I can click this. Apply masto layer and the mask basically disappears. I don't know why do you want to do this? But it is an option, and then finally you got the trash can. I've got mindset to ask. Are you sure you want to do this? Those air, All of the options on the layer window, Let's move on. 34. Conclusion: all right, we have made it to the end of the course. So congratulations. I just wanted to bring up one other thing here, right at the end that some of you guys may or may not realize, depending on how experienced you are. But because we have put all of our different lighting on separate layers, we can go in and change any of these at any time. You can completely change the way that a layer looks by opening up hue, saturation and changing the colors of those lights that you could have A you know, a daytime look. You could have a nine time look, a lot of different options there, a lot of flexibility and working this way. Obviously, if you want to use less layers, you want to do it all on a couple layers. That works, too, but I thank you so much for watching a do hope you've learned something. If you did spread the word, tell somebody on social media. I am a one man operation. There's no marketing team, and what I found makes a bigger difference than anything is just word of mouth. And that's working. People have known this for a long, long time. And that's really all I ask of you in return. I'd love to see your versions of these. You can tag me in social media. This app frustrated me for such a long time because I really couldn't find time around my other work toe Put time into it to actually been some time to figure it out. And once I did, it opened up a lot of options for me. And I hope that it does for you to begin. Thank you so much for your support. I'll include links all my social media and other courses and give you a discount as well. Depending on what platform you're on. But you should see that in the very last lesson listed here again, I can't thank you enough. Hope you enjoyed it. Take care yourself.