Learn to Draw and Paint in Photoshop

1. 01. Welcome to the course: Hi there, I'm Siphone and welcome to this course on how to draw and paint digitally. This course is all about demystifying the process of drawing or painting in Photoshop or any other digital application. This means that you don't have to be put off by a blank Canvas or by thinking that you can't draw. Or even by thinking that digital tools are a bit too complex. I designed the course specifically to show you techniques and tools that are used every single day by professional artists to create stunning artwork. They're actually very simple and very straightforward once you know how to use them. These are the exact same tools and techniques that I've used for over 15 years as an illustrator, an artist, and an animation professional. Since 2007, I've been a background artist creating background paintings, concept arts, prop designs, even character designs for animation studios in Dublin and in Vancouver. I think part of the reason that I've had such success as a background artist really comes down to the fact that I had a really good supervisor who mentored me in the very, very beginning. He showed me some techniques and some processes that were so simple but so effective. However, I would never have been able to figure them out by myself. That's what I want to do today. I want to share with you some of these techniques that I've learned, that I've made part of my process, and then hopefully you can do the same. I structured the lessons in this course so that they can build progressively. I'm going to start off showing you how to draw dynamic fast and confident lines in Photoshop, and give you some techniques on how to hone your drawing skills moving forwards. Then I'll show you how to approach your drawing from very, very rough line work right away through to polish cleanup line. After that, we'll dive into color and I'll show you how to paint in Photoshop. Plus I'll give you some tips on how to effectively add shading texture highlights to your artwork. At this point, I'll also share with you a technique that I use every single day when I'm working professionally, and that's a really simple, easy technique to get through an entire painting quickly and effectively. Then I'll finish up with a quick roundup of the top highlights of the course content just to give you a bit of a revision of what we covered, and also point out with you what I think would be the main takeaways from the whole course. So not only will you learn new skills in the next few hours, but you'll also learn how to push your creative boundaries a bit further. I can't wait to see what kind of amazing artwork you come up with. Let's get started. I'll see you in the next lesson. 2. 02. Setting Up: To get started in this course, we're going to need Photoshop or some similar digital painting software. By no means do you have to have Photoshop, there are alternatives to Photoshop that you can download for free, such as GIMP or Sketchbook by Autodesk. If you don't want to install Photoshop or if you don't want to pay for a license just yet, that's not a problem. You can use one of these free options and just follow along. Everything that I'm going to cover in this course will apply exactly the same. But Photoshop for me is the most robust application that there is for drawing and painting or creating artwork, and also it's industry standard across the board. For that reason, I generally tend to recommend students to download Photoshop. It is subscription-based, so you can pay month by month. If at any time you feel like you're not using it or it's not really suited to you, then you can just unsubscribe. Why not download a free trial? That way you can see what it's like, test it out for yourself without having to commit to paying for the whole subscription. I think they let you use it for about a week. You can certainly do that and get started in this course right away. The other thing that we're going to need for this course today is a drawing tablet. I presume that you will have something to draw on; a tablet and a stylus. I use a Wacom Intuos Pro. It's obviously one of the more expensive tablets out there, but you can get cheaper alternatives. Again, you don't have to spend loads of money if you're just starting out and you're experimenting and testing the [inaudible]. Have a look online and see if you can pick up a cheaper alternative. But just bear in mind that with the cheaper tablets, they may not be as precise or as good as the more expensive ones. But at least you'll get a feel for it and you'll get to start drawing and painting right away. If you want to check out the Wacom tablets, just head over to wacom.com, and you can see the whole range of products that they have over there and choose for yourself. The reason why I insist we have a drawing tablet for this course is because I want to teach you how to draw and paint with very expressive lines, very fast gestural brushstrokes, and you really can't do that with a mouse. Getting a pen and tablet is really the way to go. Other than the software and the hardware, that's really all you need. Maybe a notebook for jotting down like the keyboard shortcuts that I'm going to be calling out. Then that's it. We're ready to get started. In the next lesson, I'm going to share with you my top five tips for Photoshop as it relates to drawing and painting. 3. 03. My Top Tips for Photoshop: Learning new Photoshop tips always makes life easier and your workflow so much faster. I hope you enjoy these five tips that I think are essential for drawing and painting in Photoshop. Tip number 1, undo. This might sound a bit stupid to have as a tip, but for those of you starting out, getting your head around undoing stuff takes your work to a whole new level because you'll never be afraid to experiment again. In Photoshop, the regular command or Alt plus Z will only undo the last action that you did, so you have to hit Command plus Alt plus Z and that will let you undo many actions. But if you've made so many mistakes or if you want to get back to a way earlier stage in your document, then you can use this history panel and jump back in time by clicking on the name of the action that you want to get back to without having to go through all the subsequent actions. You can also go right back to the very beginning of your document when you first opened it up. This one's really handy if say, for example, you've made loads of mistakes and then saved over your work, which I've done many times. All I do then is just simply go back up to the very beginning state of the document and resave it with another name. Tip number 2, view your artwork in different viewing modes. Hit F on your keyboard and you can toggle between three different screen modes while you work. The first screen mode is the standard view, the second one allows you to view full-screen but still keep the menu bar and toolbar on the sides. Plus in this mode, you can also hit the space bar and that'll bring up the hand tool which allows you to pan your canvas around. This is usually the setting that I normally work in. The third mode takes away all the clutter on the sides. This one is great for viewing finished artwork in a maximize viewing pan. Tip number 3, get to know the transform tool. This is probably one of the tools that I use the most outside the Brush and Pen tool. I'm constantly hitting Command plus T on my keyboard to rotate, skew or scale elements of my artwork. It's a very standard operation, but you'll find that you use it so much when you're in your workflow. It's a good idea to experiment with it and get really comfortable using it. Get to know the Lasso Tool. This one is updated with the Transform Tool. I use it constantly. Holding down Shift and L lets you cycle through regular polygonal and magnetic lasso. But to be honest, I rarely use the magnetic one unless I'm working on a photograph or something like that. For drawing and painting, I usually only use the regular or the polygonal. Here's a really handy tip, if you're selecting an area of artwork with the regular Lasso, you can hold down Alt on your keyboard, and that will engage the Polygonal Lasso, and you can maybe select very intricate areas then release Alt, and go back to the regular one to finish off your selection. As of my top 5 tips as it relates to drawing and painting, it is to download a set of texture brushes. These days, there are countless free resources to download online and you'll be doing yourself a huge favor by getting a really nice set of big texture brushes. Now, by all means, you don't have to have texture brushes. Some artists can be purists and say, "Well, you should be able to make a whole painting with just one soft-edged brush," which is fine but these texture brushes will allow you to create really nice effect in your painting very fast, very efficiently. Do a bit of research online and see if there's a brush set out there that you like. That's it for my list of tips. Up next, we're going to start drawing and explore dynamic linework. 4. 04. Drawing Dynamic Lines: Head over to Photoshop and hit "Create New". Now from this menu you can select any size canvas that you like. But I usually go for A4 just because that's the size that I'm used to. It's your standard, legal, or an exercise. You can click "A4". I make the orientation landscape. That again is just a personal preference, you don't have to buy any means, but if you want to, follow along with me, go ahead and do that and then hit "Create". The first thing that I always do is make a new layer so that I'm not drawing on this locked background layer. Just come down to the bottom of the Layers tab, our panel and click this icon here, to create a new layer. Now we're ready to get going. If you come over to the left here, the tools on the left-hand side, this is where the brush is, so you can either click on the Brush icon or hit "B" on your keyboard. That'll bring it up too. Up at the top here are the properties of the tool. Clicking on this arrow will reveal all different kinds of properties like the size of the brush or if you want to change to a different brush. Right now, I'm going to be working with just one of the standard Photoshop hard-edged brushes. The size is about in and around 20, 25 pixels. So we double-click on that. Basically, what I want you to do is just start scribbling and moving the pen around on the tablet and getting used to the feel of how it works, going from very, very light to quite dark lines simply by adjusting the pressure of the pen. I want you to notice now exactly how you're moving your pain. Check if you're moving it from your wrist. In other words, check if your elbow and forearm are leaning on the table. See if you're just moving your hand around the tablet as you make marks. If this is the case, I want you to start drawing a very different way. Pick up your elbow and move your pen around as though your elbow is directing your whole arm. This might feel a bit strange at first, but it's going to help keep your wrist steady and that will dramatically improve the quality of your lines. You'll be able to get much more fluid, much more confident line strokes if you are keeping your wrist and forearm steady. Once you've done this for a while, we can move on from just moving the pen around. I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to open up the practice sheets that I've left for you in the resources folder. The first one is the join the dots. This lesson is really all about getting you up to speed, drawing confident lines. Just copy what I'm doing here joining the dots. You're basically obviously going from one side to the other. But the aim of the exercise is to get as clean and straight a line as possible. It doesn't really matter if you hit the opposite dot or not. I mean, that's not really the point. The point is to get clean, fast, confident lines. Overshoot the second dot by all means and don't, obviously aim for where you're going, but don't get too stressed about getting from one door to the other. Try and see, can you make those clean, swift, confident lines. Do this for a while until you get used to it. Remember to pick up your elbow and move your arm in a wide motion in the direction that you want the line to go. Now I'm going to move on. Enough with the lines, I'm going to get into some circles and squares. Again, the idea is to draw fast, fluid, and confident lines. You don't have to start in one point and make sure that you end up in that point. That's not really the point of issue I suppose. You can overshoot your starting and ending point, especially when you're drawing squares. These drills are something that you should get into the habit of doing almost every day. Think of a musician warming up. Just start your day off with these warm ups. Or if you want to take a break during your day, do a page or two of lines and circles. I promise you it will really improve your line work in no time. You will definitely notice it. Personally, I think the one secret to dynamic drawing for both digital media as well as traditional pencil on paper, the one secret is very simple. It's keep your first marks very large and very, very rough. In other words, don't go straight in and start drawing details and perfect finished lines. Keep your first draft very rough and sketchy but with confidence and dynamic lines. 5. 05. Perspective Grids: The next thing that I'm going to work on is drawing on the perspective grid. This is another daily drill that will dramatically improve your line quality and your confidence if you practice it over and over again. This is a one-point grid and this line here represents where your eye line is. Now, it's often called the horizon line. But basically, it represents your viewpoints or the viewers' viewpoint. When you're looking in this direction, all lines that are traveling away from you will converge on this horizon line, and the way you work with this grid is that you use it to draw objects that are in perspective. For this lesson, I'm just going to be showing you how to draw boxes. If you haven't worked with this group before, it's a good tip to draw your base in first and then determine what height you want your box to be, and then you can draw on the top. Now a two-point grid is slightly different because there are no two vanishing points. But the principles are the exact same. The horizon line still represents the height of your viewpoint. Above it, you are essentially looking up at objects and anything below it, you're essentially looking down on them, if that makes sense. It can be a bit technical, but for now, it only matters that you understand it in terms of drawing, and the way to do that is just to draw as much as you can on this grid and really get comfortable drawing in perspective without getting to slavishly attached to the rigid quality of a grid. Remember, you're aiming to improve your line quality, not your technical drawing skills at this stage, and as far as I'm concerned, it's actually much better to draw confident dynamic lines than to have the exact degree and angle of the line perfectly correct. I hope this makes sense to you. I've left both of these grids in the resource pack, and I'll encourage you to just practice with them drawing boxes, imaginary cities, or whatever you want to draw on these grids over and over again and get comfortable working with fast dynamic lines. You will see a huge improvement if you keep going with this. To counteract this very rigid way of drawing, I try to do as much free-hand drawing as I can, and the best way to do this is, just look around you right now, at this very moment and pick an object to draw. Don't even think too much about it, and don't try to draw it perfectly exact. Just work on capturing the rough shape of an outline in very loose marks. If you make it a challenge to draw like this for 10 or 15 minutes a day, you can really build up your skills, and drawing a page of normal, everyday objects like this is a great way to apply those boring drills to something much looser and much more fun. Plus this is where you can start to observe shapes and match your mark-making to what you're actually observing. In the next lesson, I'm going to walk you through the steps that I go through every time I make a drawing from start to finish. 6. 06. Drawing Rough to Polished: In this video, I'm going to share with you a process of taking a drawing from very rough, sketchy line work step-by-step, right the way through to a polished cleaned up line. If you want to follow along with me, you can open up this document called Lion that I've left in the resource folder. Otherwise, if you want to work on your own drawing and apply the steps that I'm covering here, that's totally fine. If you are working on this document, there's a locked background layer. The photograph itself is on this layer that's also locked. I'm going to be drawing on this layer above. On the right-hand side, I'm going to copy the line over to here. Just make sure that you have this layer selected. Then you can go ahead and open up the brush properties and make sure that you've got a nice soft edge brush selected. I'm going to bring the opacity down to about 68 or 70 percent. I do this so that I can make big gestural marks and not worry too much about the details at this point. The first thing that I always do is just try and get a sense of the volume of the thing that I'm drawing. Try and break down whatever it is you're drawing into the most basic shapes. It's a lot easier to understand the form once you think about it in these basic shapes. I'm not going to worry at all about details. I'm not going to worry about whether my proportions are correct to this stage or if the size is right. What about just getting marks down on paper? That should always be your very first step. Now, I'm going to go back to my layers. I'm going to drop the drawing layer down to about 70 percent. Then I'll make a new layer above that. Now I'm just basically going to repeat that process. You could be really tempted at this stage to get into detail and start refining things, but I want you to keep it very loose and sketchy for a while. So keep working like this. This is by no means perfect. I mean, I can already see that this drawing is probably way too big, but I'm just going to continue in this exact same way, and just keep going with this very large gestural brushwork. Going back over to my layer stack for a moment, what I have at this stage is two layers of very rough, what I call background drawings. What I'm going to do is select both those layers and merge them together. Now that layer itself, I'm going to drop the opacity down to about 70 percent, create a new layer above that. Now I'm going to draw over this layer. For this part, I'm going to use a hard edge brush. Probably bring the size down to about 20. I'm still going to keep the opacity low. Probably around 60 or even 50 percent might work. With a hard edge brush, you can start to pick out details. I'm going to keep it very loosed still, but you can start to refine your drawing a little bit, following those big gestural marks underneath. I'm just going to pick up the lines for my under drawing where I think the form is more defined. I'm going to block in some of the landmarks for myself and try and get a sense of the outline a bit better. I can already see that my proportions are not quite right. The nose and the mouth aren't in the right position, but I'm actually just going to keep working at it. Maybe in the next parts, I'll start to fix things. As before, this process with the hard edge line can be repeated as often as you like. I think I'm probably going to do another couple of layers with this loose squiggly line work. Because as you can see, I'm feeling I'm not quite getting the size and the proportions of the face of the lion right. At this stage, while it's still rough and loose, I can make any changes that I like. I can erase things out, and just shift things around. If you look over at the layers now, you can see all the different layers that I've been working on. The first one, that was the very rough initial marks that I was making, the very soft edge brush followed by the squiggly line and the hard edge brush. Then I've got another part where I was still working quite rough, but I was starting to make corrections to the drawing. Then I've got a final rough part where the line is becoming cleaner and more defined, but it's still very rough in my view. Now I'm going to make a layer on top of this and hopefully go in for my final cleaned up line. Now is the time to get as detailed as you like. Now you can really work into those areas of very fine details and really pick out the marks that you want to work on. If you've given yourself those previous stages of working very, very rough all the way through. Now when you zoom in and you go to draw those very fine detailed areas, you've got something to work on. You've got a foundation there, so you're not going to go astray very often if you zoom in and draw details straight off the bat when you zoom out again your drawings all over the place. But because you've got that foundational rough layer underneath, zooming in and drawing the details is really easy. You'll always know exactly where you are in the drawing. Working like this makes so much sense. I use this method of approaching any drawing pretty much nearly all the time that I sit down to make an artwork like this. It's a very intuitive way of drawing, and it's a great way to avoid compositional mistakes. I'm going to encourage you to use this method over and over again on a few different drawings, and really get to grips with the workflow from going from very rough marks that almost make no sense, and kind of almost like a sculpture really chipping away until you get to the refined and clean final line. 7. 07. Managing Your Layers: Before going any further, I want to talk about keeping your work in order so that things don't start getting really complicated. To do that, you need to keep your layers properly organized. Things can get complicated really fast when you're starting to build up your composition and your paint layers. Take a look at this background. It's a prime example of how quickly you can wind up with loads and loads of unnamed layers like this one, shape 145 copy 13. Okay, that's a bit excessive and a little bit embarrassing. Make sure this doesn't happen. The reason you want to keep everything organized in your layer stack is because quite simply when it comes to drawing and painting, layers are by far the most important feature of any digital program. More so, I would say, than the tools or the effects that you can apply. You will see this in action later in the course when I show you how to add texture, highlights, and shading to areas of flat color. Here's my approach to keeping your layers organized. First of all, make sure that when you have the "Move Tool" selected, that Auto-Select is checked off up here in the Properties. Then make sure that it's set to layer and not to group. That way, you can just tap on any part of your canvas and move an item around. Plus that particular item's layer will be highlighted in the layer stack so you know exactly where everything is at any given moment. When building up a drawing or painting, you don't have to put every brush stroke on a separate layer. But if you are using lots of layers, a handy thing to do is either to name every one of them or to group them and name that group. That's what I do at the very least is I just make a folder with the name of the main item as that folder's name. Then within that folder there may be lots of layers that aren't necessarily labeled. Like I showed you earlier in the line drawing, you can also use layers to build up a drawing and play with the opacity. Keeping layers separate will allow you to go back and make changes to just parts of your artwork or move things around. If you're happy with how the artwork is looking, then you can by all means, flatten your layers or merge a select number of layers. Just hold down shift to select a bunch of layers. Then if you right-click, you can choose "Merge Layers", and that will flatten everything that you selected into one layer. There's also the option to merge one layer down to the layer beneath it. Or you can Merge Visible and you can also flatten your image. That's also an option. For drawing and painting, just get your head around using lots of layers, grouping them, naming them, and flattening them if necessary. Up next, I'm going to take a look at the second important component of digital art, after layers, and that's your color palette. I'll see you in the next lesson. 8. 08. Colour: Because something like Photoshop allows you to use millions and millions of colors, any color combination that you like, any hue, any saturation, it can be a bit overwhelming and sometimes the concept of a color theory can be a bit daunting. In this lesson, I'm just going to demystify the whole process a little bit and show you how to quickly and easily apply color to your artwork or how to change the hue saturation settings, and how to navigate around your color windows very easily. The quickest and easiest way to bring up your color options is to come over here and double-click on the square. This brings up your color picker. Basically you can drag this picker all around the spectrum of colors and choose whichever color you like. Now, your color picker might not look the exact same as mine that's because I've got checked off to represent the saturation of any color. It could also be under H, which stands for hue, B for brightness, and then these three ones, RGB represents the colors for screen resolution. But I like to have mine set to S. It's just personal preference. I've gotten used to working with it in this kind of setup. If I select, say, that color, I can just drag this slider up and down to affect the saturation and so for me that's the easiest. You'll notice that down here, there is a series of numbers. This is called the hex code. What this is is the specific number that relates to every single solitary color available to you. If you change your color picker to a different area of the spectrum, you will get a different number there. This can be very handy obviously, because if you've got the exact hex code, you can match the exact color. But what I find as a painter and an illustrator in Photoshop, I don't tend to use the hex codes as much as I tend to use my eye to select colors. I'm just pointing that out to you now so that you don't get too worried about using the hex code or trying to think, I've got to match that exact same series of numbers to my colors. Where that can be very useful in graphic design or in other digital art forms for drawing and painting and especially for the way I'm trying to teach you to draw and paint, I would encourage you to just eyeball your colors and get to know the difference between a very saturated color and a very desaturated color. Now, if you hit G on your keyboard, it brings up the bucket tool, which can also be found over here on the left and tapping into your canvas that will then apply the color to the whole canvas. Your foreground color is set. This square underneath it represents the background color and for painting purposes, I usually use that as a nice way to toggle between two colors. If I'm painting, say with this green color, I need a blue, but I don't want to lose that green altogether, I'll just toggle over to the background color, get my blue. Say like that and now I can work with the blue color. But if I need to go back to green, it's there for me as well. Now, more than likely you'll be applying color to your artwork in one of three ways. Either by making a selection and using the bucket tool to tap color into the center. Or by using the brush tool and just brushing on the color with brush strokes, or by using one of Photoshop's many vector tools, such as the shape tool or the Pen tool. Over the next few lessons in the course, I'm going to be going into much greater detail in each of these ways of applying color. Obviously, each one has its own quirks and its own unique capabilities, so I'm going to unpack all of that for you and show you the best way and the most effective way to use these tools. Up next in the next video, I'm going to start off by showing you some painting techniques with the brush tool. 9. 09. Brush Techniques: In this lesson, I'm going to cover the basics of painting in Photoshop by showing you a few brush techniques. There are only really about three or four that you'll use over and over again when you're painting. I'm going to use this photo as the basis of a painting and I'm going to work on this side of the canvas over here on a new layer. The first thing I'll do is roughly unlikely, draw an outline of the basic shape. This is with the small-ish, hard-edged brush. I just want to mark out the overall shape as a starting point for this painting. I'm not going to get too worried about details or getting exactly right. Once I have that, I'm going to choose a soft round brush and bring the opacity down just a little bit. I'll increase the size because I want to make quite big marks at this stage. The first pass of a painting is always about getting large areas of color down. I'm going to select the color off the photo at first just to make sure that I've got the general tones right. To do that, I'm using this eyedropper tool, so just hit "i" on your keyboard anytime you want to bring up the eyedropper or the color picker and you can just select the color and that loads it up into your brush and you're ready to go. Just with a very soft edge brush, I'm working around and getting all of the color down. Then once I'm happy enough with that, for some of the more detailed areas, I will switch back into a hard edge brush. Just remember that with the hard edge brush, you might want to bring the size down. For areas that seem to have very defined edges like the tonal changes or the details of the feather texture, this is where a hard edge brush comes in very handy. But I'm still working rough and very delicately at this stage, I don't want to go in too heavy handed with brush marks for now. I've got a general first-pass done. The next technique that I want to show you is how to blend colors using brushstrokes. The way you do this is to alternate between the brush and the eye tool. I'm just going to show you what I mean. Let me hop over here to a new canvas quickly. Say for example, you've got two colors like this. You can blend them using the low-opacity soft edge brush. Then hit "i" on your keyboard to bring up that color picker tool. Now you can sample the new color that you just made and hit "b" on your keyboard to go back and paint with that. Select the new color again and make more brushstrokes. You can also engage the eyedropper tool by hitting Alt on your keyboard while you've got the brush tool on. That brings up the eyedropper, release Alt and then you're back on brush mode. It's a much faster and more efficient way of painting and selecting color on the go while staying in the brush mode. I'm going to work through this now, this whole painting, using that technique of basically toggling between brush and color picker and blending the colors. I can also sample colors of my photo in the exact same workflow. Same goes with the branch that this bird's perched on. Here I've got two distinct colors. I can blend both at the edges to make those midtones. That's basically the way I'm going to work through the whole of this painting in terms of the bird just switching back to the hard edge brush when I need to define something like the eye or the beak and using the color picker to blend my colors. These are both very simple techniques, but they allow you to build up your painting progressively, which is what I like. They also allow you to paint over areas where maybe you made a mistake or you realize you don't like it so much. It's a really good, intuitive and natural approach to painting. I find that this allows you to be a lot more creative because you're painting on the go. Okay, next up, when I get to about this point in the painting, I'm going to use my third technique that I want to show you, and that's using the eraser as a brush. The eraser in Photoshop is basically built like a brush, so you can use any brush shape that you like. I'm going to use a smaller hard edge brush, just wiping away the fuzzy or blurry edges all the way around the painting, giving it a nice, crisp, clean edge. For this technique, you do need to use fast confident marks. This is where your drawing drills from the earlier class will come in handy. The last technique that I want to show you in this lesson is how to turn your brush around. Say, for example, I wanted to add an abstract leafy background. Well, if I chose a texture brush like this and apply it to the background underneath the bird, it might look a bit like a rubber stamp all over the whole thing. What I do is right-click anywhere on the canvas, and this quickly brings up the properties of the brush that I'm working with and I simply drag the brush direction around to get it pointing in a different direction and then you get a totally different brush shape. When you lay it on top of previous brush shapes, it starts to look a lot more natural. You can experiment with this style with as many brush shapes as you like. That's the nice thing about an abstract background. It doesn't have to be exact. Here, I'm just trying to give the impression of trees and leaves. That's my final painting, done and dusted. I think that took me about half an hour or 40 minutes, start to finish. I've left this image in the resource pack. I hope you have fun experimenting with it. We're trying out with the painting techniques that I've covered here. Work away on this as much as you can and please post your artwork in the discussion section. I'd love to see it and give feedback to you if you like. Up next, I'm going to show you how to paint with the lasso tool. 10. 10. Painting with the Lasso: This lesson is going to cover what for me is the basis of my workflow and work practice, which I use every day as an illustrator or designer. It's basically a very simple technique for moving around an entire canvas and getting through a whole painting quickly and very effectively. Let's get started. What I do is I use the lasso tool to first mark out or define the area that I want to add color to and then paint with that area selected. This means that I'm essentially drawing with the lasso. It gives me a really clean and clearly defined area. It's very easy to get shapes exactly right. I love drawing and painting in this way, and especially for Photoshop, it's a really good workflow. Now there are a few things that you need to know about the lasso in order to get the most out of the tool and to apply it in the way that I'm showing you here. Let me first take time now to cover those points. First of all, come up here to the lasso tool and select the regular one. On your canvas, you can draw out an area of selection freehand, but you do have to keep the pen on the tablets and keep it engaged all the way to the end. When you release it, the selection will automatically close, and that's your active area. Now you can paint inside this area with the brush and only this area will be painted on the canvas. Now if you were to make a selection and release before you got to the end, what happens is it just snaps back to the beginning. Sometimes that can be useful. You can make that work to your advantage. With the polygonal tool, you need to go back all the way to beginning and close the area or you can simply double-tap at any point, it will snap the selection back to the starting point. Once you have a selection made, if you need to add any more to it, just hold down Shift and start drawing again, and that will add to the current selection. Similarly, if you need to subtract, all you need to do is just hold down Alt and draw out the part that you want to delete. Rather than having to de-select and redraw your selection, you can easily make changes on the go. To move your selection around, you can simply use the arrow keys on your keyboard. This will nudge your selection so you can't move it hugely unless you hold down Shift and the arrow keys. You cannot just in larger increments. But if you wanted to transform your selection, then you will need to add color to the selection first. Finally, the last points that I think is important to know about with regards to this tool is that you can always make a selection and then paint outside that by coming up here to Select and choosing "Inverse". When using this tool to paint, it allows you to use really big brushes and paint with large gestural marks, yet still keep the area perfectly defined. It's a very nice and very controlled way to paint a canvas. 11. 11. Using the Bucket and Brush: This class covers step 2 of what I've been talking about as my process as an illustrator and background artist. I explained before in a previous video how you can easily use the Lasso tool to select areas and add flat color. Well, in this class, I'm going get you to start adding highlights, textures, shading to areas of color using the same technique. The result is really effective. It's very simple, it's what I call the bucket-and-brush technique. You'll be surprised at how easy it is to move around a whole canvas quickly. For this example, I'm just going to paint a tree. I'm going to use the Lasso tool. First of all, just using very small squiggly shapes, just paint out what I think the leaves of the tree is going to look like. Then I'm going to select a greeny color and fill that with the green color. Now, I'm going to make a new layer underneath that and I'll just do the tree trunk. I'm using the Lasso tool. I'm using the combination of Polygonal and Regular Lasso, moving from one to the other. Just holding on Alt to get the Polygonal Lasso Tool. I'm not going to worry too much about the shape of the branches, it's just to give you the idea. Let me go ahead and choose a color for the tree trunk. I hit G on my keyboard and fill that shape. I've just de-selected my selection because I want to show you something, anytime that you have an item on a layer and you want to select the edges of that item, instead of using the Lasso tool, you can come over here and hold down Option on a Mac or Command on a PC and then click on the thumbnail of that layer. That will make the contents of the layer into an active selection. Now, you could obviously just keep your selection active after you've used the bucket, but in this case, I just wanted to show you what to do if you didn't have it selected already. Now, I'm going to go up to my brushes and I'll choose a nice textured brush. By textured, I mean one that has a pattern. Some of the default Photoshop brushes are good for this, but they can be quite small. As I suggested earlier in this course, you can also search online for a pack of nice texture brushes and add them to your brush collection. Next, I'm going to sample the base color by first clicking into the foreground color box to bring up this window. The idea is that the texture is going to offset the base colors. I'm going to select a different color for this, but I'll just lightly brush around my selection. Some people like to keep the opacity of the textured brushes way down, so it allows them to build the effect up over with each successive brushstroke. That's okay. Now I'm going to add slightly lighter colors at the very top of the tree. Just affect my hue and saturation a little bit and change up the colors. Then lightly, what you do here is just lightly brush around the edges of the selection. Okay. Then I'm going do the same for the shading parts. So for the opposite edge of the leaves, I'll just pick a darker color and brush around the edge like that. The exact same thing goes for the tree trunk. You can just select the tree trunk shape. Pick a different brush this time, maybe we could just go for this one. The lighter color and brush gently and lightly around the edges, just to give the idea or the impression that that side of the tree, that there's light coming from that side. So effectively, I'm adding texture and shading and highlights at the same time with this process. I think the reason that I love this process so much is because it combines drawing and painting in one, It's not like you're separating out your drawing from your painting. Because with the Lasso, you're essentially drawing. You're drawing out your shape and then with the brush technique, you get to paint within that. So it's very cool way of approaching the artwork. Another reason I love this so much is because with the Lasso, you can then go back in and draw shapes into the piece. So say I wanted to add the effect of leaves or something like that in the tree, I'm just going to simply draw very loose, roundy shapes like this. Again, using the texture brush, just brush lightly into the edges. That gives us immediately the effect that they are leaves in the tree. As you can see on the tree trunk, I haven't made a new layer above my base layer. I've just been painting directly into that layer. So you can by all means do that if you want. I'm just going to finish off the tree trunk by giving it some sort on the sides there like that, sampling my colors. It's not a great tree by any means. I'm not saying that this is a beautiful work of art, this tree. But you can definitely see that it's transformed from being flushed out work to something that looks a lot more rendered, a lot more solid with this very simple technique of just brushing in some texture brushes and using the Lasso tool to define your edges. 12. 12. Drawing with the Pen Tool: So far, I've covered drawing and painting with brushes using the Lasso tool and the Bucket tool and I've also shown you how to add texture and shading. We're nearly at the end of the course and I just have one more important aspect of Photoshop to cover and then you'll have a fully rendered idea of mastering digital painting. For this class, I'm going to focus on the Pen tool. Photoshop does have a few vector-based features for creating artwork such as these shape tools. When you use these though, you do have to invariably edit them in some way to change the shape because you're never really just going to be painting circles and squares. I find that rather than use these, I always go straight to the Pen tool. Click on the regular Pen tool, and then just make sure that your properties are the same as what I have here. Make sure this is set to Shape and not Path, that your fill is active and that this stroke square has this red line going through it which means it's not active, it's turned off. Then just click around your canvas a few times. As you make a shape, the color comes in automatically. Each of these clicks creates an anchor point. Then to close off the shape altogether, just come back to the very first anchor point you made, you'll see this little round circle pops up, click on the anchor point and now your shape is completely closed. To get these points to curve or to edit them in any way, come back over to the toolbar, click and hold here, and now select the very last option which is the convert anchor point. Then you just need to click and drag onto the point. These lines that I'm drawing out here are called handles, and if you want, you can even drag one of them out more than the other to affect the curve. If you want to move the point completely, just hold "Option" on a Mac, "Control" on a PC, click and drag the point into the new position or wherever you want it to be. That's fine, but it's actually easier to make the curves as you draw the shape in the first place. Let me show you how you do that. You just basically click and drag as you draw your shape. You can use the freehand pen, but I find that this makes way too many anchor points and that for me it's just too messy. I like to control the amount of anchor points that I want, just so that editing is all that easier. Let's take a quick look at the other options of this tool. If you want to subtract any one of these points, go to Delete Anchor Point, click on that, and then come over and just click onto the point that you want to take away. Then to add an extra anchor point, go back over here and get Add Anchor and then click onto the path where you want the new point to be. What I usually do is just hold on "Option" and drag the handles around to change the curve, or if I don't want any curve at all, just click on the point and that takes away the handles. Another point to note is that whenever you use the pen tool like this, it automatically creates a shape on a new and separate layer as you can see here. The thumbnail has this little vector icon on the bottom right-hand corner just to indicate that this layer is a vector. In other words, when it's a shape like this, you can't paint on it or select any part of it to delete because as you see you get this error message that says it's not editable. All you can do at this stage really is change up or edit the anchor points and change up or edit the color. To change the color, just double-click on the thumbnail, this window pops up and choose a new color. But once you are happy with the shape and you do want to start editing it like adding brushstrokes or deleting parts of it, what you do is you right-click on the layer and choose Rasterize Layer. Now, without getting too technical here, what you've done is you've turned the vector shape into a bitmap. The difference really between a vector and a bitmap is probably enough material for an entire course on its own. So I'm not going to go into too much detail here, but just to let you know that in terms of drawing and painting, you do need to know how to work with both vector shapes and bitmaps just in the way that I've outlined so far. What I'm going to do in the next lesson is show you how that comes together to make a painting. I'm going to walk you through the process of using the Pen tool and using the Brush tool together to make a really nice painterly effect. 13. 13. Applying the Pen and Brush, Part 1: As you know, I tend to make my rough drawings very rough, and this sketch here is no different. But I'm not worried about the sketch because the final product is going to be just paint without any line drawings. What I want to do is take you step-by-step through a fully painted background and show you my entire process from start to finish. Let's get started. The first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to put down some colors for the sky. On a new layer, I'm going to use the Marquee tool and select just a basic rectangle. Normally, I would use the bucket tool to fill this, but this time, I'm going to go and use the gradient bucket. You can change the color of the gradient by double-clicking up here and then double-clicking on this marker, if you want to change this color or the left-hand marker if you want to change that color. The top two markers will change the opacity. Then just click and drag the tool through the direction that you want the gradient to go, so I want it to go from top to bottom. Then I'm going to jump straight into the Pen tool and start making shapes for the hills by clicking and dragging like this. If I want to create a curve that is curved on one side and right-angled on the other, just tap into their point while you hold down Alt. That will make your path be curved on one side and straight on the other. Then I'll just change the colors up as I go. I'm not going to get too worried about what my colors are at this moment. At this point, the colors don't really matter hugely. I'm just focusing on getting shapes and compositions down, and I can always adjust the color lasure because I'm drawing with the pen tool, and that means I can easily just double-click on the icon and change the color. Those are my background hills. I'll now put down a base color for the ground. Again, something vaguely green is fine. I'll just tap into the center with the regular bucket, maybe change that greens looking look blue and now, I can move and adjust things if I need to. I can change the shape of the hills. That, again, is another very handy feature of the pen tool. Not only can you change the color as many times as you like, but you can just adjust the shape of it after you've drawn it, which is really handy. I'll just put in a river coming down here like this. I'll probably put the rocks over the river so I don't need to get the shape of the river exactly right at this point. I'll just put the rocks in for now and I want them to be above the river or so. Just drag my layers up, choose a brown color. Now, if I turn the drawing off, you can see the basic elements are there and now I can go into working on the details a bit more. It is a good idea to start naming and grouping your layers at the beginning so that you don't wander into that awful millions of unnamed layers territory. I'm just going to do a little bit of housekeeping right now and then at least I've started making an attempt at order. I've clicked into the thumbnail of the left-hand side hill and I've made a layer above it and now I'm going to just choose a very textured brush and going to throw down some marks and some paint on top of it and get warmed up in that way. I can always paint over this, so I'm not going to fuss too much at this point. In the back hill, I'll do the same and maybe just choose a different brush. I always like to work on top of the shape layer simply because it allows me to go back and change the base color if I want or change the base shape as you saw previously. While I'm at it, I'm going to throw on just a hint of highlights on the top of these hills just to set the tone. I want to give the impression of highlights on the top of the hill. Now, it might be too early for that, but I think it will help me to find the right tones for the whole piece if I can fill into it now. The pinks probably will work very nice with the green, so I might go in that direction. Even though I don't have a defined palette to work from, this is a very good intuitive approach to color. This is going to be my process for the rest of the painting just to find the shape within my layer stack, create a new layer above it, and add texture and color on top of it. Because my opacity is low, the paints is really interacting well with the underneath color and it allows you just to build tones and values up very slowly. Jumping back to my drawing. Now, as you can see, I've still got the trees and mountains to do. I think I'll go for this foreground tree as my main tree and really I want a stylized version of a tree. I'm not going for anything too realistic because the whole look and feel of this painting is a little bit imaginary, so just a generic pine tree and what I will do is probably use this as my main tree and then duplicate it for the rest. I'll show you how I do that in a moment, but let me just put it in my mountains in the background. I'm using the oval tool because again, I'm going for that very stylized look. It's just simply dragging the oval tool down and adjusting the size of it a little bit. You obviously don't have to make oval mountains. You can make whatever shape you like. Really, this video is just about process and technique so feel free to make whatever shapes you like. Now, I'll get onto the tree. So I'll make a new layer above the green and start painting in real rough textures, getting highlights onto the edges. I'm just experimenting with as many different brush shapes as I like because you never know which brush shape is going to give you that texture that you want. Try them out, and this one looks like it might work well. You can also change the direction of the brush shape to even further randomize the shapes and the marks. Now, I'm going to group all of these layers together and I'll name this group, tree, okay and duplicate it, and then I can merge that group. Now, I've got that whole tree just on one layer. As you can see, I can just grab it, scale it, transform it, and move it around. A handy thing to do is if you are duplicating elements of your art, try to flip them horizontally, that will make them look less cloned. You can always go back in and just tweak the colors or tweak the brushstrokes on your duplicated piece. That also helps to make it look a bit distinct and a bit different from the other ones. Let me group all of these guys together into one folder and I'm going to call that left trees. For the faraway background foresty trees, I'm really now going to be very stylized and just use a simple shape like a triangle, duplicate it as many times and there you have a little forest, and before for this layer stack gets too unwieldy, let me group all of these shapes together into a folder and then just duplicate that folder again, drag it out, and I've got an even bigger forest. Now, at some point, I am going to merge all of these shapes together. But for now, while I'm working at the composition, it's handy to keep them separate so I can move them around like this. Time to work on these background mountains. I'm really liking the way the colors of this piece are coming together, so I'm not going to stray too much, and because the pink in the gradient of the sky looks so nice, I'll just put some of that onto these mountains as a bit of a highlight to give the impression, say that it's sunrise, the sun is coming up and it's splashing this beautiful dawn light over those mountains in the back. Remember to put darker tones on the opposite side of the highlights just to define the form and the shape. Now, I'm keeping these brushstrokes very gestural, very light. I'm hardly pressing down on the tablet at all. That helps me to build up the tone gradually because I'm not going in very heavy-handed. Well, that's part 1 of the painting. I'm going to split this up into two lessons, so follow me in the next lesson and we'll finish off this painting and take it to a fully rendered and completed look. 14. 14. Applying the Pen and Brush, Part 2: Welcome back. Let's keep going with this painting. I need to sort out the river so what I want to do for the river is give it a lot more texture and make it look like it has a bit of depth right now it's looking really flat so I'm going to work on this for awhile. Now getting water rise, especially in this style, is really all about trial and error. Maybe if I select the edges of the river, I can add some highlights or shading around the edges. I've made a selection here, but I've selected the inside of the river. I'm going to go up to select inverse, and that will make the edges of the river selected, and then if I drag my color down to a bit darker, I can add. This is an instance of where I feel like I'm not really getting it right you can see that I'm really experimenting here. I might end up actually erasing all of this river texture and shading and just try it again because it's a bit tricky. But that's why keeping everything on separate layers really pays off, in the end, it's not a big deal at all if I delete these textures and start over again. Think I'll try putting some highlights onto the reverse, but sparkles can go here towards the back. This is probably a good thing to show you that I'm struggling with the river because it really points out the fact that whenever you're creating any artwork, you have to have reference, you have to be looking at something and taking your inspiration and reference from that. It's very distinct from just copying but as you can see here, I'm trying to do a river out of my head and it's not working. Let me move on and I'll come back to that in a while I'm going to throw some highlights onto the trees in the background. First of all, I merge them into one shape, pick a highlight color and with a soft edge brush, just very gently brush along the top and there you can see that can give you quite a nice effect. Then I can just drag my tree over from the left-hand side to the right-hand side to balance out the composition a little bit. Using the transform and the scale tool to tweak the shapes. You have to be very careful not to fuss over things too much and you could be tweaking the shape and the size and the orientation over and over again. But eventually, at some point, you have to go up our composition is okay, it's working, so let's move forward. Let me tackle the river again. I feel like I've had a bit of a break from it so I can go back. Again, it's the edges that I feel need to be defined so much to give it that bit of depth so maybe it needs highlights along the edge where the water meets the land. I'm going way over the river itself now with the brush. But I can just select the river, select the inverse of that texture layer, and then delete it. What I'm going to do now is give some shading underneath the white highlights. I think maybe what I need is to give the impression that the rocks are going underneath the water. If that's the case, they would be a bit darker, so something like that, and then with my eraser tool I'm just going to knock it back a little bit and come back in with the brush tool where I need to define it a bit more. It's looking better. I think it is definitely looking better. I'm going to go back to the highlights, but this time instead of a soft edge brush, I'm going to use a hard edge brush and that's starting to look a lot nicer it's fitting in with the whole composition a lot better and yes, it's sparkly washer, it's looking good. What's next? Group these mountains together for one thing and name that folder mountains. Actually, you can see I'm not doing too badly in terms of my layer stack. I do have everything nice and neat and folders and I've got the sky here. I think the last couple of steps I want to do on this painting is just add those touches that are going to lift it up. One of the things I like to do with something like this is add in a layer of very like a big brush, a big soft edge brush, and just drag it across and you'll see the effect that it gives. When I said instantly gives you that misty atmospheric feel, and for landscapes, this is like one of those final touches that you do on a painting that can really make it pop, really make it look good. I might move this around, though and find the best spot for it, this misty layer. There may be behind that hill peeping up, and then that gives even more distance between that middle ground hill and the far background mountains. In fact, you could even duplicate that layer again, that misty layer, and put it in between the two mountains. Let's see if that works. Sometimes it works, sometimes it's too much and you have to just leave it, but yes, I think that could work. I'll bring the opacity of the layer down and just transform it slightly so it's a bit more subtle. I'm going to call that layer mist and I'm going to call this layer mist and I think this isn't very much coming to the end. I think I'm nearly done with this. On the sky layer, I'm going to make some selection shapes like this to give the impression of cloud. I don't want to draw clouds, but I want to give the gradient itself a bit more break it up a little bit. This painting is probably finished, but there's one final thing I want to add, the last flourish if you'd like because I think this is going to make it really look nice and that's just a very slightest hint of a waterfall. Now, don't get alarmed when I say waterfall, I'm not going to go in and draw a waterfall. What I'm going to do, it's really easy. Again, it's another very simple technique. Let me see, I'll pick this far the real behind mountain, the mountain that's farthest away. On a new layer, I'm just going to draw a line. That is just one stroke, one brush stroke. Then I'm going to select it, command "T" on my keyboard and just skew it ever so slightly so that it's bigger towards the bottom and thinner at the top and that's a waterfall. You see how easy that is? That's one of those things that you can just add on at the end and suddenly the whole painting starts to look much better. I can't think of anything else that I'm going to do on this. Maybe on the river I'll just add another touch of a mist layer onto the river. I'm going to say that is dash. I think that's finished, I think it's done it looks great, my layers are all nicely organized. If you followed along with me and watched step-by-step, I really hope that I made the steps as clear as I possibly could. I really hope that you got something out of it and that you can give it a go because I would love to see your artwork. I'm going to leave the sketch in the resource folder and please take it and use it and see how your painting process turns out. 15. 15. Advanced Layer Options: Before I completely finish up the course, I want to show you some advanced layer options that you might find useful. These are options that are available to you to manipulate colors and your artwork directly from within the layer stack. These are powerful ways to create effect as well as to create overall looks. The first technique is how to paint on an image without actually changing the image itself. This is called nondestructive editing, and it's done by using a mask. For example, on this bird, if I apply a mask like this, and then paint in here with black, you can see that the pixels seemed to be erased, but they're actually still within the image of the bird. If I paint anywhere with white, I'm revealing that image. The second aspect of layers that's useful to know is clipping masks. I usually use clipping masks in the exact same way as the selection tool, which I showed you earlier for selecting in painting. They both do the exact same thing. But I wanted to just show you so that if you ever come across this, you know what it is. For example, if I want to add texture to these crates, I can paint on a new layer above it and I can use really big gestural brush marks like this. Then come back over to the layer, right-click on it and choose Clipping Mask. That clips the artwork in this top layer to the layer below. You can also add an adjustment directly in the layer stack by clicking on this tiny little icon here. I'd say just play around with these options and see what they can do. But for demonstration purposes, let's say I wanted to change the hue or saturation of the crates. Well, I'll click on this, and then this window pops up. Within here, without getting too complicated, I can just use the slider to adjust the hue. As you can see, the adjustment is actually affecting all of the layers below this one. What you need to do then is simply create that clipping mask I just showed you and now, the adjustment affects only the crates. Personally, I find all of these advanced layer options unnecessary for my process, for the way that I paint and draw. I fully think that you can create the exact colors that you want as you go and you can control the areas that you want to paint in in a more simple ways, like I've shown you previously. The one thing that I do find useful though to a small extent, it's not a huge, big deal, but it can come in very useful, are Photoshop's blending modes. You'll find all the blending modes up here in this drop-down menu. Blending modes make the top layer be affected if you like, by the colors of the layer below it. This is something that I'll only ever do at the very end of a painting, because it can be a really good way to unify all the colors that you've put together in your painting. What I mean by this is that you can make, for example, a whole layer of say, red on top of your artwork and then set that layer to something like hue and instantly, it gives the whole piece a very different look. Then you can play with the opacity and see if maybe that's the final touch that you want, or you could try overlay or multiply, whatever looks good, whatever is the look that you want to achieve. Something that's very nice to do is to add a dark color, say for example, on this background and set it to multiply. Then hit E for eraser, and just make sure that you choose a soft edge brush. Then in a circular motion, erase the central way and take down your opacity a little bit. This creates a very nice vignette that excellent for moody nighttime scenes just like this. Play around with the blending modes, and see how each one works, and experiment. Don't get too caught up by their complexity. At the end of the day, the more simple your workflow and your approach, the more room you'll actually have for creativity, believe it or not. 16. 15. Recap: Well, well done for getting this far into the course. You've actually made it to the end. I'm so delighted that you enrolled and that you got this far with me. I really hope you enjoyed this and that you got something out of it that you can take and bring your artwork and your art practice to a new level in digital art. Before I wrap up, I want to highlight what I think are the top takeaways out of all of the content that we've covered. Number 1, practice your mark. I know that the drawing drills were probably very boring, but working on these skills really improved my line work and helped me to get my drawing to a much better level. You'll find that the faster and more confident you draw, the more likely you'll be able to tap into your own expressive and natural ability to draw. Number 2, always start at rough and very, very light and then go in with darker marks gradually over time and build up your tones. Not only will you avoid compositional mistakes, but you'll have a stronger finished piece because it will have layers of work that's been put into it, and that always shows up in some way in the finished product. Number 3, draw with the Lasso tool and then use paint to fill those areas. Don't try to go in with the brush to make those shapes, then you can add textures and shading. You can do the same with the pen tool. It's all about getting flat colors down first and then building up tones and textures. When it comes to painting, train yourself to eye colors, and match colors according to what your intuition is telling you. I'm not saying make up colors that aren't necessarily there on the reference that you're looking at, but trust yourself and trust your instinct for color. Finally, try to draw every day. This could be from memory or from reference, but a sketch a day is a great practice. I need to take this advice myself, but if you wanted to share your daily sketches in the discussion area, I'd love to see them and then maybe I can draw inspiration from them as well. Finally, it's just left for me to say, thank you so much for being here. Please do let me know if you have any questions regarding any of the material covered in this course, or if you have any questions in general about your work that you think I might be able to help out with. I look forward to staying in touch with you and to seeing your work progress from strength to strength.