Learn to Draw Like Arcane In Clip Studio Paint

1. Intro and Overview: Hello, by you, beautiful people. My name is Nathan Jones, and I'm an illustrator and up and coming comic book creator who's been studying the art of illustration for over ten years. But every artist knows that when you first start out, getting to that finished illustration seems like a mighty mountain declimb. And it can seem even more overwhelming when you realize that that's just one illustration. If you want to go any further, there will be many mountains to climb. That's why there are teachers like me to help you out and break these tasks into bite sizable chunks to convince you that being an artist is very doable. To climb the mountain, let's start with the first hill and go from there. Let's go over what this class is really going to be about. We'll start with pre illustration, which includes gathering a wide array of inspirational work from your favorite artists, finding useful references. Understanding the importance of a warm up before any serious illustrations. We'll then move into the illustration while breaking up the progression into chunks. We'll start with a sketch phase and move into the cleanup phase, coloring phase and lighting phases before ending in the stylized background. This will be the first class in a series of classes that will teach processes and techniques that we're turning you into a multi faceted artist. In this class, in particular, however, we will be creating a relatively simple example of this process with a portrait and a simple stylized background. A simple in concept, this is by far the most popular type of art that one will find being churned out by the top artists on websites like Instagram, Twitter, and Art Station. Tough everyone can learn something here. In future classes, we will explore deeper concepts, such as backgrounds rooted in the real world, storytelling, perspective, special effects, and dynamic lighting. And I realize that every artist has their own style and process. And that's good. Artists should be different. The differences between us are what justify our art and bring special meaning from our unique perspectives. More than anything, I want my lessons to be a stepping stone that inspires you to keep growing and explore what makes you you. And then put that on the canvas. So, without further ado, It's get started. 2. Inspirations: Inspiration is easily one of the most important things that every artist needs. Without it, you wouldn't have even started. Not on our current art piece, and maybe not on any art at all. We all get ideas and create unique perspectives from the bits and pieces of creativity that we collect from our favorite artists in the environment around us. And then we steal. I mean, borrow those ideas and techniques for ourselves. And that actually brings me to a common question among the art community about styles and inspirations. If you are drawn to some aspect of someone else's artwork and want to apply set aspect to your own artwork. Is that stealing? Is it copying? Are you simply discovering your own style and interest through the work of others? It's a difficult question to answer. And I'm not sure if anyone could ever completely answer one way or the other. Personally, I'd like to think we are discovering our own style through others. Of course, That's mostly just so I can still feel good about myself after I blatantly steal from other artists. So, you know, take that with a grain of salt. Seriously. To make art to look appealing in the first place, so I can't really say it's stealing if someone else also finds your art to be appealing and wants to make art with a similar feel. And it would be very difficult to argue that any one person holds claim to a specific looker style anyway. But now that I'm done with this unwarranted philosophy section of this clearly not philosophy part of this class, I should probably, at some point, each and wife is relevant for the class. You might have already figured it out while I was ranting. But it's important for every artist to gather as much creative data and information as they possibly can. Every artist that's ever made anything of themselves has a list of inspiring artists that they took after. So, I think it's best that each one of you takes the time to build a library of pieces and artists that you look up to. And from every medium as well, not just necessarily from the medium that you're using. For instance, there's tons of things that a td artist can learn from a photographer, an illustrator can learn from an animator. All of these disciplines compliment each other in important ways. When you collect these bits of artistic data, you can start using them as references for your own artwork. And I'll be talking more about that in the next lesson. 3. Reference: References. Who needs them, right? Everybody knows that real artists don't need references. They can draw straight from the dome with the utmost precision. Even when drawing stuff that they've never studied before. Yeah, no. Every top of artist uses tons of references in their everyday work flow. Anyone who says otherwise is lying, unless you're Kim junkie. And for those of you who don't know, since I'm not sure if there's a communication barrier for the word reference as terminology, reference is any image that an artist looked at to see how something or someone looks so that they can illustrate it properly. And many people seem to think that professional artists don't need to use these references. I also used to be one of these people thinking that I wasn't good until I could create entire scenes all from my head. Man, did I stress myself out with all that immense pressure? And Oh, boy, was that so so very wrong. Not only is reference not a pair of shameful trained wheels that you need to put on your artistic bicycle, but it's actually a tool that you should carry into every piece that you make, cause none of us can draw the entire world shirt from our heads, unless, like I said earlier, you're Kim Junge. But even Kim Junge dedicated countless hours of his life, more than any sane man should to studying the construction of every mundane object in existence from every angle. Yeah, you don't need to do all that. Instead, you're having trouble picturing how something looks. Use a reference. Don't know how to draw that person. Use a reference. Don't know how to draw that tree. Use a reference. Don't know how to draw a stick figure. Use a reference. I swear I won't tell anyone. Have I bet it into your head how important it is to use reference yet? I certainly hopes so. But the project in this class, I'll be using a reference for a kick because I'm very excited to draw. Everyone put your hands together for the beautiful, the intelligent, the amazing Mel Madata from the Hit Netflix show. Hurricane. If you have any interest in art at all, and you haven't seen this show, I strongly urge you to do so immediately. This show is one of the most visually amazing things I've ever seen, and we're going to try to incorporate some of its outstanding signature style into this project. I especially love the shapes and textures created by their lighting, even on faces. It's a beautiful blend of gradation and hard edges that really looks unique, and I hope I can do it justice. But this illustration isn't gonna start it up, so let's get to it. 4. Warm Up: So, you're ready to jump right into the illustration, are you? If you're gonna set pin to the tablet with immediate grace and diligence and create a masterpiece. Oh, who am I kidding? You know where I'm going with this. You can see the namuls lesson right down on your screen. This is something that seems so obvious to me now, but for years, I used to skip warm ups. I used to just jump right into a drawing and just wing it. I now a learned man. Have come to the conclusion that you should always do some kind of warm up before going into your illustration proper. Trust me. Jumping straight into a drawing without a warm up is really going to mess you up in the long run. Your arm and your brain definitely need some time to get into the swing of things before getting serious. There have been many times where I started a picture, but because I didn't warm up in any way, my sketches became really stiff and uninspired. And then after wasting too much time and realizing that the piece wasn't sligable, I would have to start over, meaning that my first attempt ended up serving the purpose of a warm up anyway. So beforehand, you definitely want to at least get your hand and arm moving. Just to get into the flow. So, we're going to just draw some lines, get it started. See if you can make them parallel. And then we're going to draw some spirals. Make sure you're really using your shoulders for the full effect. Be sure to practice doing it in both directions, and try to go about it quickly to make it flow as smoothly as possible. And then we're going to draw some ellipses. Try to make it so that the ending meets up with the beginning. I swear it's more difficult than it looks. Next, we're going to draw some circles. We're going to slow down if we have to and try to make them as perfect as possible. Well, emphasis on. Try. Anyway. All of this could suffice as a warm up. But honestly, it would be best to sketch some kind of subject matter to really get warmed up to not only help your arm, but to also get your brain juices flowing. And remember, it's a warm up. We're not trying to make a sophisticated illustration here. So we're not worried about actually making anything look good. And as an artist, this is actually so framing to just draw and not actually care about trying to make a masterpiece out of nothing. But once you're finished with that, now you going to the sketch proper. 5. Sketch: How that you're all warmed up. You can finally get down to what we're all here for. But first, let's set up our references. Remember those things I said were really important. Hoops studio paint has a pretty neat function for this. You can set up a sub window next to you drawing for easy accessibility. That way, you don't have to swap back and forth between different windows or need two different screens. It'll be right there for you. To set this up, first, feast your eyes upon the top right corner of your program, where a small version of the canvas should be visible. This is the navigator. But if you click the little tab to the right of it, this will be your subview. Another way of getting here is by clicking on the window tab to the top and scrolling down to the subview. Here, you can click on the little folder icon and search your computer for any saved images that you want to use. But you might be thinking to yourself, but this little window in the corner is a bit too small. You can remedy this by shifting your tabs and functions around or, and this is by far the better option in my opinion. You can just pull the subview out altogether and place it within your canvas area. And now you can click on the corners and resize it, however you like. And once you've got all that set up, now we can start drawing. When getting started, be sure to place your canvas and sub view in a way that your subview doesn't obstruct anything. Zooming out like this is actually a good idea. And for several reasons, actually. For one, you don't want to get too caught up with zooming in for details and lose the bigger picture. But for the sketching phase specifically, it's better to be zoomed out so that you can more easily construct your composition with loose lines. I tend to start my sketches off using the default lighter pentel. But use whatever is most comfortable for you. God tip that usually works for me is to start with the most dynamic or most captivating or most important shape in the picture. Whatever the main concept you want to focus on is, I always pencil that in first and then build the rest around it. This tip is more useful for more complex figures and compositions as this is merely a portrait, but it's always good to think about anyway. And for a portrait, you want to focus on key markers of the face and their relationship to one another. Key markers such as the shape of the jaw line, the chin, the center line, the eyes, nose, ears, et cetera. I want to try to get this in pretty quickly, and don't worry about making the lines clean. This is all going to be cleaned up later. Right now, we just want to convey their general idea. Be sure to always compare your image of the reference and make adjustments accordingly. Now, there's something important that I need to address. There was an error that I made in my first video entitled Flip Sudo Paint Beginners Guide. I stated that you could flip the Canvas by pressing the F K on your keyboard. Though this was incorrect. On a fresh installation of the program, there is no shortcut key for flipping the canvas. You have to set it up manually, and I had forgotten that I had done that. So, I'm going to show you how to set that up for your own convenience. Under the File tab, click on the shortcut Settings option. A menu should pop up showing all the tabs that you have at the top of your program. From here, click on the arrow for the view tab and find the option called Flip Horizontal. Click on it and then click Edit Shortcut. You can now accept this to whatever key you'd like. I just set it to F for Flip. It's easy for me to remember it that way. And be sure to click Okay, when you're done. And it is of the utmost importance that you flip your canvas regularly to catch big issues in proportions. I made an issue with the placement of the eyes immediately, and flipping the canvas made that clear to me. There's a button to flip the image in the subview as well, if you need to. Keeping your eyes on a specific orientation for too long can really mess up your illustration as your mind will start ignoring imperfections to make things feel better for you. These imperfections can add up really quickly, so it's best to snuff them out as though as possible. Flipping the canvas helps because it forces your brain to look at the image from a different perspective, thus, essentially giving you a fresh look at your work. It's important to note that I don't copy my reference picture exactly. I'm taking some artistic liberties, which you should do as well to strengthen your creative juices. Notably, I've took some of the head like in the first reference, but I've relaxed the shoulders like the second reference. As such, the visibility of the neck will be somewhere between the references. And I plan on changing the hair clothes and accessories as well. Something that's worth pointing out, that it's easy for the changing of values and tong and references to confuse you and cause you to distort the general ship of your figure. For instance, the shadows from the edge of the face as the face turns away from you can cause you to bring to think that the face and your reference is more sliner than it actually is. Translating colors and values to linework can be very tricky. So always be conscious of that. Once you've gotten a bit more detailed in your illustration, you should be noticing the small errors in your finer details. As I said before, having knowledge of different artistic disciplines can be a great help to you. And it is at this point that you'll want to start treating your drawing in the way a sculptor would. So, shave down some edges, readjust some lines and curriers, and make sure to keep in line with your reference. A lot of issues that can arise later will likely start with your initial sketch. You will likely going to chisel as many of those issues out as possible. I changed the earrings to a single feathered earring because I already had an idea of what I wanted to change when I went into this drawing. I then darken some lines with the eyes because they're the most attention grabbing part of the body. You'll want to make them stand out, especially when it comes to a portrait. I decided to go with a different style entirely for the hair, so I ended up going with a completely different reference for it. I also like to draw on the hair on a different layer. So that any changes to it doesn't bother the lines I already have for the face. Keep in mind that this is very rough and not really an accurate representation for what the hair will end up looking like later. I mostly just want to get that overall shape in so I can see how all the elements will eventually fit together. As artists, it's an essential skill to be able to visualize what an illustration will look like as early as possible so that we can plan accordingly. But for most of us, that visualization is blurring and lacks detail. And as we continue to work and add sculpt and construct, that visual in our mind comes clear and informs our next decision. So with the placing of the hair and consequential getting of information in mind, it's time to sculpt some more. With the clothes and necklaces, I decided to go with the third reference again because I wanted something a little more realistic and modern and not the fantastic garb that Mo wears as one of the ruling counselors in the City of Tiltoer. And with all that, the sketching phase of the drawing is completed. Well, kind of. The sculpting process is something that you should continue to engage in from the start of your piece to the end of it. And I know that this is looking very rough now, but that's what the next phase is for. So we can clean all this up and define these lines. And that's finish the 6. Clean Lines: So now we've got a sketch done, which is essentially the skeleton of our illustration. Now it's time to clean it up and flesh it out. Getting right into it, you're going to want to create a new layer above your sketch layer and then lower the opacity of your sketch layer. You're doing this so that when you start putting down your clean lines, you'll be able to see them more easily without being confused by all the lines of the sketch layer, and then you're going to want to choose your drawing tool. The letter pencil that I used earlier is a great tool, but if you want a more professional look, you're gonna want something a little more solid. A later pencil might be too soft. The G pin is definitely the default tool for this exact purpose. Though person I like to use the darker princel more, despite the fact that it has a softness to it as well. Cause me to sometimes having to duplicate the layer to make the lines appear more solid. But it's what I've become accustomed to. Use whatever tool works for you. And once you do choose, be sure not to make your brush size too big. Thick lines can sometimes obscure the shafts that you're trying to contour. Don't necessarily take my exact brush size for reference. As the size of my canvas is rather large. Play with brush sizes and see what you think would be a good size. And if you draw a lot, you'll know how easy it is to draw on the wrong layer by mistake. To prevent this from happening, you can hit this lock icon at the top of your layer settings. For whatever layer that this is active for, you prevent it from making any changes to it. That way, you can't accidentally start drawing on your sketch layer when you're intending to draw on your clean layer. And when you finally do get around to putting down those lines, this is a great time for some more sculpting and fixing small errors. As you may be able to see a slightly change the shape of the eyes that I had in my sketch. You're going to be making small changes like that as I go on. And you should, too, as you're chiseling what was present in your sketch layer down to a single line, but you'll still want to more or less follow what was established in the sketching phase. And speaking of a single line, you want your illustration to appear as if it was all drawn in a single line in one stroke. Obviously, you're not going to draw it in one stroke, but you want it to appear that way. The easiest way to do that is to make broad confident strokes. Control Z is going to be your best friend here. Alternatively, you can draw your lines in segments and then sculpt them down to make them appear at singular lines later. This can be a long and tedious process, but since you're mostly following the guide that you've already set for yourself, it's likely the part that's going to take the least amount of brainword. Even though you're following the sketch, don't forget to flip your canvas from time to time to refresh your perspective on how things are looking. They're still sculpted. We shouldn't turn off your sketch layer from time to time to see how your clean layer looks on its own. Even though the sketch layer is set at a lower capacity, its presence oftentimes fills in gaps of information that shouldn't be there in your clean layer. Turning off that sketch layer, makes those issues more glaring and allows for us to fix them more equally. You find that your lines are looking a bit janky, and you're finding it too difficult to draw them in clean strokes, it could help a lot to turn up the stabilization level in your tool property settings. This will help to counteract any shakiness in your hands so it doesn't appear in your lines. Unnatural objects are generally hard to draw up because their shapes are uncompromising. Whereas natural objects such as human bodies and hair and objects that completely conform to gravity like clothing, have tons of leeway when it comes to form. Natural objects like these necklaces can only look right one way. The word of advice, don't be like me. Use up that cooler. That way, edit your lines after you draw them and shape them however you want. Would have made this so easier. But at least you get to watch me struggle drawing these necklace. And after taking way too long drawing those necklaces, I decided to make the irises a bit smaller than in my initial sketch. Now, once I've gotten all these lines down, I like to employ some line variation. First, make a new layer and chop the felt pin. Then use this pin to be hop some lines to suggest shadow and depth in our TD image. And if you have some trouble with deciding what lines to beef up, some good areas to start would be wherever you would find the strongest shadows. Like the upper cheek bones, the chin, the mouth, the nose, and especially the eyes. You definitely want thicker lines on the eyes and pop more than any other area on the face. You'd be surprised at how much of a difference this can make. You should check that by flipping this layer on and off to see D path. Do the same line variation technique with the clothing, which should be much easier. The form of clothing is far less defined because the plane shifts a randomly. So you can pretty much make it up as you go, and just add some thicker lines in some places. It's easier than it looks. And then when I'm completely done with the clean line layer. You would think that I would turn up the sketch layer, but I actually like to keep it around at low pacity. I like to settle softness that adds around my cleaner lines. They often give the appearance of finer details. And I also like the texture they provide. But I won't just leave them as they are. I like to use the layer mask to erase out any part of the sketch layer that I don't want around for the final piece. You can do this by hitting this button at the top of the layer menu when you're on the desired layer that you want to apply the mask to. Then you can erase away any lines using an eraser tool or a tool with a transparent color and simply add them back by using any non transparent color. This way, you can erase things and add them back without any real commitment. You may have noticed that I didn't draw lines for the hair, eyebrows, or the feather. And that's because I'm saving those for the color phase. I personally find those areas much easier to add with solid color rather than outlining every strand in my line layers. And that will be coming up in the next part of this lesson. 7. Base Colors: So we've got our lines down. Now it's time to bring some life to our piece. Adding color is a huge step for a lot of artists, and many people find it intimidating to attack it proper. But I'm going to show you that it's not as complicated as you might be imagining it to be. We're going to be doing this in steps, and our first step is to decide on our base colors. Well, naturally, our first step is to make a new layer and place it beneath our line and sketch layers. But after that, we're deciding on our base colors. Looking at the color wheel, I'm going to pick a color that resembles the color of mell skin in my reference. Of course, first thing that we should notice is that there are many colors in her skin. It's not just any one flat tongue. What you need to do is to discern what color best represents the middle value, the color that lies between the highlights and the shadows. Obviously, since Mellow is a black character, your base color will be some shade of brown, which you will find around the reddish slash, orangish color of the color wheel. Here, you should try to pick the color closest to your discerned base skin tone. If you want an easier method of doing this, here's an eye dropper icon on the sub view. If you click that, you'll be able to click anywhere on your reference image and select that color instead of having to find it on your color wheel. And that's fine if you choose to do it that way. But finding the color yourself is great practice for times when you're drawing without such clear reference. Once you've got the color selected, you're going to want to pick out a good flat coloring tool to evenly lay out this color. I'd like to go into the marker subsection of the pin tools and use the fill in mono pin. And now we revert back to our grade school days and try to color inside the lines of our image. Hopefully we're better at it this time. This could easily take quite a bit of time, and the criest way to do it is to outline the desired area with a color and then press the GKey twice to get to the field tool, or you can click this icon over here on the left. It should automatically be on refer only to editing layer, but make sure just in case. And then just simply click the area that you've outlined, and it should automatically fill in that area with color. R. If you've noticed, the color over even the press that will be covered by the hair. That's because there will be places where the scalp shows through this hairstyle, and the hair will be on the higher layer. Now I'm going to make a separate layer above the skin color layer for the clothing color. It's safer to make a new layer for each color and value that you put down because it'll be easier to edit later on if they require it. I'm using the third reference for colored choice for the clothing. And since the color is dark, it makes it a little difficult to differentiate between the color and the linear. You can lower the opacity of the color layer that you're using, and this will differentiate the values enough to keep working without any trouble. Once that's done, it's time to make a new layer above the other co layers so we can color the hair. Nel's hair is brown, but I decided to go with black just as another difference that I decided to make. As I'm coloring in the hair with the fill in monopin, by the way, I only used the earlier hair sketched layer as a guideline and not as a schematic. I experiment with the form and sculpt the image into something that I find visually appealing. This is a big reason for why I didn't want to attempt to draw in these shapes in the clean line layer. I swap to the light pencil tool in order to soften the edges of the hair and make it look more natural. The techniques that I use here are more so from experience of drawing black characters. And perhaps I should make a more in depth tutorial on black features and hair textures at some point in the future. Let me know if you want to learn more about that. At this point, I decide that I don't actually want to go with a duck should have black for the hair after all. And I seek to change the color without having to do it all over again. An easy fix for this is to go up to edit, scroll down to tunnel correction, and click on huge saturation luminosity or simply press control you. Here, a menu will pop up for you from sliders for altering the color on your layer. Sliding hue will change the color. Sturation measures how vibrant or dull that color is. And Luminosity measures how light or dark you want the color. What's amazing about this feature is that you can see the colors changing in real time, making it easier to gauge what colors and values work and which ones don't. You can even tackle this preview check mark to see you before and after. This feature is a big reason for why I believe it's easier to separate all your colors and values by layer. That way, you can do tomal corrections on each of them individually. I decided to leave a gap on the right side between the hair and the face because the hair on this side of her face is being pulled behind her face. I could just simply try to be careful and slowly color up to the line, can turn out to accidently color over her face, but there's a much easier method available. And that is to make a separate layer, this time below the skin color layer, and fill in these spaces that way. Now I don't have to be careful with how I color it. I use the third reference to construct the braids. For advice on how to do this, try to group the strands into sections that fan outward from the braid. Curving forward toward the face as the braid draws closer to the forehead. But make sure that you leave enough space for areas where you can see the scalp between the braids. Make another layer below the hair layer for the eyebrows. Using the same liner pencil that I used for the softer edges of the hair. I intentionally make the eyebrows a different shape from my reference. I just like them that way. Use an off white color for the square, something slightly grayish with a very diacritic hint of yellow or orange. I first colored this on the same layer as the clothing layer, but I soon realized I had was a mistake and moved it to its own layer. I did this by using the lasso tool on the selection menu, outlining the eyes and cutting and pasting them. You can do the standard control X and control V, or you can click on the cut and paste option on the tool bar beneath your selection. I decided to use another tonal correction for the sca where I made them slightly more saturated and darken them a bit. Next, make a new layer for coloring the rises. Mo's got quite a few interesting colors going on in her eyes. I can see some oranges, some yellows, some greens. I decided to go with a more natural brown color. I make them a little too light at first. Chosks a dark and brown. I could use another tunnel correction. But another way to easily edit a layer color is to click the lock transparent pixels option in your layer settings, and simply color over what was there. This option makes it so that you can only edit what was already existing on that layer. I can't add to it. Alternatively, after locking the pixels, you could just hit the fill icon at the top instead of coloring over the area with a brush. Next, make another new layer and select a brighter color to the lighter rings of melis in her eyes. Remember when I said that the sculpting process happens throughout your entire illustration, it was at this point, though, that I realized that one of the eyes was a bit shorter than the other. Problem is, there's a bunch of things that need to be edited to fix this. The solution is, use a selection tool. First, start by selecting every layer that needs to be edited. You can do this by holding control and clicking the necessary layers. That should be the sketch layer, the clean line layer, and every color layer that's here, like the skin color, sclera color, iris color, and inner Iris color. Then use the lasso tool and select it. Next, click the scale, rotate icon. Sentence my plan to warp the shape a little. Make sure that the keep aspect ratio option and the tool property settings was turned off. If you want to edit something and keep the proportions to the same, make sure that this option is turned on. Make a new layer above the skin color for the color of the necklaces. Grab a very saturated yellow for this one. They use the same color for the earrings as well. At first, I put them on the same layer, but I later decided to move the earring to its own layer using that good old lassal tool and cutting and pasting. Use a layer match with a clean line layer, so you raise up the lines that you don't want to show through the hair. I decided to color in the feather on the same layer that had colored the golden part of the earring. Suddenly, remembering that I hadn't colored in the lips yet, make a new layer of both the skin and start coloring. The first color I chose was far too bright and vibrant, so I toned it down a bit. Be sure to make the upper lip darker than the lower lip because it casts a shadow. At the very end, I realized that I had been coloring on the wrong layer the entire time. So I cut it out, tasted it, and then merged that new layer with a layer that it was intended to be on. If you do this by putting that layer directly above the intended layers that you went to merge with, right click the layer and slip merge with the layer below. I then add in the color for the teeth behind the lips. It decided to do this on the same layer as a skin color. I didn't really think it needed its own layer. And with that, the base colors are complete. Next, we're going to be adding dimension to our worth of shadows. 8. Shadows: So, we've got our base colors down. It's looking nice, but we're trying to draw on the style of arcane, and it's looking a little wet. So now, we're going to add depth to the illustration by adding in the shadows. Of course, we're going to start by creating a new layer. It's been a state at the beginning of every part of this lesson so far. And I see no reason to stop now. Up, I'm going to create a layer above the lip layer, like the lip layer, wouldn't clip it to the layer below. You might be thinking that this is absurd. If I clip the shadow layer to the lip layer, then I'll only be able to draw over the lips. That would be correct, but the lip layers already clipped to the skin color layer. So when I clip a layer to a layer that's already clipped, all of them get clipped to the base layer, which in this case, is the base skin color layer. Confusing. I know. Now, picking the right color for the shadows can be a bit of a rope block. You might just think to pick a darker vase from the same color that you're already using. And that's logical to think, but it's not exactly that simple. In truth, you want to pick a cooler hue than the one you have for the skin color. And by that, I mean, pick a color that's more in the direction of blue, which is the coolest color of them all. Hun slightly intended. But look at your color wheel and move it slightly toward blue. Then you'll want to move your color crestor down to get a darker value and then toward the left to get a more saturated color. The presence of light is how we see color at all in the first place. But it makes sense that when less light is hitting the surface, we see less of the surface this color, and it appears more on the grayer side. When it comes to most things involving value, the lights and the darks. L to start with the eyes. They're the most important part of the face that you want to look good. So I find it smartest to start with the first to set the standard. Like before, using the filling moto marker to quickly lay down flat color. I know I said earlier that this was going to add depth and get rid of the flatness. And the dimension we're adding is definitely going to be more apparent later. This is the part of the illustration that requires a lot more planning and forward thinking. Pay close attention to the reference. We're getting into the meat of what makes arcane look like arcane. It's all about the relationship between light Jada. Takin's unique appearance is thanks to the creative blend of hard edges and soft edges that create such interesting and appealing shapes. And you'll see what I mean by that as we proceed. Once I get a good idea of the layout of the shadows, I do a tunnel correction and make sure that the colors look the best. I said earlier that shadows are typically cooler and less saturated. That's a good rule of thumb, but it isn't always true in nature. It's best to play with all of your options. I don't think that the previous color looked bad, and I believe that it definitely could have worked, but through the tunnel correction, I realized that there was a better option. Now comes the good part. We've got everything blocked in, and now we're going to start blending. We do that by hitting this little icon over here or by pressing the J Key as a shortcut. Select the blending tool and start softening some edges with it. Make sure to follow the reference. And here is what I was talking about when I mentioned before about Arcanes mixture of hard and soft edges. Especially around the eyes here, you can see the drastic change in value going from light to dark areas, and vice versa. But as those shadows move down toward the nose and cheeks, the values change more gradually and fans out. The former is called a hard edge, and the latter is called a soft edge, and Arcane plays with these concepts a lot. There are times when the blinding tool can create messy smudges. The use of soft airbod to clean up these oughts more easily. So we've got some shadows down. But the reference shows some clearly darker shadows as well. So what we're going to do is we're going to layer our shadows on. Get it. Anyway, create a new layer. We want to clip the deeper shadow layer to the first shadow layer. But using the clipping button, we'll clip it all to the base color layer as I said before. So instead, we're going to color on a selection. So right click the first shadow layer and go to selection from layer, then click Bate selection. This, as you can see, creates a selection in the shape of everything that's in the first shadow layer. And no matter what you do, you only draw on this selection while it's active. You'll go back to the second shadow layer, and everything will be contained within the bounds of the first shadow layer. And if these selection lines are bothering you, and I know they are, can simply turn them off by clicking this little button at the top. The selection lines will still be there. You just can't see them. Now, paint the second layer of shadow similar to how we did the first, but with an even darker, cooler, and more desaturated color. Make sure to leave room between the edge of the second shadow and the edge of the first shadow to give the appearance of gradation occurring. Once again, I make use of my handy gay tonal corresion, to see my available options and make the shadows more faithful to my reference. I'm using two different references for the lighting and shading of this illustration. So naturally, there's going to be some creative decision making that is required. While I'm using the first reference for most of the structure, I want to hard slight cast in the face and the second reference, and I'm building my shadows with that in mind. I create a third layer for the deepest shadows, which are almost straight black. Just remember not to overdo it. When it comes to creating cast shadows for the eyes, I go with a bit of a different technique. There are a lot of different colors here that the shadow is being cast over. So unless you want to grab a shadow color for each and every one of them, I suggest you use a layer filter. There's a drop down menu in your layer settings that should say normal at first. Clicking on it, you will get a bunch of options for your layer filter. For shadows, a useful filter is the multiply filter. Select an appropriate color, probably something relative to the colors around the areas that you're shading and start laying down shadows. Because it's a filter, the multiplier layer is taking the colors below into consideration when you place down your colors or values. We could have easily done this for all of our shadows throughout our entire illustration, but the hues would have ended up looking a bit superficial compared to what we're going for, especially considering the variety of colors that exist within skin, which is most of our picture here. Create a new layer for the shadows from the jewelry. Only thing is, the ear nd and the necklace are on two different layers, so we can't clip this layer to both of them at the same time. You could create two layers and clip them to each piece of jewelry instead. But I've got a better idea. Like we did earlier, let's do a layer selection. You can actually include more than one layer in a selection. That's perfect for this. So hold control and click each necessary layer. Then do as we did before by right clicking one of the selected layers and click and create selection. Now, the brush trucks are limited to the two jewelry areas. In shaping the jewelry itself, you want to use the marker tool again and select the dark brown color. But instead of softing the edges, you want the edges to be as hard cut as possible. Because we'll want to to metalic we'll want high contrast, so the shifting between lights and darks will be sharp. Erase out some of the shadows around the edges to give the impression of rim lighting on the shiny material. And try to make some interesting shapes with the light and shadow. The shadows on the face are more or less complete, but we'll take some time to sculpt things into a satisfactory condition. Now, I suppose it's time to do something with the clothes. We've been using the third reference for the war drove thus far. So make a new layer above the base clothing color and clip it. If you look closely, the shirt isn't flat. There are some ridges in the shirt that are casting shadows. So grabbing the lighter pencil tool in a slightly darker and cooler color, we're going to draw on these ridges. Once that's done, create a new layer above the ridges and clip that one as well. This layer is going to be for the shadows proper, and we're going to be using the same color as before because the ridges are technically shadows, but more representation of the shirts design. Now, we're doing the shadows that are borne out of the form of the character's body. Use the same marker and blending tools that we've been using before this. Then use the soft airbrush across the lighter areas to suggest the subtle changes of planes in the shirt. Use the marker to erase out hard edges, while the blending tool is used for soft edges. And now it's finally time for the most important part of this illustration to shade the lips. And by that, I mean, I forgot to place the shadows earlier. So I'm just now doing that. Just make sure to place the lip layer below the third shadow layer, but above the rest. The darkest shadows are the ones that I use for the lips here. And once that's done, the shadows are now complete, not counting any later sculpting, which will most definitely occur. And the next part, we will be putting in the highlights. 9. Highlights: Now that we've added shadows to our image, you can really see the depth that they bring. The picture doesn't look so flat anymore. We can push it even further by adding the highlights. So, as always, make a new layer, but place this one below the shadows. Because we did the shadows first, we've already used them to define a lot of shapes and edges of the face. From now, using the highlights, we simply just need to color undervill shadows. When color picking, just like how you generally shouldn't go black from most shadows, you also shouldn't go white from most highlights. And while shadows are generally cooler and darker, highlights are generally warmer and brighter. Warmer in this sense means closer to yellow on your color wheel. That being said, both shadows and highlights tend to be less saturated than your base tone. All of this is almost moot anyway, though, because let's be real. I'm going to use tonal corrections later as my digital crutch anyway. But it's still good to know. And also, without this knowledge, using the tonal correction function would be harder to use anyway. I begin by testing some brushes with some texture on them. I wanted something with texture because skin isn't perfectly smooth, and I wanted to represent that in some way, as so long as the texture wasn't too jarring or too noticeable. I ended up settling on the charcoal tool, which is among the second list of sub tools besides the pencil tools. This part might be a little confusing because you might notice that I have charcoal and charcoal two listed in my tools. This is because tools are sometimes changed from version to version when clip DOPA gets updates, and the charcoal tool was one such tool. The charchl two that I have listed here is the newer version of the tool, and the charchl that I end up using is from an older version of Clip Studio Paint. Don't fret, though. If you don't have this older version, you can download it pretty easily. You got the Clip Studio Paint art program, you should have gotten another app alongside it, the Clip Studio app, which manages all the files and materials you use for paint. If you open that up and click the Clip Studio Assets tab on the left, it'll be taken into a database of materials and assets that you can download and use for your own artwork. Many of these are even free to use. But in the search bar at the top, if you type in 1.10 0.9 and tools, you'll find the default sub tools for version 1.10 0.9 of Clips VDO paint. Here you can download these older tools, and once that's complete, open your actual paint app and click to the single arrow at the top here. Under the download tab, there should be a folder from the tools you just downloaded. In there, you can find the charcoal tool that I use and simply click and drag it to the subtol menu that you want to place it in. Just make sure that you rename your early charcoal tool if you want to place them in the same menu. You can do this by right clicking the tool, selecting settings of the sub Tool, and changing the name there. And now we finally start laying down color for the highlighted areas. But remember, none of the layout is coming from my mind. I'm taking it from the reference. Blend the edges so that the texture isn't too jarring. And if you find that your blending is smoothing things out too much to the point that it completely flattens the texture. Another good option to use is the blur tool just beneath the blend tool in the subtol menu. With the blur tool, you can make the textures less distinct without mixing everything into a flat tone. This will keep the texture, but it will make it less eye catching. And then you know what time it is. It's tonal correction tie. Try to find a medium between texture and grain, where they both exist, but neither of them completely overpowers the other. Now we're going to create another highlight layer, but this time above the shadow layers, for those areas where the edges between values have yet to be defined. At first, I only put the layer above the first shadow layer, but eventually move it above all the shadow layers as well as the lip color layer as well. When putting the highlights on the lips, I swap back to using the marker and lighter pencil to simulate the high contrast shine of lip gloss. Similar to the shine of jewelry, with a little more softness to it. And now, create a third highlight layer above all of the other highlight and chatl layers. I wanted to add the bright light cast in the side of the face like in the second reference. I initially went for a bright pinkish color is similar to what had shown in the second reference. But as you might have guessed, I rely on our Lord and Savior Tomo correction later on. I also use the marker for this to portray the intensity of the light shining on her face. The placing of this bright highlight is why I constructed the shadows as I did. As I said before, I planned ahead for how I wanted the lighting to be laid out over the face, which is why I placed the shadow to bit unevenly on both sides. I put more shadow on the exposed side of her face because I knew that the harsh lighting would create a harsh core shadow where the plane shifted from the side of her face to the front of her face. Whereas the other side of her face has more of a gradation from light to dark and vice versa. And then I used my handy Danny tonal correction to change the color of this highlight to be more consistent with the colors of the first reference. Seeing as we've been using the first reference for most of the colors up to this point, we should keep things consistent. And then we use the blinding tool and soft airbrush for a lot of sculpting. Layer masks are a good way to erase something without fully committing to a decision. Here, I use a layer mask on the first highlight layer to erase the way some of the highlight on the forehead to make it less intense. And then I turn the mask on and off to see if I like to change. If I do, I can just keep the mask. If I don't, I can just turn the mask off. Next, I create a new layer above the eye color layer, but below the eye shadow layer to add some lighter colors and bring some light to the eyes. I end up using a layer filter again. This time, it's color dotage, which will add a slight glow effect. I choose a yellowish color to add some warmth. But since this is a filtered layer, I don't actually know how this color will translate until I lay it down. It comes out as this light and brown color, which I was happy with. But, you know mean, I just had to use a tunnel correction to see if there was anything better. Yes, I know I have a problem. And no, I'm not changing it. In the end, the color I end up going with wasn't that much different from the initial color anyway. Next, I create a layer for the white shines in the eye above all other eye color layers. Usually, this is the part that really brings the eyes together in an aesthetically pleasing sense. Initially, going with a pure white, I place the white sparkles in the same places that they appear in the first reference. Now the eyes really stand out as they should, since the eyes are the part of the face that our attention gravitates to when we look at people. But Zooming out, I notice that that the white sparkles are a bit too much. So, like the addict that I am, I go running back to my precious tunnel correction and dim down the aluminous so that they aren't pure white, but rather very light gray. Now that the face is at a relatively satisfactory state, I move on to the clothes and create a new layer. I use the pastel brush for the texture and use the blending tool in the soft airbrush a smooth things were necessary. I next want to give the jewelry a bit of the shine we see in the fresh reference picture. I create a new layer above the jewelry and set the filter to glow while I choose the same golden color that I use as the base for the necklaces in the hearing. Because there's a glow filter on the layer, this golden color is going to appear a lot brighter and more vibrant than before. I then use the same function that we used before by creating a selection over multiple layers to limit where I draw. Teaching the soft airbrush, we're going to gently apply this glare on the side where the light is coming from. At this point, I'd like to start fleshing out that feather on the ear ring so they can stand out a little more. But first, I imported new reference of a raven feather to make it shape more accurate. When all else fails, in more reference. Once I'm satisfied with the shape of the feather, make a new layer for the lighter stem of the feather. Athos a grid slightly lighter than the halfway point between white and black. But, of course, because I can't help myself. I run back to my total correction and make the stem darker so that it doesn't demand too much attention. I then make a new layer for the highlights on the feather part itself, using the same color that I use for the stem. You're probably starting to see just how many layers one can use when making an illustration. We probably could have used less, but more layers are safer. Albeit very tedious to edit if we need to. Make a new layer for highlights in the hair. This time, I decided to go with the charcoal tool, that is the newer charcoal tool that's actually native to the latest version of clip studio paint. The value of the highlights don't need to be much lighter than the base color of the hair. They just need to be light enough to be noticeable. You don't want to make them too light or else they'll demand too much attention. When it comes to illustration, it's largely a game of balancing hues and values that guide the audience's eyes to the places you want them to focus on while creating interesting, yet less noticeable areas around them. I made the hair quite a bit different from my references, but I don't use them for this. For this part, I draw from experience. But it took for doing this would be to think of the hair as coiling bands that overlap each other. If you decide to go this route, be sure to make the bands appear as if they're laid on top of each other. I also suggest some highlights on the side of the hair opposite of the primary light source. This is to suggest a secondary light source, which is very likely to happen in nature as light bounces from surface to surface. Unless you specifically made a decision to have one light source, you should always consider a second one. And then the total correction you started to call out to me again. What you probably didn't expect was me turning it down this time and going with the color that I already had. I do believe this is what you would call character development. And after that, the rest of this highlight process is simply just further sculpting. The next video we'll finally be adding a background, so she's not just standing inside of a white void. 10. Background: Well, would you look at that? Looks like we've got ourselves a relatively complete character on our campus so far. Of course, this goes without mentioning the corrections that we may make later on. But at this point, I hope you're really starting to see a possible end game for this illustration. The finish line is in sight. If you've been following along with your own illustration, I certainly hope that you can see everything coming together at this point. And now it's time to make a background, but something that isn't too complex or detailed. It's mainly just something to cover up this white board in the background thus far. Let's start by placing everything involving our character into a folder of its own so that the layers that make up this character can be easily separated from the layers that make up the background. Select every layer that's viable in the same way that I showed you before. Next, you want to right plate somewhere on these layers and select the option and create folder and insert layer. Now, all of these layers are placed inside of a neatly packed folder, and you can minimize this folder by pressing the drop down arrow at the top. And here, I'm going to duplicate this folder and all the layers inside of it by right clicking the folder and selecting duplicate layer. Notice the difference that made in the hair. It really darkened the wild strands around the ages. Using these lighter pencils and brush tools, sometimes duplicating the layers that use these can make your art look more intangible. That being said, there's also another completely different reason for why I duplicated this layer, which I will explain in greater detail in the next section of this lesson. But for now, let's focus on making the background, which will be based off the background of the first reference. First things first, create a new layer below the folders. And grabbing a dark desaturated bronze color, create a base color for the lower part of the background. Do this by using a function that can make straight lines and draw a horizontal line across the canvas. In order to make these straight lines, and simply tap a spot any spot within your drawing parameters and hold shift, the spot you tap doesn't actually have to be on your Canvas. And when you do this, a projection will appear wherever you move your cursor, displaying how your straight line will be placed. When to is placed, I use the fill tool to fill in everything below the line same color. I soon realized, however, that this area is too low, so I scale it upwards using a transformation. Since the upper part of the background in the reference is white, we're going to leave the top part of the background in my canvas as is. Next, create a new layer above your previous one and use a blue color with a soft airbrush because even though the background is a bright golden light, there are still some cool tones present to balance it out. Here, we're going to lightly place in these blue tones around nine specific areas. And then we're going to make another new layer this time with the glow filter, per bright yellow color for the rays of light at the edges of the white section and the bronze section. At this time, it would be really good to note that you can have two colors held at any given time. As you can probably see with the two squares at the lower left corner of your color wheel. And we definitely want to make use of this, since it can be tedious to use the color picker on layers that have filters, since it will grab the filtered color instead of the actual color that you chose. You can still color picker. But you'd have to turn the layer back to normal and then reset the filter once you've picked the color. But instead, you can swap between your two colors with the g shortcut key. You're going to want to save that yellow color that you've got for later adjustments. So use the second color and make a new layer. This one also with the glove filter, but the color we're using for this one is white. We're going to use the white to give that blown out look pressing the reference. Be sure to pull the light down, pressing harder at the top of your stroke, and loosening it as you come down. This makes it look like the light is being cast upon the character. I save that yellow color so that can switch back to the previous layer and make adjustments without missing a beat. Now that the background is starting to come together, I start thinking about how this newly established background lighting might affect the character that we've already made. Though, I create a new layer above all previous layers. This time with a glow dodge filter, instead of just the glow filter. Using the same white color, I look for a spot where light might be bleeding through or wrapping around the character, like the hair. I also use it to brighten the shine on the jewelry. Then create a new layer above the rest of the background layers to put the finishing touches on it. Here, we will be putting in the light particles that you see floating around in the first reference if you look closely enough. To imitate this effect, I go to the tone scraping tool in the airbrush menu, and then I adjust the particle size to a reasonable magnitude. I then begin laying down the tone scraping particles with some even distribution on both sides. And lastly, use the blur tool in the blending menu to soften them and make them appear as dust being eliminated by the light. Depending on how hard you press down, you can get some nice variation on how much each particle is blurred. Please try to keep the pressure light for the most part. Returning to the glow dodge layer, I decided to add some rim lighting to the clothes. I begin with the soft airbrush, but move to the old charcoal tool later for that added texture, as well as the blending tool to manage that texture. Be sure to remember where the light is coming from and where the shadows will be laid. I decided to erase out some of the rim lighting on the clothes for the shadow being cast by the hair. And just like that, we are just about done with this illustration. Anything we do to it now will be for sculpting and correction purposes, which I will talk about more in depth in the next part of this lesson. 11. Corrections: I'll be honest, this video is difficult for me to place into the lesson because it's something that one should be doing throughout their entire illustrative process. From the beginning to the end, you should be taking the time to take a good look at your illustration and make corrections whenever you find something that bothers you. Because, believe me, if something in your illustration is bothering you early, it will definitely bother you later on. Those imperfections in your artwork build up fast over time. And this is why I put so much emphasis on the sculpting process before. I considered placing this video earlier in the lesson because of how early in the process that it's required. Like when I altered the shape of the face before adding the color or when I edited the hair before placing the shadows. I would go back and forth editing these shapes throughout the illustration. But the reason that I decided to place this part of the lesson here is because I believe that those edits are kind of obvious. Of course, you should be editing those things if you don't like them early on. But there are certain edits nearing the end of your illustrative process that can require a lot more nuance. A very good example of this is when I decided to shorten the distance between the eyes and the nose of this character after I had already finished the lighting, the shadows, and the finer details of the face. So there was a lot of things that needed to be corrected on a lot of layers. Now, I definitely should have fixed proportions of her face earlier. But honestly, it wasn't something that bothered me or that I even noticed until I added detail. And sometimes that's just how the cookie crumbles. Sometimes errors don't look like errors until the detail is added, but by that point, the editing needs to occur over several layers. So what do you do? Well, in the case of this example, it's easier when you can group a lot of problems together and solve them at the same time. We can start this process by making a group selection of every layer that will be edited. This is actually the time of the illustration that I group these layers into a folder, which I talked about in the last part of this lesson. This is also when I duplicated this folder. And the reason why I duplicated this folder was to make this mass edit and have a backup folder just in case I didn't like how the edit turned out. As it turned out, the duplication made the hair appear thicker, and I liked it. But moving on, I made a selection cutting through the nose, the hair, and around the earring. And with everything selected, when I click on the scale rotate option in the selection menu, it applied to every layer. So in this instance, I just want to pull the upper part of the face down a little. I could do this by clicking the dragon, but my hand could easily drift to the right or left, and we don't want that. So instead, I click the down error on my keyboard, which will move the selection pixel by pixel. I move it to a point where I'm satisfied. The change may be quite small, but small details can make a big difference. Now, you may have noticed the line going across the face, where colors have now overlapped because of the edit. Unfortunately, fixing this won't be simply. The solution to this one is going to be the easier blending tool and go to each and every color layer that's affected and blend them back to a reasonable point. To make it easier for yourself, turn off all the layers except the one that you're working on and go through them one at a time. Moving on to the next important change that I made, after making the background, I decided that the character wasn't popping out as well as I would have liked her to. The background was a little too overpowering, so I decided to cast a little more light on the face using a glob dige layer above all the other layers. Using the same yellow color that was used in the background and with a soft hair brush, and gently brighten the face to keep the focus where it should be. These are just examples of some of the obstacles that you could come across nearing the in of your heart crisis. But with time and practice, you will gain the experience needed to tackle any obstacle add on. 12. Assignment and Thank You: So, we've reached the end of the lesson, and now it's time for your assignment. And for that assignment, I want you to follow my route in this lesson. I will provide every reference that I use in this illustration as tools for you to use as well. And like this process that I just showed you, try to mix things up and add your own flare and personality to your picture. Instead of just trying to match the reference pixel for pixel. And if you're feeling confident enough to translate this to another character, then by all means, illustrate a picture of any other of the amazingly designed characters that Arcane has to offer. And when you're finished, be sure to post a picture in the class projects. And if you're feeling brave enough to share your artwork online, be sure to tag me on Instagram or Twitter at Blue Underscore Omni and Blue Omniverse respectively. I'd love to see your work. And thank you so much for tuning into my lesson, and I hope that everyone who viewed this has gained something from it. Let me know what else do you'd like to see in the comments and be sure to stay tuned for more.