Let's Color A Comic Page in Procreate!

1. Introduction: All right, welcome everyone. My name is Kurt and I am looking forward to showing you my workflow for coloring Sequential Comics in Procreate on the ipad. Procreate's an amazing tool. I've used it in my own project several times. And if you have some experience, you're used to other software that's more commonly used for coloring comics like Clip Studio or Photoshop. Procreate selection tools can leave a little bit to be desired. So I'll show you some tricks and workarounds to make sure you're getting the most out of it and a little bit about me. I have been coloring comics since 2011, professionally drawing since birth effectively. I started teaching coloring on line in 2013 and it's still pretty fun for me. So a few quick disclaimers. This is going to show you a workflow for coloring comics with procreate. And of course, you can apply this to other types of art, but that's really what it's going to be focused on. The other thing is, this is not a how to draw course. This is not a color theory course. I have not the course for that. But coloring can be time consuming. And there are certain parts of the process that take longer than even the videos that I can post on this website. So what I will do is I will show you the steps in order to get started. And in some cases, I might need to skip ahead in order to not do the entire process of an actual page in a course. Because even professional colorists, you can take hours and hours to do a single page. So that's something else to keep in mind. If you're watching this and you're thinking, well, this is going to take a while, true? Yes, it will. It can, especially if you're just getting started. You will get faster by the way, if you keep practicing. And last thing, especially if you've followed my Youtube channel, You've heard this over the years p***ty of times. But there is no industry standard in the way that comics are colored. The process itself, there's no standard, you could ask 50 color is what their process looks like. You might get 50 different answers. So keep that in mind. This is just my own, what I believe best practices, best way to handle this. But of course you could ask, you know, another colors and get a different opinion. So keep that in mind and what I've done with this course and the first lesson, I'm calling it a quick start lesson. I think at this point, the way it's going to work is it's going to give you a really quick way to get started coloring immediately. So if your drawings there and you're like, look man, I just want to color this like a coloring book. I've got the first lesson, we're going to talk about that. And then we're going to dig into all of the nuts and bolts and get into more of a technical workflow. But those of you that are just like, hey, just want to color something real quick, I drew a picture of my dog. I don't know what to do. We'll take care of that in the first lesson. Procreate is an amazing app. It's one of my favorite apps. I'm looking forward to showing you some cool stuff. So let's get going. 2. Quick start guide: All right, for this lesson, I'm going to call it the Quick start guide. And I want to give you guys that just want to be able to jump in and start coloring something pretty quickly. A way to do that, and that's what this lessons for. After this lesson, we'll get into all sorts of specifics and tools and tips and tricks and things and all sorts of stuff. So let's say I've brought this drawing or this page into the software, and right now this was drawn outside of procreate. And so the ink and the white of the paper is all in the same layer. So if you try to color on this on a layer on top, it's going to cover up the ink, which obviously we don't want. And if we take this layer hold and drag below the inks, it still doesn't show up because the white of the paper on the inks layer is hiding that layer two from us. So the easy thing to do here is to go to the inks layer and click the letter in, which will change the b***ding mode for that layer and change it to multiply. Changing it to multiply will allow us to color on a layer underneath, but it won't cover up the black of the ink. So let's zoom up here and say I want to color this just like a coloring book. Well, I'm going to go to my layers here. I'm going to make a new layer by clicking the plus sign up at the top right. I'm going to hold on that new layer with one finger and drag it below the ink layer. And then you can pick any brush I just went to the painting and chose a flat brush there and you could start coloring on this and the software would behave very much like it would if it was, you know, just like a coloring book or anything else. You can go outside the lines or inside the lines or just like anything else. But if you're worried about going outside the lines here and going outside of your gutters, a couple ways to handle that one, You can just not worry about it until you're done and then fill all the gutters with white. Or you could use the selection tool. And we'll go into this in more detail a little bit later. But if you go to the selection tool and choose freehand, you can click on each point on each corner of the panel that we can draw a box around that point. And I'll just fill this with a color for now. It doesn't matter what the color is. And you can fill it with a color by just dragging the color at the top down into the area you want it to fill. And I'm going to do that for each panel. Now, once I filled all of the panels with a color, you can click that layer and click Alpha lock. Now anything that let's change colors here. Anything that I do on any of these layers is going to be contained to the layers that we've colored already. The alpha lock prevents us from coloring outside of anything that doesn't already have color on it. In this case, all of the transparent areas in between, effectively areas that we can't color. So that's a really quick, easy way to just sort of lock yourself out of being able to do that. And if you did want to say color on a few layers while working this way, you could also just make a new layer on top and you don't have to click the alpha lock each time. You can also do what's called a clipping mask like on this new layer three here. If I choose clipping mask, that is also going to contain everything to the pixels that are, have something on them on layer two. In this case we'll go into more details in masking and alpha locking and all that later. But that's just a few quick ways that you can control where things go and, you know, get under the lines properly. But if you're thinking, you know, I want to learn about the selection tools and the lasso and all that, that's all coming up very soon. But this is a really quick, easy way to get started coloring right now if you want to, but let's keep rolling on with the course. 3. How to import class resources: So in this lesson, I'm going to show y'all how to import the course resources into procreate. So the first thing we're going to do is make sure procreate is open. Okay? Because in order for this to work, you need to have one app opens. Let's go in and open up Procreate. So I'm going to swipe up from the bottom and if the IOS stars align and to keep doing it, it will open up the dock. I'm not sure what the trick is to get that happen on the first time because I can't do it. But I have the files app over here on the far, far right. I'm going to grab that and pull it up And drop it right there. And that's going to pull up what I think IOS calls the slide over feature, which allows you to swipe this away and swipe it back out. The way that works is there's a little line up here at the top that you can grab. And that will allow you to do it as a dual screen app or to pull it out as a slide over app. It also allows you to swipe it away. Now to swipe it back onto the screen, you just swipe from the right. Again, I usually have to do this twice. I don't know why blame Apple. But here are all the resources I recommend just putting them all in a folder on your ipad. I've got mine organized here. We'll start with the sample pages. Go to sample comic pages. And you can just hold on these files and drag them over into procreate. Here's the first one again, hold for a second, and then drag over to procreate. So now we've got both of our sample pages there installed or imported. And there is also a flatting brush I'm going to be discussing later. If you want to go ahead and import that. Now you can, same way, just grab it, drag it into procreate, let it go. And it'll import it. You won't see anything happen here on the gallery, but it will put it in your imported brushes. So now that we have our pages in here and we've got our flatting brush installed, let's keep going. 4. Using the basic tools: So for this first real lesson here, I want to try to show all the main tools and show you, like, how you could color this if it were, say, a coloring book. Like just the very simplest possible way of coloring. And that way even after this first lesson, if you want to jump in and start playing around with it or if you'd like to color just to, you know, Zen out and do this as like a meditation like then you can do this right after this first lesson. So I want to start with some of the basic tools and then we'll go on from there. So I'm going to start on the right side up at the top of the screen, looking at the actual colors tool itself, which is your color selector. Basically, I believe the default look for this, if you go at the very bottom, you see where it says Disc Classic Harmony Value palettes. I typically keep this on classic because I'm just used to working in that square and I'm used to measuring distance for contrast in that square. And we'll talk about that a little bit later. But I think the default is disc, it might look like this to begin with. This is also a good way to look at your colors if you want to see the wheel in context. But for the sake of this course, for myself here, I'm going to leave this on the classic mode now. It doesn't really matter which one you use. You can use whatever you want. If you're a slider person and you like sliders, you can use sliders, not a slider guy, but whatever works for you will probably be fine. And I haven't tried this harmony stuff yet, I don't really use it. So we're going to leave it on classic now. Right next to the color tool is the layers tool. And we're going to spend a lot of time in this little window learning a lot about how layers work. And but I do want to touch on a few things to begin with before we jump into this today. Now, the file that I've given you guys was a PSD file and I've already got it labeled here for you. But if you want to ever re label any of these layers, you just click on the layer and click Rename. You can change that to whatever you want. I like to do that keeps it organized, especially with procreate. You're limited in the number of layers you can use normally, depending on your file size. If I ever reference a layer and you want to know name your layer to match, then that's the quick way to do that. But the first thing I want to point out here in this little section is the little letter that is over here to the right, right next to the checkbox. That little, if you click it, it will bring up this little scrolling option of color modes here. Now we're not going to get into all these color modes in this particular lesson. I'll talk about that a little bit later when you first open up this file. And I did this on purpose, so you guys can see the difference here. It's on the letter n, which is just the normal mode. Okay? There's no fancy b***ding or anything going on. It's just what you see is what you get on a normal layer. Black is black. White is white. If I click a little plus sign up at the top right, that makes a new layer. Now if you hold on layer two, you can drag it down below layer one, which is that ink layer. Now if I tried a color on this second layer, and a lot of new colorists might try this like, well, here's my inks and here's my colors. And here we go. And they start doing, I'm brushing on the canvas if you can't tell and nothing's coming out. And so they go look at the layers and you can see the color there. Here. I'll choose a different color, a little bit easier to see, and you can see the colors under there, but it's not coming through. The reason for that is this layer has the white of the paper on it in addition to the inks, so you're not seeing through the inks. This wasn't drawn in procreate. Okay, it was imported and I'll get to it a whole other lesson later on how to put this on a transparent layer. But the way this works though, the simplest thing to do is to go to that little letter in on the ink layer, pull up this little section. And for whatever reason, I don't know why procreate did this. But you have to scroll up or down, depending on how you look at it. Pull the menu down in order to see multiply. Multiply is the only one that is north of the selections that above the selections on the list, everything else is below. So I don't know why they did that, but if you'll put it on multiply, multiply is a special mode that effectively hides white, okay? It completely hides all the white. And so now you can see my gorgeous coloring underneath there, okay? So if you just want to jump in and immediately start playing around with this, that's the best way to do it. Go to your ink layer, set it to multiply, make a new layer, stick it underneath there. Again, just hold the layer, drag it under, and then you can go crazy with whatever brush and whatever colors that you would like to do. Now, in order to delete layers, which we might do, sometimes you can swipe to the left and delete, swipe, delete. And you can also change the background color here since it will show through that file. Now personally, I like to color usually with like a grayish color most of the time just because I don't coloring with a white backgrounds, like looking into a light bulb. So I don't really like to color it with white personally, but that is totally up to you. These next ones will touch on very briefly, they are pretty simple I'm going to skip. We're going to do this in reverse. So we're going to skip the eraser tool and the smudge tool for a second and go straight to the brush which looks like a brush. And if you click on that brush, it will bring up a list of all of the brushes that are available in procreate. I'm not going to be using any custom brushes during this course. They're all going to be brushes that are built into the app. But you might notice that I do have other brushes from other places, They are not included in this course. This is only using the default brushes, which are great, by the way. But the brush tool does exactly what it sounds like when you use it. It brushes onto the canvas over here on the left side. You can adjust the size. I usually keep my left hand pretty close to this as I'm working. So you can play around with changing the size of the brush. This will show you the opacity, so you can adjust how opaque the brush is. So if you just want it like a glaze, you can turn it way down and you can see how that works. And I did all of this on the same layer with my inks. Now's a great time to talk about two finger undo and three finger redo. So two fingers tapping on the canvas will undo your brush strokes. I know you guys can't see me tapping, but trust me, I'm putting two fingers on the canvas and tapping with two fingers. Now, three fingers on the canvas will redo bring them right back. So if you use procreate for long enough, you will be working on a real paper sketch book. And at some point you will tap it with two fingers. I guarantee it'll happen, it's happened to me. But anyway, when you click on brush, it pulls up this brush library. There are lots and lots and lots of options in the Sap. We'll talk about brushes a little bit later. I'll give you guys some tips on that, but we're just getting started. I'm also not going to get into editing brushes very much at this point. A little too far ahead. Let's go to the next section here which is the smudge tool, I believe is what they call it. It works well, let me put this on a new layer, drag this back down here, and give us something to smudge. If I go to the smudge tool, you can see that it is b***ding the edges of this into the canvas. You can make it big, you can make it small. You can change the opacity of it, which is which affects the strength of this smudge tool is cool. I don't use it a ton personally, but it is an option. It smudges, you'll never guess the same thing here. All the brushes you can use on the brush, you can also use as a smudge tool or the eraser. And a little pro tip here. If you'll notice right now, I've got the old beach brush selected on the brush settings and the smudge tool is currently set to this different tool. So if I go back to my brush, make sure it's set to whatever I wanted to set the smudge tool to, I can hold down on the smudge tool and now it's using the same brush as the brush. Okay, so now I can go to the smudge and I'm effectively smudging with the same tool that I'm brushing with. I like how this looks because, you know, I don't like to use a really, you know, natural looking brush. And then some like super digital looking eraser or super digital looking smudge tool, you can do the same thing with the eraser. Again, just make sure you'll notice that the brush is set to old beach and the eraser is set to a pencil right now. So again, I'm just going to go back to my brush, make sure I have the right brush selected. And then hold on the eraser. And now you can see the eraser is using the same brush. And again, now we're erasing with the same texture that we used for brushing, which I think looks good if you're going for like that natural media look to finger undo a couple of times. So those are the very basic tools that are in the app. So if you're new to procreate and just want to kind of play around with that practice With that, you've got enough knowledge now to set your inks to the multiply mode, create a layer underneath, and you're now coloring. The other quick feature that I forgot to mention on the color tool is the color fill. What they call, or a color drop is a technical name for it. Any color that you have selected here, you can drag onto the canvas and that will fill the canvas with that color. Now you can use this in conjunction with the selection tools to of course, limit where it goes on your canvas. And we'll talk about more of that in the next lesson. But you should know enough to be dangerous at this point. Let's move on to the next lesson. 5. Transforming and selecting: All right, so in this lesson we'll move on to the tools that are on the left side of the screen. Up at the top that is the transform tool, which is the one that looks like the arrow there. That little S are all of these selection tools. We'll discuss that. There are the adjustments. And if we have time, we'll get into the actions in this lesson. If not, we'll do it in the next one. So I'm going to go to my layers briefly here and make sure that I have the ink selected, just so I've got something to manipulate here. And if I click on that arrow, it's going to pull up the transform tool. Now there's a lot of functionality in here. Again, I just want to kind of hit the highlights for now. We'll do a lot of a deeper dive in this a little bit later. But this will allow you to select and move items that are on the canvas already. You know, things that you've drawn, things that you've done. Not really something that we'll probably do very much of in this course. But I did want to show you guys how that works and this is where you can decide if you want to uniformly change the size of something like. You can see that it's set to uniform right now. You also have free form which allows you to squash and stretch this in a different way. Again, not something we're going to do a whole lot of in this course. There's a distort which you get these interesting perspective effects. I use this sometimes if you have like a brick wall or something and you want to make it look like it fits, this is an easy way to do that. And then warp is just that. It warps again, not something we're going to do a ton of, but it's there as a tool. I thought we would talk about it very quickly. The rest of this is fairly self explanatory. You can flip horizontal, you can flip vertical, you can rotate, you can fit to canvas And this bi linear nearest near bicubic option, those are all just settings if you were ever resizing pages or resizing things, which we're not really going to do a whole lot of here. But that's what that tool is. Right next to it is the selection tool. Now the selection tool will actually use quite a bit. The selection tools can be used heavily, and maybe not so heavily just depending on the style that you're doing. But selections allow you to limit what you're doing on the canvas to specific areas. For example, right now it's set to the free hand, or what Photoshop Clip Studio would call a lasso. Which is basically just whatever I draw on the canvas is what's going to show up. Wherever you start your selection, you're going to see a little circle there. If you click that circle, it will close the selection. For example, with the freehand option here. If I draw on the canvas that creates a selection. Now unlike a lot of apps, again if you're used to protos Clip Studio, lifting the stylus from the canvas is not going to close it automatically. And what this means is you can pick it up where you left off and keep going even if you raise your pencil. I really like this about procreate, because a lot of apps, when you get done drawing, it immediately snaps the selection closed. And in procreate it doesn't do that. So just to show you guys how a selection works, we'll draw it and we'll close it. And then we'll grab a brush. It doesn't matter what layer on, but now you can see that my brushing is contained to that selection. So you can use this in comics. There's a style of coloring they call cut and grad. So you can make a selection with it, close it, and then switch to a brush. And you can see how these brush strokes are contained to that selection. They call that cut and grad. Selection is the cut and the grad is the gradient from the brush. There's also an automatic selection tool. We're going to talk about this during the flatting portion. There's also the rectangle tool, and I actually use the rectangle quite a bit. This is particularly helpful for things like panels, like on this page. What we might do is just start at one corner of the panel, draw to the other corner of it, and then I'm going to do another for this one. And you can see it selected because there's these little thin diagonal lines, which I don't know if you guys can see this in the video, but there's these little diagonal lines outside of the selection, but you don't see them inside the selection. But I'm going to go ahead. While this is set to the ad mode, I'm just going to select all of these panels just to show you how I might use this. And then we'll do this one as well. So in this example, I've selected all of the panels. Now if you ever click off your selection accidentally or you switch to the brush tool and or something happens and you lose your selection. You can always hold down on the selection button, that little symbol, it will reload the last selection. I use that all the time, but I'm going to use the invert button down here at the bottom. So it's going to invert the selection. So now only the gutters in the areas between the panels are selected. So I can go to my colors, choose white, and use the color drop to fill the gutters with white. It looks like I missed a section, so go grab my brush tool real quick and fill that in using the flatting brush that I included. The only brush right now it's included with this course is that flatting the KM R Fighter 2.0 We'll talk about that later too and we'll dive in more into the selection options. But I just wanted to show you guys a couple of quick things on each one of these, all of these adjustments, we're going to do a whole lot with this stuff later. There's a lot to be discussed here, but that's where the adjustments are. Again, not really going to dive into that at this point. That'll come later. The last little section here are the actions. And there are a lot of different options in here. In fact, I'm reaching the limits of ***gth on this lesson. So we'll talk about that in the next one. 6. Procreate actions menu: All right, so this next lesson we're going to talk about the Actions menu. That's a little button up at the top left that looks like a little wrench there. And the ad section up here at the top is, again, fairly self explanatory, so I'm not going to spend whole lot of time here. You can insert other files, other procreate files, you can insert other photos. So if I wanted to pull in reference of a fist that I took in a different app, then I've got the ability here to pull that in, resize it, use that as reference point. If I wanted to. I've going to two finger undo that a couple times and then go back to the Actions menu. We can add text. Not really going to be adding any text. I'm not a letter, I don't want to be a letter. But that's where you can go to do it if you want cut copy is there as well. I have my three finger swipe down set to copy and paste. But that is an option that you can decide in the preferences, which we'll get to that in a second canvas. Again, this is fairly self explanatory, crop and resize. We're not going to be doing a whole lot of this, but that is where you go to do that. Page assist, animation assist. We're not really going to be using just not things that we're going to use as a colorist drawing guide. Again, not something we're going to really need for this course, but the drawing guide is not something that we're really going to use in this course. But if you do draw, and let's say you wanted some perspective guides or something, you can click on drawing guides, the edit drawing guide, and you've got some perspective tools here that you can use. Again, not really the point of this course. Then this is a new little feature in Procreate 5.2 I think if you have reference material that you want to view while you're looking at your Canvas, then this little reference window is really good for that. By default it's just going to show you your canvas. So it's if you're one of those people that like me that likes to step back from the canvas very often, then this is a good way to not have to continually zoom in and out. You know, you can also import other images. Wow. You can map your page to your face if you want very weird. Not that we need any of that stuff, but that's, that's what the reference button is. Flip horizontal and flip vertical. Again, these are self explanatory and then canvas information. We're going to talk about all of this stuff in a little bit when we get into creating our files and all that stuff. But not really something we're going to dive too much into. Here. The Share button, again, kind of self explanatory, but this, if you want to save your layers intact, make sure you're using a procreate file or a PSD file. Those are the two that include layers, PDFs, Jpegs, all the rest are just going to export a single layer. So not really what you want to do unless that's, you know, you're sending that off to whoever you're coloring for. Video is where you adjust the settings for procreates. Time lapse function that's built in. If you go to time lapse replay, it'll play back everything you've done so far. And recording is something again you can toggle off and on. If you have an old ipad, maybe it runs a little slower or something with that on. And then export time lapse video, we'll give you options for that full ***gth or 30 seconds and then the preferences. If you're one of those people that like light interfaces, what's wrong with you? No, I'm kidding. But I like dark interfaces. And this switches the interface from left to right. The right hand, the brush cursor will decide whether or not you see the shape of the cursor while you're working. Again, I was it I don't remember if mine was off or on. I think it was on. I'll have to go back and watch the video and find out. I think it was on dynamic brush scaling. What this does is as you zoom in on the canvas, it keeps the brush relatively the same size for the canvas, not the view you're in. Which I do recommend keeping that on project canvas as if you were sending it to like a projector. Re not going to do that. Connect legacy status, going to skip that section or I'm using an apple pencil And that's what I'd recommend you use. If you use something else, you would use this pressure in smoothing, I've got all of this stuff off. That's the way I like it. I did pressure sensitivity slightly. If this is something that you struggle with, how hard you're pressing or having to press too hard or press too lightly, you can goof around with this curve and that will adjust that for you. Again, not really what we're talking about in this course. It doesn't matter that much. Then gesture controls. I pulled this up earlier. If you get a copy paste, I've got mine set to three finger swipe. There's a lot of other options here you can use. But the two things I have set up in this section or Cap and Paste, or set to three finger swipe. On the Quick menu, I have set to four finger tap. I don't do this very often, but four finger tap pulls up this menu. And it's great for like quickly flipping the canvas. I do that pretty often because you hit it with four fingers, hit the canvas, flip it back and forth. That's convenient, especially when you're drawing. Not so much when you're coloring. And then help is help. There's really nothing in there I think we need to talk about. But if you click on Advanced Settings, you can see that Palm support level is something you might want to mess around with. My hands are not huge and for me, fine mode worked best. You can try standard, But if you notice that your palm is hitting things you don't intend to hit, then maybe try fine mode and you can disable the time blast from here. Everything else, I would leave it alone. So there you go. Those are all the major tools very quickly. Now, again, we're going to dig into some of this a little bit later, but I wanted to at least have everybody on the same page about what everything is and where everything is and let's move on. 7. File specs discussion: All right, so before we get into the actual coloring, let's talk a little bit about some of the first things that I would do when I get new pages in, which is to check the size and to talk a little bit about the technical specs on the pages. Because it's important to know this stuff if you're going to be coloring anything yourself. Now, I've already imported the first two pages here and you can see the size, the 27, 80 by 41, 75. If your eyes work, it's really small. But I'm going to go ahead and click the plus sign over here on the top right. And pull up all of the details and we'll look at all of the specs. And you can click on this, it's that little folder icon up at the top left, top right. I mean, sorry about that. So I'm going to click that and that's going to open up the custom canvas that breaks everything down. So the first thing is the dimension. Now to be honest, there isn't like a single perfect template that's going to work for every single publisher. Every artist is going to get a set of specs. They're going to say, hey, you need to use these specs. And it's not something that colorists really have to worry about very much. But a few things that I would be sure to check, it's usually going to be at least two or 3,000 pixels wide by three or four, or 5,000 pixels tall. It can vary quite a bit. The DPI, at least 300 at minimum, I would say 300 is a minimum. For coloring, I see a lot of pages at 400.600 but most of the work that I do is at three or 400 DPI. And that will have an impact on how many layers that you get in your file, you know, whatever the size is. So keep that in mind. You know, if I change these to different numbers, you can see that the number of maximum layers is changing now. I've never really run up against the layer limitations myself, but on a very large file, a very high DPI, you may find that there are some issues with that. Just something to keep in mind. But I don't want to get too bogged down to the specifics on this because like I said, it will change depending on the project. There's another book I'm doing right now that's at 41 25 by 62, 63. And if that's at, let's say 400 DPI, then that gives me 16 layers, which seems like a lot. But that can run out pretty quickly depending on what style you're doing. That can vary, but those are the important things. Make sure your DPI is at least 300, you're probably going to be fine. My apologies if this little cut in feels a little different, it's because it's happening weeks later in the edit. So for the color profile now, this is really important, especially if you're doing professional published work, less so if you're just messing around on the Internet and posting stuff on Twitter. But I'm of the opinion that you should always work as if it's going to be printed because who knows, maybe it will. The default option, or at least it was a default last I checked and procreate is an RGB color gamut and it's the display P three is what it's called. And I want to talk a little bit about color gamuts because it's not going to do much good for me to explain this without going into little detail about it. I will put a link in the resources to a video I made about it already that's on Youtube. That'll go into more detail with some visualizations. But just very briefly enough so you know what's going on here a little bit. Color gamut are just you could think of as your spectrum of options, unintended there it is, the number of colors available to you on a given canvas. And that gamut can range from, you know, billions of colors. You know, my local theater claims they have billions of colors on their projector. I'm sure they do better than I have at home. But the P three color gamut is a very lush, very intense spectrum of colors that look great on an ipad. They are great at selling ipads. All of the images that you see in Best Buy when they're trying to sell, you know, those tablets with these crazy gorgeous, you know, images. And they're really bright and they're really saturated and it looks amazing. But here's the catch, the CMYK color palette, which is what, you know, we use in the comic book industry and in most print industries is limited to, you know, like 27,000 colors or something. It's a very small print gamut. So while this first gamut looks great, I don't recommend working in this one. I would use the S RGB right below it. The very next one, if you're going to work in RGB. Now the reason this lesson is actually cut in is my thoughts have changed on this. I've talked to some colorists that actually are using the default CMYK generic profile that is in procreate and turning that in and having no issues with it. So I have not personally done this, and so I can't vouch that, you know, if you're coloring Spider Man, that this is exactly what Marvel needs or, you know. Dc likes very specific profiles, you know. So this wouldn't work for that sort of work? Not directly. What I've done in the past when I was working in Pro Create was I was working in just a standard SRGB gamut and then exporting into Photoshop on my desktop, creating the C, MY K files from there. Because at the time I did not like the output from procreate and it didn't match what I was getting in Photoshop. And I've done some testing recently and that is no longer how I feel. So what I would recommend, if you're going to work in print and you don't have access to another device or a Photoshop or some other app that you're going to be doing conversions in, I would go ahead and use the CMYK profile, and that is purely if you're wanting to stay in procreate. And let's say you don't have another device, you don't have any other apps, you're not trying to do any converting, This is your best option. Now this will cut down on the number of layers you get. There are b***ding modes that will act differently. Keep that in mind, it's why a lot of people do choose to work in RGB and then convert in other apps. Because RGB does allow just for more choices and flexibility on the digital side. If you have access to other apps that can do the conversion to CMYK, then this is a moot point anyway. So it's total personal preference. I know colorists that work in RGB and convert to CMYK almost always in Photoshop, and I know artists that work strictly in CMYK and don't convert and don't understand why anyone would want to work in RGB. And and so there's just two facts, so there's just two factions there that both have their own thoughts. It usually breaks out into a Twitter conversation every six months or so back when Twitter was useful as of this recording, it actually already doesn't exist. It's called X really dating this video. Anyway, I wanted to step in here with this little section on the color profile because it's honestly, it's up to you which one you want to work in, try both. They will feel different, especially if you're used to working in RGB CMYK, you will see some color shifts in the color picker that you won't see an RGB because it's trying to show you the equiva***t of what you would get, fascinating stuff. Anyway, back to the rest of this lesson time lab settings. This is whatever you want to do. Honestly, I'd like to leave mine on the highest it'll go, because I want the quality of the video to be as high as it possibly can be. If you have an old ipad, if you have something that doesn't run very well, you can use one of these other standards, really doesn't matter. Very much. Has nothing to do with what we're doing today, but it is in this section, so why not? I also leave it on loss list, although you can adjust that. Hevc is just another video codec standard, I wouldn't worry about it. Too much. Canvas properties, this is individual to the canvas, doesn't really matter for us. I do like to keep my default canvas as gray, just as a gray color instead of white. But that's just me. You can leave it on white if you want. And then the background is hidden, I think by default, or not hidden by default. Depending on whichever one it is, it doesn't really matter. But now we've got that set. That is not really anything you need to worry about to use the pages that I've provided in this course. But if you wanted to set up your own pages, that is how I would recommend doing it. We're not going to be starting on a new canvas in this course. I'm going to cancel this and go back to the gallery because we're going to use one of those pages that I provided. And we'll start there in the next lesson. 8. Flatting part 1: panels: For the start of this lesson, I'm going to go ahead and open up the first sample page, which is, well, the second sample page actually on this list by clicking that file. And that will bring that page up into per grade for us. Now this is the file that I have provided you guys as part of the course. So of course, you can use this throughout the course and I will follow along through this or you can use your own art. Obviously, it might be better to the first time around to at least try to follow along with this one. And then we'll take it from there. Now this page is already set to the multiply b***ding mode, and I would recommend using that to begin with. But if you happen to just start the file here, I believe it's in normal to begin with, which we talked about in the earlier lesson. And like I said, I would start and multiply. That's going to let us see right through all of that paper. So anything that we color underneath it would be easy to see. In a later lesson, I'll show you guys a different way to set up the inks, but it's probably a little too technical for this early in this course. So the first thing I'm going to do is click on the plus sign in the layers window to open up a new layer. And that's going to create layer two. I'm going to put my finger on that and hold it for a second and then drag it below the inks. Now let's go ahead and label this. I'm going to rename this by clicking the layer, and we're going to call it panels. And the way that I'm going to show you guys to flat this file, which is going to be the first kind of step in the coloring process. It's going to be specific to how I set up my pages and how I recommend setting them up given how procreate handles selections. Because there are some things I do with the layers and selections in procreate that I don't do in other apps just because of some of the limitations a procreate has. So if you're used to seeing my workflow in clip studio or procreates a little bit different, still an efficient process. It's how I did several, several issues of this book in procreate. But we're going to start with the panels. And there's a couple of ways to do this. There almost always are a lot of ways to do this. But I'm going to start by clicking on the selection tool. Clicking on that, up there at the top. And that's going to bring up the selection tool. And I'm going to click the freehand option. We used the rectangle earlier, but I'm going to use the freehand and I'm going to zoom up. And we're just going to start by basically tracing the border of each panel and we want to make sure that you're inside that black line and not going outside. I'm just going to click that corner. And then we'll zoom up and click this one. You could also do this, and I'm just dragging, with two fingers across the canvas to there. And then up to this corner, and then all the way back over to here. Now you can see that we've selected that panel. I can go to, not my layers, make sure that I'm on my panels layer and then go to your color. And I'm just going to fill this with a color. I'm just going to pick a color, it honestly doesn't matter what color at this point. And then grab that color and drag it into that box and let it go. And that's going to fill up that particular panel. We can do this with the rectangle tool as well. So I'm going to click my little selection tool again. And this time it's instead of free hand, I'm going to choose Rectangle and click at the top and drag to the opposite corner. Now we fill that, I'm going to choose a slightly different color and fill that panel. Same as before. We're going to do that for all of these panels. And I'm just going to use the rectangle for now because it's probably a little bit faster the colors at this point. I wouldn't worry about too much. It doesn't really matter. Now if you make a mistake, I don't know if I did there or not. I may have been a little bit outside of the line there. But you can click on Remove. Let's say that I went outside the top and can create a rectangular selection outside the box. And that's going to remove any selections that I may have gone over that line again, I'm going to just bump this to do a different color and fill it. Now to start off with, we have just our panels here. And this is going to come in handy if we ever need to just select a panel later to shift it a certain way. It'll be faster. We won't have to redo all that again. Once we've got our panels done, let's go back up to layers. And swipe this panel to the left, and you're going to see an option to duplicate. Let's duplicate this layer. Now we have two panels, layers. I'm going to take this first one, I'm going to rename it, and I'm going to call it Big flats. These are my simple flats. Now this will be the first time in this video where we're going to be making some selections that aren't perfectly horizontal and perfectly vertical. And I want to explain why I don't want to use the lasso for what I'm about to do because you guys are going to ask. If I don't, I'm going to show you real quick. I'm going to go to my lasso tool. I call it the lasso. It's this freehand selection tool. It's called a lasso in most apps. So if I zoom up on this and draw a selection and then fill it with a color, I want you to notice something about these edges. You see how these edges are b***ded, like they're not actually hard edges. This is a huge problem for trying to use procreate to do flats and flatting is just the first stage of separating all the colors out. This is the reason why I don't use the lasso for flatting with procreate. Because later on if I try to make a selection based on these particular selections, like if I go to the selection tool, click Automatic and then click that. You can see that it's not getting all of the edges. Now you can, with the selection, click and drag. And that will sort of start to fill in some of that stuff and eventually you'll get all of it. But now you can see it starting to get the white and then it's selected the white too. So none of this is actually very workable for, I would say a professional flatter or professional colors for that matter. That's why instead of using this sort of, you know, alias edge is really what that is. We're going to use that KMR flatter brush that I had you guys load earlier. And what you'll notice about this and it's not perfect. I haven't been able to make it perfect, but what it does is it creates clean edges on these selections. Okay. Another quick note I want to make at this point is for my workflow, the colors that I'm picking at this point are not really relevant. The colors we're putting on here now are strictly for selection purposes later. This is totally an optional step. If you want to go straight to, you know, the colors you think you'll be using, that's totally possible. You can go ahead and do that. I'm not going to be doing that for this particular course because I very rarely ever work that way. Because if I'm trying to make decisions while I'm trying to create these selections, it slows me down. If I know what I need to have separated and broken down, I can just do that. It doesn't really matter what the colors are. It's going to be easy to change those later. But let's finish up the big flat to the next one. 9. Flatting part 2: elements: So for this little layer that I'm calling the big flat. So we're just going to separate the page into the main elements. And this can be a good exercise because it also forces you to think about which elements you have to work with in every panel. What things need to come forward, what things need to go back, you know? And when I say come forward and go back, I mean visually, you know that we're going to be creating focus in places. We're going to be creating areas that are simpler and not as caching. That's all sort of part of this process. So it's a good idea to go ahead and start working on that at this stage. You know what's coming that way. Now, how you actually break this up is totally up to you. What I'm going to do is sort of do, think about it as like a foreground, middle ground background. That's an option. You might also just think about the focus of the panel versus the surroundings of the panel. There's a lot of ways to do this, but I'm going to start by clicking the brush again to make sure that I'm on that flatting brush. I'm going to pick a different color again. It doesn't really matter what it is at this stage. And I'm going to zoom up, I'm going to start drawing, I'm going to pick a color that's a very different value so that I can see it easily. And I'm going to trace out this little edge along here, all the way across the bottom. Now you can see that I'm going outside the lines a little bit here if you want to avoid that. Let me back up here a little bit. We can go back to our panels layer. I can choose the selection tool, make sure it's set to automatic. By clicking that color, it will choose all of that color on that layer, which in this case is the first layer. Now I can go back to my big flats and not have to worry about going outside that line. But once I've got that done, I can grab my color. Once I've got the border done and just drop that in. Let's make sure that that works properly. You can see there's a couple of places where you see a few dots here, so you can drag that threshold over a little bit before you let it go. And that'll fill that in. Now in this panel, the focus is really about this building that's across here in the middle. So I'm going to do that next. I've still got my panel selected, so I'm not worrying about going outside the lines. I'm going to grab a different color and start selecting this little section. Now, if you're watching this and you're thinking, well, this seems like this would take a while, correct? It will. Even for professionals, this is a time consuming part of the process. But again, I'm basically just wanting to separate all of this out from its surroundings. I'm just making sure that all of this connects all the way across so that when I feel in a second, we don't have a bunch of stray stuff going on here. Go down this way. I like to turn my canvas A, People don't totally up to you. I could probably be a little bit neater here, but we really would be here all day and these lessons are limited how long they can be. I'll be skipping some of this stuff. But anyway, so now we've got our outline again. Just drag that color in and drop it. Now you may be thinking, well, why do this this way later on when we start coloring this, this will make a lot more sense. But I can easily grab this foreground element, the main element, and everything surrounding it all by using the selection tool. Now, because it sets automatic, I can click the top. I can click the bottom. I can undo that. We can just click the building. Just click the foreground. This makes it very easy for us to go in and shift these colors around later. And I'm not worried about flatting everything at this stage, because I just want to get the big shapes in there for now. We're going to do the details in a second. All right. Again, switch into a different color. I'm going to make sure, again, this is a color really stands out, so I can see it. If you make a mistake, again, if you go outside the lines like I just did a little bit there, you can hold down depending on what your settings are. I've got the color selection set to the little button between, I'm clicking it over here. If you can't see it on the far left side between the two sliders, I've got that set to click the canvas, which will set the color that you've chosen. So I can just grab that green and fill that back in. Then grab the white again and keep going. As a flatting tool goes, I would say procreate is not bad. There are probably other tools that might make this a little bit simpler, but it still, it's not going to speed you up too much because Whether you're doing it with a lasso or you're doing it like this, it's all time consuming. Unfortunately, again, once you've got all that border selected and drag that color in and drop it, I'm not going to do anything with this waste basket because we can see straight through it. You can leave that or you can color it if you want. All right, so that's two panels down. We'll do this third one again in this panel, the only real elements are her in the background. That's what I'm going to select. I'm going to change the slightly different color and start going around all of these edges again. If you make a mistake, just switch to the other color and switch right back. Think about this stage is like you're trying to build a fence all the way around the edge. If there's any openings, we're not going to be able to fill it properly some of this hair. It's just easier to, while you're here, just go ahead and fill it. I accidentally draw on the canvas. Sometimes when I'm trying to rotate the canvas, the palm rejection is pretty good in this software, but it's not perfect. For me personally, it's more comfortable to color vertically, to draw lines up and down, than it is side to side. Anytime I have a long run, I usually will turn my canvas up on its side, but you don't have to. You can always go back and change and shift this around at any time just by clicking on this brush and going back in and making adjustments. Now when you have an opening like this, you want to make sure you get all the way around it selected. Otherwise, it'll just feel we don't want the little loop of hair filled in there. All right. If I didn't miss anything, this should stay in the lines. Yeah, so you guys get the idea here on the big flatting section. Now what I would do, which I don't really have time for for the sake of this lesson, but what I would do next in this panel is to go through and select all of her and fill it. And then pick a different color. Select him and fill it. Pick another color. Click her and fill it. You know, doing that all the way across all of these people and doing slightly different colors so that we can grab each one. And then the entire background would pretty much be its own section as well. And I will provide you guys with my flatted version in the course as well, if you are familiar with this or if it's not a part of the process you really want to get into. I'll give you guys my flat file with all the layers. You'll be able to see that. I'll make sure this is all set up before the next lesson. 10. Flatting part 3: details: All right, so now you can see that we have all the big flats done. You can also think about, this is just the elements on the page and I'm going to go in now and we're going to do the detailed flats on this. And you can think of flatting, at least in how I look at it as something that you're trying to break the page down from big elements to small elements. We've broken down so far with this layer, this big flat, the foreground from the background. So what we're going to do to use this as a launching point to do all the rest of the flats. I'm going to go back to the layers, window swipe left on the big flat layer and duplicate it. I'm going to rename this big flats layer by clicking on it. Click Rename. I'm just going to call this flats. I'll go in on this panel here is actually one of the simpler ones. Not the simplest, but maybe one of the simpler ones on this page, we'll start here. Same as before. I'm not going to worry too much about the colors themselves at this point. If you want to, that's fine. If you don't, that's fine. Either way, I know I'm going to be able to change them later easily. I'm going to start with this character here now. Again, she's all one color right now. So you can imagine we're just going to break down all the individual colors on her now. So I'm going to make sure that I have the flatter brush still selected. Now, the other thing I want you guys to think about as we're doing this is that I don't want you to ever trace the same separation twice. Okay? We've already separated her hair from the background, we've already separated her from the background. We don't need to do that again. Okay. So what I'm going to do to start off with here, just to show you what I mean, I'm going to pick a color and let's just say that's that color. If I make my edge, let's just say this little section here and all the way up to here, just to block off that one little section. If I fill this with that same color, you can see that it respects that line that we already drew through here. Okay? It's going to contain that fill to just what we've already got there. So what that allows us to do is to not worry about tracing that edge again. Now the other thing we can do to help out with this is just to hit the selection button. And hit the automatic selection to select her so we don't have to worry about going outside the lines. Anyway, I'm going to go back to my brush tool and I'm going to start this selection. All I'm really thinking about right now is separating her hair from the rest of her outline. As long as I make sure that I've blocked off all the openings here, I can fill this. And it's just going to stay on her hair without having to worry about going all the way around. Again, it's not perfect. We can come in here and clean up some of these edges a little bit. Anything else that needs to be separated? Let's go ahead and fill it in. Like her eyes make her eyes and teeth the same color. No problem there. Grab a different color, fill in her lips and what else do we have? So we've got her jacket, so let's switch this color up the separation against her skin and her shirts and make the separation where her arm is. I think that's all we need to do there. Let's just fill in the rest. Again, make the selection across separating her shirt and we're going to black her arm off on this end. And we can fill the rest because you've already made that selection. Once, change the color again, we'll fill in this part. Fill, whoops, fill in this part. Again, I'm just randomly changing these colors because again, for me, it doesn't really make that much difference. We're just going to use these for selections later. I know if you're not familiar with the comics process, this might seem counterintuitive, but I promise it'll be worth it. Now, we've got all of her separated out her eyes, skin, hair, all of her clothing. I didn't do her name tag here. We'll fill that real quick. There we go. Now just the background needs to be flatted on this. Again, there just aren't really any shortcuts for this part of the process. I'm just going to grab a different color. I'm going to also make sure that I have selected this area using the automatic selection tool so I don't have to worry about going outside the lines making sure that I'm still in my flat layer. I'm still using my flatter brush. We'll keep on rolling again. Even these little elements, it's like there's lots of little elements inside. We've got the cup and all that stuff, but we can still start with the big shape and break it down into the simple shapes. Then we can go in here, shift that color, change this and this a little bit of clean up here. And we've got these little magnets. I guess this is, we would do that for the rest of the background as well. We'd fill in this one, even some of these elements that are behind the character. There's a lot of little openings in here and different things that need to be flatted. All of that stuff would be separated out. What I would do again, is just select that background, select all the little pieces of it with the automatic selection tool. And then switch over to your brush, change the color to something else. You can get a different color, Fill this behind the character with different color. And I would do this around all the little parts of that background that I might want to fill later. Now the line art on this is actually really clean. Another option that you have, and I'll be honest, this rarely works on any other type of line art. It just so happens this line art is incredibly clean and sharp. The other thing you can do here is to set your inks as a reference layer. The little color fill will try to respect those edges. Instead, what I mean by that, I go up to my ink layer and click Reference. You're going to see the little reference image or a little reference text pop up right below the layer name. What this is going to do is instead of filling based on what is on this flat layer, it's going to fill based on what's on the inks layer instead. What I mean by that is if I pick a color here, just get a different color and drag this down. It's going to try to stay within the lines of those ink layers. And this is significantly faster if your clays are clean enough. Again, this is often not the case. Okay, so I can go around this, dropping all these colors in this is actually working again pretty well because of how clean these lines are. But like I said, don't fall in love with this process. You're thinking, well, Kurt, why don't you teach us this first. This would be so much faster. That's rarely is the line art actually, I would say can enough, feasible enough for this to even be an option. What I'm doing right now is clean up some of these edges where you can see that blue coming through. Because yeah, because even this you can see it's not really doing it perfectly. So always something to consider. But it does work really well anytime you have perfectly straight lines like this also. But if I was going to flat this entire page step by step, this is what it would look like. I would then go in into all these little elements and fill, let's say the sidewalks, the trees, the little puddles. There's a lot of stuff on this to flat. So I'm not going to be able to go through all of that in this lesson, but that's how it's done. 11. More selection tricks: I want to throw in a kind of a quick tangent lesson here. I guess you could call it. On a feature that procreate, added within the last couple of years, which is the ability to save selections. I've done this in the past, especially with things like skin tones that I know I'm going to come re, select over and over. Because I might select our skin to do shadows and then select it later to do highlights. Or select it later to do something else. With one of the limitations with procreate. And I'm going to turn off the reference on the inks here for a second. Just click on the inks and click Reference. So if I go back to my flats and click on the magic wand or the automatic selection tool, You'll notice that if I click using that tool on her face, it doesn't select her hands. You have to click those and select those as well. This is the only app that works that way. Photoshop, there's very other few apps that don't allow to just select all the same color, but procreate doesn't. And so what I would recommend doing, or what I've done in the past, is to go in and I'm going to select all of this skin for all of these characters. Okay, right there, right there, right there. All these little areas of skin. I think I got them all. I didn't get his eyebrows. Just get his eyebrows. There we go. Now that I've got all those selected, I can go down to save and load at the bottom of the screen. Click save and load, and just click the plus sign. Now what that's going to do is create a selection of just the skin tones. And the way you can use that then, which we'll use later, is you can click on the selection tool, go to save and load, and just click on selection one. It will re select those skin tones for you. And if you're wondering, why would you want to do that? Well, if I don't have that. So let me just show you the difference. If I want to select all the skin tones, I can go to the selection, click Save and load. Hit selection one, It's going to do all the skin tones. I can start doing my coloring on that if I want, if I don't have that as an option. I have to go through every time that I want to do anything to the skin and click all the places where that skin shows up. It's not an optimal workflow to me to do that that way. So anything like skin tones or clothing or things that you might revisit a couple of times, it's not a bad idea to use those save selections. The only thing that it doesn't do right now that I wish it did is the ability to rename. I wish I could hold that and rename it to say skin or something. It's not an option, unfortunately, you just have to remember that that's what you selected here. Now, another thing that I do pretty often is the shift the entire background to be lighter, or darker, or whatever during the coloring process. I'll show you some of that later. But again, I want to quickly select the entire background, let's say in this last panel. Now if I go to the big flats layer and click the selection tool, make sure it's on automatic. I can click that. It's going to select the top part that's all connected together, but it's not getting everything that is disconnected, all of this stuff at the bottom, the floors where the cabinets are, all that stuff doesn't get selected. So if I want to quickly grab that background and all I have are my big flat layers and the main flat layer, it's going to take a while to select it every single time I like to set up my backgrounds on a separate layer, strictly for selection purposes sometimes. And again, this is not something I do every time, but I'd like to show you guys as many options as possible. So what I'm going to do, let's say I just want to select the backgrounds. And let's just say these last two panels. So I'm going to use that big flat layer that I set up earlier. I'm going to go to my selection tool, make sure it's sets automatic, and click on all of these characters. Now I'm also going to click into the gutters because I just want to leave everything except the background. Go to my panels. Hold down my selection to bring that back up. I remember again, holding down the selection will reload the selection and I want to choose the top two panels. And now you can see that I only have the background in panel 3.4 not selected. So what that means is I can now just click Invert, and now I only have background selected in panel 3.4 Okay, so just to show you a quick way to do that, but now that we have that, I'm going to make a new layer and I'm going to label this background click on the layer and fill. Now you're not going to be able to see this because this is under our flats. But now we can use another selection trick that procreate has, which is two finger select is what I call it. I don't know what it's going. But what it does is it selects the contents of the layer. On the background layer, if I two finger hold on that it now selects just the background in those two layers because they're by themselves on that layer which looks like this. And if you want to do that, you just long press on the little checkbox to view whether it's off or on or not. This layer that toggles everything, you can hold that and it will isolate that layer. This actually isn't perfect. There's a few little marks in it. I need to clean up, but you get the idea. We can make selections using the selection tool. We can select using the contents of the layer like we did here. We can use those big flats in the panels layers to sort of narrow those selections where we need to. If I come up with any other selection tricks along the way, I'll let you know. But that's all the ones for now. Let's move on. 12. Making line art transparent: In this lesson, I want to show you something that I was asked a lot, and I've made a Youtube video about this. That is, I think, the most popular video on my channel these days. Which is how to put the inks on a transparent layer if they are not on a transparent layer already. If you're drawing in procreate, then you're drawing on a transparent layer. It's not a big deal. But if you import something like this file, then you have the ink and the white of the paper on the same layer. That's cool, you can put it in multiply mode and color behind it. But it limits you in some ways you can't use a clipping mask on it, for example, because if you hit the plus sign and put a clipping mask, all of the pixels on the inks layer have something on them, black and white. And so the clipping mask just colors everywhere. You know, it doesn't do any good, but if I had the inks on a transparent layer, then anything I do on a clipping mask will stay stuck to the inks themselves, which is a great way to change the color of the inks. The lines themselves is what I mean here. So what we're going to do is I'm going to turn this off for a second and at me to get rid of all of that. So in order to do this, there's a couple of steps involved, and you won't remember them all the first time, but this is how to do it in procreate alone. Clip Studio, it's one button. In Photoshop it's two or three, and here it's a few. We're going to start by going to the layers. Clicking on the inks layer and click Copy. Make a new layer by clicking the plus sign. Fill that layer with black. Now click that new layer and put a mask on that layer. Just click mask. Next we're going to click the layer mask. Make sure it's selected. Then three finger swipe down and click Paste. Go back to your layers. Click on the mask again. Click Invert. Then two finger pinch the layer mask and the layer you filled with black, that will merge them together. I can now turn off the original ink layer, and now we can see that the white is gone from the layer. So those inks are now on a transparent layer. So you can see in the image here on the top right, where the layer two is, the white no longer appears on the image, it's only the inks. Now if we put a new layer above it and choose clipping mask, and anything I do on that clipping mask is being contained to the ink layer. This is a really easy way to change the color of the lines. I didn't know exactly where to put this trick, but now you know how to do it. 13. Base colors: All right, so now we're through with what I feel is definitely the most boring part of the coloring process is the flatting process. Now, depending on how your workflow is, you know, if you decide to set up your correct base colors while you're flatting, which some of you may have, then you're already ready for this next step. But if you're like me and you don't like making color decisions while you're flatting, because I'm just trying to get through the flatting process. Then we need to set up our actual base colors. Okay, so the next thing we're going to do, at least in my case, is to start this with a neutral tone everywhere. Now I'll explain a little bit about this because I'm afraid some people aren't going to quite follow why I do this. So as a quick example, if I get my page from my flatter, what I used to do when I first started, actually, I would get my selection tools. Okay, I want to grab her skin tone. I'm going to click on the automatic selection and then go up to either hue saturation and change that color. Or maybe I go grab another color from over here somewhere and fill that color in. There's some ways to do that just by changing the colors that are here. I'm not actually a big fan of that myself, because to me, contrast and color choice is all about what's already on the page. And there are no color choices that should ever be made in a vacuum. To me, this isn't starting from a neutral position. There's a lot of colors on the board. There's a lot of distracting colors that I'm not going to be using. So I don't really want to look at my flats while I'm setting at my base colors. So this is how I do it. I'm going to go to my layers. We're going to make a new layer. I'm going to call this base base colors maybe. And so the base colors are going to be the color that is on the bottom of our stack of rendering basically. And it's the first colors we're actually going to see that are actually going to come through in the final product. Because the way that I work, the flats never even show up on the page. So what I'm going to do in this case, I want to fill all the panels with one neutral color. So I'm just going to hold down two fingers on the panels layer right here, and that selects the contents of just the panels. And I'm going to pick personally, what I'd like to do is get about halfway down and I want a little bit of a color in here. I don't want to go all the way to gray, because when you're gray, you can't add or remove saturation to gray. Okay. It's just going to you in most apps, it's just going to stay gray. So I want to add a little bit of color here. And I usually choose a blue or an orange. It doesn't really matter what color you start with, It's going to appear to be pretty neutral. So once I've got that color selected, the fastest thing to do is to click on the layer and then click Fill Layer. And that's going to fill all of the panels with a neutral color. That gives us a good starting point. I'm going to zoom up here to this third panel, since it's one of the simpler ones, we'll start there. Now in this case, I want to lighten the background. Okay, the panel where it looks in the final product. The background is a little bit lighter than all of the characters in the foreground. The background being lighter and the characters being darker is a simple way to break up your planes here. When I say planes, I'm talking about not airplanes, but planes as in foreground, background, that kind of thing. Those are called planes. So what we really have here are just two planes. We've got a foreground character and the background, you know the room behind it. Now I've already set this up earlier to have the background selected on this layer. Okay, so all I have to do is two finger hold on that layer and it's going to select the contents of both of these layers in this case. Now I could go ahead and set the background colors for both of these because they are going to be similar. Or if I wanted to just work on the third panel, I could choose, say, the rectangle selection, go to remove, and then remove that bottom panel from the selection if I wanted to. But I'm actually going to just leave it because honestly, I'm going to be using similar colors in both of these backgrounds. So in this case, I'm just going to hold down two fingers to grab the background. Now, there's so, so many ways to do this part. If you want to brush in your background with the brush, if you want to change it, let's say the hue saturation adjustment. There's a lot of different ways you can do this. I'll show you both. Yes. Real quick. I'm going to start with just a big soft brush. If you go into airbrushing, the first one on the list is, sorry, the soft airbrush. Let's say I want to make this color lighter and I could lost my selection. I'm going to hold down the S to bring that selection back and then go to my Brush and we're going to paint that in and that's going to fill all the background with that color. You could also just, you could also go to your layer stack, click on the layer and fill with that new color. That's an option. Or if you're not sure exactly what color you want, which I do this often is I will open up the adjustments, which is the little sparkly magic wand looking thing up at the top left. Which is ironic because there is no magic one. But if I go to hue saturation brightness, I can brighten it this way. That's three different ways. You could come in here and shift that color around if you want. We could saturate a little bit. We could gray it out a little bit, whatever you want to do to adjust that. But I know I want it to be lighter than the other characters. So there we go. That's step one. But the other reason that I do this is it also forces you very early on to think about your planes and to think about those breakdowns of foreground, middle ground background, what's a focus, What's the background? All these things are questions you're going to have to answer at some point anyway. So to me, starting very early, getting to at least the big shapes again, foreground, middle ground, background. It'll do you a whole lot of good at this stage to keep that in mind. So we've got more colors to separate in this background. So what I'm going to do is go to my flat layer, Click on that. And then make sure that you click Reference. And that's going to put that little reference line there right below the flats name. Now we can go up to my base colors. And now when I choose my selection tools, it's going to choose from the reference layer, which are my flats, which is just what I want. I'm going to click here and here. I don't think anything else is going to be that color. But I can go up to hue saturation. I can adjust that a little bit, make it a little bit brighter. And I'm going to do this for all the little sections that need to be changed. So I'm going to click all those little magnets there. Again, go to hue saturation, maybe we'll dark. Make sure I'm on the base colors, by the way. Make sure you're on the base colors. Now we're going to try to darken this a little bit, maybe saturate them a little bit, maybe shift the color around and do the same thing all throughout this piece. We've got this light switch, maybe warm it up a little bit, desaturate it some of all I'm really thinking about right now is I know I want this background to overall feel light, okay. When I zoom way out on this, even with those other colors that I'm choosing, they're close to my background color. They really b***d together at this stage. Anyway, what else do we have here? We've these things, little doorways I guess is what that is. Again, saturation. We can shift that around a little bit. Now it looks like we're looking through a doorway to like another door back there. We could actually come in and grab all of this background here. Whoops. If you ever mess up just two finger undo. I think I have everything in the doorway selected again. Go back to hue saturation, maybe we darken that some a little color to it. Getting, getting there. Let's move on to the character here. Going to grab the selection tool again, grab her hair. I will fill this with rough hair color, which in this case is a brown. Go ahead and grab the skin tones, choose a color. Now if you drop a color in here and it's not what you expect, like in this case I drop this in, I'm like, it's pretty close, but it's a little dark, it's a little light, whatever. Just remember you can always go back to your adjustments and click on like hue saturation or on color balance or whatever. And shift that color around even after you've put it on the page. That's what I'm doing. Over and over here, it's like I'm grabbing the lips, switching to the adjustment and changing that, or either going to my color and just drop it in however you want to do it now. Something else you can do here, now that I think about it, is I don't think you necessarily have to have a selection to use the color drop feature if you're using a reference layer, like in this case, I'm on the base colors, but my flats is set as reference. If I grab a color and drag it onto her jacket, it's going to fill just because the reference layer is already established. Those edges, you don't actually have to make a selection in order to do that. For the rest of this. Like for her jacket there, I can describe a different color, pull it down to here and you can see it's filling that without actually having to have a selection of any kind. Again, you put a color down you don't like you can always drop another color in or choose a selection and then change the hue saturation that way. And I would do the same thing for all these other panels. Now obviously I'm choosing this third one here because it's a relatively simple panel. For the sake of time, I'm not really going to have time to go through the entire page like this. But just as a quick example, if you want to see how I would do this on a background landscape element like this, then what I would do is go to my colors. Choose whatever colors that I want. Again, because I've got that flat still set as a reference, I can just drop those colors in here. This is where the flatting first and getting it out of the way actually frees you up to only make color choices at this point if you want, obviously, you don't have to do that, But this is how I would do it. The other thing to remember is at any time, if you want to use some of those other layers, we set up like the big flat layer to say maybe select that building. Just remember to turn off the reference on the flats. Now we can go up to our selection tool and select the entirety of that building without having to work very much. Now, something else to keep in mind with these selections, and the field tool is right now, if I select from this big flat layer and I just touch that building, one thing you might notice is that on some of these edges you can see how it looks a little rough around the edges Here there's a feature that is called threshold. If you notice that if it's all the way down to zero, sometimes it will be a little too sensitive and you'll get these weird after effects like that. What you can do when you use the selection is to click and then drag to the right. You can see that threshold number up at the top adjusting that will fill that out all the way to the edge. If you keep dragging, it'll even jump outside of your selection, which you don't really want. You can find a threshold that works for you. For me, it's usually around 25% or so, I think. But it depends on what brush you're using and all that kind of stuff. But I can go up to my base colors now back to say hue saturation and change that building to be whatever color I want it to be. Now once you've got that done, you can go back to your flats, make sure it's set as reference, and then continue on by making selections, and then filling those in, or using a brush. And again, you're like, wow, that seems like it will take a while. Absolutely. It will take hours for a professional flatter to set up all the base colors on a page. It can easily take several hours. And then the coloring process itself can often take several hours. So this isn't something that can usually come together very quickly. So keep that in mind. If you feel slow, it's because it's a slow process. 14. Rendering light and shadow, part 1: All right, for this rendering lesson, I have changed the art up a little bit here, and I apologize, I've got a bit of a cold today on the recording, so my voice sounds a little different. That would be a way. And what I've done here for the sake of this lesson is I took my original rendering. Just put a copy of that up here at the top. And then turned off all of the rendering on the version below and so on. This new layer, which I've labeled new, is where I'm actually going to start my rendering on the bottom down here and you'll be able to follow along. So next up for the rendering stage, I want to make sure that my flats are set as my reference layer because we're going to be making a lot of selections. And I don't want to keep jumping around layer to layer. So what we can do is set that flat as a reference layer. I think I talked about this earlier. And we'll be able to select from that layer with our selection tools. Another thing I've set up for this lesson is a camera. So you can see my hands. I'm going to keep my left hand sort of resting near the top so that I can quickly get to the left side of the screen here. Over to choose my size on the brush, to choose the opacity if I want to. But really what this is best for is getting to these selections up top. You can get the selections, the move tool, the adjustments, all of this stuff. We're going to be using a lot of selections. And so if you're constantly going from coloring on the canvas to clicking up here and then doing stuff. And then it saves a little bit of time to get, you know, one arm chilling out up here. Handling that part of the business. Going to zoom up a bit here. And I'm going to start by clicking on the selection tool up here at the top left. And make sure it's set to automatic. Make sure it's set to add. The feather should be none. This is critical, Crucial. Make sure that's set to none. If you set this to anything other than zero, when it makes a selection, it's going to add a little fuzzy edge to it which you do not want. What else? I think that's really all we need here. Automatic add selection tool. We'll start with her hair here. I'm just going to click with the, um, with the pin there on her hair, and you can see that it has grabbed her entire hair there as a selection, and I don't see any stray hairs or anything that we missed. So I'm going to directly switch to my brush. Now, the brush that I'm used on this book, I'm going to include in the course, and you'll be able to just drag and drop it here. It's this flat marker. I really like the way it behaves. Kind has a little bit of texture to it, but not too much. But of course, you can use whatever kind of brush you want for this, or you can use a lasso and a field tool or whatever. We'll get to all of that. But I'm going to start with her hair. I'm going to start with a brush to begin with here. And I'm going to hold the left button here and do my color pick, which is how I've got mind set up. You might have your color picking set up a little bit differently. Most people you can probably just hold, I think with a finger, I think is the default behavior. I can't remember though. But now that I've got my color, I can decide, you know, am I doing shadows? Am I doing highlights, What am I doing here? So in this case, I'm doing shadows. I'm going to get a little bit darker and warm them up just a little bit because the hair would be bouncing off itself and getting a little bit more reddish. Probably that I lose my selection. I did. So just hold the selection tool to bring the selection back. Then click the brush. And now I'm going to start brushing in here. And you guys should be able to see this coming in. And this layer is just in normal mode. Right now, there's nothing. This is just like painting on a canvas. You pick a color and, and that's what you're going to end up with. Now let's say down here in her hair, it kind of over painted this one little strip that's coming down there. And I want to bring a little bit of that light bag I can quickly switch to the eraser tool. Now I'm going to make sure my eraser is set to the same tool as my brush. So I'm going to check my brush is on flat marker. I'm going to hold on the eraser now I can erase with the current brush, so it'll have the exact same texture. Do the same thing up here, I got a little crazy on her hair. This is meant to be just a rough pass, We can always tighten this up later. But let's see a little bit here. Again, back to my brush and I really haven't even switched color yet since that original selection there. Something like that. At least to get started that shadows. Let's say we want to do some highlights. Actually, let's say at this point I decide her hair is not saturated enough, I want it to change the hair color. So I'm going to go down to my colors layer. I'm just going to hold down the selection tool to bring that selection back. And then go to saturation and brightness on my adjustments. And we can saturate that a little bit, darken that a little bit, something like that. Now let's say for the sharp, more like specular highlights and reflections in her hair. I don't want it to be soft around the edges like these shadows. I want to have a little bite to it, have it be a little crispy in there. And this time I'm going to switch to my selection tool. Go to free hand. I'm going to zoom up here a little bit, Make sure freehand, make sure that we're on ad. And I'm just going to trace out a little selection here that maybe this is what the high lights do in there. Do another one here, and it's an ad mode, so it's just going to keep adding. This is the sort thing that it takes a little practice to get used to specular highlights, But observe, look for photos of models. And look at what their hair's doing under bright lights, it's very shiny. And you'll find these little bands all over the place. Little bands of light anyway. So we've got a couple of sharp selections. Now I'm going to go and get a brighter color. Maybe something with some orange. I don't know, Let's see, We get a big brush and start painting some of this in and you can see how these have a little bit of sharp edges to them. You know, a different look. This one's a little weird over here, but hey, we're doing this on the fly now. I can de select from that. I can switch back to my brush if I want, and maybe we clean this up a little bit or add a few more. There's no rules here. If you want to mix your lasso with your brushing or if you want to do all lasso type stuff, that's fine. Just get that brown underneath here. And just b***d all this a little bit better than it was how healthy we want her hair to look today. Do we want it to be super crispy bright on the edges, so maybe we get a little bit of a real, real bright color. Just add a little bit of that in here. And again, it's going to make her hair look even more shiny. And you could do this again. You could do this with the lasso, you didn't want to do it this way. We could undo that switch back to my free hand lasso tool and follow the contours of the hair a little bit. In that way, we switched to our brush make a little bit bigger. It's all in like what do you want it to feel like? There's lots and lots of ways to render things. You can see it's a little bit different than what I did the first time. I think I've improved a little bit since then. Maybe, maybe not. 15. Rendering light and shadow, part 2: Now we can actually, I think I originally used a photo of someone that had some nice shadows on their face for my lighting here. And so we can just use that original for reference here. So I'm just going to grab this color now. I want you to notice something here. When we start comparing these colors to each other. I want you to notice, I'm not going to get into a whole huge color theory thing here because we could be here all day. But how those colors relate to each other, you are never, under any circumstance in art, going to pick one color. It just doesn't really happen that color needs to work with something, needs to work with something else. Even something as simple as a light and shadow on skin. There's a relationship there. If I look at the color picture here and the actual skin tones are relevant. But if I look at where we are here, like her base skin tone right now is a middle light orange type color. The next stage of highlights are all the way bright, as bright as you can get. And I don't know about halfway to white. That's kind of how I think about it. It's like, well, we didn't go all the way to white, we went halfway. And that was enough to get a pretty nice stage of color there. What you don't want to get in the habit of is, you know, starting with a base and then go, okay, it's time for some highlights and then move, you know, maybe this could look okay. But you don't want every decision to be these subtle little moves. You sometimes you want to make a bold highlight somewhere. You want to make a bold decision. Don't be afraid to really swing this around over here. There's a lot to play with in your color choices. But the biggest advice again, is to remember that you're never picking a color in a vacuum. You can very quickly usually figure out if a color is the right color just by comparing it to everything that's there on the canvas already. So for example, in this case, she's in a very clinical environment and that's kind of part of the story. And so I did something that I rarely do, which is use highlights and base colors that are very close to the same hue. Okay, I didn't do a lot of shifting to make the light yellow or cooler or anything because a clinical setting is one setting where your light is usually very white. It's very clear, there's not a lot of color in it. And so I intentionally straight away from tinting the light source very much here, which is probably the only place in the book that I do this is to really sell that clinical environment. So not necessarily good advice for most environments. You know, if it's sunny, you want a little bit of warmth in your light. If it's nighttime, maybe cool it off. Or you know a lot of ways to do that. But again, I'm going to start by going to my selection. I'm going to make sure I'm in automatic mode and click her skin. And this is a little bit messy because I got I had to do some resizing on this earlier and it should stay under the line, Shouldn't really affect it too much. But if you noticed a little bit of screw up stair, I think those are my fault, not yours. So anyway, we'll go ahead and get that hand, we'll get that arm to. So now we've got all the skin that we're ready to render here. I'm going to switch to my brush. And I'm still just on a normal layer right now on top of my colors. And I could on this normal layer, whoops, go in with the chosen skin tone here. And you started feeling this in a normal mode and it would look fine. But just to change things up and give you guys a different way of doing this, I'm going to start a new layer, and this time I'm going to use a different layer mode. I'm going to click the layer in and you've got a couple of different modes here and I'm going to set this to, let's try hard light mode. This is my favorite b***ding mode. It's very handy and I think you'll see why here. So hard light mode is very unique in that if you pick a color that is above the 50% gray point here, okay, It's above that point, it's going to lighten. Okay. And that wasn't very light. Let's go lighter, lighten. If you go below the 50% point, it darkens. It's very handy to do all of your lights and shadows on one layer if that's what you want to do. But I even use it when I do separate layers because it's convenient and easy to work with for me. Let's see what this looks like. Again, this matches pretty closely with what was there before. Right, We can go with that. Again, just to change things up a little bit today, maybe we cool it off, start pulling it across toward yellow, and that gives a little bit of a different vibe. Or we could slide it toward war. A little bit warmer. So it's a bright warmer color. It doesn't look bad either. So anyway, any light in this color range is probably going to look pretty cool. Even if I go with like a really cool light, you know, we get some really strong contrast there. You know, if that's what you're going for, it's all about the field. There's no right or wrong answer here. But just to match up what was there before, we'll go with something that is probably about right. If it's too bright, just bring it down. Bring it down. You want to save a little room for those bright highlights. The brightest highlights. So I think I like that right there. And now I can start painting in my highlights on kind of look at what was there before we can do something different. And I'm not worried about splashing anywhere or going outside the lines because I've got that selection right. So even if I go crazy, I can't, I can't go outside those lines, switch to the eraser and clean this up a little bit. Can start adding some harder edges on some of these shadows under her glasses, maybe under nose, even with the eraser to an extent still rendering, just cleaning it up while I'm doing it. Switch back to my brush and I'm going to leave a little room for her shadow there. Collar bones, just a hint of chest there. One of the cool things about working on a separate layer like this, I just realized that I changed that to screen at some point by accident, maybe that's why that wasn't behaving exactly like I intended. That's funny, yeah, a different tone in hard light mode, but it brings me to my point anyway, in hard light mode, we need to shift the color again. I'm going to go to adjustments, hue, saturation, brightness. We can brighten that up. And you can see how in hard light mode, it will brighten all the way to white, or it'll pass through the color we chose and then start getting darker. So it works either way. Now again, these aren't good shadow shapes. These are good light shapes though. But I can do this after the fact. Let's put it light right there. We can still shift the color, which I don't think it needs. We can saturate it. We can desaturate it, which again, maybe we saturate it a little bit. It's a little bit different vibe this time. Now, here's another trick for you, since this is on its own layer, these light shapes are on their own layer, right? If you hold down that check box, we can isolate those. If you turn the background off, you can see them. We can use this shape as a selection tool. So let me turn this all back on by holding that check box over there so I'm going to two finger hold on that layer. And what it does is it makes a selection based on what's in that layer. Which in this case are those light shapes. Right now, I can use that as a selection. Now I could do this on a new layer, or I could do this on the same layer. I'll do it on a different layer. Let's say I want my specular reflections to be a little cooler. Now, I can paint across here and you can see that it's staying contained to where my light was, right? So this is really handy when you get around to wanting to add some brighter highlights. So if I'm starting here with this bright yellow color, maybe we go to here, maybe we go a little bit more yellow. And now I can paint here very safely, staying inside that original shape without having to worry about going outside the lines. It's very fast and it's a very quick way to get a lot of detail in very quickly without really feeling like you did a whole lot. 16. Rendering light and shadow, part 3: Now, just because a lot of you are going to be asking, what about multiply mode? What about screen mode? Hey, those are cool. Let's talk about them. Let's hit the plus sign. Let's change this mode. This is the only one you have to pull down for. I don't know why they don't just start with multiply at the top. But when you hit the letter in, you have to pull down to see the word multiply. Now, multiply is different from hard light. Multiply is going to always, always darken no matter what color you choose on this multiply layer. Let me label these just for the sake of you guys having some clarity. Hard light, normal multiply. Now, multiply is often used for shadows. Yes, someone probably said it. So how do we choose our shadow colors? It's a huge mystery. No one's ever been able to figure it out. No, I'm kidding. It's very, very easy. You're going to be surprised. So multiply mode again, no matter what color I choose, it's going to darken. So even this really bright yellow is going to be a dark yellow. If I choose a blue, no matter how bright I get even a deep purple, it's going to be darkening a little bit. That's what multiply mode does. So always remember that a very common mistake with multiply mode is to think, well, I'm doing shadows. I need a dark color. Here's the problem. Dark colors and multiply mode get really, really dark very, very quickly, okay? And often too dark for what we're doing in comics, because you start getting into this little sea of dark black down here. This is no man's land. Don't choose colors down here. They won't print very well. And they'll look way too close to the inks in value. And we'll be hidden and we'll hide the inks possibly. So I've seen the advice, oh, you just pick purple. Purple is safe. You can always pick purple and it always looks okay. Well, maybe the reason purple looks okay is because it's not a strong choice. It's not really cool and it's not really warm, so it's a very safe middle of the road option that you will see a lot of you know, entire books that will you be done in. All other shadows will be one big color like this. And I'm just scribbling this on here to show you what it looks like. It doesn't look bad, doesn't look bad at all. That's kind of the thing. It just doesn't look bad. And this is sort of the go to color for really rich skin tones, because skin tones are orange, its complement is purple. That's why that works. So again, there's nothing wrong with using this. It looks awesome, but this is not what the lighting would look like in this room. And I'm going for a kind of a realistic look here. So instead of repainting all of my ugly shadows real quick, I'm just going to go to the hue brightness adjustment slider. And the first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to lighten them a little bit because they're just too dark. And again, it's a great color, it always looks good. What happens if we strip all the color out and we just go to basically grays? Okay? If you look at this by itself now it's just gray. Okay? Or this is the equiva***t of, you know, painting with black. It doesn't look bad. Okay? It gives us sort of a rich brown color. But I also think it doesn't really seem to look right either in this environment. Because this environment is very cool. You couldn't really see it without zooming out. But it's a cool environment. So what difference does that make? Well, let's think about this for a second. Your shadows, where did the color of the shadows really come from? If we were going to be realistic with this, how did they get their color? Well, a shadow is just the absence of light. Okay. And in this case, it's an absence of the direct light from above in this room. So if the light from the room isn't reaching the shadows, then what light is reaching the shadows? Because we can still see it. There has to be some light hitting there. What sort of light is reflecting into the shadows? Very often, it's the color of the environment. Now, to be real technical, of course, around her head and skin, most of that would probably be pretty warm because her skin is reflecting off her hair and nail this, those are the things. But the shadows are typically filled with the average color of what's around them and what they're reflecting. So if this is a room that is mostly cool, greenish blue, then if I choose cool greenish blue colors for my shadows, it's probably going to work. I'm going to go to my multiply layer. Gamer is going to undo that change to gray. Go back into my adjustments and we're going to cool it off. We're going to go this way with it. So we're going from purple, there's green. And then we start warming up again. You can see that the blue really just turns a gray color right there. I would say that pretty closely matches the color of the environment now. Maybe it's a little dark, maybe it's a little saturated. We can play with that though. That's the cool thing about this mode and hard light mode, we can adjust all this after the fact. And so maybe we do want some really stripped down shadows. Maybe we want some really rich, intense ones. If it was a very emotional moment, but this is not an emotional moment. Not like that, not for this book. So I'm going to pick a happy medium somewhere, right about there. And I think that looks good. So how can I then paint with that color? So first off, let me get rid of my ugly shadows for a second. I'm going to isolate this layer by holding down the checkbox and make sure I select this color. Okay. 'cause I just slid the slider into that color. I didn't paint that color. So I want to make sure I've got that color. Pull down the checkbox to bring everything else back. Let's just clear this layer. I'm going to click that layer and hit Clear. And now if I was really painting this using this color, again, we're in that multiply mode. But look at how bright this color is. Let's sort of her middle blue, You know color, it's not really bright, but now I can paint with this color. You can see it in her eyes, especially. It's like eyes do a lot to reflect the color of their environment. So that really cool blue really comes through on the white of her eyes. And again, totally up to you as far as like how much detail you want to do in this. I'm just sort of having fun here and I'm not even really staying in the lines very well. I'll switch to my eraser, we'll clean that up again, you can see like on her teeth, especially that blue coming through like that, better than my original. It's a different vibe, a little more realistic. I can keep that same shadow color. Whoops, for her jacket. Let's do a selection this time. Select your jacket. Switch to my brush and start paying this in. That is pretty close to what I used the first time around. Not exactly. I did a little green reflected lighting here. We haven't got to that part yet. I'm just kind of following these wrinkles. Rebecca Isaacs is my favorite artist to work with because all of her stuff just works. So you can see now why we spend that extra time on the flats. Think about if I had to worry about all of those selections every time. Now I will say, don't forget that when we're doing hair. And I'm going to go ahead and I'll paint some deep shadows in this using that color, and it's kind of too dark. But the point I wanted to make was remember that after the fact, you can change these shadow colors. And different materials are going to reflect colors differently. The hair is going to reflect with a little bit richer color than say her jacket would, just because of the texture of it. There's definitely, you got to think about the material, how reflective it is. Even the type of light and shadow should change depending on depending on what your stuff is made of. 17. Rendering light and shadow, part 4: One other thing I'll do sometimes to adjust at this point is let's say I do want to account for the warmth of her hair in the shadows of her face because they would be warmer around her hair. So because we did all of those shadows on their own layer two finger hold on, that layer will make a selection. So I can now pick, let's say just a gray color, which it's really just stripping the color out of it. And you can see by brushing over that it's starting to warm up. I didn't really change the value that much, I just changed the saturation level because pure gray is going to reveal more what's underneath. So it's a nice way to get some variety without having to work very hard. Again, I want to talk a little bit about bounce light and reflected light, rim lights a little bit here, just a way to dress things up a little bit more. You know, at any point you can bail on this sort of thing. You know, it's like if you do a shadow layer and that's it, great. If you just want to do a layer of lights, that's it. You want to leave it flat, Fantastic. So these are just, you know, maybe get a little bit bigger page rate on this cover. You want to really push the detail, what all can you do. So first thing I'll do is talk about bounce light or reflected light. I like to call it bounce light because to me it just makes more sense. And a really good way to decide where your bounce light shouldn't go is to contain them to your shadows. Because think about it, your direct light is not bounce light. The only place the bounce light you're really going to see if you're splitting it up, is going to be in the shadows from your direct light. I know that sounds like a lot, but if you really think about it's very, very simple. So I'm going to two finger hold on my shadows that I just made, judge, and sorry. You can ignore all of this white that I accidentally painted, you might see pop up on the selection judge. But again, everything you see there that is very dark is what is selected. Okay. So when I switch to a brush, anything that I do is once again going to be contained to those shadows, right? So this is just another sort of shortcut that you can do. So let's just think about this. What color might reflect in the shadow of her jacket? Okay, we know it's going to be lighter than what's there, so we know it's going to be at least that bright. So I'm going to get, let's say again, halfway to white. The floor is white, which I think it is here. It's probably going to be a bright color. And so I'm not going to shift the hue too much here. I think in the original I did it a little bit toward green just for the sake of having it a little bit different. So if I start adding a little bit of that green into this area where it would reflect, it really looks pretty cool now. Again, it's not everywhere. Maybe we get a little bit over here, but it shouldn't just feel every part of every shadow. That's a quick way of making it look boring. And this is really close to the value that's there. So I don't really have to worry too much about specifics, but it already feels like the lights bouncing off the floor. Right. Maybe we do some of this up here, underside of her nose, maybe it really starts to add a lot of dimension. I'm going to select the hair now, I'm just using that same, just cool color and start throwing it around on the underside of the hair and it starts to add volume to the hair almost immediately. You know, up here, maybe we don't want to go that cool. Maybe we want to warm it up because it's, you know, near the skin. So maybe those reflections are a little bit warmer. Another type of light that I think is really fun to play with are just really sharp rim lights. This is not really a situation where I would probably use one, I don't think. But I will sometimes change the vibe up, like maybe in an action scene or something. If I accidentally selecting things, let's say I start with a really sharp edge there. Actually, let's do this on the shadow side, sort of tracing down this way. I don't know how much of her neck would actually be covered there. Let me pick a little spot of light on her nose. Maybe right here, maybe right there. Then I switch to the brush. Again, not really fitting for this particular situation. It's not really bright enough either. But yeah, if we go like really bright, maybe change the color up, get you could see that being useful somewhere next to a fire or something and it doesn't have to be a solid color. Of course we could go into this rim light, say pick that yellow, get brighter, you know, add some light parts to it that'll make it look even hotter. And then one last thing I'll mention here on her skin that is usually very, very helpful. I've talked about this in other courses, but is spreading a little bit of what we call subsurface scattering. Okay? And so on a layer on top of everything so far we're working with here, I'm going to make a new layer here and set it to overlay. Now this is a bit of a cheat, but it's a good cheat. Overlay mode is great for shifting the tint and the hue of things without affecting the value very much if you know how to use it. And so on this overlay layer, I'm going to pick a big, maybe soft airbrush type brush. I should have one and I'm going to choose the base skin tone, that's a good place to start. I'm going to start with the base skin tone, which in this case is kind of like, you know, a yellow, orange sort of color. That'll get you in the ball park where you need to be overlay mode. It's sort of the opposite of hard light mode overlay. If you want to affect the tint without affecting the values very much, you want to choose colors that are near the middle. Okay? Very bright colors are going to shift the colors quite a bit. Very dark colors in this mode will shift the colors quite a bit in very dramatic ways. Sometimes that can be cool, but not what we're doing here. So I'm going to get about halfway, I'm going to get about halfway, up to 50% roughly. It doesn't have to be exact. And I want to warm this up a little bit because subsurface scattering is really about the blood under the skin, right, with my soft brush with her skin selected just right around her eyes. And I'm just going to tap this in a little bit. Really nose and cheeks and all that stuff. It's very subtle, Off and on. I don't even think I did this on the original book. It was just another layer again, guys. And again, the color is not exactly right. You want to shift it around? It looks a little orange to me. So maybe we go this way. That looks good. I like that. So what color is that? Purple, of course, but it's good for hair. If I, if I grab the selection of her hair and again, I want to just warm it up in places, it looks pretty good just to warm up hair, especially like brunette hair, blonde hair. Warm it up, looks pretty awesome. And you're like, oh no, I overdid it. Turn it down. Just turn the saturation down. Turning the saturation will effectively turn it off. Or turning it up, we'll crank it up. And you would go through, of course, each selection and go as deep into this as you want to get into it doesn't really change anything for the background. Again, I would probably use my background selection layers here to take advantage of that. I can two finger hold the background, it's going to select all my backgrounds. I can choose any number of techniques that we've talked about today to get these shadows going. This is with a soft brush, you could use a hard brush, totally up to you. It's a little bit more dramatic this time and have fun with it. Just because you chose a certain color doesn't mean everything has to be that color. If I want to shift some of these shadows a little bit toward green just to make it look different, make it look a little bit more interesting, maybe that works. It's like reflecting a lot of green in the background. Now maybe if she was facing the window and there were reflections coming in from outside or something, Well, maybe these areas reflect a little warmer color. Or maybe you leave them where they are. 18. The "cut and grad" style in Procreate: All right, I actually want to do a quick lesson specifically on the cut and grad method of rendering. Because I've had several, several people over the years ask me about this method in procreate because it's a little bit different than it is in Photoshop. It's different than Clip Studio. And because of the limitations of the selection tools with procreate, you sort of have to do a few work arounds in order to use that style. And so I'm actually going to talk about that in this lesson. Now what cut and grad means, if you don't know, is it's an older term. Back when they called the selections cuts. And some people still do call these cuts, I guess. So if you have a light shape, they call that a cut. Right. And then the grad part is a gradient cut. And grad is actually, it's cut and gradient. And a gradient is, in this case, is typically talking about a soft gradient from one color to another or from, you know, some color to transparency or something. And the way I have found to make this work can procreate, It is a little clunky compared to other styles, to be honest. But this is what I would do if I needed to do this for a book myself. Now what I've done here has just turned off again, all of the rendering that is on that big group up at the top, we're on the base colors layer. At the moment my flats is set as the reference layer. So with the selection tool set to automatic, I'm going to select her skin. Now after I've selected her skin, I'm going to three finger swipe down to pull up the Copy and Paste menu. Now yours might be different from this. I don't know exactly what gesture is, the default gesture. But if you want to look into that, actually, let's undo this for a second. Let's go back to the actions and preferences, The preference sections up here at the top. And then gesture controls. And you'll see a bunch of different options here. If you go to Copy and Paste, you can see I've got mine set to a three finger swipe. Again, I'm not sure what the default is. Quick menu is a four finger tap, which I don't think we've done any quick menu on this one. But that is that little menu which is good for flipping things, really. That's the best use for it. Four finger tap. It's a quick way to make a new layer also, I just never remember to use it. So anyway, sorry for the tangent there about that setting. But anyway, we're going to click her skin. I'm going to three finger swipe down and duplicate. And what this does is it makes a new layer with whatever is selected. Okay? You can see that by itself here. What I would do then at this point is just set this to alpha lock. Okay? Take that new layer, set it to alpha lock. What alpha lock does, it only lets you color on the pixels that already have something on it. Okay, in this case, it's just her skin that's on this layer. So that's the only thing that is being painted on right now. So what that means is we can use that as an act of selection effectively while making other selections. Okay, so now I can go to my free hand tool. And I'm not going to worry about going outside the lines. I'm just going to make a few quick shadows. Shapes here, maybe one over there. Remove a little bit from her hair. Remove a little bit of that. Something like that. Switch to my brush, and now I've got my selection and my superhero looking rendering there. And then I can go in and make more selections here. Of course, we'll make a few here real quick. It's kind of a quick ugly selection switch to a brush. There we go. So that's a real quick, really easy way to do a cut and grad style as long as you're working on that one layer. Okay, if you're just working on a normal mode layer and you're picking your colors and you're not worried too much about editability after the fact, this is a good way to do that. Okay, I would then just merge this down and move on to the next thing. So let's say I get the hair, make sure I'm on the automatic selection tool. Click the hair, three finger swipe, duplicate. Go to the thing, alpha, lock it, switch to freehand. And now I've got my selection here. Make a few quick ugly ones. You get a different color. There we go. I didn't say was pretty, but it is a quick, pretty easy way to do that kind of cut and grad style. Again, it's not as flexible because you do either have to merge these down or you end up with tons and tons of layers. There are a few workarounds for that even. I would say that you could also save selections in procreate for things that you might be rendering a lot. And let's say that it appears in a couple of different places and because we don't have a proper magic one, you might just want to save that whole selection and not have to make it again. For example, do I have an example here? I switched pages for this because this is a better example. Let's say that I know I'm going to come back and do a couple of different passes on this big blue guy here, right? Might do some shadows, some highlights, whatever I can go in. And I'm using the automatic selection tool to first just select all these different areas. Now again, this is why this app is not great for this sort of method, in my opinion. But you can see that I've got to select into all of these different things. If I really wanted to color all of them, I'm not going to worry about it right now. But once you have the selection made, you can go to save and load down here on the bottom and hit the plus sign. And what that'll do is that'll save that selection. So let's say that I come in here with my highlights and I do some stuff and then I work on other things and I come back, I want to work on it again, but oh, no, I lost my selection. Open up selection, tool, save and load. There's that selection. We have it loaded. And now I can go back to what I was doing. I've done that before as well, especially for things like skin tones. Like I said, something like that guy probably would because you've got a lot of different parts. But if you have a character, you know you're going to be coming back to the primary character. You might want to make a selection of all the clothing. Maybe on this guy, I select his head band and that thing and that stuff. Now you can see how it's grabbed this over here. I don't really want that to be a part of this. So I'm going to go to freehand remove and we'll just cut him out. And that's going to remove him from the selection. Now I'm going to save this selection. And now I've got his clothing as another option there. Now, you can't rename these selections as far as I can tell. To show you another method that you might want to use for this that I've done before is like in this case. And this is not a, this is not a perfect example of this. But one trick that's worked often for me is, especially if I usually have my flyer, create this as just part of the regular flatting process to split up the figures from the background or to break up foreground, middle ground background. Those are also good selection tools because remember in procreate you can hold down two fingers on a layer and it will select the contents of that layer. Like in this case, it's all the foreground characters. That's a really quick way. If I'm working on this guy and I want to do a quick selection, I will go down to finger click the foreground layer. And now I've got a selection here that I can work with. And of course, if you do want to do a cut and grad method and just be careful, that's also an option. You know, if you want to choose a selection tool and then just trace the inside, you know, along the sides where you want the light or the shadow to be. That way you don't have to worry about anything in particular there. But there's lots of ways to do that. There's a couple of them there. Hopefully one of those will work for you. 19. Special effects and line colors: All right, so we're getting into the home stretch here. I thought I would show you guys a few special effects techniques that I think that are easy to do and procreate. And this particular page doesn't have much in the way of those effects. In the original file, there you can see the lights there coming on in the bottom panel. And there's a few places where I changed the color of the lines, and we'll talk about both of those. So to start off with things that are glowing in comics, very often, the biggest step that's missed is that you need to be above the lines when you start doing special effects that are glows that are intended to look like they are actually bright and actually glowing. Now, there are certain styles where you know, soft, glowy, digital looking effects don't really fit. Maybe you just paint them over the top. Again, lots of ways to do this. I won't really dictate anything in particular there, but let's just say for this example that she has some sci fi glowing glasses here or something, you know. And so that'll be a good example for us. The first thing I'm going to do, I'm going to my selection tool. And I'm going to select the inside of the eyes and the skin. Now it's selecting all the skin, so instead I'll just zoom up and just draw these in real quick with the freehand selection tool. I'm staying a little bit inside the frames here. I missed that. Try it again. I'm staying just inside the frames as if what we're seeing would cut into the frame a little bit. Which it actually would, I guess. And I'm going to get on a layer on top of everything here. And I'm going to use hard light mode again. But you can use whatever you want. You can try screen or color dodge. Different thing is going to give you different effects. But I'm going to go to hard light, let's just say they're reddish. You can see now that it's on top of the lines. The red is affecting not just the areas below the line so to speak, but also the lines themselves are also being tinted. Just to show you real quick what some of the other modes look like here, soft light, which is very, very subtle, overlay is again a subtle effect, good for sunglasses. Maybe a lot of these are interesting for different reasons. Like this is a different vibe, doesn't look bad, not exactly what I'm looking for. Screen, very similar to hard light, because hard light mode is effectively screening and multiplying depending on what you're choosing. So screen will often look similar to hard light mode, but anyway, let's go back to hard light. I do like the way it looks, so now our glasses look red, but they don't really look like they're glowing. Right. And so let's fix that. The first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to make a new layer. We can use screen this time. And again, big soft brush and I don't have a selection this time. Right? I'm just going to paint over the top here with a big soft brush. And you can see that it is giving us a little bit of a fuzzy edge to this and starting to look like the, the glasses themselves are actually glowing a little bit. The stronger you want that effect to be, of course, like the brighter you could make it. So maybe if I go back to my selection there, just reload my selection could play around with going brighter around the edges. That's a look that's an option. They look like they're blowing that way. And let's say we want to make her, I don't know, we want to make her food here that she's sniffing radioactive or something. I don't know, It's a common book, it might happen. Get a big bright blue color here again, because this is on top of the lines, we're going to see all of the little differences here over the lines that you might not catch if it was under. I don't know if this is great lightning, but I'm just painting this in with a texture brush. Again, we can get like on a different layer underneath with a different color. Maybe a soft brush and a little bit of a glow around it, like that, really underneath it. All right, so the lightning is hitting this thing, maybe. Let's go back that up. And now let's say I want to change the color of the lines on this little Tupperware bowl for some reason, like I did in the background here. So I've already got a layer that is clipped to my inks layer and that's what's affecting the line colors behind her. This is called a clipping mask. Photoshop has these clips do. A lot of digital art apps have clipping mask and the way they work is actually very simple. So remember that the inks are on their own transparent layer, so there's no white of the paper on that layer. So when you use a clipping mask, anything you do on that clipping mask is going to stay contained to the layer that it is clipped to. Okay, so I'm going to make a new layer just above my inks here now because there's already a clipping mask here. You can see that if I make a new layer under, it automatically adds that little arrow indicating that this is a clipping mask. So if you make a layer on top and you want it to be a clipping mask, just click it and hit Clipping Mask. And so now I'm going to start with my Tupperware color will darken that a little bit. And now when I paint this on, you can see that it is changing the color of the lines. It looks okay. It doesn't look bad. But maybe on the food, I want it to be a little bit darker. I could also have made a big selection here instead of the brush and did it that way. There's a lot of ways to do this. Quick example of that, I could draw around her glove. Now remember I'm not going through the center of the lines here. I'm not flatting. I need to get all of the total line that I want to change inside that selection now. Because again, I'm on a clipping mask that's going to automatically change the color of whatever's in there and ignore everything else. These kind of techniques are really good when you want a little less contrast in your backgrounds. Like in this case, I really wanted to sort of push all of that background toward white, including the lines. You're basically creating a plane here, you know, across the entire background. And then there's the plane of the characters there. And then there's the plane of the central character here on the right side. It's a little bit darker to separate her from the other two planes. 20. Tinting and adjusting: All right, and this lesson I want to show you guys just a few other easy ways to do some adjustments. And tweaking maybe after the fact, sometimes while you're coloring, but just some quick ways to make some big changes without having to redo a bunch of stuff. So in my layers, I have unchecked reference on the flats for now because I'm going to be jumping around selections a little bit. So let's say for the sake of this example, I want to really change the tone of this panel we've been working on and shift the colors around, maybe add some heavy color cast or something. Right? So I'm going to go down to my panels layer first. And with the automatic selection tool, just select the whole panel. Okay. And in the layers, I've got all the rendering in this one big group for now. And so anything we do is going to be on top of that, on a new layer. So I've hit new layer here. We're on this normal layer under the inks, but above the rest of the rendering. Okay, I'm going to change this to, we'll do hard light again. And I don't know, I want to change the color scheme completely. So let's say I get it like a deep green and I'm just going to color drop that. It immediately starts to feel like a saw movie or something, right? But it also, you know, it really flattened our values out quite a bit. You know, everything is kind of a midtone right now. And if that's hard for you to see, if you don't really understand what I mean when I say that, or if it's difficult for you to see that the values are kind of compressed. Another way you can sort of look at this is to make a new layer, put a gray over the top of it, and set that layer to color mode. And that will effectively give you a black and white version of your existing values here. Other than her hair being dark, most of the other values are in a very middle tone range here. But you can see if I take that green layer off that we just made, we've got a little bit more variety and they're a little bit brighter. Obviously you too. You can see I'll just leave that color layer up there for us to look at later if we want. But I want to take this chance to talk about mask again because I love using a layer mask to adjust things like this. So let's say in this case I want to change up where that green effect appears. Okay, so I'm going to click on the layer and click Mask. And I'm going to switch to my brush. And right now I've got a black selected. I'm going to two click on my background layer, just so I've got it selected. Now I can paint that effect away in the places that I don't want it. So maybe I want this to look very dramatically lit, and so I'm painting it out. And then on the character I will two finger hold on the foreground, switch back to my brush. I'm still on my layer mask. I'm not going to be really specific here, but maybe I paint it away on one side of her face. And I'll do this quick just for the sake of the lesson here. And give her like a hard light, no unintended, but a harsh light from a different angle here. Really quickly, it changes the tone of the scene. It changes how it feels, it changes how dynamic it is. Again, because this is on its own layer, we have the luxury of maybe we get to this point and say, I don't know the greens little much. Well, we can tone it down, we can change the saturation, We can make it more intense. You know, we can play with the brightness. You know, there's lots of things we can do here to adjust this. It all gives it a slightly different sort of tone right now. Here's another quick trick. Let's say that we're starting to get a lot of layers in here and I don't know, maybe we're close to running out. Are we close to running out? We've used 19. We have 23 available. No, we're not. So, I just wanted to check before I did all of this and then seem really stupid when I forgot to resize it or something. So, so we don't have to worry too much about layer counts on this. But I'm going to two finger pinch the mask into the layer. And what that's going to do is apply the masks to the layer is what they call it. Now we just have the contents of the layer, in this case that deep shadowy color that we used on the hard light layer. But because that's on its own layer, remember that becomes a selection. And I'm always bringing this up because procreate is, again, the selection tools leave a little bit to be desired. Sometimes anytime we have something we can take advantage of like that, I want to tell you about it. So I'm going to two finger click on my shadows. Now I'm going to switch to maybe an interesting bounce color that we don't see much of. Maybe an orangey color, let's say really bright. Now, using the shadows as a selection, this is very close to our skin tone. Let me make this a different, let's do that. Now, if I paint on this, it again is going to stay on the shadows. I really can't paint into the light now, which is handy when you're doing an indirect light that is, of course, bright enough to get into the direct areas of light. Again, I'm just scribbling this in here really quick just to give us something interesting to look at. And again, this is really over the top from our original. But the point is I just wanted to give you guys some ideas of some ways to make things dynamic and interesting to also not get too worried about getting stuck in a particular thing you've done. It's like in this case, I accidentally did all of that on that layer, which I didn't really mean to, but I could still bring all the values together and adjust that as a whole or start over because I wasn't there very long. 21. More adjustment tips: Procreate also has adjustments here like curves and color balance, and gradient maps and things like that. And I haven't talked a whole lot about that because I don't use them a lot myself. But I wanted to give you guys a few other kind of tricks here just so you've got some options to choose from. And these adjustments, you know, only affect the layer that we're talking about. So I've turned off everything above my rendering, and I've got a couple of mistakes up there, you can see. But I want a copy of this. I want a copy of what I'm looking at right now. And so I'm going to go to my actions over here. And on the ad section up here at the top, right here at the bottom is copy canvas. So at the top we've got add canvas, share video, go to add and then copy canvas. We're going to go to a new layer three finger swipe paste. And what this does is it. 22. Exporting the final product: So as we come in close to the end here, I want to talk a little bit about exporting the final product. So if we go to Actions and go to Share, you will see all the options available to you here for exporting these files. So the first one here is a procreate file. So this is nice if you are creating files that you want to share with others to open and procreate with all the functionality and all the things that's going to come with it. That includes the video. Also, if you want to export a procreate file and you've got the video recording and your preferences, you know, if you could send that file to someone, they could play that file back on their ipad, they would see the process. Also, I guess is my point. That which you may or may not care about. I personally wouldn't care, but that's a good reason for using the procreate file. Psd is pretty much an industry standard. It's the Photoshop standard. There's 1 million of them. If you don't know what to use and you want to keep your layers and whatnot, you use a PSD file, you got the best shot of it opening as much as it can with the app. So for example, Clip Studio reads what it can from Photoshop, let's say things like opacity. But Photoshop also has a fill percentage which clip doesn't have, this doesn't have, so it wouldn't be included in the file. But I think pretty much everything in the procreate layer stack will apply to a PSD file. So you know, the layers, the mask, all that clipping mask work, all that stuff. So PSD is good all around. Safe bet. Pdf is going to flatten it down, I believe to just one layer. I don't really do much with PDF. Personally, J Pegs are the image format of the Internet pretty much. If you're going to be uploading something, you know, Twitter or something, you might click Jpeg and it'll only take a second to export. Keep in mind it's going to be a pretty big file. It's like that's a four, almost five megabyte file when it's in Jpeg format. So kind of a big file, I think a lot of ads will kind of automatically, you attach that to G mail like they're going to resize it automatically or whatever. Tfr I skipped P and G. That's also a format that is typically one layer and you can also have transparency. So let's say you were doing a logo or something and you just wanted on a transparent background and you know, so you could see the check boxes or whatever, then PNG is the format to use for that. Png is also uncompressed, I forgot to mention, which means even this file is 18.4 megabytes is a single layer so that it doesn't compress it at all. And then a Tiff file that is, again, I believe it only exports single layer Tiff files. This is pretty much the standard for the com, book industry and a lot of print industries. So if I were to, was going to be exporting this to a printer when I was using procreate more in my comment book work, I would export as a PS D to photo shop or to affinity photo files just on the ipad to export the CMYK Tiff files. Because when I was using it, procreate did weird things with the Tiff files. It seems to be working now. I just tested it today, actually, right before this recording, to make sure and it will export a CMYK Tiff file. But the kicker is you have to start in CMYK. Most apps you can choose after the fact, not procreate. So if you're going to be using this for print work, especially in the comics industry, I can't speak for anybody else. I would go ahead and just work in CMYK in procreate. And that way you don't have to worry about converting or wondering if it's going to look the same. The generic profile is apparently pretty safe, so if it doesn't work, you can blame me, I guess. Test it though. Test it with your publisher before you try. Oh, and here's all the ways we can share the layers. We were doing animated stuff, you can export to a bunch of video formats, which we're not doing in this course. I'm not really going to talk about here. 23. Conclusion: All right, that about covers it. Thank you so much for watching. I hope you learned something. I hope you learned a lot. If you have questions about anything, come find me on the discord. I'll be happy to help. And if you enjoy this course, please check out some of the others. I will leave some coupon codes and discount codes in the text of this lesson or the next lesson somewhere in here. Somewhere around me you will see some codes. But these courses have kept my business running for the last couple of years. And I hope that you've learned something about wrangling procreate into a decent comment book coloring tool. Maybe one day they'll give us a magic wand. I'm not holding my breath anymore. I think it's going to sculpt things in three D before I get my magic wand anyway. Thank you guys again. Take care.