Let's Color a Goblin! | Complete Digital Coloring Process Walkthrough

1. Introduction to Let's Color a Goblin! : Hey there. So in this course, we're going to be coloring a goblin. This government, this is a complete start to finish walk through of every step of the coloring process, using procreate on the iPad. This time, lecture watching is actually made from all the lessons in this tutorial. My name is Kurt, and I will be the one teaching it. I've been a digital artist since 2000 three and been teaching art on YouTube since 2013. Since then, I've recorded hundreds of hours of lessons and taught thousands of students all over the world about digital art. I designed this course for anyone looking for a step by step, comprehensive, detailed walk through think Bob Ross style but digital. By the end of this course, you'll understand several different ways to create awesome lights and shadows, how to pick colors and change them on the fly. How to use a mask to make things easier for yourself and a bunch of stuff I can fit in this promo. And of course, you'll be able to take what you've learned into your own artwork. Also include brushes you can download and the actual layered files that I created making the course so you can import the art toe, work on it yourself from a few different stages. Or you could just rummage through the layers on the finished product and see how it all comes together. Keep in mind that I am going to assume you know, the very basics of procreate. You can find the brush you confined. The eraser will be going over these things. But if you're a rank beginner to procreate, might want to check out some my other courses. So I had a lot of fun making this course. I think it's a fun way to learn, so thanks for watching and hope to see you inside. 2. About: All right. Welcome, everyone. My name is Kay Michael Russell. I am a comic book colors and welcome to my course. This course is going to be a very detailed walk through of doing some very finished colors . And I'll give you guys kind of an example, something like this that's very painterly, with a lot of detail on something that I have had a lot of requests for that really haven't done before in my other courses. And so I thought that this piece would be, ah, lot of fun to do because I want to sort of, you know, demystify this process. So I think when you see all the different layers and how they work together and how simple that this can be, then I think it will give you guys a lot of confidence and you'll see that it's not the black magic that you might have thought it was. So now I will be using procreate in this course. But you should be able to use just about any drawing app that has layers and blending modes and mask, and that sort of things like clip, studio and credit and all those different things should work to I won't be able to speak to that is as far as questions goes, Procreate and Photoshopped pretty much my mind go to but should be a lot of fun. And if you're not sure how to import the art into procreate, just refusing procreate about the top, right? If you click on import now, I've made this final available in a couple of different ways. There's a J peg, so if you have one of the smaller ipads, then that might be necessary for you. There's also the procreate final, and that's the full four K resolution file. So again, some ipads might not open that procreate file s. I've also made a PSD final available, which opened on pretty much anything. It's a pretty small file, and I've also made the sketch available, which you can't see very well on the screen. But you can see more of it on the actual, uh, on the actual file. So if anyone here wants toe, you know, try their hand in thinking that then you could back up a step. But this course is strictly going to be focused on color Now, disclaimer up front, there are a ton of ways to color things. Okay, so this is not meant to be the right way or the only way. This is just how I do things. If you ask 10 colorist how they color, you're probably gonna get 10 different answers. So keep that in mind if if you see something that's different than you've seen before, that's probably gonna happen because we all kind of work in different ways. My methods for layering and things kind of come from working on monthly comics. There's a lot of things you have to do quickly, and I like to be able to make changes easily. And so I tend to work on a few different layers to make edit ability. Very simple Do. And I'll give you guys just a little bit about me again. My name is Kay Michael Russell. I'm a colorist primarily and digital artist. I've worked on a nun on the 80 something comics have been published. I've got YouTube channel. I've been teaching art online since 2013 2014 or so have students all over the world, and I enjoy this. This is fun for me. So one of the pleasant side effects of being an instructor is We have to understand whatever you're teaching well enough to teach it. But I also I'm picking things up along the way, too. So that's my sinister, ulterior motive there before you. So that is enough rambling for the intro Let's go and get started. 3. Adding base colors: all right. So if you were able to import either the PSD file or the procreate file, then you should have everything you need to get started here. Now, if you have an older iPad and you had to use one of the J pegs, then the only thing that you have to do that's really different is on your main inks. Later, I'm gonna go ahead and rename these inks and pencils. But if you imported the J peg that has the white background built into the final, then you'll need to change the layer mode of your in clear to multiply. Okay, now, this final that I'm drawing in procreate I since I drew it in procreate, you don't necessarily have to do this step. Even normal is gonna work because the only thing on this layer is the inks itself, the inclines. But if you see white up here, if you If you've imported the J peg and includes those white pixels as well, then just click that little end button and you're using procreate and check and changing multiply. Everything else should pretty much be the same. Now I'm not a fan of working on white very often, even if my final drawing is gonna be in white. So I'm gonna change my background color to kind of a middle gray just so I don't have to stare toe white background. It looks like a light bulb for a couple hours. If you're working in another app, then you can just put a layer underneath the inks and fill it with whatever color you like . I would recommend kind of a neutral middle of the road gray, which is kind of what I've selected here. So the first thing we're gonna do is color the entire outline because once we have the outlined the silhouette of the character done, that's going to save us a lot of time and making sure that we stay inside those lines for the rest of our colors. So I'm gonna make a new layer, and this is undermining Slayer. And I'll just call this Ah outline. Now, as far as brushes for this, it doesn't really matter what kind of brush you use, but any brush that has a hard edge. Okay, you don't want a real fuzzy edge on it. You want it to be a pretty hard transition without any fuzziness or picks, elation or anything around it. And the color really doesn't matter that much for this. But I'm gonna go ahead and pick a color that I think will end up being pretty close to her skin tone. Now she is a goblin, and I want her skin to be kind of green. So I'm gonna pick kind of a middle of the road green here, and we'll see it's a little too bright, a little bit darker, every or something like that. So I'm gonna zoom up and just start right here at the top, and I'm gonna start filling this in around this edge. And you know what? I'm gonna pick a darker color that is a little bit further away from that. Gray said. I could see it better. Here we go much better. And I'm using the apple pencil on an iPad pro. But you should be able to use just about any stylists for this. And I really just want to get get all the way around the edge. And I want to make sure that underneath that, all of these lines are connected because white procreate works weaken color drop in the middle of this once we're done coloring. But this part is sort of like being in elementary school again. Just stay in the lines. So this is one way to do this. I'll show you guys another way, too. To you. It just go. Okay. I'm gonna close this whole side off here. So at least with procreate bucket tool works also another APS. You can drag this down, let it go, and then just drag it left and right in order to make sure it feel the entire thing properly. That's one way to do it. You can. Also, if you wanted to use the lasso tool for this, that's another good option. So you could go in with the last seven. Fill it this way. That's more comfortable for you. Do it that way. But I'm in kind of a painting mood today, so there's gonna paint the sin. This is the brush pin is actually the footage of the procreate name for this brush. But like I said, or the brush really, Russia's air brushes air overrated. I get I get more questions about brushes and probably the one of the least important aspects of color. I think a lot of people just assume there's some kind of magic in the in the brush, and I do a lot of work with a soft, round like air brush that's just like like the Photoshopped default brush. But I like this particular brush because it'll get pretty thin or pretty thick pretty easily, depending on what you want to do with it. This is the least exciting part of being a colorist, by the way they call this flat ing because we're putting in all the flat colors. But what this allows us to do later is to use these as selections that saves a lot of time . Sorry, there's nothing super exciting talk about over all of this. This is sort of the grunt work of coloring. All right, I'm just doing a quick once over here to make sure that I don't have any straight pixels anywhere. Looks like we're good and you could ignore little special effect thing. We're gonna do something different with that toward the end. But now I've got a silhouette for the character, and we don't have to worry about staying inside any of these lines ever again. Not in this course anyway, Now, the first thing I'm going to do is I wanna lock this layer because I don't want to accidentally make any adjustments of this layer right now. So and depends on the app you're using. It would be different, but in procreate, if you slide the layer to the left with one finger, there's a lot button right there. You can lock and unlock it. Now, this just means that even if I try to color on this, I'm gonna get a warning that the layers locked and I've gotta change that. So that's good, because I want to ever change this. So I'm going to duplicate this layer, works the same way. Just swipe to the left and procreate and click duplicate or whoever that happens in the app that you might be using. And I just want to unlock that new one, and we're gonna name this flats. These are gonna be our flat colors, and we're just starting with that green for her skin, which is fine so we can leave that just the way it is. And we'll do the rest of this now One more step, I'm going to take here again. Just to save us some time is to set this layer as a clipping mask. So if you just click on that flats layer after it's been highlighted and click on clipping mask what this does everything that we do on this layer is going to be contained to the outlined lier. Okay, the little arrow you see, that's pointing down. Bring this over here. Right here. That marks, that is a clipping mask. And it means that no matter what I do, it's going to stay contained within this outline. Okay, so you'll see that if I get a brush here and change the color and try to go outside the lines and won't even let me this saves a tremendous amount of time. Whenever you're flooding and rendering and everything else we're gonna be doing all right. So I'm on my flats, layer. I've got my clipping mask, and we're gonna start with her hair. So I'm gonna pick kind of a middle red here and as a a bit of advice for those of you that maybe haven't taken other courses. You want to avoid all of this? Okay, Especially with comics. All this stuff down here. People think I want a dark red and they go down here. This is not where you want to live in comics, because a lot of this stuff just won't print. So, you know, a dark red to me would be like here. Basically, I avoid the bottom third of the color picture of what? I'm picking colors anyway, so kind of. Ah, middle Red. What does that look like? It's a little harsh. Too much saturation. There we go. We can always adjust these. The final colors don't really matter too much at this point. To be honest, we can always adjust that later. So the same thing. I'm going to start outlining the hair. No one's. I've got that bottom outline done. I could increase my brush size and fill the rest of this and really quick because of that clipping mask. All right. And while we're up here, we'll go ahead and do the eyes. Now. I don't use white for eyes very often, because usually it doesn't fit very well with the rest of color. So I tend to pick kind of ah, off white, kind of in whatever the like. This is kind of a bluish color doesn't really matter, and I don't know what color her eyes were gonna be, but I'm gonna make him orange for now. And I will also make this version available of the flats version of the file to just say you guys will have one less thing toe to do. Unless you want to learn this part too. I would recommend it. Save yourself some time in the future. All right, so I'm gonna pick sort of Ah, clothing kind of a brown, maybe something about like that. A little bit more saturation. Yeah. So to get brown, you're pretty much going toe orange and then finding the middle. And of course, you don't have to necessarily use the same colors. I'm using our or even close to it. If you prefer to do something completely different, that's fine, too. We just understand that I'm gonna be basing my lighting colors and shadow colors all that off of the colors that I'm currently making. So I would recommend may be going through it with meaning, picking colors that are close to this the first time. And then maybe later on, if you want Teoh, try something different than you can, but highlight colors, and all of that will be based on these might help toe go through this with me at least once . So for her shirt here on picking kind of Ah, the age color again. It's kind of in the orange family, but just appear the top left right there. Sorry. I keep zooming out just to get overall feel of what this looks like. You haven't thought about what car? I want to make these pants yet. I'm just gonna pick a color for now, and then I'm gonna change it a little bit later. So now that I've got a colored, I'll just use the selection tool set to automatic and then go to the adjustments and change that color. Whatever I want it to be. I think that works. And the belt buckle. I'm gonna do pretty much orange, but it's gonna end up being gold when we're done. But we'll start with, like, a deep orange kind of, ah, base Here again, I'm just kind of touching this up Some of these areas where the greens coming through. Just taking a good look everywhere, and I'll do this little necklace the same color as the belt buckle. Maybe these things, too little ornamentation on the cape there. We're almost done with this stage here and then Kind of a grayish crash arms for this stuff here and these little wrappings. All right. Did we get everything I think we did? Now I want to change her skin tone a little bit here. I think so. Again, I'm just gonna go to the selection tool. There we go, and then switch over to the adjustments once I've got the selection made. Hue, saturation, brightness. And that's kind of more what I was going for A little bit at a little bit of yellow are moving toward yellow instead of blue. Although that bluish green was good too. I want to lighten this up with a good bit Too little, too dark. I think I want to change her eyes toe blue or something else. At least Same thing. Adjustments, Hue, saturation. Yeah, Blue's better. A little bit less distracting. We have fingernails. They're slightly different color. I'm just gonna brighten this green up a little bit. All right, so now we have it flatted. This is by far the most boring part of the course. I'm gonna have to made it, but, ah, if you get your flats right the first time, though, it saves a lot of time later. So let's move on the next lesson. 4. Adding shadows - part 1: All right. So we're at the point where we can start adding some lightning shadows or into a real quick recap. And I've made this final at this stage also available to you guys. It's just labeled goblin major flats. You guys could start here if you like, But quick re camp. We have our inks clear and again. If you are importing Leinart, you might need to change that to multiply. But we're OK with normal mode since it was drawn in procreate. We've got our base colors. We've got our flats underneath those air locked. Okay, so we don't make any changes to those. And I've got my sketch underneath, but we're not really using that today. So the first thing do you figure out is where we want to do our life sources or light source. However you want to do this. And here's what I was thinking. Obviously, you guys conduce something different. If you like that, let me make a new layer here just to make some notes for you guys. So what I'm thinking is our main light source that light CME is going to be coming from the right and the front. Okay? what I see with a lot of beginners is that because describing the light as Onley from the right really doesn't tell the whole picture we have. Ah, well, we have three d space here. Okay? So if you say from the right, you know, is it in the right, But closer to us, like in between us and the girl and the girl, or is it way in the background? So we kind of have to think in in three Dimension. So I'm thinking about light coming at an angle. Kind of like this. Okay. Actually, probably a little bit more sharper than that if I had to be specific about it. So like if it was an era that was shaded, it would kind of be coming in like this and probably more from the top to. But as far as our main light sorts coming from there, and then at the end, we make this staff glow in a different color than that would give us an opportunity to do some cool lighting on this side. That's what I was thinking to look dramatic and and we'll do this in a way that we can actually change the color scheme of the lighting later. So, like, it will do this at first as sort of ah, general kind of daytime look. And then maybe at the and I'll show you guys had a switch it over to maybe a nighttime. Look. The other thing I'm going to do here is I'm going to set my flats layer as the reference layer, okay? And procreate as reference layers. Not every have probably has this. I know that clip studio does as well, but I'm gonna hit flats and choose reference. Now, what this does is even if I'm on a different layer, like, say, I'm making new earlier, I can go in with my selection Tool said it's automatic. And when I make a selection, even though I want a different layer, it still treating it the selection as if it came from that flat slayer. So this helps a lot when you're rendering. So my method lately is to start with shadows that you guys can start in different places, but in this course, we're gonna be starting with shadows first. So I'm going to make a new layer in between my inks layer and my base colors. I'm gonna set it to multiply, multiplies a good layer mode for shadows. We're going to rename this shadows, and I also I'm going to set this as a clipping mask. That way, I don't have to worry about ever going outside these lines. Now, if you're working on something that's not just a single character and a clipping mask, it might not be an option for you. You can effectively do the same thing by going into your flats and choose your selection tool. Make sure it's set to automatic and to make a selection and then just color on that new layer that will also keep you in the lines. But I'm gonna set. This is the clipping matches because we can and I'll show you guys had I'd go about adding a background layer to. So for the daytime shot of this, you know, we're gonna have ah, warm, I think kind of sunlight type effect. And so I want to use cool shadows. Now I want to clarify one thing here. A lot of people think that that's a rule that you have to have. If you're light sources warm, your shadows have to be cool that does work most of the time. I would say 90% of time. It looks great. It's not always realistic, but it doesn't have to be. Realism is not what we're going for, but the reason that it's a very common thing that that is said, is when it does look together, look good together. They're complementary colors, usually. But what it stems from is if there's if the sun is, you know, warm and the shadows aren't being hit by the sun. What are they being lit by? Because the shadows aren't black, you know, we're seeing something and they tend to look bluish because the sky is lighting the shadows . OK, well, this guy's blue, OK, but if you were to go to travel to Mars, your shadows with me cool anymore because the skies orange or red or whatever. So, uh, just something to keep in my bonus tip there for you. So I'm gonna pick like a baby sky blue color here first. And the cool thing about working this way is we don't even have to get the color right the first time we can start throwing it in here and then later on, decide if we want to change it. So at this point, you can go in and pick your favorite brush. Whatever you like to brush with, I'm gonna use this round brush. You can use any kind of breast that you prefer to use, and I'm gonna lower the opacity of the brush to about 50%. And what that allows me to do is tow layer this a little bit, okay? Because if if if I go 200 then that's that's just what I've got. I can't really go. Liar. I can't really go any darker, so I want to lower this opacity of the brush down to about halfway. So with lights coming from the you know the top right in front, then the shadows gonna be on the opposite side, which is left behind us. Okay, so I'm gonna start working on this side and think about all the places, the lights not going to reach very well. Okay. Inside of her, eager. But then I can go in and see. You can make this darker without changing color, despite layering it again so I can keep blaring this and get darker there. If I want all of this under her ears, Kind of gonna be in shadows. I'm gonna fill all this in. Then I can make it darker is we'll make another pass at it. You'll notice that I didn't lift my brush. That that's one of the tricks when you're working in a Lear like this is if I were to make a bunch of strokes here, it's going to change the overall color every time I make a struck, every time it doubles or every time it layers is gonna get darker. So one thing you can do to avoid that on a layer like a multiply layer is to just not raise your pencil until you're done with that section. So this entire time is I'm coloring here. I'm not lifting my my apple pencil off of the iPad and again, being ableto understand where you want Thies to go exactly is something that, uh, you know, we'll come with more time, But I'm just really thinking about where the deepest shadows air gonna be and filling those things in here. Now her hair is going to cast a bit of a shadow over this face so I could kind of color in this little shape here and all under this part of the hair is not gonna be lit. And I could give you guys another. Another way of doing this. That might make more sense to some here. And I'm just gonna fill looks. I'm gonna get used this to feel that's for just one quick second. All right, So what I've done here is I've just filled all of this area with shadow. Okay, Now, if I wanted to, I could come in with the eraser. Instead, she used the same brush I would and just painted away. If this makes more sense to you, you can color this way to it's It's the same same thing at the end of the day. But since there's gonna be more shadows than light, I'm gonna go ahead and keep doing it this way. So the underside of the hair here and again, if you want it darker, Aiken, just layer this a little bit more. I'm gonna smooth all this out a little bit later to with this much tool in pretty much the whole inside of her ear, I'm gonna make dark. And then as we get more toward the center like where her eager canal would be. I'm actually making it a little bit darker there. So like her, her hands gonna toss a shadow here, Probably this whole area. And it helps when you're when you're thinking about adding shadows on the all of these shapes, it helps to think about the basic shapes that make up all of these different parts. So, for example, on her arm, if we think about it, an arm is just a cylinder, right? Kind of like this. So if the lights coming from the top, then the top part of this cylinder is going to be lit, right, except for the areas that might be blocked by something else like your chest. So that's kind of the the mental ah, math that I'm doing here. So, like on her face really didn't do much with her face. But I'm gonna get like, the under side of her nose and maybe just ill add a little bit underneath like a cash shadow from her nose and then under her chin, do a little bit. Most of her face is gonna be lit. So we're not adding a ton of shadows there now to draw a straight line and procreate. If you draw the line and then hold it, it'll bounce into a straight line. I use that old time. I'm leaving a little bit of, ah, sunlight on these fingers, making the palm a little bit darker under here. All right. So as we get further away from her face and and as the detail, you'll notice the detail level is going down to because it's a kind of a trick. You can do that will, ah save you some time? Because because, honestly, there's less detail, usually as you get further and further away from your main focal points, which in this case is her face again, pretty dark under here. Bottom side, because the other thing is, you know, brighter values will also kind of draw your eye up. So helps with that, too. Now, this would be a good time to adjust your shadow color if you need to, and all we have to do to do that is go into that shadow layer. Make sure that your selected what you already are and then go up to your adjustments on the top left and just change the huge saturation or balance so I can add more saturation. I can darken this. I can lighten and ignore these different things. I can change the color, I mean lots of different effects. I'm adding a little bit more blue to that. I think I like that a little bit more so. I think as far as our base shadows, we should be good. Let's go and move onto the next one. 5. Adding shadows - part 2: So for this particular drawing, I sort of want to hide the digital evidence of brushstrokes and adding a few more shadows in here where this hair kind of folds under. All right, that is better. What I'm gonna do because some of this stuff kind of looks digital because of the way that it's painted in here. So I'm just going to use a smudge tool. Now, there's a lots of different brushes for this to, um you can use the same brush, that round brush, you could pick a softer brush. I'm going kind of pick a soft brush. And again, I must set this about 50% capacity and right along these edges And when it's kind of start blending this a little bit and just by by painting in here with that brush tool, I'm kind of losing some of those brush strokes and making it look a little bit smoother A little bit more like a bit more natural, like this area under here. Now you don't want to smooth out every edge. Okay, So, like, this is a cash shadow this area here from the ear, so I don't really want to smooth that out, okay? Because it helps toe have a like, I'm not smoothing this out much along the edge there. But I'm just kind of bouncing around here and smoothing out some of these places where you can see where the brushstrokes word. Now, you can leave that in there if you want, but for the look that we're doing in this course, we're gonna pay them out. And I'm just kind of jumping around all over the place here, some of this under her skin and neck. I want to smooth this out. What? I'm gonna leave that cash other under her chin in this area. We're gonna leave that and again, don't be concerned if this takes you a significant amount time, because it will. First time you ever try this and again, you don't necessarily have to do it if you don't want to. But I think it will make the final drawing look more interesting. I'm gonna add a little bit of shadow underneath this little cape thing that she's wearing. But that showing up a different color, right, because we color shifted all the shadows. So let's actually go find that color. The only way I know to do this and procreate is turn off everything except for the layer that you want to see. It looks like we also need to disable the clipping mass so that we can do that. There we go. We'll turn the clipping mask back on in a second. Someone go pick this color and let's save this color. Okay, so I've got that color save. I'm just gonna touch this first box, and it's set in that way. Uh, this is right here. Just hold down on that area. It'll save that swatch so we can reuse that shadow color layer and set the clipping mask back Turner background back on. And there we go. Last thing I want to do is come on the side of her face, get a big soft round brush, this simple round brush and kind of laying a little bit of shadow through here. It's a little bit softer just on that side of her face. All right, so we've got all of our shadows kind of smoothed out. Let's go ahead and move on to some lights 6. Direct lighting - part 1: All right. So to explain kind of how I think through lighting, and this might be different from how you do. But what? You guys know at least how I think about this. So I'm thinking about all of the surface. Is that our that our first facing the light source. Okay. And that means breaking these things down into their basic shapes again. Okay, So even things like hair your lately Well, that's not a basic shape. How can I figure out how you know some down a basic shape for that? Well, break it up into sections, and if you think about it like this part is really sort of Ah, Bigs fear. Right or part of, ah, on a sphere, A cylinder kind of a flat cylinder. This area here again, you could say this is a kind of a squatty cylinder. Here's another cylinder going this way. Here's one bending back the opposite way. Even this little section back here. You know, if you could think of that as part of a big sphere, you know? So here's a cylinder here and even things Aziz Bigas faces. Generally speaking, you know, kind of the whole front side. If this again was a curved surface, we're gonna have more light on the top legs and arms and hands and fingers. There's there. There's really obvious cylinders, but I always just think of things in terms of which planes of those objects are facing the light source. Okay. And I've done it a pretty extensive YouTube video on this, but I'll give you guys one more kind of trick here. Taking her hair, for example. All right, so let's take this cylinder shape right here. Okay? Now the lights coming from the top, it's generally gonna be through here, right? If this was just a cylinder, you're gonna have an area of it that's brighter. And then as it gets further and further turning away from the light, it's gonna get dimmer and dimmer. If you take this cylinder Now, let's turn it on its head for a second. Let's say that we're looking at the end of it. Okay, So, like, put it x on this surface, and we're just looking at the cylinder for right now. Is turning this off for a second. So this is our cylinder shape. Okay, here's the X. So let's look at it straight on, Like this tangent. Listen, bouncing lights a hard thing to kind of wrap your head around. Okay, So what I say is make it easy. Make it something like a bouncing ball. So if we have a one of those, we call them Super Bowls. When I was a kid, that air super, super bouncy, right? Well, if it if we If we dropped this ball and it hits the top of this soldier, what's gonna happen? Okay, It's mostly gonna bounce back in this direction right now. If we start dropping it over here, it's gonna kind of start bouncing off, right? It's gonna bounce off in this direction. Sorry, I accidentally changed my ball. So again, at the top, it's gonna mostly bounce back in the direction that it came from If we're talking about gravity here, but as we get closer to these edges is going to start bouncing off this way. If you were to get on the very edge, it's gonna be like bounce way down here and this works the same way. With light, you can think of light bouncing in the same way. Most of it is gonna bounce in the direction that it came from. And as you go around that edge, you're gonna see less and less of it because less and less of its being reflected. Okay, so that's what I'm thinking when I'm deciding where I'm gonna put these shadows were, put these lights. So I'm gonna make a new layer. Well, put it above the shutters under the ink. Still, we're gonna clip this one, too, just for the sake of making it easy. So again, just click it hit, clipping mask and will also rename it to directly is this is really what this is. And the last thing I'm going to do is change the blending boat. Okay, so right now it's on normal. I'm gonna come in and change it Now, there's a lot of different ways to do this. I'm gonna use add mode. Okay. And photo shopping clip studio. I think this is called, uh, linear Dodge, I think. But I'm going to set it to that for these purposes today. And let's just try like a very saturated orangey color. See what that looks like? I'm just kind of trying this out. I think I like it all right now on the brush this time in this particular brush mode. And I may not necessarily with other modes if your screen or lighter, hard light or something else, you know? So I have to do this, But in Linear Dodger and add mode, I'm gonna use a very low opacity brush, OK? Because it doesn't a little goes a long way here. Okay? If I turn it all the way up, you can see it gets very, very bright and kind of oversaturated, overexposed. Almost some taking this down to, like, 2025%. Something like that. And I'm gonna start laying this in here. I'm just thinking about all of the services that are facing the light. And I'm just gonna kind of smooth this out the blending brush again. I could use the eraser to cut into this. If I wanna have a harder edge again using the eraser to cut in a little bit harder there, it'll end up doing some more highlights on this to but for now, this is gonna work for us. And I see you guys another trick to if you want to add some soft edges to things you can choose the lasso tool and in procreate, the newest version, they have a feature called Feather Photoshopped has this to for, ah, things like, uh, lasso tool. And if you make a selection with it and close that, you'll see that the right along the edge it has the edge has kind of a fade to it instead of using ah, instead of being like a hard ah, hard edge like it is most of the time that I can use the eraser to get it out from under the eyebrows. I want just another idea. Gonna go ahead and save this watch to right over here, that orange color using so I can grab it later. So flats are still set is reference. So even though I'm on the direct light lier, I can still go to my selection tool, make sure it's set to automatic and select the skin. Now I can go back to my direct light lier and start painting some of this in. I'm just using a soft brush this time and just changing the size. I want to make a harder edge on it a little bit more of a highlight on the nose right now. I'm gonna use that freehand last. So again, I'm gonna put, like, 15% feather in here, kind of selected forehead, A soft brush kind of let that fall in there a little bit more at the top for right now and procreate. You have to keep changing the feather every time. I don't know why does that? But that's what it's doing. So back to my free end, back to my feather said it about 10 15. There's a shape on the face that kind of does this. There's there's a plane of the face that kind of makes that shape just lightly, kind of laying this sand little bit brighter at the top. And even here, this sticks out a little bit more. So again, just very lightly and see the feather change back to zero again. I hope they fix this in a patch scene, but that little area of the upper lip kind of comes out from the rest of it. So again, just very subtly making them brighter there, but not too much that even might be too much. Let's try this again. Make sure feathers set again and again. Just a little bit right there, but not much, also adding smaller than knows there. I want to do a little bit more on the cheek here. Some of this that splashed over into the year I can erase. All right, we'll continue with the lighting in the next lesson. 7. Direct lighting - part 2: All right. So picking up where we left off, I still have my soft, round brush and can do the ah, fingers here. Actually, I'm gonna switch back to my round brush just a little bit harder edge on it a little bit easier to control through here, brightening up the tips a little bit. Same thing over here. And then, of course, you can always use this much tool to blend some of this away. Gonna add a little spot on her chin. I didn't really do before. Here we go. Now. Right now, I'm only doing kind of one pass at a time of these lighting where what we're gonna do later ? Because the textures of these items are different. You know, hair, skin, clothing. All this. So some of it will get mawr machine to it kind of mawr shining similarly flatter eso. It's important to make sure that your coloring, your textures different, that not everything gets color the exact same way, Mr. Racing that bit under her mouth, making sure that's dark enough. Kind of erasing some of this under her nose also. All right, so moving on to our clothing and again I'm kind of avoiding my shadows. If you haven't noticed that I am. I'm making sure that I don't really overlap into those areas just yet. And they will blend some of this together. Now, there's not any light reaching the top of this cape or her, uh, little necklace there yet, so we're gonna color that little bit later. So again, I'm just kind of leaving a little bit of space there where the shadow is. Make sure I don't color those areas that on the staff again picking up where the shadow leaves off. You can think of the shadow, This kind of a barrier that were just we're not crossing it and then is I'm just blending some of this together. - This is a big soft surface. I'm just going to switch to this off brush. All right, so I wanna cut in some really bright kind of what they call speculator highlights on hair, because hair is pretty reflective. So I'm gonna use the last. So for this, just the freehand last so and I might end up smudging it out afterward, but just gonna kind of make a shape that sort of follows the contours of the hair there. There's the sheep so you guys can see got these little jagged edges in the areas. That's kind of following the flow of the hair. So what I mean by that is you know, I wouldn't do it This direction, because the hair is not going in that direction, is that makes sense. So I'm just adding this in all these places that are again. It's kind of facing the parts of the hair that's facing the light source or if we go back to my little bouncy ball analogy, the parts where the ball would bounce back in the direction that it came from. We can do that all over here. See, I'm kind of following the contours, and this will give the hair a different look than the rest of it, too, which is important. You don't want it all to look like one big blob, and we can take this even, Ah, step further with a brighter color, because it's so I've got my orange saved. If you haven't saved your arms, be sure you save that orange. Just hold down the pallet. It'll save that color. So I'm gonna switch this to a brighter version with some yellow. When a move toward the color of our light source in our light sources worm, I'm gonna make another little small area inside of this. One must see my crazy about that shape. So I want some more yellow, not white. There we go. But I started, like here. We don't have to color every little section of here. Every little strand just kind of hint at it. The other thing to remember to is you don't have to fill in the entire section. You'll notice that I'm letting some of the light kind of fade off of it. And if it's still not as bright as you want it, you could even could make you live really, really bright. This is a brush and put it in there and let's see what blending this looks like. I kind of like that look, but I'm gonna blend this a little bit along the edges to see what it looks like. Yes, it depends on how digital you want it to look. Yeah, I just kind of blend it a little bit. Not a lot. All right. We will continue to like things. The next lesson 8. Direct lighting - part 3: all right, so our skin is not quite as reflective as the rest of the image. So I'm just gonna touch a couple of spots here on her nose and brighten it up a little bit . And again, I'm using a pretty bright, bright, bright orange this time. Just a little bit more reflection. There are forehead and, like on our the rims of her eaters would reflect a lot of light again with my free hand tool. Just a little bit of feather in there. Want to brighten up this area a little bit? Maybe just a little on her thumb? Not much. I don't want it to be the same exact reflectivity everywhere. Smooth this out on your ear a little bit more now. Her cape in clothing and all this stuff is leather. So I'm not really gonna throw around a lot of highlights because it's just you're just not that bright, but I'll put a little bit on this side. It's facing the light, like on a shirt again. This is just a big, soft round brush a little bit on her pants. If we want, we're gonna have her boots sort of a little bit more reflective so I can cut in with the freehand tool on this Kind of like we did the hair. And there's harder highlights that having additional contrast there, it really helps toe sell the fact that you know, this is shiny and again I can smudge some of this away if I want. Just blending away some of these edges makes it look a little bit more organic that her belt buckle being like metal really, really reflective here, basically white. In some areas, the more contrast you have, the shiny er things appear be like here on her boot. If I put little speculator highlights on the top, it's gonna look more reflective. All right, so that ramps up all the main direct light. So in the next lesson, we're gonna move into the indirect light. 9. Indirect lighting: all right, so indirect light is for our purposes today. All of the light that is not the direct lights of is not coming from the sun. Where is it coming from? It's either being reflected from the environment or it's coming from. It's bouncing off object. It's nearby or something. So we're gonna make a new layer, and we'll clip this one, too, just to make it easy. And we'll call this one indirect light Now. We don't really have an environment for this particular example, and we know that we're gonna have a glowing power coming from this staff that she's wielding here. And so that's what I'm gonna think of. First is just so the lights coming from that that we can use that as a second light source because our length warm. Let's make this one cool. It's because of the look cooler, and I'm kind of testing this out. But yeah, I think that's a good car. I am still and let's see right now in normal mode, So I've got a really saturated, kind of baby blue color, and I put this in hard light mode. I like to change it up, sometimes get different effects. Now, the key thing to remember here for our purposes today this light coming from the staff is weaker than the light coming from the sun. OK, so in this case, we're only going to contain that light to the shadows that we've already put in place because the light from the sun is gonna overpower any light coming from staff. So we already have sort of a set of boundaries for ourselves. If we keep our lights within the shadows, it should work. Now, if you start going into the direct light, it's going to start to look a little weird. All right, so recap indirect like hard light mode. It's still clipped. Looks like everything else is. So I'm just gonna start on this side and start laying this in here. It's already looking cool. And I mean the blending to a little bit on her neck just to smooth that out anywhere that I've got like a like a soft round shaped like the neck. I don't want it to be like, look very brushy than yeah, I try to smooth it out. Now it's not going to reach to the other side of her so keep that in mind. We're not doing this in all the shadows. Maybe your nose caught a little bit there. And when I get really close again, you'll notice that I am keeping a little bit of space between the light and the shadow here . And you'll see this through here. That's what they call Ah, Terminator. It's where the lightest part in the darkest part basically come together. And other thing to keep in mind here is we're not also just lighting edges. It's a very common problem I see from beginners is just think okay with lights over there. So it's all going to be on the edge, you know, if you think about it, you know this leg is facing, You know, the top of that leg is facing the light source every year, so this entire little area is gonna be lit. All right. Not so much down here. Maybe just the top of this boot probably wouldn't catch very much, but we'll put it in there. Maybe a little bit over here on this side. All right, so we've got all of our main light and will make the the Mejdi staff thing glow a bit later , but we got over, like from that. But we've got more like to add, so let's move on to the next one. 10. Color details: All right, so in this lesson, we're gonna continue on with just more indirect light. And so we've pretty much covered all the places. Almost all the places I just noticed. Ah, probably this here needs to be flu better, but ah so anywhere else that, um you want to add more detail and more color in the shadows that aren't necessarily or that isn't necessarily just from the, uh from the staff over here. And so I was trying to find a good example for this. And, uh so, like, for example, another type of light to consider is reflected light and the reflected light off of other objects. So let's take this area here. So like under her hair, OK, it's not really facing up, So that's not gonna catch any light. It's on the opposite side from the staff, so it's not gonna catching the light from that, But it is going to reflect some light off of the her her skin. Actually, in this case so I can make a new layer. It won't clip this to, and we'll call this reflected light, and I'm doing this all in different layers just to keep this separate for our purposes, and you could do all of this on a single layer. But I'd like to be able to go back, edit it later. Possibly so. So I'm doing are different layer, so I just picked this skin. Color is pretty close to where this light is and see what that looks like. It's got a little darker again. It's very subtle. I think it looks cool and again, it's not gonna go into the areas with the light. Just remember that the main direct light Anyway, we would have some of this on this little surface here, I think to we could do the same thing in the opposite direction. We could pick like hair color a little bit of that into the shadows. It's a very subtle through here. We really don't have a environment. Color is very strong, so I can get like a pretty de saturated ah caray in here. Very low opacity and maybe some of these remaining areas in the shadow of want to add a little bit of this light gray color because we're we're reflecting, like all the combined light in this area, which is pretty much gonna mix into white anyway. Again, it's all pretty subtle, but it adds a little bit of interest, all right, we've pretty much ignored her eyes so far. Let's go ahead and fix that problem. So shadows again. I'm just choosing that same blue shadow color from my Palin putting some shadows in and then just blending that a little bit. And then on our ender are direct light layer. I going pick kind of an orange color, anything even close to its fine. A soft brush cause we've got a soft round surface and brighten that up. All right, so we're getting pretty close to being ramped up on just the colors themselves. I'm gonna come down to the base colors, actually, below all the lighting we've done so far and pick like a warm, warmish red color. Let's see what this looks like. Had a little bit of this on her nose and ears because ears the lights coming through them. You can actually see all of the they call it subsurface scattering. It's like all the world of blood is visible through the light. There could see how it starts to look more like we're seeing through it. I'm adding in a little bit stronger at the top than the bottom. This is actually just on the base. Colors on the very bottom is not really any of the lights layers we've made so far. If you want to push that even further, we can make that a little bit brighter, more saturated. Really? All right, so I think these colors air looking pretty good. And if you want to make things look really reflective to go back to just my direct light layer, get a really bright color in this case, will a little bit of yellow in it and then maybe, ah, maybe a smaller brush. And I just want to get a little touch of basically white in here in a couple of places. It makes the skin look a little bit more reflective. And I'm being again very easy where putting this in, just a couple of places, and it makes it look a little bit more reflective. Usual small speculum highlights. It doesn't take much. All right, so I think read a good stopping spot on all of the main colors for now. So let's move on to the next one 11. Color holds & glows: All right. So the industry term for changing the color of the lines is called color holds, At least in the comics world they call that color holds, there's two ways to do it. The first depends on whether or not you're Leinart was created in the app that you're working on or if it was imported, I'm gonna show you both ways. So, for example, these inks were created in procreate. Okay, when we turn everything else off for now, except for the background. So the only thing that I have to do if I want to change the color of these lines because there is no white on the ink slayer, there's no paper. I just hit Alfa Lock. Okay, so it Alfa lock. And that makes everything else that's not black on this layer. Transparent. Okay, if I were to get a brush and start coloring, I can just call it on the lines, okay? And that's what we'll do for this in a second. But let's say that you had an image like more of the J pegs from this lesson. I'll go ahead and pull one in for you here and show you So we're gonna import the J pig. All right, so this is a JPEG. Okay, So the black and whites all on the same layer. If I try to Alfa lock this, it doesn't really do anything. Because in this case, there's black lines and white paper all in the same image. And so the Alfa Lock hides the transparent pixels, and there are no transparent pixels here. Okay, So what do you do with that? There's a lot of ways to do this, but I'll show you how to do it in procreate. First, we copy the contents of this layer. So with that layer highlighted, I'm just going to click. Copy. I'm gonna make a new layer. I'm gonna fill this layer with black because we're gonna be using a mask in order to create our lines. All right, so I'm gonna fill this all with black. Now, once I've got my layer that's feel with black, I'm gonna select that again and click mask. So I've got a mask layer now. So now all I'm gonna do is I'm gonna select my mask, not the blank layer, but select the mask and paste this three finger swipe down to paste and procreate. Okay, I'll do that one more time. So I've got my blank layer. I've got my mask clear. I'm gonna three finger swipe down and click paste and then just go up to that layer. Same layer mask and click. Invert. Now I can delete my inks, and I have a version of my inks with transparency, so it's a little convoluted, but that's the best way that I found to do that in appropriate so one more time, because I know there's a lot of steps they're using. One of my example exercises. You don't have to do this because it was drawn in procreate. So let's delete all this. We're going to copy on three fingers swept down copy, make a new layer, fill it with black. Take that layer and add a mask and then paste into the mask and then invert the mask. Now what this is technically doing, because I know some of you guys play when I want to know. The mask is hiding everything that is that you see that's black on the mask doesn't show up . Everything that's white on the mask comes through is black. That's what we have here. Okay, So if I want a color, there's these lines. Now I can go to the layer below, Like, in this case, the black layer that's fill in black, choose a different color and get the same effect. But if you take the mascot of the equation, this is what's actually what we're looking at. Okay? So if you're not familiar with mask, I've got some courses on that, too. But it's a It's a great way toe control where things appear on an image and where they don't. Okay. And my rule of thumb for if I want to change the color of the lines is basically to never go lighter than the darkest color in that area. Okay, so what I mean is find the darkest color, which is probably what, that on the hair and go a little darker. Okay. Was gonna pull this down a little bit more and then this time, 100% opacity, We'll see what this looks like. I can just start painting this in here. Just right on top. The lines. You'll notice I'm not covering her skin or her neck here. I'm just doing the hair. So now we've got all the hair done. Now there is another way that you can do this. Like I said, there's a lot of ways to do things and procreate. So if I go back and undo all of this and if I have my inks Alfa locked, which right now I do. I've got an awful lot checked. I can make a layer on top and just make this a clipping mask and we can call this color holds. So now it acts just like these clipping mask below. But all of these clipping mask here are clipped to the base colors. And then we've got our inks and we've got a clipping mask clipped to the inks. Makes sense, and this makes a little bit easier to make selections and procreate. So let's say that I go in and let's go in color. This I'll just speed through recovering this hair again, or it might be faster to just use the freehand tool and select the hair. In that way, we don't have to worry about staying in the lines workers as closely. Either way, it works. But the benefit of doing it on a clipping mask like this is that I can easily go in with the automatic selection tool. Select those areas. Actually, right now, I've got my flat set. His reference. So let's uncheck reference from the flats layer. Then use our selection tool. Now we can darken or lighten this or change the saturation or the color actually got it a little bit purple, which it kinda link easy to do. And you could do the same thing for the rest of the image if you wanted to. You know, like I really like leaving it. Just has her hair for now. But let's say that you did want to maybe get darker on her skin in places. Then we can come in with layer on top of that if we wanted to and feel that in maybe these lines in her here, that kind of makes sense. Color those. Now we can do our glowy thing. Now, I said that we were gonna have this thing glow blue, but the lines themselves I'm gonna make them white. You'll see why in a second, because objects that are glowing tend actually have their base color as white most of the time, like the core of it. will be white. Then we do our glows on top of them. So for special effects, gonna make a new layer, we're gonna put it on top of everything. Gonna call it. Special effects are S f X. I'm gonna set the mode to screen. Actually, before I said it screen, I want to show you guys something. Gonna fill it with black. You're thinking What? What on earth were you thinking? Okay, we're gonna set the mood of this layer to screen. Okay? Screen's gonna hide all the blind, but it gives us something for the colors. Were choosing toe work with their Okay. Now we can go pick a color, get a really bright saturated blue, big, soft brush. And here's our glows. Probably overkill. Thought I would try it and see what it looked like. So you just subtle glow and there you have it. And if you wanted to procreate, actually has some cool luminant Russia's they call it. There's ah, brush. They call the light pin, and it also creates this kind of glowy effect. So if you wanted toe like trace around some of these rings with that effect, you could and this will look better, actually, Probably against a darker background. Yeah, And I'm gonna use that same color, actually, that same bright blue on the direct light layer to add some reflections on these the jewelry. And you could even get on top of your special effects. Here, go back to your, uh, special effects layer and maybe make some some subtle glows here, too. Maybe on the side of the belt buckle. All right, so But that is how I change the color lines. And that's how I do glows. So we're getting close to wrapping this up. Well, the next couple lessons will talk about ways to kind of tweak the lighting and tweak the final product a little bit. So let's move on. 12. Final polish: All right, So in this lesson, let's say you want to change the overall feel of the image and you'll see why we're working on different layers now. So let's say, for example, that instead of this being lit by the sun, you want to be lit by the moon. Okay? Are a nightlight or something you'd see at night. So first thing we could do is just shift the color of the direct light. Okay, Now, I'm gonna make a duplicate of this. Just swipe to the left, Duplicate. You can see it actually doubles the effect, too. So I'm gonna turn this one off and just gonna go to the hue, saturation, brightness and change color. Okay, So I can choose more of, ah, blue or green, change the saturation. If we want change the hell bright or dark it is. Maybe we darken it because it's not quite as strong. Then we could do the same thing with the indirect light. Just shift the the color of their different way. Completely different lighting effects. That actually is one way to kind of increase. The strength of your lights is if you took this direct, likelier, duplicated and then just lower the opacity like let's say you don't want it all the way double. You just want it. You know, Brighton in a few places so we could change the opacity of that second layer, and it's gonna change how much of that shows up here. And then I could merge that down if I want. But another good way to kind of affect the overall output of how the colors look is to do adjustments on top, and there's lots and lots of ways to do this. One cool way is to use overlay. So if I make a new layer and set it to overlay and just drop in a color, it doesn't really matter what color you can see that it completely changes the overall. You know, look of this. Now we can take that same color and adjust the hue. We can adjust the saturation level, we can adjust the brightness of it, and then we give it all these different effects. What I like to do well, so it's clear this layer is to pick a color. That's that's pretty close to about halfway down the color picker. Okay, uh, and let's say on, Let's make it a blue. For example. If I drop that in when you pick a color that's in the middle, it tends to do a pretty good job of affecting the colors and interesting ways. You can always adjust the opacity, too. So let's say that affects a little strong, and we only wanted affected this much. It's a way to kind of tie the the colors together a little bit. There's the effect often on, and you can control this with a mask. So let's say, for example, that you like this look. But you don't really want very much of it on the side with light weaken. Just click that layer, make a new mask and anywhere that we paint with black on the mask. It's gonna hide that fact. Okay, I want to make this really obvious. So you guys conceive, So I'm gonna spreading this all the way back up our capacities back 100. And now if I start painting this in here, you're going to see that it's pulling. That blew away from this site it's doing on the background to, but I just want to use this as an example. See the difference that's turning the mask often on. We could even drag this layer down and it automatically becomes a clipping mask, actually, which is pretty cool. But see now on this side, that blue usually not affecting this site. And there's this. That's the effect that we're actually getting. So, like there's other places I want to paint this out. I can just come in with black and maybe a little bit on her. Eager. I don't want this to be in shadow quite as much. And there's our effect. Also. Just give you some more interesting. You know, color mixing is going on now. If this was a comic, I would say that that her right leg, the left lung we're looking at is probably a little dark, so I can come into that mask layer on the overlay layer and paint some of that away. If I wanted to brighten it up some now, once all is said and done, if you guys do you want to drop in some kind of background to this, it's just a matter of coming underneath everything. Make a new layer, and you can drop that color in or do any number of effects that you wanted to do here. So let's say let's make this kind of dark, kind of like that dark against all that and then just maybe put a subtle Grady in behind and one last trick. I'll show you here in procreate, since it doesn't really have a adjustment layer. If you're familiar with photo shop or clip studio, are any number of art studio pro that has adjustment layers once you're ready for the adjustments and you get everything else done if you three finger swipe and and procreate and copy all and then make a new layer on top three fingers wiped down to paste, it basically puts a copy of the entire image on one layer. Okay, so we can see it right there. We can turn everything else in here off, and it's not gonna change anything, because all of this is on one layer by itself. So the entire contents of all the layers are on one layer and then with that layer, if you wanted to say do a color balance adjustment, let's say you wanted toe increase the greens or you want to take this little bit more bluer or you want O make it really blew or whatever effects you want to do to it, make all of those changes. And I'm just kind of playing around with this a little bit here. There's really no formula for any of this stuff, just kind of playing around with it. And now I've got an adjustment of everything that I've done so far. And I could even use this with a mask if I wanted to and paint that effect out of certain areas. All right, so I think we are ready to wrap it up. 13. Conclusion: all right. I hope you guys have enjoyed this little demo walk through, and I've had a lot of fun making it. And again, remember that these are just some ideas. Okay? I'm going to get you guys thinking in the right direction on some of this stuff. You know, none of this is meant to be gospel, that you have to work this way or that. These are the rules, you know, I just want to show you guys kind of what my process looks like to do. Sort of a really polished finish piece like this. And hopefully you learn something. So thanks for watching. And be sure to check out my other courses if you're interested and hope to see you guys in the next one take care.