Transcripts
1. Introduction to the Class: Hi, my name is Chloe and I'm a freelance artist on digital content creator on YouTube. On my channel, I make helpful advice videos, hack videos, silly kind of videos, SpeakPipe videos. I've been a digital artists for eight years and I have my work published twice this year, once in a magazine and the second is a book coming out next month. Digital arts and digital painting is one of the newest forms of creating artwork in the modern world. I have been doing it for such long time now that I feel I have a lot of knowledge to share and I've done so in this class. What am I going to teach you in this class? I'm going to teach you the very fundamentals of digital arts, and I'm going to teach you how to create a final finished piece. You're going to start out by learning about tablets, software, resolution, printing, and much more. I'm going to teach you how I accurately draw from a reference but realistically and accurately because this is one question that I get so much and I felt that it was a topic I needed to cover in this class. At the end of the class you can show you what with me for a feedback and critique. Who is this class for? This class is for anyone that's wanting to become a better digital artists, because I have started way from the very beginning, the fundamentals. If you already know these things and you're more of an intermediate artist, there's still definitely a lot you'll be able to learn from this class because I'm talking about my entire drawing process and I feel that I have shared a lot of knowledge that may be helpful to anyone that's a digital artist. What will you be able to do by the end of this class? By the end of this class, you'll have drawn your very own digital drawing, portrait of your favorite TV show character, your favorite movie character, your favorite singer, it's up to you. It doesn't matter what you're drawing, but we're going to be creating something with your very own hands. A lot of people think that being an artist is all just talent, but it's not, it's a lot of hard work too. It goes into a lot of practice, a lot of dedication, and a lot of time. That's something that I standby quite heavily. I hope you decide to take this class. I really hope that I can help you learn. I look forward to seeing what you create.
2. Project: Okay, so as with any other Skillshare class, there's always a project at the end of the class that you complete because of what you've learned throughout the class. For this class projects, you're going to be drawing a portray. It can be someone from your favorite TV show, your favorite movie, your favorite musician. It can even be a picture of yourself. As long as you are creating a portrait of some kind, it doesn't matter. You're going to share it right at the end of the class for all of us to see and for me to give you feedback on. I'm very excited to see what you create. So I'm just going to teach you how to sketch it all out and house completely, finish it and complete it. I look forward to seeing what you come up with, and I look forward to seeing you in the class project comments.
3. Tablets: If you're watching this video, it means that you have an interest in drawing tablets, getting hold of one, or seeing a comparison of different tablets. There are two different types of digital tablets, and that is one like this, a screen tablet. This is a Wacom Cintiq, and it is my absolute favorite thing in the entire world. Tablets like this, screen tablets, you draw on the screen and it makes life a lot easier. It's a lot more natural to a regular piece of paper. If you do have the budget for it, I'd recommend it. But if you are just starting out, I definitely don't recommend spending a huge amount of money on a tablet because you might find that you don't enjoy it or you feel that you want to get a lot more practice in before you feel that it's worth it to spend that a lot of money on a tablet like this. This is the Wacom Cintiq 13 inch HD tablet. It runs for about $800, it's quite expensive. It's not as expensive as the bigger ones are but if you are just starting out, I don't really recommend splurging out on a huge amount of money unless you truly feel that digital art is something that you are going to enjoy. Give it a little bit of practice first before you do decide to take the dive into the expensive tablets. Then you have these much cheaper tablets which aren't screen tablets at all. Instead, you use this as a piece of paper and look at the screen as you are drawing. It's unnatural to do this at first and it takes it a little bit of getting used to, but it doesn't take long and they're a lot cheaper. They're well under $100. This is a Wacom Intuos tablet, this one runs $60 to $70. I highly recommend Wacom tablet, they are really, really good and they're very long-lasting as well. I've had three Wacom tablets in my eight years and I absolutely love them. This is the small size so you might feel that you want something a little bit bigger. If not, you can definitely work with this and I recommend it highly. I was recently sent a tablet from Huion. This is very similar to the Wacom tablet I just showed you. It is bigger, it has a nice bigger working space area. Huion is a company that are really starting to dominate the tablet world. Wacom is the tablet giant but Huion is following closely along behind because their tablets are more budget friendly and it works the same as the Wacom tablet that I just showed you. You basically draw on the surface and look at the screen as you draw. Something you need to keep in mind when purchasing a tablet, you need something with pen pressure. Pen pressure, very simply put, is where you have more natural sense of drawing. The harder you press with the pen, the thicker the stroke will be on the screen, the lighter you press, the thinner the stroke will be. That's what pen pressure does, it makes it a lot more natural, a lot more easier. So trust me when I say, do not get a tablet without it. It's the most important feature you can look for in a tablet no matter what the brand. All the topics I've just mentioned to you I will put in a resources document in the class description. I'll put links to all of these things and proper detailed information but for now, if you don't want to pick a tablet, you don't want to spend out the money and you want to start the class right away, feel free to use your mouse or laptop touch pad. That's what I did in my early digital art days, it's difficult, but possible. I'll see you in the next video where we're going to talk about software.
4. Software: Digital software is fundamental to any form of digital painting because without the software, you're not going to be able to paint anything. There are some that are made specifically for drawing. There are some that are made for other things, but people use this drawing. In this class, I personally I'm going to be using Photoshop because it's what I most experienced in and what I enjoy using the most. But even if you're not using Photoshop, you can definitely use some of the free programs that I'm talking about, because a lot of them are laid out similarly so it won't be too difficult for you to be able to follow along. Photoshop CS6 is what I have, is what I've owned for about five years now. It's my favorite drawing program. It's actually a photo editing software, so it's not made specifically for digital painting, but I know lots of artists myself included who actually do use it because of the amount of features and freedom that it offers. It's a very natural way to draw and I really enjoy using it. There are also other programs you can use. I personally do recommend Photoshop because again, it's what I most experienced in or more I enjoy using, however, is the most expensive program you can use. I think it runs for about $20 a month. You can get a free trial, if you just want to do this class download the free trial, I recommend it highly. If not, it's about $20 a month, which can break the bank depending on what your budget is. The second option is Paint Tool SAI. This is made specifically for digital painting. It comes with a lot preloaded brushes as those of Photoshop, but these are specially made for artists. Brushes are very important, but I personally download them anyway, so it doesn't make much difference to me. I have never used Paint Tool SAI, I've heard a lot of people that really love it as opposed Photoshop. I've also heard people say it's not as a natural as Photoshop and they prefer the layout of photoshop. Which I agree with, I don't really like the way Paint Tool SAI looks, but I've seen people make amazing pieces. This is a paint full software. I'm not sure exactly the cost of the Paint Tool SAI, but I will put it up here if I can find it. As far as I'm aware, Paint Tool SAI one payment thing. It's a cheaper alternative to Photoshop. From what I've heard however, there isn't a lot of support left for Paint Tool SAI, because photoshop itself has been around for such a long period of time. There was a lot of tutorials and support from Adobe itself. If you're looking for something that has a lot of support Photoshop will definitely outweigh the price of Paint Tool SAI. Next step, I'm going to be talking about two free software you can use if you're not willing to spend any money on a drawing software. Now, Krita or Krita on not sure how you pronounce it is a new drawing software that I've heard about recently. I've had some good reviews on it again. It's based around digital painters. It's specifically made for that purpose. You might want to get this to go because it is free and I have heard good things about it. I again don't know a lot about it, but people tell me that it's pretty good. If you all give something free give that go, there's also GIMP, which is a free software, like a simplified Photoshop. It's not made specifically for digital painting, but I've seen people make some amazing pieces. That's it for software. I hope that this made sense to you. Again, I have a resources document in the class description with links to all of these particular things I've been talking about and I will see you in the next video.
5. Lesson 1: Workspace: This is the first lesson in this class. Before I begin, I just want to make sure that we both are having the same screen because I know from experience, it's very annoying if someone is teaching you something and you haven't solved, got certain boxes up on the window or your screens are your programs different. It's showing different options. I'm just going to talk you through what you need. For this class, you're just going to need the tools at the side, you're going to need the options at the top, and going to need the layers. If you don't have some of these aspects, all you need to do is go to window at the top and make sure that layers, options, and tools are checked. If I was to get rid of layers, it would disappear at the side here. You always want to make sure that you have that option available because layers are incredibly important to all digital drawing. Options controls the bar at the top, and tools controls the bar on the side. You just want to make sure that you have both of those because without this top bar, you wouldn't be able to control the brush tool, it controls everything you need to know. That's where we're going to stop and I look forward to getting into the class with you.
6. Lesson 2: Resolution: Before we begin, we're just going to go to File, New and open up the options for a new workspace. This should be the same no matter what program you're using. But I just want to cover this option right here, Resolution. I want you to consider what the piece you're creating is going to be used for. If you're using your piece, then it's just going to be displayed on a monitor on a screen. It's never going to be printed. 72 DPI resolution is perfectly fine. DPI stands for dots per inch, and 72 is an acceptable form for computer screens. Computers don't need as many pixels to display an image whereas when you're printing an image, it requires this to be at least 300 DPI. I don't know if you've ever printed, a photo and you've had it come and it's not been great quality. It's been kind of blurry, pixelated. That's because the image more than likely was not at 300 DPI. You have to have this bigger image resolution quality. You have to have better resolution quality to have it print any decent level. Always keep that in mind. For this class, if you're just going to be practicing, 72 is perfectly fine, so we can just set it at that. But other than that, if it's going to be printed, make sure it's set at 300 DPI.
7. Lesson 3: Tools: I'm just going to talk you through a few of the features we're going to be using in this class. I'm not going to talk about all of the tools and things because we're not going to be using all of them. But even if you're not using Photoshop, that's certainly fine. You'll be able to follow along perfectly well enough. Most of the icons look the same and they act the same, so it doesn't really matter what program you're using. But just for the sake of this class, I'm going to talk through the features that I'm going to be using. First of all, the most important one is, of course, the Brush tool. If you click on that and then click on this little arrow up here, it displays all of your brushes. There are options here, including the Size, meaning that you can take one of these brushes, have it this size. If you increase the size of the brush, it's going to be bigger. Hardness basically just changes the softness of the brush. I never really use this feature much, so you shouldn't have to worry about it. That's all it does. It basically softens the edges of the brushes. Next, we have Opacity and Flow which I'm not going to talk to you about, because I talked to you about that in the brush lesson. But basically, this controls transparency and similarly to flow, but again I'll talk about that a bit later. Then we have the Eraser tool, which is right here. It looks like a little eraser. It has the same features as the Brush tool. You have these brushes, so you can erase with the shape of these brushes, which is cool. Again, you've got Opacity and Flow to control your eraser brush just to erase if you want to. Of course, you can change the size and the hardness. Next up, we have the Paint Bucket tool, which does what it did in Microsoft Paint, if you ever used that. It fills in a color, that's what it does. Then you have, if you click and hold down, you'll see the Gradient tool. What this does is it creates a gradient of the colors that are right here. If I do this, it's going to have a nice little gradient color. I'm not going to use this feature, but it's quite cool to know that, that is there if you ever want to use that in the future. Another tool that I use is the Eyedropper tool. This one selects any color. I use this a lot because you color pick the colors from your reference, and then it will change the color here. You can just take your brush and then fill in with that color that you've got. That's what it does. It can pick color. I pick the red, go to my paintbrush, and it'll be red. That's how that works. What else can we talk about? The Magnifying Glass tool which zooms out and in, very simple, very easy to use. I use this a lot again. Another cool feature about Photoshop is you can pull your windows out and you can move them around and change the size if you want to. These are some basic tools. This here is your Layers panel, which I will, again, be talking about in a separate video. You always want to have this up. Make sure that you do. It's very helpful. Other than that, we're not going to be using any of these other features here. You can use the Selection tool and select a certain area if you want to move it. So say, I want to move this section, I can then take this Cursor tool and then move it. That's fun to work with if you feel that you've placed a certain facial feature in the wrong place. I'm not really going to be using any of these other features on Photoshop, just the ones I've talked about. Hopefully, that makes sense. If you do have any questions, however, do feel free to let me know in the comments or the class projects. Give me a question and I'll do my best to answer you. Yes, hopefully, this helps and I look forward to seeing what you create.
8. Lesson 4: Choosing an Image: Now it is time to pick a reference photo. This can be as easy or difficult as you want it to be because the project of this class is to create to one of our favorite characters, move film, a movie or TV show. It could even be a picture of yourself. But it has to be a decent enough quality to draw from, especially when you're starting out. You need to make it as easy for yourself as you can. I'm just going to go through a few images here. This is Jenna Coleman, this is who I'm going to be drawing. She's from Doctor Who, if you want to know. I like Doctor Who. There's a lot of decent pictures of her on Google Images, this is the best place to look really. Some are going to be better than others to draw from, whereas others aren't going to be as good. Most of these are actually very high quality, so that's fine. This one, for example, would not be something I would recommend doing. It's very difficult, it's far away. It's going to be very difficult to, even if you zoom in on this image, it can be very difficult to draw anything decent with facial features. You want something that's going to be closer up like this and you want something that's going to be decent quality. You don't want something that's too small, you don't want something that's too dark. We want something that's going to have a little bit of variation. It's totally up to you, what you decide to pick. I feel something like this. Try not to pick something that's just very bright in the face so it's all just one color basically, because you're not going to really learn much from that. The image that I'm going to go for this is, if I can open up here, this one. I felt this was really good. The quality is decent. Even if this is a 100 percent, even if I zoom in, I can still see her features pretty decently. It has that nice variation in shadow to light. I'm going to have a nice time blending that in. You've got a lot of colors in her hair which I'm going to be covering the hair and be covering how to blend, how to highlight, how to shade, that thing. Something like this would work really well. Just make sure it's a decent enough quality to make it easier for yourself and don't make it too dark. This image is probably a little bit too big, so I'm just going to crop this. This is the crop tool right here. I'm just going to get rid of this unnecessary space I really do not need, tick and that's just crop the image. It's up to you entirely. When I was first starting out, I found it difficult when copying from a reference, visualize the distance between, say, the eyes, from the nose to the eyes. If the image was, say, this small, and then I was drawing on the canvas that was this big, when you're first starting out, it's difficult to perceive that and train your eyes to see it that way. You might want to have the image a similar size to the canvas you're working on. It's totally up to you. Some people do, some people don't. But what you can do is if you want to figure out the size of your reference image, is go to Image, Image Size, and it will tell you right here. The width is 743 by 799. Hopefully I'll remember that. If you now test because it is a web image, again, it's at 72 resolution. We're going to work with 72 because we're not really printing or drawing of a filter which doesn't belong to us. We're going to do sample 43 by 799, that's if I remember that. We're going to go to File, New. This is the size of a picture here. What I'm going to do is I'm basically going to do this exact size. But I'm thinking, if I pull this out and it's separate, that I'm going to want it to be a little bit bigger than that. What I'll probably do is if I go to Image, then Image Size and then I do percent, 200 percent. W is big for me to be able to zoom in properly, but I can draw the same size if I just zoom out 50 percent. We're going to get started on that and you can work with them side-by-side if that makes it easier for you. Or you can zoom out on this image if you feel that you can work with it like that, it's totally up to you. Once you've picked your image, you can get started making your canvas size the right size. Yeah, that's it for this class. Let's get on with the next video.
9. Lesson 5: Brushes: Before we begin to draw anything, I want to guide you guys through brushes, what they are, how you can get them, how you can use them, what you use them for. Now brushes essentially are the digital equivalent of a pencil or a paint brush of a marker pen. They're basically what you use to draw digitally they're what you use they are like this. This is just the very, very really basic digital brush, Photoshop, Paint to psi, Krita. They all come with default brushes that you can use. All you have passed, made full drawings with just the default brushes so you don't need to worry too much about downloading some, but I highly recommend that you do because it's incredibly important to give yourself the best stabilities when it comes to digital art. Was that the best word? I don't think that was about word but you have a whole bunch of digital art brushes here. These ones I've actually physically downloaded because they do come with so many default brushes. I ended up deleting the ones I've never used and we'll never use. I only have the first like five brushes head are just the Photoshop defaults. The rest are all ones I've downloaded. Some of my favorite brushes I have put into a resources document, which is filled with information and everything you need to know about this class. It should be in the class description, a link to the Dropbox document. It contains links to where you can download these brushes and everything. Just keep that in mind. There are so many different kinds of brushes, different textures like this is one texture for example and then you have this one which is nice for blending and then you have this one here, which is nice for backgrounds. This is my absolute favorite background brush but I'm not sure where got it from, I got it from ages ago but it's my favorite brushes, really cool. Keep that in mind, this is what brushes are for. You can get so many different effects. You can get watercolor brushes, you can get like oil paint brushes. You can get lots of different things just with simple google search and the ones I've provided in the resources page are free. Make sure you do check these out. Now, I want to talk to you about how you download brushes. Once you've gone to the links I have provided and downloaded the brushes, what you do is to click on the Brush tool right here. Go up here to this arrow to little cog. Load brushes. If you click Load brushes and find your brushes, it will instantly put them into here. As you can see, when I went to load brushes and I've got to downloads, I've got this lowish brush art which I absolutely love. Click on it, open, boom their in there. I now have two sets of these brushes which I don't need, but they're there now. You've got those. That's how you install them. They should be there when you close the program, it's all saved in there. Now I'm going to talk to you about opacity and flow. These are two incredibly important things you're going to need to know when working with digital painting and blending especially that's what is important for. I'm just going to go with this very default Photoshop brush. I'm going to pick a very vibrant, bright, obnoxious color here. Now, opacity is basically transparency. That's what opacity is. A 100 percent opacity It's just going to be one solid color. If I bring the opacity down, it's going to be more transparent. Pretty down further again, is going to be very transparent. That's how it works and with opacity, if you're holding it down is an unnatural way because if you're using a physical marker, the more you go over something, it's going to build up and it's going to get darker. But for opacity, you have to literally lift off your hand from the tablet and then lift it down again and then it's going to build up the color. But that's the only way you have to keep lifting your pen off to build up the color. I love opacity its really helped me blend in the past and that's how it works. I'm going to bring this up again. Flow is slightly different. It works more of a natural way. For example, a 100 percent is just going to be like that. Perfectly fine. If we bring it down, what I did here with the opacity will not happen. It will be continuous flow like regular marker. If I bring that down a little bit more, as you can see, the more I go over the lines, the more the darker it gets where previously drawn, if that makes sense. If I just bring that down, as you can see it builds up itself in one stroke. You can build up constantly like that. You may find that you prefer flow, but you want to use a balance of both. It's totally up to you because I can bring the opacity down, bring flow up, and then have this difference color and shading. Keep that in mind, I hope that makes sense to you. Basically, flow allows you to build up the color on top of the previous color. Like that, it just allows you to do that. Whereas opacity, you have to keep lifting your hand off the tablet in order to build up like that. Keep that in mind that they're both similar but they do work differently and its a balanced both. So you want it, feel free to experiment with that little bit before we do anything to just get yourself used to it because this is one of the most vital things you ever going to learn about brushes and digital painting.
10. Lesson 6: Layers: I want to get into layers and what they are and how you can utilize them because they're very important and they help you greatly in digital painting. Now this is a digital painting I did probably two-and-a-half years ago. There was a lot more layers at the time, but I ended up merging a lot of them and moving them around. But layers are incredibly helpful because they allow you to build upon your initial sketch into something better. You can hide previous layers to get rid of the rubbish parts. This probably isn't the best example, but it's the only ones I have saved as this particular file format. As you can see, this was merged into one layer so I did the eyeballs in different layers. But if I move this layer, you can see here where I went behind this layer, because I noticed there was a few patches I missed in his eyeballs and in his hair so I ended up doing a new layer and just drawing black all underneath to cover up tiny bits I missed. The background here is on different layers because I was building up and I was like, "I don't like that so I'm going to build up to make it like that." If I give you a better example, instead of these bits bits missing, hiding sets or have made improvements, added upon things without ruining it. If I show you a better example, when you make a new image, you start off with the background layer. If you click this little icon here, it makes a new layer. Say I'm going to draw a rubber sheet stick man called Fred. Here's Fred. Fred is very sad because he's supposed to be in a garden but he's not. We could say, well, let's give Fred some grass. Oh, no. The grass is over the top of him and it's not supposed to be. If I go back to the background layer, I can either draw on the background layer or I can make a new layer to be underneath Fred. Let's name this Fred because you can name your layers and that's important so you know what's what. If I go ahead, create a new layer to be Antony Fred, I can then draw grass and have it be behind Fred. This may seem like a very simplistic way to put it, but that's basically all there is to it. When you're drawing your initial sketches, for example, let's make another layer. Say this is your initial sketch. This is really bad, but say that's a head you've done, all magic. Then you're like, "Right this is rubbish. I'm going to now build upon it." You can take another color or whatever you want to do. Make a new layer, draw upon that, draw the eyes, draw the nose and the mouth or whatever you want to do. Then improve the facial structure and you're like," I don't need those green lines anymore so I can get rid of them." That's basically how it works. It's important to master how to use layers, because they're very important intage to art. Again, you don't need them, but honestly they really will help your life greatly. All of you've often, myself, done something with the piece and you're like, "I really like that eye but I think I can make it better." If you're an artist, you know that sometimes when you try to improve something that's already quite good, you can often ruin it. What I like to do is say, "Okay. I like this eye but just in case I can make it better, I'm going to make a new layer and try to make it better. But if it's worse, I can always delete that layer or remove it later and just go back to the original eyeball." I hope that makes sense. That's all there is to it really. I love your layers as you can see and a lot these were merged so there was a lot more layers when I was doing it. I'm terrible, I don't name mine, but I recommend greatly that you do, so yes. To just quickly talk about when you're saving your files. It's very important that you save it correctly. If you are using layers like this and you want to save your image and come back to it later with the same layers. You're going to want to save it differently as to how you'd save it if you were just finishing up with it. What you want to do is you want to go to File, Save As, and then you want to make sure that it's saved as a PSD, which is Photoshop format. This way, whenever you open this image up on the computer, it's always going to preserve these layers. If you're saving it as a PNG, it's going to flatten the image and you're not going to be able to open up with these layers ever again. Make sure if you are still working on it or you want to come back to it a later date, save it as PSD, Photoshop format. Other than that, whenever you finish with an image, PNG is my favorite format and it's the best format to save digital paintings. That's basically it. Just make sure you're saving it correctly and in the right place.
11. Lesson 7: Visualizing for Accuracy : Right. I want to talk to you guys through what you need to do in order to look at a reference and train your eyes and your mind to see it as a shape instead of just an overwhelming amount of detail. The biggest thing a lot of artists try to do in that they'd like to draw from a reference is make as accurate as they possibly can. Now most of this comes with practice, but I'm going to teach you a few different tricks that you can use and sort of learn quicker to see things in a different way. A lot of the time it's hard for people to, and myself included when I especially first began to do something with any accuracy because it's just like you see a face, "It's like, oh my gosh, where do I start?" I personally like to draw with the shapes. Some artists tend to just color-grab, and then just do massive shapes like this and then work from there. I personally don't enjoy doing this. I don't find it of any help to me. I personally like to work with sketchy outline of what I'm seeing and then fill it in after. That's what's always worked for me. Might not work for you, but definitely just experiment a little bit. When it comes to trying to copy a reference, you need to visualize everything as a shape. If I take, again, on an obnoxious color, and we'll just change the size of this. I'm going to make a new layer on this so I'm not drawing on the base and I can remove after. Try and see everything here, like this. Instead of being overwhelmed with details, worry about details later. Details are not important. It's always going to look quite messy until you're completely finished. Don't worry about that. One of the biggest problems I see in people is they start to think their drawing looks bad and then they rush it and finish it and it does look bad because they're rushing it. No matter how you drawing is looking, there's always a way, especially with [inaudible] , she's so flexible, there's always a way to fix it. [inaudible] is one of the most flexible forms of drawing, especially when you have layers. Because again, if you mess up, you can start to draw a new layer and fix it. I've outlined the shape of a face here. This is how I want you to try and visualize the face shape. I always start firstly with the face shape, then I go for the eyes, the eyebrows, the nose, and then I do the lips last because I don't really enjoy drawing lips pretty much, never have. But just try and visualize everything as a shape instead of an overwhelming amount of detail. As you can see, I'm very badly and loosely just outlining this hair. Have a few tricks for drawing eyes, which I'll talk about. I'm going to talk about blending the skin and the hair, all in a later class video. But for now, we're going to focus on just the basics. Try not to get too overwhelmed and just follow along. What I'm doing at the moment, it's just trying to help you visualize the shapes of everything. These are all shapes. This is basically just straight line under her lips. What you can do if you are someone who struggles to visualize things in this manner, you can do what I'm doing. Start any layer, draw over that and then kind of make the basic shapes, and then what you can do afterwards is you can remove this background and see it like this. This may help you to visualize it, it may not. I used to do something similar to this when I was first starting out. It did help me. There's also something called the grid method, which you might find helpful. I'm not going to discuss that in this class, but there's a lot of information on it if you search the grid drawing method on Google. Try and visualize your picture as a shape, an oval shape. Trust me, when I say this will greatly help you. Try not to rush it. Because it's never going to look good if you're rushing it. Drawings take a long time. They take a long time. There we have it. Just some basic shapes. If it helps you, feel free to do this with your drawing and remove the background and look at it back and forth like that. That's where you can begin. I'm just going to move this because I don't do that anymore. I'm going to get going with an outline of her face.
12. Lesson 8: Sketch Part 1: As I said, I'm going to start off with doing an outline of her face. Now for this, I'm going to make sure that I'm not drawing on the background layer because trust me when I say if you draw on the background layer it's going to make your life a lot more difficult later on if you ever want to put a background in. Let's make sure you create a new layer, and we're going to name this outline. Do try to name your layers it will make it much more simple for you but I can't really talk because I don't do this very often, but do try to remember to do that, make it a habit. Now, I'm going to go with the default brush here, this comes with Photoshop. It's the hard round pressure brush, which means the harder I press the thicker the line. I've explained this before, but you know the drill. I'm going to go with, usually I edit the colors round on the photo, and have my own colors and things but to keep the purpose of this video simple, I'm just going to go with the colors that are already here. If I go to the color picker tool here, which is this little eyedropper tool here. I'm going to pick one of these colors, maybe this one, might be a good one. As you can see, the colors change as you click around but I think I'll go with the semi-light colors. Sometimes I'll start with gray, but sometimes I'll color pick. I have started my new layer. I have my pictures. I've made sure that this is nice and big, so you can see what I'm doing. I believe that's everything I need to say, so let's get started with the outline. Always remember, details come last, so try not to worry too much about it being perfect right away. So many people they give up because they think it's not good. Something you might find quite helpful, is when you are looking at this hair, let me get rid of this layer. You might want to start a new layer and focus on the hair line, and the chin. Then you can always draw a line straight up, straight through the face. This is not very straight, but you get where I'm going with this. Then you can gauge, what's on this side of the line, how this outlined line works in comparison to the straight line. For example this one up here, you got about this much space from, say, this side of her face, and this much space from this side of her face. Making lines can help, there's no right or wrong way to do this. Just do what feels easiest and best for you. I'm going to focus on her chin a little bit at the moment. If I was to visually think of a line up here. There is a lot less space, so I need to make this a little bit wider. For example I'm looking at her hairline right now, and it starts, straight line down, it meets the side of her chin here. I want to say about there but again, it doesn't have to be perfect. I've just slightly tried to clean up this little bit of a mess that I made before, to make it a little bit less harsh. Doesn't really look much different, but just try to make it a little bit neater, so I can see the wood for the trees. That's probably a good size right there. I've made her slightly bigger so I can focus on the face better, and just need to rearrange this a little bit. If you have a small computer screen this might be quite difficult, hence why it might be a better idea to just draw the reference picture smaller but if you are trying to begin to get your proportions right, then you might want to have it, similar size to what you're drawing on. A great way to visualize the face is to compare certain features to others. For example, for us to get to this reference picture here, say make a new layer, compare the chin distance to the distance of say the outer corner of the eye, so you're working with that much distance. Same goes for the bottom of the lip and the chin, you have much distance. From the lip to the chin maybe about there, it's probably not too accurate, but we'll just go with that for now. Then the eye is probably going to be a straight line up to maybe, let's go about here. Going to go with about that there. I might have to rearrange the shape of this but I'm going to say that's about right, feel free to use finger measurements, or pen measurements if you think that's going to help. Yeah about there, about the distance in widths, but this needs to be shaped slightly differently to accommodate that. Now I'm going to work on the shape of the eye, I'm going to just get rid of this cause it's been annoying in the way. I'm just going to work on the shape of her eye. This can go away cause it's annoying. Let's just open a new layer. Then on this shape, you're going to focus on this right here. You're going to focus a lot on the pupil. The pupil tells a lot because you can see how much white of the eye there is from the outside of the pupils, and you can see the shape a little bit as well. Try and focus on this in particular. Then you can do the eyelids afterwards, and take into account the line for the eyeliner as well, and so you just want to visualize it like that. Another piece of advice I can give you is try not to look too closely to the screen. Try and take a step back a little bit, because I tend to have a habit of getting really close to the screen, to look at the features, and then I realize I'm looking so closely I add it further away it looks absolutely terrible. Every now and again just make sure you take a break, take a look back and then just keep going. Once you finish one eye, it's easier to do the second because you're able to gauge from the inner corner from this eye, to the inner corner of this eye and then see the distance like that. It's not like an inch. Just figure out where you're going with it, and then just begin. Again, don't worry about details. Details come later, so you're just laying down the foundation work at the moment and we can always change it. I always end up, changing things much later on, so keep that in mind. I've got the basis of the eyes here, and now I'm going to get started on the nose.
13. Lesson 8: Sketch Part 2: Now we're going to work on the nose. Again, if we decide to map out what we're doing on here, we can see that the inner corner of this eye, is almost a straight line right down to the side of her nose and the side of our nose go straight up almost to the corner of the other eye. So just visualize it like that. This is the width of our nose, take look at these lines, try and map out, best you can with your eyes and just do your best to visualize it. If you reference pictures like this one, in that you've got quite a bright highlight this way from the lighting angle, you can definitely go ahead and solve, try and shape out the nose because obviously this isn't too visible on the picture, but this is what we going for, the aim of the drawing and just map out the nose if it helps you and then you can just see what you need to do, I always found that helped me just give it a go. One thing I of struggle with especially when was first starting out was trying to picture how the angles worked with the features when copying from a reference, for example, this eye is low than this one perhaps, draw straight line here, you would say that this eye is about this distance higher than this eye, same with nostrils. The nostrils of this one is slightly lower than this nostril line, but you can see it's slightly lower than this nostril hair. It's really training your brain, which again, it takes practice but definitely feel free to use and utilize lines to guide yourself, like you can see the distance between this line, and this line is the distance from the eye to the bottom of this nostril, you've got this line. So say along here, and then you can go up here. It's totally up to you how you do it, but I definitely recommend when trying to really get your proportions correct, utilize lines like this in a new layer so you are not ruining the original drawing and just do your best practice and don't give up, don't do it too quickly. This doesn't look anything like the reference picture right now, but as we add color, as we solve strange features around a bend, you'll notice that it starts to really come alive. When trying to draw accurately from a reference, everything is looking at distance, everything is visualizing the distance from one feature of the drawing to another. For example, even like the outer corner of this nasal hair. So this distance here, this is a distance, you have to visualize that as a measurement in your mind. From the inner corner of a nostril, for example, this distance here and then the distance from here to here, it's all working with one pace, you can start with anything on the face. You can start with the nose, the eyes like I did, the mouth and then you've got to really solve picture the distance between each thing that you're drawing when you master that, you'll really well on your way and it does come with practice, but you just need to do your best to map out what you're saying with your eyes. Something I've actually seen quite a few digital artists utilize, which I never have before, but it's quite a good idea because you are also flexible digital. If you select an area that you feel is slightly too low or too high, instead of redrawing it, you can just use the Select tool select the area, got pair to the little Transform Tool. You can use your arrow keys to push it up, push it down, to the left, to the right, it's totally up to you. I've never utilize this, but it's quite a good feature to do. If ever you've drawn something fully and you feel like it's too high, it's too low, you can just slightly move it to fit your needs. I'm just going leave this very simplistic for the nose because noses rarely come to life when you're using color, when you're shading and highlighting. So we can leave that for now and we'll fix it again later. Now I'm going to move on to the mouth, which again, if you want to visualize the distance from the bottom of the nose up into the top of the mouth, you can just use some lines like this. Let me grab the correct color we need, let's do a bright red. If we envisioned the line, but we solve of underneath the nose to the cupid's bow of her mouth, we've got this much distance. So try to visualize that on your piece, say from here to maybe about there. This is straight line under her mouth here, but it's diagonal there, we've got this much distance and then it's measured this slight more distance here than there is between the bottom of the nose and the top of the lip. But it's all about measuring out in your mind protocol reference picture we can see that if we draw a straight line from the outside of her mouth, straight up, we can see that it starts at about where her iris is. Probably about that just where pupil starts, it's about a solid line up. So we can say if the pupil is about here, we could go straight down like this and then envision it to be maybe about here for the lip to start. I'm using a little bit of black here because always through with the lips, you really want to use of this, a black line to map out the shape of the lips. As you can see when I draw, I really go back and forth quite a lot trying to fix things that I see my I might made mistake with. This is very normal, I think a lot of people tend to think the artists just draw and the first they do is perfect and they know exactly what they're doing. It's not that way, you definitely, as an artist, you constantly go back and forth fixing and as an author you should really always learning that the more time you spend on something, the better it's going to get usually, sometimes that's not the case. But in general, it's learning about having patience with you art more than anything else. So just keep that in mind, try to be patient, try not to give up too easily. So I'm going to just leave it as it is for now, it's not perfect, but it's only supposed to be just a rough sketch. It's still slightly off, we're going to be adjusting the chin size and we're just in the hairline. But we're going to do that with color instead of with just basic outlines. Now we will be getting on with how to blend skin tones.
14. Lesson 9: How to Blend: So this is the fun part. Now we're going to start learning how to apply color, how to blend. I'm going to do it best I can to explain this to you in a simple way. It's not as difficult as you would think it would be if you've never done it before. But basically, I like to start out with a mid-tone color. I don't like starting thing too dark, but I like to start with a mid shade this where I can go darker and lighter if I need to. It's always nice to build upon your color, even though it really doesn't matter when it comes to digital, I find that it's always easiest to get at mid color. For this, I'm going to probably go with maybe about here, this type of color here right in the middle and I'm just going to apply this over my face. I'm going to do this with the default brush Photoshop, which is the hard ground pressure brush. It's this one here. The one that again you can use with the pressure. I'm just going to grab a big size of that and then I'm just going to apply it quite messily over her skin. I'm going to make another layer with this, which layer was this for? Is this for anything, no it wasn't. I'm going to use a slide here. I should create a new one. Here we go. I'm going to name this one Skin, I need to rename this one here or to make another one before. Let's call this outline. We're going to just apply color to the skin layer which we're going to put, pull and drag under the outline layer. So we're able to solve draw underneath what we can see. Make sure as well that you have your opacity 100% and your flow as well, because we're not going to worry about blending too much just yet. Now we have this sort of mid shade color hair for her skin. We're going to go ahead and grab, let's say the lighter color and I'm going to teach you now how I like to blend. We are just using the color picker here. I'm going to grab the lightest shade I can, maybe we'll go with the mid shade again. You've really got a color pick lot when you're blending, but will go for this color up here. Now, when you're blending, you really want to utilize your flow and your opacity. For a long time I just use opacity but I found that flow is often better for this. You can use the very basic brush here, which is, what's it called? Let me just check. This one is called Soft Ground Pressure Opacity. Again, this is a default brush if you've not downloaded any. No matter what product program you're using either going to have something similar to this. You can use this and I don't tend to use this one because I find it a little bit unnatural in a way that as you can see, it's slightly lightening it up a little bit, which is good. This is one way to blend. I personally don't like the look of the really airbrushed appearance. I like to use something with a little bit of texture. There's one by loish here, which is called the loish_soft shade. This is quite good for shading. It has a bit more texture to it. The only thing is it's not pressure sensitive, so it's not going to get bigger and smaller. I've chosen a light color hair. As you can tell, it's not personal stuff, which is not a bad thing. But the key to really shading is using light colors and just continuously blending and utilizing flow and opacity. Working with something more along the lines of the default hard round brush that I like to use. It's a lot harder, as you can see. It's nowhere near as forgiving. It's not natural in the slightest, so what you're going to want to do is really play around with your opacity. Pull that down a little bit, see how that works. This is much better because you are able to build up a little bit some of the flow. I did explain the flow and the opacity difference before the flow, you can build up in one stroke whereas opacity, you have to keep putting your pen down. The key really to blending is just working your way down. If you start with this dark color here, and then you want to go slightly lighter, you can color, pick lighter color, bring down your opacity, bring down you flow and you can kind of blend in like that. It really depends entirely on the kind of brush that you've got. You're going to want to go back and forth a lot. You're going to want to have really change your opacity, bring that down because you build up, have that change, blending color. What you can do is now it's created a mid color between the dark and the light. What you can do is you can color grab that. It's in the middle of the light and the dark shared you've got. Then you can just grab that and then really help to blend it even more. Now it's basically seamless. You might not want it to be seamless. Some people do, all you like to have some texture in there, but it really doesn't matter too much. Really, key points takeaway from this. Grab a color, put that in. Don't be afraid of color. Then you're going to want to take a little, maybe a slightly lighter shade, put that in at the top. We're going to bring the opacity up. You can do that and then it's not blended too well, so you can bring the opacity down, go back to the original color, get back your brush, and start to blend. Bring down you flow, bring down your opacity, then you can grab the soft, middy color it's developed. Then really just go to down on blending the colors in. This is how you blend. It really does depend a lot on the brushes you're using. As I say, if using a harder brush as opposed to a softer brush, you really going to want to play around with the opacity and the flow a lot more as opposed to only softer ones which just naturally just blends seamlessly. But again, it depends what you're using. That's it for this blending video. I hope that makes sense to you. If you do have any questions, don't hesitate to ask me. But it's really just a little bit of playing around, messing around. You can use a bit of both different brushes. You just go all on to color, pick the right colors, pick your mid colors, go back and forth, blend in that way. Yeah, it's comes with practice. So just keep practicing. Let me know how you get on. Now we will talk about shadows and highlights.
15. Lesson 10: Light and Shadow: In this particular video, I want to talk to you guys about shadows, lights, mid colors, and lighting. If you've ever had our class before you might not have known about this. If you've been announced for awhile, you more than likely do. But I just want a coverage just to give you a little bit of an insight just to train your mind a little bit. So I've actually got advice. There is no light source coming from this direction whatsoever. This is why her face is shaded. She moved like she has like a window or something coming from this direction. She has light pushing onto her face like this that's the light. This side is completely in shadow because there is no light source. So keep in mind, there is light coming in only from here, not from here. Now, she has a little bit of shading under her eyes because people, humans are 3D creatures, we have features that stick out. Naturally, not all of our face is going to 100 percent of the time be in complete direct sunlight unless we're looking directly at the sun. Shadows are what give that realistic and 3D effect. Without shadows, without light, your pieces are going to look flat, completely and utterly flat. Her face hair, as you can see, is curved round. It's curved rounds like every faces, which is why it gets much darker on this side. This side is slightly more exposed to the light coming from this side. So she has a little bit more like hair and you tend to find the cheekbones especially have a little bit more light on them because they stick out further than the rest of the face of a snop nose, I mean the cheeks. Now, we need to keep in mind this, this is a lot darker than this. Often on your pieces you're going to want to keep the cheekbones light up. To keep it bow that is usually always lighter as well. Because if you think about it, keeps spokes or picks out a little bit, you're going to have the chin because the chin. You have like your chin does spoke out. So you have usually have light source here, you don't have light source here usually on the brow bone is going to have a light source on the cheekbone and on the nose as well. Those are usually the places you find that you're going to have light sources more than anywhere sometimes on the forehead as well. These are places that stick out more than the rest of the face. So when exposed to light these are areas that are going to get the light hit first and have the brightest amount of highlights. Same for the shadows. This is why if you're someone that was make up, you're going to know that when you apply contour, the contour is darker shade usually have it down here because this is all in was a little bit the concave of our cheeks is going to be darker. The side isn't because obviously it's very exposed to the light. The inside of eyes like the eyelids, these are going to be darker because they're so deeply center eyes and the size of a nose is going to be darker as well, as well as the sides of her nose. These are just the main points she need to solve. Remember, just visualize where the light sources going to come from. If it's come from this side, you're going to see here, if it from this side, this side really up, this side should be darker. Same with the hair as you can see, her hair is a lot lighter here as opposed to here, because it's not exposed to the light. So you want to keep that in mind. If you color picking, you don't have to worry about that as much as you're applying your color you really going to want to remember this. So, yeah, I think that's it for this particular video. Hopefully, this helped you out. Keep in mind while your light source is coming from and you can apply your color that way.
16. Lesson 11: Adding Color: Now is the fun part? We're going to start adding color and really making our face look like our reference and just come alive. So what I'm going do is, because I start with this mid color hair that I always to start out with. I'm probably going to go ahead and add some highlights now. Now, speaking of color and highlights, we always want to make note that if you look at this picture here, that I have, notice how it goes from being very, very light to very, very dark, very easily. There was a slight blend that but it's pretty intensely different. Do not be afraid. This is something I, myself have done, something I see a lot of new artists in particular be afraid of. They think that if they put too intense a color down, it's not going to work. It's going to look unnatural and not right, but actually it looks more unnatural if you don't do that and I'm going to show you what I mean by that. When I was first starting out, I would take say this color here, and I would bring my opacity down so unbelievably far that it was virtually impossible to. So see the color and I would really slowly build up. So I'd leave it like that. May be a little bit nicer than that. That's not what you want to do. If you're trying to create something realistic, you really want to do your best to have that intense color difference on. Don't be afraid to have blocks of color. This color right here on the cheek is virtually the same color. Now you wouldn't think that would be right, you think, "I've got to have a variation of color here", not in the slightest. You really need to keep and utilize what you're seeing in the picture. Now if I just get rid of what I've done, actually I can keep that. I personally like to use, I'm going to go ahead and just use the default brush because this fetch comes with every program that you've got. So for now I'm going to bring my pasty down a little bit and I'm going to bring my flow down a bit as well. Can we experiment to see how that looks. I'm going to create a new layer, hold my highlights and this is a good color. So what I'm going to do is, I'm going to follow the curvatures of a face. She has a nice curve on her nose. So if I compare the inequality to the end of this lightness here. I'm just going to go ahead and do two. Maybe about that. It's always nice to use flow and opacity in this way because you can build up. Don't be afraid of color. That's one of the biggest pieces of advice I can give you. Do not be afraid to use color. Just play around with the capacity in the flow until you feel comfortable with it. You're going to pull a slab above the outline there now. You always want to remember as well, even though we've done these lines, you don't want to keep them in final face. So make sure you are drawing above the outline because faces don't have lines. Faces have color. She no lines on a face. So we just want to keep that in mind as well. When you start laying down color that you can really bring the face to be realistic. So I'm going to take this slightly darker color here and then I'm going to use my blending techniques that I showed you before. As you can see, this doesn't blend well, and that's totally fine. We'll go back with this. Bringing the opacity in the flow down and just work on it like that. Bring it down a bit more, grab that mid color that is developed, and then blend it nicely like that. Not perfect, but we're still in the very soft baby steps of trying to pull this together. Let's go ahead and use some shadow under her hair. This is something else you want to note. Hair always falls over the face unless obviously pulled back and creates a nice little shadow. So keep that in mind as well. So at the moment it looks like a nice big blob of color. But basically what we doing, we just scan back and forth color picking until we get the right colors and we can eventually just build up and blend it a little bit better. So bring your opacity down again and just keep going back in there with the brush. Don't be afraid to use a 100 percent opacity as well at times, especially when you're using like really dark colors. It looks more natural that way, even though you think the opposite. But it's very important that you really study your reference to see where the colors are truly going and coming from. We're not going to probably do the eyebrows just yet, but eyebrows pretty easy. You just take the darkest color you confined in the eyebrow. Then you just going to go find one and set them down approximately where they go. So because I'm not too sure on this, I'm just going to make a new layer, so I can always link them later. So she has a very big eyebrows, and eyebrows are very, very good, are telling who the person is no matter how anything else looks. If you've got the eyes and the eyebrows right, you going to know who is. Well, I'm going to get back into her skin again now. So I think I'm going to start working on this side of her face. So I'm going to bring some of the dark color around and I've just made a mistake. I'm drawing on my eyebrow layer. This is something you got to watch out for and something I'm glad I did just to show you how you need to be careful, but do make sure you are drawing on the right layer because it's a pain when you don't. Sometimes you might want to alternate with brushes as well. So to keep that in mind, if you will do that. So I think for now I'm going to maybe, what does this brush do? I'm going to play around with this brush now. It's fun to experiment a little bit and give that texture to your paintings. You might find it blends better as well. Skin has a lot of different tones in it. You wouldn't think it does, but it's only when you start doing digital painting you really, really can say just how many colors are in the skin to make it really come alive. Again, this is going to be quite rough because more than likely, I think her chins are little bit too long and her jaw line needs to be pulled up a little bit. So I'm not going to make it so Perfectly laid out right now. It's just solve, so I can see the wood for the trees. Don't also just like hello down, pick it and then just put it wherever you want. You really do have to focus on where you getting the color form and then try to replicate that so you can bring the skin out. I definitely recommend this particular brush I'm really, really liking this, blends quite nicely it gives that little bit of texture. That will be in the resources file and the lowish brush that I have added in the class description. If you can't find it, leave a comment I'll give to you back. So hopefully you can see what I'm doing here. I'm trying to replicate the shape of the shadows. On this one, for example, she's shaped like this. This is called shaped like that. You got to shape down here, along here is color change here. You basically just looking at the different variations of color and textures. So you can analyze what's different. This hair is slightly different all the way round her eye here, that's darker. Then you have here, this is darker, this is darker, on the hair is darker. It's just a matter of really trying to shape the colors you using into the light, the shadows. It's just important that you keep going back and forth. You can do as many times as you want. Because as I said, digital art is very forgiving, it allows you to make mistakes, it allows you to just keep going over it without ruining any form of paper. Just keep that in mind. Keep minding the shape of the shadows, and you should be good to go.
17. Lesson 12: Eyes: Now we're going to focus on the eyes. The skin's still isn't completely done. But I always like to semi-do the skin and then do some of the features and then go back and forth fixing what I've missed and the proportions that are bad. We're going to go ahead and undo the eyes. Basically you're going to be color picking again using the same process I've been using throughout this whole time and color picking my way through out the eye. I always like to start with the whites of the eyes. Now you're color blocking in the shapes you can really start to compare how it looks in comparison to the shapes over here and it looks pretty good so far. I'm just going to leave it like that. Then we're going to go ahead and do some of the iris. Pick the darkest color of the iris you can find, put that in there and then we go from there. I always like to [inaudible] , I've said this before, buildup. So from dark to light because you can always add dark too it if you want to. But I always just prefer working with the dark base. Now I'm color picking the slightly lighter color in the eyes and then we can use the blending method as well. Always note that eyes in particular are always going to show the light source, so there's always going to be some shape in the eyes and usually it's either a square or rectangle. In this case, it's a very solid rectangular look to the iris. This is genuinely how you're going to make the eyeballs look really realistic, is by adding these highlights in there. Usually around the iris it's going to be darker. So you want to grab the darker color to work around the iris and it's usually because the shadow is darker right underneath the eyelashes here. Keep note of that. We're going to add a little bit of reflection in there now. I'm going to go ahead and add some eyelashes in. Even though we're still not done with the actual eye itself, we want to just pull it together. Not so worrying too much about details because details always come last. But I just want to pull it together a little bit better. Just try not to worry too much about it at this point. Eyelashes are just literally quick little strokes. Sometimes they clump together. In this case, we haven't got a good look on what the eyelashes actually look like. But they're longer on the outside and they get more sparse and short at the end of the corner. Around the eye where it's darker and more smudgy, I'm just going to use something with a less of an opacity and flow perhaps. I think I'm going to go with this little brush again from the lowish brush set, going to pull down the opacity and maybe the flow, experiment a little bit. I highly recommend zooming in once you've done the overall basic layer of the colors of the face, zoom in on certain features and really start focusing on those and working around those and then you can adjust the facial shape as you go because often you'll find that the shape, looks okay now, will not really work once you put the features in. The more you do this, the more you're going to learn, so honestly, the best advice I can give you is genuinely to just practice as much as you can. Because as much as I'm telling you now, really, the best advice I can give you is just practice and it's up to you how much you practice. It doesn't have to be every day. That might be the best option for you, especially if you want to learn quickly. But overall, it's quality over quantity, so it is better that you spend a few days on one piece, as opposed to drawing one piece every day, that's maybe not as good as it would be if you'd spend longer on it. So keep that in mind. Just keep practicing and you will get to the point you want to be. Now that I've roughly done this, I'm going to work on the eyebrow. Now I have done her eye, I can really see that the eyebrow is slightly out of shape. It's a little bit too high up at this point. In needs to be a little bit lighter here and we just need to work on that. Once you've done one part of the face it's really easy to build upon that and get further on with it. Now I have my base of the eyebrow. What's really good about this is then you can now take the lighter colors from the eyebrow and then go ahead and so fix it that way. But for now I'm just going to work on the shape, because the shape is slightly off in comparison to the eyeball. So we just add this in here. It's more straight across. Some people have really arched eyebrows, some people have a slight arch, some people have no arch, it's really dependent on the face. But you can also take note that this goes in further here, so we're going to get rid of that. What I'm going to do now is I'm going to take a lighter color from the eyebrow where we can see that it's similar in places and as I will show you with the hair, a little bit later on, I like to take a very small sized hard round pressure brush, and then I like to put it in with a low opacity. But we're probably going to bring the flow down more and then we just probably even smaller than that. With very small strokes you want to build up the look of an eyebrow. Remember, an eyebrow is not just a rectangle, it's made up of hundreds little hairs. I actually really enjoy drawing eyebrows. I think there are a lot of fun and you can be quite loose with them if you want to be. Because the eyebrows can be very messy, but as long as you have the basic shape right, you're good to go. It's like a lot of fine hairs that pull into the eyebrow up here and underneath as well, you don't want to have a solid straight line because that is not going to look very natural. I'm just going to leave the eyebrow like this. It's not perfect nor is it exactly accurate to the reference. But sometimes that's the joy of it. You don't always want it to be exactly the same. I feel like eyebrows, you have a lot more room to be a bit messier with, as long as that the shape is right, it doesn't really matter how the hairs fall. I will keep it like that for now and I'm going to go ahead and start the other eye. Pay attention to the lash line as well because it's not just like a thin line. If you look, it's thicker in some places than in others. You're always going to want to make allowances for that and usually I would always have to move the eyelid crease up a little bit, because of I've not allowed for that space that is required from the white of the eyes up to the lash line to the top of the crease of the eye. So keep that in mind. I feel that these eyes are slightly too far apart. What I'm going to do, as an example to you, a lot of the Jew artists do this as well. Just select the area, I have talked about this before. Select the area that you feel is slightly off and then you can grab this tool up here. Then you can use your arrow keys to bring it over just slightly. I think that should be good. We can fix this and blend it properly, but I feel that works a little bit better than this did before. Sometimes you make mistakes and you don't draw things the exact distance you expect them to be when you start coloring in and that's why it's perfectly fine if you want to try and move those features about low bit. Now I'm just going to fill in these blank spaces and blend in to fix the little bit of gap we have here. There we go. Easy fix.
18. Lesson 13: The Nose: Now we're going to work on the nose. Same thing. I don't really know what else to say. Just focus on forming the shapes with color. Keep going back and forth with the Color Picker as well. That will definitely help. Try to focus on the shapes of the shadows right here. This is like little L shape. We're going to try and achieve that on her nose here, nostrils will come in there, at some points, sometimes you do that first. Sometimes you do it lasts, it depends. But just forming the nose is not one of the easiest things to do. Especially because there's not so much detail in this area here. But we're going to go ahead and just form the nose as best we can. Keep an eye on the shape of the nose. I've said this many times, but the nose ends here. Then you have, because she's slightly an angle it covers some of her nostril, so that's to the side. Just focus on using color to shape the features. It's not easy, but again practice makes perfect or not so much perfect practice makes you better. So just keep on trying, keep on trying. Don't give up.
19. Lesson 14: Lips: Coloring in and shading really does make or break your drawing. You have to make sure that the shapes you're getting are matching up to what you're drawing. Because otherwise it's going to end up not looking like features of the person you're trying to draw. As you can see, this is more of a smooth transition of an L, whereas this is quite hard and this isn't rounded as much. I liked the all hard look with color. It's up to you how you do that, but I really do need to fix this shape here and fix her up. Now I'm going to work on the lips. Now, you always want to keep in mind that the top lip is always going to be darker than the bottom lip. You don't need to worry about this too much because if you're color picky, you're going to see that anyway. But because of the way the top lip is angled, it's always going to be darker than the bottom lip and the bottom tends to be bigger as well. It grabs a lot of lightness to it. Keep in mind that the smile lines here are always going to be very dark, not black, but they're going to be pretty dark. Then towards the inside of the mouth that's going to be dark as well onto the sides of the mouth. Just keep an eye on how lips tend to look in photographs, and how your reference picture looks. But overall, even if you're doing something that's non-referenced, you're going to want to have highlight on the bottom lip. The bottom lip is going to be bigger than the top lip, and the top lip is going to be more shaded than the bottom. I'm just going to do this with a hard round pressure brush here. I'm going to pull the opacity way up. Actually, I'm going to have it down a little bit. I don't want it to be too hard. Lips are very, they're quite tough. It's different for everyone, but for me lips are the more difficult part of the face, I feel because that they can be so different, in so many different shades and I can never seem to get it exactly how I want it. So practice makes perfect. Like how I did with the eyebrows. I tend to just like to go in with say, a mid color. I went with this one right here, and then I can go both lighter and darker if need be. Another good tip is to not worry too much about how you've done the skin around the mouth until you have done the mouth because otherwise, if you need to go in there and fix it, you're going to be messing all this up anyway. If it's rough, don't worry about that. I always do some of the skin then do the features, and then finish the skin off at the end. Again, her face still is not exactly perfect, but while I'm doing details at the moment, I'm not focusing on finished proper details as I said. Her chin's going to need to be reshaped as this other cheek probably, we're going to need to fix this line right here. But we worry about all of that finishing stuff right at the very end. If we make mistakes, we can go ahead and fix them without messing up what we've already done. I'm going to make it look like a bunny rabbit now and just casually place her teeth in there. Always go for the soft color in between when coloring in anything. Just always, always go for that. I find it the easiest way to color things in. Just keep going back and forth with your colors. As I've said before, just going back and forth is really the way to do it. There we go. Once you have that base color down, you can really start shaping it a little bit better. One big piece of advice I can give you is, to not worry too much about getting it perfect the first time. Just keep shaping things. Draw it down best you can. Draw something else, go back to it, and then keep reshaping until it looks right. Because the more you build upon other things, the easier it will be for your brain to comprehend how it's actually supposed to look.
20. Lesson 15: Fixing and Re-Blending: I've already mentioned this before, but when I am applying color, I like to do quite a bold, bright color like this. Then I like to feather out with a lower flow or a pasty like this. I'm going to try and show you, I mean, because it's quite bright, almost white hair, it's light pink and then it goes to a darker pink. You can blend that quite easily by using a lower opacity and just feather that out a little bit like that. Especially on lips, in particular, there are so many colors and you want to make sure that you've blended them well enough, but you also getting with bold highlight color that you're seeing here. Otherwise, it's not going to look any realistic whatsoever. So you should make sure you do have these bold build swatches of color, as you can see here, that you can splendor afterwards to have quite a bit of color in them as well. So you want to make sure that you're including all of that. Feel free as well, again, to use finger measurements to try and figure out where things need to be. For example, her mouth hair is slightly close to the bottom of her nose. So this cupid's bow hair needs to be down a little bit further. You can tell that visually but, if not, use your finger measurements and you'll be able to see that as well. So remember don't be afraid of bold color like this. Do not be afraid because this is how you get that realistic look to it. Any artist you follow and you realize that a lot of their work does look realistic because they use thick, bold, non-transparent color in their work. Even with acrylic portraits, if you look at people that make very realistic paintings, it's because they have these shapes, solid shapes of deep rich color. If you have everything, everything's too wish-washy and the same and blended so perfectly you're not going to have that realistic look to it. So keep that in your mind as you are drawing. You really have to spot every little bit of lightness and darkness like a little bit of light hair and her chin, and it goes a little bit darker and you have some white hair. You really got to keep your eyes open and notice these things. Lips really do have so much color in them. If you notice they have a lot of small lines. The best way to do this like you did with the eyebrows which, again, we have not already finished yet. But you want to take a small brush, make sure you have your darker base color down first. So we're going to go with this in-between color, head slightly darker. We're going to make sure that is down there pretty well. Then we're going to take the lightest color where the lines are. Then we'll just with a lower flow and slightly lower opacity, we're going to go ahead and just make those lines like this. This is just how you create it. It's not perfect, but that's the effect we're going for on the lips. Also notice so it's not too bold from the skin straight into the lips, there's always this transitioning shade that you can use to really blend out the lips into the skin because they can poke out looking very unnatural otherwise. So make sure you always try and somehow include lightly that transitioning color so that it so blends better into the skin. There is a slight curve in her lip hair whereas mine is straight down. These all small details that you're going to need to notice to make it look more like the reference picture you're copying. Closer to the inside of the mouth that gets the darker the color is going to be. As you can see, all these colors are put in and now blending very nicely together. That is exactly what you want. You want to make sure that you do have that nice blend. But still those bold colors. For highlights as well you might want to just go in there with the brightest color. Pull your opacity and you'll flow way up, pull down the size of the brush, and then just go straight in there like that. You got that more bold, bright color for the highlight. Highlights really accentuate the realisticness of pieces. I highly recommend that you don't be afraid to use highlight where it's needed. Okay. So this is what we have so far, still a little bit of way to go. The face shape right down here, the jaw, and the chin needs to be reshaped, needs to be a little bit smaller. This is why I always like to do this part towards the end because once I put the features in sometimes what I thought was quite accurate for the face shape is not always as accurate as you think is. So at this point what I'm going to do is I'm actually going to merge all of my layers. Now if I take my layers back right here, what you can do is you can right-click and then do merge down. This way it makes everything into one layer, which is what we want. So we're going to do merge down again. Then I'm just going to basically get rid of everything, even the outline and skin. Everything is now in one layer, okay, which is very helpful towards the end. This is something that sometimes you, if you do it too early, it's going to be a bit of a pain for you. This is why it's so nice to be able to work with layers. I'm at the point now where I'm quite happy with what you've got. So I'm just going to go ahead and start fixing all of this up which is difficult when you have color on top of the outline because everything's going to be separate and you're going to have to do on loads of different layers. So by this point, I'm just going to start fixing up the jaw, the face. Then once you've done all of that, we're going to try and fix all the skin and the neck. We're going to go ahead and I'm going to teach you how to draw hair. I think what I'm going to do as well to make it easy because this is so white, I'm going to take a dark background color like, say this is [inaudible] dark blue. If you go to this little tool here, hold it down, have the paint bucket tool. So then if you go to the background there, you can just stick a color in and that way. Okay. Her jaw line is too far down so what I'm going to do is I'm going to take some of the dark color in her neck, take the paint brush tool, and then I'm just going to pull it up like this. Next are basically just a huge amount of blending different colors. Next I usually take too long so [inaudible] up so bad. We are going to go with that mute color at the beginning. So now I'm just going to take my darker color hair, grab my tool, hot brown pressure brush again, bringing opacity way down to about 30, bringing the flow down. And then we're just going to up the color in like this. Soften those edges up a little bit, but we can also be hiding a lot of this with hair. So I'm not going to worry too much about that. But for now let's just up that in. You're going to try and shape the shadows into how it looks on the reference because it curves inwards, and as you're gradually transitioning from the darker color into the lighter color, just change your opacity up and then you can blend it in. Okay. Let's quickly work on our E's, E's, again, come out the neck because it's just a bunch of shapes of color and blending a little bit. I never spend very long E's whatsoever. I never really pay too much attention to getting the E's exactly as they are in the reference because as long as you've got the size correct, it doesn't really matter too much what they are doing. Shape is a little bit more.
21. Lesson 16: Hair: Now I'm going to teach you how to draw hair. Now hair, when you have a reference like this, it's not as difficult as you might think it would be, nor does it take you as long as you think it might. Basically, it's just a little toing and froing from smaller brushes to large brushes and mixing the colors around. What I'd like to do is, I like to start off with the darkest color of the hair that I can see, for this, I'm probably going to start off with this color right here, it's almost black, but I'm going to put that all the way throughout the hair and just fill it all in. What I'm going to do is I'm going to take this, I'm going to create a brand new layer, we're going to call it hair, because I always like to make sure the hair is on a different layer just in case I mess it up, and then it's all over the face, and then I can't fix it, we're going to color pick, take this color right here, and we are going to get a big brush and just go all the way over the rubber sheet, rough outline here. Make sure your opacity is way up, and you flow, which I have not, let's put that up. Now, hair is not just a bunch of tiny little strands like you might think, you're not going to see hair and do every individual hair with a small brush, that's just not how it works. Hair you do in shapes, and any artists will tell you this, that it's just important to focus more on the shape of the hair as opposed to doing each individual strand. Remember that it's not going to be as stressful or scary as you think it might be, it's just a matter of shaping it and using a little bit of color, I've messed her hair up, but that's okay because they didn't want a new layer, and I can erase that, and I've messed up again. Brilliant, hang on, here we go, eraser. There we go, now we are going to go ahead and start color picking some different colors. We're going to go for the next lightest color, let me just fix this hair, just reshaping the hair a little bit, and the color you want to probably go for is this one right here, it's slightly lighter. We're going to get the brush size a little bit bigger, we're going to bring the opacity down, we're going to bring the flow down, and we're going to see, is that the right color? Yes. We're going to bring it out a little bit more, and we've basically just going to go over the parts, we see where the brown is slightly lighter, we want to keep note of the parting which is about here, and just very loosely, color over this dark base. Digital painting, it's so much easier, starting out with the darker base and then going like lighter than it is the other way round. I just recommend doing it this way, it's obviously optional and personal preference, but this is just how I like to do it, you can see it's pulling it together a little bit. Still not perfectly, but we are getting there, you always want to do this as a lower opacity because we are building the hair up from the bottom, building it up, because if we're not building it up, it's going to look a mess, we're just going to do this. Focusing on these lighter browns, even though this brown is slightly different to this brown, would still going to put it in any way, and then we're going to put this brown down here as well, just going to shape the hair. As you can see, it's still dark hair, and I've mess that up, but that's fine, we'll go back and add some dark later on, but notice how the strand, this is tucked back, the strand falls over, we want to make sure that we keep note of that. Now, we are going to try and fix this hairline as well, that's very important is quite soft. I'm going to color pick the head that's very close to her like that, we're going to bring this down a little bit and keep it the same opacity, low opacity, low flow, and we're going to try to blend that a little bit with quick strokes like this, and we're going to go ahead and grab. What should we grab? We'll grab this darker color here, and then we're going to go in with a even smaller brush, I'm talking like five pixels here. We're going to pull the opacity up, we're going to try and make it look like smooth strands, you see how that's looking like strands of hair? That's what we're aiming to achieve, but of course, we want it in the shape of a hairline, they come out a little bit more up here, that's how we're going to hairline. We will make it a little bit better shortly, but for now, we need to do this little bit of hair by her ear. Now I'm going to go back and take this dark color here and make sure that is prominent, and we're going to take this color here, this should be similar to what we've got, but we're going to pull it up. Pull the opacity down, and we're going to build the color up a little bit pull up a moment. We are going to build the opacity this one's is slightly warmer brown, most of this hair is black, keep that as it is. Note the very dark spots because this is again how you realistic this is further back from the lighting, so is so dark with a little bit of light hair poking out here so we can keep this dark and focus on this hair that's poking out. We're slowly building this color up, and now I want to insert, we'll take some of this hair, some of the highlights on the side. Which the highlights on this side even though you know they're the same color on this side, in drawing because of the lighting is going to be a little lighter, so the color on the side is, as you can see, is quite dark, but in the color on this side is obviously that much lighter, don't start going from this side to that side because then it's not going to look right, this color is getting color picked for this side only because they are quite small, the highlights we're going to [inaudible] for much smaller brush. A higher opacity will keep the flow slightly lower, but we're going to go in here with a small brush, we will soften these edges right here as well. To soften the edges, you basically want to take the color that's right at the edge and then using a small brush with a lower opacity, I'm using 58 percent opacity, just use it to soften the edges of the hair, and then if you have strands up like that, it's going to look a little bit more natural. We still have quite a long way to go with the hair because we have a lot of lightness to add. We need to shape this a little bit better, but we are getting there slowly, and I'm going to minimize this now make it smaller because we don't need to size up. I am going to take this color right here, which is very light, and I am going to use a lower opacity. I'm going to use maybe slightly bigger brush, and then I'm just going to solve very carefully, go where these lightness sections are. I'm just literally being very light as I pull it down the hair. Any bigger chunks of color that you see, you're going to want to use a bigger brush eyes and a lower opacity to cover more area, if you have highlights there off quite few and far between, you're going to want to use a smaller brush on those ones. If you're going with a bigger brush, always make sure that you are still going over afterward with a thinner brush, make it neater, and more realistic. Finishing off the edges of the hair, here, this would have to worry about too much because it blends into her shirt. This side, however, we're just going to grab these thicker sections, we are going to pull the opacity up more, we're going to make this smaller, and we're just going to point the edges out, pull them up. Try to just point the edges out a little bit, feather them, pull them out, whatever works for you, this one we're going to make brown. I've also noticed that on different screens, sometimes the hair looks better than on others, because you've really goes off make sure that you have feathered out everything, so you're not just getting big blocky chunks of hair. I'm just going to leave it that I'm going to come back and fix it later, but for the purpose of this tutorial, that is what you do to create hair, you just want to make sure it's all nice and feathered out, so you have those little effects of hair. I might do that this side as, well, we just grab one of these light colors she has and then just wispy edges, that is looking good. That's what I'm going to do with her hair, for now. There we go there is her hair.
22. Lesson 17: Background and Clothes: I think in regards to the shaft, we'll just add that in here. I think I'm going to put this on the previous slide because we wanted to try and draw around the house. Then you get back to the previous layer. We're going to grab this doc, pull it over here, and then just pull it past here. Pull that in. It is blue here, so I'm just going to pull it past way down. Because it's blurred effect, I'm going to use this soft brush here and just put that in. This is pretty much done, are doing to fix a few things on a face, but as for backgrounds, it's entirely up to you what you do. I personally like to mess around with Photoshop brushes. I have this one here which I am not sure where I got it from. But you have a whole bunch here, you can use from the Lavish brush set, this one here. I will try my best to find this particular brush. If not, what you can do is we especially when it's something like this, you can go to the background layer. You can use paint brush tool to grab like dot color, push it in, and then you can get the very brushy soft brush. Then you can make that pretty big, pull the opacity and the flow way down and then highlight the soft bright colors, and then do it like this. Then you've got that soft blurred effect. Depending on the photo you've chosen, I would just go with something blurry in the background so you can just do it like that, and that works pretty well. Me personally, I like to do something a little bit different, I have a solve. My style is to have some color in the background. I'm going to go with something like deep purple. Usually loud colorize her skin as well, but that's, again, that's an entirely different class because there's a lot that goes into every colorizing portraits. I'd go with a dark color like this, and then I will take my brush. I'll do my best to find this brush. I'm not sure where it's from, but I would then solve proper lighter color. We'll just do the background like this. So that is that. Now, I'm just going to fix the vice because it's a little bit of style.
23. Complete!: Here we go. Now comes the really fun part, signing your name. Let's go ahead and grab the white. I always sign with white, pull-down the size, 100 percent opacity, 100 percent flow. Then I always put it somewhere where someone can't steal it and cover my skip signature over. I'm probably going to do it over her shoulder right here, because if anyone tried to cover that up it would look very suspicious because the background is like that. Here we have it. We have our final finished piece. It is not perfect by any means. None of my pieces are exactly perfect, but overall I'm very happy with this. I like to keep the sort of painted effect so you could tell that it is painted in. Maybe in another class I'll talk more about changing the the skin color and the hair and the overall color. Because sometimes I like to blend the actual drawing with the background colors a little bit, but I didn't do this for this one because I wanted to keep it as simple as I could. If you have any feedback for me, I'd love to hear it. If you'd like to see anymore classes for me, let me know. I'd love it if you could give me a review as well, what you thought of this class. I look forward to seeing what you post in the project folder as well. Yes, very excited to start talking with you guys and giving you feedback. I hope you enjoyed the class. I hope you found it helpful. Take care, and I will see you in the next class.
Chloe Rose, Artist, Youtuber, Youtube.com/mschlosey
1.013
4 Std. 13 Min.
