Paint a Cute Dog in Krita: A Fun Beginner Digital Art Process

1. Welcome!: Alright, check this out, everybody who doesn't love a happy, excited, cuddly cute dog. In this course, we're going to paint one with a completely free software treater. This is a follow along digital art process that you can enjoy in Windows, Mac, Linux, or even an Android tablet. You're going to learn how to use this program from an experienced artist and paint in this really cool and versatile art style. But here's the twist. The interesting part about this. Honestly, I'm not a huge expert on painting dogs. I've painted, like, one or two good ones in my career as an artist. Maybe three if you count the scrabble as a dog, which you shouldn't this is actually perfect, because the focus of this course is going to be, how do you approach a subject that you don't know? You don't have any technical knowledge about it. You haven't painted a lot of similar things before. How can you still make it work? You know, it would be kind of lame if I, the teacher, just painted something that I've practiced 100 times before, and you try to follow me because there will be many things that I don't even think about anymore and just do subconsciously, and you'd never be able to fully understand what I'm doing. So in this course, I want to go in the complete opposite direction and tackle a new subject together with you. I'm going to show you my process that allows me to paint new things without having to make studies all the time. And I'll tell you exactly what I'm thinking during each step. Those include finding a good reference, breaking it down and sketching it, blocking in colors and shapes, using Creta's amazing brushes to create detail, and even adding your own personal flavor without messing it up. So I think it'll be fun. We're going to break it down, so you can do this project in multiple days if you want. Doesn't have to be all in one sitting if you're scared of that. And yeah, regarding the software, we're using Creta, as I've said, and I'm going to give you a quick overview for it before we start. So even if you've never used it before, you can participate here because the software is not too complicated. By the way, I'm Duple your teacher. I'm an experienced artist and designer from Germany, and I am a huge proponent of Greta. I've been using it for many years to paint impressionist landscapes, abstract artworks, make logos, and web graphics, all kinds of stuff, because the software has so many options and the best brushes in the game. Aside from that, I really like thinking about and developing art and design theory. So my courses are always littered with little tips and tricks that are applicable beyond the current project. At least that's what I try to do. Now, our use of Krita is going to be quite minimal in this course. We're only using simple functions like brushes and layers because I want to focus on the actual art approach with a project. So if you have a computer and a drawing tablet, there is nothing stopping you from downloading Creta and joining me. It runs on any operating system. It costs nothing, and you don't even have to create an account. It even works on Android tablets, as I've heard. So there you go. Ladies and gentlemen, if you're interested, I invite you to join me in the first lesson. See you there. 2. Krita Overview: Okay. Welcome, everybody, to this little course. In this lesson, I'm going to show you the basics of using Creta. So if you're already familiar with this program and you're just here for the project, you can move on to the next lesson. But let's say you're starting from zero and you don't know what any of this is about. Well, the first thing you got to do is go to rita.org and download the installer for your operating system. Then just open it up and click through everything. The installation process is really quite simple. And once you've installed it, you can open it up, and you should end up on this start screen here. This is what you see by default every time you open up Krita. So if you can see this, you've done everything right. Now, right here, we can enable some news about updates and stuff. I don't really need that. And you can view your recently edited documents. You can just click them and continue working. But yeah, this is probably empty for you if you're new to this. And then on the left, we got the important stuff, which is making new images and opening up images. You can open up pretty much any image file in Creta, and it will work. But let's click on New Image. Then we get this little window where we can define a few attributes that our image will have. So things like the default background color or the number of layers, and we have a few templates here. But I'm usually just worried about the resolution and the image size. So the format of the image and its dimensions and the quality, which is, of course, also very important. But right here for this demo, it doesn't really matter. So let's just set it to something like thousand by 1,000 or ten ATP, like right here, and then we can click on Create Evo, this is the user interface of Krita. This is what you see all the time when you make digital art. Nice. Now, it might be a little bit confusing at first, but it's actually really simple. And if this looks any different for you, don't worry. You can adjust pretty much everything about this interface. But here is what we want for this course. First of all, you want to be able to see your tool bar, which is probably on the left side. There we can select all these awesome tools that Krita offers us. You can slide here to change its shape, and you can right click on this tool bar in order to change the icon size. I think like this, it's pretty cool with two columns and size 32, but it's up to you. Then on the right side, it gets a little bit more complex with multiple dockers. I have the color selector really important than the layers which we're also going to use in this course, and down here is the huge selection of brushes that Creta offers us. Now, here's the thing about these dockers. You can put them pretty much anywhere you like. So you can drag this color selector and put it up here or change the size. That's possible with every docker. And if any of these dockers are missing for you, go to settings, dockers, and there you have an overview for the different options. So these are the ones that I have active and the ones that I recommend for this course. Make sure you also have these dockers and put them somewhere where you can quickly access them. I think this right here is pretty close to the default interface. If you're happy with your arrangement of Dockers, which is called a workspace, you can also save it by clicking up here. You can type in a name for your current arrangement and then save it. So you can always return to this point. Mine is called Duplos standard. So if I select anything else here, the interface changes or I mess up something, I can just always return on this button and click on Duplos Standard, and then I'm back to my comfort zone. So, yeah, that's very useful to know for the start. You might also be interested in checking out the different themes by clicking on settings and themes. And there you have a little selection of different color schemes for Creta, but honestly, I pretty much only enjoy Creta darker, so that's what I'm working with. But yeah, once again, you can choose what you prefer and look around a bit. Alright, so much about the appearance of Creta and adjusting it to your liking. The first practical thing you should be able to do in Creta is navigating the canvas. The canvas, by the way, is this white box in the middle. This is where you can put the paint, where you can use the tools, and the thing that you will save as an image later on. You can zoom in and out by pressing minus or plus on your keyboard or alternatively by scrolling on your mouse, which I find way more practical. You can move the canvas around by holding down your space bar and then clicking and dragging or alternatively by holding down your scrolling wheel on the mouse and then just moving your mouse. I definitely prefer navigating the canvas with my mouse, so I always have it right next to my drawing tablet, and I'm switching back and forth between the pen for drawing and the mouse for navigating. But yeah, there are a couple options. What's also interesting is that you can rotate this canvas to the left by pressing four, rotate it to the right by pressing six, and neutralize it by pressing five. Might seem weird, but it actually comes in handy in a few different situations. Alright, so you should get comfortable with your way of navigating the canvas. You do it all the time in digital art. So yeah, just try it out a few times and make sure that works for you. Then let's move on to the functions, what we can actually do with Creta. For that, let's start up here at File. Of course, you can save your documents or export them or open up another one and edit multiple documents at once. Then we have all kinds of options for edit, view image, layer select. Most of those are not really important here. We are going to use some filters, I think, maybe one or two in this project. But yeah, you don't need to know about all that stuff now. But what might also be interesting is settings and configure Creta. You can change a few more general settings like about the performance, the shape of your color selector, and stuff like that. If you have performance issues or your drawing tablet doesn't work or something, then you might want to look into this and change a few settings. But you can also ask me, and I'll try to come back to you as soon as I can. Alright, so this is how it basically works. You have all kinds of options, all kinds of stuff here. Most of that you can figure out if you need it. But the core of it is, of course, still using the tools and functions. So let's start with the most important one, which is the brush tool. If you click on this icon right here, or you press B for brush, then you have the brush tool. And this is how you can draw and paint. If you have the brush tool selected and you click and drag, you are performing digital art. Great. The most important settings for that are the brush that you've selected. If you click on any brush here, then the paint that you drag on the canvas will have the shape of that brush. You can change the size of your brush by sliding here. You can change the opacity by sliding there, so your brush strokes will be more dense or more light. And you can, of course, select a color on the color selector by sliding on the circle to change the hue or in this triangle to change saturation and value. So that's cool. If you want to remove all the paint on your current layer, you can press delete, and it's gone. Or you can select an eraser as a brush, which are these ones with a transparency pattern. And if you don't like what you've changed about your brush, then you can always click on this icon here to reload the original preset. Alright, then what's absolutely essential to know in digital art is how to undo and redo. You can undo any action by pressing Control C and redo any action that you've undone by pressing Control Shift C. These are important hot keys that I use so much that I've actually mapped them to buttons on my drawing tablet, so I don't have to use my keyboard for that. And this is something that I generally recommend. If you have any buttons on your drawing tablet, map undo and redo to them, which you should be able to do in your tablet software. So this is the core action of digital art. You select a brush, you put paint on the canvas, and you change the size, opacity, and color. And if you don't like it, you can use an eraser and remove it or you press undo. That's it. By the way, you can access these options as well by right clicking with your brush, and there you have this quick access window. There you can also select the color, opacity, size, brush, all that important stuff. I don't use it too often, but many artists wear on it. So yeah, maybe you like to work that way. Keep it in mind. So this is basically how you do 99% of your digital painting. It's just navigating the canvas and putting paint there. Nevertheless, I should probably also show you some of these other tools. For example, this line tool with which you can drag straight lines that also have the shape of your brush, and the same applies for these other shape tools like the rectangle tool, the circle tool, and these other ones that we don't need. In any case, you can always view the tool options for these. If you go to this tool options docker, you can activate it under settings and dockers if you don't have it and put it somewhere, and there you can, for example, set it to fill with foreground color. So your circle is filled with a foreground color or stuff like that. But for digital painting, this is really useful. It's mostly for design, and that's not what this course is about. What we are going to need, however, is layers. Layers are like different overlapping work spaces that you can independently edit. For example, if I paint this line here, then this is on paint layer one, as you can see, on the layer docker. And if I want to make a new layer, I can click on this plus and then paint another line. Let's make it in a different color like that. And then you can independently ddt these layers. For example, with this transformation tool with which you can move them around or change their size, and as you can see, it only works on this one layer. If I want the other layer, then I have to click it on the layer Docker, and then I can edit that one. So this is how it basically works. And I can tell you already, it's very, very useful to separate different parts of your image by putting them on different layers, so you can independently make adjustments. This is a huge advantage of digital art, so we're going to make use of it in this course. Then we have some more tools like this gradient with which you can drag a gradient over the canvas and this color picker tool with which you can click on any color on your canvas to select it. But this tool is basically obsolete because you can always with your brush, hold Control and then click in order to select a color. And that's just way faster than first selecting this tool. Then we got the fill Bucket tool. Very simple. You can just fill the whole layer with the selected color just by clicking. And down here are the selection tools. Selections are the last big thing that you need to understand about Creta. So here's how it works. If you select an area, for example, with this rectangular selection tool, then you can only draw and paint inside this area. So yeah, that's basically it. You can undo any selection by pressing Control Shift A. And yeah, you have these different options for different shapes of selections like circular selections, free hand selections or also selecting a specific color on the canvas with this one. Here we go. This is basically everything you need to know to start making art with Creta. Of course, there are many more smaller options or different ways to do something that I've described here that I'm not going to go over here because I feel like it's just wasting your time, but you can always play around with this program and find out potentially useful or just interesting things. You should also do that if you're not comfortable yet navigating the canvas or using the basic tools that I've shown. Just make a few documents, save them, maybe experiment with layers, put some paint there, put some shapes there, move them around, and edit them, and maybe also experiment with these brushes and see how they react to pen pressure because that can also be quite interesting. But, yeah, that's on you. If you feel comfortable with these main functions, that's an excellent basis to start making an actual artwork. So let's go. 3. The Setup: Before we get started painting our dog, we need to set up a few things. First of all, let me make clear how you should participate in this course. What is the ideal way to do this project together with me? Well, we're going to make a digital painting of a dog from reference, which means you should have your software on your main screen or your tablet. But also, you want to look at both my course and the reference. And there are a few different options for this. For example, when I'm making a digital painting, I always have Creta on my main monitor and I pull up my references on my second monitor that is right next to it. And I could also switch back and forth between a tutorial and the reference on my second monitor. So that would be ideal, but you don't necessarily need that if you don't have a second monitor. You can also watch my course on your phone or even better a tablet that you set up right next to your single monitor. That's a great option. And I'm going to show the reference in my course in the corner like that. So it's going to look like this during the course. So you can look at the reference while you look at my course. However, it would be ideal if you could view this reference bigger. This is pretty much just a backup if you're too lazy to set it up in any different way. But I believe it would be way more productive for you if you, for example, printed the reference out so you can just see more detail there. And if you have a choice between a bigger screen and a smaller screen like your phone, for example, I would always put the reference on the bigger screen. Because here's the deal. If you paint, you want to look more at the reference than at my painting and my course because our main task is, well, paint the dog from reference. And this might seem obvious, but many people actually get this wrong about online courses. Yes, you want to watch my process, listen to my explanations, and my tips. But as soon as you pause to do a step yourself, you want to turn to the reference and not my course anymore. That is the crucial point here. If you see me sketch the basic shapes and explain something about it and you pause, then you don't want to look at my sketch and try to recreate that sketch, but you should look at your reference and try to sketch the basic shapes as you see them in the reference. I'm just giving you an example process, and I'm telling you what you should do and what order and what you should focus on. Use my process as orientation for what you should be doing step by step, but don't use my painting as a reference for your painting. That's basically all I'm trying to say here. Because you can actually get stuck, and you have to rely on digital art processes or tutorials or courses every time you want to make an artwork. And I don't want that. I want to enable you with this course to make art yourself, to be able to choose any reference you like, break it down and recreate it in your interpretation. That's the goal. So if you see me use a certain type of brown, don't try to pick the exact same brown as me. No, you learn nothing that way. But ask yourself, why does Duple use this brown? Okay, he said he's looking for the average color of the dog's feet. So you look for the average color of the dog's feet in your reference, and then you use that. And who knows? Maybe your brown is even more accurate than mine. That's the whole point here. Alright, I think you get it now. This is just how you can extract the most value out of this course, and that's what we want, right? So make sure you're able to see the reference as big as possible and always watch a bit ahead to see me complete a step of this project and see what I have to say about it, and then do it yourself by looking at your reference. So, yeah, it could also be an option for you to switch back and forth between the course and the reference on the same screen. Maybe that works for you. There are also programs like PUREf that let you overlay a reference over a certain window on your computer. You can check it out if you want, but I don't personally use it because I have two monitors. Yeah, get yourself set up comfortably before we start. But the way we're going to look for that reference together in a different lesson, where I tell you a few tips what I'm looking for in a reference and where I'm looking for references and all that stuff. So yeah, just keep that in mind until then. This lesson was maybe a bit abstract and just me rambling, but it's going to get a lot more simple in the practical part. I just feel like too few art teachers actually talk about this issue. So here we go. 4. The Reference: Ladies and gentlemen, let's have a look for a beautiful reference. I know it might seem unnecessary to you because you've probably already seen what you're going to paint in the course thumbnail or the intro, but me right now, I don't know yet, and I want to take you with me through the whole process of making an artwork. And that starts well, at the very beginning with finding out what you want to paint in the first place. So yeah, maybe you can already learn something here. So, I want to paint art dog today. Dogs are cute. Everybody likes dogs, and they are a very fun subject to paint. So I think it would be cool to make a little course about painting a dog to get more people into digital art. That is my first vision here. However, I'm not very experienced with dogs, so I'm going to need a reference, and I look for a reference that I can replicate without thinking too much. I don't want to construct a unique composition in this case with combining multiple references or using lots of art theory to find the right arrangement of the subjects and whatever. That's something that I do in some of my other courses, but right here, let's keep it very simple and beginner friendly. Still, I want our painting to have quite a bit of detail. So I'm going to look for a reference that has high quality where you can see everything clearly. And because that's all for now in terms of ideas, I'm going to go on the world wide web to a place where I can find many high quality references. For me, that place is usually paxels.com or pagesaby.com. On these stock photo sites, you have pretty much unlimited images with no copyright, and they've been uploaded by actual photographers, and they're not just indexed from random websites like the Google Images. So if you want a clean, high quality depiction of a simple subject, I highly recommend you these two websites. Obviously, if your search gets very specific, then you might find just more stuff with a standard search engine. But for something generic like in our case, dog, this is perfect. So let's type in dog on pexels.com, and let's see what we got. I pretty much only want a dog with nothing too complex in the background and ideally very simple light conditions. Usually, I'm a big fan of extreme light conditions because I like impressionism and I like exaggerating light effects and sunsets with high contrast and stuff like that. But I think it would be too difficult here to pick the correct colors. Let's keep it chill with something like this, maybe. As you can see, if you click on any image here, you can scroll down and you will find similar ones. So if something looks close enough to you but not quite it, then don't ignore it, but click on it. I mean, this right here is quite good, but I ideally want to paint a bit more of the body as well and not just the head. So maybe how about this one? That's a very cute dog. We have a well, very high quality image. That's awesome. We have a simple background with only grass, so it's gonna be easy to paint. And also we have very simple light conditions, just a little bit of shadow on the bottom, but that's pretty much it. The only thing that's bothering me about this is that it's not central. You see the dog is pretty high up and we got this unnecessary bit of blurry grass at the bottom. So perhaps this would look good as a square image where we leave all of that out. You know what? Let me just download this and open up Creta, so I can make a few adjustments to this reference. You don't have to follow me yet. Don't worry. Now, you could open up your reference in Creta and just adjust it with a crop tool, but I'm going to make a square image right away and fit the reference into it. So new file 2000 by 2000, that's going to be big enough. And then I'm going to pull the reference in here and insert it as a new layer. Here we go. Now I'm going to use the transformation tool that I've shown you to move the reference around and adjust it. So like this, it's a little bit too narrow to fill out the whole square, but there are a couple of things that we could do about that. For example, we could fill this empty area on the right here with a solid color like that, so we could just expand the grass in our painting so it would fit. However, that would mean that the dog is a little bit off center, and I don't want that. So maybe we can just make the dog layer bigger so it fills out everything. Let's hold down shift while we drag this corner to keep the proportions. And okay, let's move it down. And, yeah, now it fits, and the dog fills out pretty much everything. We have just a tiny bit of empty space around it with the grass. Usually, empty space is really important in art, especially if you have multiple elements interacting with each other in a composition. But right here, we have a central subject, single depiction of one dog, and I think it's fine like that. So yeah, let me save this as reference and as a standard image file like PNG or JPEG. So we can open this up with a simple image viewer while we make the artwork. Alright, I'm going to put this reference that I've just edited down in the course resources. So you can download it right now. Or if you want, you can also go through this whole process yourself by following my path on pexels.com, finding this image, then importing it in Creta, and cropping it and whatever. You can do all of that for practice, or you just download this ready made reference. It's up to you. Now, what is the takeaway from this lesson? Well, it's a little insight into what I'm thinking when I'm preparing an artwork. I think it's really useful to think about many factors when, for example, selecting a reference. You see, I thought about the art style in which I want to paint, the background, if it's simple or complex, the lighting, if I want to make it difficult for myself and maybe make something more exciting or very simple, like right here with just nice textures. And of course, I want you to be aware of the fact that you can always adjust your references. So you don't have to look for the absolutely perfect image on the Internet that you can replicate one by one. But if you open up your mind to imagine what you could possibly change about references that you see, you'll suddenly see a lot more possibilities for what you could do as an artist. Right here, obviously, it was very simple. We just scaled the reference a bit and adjusted the format. But you can do so much more if you want, if you use the basic tools of Creta, you can mirror a reference, you can adjust its colors, if you don't like them. You can even combine multiple references to construct a unique composition. The creative part of digital art already starts with selecting a reference and imagining how you could adjust it to your personal needs. So make sure you got the reference, and let's move on. 5. The Brushes: Okay, one last thing before we move on to the practical part, you'll have to download some brush bundles. Brushes, as you hopefully know by now, are these things in Creta that you can click on, and they change the way you're applying paint to the canvas. And there are many pretty nice brushes in Creta, as you can see, they all react very differently and in kind of a unique way often. But, ladies and gentlemen, in my opinion, the best ones are not in Creta by default, so you'll have to download them. There are these things called brush bundles that are basically collections of custom brushes that other artists have kindly created for us. And I've added the ones that I'm currently using to the course resources. So download the file that says something like Duples brush bundles and then save it somewhere on your computer where it doesn't annoy you, but you can still find it. Those are the two most important criteria. Because once you got them, you can open up Creta and go to settings, manage resource libraries, and there you can manage your brush bundles. For example, you can import the ones that you've downloaded and let them show up here. Mine are already there, but I'll have to activate them by clicking on each and then clicking on Activate. And yeah, this is basically how it works. The brushes should show up in the brush list now, and we'll have a lot more options to apply paint in beautiful ways. Obviously, we're not going to use 100 different brushes in our painting. I mean, these are quite many now, but it definitely doesn't hurt to have more brush bundles, and I just want that you have the same options as me when we make the artwork. If you want, you can look for certain brushes by filtering for a tag here. For instance, we've downloaded the Mimi Leo impasto brushes that I found just last year, and I've already used them so many times. These brushes are absolutely amazing, and I'm pretty sure that we're going to find a use for them in our artwork. As you can see, they make these beautiful painterly brush strokes, and they even automatically mix the paint like it's real impasto. As you can see, if you scribble with different colors next to each other, you have this really cool effect, and all these brushes have a slightly different texture. So yeah, download my brush bundles, import them in Creta, as I've shown you, and perhaps you maybe want to even get a little bit of practice with them. You can just take 5 minutes and click on different brushes here, maybe the new ones that you've imported and just play around with them, see how they react to different pen pressure and to different colors. And a, that would be a great basis. So if you're ready, let's finally move on to the dog painting and start with a simple but effective sketch. 6. Sketching: Okay, everybody. I hope you're all ready to start with the artwork, and let's get right into it by making a new image in Creta. Actually, let's make it a bit bigger than the reference. So 2,500 by 2,500. That way, we'll be able to see some very nice detail. If you really want, you can also make this a different resolution, but it has to be a square. Then you're all good. So here we have our nice document. And the first thing I want to do is go to the layer Docker, double click on paint Layer one, and rename it to sketch. This is really important, so we're able to paint underneath our sketch and see it while we are painting, but also to be able to deactivate it later on. You know, we don't want any scrappy pencil lines on our beautiful painting, but we need them nonetheless to know where everything goes. So let's select a nice sketching brush. The best ones for that are usually these pencils here, but my personal favorite is always this one, this pencil for soft. With it, we can make these very smooth and thin lines. Look at that. Oh, that was a pretty good circle. It's usually not super important which exact sketching brush you use because they won't be visible in the final painting anyways, but I can highly recommend you this one. So this is the basis for our artwork. Whenever you feel like saving, save your artwork as a Krita document like this. Click on Save and then select the file type Krita document. That way, you're going to keep all your layers. And that's really important if you want to be able to continue. Alright, that's everything you need to know. So let's pull up the reference like that and get started. The first thing I'm always looking for in a reference is the big shapes and the big lines. We want to divide our image into smaller parts, smaller shapes that we can then divide into even smaller ones. So we first want to recreate the big shapes as accurately as possible. You want to think like this, for example, the head is an ellipsis that is this far away from the left edge and that far away from the top edge, and I'm going to make it a bit easier for myself here by just creating more of these edges for orientation. So let me divide this image into four equal parts using the line tool. If you hold down shift while dragging your line, you can make it perfectly horizontal or vertical, and we want one of each. Apply just a little bit of pressure on your drawing table because these lines should be very light. Okay, maybe a bit more to the right like that. These lines are going to help us to position the big lines and shapes more accurately and therefore make the artwork look better. And let's see what are the easiest things that we can draw now? Well, the back of our dog comes out at pretty much exactly the middle of the left side. So let me draw this angle here, how I see it. That should be quite accurate. Then the dog's head is about this far away from the top, I think. And it makes a little curve like that. And the ear is about this far away from the right side, I think. So let me indicate it with a line. Very likely. So this is how I usually proceed when making a sketch. I'm first looking for the easy parts. So something like the horizon line or the center line or if we have anything like that. Right here, a defining characteristic of the composition is definitely the big circle that makes our dog's head. So let me try to draw it in an appropriate size and position. This is definitely going to take a few attempts because I'm just drawing free hand and not with a circle tool, which you can also use in a sketch, but I don't know, I like to practice making circles. So yeah, this is maybe not the most beautiful circle, but it looks like the head of our dog in the right place. So that's what we want. And now that we have the circle, we have one more object for orientation where the other stuff goes. So now I know that the top edge of the head goes something like that. So let me scribble it very lightly. And on the right side, the head connects to the ear in a downward line like that. Let me also indicate a few of these hairs already. And then it goes down and it comes back up about here into the head. Looks pretty good, so I'm already intensifying these lines a little bit. Then what would also be quite easy to do is the right side of our dog because we can always measure the distance between the right edge and the edge of the dog. It gets a little bit more narrow as we move down here. And then comes the foot approximately like that. So yeah, when making a sketch, we're basically just measuring the distance between the big shapes and putting our best guess on the canvas with very light lines. And it doesn't matter at all what you're painting or what the anatomy of that thing is. If you just look at these big shapes, their differences, and their distance between each other. Our dog is just one big wacky shape in the middle of green that consists of smaller wacky shapes. If you make a mistake, it does matter. Just draw over it and remove the lines that you don't want anymore in eraser mode, which you can activate by pressing E. You can see the closer you are to the edge of your image, the easier it is to estimate the distances. So this is usually where I start working when I'm making a sketch like that, just scribbling the outside edges like that. I'm also drawing very quickly and dynamically here, just to put many lines on the canvas. This feels better to me when sketching than drawing slow and precise lines because I can kind of feel the shapes better when I'm drawing quickly, especially when they are round shapes, and we got quite a few of those here. It doesn't matter if you make your sketch in the exact same order as me. You can also start on the left side and go counterclockwise or something like that. But I just want you to be aware of what you're trying to do when sketching. You want to make a skeleton of your artwork so you know where to put all the paint later on. It's not about making a beautiful line art where no lines go slightly outside or you have too many different scribbles next to each other. You just want to know where are the big shapes, and where should I put my paint later on? Right here, as you can see, I've procrastinated on the face because I think that's the most difficult part. But now I have more other shapes for orientation. So let me start with the chin. And for that, this middle horizontal line is very useful. And always check if the differences between the shapes that are already there are roughly correct. So look at your reference and estimate how big the difference is between the ear and the mouth and the mouth and the middle line. And if it all kind of works, then you're on the right track. Sometimes when it's very difficult, like with his nose, you just have to invest a few attempts and undo with Control C until you like it. Okay, and now as we've drawn the head, it also becomes obvious how it connects to this part on the left side that we sketched at the very start. This is the nice thing about sketching. It's very hard in the beginning, usually, but you just start with the obvious shapes and the obvious lines and distances. And then as you keep going, it clears up more and more. So I think this left side of the dog looks especially accurate. In order to estimate the proportions, it makes sense to zoom out once in a while. And yeah, you can see I'm intensifying the lines that I already like. Now, for the eyes, I'm especially careful because I know that those are really important factors. If the eyes are off, it's just not going to look good. So I'm trying to measure as many distances here as possible. So the distance between the ear and the eye, between the top part and the eye, between the mouth and the eye, and this is where I think it should be. Maybe it could also help to indicate some of these color differences in the fur here just to have more reference points for the right proportions. Actually, now as I've intensified some of these lines and I zoom out a bit, I noticed that the head is not quite right. I mean, it's okay, so I'm not going to erase it with the eraser, but if I could just shift the shapes a little bit, that would be awesome. Luckily, there are a few options for that increta. So look at this method for a second. I'm using this freehand selection tool here to select the area that I want to shift a little bit. So this left side of the dog's face Just like that, just go around all of it, and then I have it selected. Then I can press Control C, delete, and Control V to copy, delete and paste this area onto a new layer. And then I can use the transformation tool here to transform this layer and therefore shift the shapes of this area that I want to fix. So maybe like that, you can see I can slightly rotate this, and it's always helpful to zoom out to measure the proportions. And yeah, I think that's not quite it. So let me undo all of that and re select this time, including the ear as well. Then same thing once again, copy, delete paste, and then we can perhaps rotate the whole head a little bit like that and squeeze it together just a tiny bit. When you're done with a transformation like that, you can press Control E to merge your layer with a layer below it, so you have everything on one layer again. I think the grand proportions are pretty good now, so I'm just intensifying some of the best lines and then maybe shifting the whole layer a bit to the right. So these are tools and functions that you can use to make your sketch as accurate as possible. Always measure the distances between shapes that you can see in your head and check if they're roughly correct. Before moving on to the painting part, I usually like to clean up my sketches a little bit. That means I'm going over it in eraser mode, and I'm erasing all the lines that I don't quite like, and I replace them with more clean ones. In sketching, it often happens that you just have many lines. And when you're painting, you pretty much only want to use the best ones for orientation. So let's make them as clearly visible as possible. Okay, I hope that you understood this sketching process, and your dog looks something like this in the end. Remember, if something looks totally off to you, just use the selection tool to select that area, copy, delete, paste it onto a new layer, and then you can perhaps transform it into a better version of it with a transformation tool. This is, of course, not only the head, like I did it here, but it could also be just the foot or the body of the dog or something like that. Does matter. If you use these basic tools well and you take your time, you can sketch pretty much anything. You just have to break it down into shapes, constantly measure the distances between them in your head, and put your best guess on the canvas until you like it. And I would really not make the sketch any more detail than it is right now. Too many lines could be confusing when you're painting. You just want to indicate the important shapes that have a lot of difference to their surroundings. So the bright dog in the middle, to the grass on the sides, the colored tongue, and the dark chin, these things should be outlined in your sketch. And if it looks something like this for you as well, then save it with Control S. And then I would say we're totally ready to add some paint to it. Let's go. 7. Blocking in Colors: Okay, I hope you all have your sketch ready because now comes the real deal of making a painting, which is adding the paint, who would have thought. And yeah, let's just start practically. In digital art, the best way to add paint, in my opinion, is to add it underneath the sketch. So we can still see the sketch while we're painting, but it doesn't interfere with anything. So let's go ahead and make a new layer underneath the sketch layer. For that, let's select the background layer and then click on this plus icon to make a new layer above it. I'm going to double click and call it grass because that's the first thing that I want to paint. So now let's try to find the average color of our background grass. It doesn't have to be 100% accurate, but it should be as close as possible. In order to do this economically, let's use the fill Bucket tool and just click. Yeah, that's not quite it, I think. Maybe like that. Okay, if it's just a bit more desaturated, I think it should work. Alright, that's a good basis. So I'll go ahead and make a new layer above the grass layer called dog because that's the only other thing we got. So let's select a brush with which we can nicely block in some colors. And I'll go with this one. Mm eo one brush, flat tip. That's a good one. I know it very well, and, yeah, it's quite versatile, so I'm going to use it for this artwork. But before we start with the painting, let me make the sketch layer a little bit less opaque by selecting it and then sliding the opacity around here, I think. And then we can switch back to the dog layer. Nice. Let's do the same thing once again for the dog. What is the average color of the whole dog? Once again, look at the reference and not which color I'm picking, but I think it could be something like this. So let me scribble a little bit with this, and, yeah, I think I'm going to fill the whole dog with this color first. I painted a bit over the edge here, so let me use this selection tool, select that area, and then delete it. And then let's keep going. Just scribble and fill out the whole thing with the average color that you think the dog has. This is always a great way to start your painting. By the way, I'm first making my brush very big to fill out everything in the middle. But I'm leaving a little bit of empty space on the sides on the outlines of the dog because I want to make the brush a bit smaller for that so we can be more precise. You see, now I can just make the brush a bit smaller and be more precise at the outlines. And this is also why I like reducing the opacity of my sketch when I'm painting. If your sketch is at 100% density, it's not easy to see where all your paint starts and stops. But still, it doesn't have to be super precise yet. We just want to block in the basic colors that we can see one by one. I Okay, now we have the dog in one color. And the next step is to divide it into two colors for the next layer of detail. We can, for example, divide it into light parts and dark parts, and this is pretty light. So let's block in some dark parts. What is the average color of the dog's shadow parts? Let's look for that. Could be somewhere around here. So let's make the brush bigger again so we can just roughly block that in and try to recreate those dark shapes. Okay, maybe it's a bit more on the red side. So it's dark around here at the neck and also the ear is pretty dark. So let's follow the sketch at that point. And then here on the right side, the foot and the bottom. I'm just quickly blocking in all these dark parts where I see them in the sketch. I mean the reference. So in the middle, we have kind of a mix between dark and bright, so I'm not filling this out, but just scribbling a bit. And then we got something on this foot, as well. Okay, this should be it for the dark parts. So let's look for the next division that we could make. And yeah, our dog has some mitons. You see, there is a lot of difference between the dark and the bright parts now. So let's try to look for a color in the middle and kind of connect them. So that's about here, I think. And then let's just block that in everywhere where we see it. You will see that this is an amazing brush. It varies both its size and opacity as you vary the pressure on your drawing tablet, and it mixes with the paint that's already there. So it kind of reacts like real oil paint, and that's so awesome. If you just look at these values, these dark parts, and bright parts, and try to blur them in, it almost starts looking three dimensional already. Okay, I would say that's a good first layer of detail. So let me switch to another thing that's quite easy to do, and that is blocking in those black parts in the face. They are also pretty distinct. For that, we use black, of course, but also let's make the brush a little bit smaller so we can be more precise. And then let's just add this nose and this mouth, these black lips. And then the ice with an even smaller brush. And this is so easy if you have a good sketch. Then we also have a little bit of black between the nose and the lip like that. And after that, let's immediately move on to the tongue because that's also clearly visible, and we can just block in this average color that we see, which should be something like this. Let's just paint that beneath the sketch. It's literally just coloring the lines at this stage. Nice. Now we can move back to the dog's fur texture, I would say, and just add another layer of detail. So let's go back to brown, maybe make it a bit more saturated, and then try to find these more defined shadow areas. Don't worry too much about the texture of your brush strokes yet. You still just want to put the right colors in the right place at approximately the size that you see them, if you can understand that. But I already try to go a little bit in the direction that the fur grows with my brush. So if the fur grows sideways in a place, I paint more sideways. If the fur goes down, I paint downwards. This just feels so intuitive to you as an artist if you paint lots of fur or also trees and stuff like that to kind of mimic the direction of the shapes with your brush. But I think many beginner artists don't know that yet. So try to paint how you would pet the dog. I think that's a good analogy. Just follow the direction in which the fur grows with your brush. Just block in the most common average colors of this dog. You can see if I deactivate the sketch layer, it already kind of looks like a dog. In the end, we of course, want to deactivate the sketch layer altogether. So it makes sense to just click on this eye icon once in a while to just see where the artwork is going. As you get a little bit more detailed, you also notice that you have to shrink your brush a little bit in order to still be able to recreate the shapes that you see accurately. But I would say you should not make it smaller than 50 pixels in this lesson. We first want to put all the basic colors where they belong. You see, I'm mainly using very big brush strokes in order to achieve that, and I'm also painting very dynamically. Of course, for some finer sections like this gray around the nose, it's okay to make the brush a bit smaller and paint a bit more slowly. But we still want to follow the same principle. Just block it in. By the way, it doesn't really matter that much in digital art, what you paint first. In traditional art, you should usually start with the background, so the sky usually or the ground, depending on what you paint. But in digital art, with these layers, you have the freedom. You don't have to always paint above the stuff that's already there, but you can also paint behind it. So there is no strict rule for what you should paint first. But be aware you always want to work in these layers of detail like we're doing it here. The first brushstrokes of a painting will always be ugly. That's just a timeless rule of art. So you just have to start and push through, and it kind of unfolds as you go. Start really easy with one color, then two colors, then try to mix in a third color and just keep going like that. Don't think about any details, just colors and shapes and work layer by layer. If you're able to just think in colors and shapes, it doesn't matter at all what you're painting. I'm not thinking, Oh, let me paint an ear here, but I'm thinking, let me paint some dark, desaturated brown here that's slightly underneath this more saturated brown. It's just colors and shapes. Nothing else. And also, I've deactivated my sketch at this point because I already have quite a lot of paint on the canvas that I can use for orientation, but you can still have it on for this lesson if you want. I think this would be a reasonable goal for this lesson to put enough paint on the canvas that you don't need the sketch anymore to distinguish the different areas. No more and not less. Just use this beautiful brush to define where are the dark parts, where are the bright parts, and how do they connect with each other. A When your dog looks something like this like a dog, then you've done a very good job. This is always the first step of making a great painting, just blocking in all the basic colors. So when you're done, save it, and let's dive a bit deeper in the next lesson. 8. Painting smaller Shapes: Welcome to the next lesson. Right now, we are at a very interesting point of making a painting because we have many options now. All the stuff that we did until here, like sketching and blocking and colors, that's a process that you can follow pretty much always in the same way, and it will work out as a great basis for an artwork. But as it gets more detailed and you put on the brushstrokes that the viewers will actually see in the end, you have a lot more options. So what we'll be doing from now on will be a little bit more specific to our painting. But let me explain more about that while we're doing it. So let's just start. I've told you that we want to work in layers of detail. That's not going to change throughout this course. So a good way to progress through your painting. Remember this is to always look out which part is lagging behind in terms of detail now. And in our case, that's definitely the background, which is just one color. So let's go back to the grass layer. We still just want to block in the basic colors as we've done it for the dog. And for that, I think this brush would be fitting quite big. Choosing the right brushes is something that unfortunately just comes with experience. There is no trick or anything. You just have to know them and use them. But the ones that I'm showing you in this course are ones that I use very often, and I can highly recommend them. Every brush that you use in Creta is kind of a new learning curve. So you should definitely not use too many brushes in the beginning, but try to understand the ones that you're using very well. So just follow me, use the brushes that I'm using. And yeah, I think that way, you're on a good path. With this one, as you can see, we can make a nice blend of different colors into a chaotic texture, and it kind of goes in the direction of the grass that we can see in the reference. It definitely takes a few layers to get this looking good. But we just want to make a texture of slightly different tones of green that approximately looks like in the reference in terms of color. Again, don't worry too much about texture and detail yet, but just about the colors and where they are. Okay, I think like this, it's pretty right. So let's add another layer of detail to the dog, of course, on the dog layer. And I would say still with this brush, it has served us well. I want to start in the face with these lighter hairs, and for that, I'll make the brush quite a bit smaller. Now look how I'm doing it. I'm doing the exact same thing that we've done last lesson just on a smaller scale. Now we have quite a few colors and shapes on the dog as reference points, so we can divide them into slightly smaller ones, and we can zoom in a little bit. So just look at your reference a little bit more closely and put the right colors in the right place. You can see I'm still trying to follow the direction in which the hairs of our dog grow with the brush strokes. I'm making them long and thin, so they look like fur a little bit more. Once again, I recommend that you start in a place where you're confident. So the top of the head is quite easy here, I think, and the ear too, because it's very chaotic, so it's not super important which exact color every place has. Around the eyes, however, I'm trying to be a bit more precise, and I'm making my bras strokes a bit shorter. Don't forget to zoom out once in a while to check if the proportions are still right. Sometimes adding a new layer of detail can throw things off a bit. So never stay zoomed in for too long. When making a digital painting, you could lose track of the grand composition. As you can see, the face is especially tricky, and I'm working with very small brush strokes here. Y. It might take you a few layers to get it right. Like right here, I'm making the whole thing darker again because there are too many bright brush strokes. Also on the ear. Actually, putting many layers of paint on the canvas over each other can look really cool if you do it right. It gives you this very rich and busy look in the end, and I always find that very interesting to look at in digital art. Here's the thing about this layer of detail. We're still not putting on the final texture for this dog. This layer serves the same function as the last one, just on a more detailed level. It's a definition where the colors are at their approximate size. If we do this well, then we'll have many options in the end to create a more fine tuned texter, maybe with multiple different brushes. But this right here is the basis. I mean, we can continue working like this and make a final texture with this exact brush, but then we'd have to be a bit more careful than right now. Also, it might be a bit boring and you don't learn as much if we just do everything with one brush. We could do it, of course. I mean, it's a really good one, but we have so many options in digital art that I want to highlight something special in this course, because I've decided to go with a painting technique that many artists don't use, but I really like it. So let me spoil what we're going to do in the next lesson. We're going to use blending brushes to create a really smooth and beautiful texture out of the colors that we're adding right now. So here we are basically just preparing by putting the colors in the right place. And in the next lesson, we will blend them together and create awesome detail. Sounds weird, and maybe you don't know how, but you're going to like this method, I promise. And it's actually big enough friendly because it allows us to be a bit more chaotic right now at this stage of the painting. We just have to be a bit more patient and finish this layer of detail. You can clearly see how dense my different brush throats are. So make sure your dog has the same level of detail when we're done with this lesson. And there really isn't that much else to say here. Just divide the shapes that are already there into slightly smaller ones by looking between your painting and your reference. I'm still painting very dynamically here, especially the fur, because that's a chaotic texture anyways, and it just looks better if you paint those fast and with confidence, no matter if the brush strokes are super accurate at the end, at least in my opinion. You see this fur in the middle here is very chaotic and dynamic. So let's try to mimic that with our bras strokes, so we get this more natural feeling to it. I think that's always a good way to do it. So let's add a bit more detail to the chin. And then the lip a little bit. It's probably like that. And the nose with very low pressure. There is a colour transition from gray to white to brown. So if we apply low pressure here to blend those colors together, it's got to look awesome. And then I'm moving back down to the fur and just scribbling with different colors to create this texture. Don't worry. There is no exact rule for what you should paint first. You work in these layers of detail, which means that you first give the whole artwork about the same detail before you move on to the next one, and you always start with a part that you think is the easiest that you want to paint right now. I think that helps usually. Right here, you can see, I'm not quite happy with the whole color of the dog. So I'm going over it with a bit brighter, more saturated brown on the ear, on the head, on the nose. And I think we also need some of that color down here on the fur and the foot. And then let's give the whole thing a bit more contrast by taking care of the shadow parts. I'm still painting mostly in the direction in which the fur grows. This is just the best way to do it for these organic subjects, in my opinion. But still, this is not the final texture, so it's fine if you paint a bit differently. In the next lesson, when we use the blending brushes, this is going to be more important. Alright, you will notice as you paint more and more, how you're better able to tell where all the colors and shapes go. The more you paint, the more reference points you have, and the more everything clears up. But still, let's stay patient here and create an awesome texture. Don't rush. I think patients may be the most difficult part about art. If you break it down, every single brushstroke is really a simple thing. You just have to make them and a good amount of them until anything starts looking good. Just take your time. Don't worry too much about whether it's detailed enough or the colors are exactly right. We can easily fix all of that in the next lesson. Just look at the colors in your reference and their approximate shape, measure them with your eyes and put your best guess on the canvas. Okay, I think the whole thing needs a bit more brightness. Just like that. You will probably get a good feeling for this particular brush at this stage. While in the beginning, it always feels a bit weird to use a brush. If you make a nice little painting like right here, you already understand it a lot better. And a layer of detail like this definitely already counts as a painting. Not a super fine tuned one, of course, but we're still doing a lot. Don't forget that. So, yeah, this brush should start feeling more and more comfortable to you as we move on. It's so awesome and versatile that I'm sure you'll be able to use it in many more situations beyond this course. Really good for blocking in colors, but also merging them and painting textures. And yeah, it has a lot going for it. Let's add a bit more detail to our tongue. It has this little shadow on it, and then a few highlights at the bottom. I'm leaving out the dirt because I think nobody wants to see that in the final artwork. Don't shy away from changing things. If your reference doesn't portray exactly what you want, a reference is more like a tool to use than a guideline to follow, as I always say, use a reference for help to make your artwork look more realistic and to know where everything goes. But if you want to change something, go through it. It would be boring if we as artists just recreate reality exactly one by one. We got photographers to do that job. I'm pretty sure we're going to find something to add to this artwork in the end. That's not in the reference. All right. So in the end, your dog should look something like this with this level of detail. No clearly defined shapes, no sophisticated texture, all the colors put approximately where they belong. If you got that, let's move on and bring some order to this chaos. 9. Creating the Texture: Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the fun part of this course. Our fairy friend has taken shape, but he looks a bit messy right now. So let's take care of that. We are going to create the main texture of our dog using blending brushes. Blending brushes are an amazing and underrated tool in digital art. So I hope that you'll get it in this lesson and see the possibilities to use them beyond this course. Without further ado, here they are. Blending brushes are all these white ones in Creta, especially this blending knife is one of my favorites. And here's the deal. With blending brushes, you cannot add any new paint to the canvas. You can only manipulate the paint that's already there on the layer that you're on. Like this, you can see I can drag this paint around with this knife, and it always takes the color that I start on. Maybe watch me paint first and explain a few things before you start. Let me just make this a bit smaller, and then you can see with this blending knife, I can just scribble back and forth to create these blurry lines with these peaks at the end, always with a color that I click on first. This also works with transparency like on the ear here. I can drag this nothing from outside in if there is a bit too much brown and vice versa. I can pull this brown outside to expand the dog and create some of these hairs here. And, yeah, this is basically how it works. It's definitely something to get used to, but once you get it, this opens up so many possibilities for your art. Right here, we basically want to scribble back and forth over the whole dog to create the fur texture with this blending brush. So we have these overlapping lines that together make a really detailed and smooth surface, pretty much automatically. Like with almost all brushes, you can merge the colors together more smoothly if you apply low pressure on your drawing tablet, or you can drag the colors more aggressively if you need it when you apply high pressure. Then you can create these long hairs. We still want to look at the reference in order to determine where we should pull this paint, and now it's really important that you follow the direction in which the fur grows with your brush. I'm starting at the head once again, but it's also fine if you start somewhere else, especially if you're not used to these blending brushes and just want to experiment, start on the body. There is more chaos anyways, and you can't do that much wrong. So feel free to begin. It might take you a bit to get used to this method of painting, but it's very adjustable. You can mess up everything with this brush, but you can also fix everything. So don't be afraid, scribble back and forth on this fur and see how it reacts. I recommend you set your brush size to something similar to mine, maybe even a bit bigger. Otherwise, it's going to take too long to complete this layer of detail, and we still want to be able to see these individual hairs. So if you make them too small, it might not work as well. Just drag the paint around and try to understand how this works. You can see on the ear here, I'm scribbling back and forth a lot because the ear is quite complex in terms of texture. The awesome thing about these blending brushes is that you don't have to select any color. You can just manipulate the ones that are already there. So if you need more orange in a place, you just go to an orange bit that's nearby and you drag it out, just like I'm doing it here on this ear with all these colors. Look at your reference to determine how long you should make your brush strokes. Where there are shorter hairs, you make them shorter and paint more quickly. Where there are longer hairs like on the ear or the fur on the body, you can make longer brush strokes and add a few more curves to them because with these blending brushes, we can basically simulate the hairs of our dog, and this is going to result in a very natural texture that's pleasing to look at if we do it right. I Now I'm moving a bit more down to the body. For that, I'm making my brush a bit bigger because, like, bits of hair are also bigger there, you know, the shapes. But I'm still painting pretty freestyle, just wherever I feel like it's necessary. So I might go back to the ear for a moment or the face and just do everything bit by bit, slowly expanding this beautiful texture over the whole thing. If you don't follow the direction in which the hairs grow, it's going to look really weird with this brush. So this basically forces us to understand this dog a bit better and get a feeling for these organic shapes of which it consists. This blending brush style is especially good for, I think, solid but organic shapes. You know, you wouldn't use this for foliage. It's kind of hard, and you wouldn't use it for static structures like buildings. It's too chaotic for that. But stuff like branches and tree trunks or ground like sand, snow, and earth, but also faces and skin, and, of course, all kinds of fur. These blending brushes are amazing for that once you get behind it, and now you can also see why we just put the colors in the right place in the previous lessons. That was the preparation for these blending brushes. All we have to do right now is patiently pull this paint around. This is why I think it's beginner friendly to paint in this style. You first have this blocking in colors part where you measure the shapes with your eyes and you roughly throw in some colors, and then you create the fine texture by blending them together. It's a really relaxing process. You just have to take your time and do it well. I don't forget about the reference and use it for orientation, but I would say it's fine at this point if your painting diverges from it a little bit. Just one last instruction for this stage, you want to aim for visual consistency. The density of brush strokes with this blending brush should approximately be the same on the whole dog. So you don't want any part that's significantly more detail than another. Obviously, in some places, there are more different colors interacting with each other, like on the ear, so you will have a bit more detail there. But in general, you should try to make it consistent. Many beginner artists start super detailed in one place and take their time, and then they lose patience and just scribble back and forth a few times in another place. And this leads to visual inconsistency that's not very nice to look at in an artwork. So treat every place the same, take your time and look at the reference, just like I'm doing it here. Alright. Now, here we go. I've taken care of the whole dog and created a dense texture with his blending knife. It already looks pretty detailed and relatively consistent, so that's what we want. But I think it would be cool to mix in another texture just to make it more interesting. So I'm switching to this blending brush, this other knife, and just lightly drag the paint in a few places. You can see it still works basically the same, but it results in a very different texture with these parallel lines. I'm applying very low pressure, and I'm just adding a few of these bros strokes everywhere to give the texture more life. Once again, aim for visual consistency. So if you add some of these brush strokes, add them everywhere at approximately the same density. And make sure your brush strokes go in different directions for optimal chaos and business in the fur. We don't want to fill the whole dog with this new texar, but just a few strokes like this will work wonders, because then we'll have quite a unique texar with different elements within it. That's always cool to have. M. All right. I would say that's it for the blending brushes. You should understand quite well how they work now and be able to create an equally detailed text rob with them. Just like that. If you got this, save your artwork and then let's make a few adjustments to it in the next lesson. H. 10. Finetuning the Subject: Okay, now, look at this. We've already made quite an impressive artwork, only using simple tools and a bit of patience. In this lesson, I want to go over the dog's texture a little bit and see if I can make some adjustments. Notice that it's not necessary that you follow me in this lesson one by one if you're happy with your dog. I'm just going to show you a few methods to improve something like this and explain what I'm thinking when fine tuning. Look at this, for example. I often like experimenting with filters a little bit, not just in the end, but also during the process, because there are a few filters that can be applied that if you then paint over, create a really cool mix of textures. In Creta, you have all these standard filters, but I want to go to start GMC QT or however you pronounce that. This is like an advanced filter engine that gives you amazing effects. Under patterns, you can find this canvas and especially this canvas texture effect, which I really like. You can play around with these settings, but I'm just going to hit Apply to see how it works on the grass layer. These filters usually take a bit longer to load than the normal ones. But then you can see this cool texture effect on the layer that you're on, just a little bit, but I think this is interesting here. You can, of course, do the same thing on the dog layer. Let me demonstrate it real quick. But I think our blending brass texture on its own is a little bit better. So I'm going to undo this. Maybe you want to apply a filter like this, as well, but if you do, I recommend you do it only on the grass layer, the background. Filters on the main subject can often look a bit too artificial, but it's just another thing to be aware of. They can spice up your painting, so it always makes sense to experiment with these filters once in a while. Alright, then I was not super successful in creating detail in the face with my blending brushes, so I'm switching back to the original brush to make a few adjustments to the nose. I definitely need a bit more saturation here, a bit red. If your colors are totally off in some place, of course, it doesn't make sense to go over it with a blending brush, but you just have to add it. And this is how you work more and more when you progress through a painting like this. It becomes more and more specific what you need to change, so it becomes less and less structured. The part where you go like, Alright, just blocking the colors everywhere is over. Now we have to make our own decisions, what we want to improve and how we do it. So if you're totally happy with your dog's texture and you're afraid to touch it, that's fine. Just watch me anyways, and maybe you'll find something you want to do as well. I often, after applying a texture with a blending brush like this, go over the whole thing again with a paint brush and add paint where I need it, which is often the details like the face here. I'm just going to fix the nose and the face with this paint brush. Also, there has to be a bit more brightness on the bottom lip. Maybe like this. And a little bit on the eye, I think. Then I'm trying to compare the fur texture once again to the reference to find out where I can change something about the colors. And I'm just blocking that in. So the ear definitely needs a bit more dark brown. Let me just put that on there just like in the lessons before. And now, as I've painted over with a paint brush, I can make the texture consistent again by switching back to the blending brush. Then we can blend these new colors in with the old ones like nothing happened. Easy. And yeah, this is how you make adjustments to your artwork when painting in this style. You can always, if you think you need it after looking at your reference, add some paint by blocking it in, and then you can blend it into the texture with a blending brush. It's quite a fun process. Try it out. So for me, the fur definitely needs a bit more work, some shadows, some saturation, some more detail. However, I want to go a bit further and bring this texture to the next level. So I'm not blending in all the new brushstrokes, but I'm trying to make some of them in a way that I can just leave them. You see, we already have a textur that consists of two different brushes, the two blending brushes. So if we leave in marks from a third one, it might make the whole thing even more interesting. That's a matter of personal taste, though. You can also just blend in all your brush strokes with the blending brush to create a uniform texture. But I prefer to have this chaos with three different types of brush strokes in one texter. Some blended in with the blending brush, some with the other, and some just put on there. Then again, it becomes important that you focus on visual consistency. You don't want to separate your dog into different parts where one part of the fur is only paint brushes and one part of it is only blending brushes. No, if you use different brushes, use them everywhere equally to get this consistent, chaotic texture that's pleasing to look at. I Okay, here's another thing you can do. If you press Control Hue in Creta, you can open up this color adjustment window. I love it. There you can play with hue, value, and saturation, the three basic properties of color. So you can make your whole layer more intense, less intense, darker or brighter or more blue or something like that. Look closely at your reference to determine if you need some of that. Personally, I think I was just a little bit off with a hue when painting. So I'm shifting the whole thing a little bit more towards yellow and I'm making it more saturated. Just a tiny bit, though. If I now press undo and redo, I can compare the two versions in terms of color, and I think the adjustments were definitely worth it. With these color adjustments, you have to be very careful, but they can be a powerful tool if you have to make big changes about something. This, of course, would also work on the grass or any other layer. So always be aware of this function, control you in Creta, when you make an artwork. I can absolutely save you. Now I can continue with my adjustments. I need a bit more brightness on the whole thing. And perhaps a bit of saturation like orange. And then I'm going over some of these new brush strokes with a blending brush, just as I've demonstrated now. I'm making these new blending brthrokes a bit longer and more curvy to simulate the longer hairs. It's starting to look better and better. One small thing that's difficult to create with the brushes so far, though, are the small white hairs in the face. You can see in the reference, we got these tiny white hairs. So I'm switching to this RGBA brush and selecting white, and I'm making the brush very small, of course. For tiny detailed features like this, it's not super important which brush you use because you can't see any texture when it's literally just a fin line. It just has to work. Once again, I'm trying to paint quite dynamically here to simulate these curves in the hair. We also got some of them on the ear. And down here a bit on the fur. Now we're on a quite advanced layer of detail, as you can tell, which is awesome. And just like that, finish your dog's texter. Use these different brushes to create detail and focus on visual consistency. You have experience with very powerful and versatile brushes now. So try to find out in each detail which of the brushes would be the best for that. Do you want to make the tongue more with a blending brush? Do you want to paint the dark parts on the toes with the paint brush and leave it like that? You're capable of making these decisions now. I'm just going over the whole thing again with this textured blending brush just because I want to have a few more of these brush strokes. And then that's basically it. Alright. When you like the texture of your dog, when it has a good mix of these different brushes, accurate details, and visual consistency, let's move on to the next lesson. There we will take care of the missing parts of our artwork. See you there. 11. Background and Fixing: Alright, you guys know the deal. How do we progress? Well, which part is lagging behind in terms of detail? And that is, at this point, our beautiful grass in the background because, well, it's not so beautiful yet. So let's go back to the grass layer, and let's see what we can do. In the reference, we can see a little bit of beige, dry grass and brown ground underneath the grass. So let's just put that on there using pretty much any brush. I'll go with this one. But the plan right now is once again to just block in those colors so we can put more detail on top of it later on. We want to put this brown and beige everywhere where it belongs and then cover it with blades of grass, just like the reference. Okay, before we can do that, though, let's make a new layer above the dog layer called grass top or something like that, because the reference, you can see that the grass is not only in the background, but it covers the dog's feet and its bottom, as well. So we'll have to paint above the dog in order to get a good result with the grass. For that, we need to block in a little bit of green on this grass layer, too, because it's empty right now. So I'll just put a little bit of that grass color on this new layer. And now we can start working the texture once again with our blending brush, just like that. Let's simulate some blades of grass with our brush. Actually, I think we need some more dark brown on the regular grass layer for more contrast. So I'll put that on there with some smaller brush throkes. And then I'm going back to the grass top layer to add some more grass. You see, this grass part here is very freestyle. Please don't pay too much attention to how exactly I'm doing it, but try to see the method behind it and the way of creation. We have a multi layered chaotic texture in this grass. Some of it is better painted behind the dog and some in front of it. So I'm just switching back and forth between two layers, putting some paint where I think it belongs, and then blending it in with the blending brush. It's quite a simple process, but it may take a few layers of scribbling until it starts looking right, and that's okay. This is a common thing in digital art that you start experimenting with different brushes along the way. So don't get confused. This is totally fine. Because the good thing is, this is grass, so we don't have to paint anything precisely. We just want to get the colors approximately right and then create a texture with them that's somewhat consistent. And you should have a good idea how to do that now. This grass surrounds our dog and is not part of the main subject, so it's completely fine to not spend too much time here. The viewers will not care so much about this, but let's give them something to look at nonetheless. Just some overlapping lines and different colors to make this whole thing feel more complete. You can paint your grass more with paint brushes if you want, or only blending brushes, or you mix them together like me. Just don't get too caught up in this. It's just grass. Put on as many layers as you have to in order to get this to look good to you. As you can see, I'm even switching back to the dog layer for a moment. In order to paint these hairs on the right foot a bit more precisely, they kind of blend in with the grass, so I've waited with that for this lesson. Sometimes a change between subjects like this is necessary, especially in the end when the whole process gets more free and situational, let's say, Nice. Now, in my case, the background should be a bit more bright and saturated, maybe even a little bit more towards yellow. No problem. Let's just put that on there with this brush that we've used in the beginning for the background. In the reference, you can see that the background is very blurry and not detailed. So let's try to simulate that with simple colour transitions and big brush strokes. No need to use blending brushes there. And just like that, it's starting to look better and better. On the left side, we have the dog separating foreground and background. So just add more brush strokes in the foreground and make the background more blurry. But on the right side, where they flow into each other without a clear line of separation, we have to create a little transition in terms of detail. In order to create an appropriate shadow underneath the dog, I'm using this big airbrush at the very top of Creta's brush list, and I'm lightly painting with very dark green, single clicks underneath the dog on the bottom grass layer. This is a pretty awesome brush. If you need some smooth highlights or shadows, by the way, so try it out. And, yeah, the rest is pretty much entirely freestyle. The only criterion for the end, try to give your grass in the foreground the same level of detail as the dog. This is where the sweet spot of detail is because these two elements, the dog and the foreground grass are both very close to the viewers in the focus point. So try to look at the density of your brush strokes in the grass and compare it with the density of brush strokes in your dog. This is kind of the only way I can explain it, but I think you can see it. You want about the same scribbly, vibrant texture as I have here. That doesn't make a whole lot of sense if you look closely, but it absolutely looks like grass if you view the picture as a whole. Great. Now I'm going to make a few final adjustments to the dog. For example, adding a few more details to the lip and the chin. This is something that often happens in digital art. Sometimes you have to look away from the subject for some time in order to see it in a new light. After looking at the dog for a long time, it becomes kind of annoying at some point. So switching to the grass in the background and then back to the dog is really refreshing for the mind. If I now compare it to the reference, I can see a lot more little things that I want to change than when I last looked away. This is the nature of painting that you'll experience, especially in the later stages of making an artwork. I hope that you see the pattern here. In the beginning, it's all very structured and you can clearly tell what to do next. Sketch first, start with the easy lines, measure them more and more precisely, then block in the big shapes with the right colors. Lo which layer is lagging behind in terms of detail to progress, and then make the shapes smaller and smaller to create detail. But now in the end, it's a lot more freestyle, and you'll find yourself switching between the subjects and layers more intuitively because the details that you need to change or that you want to change become very individual. And also, you can afford to look at the reference less and less as you progress because your painting will take shape and become its own thing. You have to make it look good in its own style and not necessarily make it look as similar to the reference as possible. The reference just shows us what a dog looks like with his lighting and whatever. So as soon as we've put everything in its place, approximately, we can start working on our own and, for example, create a unique, semi abstract fur texture that's maybe not 100% realistic but pleasing to look at. This is the point of making art. Don't worry too much about the reference in the end, if you like your own painting. And yeah, for me, that's the case now. I'm very happy with my dog, except there is maybe one last thing that I could try that I want to show you. I'm clicking on this checker pattern on the dog layer in order to lock its transparency. This means that we can't paint over the edge now. And now let me go back to this big airbrush and make it very dark brown. Then I can just click a bit on the bottom here to add some smooth shadows, and they don't overlap with the grass because I've locked the transparency of the layer. Very useful trick. So we just get a tiny bit more contrast here with these shadows, which I'm a huge fan of. Maybe on this left side as well, but let's not overdo it. If you paint too much with this airbrush, the artwork can start looking very artificial, but just a little bit can work wonders. So remember this method, lock the transparency with this checker pattern and then use the smooth airbrush to just add some light highlights or shadows to something. Alright, I would say this is it. This is approximately what my interpretation of this beautiful reference looks like. It's not exactly like the reference, but it's not supposed to be. The reference has helped us a lot, but we've created our own painting with its own qualities out of it. In the next and I think last lesson, let's see if we can spice it up a little bit by adding something else. 12. Adding your own Touch: So I hope you're happy with your artwork so far because we've made it. This is the subject. This is the dog sitting in some grass that we've painted from reference. If your painting also looks something like this, you've done a great job, honestly. But I think I can even add a little bit more to this, like some flowers. Why not? It's grass. It's sunny. It would fit in. Flowers are not in the reference, so we'll have to use logic to figure out how to do that. But let's keep them very simple. Flowers are definitely more my terrain than dogs, so it's fine if you just follow me here. There is no more practice by breaking down your own reference and guessing colors from it. Now you can just do what I'm doing. First of all, we'll need some stems to define where the flowers are. So let's make this brush very thin. I'm just going to use this one once again and select some dark green like that. It makes the most sense to do this on the grass top layer. So let's paint some stems. Dynamically and slightly curved. I think this will look very cool. Let's put these stems everywhere on the bottom part at about this height. Maybe with some different green tones as well. Just like that. And then we can drop some light yellow bits as the middle part of the flowers on top of these stems. This is where we define where the flowers actually are. So let's not put this on top of every stem. Before you do this yourself, I should say that you maybe want to do this on a new layer. So perhaps make a new layer called flowers on top, but I'm very confident here that it'll work out. So I'm just doing this on the grass top layer. Should also work, but yeah, if you want to be extra careful, maybe make a new layer. Okay, let's see. I'm going to select white, and let's try this brush so we can drag some white, chaotic blossoms around these yellow dots. Let's make them curved and fall down a bit and not too long. Here's the thing. I'm painting daisies here. I think they're called that. So I make my flowers white with a yellow center, and approximately that size if I compare them with the dog. But you can also give these flowers a different color if you want, like orange, red, light blue or purple. They should just have a distinct center like yellow in this case, because then it's quite easy to make them look like flowers with these blossoms around. I don't think anyone would want to paint roses or hyacinths now after all this work on the dog. Let's make the flowers very simple like this, but I'll give you the freedom to choose any color you like. Okay, that's a pretty good basis. Now I'm going to add a variation to the yellow bit in the middle by just making it more saturated and darker in some places by literally just clicking. And then let me fix some of these white parts. All right, so it would be unrealistic if we just had these six flowers in the foreground and none in the background. But we can just add more flowers in the same way because the background works different. So let's just indicate some flowers and let them fade out as you go up here with white or whatever color you've chosen for the blossoms. Let's just scribble a little bit with this brush. So it looks something like this. Okay. But actually, it still looks a little bit off because there are no flowers close to us. In order to make this visually and logically consistent, let's add another one in the foreground at the very bottom. This time, I'm starting with the white parts, and then I'm adding the yellow bit in the middle. This also works, so it's not that important. And I think this already looks much better. Nice. Now we need a bit more detail on these flowers, which I'll add by scribbling some color on top of them. Daisies often have this pink shade to them, so I'll work with that. But if you have another color, I think it would be best if you just add a darker or brighter version of that color. So nothing else in terms of hue. With white, this pink works because white is a neutral color. But if you have blue blossoms and you try to add pink on top, it's maybe a bit too much. So better just stick with dark blue or light blue in that case. So this is how I'm adding my own touch to paintings that I mainly paint from reference. I stick with very simple subjects that I either know very well or that are easy to paint. And I change things mainly about the background and the surroundings, not the main subjects. You can always add some simple flowers like this or snowflakes or maybe a new stone here and there, depending on what you're painting and what would be fitting. But you always have to use your own logic if you don't have a reference. So usually sticking to a reference is the best choice. Right here, for example, I have to carefully blur in some white, yellow, and pink in the background to make it seem like these flowers are fading away along with the grass. And this is fine because they're just flowers. So these colorful scribbles will make the painting feel more alive. Then I'm making a few more simple adjustments to the flowers. For example, by erasing parts that went a bit too far. One thing that you'll always have to be careful about when adding your own new things to an artwork is color theory. Usually, you can just add any saturated color you like, because this can throw of the harmony. You can always add neutral elements like white snowflakes, gray dirt, or something like that. But if you add something colorful like right here, it's better to either make it fit the color scheme or make the part very small. In which case, it's also okay. In this case, for once, I think it's fine if you make the flowers whatever color you like. This has a happy spring wipe. It's very bright, and we just have two main colors, brown and green. So it won't hurt if you add a little bit of something else, and it won't matter what it is. But keep this in mind for your next artwork. Colors usually have to be carefully selected. Okay, you know what? I think some of these flowers shouldn't be this white realistically. So let me lock the transparency of this layer and just paint a little bit dark gray with this airbrush. On this flower. And that one light comes pretty much from above, as you can see, so our dog will block some of it from reaching the flowers, which are these ones, I think. So yeah, there is no way around that. You just have to think a little bit when adding your own touch. But it's usually very simple. It just has to roughly fit the color scheme and react to light the same way that the other elements do. Then it looks like it all fits together. Last but not least, I'm selecting this flower and deleting it because I think it's too much, actually. And I'm selecting this flower, copying, deleting, and pasting it onto a new layer, so I can move it around with a transformation tool. I feel like it should be closer to the ground. So let me delete these unnecessary stems as well, then and paint a little bit below the new flower so it doesn't float in the air. Whenever you make adjustments like this, these are things that you have to pay attention to. Does it still fit logically? And here we go. I think I'm done now. This is the painting that I want to have. So let me save this Creta document and then go to File Export and save it as a dot PNG file as well. That's going to be the final image, but you can also export it as dot JPEG or whatever you want. I would recommend you, however, to definitely keep the Krita document because the Pure image file won't have the layers anymore. So if you want to change anything about your artwork, like making some of the adjustments that I've shown you, or you want to paint something differently later on, it's far easier with a Creta document where you have the layers. And, yeah, that's basically it. This is how I make a painting of a thing that I don't understand. I just look at colors and shapes and their scale. I follow my general art process patiently, make some nice textures, and in the end, I may spice it up with things that I know. Hope you get it now. 13. Outro: Ladies and gentlemen, we made it. This was our course on painting this dog from reference. So let me do a little recap. You should understand how to use Creta now. You should have a strategy, how to use references in the future. You should have an understanding of this art style that you can replicate, and you should have your finished artwork, of course. I know this course was perhaps not super easy to follow at certain times because I did give you quite a bit of freedom. You know, this was not exactly step by step, do the exact same thing as me, but a bit more about the principles behind the process, because I believe this is way more important than just following a teacher for one artwork, and then you can't do anything on your own. With this course, I try to find a balance between making it easy to follow but not so easy that you don't have to think for yourself. I hope I succeeded at that, at least somewhat. There was a little bit of switching back and forth between parts, having to make your own decisions, how many layers of detail you want, which color the flowers have, whatever. This is how I prefer teaching because I think that this enables you more to make art. I know it's more comfortable in the beginning to have someone tell you put a line there and there, but this doesn't give you the confetnce to make art yourself. The underlying concepts are way more important like having a structured approach, understanding visual consistency, seeing shapes and colors, knowing where you can be sloppy, and, of course, knowing how to use the tools of the software to your advantage. Oh, yeah, I hope I managed to get that across and make you understand the process better. So you can roughly replicate it in the future to make your own beautiful paintings. Very important, don't forget to upload your project, the image file, so I can give you personal feedback. I'm very excited to see how this work for you. Also, feel free to ask me any question goes without saying. I know this was supposed to be for beginners, but there were actually quite a few advanced art principles in here. I just can't help it, but I believe people can always do more in art than they think. Let's analyze our work for a moment. Does it look like a dog? Absolutely. Does it have some nice colors? I think, yes. Does it have an interesting texture? Well, if we zoom in, I think, Yeah, there is a lot going on. And does it look exactly like the reference? Absolutely not. And this is what I want you to remember. If it looks good, this doesn't matter. Artists art and photos are photos. Whenever you use a reference like this, there is a pattern that you can follow. In the beginning, when sketching and blocking in colors, you try to be as precise as possible and recreate the reference as exactly as possible. And the further you go, the more freedom you have to go in your own direction regarding the art style, the level of detail, and even what you want to add or remove. So always stay open to new possibilities even when you intend to paint from reference. You'll have a lot more fun painting like that, I promise. You know what? This is a really cool artwork, actually. Nothing super special, no high contrast, stunning composition that tells a moving story, no six hour process to perfect the eye of a hyperrealistic depiction that's simply there to make other artists jealous. Nope, we just painted a beautiful dog because it's fun and looks cool. So, yeah, I also hope that this motivates you to keep going with digital painting, because I think it's really important that we do this, make some art. Even if you're not super content with your project right now, I want you to be proud of yourself that you did it and share it nonetheless. Just trying out a new way of creation, a way of expressing yourself is already so much more than most people are willing to do. Remember that whenever you're putting in the effort to make some art, even if it's really simple, we need more of it. If you want to find out more about Creta, I made a course about it that goes a bit more in depth. If you want to not only paint from reference but learn how to construct your own compositions, there is also a course of mine and a very good one, I think, or this one about color theory. Also very useful. So yeah, if you're interested, check out my profile. It would be awesome to see you again. Also, it would be amazing if you could give me a quick review. Tell me what you liked about this course or what I can do better next time. And then there is nothing else to say. Share your project, leave a review, and then get some fresh air. Have a good day.