Paint a fantasy portrait with Blender and Photoshop

1. Intro: Hi, I'm Domina Catelli. I'm a freelance illustrator and fantasy artist specializing in creatures and environments. In this lesson, we're going to cover how to get started using a three D base for your illustrations. In the first step, we'll gather reference and a prompt for our teacher portrait. Next, in blender, I'll cover the basic modeling tools I use and some of the methods for brainstorming. But to keep this lesson focused, I'm not going to start from zero. I'm going to assume you know the very basics like navigating the scene, adding and modifying objects, and setting up basic lights and cameras. You don't need an in depth knowledge of blender, but basic navigating modeling will be very helpful. Third step, we'll jump over to photoshop and in a more traditional drawing workflow, we'll complete a creature portrait using the three d base we created over in Blender. To keep it simple, we're just going to do a basic portrait. This is to focus on techniques and ideas in the course, but the basic principles will be exactly the same for a larger piece. It'll just require a larger time commitment to complete. Let's get started. 2. Generating Ideas: The first thing we need is a prompt to work from. So if we're too wide open, it becomes difficult to decide, you know, what direction we want to go in. So we end up really going nowhere. I find it's better to at least have some idea than to randomly start sketching with no intention. Although that can be fun to do in your personal work and it's even it's fun sometimes, it's not the most efficient way to work. So what I'm going to do here is, I'm just going to write the first word that comes to mind, and I'm just thinking attack. So this creature is going to be attack focus. And then from there, I'll just come up with some other words, like, heavy light attacks, et's see, fast. What different types of attacks would this creature be capable of brutal attacks? And this is really, there's no right or wrong answer here. You're just writing what comes to mind. You're generating ideas and sort of categories or directions that you can go. So now I'm branching off from Light and fast and thinking, what type of character would be Light and fast, slim? We got brusly, you know, very lean, muscular sort of character. And then what would heavy entail? He's got huge, like fighting hands or maybe he's got a giant head. Maybe that head is in fact the weapon that he uses to attack with. And then I'm thinking, you know, what other kinds of attacks might he be capable of. So maybe sound. You know, he's got ears that are adapted to that sort of attack. He's got maybe his neck like his head, maybe his neck is a weapon instead. You know, it's developed so that he's got weaponized vocal cords, and how would that play out on the character? This is really all about generating ideas. Don't worry about writing something cool or impressive or thinking about anything other than just generating ideas. By putting that pressure on yourself, you're going to block yourself, you're going to stifle yourself, and you're going to edit before you even have anything to work with. So just open your mind and let the ideas come out however they want. Now I'm just going to take that list and put it in a more readable format. I'm not doing anything different here. I'm just transferring this handwritten Word Cloud and free association into a list that I can then work from. So I'm not going to use everything on this list. It's just sort of a starting point, and I'm going to pick and choose based on whether or not I have a client brief already or if it's open, if it's just a personal project, just based on interest. But at least now we have a solid starting point to work from. 3. Prompt Generators: So another great way to generate ideas is these online generators, and there's so many of them. You just a quick Google search, and you'll find a ton of them. But there are a really great way to generate ideas if you're stuck using the other methods. One of the first ones I like is this your art path, and it's pretty simple. There's a generate all prompts at the bottom, where you can just generate new ideas for each category, or you can click the individual ones, and it'll just change that particular one. So it's very simple, but can pick and choose from here and create a Word Cloud just like you did in the first step or you can just work straight from that list that you generate there. Another option is this brief builder tool on Learn Squared. If you've never heard of Learn Squared before, it's an online education platform with really high quality instructors and really high quality courses. It's a little bit expensive, but it's I think a little more organized and better structured than your typical YouTube sort of course design. But anyway, they do have this free tool that's called the brief builder, and you have these categories at the top that you can change, and those stay in place once they're set, right? So I have functionality, motion, location, time period, and there's different pre built categories that you can put in there. And then there's sublist under there that every time you click, it will pull an option from there. It's just a curated list instead of coming up with that stuff on your own. So it's just a separate tool that you could use to either create a brief directly from or you could pick and choose individual words and create your own word cloud based on that. Combine the methodologies and just to come up with a direction and a prompt for yourself. 4. Reference: Alright, so I've generated this list using the Brief Builder app on Learn Square that I just showed you in the last step. And what we're going to do now is using this list, we're going to do some research and pull some reference images that we can then use to design our character portrait. And one of my favorite apps for gathering reference is PRF. If you've ever studied with any other artists, you've probably heard of this. It's pretty popular, and for good reason, it's simple. It gets out of your way, and it's really great at what it does. So it's really just a mood board for gathering reference images. And the only thing that I change that's different from the default is in this appearance tab, I select always show the title bar. And you see that right here. Always show on title bar visibility. And the reason for that is without that, you don't have the title bar, and you're missing some of those controls for manipulating the window, which I find annoying, but otherwise, it's very simple to use. You just drag images into the window there. And it will automatically grab the largest image that it could find at that link. It also it has tools for automatically organizing. You can go to a new image, drag a new image in, and it'll automatically resize the canvas there so that to fit the new image size, and if it's grown too large, you can optimize it. There's also options for automatically organizing with just control and the arrow keys. You can move the images around automatically. So it's just got some really nice features, and it's got a note feature where you can add categories or further organize and label things, but I don't really use the notes. It's just there in case you're super obsessive about organization and that sort of thing. But I just use it just like this, plain document. And you've already seen me using this other part that I'm going to show you about gathering re pinches. Pinchs is a really great tool for surfacing images because it's one of the only times where the algorithm is really helping us as artists, right? It's not great in social media, but here it's wonderful because every time you click an image, it surfaces a lot of other similar images. So I'll just click on something here. Se and then below that, we have all these other images. And every time you click an image, it surfaces new images. And now you see that because I was clicking on skulls with armor on it, it surfaced more images like dark grimy images of characters with armor, different types of armor, different types of characters. And it's really great at doing that. So every time you click a certain image, it just surfaces more similar images like that. And then you can also search specifically. You can see some of my recent searches here. And I'll just click Gothic leather armor. And you can see it's got a bunch of great examples of that type of armor and then you click on it, and it's got even more below it, and you can just click and drag in to the window. Automatically resizes the canvas there, and it's really just a great way to gather your images. So the other feature on pinches that's worth mentioning is if you don't want to save the images on your hard drive for any reason, it's got some great organization options on its own. You can create different categories, different groups, and you can save the images in there. You can mark them for private if you've uploaded some of your own reference images that you don't want out in the wider world of the Internet. You can have your boards private. And it's just a convenient way to save things without having to save them and take up hard drive space. So I've skipped ahead and just built my reference board out here. The amount of images here, I would say is medium. I call it a lot. I wouldn't call it a little. And this is really just based on preference. It's based on the job you're working on. Sometimes you'll need to do a lot more research. Like for some people, this might just be getting started. For some people, this might be too much already. There's arguments for keeping it small and focused, and there's arguments for having a huge reference and moodboard. It just depends on the context and what you're doing. This one, I think this is probably more than enough, I would even call this maybe a little too much, but it is what it is, like I said, based on preference. So I've got all kinds of different reference here. I'm thinking because of mythological and spiritual, I'm going to do something with maybe a harpy or a griffin, make it undead to cover the dark, sinister, grave. We've got some spooky ghosts like stuff here. We've got some armor reference. I'm going to try to do some tattered, maybe fabric mixed with some more mechanical hard surface design, we'll see how it goes. None of this is really required to follow. It's just sort of like the Word Clouds and the prompt generators and stuff, it's meant to inspire, ideas of your own. You're not copying any of this one for one. So, and then down here, I'm a sucker for this kind of like glowing magic effects, especially for something dark like this. I just think that's so much fun to paint. It's so much fun to look at. This stuff, I don't know if I'm going to use this. This is more of the mythological stuff, I've got some minotaurs, cyclops. I just threw it in there to have it, but I don't know if I'll use it. Here, I've got some texture reference. The stuff on the face looks really cool. I think I might use some of that. The way the striations and stuff in here are over top of the dark looks really interesting to me. This guy with the skull neck. I don't know if I'll use that, but still it's just there in case It inspires something better. I think the primary references are going to be these skulls here mixed with maybe some of these birds, and then the armor, and then that's going to be kind of my creature. And then probably I'll add some sort of glowing effect because I love it. That was my methodology there. Do what you want, do what works for you, but that's what I do. 5. Basic Blender Modeling: So, like I said, I'm not going to cover the basics of moving around, adding objects, that kind of thing, but I will cover my setup and the basic tools that I use to do some modeling in blender. I have my ref board pinned here just like I showed in photoshop. I have this main window that I use for adding objects, modeling objects, sculpting objects, and that kind of thing. I set up a camera here with another view so that you always have a separate view that you can check and refer to. It's not always helpful, but the main benefit of working this way is being able to see the objects that you're working on from different views. We're still focused on big shapes and the overall concept, but we're getting a more holistic view of our object that we're working on as opposed to just sketching straight two D silhouettes. So Let's start with the basic cube. I'll hit Shift A, add a mesh, we'll add a cube. I use scaling just with the S. I'll scale that and you can constrain to x or y by just hitting those keys or z. I use those a lot. Make sure that when you're doing that, if you want to manipulate it later, you may have to apply the scale. If you're getting something weird, another tool I use is the bevel quite a bit. And if you've resized it and then try to bevel it, it's going to look weird. So if you apply the rotation and scale, and then Bevel, it's a more perfect bevel than when it's scaled. If it has a weird scale, sometimes those operations will mess you up a little bit. So another tool I use other than Bevel to add Extra faces and extra topology is in the modeling view, I'll hit Control R, and you can add loop cuts this way. This is very helpful, especially for hard surface stuff or architectural rendering, but we're not going to get into that. This is more organic. Add more faces, you can move them around, you can scale them, and you can constrain just like you can with the other scaling. Now you have all these other faces that you can work with. And in terms of moving stuff, I will just move stuff around. It's based on the shapes that I want to create. It's based on the object I want to make, and I'll switch my view quite a bit. It helps a lot, I find being able to see your object from different views. Another thing I'll use quite a bit is this proportional edit, so you can see the shortcut is there and that's by default. So what that does is when you grab say this vertice here, you see this is the circle of influence, and the wider it is, the more objects, the wider it is, the more vertex, it'll move at one time. And that's just handy for smoother sort of editing. S with this off, It just moves the one. Nothing else moves with it. And even if you select multiple vertex, it doesn't work quite the same way. It's not as nice. You're very limited and how much you can move it without it getting distorted and weird. If you turn it back on, I moves everything, so it's a little bit smoother of a change. Now you'll see that it's way off center here. Another thing I use a lot is modifiers and specifically, If you hit the ad and then just type mirror, mirror come up. And now you can see it's exactly the same on both sides. This is very handy for symmetrical edits. You don't have to do it on both sides. You can just change the one side and now you can have both proportional and the mirrored edits. And now you have a cool little shape there that you can work on. The thing to keep in mind here is since I have it mirrored across the x, meaning it's taking this side and mirroring it over to this side, you can see there's no vertices here, where there are over here. That's because that's mirrored. There's no actual vertices here. It's just a virtual clone of this side. One other thing that you can do is you can actually just delete with these vertices and because you don't need them. So it makes it a little clearer, right? I just scaled x to zero there and then I'll move it to the center. Move this over to the center. And now it's Now, it's perfectly mired, and you'll see that there are no vertices on this side at all. You can only move this side, but it's perfectly mirrored on the other side, you can always break that symmetry later if you need to, but typically, I'll just do that in the drawing later. This is how it usually looks when I use this, I always access and bisect and then merge. What that does is, if you apply this, it'll merge these verts together instead of having them separate like that. If you merge that now, it's one piece, and you can select this and y, go. Now it's a solid object. The reason why I did that, the reason why I created those faces there is because if you come over here to sculpt, which I do frequently, and then hit the R, and this is like a visual remesh to give you some more verts to work with, you see, we only have 40, so it's going to be hard to sculpt that. I mean, you can. You're just going to be moving these individual verts, and you can't move these faces at all, so if you remesh it, and now we have 9,000, right? And the reason why I closed all those holes is that if you try to remesh with those holes, it's going to create issues. So you want to make sure that the mesh is fully closed before you remesh, but you really don't have to worry about making it perfect, it just needs to be closed, right? So you can do the same mirroring operation over here, right? And it'll say negative x to positive x, and then you just symmetrize and it's exactly the same on both sides. So either place, you can use that. It just depends on what you're in the middle of doing, right? So I'll come over here once the basic shape is laid out, and I'll kind of modify a little bit with the sculpting. I use clay strips quite a bit for basic sculpting. I'll use the G for grab and move. I use shift for smoothing. I'll use the raw sharp to not necessarily details because we're not focused on details here, but just giving an indication of the forms, right? I can pinch, if I want that to be closer together, and we're already getting sort of a idea of our reference here. And we'll just keep messing with it that way. I will also like I just showed that mirror, turn turn off proportional, so for an eyeball, you know, you can use the mirroring cross the x. Right? And now, you have an eyeball on both sides. And you can use that as sort of a reference point for sculpting around. And we're focused on big shapes. We're not focused on details at all. I probably wouldn't even take this much farther. You do want the shapes to be accurate. The model doesn't need to be perfect, but the whole point of the three D is to make sure your shapes are accurate, right? This is what I have problem doing in two D. That's why this is a beneficial tool is so that you can visualize these shapes and know by looking at them that they're accurate. So that's it for that one. Right? I'm just going to keep doing that until I have a few ideas. I might spend less than an hour on it. Maybe more just depends on how the ideas are flowing. So I'm going to go ahead and do that. I'm going to create some ideas, and then we'll jump into the next step. 6. Advanced Blender Tools: So I just quickly want to show some more advanced sort of things that I do. Sometimes, you can see in the middle here is a curve. And now you can see if I edit it, these objects that I have here follow it. Follow the curve, and you can use this for cool stuff like maybe a spine or like a belt or something. And then if I select it and subdivide it, We can sort of modify it that way. And it just keeps going and it follows. So we have, like, a cool little spine there, and then you can even go back and you can modify this so that it's pointer. T You got to make sure it's pointed the same right way. There you go. Sometimes it's finicky and you got to mess with it. Now, you can see that you have this interesting pattern here that you could use, and you can continue sort of playing with it and modifying it. Until it suits your fenc. All that is is an array followed by a curve. The array is set to fit curve with a relative offset that I just changed based on how many I need there. On this object that you're arraying, you just need to make sure that the scale and the rotation are applied and correct and it'll follow the curve. Then you add the curve deform, pointing to the curve object here that I've created, and you have kind of a cool little way to, you know, create some interesting designs here. So another thing I do sometimes is, let's say you have an object here and if you shift to duplicate, you change them independently and it won't affect the other one, right? But if I t d They are actually the same object or at least they're copying each other's information. So in this way, you can move objects around the scene, and as long as you use lt D every time, they're essentially virtual copies of each other. So I can modify any of them and they'll all have the same properties. So it's a little bit easier than trying to muck around with the curves because that can be finicky sometimes, but it's not quite as perfect. I'll take a lot longer if you need it to be perfectly aligned to do that. But the benefit is, if I go into any of these objects, it doesn't matter which one, they're all copying each other's information. So modifying one modifies all of them, and I use that a lot. One other thing that I will use is let's say you have an object, I'm just going to apply the scale there that you want to attach these to, right? You can use snapping. You just turn this on. And then I usually the settings I'll use our center and face. But you have all these other options that you can use if it's not doing exactly what you want. Right? And If you have this magnet on, every time you move it, it'll attach, or you can turn that off and move it freely and then just use control, and it'll attach. You'll see what it's doing is it's attaching based on the origin point. So if you go into the object and change the origin point, now, every time you attach it, It attaches based on that point. Then you can grab all of these and just attach them here like this. You could manually rotate them like that, or you could also align rotation to target, and now based on the normals of the faces of the source object here. It's basing that on the origin point you could see here. It's basing that on the selection point of those faces. So you can see it kind of snapping rigidly there, that's based on the face that my mouse is over. So that's an easy way to do that. Another thing, what I just did there, if you hit constrain Z, it'll constrain to the world Z. If you hit a second time, it'll constrain to the objects local Z, which, as you can see, because it's rotated here is sort of at an angle. That's also a helpful thing you can do. What will happen though is if you apply that rotation, you'll no longer be able to do that, it'll always be based on the world. But And then we can also we can modify them and it'll modify all of them because they're all still copies. One other thing you can do is change face to volume, and that'll place it inside the object. Instead of on the face, it'll place it inside. Let's say you have an object here with a complex shape, the volume will put it in the center rather than on the faces of it. So you could scale it down and now it's Instead of being up on the face, it's automatically placed inside that object. You can create a cool little shapes and designs that way. I find sometimes manually doing it versus the curve method is a It takes a little bit longer, but there's less futzing with it. Simpler is sometimes better than trying to optimize it or keep it 100% flexible at all times. You don't always need that. Sometimes you just want to get the design done and move on and simpler is sometimes better that way. So another thing I do sometimes is I've added these little spikes from the last part into a collection over here called spikes, and we'll go here into particles. At of particle system, create hair. And usually I will turn this down at first. Just so it's not crazy. And then we'll do collection, o spikes, right? And that's another way to cover your object in whatever little design item you have there. So you can mess around with the scale. I defaults to a very small size. Sometimes you need to change that so that it's the correct size or actually a size that makes sense for the source object there. And with the scattering there, sometimes you have to rotate the object. So I just selected the whole thing, rotated it till it looks right. And then there you are. And then you can come over here and you can add stuff back. You can change the seed, which is the randomness. You can change the sort of modified length there, you can change the segments, although For this, you don't really need it. And you can just mess around with the settings until it does something interesting, right? You can mess with the scale again, scale randomness so that they're not all the same. And maybe you can use that for something there. So I'll use that particle system sometimes for things. Just depends on what I'm going after. One thing to keep in mind is that you see that because these were all objects that were copied from these objects, that once I rotated it for this, it rot for this. You just have to be careful of that. If you want to be its own object, you can just come over here, select this button, and then it'll be its own thing again. See how it went 6-0. But if I choose this, It's five because it was six, which were all these three, and these three. And then I removed this from the collection of copied objects. So now it's on its own. One more thing I wanted to show you is let's say you want some fabric or something. I've created this plane. I'm applying the scale, so it's one. And for fabric, it's important that the scale is applied, Control A, S or just select scale. So there's one. Otherwise, the simulation is going to mess up. So you do this with modifiers and over here, you cloth then in here you're going to want to add a collision, And then that's in the physics tab, which is right here. I generally will just use one of these just to make it simple cotton, I like because it makes it a little stiff, but not so stiff that it doesn't deform. And I'll I'll leave most of this default. So you want to come into faces, and then you'll want to subdivide maybe once, twice. You'll want to add a subdivision surface. The first one, I'll put on simple, and then sometimes I'll throw a second one at the end to smooth everything out, but it's not really necessary for the stimulation. You just want to use that after the fact. So because this has a cloth, and this has the collision, when we hit play on the timeline, or for me, it's shift space bar. I think default, it's just space bar. You hit play, and it'll fall down and deform like cloth. So what happened here is that I don't have enough subdivisions. That's why it's still stiff and not deforming completely. So I'll just tick this up one, and you just have to be careful. Watch your faces here. 4,000 is not very much. But I try to keep it as low as possible just to get the right amount of deformation without really slowing down because even on a decent system, it can really slow down very quickly. So let me do it one more time, or at seven, let's see what four looks like. 19. Yeah, see, I have a pretty decent machine, I have a MAC studio, and this is already slowing down a little bit. Not too bad, but more than I would probably like. And anyway, at any point, you can stop this and you can roll it back, but you can't roll past. Otherwise, it's going to slow down again, right? Okay. So once it comes to a settling point, That's when you can turn the second one back on, and now it'll smooth everything out. And now you have a nice little cape, possibly, something along those lines. So what I'll do is I'll shifty to duplicate that, and it's messed up because it didn't do the simulation, but that's okay. I'm going to come back to this one. I'm going to hit Control A, visual geometry to mesh. And now this one still has all the modifiers and stuff on it, and we just need to roll back to the beginning. And then we can start over, and it'll go through the whole simulation. I'm not going to do it again, but you can keep messing with it. You can rotate it, you can change as long as you're on the first frame, you can rotate it. If you're not on the first frame, you can't do anything because it's in the middle of a simulation. So if you're having weird issues like that, just roll back to the first frame, and then you can modify it however you want. Sometimes I'll put a cut in it here, or I'll put a hole in the center for a head or something. But that's how you get cloth. So now there's this cool little cloth guy on top of this, and you can come over here. You can add thickness, was to solidify Right? I don't know if you can see that yeah here. Do you see this edge here, adds an edge to it? You can apply that. And it's relatively low poly, but I could shade it smooth. And it looks pretty good. Sometimes if it's gotten too out of control, I'll do a decimate, and I'll just leave it on collapse and then do you want to type in here cause sometimes if it's really high poly, it'll take a while, so dragging it doesn't work. You just type it in. You can see the number dropping here. It started at, like, 100,000 something, and now it's at 40,000, and it still looks fine enough. I mean, I wouldn't put this in a render, but if we're going to be drawing over top of it, it's got enough information that I can use, so I can just control A apply. And now it's messed up the topology, but we don't really care. It's not a production model. It's a reference for us to draw on top of. And then we could even come down and, like, do this. I've got the relative move enabled and you can manipulate it, do stuff that way. It's kind of a weird example, but I'm just showing you the technique of doing the cloth simulation. 7. Modeling Heads: So I'm just going to start modeling some heads. And you'll see pretty quickly, although I'm using the techniques I described in the basic modeling video, I'm using just basic shapes, blocks and circles and I'm using blocks and spheres and whatnot. For this particular one, I pretty quickly abandon that and just start using sculpting. This is still good for just laying out the forms, but for this particular thing, it just wasn't as fast to hand model all the little intricate details. It was just much faster to sculpt it. So I'm just scaling, moving, beveling, that kind of thing just to lay out the big shapes for the first head here. I'm beveling the edges, and then I use a sphere for the main head shape. I jump over into sculpting and I rematch quickly and then just start sculpting the forms just because it's way faster to use the grab in the sculpt tools, and then I take the beat and I just rematch by using control R in the sculpting mode. And then I just move on to the next one. And this one, you can see, I just go straight to sculpting. I start with a sphere and then I remesh it in the sculpt mode, and then I just start pulling and pushing in sculpting forms. Like I said, it's just for this particular one, the skull shapes, like the cheekbone in particular, it's just faster to model with sculpting. And that's what this technique is sort of all about. It's about just quickly getting a three D representation that you can then take over into photoshop or a clip studio or whatever and draw over top of it accurately and be sure that the shapes are correct. So it's a reference. It's like a lot of traditional artists specifically James Gurney is famous for using maquetes. They just use real clay, and that's kind of what this is, except for that you can just draw on top of it instead of looking at it as reference. But you see what I did there was I just cut the end off because I didn't like it. So And then I just started a new one, remeshing there, and then I'm pulling and pushing. It's just playing with the shapes, playing with the design, having fun with it. This really doesn't need to be perfect. It's just all about the shapes, and I'm masking out the eyes and pulling them back so that it's more of a cavity there, then I'm working back into it. It's always a back and forth, pulling shapes out, reshaping them. Refer to the reference, reshape. I want this to be d, maybe not demonic, but in that vein of light hor I'm just blocking out some basic teeth in the mouth shape. I like that curve down on the bottom jaw, so I'm trying to replicate that from the reference. You see, I keep moving the camera around, just to get a different point of view while I'm sculpting, so I don't have to snap to that view every time. It's just always there. Sometimes I do it anyway out of habit, but it's nice to have that there just to refer back to. And sometimes it's easier to just sculpt in that view also. This one I like a lot. I think this is the one that I end up going with, but it's at a stage where I can just move on to the next one. This is all about quickly iterating and coming up with different ideas and different shapes and designs. So there I just shifted, I duplicated, I rem, and then I merged them with the rem, and then I start shaping again. I'm always sculpting with the mirror in sculpt mode. I just faster. You don't have to do both sides, obviously. So this is just reference, so it's good to be as quick and as efficient as possible. And all these heads are fairly similar. I knew kind of direction I wanted to go and I wanted to make this sort of streamlined for the class. So I didn't really go on and on and on doing different forms. I might typically do more than this, but for the class, I felt like this was enough to just show the technique. So I experimented here a little bit with some spikes and whatnot, which I like this one. This is probably my second choice if I didn't pick the other one. Again, just blocking in, you know, the big forms, the big shapes, the main shapes. And I think I'm done here. Yeah, so I'm going to mess around with this one just a little bit more, and then I'll pull all the heads out into a lineup and pick the one that I like the most. Just sort of adding some rough detail here into this one. And then I'll turn them all back on and continue messing with them because now that you see them in a lineup, you see that some of the earlier ones are not developed quite as much, so I go back and I start developing it a little bit more just to see if I can pull something out of it. Yeah, I think I like this one, so I move that back to the Santa turn all the other ones off, and then the next one, we're going to start modeling the body. 8. Modeling Body: All right, so I'm going to move the camera into a position. I'm going to change the aspect ratio to be portrait because that's what the photoshop document is going to be. So I just sort of roughly match the same proportions. And then I'm going to block out the body with again, using simple shapes and mirroring, like I showed in the tools video. I'm just moving stuff around, I'm just shaping it. I know I'm going to put clothing over this, so I'm just sort of roughly shaping the body. I'm not going to get into sculpting any details. I use the D on the arms here, and then I break that connection so that I can move them independently. I'm just adjusting the camera here a little bit. A And for a lot of this part, I am actually looking at the camera view on the right. I'm going back and forth just so that I can see you know what the render is going to look like, what my paint over is going to be. So here, I'm doing what I was describing. I I'm cutting out a hole, adding subdivision and cloth, and then I'm just draping it over the body. I try to do a second one, but I don't like the way it looks. It doesn't make sens, so I just delete it. And then I'm going to add a hood over top. I'm just shaping it so it falls a little better. And then instead of just messing with it over and over again, I got it close, and then I switched over into sculpting mode, and then I'm just going to manually shape it. Because again, the model is not really going to stay in the final, it's going to be mostly painting. So it really just needs to be a good reference. It doesn't need to be a perfect model. So then I cut out a little piece for a frayed part of the hood because he's supposed to be da. So I'm just adding like damage to the clothing, then I'm adding some armor pieces there. I like that scalloped look there on the rusty Mck on the left. So I'm just kind of using that as an inspiration. I'm not really copying it. I'm just sort of using that idea to build something into my own character. And those are all D virtual copies, so they all adjust exactly the same. And then I'm going to quickly throw in some kind of strap here with just a simple plane. I'm using that proportional move and I'm just rotating and extruding. Then I add a little bit of thickness there with a solidify modifier. And now I switch over into the full rendered view and I start moving the lights around. This is really just kind of trial and air. I generally will place the front key light in one direction, and then the opposite side will be rim light. In this case, they end up both on the same side. Like I said, it's just really trial and air. And then I come over here into photoshop. All I did was take a screenshot and drop it into my photoshop document and so that I could do some drawing design work over here. Sometimes it is just faster to do a drawing. And I wanted to test this idea out and make sure that the direction that I'm going in blender is going to work for photoshop. So I'm just doing a draw over. I'm just following the model underneath and sort of designing as I draw also so that I know kind of what direction that I'm going in. I remember that I wanted to put this glow in here, so I just add an indication. This is not rendering. This is just is basically taking notes, right? Eventually, once I'm done with this, I'm going to end up back over into blender. And some of this stuff, I don't even end up using the glow on the neck is not in the final. I'm referring back and forth to the reference and the drawing and just sort of playing around with designs and ideas where to add glow so that's not too overwhelming. I add just enough shadow so that I can see, like an indication of how that's going to show up in the final, just a glow in the dark eye sockets there. I had the idea to instead of spikes, I'm going to add feathers here to the shoulder armor. And then I didn't like the strap. It was too simple, so I'm adding it's basically the same idea. It's still a strap. You can see I pulled up the reference on the left there, and I end up drawing that cloth based bungee in instead of the strap. Then I jump back over into Blender here, and referring back to the drawing that I did, I start adding pieces back to it. So it can really be a back and forth. I have them both open all the time, and whatever method is convenient or gets the job done faster is the one that I'll use. I want to have the three D model as a reference for the perspective and the shapes, you know, so I'm rebuilding it in three D so that I know that it's accurate. And so I'm going to build the feathers here now. This is really simple, just a plane split down the center with a loop cut, control R, and then I'm shaping it and moving them around. I'm using the AD shifty both, whatever makes sense. I try to keep them all connected if possible, so that when I edit one, it edits all of them, but sometimes you don't want them all to be the same, so I'll remove one from the copied collection and edit it. And you can also, you can just scale them without removing them from the collection. So you can do it that way, and they still retain their connection. So I'm going to just add some basic textures here. Sometimes I take this a lot farther. I'm not being very particular about the textures I'm adding here. I just really want a base of colors to work on top of because this is going to be 99% painting. You'll see some of that texture bleed through, but a vast majority of it is going to be painting. So it's just really there as, like, almost an underpainting to the final. I'm not even particular about the feather. I just sort of lay it in there. It really doesn't matter. I'm just looking for color and lighting reference. So you can see here I forgot that I changed it in the photoshop document. I didn't refer back to it, so I start texturing the strap. And on the body and the head there. I don't do anything else. I just color it. Add a basic color and I move on. I really don't need it to be super detailed. I'm going to do all that in paint. So I add just some internal glow there in the mouth, again, as reference, I'm not particular about it at all. These things I thought that could be maybe like pouches that he holds, ingredients or some sort of item that he finds important. And you'll see, again, over in the painting, I end up changing those completely. I didn't think them out very much. Here in this stage. I left it for the painting to figure out If more of the three D part was going to stay, I probably would spend a lot more time texturing and figuring this stuff out. And the three D is more of just like a base that I can complete the painting on top of. So I'm just going to create a quick render and then throw it into photoshop, and we'll move on to the next step. 9. Photoshop Basic Tools: I'm just quickly going to go over some of the basic tools I use in photoshop. Here's the finished image here. I'm going to just do command N for new and show you this background contents, is set to other, and I usually set it to 50% gray. Almost every time I start a new document, I start with 50% gray. The reason is when you're painting, if you start with white, it's harder to go anywhere from there. Starting at 50% gray, gives you head room either way towards the darks and towards the lights to work from. So that's the first thing. Every time I start a new document, I'm almost always on a gray. The next thing is, I have these actions set up here, and to get these buttons, you just turn it onto button mode there. And you can see what it's doing here. I have a few setup for add multiply layer, add soft light layer, and they're not really doing anything other than creating layers so that I don't have to come up here, add a layer, set it to multiply, all that stuff. I just hit the button and it creates it. So I have an action to hide an old layer and start a new layer. So if I'm just concepting and drawing in here, and I don't like what I'm doing. I can just Play that button. It hides the old layer so that I saves my work and then starts a new layer so I can start a new drawing there. I have a light table one. So if I have a rough drawing that I like, let's say this is a head here. That automatically sets the old layer to 25%, creates a new layer, and then I can come back over top and refine that drawing if I need to. So that's handy. Just basically setting up a bunch of different actions here that cut down repetitive movements. Clear layer selects the whole layer, deletes, and then deselects the layer. So I can just start from scratch without creating a new layer, deleting the old layer, that kind of thing. Just clears the contents of the layer. Another one I use a lot is the high pass and gray noise. And I'll show you what that does. High pass merges everything that's visible. So if you command option shift E, it stamps every visible layer into a new layer. So I use that a lot for backups. If I've added too many layers that don't merge correctly, sometimes if you use multiply layer or an overlay layer, they don't merge correctly. So I'll just stamp to a new layer or merge all the way down to my latest backup. That's what merge visible does. And then it creates a duplicate, it creates a high pass. If you come up to a filter, other high pass, creates a high pass filter. It sets the radius here to 4.4, accepts it and then sets it to soft light. And then I usually leave opacity at 100 because I change it every time. So from there, once that's done, then I'll adjust the opacities. All right. So back over here on the final. You can see what the high pass is doing. Basically, it just sharpens these edges here. It makes the whole thing appear a little bit more. It seems like it has more texture there. But I find that's a little bit too on default, so I'll drag it all the way down so that's nothing and drag gradually pull it back a little bit. Usually around 20 to 50% is good. You want it to be subtly sharper, not 100%. I think that's a little bit too much. But somewhere around 20 to 50% is usually good. That is what high pass does. The final thing that I use a lot is the gray noise. And all that does is creates a new layer, fills it with gray. I'm hitting shift, delete to fill with 50% gray. And then filter noise, add noise. And this is usually about what I use, right? And then it sets the blending mode to soft light. And then from there, and that's the last thing it does. And then from there, I'll manually adjust to taste. So I'm going to include these art actions here in the class so that you want to make your own, but if you want to make your own, I'll just go over that very quickly. You do that down here. You start a new action. Just name it. Let's just do the noise again. Okay. And then you can see it's recording. And it's not recording real time. It's just recording every step that you take. So moving the mouse, anything like that, it doesn't record. But let's say if I hit the control ult shift n for a new layer, it records that I made that new layer there. Shift back space for fill and it's automatically set to 50% gray, which is what I always use for noise, and then I accept. And then as soon as you accept, it adds that fill command there, fill gray capacity 100 normal. Which is correct, and then you go to filter, noise, add noise. And again, it's set to the my usual default. So if yours might be in the middle somewhere or something, I like to keep this pretty low. Sometimes gaussian uniform and monochromatic, you may want to use instead. But I I use this at the end. So I don't care that has a little bit of color in it. I actually like that it has that, but if you continue painting over top of it and you try to select color, those little colors in the dots are going to mess up your color selection. So you may want to put it on monochrome if you're going to keep painting on it, but I like the little color variation in there, so I leave that in there. Set it super low, except it adds noise to the new section, and then I'll put it usually on soft light or overlay soft light. I find it's better for noise, and then it adds that to the action set, and then you just hit stop, and you have your new noise action there, right? And then to switch back to the other mode, you hit button mode. And now every time you hit one of these buttons, it's going to add that noise action that we just did, and you can see it did the same thing. Very handy. I suggest using that quite a bit. So a couple more handy things that I like to do. I like this setup here. I like layers on the bottom, navigator, and color. It doesn't really matter which order you have them in, but I like to have this stuff up at all times, especially this color. I don't use swatches very much, but it's there just in case. But on color, I would highly suggest using a color wheel and using HSB sliders. And the reason is this is very easy to dial in values and saturations, which is all that's important in painting is values. So the HSB sliders allow you to very quickly say, I want a darker value and then adjust the saturation along with it. You can adjust hue, value, and saturation very quickly. And if you do decide to use the color wheel, you get a visual representation of where you are in terms of brightness, saturation, and hue. And I like this color wheel because you can see at a glance complimentary colors. You have warm colors on one side, cooler colors on the other side. It's just very handy. So I use that quite a bit. Another thing I do is I can't show you this, but I have ult or option set up on my pen button. So my Wacom pen button pressed down and it selects colors. That's very handy for quickly. Selecting in the document. Another thing that I do quite a bit is without changing the brush, I can hold down the Tilde key, the one just to the left of the number one on my keyboard, and it'll automatically erase with the same brush that you're painting with. I use that a lot way more than I use my eraser, which you can also see here. I almost never use that because It's just more convenient to have that same edge that you can paint a big shape in, and then using the tilde key in the same exact brush size and shape and texture. You can erase with. It's just so much faster than switching back and forth constantly between the eraser and the brush. Another thing I use of a lot is I'll use the Lasso tool, and I almost always instead of switching tools, leave it on the polygonal Lasso tool so I can get straight lines just by holding shift. And you see that little circle there. I'm hitting control or command and then tap and it'll complete the selection. But if you want to switch back and forth quickly between straight lines and drawing, you just hold down the alter option key. So you never have to switch the lasso tool. You can always just do both of them with one action. So I always leave it on the polygonal so I can get straight lines and then hand drawn lines together in one tool and then tap, and it's closed. I use that a lot if I want to get some interesting edges and shapes and stuff like that. Then do you select and you have your shape there. Use my clear layer function and that clears the layer out and we are back to square one. Another thing I use sometimes for concepting is this symmetry. If you come in here, I almost always use vertical, and you can just accept this. It doesn't need to be across the whole document. You can just put it in the middle and it'll be there. I use this for just quick idea drawing, and then I use utility key again to go back and forth, and you can see very quickly I can get some kind of idea going. That's a really handy way to quickly generate some ideas. You don't like what you did, you can just come over top of it and just continuously sort of shape and reshape Then I'll use whatever comes out here as new reference to model over and blender. In terms of brushes, I do use a large brush set. This is the photoshop master pack by Lane Brown. I'll put that in the resources, but you absolutely don't need this. For a very long time. I also got by with Shady Sadafi brush set, which is free. I'll also include that in the resources. This is a really great brush set that I used for a very long time. You don't need fancy brushes. You just need something with a little bit of texture and the ability to control the value of the brush, right? That's pretty much all you need in a brush. You could definitely get by painting an entire painting with just this one brush. And I'm pretty sure that I have on a number of occasions, so don't worry too much about brushes. But again, if you want them, I'll include links in the resources. So I think that is all the basic tools in photoshop, and we'll see in the next one. 10. Painting: So you can see here I put the render into photoshop, and I've just started roughly working in colors and values. I know ahead of time that I want the beak to be a little darker. I just like the way that looks. And you can see I'm putting cool colors in the shadows and warm colors on the face. Since I had already textured the face to be a little warmer color, I'm going to use the opposite a complimentary cool color in the shadows. And I'm starting in the face because want most of the detail to be in the face. I'm going to as you move away from the face, which is the focal point, there'll be fewer and fewer details and it'll be less rendered, and I want most of the detail and rendering to happen in the face. But generally, I will work over the whole image at once rather than on one spot and finish that one spot. I prefer to take a more holistic view of the whole thing. I feel like it develops better that way when you work on the whole image. Still keeping in mind that the details should all go in the focal point, which is the face and the glowy mouth and eyes and that kind of stuff. So, this whole process is really just rendering fixing details that I didn't figure out in Blender and using the Blender three D base kind of to check correctness, of shapes, of perspective, of values. All of the lighting information was figured out in Blender. So I really only have to render it, make it look like a pretty picture. I'm changing some things that aren't happening with the realistic lighting. I'm making artistic choices still. You know, I'm highlighting. I'm putting a rim light on the beak there that wasn't in the render. Here I'm fixing some of the issues with the cloth from not spending enough time simulating it. So I'm looking at reference, and I'm just making the cloth a little more aesthetic, making it look nicer. I'm concentrating on the brush strokes. This is sped up about ten times. So it looks like I'm just going nuts all over the canvas, but really what I'm doing is intentional brush strokes. Thinking about every brush stroke that I lay down as a mark that's going to show up even though it may or not. It's good to think about it that way because on the less finished parts like down in the cape and the parts that aren't as rendered as the face, that may be the final. So you want the brush strokes to look good on the canvas, even if they're not fully developed or fully, hyper realistically rendered, if that makes sense. I'm doing the same thing down here on the bottom. I'm adding cool into the shadows and warm lights onto the surfaces that are lit. Again, I forgot about the bungee stra, I start rendering a belt and I don't like it, so I change that. But my rendering technique is to add a dark base. You can see I'm doing it here. I'm changing that strap. I'm adding a dark base in the general shape that I want, and then I add lights to it to give it form, and then I'll add some details on top. And then I don't know if I just got tired of it, but I moved to the face. And I'm adding some little details here, but I end up changing that. As I said, I don't like those little pouches, so I change them in a second. And then I'm moving back here. I'm adding details. Now that the form is put in, as I was saying, I start adding little bits of detail, but not too much down here because I don't want that to draw the eye. I want the face to be the most rendered part. I add a secondary strap here. You'll see that nothing is set in stone, right? I didn't model this. I just added it. But because the whole thing is in perspective and created in blender, it's pretty easy to just add in a strap. And I'm adjusting the sleeves and adding a different type of arm detail there than what was in the original sketch. Again, because it's not the focal point, I didn't put a lot of time into that. I just wanted to kind of be an indication of detail in the background. So he's got some sort of ropes on his arm or something like that, something that maybe scavenged. And while I was looking over my reference, I liked this shadowy smoke, so I'm kind of adding that in. A good technique for painting smoke is similar to how I was just describing rendering. Add the big shapes in and then come over top with another color or erasing. Don't try to paint the smoke as is, paint the big shapes on the canvas and then come back over it with other colors or the eraser to shape it. And I'm bringing some of that color down into the cape there. Here I'm doing more fixing on that lower part of the cape. You can see I'm just working over the whole image. I'm using different brushes to give different marks. I'm using different colors and rendering techniques. I'm just trying to give it an overall aesthetic that I like. Always referring back to the reference. You can see here that extremy s texture that didn't really come into play anywhere else. Now I'm going to try to put it in paint. This would have been really hard to model and taken a lot longer than just painting it in. So I'm thinking about the planes here. I'm thinking about what might be catching light, and I'm also thinking about what's next to it. So since there's darker shapes next to those cheekbone areas, I'm adding lighter shapes on top of that where I think it might catch some light based on the lighting from the reference and the three D model that we created. I'm messing around with some details in the color, just trying to make it interesting. And you notice in the darks, I'm trying not to use black. I almost never if you watched my brightness slider, I almost never go below eight to ten in this. I really need it to be dark. I want colors in the shadows. I want them to read as darks, but I don't want them to be fully black because black on an image is just dead. It just lays there, and it's not interesting. You want even your darks should have some sort of color in them, even if it's not much. So here I'm changing those little pouches to little skulls, like maybe he collects these as trophies or something. Just an interesting little detail. Didn't really think too much about it. Storywise, I just rendering some interesting detail in there. You can see I did the dark color for the shapes, and then I just laid in some progressively brighter values until it read properly. I'm continuously adjusting the values and adding brighter colors. And I'm just working over the whole image. And now I thought that glow was a little dull. So I'm going over top of a color dodge. I'm just picking the color that I'm going to paint over top of, like the green in the mouth. I color pick that with ult, and then I just painted in gently with the soft brush. And then I do the same, but with a multiply layer for shadows, just deepening those shadows, always trying to include color and not make it perfect black. But you can see, like, it's a pretty bright value that I painted multiply with. Now, I'm pretty happy with the rendering, so I'm starting to add some little details. Also not going crazy with this because this is a loose demo painting. I don't want it super tight and ultra realistic. So I'm keeping it lose, and I'm just trying to add some interesting details. I felt like it was a little bit flat, but this is just me experimenting, right? I tend to work on few layers, but I will use temporary layers. I'm unsure of something that I'm going to do, I'll add a layer and start working on top of that. That way, if I don't like it, I can just pull it out. But eventually, I will just sort of merge it back down. Always making backups, but working on very few layers. So the rendering process is simple. It's really just adding interesting colors, value, shapes, making sure the image reads properly. I'm always referring to the navigator panel on the right there in the small thumbnail to make sure it reads at a glance, right? Like if this was a illustration for a card game like magic, the gathering, it would have to read upside down and across the table at a glance. And that's kind of what I'm thinking about in this illustration is making sure it reads properly. And I'm copying those light trails. I think I like this version the most, but I keep going. I keep pushing it, and it becomes a little bit too much. But that's okay. That's you see I'm working on an extra layer and I end up backtracking from there. That's the end of the rendering process here, and the next step, we're going to go to the final details. 11. FinalDetails: Alright, so I stamp everything onto one layer, and then I go into the camera raw filter. Usually it's to taste, but there's a few settings that I usually use all the time, and that's what you're seeing here. I'll mess with the exposure, either up or down. I tend to paint darker, so I usually adjust it up a little bit. Then I'll take the shadows up some, the whites up a little bit, and then drop the blacks down, so. That's generally the set up I use. Although I do have to, as you see, I'm adjusting it a little bit. It's not always exactly the same, but it's similar. Sometimes I mess with the curves. If you drag the bottom one up into the right, it'll gray out the blacks a little bit. Color grading works for me sometimes, sometimes it doesn't. You can always reset it by holding alt and then there's a it'll say reset color grading. That's for that one. Then the next thing I'll do is add a high pass filter. I've got an action setup for this that covered in the photoshop video. I'll drop the capacity on that a b and then also I have a noise action the final thing that I do is I have a brush with some texture that I'll brush over top. Sometimes it take some experimenting. I didn't use that when I used a different one on this. I usually use a midtone gray, set it to soft light or overlay, and then drop the opacity. And you can just see it adds a little bit of subtle texture, make it look more cohesive. And then I'll manually add a vignette. I like to do it manually because you have more control over the vignette. Sometimes it's not a full all the way around the image that I use. This is where I decided that all three trails were too much. I took them all off and redid the camera raw portion again, dragging the exposure shadows up. Blacks down. I'm working in the color grading trying to accentuate the glows. I'm putting green in the highlights because that's the brightest part, and then I'm using a complimentary color in the shadows. Then you can just see me comparing contrasting. And then adding the texture again. And that's the final result. So I hope you got a lot out of this. I hope it was helpful. Thanks for watching. I appreciate it.