Painting Faces with the Power of Photoshop

1. Trailer: welcome to painting faces. My name is Hardy Fowler, and I'm a professional illustrator. I'm calling on all artists with a passion for drawing faces who would rather not spend thousands of dollars for years of their life in art school. Painting faces is a fun, beautiful, insists sinks set of lessons that can have you creating masterpieces more quickly than you've ever imagined. In our easy to grasp step by step course, we will demystify the entire process of painting the human face so that you can master a timeless art form with the power of the digital medium and all of its incredible tools that you use to get amazing results. But this is so much more than just a painting demonstration. We'll have detailed discussions about the fundamental concepts, portrait and concept artists use, and we'll learn detailed techniques for realistically rendering each part of the face. I've got some cool tricks that you're going to love to tie it all together, we offer responsive support so that every student can take their face are to new heights. You can do this, don't miss out on your chance to start painting the human face like a master. So enroll today, grab your stylists and let's paint cool stuff 2. Intro: Oh, hi, everyone. This is Hardy and welcome to the painting Faces Course. Before we get started, let's take a look at some essential prerequisites for this course. You need to have completed the art fundamentals and Photoshopped Fundamentals courses before getting to this point. Most of the projects that we do in this course will be beginner level at about a three. But we made sure Isom challenging projects on the back end that could push it up to a Level four. But we'll take it slow and start with some simple stuff. Learning had a pain. Realistic, cool looking faces is a worthwhile challenge. The skills we learned in this course will feed into all kinds of other past, like figure painting and ultimately, character design. So this is an excellent place to start applying your digital art talents. After all, we're all hardwired to recognize faces instantly. Because of this, yours have a very high standard when judging paintings of faces. The slightest adjustment of the facial features, expressions or even hair style can have a dramatic effect on how your face painting is received, so in this course will focus on giving you a set of easy to follow steps that will help ensure success in your final product. With a little practice, you'll be creating incredibly cool, believable character faces like a pro. I'd encourage you all to download the basics of faces. Infographic. It includes some step by step instructions on how to construct the features of the face. Realistically, of course, all of these techniques will be demonstrated during our project videos, but the service is a nice cici to keep handy up. Next, we'll take a look at some basic concepts of facial proportions, and they will move on to the first of several fund face project. So grab your stylist and get ready to dive in. 3. Face Proportions: Oh, hi, everyone, This is Hardy. In this lecture, we will take a look at general face proportions. Obviously, all faces are different, but there are some general guidelines. It can help get you started. Let's take a look at the basic oval shape of a generic face. You can see it split up into two main parts, a circular part of the top that defines the dome of the head and a more elongated, slightly more angular oval shape at the bottom that defines the cheeks, jaw and chin. I usually find it useful to begin with this basic set of construction shapes when starting a new face illustration. The size and proportion of these simple shapes is what governs the general feel of your character's face. As you can see here, varying the size of the jaw relative to the top part of the head can dramatically affect the feel of the character. So be sure to have a plan in place before you even start with these basic shapes. Another important concept to keep in mind is it faces exist in three dimensional space. Looking at a few simple oval shapes with cross lines is a good way to understand this. In a more fully described face sketch, we need to take perspective into account and make sure that symmetrical parts of the face like the eyes, nostrils and corners of the mouth lineup in the correct perspective. Lines. Drawing a few quick perspective lines that go to a vanishing point can usually keep you on track with this, and it's a good idea to double check before getting too far along in a face sketch. With a little practice, this will become second nature. So don't worry about doing this with each project. Let's take a look at some general differences between male and female face shapes. In terms of proportion, female faces have a relatively less massive jaw, so the lower shape that we used to define the jaw, cheeks and chin tends to be smaller relative to the upper dome of the head. The lines have described the female face should be Kirby and smooth. The jawline eyes, eyebrow ridges, lips and nose should have his few sharp angles is possible. This kind of curvy treatment will make the face seem more feminine, and male faces are the opposite. The jaw is more massive in the mail face, so the lower shape should be larger relative to the upper shape. The lines of the jaw, cheeks, chin, lips and eyes can be more angular, and this block your treatment will make the face seem more masculine. So keep these basic ideas in mind in your face. Project will get off to a great start. I look forward to seeing you in the next lecture. 4. Facial Expressions: Oh, hi, everyone, this is Hardy. In this lecture, we will discuss facial expressions. I've started by making a pretty generic sketch of a guy with a very neutral expression. This guy just doesn't really care about anything right now, not feeling any particular way. And he's gonna be our baseline. I'm just going to transform this sketch over and over to show you how just subtle manipulations to some of the facial features can really make a huge difference in the kind of expression your character conveyed. Now we're gonna take a close look at the specific facial features that will manipulate to achieve these results. And in order of importance, I would say these are first, the eyes and more specifically, the islands with shape that the eyes in the eyelids make are really the most important part about what what kind of emotion you're character is conveying. In fact, you can cover up everything except for the eyes, and you can still communicate pretty well just by the way your eyes look next in their closely related. But is the eyebrows and the forehead Those two sort of go hand in hand, But obviously, if your eyebrows go down in a sharp angle. You can look very angry at the same time. If they slant upwards, you can look scared or sad, So eyebrows are also very powerful. Next comes the mouth. Obviously, we could make all kinds of different shapes with our mouth, from a smile to a frown or clenched teeth. Any number of different shapes. We can show the mouth that conveys powerful emotions, so that one is certainly going to be a factor. And finally, is the nose. And it's one that's often left out of artwork, the nose, particularly when someone's very angry. It kind of Bunches up, and it's Ah, it's a feature that people often leave out of their emotions when they're trying to draw someone's who's very angry. So that's an important one to include. I've left it for last, but we certainly don't want to forget that one. So let's get started doing our transformations and showing some different kinds of emotions . First thing I'm gonna do is copy this layer, and I'll just start a racing away certain facial features, and to start with, I felt we would make this guy look happy. So the most obvious first transformation is the mouth. We're gonna pull back the corners of the mouth and show some teeth, and that's all that a smile is, but more importantly, noticed that I'm manipulating the shape of the cheeks and the lower eyelid, the cheeks kind of bunch up, and it makes the lower eyelids press upwards a little bit, too. So the eyelids are actually Justus. Important is the shape of the mouth to show us a sincere smile if you just do the smiling mouth and you don't change the eyes or the cheeks than the smile looks insincere. Kind of like a kids smiling for a Christmas card or something. It just looks like the guys faking it so the eyes air. Very important. The eyes have to smile. Justus Muchas the mouth. So just showing some teeth with those corners of the mouth pulled back, lifting the edges of the eyebrows just a tad. Not too much or he'll look sort of sarcastic. And again, this is such incredibly power stuff. Powerful stuff. It's it's fun to play with. The smallest little changes can have a huge impact on the emotion you're characters conveying, but right now I'd say this guy looks pretty sincere, is cheeks and his eyes are matching what his mouth is doing. So this looks like a sincere smile up. Next, we will try and make this guy look annoyed, so he is getting kind of angry. He's not in a full blown rage, but the first thing we're showing his lips pursed together so that mouth becomes just a tiny slit. The next thing I'm gonna do is move these eyebrows down. They get lowered and closer the eyelid. Same thing on the other side. And what we're gonna do next is shows, um, some wrinkling happening, some bunching up where the eyebrow and the nose meat. It's where that forehead gets pressed together when you're starting to get mad. So mad eyes, eyebrows and mouth. That's that's how we shows somebody who is annoyed there getting mad, not a full blown rage. But this guys is definitely peeved up. Next, we're going to take that to the next logical step and show this guy in a full blown rage. Now this one requires just about every part of the face to pull off. So I'm gonna be changing just about everything and first notice. I'm going to take care of that bunched up knows that we talked about basically the cheeks start wrinkling up in the nose, Bunches up towards the forehead, and that is the most important part to sell. Rage the eyes. I'm gonna show them widened. I want this guy to just seem insane with rage. You can't squint them together and get a good effect as well. But I thought I'd make this guy just look like a maniac. And finally, the mouth just wide open, bearing teeth, looking just like he's about to rip someone's head off. And finally, we're going to do a lot of that bunched up facial features. So the nose most importantly, but also those wrinkles where the eyebrows and the nose get pressed together. The forehead wrinkles as well, and the eyebrows angled downward. That's a classic angry expression device to use their, and it's ah, based on what really happens. So showing some teeth here, not getting into too much detail, just basically describing the facial features that need to change and, of course, some wrinkles down around the sides of the mouth where that that skin and flesh is sort of stretched over the teeth on the side, and I think this guy's very convincingly angry. Finally, just to bring everything into it. I'm gonna make his hair kind of messed up, just like he's flying around insane and his hair's flying around kind of just for fun, but that that's certainly convincing rage, expression and finally, kind of the opposite of that. Let's make a guy looks scared. So this guy's afraid I'm gonna make his mouth closely held together, but slightly ajar. So just a little bit of a gap. Like he's, he's drawing breath, breathing uncontrollably, but he's still trying to keep his mouth closed. Next, we're gonna make his eyes wide, like he's looking around to see where the danger is coming from and his eyebrows a raise. So just with those very easy touches, little beads of sweat is an added detail. This guy already looks very scared, so there we have it. Some basic tricks for manipulating the facial features to show expression. Hope you found this helpful 5. Parts of the face: Oh, everyone, this is hard. In this lecture, we will take a close look at each main part of the face and learn some effective ways to draw each of them. Be sure to download the painting parts of the face. Infographic, as will be walking through these diagrams step by step. Let's start with the nose. In its most general form, the noses triangular so we can first think of it is a three dimensional, triangular block type of shape with the tip bumped in. This separates the nose into an upper plane where the bridge of the nose is in a lower plane where the nationals live. We can then expand this basic shape to include some spheres around the nose in the nostril plate. At this phase, think of the bridge of the nose is half of a cylinder. With these general shapes in mind, we can connect the dots and draw the contour of are knows as well as a downward facing over oval shape for the nostril beneath the skin. The shape of the nose is defined by several cartilage plates. Now you don't need to sketch these in to have a realistic looking note but it is helpful to keep these general shapes in mind to give your nose some more realism. Here is a look at a finished painting of the nose. I noticed how you can see subtle indications of these cartilage plates beneath the skin. Of course, each knows is highly individual, so play around with the slopes and curves of each part of the nose, and you'll be stunned by how dramatic the effect is next. Let's take a look at the ear. Let's start with a basic curve, whiter at the top and sharp at the ear lobe at the bottom. Next, make a curvy V shape near the bottom third. This is where those two weird little bumps are where your headphones sit. Next, we'll make another curve slightly interior to the 1st 1 and then another one inside of that one to finish it off. Years air kind of weird and one of those things that you just have to memorize how to do so . I hope these steps were helpful. Here's a look at a finished year painting. Another thing to note is that ears are so thin in some parts that light can shine through them. I call this transmitted light, and it occurs when a light sources behind the ear and makes the deep parts of it glow red. This is a really cool way to add realism to any face painting. Finally, let's take a look at the mouth. We can first visualize the mouth by thinking of five ob long ovoid shapes, three on the top and two on the bottom. They sort of inter linked together to form the undulating curve of the mouth opening itself . Think of this is to hills with a shallow valley in between. We can then expand this to include upper and lower lip borders and minor wrinkles at the corner of the mouth, in the areas above and below the lip lines. Here is a look at a finished mouth painting. Notice that the skin of the lips is redder and shiner than the rest of the skin. Mounts could be hugely expressive, and slightest changes to any wrinkle or crease can completely change the attitude of your character. So this is where some practice the infographic has a section on painting the eye as well, and that's certainly worth checking out. However, eyes air so cool and complex that I've devoted an entire lecture just on this one part of the face. So be sure to check that out for a detailed look at rendering the eyes. I hope you find this helpful. I look forward to seeing you in the next lecture. 6. Project 1 - Sketch & Ink: Oh, everyone, this is Hardy. In this section, we will begin our male face project in the first step will be sketching the male phase. But before we do that, let's take a look at some essential prerequisites. In order to start this project, you should have already completed the art fundamentals and Photoshopped fundamentals lectures. There's a really essential to have a good grasp of the workings, both of basic, our principles and the software. I would call this a beginner. Ah, high beginner level three, still in the beginner bracket. But we will be doing some sketching and will be using value to create the illusion of three dimension. So again, you need to have a very good grasp of those fundamental concepts explored in those earlier lectures. So let's dive in here. We have the blank canvas, and it's best to just dive right in. So I've gone ahead and made a new layer. I've got my brush set to kind of a flattened circle. It's sort of a nice calligraphy brush simulation, so that's what I'm doing. Let's just get started. Start making some marks here. The blank canvas could be a little daunting, so instead of overthinking it. It's always best to just dive right in and start making marks. And that's what I'm doing here. Just defining a very rough outline of the male face kind of strong, angular lines. Keep that in mind. Something that'll make this character look male. Um, kind of from from the bones up. So, uh, making my lines very angular, supposed to female, where we'd be making them smoother and curvy. Er, um, So just this is a very loose and expressive part of the process. Don't worry about making mistakes here. We're just sort of getting an idea onto the canvas. Very expressive, very loose. Let the ideas flow and just a race away and add in tone is needed. It's really in many ways Ah, very fun and free part of the process. You have to worry about technicalities too much. So as you can see him just defining in the basic, uh, main structures of the face. I've got the brow lines, the year, the cheekbones, the jaw and now I'm working on the nose a bit. And as you'll notice I'm not particularly measuring things out or using a photo reference, eyes have discussed in earlier lectures. I think the best way to go about this is to just kind of feel your way through kind of work out how structures of the face fit relative to one another in just adjust is needed. As you can see, Photo Shop has so many tools that lets you adjust your line work so you can just sort of find Tunas Ugo and and nothing is permanent to bring up that transform menu, you'll notice I'm just making selections with the lasso tool and hitting Command T, and that will bring up all of your transform options you can scale rotate, and I use warp a good bid as well. So now that I've got these basic, broad areas of the face to find, I'm starting to add in some slightly finer detail. The eyes. Some of the wrinkles was kind of baggy areas under the lower eyelid and, again, not not really measuring out or referring to anything or going by any rules. Just just feeling my way through this and figuring out what looks right based on my eye, that takes a good bit of practice to learn to trust your eye that well but it really is worth it. And it will save you from having ah, having books out our scale references every time you want to make something up. This is just a very free creative process. Once you can just trust yourself, Teoh to trust your own I So, uh, that's what I'm doing here and just sort of erasing away refining as I g o tracing around some of these lines to just define the forms of the shape. It's amazing. Leinart, especially this early phase, can be so powerful, cause even Ah, few tiny lines can really adjust how how the forms seem to be registering with the human eye. So you're wielding a lot of power at this phase. The tiniest little mark can change the whole thing, and that's especially true of the human face. You can adjust something around the mouth or the eyes, and you can totally change the attitude of your character. So that's a lot of fun to try as well. You can just move up the corners of the mouth and the corners of the eyes, and this guy would be smiling it. It's just that easy. Just changing. A few lines and you're there. Um, for this character, I'm just going with a sort of stern but not overly angry look, just kind of, Ah, stoic looking figure. Just something that I tend to like painting it. It makes him interesting wrinkles on the forehead and around the nose where the bridge of the nose meets the forehead. So that's really just my planning ahead, right there. Just want want some interesting painting opportunities down the road. But by all means make any kind of expression, any attitude, kind of character that you wish all of the principles that we're gonna learn here. Apply now. I've pulled up the liquid five filter. I've done that by command. Shift X was one of my favorite filters on, and it seems like a mode unto itself. Not so much of a filter, but as you can see once I've got the little pin pressure tool selected, I, uh I can move around just about any aspect of the sketch, and this allows me to find tune everything. It's amazing. And you can even use this at the very end of your project. If you get all the way to the end and decide that something looks a bit odd. Some things out of proportion or not Quite right. You can just use liquefy to make a quick fix at the end, and you can see before and after. I think that's Ah, big help What I just did. So I'm gonna go ahead, make this guy a little bit bigger in the canvas. Start toe Philip the page a bit more. Another thing you'll notice I'm doing pretty frequently is flipping the campus. Now. I've created my own keyboard shortcut because I do this so often I've got it set to command shift F. But I had to customize that in Photoshopped Preferences for myself. It's not something that photo shop has a, uh, a shortcut for out of the box. So I really like doing that because it keeps the image fresh in my eye. Even if something is not quite looking right, you can't quite tell what it is. Oftentimes, flipping the canvas will really fix that. I learned that in an art school in college that when a painting wasn't quite looking right , my teacher would just tell me to get a hand mirror and look at it backwards. and just about every time I did that, whatever the problem was was immediately apparent to me. So same thing here it's just a whole lot easier in the digital medium. You just flip the canvas and suddenly it's like you're looking at an entirely new image. So just really doing some last minute refinement here. But this sketch is coming together nicely. The proportions and facial structures all look pretty nice, and I like the general attitude and expression of this character. So with just a tiny bit more refinement, I think we'll be ready to take this to the next stage, which will be the inking phase. This is very similar to the sketch phase, except we've made a new layer on top of the sketch, and we're making much more deliberate, much more bold and thoughtful brushstrokes. Now that the expressive and most creative part is out of the way, we can focus on technique here. Let's make some really nice, smooth, nice looking line work here to make this sketch look more professional and nice looking. I've got the brush scaled up a little bit cause I want some of these outer contour lines to be fairly thick and bold. I like for the outer lines with lines that defined the main contour shapes to be thick. And then you scale down your brush and do some finer line work for details such as facial wrinkles and and fine lines around the eyes. Things like that. A good rule of thumb, big brush for outer contour and main main forms and smaller brush for for minor details on the interior. So it doesn't take much to to define the main shapes of this character. Just, ah, the jawline, the outer contour in the ear. And then we'll do some finer line work on the interior. But this is a fun process. It's It's sort of like tracing something that, uh, as a kid, I would often trace things I'd see in magazines, and it all always made you feel cool like it was your own. Well, it's sort of a similar feeling here. You feel like you're doing something very clean and professional looking because you have this nice underlying sketch to work off of. You can rely on that. It's kind of like a safety net, and it allows you just to focus on technique which is very nice. So just to finding the shapes of the eyes and being careful not to be too heavy handed with the incline work, I always try to be very sparing with with incline work kind of been economy of line principle. Uh, we'll talk about that a little bit later, but a common mistake is using too much lines to too many lines to over describe things in the ink phase. You don't really want to do that. It doesn't take much to get the point across of what you're going for, especially with a human face. There just isn't a need for that many lines to do the job. So just a few simple skin lines implying a couple of wrinkles and contours, cheekbone, etcetera. And that just about does it. We're just adding some very fine line work here, and once we're at this stage, this is already looking like a much more professional and presentable product. A. To this stage, this is where I would present this to a client if they had asked me to paint this character . I send this and say, Is this what you were after? And we could easily find tune at this point, just ah, this is a great way to present it professionally, but without investing so much time that if you had to start over, if it had to be totally scrapped, that wouldn't be the end of the world, because we've really only got a few minutes invested in this character at this point. So it looks nice, but it hasn't taken you all day. A nice, nice middle ground, just adding a few last minute fine lines to describe some of these contours. But being careful not to be too heavy handed before we move on, let's talk about how to avoid some common mistakes up to this point. So on the left side here, we've got our ink sketch that we just finished, and let's look at some common errors. The first error and this is a common one, believe it or not, is avoid drawing with icons. And what I mean by that is a lot of people over the years have learned to draw especially the human face by just memorizing a few icons. They'll know, for example, that the eye is football shaped with one big circle in one small circle, and then a bunch of lines look like eyelashes. It's kind of following a formula, and it doesn't really show any evidence that someone is actually looking at a human face or really considering the forms there. Just drawing with the icons of the eyes, the nose, the mouth, etcetera. It certainly gets the point across. Anyone seeing this face on the right would know that this is a human face, but it certainly isn't realistic. So that's what I mean. Avoid painting with icons. Don't don't draw something just because you think you've memorized what it should look like , really pay attention, make it look three dimensional. Make it look realistic. The next thing we need to avoid is we need to make sure that we get our perspective right, so the face on the left is the one that we did. It's got correct perspective and the one on the right. You can see he looks pretty good, but there's just something not quite right, and it's that the perspective is off. So let's take a look at the face on the left. If we draw perspective lines all meeting at a common vanishing point that all adds up the bilaterally symmetrical objects like the eyes, the nostrils in the corners of the mouth. They all line up in the same perspective grid, however, the face on the right, As you can see, his perspective, is way off the eyes air Perspectively pointing in one direction, the nose and another in the mouth and another. And it makes him kind of look like a Picasso painting, something that might not immediately be apparent. But just use those perspective lines before you move on, just to make sure that all of those bilaterally symmetrical parts of the face add up and are in the correct perspective plane looking again on the left that allows us to imagine that this character is a realistic three dimensional object occupying three dimensional space. One last very common mistake at this point is over describing, and we discuss that a little bit. But when you think you really don't need that many lines, and as you can see if you do, too many can make this guy look kind of scary and zombie like so you some restraint with that one particular area where this could be a problem is if you're rendering teeth now made him smiling in a very weird way on the right side, just so that you can see you don't need to render every tooth. Uh, if we were rendering a smiling character, honestly, I would kind of leave the teeth is a solid white object with just a few lines in there to describe a few teeth. If you do too many, as you can see, he looks really terrifying. So that's that's, ah, good list of common mistakes to avoid hope you find that helpful and let's move on to our next step. 7. Lighting Schemes: Oh, hi, everyone. This is Hardy. In this section, we will look at some examples of artwork to see how we can go about lighting our face. This is sort of lighting schemes for the face. Let's look at this example in the top left, first of all, and first each example, I've rendered a very simple grayscale sphere just to show where the light sources air coming from. Because really, if you can understand how light is affecting this simple sphere shape, all you have to do is sort of expand that out to the more complex forms of the human face and body. And ah, and that's really all there is to it. So once you understand how this works, it's just a matter of applying this to a more complex shape. So as you can see on this guy, we've got a light source. The primary light source coming from the upper left and the planes of his face and body that face this light source most directly are the highest value. So you can see here the shoulder, this part of his head is cheekbone in his jaw and also parts of his neck. Those air the parts that are lit the most brightly have the highest value. Same here on his arm. On the far side, there are some cast shadows occurring because of this. You can see across this part of his chest and his arm, this light sources being blocked by his head. So we have a cash shadow, kind of like the cash shadow on the ground here that the sphere is casting another subtle one on the hand. Here, this part of his of his hand is blocking the light, creating that nice cash shadow that gives us more visual clues to describe the form. You can also see this reflected light kind of the bounced light on the bottom right side. You can see I've got these cooler colored sort of bluish reflected lights happening on these planes that face in that direction. There's also one mawr, very bright light source on the back of his head and shoulders. So another secondary light source. You can see it here on the fingers and the arm is well helped define. This is a very three dimensional shape, similarly looking down below to this lady again, looking at her sphere. It's similar but a little bit different again. The plains of her face lit by this primary light source are the most bright. But I've also done some very intense secondary light sources, specifically this one lighting her forehead, and this one is actually sort of coming around the corner a little bit more than the first examples. That's why I'm or of the forehead is lit with this bright light source, but still a very similar scheme. A primary light source. A reflected light that you can see here and then a secondary light source to give it added interest. Moving over to Ah, this alien guy similar thing, but much more subtle use of secondary light sources. Basically, the primary light source does just about the whole job for it, for us, the forehead cheekbones in this part of where I guess the nose would normally be. Those planes are facing this primary light source, so they are the planes that are lit most brightly, and that's what gives us this nice illusion of a three dimensional form, and it gets darker as it wraps around this round shape. Just like in this sphere, it's just a more complex shape so a light side fading gradually to a dark side, our core shadow and then we have some reflected lights here is well, they're subtle on this guy, but they are there, moving up to this friendly looking guy with a cigar. Very similar thing. Primary light source. Lighting these areas of his forehead, nose and cheek most brightly because those planes are facing up to the light source. I've got a few secondary light sources here. A bright one on either side of the heads of indicated those here on the sphere, and he's also got a little bit of light coming off of this cigar. So applying it to the sphere, there's just a little bright spot right there in some bright edge lighting around the outside. And that gives his face a really nice three dimensional form. But looking at this primary light source, you can see it's it's a little bit right of center, so this side of his face is kind of the light side, and it gradually gets a little darker as it goes to the left. One thing I'd like to point out is this area where light starts to turn to shadow is where you see all of these wrinkles and little craggy features. Most prominently, it's often referred to is the half tone. But this area, where light turns into dark, is where you can really see some nice contrast. And all these interesting wrinkles of the face can really pop. So a good opportunity to, ah to define your form further in that half tone area. Finally going down to the bottom of this one's very basic as well. A primary light source lighting these planes facing us most brightly. There's also some very bright secondary light sources on either side of the head. One interesting thing about this one is why included it is there's one that doesn't really fit in tow any of these categories. This is, Ah, I sometimes called a transmitted light or three dimensional modelers. Call it subsurface scattering. It's where light shining on the back of a thin skinned area like the ear or some of the webbing of the hands, you'll see this bright red glow kind of shine through. It's actually light, going through the skin and bouncing around underneath the surface. It's a really cool thing to try and include on uh, on on organic forms. It gives him an extra organic feel to them. You can see I did that on this guy as well into an extent on this one, too. So adding a nice glow behind years when you can, when the lighting scheme will allow it is a nice little detail to add. So that's the basic idea behind lighting the face. If you could just understand, it simply is, ah, three dimensional form. Then you'll know just how light should behave, and it'll look very realistic, so I hope you find this helpful moving forward. 8. Project 1 - Value: Oh, hi, everyone, this is Hardy. In this lecture, we will add value to our male face project. So now that we have our face sketch all inked in and ready to go, I'm going to do a little bit of re labeling just to keep everything organized in the layer menu. So we've got our in Claire all set up, and what I'm going to do now is finish blocking this in. We want the entire outer perimeter of this sketch to be a solid line with no holes so that we can use the magic wand tool, which I'm selecting here to select the outside. And if I then do select in verse, we can create a new layer underneath the ink layer in block in our silhouette. Just a Z Z. Is that very quick technique for that? And I'm gonna lower the value of the background just so that we're working in more of ah, middle value range. There. I'm going to create a copy of the ink layer and merged that with the silhouette. So we have the ink and silhouette on one layer, and now we're ready to add value on top for value paintings. I like to use this bright orange color. There's no particular reason you could just do white if you wanted, because over doing his value here, but it it works well. It really pops with that dark scion background silhouette color, and we're just going to start dropping in value. Remember the basic sphere value rendering exercise that we did previously? This is our basic lighting scheme. The light is coming from the upper left in a general sense, so any planes of the face that are facing in that direction would have a higher value. So that's what I'm doing here. To start is just dropping in values where those planes of the face are facing up upwards into the left. This sort of defines the general three dimensional shape of the face, and it's a great place to start. Once I have that done, I'm gonna come back in and just start refining, adding brighter values where those planes air really facing that that direction and you'll see the more the more detail we add, all of these subtle, little realistic effect start coming into play. It just looks like shiny parts of the skin, little muscles beneath the skin even, and it can become really realistic. So take your time here, Uh, with repetition. This this will all become second nature, and these effects will just start happening almost on their own. It's it's really amazing. One of my favorite parts about digital painting or art in general is that moment when the marks you're making on a page stop looking like brush strokes and start looking like something realistic. And this value rendering step is usually when that happens, it's ah, pretty exciting is an artist, so I hope I hope you enjoy that as much as I do. But I'm just adding Cem some brighter values where, where I'd like it to have a little more pop that area in the inner corner of the eye. I always try and add a really bright value there. It sort of makes the I look sunk in in a natural way and makes that that little angle of the I pop another place I like to put a bright highlight is on that bridge of the nose and on the tip of the nose. There seem to be Cem shiny areas of skin, and that's usually a good place to put some high values just to give it a little extra shine. And pop makes it look like really realistic skin, a little bit of treatment around the mouth. The mouth needs to be treated with a lot of care, because where you put those values really dictates the kind of expression that this character has. If if you give him a really tightly pursed lips, it makes him look angry, just like we discussed in the facial expressions lecture. So the way that you treat the values around the corners of the mouth and the angles of the lips has a big effect on the type of expression he's having. So give that some care, really play around, Add and subtract is needed with the erase tool. If if you have to erase away no problem at all. Everything. The digital medium is infinitely re workable, so you never have to worry about a thing. I also noticed that I'm flipping the Candace pretty regularly. I have a short cut set up to do this, but it's not a Photoshopped default. Uh, keyboard shortcuts are easy to customize with photo shop, so that's something that I do pretty regularly. Just to keep the composition fresh in my eyes always makes it seem like it's a new drawing . Let your eyeballs see it in a new way. When you can do that, it really makes any kind of mistakes you might be making jump out at. You heard. That was a trick that Renaissance artists use. They'd have their students look at their paintings with a mirror just to see if, if anything looked abnormal. And, of course, that's even easier for us here in photo shop. Just flip the canvas and you can see it backwards. A little more refinement to the treatment around the mouth. As I said earlier, that's a tricky area and something that takes a good bit of refinement to get right. Otherwise, you might have kind of a facial expression that that you're not really liking, also adding a little bit more detail to those little cartilage plates around the nose just to give it some more realism. And really, by this point, we've got all of our basic values established. The faces pretty much looking three dimensional. T even got some fairly realistic skin quality just based on the shyness sort of the intensity of some of the values. And right now we're just, ah, just refining and making it look more realistic, keeping everything consistent with that light source that we established with that simple sphere shape. So at this point, it's sort of you let your your unconscious brain take over and just start dropping in values wherever, wherever they seem to be needed. It's great. You can sort of switch your brain off and just let your hand do the painting for you with with enough practice. Of course, a little bit of wrinkle to the forehead don't want to put too much, or it could make him look older than I want, or even angry if his forehead is scrunched up. So just a little extra detail there and around the eyes as well. But I think this is coming together nicely. Another thing you may notice is I go from adding sharp values to with a small brush kind of intense values in areas, and then I'll switch to a larger brush and sort of add large areas of paint just to sort of unify things. So it's sort of this tug of war between adding small areas of definition and then painting over it with large areas of unifying tone hope that makes sense a little more detail around the mouse and note mouth and nose area. And I think we're coming right along here. Extend this down to the neck. I think at the end we're gonna end up fading out a good bit of the neck. But I want to leave some of this rendered in so that we can so it won't be cut off once we fade that out at the end, making sure that that's consistent with the light sourcing we have established on the face and unifying that with a large brush once again adding some hard edges around the jaw so that those light and dark values really make it pop and seem three dimensional. Same thing around the ear. You'll notice I have a very high value on the ear, balanced with a darker value behind it, and it's those areas of contrast that really make it look like three dimensional planes of the face are changing. And of course, that's that's what our eyes perceive to be three dimensional. So now I've switched to the smudge tool. And I'm just doing some very light blending just to make some of these more textured areas these chunky brushstrokes a little bit smoother. I don't want to kill that completely. I don't want it to look overly soft and airbrushed. I just want these to be blended in nicely and smooth and places, but leave it rough and others. I think that contrast is a nice painterly effect and just adding some more refinement. With this tool as well, you can move tones around change how hard edges between light and dark are. It's, ah, very useful way toe. Refine your painting, even correct some minor mistakes. You may have noticed that a little spot of value at a place on the year and you could just much that right into place and fix it up. Flipping this back and forth just toe. Give it a very hard critical look moving, Cem tones around. But I think this is just about good to G O up next, we're gonna convert this value painting into believable skin tones. But right now, our goals for this lecture or to make it look three dimensional, believable skin, shiny quality and I think we've achieved that here. So we will call this value step finished and up next will change it, too. Believable skin tones I look forward to seeing in the next lecture. 9. Project 1 - Skin Tones: Oh, hi, everyone. This is Hardy. In this lecture, we will convert our value painting into believable skin tones. But before we get started, let's take a look. A diagram Attic rendering of the face that shows different skin tone colors. Notice. It's certain. Areas of the face are much warmer, and Hugh and others are much cooler. This effect has been greatly exaggerated in this painting to help us understand which parts of the face to treat in which way think of it is a road map for facial skin tones. The ears, cheeks, nose and lips are much warmer or more red in hue. On the flip side of this, the beard area and scalp are much cooler and gray er in color. This variation in hue is what makes the skin look realistic in alive, as opposed to just flesh colored plastic. So let's keep this concept in mind as we begin converting our value, painting into skin tones, jumping back to our main project here. We've got our value layer ready to go, so I'm gonna hit command you and do a shift to make this sort of ah, high key off white color very pale high key yellow. And once I've got that done, I'm going to create a new layer underneath it and we'll call this one skin tones. This is the layer where we're gonna paint in red in certain places just to create that modulation in skin tone that we discussed looking at that schematic. So I'm just gonna grab default round brush, gonna make it pretty soft just so that thes thes areas of delineation are nice and soft and again on that skin tone layer underneath the value Later, very important, we're gonna start painting in some soft red color. And again these reddish areas need to be around the nose, cheeks, ears and lips a little bit on the forehead as well to a lesser degree. But you can already see this delineation between these redder areas in the areas that we will let. The cool science background color show through really makes this look fleshy and realistic , like it's living skin and not just sort of flesh colored plastic. So there we go, just with a few brushstrokes. This goes from being a flat value painting to something that really looks pretty believable is human skin. And I'm adding a little bit of that warmer tone to the Necas well so that that scalp area and the beard area really stand out from the rest of the skin. And also we want the nose and ears and cheeks and lips to be an extra intense shade of red . So there we have it that that looks very skin tone like already. Let's take a look at this skin tone layer just by itself, and you can see where all those red areas are in the areas where we let the science background color show through. So I think that's just about where we wanted to bay. I'm gonna merge those together. I just selected them both and hit Command E. And now I've got one layer for my skin tones and just relate renamed that skin. So at this point, I've got these two merge together, and I'm just going to start painting in on top of both of them. This is sort of a fine tuning step. You'll notice I'm hitting Ault in switching my brush tool to the medicine dropper tool or eyedropper. Um, just Teoh to pick up the colors that air underneath. So it's sort of, Ah, pick it up and lay it down. Very organic process. I'm sort of doing this on the fly, letting my art brain take over, and it just becomes sort of a mindless, repetitive exercise. You're sort of smoothing things out, unifying skin tones, adding some shadows or orm or more defined value changes wherever needed. But this is just sort of a refinement step, smoothing things out a little bit. But we don't want to totally kill the nice texture that we've established in our values. Step so Ah, BP. Wary of that. You can use that soft round brush too much and end up with with something overly airbrush, he looking. So just sort of going all over all over the face and neck here and sampling colors again by hitting Ault and switching to the medicine dropper tool and then just painting that color back in. And if you keep doing that, picking it up and laying it back down, it has a averaging effect. It it ends up unifying a lot of your tones and that that's a good thing. I think it gels, gels everything together, makes it seem more cohesive. Notice I keep flipping the canvas back and forth. I keep repeating that over and over. That's, Ah, very valuable trick bringing some lighter values here across the nose. Figured some of that light from our main light source would be getting all the way over there. So I wanted to do that as well and refining some of these creases around the brow. Um, if you see something that you don't really like from an earlier step, it's never too late to change it. You can even change his entire facial expression at this step if you want to. So all of these steps build on one another, but never feel like you're committed at any point. Really, you can rework things is radically is you want to, and it's really no problem. Adding a few more shadows here cast shadows under the chin, and that gets more effective and again, a little more value to make that Adam's apple pop out a little bit more. Uh, the neck is kind of an afterthought in this piece, since we will be fading it out a good bit, I think, at the end, so don't want to spend too much time on that, but worth adding a little bit of detail, gonna add just a little more red to the tip of the nose and the ears here just again to create that skin tone modulation that we've been talking about. Also going to select a very high key off white and add some very bright highlights. Just a few areas that I want a pop. Ah, the bridge and the tip of the nose air. Always a really good place to use this, but I also don't it on the cheek and the pointing part of the front of the forehead as well . Just gonna blend those out a little bit to make sure that they gel with the rest of it. But this is already starting to come together pretty nicely, and it's certainly come a long way from just the flat value painting that we started with. This certainly looks believable in fleshy like riel human skin should, so we're having some success here and such such an easy technique. It's so hard to try and just come up with the skin tones if you're just picking colors at random. But if you just do the value painting first is we've done and then converted and add that skin tone modulation layer underneath. It takes so much of the guesswork out and becomes just a simple formula process that you can repeat over and over again with very predictable results. So I hope you find this useful. It's certainly one of the best parts of this technique of painting faces and, ah, huge time saver and in for professionals out there that that becomes a money saver as well . So I hope you find this useful just doing a little bit of refinement with the smudge tool here in the Eager. I wanted to do some some darker values on actually a racing a little bit of the skin tone layer away just to make that that earhole kind of anchor the value range at the bottom wanna have the value range be about as far stretching is we can, uh, maybe not quite all the way to pure white or pure black, but close do so that you have a nice dynamic range. Make sure project looked really rich and interesting. If if the values air all too close together kind of middle tones, it can seem sort of washed out and not very interesting. So if the project seemed like seems like it needs a little more pop, try extending that value range. Add some darker darks and lighter lights just toe to make it a stretched out a little bit more. I think it will seem a lot richer and more dynamic a common a common problem we see in student work, but one that's very easily correctable. Refining this lower eyelid a good bit and can't quite seem to get it the way I want it. But I think that's just about good enough. A little more refinement to the nose and other areas. And at this point, it's just sort of going over your piece meticulously, step by step, just sharpening areas up that it looked like they need it, and sometimes it's a good place to to take a break and come back and look at this with fresh eyes, because if you get so ah lost in the minutia, sometimes it can. It can start to lose meaning for you, and you might go down a wrong path, so always going to take a little five minute breaks, just toe come back and give it fresh eyes, even something as quick as a coffee, your bathroom break, and you should be able to see it with a very fresh perspective. I think this is wrapping up nicely, so we started with a simple value painting. We converted it to believable skin tones, and we've been refining it just by picking up tones with with the old key and laying them down. So we'll add some more detail in future lectures. Hope you found this helpful. 10. Eyes: everyone, this is Hardy. In this lecture, we will discuss how to render I jumping back to our sphere rendering exercise. Here. You can see we've got the standard three dimensional rendered sphere on our left. But the way light effects eyes in any kind of jeweled, glassy, translucent object is a little bit different. So we're gonna do another sphere rendering exercise. Here I made a new layer and I'm just calling it Jewell. And I filled in a solid circle with the marquee tool is our starting point. Now, instead of the brightest part being where the light source hits, it's actually kind of the opposite. We put darker values where that light source hits and lighter values at the bottom. What's happening here is light is going through this glassy sphere bouncing around inside, and it actually makes the lower part. The opposite part seemed to glow. It's sort of counterintuitive, but if you can get this very simple concept mastered, it really makes these very cool, jeweled glassy effects, which is exactly what we want to use to make a realistic looking I. It makes It was all very, very easy to achieve and very, very effective. Now this is the main selling point is we put a very bright white highlight right where that light source would be hitting. So in effect, we've got our brightest highlight sitting right on top of our darkest, darkest spot on the underlying sphere. Let's look, it's among some artwork that I've done using this simple concept. And you can see I've got that Jewell rendered sphere in a square near the top left just for reference. But looking at all these very different kinds of characters, this principle works the same for all of them. We've got these alien characters on the left, where the eyes We're kind of a main selling point. And as you can see, the spear shape of the I. The darkest part is near the top, and it gets light near the bottom. So again, sort of counterintuitive to that basic, basic three dimensional, uh, opaque sphere, rendering one other thing that I'd like to point out. And this is true on the characters on the right as well the the insane rabbit and the woman on the upper right. I noticed that the bright white highlight covers the pupil This Ah, this makes it seem kind of deep and interesting. You have to make sure that that white highlights sort of crosses both the iris part of the eye, the color part and that that dark black circular part the pupil, um, this really help sell. It is a deep and translucent objects or just something to remember. Make sure your bright white highlight covers both sort of straddles the two. So now that we understand this basic idea, let's put it into practice with a quick rendering demonstration. I'm just doing a very basic sketch of a human eye. I'd really recommend having a mirror somewhere near your work station. It's always, ah, great way to just check out a quick face reference and rendering this. I'm looking pretty carefully in my own I at all the weird little wrinkles about it. It's actually and more complex series of shapes than in. People tend to realize it's more than just an oval shaped. They're all kinds of little creases and indentations. And if you're doing a close up rendering of the I like this, it's good to have that reference handy. And obviously, your own face is always very handy. If you have a mirror nearby. So something I certainly suggest I've got this basic shape oven I sketched up. We'll start rendering in sin value. The first thing I'm gonna do is render the sphere shape of the eyes. Now, this is like any basic opaque spear she ate and you can see I've got the rendered sphere just for reference. We're just trying to make this look like, around white of the eye part of the because the eyes actually are just about perfectly spherical inside of your head. Just blending that out a little bit to make it look smooth and in spear shaped. And this is just sort of laying the foundation for the white part of the eye before we start doing the the other stuff that looks about right. So I'm going to grab the circular marquee tool, and I'm actually gonna erase away that round part. This is the iris that we're rendering. Here's a part of the eye that it has color Blue green Brown would have you, but that that's a simple rendering for that. And now another circle inside very dark. This is the pupil. It's the very dark hole that light actually enters our eye. That's how we can see. So that's ah, what I've rendered up there now what I'm going to do is start doing some of that Jewell shape value rendering that we just discussed. So I want the top part of the iris to be darker, just like in our Jewell sphere rendering and the bottom part under the pupil to be lighter . And that makes it look like light is passing through this clear object in sort of bouncing around in the bottom. That's what gives it that deep, interesting Jewell effect. And finally, once we have that done, we do the highlight again. The highlight needs to straddle both the iris and the pupil to make it look very deep in interesting and just like that, that's a pretty convincing, deep, Julie looking eye looking at you. So that's a very handy effect, and something we can achieve just just that quickly. What I'm doing now is blending out some of these little striations inside of the Irish to make it look a little more interesting, and you can spend as much time as you want making those really cool striations of the eye as detailed as you want, but this is really just a quick demonstration, and I couldn't really resist here. I'm doing a little bit of rendering on the skin around the eye, just Teoh at a little bit more realism. So adding in some shadows around those creases in a good dark when here under the brow to sort of define these eyelid shapes. But that's the basic idea. Just just checking out how that Jewell effect applies to the eye and just adding in a little extra rendering here for fun. Teoh, help make it into a more complete demonstration. But give this a try. Get out of mirror on your desk and take a good close look at your I you can get is detailed as you want, even down to the little blood vessels and the white of your eye if you want. But what we're really hoping to take away is that that Jewell effect and how that applies to the I jumping back to our main project, we're gonna apply all of these I principles to our main figure here. So I've created a new layer. I'm calling it eyes, and I'm just quickly rendering in that sphere shape of the white of the eye, exactly like we did on our demonstration and just trying to make this seem round in natural . The way it sits in the head, the way the shadows of the brow affected, blending that out a little bit just to make it all fit. And now I'll begin erasing away the iris. And of course, this part is when you decide what direction your character is gonna be looking in. So it's very important to get right. And I tried a few things, but I ultimately just decided to make another layer with a circle so that I could move it around and kind of changed the way he's looking. And also you want to make very sure that both eyes are aimed in the same direction, or he'll look kind of cross eyed or lazy. So now I'm adding in their jeweled effect, dark on the top and lighter colors in the bottom. This is where you can decide what color eyes you want. Your character tohave went for just kind of a gray lighter. I just to sort of demonstrate the concept. But now that we've got that in place, we add our bright white highlight that covers the pupil. And just like that, suddenly this guy really comes to life with a very light believable I So that's the basic idea. 11. Hair: Oh, hi, everyone, this is Hardy. In this lecture, we will discuss how to render hair. I've got a few ah, cool techniques I'd like to show you. We're gonna put each on its own layer. So I'm making one called hair one. And to do this, this is the easiest one. We're going to switch our brush mode to dissolve and grab a dark color from somewhere on our character. And as you can see, dissolve makes these little speckled kind of sprayed on effect. It looks like the old spray can tool on Microsoft paint, but it it creates a fairly convincing stubble look. So if you have a character who you just want to have a shaved head or this works great for a shaved beard area as well, this is a really great, super easy way to do it. It's good to apply a bit of a Gaussian blur to it just makes it seem not quite so pixel e. But just like that, with just a few brushstrokes, this guy has some pretty believable stubble, so Ah, handy. Very quick. Easy trick There. The second technique, we're gonna give this guy a short kind of crew haircut, sort of Ah, maybe military style. But I've just got my chalk style brush. And I'm just laying in a basic pattern here, hair shaped, kind of defining his hairline gonna be sort of halfway between Ah, long hair and in the shaved head. Look, um, so just right now, trying to define the hairline, still thinking three dimensionally, trying to make that sort of slight widow's peak match the perspective that the rest of his face is in and also trying to give a little bit of interest to where the hair comes into contact with skin. I'm going a little less heavy on the sideburns just to make it seem like that hair's a little bit shorter crop. You can still see a little bit of skin showing through, and that's what gives that effect a bit of a kind of a fade up up the side of his hair. Little details like that really helped. Now I'm doing some smudging. This is a really crucial for rendering longer hair. You can use this smudge tool to kind of pull out all kinds of little wisps and is is I'm doing here on the border where the hair comes into contact with the skin. If you just pull little wispy hairs with a fairly small size brush, it can make a really cool effect. Looks like thousands of little hairs doing the same thing here on the perimeter and sort of trying to pull in slightly different directions so that it doesn't seem to uniform. A big part of rendering hair convincingly is capturing the randomness that hair has it. It does follows somewhat of, ah, uniform pattern, but it also tends to have have sort of a randomness is well, and if you go to uniform, it can seem very fake looking. I've grab some of that lighter color on the sideburn. I'm just starting to render in some hair, light up some highlights. Teoh details some of that hair, just some small, blocky brushstrokes. And since this isn't long flowing hair, I am Ah, I'm doing long, blocky brush strokes and for these finer hairs notice I'm doing these crisscross strokes. They sort of overlapped. That's how I'm getting that look of overlapping hair. Um, this is a little bit more time consuming, but as you can see, you can fairly easily get in the impression of thousands of hairs, Very the length of that do short exes and long crisscross X is and, ah, again going to that that randomness of hair that we discussed. But, uh, just like that, this guy's hair looks fairly realistic, doing some more smudging just to pull around some of those tones. I think the top of his head looks a little too uniforms on smudging around a little bit more just to make it seem a little random. You know, bedhead wind blowing all kinds of things affect the shape of the hair, so you want to make sure it doesn't look too perfect. You are cardboard cut out or anything, or it'll it'll ring false. But that's looking, Ah, pretty convincing already sort of trying to blend in between the hairline and the rest of the skin, and I think I'll add some eyebrows as well. Sometimes the brow area can get dark enough in the value rendering that don't really seem to need it, but I think this guy could use it. So, gonna add that into this one, just blending out a little bit, not going into too much detail here, also going to Ah, I'm noticed. This this I on the far side looks a little too light. So I'm adding a few more darks toe punch that up. But this guy's coming along very nicely a little more blending here to make that hairline seem more realistic, and you can see what a dramatic change it is. I'm going to copy this second layer just because I like the eyebrows and some of the sideburns. So I'm going to sort of use this is a jumping off point and doing a little more detail work on the eyebrows before I move on to our our third hair style here just to give those a little more detail, some individual hair shapes gonna delete out the top. And I noticed I was letting some of that underlying layer show through. So here we go. We're going to start from scratch for 1/3 1 I'm gonna do a longer hair style kind of, ah, bangs hanging over the face in ah, parted hair and we might even give this guy a beard. I'd like to show you how to render facial hair is well, but we're really just sort of building on the same techniques here. This is just a little bit more involved, more more highlighting to do, but again, just using a fairly solid, high opacity brush to block in the general shapes. This is kind of where you do your design work and decide what what sort of hairstyle you'd like to see. And I think this is working pretty well and, yeah, let's let's go ahead and give this guy of full beard and will render that up is well, similar techniques is rendering short hair just, ah, applied to more of the face. It's just a matter of putting the time in and rendering it so. Obviously, shorter hair is easier to render. There's just not as many brushstrokes needed, but it really. With this technique, none of this is terribly difficult and pulling out some some individual hairs with a smudge tool said I'm pretty high strength so that that tone really moves with the brush drags out long, thin hair shapes. That's that's really what we want for this and just smoothing things out a little bit. Adding some detail to the perimeter of the hair up top. Justo make it seem a little more interesting on the contours, adding a few individual hairs here again, just those X shapes, making sure that those hairs kind of overlap in a random but not too random pattern. If that makes sense, sort of, ah, structured chaos, I guess, would be a good way to to describe it. And ah, and that should get you there. Just blending in the beard here a little bit more margins where hair meat skin is really crucial in rendering believable hair. If if it's too stark of a contrast, it rings false. It's got to be just right. Things need Teoh come together nicely. There need to be a good a shoreline between hair and skin, so that's what this detail work is. Even before we add our first highlight or tone within the hair, I'm putting in a lot of groundwork to make sure that the hair where it meets the skin looks believable. So now that that's done of grabbed a lighter color around his cheek, and I'm starting to drop in some some highlights just long X strokes really crisscrossing, overlapping, and I'm kind of defining highlights where where they would be be striking that hair around the part kind of two highlights on either side of that part line, with the actual part itself remaining pretty dark. And we're just extending those crisscross strokes down towards the bottom a bit, starting to just render it out with hair. It's kind of just a lot of the same technique, just rendering it over and over. You can A you can get is complex auras simple as you want, but basically it's just a bunch of ex shape strokes over and over and in keeping in mind your light source and where, where everything is, where light is striking all of the different structures. Make sure it all adds up with the value scheme you set up for the rendering of the skin, and it should look pretty realistic. Lightening things up a little. This guy's beard was looking just so black it didn't quite seem to fit with with the rest of him. So I'm ah, correcting at a bit and just blending it back with connect us and X shaped brushstrokes. And it looks very believable now in this area where light turns to shadow. You can really make some nice details pop see on his chin. You've got some stark contrast between the highlight color and that darker, almost black color, and that that really is, Ah, very realistic part Manning a little more highlight to make that pop because I like that effect. But that half to an area where highlight turns to shadow is an area where detail like like hares, can really pop. That's a good opportunity to give a bunch of realism to your character painting here and in just a little more detail, some brighter highlights here along this near side of the part line and maybe a few here on the other side as well, but not quite as bright. And I think this guy is shaping up very nicely. Let's take a look at all three. We can see the shorts, double hair, the middle kind of crew cut hair and the longer hair with facial hair. You can tell what an unbelievably dramatic effect different hairstyles can have on the overall feel of your character. Very powerful tool to use. And with these techniques, you should have the tools to make just about any kind of hair style that you want, so hope you found that helpful 12. Project 1 - Final Polish: Hi, everyone. This is Hardy. In this lecture, we will add final polish to our project and I've decided to go with the shorter hair style . But I'm gonna go ahead and bring some of the stubble over from the very short hair style kind of a nice middle ground. And what we're gonna do is add some secondary light sources. So I'm creating a new layer and we're going to start adding some light around the perimeter , some different light sources just to add further three dimensional qualities to our character. And it also gives us some nice color opportunities to balance things out and add more interest. So chosen kind of Ah, very pale, grayish blue color. I think this kind of implies light bouncing off from from the sky. And since our characters face is mostly made up of warmer colors, this is a nice way to balance things out and not make it so heavily warm and in color scheme. I think it's a nice a nice offset, but I'm basically just imagining a second light source somewhere off to the character or the page left here, adding in some light, hitting him on the side of the face of this lights coming in pretty much directly from the side and just painting in those those light sources again imagining how how that light would affect this three dimensional shape and just blending things out to make it smoother . Um, the corner of the mouth is always a very sensitive area to get thes secondary light sources , right. Ah, very most minimal amount of tone or smudging can really change the whole whole quality of the characters. Face that the corners of the mouth are very expressive, so important to get that right. But the rest of it is is very easy. You're basically just dropping in value, and I'm adding in some of that dissolved brush mode just to make some of that stubble on that side of his face. Catch some of that. That grayish blue light source is well in erasing back just a little bit here, refining things, making them more more subtle and fit better. And I'm gonna add another light source here on the other side of his head. Very small brush diameter here, just just making some very fine detail because this really is are very final steps. This is right before we'd consider this project done. So this is when you want to add your your most most subtle and fine detail that you want the final product to have. So take take the time. Teoh, get this last polish step, right? You've worked so hard getting to this point. So take a little extra time to have a strong finish and make sure you have the best possible final product on the ear on actually drawing a little bit of adding in some paint , showing light transmitting through that thin skinned area that it's a really cool phenomenon that happens if light hits the back of the ear. It shines through and it's ah, really bright reddish color. So that's an interesting detail you can add as well. If if you've set up your lighting scheme to support that, I'm going Teoh, let me see if this looks better. Kind of knocked back a little. I think I like that better. Full brightness. So I'm gonna leave that as it is now. I'm I'm grouping everything, copying the group and then making emerged version. So we've got everything on one layer here and now I've got my smudge tool, and I'm going to go around the entire outer perimeter and lightly smudge things just to to sort of blend in everything. If you have a very sharp cut edge, it can sort of flatten things out and kill that sense of three dimensions that we worked so hard to achieve. So this is a very good, uh, final step. Just Teoh Polish things up, make it make it as realistic as possible. So that's looking pretty good. Just gonna make sure I like the color balance here. Trying some subtle variations on this may be cool. The skin tones off just a tad, but nothing major. I think this is pretty much correct, but it's a good opportunity to try that now. I think, uh, taking a look at his perspective and just final checks on everything, maybe adding in a little more dark here in the nostril. Yeah, that's better. Smudging that out of bits that it blends and I'm entering liquefy mode, which is command shift X to bring this up just to do some last minute fine tuning to just areas that need a little bit of extra help. Want to make sure the perspective of the corners of his mouth and even up around his eyebrow in the hairline. Make sure that all adds up and liquefies just such a great, super easy tool to use to make these last minute changes. Even at this late step, it's never too late to make these adjustments. So one of the really best parts of photo shop is this is always available to you late in the process or if a client has changes for you, this is such an easy way to change things and make them make them just right. Just, ah, adding in a little bit more light on the forehead here noticed an opportunity there. But I think this guy is just about done. So let's take a look it our steps for this project. We went through quite a few just getting to this final product, but we started with a sketch where we defined our rough form and our our character really got our perspective and basic idea on the page. Then we moved to the X Step, where we were fine, things made much more deliberate and Chris brush strokes so that we could see everything in better detail and sort of cement our idea. From there we blocked in. We created a silhouette and did our value. Painting in the bright orange color just toe give our character three dimensions, establish how light falls on the forms and start to bring him to life. From there, we converted the value layer into the skin tones, where we differentiate between the redder parts of the face, like the cheeks and nose and ears etcetera from the cooler colors around the facial hair and the scout. From there, we added some final product polish, and that brings us to our final product. All in all, we went from a blank canvas to a finished product that we could be proud of. I hope you've gotten a lot out of this project. Join us again for future projects where we'll build on what we've learned here and take it to the next level. 13. Project 2 - Sketch & Ink: Oh, everyone, this is hardy. In this extra, we will begin our female face project by starting the sketch and ink steps before we get started. Let's take a look at some essential prerequisites. You need to have completed the art fundamentals and Photoshopped Fundamentals lectures before getting to this point. This will be a beginner level course, but it's a high beginner level three. So make sure you're very comfortable with both those art and Photoshopped fundamentals courses before moving on. So let's dive in. We'll start with a blank canvas and is always It's a great idea to just jump right in and start making marks. I'm just defining the basic egg shape of the head and starting to sketch in little guidelines for my my main facial landmarks, the jaw line, the ears and the nose in the lines where the eyes will go. So remember it's a female character who were drawing here, so we're gonna make her neck and jaw much slimmer than we did in the mail project, and we want to make our lines more gently curving. In Overall, curvy is opposed to angular as we did in the mail project. Those air two of the most important things to keep in mind when rendering a female character versus a male. If the jar neck or too big, or if the features air overly angular, it can start to look masculine and just look a little weird. If it is, Ah, woman, you're tryingto depict here. So, just like in everything else, I am making marks freely and expressively in this phase, and we're just erasing away or transforming is needed. It's that feel your way through approach. There's no pressure to get things right. The first time make is many marks as you need, and B is loose and expressive is you want. At this phase, we're just sort of exploring ideas and generally getting the broad strokes in their correct position before moving on. So this is the idea phase. Just try as many different things you want and a race and adjust until it looks right and that's it. It is forgiving. It's infinitely forgiving, basically so no pressure at all, and it's it's sort of the part I like best about this technique is there's almost no pressure to to get anything right. It's very fun and and liberating So I've got my basic elements all in place here that the eyes, nose mouth, years It's all looking pretty good and certainly looking feminine at this phase. Uh, I'd like to leave hair for a later step because I find if I add hair at this early stage, it sort of hides other features that I need to describe. And it ends up leaving some things unfinished until later steps. So it looks a little strange but will make her bald at first and then add hair at a later step. Hair can also be kind of a crutch. It it can automatically make your character look feminine, and it lets you sort of cheat, even if you you're leaving other features of the face, not looking as feminine as they should. So another reason that I leave hair out until later steps. But I'm just really refining here and say, This is basically correct. It's in the correct perspective. Planes. It looks feminine. The basic features of the face all have the attitude and gesture that I'm after, more or less a neutral expression here, not going for any wild facial expressions, and, uh, I think this is looking pretty good, A little last minute refinement. And ah, and I think we're in good shape. Once we have all of these lines refined, I'll do a little liquefy pass here. Just Teoh. Correct. A few little things sort of push and pull a few features that look like they need a little bit of correction liquefies so great for that. So feel free toe. Push around those lines as much as you want. Teoh Correct little minor oddities that that may have come through during your normal sketching. I think that it made a big difference. And, of course, we can use liquefy at just about any stage. So know where he is there now that we have are loose, sketch in place have started a new layer, and I'm going to do a more bold inking pass. So more deliberate brushstrokes here we're trying to avoid any stray sketch marks very sparse line approach here, especially with a female character. If if you over describe the facial features with too much line work, it can have a very strange masculine izing effect, and it can make them look elderly. So really, try to use this few lines is, you can obviously you need to describe each feature of the face, and it needs toe all make sense, but avoid extraneous lines. And I think you'll be much more pleased with the result. Just doing some bold line work here on the eyes and, ah, a few little describing detail lines inside but again trying to keep those to a minimum and taking a few tries at getting this arc of the nose. It's incredible how each feature of the face has such a big impact on the overall feel of the picture. You can move lines in a very small way, and it can change the entire look of your character so important t get things right the way you like them at this early phase and and make sure that they're there in the correct position. Or it may seem odd later down the line, but at the same time, don't don't worry too much, because we can always adjust it later steps to so just sort of getting our basic idea down in these early steps, trying to avoid too much line work and making sure that she looks feminine and is generally look that we're after. And I think we're just about there. Up next we'll start our value rendering 14. Project 2 - Value: Oh, hi, everyone. This is Hardy. In this extra, we will be doing the value rendering portion of our female face project. So let's get started. I'm going to turn the background layer to a middle gray, and the next thing I'm gonna do is complete the outer contour of this ink layers. Just sort of closing in these lines so that it's a solid shape. And I'm gonna do that to make our selection. I've used the magic wand tool to select the outside, and then I'm selecting the inverse by hitting command shift. I and I've created a new layer, and I'm filling it in with a dark scion color and making a quick copy of my ink layer so that I could merge those two together. He will call that new layer silhouette, and we can use that to make selections anytime and that that will give us a nice, solid shape to contain our value rendering. So I'm getting started with that, a new layer on top of silhouette, and I grabbed that bright orange color that I always used for the value rendering step. And we're just starting to drop in light values where that that light source would be coming from. We're using an upper middle upper left light scheme that that's where our light sources here, so that near part of the face will get the most most high key values. Basically just just dropping in general. Areas of light on those planes that face upwards of the cheekbones, the forehead, the upper part of the lip under the nose and the lower lip, the chin, things like that. All the areas that that face up into that light source have a higher value, just like our basic sphere rendering exercise that we do in the art fundamentals portion that that's basically the same idea. We're just applying it to a slightly more complex form that the human face, uh, in in this slightly more advanced application that we also want to keep edges in mind. So we need to have the late the high key values facing the light sores. But we're also keeping edge edges of our values in mind. But I mean by that is areas where a very high value happens right next to a very low value . So, for example, where the upper lip and the bottom lip meat. There's a very sharp delineation between a high value and a low value that gives us a very clear understanding that they're two different planes coming together sharply. Same thing going on here on the nose. I'm smudging some of these tones around, but it gives us some very sharp delineations between dark areas and light areas. And that is really Ah, very fundamental, very important technique to use here. It makes these fleshy forms look very realistic when you have those high key values right next to a dark value. It makes an edge very well defined, and it makes it look very realistic in three dimensional. So you'll see me kind of go back and forth, sort of a tug of war with that where will define edges very sharply darks right next to light. And then I'll come back on top with a low opacity, low flow brush and just sort of generally paint over in broad strokes to unify things together. So, uh, it's, ah, back and forth between delineating things and then unifying them back together. Hope that makes sense. Another thing to keep in mind is that since this is a female, we want our tones to be a little softer In our mail project, there are some kind of really chunky brushstrokes. A lot of it was very modeled and and that looked cool, kind of like skin texture. But we generally want the skin to be a little bit smoother and softer, not quite so much brushstroke showing through in the final product. So it this phase, it's OK for it's still toe look very modeled and textured like it does here. But in later steps I'll actually switch to Ah, around a soft brush just to start softening things. You don't want it to get so soft that it looks completely airbrushed or anything like that . You want to keep some of this very cool, painterly texture. But in a female project, our character rather you don't want it to be so textured in the final product or it she could end up looking a little bit masculine or elderly, in effect, that you might not necessarily be after because we're we're going after a relatively young character here, and we wanted to look that way and look feminine as well. So good things to keep in mind. Soft line work and soft brushwork is, well just to match. So look at that really nice edge between the far edge of the nose and that light area of the cheek on the far side of the face. It's a great example of the edge technique being used because it really makes the nose seem three dimensional. It makes it seem like it's popping up off of the surface of the face. And that's all because of that very dark edge of the far edge of the nose, contrasting with the very light cheek on the other side so that that use of the edge technique really helps make this seem three dimensional. Her nose seems like it's coming out towards a slightly as it should, so that's that's what we use value edges for that. That's, Ah, great example. Just adding some pain here. T e years kind of just going around unifying things a little bit is, as we describe, just did that with a larger brush, erasing away a little bit just to make her cheekbone kind of defined on the female face. Uh, it's it's often OK to to make the cheekbones more prominent. Same thing with the lips and eyelash type features. You can play those up on a female character, things that you would want to sort of understate on a male character. The opposite is true here, so cheekbones, lips and eyelash areas you can pretty much take those as far as you want. Within reason. Obviously, if if you give her gigantic lips and movie star eyelashes, it may look a little bit silly. But, um, of course, just generally speaking, that's Ah, it's okay toe toe accentuate on a female character was experimenting with with that crease along the cheeks, or that separates the upper lip from the cheek. But I decided to dial that back a little bit, and I'm just going to start rendering in the neck. That sort of defines the jaws well. Another get use of value edges. We have that bright area of the neck coming up right against that dark edge, where the jaw kind of curves away and turns into the next. Another good use of value edges to help make this figure look look three dimensional, and I think it's very effective. So just some simple brush strokes and unifying things once again with a larger brush, and I'd say this is coming together pretty nicely. It certainly is believable. Three dimensionally it say she still looks feminine, So we've got a nice Knicks between textured brushes and softness. It's working well, so I'd say this is ready to convert to skin tones, which will do in our next step. 15. Project 2 - Skin Tones: Oh, hi, everyone. This is Hardy. In this sexual, we'll be converting our value rendering to skin tones. So let's get started. Let's talk a little bit about the layers were going to set up here. I'm going to change. Or a rename. Rather, my value rendering is value. So that orange layer orange color is value. Gonna make a new layer beneath it. That's very important. We're gonna name that skin mod. So we have value above and skin mod underneath. Very important. So the first thing we're gonna do is on our value layer is do a hue saturation adjustment. Hit command you to bring up this adjuster. We're gonna increase the lightness and change the hue to more of a yellow range. So the result is sort of an off white, very pale, high key yellow, and that looks just about rights. It will hit. Okay, I'm making a copy of the value just to save it in case I need to go back to this step later . So on the layer beneath skin mod, we're gonna grab sort of Ah, an orangish red color, very middle value. And we're going to switch to a soft brush around brush because we're gonna use this to make make modified skin tones beneath the value layer. Now I'm changing this to a soft brush. You can change the hardness of this round brush with a keyboard shortcut. Just hold down, shift and hit the bracket keys, and it will change the hardness or softness up and down by 25% increments. So now that we have that done, I'm going to start painting in some this red color on the skin model layer beneath the value layer. Now it's important to make certain parts of the face more red than others. We want the lips, nose, cheeks and ears to be very red. So be as heavy handed as you want on those particular areas of the face, and by contrast, we leave the scalp area Ah, fairly free of that red color, and it lets some of that greenish scion show through makes it look more like hair. Now, of course, we're gonna cover our character's head with hair, but as a general rule, we want those those layers Teoh those particular parts of the head t show through without much of that red coloration, so that looks generally right. I've merged those two layers together and renamed it emerged skin tones, and I've still got my soft brush. And what I'm doing now is just picking up, uh, paint colors by using the dropper tool by hitting Ault when I have the brush tool selected , and I'm just picking it up and laying it down to sort of unify things and smooth them out so you can see already a lot of those modeled brushstrokes that some of them looked a little bit rough are starting to be smoothed out in a nice way. And it certainly adds to the feminine quality. I'm also taking this step to, to add in a few shadows on the darker side of the face, as you can see and just generally start to correct skin tone so redder in the cheeks, nose and lips and ears, and let some of that that paler, yellowish color show through on the other areas of the face, like the forehead jaw ah, bridge of the nose. I guess that those parts of the face you can let that show through, so adding a little more red to those parts just to make that that modulation show through. And that's really the key to making realistic looking skin tones, especially on the faces, that subtle difference between those parts of the face. So one more time just nose, cheeks, lips and ears. We want those to be redder in appearance, and the rest of the face can stay more in the neighborhood of that hi key pale yellow. So that's really the big secret. That's, Ah, such an easy way to convert a simple value painting into believable skin tones. And you didn't have to worry about mixing colors the entire time you were trying to figure out the forms of the face and make it look three dimensional. Kind of allows us to compartmentalize those two parts of the drawing. You can just focus on value in one step and then worry about color and the next step. And as you can see the results already pretty nice, it certainly looks like believable skin, and we've certainly preserved the three dimensional quality, and at this point, it's just a lot of refinement. I'm using that dropper tool by hitting Ault when I have the brush selected to just pick up colors and then paint them right back in. And if you do that enough times, pick it up and put it down. It sort of starts to unify things so you can see ah much smoother quality to the skin than we had just a short while ago and again trying to make this look even more three dimensional. So I'm adding some shadows to the far side and defining some of these forms a little bit. It's interesting sometimes things that looked fine and the value phase. You comptel need more work when you get to this skin tone coloring phase. So feel free toe to correct things or make any changes that you want even drastic changes to the the entire project. At this phase, if you want voter shops infinitely forgiving, so make his many changes as you see fit, correcting some of these far side shadows. A lot of them were looking a little bit rough, and it's an easy part of the face to sort of forget about. You're focusing on the foreground parts that you see most prominently, but we certainly need to give equal attention to that darker side of the face because it all needs toe agree and add up and trying to make that that edge of the nose in the far cheek pop just like it did in the value range. And I think that's looking very nice, adding some very dark values to the nostrils just toe expand the value range a little bit and blending things out just to make it a little smoother than it. Waas. We don't want things to get to smoother. It can look overly airbrushed and too soft, and it will seem abnormal. I've, ah grabbed a higher value color, just about white, sort of an off white, and I'm using that to paint in some very small, very bright highlights in certain parts, the tip of the nose in particular in that little area near the corner of the eye. It's often very nice to give that a really bright shine. Those areas of the face seemed Teoh catch really bold highlights for some reason, I think just the the quality of the skin at that part. But it can really, really make your character look more realistic. So a nice detail to include and just adding a little more refinement here, but I'd say this is just about where we want it. So up next we'll add hair and eyes, and after that, some final Polish. 16. Project 2 - Eyes & Hair: Oh, hi, everyone, This is Hardy. In this lecture, we will be adding eyes and hair to our characters. So let's get started. I'm going to start a new layer in Name it eyes, and I'm going to sample one of the lighter skin tone colors and we're going to start by dropping in the white of the eye. And this is basically just a spirit kal shape inside of the eye socket. The eyeballs themselves actually are round mostly spherical shape. So we want this to look around and if you haven't already had, certainly encourage you to look at our basic I demonstration that goes into a lot of good depth about the specifics of rendering eyes. So now that we have, this basic spherical shape is looking round and ah, good skin tone or, ah, good tone color. We're gonna erase away some Irish shaves, and this is where we decide what direction we want our character to be looking in. So that's that's an important decision. Actually, it has a lot of impact on the attitude and a general feeling of your character I've got are looking just about right at us, but a little bit above. And I think that's just the attitude that I'd like to convey here. And it goes along well with the rest of it, but certainly do whatever you'd prefer meeting in a little bit of eyelash definition. Don't want to be too heavy handed with that. Maybe, uh, some slight makeup added effect here. But don't want that to look overdone just to make her look feminine. And, uh, give it a nice look and also to give the eyes a little bit more definition, I'm actually gonna erase that back a little bit. Sometimes. If they get too bold white of the white eye and the dark of the iris and the eyelashes, it can be so different from the skin tones that it doesn't quite blend in. Well, now I'm bouncing some light inside the I, uh, adding some light to the irises. And if you'll recall from our I demonstration, we follow that Jewell lighting color scheme where the light actually bounces around inside . So we want the lightest part to be at the bottom. We're gonna put in a bright white highlight at the end of this step, but for now, we just want a little bit of light bouncing around there, and it's lighter at the bottom and darker at the top. Once we have that in place, we're gonna put a very bright white highlight nearly in the centre. We wanted to span both the Iris and the dark pupil. And just like that, I think we have some very believable eyes. This is always a step where the the image really starts to come to life. So I'm pretty pleased with this, and I think up next we'll move on to hair. Hair is another really important part, especially for a female character. It just has such a big impact on the kind of personality that we have. So check out as many reference photos is you need to just to pick a style that you like. I have a kind of a shorter hair style in mind, but you just sort of sketch it in with a darker color, kind of grab your darkest skin tone on the page and just start sketching things in. This is also the layer that you would put the eyebrows and even a little bit of extra eyelash work on as well. It's just nice to have all of these things organized, and certainly that would fall under the category of hair. So I'm just fine tuning my idea here and just gonna block this in. And just like that, it really changes the entire personality of the image. And certainly you can try multiple hairstyles and you'll see how much power there is in these these very seemingly minor decisions. So take your time with it, get it just right. I'm adding in some sort of wisps to make the hairline interesting. Just the intersection of hair and skin kind of start thinking about how the clumps of hair would fall naturally over the face and that that really ends up making it be realistic. So try and try and think about these things, even at this early stage, when you're just blocking things in and you'll, you'll end up with a better final product. I always like to have a few wisps of hair kind of flowing out beyond the perimeter of the characters. If there's a breeze blowing or something just sort of, adds Cem instant drama, even to something simple story wise, like a portrait. And I think this is coming along nicely adjusting the hue and saturation just a little bit before a start, adding in highlight. So remember, we're just going to do generalized dragged out X shaped strokes were sort of crossing the brush X shape that it's tough to pick up on these long strands of hair. But every brush stroke series that I make is an elongated X. So here's a detailed look at how we do that, just sort of backing fourth X shape strokes. And if you do that enough times, it starts to add up toe realistic, layered looking hair. And, of course, once we have that in place, we do some heavy smudging. I've got this much tool set on a pretty high pressure, and I'm just dragging around those those highlights that I added on, and that adds further realism. The hair should be able to be viewed, as is thousands of individual strands of hair. But at the same time, you're, I should sort of read. It is a few generalized clumps, so we sort of go back and forth between making broad shapes and then coming back in doing much finer detail. Work with those x shaped strokes like you can see here, so just remember very long X is layered over and over again. That's pretty much the recipe for success when rendering hair, male or female, even facial hair, beards, etcetera. It's, ah, great and really easy way to make it look like you've been laboring on this for hours, doing individual hairs when in reality, it just takes a few brushstrokes put on in the right way. So a great time saver and certainly a cool way to add some professional level finished to your image without a whole lot of effort, our mastery of any detailed techniques. So give that some practice, and it will definitely pay off playing around with with smudging out some more strands of hair along the border here and even adjusting the length and style just a little bit. Feel free to play with this as much as you need. Your Aiken sort of change the way it's picking up on these things as you go, so it's it's worth messing around with a little bit if if you want to change things, it's also nice to have your hair on its own layer, just in case you want to change something drastically, like the entire hair color or or something like that. Now I'm adding some very fine strands, kind of laying down on the side of the cheek and hanging over the ears when, even when hair is pulled back, you'll find that a few strands always escape that that hair do and they will hang down. And if if you don't include those little details that it's sort of end up missing these things. So make sure to add a few extra stray strands if if you're missing some added realism, I've added a layer beneath the hair layer, and I'm just adding some cash shadows where that hair would darken certain areas like the forehead, even doing a little bit of liquefied because I didn't quite like the way that Strand was laying. Just experimenting, really playing around a little more, adding some more definition to these strands hanging down over the face, and I'm back down to that shadow layer beneath the hair. Just add a little more darkness. Some of these parts of the face seemed like they'd be getting a good bit of shadow on them from where the hair is casting. Didn't put a bright highlight where that bit of the forehead is peeking through and a bit of a harder shadow line. I think that adds a lot of realism, like the The hair hanging over her forehead is casting a shadow so we can use all of these little details to our advantage to enhance our realism and and make it more interesting gonna go back with, ah, higher value and add some even brighter highlights just to give Give the hair a little bit of a shine so sort of coming back for round two with with building up values here, I'd like it to have a bit of a higher value range, so I'm just smudging those out to make them blend a little bit. And you can see just like that. It gives a nice, shiny quality to the hair, and I think that's looking very nice, a little bit more blending, and I think we're just about all set with our hair step 17. Project 2 - Final Polish: Oh, hi, everyone, This is Hardy. In this extra, we will add some final polish to our image into a project recap. Now that we have our hair and eyes in place, I'm gonna group everything into a group, make a copy and then hit command E to merge everything together. So now I've got everything saved. If I need to manipulate the individual layers, but I'm gonna work on it is a merged single layer here just to do some final touch ups. It's easier to do that just so that you can apply everything to the same layer all at once rather than adjusting each. So what I'm doing is treating the edges now with some smudging just going around the entire outside, sort of. It's kind of like using sandpaper, just toe buff away All the rough edges on the outer perimeter make it all look smooth and not too crisp. You want you want to put a very slight blur around the edge of everything. If it's too sharp, it has, ah, the effect of flattening things that it kills that three dimensional effect that we've worked so hard to achieve. So that's why I recommend treating the edges is one of your final Polish steps here. And I'm doing that also doing a little bit of fine tuning smudging just ah, any rough edges, anything that doesn't look quite right. Now you've got it all on one layer and you can just do your modifications, right? You know, just little spot finishing touches just to put final polish on everything. Because this is these are are very final steps, and we would be presenting this to a client or possibly a teacher after this point. So put on a is many polishing points as you can. Mostly gonna gonna refine a few of these edges. Some of these these little spots and here could use a little more definition, adding, Even sum's, um, slightly darker shadows with the burn tool, which is o on your keyboard shortcuts. It's just kind of darkens things out, being very light handed with that, I don't want to drastically change the value range at this phase, but I just noticed a few areas that could use a little more pop, adding a slightly brighter highlight to a few areas on the face, the tip of the nose and the lips here just to give it a little extra pop in a few places, but again, be very light handed with that. You don't want to go overboard. But I think that anything we can do to stretch out the value range only edge richness and beauty to our image. Now going to do a little bit of liquefying just to do some last minute changes. The nostrils, the eyes, a few things I just wanted to tweak ever so slightly. Any little issue you noticed on your way through the project. This is a great time to put that to rest perspective, problems or proportions. You can correct that Here, too. I'm even shortening the hair just a little bit. But some last minute touches just toe change things make them as good as possible. And you can see jumping back and forth here. These Ah, these changes, I think, or an improvement some. I'm gonna let them stand. It's always good to hit. Undo a few times after you liquefy, just tow. Watch it go back and forth. Now we're gonna add some secondary light sources. I've decided to go with a single secondary light source on the side make it a bright off, white kind of penlight shining on that edge of her face. This adds a lot of realism, really makes it look three dimensional. And this is a nice, painterly quality toe. Adiz is one of our final steps here, so always a worthwhile thing to explore. I don't think it needs it necessarily, but it can add add charm and beauty to your image. So the secondary light sources are a nice finishing touch. Now that I've got them in place, I'm doing a little bit of smudging just to blend those out. Don't want them to be to rough his brush strokes. So I'm blending the men so that they match with the rest of the softness that I had established earlier. And I think that fits very nicely a little more blending just to make it all fit, racing back a little bit just to make it all jive. And I'm going to carry this light source up to the rest of the hair on this side of the face to notice on. I'm taking this opportunity toe have a few strands of hair floating out there with the this light source it does a nice job of making it look like they're just a few individuals, strands of hair hanging out there that are catching this light. That adds a lot of realism. So something worth experimenting with a few hairs caught in that secondary light source could be very interesting. And I'm doing a little bit of refinements of erasing and some smudging just to make all that fit some last minute touches. And I think this is just about a finished product. Congratulations on making it through the female face project. Let's take a look back at our project steps to see how far we've come. We started with a rough sketch to get our basic pose and proportions in place way, then made an inking pass to refine and clean it up. After that, we blocked in the silhouette and did a value rendering to make our character look three dimensional way, then converted the value rendering into believable skin tones. In our final Polish phase, we refined our skin tones and then added eyes, hair and secondary light sources. All in all, we went from a blank canvas to a finished product that we could be proud of I hope you've gotten a lot out of this project. Join us again for future projects where we'll build on what we've learned here and take it to the next level. 18. Project 3 - VILLAIN - Sketch & Ink: Hi, everyone. This is Hardy and welcome to the villain face project. We're going to start with our sketch in ink steps, but we're gonna fit value into this video as well. So let's start with a blank canvas. And again, I want to make this guy not quite so generic is our 1st 2 projects. So I'm gonna make him ah, riel, sleazeball looking villain and have an idea in mind of some kind of ah, mobster mug shot type of look. So that's my idea setting out here and again, we want to focus a little bit more on character design and personality in this one. But certainly we're gonna remember all the principles that we learned in our 1st 2 projects that the male and female face projects, but something not quite so generic this time. So injecting a little bit of personality, some some character design stuff, some more storytelling. So that should be a lot of fun. Maybe a little more interesting as well. So I'm taking Cem visual cues on how to make this guy seem creepy and gangster looking up, and that starts with the shape of his head. I've made it sort of ob long and peanut shaped, and I've given him some big, funny looking ears. I'm also ah, giving him some asymmetrical eyebrows. He's got sort of a sneer, raised, eyebrow type of expression in some bags under his eyes, just sort of to imply this guys up all night. Maybe seen some hard years, little visual cues like that. But every shape and every every decision I'm making is is designed to back up this this story that I'm tryingto portray here. So we are delving a little bit into character designed with this one. So just for finding things as I go here. But everything's really going smoothly for me here. All of these visual cues air coming together nicely. The nose is gonna be really lumpy and angular, defined a lot of very masculine line shapes. Not so many smooth, curving shapes. But I'm trying to keep things very angular. I also noticed I've got one corner of his mouth, a lip raised in sort of a sneer, and that'll correspond with the the wrinkles around the corner of his nose being raised as well. So basically this guy is posing for a mug shot. Let's say and he's just trying to look tough like he just doesn't care. So there's that wrinkle of skin around the corner of the knows that makes a sneer. So, just like that, these incredibly subtle little lines that we can add or subtract have such a huge impact on the attitude and facial expression that our character portrays. And up that that's just one of the coolest things about this technique is you can erase or just move a few lines up or down with photo shop, and you're just totally seeing something different, something that's really impossible with traditional media, so hope that gets you as excited as it still does for May, cause that's that's just one of the coolest things about this. Seeing your image just change before your eyes with with so little effort, trying to give him some really accentuated angular facial features, his cheekbones. But I want his jaw to be kind of week. I've got sort of a turkey neck thing going on with some wrinkles around his chin. I want to stay far away from ah, hero like square jaw, so that's why he's got kind of a week jawline and chin to go along with all of these other facial features. Uh, all of these things just designed to make this guy kind of unlikable and unsympathetic and just nasty in his demeanor. And I think this is coming across nicely. All these little things you have to keep in mind when, when you're designing a character in one of portray a certain feeling. Also notice what we're getting in quite a few triangle shapes as well, so that that kind of aggressive shape really fits well with this type of character doing a little more refined line work than I usually would. But there's a lot more a lot more to express here and a lot more. I want to refine before I get to the the inking step, which will do very shortly. As you can see, Liquefies is really my best friend on this one. You can just push and pull all of these lines you've been working on around with ease and just change things. Fine, tune them so nice and subtly. I've changed the direction the eyes were pointing. I thought he should be kind of deadpan looking right into the camera on this one. Just like he's he's not afraid to stare down anybody, and he'll just look you right in the eye and even playing around with the idea of a scar going across his eye like he's been in his, You know, a gangster would be and fights a lot, so that's a little back story. They're not sure if I'm gonna keep that, though. And there's that kind of 19 twenties mobster haircut where the sides of the head or almost shaving, but he's got greased up black hair on tops. I think that'll fit very well with what I'm going for here. I think this is looking great. So I made a new layer and I'm I'm going to start an inking pass, just like in our other projects. All we're doing here is refining what we've worked on so far and just really anchoring it all down with some more deliberate line work. Give it a more professional presentation, but also just a help. Figure things out internally. It's It's always a good exercise to go through this step. You don't have to, and in fact, that sketch sketch phase below is pretty tight in itself. I think that might even be enough to go off for a painting, but still nice to do this if you have the time and I think it's, ah worthwhile exercise that I would suggest to all students. So that's why we're doing it here, defining all those little cartilage bumps of the nose. His eyes look very, very nice, and he looks just unimpressed with whoever he's looking at. And that's just what we want to go for that evil confidence and giving that other I sort of asymmetrically his eyebrows. One of them's raised a little bit more than the other just to give him some interest, defining the ears, hear oops, accidentally used the wrong tool there and move the whole layer. But we can always undo the beauty of photo shop and just to finding these shapes just a little bit more. But I love it. He's looking very, very much what I had in mind just using personality, and all of these shapes were really backing up the character that had in mind. So this should work nicely. Well, certainly refine just a little bit more, but this is just about where I wanted to be and already got some some cool ideas for how to handle the values and the skin tones later for this one. So things were looking cool so far, and I would certainly recommend this is a second level project. Once you've done the 1st 2 just male female generic faces, try something with a little more personality like this. Something with a little more back story, some or character to it. And I'm doing a bit of heavy liquefy work here just to define his gross proportions a little bit, kind of his general shapes. Thought I wanted the top of his head to be a little wider. Justo enforce that upside down triangle, aggressive shape of his face, kind of peanut headed and have those ears sticking way out. Just everything about him seems strange and unknown, undesirable and unwelcoming. And that's certainly what we're going for here, what this guy to be unapproachable and really sinister looking and and I think that's coming across well. So a little bit more of refining line work a little bit more liquefied just to push and pull things around. You can do this to your heart's content, and I think this guy's just about ready to go. So up next, we'll add value to our painting. First will block him in, make a silhouette, and then we'll start making him look three dimensional with some values. So I finished this silhouette and the ink layer. I'm using the Magic Wand tool to select the outside and then selecting the inverse. And I filled in my silhouette layer, as you see there and after making a copy of the ink layer, have merged silhouette and ink and then darken the background to a gray so that all happened fast. Feel free to refined it are. Check out the earlier videos if you missed anything but I'm already onto the value Step created a new layer, and I grabbed that bright orange color. And Justus we do in our other projects. I'm just trying to think three dimensionally. I've got a light source coming from the upper left and just thinking of which planes of his face would be facing upwards. And this is where we start, really defining the character. Three. Dimensionally. A lot of these facial expressions that we've defined with our Inc step will really come across and start looking super cool. So to start just making those planes that face up lighter in value in the ones that are facing down in our shadow. So you can see that already the brighter parts of the cheeks, lips and, of course I'll add into the forehead and nose are much higher in value. But the nose, bottom of the nose and the underside of the eyebrows kind of the eye sockets, those air all a good bit darker. And I'm already getting into a little bit of detail, making a lot of wrinkles around his mouth just to make those lips seem kind of pursed in sneering. Just to back up this demeanor that I'm trying to portray here, and I think that's very effective. All those little parallel lines seem like wrinkles. All pointing towards his mouth really, really makes it effective and adding a little bit of tone to even these. These shadow areas don't want everywhere to be so dark, where there's a shadow plane but some very effective use of values and some edges that have very hard transitions from high value to dark value, and that that really makes all of these little craggy parts of his face very believable. I want this guy to have a lot of really sharp lines in his face. Don't want his skin to look smooth. Wanted to have kind of nasty complexion. So we're gonna leave our brushwork pretty textured here. A lot of these hard cuts between light and dark or what make all those wrinkles just They make him seem old and weathered and kind of just nasty just to fit in with the whole other personality we're trying to define. Giving him some jowls sort of made his cheeks a little bit fuller, even though they're kind of sagging at the same time. So sort of two different things going on there. But that sneer is really working with the lips curled up with all those wrinkles, making them look purse together. And they correspond with that wrinkle around the corner of his nose, kind of raising that side of his face in a sneer. And it also works well with that raised eyebrow. It's subtle, but these things really, really make his personality shine, even if it's, ah, an ugly personality that we're going for here. So definitely try a character who is unsympathetic. It's a good exercise, find all the ways to make him seem unlikable and undesirable. It's kind of like you're doing the opposite of what you normally would do. I seem to get asked Teoh, portray heroes and likeable characters much more often. So when it's time to do something where the character is a villain and it's supposed to be unlikable, you sort of just do the opposite of what you would normally do. So making the skin really wrinkled in nasty. Having a lot of hard lines is one way we given that weak chin to couple with all of these other wrinkles and other undesirable facial features just to make this guy really in antagonised somebody who people are going to know that they don't like him the instant they look at him. Now, of course, we all have villains that we cheer for, and that's a whole different conversation. But you get what I mean This guy, you take one look and you can tell he's not not doing much charity work or not not contributing to society. So I'm just using this much tool to refine some of these wrinkles I've established. I don't want to smear it too much because I don't want to lose any of that really nice texture that I've created with all of these layered brushstrokes. And all these hard lines are really nice. And they fit well with our our project goal here and unifying things a bit, even adding some little pock marks around his cheeks, Thinking of all these gangster movie faces that you can remember all kinds of actors and photographs you might have seen of good old 19 twenties era gangster movies. That's what we're going for here. And just a little more refinement summer racing with a soft brush, a little more smudging just to make thes tones work together better. And then I'm gonna add a little bit of value to these gigantic, weird, awesome ears. I think they're my favorite part of this guy. Uh, I love those big wide ears. They're probably gonna be the the memorable feature about this guy. Look at it and probably say, the guy with the funny ears. So that's certainly a selling point for this one. Just adding a little more unifying value here and some shadow on the dark side just to make that light source nice and asymmetrical makes it look really three dimensional and a little bit of value on this era's well. But we want him to stay a little bit darker than the one that's closer to the light source , and we're closing in on a finished value painting here. This has come together really nicely. I think it's kept all of the personality that we were able toe get on the sketch and ink layers, and that's certainly a way to measure success. Sometimes you can lose some personality on the value painting, but not the case with this guy. I think we were able to keep it, rendering a little bit of that turkey neck, kind of waddle chin, weak chin that we talked about when his Adam's apple to really pop out almost seems like an attitude. He's got to where he's talking his head back, and it makes his chin and the rest of his net kind of squished together. It really goes well with the rest of his facial expression, so I think this value painting is just about finished up. Next will convert this guy too believable. Skin tones 19. Project 3 - VILLAIN - Skin Tones & Final Polish: Oh, hi, everyone. This is Hardy. In this section, we will finish up. Our villain face project will convert our value painting too believable skin tones and then we'll add hair, eyes and final polish. But skin tones are up first. So let's get started. I'm going to start by making a copy of my value painting just to be safe. And once we have that done, I'm gonna convert this value color to that pale yellow kind of off white color. Just did that by hitting command you and doing a hue saturation adjustments. Now I've made a new layer skin mod underneath the value layer. And as you can see, I'm just painting in some red issues around the nose, cheeks, lips and ears. And again, we can follow that schematic that we discussed in the mail face project. But basically we want thes areas to be more red in Hue and the other areas, like the beard and scalp, to be much cooler and gray er in color. So it's this differentiation. It makes it really look like realistic living skin tissue and not just flesh colored plastic. So now that I have that differentiation done, I've merged the two into a single skin tones layer. And this is the fun part where I just start using the the medicine dropper tool by hitting Ault when I have the brush tool selected to just pick up and lay down paint as I go. So we basically have every color that we need on the canvas already. We just sample them as we need them. So pick any color from anywhere around around the guy's face and just start laying that color back in wherever it's needed. And overall, this has a nice, averaging effect. It's sort of smooth things out, making a little shadow for his hair and on the dark side of his nose. Again, let's keep our character brief in mind here. We want this guy to be unlikable and sleazy looking, so we want some hard shadows, Cem. Some deep cuts, wrinkles, all that good, nasty bad complexion stuff. We don't want to totally kill that. And when we're unifying things together by by sampling and painting over, it has a smoothing effect, so you don't want to get too carried away with that. Otherwise, this guy's skin might start looking to to Nice and smooth, and you'll lose all of that nice, chunky brushwork that we did in the value painting that gave it such a nice texture. Did a little bit of, ah, color balance adjustment there. You can do that by hitting command be and then just painting back in some of those brighter red areas. And, ah, again not to sound like a broken record, but its lips, nose, ears and cheeks. Those areas should be very red compared to the other other parts of the canvas in just a little fine tuning here, picking up paint and laying it back down, adding some little cuts, some highlights to the lips here just to make those seem a little more realistic. This guy's lips air just using personality. I really like How these air turning out that sneer, kind of, ah, British rock star kind of expression, really, really working and just adding a little more dark beard color. It doesn't have to even, you know, it just looks like scared. I'm sorry. Shaven skin doesn't really need toe have stubble or anything to show that it's ah, guy who's growing a beard. Has that gray or color, just like on the sides of his head looks like shaved skin, where hair is a little more detail to these credits areas in the interior of the I just adding some detail, really. And some refinement, even though those were mostly in shadow, is still good toe to bounce a little bit of tone in there, especially with this guy's nice, wrinkled kind of bags under his eyes. Good include those details and just fine tuning is we g. O carving out some darks in that little corner of the eye part of the nose. All really nice details that that really work with what we're trying to show here. The good news about a face like this is you really can't over describe it. If you had tons of lines and light colors and darks and end up with all kinds of lines, it it it will just make this guy even better. Will make every brush stroke will make him richer and more complex. If you're doing a female or even a child face, you do run the risk of over describing. But but not with this guy. Every wrinkle and hard line will just make it better, so go nuts have have as much fun when you're doing a character like this as you want, and and it should all work out well, adding in some brighter highlights here with with the yellow off white color almost white. Just want a few areas to really pop and shine make him seem nice and shiny. And I think that's working well. A little bit more red around that scar over his eye and a little, little more intense readiness on the ears as well. What those two really seem more red than the rest. A little more of that very bright, almost white highlight color in a few places just to make the skin seems shiny and realistic. That that really helps a little bit of detail on the nose. Here is well of this big knobby knows, with all of those cartilage plate lumps just really defined well and really making this guy's facial features seem interesting and unusual. And that's exactly what we're going for. So having a good time with this one, kind of jumping around from one side of the other just so that I don't get too lost in any one part of the face it don't don't ever want to get lost out in the details and lose sight of the big picture and jumping around from one part to the other is a good way to keep the image fresh in your mind and let you never lose sight of your ultimate goal. So ah, nice, nice trick to do there. You may be more methodical than I am and like to just see one part through to completion, and that's fine, too. But But this way is worked very well for me and something I suggest you try a little bit of detail and going on on the bags under the eyes again. Just want this guy to seem really world weary and tired. Just seemed like he hasn't had a good night's sleep in a long time. Cause it is, is, ah, wrongdoings, whatever they may be in his his gangster lifestyle. Refining the chin in that crease area under the lips on area that's often overlooked is that that area of shadow underneath the bottom lip and before the chin there's a lot of expression there, so so pay some attention to that and give give it a little bit of extra detail, and it will pay off doing a little bit of work with the smudge tool there just to refine things a little switching from smudge to brush pretty often, actually, I think I usually hit be in our on the keyboard first, much tool and brush tool, probably more often than any other. So a great way to just jump back and forth and lay in paint and then smooth it out. With the smudge tool, you can get into a nice rhythm and really start making some fast progress. As you can see, this is going pretty quickly. It's It's gone from a flat value painting, just very believable skin tones without a whole lot of work at all. Just some refinement and again that that modulation between parts of the face that is the key. I hope that's the one big take away from this technique for you of painting faces is that that modulation of different parts of the face, redder in some areas and cooler and grayer and others? That's what makes skin looks really looks realistic on the face. I hope I hope you find that helpful. That was a big Ah ha! Moment for me, but I'd say the skin's looking pretty realistic. I think we're about there so up next Will will likely move onto hair and eyes and then some final polish. So let's tackle hair. First, I'm going to create a new layer and call it hair, and the first thing I'm gonna do is just grab some of this dark scion background silhouette color. And I'm just gonna block in some of the basic hairline shapes. This guy's hair is is pretty much defined already, but we do want to define that that border between skin and hair pretty clearly. So that's what I'm doing here already, making a few strands that kind of hang down in his face. And I'm going to smudge some of these little individuals strands of hair just to make them look like they're growing out of his scalp. And that's a super easy way to do that. You just dragged those little Swiss ISPs of hair into the skin, and it really looks like a realistic hairline. So I want this guy's 19 twenties gangster style to show through here, so we've got his hair mostly kind of slicked back and jelled up or whatever the product of the time was. And, uh, we really want that Teoh show through. So doing a bit of fine tuning to the skin just to make that hairline nice and and seamless make it all fit together Well, but back on the hair layer now and just a little more fine tuning some individual strands of hair. And I'm gonna darken up some of that shaved scalp area just to make it have sort of a fade type of hair style. And I think that's working pretty nicely, jumping back to the skin layer from time to time just to make that all jive together. But here we are, back on the hair layer, and I'm going to start doing some highlights. Remember elongated X shaped strokes or a great way to make realistic looking hair? But this is gonna be really simple. We've just put in a few highlights, and now I'm smudging those out to make them more more seen with. I'm coming back with some very bright, shiny highlights. Want this hair to look all wet and slicked up as you see and these types of gangster characters. So that's what that second round of brighter, shiny or highlight accomplishes. And I think that's looking great. That's just what I had in mind. Nice, shiny, slicked back. Good, good mobster scum bag Look, can I add a little bit of stubble again? We just switch our brush mode to dissolve, and I've put this on another layer because I'm going to run a Gaussian blur on it. But just adding some stubble here and there to make it seem like areas where he's shaved on the side of his head and the beard area even a little down on the neck. And I think that works well. So we'll run a subtle Goshen blur just a few pixels and play with the capacity of that layer a little bit. And, ah have erased away a few spots on this double just to make it look like more more scars and a little bit of erasing here as well. Everyone had merged that with the hair layer is well, and now I think we're ready to begin eyes. So for the whites of the eyes of just sampled a skin tone. And I'm just painting in sort of a spiritual shape inside of his eye, making this seem a little blood shot around the borders. But just more that skin tone to make the I seem Spiric alike. They're really sitting in those eye sockets, so even a bit of cash shadow there. And already he looks like he's got some believable spirituals shapes sitting in those eye sockets that's working very well, jumping back to the hair layer just to add in some eyebrows. Want to keep all these materials separate? Eso I'm gonna do that on the hair layer, similar to what we did with the hairline. Just some little wisps of hair and a little light blending to make that work and notice I I left the area of that scar blank so there's no eyebrow when something scarred where hair grows. Usually hair won't grow anymore. So nice detail to include there in a little bit of eyelash, Bordering is, Well, we're gonna put that on the hair layer now that that set, go ahead and drop in the guise pupils and remember, we want him kind of looking up directly at it's sort of a deadpan stare. I think that's perfect. That that mug shot look that we we decided on at the beginning of the project, and I'm just doing a little bit of refinements and smudging just to get that all just right and a little bit of, ah white highlight just to make it seem shiny. Just add a little bit of interest in the iris. I'm adding some highlights to the bottom. Remember that Jewell lighting scheme? So we want the highlight to be at the bottom of the eye in the top part of the eye to be dark. So when the light bounces around in, their gives it that Jewell effect now to make this guy's other, I seem injured or blinded. Just because of that scar over there, I'm gonna make it look all nasty. Have it's sort of like a zombie. I just to make him extra interesting. And we make that highlight a little less Chris, because that that surface isn't is nice and smooth anymore, so that it looks really cool. It fits with that scar that's going over his eyebrow looks like his I was injured and whatever got him there so a really cool detail and certainly gives this guy a ton of personality I'm just doing a few experiments, really To see if some color adjustments really make this guy look better. Ended up making him a little more scion overall. And I'm using a bit of history. Brush Teoh. Go back toe the way it was in the previous state. Just toe modulate it. Really, I think that's looking great. So we'll start adding in some secondary light sources. First, I'm going to do a little bit of bounce light on this dark side of the characters face. So notice I started on the interior of the nose. You know, I'm adding some around that outer edge of the cheekbone and the bags under the eyes, and we're just going to sort of make this all fit is if there's another light source low and into the right of the page. I love this step. This is always a really cool step. You've done all this work to make him look three dimensional, and now these secondary light sources just really make him shine. Always a very fun step and a little bit of blending just to make that all smooth and realistic looking. And I think that light sources is really adding a lot to the to the overall image. Want to make it a little brighter on his Adam's apple just to make it look like that's really sticking out again? Just making this guy's weird turkey neck is defined as we can, and I think that really helps a little bit of light on the ears as well shining from below . I think that works well. Gonna do just a little bit of that dissolved brush just to make it look like some of that stubble is catching. That reflected light as well. So didn't another quick layer there. I think that adds a lot, though you would see those secondary light source is really catching those tiny little hairs and that that makes it look pretty realistic. So we're gonna do another secondary light source, this one coming from above what this one to be a good bit brighter notice. I'm picking out a few little individual hair strands to catch that light to. That's a really nice, really nice detail to include, because that really is what happens. Hair can can really catch some light, so if you have a few strands hanging out in that secondary, light source. It can really help it. Just working my way down here, smoothing things out a little bit. And I very deliberately designed this light source to be hitting the back of the ears. And if you'll recall from our ear demonstration, we're gonna do a little bit of transmitted light coming through that ears, and that's a really cool effect. So painting a really, really intense red color on the inside of the ears like we're doing here makes it look like light is shining through them. An incredibly realistic detail to include. So I would certainly recommend that now I've got everything merged into one layer. I grouped it and made a copy just in case. I wanted to edit things later individually, but now we're just going around the entire outside and sort of treating our edges, smoothing things with the smudge brush on a low strength. Just 10 or 20% is fine and dragging out a few hair wisps. And with that, I think this guy's really looking excellent. I'm gonna fade him out with a layer mask and then put a little bit of a white glow behind him, and with that, I think he is just about finished. Congratulations on completing the villain face project. Let's take a look back at our project steps and see how far we've come. We started with a rough sketch to get our basic pose and proportions in place way, then made an inking pass to refine and clean it up. After that, we blocked in the silhouette and did a value rendering to make our character look three dimensional way, then converted the value, rendering into believable skin tones. In our final Polish phase, we refined our skin tones and then added eyes, hair and secondary light sources. All in all, we went from a blank canvas to a finished product that we could be proud of. I hope you've gotten a lot out of this project. Join us again for future projects where we'll build on what we've learned here and take it to the next level 20. Project 4 - PUNK GIRL - Sketch, Ink & Value: Oh, hi, everyone. This is hardly and welcome to the punk girl face project. In this video we'll get started with our sketch and ink phase, but we're also gonna block in and do our value painting as well. So let's get started. I've got a basic blank canvas set up, and I'm gonna get started with a sketch layer. And in this one, we're gonna try and again, just like the villain project Stretch our character design a little bit. So we're gonna try and do something with a little bit of personality we're gonna do sort of , ah, moody teenager type of punk girls. So I wanted to have a lot of personality, a lot of attitude, generic character that you see in a lot of movies, it's something everyone can identify with, but an interesting design challenge and certainly a lot of fun toe to paint into practice your face rendering skills. So this is a good, good, typical character toe to try and try and emulate if if you'd like to give this one a try. So I've just gone ahead and done my basic face shape block in just sort of starting to find some of those interior facial features. But remember, we want the jaw in a female to be much smaller and less prominent. Overall, we want to use a lot more curvy circular elliptical lines rather than hard angles. Isso makers seem much more feminine, and we don't want accidentally stray into any kind of masculine looks. And also I'd like her to be a teenager. So not not quite fully adult yet. So we're going for some slightly childish proportions. That means larger eyes, smaller jaw. Essentially. So with those basic ideas in mind, we can really communicate the age and attitude of this character that we're going at and again. I've got those asymmetrical eyebrows. One kind of raised. She's staring right at us. She's got a lot of confidence. It might be false confidence, but sort of Ah, hey, what are you looking at? Kind of facial expression? That's what I'm going for. Just to give that that attitude that they were going for here, so defining the shape of the the eyes here and she's just staring us down and that that really fits, Also giving your kind of an interesting hairstyle shaved on the sides and sort of Cem dreadlock type things going on. I think I'd probably give her some piercings as well, just to add a little bit of personality. All these little side details didn't really help your character design B'more interesting and and flesh out the personality that that you're going for. So just a little bit of refinement. But I think we've got the basic shapes in place here. Gonna add a little bit of detail to the hair in the ears years. We're looking a little bit like they're sticking out too far. I think I'm gonna correct that a little bit with some other things and little liquefy here . Bringing those sides of the head a little bit makes you seem a little bit older, but I think it's OK. She's still not. She's not losing that youthful look that we're going for. I think that's much better. You know, just the position of her eyes a little bit, too. Bring those up just a little, make them fit with where her ears or positioned. I think that's good. Moving the nose up is well again. I say it all the time, but this is the real miracle of the digital, medium and photo shop. You just move these elements around something you could never get away with with a pencil and paper. So I hope you find that is amazing and useful as I do, and sure is worthwhile learning. Learning this technique, you know, just to find her hair a little bit more kind of got it pulled back and tied into kind of a bun, with some little dreadlocks hanging out the back but some cool hair hanging over her face as well. So I think that's an interesting mix, sort of two different hanger styles and one. But I think it fits, and it looked cool when we painted in. Later on. I may even die some of the hair a different color and adding some piercings here Think that looks cool. Basic, moody teenager character archetype. Something we go all seen and probably all met before is well, it's warping these ears and a little bit again. Just command t to do those transform functions and bringing those in a little bit. She had a little bit of an elf ear thing going on that I think that looks much better after that correction. But her proportions air very feminine. She's got a nice, narrow neck on understated jaw, her eyebrows or thin. She's got some nice full cheekbones and full lips. All these little details make her seem very feminine. And I think this sketch is right about where I want it. So I'm gonna go ahead and open up a new layer, just hit new layer, and we're gonna do an inking pass just to refine this a little bit and get us ready for our value painting. So basically just going over and tracing all the marks I made in my sketch, but much more deliberate with my brush strokes this time trying to make it seem very crisp and professional and presentation. And this could be a good, good phase to show to a client for approval. If if this is a job you were working on our show to a teacher before going to a final, always good to get some kind of preliminary phase approved before you get too far into a final painting because you never know if you had some early detail wrong, that could save you a ton of work that you'd have to do over again. So never start a final painting without getting some kind of line art approved fry by whoever whoever you're doing the project for. Of course, if it's just a personal project for your portfolio than you're the only one you have to make happy. So have at it. But I really like I just pulled a strand of hair over her eye, and she's kind of looking up through it that that really matches with the attitude that I'm going for here. I think that's working really well. And remember when with female characters especially, we want to be kind of sparse with our Leinart. We don't want to over describe any features of the face, or it can make her seem masculine or even older than we want to. And now that I've turned off that sketch layer, this is standing up pretty well on its own, and I think this is good to go. We'll start our value painting next. The first step with the Value step is to block this silhouette in, so I've used the magic wand tool just like always to select the outside and then I select inverse start a new layer underneath and filled in with that dark sigh in color that we always use. So I did that kind of fast. But feel free to rewind or check it out again. Same step we always use. It's a really nice quick way toe block, everything in turn a line, drawing into a solid silhouette with just a few easy steps. So now that that's done, I've started a new layer, and I've grabbed my bright orange color that I always used for value. And I'm going to start dropping in some basic values where going to use an upper right lighting scheme similar to what I usually do for face. It's just going to start looking for where those planes of the face would be facing upwards towards the light source. And we just start defining the three dimensional shape of this face in a very general way to start and we add detail and Refiners, we go. So it's really a simple is that if if you understand how to render that basic sphere exercise, then you really understand all the concepts you need to know to pain in a human face. It's just, um, slightly more complex shapes that you have to take into account, but nothing more complex than that. So making some little general areas of of light value and then filling those in with with more broader brush strokes, so little tiny details and then covering those with with washes of lower opacity tone and refining things a little bit. We're starting toe get into some detail now off of what these little changes in value due to her facial expression and and her overall form. So this is where we get into the more detailed steps where we really define her. Her look, her perform, the way she reads to the viewer with a female character, especially a younger one. I want to be careful not to over render things and make her seem craggy or have too many hard lines or wrinkles. Overall, I want this to be some pretty smooth gradations just about everywhere, obviously, on a few hard edges, in places where there would be like where the lips meet, for example, and underneath the nose that that sharp delineation between light and dark. But other than that noticed that for the most part, it's a lot of smooth, great Asians and that gives the effect of Cem smooth, youthful, skin, feminine skin. And it helps with that aspect of it as well. So keep that in mind. No, no, the character that that you're working on. And if it's to be an old or masculine character, then you could make a many hard edges as you want. Well, almost as many as you want within reason. But if you're going for a feminine character or ah, or a young character, you're gonna want to keep that skin a little bit smoother. And we do that by just avoiding hard lines between light and dark. So of course, we do need some hard edges. Otherwise, she would just look like a an airbrush he mess. But keep those to a minimum and out in the areas like the cheeks and the corners of the mouth, the corners of the eye. We want those all to be nice and smooth. Just that. That youthful lack of wrinkles is what we're going for here. So I'm doing a little bit of refining with smudge tool that has a smoothing effect as well , so you can smudged a little bit more on this character. This type of character than you would on a male character and an older character, for example, so just a little bit of refinement. And these are some some finer points to keep in mind when you're entering the character. But of course, in a general sense, what we're really doing here is just to finding her is a three dimensional form. So once you understand those simple concepts, it really becomes kind of a formula, almost a paint by number. And with that, I think are value. Painting is shaping up nicely up Next will convert this value painting into believable skin tones. 21. Project 4 - PUNK GIRL - Skin Tones & Final Polish: Oh, hi, everyone. This is Hardy. In this lecture, we will convert our value painting into believable skin tones and will also add hair, eyes and final polish to finish things off. But skin tones air first. So first we're gonna copy our value layer and convert it to that pale yellow hi key off white color that we usually do. So that's what I'm doing here. Just did a hue saturation shift. And then I've made a new layer underneath, and we're gonna call that skin mod the same exact system that we use every time we convert value to skin tones and, as you can see on adding red in to the parts of the face certainly heavier on the nose, ears, lips and cheeks. And I'm leaving that area of scalp pretty dark now. Obviously this This is a much more pronounced effect on a male character because you leave . The beard area is more gray and scion as well, but But here it's more of a uniform, reddening and making everything a little more pink in skin tone but still some modulation that makes it look realistic. Now that we have those basic steps completed, I went ahead and merge those into a single skin tone layer. And now I'm beginning the refinement process of just picking up and laying down paint, sort of jumping all over the face here just to try and get her skin tones refined and look nice and realistic, adding in a little more red to the nose and lips there just to give that nice modulation that I mentioned earlier. But this picking up with the medicine dropper tool and painting back in has sort of an averaging effect. It it makes things smoother overall, and that's a great thing for this youthful female character. We can pretty much make her skin tones as smooth as we want, and it and it will work. So feel free to be his heavy handed. With this picking up and laying down averaging, it'll it'll make things nice and smooth, and you can see that's coming along quite nicely. She's got a nice readiness to the cheeks and nose, and it contrasts well with that grayer, darker color around her scalp on the sides and also just the paler yellow parts of her skin , like near the corner of the eye near the nose and on her forehead as well. So those modulations, all those different colors going on at the same time. That's what makes the skin look realistic in alive. That's kind of the the magic step that takes it from value to looking like rial skin. So I hope you really enjoy that. It's a kind of a simple formula to follow, just redder on the nose, lips, cheeks and ears, and that will pretty much do most of the job for you. After that, it's just refinement. This is kind of the fun part where you just turn off your your brain and and let let your hands to start painting things in and refining its. It's a really enjoyable process and also one of those really great moments creating art where those brush strokes stopped looking like brush strokes and start looking like something realistic. That still such a big thrill for me. And I hope you enjoy that as well, because this is where those those payoff moments start happening. You've done all your homework and you've done the hard part. And now, now the enjoyable steps air here, and it's time to just sort of bring this one home. It's the final stretch, so just to stretch the value range of added a little bit of darker tone to the lips right where those let's come together, I made it quite dark just to anchor the value range. Give it a little bit of a lower value range. When you construct your value range, make it nice and dynamic Hi highlights and dark darks. It keeps it from looking washed out. It's a common, inexperienced painter. Mistake is that they let their value range state too close to the middle. It ends up looking a little washed out and unrealistic, so keep that in mind, Really stretched the value range out. Making is dynamic is possible when you can, and I think this is coming together nicely. This is certainly come a long way from the flat value painting. Her skin looks nice and realistic, so I think it's time to start adding some hair and eyes. So we're gonna start with eyes first. I'm racing away a little bit of space. Teoh, add in those spheres of the whites of her eye, created a new layer here, and I'm just grabbing some skin tones. Start with kind of a reddish and start building up thinking of those spheres in her eye socket. So we want that to look nice and round, going back to my chalk brush just to give this a little more texture in making that brighter and brighter near the middle. So that those those spirituals shapes look, look nice and round and believable. And I think that works pretty well. So I've dropped the opacity just so that I can erase away these pupils. I can see my line work underneath. That makes it a lot easier. And, of course, be very careful that the eyes air looking in the same direction here. This is when you make those decisions and this seems right, you don't want to seem lazy eyed or cross eyed or anything. So this is that step when you you need to make sure that I mean being adding in a little bit of dark around the eyes, kind of like I make up or mascara just to go with her. Her style that we've established, I think that would fit well. Some dark mascara on the underside of the eye as well, like that looks cool That's certainly fits with what we're going for, so I'm gonna blend that out a little bit. I think that's looking good. Even a little bit of streaking nous like it was applied in a deliberately messy way. Just think that's kind of cool fits with the personality we're going for here. So now that that's basically done, I'm just going to refine a little bit, darkening things a little. Sometimes I leave the whites of the eyes a little too bright. They seem almost unrealistic, so I'm trying to make sure I have that right, even though they are technically the whites of the eyes, they're actually not that much lighter in actual color than the rest of your skin. So be careful not to make those whites of the eyes too bright. They're essentially just like the rest of the skin, but a little bit brighter now, adding in some detail to the pupil. And remember that Jewell lighting scheme where the highlight is on top. But then there's dark under it, and then some bounce light happening in the bottom. So what that basically ends up meaning is we put the bright, colorful part of the iris near the bottom, and we put that nice single white highlight dot near the top. I'm gonna add that in here in just a moment, we have to make sure that that single white highlight covers the pupil and the iris. That's what makes it look deep in interesting. And there we go. That's always the moment when it starts seeming like somebody actually looking out at me. I really like that. And such an easy trick to remember for rendering really deep in interesting eyes. Hope you find that helpful. A little bit more refinement here. Just want to make sure I have these eyes exactly right. And I think that that's looking very nice. So I'm gonna merge all those little layers I was using separately together just, ah t to keep it a nice, manageable file. Have eyes all on one layer now looking good up next, I'm gonna move to hair and I want to see my line work underneath. So I've dropped the opacity on my skin tones layer temporarily just so that I could drop in these strands of hair covering her face, kind of establishing a nice blocked in hairline. And there we go filled in and I could bring my skin tone layer back up to full opacity. And I'm doing a little bit of smudging to this skin tone layer just to make those brush lines nice and smooth and realistic, adding in some smaller, more detailed strands of hair as well. But it's amazing the effect that just adding some hair can have on the overall feel. Suddenly she's looking much more finished in her style is really starting to come through very loudly. I think that's working well, adding some eyebrows as well. I don't want to make those to thick again with a female character. We wanted to be nice and understated. So making those pretty pretty subtle. I think this is coming together well, doing a little bit of shadow work under these hairlines that they'd drop over her forehead . So I've created a new layer above skin tones. I just want there to be a little bit of a cash shadow where where that hair would dark and some of her forehead, and I think that works well, makes it all seem to jive together a little bit better and just jumping back, doing a little bit of refinement, racing back some of that mascara that was getting a little bit heavy handed, and I'm gonna start highlighting the hair. So remember these air just very elongated X shaped strokes? I'm just making these look is if they're strands of hair catching, a little bit of highlight, and that's really all there is to it. You just drawing strands of hair kind of Bunches of hair and then blend it out with the smudge tool. Make them all seem to g O in the right direction. Have some strands, overlap one another. And just like that, we've got some pretty believable hair changing up my brush stroke method a little bit, making the hair seem a little more lumpy and braided like they're kind of dreadlocks in the back there, just for a little added interest. Think that looks pretty cool, adding, in a kind of a tie, some kind of rubber band or something. She's using the bunch back. Her hair just is a little extra detail and a little more of that on those those braids hanging out just toe Give her a little more detail. Make that hairstyle make sense. I think that adds a lot. So next I think we'll get started with some secondary light sources. I'm gonna start with a reflected light coming on this dark side of her face. What this to be kind of subtle like it's coming from from below into the left or right now that I flipped it and just want those undersides of her face to be catching some of that light really gives it a little bit of nice moodiness in some atmosphere, and it also rounds out. The face adds to the three dimensional effect that we're working so hard. Teoh establish here. So just smoothing that out again, we want her skin tones to be nice and smooth so you can soften that and blend it in a good bit. And that'll be appropriate for this kind of character. Think that's working well, just a little bit of light catching the under side of her nose, the underside of her eyebrow and even the eyeball itself here, all looking nice in three dimensional Cool. Just blending out some of these parts underneath, and then I'm gonna add a much brighter light source up and behind. Wanted to be catching a few individual strands of hair. But mostly I wanted toe light thes ears from the back so that we can show some of that really cool transmitted light shining through. So making sure that the light effects everything, it's hitting the face in the head. It has to hit the hair as well, adding in a few little little strands. But here's a transmitted light I was talking about those bright spots of light that's actually actually shining through the years. Really looks cool, I thought would be a little extra personality if I added a blue streak to her hair. So just a little extra color and some extra highlight is really all all we have to do for that, blending that out a little bit so that it fits with everything and erasing it back just so that there aren't so many hard edges, but just that easily. We can add a nice color street try and hue saturation shifts just to see if there's any other color I like better. But I think blue is pretty cool. So now that I've got everything finished emerging it together, I made a group and then copied that group just that I could have the individual elements preserved if I ever needed to edit anything. But then I merged the copy into one layer, and I'm smudging softly around the outside just so that there aren't any really hard or pixelated edges really gives it a nice finished look. We're also doing a little bit of final editing here. Sort of punch list on your character toe. See if there any rough spots that you want to fix up. This is a great a great sort of last last run to do it on, and I'm just refining a few things, seeing some edges in some areas I wanted to smooth out, and I think we'll do a little bit of liquefying as well just to try some last minute adjustments. See if there are any facial proportions that it will work any better, and, ah, a little more reflected light here as well. I think that looks really nice and three dimensional Overall thinks she's looking good. Let's try a little liquefy some last minute adjustments of her proportion. You can change her facial expression subtly. Here is well, see if those eyes were looking in the right direction or if they're the right size. All of these things can be adjusted at this phase. And I think these adjustments air really nice. So it was a little presentation tool. I'm just fading out her neck, and I'm gonna add in these piercings that we had in our sketch just to give her a little bit of extra personality. I think there's really do add a lot. I'll show you, Ah, great technique for easily rendering metal material in a another course. But this is so minor. It's not anything t worry too much about here. But I do have a really easy formula for getting this done quickly and easily. So hope. Hope you'll check out my other courses. And with that, I think we can just about call this one a finished painting. Congratulations on completing the punk girl face project. Let's take a look back at our project steps and see how far we've come. We started with a rough sketch to get our basic pose and proportions in place. We then made an inking pass to refine and clean it up. After that, we blocked in the silhouette and did a value rendering to make our character look three dimensional. We then converted the value, rendering into believable skin tones. In our final Polish phase, we refined our skin tones and then added eyes, hair and secondary light sources. All in all, we went from a blank canvas to a finished product that we could be proud of. I hope you've gotten a lot out of this project. Join us again for future projects where we'll build on what we've learned here and take it to the next level. 22. Project 5 - BUDDY - Sketch, Ink & Value: everyone. This is Hardy and welcome to the Buddy Face project. Congratulations for making it this far. This is the fifth face project that we've done in this course, and they will find this one very interesting and challenging. So let's go ahead and dive in. I've got my blank canvas. So I'm gonna start by making a new sketch layer, and I'm just gonna get started making some marks. So a little bit about what I have in mind for this character. I think Buddy is a little bit of an open over simplification. I struggled with coming up with a name for this guy, but basically I'm trying to design a supportive mentor type figure that you see in a lot of movies and video games. Basically, this is that guy who's sometimes a bartender or a mechanic who fixes your spaceship or upgrade your your weapons. He's just sort of a supportive background figure who provides wisdom. He's friendly, but mostly he's dependable. Sometimes he's sort of an older, gruff kind of guy. He's jaded and his seen it all, but he's there to provide support, either physically by by helping you on missions or something like that in a video game or just to provide wisdom or help you out with, with other stuff, just just guiding you. So a support character that we're all familiar with, but, uh, not not a frontline hero or villain like like he might get used to to designing most often . But this is a very useful, behind the scenes kind of character to know how to design. So we're trying to make him seem dependable, friendly and approachable, but also sort of jaded and like he's just seen everything he's experienced, dependable and friendly. He's there to help. So I'm making a lot of square, very angular lines, as you might notice here, his jaw nose and browse our super stylized in very square. This guy's probably pushing it beyond the realm of even realistic human proportions. But that's OK. Weaken stylized things a little bit to help our narrative. And if it's for a video game or a movie, this guy's gonna end up being, you know, not a real person anyway. So so have fun with it, and that goes for all of our projects. If you want to stylized things by all means, don't don't be bound by what is perfectly realistic have as much fun as you want. But going for those really square angles, just it really make him read as dependable and friendly and approachable and, ah, experienced. So I hope that's coming across. I think we're going to refine this a good bit and really make that work. But again, a really fun, in quite challenging sort of background character to design something that it's a little bit more difficult than just a hero or villain, because there's a little bit more subtlety involved, some some stuff that you you might not think of right off the bat. You really have to factor in because essentially all of our visual cues here are subtle and background type of ah, visual cues. Not he's not immediately readable. Is is a good guy or a bad? Yeah, it's sort of in the details and the subtlety where we figure out how we feel about this character. So I'm trying to use all those really square angles and in sort of his his demeanor has got sort of an unimpressed smirk. So he looks generally nice and approachable, but he's not exactly just is not a ray of sunshine by any stretch. He's just there in the bar or in the garage, ready to fix up your vehicles for you or your weapons. And he's there to talk if you need him. But that's about it. He's not not telling jokes or ah, or dancing or anything like that. Ah, gruff kind of guy here and I'm liking the way are designed shaping up here looking good. He's got a nice 3/4 angle. I think all of those qualities have been talking about her coming across pretty well. Ah, the square angles air, definitely helping the exaggerated proportions or helping as well. And I think this is getting just about good to go. Now we have some experience. I'm just going to skip the ink face for this one. We're gonna go right from sketch to painting. So up next we will go ahead and block this guy in into a silhouette and we'll start our value painting. So our process for blocking in this is just like in our other projects. We just use the magic wand tool to select the outside, and then we select the inverse and I create a new layer underneath. And that's just a simple is it is. I made a copy of the sketch layer and then emerged the sketch and the silhouette layer together, and suddenly we have a nice blocked in guy to work with here, and we can start our value. Painting of changes angle just a little bit. He was leaning over a little bit too much. We wanted to seem like he's listening to you, but that was a little too aggressive, so good to go there of dark in the background layer to a nice middle gray so that we can start our value work. And here we go. I've got a new value layer set up and just like always, we kind of just start dropping in the main plains where the light source would be hitting upper left light source is always use that just about every time with with this type of character work and that that works well. So the main patches of of those planes that air aiming in that way That's that's how we start making him look three dimensional and dropping in those main light areas. And it's sort of a complex facial expression I'm going for here. So there's gonna be a good bit of reworking, I imagine just to get that subtle smile but not overly enthusiastic. Smile just the way I want it. But what will get to that in a little while, for now, just dropping in some some second level lights just to make those areas around the nose and corner of the nose. And I kind of shiny, just like they are in reality, always an area I like to work out from sort of in the middle, the nose and eyes where those come together. That's always a really important part of the face to to determine the general feel. So I find I often work out from that middle part. It's, Ah, good wayto keep everything on track and just adding in some some brighter lights just to make some of those areas shiny. Er, and you can see these proportions air looking even wilder when we're rendering them out. But I kind of like it. It's really need. Having that knows so blocky like that almost looks like some kind of a wood carving, and his jaw is just so exaggeratedly square and angular that I think it really works for the attitude we're trying to bring across. So now comes the tricky part of trying to get that facial expression just right again. Just friendly and welcoming and supportive. But but not super over the top. Nice guy. And this is just a world weary, gruff, older guy who's who is there to help and a little bit of smudging just to refine things a little. But this is already nicely on its way. Once we get those main parts in the middle of the face rendered out, it starts really coming together nicely and really takes on a life of its own. You can sort of start shutting your brain off and just start dropping in paint where, where it seems like it belongs. It's a great part of a painting when when your conscious brain can kind of take a back seat and you just sort of get into the zone really a lot of fun. And that's really where you often do your best work. Just refining the lips and the the mouth is going to need a ton of work and rework. I imagine just a to get it exactly how I wanted, because that is such a subtle expression in the corners of the mouth in those areas under the lips, just depending on how how full you make them look with your value. That changes so much about how how the expression reads that it could look like he's got a big, you know, mouth full of food or something if I do that wrong. So you got to make sure I'm getting that right. Also, that little edge of light that the lower lip is catching that that's also a big determining factor. And I'm I'm refining that here. If it's flat, it makes the lip look like it's sticking out, and that is one kind of facial expression. But sometimes that lip sort of curves in towards where the two lips meet, and I think that fits a little bit better with what I'm going for here. So incredibly subtle stuff, things you'll just sort of have to pick up on. With some trial and error and some observation of people. This course may ruin the way you interact with your friends because you find yourself looking at their faces in in new ways just to sort of start collecting information for your own own mental set of visual cues that you bring to your own work. So my apologies if if if your friends start catching you looking that have been with critical eyes if they were a work of art. But all part of being an artist and it's kind of fun, So just a little bit of refinement here. I think that smile is, is getting there. That's it's pretty close to what I have in mind. So you know, we're going to start refining things a little bit. Making the chin The area where the chin meets the lower lip is also an important part of defining expression. There's often a really sharp crease there, depending on the facial features, and that can be a cool, cool facial feature to accentuate, especially with a character like this, where the chin and the expression of the mouth or such a central part of his personality. So I went for a really bold, bold a choice there with with a sharp crease between the chin and the lower lip. Think that looks great? Just what we're going for. Overstated chin, super angular cheekbones and nose knows kind of tapers into a smaller, pointy part. But that bridge of his nose is is just huge and squared often. Now I'm adding some wrinkles to his forehead, pushing his hairline back a good bed, because I want this guy to be somewhat middle aged just so that he fits the profile of this character type that we're going forward. What this guy to have some years on him so that he can speak with experience whenever he's telling you, giving you advice. And let's say it's a video game. It's a little more refinement, but this is coming together well, getting all of these angles in the areas where the sharp delineations between light and dark value really helped to make it look realistic and, like those hard lines in the face, don't want too many hard lines. I don't want this getting so wrinkled and harrowed looking that he comes across as a villain, but I just want to put a little some years on and give him some Cem age and wisdom, some experience, and I think that's just about the middle ground that we've found here. So I'm liking that a lot, having a little more bright value. Justo, give some shiny spots and make a few more hard edges between values. Again, a good value painting. There's sort of equal parts hard edges and soft edges. That's that's really what makes something look realistic is if you have both of those working together, so make sure you're not going to too far one way or another. You wanna have plenty of hard angles and plenty of soft angles, too, to put it very simply so. Just a little smudging out to refine him a little bit, editing that corner of the mouth just to touch more, adding a little more complexity. And I think that's just about the facial expression I had in mind, blending out just a little more to make those edges soft and will start rendering in the ear. It is here pretty stylized as well. Not quite a square is the rest of him, but certainly a little more angular, little more thick on the top than you'd find in real life. But I like that stylization. I think it fits well with this character, so we're gonna go with that and again, the shapes of the ear or something. We show in detail in the parts of the face video. So feel free to review that if any of what I'm doing here doesn't seem familiar. If it looks like I'm jumping ahead, that's all outlined in detail. If if you need a little more practice on that, But just like anything else, we sort of learn to do it by doing it. So jump right in and paints. Amir's is part of your face projects, and I'm sure you'll get better with experience. So I wanted to have a very strong job. But I'm also putting Cem wrinkles on his neck just again just to make him age appropriate. Uh, pretty strong Adam's apple as well, just to add to the stylization of this guy rendering out the neck a little bit. But we're gonna fade a lot of that. So I'm not going to spend too much time. Just wanted to have a few cool details, but I think this value painting is coming together nicely up next will convert him to skin tones, and then we'll move on to hair and eyes and final polish. But for now, I think this is doing the trick, so I'll see you in the next lecture 23. Project 5 - BUDDY - Skin Tones & Final Polish: Oh, hi, everyone. This is Hardy. In this lecture, we will convert our characters values to skin tones, and then we'll add eyes, hair and final polish. So let's get started. The first thing I'm gonna do is make a copy of my value layer just to be safe. I made a new layer underneath, and I'm naming that skin mod, and then we just do a hue saturation shift on the value layer itself. And we're good to go. We could get that pale off white color. So now that that's good to go, I'm working on the skin mod layer, and I'm just painting in some red issues on those very specific areas of the face that we've talked about several times. And we did a schematic for the nose, cheeks, ears and lips. We want those to be read compared with the other parts of the face and notice that I'm leaving that beard area gray and cool. We're letting that dark Scion background color show through, so that's really the whole trick. Teoh making this look like believable skin tones is the beard area looks cooler and gray er and the nose, cheeks, ears and lips look just a little bit redder. So just like that, we've gone from a flat value painting to some pretty believable skin tones. And now notice that I've merged those two skin layers together value in skin mod there now , just one layer skin tones. And now I'm just going all over and doing a little bit of refinement. This is that part of the process where we use the eyedropper tool, a good bit to sort of pick up in lay down tone, and we'll sort of refine things. Sharpen it up now for this project, I'm gonna do something a little bit different than the other two that you might like, so give it a shot. It's very subtle, but I'm using a different brush, and there's nothing special about this brush. It's just a squashed circle at about a 45 degree angle. So ah, very simple brush to make you just change the brush tip shape. And what I'm gonna do this time is try and be a little more expressive with my brush work. You see, I'm leaving a lot of texture there. All of these overlapping sort of square brush marks start start, adding up to a really rich and interesting quality, and I really like that it's something not as smooth as the other characters we've done. But I wanted to show you something just for the sake of variety. It's just a little more expressiveness to your painting leaves it a little bit rougher and more raw, and it's, ah, pretty pleasant effect. If you want to experiment with that, give this brush or try just a very simple squashed circle at a 45 degree angle. And I'm just picking up paint and laying it back down, hitting Ault on the keyboard to switch the brush to the medicine dropper tool. And I'm just sort of refining things. And every brush stroke that I make adds a little bit more of that chunky texture, makes it look really cool and adding detail as I goes Well, like to the bags under the eyes here a little bit of shadow work and refining the nose, and I think that's a really cool look. I already really like the way that the quality that brushes is affecting this guy gives it a lot of expressiveness, so get that a tried something. Just a little bit different from what we've done in the other projects following all the same steps. So nothing, ah, to off script here. But just a little twist on what we've done before just to give you some extra tricks of the trade. And so far, so good looking pretty cool, picking up and laying down, sort of averaging things just a little bit, but also adding texture and personality and character to to our painting as we dio heading in a few more wrinkles to certain spots as well want this guy's age and world weariness to start showing through just a bit more. So that's what I'm doing here, adding in a few more colors here and there just to make the range of colors a little bit more rich and interesting. Refining that nostril angle is well here. Notice. I'm not doing a whole lot of smudging and just a little bit, but for the most part I'm letting the brush brush strokes do the work, just sort of picking up the pain and laying it down, and that that's giving me a really nice textured effect that that sets this guy apart from our other projects. and something that I've been favoring a good bid in my own work lately as well. Just something a little more interesting, and you can see even making some detail of where those margins of the beard meet with the rest of his skin. So sometimes just trying a different brush consort of open all kinds of new doors, giving new ideas, so doing things that probably wouldn't normally do if I were sticking to my other brushes. Notice I added a few little ticks of lighter skin to his beard. These look like little scars where the beard hair won't grow a cool detail I, I usually like to do on world weary looking characters. Give them a few scars. The beard is a great place to kind of sneak the men where they're not super noticeable, but but a nice, subtle background detail just to give this guy a little back story, putting some nice shiny highlights on his nose in the corner of the nose, the eye corner of the eye and the lips here. And with this, this brush I'm using. Even those highlights have a little more personality. They sort of look like little scribbled lines? Um, a really cool effect. I'm enjoying this one. A lot and beyond that were just refining as we dio sort of laying the groundwork for the details. It will add later, like hair and eyes and final polish. But this refining process has gone very well, like like the way he's looking a lot. And we've added a whole new layer of personality with this simple change in our brushwork. So give that a shot. A few more highlights just to make certain parts of the skin seems shiny and realistic, always tryingto elevate. The realism is we g o. I think that's working really well. Flipping back and forth as I always do. You'll notice that that always keeps the picture fresh in the artist's eye. So feel free to jump back and forth as much as you like to. I've got a keyboard set up keyboard shortcuts set up on my my system. That's not a default with photo shop. You'll have to set that up yourself. But that's something that can easily be done, and I would recommend it because it it helps you see your composition, your whole character in a fresh light. It makes him seem brand new every time you flip it. So any mistakes you might be making suddenly become very obvious to you. A great way to keep from going down any any wrong paths, a little refinement to the ear here and some highlight don't want that to be too bright, cause it's sort of curving around of the darker side of that side of his face. But I want to give it a little bit of attention and just taking in some little highlights with that smaller brush. I love it the way way all those different brush marks interact with one another on his chin , especially his nose, his lips. Those little highlights look really cool, and it's it's largely in. Part of this is very small, subtle change to brushwork that we've made and just picking up paint and laying it down all these very subtle brushstrokes. It makes it look very deliberate, like every every brush. Mark was very carefully planned out, and as you can see, that's not really what's happening. I'm kind of flying through this, but just picking it up and dropping the color makes it such an organic natural process that that you can just really fly through these. So I think our skin tones are in good shape. Up next will add eyes and hair, and then we'll move on to some secondary light sources and final polish. So let's get started. I'm going to start by making the whites of the eyes and have created a new layer. And again, remember, we're just sort of grabbing a skin tone color from somewhere on the face because the whites of the eyes are basically the same color. Is the skin tones there just a little bit lighter in value, but not much, so you don't have to automatically assume you need to make these white despite their name, they're really just basically skin colored, maybe a little lighter. And I'm making general spherical looking shapes inside of the eyes were going to look around sitting in the eye sockets, and now I'm just a racing away the pupil. This is where you decide where this guy's looking, and I didn't want him toe be really aggressive looking, staring right at us. So I've got him looking slightly off camera, so to speak, just to make him seem approachable again. Don't want him looking so aggressive staring us down like some of our other characters. So that's what my decision process was there. And I'm just sort of refining these edges. Those areas where the whites of the eye meets the eyelid can be very important. If it's too dark, it'll look like he's got Maschera are overstated eyelashes or something. But you do want there to be some kind of a border, but but not anything too bold, just sort of refining that. That eyeball and skin relationship there, I think that's looking night. So next we're gonna add some detail to the iris of the eye. And again, remember the Jewell lighting scheme? We wanted to be mostly dark at the top, and the light bouncing around inside makes the bottom half seem lighter. So basically the top part of the iris is darker, and we see the really bright detail part in the bottom, and I'm just darkening that a little bit. I didn't want it to be super bright, don't want this guy's eyes to be terribly captivating. And then we put that all important bright white highlights spanning the pupil and the iris , and I just thought I'd easily copy and paste that for the other side. So quick cheat there for you and that works very well. Like the way those eyes were looking. He's engaging and friendly, looking believable. I think that's just about right. What the white of the eye to show through a little bit more got a little dark on that far side of the face. I think that's a good fix. So I've merged eyes with the skin layer. You don't have to do that, but I just thought I'd sort of start consolidating everything. I'm pleased with it. I think it's looking good. So just jumping around for a little bit of quick refinement to lay the groundwork for the hair layer that we're gonna add. But I like the way those eyes were looking. He's he's engaging, but but not so aggressive. First thing I'm gonna do on our hair layer that I've just created is adding some eyebrows and a little bit of detail. I'm using that same angular, squashed circle brush just to make him make make the brushwork consistent at this phase, and that looks pretty cool. I've got the eyebrows raised just a little bit, but suddenly I'm kind of realizing that makes him look a little bit villainous. There's sort of a triangle shape to his eyebrows, and I think I'm losing a bit of the character of the original sketch. So I'm gonna tone those eyebrows down, make them a bit more of a flat line, and that immediately works so much better with everything else is much less stated eyebrows sort of just a flat line across his brow, working much better. So now I'm gonna go ahead and start defining his hairline up top, just dropping in some color T to show where hair starts and skin stops and just really defining borders here. And we're gonna smudge that in just a little bit and do some more refined brushwork to make it blend with where it meets the skin so that it doesn't look like hair plugs or anything. That's what I'm doing here, and I'd like this guy to be middle aged. I'm thinking about kind of a sultan pepper color for his hair, some gray around the temples. I think that would work well with with the rest of what we've established here. So I'm going to do that. And yeah, that fits very nicely. So with that same brush, I'm just adding some highlights, keeping that hair lighter around the temples cause we're gonna do that. Salt and pepper gray hair effect and just a little bit of refinement. Chunkier brushstrokes. For this hair, I'm not really defining every individual hair. The lesson of this one is just to keep things a little more expressive as an experiment we're doing here. But we will add some detail, but not quite as much as is the other. Sometimes I think true mastery and a painting is is getting the point across with his few brushstrokes is possible when a painting gets over rendered, you can sort of tell if it was an inexperienced artist overworking something just to death . But some of the real master painters that I've admire digital painters, they just seem to get so much done with without many brushstrokes. And that's that's the hallmark about a real master. So something to strive for something. I'm certainly working towards myself. It's ah, it's a challenge, but I think that's working nicely. I'm gonna add in some secondary light. Sources now added a few little flicks of hair around his eyebrow because that bright light source on the far side of his face would be catching some of those hairs. And nothing seems to catch light quite like hair, so a cool detail to consider and adding a little bit to the nose as well. This gives him a nice did a more character, and it also makes him seem more three dimensional. So these secondary light sources air just such an awesome part of the process. You've done all this hard work getting to this point, and now this is sort of the payoff. So Notice added some bright little whisker highlights on the far side of his chin as well. Again, just what I was saying about hair a great way to make make that seem believable and a little bit of dark just said that it it doesn't quite look so, so cut off don't want that super bright light edge there. But this is really rounding him out nicely. I think that works very well. It makes his chin seem even more bold and overstated somehow. So that's that's great. Everything fits, adding a little more brightness to the nose just one of those shiny skin areas, it seemed toe catch a little more light than everywhere else. Just a hint of transmitted light in that ear on the far side. A little bit of light shining through, but nothing too intense there and just a little more subtle brushwork to clean this all up , bringing some of that highlight up to his hairline as well and a little more on the eyebrows just to make that all fit. And I think that's working beautifully, but it brightened up his eyes. Just a touch more a few little little squiggles with that brush. And I think this guy is ready toe, give our final treatment to I've put everything in a group and then I copied that emerged it together. That way we preserve all the individual layers, as is their own thing. But I've also got Emerge copy to do these final treatments, just dropping in some or little whisker highlights. And now I'm smudging out around the contours, making those hair hair line wisps look like they're sort of blowing in the breeze and also smoothing out some edges around the periphery just so that nothing looks to cut out that can really flatten it. And I think this guy's in very good shape, little more smudging, and I'm ready to put a little glow behind him. And with that, I think we have just got about a finished painting. I hope you enjoy this one. Congratulations on completing the Buddy Face project. Let's take a look back at our project steps and see how far we've come. We started with a rough sketch to get our basic pose and proportions in place. After that, we blocked in the silhouette and did a value rendering to make our character look three dimensional. We then converted the value, rendering into believable skin tones. In our final Polish phase, we refined our skin tones and then added eyes, hair and secondary light sources. All in all, we went from a blank canvas to a finished product that we could be proud of. I hope you've gotten a lot out of this project. Join us again for future projects where we'll build on what we've learned here and take it to the next level 24. Course Recap: congratulations on completing the painting faces course. We've gone over face proportions, parts of the face expressions, and we've done several face projects that we could be very proud of. Post them work so that the entire course community can see what a rock star you become. If you would like to continue to sharpen your face rendering skills, try these course challenges. Of course. Challenge one. Sketch three very different faces. Let's test both your creativity in your face construction skills. Make three separate faces that look totally different from one another. Of course, challenge to facial expressions. Take a face. Guess that you like and make three versions, each with an entirely different facial expression. Course challenge. Three Different lining. Render up of face, sketched two separate times, using different lighting schemes to affect mood and feel You'll be amazed at how different of face can look, depending on how you like. Well, that's it for the painting faces course. I hope you've gotten a lot of these lessons and I hope to see you again in future courses where we'll build on everything that we've learned here