Painting Figures with the Power of Photoshop

1. Trailer: welcome to painting figures. My name is Hardy Fowler, and I'm a professional illustrator. I'm calling on all artists with a passion for figure painting who don't want to spend thousands of dollars or years of their life in art school painting figures is a fun beautiful into sinks set of lessons that can have you creating masterpieces more quickly than you ever imagined. In our easy to grasp, step by step course, we will demystify the entire process of creating figure are so that you can master a timeless art form with the power of the digital medium in all of its incredible tools that you use to get amazing results. But this is so much more than just a painting. Demonstration will have detailed discussions about the fundamental concepts that figure artists use, and we'll learn detailed techniques for rendering each area of the body all without agonizing hours of memorizing anatomical terms. To tie it all together, we offer responsive support so that every student can take their figure are to new heights . Don't miss out on your chance to start painting the human form like a master, so it rolled today. Grab your stylists and let's paint cool stuff 2. Intro: Hi, everyone. This is hardy and welcome to the painting figures 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, I would also recommend completing the painting Faces courses Well, most of the projects it will do in this course will be intermediate level in about a four, but we may attempt a few things on the back end that will push it up to a Level five. But we'll take it slow and start with some simple stuff. I would encourage you all to download the painting parts of the body. Infographic. We'll go over each area of the body and detailed videos, but this resource is great. To keep handy is a quick road map, and it contains lots of useful tricks. Painting figures is a wonderful thing to know how to do figure Paintings can be really beautiful works of art in their own right. But learning how to convincingly depict the human form is an essential foundation for other disciplines such as character design. In order for a character painting to be successful, it has to have the underlying framework of a solid figure drawing. So this is certainly a worthwhile pursuit. While it is important to get anatomy and proportions right in your figure drawings, many students get so bogged down and learning these technicalities that they end up discouraged or overwhelmed. My view of things is that learning art needs to be fun and inspiring in order to be effective. So we're going to excuse ourselves from anatomy class and get right down to the fun stuff. Now I will discuss some anatomical terms as we go along, but I'm not going to commit you to hours of learning muscle names and shapes, as the majority of our tutorials do. After all, unless you were drawing and anatomy textbook, all you really need to know is how these structures look on the surface and that comes from practice and from learning to trust your artistic eye to feel your way through a drawing, we are going to create some simple human forms and then add detail as we go, all the while using the power of the digital medium to transform lines if proportions or anatomy don't look right, the first time I've been doing this for years, and I still rely on these tools to find Tune. So don't worry if you don't get it right on the first brushstroke. This feel your way through approach is incredibly liberating. It allows you to start pouring out your ideas without any fear of making a mistake. In this course, we will discuss basic proportions how to render each area of the body. Then we will tackle the actual figure painting project. I'll also show you an incredibly cool way to use Photoshopped to create a realistic simulation of a charcoal figure drawing, which I think you'll really enjoy. So grab your stylists and let's dive in. 3. Course Overview: Oh, hi, everyone, this is Hardy in this section will take a look at general proportions of the figure, and we'll also look at some differences between male and female figures. A few quick rules of thumb to keep in mind when rendering male versus female figures. There are a few aspects of anatomy that can really make your figure to scream either masculine or feminine trade, so it's worth pointing those out before we dive in with a project. First of all, noticed the proportion differences. Males tend to have much broader shoulders and narrower hips, whereas females have broader hips and narrower shoulders. So it's sort of an inverse relationship that's probably the biggest single key that that can give your figure other masculine or feminine quality. Um, another thing to notice is that the male character tends to be more massive overall when standing side by side and also notice again like we did in the face project. There's an overall more oven angularity to the male figure and more of a curvy, soft kind of line work to the female figure again. That sort of squared edge versus curved edge can also have ah, big impact on whether your figure seems masculine or feminine. Another trick for general anatomy drawing that I've found useful. There are 1,000,000 tricks like these out there, but this one I actually get some use out of is something called the 7.5 head rule. If you take your figures head and copy it 7.5 times, that's about their height. So proportion wise to get the head correctly proportioned relative to the body. It should be about as tall is 7.5 head. So handy trick there. One other general rule of thumb in this helps me get the length of the arms right. Is that the inner surface of the wrist? You can often put that right on your hip bones. So I like to make sure that the risks line up right where the hip, uh, meets the rest of the pelvis. So another good, handy proportion tool there with with those in mind, I think we're ready to start some exercises regarding painting the figure and then on to our first full figure project. So let's get started 4. Painting Arms: Oh, hi, everyone. This is Hardy. In this section, we will take a detailed look at rendering arms, and I thought a good place to start would be to look at Cem detailed shots of some finished artwork, specifically Cem arms. And we can kind of reverse engineer things that sort of work backwards from a finished product. And I've got to zoom shots of arms on Teoh two pieces of artwork that I did and I thought these were good examples. And basically, we're going to simplify things just to take this back to a starting point. These are very similar. Noticed. They just have a sort of spherical shaped shoulder, a cylinder shaped arm. Uh, well, kind of simplify the elbow joint by making in another sphere. But we'll go into a little more detail on that and another cylinder, so reducing this to its basic three dimensional forms. It's just spheres and cylinders, and we can put light rendering on that and in predictable patterns and basically get our shapes right so that that's the bare bones of arm anatomy. Uh, going into a little more detail, I'll sort of sketched this out in the same approach we've got that shoulder muscle and that defines thes two main masses of of the the upper arm. And I know I try to avoid too many technical terms, but bicep and tricep. I think most people know those those were the main muscle masses of the upper arm. The bicep tends to be kind of a long, curving shape, and the tricep is a little more complex. It it cuts in and has a sharp angle. And that's actually a really nice trick to put on most arms. It's a nice detail to include it adds a lot of realism, and you can see on both of these I've tried to make that tricep muscle pretty bold and very visible. I use, um, reflected light on this one to make that really pop out going down to the forearm. I guess we'll take our tricep right to the elbow. Just sort of the knobby, bony, angular part where we're upper arm becomes forearm. And instead of being like a hinge that your your arm bends on, there is a muscle that crosses over and sort of angles down towards the wrist. I forget the technical name for this. It might be. I think it's breaking or radi Alice, but doesn't really matter. Just this muscle mass, sort of looping over from the direction of the tricep down into the forearm and we can kind of just blend that out, is we get down towards the risk. The forearm just becomes kind of a tangle of these smaller muscles. These air, all the muscles that make your fingers move there, actually in your forearm. But that's the basic idea. Just a few muscle mass is in the upper arm. Uh, this one shape to kind of keep in mind when you're rendering the tricep. This strap muscle that loops over can see it here and here, and that's the basic anatomy of the arm. So taking those principles into a quick demonstration will sketch up another very basic view of of the cylinder and spear shapes and just a rough hand here to define our our general arm anatomy. And I'll just start sketching the arm from a few different views here, and we'll render these up just to see how how light lighting scheme typically works when rendering the arm and basically just following the proportions and masses of that cylinder and sphere shape but adding those muscle masses that we talked about refining it, circling those here just to show the main spherical kind of shapes that that the light will hit. And I'll do another view of the arm kind of, Ah, big, strong flexing arm just so that we can go into a little more detail with these muscle renderings and make the values really pop. Uh, this stuff's really fun to render. You can really ah, stretch your value range. Go from darks toe light. The shiny er of muscle is typically it can make it look stronger and more defined. And obviously these air extreme examples like bodybuilder type muscles. But just going to those extremes just Teoh illustrates, um, some points here about how to render muscles for your average figure drawing. You will likely tone the definition of the musculature way back, but these exercises air helpful just to show you how toe render the muscles, how to give the impression that the muscles there beneath the skin and look realistic, the way light effects of so just doing a little liquefy again, we're just feeling our way through here, a race in a just and warp transform as much as you need. And that's that's the beauty of photo shop. So instead of ah, rigidly following a formula or using a photo reference, just kind of feeling my way through here and adjusting is needed and going to define these with Cem border lines just so that we can fill in silhouettes and not have to fade anything out or anything. But I think that's about right. Gonna resize things a little bit here so that we can do our main rendering a little bit larger, and I'll do a quick inking pass after I refined things here just a little bit so that we have a nice defined Siris of line work before we block in and start a value rendering. So it's always a nice idea to do this second pass. Even if it's an exercise, it just helps clean things up and define everything kind of set it in stone before you start your value, rendering so a nice step to take, even if it's just for your own personal use in nothing that a client or a teacher will be seeing, and just a little extra line work. These air kind of just guides for myself just to remember where those little muscle masses are beneath the skin and how how the value will affect them. It's all informed by this line line work that you you're making here, just going around the elbow, finishing this guy up. Remember that angular triceps shape that we talked about that comes into play here is well , and the curvy shape of the bicep on up to the shoulder, and I'll just box this in, and I think with a little more line work, we're just about ready to block this guy in and start a value rendering. So I'm going to use my magic wand tool to make a selection. I select the outside and select the inverse and fill it in. So I've got that on a new layer beneath my inking later, and we're ready to start a value painting now. When painting muscles, it's very important to use your light values that you're adding. It both defines the light areas and the shadows, so I'm making just these two little areas of tone. But as you can see, it looks like one muscle sitting on top of another in that lack of value between the two. The darker area that I have left is actually what defines that defined kind of cut muscle look, so even though we're only adding light, were also adding shadow because we were leaving areas of dark. That's basically the whole idea. You add light, but you leave areas in shadow to define those areas, and the more cut, the harder. The edge between light and shadow is, the more defined your muscles seem to be. So as you can see, I've left a hard edge under that angle of the tricep, and I've added some more light value underneath that angle. And that's what gives it such a defined look same thing on the bicep where it meets that other little mass in the middle of the arm. It really looks defined because light and dark are right next to each other, and there's a pretty hard edge insane with all of these little tendons and strap muscles in the forearm, all these areas of the hand it's all informed why, where you put value where you put light value and where you leave the shadow. Now I'm going back on top with a light opacity about 10%. And when I just paint in broad areas, it has an effective kind of wrapping all these muscles and skin. It's sort of unifies them. That's when it really starts to look realistic. I think this is starting to come together, adding a few brighter, shiny er highlights because again, the shiny or these muscles are the more peaked in and thought they seem, that that really makes him seem realistic and and extremely defined. Obviously, this is a neck stream. But, hey, if you're gonna be rendering superheroes or Space Marines, oftentimes these guys need to be very well built. So it's a good thing, Teoh. No, Um, there are tons of great references for, you know, extremes of musculature. Check out pictures of boxing matches or even those bodybuilder guys always. Ah, handy online reference if if you need to see the way certain muscles air coming together certainly easier than studying an anatomy text. But basically I'm just applying the same principles over and over, just adding value but leaving those darks and then adding more light value to kind of make those cut areas just like under the biceps. That light area under that curve of the biceps is what makes it seem so cut. So that's the basic idea. Hope you find yourself alone. We'll look into other parts of the body next. 5. Painting Hands: Oh, hi, everyone, this is Hardy. In this lecture, we will take a detailed look at rendering hands. So to start, I've just got a basic grey canvas set up, and I'm just gonna sketch some basic hands and to do this I am just looking at my left hand . I've got it held up next to the screen, and it's a very quick and easy reference toe. Have you may have to twist your hand in some strange shapes if you need to get to some of those back angles. But other than that, this is the easiest body part to reference. It's always there for you, and I'm following that pretty closely, especially for this very basic just view of the top of the hand. Just sort of refining marks is I g o adding in and ah and erasing away, starting to add in some secondary details and knuckles and just make some of this line work a little bit more bold hands or a lot of fun. Two. Draw. They're probably the most expressive part of the body. Other than the face. You can communicate a lot with hand gestures, so it's a very good good part of the body to master rendering, so I'd recommend really taking your time with this exercise. Do it as many times as you need to get comfortable before taking it into a full blown project. Now that I'm done with that top view of the hand and going to do more of, Ah, side views have changed my hand shape here. For my reference, you sort of rendering the outside periphery first and then I'll start filling in the details. It could be a little bit tricky when you have a lot of overlapping fingers to get all of that right. So just a race away as much as needed again. The beauty of the digital medium is it's infinitely forgiving. So trial and error is really the cornerstone of this entire techniques. Really. Take advantage of that. Um, I'm getting lucky here, frankly, that I'm getting a lot of these marks right on the first try. But deal free Teoh to erase away and redo is much is needed, and we also have the liquefy and transform tools at our disposal. If something looks not quite right, this is such a an important part of the body. This is actually one of the test subjects from my entry portfolio to graduate school is we had to render 10 hands is convincingly as we could with no photo references. That was a challenge. But it's certainly worthwhile body part to ah to really master rendering. So one more one more hand we're gonna add here that we do a cool fist facing us, just adding in a little more line work to define the fingers and again just got my own hand right in front of my face for reference. And that really does the trick. I like these poses we've come up with here, but I think this fist I'm drawing now is probably my favorite. So in a moment will expand that and take it to ah, fully rendered painting. Think I'll just stick Teoh to gray scale just black and white for these as well. Gonna liquefy this a little. Some of these proportions looked a little bit strange. Sometimes the finger length there The thickness of the wrist can be a little Ah, so just a quick correction with liquefy again. One of your best friends liquefy so yeah, I think we'll take this one and in ink it up first and then Then we'll go ahead and do a fully fully, ah composed painting. So I'm going to do another another layer on top and ink layer. And just doing some more bold and deliberate brush works just like we do in our inking step in all of our other projects. Gives it a nice clean look, and it gives us more of a solid foundation to base our painting on. So that's what I'm doing here. Just going around the contours. No need to add a whole lot of interior detail. Just basically want to get these structures correct. Maybe a few minor lines where the main wrinkles of the hand are because there's all need to be correct in order for them to carry through to the finish painting. So taking my time here to get all of that right, but very basic, just tracing essentially with just a little more attention to line quality and certain overlapping little character lines that you can get to really make your your line artpop. If you do plan on presenting it to a client or to a teacher at this phase before going on to a fully fledged painting, Always nice to have something presentable looking. That's that's a good, good use of the line or the ink step, adding in some last minute wrinkles thes tendons that go up to the risks that move the fingers. That was always pop out a good bit. So I want to indicate those I think we just about got it. So I'm gonna add in a silhouette. I just use my magic one tool to select the outside. And now that that's all set, I've got it blocked in going to do a little more liquefying now that I see it blocked in. Some of these proportions look a little weird to me. So just a little bit of nudging around in liquefy mode and that does the trick. Good deal. Just going to trim off the bottom here, and I think we're ready to start rendering this up. I'm gonna grab my chalk brush in sort of a middle gray value decided. My light source is sort of coming from above, more or less Ah, upper right of the page. And I'm just adding in some basic tones, the way the fingers bend it. It really separates a plane. You can see I've got a very sharp change from light to dark, where those knuckles that air closer to us sort of been the finger and that that really helps sell the structure. Another thing further, communicating that the shape of the hand is, is the way those that dark side of the fingers facing us, it very abruptly changes to those very light values we see on the palm. So it's that contrast between light and dark that really makes this pop and really makes it look three dimensional. So where you have very abrupt changes in plain, make sure that your value changes reflect that, and that will really help sell it. Doing a little bit of smudging here just to make some of this brush work a little more even and move tones around a little bit into the tighter spaces. A racing away a little bit to make that shadow a little bit softer and now just unifying my tones a little bit, with some more general brush marks on top and adding a few of those wrinkles on the knuckled for added detail. And again, I've still got my left hand up in front of my face anytime. I need a little visual. Cute to help get one of these more come complex wrinkles or areas of the hand, right? It's always there. Four years, a reference I've selected. Ah, higher value white, almost white color, high grade, really. Just add a few very bright highlights in some areas of pop now that I've got that and I've made another layer because I want to have a little bit of reflected light on these dark sides of the fingers, sort of the secondary light source, but want them to be pretty subtle. But that adds a whole lot of realism. Even in those dark shadow areas, there's a little bit of light bouncing around, and that that really makes it look realistic. And with that, I think we're closing in on a Finnish hand painting. You can take this as detailed as you like, but this is the basic idea. We've got all the forms and the values, really showing it, so I think we'll call this done 6. Painting the Torso: Oh, hi, everyone, this is Hardy. In this lecture, we will take a detailed look at rendering the torso, so I've got a basic great canvas set up, and we're going to do a study for both a male and female torso. So it started by sketching in some very rough shapes and in a very broad sense, we can think of the torso is more or less an oval shape with sort of a plane cut out of it , which is what the rib cages. So you can see this simple value shape that we rendered previously, and I've just adjusted it to show that sort of subtracted away flattened area where we subtract away the rib cage shape. So in a very gross sense that that is the basic idea of the torso, an oval with Cem, some details in it, with a sort of subtracted negative space out of the middle, which, of course, is the rib cage. And I've added in some basic musculature, broader shoulders and more angular features again for the mail and just erasing away and find tuning here. But that's the basic idea, adding in a few detail lines just toe make that musculature more evident. But I think this is looking pretty good for a male shape, so we'll do a female on the other side of the page. And again, what we're thinking about here is more curvy, smoother barking lines, much narrower shoulders and broader hips when compared to the mail. So we'll get a very good look at that side by side and again, just that very broad oval shape of the chest, that torso with that rib cage space subtracted out of it and adding in basic interior details, The breast can be very tricky to render, and you'll see. I'm sure I'm not going to get it right on on the first or even 1/10 try. But again, with Photoshopped, just fine. Tune as much as you need gonna liquefy a little bit. Here is well to help get those shapes right, but breasts need to look like they're being affected by gravity. To common mistake is to make them just perfectly spherical and look like they defy gravity . And that's just not the way they are in reality. So one of the more important line arcs to get right because even if they're slightly wrong they can look, bring very false. So there are entire tutorials devoted just to rendering breasts. It's something worth putting some time in to get right. But just like everything else we preach here, it's best to just feel your way through and redo as much as needed. Liquefied transform until it looks right to your eye. So that's what we're going with is trusting your eye and take a many tries as you need to get it right. It's a beauty of the digital medium, so I'm just thinking up. We're gonna take up both sides here to get ready for our value painting, doing the male side here first and just a few lines to indicate some of the musculature. But we're gonna let our values study do most of that work for us. This is just to get our basic shapes and to get a nice, clean outer edge so we can make our silhouettes and start blocking this in. But again, very careful and deliberate brushstrokes here when compared to the sketch phase, just to make it look a little more polished in nice and neat. But I think we're just about there a little more detail and then we'll be ready. Teoh. Close this in and block in. So I've gone ahead and done that. And vignette id these in a way that didn't make them seem decapitated or anything. Ah, and I'm just going to start laying in some values when adding in the general values. Let's take a look at a sketch of a side view of the female torso, and that gives you an idea of where light will be hitting. Now. These areas are where the light is coming from above, so we want those to be higher value and the areas beneath, or where there is less light reaching. So, of course, those will be lower values of very basic stuff. And also just like the basics. Fear rendering exercise that we refer to over and over but good good anatomical landmarks to keep in mind when rendering the tour so and also noticed that negative ribcage, or that that area of the stomach beneath the rib cage isn't shadow again. Referring to that that oval shape with the rib cage area subtracted out and also note that whenever we put a high value very closely, next to a dark value. It gives us a really cut edge looks, um, some very sharp definition that can make a person look to be very physically fit and can look like muscle definition. So if that's something you're going for, try to have a lot of hard edges of very high value next to very dark value, of course, in the context of keeping it true to the forms that were rendering. But the sharper those differentiations between light and dark, the more defined and more cut those areas will seem. Muscle cut, ripped is what I mean to say so just refining this a little bit, doing a bit of smudging. But I think this is a pretty good representative female torso, and I think with a little reflected light will be ready to move on to the male torso. So jumping over to this side of the page again, just going to start adding in some basic values and also keeping in mind on. And here's a look at the lateral sketch of the male torso, the way it looks from the side that gives us our cues as to where to put our higher values where the light source is facing and where to put our darker values or whereto omit our breast strokes to leave those areas dark. Heading in a little more definition, the more lines we put, just as I mentioned specifically in those chest muscles, the more ripped and cut it looks. And if if you want this guy to look super muscular, just keep adding those sharp definitions between light and dark, and you can take that as far as you care to. And, of course, these air very basic studies. Nothing terribly detailed, just wanting to demonstrate the general principles and create something reasonably realistic, adding, in some of the abdominal musculature here, I think a common mistake is to over define these. Make them look like tennis balls beneath the skin, and that's just not the way they are in real life. But again, just light next to dark value. That's how you get that defined muscle look and feel free to take that as far as you want. But I think this one shaping up well, it looks like a pretty good representative male and female torso, so we'll call this one done, and I hope you found this one helpful 7. Painting Legs & Feet: Oh, hi, everyone. This is Hardy. In this section, we will take a look, a rendering, legs and feet. So let's get started. I've got another great canvas set up, and we're going to start with a front view of the leg and legs, especially from the front or just a series of long arc ing lines. But they have some slightly different curves on the inner and outer side, so noticing up here on the thigh, there's a bit more of a bulge on the inside, and it's more of a smooth long arc on the outer side. Same down on the lower leg. The calf on the inside is more of, Ah, circular bulge and then a long, smoother our king line on the outside. So that's the basic difference. The outer edges of the leg seemed to be long. Our king lines the inside your more compact little bulgy circular muscle shapes, and obviously it's a subtle difference. But something to keep in mind have rendered a simple foot there as well. But we're gonna move on to a side view of the leg here again, that circular bulging shape of the calf kind of a hamstring coming across the knee there, you can see right above the calf, and we're just sort of describing some of these muscle shaves now down on the foot. Notice you have a very knobby, bony ankle bone on both side. It's Ah, bone sticking out there, and that's an important detail to make your foot seem realistic. So don't forget that ankle protruding out there. And I'm gonna do a detailed view of a foot here on this side just cause it's kind of got its own little little aspects that you need to pay attention to apart from the leg. Obviously, the big toe is much larger, and it's got a different shape, kind of long. Our king shapes and then the other toes air essentially just copies of one another, but they get smaller as they go out towards the small toe. So basically, just make sure you get the count right, but they're the same little appendage repeated over and over. So think this line or it's looking pretty good. Just re sizing a few things here, doing a little bit of liquefy adjustment theater. A weird thing at that, something I usually rework Ah, lot just because they're so strange to begin with that it's often hard to trust your eye, even if you're copying a photo that can still end up looking a little bit weird. So again, that's the beauty of a photo shop is weaken rework things, liquefy a race, transform as much as you need until it looks right to you. So now that we have are our Leinart pretty much in place? I'm going to go over it one more time with a little inking past just to make these a little more clean and professional looking. And then after that, we're gonna do some value paintings just to take a look at how to render thes, thes muscle and other shapes. So there we go, getting the ankle bone, the calf muscles, the inner thigh muscles, describing the rest of the toes here up to the outer calf and the outer thigh for the knees . Honestly, if you just put a few little lumpy shapes in the middle there, it usually ends up looking right. There's a lot going on in the knee anatomically, and when you stand up and lock your knees, a lot of those structures kind of overlap one another, so it it turns into just kind of, ah, collection of lumpy shapes. So I blocked that in. I've got a silhouette here and let's just start adding in some value, and we'll sort of start describing these these muscles shapes in three dimensions. Just like I said, I'm starting with the knee and just a series of lumpy, semi spherical shapes in the middle there. And the middle of the lower leg actually comes to a pretty sharp point near the beginning, so you can see I've got a fairly sharp line. They're separating the inner and outer surfaces of the of the cafs of attention to that, it's something a n'importe detail to get right allowed a lot of realism if if you can nail that and just some value cuts, making Cem sharp distinctions between light and dark values, along with all of these nice soft radiance over the larger muscle masses. And that's kind of the key to to realism when rendering either people or creatures make it look like realistic musculature hers to have that mix between soft radiance and hard, hard edges between light and dark. I know I sound like a broken record. But that really is such an important concept to remember the key Teoh to realism. So rendering in a little bit of the outer surface of the calf. And I think that's looking fairly realistic, adding some highlights just to make a few areas of these muscles really shine make that skin seem realistic, and also to give just a slightly brighter value to the inner surface of the eye just to make our light source a little more realistic. I think that's looking very believable. So we'll move on to this side view of the inner surface of the leg, and I've made that hamstring fairly distinct. Crossing over the knee joint there, I've got a kind of casting a shadow down on the calf muscles. So I wanted that to be a nice hard edge between light and dark, just to give us a realistic cast shadow there so little detail making that bony ankle stick out. I've got some sharp delineations there as well, just so that that ankle looks like it's sticking out as as of course it does in real life in a little bit of rendering for the toes, and that's just about all there is to it for this one. Not not a very difficult view of the leg to depict just Cem Kirby muscle shapes. Get that hamstring right and make sure that it it's interacting correctly with the calf. A few value cuts and that's practically all it takes to make a pretty realistic looking leg , adding a little bit of highlight value. Just toe. Give the skin Cem shining qualities in a few places just to make it pop. And I think that's working pretty well. We'll move on to our foot rendering next now right on the front that the first mark I made There is this prominent tendon that crosses over the front of your ankle, and that's something you really need to to pay attention to and rendering feet. It's, ah really big strap like shape that crosses over, so that's that's the way ankle and foot come together. And then, of course, there are all of those little tendons that control your toes going out towards the toes. So I've added some some lines in there as well to make those little structures seem like they're there under the skin surface on the foot, another key to realism you what you wanted to always seem like. There are these muscles and tendons occurring under the skin, just like they are in real life. So little suggestions of that can add a ton of realism to your painting. No matter which part of the body you're painting, they're always little structures under the skin that that we need to suggest subtly because it can't seem to prominent, obviously, because it's under the skin, Um, rendering this big toe with a little more care just to give it a prominent toenail like it has a little sunken spot for the toenail to sit and a little bit of highlight to make the nail seem shiny er than the surrounding skin. And I think this is looking pretty realistic. A nice, realistic foot and some realistic leg rendering. So that's about it, I hope. Hope you got a lot out of this, and you have a good understanding. Teoh how toe draw and render the foot and legs 8. 'Mannequin' Sketches: Oh, I everyone, this is Hardy. In this lecture, we will take a look at constructing figures. Now that we've looked at how to render each individual body part, we'll start putting it all together here. So let's get started. I've got a blank canvas, and I'm just going to set up a little exercise where we construct very vague, mannequin like forms. This is just a very quick way to jot down human proportions. Get each body part put together. And this is kind of how we start assembling each body part that we've learned to render individually. So we're putting it all together here into the whole picture. So I start with this very basic mannequin type shape where I reduce the body to simple forms like spheres and cylinders and weaken. Just jot down very easily some believable, correct, proportioned human figures without much effort. And what I'll do next after we have these mannequin type drawings finished is I'll come back for a second pass where we refine these and turn them into more believable human figures that have muscle details. More correct detail ing. So that's the basic process that I used to construct a human figures. I start with these very rough shapes putting everything together, and it gives us a nice gesture and pose without much effort. And, of course, you're not committed to too much because you've only made a few very sketchy lines. And if anything doesn't work out, you can always just trash it and start over or just erase and refined those lines until it's working better, but very easily here. I've got three manic informs put together without much effort, and there are some proportion issues that all correct when we refine these. But that's basically all there is to it to get a human form together pretty easily. So it made a copy of this mannequin layer, and I'm gonna go back for my second pass here and just start refining these shapes on starting with the head here on the first figure and adding a little bit of detail. And and we'll just sort of start filling in these rough armatures that we've made with detailed and more correct human anatomy. And just like that, all these muscle shapes that we studied in our previous videos, we can add those into this rough shape, and it'll all be in the correct place because we establish proportions in general sizes when we made our our mannequin, so that's a great way to do it. Start with a very rough mannequin and then go back and add in more appropriate details. And that's such an easy way to get to a ah finished, pretty realistic looking figure without much effort, and you don't have to sort of wade through. Unknown Water is trying to get details right the first time you can do a rough and then come back and kind of trace over it and refine it until it looks right in correcting some proportions. Here he looked a little long in the legs and arms, so just liquefying and adjusting a few things until that looks correct to me. I think that's good, so we'll move on to this next guy. The First post was just flat footed, perfectly straightforward, but I tried to make this guy a little more complex and interesting kind of a contra pasta, where he has all of his weight on that far leg and sort of a flexed knee in the foreground leg kind of ah, more interesting pose, feel free to play around with that and there so many references for classical poses like this online. So I encourage you to explore that if you're looking for a more interesting type of pose. But correcting this guy's proportions Justus we did with the 1st 1 and adding in details as we go refining, erasing and redrawing lines as we see fit. And just like that, this guy's put together pretty quickly, as I'm sure you've noticed, this is sped up quite a good bit. I certainly don't draw this fast quickly, but didn't seem like very interesting video material. Toe Watch me slowly re sketch these in real time. So by all means, don't feel like you have to draw this fast. But I just wanted to speed this up so it would not not be a long boring video, but the process is what I'm trying to get across here, and I think that's Ah, the point is getting through that you can just sort of do these rough, first round mannequin type sketches and then come back and fill them in with some detail. And just like that, I think we have three pretty good mannequins that we have refined this third guy didn't like so much. I'll leave him out of the finished product. But let's take a look at how these to work out. Here are two mannequin studies side by side in their rough form, and here is the refined past, where we have to fully realized, put together figure drawings, ready to ink in or even start a painting. So that's Ah, great demonstration of my general process for coming up with fully assembled figures Up. Next, we will take a look at how to realistically add body fat to a figure drawing. I've pulled up this pair of figures that we reviewed when we discussed general figure proportions. Now, obviously these two figures have extremely low body fat. So let's now take a look at two figures with much higher body fat to see how this affects how we approach things. A very general effect on notice is that bodies with higher fat percentage have less definition in their forms. There is an overall smoothness and roundness to the forms, as opposed to the sharper cut angles of the lower body fat figures, areas like the neck under the chin, the ankles and the gap between the thighs are smoothed out and filled in. For Leinart, this means much fewer lines on the interior of the figure, since we want things to look smooth and ill defined. It's also important to note that males and females carry fat in several key different ways . Of course, there are tons of variation, and no two people are alike. But these air good general guidelines to keep in mind. Males tend to carry fat predominantly in the belly, and love handles the old spare tire look. There is added bulk to the arms and legs, but adding weight to the midsection is certainly the best way to give your higher body fat character a very male look. On the other hand, females tend to carry fat, predominantly in the hips, rear end and legs. This gives the body and overall pear shaped quality. Keep these guidelines in mind, and your heavier characters will have a very realistic look up. Next. Let's put all of these concepts together and start our first full figure painting project. I look forward to seeing you there 9. Splash Backgrounds: Hi, everyone. This is Hardy. In this section, we will take a look at how to make a cool splash background. These have tons of applications. That can be a nice presentation for a figure painting or character painting. They can also make a cool background texture for a website or graphic design project. Lots of applications for the So I think you're gonna find this useful. Let's get started. I've got my documents set up here. It's just a blank white background, but I've pasted in a brick wall photo that I took. And I like this because it's got some cool, vague textures. You can see a few areas near the top here and some out towards the side. A lot of neat sort of nondescript textures. I'm not so interested in the brick patterning for this one, but I like those rocky looking, vaguer textures those we're gonna make a great splash background. So first we need to add a little bit of color with some simple Grady INTs. I've created a new layer, and I've called it color, and I'm going to sample a gray with a little bit of warmth to it, right out of that photo so you can see it right there, Gray with just a touch of yellowish orange. And I'm going to switch to my Grady int tool, put it on linear Grady int mode and said it to normal. Got it in about 30% opacity. I've filled in the background color with that color and now switching my Grady into multiply, I'm just gonna pull some linear Grady INTs from each of the four sides and start doing it at angles. Basically, I'm trying to very gradually buildups, um, slightly darker colors out towards the perimeter. I wanted to be lighter in the middle, and that's that's the way we sort of draw attention into the middle. I'm going to select that center color and do a radio Grady int setting my brush back to normal here. Just sort of some circular radio Grady INTs to make that center point a good bit brighter. And that looks just about right. So now we're gonna do some photo tech Cering gonna make a copy of this brick wall photograph and then put it in a layer group. Now I'm going to set that group too soft, light blending mode very important soft light. So now I can play with this photo within the soft light layer group and we can start manipulating it. And I really like it. Look, the way it looks on this upper left corner, that area is just perfect. So I'm going to copy this photo and transform it to try and get that texture in all four corners. And as I go all kind of a race away so that the parts of the photo that I don't want to use aren't covering up the other corners. So all sort of copy transform and a race is I go, I'll flip this one vertical. I'm just hitting command t to bring up these transform menus and then you just hit control . If you want to do the other options, like flipping or warping and gonna rotate this one just like that, we've got all four corners covered with that nice kind of pebbly texture can erase away this part on it Looks like one of these layers is covering up that first corner. Whoops. Nope, not that layer. That's the one. There we go. So we've got a pretty nice, vague, stony texture going on here. I'm gonna merge all of those copies together and do a little bit of clone stamping. Just hit s on your keyboard to bring up that tool. And I'm just going to sort of cover up these more descript parts that show these bricks or that little window sill. Just gonna clone stamp those out so that the whole thing is pretty vague, just a soft, stony texture. And I think that's just about perfect. Sort of looks like it could be a canvas or some kind of Rockwall background, something that's not super attention grabbing because again, it is just a background. But it's a nice look in a very professional presentation. So just gonna name my layer group here for these photo textures. And here's a look at the original photo. Very cool stuff. So we're gonna make a copy of these. I'm gonna group the color and the texture layer together, make a copy of that, and I'm going to merge the copy. And what I'm gonna do next is use money, Marquis whips, rectangular marquee tool, and I'm going to transform that squash it down so that we may kind of the suggestion of a floor. There we go. It looks like it has kind of a spotlight in the middle because it's darker out towards the edges. And I'm just going to race away a little bit so that the horizon isn't so distinct. And there we go. That looks great. Here's a look at our finished product. It's a very nice texture, nothing super attention getting. But it will make a very nice, clean, professional looking presentation for character art. So here's a look with a character in place. As you can see, I've added a cast shadow beneath the feet, just a sort of anchor him in place. But it gives your character are very nice professional presentation, so I hope you find this useful. 10. Value Edges: Oh, how everyone This is hardy. In this lecture, we will discuss value edges. Now I have an exercise set up here that will describe what I mean by that. Basically, we can use edges between light and dark values to relate a tremendous amount of information about our three dimensional form. And what I mean about edges is you can either have a soft edge, which means a gentle, gradual transition from a light value to a dark value like I have here. It starts very light in the center, and I'm sort of blending it out towards the edges. It has a very gradual, gradual transition from light to dark. And that makes this very vague form that I've described here seem very soft and round kind of ah, kind of spherical, just a gentle transition from light to dark with these soft gradations from high value out to dark value. But if I do another little area of value further down and I have an area where it goes from dark, back toe light very abruptly, suddenly it looks like we have two different forms right next to each other. It makes a hard cut in the form between this soft gradation and suddenly it goes from very , very dark right here. Two very, very light right here. So it's that juxtaposition between this very soft gradation into this very sharp junction between light and dark. In that core concept, right, there is basically that the secret to creating realistic looking musculature or any kind of flesh. Really, This is, ah, core principle of creature painting as well. It it really helps sell these forms is organic, and it it looks very convincing is muscle beneath skin. And just to show you one more time, we're gonna do a soft value, Great Asian here, going from a high key value out towards our lower keys. And then I'm just hitting it multiple times with the brush sort of lightly so that it's a small brush diameter. And just like that, that hard edge between the dark and the light gives us a tremendous amount of information about our form, and it makes it look very organic. And I have set up this weird, organic, fleshy looking shape over here to put that concept into practice. So is a game plan. Before we get started, these round spherical areas will represent our soft edges will have high key value where the light sources and then it'll softly great out, just like our basic sphere rendering value exercises. But some of these areas where these little fleshy wrinkles those will give us opportunity to put some some high, high contrast value cuts between those soft edges and hard edges. So right where all of these little wrinkles start right under there is where we're gonna put thes hard cuts just like we did over here. And you'll see, even though this isn't a recognisable shape, it's gonna have a very organic and fleshy feel to it by the time we're done. So let's just start by dropping in a basic value scheme here. And I'm using that same very bright orange color that I always use for value steps in these paintings. So there are all the the numerical values for it if you want to find that exact color, but feel free to do this in black and white. If you're more comfortable with that, it's no problem at all. So I'm just going to tackle these larger spherical shapes first, just to kind of get the broad strokes in place, maybe even a few of these larger areas. And then we'll go in and start doing some of those harder cuts between very light values in very dark values. And that's when this theoretically is going to start looking very organic and fleshy, like there are muscles or or ah, other other things going on beneath the skin. So here we go. Some some high contrast cuts between light and dark, and it's important to have the high contrast edge on one side. And then I'm fading out gradually, so hard edge on this side and then soft gradation on the other. So you don't want to try to put that hard edge on both sides. So again, I'm just moving up to this wrinkle up above and repeating the same process. I'll do the same thing down here, hard edge, and then I just start gradually fading those values away just a little bit more. Same thing here, anywhere where one of these wrinkles begins, I'm just gonna come and start hitting it with Cem repeated brushstrokes and even sort of, ah, lighter pressure so that the diameter of the brush gets smaller. It's kind of doing some fine detail work in there. And now that we've got that detail work in I'll, I'll make my brush a little bit larger. Maybe drop the flow and opacity and start unifying these a little bit. I'm sort of going over the top of everything with a brush in, in sort of unifying these values. If that makes sense, attend to first, separate everything out, define everything very starkly. And then you go back later in Unified Together a fund that's easier than trying toe trying to start loosely and her start with it all soft and sort of blended together and then trying to find the details that that could be a little bit difficult. But if we define all of our edges and all of our details from the start, it's certainly easier to just add more value on top and sort of draw all these forms together. So right off the bet Well, I guess, Ah, good port portion into this exercise. This certainly looks like a organic, fleshy kind of form, and we can repeat this out to the degree feel free to take. This is detailed as you want, but that's the basic point noticing the the use of edges hard value edges versus soft value edges to make all of these wrinkles shapes. And that's that's really the basis for everything we do to make muscles for humans and creatures or any kind of fleshy skin. That's the secret is finding these the contrast between these hard edges of value and the soft blended out softer gradations? So I hope that makes sense. We're certainly gonna apply this concept of future lectures, so give this one a try. I think you'll find it very helpful, and we will come back to these concepts again and again, so it's worth putting in the time. I hope that's helpful. 11. Female Figure - Sketch & Ink: Oh, everyone, this is Hardy In this lecture will begin our female figure project, the sketch and ink phase. But before we dive in, let's take a look at some prerequisites. A central prerequisites are the art fundamentals, Photoshopped fundamentals and figure basics courses. I'd also recommend the male face and female face project. Since these figures will include faces, it would be a good idea to have both of those projects checked off your list before you get this point. This is a skill level for possibly a high beginner, like a three, but we're starting to get into the intermediate phase. So more advanced stuff going on here. So I'd say this is a four, so let's dive in. As is often the case, the blank canvas can often be the most challenging part of the project. So it's best to just dive in and start making marks. And at this phase, remember, we're just wide open, completely free, just describing forms with some very loose brushwork, deciding what kind of pose what would kind of body type all of the very general questions we're going to start answering for ourselves here, so I'm just very loosely defining all of the major parts of the shape, kind of keeping it in almost manic inform here. But I'll start defining some of the body forms in a little bit more detail in just erasing away, using those transform tools by hitting command t to adjust things as I see fit. And I'm trying to keep a sense of perspective in mind, making sure all of the parallel symmetrical structures like shoulders, hips, things like that they all match up in the same perspective plain. And I think I'm going to go for a kind of an artistic looking pose with one leg, shifted back a bit, just toe to give her a nice sense of balance and shifted weight just to make it a little more interesting. But go with whatever kind of pose works for you. And as you can see, I'm just erasing and adjusting is I go. It's that trial and error. Feel your way through approach that that we preach in just about every project Here. It's, ah, very liberating way to go, making sure I keep my proportions correct. And of course, all of the qualities that we've discussed that that helps define a female figure different from a male. Obviously the curvy, smoother our king lines, the narrower shoulders and wider hips. Those all go a long way to help communicate. This figure is feminine, and in fact, a lot of the just The adjustments that I'll make is I go. They tend to be that that something is making her look more masculine than she's supposed to. And it's. It's often just a simple proportion correction that they can fix that the shoulders or too broad and hips too narrow or just some kind of issue with proportions, trying to come up with a nice gesture for the hands and just trying a few different options just to see what what kind of attitude I'd like her toe have said it before. But other than the face, the hands really are the most expressive body part, so they can communicate an awful lot in a figure like we have here. Opening up liquefy now just to do some proportion corrections here. Changing this the scale of the head, making the neck a bit thinner, changing some of the lines of the breast that weren't looking quite right, and the hip waist ratio got to make sure we get that right as well. These warp tools are very handy to I'm sort of adjusting her center of gravity and making sure it all looks right. But this is just the whittle away and refine until it's got the exact attitude and gesture that you want your your character to have. This is where we answer all of the big picture questions, and we we don't worry about every little detail yet. We'll refine this in our thinking phase immediately after this. But right now, let's just have fun and and start defining all of the broad strokes. I'm gonna add in some detail to the face here and all of the same rules about feminine depictions apply here is, well, smoother our king lines. Not nothing angular or she'll look masculine and just moving these facial features around to make sure that everything looks proportionate and agrees with the perspective that I have established here and just refining, adding in tone and then erasing it away, making it all look, look for offer 11 feature that can always make a face look overly masculine is if the jaw is to square, so I've got to make sure to make that jaw look very understated. There's certain features you can overstate with a female and overstate with a male. For example, the female lips eyelashes. Things like that can be really rendered about as much as you want to. If you try to do that on a male character, it'll make him look feminine. On the flip side of that, if you make a female characters jaw too square or her neck too thick, shouldering Falls is, ah, female every time. So always trying. Pay attention to those general rules about male versus female depictions, and you won't go wrong doing a little bit more refinement, adding in a little detail. And often that's just erasing away. Some of this Boulder line work and you can see already are sketches getting fairly refined , mostly just details. Now that the broad strokes that the basic pose and attitude of the character are in place, this one is, ah well on its way, adding some details just where the hips meet Thea the abdominal muscles, things like that. Now we're gonna start adding a little a little more detail down to the lower body as well, where these little bumps around the knees occur. Some of the musculature we're gonna suggest in the leg to and again. I don't want to over describe that. That's Ah, big no, no, especially with female characters. If you add too much line work or even too much muscle rendering, that will certainly make it seem a lot less feminine. So try and be sparing with your line work here, especially in the ink phase, which which we'll get to in a moment, a little bit of proportion correction and just playing around with a few things to see if I liked them better. But I'd say we're doing pretty well here. Good old liquefy once again. And remember, that's command shift X to enter this mode. It is such a handy tool. Maybe maybe one of my favorite parts about photo shop is is this tool. It's just if you, uh, come up doing doing pencil sketches or pen and ink drawings, this really will seem like a miracle, cause it's so forgiving. And if you're used to having to throw away a drawing just because an arm or a leg was too too long or a head was too big than this. This is Ah, the answer to your prayers right here. A little more refinement. But I'd say this is coming together quite nicely. It looks pretty feminine. I'd say, obviously, hair and other details like that later on will reinforce that. But I want to make sure that the basic body shape and just general feeling of the figure seems feminine. Before I go any farther here, I'll add some hair. Just gonna do something very simple. Kind of a short ladies hairstyle, maybe kind of a bun in the back. I thought that would be kind of cool. A little bit more refinement to the face here that the jaw was still looking a little too square to me. That's better. I position seemed a little little out of whack there. Great. I think this is good to go, so we will start Our inking skin are sinking phase now, So just remember more bold and deliberate line work, adding subtle detail, but basically just just making a second pass to make this all look very clean and deliberate. Nothing really sketchy going on here, sort of a more technical and deliberate description of all of these forms that we've established, and this is all always, ah, good item to present to a client or to a teacher. If if you're this phase and just want a more professional, put together looking version of of your initial concept, this is a great way to go. So just adding in some detail again, being very sparing with line work. I don't want to over describe any features here that could make her her face especially look kind of old and scary if I do that are overly masculine. So being just about as sparing as I can be is few lines, as I can possibly use to describe all of the features, adding in a little more detail around the eyes. But again, she lines as possible a little bit of detail around the hair here and down. We go around the shoulders and the rest of the arms and upper body, but this is just basically tracing and just tryingto make your line work look nicer. All it is, it's it's ah, kind of the part of the project where you can shut off your brain, really put on some music, whatever you need to do to relax and kind of get in the zone and just start letting your hand takeover. So you need a few tries to get this line right? Kind of a long when sometimes the longer lines like, uh, well, these on the legs, For example, Your your hand kind of runs out of steadiness before you get to the end, so I'll take a few tries at that. But again, just hit Undo Command Z and take his many tries is you need to and you'll get there. So trial and error feel your way through Dona. Don't be discouraged if if your project takes a lot more trial and error to get to, ah more ah, more finished state like this. It's nothing to worry about it all and just a little bit more interior detail work. And I'd say this is just about ready to go before we move on. Let's take a look at a couple of common mistakes that we need to avoid. First of all, let's check our proportions. I've done the 7.5 head rule, and that seems to add up just right. But make sure that the arms and legs, torso. All of that has, ah, good natural proportion so that a simple liquefy can fix those things. If any of those seem out of whack on your character, this is a great spot to fix that before moving on. Another thing is, make sure you don't over describe your female character with too much line work. As you can see here, that can have a really strange effect of making making you're seeing muscular or even old in a strange way. And finally, with a female character, just make sure that the breasts seem to be natural and, ah, responding to gravity. I guess a common mistake is to make them to spherical and act like they're defying gravity . So check those common mistakes. Make sure that your project is not hitting on any of those, and then it's, Ah, good place toe. Move forward up next, we'll do value, and I look forward to seeing you there 12. Female Figure - Torso Value: Oh, hi, everyone. This is Hardy. In this section, we will do the value rendering for the face and torso. So let's get started. First of all, noticed that I've added a splash background, and that's something that I described how to do in another video. So feel free to check that out if you'd like to add, that just gives it a nice kind of a fine art feel, and it's very simple to add. But moving on, I've, ah used the magic wand tool on our ink layer to create a silhouette just by selecting the outside and then selecting inverse and filling in a new layer underneath called silhouette . Now that I've got that set up, I can use it to make selections. And here we are, starting our value rendering. I notice I've created another layer layer, one above the silhouette layer. We want to make sure that those two are separate, very important at this phase, and I'm just using that same bright orange color, Uh, and again, that's somewhat arbitrary, just sort of a habit that that I have found that works well for May. But essentially, we're just we're just painting in black and white at this point like value against dark value and also recall that the female and male face projects are a recommended prerequisite to get to this point. So if you're not feeling confident about painting faces up to this point, do feel free to check out those projects, and I think they'll get you right where you need to be. Teoh have some confidence at this phase, but I'm basically just keeping in mind how light would fall on these forms and using that to render in the shapes of the face again, trying to make the features kind of soft and nice and smooth lines just to make this base seem feminine. And also, I'm not over describing things, trying to keep the features somewhat smooth and and not overly pronounced again just to give more of a feminine quality. Another thing to keep in mind is not just have value how light hits the face but also keep your edges in mind. Notice that there are some really hard edges where light value hits dark value, like right under the nose, for example, or right in the corner of the eye, or where the bottom lip and the upper lip meat. Um, those hard edges contrast really nicely with all the other soft edges, like out on the cheeks or the forehead. That's what really makes us look realistic. It's not just the smart use of value, but it's also the use of edges. So that's sort of the next level we need to get to at this point. To make this figure seem realistic. Keep your values in mind just like rendering the sphere and are are simple value exercises . But we also need to pay attention to our edges as well. So those those sharp edges to contrast with all of the soft, smooth skin areas. That's what will really make this look realistic. And already this faces coming together quite nicely. Nice nice mix of hard edges and very soft, smooth value gradations. And that's that's what what really is the key to making all kinds of figure and even creature drawings. Look, our paintings rather look realistic those different kinds of edges. So now ah, pretty happy with where this faces will start, adding in some value to the shoulders and start working on our torso. So basically just letting the face sort of blend into the neck and realize I've kind of forgotten about the Eager, so we'll jump back up there periodically, but making sure that the light sources consistent. It's sort of coming from the upper right at this point. So we're gonna keep Keep going with that for the rest of the figure. Make sure it all adds up. You can't have the face lit in a different way from the rest of the body, for example. But you're starting to add in some some broad areas of tone in defining these basic forms the collarbone, the breast, the shoulder general, very simple shapes that we just start adding in and we'll add definition is we dio trying to imply some ribs kind of the underlying structures like ribs and muscles. But again, that's something to be very light handed with, because if you over describe those features, it'll make your character either look too masculine or even elderly in a strange way. So add those those interesting under the skin details, but be very light handed and used those very, very sparingly because they can. They can get away from you and give you a a result you may not like and again using some some contrasting edges a lot of soft edges out, sort of in the middle of the chest and shoulder. But I've contrasted that with some hard edges here between the breasts where the shoulder meets the breast. Um, all those areas really helped make it seem very realistic. So not only once again to reiterate, Not only do we need our values scheme to be correct, but we're starting to pay attention with value edges, sharp delineations between light value and dark value. Hope that makes sense and adding in the abs here. And it's good to have that delineation where the rib cage becomes kind of con cave like we explored in our torso study exercise. But you don't want to make that overly pronounce. It could make her look kind of, ah, emaciated, like she's starving or something if her ribs local sunken in. So unify that a little bit with some broad strokes. But But it is nice to have that that definition of the rib cage structure and the way it's sort of connects with the abdominal muscles that that can really be some compelling detail to include so check that out in just unifying things a bit. At this phase, it's sort of, ah, back and forth tug of war between sharply defining a lot of detailed structures like ribs and muscles and then just coming back on top of it to soften it with some broad strokes to unify the values and doing some blending here just for that purpose. To make things kind of seem cohesive and all part of the same body and just bringing it all together and going pretty well so far. A little bit more work on the face, in the shoulders. And I'd say this is looking just about right on. The next lecture will start rendering the arms and legs. 13. Female Figure - Arms & Legs Value: Oh, hi, everyone. This is Hardy. In this section, we will continue our value rendering and render the arms and legs. So I'm going to start by rendering the far arm the one that's farther away from us. And on the whole, I'm gonna make this slightly lower in value. Not quite so many light tones, because I wanted to sort of hide over there in the shadows. Since it's farther away, that will help back up the sense of depth that we're trying to establish here. And I'm zooming in on the hand to do a little bit of, ah, finer detail work. Want to see some of those tendons and things like that under the hand under the surface of the skin that did make the hand look realistic. And then we'll just unify that together with some some finer brush strokes, but definitely want to try and pick up some of those details. Hands air just almost. A important is the faces in terms of expressiveness. Is that mentioned before? So just doing a little bit of light blending here to make this stay smooth and don't want those brush strokes to get too chunky? We like a little bit of a layered look, some of that modelled, splotchy nous, but we won't also smooth that out. So everything in in contrast, using all of these tools artistically to help title together, I'm gonna render the near arm going to try and make some muscle definition here. Just make that tricep ridge kind of stand out a little bit There again. Ah, be kind of laid handed with this, if you can. We don't want to over describe the musculature on a female character unless you're trying to make her look especially fitter or muscular. That tends to have a masculine, a masculine izing effect. If if you take that too far, so I'm actually making a mental note, I'm gonna tone that that arm musculature down a little bit when we convert this to a skin tone phase in a later step. It's a similar treatment on the near hand, just making those tendons on the top of the hand pop out and rendering each finger kind of individually. And once that's looking good, I'll just start unifying things together with some broader brush strokes just to tie it all together so that we can see those structures under the skin. But it's all sort of blending together as if it's covered in skin, which, of course it is in reality, so emulating real life whenever we can, taking our cues from from reality just a little bit more smudging in detail work on the tips of the fingers. They think this arm is starting to come together nicely a little bit more detail on this fingers and some refinement. But that's the basic idea, sort of picking out hard edge value cuts to make those muscle shapes and those tendons on the hands and then unifying them all together with a larger brush and larger brush strokes like you see I'm doing here. But I think that's nice. Gonna race away a little bit of a shadow under the armpit. Here. I want to try and keep in mind where objects would cast shadows on one another. And if we're looking at this light source than it stands to reason that that arm would be casting a cast shadow over that area of the armpit and even down the rib cage a little bit , so just a little bit of refinement there. And I think we're just about ready to start thinking about our lower body. Now I'm gonna add in some of these longer stretched out kind of tones just to define the long part of the leg. Gonna make it try to seem like Cem muscles that sort of go head to toe in orientation down the length of the thigh again. Don't want that to be too pronounced. So be sparing with your hard edges, but do include a few. Once again, we have to just trust our own I and do what what seems natural. So if if the muscles seem to pronounce her to built, just add some tones over the top and unify things together again, we're just a race away a little bit. Whatever you need to do to smooth things out and make sure to pace, um, some attention to where the hips made the abdominal Meet the abdominal muscles. That's, ah, an important part to get right. You want them to seem continuous like one just runs into one, the other fairly seamlessly. Um, it's awfully hard to to do that that the tendency is to render one and then render the other and the to consume disconnected. But of course we want this all the seem unified and, like 11 body, a little bit of tone work here just to make the figure is a whole seem round, as if it's curving away from its just trying to sell the whole three dimensional look that we're going for here to make this a believable three dimensional form. And I think we're succeeding for the most part. Similarly, gonna add some detail to the feet probably don't need quite as much as we did on the hands , the feet or just a little bit simpler and maybe not quite as expressive, but all the same, we do want to make sure we can pick out each toe and see the ankle in its correct shape and certainly want the proportions to be correct. Um, feet that are too big or too smaller, Just as distracting is, is when hands are too big or too small, so make sure that you get that to a point that you're happy with. Of course, if you get to the end and things are looking at a proportion than liquefies always available, just adding into more unifying tones here doing a little bit of erasing to make that dark side of the calf sort of fade into the shadows again, trying to sell that three dimensional look. If we think about the entire leg is a cylinder, then of course, it would start fading over into darker values as it curves away from us, adding a little bit of value here to this back leg. Of course, this one will be slightly more in shadow, similar to the far arm and hand. But we do need Teoh render it up all the same. Maybe doesn't need quite as much as attention, but want to keep all of those main structures. The toes, ankle heal, it said. I want that to look correct. Doesn't have to be the best part of your whole painting, but you don't want it to be a distraction that takes away from anything else. A little more detail on the hip here. There's sort of ah, a knobby, bony per true prince, right, right there at the hip that points out, it kind of separates those planes, so I'm I'm refining that just a little bit to try and make this hip to thigh intersection just a little more realistic, and I think that's a huge help. So just sort of adding a little bit more refinement, trying to make the lower body and upper body more cohesive and more realistic looking, adding a few hard cuts there just to make those abdominal muscles pop a little more. And then, of course, a little more unifying tone on top to soften things. So that same tug of war that they were always, always doing between cut edges and then smoothing things out. That certainly applies here, and just a little more refinement with smudging. And I'd say this is just about ready to convert to skin tones, which will do in our next step. 14. Female Figure - Final Polish: Oh, hi, everyone. This is Hardy. In this section, we will convert our value painting too believable skin tones. And at this point, I'd like to advise some viewer discretion. This is a nude figure. Painting in our image is starting to get fairly realistic. We try to keep things fairly PG 13 and his artistic and tasteful as possible. But if anyone feels that they may be offended by nudity, feel free to skip this video diving right in. We're going to create a new layer beneath the value layer, and we're gonna call that skin mod notice. I've gone back up to my value layer, and I'm going to convert it from the bright orange to a more light kind of off white color and on the skin mod layer below. This is where we start adding in our red color variation. It's very important that we had this to the layer below the value layer. And just like in our face projects, we are adding a lot more red to the nose, lips, ears and cheeks. Now expanding that out to the rest of the body, you can add the a little more heavy handed with that red on the fingers and toes, Um, sort sort of the knees as well, but But having that modulation areas of skin where it's more red than in other places, that's what's really gonna give us that that realistic skin tone. And just like that, this goes from being a just a flat value painting to looking pretty good, a skin tones right off the bat. So I'm not gonna merge those two letters together or rather, group them and make a copy so that I can have one merged version. And I'm just going to start picking up tones with the medicine dropper tool again. You just hit Ault when you have the brush tool selected and they'll switch you to the medicine dropper. And I'm just dropping in some shadows, sort of picking up tones, picking up colors from around the painting and just dropping them back in. And I'm just working Teoh sort of even things out a little bit, but also to give some broader dimension noticed that darker value range that we see on the far side of the character, just as I mentioned earlier during our value painting. We're really taking that to the next level here so that this figure seems very three dimensional. But a big part of this step is well, is just picking up tones and in laying them down again, to sort of even things out and make everything look more believable is skin adding a little bit more redness to the nose and cheeks on the face there just to further enhance that that red skin tone modulation that we we went into great detail with on the face project having a little bit more dimension to the mid section here and just sort of smoothing things out? Really, I've got just a flat brush tool here, adding in some skin details, and ah, just making things seem more realistic. Just using that medicine dropper tool a lot hitting Ault to pick up and lay down tones on the fly and some smudging as well to create some more definition. But this is a very free part of the process, just that pick up and lay down trial and error kind of part where we just refine things, make them look better now that we've got our general color palette all on the page and it's looking good This is, Ah, fun part just fine tuning really and refinement, defining things a little more clearly where they may have been just sort of slapped on their during our value painting. This is where we sharpen things up and make everything start to come together, trying to add a bit of a darker value range to the armpit. But I'm kind of going back and forth on that. I don't want that value range to get too low on the skin tones or it won't look quite right . I've also switched to a very high value off white, and I'm adding some very bright highlights. You can see to the tip of the nose in that area in the corner of the eye. A few very bright highlights artfully placed. Don't want overuse this, but that can really go a long way to make your character really go over the edge. Looking realistic, that's a good trick to save near the end of your project and again use it sparingly. We don't want to do this too much, or it will lose its effectiveness. But a few well placed bright highlights can really add to the realism as you can see on the character's face here. Up next, we will add hair and eyes. Now we go into a lot more detail on this on our face projects, but certainly need to add that in here. So we'll go over this briefly as well. Just adding in the whites of the eyes want these two look like simple spheres within the eye sockets. So pretty simple here. Just adding some off white color that I just sampled from the skin tone and blending that out a little bit to make it make it fit. You don't what? They used to be too bold white or they will ring false. And I'm also adding a little bit of shadow because that that brow would be casting a bit of a chateau. I've sampled a dark, and I'm just gonna do the circular iris shape. And this is where you decide where your character is looking. So this is an important step in determining the eventual overall feeling of the character. So make sure you get this right. Her eyes looked a little too wide open like she was shocked or something. So I've made those eyelids relax just a little bit, adding a little bit of a darker value to make those eyes pop and extend our value range. Even Mawr. I think that works very well, toning back the way to those eyes just a little bit more. And once we have that just about where we want it, I'll add a tiny white highlight near the center of the eye. Just like that, we have some pretty believable lies. Now I'll switch back to my chalk brush, and I'm going to start adding in some hair. So I've got a new layer and I am just painting in some wisps of hair, kind of falling down over the face. First thing you want to do is establish a good hairline. You probably weren't painting the skin tone, so scared carefully at the margins so that it established a hairline. So that's all we're doing here is just painting in where hair covers skin and it's cool to make that look kind of wispy, maybe even a few strands falling into the face just for a little added personality. I think that's a cool look. You get to play a hair stylist at this point and just filling that out kind of blocking things in establishing our general. Look, I think I'm gonna go for kind of a dark brown hair here, but feel free to do whatever color you like and now also from our face projects, you'll recall, we do Cem broad kind of X shaped strokes so long crisscrosses essentially and that those highlights will look like wisps of hair kind of crossing over one another. And I'm going progressively lighter here. I'll pick a lighter, color it each past and then I'm just gonna keep adding in those highlights to make that shine of hair. And it's sort of orbits around where the hair part start. So there's a point in the center of her hair where the hair is parting from. We want that highlight to sort of curve around that just again simple, simple value considerations to keep in mind. And, ah, just make the hair look a little shiny. Er and I'm blending out a little bit just to make that all gel together, doing a little bit of adjustment. Think I wanted the value range of the hair to drop down Just a touch. So I've darkened everything and I'm coming back over the top with some more shiny highlights just to make the hair look shiny. And I think that's looking good. We'll call that finished here. Up next. We'll add final polish to our project. You're almost there. Congratulations. So the first thing I'm gonna do is group all of our layers together and make a copy just so that I can have emerged version. So everything's on one layer now, and I can manipulate it all is one, and I've got the smudge tool and I'm going to go around the entire perimeter of the character and just much things out a little bit, kind of treating the edges. And we want to do that a lot on the hair. You can kind of pull out some little wispy hair. It gives it a very realistic border for your hair there, Uh, was doing that about 80% strength, but then we're gonna go around the perimeter of all of the skin with about a 10 or a 20% strength. Just have blend that in ever so slightly very hard Cut edges have ah tendency to flatten things out and kill all of that good three dimensional rendering that we've done. So that's Ah, good opportunity, Teoh. Smooth those edges out, make everything look look good. And really, guys, I'm just doing some last minute touch ups here. Just time to take a step back, maybe even take a break from the project and come back at it with fresh eyes and see what needs adjustment. And I just notice a few areas where a few colors or a few values look like they could use some improvement. Also a good opportunity to go into liquefy thought that face looked just a little bit too, too short, top to bottom. So wanted toe lengthen in a bid. Actually makes her look a bit older, which I think is good and correcting a few proportions. Remember earlier on? I wanted to tone down the musculature on that arm, so I'm gonna do so here, thinking her hands just a little bit smaller. I thought they looked a little large and ever so slightly just just manipulating these proportions, raising the knee just a bit. So all of these issues you may have noticed at any point you're painting can be corrected right here at the very end. So a very handy way to do some final touches to your project. And I think that's looking just right now is a almost varia. Keep saying very final touch. But this is one of the very last things we do is at a secondary light source. So I've grabbed an off white color and have created a new layer, and I'm just adding in some very bright, very strong. And they're a little 10 lights, kind of a secondary light. Sources. If there is some kind of ah, spotlight off in the distance to the characters, are the left of the page Rather, and this is rounds thing at everything out makes it look a little more three dimensional. And it's also just sort of a nice painterly feature to add in. It didn't need it necessarily toe look three dimensional. But it just makes everything look nice and more more painterly, I think, and also can give it a little more dimension as well. So any plane of the body that would be facing in that direction Yeah, it's good to add just a little bit. You can see that really makes the abdominal area look a lot more realistic is, well, just kind of adds to the charm of your painting. Makes makes everything look nice and well put together. So a great final step in, uh, it's also a lot of fun. You can experiment with color on this. It's it's odd. Sometimes the color of your secondary light sores can have a profound effect on the overall mood of your painting. So since you've got that on its own layer, you can just do a hue saturation adjustment and change it toe. Any color you want could be bright green, bright purple anything. But I'm going for more traditional kind of studio art. Skin tone, muted tones here. So I went with just an off white and, of course, adding a little bit of that. That secondary highlight to the hair as well, just around everything out. And then I think that works very nicely. I noticed a little bit of the leg was not quite adding up, so I'm smudging that in a little bit just to trim things down. And I think this is just about there, create a new layer above the background. It said it to multiply, and I'm just painting in a little cash shadow on the floor. Gonna do a motion blur filter just to make that nice and smooth. And with that, I think we just about have a finished painting. Congratulations on making it through the female figure 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. 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 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 15. Male Figure - Sketch & Ink: Oh, hi, everyone. This is Hardy and welcome to the male figure project. In this video, we will take care of the sketch and ink steps. So let's get started. I've got a blank canvas and as always, this is the toughest part. You just have to dive in and start making marks. So I'm gonna select my chalk brush. I've got a sketch layer that I've set down to about 40% opacity, and I'm just going to start making vague shapes, starting with the shape of the head. And we'll just take it from there going down into the shoulders. I want to have this guy in a slightly kind of heroic pose, so you'll notice we're looking up at him just a little bit that something will get into a lot more in the character design course. It just make sure your character seem a lot more important in Epic if you're looking up at him so I'm going for a very subtle bit of that with this one. But this will mostly just be a straight up figure drawing so nothing to character driven or story telling lies that we're getting into here. Just a good old character drawing mostly exploring the anatomy and proportions and a rendering exercise here but never too early to start thinking about these things. So I've got my basic head and torso shaping up nicely, and I'm just sort of letting 11 shape build into the next one arm bone connected to the neck bone, etcetera and moving things around. Just using those transform tools toe to make things work, however I want them to. And if it doesn't look right the first time, we just a race and keep going. It's that feel our way through approach that we're always talking about, so just moving lines around and making new ones are racing away trial and error until it works. That's that's basically the key. It makes me wonder how I ever did a pencil drawing that you have to get right the first time I've gotten so used toe all of these wonderful tools that the digital medium offered. So now that our torso and head shoulders air working pretty well together, we'll start thinking about the lower body, thinking about all of those those curves shapes that define the leg that we discussed in the individual leg rendering demonstration. And I hope each of those those body part rendering exercise is really did a lot for you because, essentially, that's all we're doing here is putting each one of those lessons together, assembling everything just so that we can do a head to toe figure and a little bit of liquefied to adjust these proportions. I want him to have very masculine features, but I noticed the shoulders were so broad that it almost looked like a kind of comic book exaggeration. And that's totally fine to do if you want to make this guy really exaggerated musculature, those air a ton of fun to do. But I'm going to try to keep things pretty true to life. Obviously this guys pretty well built in rather idealized like we did in our female figure , drawing on painting but keeping it reasonable and just giving him a basic healthy musculature. But nothing too over the top, just wanting this to be a nice demonstration of of a good, good generic figure. So I want the proportions to be correct. Wanted to have, ah, a nice sense of gesture and his pose, but it's all pretty pretty vanilla just ah, basic stuff to get all of these features correct is an exercise. So that's it. Really not. Know too much storytelling going on here. Remember it at this step, we want to imagine Cem perspective lines. So notice I've I've got the eyes, nostrils, corners of the mouth and shoulders, all of those parallel, symmetrical features on either side of the body. We want those to work correctly in a perspective plane. So if we imagine this guy and some kind of a three dimensional cube, those those features will line up correctly. That's what makes him look three dimensional is I've got those far shoulder or far features sort of receding away in a realistic angle. Perspective is a very important tool to create the illusion of three dimensions. So keep that in mind as we mess with lines here and nudge things around. Just a Keep that perspective in mind. Imagine him in three dimensional space and it'll look much more realistic. And of course, that's super easy to correct. If you notice something is a little out of whack halfway through the sketch, just ah erased or use, um, transform tools, liquefy whatever you need infinitely forgiving. You can rework it as much as you want to, and it's really, really not that hard, making his shoulders a little bit broader. I want to give him Ah, a little bit of exaggeration just to make him look really masculine. And I'm realizing right now it looks like I am drawing Dr Manhattan from Watchmen. So that is completely unintentional and will give him what will avoid Ah, blue skin tones when we do the painting. And that should take care of hat. But, well, it really looks like him in the mid section. We're gonna keep it PG 13. So giving him sort of a Kindle treatment there is, we call it and moving on, rendering the feet in a little more detail just to define the toes a little bit. Now that I've got the rough broad strokes in place, some kind of coming back even in the sketch layer, just to give it sort of some second level details, picking out individual digits on the toes in the hands and sort of refining some of these muscle muscle shapes. And he seemed a little out of balance to me, son, I'm actually sliding his feet mawr under him just to give him a better sense of balance. I think that's working well, adjusting some of these hips structures so that they work in the perspective. Plane notice. I put just a little roll around the love handles area, even Ah, someone with 2% body fat. There's still a little bit of ah, bulge there, so something something they're realistic to include. So enough, of course, in a person with with more body fat, you can make that love handle area a lot more prominent and force. We will talk about all the different areas where fat occurs, and it doesn't hurt quite differently in men and women. So we'll discuss that in detail. Be sure to check out that video if you haven't already so making this far hand a little more detailed. Just want these fingers to look relaxed. Don't want him to have clinched fists or anything, but basically just trying to make them look relaxed and normal. Don't don't want too much expressiveness going on there. Obviously, if you have his hands in claw shapes or if their clenched fists than that, that implies a ton of drama and That's not really what we're going for here. Just a basic figure study. So I'm keeping everything pretty much just relaxed. A bit of a Contra pasta type of pose there with his legs, notice his far leg, the knee is locked and the front leg. I've tried to make it seem a little bit like it's bending, and he's got all of his weight on that far leg. So just a little bit of interest, something a little bit cooler than just flat footed evenly on both feet, something that makes a nicer figure drawing, in my opinion. But go with whatever kind of pose you like and feel free to get much more creative than I'm being here. This is just a simple figure exercise and wanted to be more demonstrative and show all of these techniques I want to show. But by all means, don't let this limit your creativity. Give him a cool comic book, pose heaven, punching or kicking something. If you want, you'll get to render all the musculature just like I'm going to do anyway. So have as much fun as you want. Or, of course, feel free to copy mine exactly if you'd like to, really? Whatever would would help your learning process the most and make it is interesting and fun is possible. That's always the most effective way to learn. So whatever works best for you. Just a last minute liquefied treatment here. But I think this is looking very good. He's got some realistic proportions, looks good in masculine. The musculature all looks pretty well where it belongs to sew up. Next, we will move on to our thinking phase and thinking is optional at this point. But a good idea if you want toe kind of nail things down a little bit further. So we're gonna go ahead and do that in this project. But you don't really have to as long as you have a solid outer contour that you can make your blocked in silhouette. That's essentially all you need to go to the next step, which would be the value painting. But I'm gonna go ahead and do an inking step. Justo really solidify this guy. So it started with a new layer. I've named it Inc and I'm just gonna go around the entire drawing and add some line work trying to keep the line way pretty uniform just so that it looks clean and steady. So I'm actually just using ah, flat round brush there. Nothing. Nothing to artistic or complicated, really. Just a basic brown inking brush and going around the head here. Gonna need a little bit of fine line work on these facial features. But I remember one of our don't do steps are things to avoid is over describing with with your thinking layer. So don't want that to be two prominent or he can start looking all weird and scary if if we do too much line work, I gave him a nice prominent geologist to make him super masculine. This is our male figure, so exaggerating things just a little bit as we did with the female character. But a good demonstration of all the things you do to make your character seem masculine and of course, do absolutely take it as far as you want to in your your project. A little bit of detail work since, um, wrinkles on the hands I'm going to start to define that far contour of the torso. All of these cool abdominal muscles just sort of making those little lines kind of in and out of the far edge really makes it look like a little muscle shapes overlapping. So some cool tricks to make your Leinart interesting and really make him look like a living , breathing person is just all these little muscle shapes coming down to the rest of the torso on the near side, going down into the hips and down into the legs. Remember, those are king shapes a little bit different on the inside and outside of the leg. Longer, smoother arcs on the outer leg and outer calf. And then you have those slightly rounder, bold shapes on the inside of the thigh and inside of the calf, so those muscles air just a little bit different There. There's that nice, round calf muscle with that to be a smoother curve. There we go and doing the far leg here, those little bumps that defined the knee, where all of those muscles shapes kind of smushed together, especially in a locked leg like we have there with the knee locked back and again that shows that his weight is onus far leg, and I'm just going to define the toes and we're getting to a finish line, drawing a little bit of interior detail. Here we'll start with the face, define his eyes and some of these little wrinkles around the face that defined that. But we don't want to over describe it, and I think that's coming together pretty nicely. That's just about right, not too much. Or he'll start looking old and weird, but enough to define each of those primary structures of the face. A little bit of fine line work on the interior just toe. Give some of those muscle structures a little more definition, and I think we'll we'll be in good shape. There we go to find these shoulder muscles at horseshoe shape of the tricep muscle and just the round shape of the bicep and a little bit of the tendons of his forearm, belly button and a little bit of line work on his wrists and legs. And I think we will be just about ready to block this guy in and start a value painting. So that's what we'll do up next. I hope you found this helpful 16. Male Figure - Value: Hi, everyone. This is Hardy. In this lecture. We will add value to our painting and we'll start with the head and torso, and later we'll add the arms and legs. So let's get started. I first noticed that I've added a splash background and feel free to check out the video on how to create those. But I would think it's a pretty nice way to make your figure painting look a little more professional. So check that out. But of course, a flat color background works just fine as well, and I'm doing our usual steps for converting our Inc step into a silhouette. We just select the inverse of the outer perimeter of the ink line drawing and then then fill it in with that scion color. And I made a copy of the ink layer and then merged merged it together with the silhouette. So we've got a dark silhouette with but barely visible ink. Drawing on top of it is our guideline, and now I've created a new layer and we're starting our value painting. So just like always, I've got that bright orange color for the value painting. I just really like the way that interacts with the scion color. It's kind of just a habit. I've developed it. It just has a cool look to it. But of course, all we're worried about is value at this point, So this could even be black and white if you prefer toe to do that. But this is a method that's worked well for me, So give it a try and we're just going to start with the face. Hopefully, by this point you've taken the painting faces course, and this is all familiar, but basically we're trying to just pick out the three dimensional forms of the face and later of the body. So we're keeping the light source in mind. In this case, it's up and to the right side of the page here, and we're imagining all of the planes of the face that air facing upwards towards the light . And of course, the darker ones air the planes that are facing down, away from the light sores. And if you can imagine that basic sphere rendering exercise that we did back in art fundamentals, that's really all there is to it. It's just imagining the way light interacts with three dimensional shapes. And, of course, here all the changes is it's a slightly more complex form with the face. We have to be very careful because each little area of the face can really change the expression and feeling of the character, depending on just the movement of slight marks. If you have ah, mouth turned up at the corner, it'll look like a smirk. Or if the eyes are too, you know, squinted up, he can look angry. My new little things affect the expression and attitude of your character. So this is worth taking some time and really giving ah, a lot of treatment to to get that right. Of course, this is basically just a flat figure study, So I'm not going for much attitude or expression. Just basically deadpan face and neutral pose more of an anatomical study and to help us learn how to render parts of the body. But still, we want to make sure we're giving those areas of the face of proper treatment so that he looks appropriately neutral in this case. But the face is looking pretty good. I'm gonna start bringing some of these values down to the neck and shoulders and remember the way we we make realistic looking musculature is with those value cuts that I've mentioned in other figure paintings. We have to have a nice mix between soft gradations between light and dark, sort of smooth brush, airbrush looking great Asians from light to dark. But we need that to be paired with hard cuts between light and dark, and anywhere you have one of those hard cuts. It makes it look like a sharp definition of musculature. So right here around the shoulder, notice on putting some really bright lights right around those dark edges of the shoulder, and that really makes it look like realistic musculature makes this guy look like he's got some very defined muscles. And, of course, later I'll go on top of that with a larger brush and sort of unify things together. But you still want those cuts to show through. That's how how you make realistic looking musculature And that, of course, carries over to creature rendering as well. So I'll just start unifying things together just a little bit. Put a little bit of light on this far shoulder is well, notice that neck muscle is kind of casting a shadow. And that's, Ah, cool look, sort of unifying things together here. And the head and shoulders are already looking pretty realistic. Pretty convincing chest and shoulder musculature. So we'll go down a little farther into the torso. I'm picking out some little ribs shapes and, of course, that so defined right now that he looks like he's starving or something, but will unify that together later. But you still want those those shapes to kind of show through. So that's why I started with that. I kind of work. I make things super defined to begin with, and then I come back and unify them later. So notice to start with this guy just looks ridiculously defined. Muscle lives. But then we'll smooth that out with some unifying brushwork over the top. I'm doing the old six pack Abs here looks extremely ripped here, but I'm going to dial that back. Um, common mistake is to make a very musculature abs look like it's just a bunch of tennis balls kind of round spheres. That's really not the way it works there. More complex, kind of triangular shapes on. Actually, there's quite a bit of variability between individuals. So check out some photos online worth studying a little bit because it's a feature a lot of people pay attention to. And another thing I want to keep in mind is that area right under the ribs, where those ab muscles start. I'm going to erase a way to make that look like it sinks back in just a little bit because right under the ribs, the abs sort of contour inwards a little bit down towards the belly button, and then they the abs, sort of start coming out again. So I've got that nice curve that were showing with some value here, where it curves inward, right under the ribs and then outward a little bit right at the belly button. So that's basically all you need to do to make some very convincing abs. If you're rendering a superhero than dial that way up, make make those value cuts really distinct, light and dark, and that'll make those muscles seem super defined. But for this guy basically trying to make him look like he's athletic and in shape, but not that over the top musculature that you often see in in character paintings or comic books things like that. So just sort of, ah, middle of the road here, musculature in defining those ab muscles on the far side a little bit. Notice that when we're curving from the light side to the dark side of the figure that those definitions can become really distinct because they're those sharp contrast between light and dark values. So a cool place to hide a lot of details is right in that area where it switches from light to dark. Just a little bit of refinement. Putting two very bright little value points on the pelvis right where the hips kind of turned toe legs there these little bony spines that happen under the skin and ah, that's, ah, cool feature to, uh, to include just for some added realism. But with that, I'd say the torso and head are looking great. So next will jump to the limbs, the arms and legs, and to start with the bicep muscle on the front to sort of a spherical shape. And then the tricep with that sharp cut on the back, that sort of horseshoe muscle shape and again just defining muscles sharply to begin with. And then all unified things later with some broad brushstrokes. Same thing with the hand. I'm really defining all of those little tendons under the skin that that make the fingers move. Ah, that'll make it look really realistic after we unify it together. Another way to think about this is imagine that you're painting muscles first and then later coming back and adding skin on top of them. Ah, little bit gross, but that's ah, good way to make sense of it. You need to do all of the underlying anatomy muscle shapes first, and then we just sort of unify things together. It's almost like you're covering it with skin, and that's when it starts looking realistic, a little bit more definition here on the bicep and will unify that together. Put the skin on top, so to speak. And that's a pretty realistic looking arm. If if you need any help with how to get all of these muscle shapes right, just a practice on those individual body part rendering exercises that we have in this course some good information there and, of course, check out the painting parts of the body. Infographic is, well, a lot of good Cici stuff there, and we're just really putting all the pieces together in this one but kind of justice. Some of all those parts that we've learned before and putting it together in a nice pose here for, ah, better presentation, put a little attention into this far arm. We don't need this one to be quite as detailed or as bright, because it will be somewhat in shadow. But once again just defining all of those those structures and then we'll unify them together with with broader brush strokes. So picking out some of those little tendons, some detail for the individual fingers and some of those wrinkles of the palm of the hand. And that's about all we need for this one. Don't need too much attention on these far, far side elements and just smudging that out a little bit for a little more smoothness. Same thing on the chest, just a little bit of, ah, smoothing out treatment. Some of these textured brush strokes were getting a little too textured, so sometimes just a little bit of smudging can can make brushstrokes look incredibly realistic. It's skin with just a little bit of refinement, a little more brightness on this light shoulder again want those value distinctions between light and dark to have some nice sharp cuts in certain places? Cause it's that that union between soft contrast and hard cuts that that make this look so much like realistic skin That's ah, really, I know I repeat that over and over. But that that might be the most important lesson I can teach is that both of those elements need to be present, or it won't quite look right. So now we'll start with some of the long strap muscles of the thigh and basically just long , our king brushstrokes, just like we talked about in the long the line drawing, um, and again picking out those individual muscle shapes to begin with with some hard cuts and then unifying them together. And just like that, it looks like a pretty muscular legs with skin on top. You can see what's going on beneath the surface, but not much. Uh, not so much that it seems like an odd super muscle superhero or something like that, picking out some of those little lumpy spiritual shapes around the kneecap, and then we'll start rendering the calf. Remember the calf. If it's pointed towards us like this, there's sort of a sharp keel shape in the in the very front. It sort of separates the inner calf from the outer calf, and it's kind of a sharp line. Same with that tendon that goes across the ankle that we see there. That's an important feature to include. So if we we see that sharp line in the front of the calf sort of separating one side from the others or like peak of the mountain separating the two sides and that looks pretty realistic, I'm gonna add in some toe shapes, just toe. Give a little bit of attention to the foot. Feet can often be sort of an afterthought, especially if they're sort of the last thing you get to working from head to toe. It's easy to sort of start giving up by the time you get two feet. Take a break if you need to, because feet need Teoh look just as well rendered as his hands and everything else. So take your time on those, adding a little bit of value to this far leg again, not quite as bright as the near side but we do need Teoh. Add some attention to that as well. Some of those lumpy spirituals shapes around the knee again, and that's coming along pretty well. This part of the leg will be mostly in shadow, so we don't need to put too much attention into that side. But with that, I'd see this value painting is just about finished up. Next will convert this to realistic skin tones. 17. Male Figure - Final Polish: Hi, everyone. This is Hardy. In this lecture, we will convert our value painting into believable skin tones, and then we'll go on to add final polish. So let's get started. I've got my value painting here. I'm gonna make a copy of that just is a safety net, and then we'll convert our value painting to a very high key pale yellow color just about like that. Underneath that, I'm creating a new layer called skin mod. And this is where we'll add in those red tones sort of beneath the surface to sort of modulate the skin tones a bit. We want the nose, cheeks, ears and lips to be very red, and then we'll leave the scalp and beard areas showing that scion color through. And that variation in skin tone is what makes it look like realistic skin rather than just plastic. And I'll carry that concept down to the rest of the body. For the most part, you can add this red skin tone just about everywhere else on the body, but we want the hands and feet to be just a little stronger in that red coloration than the rest of the body and just like that. We've taken a flat value painting, and that looks like fairly realistic skin tones. So I'm gonna merge those two together so that we're just painting skin tones on one layer. And at this part, I just start sampling colors by switching to that medicine dropper tool by hitting Ault option. And I'm just picking up colors and laying them down. This is sort of the unification. Part of the painting will smooth things out, even out some of these more textured brushstrokes. But we do this just by picking up colors and laying them back down. It has sort of an averaging effect, and it'll start smoothing a lot of these rougher brushstrokes around. And remember this part of the abs I'm going to create sort of a shadow just so that it looks like the area between the ribs and the belly button sort of curves inwards. And I think that's a really nice, realistic effect, but just sort of jumping all over the place, unifying tones and adding shadows where they need to be just refining, really, and it's already looking pretty realistic is skin tone and and we're enhancing the three dimensional effect as well. So jumping all over the figure here just to to try and get this effect evenly added around , and it helps me not get too wrapped up in details on any one area if I just sort of jump around so I may seem a little, uh, distracted or all over the place here, but it's just because I do better jumping around and not getting too bogged down on any one part of the body. But, uh, we need to remember to keep things kind of cohesive and unified in our treatment or otherwise. The guy's legs might look totally different from his shoulders, etcetera. So refining the face a little bit grabbing some of those varied skin tones in the face, just Teoh make things look more realistic. There's certainly more variation in the face than there is anywhere else in the body. For the most part of the body is uniform again. The fingers and toes are a little bit redder than the rest of the skin of the body, but we don't see the same level of variation as we do here on the face, adding some highlights, and I've switched to that squashed circle shaped brush. I really like the way that was working on our last face project, so I'm going to try some of that. Here is Well, uh, just makes for some cool, sketchy little marks that I'm going to try and carry in here Makes it look a little more painterly. I think so. I need need effect there and ah, working well on the figure as well, Refining things a bit on the face here. I think that's looking nice. Of course, we'll come back later and add in eyes, but I think I'm gonna lead this guy sort of bald rather than putting too much attention into hair for him, this is mostly just a figure study were mostly worried about just musculature and getting getting the figure right. So we're not gonna mess with hair on this guy. I think that looks realistic enough is just a shaved head shaved face kind of a look, just a little bit of detail making that shaved beard area little more and even on the face . Adding some skin details, jumping ahead, adding just a little bit of reflected light on the other side of that chest muscle and some on the bicep two but sort of anchoring the value range, adding some darks there to the belly button in the armpit just to make that all seem a little more realistic. And then just unifying things a little bit more with this brush tool. And this has come a long way. If you want to rewind to just the value painting, you'll see how far we've come in just a short amount of time. This refined the process is a really nice organic process where you can just sort of switch your mind off and just let your hands do the work of just picking up and laying down tone until things start looking right to you. It's a really fun, fun part. You sort of done all the hard work, and now you can just let your mind relax and listen to some music and do the fun stuff, getting a bright highlight to that thigh muscle just to make it pop a little bit. Same thing on some of these abdominal muscles, but just picking some little areas where you want to add a little more shine and, in contrast, just to make him a little more interesting. But as far as refinement goes, I think this is coming along well. We're just about there adding, in a little more attention here to the face, smudging things out. Just toe. Make them nice and smooth, sort of evening out the feet here. You never want to feed to be an afterthought. So, uh, don't forget to give them a little bit of attention to before you totally move on and notice that far lag and far hand are much lower in value than the near leg in near hand that's very delivered. It makes it seem, or three dimensional toe have those slightly farther away parts be a lower in value, kind of like they're hidden in shadow. Makes everything look a good bit more three dimensional and just adding a little bit of darkness to the toes. But you want that top surface of the foot to have some high value, since it's facing upwards towards our light sores. I think that's looking pretty nice and realistic. Just a little bit of smudging here to refine things. I think this is coming together very nicely. Evening out the face just a little bit more shadow on the far side again, just toe around him out. Make him seem more three dimensional. But he certainly pretty convincing at this point, smoothing out a little bit more on the legs here you want. You don't want to kill all those muscles that you've described beneath the skin. If you smooth it out too much, those will disappear. So you kind of just wanted to be a suggestion of those structures beneath the surface of the skin. But you don't want it to be so defined, so it's sort of a balance. You have to strike between defining those structures under the skin but also making it look like it is indeed skin on the surface and not just muscles showing through. If that makes sense, adding a little bit of very bright value a few parts just the shoulder bicep chest here. We want those to be very nice and shiny, and I think that's coming along well, defining these neck muscles a little bit more, and I think we're in good shape. I'm going to start working on the eyes here so we'll just paint in the white part of the eye and filling in that lower eyelid a little bit so that it's not just floating out there . What there to be a realistic junction between the white of the eye and the eyelid. And just by grabbing some of that dark color I'm painting in that round Irish shape. And again, be careful to have those irises looking in the same direction. We don't want him to be cross eyed or lazy eyed or anything. And just like that, it it seems pretty realistic. Like like somebody looking at you at bright white highlight in the center of the eye and then a little bit of bright iris color on the interior. And just like that, eyes were pretty realistic. We're gonna have some secondary light sources now. I've created a new layer, and on this dark side of the face, I'm gonna add some bright lights along the outer edge, and this really does a great job of anchoring the three dimensionality of your. Your figure makes him look really round if there's another light source shining on that far side, and it also keeps the dark side of your face from getting too dark but creates a nice contrast over there a really cool effect. So rumor to leave some darks on your initial value painting so that you can come back and add these new light sources. It'll give them a nice contrast to sit on if that part of the face is a little darker and we're gonna carry that down to the rest of the body, down to the neck, a little bit of light bouncing under the chin there and out here into the shoulder muscles that's looking pretty nice and realistic You can carry this down is far as you want. I tend to stop around the middle of the body just because I figured the light source wouldn't wouldn't shine all the way down there. That sort of start fading it out mainly wanted to be a feature of the face to draw attention there, but a little bit of reflected light on the lower body or midsection. That's great, too, of course. Don't feel obligated to follow this exact format. Put reflected lights or secondary light sources wherever you think they would work. But I'm doing a little more smudging here. Just toe. Even these new light sources out make them seem like they're smooth on the skin and this guy is really coming together a little bit more smudging work on the skin tone. I just noticed a few rough spots over here that I want to smooth out. And it's ah, of course, never too late to edit anything with photo shop racing back these these eye spots. I thought it was a little too bright in the iris. I wanted to darken that just a bit. And I'm refining the nose, sort of taking some final looks at everything to see where we want all these last elements to be before we call this a finished painting. And I think we're just about there. This is working very well. Secondary light sources look good. He certainly looks three dimensional and his proportions impose are all looking good. So with that, I'd say we just about have a finished painting will merge this all into one layer, and I'm going to go around the outer edges and smudged just about everything, sort of treating the edges so nothing looks too sharp and contrast e treating the edges, smoothing things out. But with that, I think we're good to go. Congratulations on making it through the male figure 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 within maden 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. 18. Charcoal Drawing - Sketch & Ink: everyone. This is hardy and welcome to the charcoal figure drawing project. This is going to be a super cool simulation of traditional charcoal figure drawing that I think you'll really enjoy, and you seriously might even come up with something cool enough to frame and hang in your house. We'll stick to black and white only on this project, but it will still be quite a challenge. Let's consider this a Level five intermediate project. I would definitely recommend completing both the male and female figure projects before attempting this one. So let's get started. Here we have are blank canvases always, and it's just best to sort of dive in and start making marks. Now I have to admit on this one it took me a lot of failed attempts just to get to a sketch that I like. So I didn't wanna have have all you guys just sitting through failure after failure. So I've just cut out all of the the ones that I ended up trashing and just showing the one that we're gonna end up going ahead with. So just know that if if you need to start over a bunch of times, I due to its it's nothing to be worried about. In fact, it's part of the beauty of photo Shop is you can without any cost, just trash something and start over if you're not liking it. So it took me quite a few it orations to get to one that I liked, Uh, because there's a very particular kind of pose and attitude that I'm after here. A lot of these really nice charcoal figure drawings have one of those models just posing in a nice, classical, relaxed kind of pose, and I wanted to really come up with something like this. So trying to find just the right pose went with a female subject here. Just thought that would be better for this kind of charcoal drawing and tons of great references on the Web for you to check out for inspiration. But I would recommend really trying to come up with your own pose if you can. Of course, if you just want to do this is a rendering exercise and certainly feel free to use a photo reference. Of course, if if you have someone available to model for you that that would be the best. But I didn't have that. So just sort of making this up as I go and tryingto come up with a a particular kind of attitude in my pose. Just relaxed, serene kind of mood. Want this to be something that would be a nice piece of fine art, so something you'd be comfortable hanging on the wall once it's finished. So keeping all of those factors in mind when coming up with my pose? And that's one of the reasons this was so tough in particulars. This this was such a specific kind of pose that I wanted to get right. So we're going for a seated position female, and she's in sort of a relaxed pose with her legs crossed loosely sort of looking up at the sky and ah, or the ceiling. This is probably an indoor. I would hope so. But just refining things as I go, you could see how roughly I started, and now I'm just starting to erase away and refined things, all with that chalk brush that I use most often for sketching and you can see once I start getting more confident with my marks, I'm using Boulder line work. I'm going to skip the inking pass in this one just because that that isn't really something you would do in a charcoal drawing, so it doesn't really fit here, keeping things pretty loose overall. Want to give it a really nice, whimsical, fine art feel? So that's what I'm trying to do here. And that's the reason we're just gonna take it to, ah, tight sketch before we start rendering and we're gonna skip that inking step. So I think my basic female anatomy is coming together pretty well here. Remember broader hips in sort of a narrower upper body, trying to give her some feminine facial features. It'll be in profile. So I thought that jaw was a little too over state. It's a reeling that back in a little bit and wanted to have a pretty thin neck. I'll very feminine and delicate. Think that's gonna be a great fit, especially for the kind of fine art finished product that I'm I'm hoping to land on, and I think that's working well. Just adjusting Cem proportions sort of feeling my way through is, as we always do with this step, where we're just making broad decisions about the pose and general feel have that far hand kind of wrapping around the knee. And I think the poses just about established here. I think that's just right. Looks like something you'd see in a fine art class. If anybody has ever had the opportunity to take one of these live model figure joined classes there, there really worthwhile. And before I it was before I learned how to use digital art, I would love an opportunity to do this again. But I haven't since college really worthwhile thing to take. Take part in if if you have an opportunity and some really cool drawings come of it. But the beauty of photo shop is you don't really have to go to an expensive art school or anything like that. Everything that you want to do, you can do for practically no money and no inconvenience. You can do just about any kind of you art that you want from from your desk. So hopefully ah, showing you a lot of great ways. Teoh, use this software. One of my one of my very favorite uses right here. And you're not gonna believe how realistic that the charcoal drawing effect can be once we once we apply to it, but we'll get to that in the next video. For now, we're just working on refining the sketch and seeing how we like it coming together very well. And I'm attempting a slightly different position for that far arm. I thought I'd have it draped down a little bit, but I think I like it. Sort of like she has both elbows crossed around that knee. I think that works well, smoothing out the our cover back and sort of defining some of those back muscles. Don't want over define her musculature. Otherwise, she might end up looking a little too masculine. But that's basically what we're doing here and now. A little bit of liquefied just to adjust some proportions. Magic. And you certainly could not do this in a charcoal drawing. So I think we might even be improving on the process here, and we'll get to a final product that's almost almost a school. In fact, I doubt many people could even tell it was computer generated. Once you're done, if if you follow these steps correctly, so I think you're really gonna like it coming together very well, We're just going to define a little bit of hair now just to finish her out. I usually like rendering the figures without hair to start and then adding it in later just said it doesn't affect proportions. Too much cause. Hair could be sort of a wild card when you're trying to measure out proportions, but I think we're all set there. Justin, this eyebrow should look a little angry, and I want her to just look nice and serene, so I just raise that eyebrow up slightly and with just a few more refinements, I think this sketch is just about there. So up next we'll start our simulation of a charcoal drawing. 19. Charcoal Drawing - Value: Oh, everyone, this is Hardy. In this lecture, we will apply our charcoal texture and into a value painting. This step is the real magic trick, and you won't believe how much this feels like a traditional charcoal drawing. First, you will need a good quality photo of some charcoal texture. I bought rights to this one on a stock photo website for about $10. Unfortunately, that means that I can't share it on this website for free. But there are tons of images that you can use on the Web for free if it's just for your own practice. So jumping back to our project here, I've set up a silhouette layer just by using the magic wand tool on the sketch layers. We always do. So I've got my image blocked in here, and it made a copy of the sketch layer just to be safe, just to have an extra gonna dark in the background, a sort of one everything to have a a dark key to start with. I want the silhouette and the background to be pretty dark grays, because I wanted to seem like we've filled in an entire page with charcoal and then we're So we're gonna gonna work up from, ah, dark ground. So that's looking good. I'm just contracting the selection and trimming the outside just a little bit by selecting inverse and hitting clear. But I think that's good to go. So up next, let's apply our charcoal texture. You can see layer to This is the charcoal photo that I'm using, and I'm gonna set that too soft light blending very important soft light and presto, just like that. Suddenly this looks like a page filled with charcoal marks that we've sketched on top of, and it immediately looks practically indistinguishable from a traditional drawing. So a cool place to start. And now we can just start having fun all the freedom of photo shop. But it's gonna look and feel very convincingly like a traditional charcoal drawing. So I've created a layer underneath the sketch and silhouette, and I'm just sort of establishing a ground for this subject to be sitting on. I wanted to be sort of like she's in a spotlight, so some shadow and some light areas around to contrast with that, just to establish our light source and also to sort of ground her with the environment. A lot of times these these images air done with a lot of cool drapery that the model is sitting on and certainly give that a try. But I thought I'd keep it simple here. Just make it a flat ground. It's picking up a lot of that cool charcoal texture anyway, so I think that's plenty of interest. And it already has really grounded her in the environment beautifully. So I've created another layer on top of the silhouette this time, and we're just going to start our value drawing. This will be a little bit simpler since we're not doing this in color. We won't have to convert this to skin tones or anything like that. So it's basically just the value step from all the other projects that we've done. But I'm going to really take my time with this making, making it nice and refined and trying to really preserve that traditional fine art. I kind of feel so this is really a great opportunity toe. Just enjoy a project, really get into the craft of the brushstrokes and and how to make it look just like one of those really nice traditional charcoal drawings that have so much personality. And hopefully, if if I can walk this narrow line, we'll end up with something worthy of hanging in a room in our house or sharing with friends something like that. It should ever really nice, sophisticated, fine art feel and and honestly, a big part of that is just that charcoal texture. It's amazing how much sophistication that lends to a simple value drawing it. It just makes it look traditional. And and that's just something that its immediately appealing. So just ah, taking my time here, still working on the face, smudging things out. You can do pretty much any kind of brushwork that you want, and it's not gonna upset that charcoal feel that we're seeing. And that's because all of these layers were working on their all underneath that layer two at the top, that charcoal photo set on a soft, light blending mode. So as long as that is at the top of our layers stack, you could do practically anything you want to on the layers beneath, and it's still gonna have that effect applied to it, and it was really look convincingly like you're working on charcoal paper and just sort of a racing away. These light and you're not even not even getting your hands dirty. It's the best of both worlds in a really cool way to come up with something convincingly traditional looking without much effort. Without much time. I don't have to go to an art studio. Are, ah, hire a model or anything like that? It's all at your fingertips, especially with this technique, So hope. Hope you get a lot out of this process. It's ah, really neat, really need process and just refining things a bit kind of feeling out the value range that I wanna go for. One thing with a charcoal drawing is it's almost impossible to get pure white or really pure black on charcoal. It has an effective bringing things slightly closer to the middle of the value range. So I'm going to try not to go super dynamic with my value range. I'm gonna keep it a little more in the middle than I normally would still wanted to be stretched out pretty good, have a nice range of lights and darks, but gonna try to avoid pure white, for example, and it will get pretty dark in places, but maybe not all the way to pure black either. Just ah, no, to keep in mind, Teoh preserve that that charcoal feel just adding some little shiny air is of skin tone to the face. And I think we're ready to start moving down the rest of the body, just adding some light around the neck, blending that out a little bit. Just imagine you're sort of smudging with your finger on that charcoal paper. Uh, you can you can really imagine that well with how convincing this process is and sort of defining this shoulder muscles want some nice, hard value edges to contrast with all the nice smooth areas on the neck and muscles. So remember, I probably say this every time. But that is really one of the keys to rendering realistic human figures, musculature, even creatures is. You need to have both hard value edges and soft value edges. So areas where the values fade out gradually to a nice, soft radiant, and you want those to be paired with areas where it's a sharp cut from from light to dark, and you can see that going on around the shoulders sort of that area underneath the armpit , where the ribs start, Even some of these little back muscles that I'm defining Those were immediately looking pretty believable just because of some of those hard cuts in the value edges and because they are paired with soft value edges as well. So I hope that makes sense, something I say a lot. But it's It's also something kind of hard to explain in words. So please, please do let me know if that's ever unclear, because it's an essential concept. I hope that the artwork demonstrations speak for themselves. But if I'm failing, putting that into words, please let me know and I'll try and describe that better, a little bit of a racing away, just a smooth things out a little bit. I would normally advise against every using soft brushes, excessively but honestly with the charcoal texture There. You can even use an airbrush on this, and it'll still look like nice, you know, textured brushstrokes just because of that charcoal layer on top. So, in a way, this this technique kind of hides mistakes. It lets you get away with some more, possibly even sloppy or amateur looking brushwork because that charcoal layer just makes everything look so charming and realistically traditional that you can make all kinds of mistakes. It would look bad if it was not there and it'll still look cool because because that charcoal layer is working for you and looking really realistic, making everything look cool. I really like how this is coming. I really like how it looks unfinished right now. Sometimes those quick figure studies that you see in an artist sketch book where it's sketched in but only half rendered those air pretty cool. So, honestly, I could print this out and put it on the wall and and I think it would make some nice wall art. But I'm gonna go ahead and render this thing fully and see how far we can take this. But really enjoying this technique. And I hope I hope you like this as much as I do. So that angle of the hip is gonna be a big selling point on this. I want that to be really realistic, so I'm making sure I have appropriate blends of hard value edges and soft value edges, and I think that's working well a little bit of blending just to refine that and tucking that light value in behind the folding, the leg and the hip just to make that nice, hard value edge to pair with all the nice, softer Grady INTs we have going on on her back and midsection. And I think that's working well, adding Cem. Slightly lighter values just to put a little more pop in certain areas, areas that I want to draw attention to. And I think that works really well, looks very believably like skin and honestly. Ah, again, a big part of that is just the charcoal texture. It it makes everything much more forgiving, and everything just seems to sort of work for you much more easily than it usually does. It's it's just, ah, a really great, great way to go a little more highlighting here, just toe. Make that leg shine especially. I want that bright valued to tuck up right under that cast shadow that her elbow is casting down on her leg that that adds a ton of realism. If you can arrange things in a way to have some cast shadows and put a nice, bright highlight right before the shadow starts to have a nice juxtaposition of, ah, of light and dark and have that sort of strapped like muscle that crosses over the outside of the knee towards her fingers. There want that to be nicely defined as well, but we don't want her to get too muscular and will start dropping in some tones here on her calf in her lower leg. A lot of these charcoal drawings seem to have an area of focus where the rendering is done with a lot of detail in a lot of value contrast, and then it sort of fades out a little bit towards the periphery. So I certainly want her upper body and face to be more of a focus. So I might try something like that to where I used a little bit less contrast and a little bit less detail out near the edge of the drawing so her feet won't be nearly as detailed as her face, for example, or the muscles of her back. But still, we can't just leave those undone, so I'm I'm putting in a little time, putting in some good value edges as well and trying to make that look pretty realistic. If you need any brush ups on any particular parts of the body, please do check out all of the individual parts of the body videos. Once again, I would hope you've seen them before getting to this point. But if you happen to skip over to this one, feel free to check those out. If if you need a little brush up on any particular parts of the body, because we do go into a good bit of detail on each and I am sort of just touching on on every body part in this project and the other projects, so feel free to check those out. Just a little more refinement. I'm flipping the canvas pretty regularly is you'll notice just to keep everything fresh in my eye. It's a good way to make everything. Keep it from getting stagnant. In your minds, I guess, is a good way to put it. So every time you flip it, it seems like a new drawing to your eye again. Any mistakes that you're making, we'll just jump out at you so really cool. Way to keep from going down any any wrong paths. I have a keyboard shortcut set up for that. It's something I had to do myself by editing photo shops, keyboard shortcuts. It's not something that comes with software by default, but it's certainly something I would recommend just a little more blending and refinement here. And I think for the most part, this all the main elements are in place. In the next video, we're going to refine our value painting a little bit, but it will be basically more of the same steps and just sharpen up things and do a few changes to our charcoal layer as well. But basically this is is on its way. I hope you like it up to this point. I hope your project is going well. See how different it looks without that charcoal layer. It's amazing. So up next we'll refine things and add a little final polish and get to our finished product. 20. Charcoal Drawing - Final Polish: Hi, everyone. This is hardy. In this sexual, we will refine our value painting and had final polish. So let's get started. Really? From here on out, it's gonna be sort of just adding subtle changes to the lights and darks just to make every little skin edge and every muscle seem realistic and just fine tuning the value range. I'm going over a lot of this with with large brushes, just a generalized things a good bit. Add some subtle details, toe other places just to give them a smudge. Pappas. We can. This is that part of a traditional charcoal drawing, where the paper has just taken about as much medium as it possibly can, and you have to sort of start leaving things alone. But with photo shop, we can rework as much as we want. And there's really no consequence of another great advantage of the digital medium. Hope, Hope. Hope you're enjoying that as much as I am so really just value refinements, picking up tone and laying it down again, hitting that medicine dropper tool by hitting Ault on the keyboard, heading a little detail of the eyes, sort of smudging out some eyelashes just to make her look a little more feminine. I don't wanna and heavy makeup or anything like that, but I think that works well with with the traditional model pose we've got going on here. Not too much makeup and a little more value refinement. Just generalizing things you can see. I'm using a very large brush, Justo, at a little bit of unity to some of that upper body area. Make raise the skin tone key just a little bit. And I also like how, in general, her head and shoulders and back are a slightly higher value than her legs. It just makes it seem like whatever the light sources is a little higher up and is shining just a little more brightly on her upper body. So I've actually switched to just a simple soft round airbrush here, and as you can see it, it's incredible. It doesn't really kill that textured look that we get because of that charcoal layer working for us on top of everything. So this is just I wanted to smooth things out, make a few areas of her skin seemed very smooth, and it's still not getting to airbrush. He looking because of that charcoal layer working for us. Notice that I did copy the charcoal layer on top. I did that before I started recording the video. There's nothing too important going on. I just wanted a slightly darker area of the charcoal to be at the bottom as well, so it sort of just copied and pasted it onto itself just to give me a little bit more of a dark ground for that texture near the bottom, just because the feet in lower body we're looking strangely more high key than the rest, just because the way that photo was set up, so no big deal there. If you did notice that it's just a very subtle change. And, of course I'm sure you will be working with a different charcoal photo altogether. So those those can affect parts of your image in different ways. But frankly, it's all just part of the charm. Little irregularities like that just make it seem, or realistically, traditional, so something I changed. But don't be troubled by things like that. The more more little imperfections like that your image has, I think the more charm and whimsy is added as Well, so another great, great way that this charcoal layer just in sort of carry the whole project for you. It's ah, really neat technique. A little more airbrushing. Just toe. Make some really nice, Smooth, great Asians, those really difficult effects to get in traditional charcoal, you just have to smudge and smudge to get gradations that soft. So seems like we're doing some really masterful charcoal work here when all we're just doing is spraying on paint with an airbrush. So I've created a new layer. I'm doing some secondary light sources when I have some light bouncing off of that light spot on the floor. So certainly on on the underside some of those areas that are facing the ground I want to have some nice pronounced reflected lights and that'll make it seem much more three dimensional. And also ah, another homage to the charcoal medium. You also see really nice reflected lights on these kind of figure drawings. So I wanted to include that here. I think that works very well, makes everything very three dimensional and add some charm as well. Just flipping things back and forth to get a look. Make sure it all looks OK and then we're gonna add in some hair. I'm just being very loose and expressive here, just like I would if if this were a real charcoal drawing. What the hair to Seymour brushstroke hand of the artist type of thing. Don't want that to look super realistic. It's kind of one of those things that grounds your drawing. Sometimes these figure drawings look so realistic that you have to look for a certain brushstroke just to see if it's a photograph or not. Now, I don't think we're quite to photo realism here, but adding a few areas of loose brushwork kind of makes it charming. That makes it seem like hand of the artist can be seen in the work. And that's something that viewers really enjoy, especially when it's contrast ID with with areas of high realism like we're getting in certain parts of this. So I've grouped all of these layers together and made a copy and then merged one of those copies so that I've got everything on one layer here, and I'm just smudging around the entire perimeter of of the the figure here, adding some darks I wanted to anchor the value range. So I've made her hair a good bit darker and ground, and I think that made it much more dynamic. And I'm just smudging out some of the edges. You don't want any sharp cut edges around the perimeter that can really have the effect of flattening your image and making it seem dull. So a good nearly last step to take is to treat all of your edges with some smudging. And that's what I'm doing here. I'm also trying to smudge out a lot of those dark sketch lines that are still still visible . Want them to see more like subtle gradations of dark tone around the perimeter? You'll just make everywhere that fades to dark seem like it's curving around three dimensionally. So a nice added bonus of having that sketch still visible is weaken. Blend it out and it just makes all these forms seem even more three dimensional and round, just like we want. So a subtle step. I'm taking their but one that's really worthwhile and doing a little bit of fine tuning brushwork as I go here, adding just a little more detail to the hands. But for the most part. I want those to kind of fade out. One things to start getting very shadowy is we get away from the face and upper body just like we talked about it, sort of the artist's way of drawing the viewer's attention toe toe where where it needs to be. So that's where my high areas of contrast are where I want the focus to be. But we still have to do a little bit of treatment, all parts of the drawing or it'll seem unfinished in a bad way. So that's what I'm doing here. A little bit more refinement, smudging out thes perimeter edges and even filing away some of the rough marks that might still be there from from the sketch part. And this is starting to look very close to ah, finished drawing with just more subtle manipulation of the values and treatment of the edges. This one is is just about ready to go, so adding a little more reflected light to these areas that are facing the ground a little more roundness and refinement here, the chest kind of tug of war between sharp muscle definition but still wanting everything to be unified and look like it's covered in skin and all kind of nice and cohesive, and I think that works very nicely, adding a few little details here. Some fingernails just toe to have the slightest indication of some skin surface detail. But again, I don't want those fingers to be a focal point. And now a little bit of liquefying. There have been a few proportion issues that have been bugging me, but now that this is just about done and it's all merged on one layer, I can refine things so her jaw and lower lip seem to be sticking out a little too much. And I also changed the shape of her nose just a little. And it's amazing. Even at this late stage you can make these changes. I never would have been possible. In a traditional drawing, I can remember doing a life size figure drawing in college. I got to the very end and realized that her head was just massively too big and the rest of it was great. It looked very realistic, but I practically had to throw it away just because I could not unsee how mis proportioned the head was so another beautiful part of Photoshopped. Even when you're almost a the end of the project like we are here, you can change. These things have changed the proportions of her feet and legs while I was talking as well . And it nothing. It's never too late to save a drawing if if something seems out of whack, even near the end of a project, and you can fix it and make it make it look perfect before you ready toe, call it finished. And with that, I think this is just about a finished painting. Congratulations on completing the charcoal figure project. Let's take a look back at our project steps and see how far we've gone. We started with a loose, gestural figure sketch. We then blocked it in and added a charcoal texture on soft, light blending mode. We then did a value painting and refined everything until it looked like a realistic charcoal figure study. All in all, we went from a blank canvas to a final product that we could be very proud of and hanging our house. I hope you've enjoyed this project. Please join us in future courses where we'll apply what we've learned here and take it to the next level 21. Course Recap: congratulations on completing the painting figures. Course. We've gone over basic proportions. How to render each area of the body. We've done both male and female figure painting project, and we've done a supercool charcoal figure drawing that we could be very proud of. Put some work so that the entire course community can see what a rock star you become. If you would like to continue to sharpen your figure rendering skills, try these course challenging course. Challenge. One. Turn a mannequin sketch into a refined sketch. Loosely sketch five mannequin figures to come up with a variety of poses and gestures. Pick your favorite one and refine it into a realistic sketch of the human body. Of course, challenge to detailed rendering of a body part. Pick a body part hand foot torso, whatever and do a detailed black and white rendering course challenge. Three. Full color figure painting here is where we will put all of our knowledge together Sketch Inc and render a full color figure painting. It could be based on a photo or even a live model, but you'll know that you have really reached the next level when you can create a realistic human figure from memory. This is a tough challenge, but keep after it. These skills will serve you well. That's it for the painting figures. Course. I hope you've gotten a lot out of these lessons, and I hope to see you again in future courses where we'll build on everything that we've learned here.