Photoshop Mastercalss for Artists

1. Welcome! Let's Learn!: put down your pencil and pick up your stylists. It's done during your ideas to the infinite digital campus. Digital tools have changed the way we create our, and this introductory course is all about how to use digital art tools, introducing you to the hard way on training you on the software. We'll take a look at the coal features and functionality. Digital Audax, getting you up to speed and working digital quickly and efficiently from using brushes, layers and creating your own canvases to working with selections and transformations you'll be creating in no time using Photoshopped as a base, you'll learn about the common shade features and digital on applications, which means you'll be able to start using most on a fairly easy All right, let's get started. 2. Introduction: Welcome to Digital are tools, Essentials. My name's Scott Harris. In this course, we're going to take a look at the general functionality available in digital art software and help you get started in the digital art world. We also take a brief look at the hardware required to do digital art from creating a canvas to drawing and painting in the applications, using layers, selections and navigating. We're gonna cover it in a pretty broad sense. Hopefully, you'll get a nice strong foundation to begin drawing and painting. I want you to feel pretty confident in what you're learning, And if you think there's anything I can add or a section that you don't understand saying up front, please do let me know. I'd be very happy to amend the course or add extra content if needed. Let's get started. 3. Hardware and Software Options: before we get into the nitty gritty details off how digital art software works. When you take a look, it's the software and hardware that you need. In order to create digital arts, you're gonna need a computer. You're gonna need digital art software, and you're going to need a drawing tablet. No need to go and buy the most expensive off any of these particular things in terms of a computer with you, go PC or Mac isn't really gonna make much of a difference. Most of the applications are on both platforms. Also, laptop or desktop doesn't make much of a difference, either. But obviously, with a laptop, you're gonna have a Biltmore portability. Personally, I use a Mac book pro and most computers these days, your mid range models are easily able to handle very high resolution digital artwork files moving on to software. They are a wealth off options available. Photoshopped, however, is by far the industry standard. It's got tons and tons and tons of great features and very, very extensive support. So really, it's your go to It's very expensive to buy in US dollars. I think it's just over 1000 U. S. dollars to purchase a hard copy. However, Adobe does have a dog Photoshopped Seat C, which is their monthly subscription, and you can get that for about 10 to $15 a month. The next big competitors is coral painter Carl Painter is primarily differentiated from photo shop in Vet. It offers very realistic brushes and very realistic papers so that paint really looks like paint. It drops lack pain. It drives like paint. Watercolors look like water color, and they absorb into the papers. It's very nice if you want a very traditional look to your work, However. That said, Carl Painter tends to be very resource intensive, and you may need ah higher in machine if you if painter is gonna be your application off choice clips. Studio paint is somewhat of a new entry into the market. It's got a bit of features from Carl Painter and a bit of features from photo Shop, and it really isn't all around. Great application. One of the based features of clips studio pain is its price. It's roughly about 50 U. S. Dollars, and you really get your money's worth from it. Finally, another big contender is auto discs sketchbook. Pro Sketchbook Pro is also very versatile as many of the same features of the other applications. And if I'm not mistaken, it's around the team to $50 price range as well. Whether you're going subscription or you'd like to buy a hard copy over the software, all of the software options listed support pin input, which is essentially what we really want you to be using. When we're doing digital art, you don't draw and paint with a mass. It's gonna be very hard to coordinate. And just in general, it's not made for drawing and painting. You're going to need a digital drawing tablet now. There are a bunch of options on the market. There are a bunch of other brains. However, I'm going to really push back on products here. And the reason is, it's not because I'm necessarily a fan of welcome rain per se rather that they really all the best. There are other options available, but so far nothing has ever come close to the accuracy and the quality of the product you get with wacko. I'm saying this from having used various products of the lost 10 years, the first kind of drawing tell you get is basically this device you see in front of you. This kind of drawing tablet essentially connects to your PC via USB port, and it doesn't actually display in image. Some people mistakenly think these tablets displayed image. They buy them and they get disappointed later on. These tablets range from about $500 plus depends on what side you're getting can be cheaper , can be a little bit more expensive, and essentially the pin interacts with this tablet and then Merisel movements on the screen . It doesn't work like a mass way. The position is relative to whatever you're doing. Rather, the position is exactly accurate to your screen. So if you move the P into the top right on the tablet, you'll be on the top right on screen, into the bottom. Left on the table. You'll be on the bottom left on the screen doesn't move around like a mouse. This is pretty much essential. My recommended sizes to go either the medium or large sizes. In this tablet form factor, the current work online is called The Welcome Into US Pro Line. Once again, they have two lines, pro and just standard into us. I would recommend the pro if you're serious about digital art. If you've got a bit more off a budget play with, you might consider the welcome sent IK companion Siri's. Essentially, it's a full computer. It's portable as a battery, and it's very much like a laptop without a keyboard, and you can draw directly on the display. These models currently are all only 13 inches in size, so that's just slightly around the side, slightly wider than an a four page but slightly shorter than a full page as well. They're ready, great machines. Depending on the model you buy, it can act as a display that connects to an external computer as well. So you can use it as a desktops antique as well, as well as using it in its portable mode so it can be a tablet for a computer. Or it could be a unscreened drawing experience in itself. These are a little pricey, though, running from about 2500 up to $2000 or more, depending on the model and specifications. This I would only really recommend if you're really wanting to pursue our professionally Finally probably one of the most desired pieces of art. Kit is a full blown welcomes. Antique No. One on the screen of the moment is the work on 22 HD. It's a 22 inch onscreen display, and it basically connects to your desktop PC or your laptop. This is very much a professional's tool, and I would caution against buying one of these too soon. While you're still learning, it's very, very expensive, also raining for about $2000 upwards, and essentially, it gives a age to efficiency. Artists can work foster and more rapidly. But again, I would recommend this for the working professional. Now that you have a general idea off the equipment and the tools you'll need Weaken dive into looking at how in general digital arts software works. 4. Let's Look at the Menu Bar: Welcome to the first lesson, of course. Let's take a look at the general tools and general overview off the menus and the options available to you in digital art software. This is Photoshopped CC, and what you see in front of you is essentially the canvas. A set of tools on the left hand side, some pellets on the right hand side. Now most of the software allows you to edit loud of these various tools, pellets and the tools options, and you can move around to your liking. Also, we have the menus at the top, and they give you various functionality and options for the software and for the peace that you may be working on. All right, let's start with a look at just the general menu structure of the top, which is fairly common in the various arts after is available. So the farm in you, as is usually the case it handles opening files, closing files in creating new files, important exporting files in different formats and printing and so forth. Nothing too crazy. They. The edit menu has a host of options that apply within the document. Your usual cut copy paste and so forth. But more importantly, the transformation tools are in. The edit menu will usually be using shortcut keys for these, but this lets you scale, rotate, skew, distort do perspective as well as the walk tools on elements of a piece or various selections that you create. Additionally, the keyboard shortcuts also in the edit menu in Photo shop, which is handy to know if you want to change them, was your color settings, and you're kind of profiles. The image menu controls the primarily the image size that Ken besides, which could modify as well as the adjustments menu. Now, not a lot. Software will necessarily have these options. This is essentially digital adjustments, adjusting the brightness, the contrast levels. Color balancing can also do color D saturation and various other adjustments. And this is in the image of menu I mean for sure. It also allows you to change the mode if you want to work, and perhaps seem why Korg, Although I always recommend RGB color. Of course, image rotation is also here, particularly flip canvas, horizontally or vertically, which is useful for chicken if you have mistakes in your work. The Layers menu has all the options for layers. When this is the layers palette on the bottom right, the top menu controls everything to do with time and text. The select menu has a host of options for selections that you make, and I can say that certainly in digital arts, elections have made digital art somewhat faster than traditional art one of the primary reasons apart from layers that digital it can be so fasters. If you say drawn I in the wrong place, you can simply selected and move it into the correct place rather than having to erase it and redraw Dechaine and selections are extremely useful for speeding up your workflow in both drawing and painting. You might find it actually quite tricky to work in applications that don't have enough selection options or limited selection options, because the more selection options you have, the Billy able you are to manipulate things. But we'll go through selections later on. In course, the full term in you. Most allegations don't have a full too many Photoshopped does, because it's obviously primarily photo orientated, and these are various filters there. Late to do blows sharpens things similar to what you might do it some other photo editing applications. The three D menu controls all the three D features of photo shop. When you're doing three D models and things like that, we don't really use this. So we can just pretty much ignore that won the View menu, since he's controlling the zooms, how the screen fits and just generally how things look, especially on the canvas area and then the window menu. It controls all the various windows. Now, Fellowship actually has quite a few palette windows. Various tools have sub options, and those can be accessed in the pallets. But we'll look at the pellets just now. If you want to view all hide a window, this is the wanted to do it as well as arranging and saving your work spaces. So if you have custom lattes off the pellets and then lastly, the help menu, which has all the help options and you know he helped gods and various things about the software and most of these features will be in most art applications 5. General Tools Overview: Now that we've looked at the menus, let's take a look at some of the tools that you may see in digital art applications on the tense side here, the first we have is just the general positioning tool allows us to move objects and manipulate things on the various layers. The next two we have is the marquee selection tool, very common tool, and essentially it lets you drag a rectangle or a square shape to create a selection. And then you can modify that selection using a modified key, which in photo shop is the command keep. The marquee selection also comes in an elliptical marquee tool, which is essentially a an ellipse. You can hold shift to constrain the proportions. That means keep it into a perfect circle, and conversely, you can do the same thing with the rectangular marquee tool, so constraining here to a square. It's very useful when you just want to select a large area of something. When I select a circular area on something, the next tool is the free hand selection tool is called the lasso tool, but more common name for it. And essentially, you can just draw out your selection in any particular shape that you want. The trip also offers a polygonal S O toole, which I like to call the point to point lasso tool. Because since you just add points point to point, and it's useful for being more accurate, you cannot to do complex curves with this tool. If you put a lot off small points together, people won't know that it's actually really done in a polygon fashion so you can get some nice, accurate selections using the Winter Point or the polygonal. Lesser, too. They're awesome. Other sub options, as you see in these selections, just gonna go through the general options. The crop tool essentially allows you to crop the canvas and change its size. Very similar to feature that's in most photo editing abscess to crop The canvas Photo shop is great in this respect because it adds a rule of thirds guideline for compositional purposes, which is very useful, and we'll learn about this in the composition course. All right, the eyedropper tool is quite crucial. You have a piece of artwork and you want to continue painting the particular value or a color that you've used and simply use the eyedropper tool to pick it now, I would say most of the time you won't be clicking the icon. You'll be on the brush tool, which will go through Justyna, and you'll hold the old key, both Windows and Mac. It's the same key, and this instantly switches to the are dropper. So if you were painting something, you can quickly Ulta color pick and struck an old color pick and struck an elk Olympic and stroke. You do it very quickly that right? Talking about the brush tool. There were two subsets of the brush tool in photo shop. Trump is the brush tool and the pencil tool now other on applications will list separate tools. For example, you'll have a market tool, a pinto, a clutch pencil tool, you know, a oil brush tool, and they have a lot of preset settings for those, so that those tools behave very similarly to the traditional media. Of course, based on the software you're using, however, a photo shop leaves everything up to the brush tool, and it's brushes and every single brush. So this is the brush selection panel here. Every single brush has various sittings in the brush sittings area over here that can be adjusted. Now. I know this may look a little complicated. If you've never seen it before, it's It's not that complicated, although you can sit quietly, Thora off options to have a brush behave in the way you'd like it to behave. There are shaped dynamics, which control the brushes shape its size based on various sitting, such as the pain pressure off your tablet and so on and so forth. And this is photo shops way off, giving you different media options but using a single tool. And I think both systems are great, whether you having multiple tools, pins and markets and so forth or using different brushes. So, for example, in photo shots, if I select a brush that is a hard round brush, I'm gonna get a hard round edged Russia over here, and you can see the edges are quite shop on that brush. Versus If I took a soft round preset and these are the most common Russia's in photo shop. I get a very airbrushed look, and then, of course, you get two more complex brushes. Let's take the chalk brush as a bit of a chalky look to it. You just do a single tap on the sides. You can see it has a bit of a nice little rough edge, and that's very nice. Wouldn't painting, so Photo shops. Brush Tool also has its own independent opacity control. That is, how transparent he painters and the flow control how much painters coming out as you press with your stylists. Additionally, you can add and remove brush presets. Create your own. You can modify the angle and be size off the brush, the sort of squash of the brush here and based on the tool your using your get additional options, such as the hard round brush. You can change its size option here, and it's hardness. And sizing is very important in digital art applications. Brush sizing. Usually it's the square brackets on your keyboard. They'll quickly modify up and down the brush size right, and that's essentially the brush tool. The tool below it is the pencil to and the pencil tool in the brush tool. Both share the brush options palette. However, the pencil tool is a tool I think is very useful when you want to get extremely sharp edges because the pencil is basically going to full indirect pixels without modifying the ages off the brush very much. It keeps everything very sharp and crisp, so that's just sort of a small tip, if you will. If you want something that has a very, very sharp edge, perhaps one of your focal points needs very sharp edges. The pencil tool can help you achieve that. Let's move on to the eraser tool. Shortcut for that is E, and that's a generally generally very common shortcut. If you're using Carl painted, a shortcut would be in the Rays. Tool is very similar to the pencil and brush tool uses. The same brush is so you can get the same effects except, of course, in a way that it's going to be raising elements. The Grady Int tool is fairly useful. Kemi failures will not. All the applications have this. It allows you to create different color Grady INTs, and then it will fill them onto the scene. So, for example, I choose this dark purple to sort of a pinkish color. I can full the entire scene with that radiant now. Usually you'd use this in the men away. You're filling a color too transparent. So agency hurts, showing white to transparent. You can then select a color. Let's say we take red and we could Full ridge too transparent. So it's delete this left. We can just do a gentle, radiant there when you want to do overlays and other special effects when you want to, perhaps do a a sky full. Or would have you the Grady in full allowed. You do do nice, smooth fools from a color too transparent or from a color to another color. The Great, until also has different full options. For example, there's the radio Grady into tool, and it does a radio Grady Inner Circle grating, and there are a bunch of other options here as well. We're not gonna go too in depth on first, but this can be a very efficient time saver to use other tools here. The smudge tool, the shop in the blow to the Blur two will blur elements of the shopping total shopping elements. That smudge tool will very much smudge things, So let's just do a quick example. This much tool, it's often ah, I've noticed it's being shunned upon in the past although many any honest today are using it fairly effectively to blend colors if they're not lending a normal way and you can see this much tool, that is exactly how it sounds. It's Mudge's smudges elements, not forgetting blurs as if you were using your finger on which paints very similar to that and also smudge tool. Once again, it also shares the same brushes and the brush modifications so you can have this much tool doing some very cool things, which will look at later. In addition, we have essentially exposure modification tools. That's the Dodge tool in the burn tool and these tools basically Latin and dark and highlights mid turns or shadows. However, I don't really want to go too deep into that right now. We look at them later. They can be overused and used incorrectly and miss up a piece of artwork because of a misunderstanding of how to use those tools. We have the pain tool for parts not very important to us, that text tool just a very typical text tool. You draw a text block you can talk with have you inside it, and that's good when you're doing layouts or putting texting to your works in the selection tool. And then we have the shape tour, which allows you to draw shapes, rectangle, rounded rectangle, ellipse and then also the custom shape to, which gives you a bunch of custom shapes that you can pop into your pieces or modify, or what have you can also create your own custom shapes. In Photoshopped, most application should have a shape to at least offering a rectangle and in in lips when you want to draw perfect ellipses, Perfect rectangles and funny, the line tool lets you draw straight lines or varying thickness is very useful because, of course, you don't put a ruler on your screen not saying that's not doable, but perhaps not practical. So the line tool allows us to draw perfectly straight lines right for laying our perspective grids and what have you. Lastly, the hand tool allows you to move your canvas. So based on your screen sitting, holding space bar and pressing, you'll be able to move your canvas around grateful when you're wanting to look around a piece and view various sections up close into Penn. Finally, we have the magnification tool, and that's your typical magnification tool. It's very common in most applications. I use the Navigator window, and most of us will also have this, and it has little zoom bar here, so I control my resume, but they I find that very efficient. Then we have the foreground and background color boxes, and in the masking tool we won't go too deep into those. Right now, we'll look at the color palette Shorty, and that is essentially the general tools overview. Most applications share a lot of these tools, particularly the selection tools, the brush tools and the smudge tool. So let's move on and take a look at the pellets on offer. 6. General Palettes Overview: All right, let's take a quick look at the various pallets that you might see in a digital application . First of all, the layers palette is probably one of the most common and most useful features that will find in a digital on application. It lets you have multiple layers of transparency on top of one another that you can draw and paint on, allowing you to have a good degree of flexibility of what you put where. For example, you may have a background on one layer, a painted character on another layer and perhaps, ah, light or some other elements. Another, and having them on separate layers allows you to move them around, change the composition freely and do a multitude of other options. Let's put very important in photo shop, and most of the applications can also control the rapacity. Use various layer modes, which will look into later and create new layers and group them into folders. Some of the more common options available. Next, very common pellet you will see, is the color palette. This may appear differently in different applications. You may see color wheels, color squares and what have you Essentially, it allows you to pick the hue that you want and modify the saturation and the value off that huge. The swatches palette is also very common because it allows you to build your own color sets by dragging colors and drinking your favorite colors and your favorite since that you've created and putting them here and having them for easy access. Lastly, another very common window that you'll see another common pellet you'll see, is the navigator palette. The navigate appellate lets you navigate the document, zoom in pan tilt and also gives you, in general a real time view that real time thumbnail view or an overall view off your piece . So, for example, if you're really zoomed in and you're making changes to the document over here, the thumbnail view here that they never get appellate presents allows you to always see things in context, which is very important. We don't get lost in small details only to Zuma and realize that piece doesn't really look good. We've made some change, and these are the three off the most common pellets. The user interface is also very modular, and you'll find that across most of the applications as well you can move windows, rearrange windows, pop things out with them in different areas or locations where you'd prefer them to be. Whatever is more useful to you could move the tools around as well. And the window menu gives you access to all the various windows that relate to the various tools. All right, so we've gone through the tools, the menus and the pallets, and this has been a general overview off some of the options you may see in digital art software. Let's move on. 7. Canvas Size and Resolution: Let's take a look at the canvas size and resolution sittings. When you create a new document, you usually find that in the file new area off the application you often presented with a window that gives you various options for the canvas. Usually, we want to have our canvas sit two pixels. The applications will give you interest sentiments, millimeters and so forth. And, of course, you're free to choose whichever relates more to you logically. So if you want to create an a four document or whatever the case may be, you use centimeters and use the a four page dimensions. The allegations will also give you presets. For example, Photoshopped gives international paper presets or US paper presets, for example, and you can choose letter legal employed sizes. International paper. We have a four, a six, a five, a three and various other sizes. However, it's often very good toe work in pixels because this gives us a good idea of the aimed resolution off the document. Now, these days, most midrange computers are capable of handling fairly high resolution artwork, found sizes and canvas sizes, and I like to work with at least a minimum width and height of at least 2000 with a resolution of 300 pixels per inch. Essentially, this resolution is quite important. Below this is the less pictures that will be per inch off the document and the mobile. Lucky and pixelated. The image will be screen resolution that is, most computer monitors, generally speaking, running a resolution of about 72 pixels per inch, which is fairly low. Most printed images in magazines and so forth run it approximately 300 dots per inch, which is a printing sent in that very clear and very nice. So 300 pixels per inch is perhaps pretty much optimal. Also, the width and the height in their relationship to each other is going to give you different proportions. So, for example, if you want to do a landscape, obviously the with needs to be brought in. The heart needs to be narrower, and of course, the opposite will apply for portraiture. Additionally, the applications will also give you option for the background contents, whether you want the background to be transparent, whether you would like it to be what whatever other call you to be. Some applications will show you the image science. This is the raw image size, so the actual source file size. When you export your image and your painting to a J pic file or a P and G far too often given additional options there, and usually those files will be about 5 to 10 megs or what have you. And you can adjust them to be much smaller if you need to. These windows will also give you the opportunity, usually to name the document here, so that when you save it will already save it as that name. You don't have to read, top the name. And essentially, this is the canvas size and resolution sittings when you're creating a new document. 8. Setting up your Canvas: in many art applications. When you create a new document using the file new dialogue, you're often creating a document that just ends up having a single background layer and what ends up happening. Or it's It's a common pitfall, especially when you're starting out with digital art is to just start painting and drawing on the actual background. And the disadvantage of this is that these elements are not separate from the background there just a single flat layer. And so it's always important to remember to any layer of transparency on top before you begin painting, and that gives you flexibility and control over the actual elements that you're drawing and painting. On that layer. You can move them around. You can transform them to manipulate them and change their various shapes and sizes. And um, you can erase is to the background, whereas if you were working on a single layer, you to raise to whatever the background color is so but raised to the rid that we see there is the background color that perhaps usually not what you want, so it's important to always remember to add that transparent top in there. Additionally, Macon Art recommendation, which is to work on a 50% gray background, so why it can often be very drawing. It can also be very glaring dipping of the lighting set up in your office space or the room that you work in. And it's often difficult to tell with the color ranges and very rangers, while working well with white as a background because of its high contrast in nature. Of course, in painting, White represents the highest brightness that we can achieve on a two D surface, right? So I would like to do is select the background there and full the background layer with a 50% gray color sort of photo shop. You can go get it full. Most applications should have this option, and first up is a pre city, a 50% gray click OK, and you have a great background to work on. You can then continue drawing and painting as you usually would, with a nice turned great background, just basically the middle value or a five on a value scale, and you can just carry on as usual, is is if you had a great piece off paper. If we look at the color picker over here, which you can double click on in Photoshopped to achieve it or utilizing this meaning 50% gray is approximately here. It's about halfway through the value scale off white and black halfway through, and it's just a nice, balanced Cray, so that's something to keep in mind. 9. Navigating!: when we're drawing or painting digitally, One of the most common things we're gonna be doing is panning around and navigating around up piece. So let's take a bit of a deep dive into how we do this very efficiently. The Navigator window is out. Promise point of contact for this. It gives us the ability to zoom and also pan across the image by dragging the small window across the piece. It's allows us to get to where we need to work quite efficiently. We can also pan across the image, using the hand tool on the canvas. Most applications support the space Barkey shortcut for this. Additionally, zooming in an act can also be done by various shortcut keys, touch trips or touch wheels that may be on your tablet or your sin teak monitor. Whatever the case may be now, modern applications are also offering the ability to rotate. This didn't used to be a feature, but it is now, and it's extremely useful. In photo shop. You can hit the R key and I'll give you the rotation tool and this Let's you'd literally rotate the peace to any angle you want when you hold shift you can also constrain it to preset angles and directions. Very, very useful. Flipping the image is something that's very common, and you may want apply a shortcut. Key to that, most of the applications will allow a shortcut key to be applied to it. If not, they may have a button near the Navigator that instantly flips the image. In photo shop, you can find the image flip option in the image menu image, rotation and flip canvas horizontally. Inflict canvas vertically. Foot canvas horizontally is the most common option and allows you to see the piece from it from a different viewpoint. Flipped Enter trick. If the perspective is right, and if the general composition looks good, however, it is much more efficient to apply a shortcut Key to this. You can look in the system menus, the edit menu in for a shop, last keyboard shortcuts and the keyboard shortcuts system here shows you all the menu options over here, and it allows you to modify them in the image menu. I'll go to the image rotation section, flip canvas, horizontal and I'll go. Come on. If is telling me that the conflict, I don't mind. I'll accept. Okay, and now, whenever I hit, come on. If the image will flip, it's taking a little while on this particular piece because there are quite a few layers for this painting that were created. So it's a very large image. But come on, if will flip the image and when you're drawing, it's actually a lot Foster. So let's just have a quick preview on a much smaller file. I have a drawing hero. Whatever the case may be, come on if it flips it, and it's a very quick and easy way to check positioning perspective and so forth. 10. Understanding Layers Quickly: layers are pretty much a core fundamental off the digital art workflow. That is how we work when working digitally. The core concept that I really want you to understand. What it comes to layers is that essentially you're dealing with layers of transparency that stack upon one another. We can do various things. Two layers change the rapacity put layer modes on them are right clicking. We can duplicate them, copy and paste them and so forth. And by manipulating the system of layers, it gives us a great degree of flexibility in what we can do. When we're creating digital art, layers can be renamed. Their visibility can also be toggled on an off. There's nothing on these layers at the moment, but the layer with this graphic on it. As I told with the visibility button, the objects disappear and reappear. Most applications also support layer folders so you can create folders of layers and generally just how you would manipulate file in your system. You can shift to select multiples and then put them in groups duplicating hiding the group and so forth. The core thing is that layers are layers off transparency of transparent pixels stacked upon one another, painting something on one layer and then perhaps adding. Lighting on top of that gives you a degree of control and a measure of control that you typically would find to be much more difficult If you're working on just a single sheet of paper. In most digital on applications, you will find a similar layers palette. To this, the single layers the layer names various other options that relate to the layer system. 11. Layer Modes and Opacity: next, let's take a look at Leia Modes and layer capacity layer. Rapacity essentially refers to how transparent or opaque a layer is in photo shop on the bottom rights. You have the opacity slider, which is relative to the lay you have selected on this layer of put a ridge stroke, and when I adjust the slaughter upward down, I make whatever is on that layer mawr or less transparent. They rapacity is especially useful when you want a Latin up drawings and draw on top of them when you want things to be see through a transparent, when you're doing color overlays over peace and so on. Next, let's take a look at layer murders. Lammens are essentially murders that manipulate all the content on a layer relative to that particular layer, and they have various effects that could do various things. For example, this layer over here layer four that I've created its fooled with the color black. Then they emerges, sits to saturation, and what it does is it d saturates the entire picture. And this is actually very useful for checking out whether the values in a piece or working well, there are many layer modes in photo shop and similar applications, and we could do an entire course discussing them. In the next video, we're gonna look at some of the most common layer modes. The key thing to remember, though, is that lamb modes effect all the pixels on a particular layer and can do very suffix to them, affecting how they are displayed on that particular layer. 12. What are Overlay, Multiply and Screen Modes?: in this. Listen, let's take a look at three layer Moz, multiply screen and overlay and take a look at what they do to the pixels underneath the layer that we're gonna be working on. We're gonna be working on Laos 77 here. Let's grab a layer mode. It's crab multiply and let's see what it does when we paint various different colors on top . I'm going to be referring to things such as huge saturation and so forth, and we'll cover these when we're doing the color course, it's go ahead here. I'm going to grab a pink, and I'm going to paint with a very soft brush. Who, uh, the section off this painting. So I'm gonna paint over here, and you can see that slowly but surely more pink is being added to this particular element . The layer rapacity over here was at 18%. I'm gonna put it up to 100%. So what multiplies actually doing is it's essentially, let's pick a color. Here, let me show you if I pick this blue from the section off this wall up there as I paint mawr and more multiplication and as the capacity of the multiplication increases. What happens is the the Q over here and the value and the saturation moves this way in the box. So you get more saturation, and this would be saturation, and you get a darker value. And that's what multiplies doing it. As you keep multiplying that same Hugh more and more and more. It just keeps moving and you call a pick and you multiplying your color. Pick in your multiple, and it eventually will get to becoming very dark. Or, if you could think about another way, darkened value and very rich and saturation over here, which is, you know, difference to being dark in value but very de saturated, so de saturated, more saturated right, And that's what multiplies doing. It's moving things down this way, so more saturation in Dhaka. Very this is is useful for darkening up areas. So if I felt like I wanted to have more value depth in some regions, I could gently using the pressure of the pin dark in this area a little bit. Mawr make it a bit more contrast, he done. There may be the area below the trees and, um, always be sure to color pick correctly so that you're multiplying the values and the hues that you want to be multiplying that you're not using arguments. Sex scarred blue appear down here on the trees. It's gonna look a little weird. It's gonna put some lose Internet. And that's what multiplied US screen effectively is the same thing just in reverse. Instead, off having a particular color selected and enriching the color with more saturation in darkening the value, it's actually going to de saturate the color and light in the value. So, for example, if I select this sort of mid tone kind of blew up here and I start screening it, you can see how it gets lighter. No, generally speaking, when we wanted paint, it's better to approach painting from a solid theoretical foundation of understanding, light and how light works. When you're painting that you don't want to use these layer modes, for example, you may be thinking, Oh, well, I can use multiply for shadows and I can use screen for highlights. You certainly can, but these are more in Huntsman tools that can make certain things easier for you. I'm not saying don't use them, but it's better to use them in the right way. All right, let's take a look at overly overlays. Essentially multiply and screen in a single tool. It's very good for creating contrast in a particular area in one fell swoop, and you can overlay any color anywhere you like. So it's also useful for changing the color or adding colors into an area. For example, if I wanted these trees to have have a bit more of a brighter green in them and select a broader green here and I can do a bit of overlay and they'll get very green now, that's obviously a little bit garish. It's what you can do is you can change the opacity sitting here and drop the opacity quite low and just have more of a subtle effect. And suddenly these trees are a little more green. Turn the layer off can see it just adds a slut extra green to that area. Just zoom in there and show you is unjust capacity higher. Get more green overlays. Great for that and for doing really overlays for you want to also introduce other colors into areas such as, uh, enriching have shadows. Maybe with a deep purple over here can also do that. And it adds a nice variation to a surface makes things a little bit more interesting. The difference? This greenest, little garish in that was just a example. Overlay is also great for contrast. As I said earlier, if we want to select a particular region like over here where it's dark and I won't increase the contrast in that section, I could just do an overlay without changing the actual color of anything. And we've suddenly got more contrast in that area was less contrast ing before and those essentially three of the most common layer Marin's multiply screen and overlay, which is essentially multiplying and screening at the same time. Based on whatever color you've chosen as this is an introductory course, I just want you to get a general feel off the blending modes that are possible on layers in digital art tools. A lot of the time, you may not end up using very many of these, based on how traditional you want to be in your approach to digital painting and drawing. So that's basically in a nutshell. Those are three off the most common. Leia, Moz, 13. Let's Lock Transparency!: Let's take a quick look at the luck. Transparency feature off digital art applications. Essentially, what this does is it locks all the areas that are transparent, allowing you to only work on the areas that have filled in pixels. So in this example, the layer full over here is the sort of turquoise e greeny full inside the circle. If I wanted to add a lighter value to it, you can see that I'm going outside the lines here and then have to go in and fix that and you raise it and what not? However, if I select this layer and I click the luck transparent pixels button, I've now locked myself out of drawing and painting outside any pixels that aren't fooled, right? All the transparent pixels, a locked. So now I can go over this area quite easily and not go outside the lines. If you will, is a really great feature. You could also hit command or control on windows and click the thumbnail view here, and it will show you a selection off the pixels that are currently being selected. And as such, the transparent pixels that aren't being selected where you can't work it 14. Understanding Digital Brushes!: brushes are an essential element to digital art creation. Photo shop has a single brush tool with multiple different brushes that you can select for that to giving you various brush effects. Other applications may have separate tools, for example, pain tools and tools, watercolor jewels and so forth. And each of those tools have various effects and sittings that you could modify in photo shop. When you have the brush tool selected, you will gain access to the brush selection window. And in this window is a bunch of brushes that come with photo shop that do various things. For example, you have the chalk brush spatter brush, standard brushes of es soft and hard round brushes and various other brushes. Each brush has different properties in different settings to it that causes it to react the way it does when you use it. For example, if we take the watercolor loaded wit flat up over here, we do a stroke with this versus, say, a standard hard round brush. They reacted if any differently. Apart from their shapes being different, various other sittings behind the brush will cause it to do various different things in front of shop the Brush Settings panel, which is this panel of a here, has a multitude of sittings that change the functionality of how particular brush looks and works. Russia's essentially in photo shop are a pre defined shape. You can create your own brushes very easily. For example, I might decide to do a bunch of dots I convene. Define these dots is a preset. Just selecting these and creating was a preset and then eventually have a brush like that that will be in that particular shape. I just want to see if there's example in this listing of a brush like that, for example, this rough run bristle brush. If I were to just increase the brush size, you can see the shape of the brush over here. If I just pressed down the brush creates that effect for stroking, probably leads to it, stretching out and looking very much like paint in the videos. That fun of this video, we're going to look at these sittings and some of the common properties that occurred with brushes in the general sense. You really just want to know that there are certain elements and students things that can be modified to achieve desired effects in a brush that you want to use when you're painting 15. Hard and Soft Edges: brushes and digital on applications have a lot of very similar attributes to them, and two of the main attributes are hardness and size. Hardness refers to the edge of the brush. A hard edged brush has a very sharp edge to it. This edge over here is very hard, and conversely, a soft edged brush is a very soft edge to it. Its edges very, very soft and very airbrushing. Hardness is important. The softness or sharpness, often edge, is an essential tool when painting also, brushes can be resized. The square bracket keys on keyboard a usually the buttons you can use to make the brush size, bigger or smaller and photo shop. You can also do this by clicking the brush panel here and adjusting these size and the hardness. It's important to know that not all brushes will have a hardness and sometimes not even a size option, depending on the preset sittings behind each of the brushes. 16. Essential Brush Sets: in most digital art applications, the brush tool will often have some essential sittings. Let's take a look at the key sittings off the brushes. The first sitting is a passage E capacity, Just like layer rapacity controls the transparency off the stroke. When you lower, the capacity of strokes become more transparent. The second sitting is flood. Flow is essentially how much pain is coming out of the tool per set. With less flow, you'll have less paint coming out. More float, more paint. So a high opacity sitting and a low flow sitting results in a brush that's putting out paint at a slower rate. Hence why you see more of these circular trails of the brush shape these sittings over here in Photoshopped, opacity and flow of global sittings. And no matter what brush you select, you'll be able to manipulate the opacity and flow. However, as previously said, each brush has a plethora of sittings behind it, determining its core functionality when you access the brush Sittings planet, which is this button here with this button over here in photo shop, you can manipulate and adjust sittings as you desire. Let's go through some of these menu items and take a closer look. First option is brush tip shape. These shapes are usually pre defined, however, in the hard and soft round rush things that come with for the shop. You can modify the squish off the brush. It's around us. You can flip it, adjust its size. Yeah, that's for the actual tools preset sitting in just its hardness, and you can adjust its spacing. This is quite an important sitting, Ah, highest spacing, as you can see in the preview, or result in a brush that paints with more divided steps. For example, here, even though the flowing capacity or quite high steps between each of the instances of painting, it's quite large. And so you see the stroke. Reduce the spacing and you'll get a much smoother stroke very milky and smooth, and there is no noticeable steps between each paint. Instance. Generally speaking, keeping the spacing at about 10% should be optimal, primarily because it's easier to blend, which will go into just now with a spacing off 10 or or slightly more. The shape dynamics option is also extremely important. Shape dynamics refers to the precious sensitivity off your input of us. In this instance, I'm using a way campaign. I'm sit the size Judah saving over here to utilize pin pressure and have also adjusted the minimum diameter that the brush size can go When I pressed lightly. So, for example, here the Russia's maybe what it is on the screen when I press softly, the minimum diameter at my least pressure will be 20% off the overall brushes sauce. The signs. Judy here is what creates the effect off precious sensitivity. So when I pressed very softly, I get a thin a stroke. When a press hard, I get a thicker struck. Of course, you get all the ranges in between at smaller brush sizes. This is very useful having a very realistic looking pencil or drawing effect. So essentially, the shaped on Imex section allows you to assign pin pressure to the size and minimum diameter controls off the shape dynamics off the brush, and this allows essentially thickness and thinness control to be assigned to the wakame pain. That's great, but what if you want to control darkness and lightness, what's allowing that control? And for the shop? This is the transfer option transfer option has the capacity Jenna sit to pin pressure. So essentially the capacity is also determined by how hard or soft I press and the size. So when I pressed softly and lightly, I get a thin light line, and when I press hard I get a nice, thick, dark line. You may notice that the ends tend to tape up very nicely. This is due to the shape dynamics, as you can see beyond shape dynamics. Transfer brush tip shape options. There are many other options available to manipulate and adjust. The brush is to your liking. That said, as a beginner for now, I wouldn't worry too much about any of the other options. There are a plethora off brush packs available online from watercolor brushes, toil brushes to ink brushes and so forth that you can download. And they already have these presets. Sittings sit for them. Do you really don't need to worry about them? All that said and done these on the essential brush sittings that you need to know for drawing and painting 17. Blending your "Paint": blending in digital are tools is a fairly essential skill. Fortunately, it's pretty straightforward and essentially just involves using the bulky and making different strokes and color selections. Let's say, for example, I want to blame a dark blue into a lighter blue. I'll lay the two colors next to each other, but I'd like a smooth, radiant here. I want thes two colors to blend into each other. I need to make sure that my pain is set to transfer so that the capacity is being affected by the pin pressure. When I first softly, I wanted to be very light, and when I pressed hard, I wanted to be very opaque. With that sitting sit, I'm now able to color pick one of the blues and gently go over the other blue, creating an entirely new color and then color. Pick that and blend that across and constantly pick these colors, merging them into each other. Let me do this a little slower so you can see as I use the color picker to select a cut off for a while. It become a fairly natural movement for you, like Olympic and I spray. I'm determined what value will color that I need next and a color pick that and I lend it in color pig Lind. Hello. Pick Lind kind of pig Lynn. And as you can see, I start to get a very nice Grady int. Different brushes will give you different effects When you're blending this way, This is the primary way that blends are done went painting digitally. 18. Erasing: Let's take a brief look at the razor to inferno shop and, in general, most applications. The eraser tool will be able to access the plethora of brushes available on the system as well. This allows you to have dynamic erasing rather than just deleting a section you can raise dynamically. Your razor also has opacity and flow settings, as well as all of the other brush settings that you could expect. The race tool is usually accessed by pressing V in key erasing won't make use of your pains pressure because of those same brush sittings. It's important to note that when you're raising, you'll raise whatever is on the current layer raising to the background. So, for example, if I created a new layer and put a red dot behind it on the blue dot lair when I raised already raise to the background, raising only what is on the current layer, I am working on 19. The Amazing Colour Picker: in this. Listen, we're going to take a look at the color picker and how the color picker really works in digital on applications, not old digital art. APS have the same color picker. Some of them are circular. Some of the more triangular with a circle around us get various different versions of it. How are they all essentially function in the same way. The first element is the hue slider, and generally speaking, this would be the color selection. When you're strictly speaking about color and its peers form the hue, the U selector allows you to pick a hue range going through all of them from yellow, red, magenta, blue, cyan and so forth. The main box here is actually a value and a saturation selection. Box saturation refers to how rich in color something is. The more saturation, the richer in the color. It is the next saturation. The more gray in the color value refers to lightness and darkness. You can see that by selecting a particular Hugh Say blue. Here we can move to high saturation high valuably, giving us this very brightly, or a high value, low saturation version that blue just very pale and all the other combinations that would go with the system. So, for example, you could have very dark valued mid saturation blue, and it's looking a little gray there in the block. Here we go is very kind of test early kind of darkish blue. Essentially, that's how you get your full range off values from Latter Doc and all colors. 20. Understanding All-Important Selections: selections are probably one of the most useful tools, and one of the biggest time savers. When it comes to digital art, selections essentially allow you to select something and being manipulated, and we'll cover transformation in the next lesson. Photo shop and most digital on applications will generally offer three kinds of selections . Three or four kinds of selections. The first is the marquee tool, and what we'll do is it will just allow you to select a rectangular or a square region to select a region perfectly square. You simply hold, shift and let go, and that region is now selected. What you can do is you can work just in that region. It'll isolate that region for you so you could just paint in this particular region. Or you can manipulate this area. For example, if I had command or control, see and then Commander Control V, I actually have copied and pasted that little block that I had selected. You can also use a elliptical marquee tool, and this will allow you to select round areas, elliptical areas or perfectly circular areas gained once again, holding the shift key to constrain it to a perfect circle If you need more precise selections, you can make use of the less so to the lesser tool allows you to make selections based on wherever you draw and any shape. There's no constraints to this particular selection tool. However. It can be a little tricky, sometimes getting very tight, areas selected nicely. And for that you can use the point of point selection tool. Not all applications have the stool in photo shops called the polygonal S. O toole. It allows you to select areas from point to point, and you can see it's a lot more accurate to select very small areas. This way, selections are very dynamic. They can be copied, pasted, adjusted and transformed. The selections themselves have their own select menu, and there are a plethora of other options that can be done here, particularly in the modify menu, which allows you to expand or contract the selection based on an Internet number. Off pixels also feather the selection that has given a very soft age. Also again based on a selected number of pixels. Selections are really most useful when drawing and when you want to move elements around, perhaps you during arm that needs to be slightly higher. You can simply select it, cut it off that layer, paste on a new layer and move it around. Or just simply by holding the commander control key move elements around on the particularly you're working on. So I consume me. Just move this object around. In the next lesson, we're gonna take a look at transformation tools, which are also extremely useful. 21. Understanding Transformation: Now that we've had a basic look at selections, let's look at what we can do when we've selected something in terms of transformation. Most digital on applications have a very high degree of transformation tools, though probably Photoshopped has the highest transformation. Tools allow us to manipulate selected elements in unique ways. The shortcuts to just general global transformation is usually control or command. T. When I hit come on T. I suddenly get some handles that I can pull and manipulate. Generally speaking, holding shift will constrain my manipulation. Whatever the case may be. In this instance, the general transformation allows me to, as I drove the cursor to a corner just past. The handle allows me to rotate the object by holding shift. I can constrain it to some preset positions by clicking and dragging one of the corners. I can manipulate the scale and the size of the object, and if I hold shift, I'll constrain it to its original proportions. When transformation mode is enabled, I can also click in the middle of the object and move it around. If this were part of a selection, you would move the selected area out off wherever it. Waas located selections can get a little bit more intense. I'm going to change the shape a little bit and show you some of the things selections can do in the edit menu, and it should be in the edit menu. On most applications, you should find the transformation menu, and here it details the additional elements of transformation scale, which we've seen in rotate, which we've seen are fairly common. However, there's also skew distort perspective ended for the shop meet Walk to the skewed, distorted perspective tools are 50 summer. They allow you to really be in the shape in different directions. The perspective tool in particular, is grateful. Making textures fit in perspective or bending something so that it is more of a correct perspective. Of great importance is the flip horizontal and flip vertical in the transforming. Now we've covered this already in a previous lesson of this is great for selections when you want to flip something around or duplicate something. For example, if I'd like this to be duplicating other side, I can simply copy the layer by duplicating the lap, moving in our little bits, going in it, transform and then flip horizontal. And then I have to off this same element. Now this is somewhat different from the image image, rotation, flip canvas, horizontal flip, canvas radical. Who's here? You're flipping the entire canvas horizontally or vertically. Essentially, that is the crux off the transformation tools. Once again, the shortcut is come on, T holding shift will always constrain what you're doing. You can squish, you can stretch, you can rotate, and additionally, holding command and touching one of these handles will put you into perspective Walk. 22. Let's Recap Everything Quick!: we've looked through. A few key core concepts to digital are tools in this course, and hopefully no matter one application you use, you're gonna recognize the similarities between them and have a good general understanding of how to utilize them. In this final listen, let's just run through again. Some of the common concepts and the common elements off digital are tools. First of all, most of the time you'll have menus at the top, and the menus will relate to various functionalities within the application. It will generally have tools on one side of the other, and each of the tools is generally specialized. It will do something useful. Palates will be on another section of the screen photo shop there on the right and the pellets related to tool settings and other various features, such as layers, navigation and so forth. Let's set up a canvass again. We'll go fall, knew and were presented with the canvas set of window. We can name the canvas. We can choose presets sizes. We can adjust the sizing two pixels interest, centimeters and so forth. Let's go with pixels. Check the resolution. The color mode, which should generally be on GB and the contents of the background lab, and we can create the new document. We can also add a layer on top of the background there to make sure we're working on a transparent layer. Gives us a good degree off flexibility. Can they navigate? Using the Navigator window? We can zoom in on us. We can pan by dragging the box in the Navigator window. We can also use the shortcut keys space, which will give us the hand tool and also allows US Japan around the peace are most common tools R B for the brush tool, which I'm currently on and that allows us to use the brush tool. Functionality of applications may have selected shortcuts for the specific tools, perhaps I for inking p for pin and beef or brush and so forth. The control button be on PC and the commander but on Mac will give you the move to, and this allows you to move elements on their particular layers around the canvas. The R Key in front of shop will bring up the rotation tool, and this allows us to rotate our view off the canvas. This isn't actually rotating the end file that is done in the image menu. Under image rotation. Most applications will give you image rotation as well as just standard rotation while you're working view rotation. Then we learned about the Layers panel that allows us to create new layers. Group them into folders. We can duplicate layers and excess of the options by right clicking them. You can change visibility of layers can also adjust the opacity of a layer. We can also add layer modes, changing how the layer displays the pixels. It is also called blend modes, and it affects how the pixels on any particular layer blended with the pixels underneath or above it. We also learned about multiply screen and overlay layer modes, and that multiply moves a particularly Hugh, into more saturation and darker values. Screen moves. It institute this saturation and higher values and overlay. It does both at the same time, based on whatever values are underneath as you paint with it. We also learned about locking the transparency on a particular layer. When we click the luck transparency button, the application will prevent us from drawing anywhere except inside the fold pixel area. So, for example, here I can use the color red to draw into the areas where I have already drawn, but the application doesn't allow me to draw outside those areas. Moving on to brushes, we learned that different tools can have different brushes. Multitude of tools and Photoshopped, particularly make use of the very same brush is available whether it's the erase tool, this smudge tool, the brush tool and so forth. Russia's have their own unique settings. So in the choke brush, for example, and select the truck brush selected sittings. And it will have varying options for that particular shape. Its own capacity and transfer sittings with their own sittings, rush to shape and spacing, sittings, smoothing and so forth. We also learned about hard edged brushes and soft edged brush is they tie into art theory quite fundamentally, based on where you need harder. More contrast, ING injures or softer, more blending injures to direct the viewers focus In various instances, we also looked at opacity and flow just in the transparency of a particular brush, as well as the amount of paint that flows out of that particular brush. Rush sizes kennels to be adjusted, but right clicking additionally, if the palate is available to you, you can adjust the brush size over here or in the brush options area. Certain tools allow harness adjustment as well. By using the slander, Aiken turn a soft round pressure into a hard round pressure. We also learned about a key skill that is blending by using the old key to Calais pick. We can blamed two colors together. This is especially useful when you're doing lighting on paintings, and you need to blamed values into one another to create a three D effect. We also looked at the Eraser tool, which uses the same brushes as the brush tool. And quite simply, it will raise based on whatever brush sitting you have selected. We looked at the color picker to which allows us to select a huge its value that's moving up or down, light to dark and its saturation moving left to right. Then we took a look at using selections, transformation and walked tools. Command or control. T will generally transform whatever objects on a particular layer, whether it's pin strokes or brush strokes or shapes. We can then grab the handles to manipulate them, holding shift to constrain the proportions moving outside the handles, we can rotate them and holding shift. Once again, we can sit them to preset positions. We can also hold commander control and distort the image in various ways, or hit the walk button and bend and warp the particular shape. These are the essential core functionalities off digital art applications. They allow us to use the layers to drawn and paint on used lamb modes to modify the way pixels display you selection and transform tools to make adjustments to the work we've done . We can generally choose from a plethora of brushes to give us varying effects from pencils , oils, inks and so forth. We can also have been create canvases of various sizes and various resolutions based on the use of the work. Thanks for taking part in this course. I hope that you have a much clearer view off. Hard digital are tools, work and how they function in general 23. Conclusion: in this course, we've looked at the core features off digital art software, and most of these features are shared amongst the various applications available. If you feel that anything the courses being unclear or you'd like extra explanation on a particular topic, please feel free to let me know. And I'll be happy to add it for you. Thank you for taking part in the course. If you want to pursue further art learning, be sure to take a look at my other course. Our fundamentals, drawing and painting essentials, which gives you the fundamentals to the fundamentals of art and is a very good starting point. If you're getting into drawing and painting, that's it from me. Have a fantastic time drawing and painting and digital on applications, and I'll see you in the next course.