Portrait Illustration with Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator

1. Introduction Portrait: You want to learn how to create expressive and unique portrait illustrations. Well, look no further because this course is exactly what you mean. I'm Martin, I have over 20 years of experience as a graphic designer, illustrator and Adobe certified instructor. I have worked with companies like BBC, these knee, Google, ikea, and I cannot wait to share my best practices with you. This is a streamline hands-on course focusing on a real life design. I will be walking you through everything step-by-step and you will get all the exercise files so you can follow along in case you prefer not to copy me. You can also follow my workflow using alternative assets provided and create something completely unique that you can showcase in your creative portfolio. I am pretty sure this course will inspire you to create something amazing. First, we will learn how to draw faces. What are the common mistakes people make, and how to avoid them? We won't go too deep into artistic anatomy. Instead, we will be focusing on the fundamentals you need to create stylized portraits who will use Adobe Illustrator for one of our portrait illustrations. Floods show for the other one. We will be working with the Pen tool extensively for both compositions and other useful features like a smart filters, layer styles, and keeping lot. Besides all the technical stuff, we will also cover some important graphic design theory that you will be able to apply in any of your future creative projects. You can join this course without any prior knowledge in graphic design, illustration or Adobe applications. But to complete the project, you will need access to Adobe Creative Cloud and a desktop or laptop computer, but now it's time to start creating. So I will see you in the next lesson. 2. Drawing faces - Why is it so difficult?: This time, I would like to concentrate on why is it so difficult to draw faces? First, I would like to show you a really cool resource where you can find inspiration and also things to draw. It is Pinterest. Now, you might be familiar that on Pinterest, whenever there is an image, you can actually do something they call a try. Which means that if it's, let's say a person, whether it's a photograph or an illustration, you can attempt to recreate it. So draw it yourself, whether it's on paper or digitally, you can upload it as a try. Now this is one of the examples that I've found. This is art by an artist called a leaf. I think that's how it's pronounced and you can find this artist on Facebook. But the main reason why I'm showing this is that we can see the original drawing on the left, and then we can see a few of the tries on Pinterest. Now, I intentionally chose few good ones and some not as good ones, but generally the reason I put them together. And so you can see it both the original and redraws is to explain that there is actually no bad drawings because every drawing is unique. And if your aim is to recreate exactly the original drawing, that's not really a good goal because then you could just simply trace it over or just scan it in and print it out. Whenever you draw something, the most important thing is to do your own take. So you have to create something slightly unique, at least in that aspect. I would say this one here is just as good as any of these other ones. But of course, if the aim is to get it closer or as close as possible to the origin or the reference, then I would say this obviously is going to win. Now it's also very important to remember that everyone starts somewhere. So no one will be able to draw like this straight away. Whenever you see an artist that you admire, they probably went through hours and hours of practice and copying references before they got to that skill level that you are familiar with it. So is it a good idea to copy? Well, of course it is because drawing is all about observation. So the better you get at observing details and trying to recreate them in your drawing, the better you will be enjoying in general, and whether your references a photograph or drawing, it doesn't really matter because you will be able to pick up things from either of them when you look at an actual photograph and then tried to find something quite similar to this drawing here, you will be able to see more details. And if you are aiming for photo realistic drawings, then obviously this is a better reference. But you might find it more difficult, especially if you're just starting out because you will have to decipher the photograph. There's so much subtle details that you might not even notice. So when I zoom closer, you won't really see much structure of the face because it's all very soft and blend it together. So you have to interpret photographs while drawings obviously add a bit clearer because they are just, most of them are line drawings. So you might find it easier to copy and practice with existing drawings that you like. But also don't forget to use photo references once in a while. So I would say a mixture of both is good. And another important thing I wanted to mention, and this is something I discussed in more detail in the previous video. And if you haven't seen it, The link is in the description below, is that whenever you are doing drawings, it is just like what I said at the beginning of this tutorial, you're not trying to recreate something exactly. And that's when it comes to stylized drawings or cartoon like caricatures. Even so there will be exaggerations like the size of the eyes in this case is obviously not like realistic eyes. 3. Drawing faces - How to use references?: But we can look at another set of images as well. And this is from another artist called Camera mark again, and you can find the artists on Instagram. Again, I included as similar shot and a similar characteristic phase. And also then we can see the tries next to it here on the right. And again on this example, you can see that there is exaggeration on the size of the eye clearly. And even the position of the nose is quite low. And the bridge of the nose is really nice and round. So it has that nice S curve, which you can see on some people. Again, this is slightly exaggerated or stylized. So again, you can ask whether it is better to practice coping stylized drawings or whether to re-create the actual realistic proportions of the face. Well, again, both of these are good practice. Again, it's all about observations. So by doing stylized drawings, you will improve. And by doing realistic drawings, you will also improve. Its similar to sports. When you do one kind of spore, it won't really harm your performance in the other one, it's actually going to most of the time improve it. Or like with instruments, when you learn multiple instruments, you will get better in both, because generally your understanding of playing music improves. Looking at the trials in this case, again, I put probably the closest one to the original up here, and then we have less successful ones. But again, these are not bad drawings, as I said, they can be more abstract or they can be just simply someone's really young who hasn't developed the observation skills yet, but you have to start somewhere. So if you draw something like this or worse, in a way, it's still fine because that's going to take you to the next level. So each drawing you do is just one step towards getting really good at drawing like these artists. And even though I've been drawing for more than 20 years, I still sit down and practice and copy other artists. And again, not tracing over it because that doesn't really develop the scale. It doesn't make your brain work. It might be relaxing, but you don't actually achieve much with it. But you can see here, I created this quick time-lapse. I can show you how I've done this drawing. So I was using the reference on the left because I'm right-handed. I just put it on the left and then I was drawing on the right of it. And you can see that I start usually with the shapes that makes up the face. I will talk a little bit more about that soon. Then I would just basically copy what I see on the left. And I tried to observe my reference, and I tried to recreate it as close as possible, but at the same time, I don't mind changing some details. So the end result doesn't have to be exactly as the original. You can see how it turned out. It is very similar to the original but still different. And I don't mind that. So again, remember, whenever you use a reference that is just for reference, you don't have to exactly recreate it. Tried to take as much out of practicing by drawing it again. But don't be too harsh on yourself because that's going to prevent you from improving. So instead of struggling on one drawing for hours, maybe do several of them not the same drawing, try a couple of different ones, and it's going to be more enjoyable as well. But believe me, you will develop your skills faster. 4. Drawing faces - Do you need to know anatomy?: And to come back to the first question I asked, Why is it drawing faces so difficult? I have a few things here that I'm going to go through, which shows just how many things you need to understand before you can actually start drawing faces confidently. It is actually a very complicated structure. The human face or human hat. You have to understand things like the skull, which is the underlying structure of the head, then how the muscles work in the face. And then you also have to understand things like perspective foreshortening, which means that when I turn my face is going to be completely different from every angle. Again, you have to be able to think In three-dimensions. You have to know the proportions where things need to go. And if anything is a little bit off, viewers will be able to tell because we are very experienced in knowing that human faces anatomy, even when you're not studying it is something that you just see constantly. So when you are new born, when you're a baby first opening your eyes, you get used to seeing your parents first. So it's the first thing that you observe as a human being. And it is something that we have to be good at because we need to be able to understand people which simply by just looking at them and understanding and reading their expressions. But coming back to the examples I wanted to show you, you can see that there are measurements that you can learn. And I usually see these are very useful guidelines. But you shouldn't, again, focus too much on them. Instead, try to observe things. Once you observe them practice. Then looking at things like these will help you to understand why certain things are already working in your drawing and why some things are still off. So don't start practicing with these references because they are too complicated to begin with. But I'm still going to go through these because it will be a good visual reference even if you just vaguely remember them next time when you start drawing faces. So the first thing to remember is the skull is probably easiest to represent with a sphere and then shapes added onto that. So when we look at it from the side, you can see that you can start with a circle and then this rectangular shape added for the jaw and the lower part of the face. So usually that's the construction of the face and that is something you can also do from the front. The only thing is that from the front, it's good to imagine chopping off two slices of that sphere. So it's not like a perfect ball. You would have to chop the sides of. That's like a plane here on both sides that you need to remember. And that's just the basic structure. There's lots of other construction lines you can learn. And of course it gets more complicated when you look at it from the side. So again, we can see that chopped off slice on the side. And then here we can actually see how these lines are coming to the center. So the chin is actually much narrower than where the jaw connects into the skull. And these points that we can see under the skin, we normally call landmarks. And that applies to the body as well. When you're drawing the full body anatomy, landmarks are visible bonds like the collarbone, for example, that you can use as a reference to find the proportions and the posterior of the body. Then moving on, we can see another image of the proportions of the features on the face. And these are obviously very standardized numbers. So it's not going to apply to everyone's faces, but in general they work. And one of the simple ones to remember is that if you look at someone's face from the front, the eyes would take two-thirds of the face width and then you would have another eyes width in-between. And then you can also find lines like from the eyes to the top of the forehead is 1 third. The same 1 third is from the top of the eyes to the bottom of the nose, and then from the bottom of the nose to the bottom of the chain. But as I said, these are really just guidelines, so you shouldn't always strictly follow them. But generally, once you remember this structure, it's going to help you to see these shapes on faces. And here's a good example where we can see that sphere chopped off on the sides. And then we can see in whatever angle we have to draw faces, we can always find that sphere. And that can be a good way of trying to understand the three-dimensional form. So even here, we have these construction lines and the basic measurements or division lines for the third. 5. Drawing faces - Don't just copy!: Again, we can see the same phase from all kinds of different angles. But you can see that generally the same shape can be found in all of them. And then another thing that I really found useful when I was learning to draw people is to think of geometric shapes or almost like a simplified polygon on the phase where we can see everything is made up of smaller elements, like the nose is also constructed of planes and these geometric shapes. And you just have to draw those first two then be able to refine it into that smooth structure that we see because of the skin. Because the skin is really just covering up all that very sharp structure that we have underneath, like the tip of the nose is actually from the skull. And we can see that really well here. It's a bit scary example, but very useful that all of this is not really born. So the bone ends there. And some people like myself, I have a very sharp tip here so I can touch that. And there is a very good landmark point again that you can remember. And even when someone has a very soft nose is still good to know that the bone ends. It's going to help your drawing to improve. So even though you are drawing those soft skin details, as long as you understand what's underneath both the bones and the muscles, you will be able to create the structure that's necessary to create more realistic and more believable faces. And lastly, I wanted to show you a full time lapse again, I'm just going to run this while I'm talking. So you can see I used a reference of Lupita has photo or from the cover of this magazine. And this is something I actually started doing while I was on a train journey. I was just bored. So again, I put this on the side and use it as a reference and I was drawing now, it took me a couple of hours to do this painting. But generally, I wasn't too focused on re-creating the exact look. I was using it as a reference, and then I've simply started playing around. And the final result you might not even be able to tell it is her. But as I said, that wasn't really my aim with it. It's all about practicing. And I was focusing really more on the expression and those landmarks that you can see, I'm going to do with the shading, bringing them out like on her face. We can really see well the bones underneath here. So these are very useful things to practice and try to recreate them. Well, I'm just going to fast forward a bit and you will see I worked on the coloring and then I was just messing around here, further refining all the details until I got to the end result. So all I wanted to show with this example again is that you should always feel free to work from references, but then put your personal touch on it and don't ever worry about concentrating too hard, recreating exactly the original photograph or drawing. 6. Drawing faces - Keep flipping!: I put these examples together next to each other to compare them and not to make fun of the drawings that were attempted based on the original. The original is always on the left side. And immediately you can see that even small things like the headline here can confuse people. And when the drawing is created, the proportions of the eye and even the placement of it can shift and distort. So if we were thinking about the symmetry here, it's clearly visible than the right side, is much larger and distorted. It's almost like being stretched towards the top right corner. So that's mainly, I'm guessing is because of this hairline here. And then the example on the right side is slightly different here mainly what happened is that the I on the right shifted upwards. So if I connect the line here at the bottom, you can probably see it better. And this, once again, most likely happened because of the headline. But then even things like the Jew is completely different on the left side and on the right side. Now faces are not perfectly symmetrical, even if you are drawing them from the front. But there should be only minor differences between the left and the right side, not huge distortions when we're comparing them to each other. If you are drawing on paper, these are the things that's hard to spot, but even that, you can always use a mirror in one hand and just place it next to your drawing so you can see the reflection and the drawing at the same time. With digital drawing, this is obviously much easier and that's what I'm going to show you later. But before we go there, I wanted to also just show you a few more examples. So when the drawing is not symmetric or like there is a strong expression like here. Sometimes it can get even more difficult to get the proportions right again, with the original drawing here on the left side, even the strong expression, you can still see the symmetry while these other ones, if I were to try to draw that, you will already see stuff like the chin, how much smaller it is on the right side compared to the left. And the jaw line as well is completely different from the left side. Even the ears are shifted. So here on the right side it's further down. Bile on the original drawing is almost perfectly straight. And even though the general proportions of the face here are almost symmetrical, we still have a much larger gap on the left side between the center of the face. And I compare it to the one on the right side. And there's a last example. Once again, we have the original drawing on the left side, and hopefully by now you can see on the copies on the right side where things moved and shifted compared to where they should be originally. So when you are drawing in Photoshop, you can use the symmetry feature. And this is something you can find here in the Options bar. You just have to select vertical and you can simply just align the center point where you need it. So in case of a portrait, we can just place it here, press enter, and then whichever layer we want to work on, we can start. And you can see immediately it starts to add the lines on both sides. So we can have the mouth, the eyes. And it really helps to keep things in symmetry. And if you want to draw something that is not symmetrical, you can just turn it off and draw, in this case, maybe the front line for the eyebrows. But then I can always come back and choose last use symmetry. So now if I draw the moustache, let's say it will appear on both sides at the same time. Now what you can also do is to place a drawing on one side of your Canvas and then duplicate it and place it on the right side. There. You can flip it horizontally by going to the Edit menu and choose Transform, Flip horizontal. And then when you go back to the brush tool and have the symmetry on, now when you're drawing, you will see the results that you're making on both sides at the same time. So this can really help you to check that the details you are adding are going to work. And whenever I draw like this, I would actually jump between the two sides of the drawing. So I would add a little bit of detail on one side and then jump on the other side. So that can help me to always have a fresh island while I'm working and make sure that I get all of the details right. Now if you don't want to see two versions of the artwork that you're working on at the same time. You can also flip your Canvas periodically while you're working. You can do this in Photoshop or if you are in Procreate, you can also go to the canvas options and choose Flip Canvas Horizontally. So even though I like this drawing and immediately can spot in this flipped version that the eyes are not completely symmetrical and it looks a little bit funny. So once again, let's just go back. I was used to seeing my drawing like this, but once I do the flip, I can detect immediately the errors if you prefer to set things up the way I showed you in Photoshop, all you have to do here in Procreate is to extend your canvas. So going to crop and resize and just drag the edge out. And then you will have to duplicate your artwork. You do from the layers panel. Simply drag to the left side, duplicate, and then the copy. You just have to move with the selection tool on the right side. And then at the bottom you can choose flip horizontal. And finally, just have to turn on the Drawing Guide option. Choose Edit, Drawing Guide. And at the bottom, make sure you have this symmetry option selected and that the symmetry is set up in the right place. You can always move this slightly further left, in this case, select it. And then now if I zoom closer, whenever I'm going to make changes is going to show on both sides at the same time. So let's just draw maybe another heel here in the background, maybe another cloud in the sky. And once again, I can draw on either side because the changes will always appear on both of the incenses. If you choose to work this way, make sure you keep jumping between the left and the right version. So keep drawing a little bit on one side, then jump to the left one and back and forth. And the same thing if you are just working with one version and you flip the whole canvas around, don't forget to do it often while you're drawing. The more often you do it, the better, because it's just going to allow you to work constantly with a fresh eye and avoid ending up having those hidden mistakes that we've seen in the beginning of this video. 7. Portrait styles - Exaggeration: Portrait painting is a fascinating topic. And in this video, I would like to give you a brief history or where it comes from, and especially focusing on current contemporary portraits, especially digital portraits or digital paintings. And to see whether it is better to go towards a more realistic impression of a character or a person, or a bit more stylized. And to be able to define which one is a better approach. And the best way to find an answer to that question, in my opinion, is to look at some amazing artists work and try to compare them to each other. All the examples that I collected for this tutorial will have the names of the artists above, and you will also see some of them have their Instagram accounts edit here. If you don't see the account name, that means that they are not on Instagram or I couldn't find them. So in that case, you can just search for their names and you will most likely find that work on Behance or other portfolio sites. The first two artists on my screen, Sarah tap ash and Louis, fund balance or lowish, as most people would know her, have quite similar style and I really love that portraits. This is already a good example of showing that although they are based on the original proportions and facial features of people, but they are still quite stylized and some details are exaggerated. The probably the best example would be to look at the eyes and the size of the eyes. So we can see these two images here, for example, have the eyes bigger than what you would see normally on a face. But it's also quite cool that lowish also changes and exaggerates the position of the eyes. Sometimes. Here, for example, you have a huge gap between the two eyes. Normally, it would be the same distance between the two eyes as one of the eyes. So if you have the AI plays the in-between two of them, that's roughly the distance. And because the eyes are really big, it's sort of works, but I feel like the gap is even lighter than that in this case, but it's still works as a stylized portray. Now historically, of course, portraits were more made for creating a perfect realistic representation of a person. It was to achieve likeness and to make sure it's recognizable. But also artists were trying to show the inner essence or characteristics of the person. And most of the time they wanted to create a flattering representation, something that shows the person in a positive light. Throughout art history, you can see the tendency that the artists improve their skills and they got closer and closer to photorealistic representations. But then came impressionism, which changed everything. And since then, I would say it's completely free for you to choose whether you want to go towards more photorealistic portraits or more stylized. And especially with digital painting, which is a very forgiving medium where you can experiment and create even multiple versions or save multiple instances of the same work while you're working through it, it opens up so many avenues and ways of creating these paintings. Now one thing is very important to mention that having something more stylized and less realistic doesn't mean the artist is not good at anatomy or not as good as another more realistic artist. With Serra's work and Louis she's work, we can clearly see that they have a very strong understanding of the human head and the facial features. And by exaggerating them, they are creating a more unique approach which really defines their style and makes it recognizable. That's already something I would like you to remember from this video that by stylizing and exaggerating some details in portraits or in any type of painting will help to define your style. And this is something you should experiment with, whether it's the colors like we're lowish sometimes uses very strange and unique colors for portraits and how paintings, or whether it's the actual proportions of the details that you are using, or even the technique or the tools or medium that you're using, it can define the style that you will be recognizable for. 8. Portrait styles - Realism: Let me show you another artist, Julia Razumovsky, who again has a very interesting style. She is much more photorealistic, especially this one here in the middle. You can see that. But most artists like these ones that I'm showing here would have a range of artwork. So if you look into their portfolio or their work, you will see some of them, for example, for Julia, a very photorealistic, while others are more stylized. So they themselves also experiment with that range between the more realistic and stylized approach. But what I love about her work is that some of the paintings and portraits she does would have a very realistic detail. But then that would be these almost cartoon like details added on top of it. Like here we can see the tears and that these are really cool combination. Once again, that defines her style. And it is really hard to be unique and you shouldn't be worried about being unique and like forcing something that makes your art different from others. It should be a natural evolution. So as you are experimenting and trying different things, you will eventually get to something that other people will recognize that it is your work. Now, no matter whether you are doing photo realistic or stylized portraits, one thing apart from anatomy that is very important is the understanding of light and using the light in a good way that defines the form. Because you are working in two dimensions, but you need to represent something that is three-dimensional and f is very important. Like in this case, we can clearly see the highlights and the shadows and mid tones used to define the form and shape of the face. Without these tonal values, it would look really flat and it would look like a cartoon. But by having the shading in place, it already looks more realistic, even though it's a stylized portray, the lighting and shading is much more subtle when we look at an example like this one here. But still here, we can see clearly strong highlights which makes the lips really glossy. And also these soft shadows under the neck and also around the ears. That again, helps to define the three-dimensional form. For a photorealistic approach, it's good to introduce lines like this one, which is obviously much more complex and unique lighting. But again, a good understanding of how light would affect the phase is very important. Now, in this case, the artists might have used a photo reference and base everything on that. But of course, some artists would just combine a couple of references together. And if they have a good understanding of how to light portraits, they would be able to do that even without an actual reference. Of course, when you are just starting out, it's a great thing to study portraits. So you can go on Pinterest and I'll find so many amazing photos of people. And you can practice basically trying to recreate them. Instead of tracing over them, it's best to have them side-by-side and don't worry too much about creating a perfect resemblance. Like even in this case, maybe the artists use the reference but then alter the couple of things. So the point is not really to create a perfect representation, especially if it's just a photo that you found online. If it's, let's say a celebrity, then you might want to make sure that people will recognize the person in the painting. But nowadays that's not really the only reason why you would paint the portrait. So coming back to lighting, let me just show you a very different style. 9. Portrait styles - Stylization: We have Alexander's work here and this artists obviously has a more abstract approach. So it's definitely not as realistic as the ones we've seen before. It's more geometric and simplified and uses a limited color palette. But still, I think the people are recognizable and that's a hard thing to achieve. So the more abstract you make your paintings, I would say the harder it is to achieve a likeness of the person. And of course, using geometric forms is just one of the many ways that you can achieve abstract representation of a person. You can also go to more painterly effects or paint with watercolor and inks. And you can see sometimes leaving whole parts of the portrait empty or just like have hints of details is also a cool approach like this artist UE is using only a few details on the face that still makes it resembling the original photo in this case. So that was the original reference for this painting. But apart from those few details on the face, everything else is really rough and exaggerated. And we haven't talked about caricature and I don't even have examples of that in this video. But you should treat caricature as a completely separate style where the exaggeration is used excessively and it's usually about taking a more fun and comical approach to a portrait. Of course, to be able to exaggerate details, first, you need to learn the real proportions, just like with anything else. The more you practice and the more you observe people and try to recreate them in paintings, the better you will get at that. But don't forget along the way to remember that a photorealistic representation, although it's interesting, It's not really the most artistic work that you can do. So if you can inject some style and exit duration or unique details into your portraits that will help to make it more interesting and engaging for your audience, like Louis work here we can see is also very unique. It's a pencil drawings, I think color pencil drawings, but they have amazing detail on them. And it's a mixture of the geometric style that we've seen before, but also has an amazing detail on the shading and really cool rainbow colors used on all of these portraits. Then we also have another artist's with the pencil drawing, where again, we see everything in gray scale apart from a few details emphasized in color. That's also quite nice touch and unique makes it recognizable for the artist. But then we have these two other artists that I love. And we can see probably next to each other in Dennis's work is probably easier to appreciate if I make one of these images bigger. So it's again, a very complex painting and a lot of details are added. But although it is very recognizable, so we can see immediately who it is. It's still has some abstract elements in it. So it is almost like People are made of glass and there's like shards on them. So if we look at another painting, Let's just say I'm going to make this one bigger. Again, you can see the same polygons are triangles and that glossy texture on them, which makes it really cool and unique. And also these very bright and saturated colors in the background and around it that adds that painterly effect as well. So I love Dennis's work. 10. Portrait styles - Define Your style!: And then we have also Afghani porphyrin of work, who again has an amazing balance between the abstract forms and realistic resemblance of the person. Here we can see that again, polygonal shapes are used and it's almost like a vector drawing. I'm not sure whether it was created in Illustrator or Photoshop. It doesn't really matter, but the final result feels like it's very geometric and still lifelike at the same time. So again, this is really hard to find that right balance and to work with so many different colors and still managed to achieve the shading and lighting to work altogether, this artist's work reminds me almost like stained glass. So TPNs portrait, for example, could be in a church window. And that's again, just makes it so unique and recognizable. And last but not least, let me show you another artist's, our store, where we can see that the original reference was actually from a game Beecher. I'm just going to make this a little bit bigger. So this is from the game itself character called the NFL. And then the artist recreated that or use that as a reference and recreated the same character, but in a much more painterly version. But still this almost looks like a life-like representation, so very realistic. And that's mainly because of the lighting that the artist was using. So having that nice backlight and then the soft light here in the front and all the little details of the head just makes it a really realistic. But again, although these artists can create these very realistic portraits, He's still experiments with lots of different styles. And within that range between abstract and realistic, we can see he can create these mixtures or blend between the two sides. So we can have a realistic style combined with a much more abstract direction. So even within the same painting, as you can see, you can combine different approaches. So similarly to what we've seen before with the painterly effects, just a part of the face detail, and then the rest is just more expressive, just like with this artwork here is also a cool and unique direction. And with my own portraits you can see also I constantly experiment between realistic and stylized approach. But generally I tried to, again, go for a mixture where some details are really detailed and closer to realism, while the rest of the details can be a bit more painterly and abstract, if you are interested to see how I created some of these paintings and you want to learn more about the process. You can find the links in the description below to the videos. So to summarize what we've talked about today, I created a diagram and I play some of the artwork we seen on it. So from the complex, too simple on the vertical axis, we have also realistic to abstract on the horizontal axis. You can see that whichever position you choose for your art, you will be able to achieve the goal of portraiture to create a likeness of a person. So even when you go down to the abstract and simplified root, or whether you go to the more complex and realistic one. It's completely up to you where you want to position yourself. And you can also shift and move around within this range freely and experiment with different styles. But to be able to define a recognizable style, it is good to find the right balance that works for you. 11. Adobe Illustrator - Minimalist Portrait - Getting started: Like always, every illustration should start with a good sketch that you prepare before you jump into Illustrator and do the vector artwork. In this video, we will be concentrating on the Illustrator part of the workflow. And amongst many useful drawing techniques, you will also see how I prefer to set up my sketch tracing layer and how I use a global clipping mask that doesn't get in the way. So in case you download the file, you will be seeing the swatches already prepared and also the layers. And this is the layer that I'm going to work on called portray. Now notice that there is already a mosque edit here. I'm going to show you later how it works, but for now, we don't have to worry about it. Let's start with a simple detail. I'm going to use the pen tool and I will just click and drag to create the first curve. Then click on this point once again to be able to draw a straight line, come up here and then click and drag to create this other curve. Now notice that out of all the details, we are really just concentrating on this bottom section here because the rest of the shape will be in the background. But it's always good to close your shapes so don't leave them open. That's just generally a good practice for vector illustrations. Now notice that even though it feels like we're drawing over the sketch, it is not completely disappearing. And that is because I set it up as a layer on top of the illustration layer. So we have it right here and it's locked. But if I unlock it temporarily, I can show you that the image itself is embedded. But most importantly, it's blend mode is set to multiply. And also I reduce the opacity to 50%, just so we can see through it a little bit even more. But thanks to the fact that I'm using Multiply blend mode, even if I set it to a 100 per cent, you can see it is not getting in the way at all. But let me just set this back to 50 per cent and lock this layer. Let's not forget to select that shape that we've been working with because that way we will make sure that the next shape will also be created on this layer. 12. Adobe Illustrator - Minimalist Portrait - Main shapes: I usually don't worry too much about the colors at this stage, so I'm just going to keep it on roughly around the colors that we will need. And I will switch back to the pen tool and continue drawing. Now we can zoom a little bit closer as just concentrate here. I'm going to start at this point down here, and I will click and drag to create the next segment. And by the way, if you have ever trouble seeing your control points, you can double-click on your layer and change the color there. So for instance, if I set this to orange, now we will be able to see them better. So I can just come up here and then probably click somewhere around here. Drag this detail out a bit. And the good thing is that we can always hold down command or control key to adjust these handles and make it as close as possible to the original illustration. However, of course, you can always make it slightly different to the sketch. It doesn't have to be exactly the same. So if I just come down here, I can also adjust this handle a bit further down, make that angle a bit sharper. And then just like before, I'm not concerned about this part here because I know I'm going to create another shape on top of it. I'm just going to click and drag, click and drag, trying to follow these angles. Again. Here, you can drag and then click and drag one more time at the bottom. So that's our second shape. Ready? Now the only thing here is at the bottom. This is a little bit too narrow, so we just have to adjust it a bit. Something like that, I think is going to work maybe just a little bit by there at the bottom. So it's not too sharp. And by the way, if you ever end up creating an anchor point where you only have a handle on one side, but not the other. Way you can do is to use the pen tool, hold down the Alt or Option key, and click and drag out to recreate that original handle that you had on the left side. But then in this case we have to split these two handles. So we have to hold down the Alt or Option key and drag this other handle in the place where it's going to look better, something like that. But now that having both of these handles is going to be easier to make refinements and adjustments. I just want to make sure that there is no gaps between these two shapes. Overlapping them is the best thing to do. Something like that. I'm happy with the way this looks so far, so we can always adjust it later. And remember I said that the least amount of anchor points you create, the easier it is going to be to make changes later on. So it's much faster to move these points around and adjust things instead of having so many anchor points. And that's something that would happen if you end up using other tools like the pencil tool. However, the pencil tool is also a useful tool in case you prefer to work with that. So I'm going to draw the outline or the contour of the face with this tool. So I have the pencil to already selected. I'm going to select a different color just so we can see what's happening. And I'm going to start drawing along the edge here and coming down, trying to trace it as close as possible. And then wherever it's going to be hidden. I'm not really worried about, but the problem is that by default, the pencil tool is going to simplify what you are drawing. As you can see, we lost quite a lot of detail that I had here on this side. So if you double-click on the Pencil Tool, instead of making the results to smooth, you can always make it more accurate. Now of course, this is going to add more anchor points, but I'm happy with that. And the good news is that you don't have to actually redraw the whole shape. You can just draw over the areas that you would like to add a little bit more detail, like around the eyes here. And then the cheek. I want to bring it out a bit. And then the rest of the details I think looks quite good actually. So you can see that for this area we needed a little bit more anchor points. However, we can always try to simplify this. If you go to the Object menu, you will find under the path section this simplify option. I actually even added a custom keyboard shortcut for this, so I can use it faster because it's something I actually use quite frequently. So you can see with this feature immediately we get slightly less anchor points. It was 12 points are originally, we can probably go down to ten points. I think that's still good. We have still enough details and then we don't even have to accept this. It's already been applied. Now we just have to add the color to this so we can see how it looks. And if we want to refine it, we can just come here and select these anchor points individually and move them around with the direct selection tool. I'm just going to adjust it slightly. And once again, I'm not worried about the rest of the details. As long as these points are in place, I'm happy with the way it looks. So I am going to move on to the next shape, and it's completely up to you whether you prefer the pencil or the pen tool. You get very similar results in the end, I'm just going to continue with the pen tool though. So I am going to draw this shape first. Let's just draw this one. Going to drag up this way. Then click on this to create a corner point, another corner point, and then click and drag down here. This can be a different color just so we can separate it for now, and then we can draw this other shapes. So let's just start maybe up here. If you click and drag already with your first anchor point, you won't have that issue that we had last time. So we want to have to recreate the curve. And I'm going to come down this way. Then, all the way down here we can click and drag, click on that anchor point to turn it into a corner point. Let's create another curve there. Click and drag here on the top, like so. And then we can hold down the Command or Control key, drag this handle back. Because on this side we need a much smaller curve like that. And then we can just finish off with this other curve segment. You can actually even get rid of this anchor point here. I don't think we need that detail on the hair. I think it's going to work without that. And now at this point we can already start moving things around in the layers panel. So either coming here in the Layers panel and drag things up and down, we'll use the Command or Control left and right square brackets to adjust where the layers are compared to each other. So I want it to have the skin tone behind the half details. And I think that works already. Now we will need another shape here in the background. And I'm just going to use our rectangle tool for this. This again is going to be covered up. So this is for that little detail there. And let me make this a different color. Again, using the Command or Control square brackets, I can move this down where it's supposed to be. And then we can draw this large shape here for the body. Just going to draw these curves. And as you can see, I just click and drag, click and drag here on the top, we have to make sure that this is a bit further down, comes out that way. So I'm trying to follow that curve again, maybe change the color of this shape so we can separate it from the rest. Okay? Don't forget to use the command key whenever you need to adjust things around while you are still drawing. And there we go. We have our shape right there. Now here at the bottom, the mask is already affecting what we are drawing. So it's actually hiding those details there, but we don't have to worry about that just yet. But this shape should be further down. So I'm going to use again the shortcut until it falls in the right place. It actually needs to go on the face as well like that. Okay, So the good news is that we have all the large shapes in place. And at this point we can already assign the actual colors that we want it to work with. So the skin is supposed to be this color, while this detail here behind it is, I think, already set to the right color, it's actually this darker shade than this detail here on the left should be a darker purple. And then all the details for the hair are using the same color, this brighter purple. And then at the end we will just add a few more shading details. But for now, I'm happy with the way things look. 13. Adobe Illustrator - Minimalist Portrait - Drawing the face: Now we can focus on the details on the face. So let me zoom a little bit closer and I'm going to start again with the pen tool. But since we are drawing over the face, I'm going to adjust once again the color of the layer so we can see the anchor points better. Now what I wanted to do here is to already start with a curve. Click and drag here at this point. Then click and drag on the top, and then click and drag again on the right side. Now we can come back and adjust these curves with the handles. Just a bit. Thing that looks quite good. And in this case I'm actually going to use a stroke instead of a fill. So that's Shift X on the keyboard. Quickly swap the two colors. And I will increase the thickness of the stroke to maybe around five points in this case. And I will use this dark purple color for it. So that's the eyeline. Let's just move it up a bit, maybe somewhere around that. And we can also just refine it slightly. I like to adjust the curve of the eye. That looks good. Now we can draw a similar shape to this here on the left side, I'm going to click and drag. Then click and drag. It's like an S curve. That looks good as well. And then we can draw this other shape which we will use for the white of the eye, which I can again create from a very few amount of anchor points. That's fine, or something like that. Then press Shift X again to swap the fill and stroke colors. And this is actually going to be white, but this should go underneath the eyeline, something like that. Now before we refine these details, I'm also going to add the iris. I'm actually using the ellipse tool and holding down the Shift key to make sure it's perfect circle. And this should also have this same dark color. So it's not even an issue if they overlap, there won't be visible in the end. So to refine these details, I can zoom closer and adjust these curves either to match the sketch or you can even temporarily turn off the sketch and see how it looks without it. I'm happy with this. Now let's not forget to move this behind the headlines, so just adjusting where it falls in the layer structure. And then let's bring back the sketch. And this is where I'm going to really simplify things. So you can see already that we are ignoring quite a lot of details because we are creating this more minimalist illustration. While for the nose, I'm literally just going to use two lines. I will come closer here and just draw this first line by clicking and dragging, click and dragging again. So that's the first one. The thickness here can be less. I'm going to set this to maybe three or two points even and change the color to this shade, make sure it falls in the right place. So that's a very good simplification. I'm going to duplicate this by holding down Alt and Option key, drag it on the other side. And then by pressing the keyboard shortcut, I can flip it around, something like that. So that's the reflected. And then let's just adjust these around as well until we get roughly the original curve that we had here. Something like that. Let's see, without the sketch, we zoom back out. That's close enough. For now. You can always refine these points a bit later. And I feel like it's a little bit too thin. So what I will also do is to change the thickness to three points. Now it looks a little bit strange at this point, but just bear with me, it's going to work. In the end. I'm going to draw another shape here. The bridge of the nose should already use the same color then same thickness. And I think that's good. Now we can draw the mouth. This again. I'm just going to draw very quickly trying to minimize the amount of anchor points and simplify the shape. Not worried about the details here at the bottom because that will be defined by the other shape. And this should also be this darker color. So that's done. Then we can again use the Pen tool, click and drag and draw these outlines. Then here I'm going to pay attention to the shape and change the color to this brighter detail. Zoom out. So that's coming together. Now for the eyebrows again, I'm going to do a very simplified detail. I will just use the Pen tool, click and drag, literally create just an arc. Then I will use the stroke color that I have here is going to be like an accent color, which only appears on the eyebrows. And I will make them quite thick, something like that, maybe ten points. And notice how it also moved it higher up compared to the sketch. I want to exaggerate the expression works quite well. And then using the pen tool again, we just draw this other shape right there. Now, this one I can move further down in the structure, should go underneath the hair. But this one on the right, I actually going to keep on top of the hairline. So that's just going to make it a little bit more interesting. The details for the I can even group together, That's Command or Control G, and I can move it down altogether underneath the hair. I think that looks good. Now. We just need to add the ring in the nose. So for this, I'm going to use again the ellipse tool and draw that detail. We'll use white color for this, which is the thickness down to maybe three points. It'd be adjusted a little bit down, something like that in size. And now we can select the other two lines that we created that. And then using the shape builder tool that's Shift M, You can delete the details. You don't need this part here on the top, simply holding down Alt or Option key, you can remove it. And then I'm just going to deselect this and make sure that the white details go underneath the other two lines. 14. Adobe Illustrator - Minimalist Portrait - Background details: And as I said in the beginning, I wanted to add some additional shading for the hair. I'm just going to do that right now. I am going to use an ellipse tool, simply drawing an ellipse up here, set this to a darker shade, maybe this one, and then make sure it goes behind this detail here in the front. So then we can just adjust it a little bit and make sure it creates that separation between these two shapes. Now, even though I started with an ellipse, I can always move these anchor points individually as well, just to get it in the right shape that I need. I feel like that creates that separation there. I'm going to do the exact same thing here. I would draw an ellipse and we'll use the same color that we use that on the top. And I just have to make sure it goes further down. And this shape needs to be on top of it. And at this point I can just select that the lips adjusted. And I only want to see these details here on the right side. So we can come down here and create the angles that we need. Something like that. I feel like he's going to work. And then now I can just select this shape and the shape behind it using the shape builder tool holding down Alt or Option key, I can just chop off the part that I don't need. Now there is not enough contrast here at the bottom at the moment, but I'm going to change that soon. First we need to work on the background. So first of all, I want to have a big rectangle here in the background. And this is going to actually be using this color that we currently used on the clothes. But then I'm going to switch back to the dress. And I'm going to change this to only be an outline. Let's increase the thickness of it, maybe around ten points, That's good. Now we can just make sure that this other shape here doesn't get in the way. We can either move these anchor points up or use the shape builder tool, which ever is easier. Now, I'm going to use the pencil tool and draw a couple of random shapes. So we will have a shape here on the left side. Let's just make sure that it's closed. And then I'm going to use this yellow color, fill it in, then set it up in the right place, somewhere in there. And I'm using the simplified command on this. So that's the Path Simplify option, reducing the anchor points, keeping this shape nicer. And I can even move this anchor point out a little bit. Just like that. I think that's a good shape. Then let's draw another one again with the pencil tool here on the right side. Once again, I'm just drawing another blob, filling it with that color, then use simplify option, reducing the anchor points. And then we can set this again all the way in the back. We need one more here on the top. This time I'm going to use the pen tool because I want to have a corner point and it's easier to do it with this. I'm just going to create a corner point there. Then click and drag. And we have our next shape. Again, put it in the right place, maybe moving it down a bit. I'm going to add the couple of additional little details here. I'm going to have a line and that's just running that way. And I will have it set to white, increase the thickness of it to something like that. I'm going to use the same appearance, but I will use the pencil tool this time to draw another shape. Use the simplified option to refine it a bit. This shape can come down a bit further and let's just add a couple of floating elements. I'm going to draw a simple line, can use the same design as before. Copy, paste this, rotate it around, select these two, and then change the stroke setting to round cap and maybe increase the thickness at bit, something like that. We can group these together and zoom back. And then we can just rotate it a little bit just to add a little bit more randomness. And then I'm just going to use this a couple of times. There. Another one here. I'm actually using the same size on all of these. And then maybe we can have one at the bottom which can be a different color. We can use this darker stroke color. And in case I don't want this to be affected by the mask, I can move this shape onto the out-of-bounds layer. So that can go outside. I'm going to draw a circle as well, have it filled with brighter shade that we used on the hair. Maybe we can put that down here. And there's actually one line that I'm missing here from the sketch. I'm just going to turn that back. It's actually quite important line. So that's for the arm. I'm going to draw that, use the same style that we have on this other shape. So it works together with that. And in case you want to keep these details aligned to the background, you can just select the mask which is supposed to be here. And then we can just drag it up. You can see we can very easily hide details or show them again all the way to the bottom. 15. Adobe Illustrator - Minimalist Portrait - How to use masking creatively?: Now, at this point, I just want to explain how this mask works. So how it was set up. Because as you can see, we have that rectangle in the background, but the mask is a completely separate shape. And in the template or the file that we started with, I already had that mask prepared and it's actually a good thing to set it up before you start drawing. But let me show you what happens if I delete it. So I'm selecting the mask and I deleted obviously all the details that we were hiding and now again revealed. And in case you create a rectangle after you created all these details and you draw over everything that you want to turn into that mask. You can select everything from that layer and as long as that shape is on top, if you press Command or Control seven, that will create the clipping group. Now the problem with a clipping group is that it's always difficult to draw inside it unless you are in an isolation mode. So when you double-click on it, you can continue drawing with it. But what I prefer to do is to avoid creating this clip group and instead create a mask on its own without having anything else selected. Now you might be wondering how to do this, and I'm going to show you, so I'm going to have that rectangle there. Let's select everything else in this layer, group it, and maybe drop it on this other layer here, so we will be able to move it back. But now on this portray layer, having that rectangle selected on its own, we can go to the layer panel menu, this drop-down. And here notice you can choose Make Clipping Mask. So that's great. Even though there was nothing else in this layer, it already turned into a mask. And I actually prefer to rename it mask so I can find it easily. And the great thing is now if we drop back our illustration here, even if we select it and ungroup it, our mask will still work. We can select that and move it around. You can see how it's affecting the illustration. So the main advantage of this is that you don't need to have an additional group. You can just have your mask pleased inside a layer. And then any other elements that you draw inside that layer will automatically be affected by the mask. Also, don't forget that you can select the mask and even make changes to it later by using the Pen Tool. For instance, if I want to keep this shape coming down here, but these other two hidden, I can just add anchor points, maybe another anchor point up here as well. And then using the direct selection tool, I can just drag this point up here, and we'll drag that one down. And now you can see we have this custom shape for our clipping mask where it hides those two lines. But it's still allows this line to come out. And that's pretty much all I wanted to show you in this tutorial. I hope you found it useful and inspiring. And of course, you can always use this style on any other portraits, even photo references if you are not good at sketching, the most important thing is to have fun. 16. Adobe Photoshop - Neon Portrait - Getting started: The first thing you will need to do is to find a good photo of a person that you can use as your reference, but you can trace solar. So once you have that ready, you can start tracing with the pen tool. So you have to press P on the keyboard to select the tool and then make sure you set it to shape. Modes are not path mode. Select Shape. Then the following settings I recommend set the fill color to none, the stroke to white or whatever color is going to look good on the image. So while you are tracing, you have to make sure you can see these lines. I'm going to use white in this case. And then the thickness you can decide on whatever works with the size. It really depends on the resolution and the image size. But I'm going to use this size by the way, if you want to increase it quickly, you can click and drag on the word stroke, and that makes it increasing and decreasing quickly. Also, additionally, options that you might want to change is the alignment for the stroke that I normally set the center line, which is the second icon from here. The caps you can already set up to be round and also the corners you can set to round. So that's pretty much all you have to do. And if you want, you can also save this as a preset. So if you're planning to do more of these portraits, you can just go to the pen tool and then select the plus icon here and just type in tracing. You can also include the color. That way you can easily come back to it next time. So if you have different settings, clicking on this preset will bring back all the options for you. So you don't even have to create a separate layer because the Pen tool will automatically create a shape layers each time you are drawing with it, I'm just going to zoom a little bit closer and show you what I mean. So all you have to do is to click to start drawing a line. And then if you just simply click that draws straight lines, or if you click and drag, you can create curved lines. So once again, I click and drag, create a curved line. And if you are drawing something and you feel like it goes too far from the position that you wanted. You don't have to undo, just hold down the spacebar, reposition the point that you are currently creating. When you let go the space, you can still adjust the handles so you can create the curve the way you need it if you hold down command or control while drawing with the pen tool, you can also go back and adjust previous anchor points, which is very handy. So as you can see, I can adjust both the handles and anchors. And then when I click on the last point, I can continue drawing the line. And other useful shortcut is holding down the Alt or Option key with which you can turn a corner points so a sharp point into a smooth point which has handles. And again, if you hold down the Alt or Option key and click on an already existing smooth point, you can convert it back into a sharp corner. If I do that on these, you can see they turn into corner points. So it removes the handles effectively to start a new line. Or you have to do is to hold down Command or Control key, click somewhere outside and then start drawing again. So that creates an additional shape layer here on the right side you can see that now I have to shape layers and you will need to combine these together. It's better to keep them separate. And because that makes it easier to make amends to them. If you want to make changes to multiple shape layers, just use the black arrow, the selection tool. A is the shortcut for it, with which you can very quickly select multiple parts, as long as the select option is set to all layers. That way you can very quickly increase, decrease the size of all of them at the same time. Now there's one additional feature for the pen tool that might be useful if you are new to using it. And that is the rubber band. You can find this here under the settings. If you turn on rubber band, you can then start drawing in a slightly different way. So if I click and move my cursor, Notice how it's already showing the next segment. So now I can click and drag to create this curve here. Then, once again, when I move my cursor without clicking or doing anything, It's already showing me the next segment. So that might help to identify whether you placed your previous anchor in the right place or not. It's also worth mentioning that if the lines are not that visible on the background, you can change the color here again in the settings. So if I switch, I don't know, maybe two yellow, it might show better on the image. So it really depends on what background you are working on. But I'm just going to go back to the default settings. Also, if you want, you can increase the thickness of these lines. Once again, that might help you to see better what you're doing. 17. Adobe Photoshop - Neon Portrait - Effects: Now I'm going to fast-forward this process because it's not that exciting to watch me doing the same thing all over again. Whenever you use a photo reference, tried to simplify it as much as you cancel the least amount of lines and details you can use the better Normally, what I'm going to also pay attention to is to keep some of the lines thicker than the other ones. So there will be some supporting detail lines that are not as important as the main silhouette and details. But now it's time to hide the photo and put a color fill layer at the bottom so we can concentrate better on the illustration itself. So I normally would go to the solid color adjustment like that and then pick whatever color works. But this will work for us. I'm going to click Okay, and I don't even have to hide the photo because this is already covering it. What's more important is that we need to group all of our shape layers. So I am going to select all of them, I think all the way up to the top. Yeah. So up to here, I'm going to select all and then Command or Control G to group it. So this is the group that has all the layers necessary for the face. And then the remaining layers I'm going to group separately, which is going to be the shades. I'm going to rename these groups shades and face. And I can also give them colors just to make it easier to find them. Later on, I'm going to mark the face blue and then the shades violet. So let's check this again. Shades and face. Now that we have all of these ready, it's time to add the neon effect and that's by using layer styles. It's a fairly simple method because all you have to do is to add these on the groups. Let's start with the face. I'm going to double-click on the layer group. And then Layer Style panel comes up within which I'm going to first add the Outer Glow option. Now you can see that I already have these settings saved. I prefer to use the settings that you can see here. But of course, you can always adjust the color easily. And for the face, I'm going to use something like this. So bright cyan or blue color. And of course we can always increase the opacity, but I prefer to use a bit less, something like that. And you can just copy the settings I use here. But of course you can experiment with other settings as well, but this is not enough on its own. I like to also add to drop shadow effects. One of them to create a very soft shadow and the other one is a little bit sharper, crisper shadow. So I'm going to turn on one of them. And then the other one. I'm going to show you the settings I use here. But to be able to see them better, I'm going to change the background color to meet create value, something like that. So if I turn off the drop shadows, you can see exactly that. One of them is a softer shadow, while the other one is a bit more sharper and closer to the lights. So the two together, it looks like this. Again, this is a personal preference. You can experiment with different settings, but if you want to use the same exact settings, here is one of the drop shadow, and then here is the other one. Both of them are set to Multiply blend mode, like the default drop shadow option. And there's a couple of things that are very mainly the spread and the size. If you want to see the settings better, I have screenshots of them in the blog post version for which the link is in the description below. Now the good news is that we can reuse these settings on the shades. So all we have to do is to hold down the Alt or Option key and drag the effects onto the shades group. And you can see it came up there. The only thing we have to change there is the color. So going into Outer Glow, we can select a different color, say something like that. So what I like to do is to first of all create a duplicate for both of these groups and then take off the drop shadow from them. So just turn off the drop shadow from this duplicate groups and then merge them by using Command or Control E. So this is a raster layer right now. But just to keep at least the filter and non-destructive, I'm going to turn it into a smart objects. So Convert to Smart Object and then go to Filter Blur, Gaussian Blur, and probably use around this much blur. This looks quite nice. Let's just turn it on and off. That gives more presence to the light or more atmosphere. Once again, before and after quite a big difference. Next, I'm going to add another additional glow by using a shape layer. And I normally use the Ellipse tool, but you can use a custom shape as well. I'm going to draw a circle somewhere here in the center where most of the neon lights are and which part is the focal point of the whole composition? And I'm going to change it so it doesn't have any stroke value. It just simply has the same color as that blue light we used on the main neon lights. So that's the field color and it's a shape layer, once again, completely non-destructive vector shape layer. The most important thing that I'm going to do now is to go into the Properties panel, switch to the mask properties and increase the feather value. With this, we can blur out this shape completely instead of blurring it with a filter. This is just much easier and again, non-destructive. And if it's too big, we can always make it smaller. Let's just say something like that. We don't want the whole canvas to be lit by this. Somewhere around there it works. And then also we can reduce the opacity to a lower value, maybe around 60 per cent. So let's just see if I turn this off. Turn it on. It again, adds a little bit more atmosphere. Now let's forget about the different color neon lights on the shades. I'm going to use the brush tool already set this layer to overlay blend mode. We can of course change that later and then use a soft brush, bigger brush. By the way, I'm using Control Option click and drag to change both size and hardness at the same time. I believe that's the same on Windows, but you might need to use the right-click on the mouse to be able to access it with the same keyboard shortcuts. So with this, I can already start painting, but instead of using a darker color, I would like to use something similar to that bright color we had up there. And it might be a little bit overkill if you are using it with 100% opacity. So maybe just press two or three on the keyboard to reduce the opacity down to around 20, 30%. And then you can build up the effect yourself. So you can paint over the shades a couple of times until you are happy with the result. And let's just see the doubt and width. So that's just again, adds that extra interest and glue to the composition. 18. Adobe Photoshop - Neon Portrait - Patterns: Another very important little detail is that normally these neon light compositions, they look good on darker backgrounds. But instead of changing the color field that we have here at the bottom, I prefer to add a vignette layer. This is again going to be a technique with the brush tool very similar to what we've just done. I will name the layer vignette and then zoom out to be it. Use an even bigger brush size. Probably the same opacity will work. But this time I'm going to use the same color as the background color and set the blend mode to multiply for the layer. Now, I can start building up this shading around the edges. So simply paint over the edges, make sure that you go over the corner points the most. So the coordinate should be the darkest. And then keep the brush from the center part of the composition as much as you can. Now this is really hard to judge how much you need to add. So what I recommend to do always is to keep turning the layer on and off just to see how much shading you added. Vignetting is a term also used in photography and paintings and art in general. And it's a useful technique to keep the interesting the center of your composition and with a neon light composition like this, it also helps to establish that dark setting where the light really close and creates this cool atmosphere. Now, although we are pretty much done with the composition, there's still a few cool things that we can do. For example, we can add some pattern for the hair and facial hair. For this, I'm going to create first of all, new shape. I'm using the line tool and I'm going to draw a straight vertical line, something like that. Probably the stroke size can be reduced. And also I'm going to reduce the thickness of my lines, the path indicators just so I can see what I'm doing. And once again, the color doesn't really matter. Then I'm going to duplicate this. So Alt click and drag a duplicate once, twice. And once again. Now merge these layers, Command or Control E and then again, duplicate, duplicate, and so on and so forth. If you're not familiar with this technique, I've recently done another tutorial with an effect and animation on time. So you can watch that and I'll go a little bit more in detail on how I create these lines. But it's really simple as you can see, I'm just duplicating and emerging the lines together. So then I can use the free transform tool, Command or Control T on all of them together and then squash them in a little bit, something like that. And also I will make sure that having all of these parts selected, I will distribute them evenly with the distributor horizontal centers option. So now that we have that ready, we can use the free transform tool and maybe turn them into 45-degree angle or 30 degrees. Press enter and then position them somewhere where they will fill up the hair and the beard. So all the facial hair as well. I think that works in this position. Now we will add a mask on this layer. So click on the little Japanese flag here at the bottom. And by the way, if you hold down the Alt or Option key, clicking on this, it will automatically create a completely hidden layer. So it creates a black mask on which you can use the Brush tool we divide to reveal those details. So I'm just going to zoom in a little bit closer and you can see exactly what's happening here. So I can paint over and reveal these details. Now, at this point, it doesn't really look that good because first of all, the layer is on top of all of the other details in the composition. And that shouldn't be the case. It should actually be under the vignette and under everything else. But we should also change the color from white to something less intrusive. And since it's a vector shape layer, what we can do is to change our path selection tool to active layers. That way we can select only the parts within this layer. And once they are all selected, we can go into the stroke settings and select a different color, maybe something like this. Let's just click away so we can see it. And yeah, that looks already much better. Now we can jump back into our mask, select the Mask icon here, and using the brush tool with a white color, I can paint over the details to reveal them where they are necessary. Now, once again, because we are working non-destructively, the cool thing about all of this is that we can always go back and make a man's on any detail. So I'm just going to paint or where the beard very quickly. And I'm not going to bother refining these details too much. I'm going to add a bit of detail on the eyebrows. Don't think much will be visible there, but I'm going to add the bid. Don't forget them stash. We won't see much because there's a lot of glue going on here. But there you go. That looks quite good already. Now, as I said, if I wanted to make amends, I can always go back, select all of these lines. And for example, I can increase the thickness of them by increasing the stroke size, just going to pump it up a bit so you can see the difference. There you go. Once again, completely different look or if I don't like the angle, I can go back with the Free Transform tool and adjust the angle and so on and so forth. And there's still a lot of little details that we can add, like little holes for each of the endings of the neon lights. I already created this so I can just turn it on for you. These are simply vector shapes added on each of the endpoints. So it feels like the neon lights are connected somehow to the wall. And then also, I just added as decoration elements, some scribbles using the brush tool around the poetry. 19. Conclusion: Well done for finishing this course. I hope you had just as much fun going through it as I had recording it. And of course, don't forget about the class project. Because remember, practice makes perfect. I can't wait to see your work, so make sure to submit it. And in case you like this course, and you would like to learn more from me, then there's plenty of other courses that you can find here. Go ahead check them out now. I can't wait to meet you in the next one.