Recycle Your Art: A Fun Mixed Media Approach

1. Introduction: Hi everyone, my name is Gabrielle, I'm an artist and big-time Photoshop fan. I love starting with a blank canvas, but today I'm going to show you a fun and creative approach to digital portrait painting. In this class we'll be recycling our old portrait drawings by painting over them in Photoshop. The hard work of making a drawing is finished. Now it's time to really lean on our creative instincts and have some fun. You can take that piece you made in high school, college, or even last week and turn it into a completely new composition. In this class, I'll show you how to photograph your work, so you're set up with a nice clean file from the start. Then we'll jump right into my all-time favorite tips and tricks. Discussing everything from new crops to easy color adjustments, to where we can find free painting resources online. After we take a stroll through Photoshop, I'll show you my painting process in action. You'll be able to watch as I take one piece and turn it into three completely new paintings. Grab that all peace that's been gathering dust or that old painting that's buried in your computer files cause it's time to start recycling. 2. Getting Started: Your class project is to recycle an old piece using Photoshop. Then share a before and after shot with the class. On a computer, you can share your work by going to the your project section and then just click "Create a Project." For this class, we're going to need a computer with Photoshop, a drawing tablet, and an old art piece. You'll also need a camera, phone, or scanner if you're planning on painting over a traditional piece. I'm on a PC right now and I'm using Photoshop CC. I'll put a link into your project section of class to a 30-day free trial. Most things can be done on the older versions of Photoshop, but some things I'll show you will need the newer version. I'm using a Wacom Intuos 3 "9 by 12." It's been my trusty tablet for over ten years now. There are also links in the your project section, if you'd like recommendations on what tablet to buy. An optional software for this class is Paint Tool SAI. Unfortunately, it's a Windows only application, so it won't work on a mac. But for Windows users, this program may be fun to check out. At this point, if you know all about Photoshop in your tablet, you can jump ahead to the next video. If you know nothing about Photoshop, I would highly recommend taking my Photoshop Demystified course. That will walk you through any confusing basics and will set you up for success with this class. For those right in the middle, let's do a quick Photoshop review. Here on the left we have our tools. If you ever find they're missing, just go to Window, tools, and make sure it's checked. As you watch my demos, you'll see I'm grabbing different tools over here. For the most part, up near the top in the middle. If you can't find a given tool, just remember you can click and hold these down and find more tool options. Over here on the right side, I like to have the Navigator, Color, History, and Layer panels open. You can find these by going to Window and then just checking them off here. You'll also want options checked, since we'll be making modifications via the options bar. Going to Edit, Preferences, Performance on your PC, or Photoshop CC, Preferences, Performance on your mac, set your history states to around 400. This will mentally free you up to experiment. It helps me to have Photoshop remember my past 400 or so steps. Just in case I go down a creative trail and find it's just not working and I need to turn back. I have the express keys on my tablet programmed to be Photoshop shortcuts. Normally if you want to undo in Photoshop, you have to press Alt-Control-Z on your keyboard every time, and personally for me, that kind of cuts into my workflow. So instead, I've programmed this express key to be the Alt-Control-Z function. Now, I simply have to click that one button and my last step will undo. It makes my life much easier, so maybe this will help you too. Here are the shortcuts I use most and I've programmed them to be my other available express keys. If you'd like to do this too but you need help, go ahead and quickly watch the getting started video in my Photoshop Demystified course. 3. Photographing Your Work: Getting a good photo or scan of your piece may be more important than you think, snow breeze past this part. A clear file is essential for displaying your work online. You'll also find that having a clear image makes digital painting on it much easier. If you want to photograph your piece, put your drawing on a table in front of a window with natural light pouring in. Then with your phone or camera on the same plane as your piece, take a few photos. Having both on the same plane, like this, will prevent distortion. Sometimes it may work better to turn your image this way instead, since the light can rake strangely across certain canvases. So try both ways and then pick the clearest photo with the best lady. Basically, the important thing to note here is that natural light will typically produce better photographs than electric light. Natural light will capture more accurate colors, whereas electric light contend to go too warm or too cold depending on the bulb. You can also scan your drawing for a nice crisp image. Just be careful with mediums like charcoal. You may want to spray them with fixative first. Your scanner settings may require a little tinkering. For my scanner, I have to overcompensate a bit to get accurate values. Do a couple of test scans to see what adjustments you might need to make. Just make sure you don't get a scan with the colors overexposed. Adjust the settings to prevent this. You want to have a scan that picks up those more subtle tones to. In Photoshop, you may have to go to image adjustments levels, and adjust the values to match those in real life. Having this cleaned up image will make your life easier in Photoshop, and it will make for a cleaner presentation of your hard work. 4. Composition and Dimensions: I'm hoping these next several videos we'll get your brain churning with ideas and I'm hoping I'll be able to show you a couple of new things you can try out with Photoshop. There's no exact order to this process. It's all about experimenting and having fun. When you're recycling your old art, you want to make a copy of your piece and work on a copy. Always keep that original file untouched for your records. Now take a moment to think about this. This will free you up creatively. You have that original file saved and this is just a copy. You can make more copies of this digital file all day long. You can do anything with this copy. It's not precious. The hard work of making a drawing is already finished. If you don't like what you make here, it's no big deal. You can start over on a new copy. We're not wasting a nice pressure sheet of paper here and we're not using all of our expensive art materials. It's just Photoshop. Realize that and let that free you up. The first thing you'll want to probably do is make your image a bit larger. This way it won't become pixelated if ever you blow it up and make a print of it. Working around this size will be great. You can always size an image down smaller but you can't size it up without it becoming pixelated. Now let's talk about Canvas dimensions. To change things up right off the bat, you can change up the height and width of your Canvas. Here's some ideas. You can change it to a tall rectangular composition or you can make it wide like this. These dimensions are typical for a landscape work, but could be used in a really cool portrait composition as well. You could crop your image and to be a square composition or just the typical portrait dimensions can recreate. This is up to you. Just think about all the interesting canvas sizes available to you. Often, I'll figure out my crop as I work through my piece. Sometimes I won't even come up with the final composition dimensions until the very end. Continue to experiment as you work through your project. You'll also want to consider how tightly you want to crop your image. Do you want to allow some room for space or a body? Do you want to keep it somewhere in the middle? or do you want it to be cropped and closely to focus in on details? Again, this is completely up to you. All of these options and many more could make for very interesting compositions. You may also find your new piece works better flipped. You can do this by going to image, image rotation, flip horizontal. Remember to have fun and try new things. You might just like it. 5. Working with Color: So typically when I started painting in Photoshop, if I'm starting from scratch, I'll just jump right into color. But in my demos I'm recycling a black and white charcoal sketch. So I want to show you how you can bring color into a grayscale image. Usually what I'll do right off the bat is add a new layer on top, fill it with a color using the paint bucket tool, and then set that layer blending mode to multiply. This just pushes us right into the world of color. Then from there, I'll continue to experiment with multiple layers until I have something up on the Canvas to work with. Now here are some of my all time favorite color adjustments to play around with. Try exploring all of these and find your favorites. Going to image adjustments, brightness, contrast, we can easily brighten, darken, and add contrast to our image. With image adjustments levels, we can also make value changes by pushing around these sliders. Sometimes I like to use image adjustments, curves to lighten a piece. Changing the channel, you can also experiment to get other cool effects. Image adjustments, vibrance will not fail in adding vibrancy to dull colors. Image adjustments, hue saturation is great for manipulating the hue saturation and values, all at once. Usually, I'll use this adjustment with one item selected, especially if I'm feeling indecisive on its color. Image adjustments color balance is another great way to tweet colors, and I really enjoy using image adjustments, shadows, highlights. Open that shadow sliders, even just a little will add exciting color to the atmosphere into the shadows in your piece. If I'm ever really looking for some fun variety and direction, I'll check out image adjustments, color loco. Then I'll use the scroll wheel on my mouse to quickly flip through options. So when I work, and you'll see this a lot in my demos, if I like something, but I don't like it at its full force. What I'll do is I grab the rectangular marquee tool and select the entire image. Then I'll press edit copy. Then I'll go back in time to my original and press edit paste. This puts it on its own separate layer on top of the original. From there, I'll bring down the opacity until I come up with a happy medium that I'm satisfied with. I found this technique works for me as an indecisive artist. I like to merge my layers whenever possible to. That's just my personal preference because it makes me feel like I'm working on a traditional painting rather than a digital piece. It just feels more natural to me and maybe it does to you too. If you'd like to work with your layers separate though, feel free. Do what works best for you and for your workflow. But if you'd like to merge like me, you may find this useful. With select color range. You can click colors you want to change and Photoshop will make a selection of it for you. It's not perfect and it may take a little playing around with, but it works well enough. From there you can experiment with the color adjustments. Now I'm just using that copy, go back, paste method to erase a little bit of green that got on her hair and cheek. I'll also occasionally use the Dodge tool. With a big fluffy airbrush and the range set to highlights, you can quickly add dramatically into your piece. I would recommend using this very sparingly though, and with intention, since it's a tool that can get away from you quickly. If you ever want to unify your piece, you can do it by adding a new layer and filling it with a color with the paint bucket tool. Then you can set the blending mode to multiply and pull down the opacity and fill sliders. The color will instantly unify everything. You can also erase out your subject lightly with a big hair brush. This will produce a vignette effect where the edges of a piece or a little darker. This will pull you into the focus of the piece and it can offer a pleasing look. If you need help coming up with color schemes, I think good go tools are now great color schemes. Those are the colors that are right next to each other in the rainbow, or right next to each other on the color wheel. This is a very natural,pleasing color scheme, since every color easily flows right into the next. It's really harmonious. Complementary color schemes are also great go tools. A complementary color scheme will use colors that are across from each other on the color wheel, or close enough to being across from each other. If you'd like more ideas on color and creating mood with color, check out my color workshop. Another idea is to borrow color schemes from nature or borrow great color scheme from art you admire. 6. Proportions and Filters: In Photoshop, it's easy to fix proportions that may be too big, too small, too far apart, or too close together. Instead of having to erase like with traditional media, we have some super fun tools made available to us in Photoshop. Filter Liquify is one of the best. You can use the Forward Warp tool to easily make tiny changes to the proportions. You can also change up expressions. Just the slightest change of the brows can make for a wildly different expression. The same goes for the corners of the mouth. Newer versions of Photoshop even detect faces. You can have fun with this and experiment with the placement of the eyes, nose, mouth, and face shape. The Lasso tool is another great way to make proportional changes. I like to duplicate my drawing, and then, I just grab the Lasso tool and I select what I want to move. In this case, I select her whole head so that I can go to the corner and straighten it out. Once I'm happy with it, I'll just press Enter and then select Deselect. You can do this for any feature. You can just use the Move tool or the arrows on your keyboard to push things around. I like to use the Lasso tool like this and the Liquify Filter to make any proportional changes to my portraits. The Filter Gallery is a great place to experiment. Some of my favorite filters are in the Artistic folder and the Brush Strokes folder. I like using Paint Daubs to get a nice painterly look. With a bigger brush, it cuts out the detail and brings it back to simple shapes. I really enjoyed that about this filter. With the sharpness up, it also makes really nice crisp edges. Accented edges can help you achieve a dark bold outline, or by pushing the edge brightness, you can get some neat, bright highlighted edges, which could work really well and effectively for a science fiction or fantasy-themed portrait. The Angled Strokes filter also helps simplify. It's a good go-to filter if you ever want to simplify a part of your piece. These are just my favorites though. There are so many here to try out, so give them a go and write down ones you think are cool so you remember to try them. If I find a filter I like, but I don't want to use it in its entirety, I'll press Okay and then I'll select everything with the rectangular marquee tool. Then, I'll press Edit, Copy, go back a couple steps in my history, and then, press Edit, Paste. Then, I'll just erase out any parts I don't want, which will reveal my original underneath. Again, you can also lower that opacity to be exactly what you want it to be. Filters will give you some really cool effects. So as always, have fun with these and follow your creative instincts. 7. Brushes and Textures: It's so fun to try out a new brush back and there's some fantastic free brush sets out there from generous artists. On a computer in the your project section of class under resources, you can find some awesome free Photoshop brushes. These are some of my all time favorites. Try out some new brushes, and remember those that you'd like to feel love. Then go to Edit Precepts, Precept Manager, and move the ones you liked the bottom. Then you'll have them there for easy access while you're painting and you won't have to spend time searching for your favorites. Try to stay away from only using the air brush. Unless you're going for a very soft look. The air brush is essential for really smooth areas of a piece like transitions and form shadows. But it can also be a comfort zone brush for beginners because it's so soft. Break out of your comfort zone a bit and experiment. Usually when I break out of my comfort zone, I'm glad I did. I also think it's so fun to incorporate photo textures into recycled paintings. I like pixabay.com and textures.com. You can use these images for free. These are two of my favorite sites because you can experiment without the high stock cost. Here keywords you can search to find great textures. Butterflies, crystals, mountains, feathers, leaves, nuts, lizards, snail, seashells, patterns, or simply just the word texture, will pull up amazing results. Just think of the things that would have a cool or interesting surface texture. I like to put textures in my images and play around with the blending modes and just see what they do. Sometimes they won't help at all but other times they may inspire you and point your piece in an exciting new direction. Some of my favorite blending modes are multiply, lightened screen, overlay, soft light and pen light. But scroll through them all to find what works best for your piece. I found that if I'm filling stumped on a piece, it's a good time for me to try experimenting of textures. I feel like they have the potential to quickly propel a piece forward. Since with most textures, you'd get the texture plus the inherent color scheme that comes along with it. I found that I use textures most in the background on low capacity. I also sometimes use them on the shirt line of a piece or on another piece of clothing or on an accessory. If you know, you just want a piece of a texture and not the whole photo, just use the Lasso Tool to select what you want and drag it over with the Move Tool, or edit, copy and edit paste. Have fun with brushes and textures. They can really add visual interest to your digital art. 8. Paint Tool SAI: I want to share another painting program with you all. But before anyone gets too excited, like I mentioned, it's a Windows only program. I know it's a bummer for Mac users, but perhaps one day you can try this program in the future. You can get really smooth effects in Photoshop of course, but Paint Tool SAI just makes blending super easy. Sometimes I went to use this program in conjunction with Photoshop. One of my favorite parts about Paint Tool SAI is this watercolor brush. I just love how smooth it feels. Another feature I like about sai is this watercolor paper. It gives an instantly painterly look. Sometimes when I'm finished a piece, I put that on there. I just love the look of it. In my demos, I'll work a little bit in sai. If you ever want to know the brush I'm using, you can see it in the settings here. They're easy to duplicate if you want. If you haven't tried Paint Tool SAI yet and you have Windows, I would recommend giving it a go. It's really a nice smooth painting program. I'll put a link to a trial download here under materials. If you'd like to program your tablet for sai, the keyboard shortcuts are a little different than they are in Photoshop. Just add another application, choose sai, and then program your favorite shortcuts. 9. Telling a New Story: A lot of my portrait works, I've drawn them for the sake of learning the face. Sometimes I don't think much about storytelling when I'm in study mode. But we're recycling our works because the hard part is already finished, we have time to have a little fun with the character. You can use colors, facial expressions, textures, and added accessories to give your subject a story. Eventually, I hope to draw inspiration from all of these themes and more, but maybe some of these will inspire you too. If not make your own inspiration list. Take inspiration from colors, nature, animals, food, weather, whatever excites you and makes you want to paint. Sometimes the painting will subconsciously lead you in a certain direction based on how your lane and the colors and textures and how you're changing the facial expression. In this painting, I didn't realize I was painting an Indian until midway through a when the colors and the textures pointed me in that direction. Storytelling can make our art really interesting and it can keep our viewers intrigued. Have fun with this. If you're stumped, put five ideas in a hat, draw one out and go for it. If you'd like more ideas or need help organizing your inspirations, check out my class here on Skillshare for creating inspiration boards on Pinterest. 10. Painting Demo: Hopefully, the last several videos will have shown you in slower motion, all the different things I like to try out as I recycle my works. I didn't want to show you this demo in slow motion because I didn't want you sitting here forever, but if you have any questions about what you see here, feel free to reach out in the Community section and let me know. There is no correct order to all this, you can always switch up the order of your process from how it's presented here. In fact, I never go about recycling my paintings in exactly the same way. Remember it's all about experimenting. Be free to act on your creative impulses. I think this is a great way to learn and discover processes and techniques that work best for you. I personally like to periodically save my work and you may catch me doing this a few times. I think it's worth taking the time to do it too. There's nothing worse than working on a piece for hours only to have a power outage. This may be a habit you'll want to adopt too. As I'm sneaking in some color, I'm really not going crazy with a variety of different colors. I'm just dancing around the idea of working with some analogous purples and pinks. I think because I put in some of these fantasy colors, that aren't really typical for portraits, I started catching a fairy vibe. I looked at my fairy board on Pinterest to help guide this idea and push it further. I liked the idea of flowers in her hair and sparkly cheeks. Now I'm just taking some general inspiration from these flowers. I really loved this general color palette happening on my fairy board, how these purples and pinks play against this seafoam green, so I decided to add that pop of color to her shirt line. Now I'm scrolling through some of the color lookup options, just to see if there's anything I like better out there. There are so many ways this piece could go at this point. Now I'm just playing around with some textures. I like where the piece is going, but I need to push it forward and textures are a good way to help with that. I'm just playing around using a little bit of the textures, but not really committing to anything just yet. But then I bring up this texture here. I'm so inspired by this little pattern. I feel like I've used it so many times, so I just select a piece with the lasso tool and place it on her shirt. Then I go to Edit, Transform, Warp and I manipulate it into place. Then I just adjust the opacity, right-click and duplicate the layer, and then just move one to the other side too. Then I merge these two new texture layers and scroll through blending modes. I end up really enjoying how it looks with the Pin Light blending mode. Since I'm happy with that, I merge it with the rest of my piece. I'm just going in with a big fluffy airbrush and I'm using an orange color to just add some atmosphere to this. Then I set the blending mode to a lighter color and lower the opacity a bit. Now I'm just adding a couple little details to her face. I've decided I don't want to stick with the same crop I always do, so I'm going to make this a square. I use the crop tool to easily do that and I just paint in the the background with a textured brush. Now in Paint Tool SAI, I just use the pencil to add some defined lines and highlights. Now I'm upping that vibrance in Photoshop and I'm going to call this one Finished. This time I want something completely different, so I go right in and add a white background. I'm even redrawing some things just to get some new ideas flowing here. Now I'm experimenting with the expression a little with the liquefy filter. You'll see I flip my canvas a lot and I'm sorry about that, but it's so useful for me. It helps me see my work from a new perspective and it helps me spot my mistakes. Now I'm jumping into color and right off the bat, I'm getting a vibe like she's outside in the sun. I play with the shadows, highlights, and curves to get a little more brightness in there. I'm just adding a little detail while I figure out what she wants to become. Then it hits me, she's a pirate, so I slap that eye patch on there and I start drawing more hair. I drag the canvas out to get that hair flowing like it's being hit by the wind. Now I'm just running with this idea and I'm trying to carve out the forms like a sculptor would. Since she's a pirate, she has to have a piratey blouse. I'm going on my Pinterest to get some inspiration and reference for that. Here you'll see she's without a blouse again. This was for no other reason than that I accidentally started painting on a previously saved version of my drawing. I completely forgot that I had drawn it the night before, but that's no matter because we can copy and paste and erase out what we don't need. Here I'm just erasing to reveal the blouse layer underneath. I'm just adding in a couple more accent details but I'm trying not to add anything that takes away from the picture as a whole. It's important at this point that every mark I make enhances the piece, rather than takes away from it. Now it's texture time. Of course, you can hand draw any texture and that would be awesome, but I think it's so fun to use photo textures and obviously it saves me a lot of time too, so I enjoy using these. Now I'm just erasing out where I don't need that texture. I think it works well for her outfit. Now with the ellipse tool, I'm adding in a couple ellipse shapes that will become hoop earrings. I just erase out the parts I don't need that get covered with hair and I erase out the center of the hoops. Then I merge the two layers together and I lock the transparent pixels. This will make it so that when I paint, it's only going to go on those hoop earrings since they're the only thing that's on that layer. Now I add a little canvas texture to her blouse and I adjust the levels to the picture as a whole. In SAI, I'm adding that watercolor texture that I really like and I'm using a watercolor brush to soften up some areas. With just a little more atmosphere, I'm calling this one finished. Now I'm beginning again and because I went quite warm in the last piece, I want to add a cool blue to start this one off. Already the colors and textures are giving me an idea where I want to go with this one. I'm making her into a mermaid. I use the shadows/highlights adjustment to bump up the color, and then I head straight for the filters here. I'm just trying to smooth some things out since it would be very soft underwater. Now I'm just going into full experimentation mode. I'm playing around with some colors, brush textures, and a little expression just to figure out where exactly I want to go with this. I'm doing a little redesign of her hair. When I think of mermaids, I think lots of hair. That's what I'm going for in this one. I want to make it look like she's underwater. I'm scrolling through a couple of color lookup options. I feel like this one gives her that look, so I do my copy, go back, paste method to get some of that effect on her. With hair, I think it turns out more natural-looking when I draw it with big clumps, rather than drawing every little strand of hair. Try thinking of hair like thick ribbons or big pieces of clay, whatever makes you not paint every single hair. I like to get those clumps in first and then add a couple accent hairs, flyaway hairs around the edges. Right now in SAI, I'm just trying to think about how light and shade would fall her hair. I'm trying to think about the hair as if I were sculpting it. With every plane change, you're going to have a color change. Here I'm changing the value to show the hair moving in and out of the light. You may find this useful for cropping, by clicking Content-Aware, Photoshop will automatically fill in your added space with similar colors. Here I'll just use the crop tool to drag the corners out a little bit and then when I double-click to commit to my crop, Photoshop automatically fills it in with what it thinks would go there. It doesn't always work perfectly, but this is a nice tool to know about. Now I'm just adding in details. It seems I add them and take them out a lot, but only because I want each detail to enhance the piece as a whole. I don't want any detail to be so distracting that it ruins the piece. I have to be careful to make everything work in harmony and I'm always striving to get better at this. I won't lie, this one was a struggle to paint. I think that happens with all artists though. Sometimes things come easily and sometimes things just don't. It's so easy to look online or on Instagram and get discouraged by all the amazing art out there, but when you see a finished piece, you don't see all the artistic struggles that went along with it. Know that we all struggle and even if you're having a hard time in your art, it doesn't mean you're bad. It just means you're pushing through to that next level in your skills. Know that with every piece and every hour you dedicate to improving your craft, you're getting better and better, so keep learning and keep practicing. I found with this piece, I looked a lot at the navigator view. I think this is a good thing to do from time to time because it gives you an idea of how your piece reads from a distance. Now I'm dragging in a texture. I'm feeling stuck. When I feel stuck, this just helps push me. I liked this texture for its fish-scale quality, so I decided to give a hint of that texture in her top. Now I'm just experimenting with a few more textures to see if they can guide me anymore. I decide to paint over her entire face on a new layer because I want to warm up her skin just a little bit. Then I scroll through blending modes to find something that I think looks natural with this cool environment. With a dodge tool and a speckled brush, I'm just adding a little visual texture. With the dodge tool set to highlights, I'm just enhancing the lighting a little bit more. I also try that vignette effect to get a little more dramatic lighting going. Now I'm making the hair even bigger because I want it to be clear that she's a mermaid. I'm using these hairs here to create a figure eight. I'm hoping these flowing lines will flow my viewers eyes right into her eyes. With a few color adjustments, I'm going to call this one finished. Here's my original charcoal drawing turned into three new digital paintings. 11. Closing Thoughts: Thank you so much for joining and watching. I hope this class if nothing else has inspired you to get painting. I'm so excited to see your recycle piece. Be sure to share your work with the class. Please also let me know if you have any questions about photoshop, painting or drawing. I'd be happy to help. If you enjoyed this course, I'd love to see you in my other classes here on Skillshare too. I have lots of classes on everything from drawing characters to drawing pencil portraits. Be sure to check those out. If you enjoyed this course, a thumbs-up review would be so appreciated and be sure to follow here on Skillshare to stay up to date on all future classes I have in store. I'm looking forward to sharing so much more with you all. Thank you so much again for joining. I cannot wait to see what you come up with. Until next time, happy painting.