Simple Lighting for Procreate Illustration

1. Vid 01: Hey guys, my name is Maria. I'm an illustrator and character designer from Turin, Italy. This is my fifth class on Skillshare. And you may have seen some of my classes before. They usually focus on digital art and they keep a reference picture entering unit into a fertile character. I love creating classes for persecution because the community is super supportive. And also I like the files that you guys can give me feedback and I can implement classes that you guys actually you want to see in my previous cartoon character classes. I got a lot of feedback asking for a more in-depth focus on lighting and shading. So basically this is where I focus on lighting and shading. I think that lighting and shading are somewhat difficult topics to tackle because lighting is so important, it may take up only 20 percent of the time that you give to a piece, but actually has a huge impact in attracting the viewer's eye. Popping up, especially on social media where images are so small and you need everything you can get to attract people's attention. In this class, I tried to put in as much knowledge and practical tips as possible so that you guys can feel more comfortable and more competent when you do lighting and shading. I'm going to focus first on the theory, talking about color theory and how life can in fact color and what kind of shadows it can create. And then from there, I'm going to move on and show you practical examples of how you can set up one of the most common photographic settings that you can get, which is the two-point lighting and three-point lighting. And then I'm going to actually take out my iPhone and actually try and apply that knowledge to different times of day. It is in full daylight, at sunset and nighttime lights. I'm using Procreate on my iPad, but you could be using Photoshop or another digital tablet and it wouldn't be very different considering Procreate and Photoshop have a very similar blending settings for the layers are, so it's quite easy to migrate from one to the other. He said, this is not a beginners class. I feel like you need to have reasonable confidence when it comes to sketching and posing, anatomy, flat coloring, et cetera. Because I am only going to talk about lighting if you feel like you need some brushing up on those other topics, I recommend that you go back and take 10 my glasses on and how to turn a picture into a cartoony character and then come back here when you're done, I think that's all for now. Please let me know what you think of this class in the discussion section of the course. And I would also love for you to tag me if you share your work on social media anywhere. I am MLM underscore illustration, basically on any platform. And I would love to give you a shout-out. Don't forget to update your progress. And I'll see you in the first video where I talk about color theory. 2. Theory: Colour pt. 1: Hi guys, and welcome to the first theory video in this course. As I mentioned before, I'm going to quickly talk about color and light to give you a general foundation before diving into the practice sessions. To start with the basic concept. The very reason why we see color is because there is light. Objects don't inherently have a color for the human eye. And they can appear to be a various tones of the same hue according to the amount of light that they are exposed to. So the two concepts, color and lighting, are intrinsically tied together. But what is these terminology that I'm using? Let's start we explaining some of the terms that I'll be using in the classes so that we can all be on the same page. The term hue is often used as a synonym for the word color. However, more specifically, a hue is a pure color. That is, it's the main wavelength of a color out of the 12 colors present on the color wheel, which comprises the primary, secondary, and tertiary colors. Of course, not many colors you find in nature are pure hues, but rather they are tons of a specific hue. That is, colors that have been desaturated, but they are not black and white. Saturation is a term used to define how vibrant or pure a color is. In real life painting, you can desaturated color by adding gray or a color on the opposite side of the pellet, which effectively kills the vibrancy of the color. This is different from how light or dark a color can be, which is expressed instead by the value of a color. And now this can be confusing, especially since you can look At a darker color and think that it's also less saturated than a lighter one, but that's not the case. Actually, dark colors can also be saturated. They are simply of a lower value in comparison to lighter colors. If you look at the color options on Procreate, you see that you can visualize the color wheel in several different ways, which will help you to practically understand these concepts. So let's have a look together. The first option you'll find is to visualize color in the traditional round color wheel option shows you an outer ring with all the different hues and an inner disk showing saturation. You can select your basic hue by moving around the outer ring and then fine tune the saturation of that hue by moving your finger in the inner disk. You may not know that you can simply pinched out the inner disk to make it bigger and allow you more control in selecting the saturation. If you double-tap anywhere within the inner disk, procreate will automatically snap your chosen color to the closest pure value. So as you can see here, I'm selecting these dark gold hue. But if I double-tap, it snaps to a different. Darker or lighter yellow, which is the pure black, pure white, half saturation or full saturation versions of the view. I personally really like this color viewing format since I think it combines the help of seeing the colors as a color wheel with the flexibility of choosing your own value and saturation. The second viewing option is called classic color. It's divided into, with the larger area being taken up by the classic color view you have on other software like Photoshop, a rectangle where you can change the brightness and saturation of a certain hue. To change the actual hue, you have three sliders underneath. The first one changes the hue, and the second one changes these iteration. And the third the value. This is the visualization that can help you best understand the difference between saturation and value. As you can see here, I'm keeping the same hue, but changing value and saturation, which of course changes the perception of the color. More interestingly, if I keep the same value and saturation but change the hue, we have radically different colors where May 1 appear to be darker than another. But since the value is the same, we know it can be the case. The reason why this is important is that when using Hughes, the appearance of value can be deceiving. To properly assess the value of a piece European team, you should take away the color and work in grayscale so that you can be sure that you can place the correct amount of value on the different parts of the image according to their proximity to the camera. This is because in perspective and especially a UDL perspective, the closer an object is to the camera, the lower the value, the farther the object, the higher the value. Working in grayscale can help you understand how to properly set the scene in your pieces. But don't worry, we'll talk about this more in the next few videos. The third color visualization on procreate is called Harmony. Although these representation isn't super accurate as it combines together hue and saturation. It's great for choosing color palettes as it automatically shows you the different color combinations for a specific hue, you simply have to choose your hue and saturation by moving inside the disk and adjust the value by moving the slider up and down. Then if you toggle the harmony options, procreate will select the appropriate colors on the disk. The main color combinations we use our complimentary split, complimentary, analogous triadic and tetrarchic. Complimentary are two colors that stand opposite in the color wheel. Split complimentary will show you two colors that are on the opposite side of the color wheel to the original one. So you'll have one warm tone and too cold ones or vice versa. The analogous scheme will select two colors that are close to either side of the original shade. So it will be three warm colors or three colors giving a sense of uniformity to the palette. Then you have the triadic and tetra schemes were procreate, will find it three or four colors that are all equidistant on the wheel, resulting in no one color appearing as dominant. If you are working with a limited color palette, and I always recommend you practice small pallets before moving on to complex ones. I suggest you start with the split complimentary, where the original color will be the dominant shade, and the other two will provide a highlight and an accent to the composition. But again, don't worry about the details right now, we are going to talk about color palettes in a later video. The fourth tab in the color panel is called value, and it's called this way because it represents color on a grayscale. But because you can see an enter precise values to define your color palette, you can either create colors by manually moving the hue, saturation and brightness sliders, or underneath the RGB sliders or inputting values into them. You can also use specific hexadecimal codes that you can find online. But I don't think that's quite as useful. Finally, the last tab is called palettes, and that's where you can find Procreate native palettes, the ones that come with the software. The first time you open the app, you're saved ones. You can create a new palette by tapping on the plus symbol in the top right corner and selecting the first option new palette, you can then rename it by simply tapping on the name untitled. And if you tap on any of the empty space inside the palette, you save the color that you are currently using. If you change the color and then tap on a new empty space, your save that color too. If you slide the whole pallet towards left, you see that you can either share it with different apps as a Procreate swatch or deleted. You can also create a color palette from your camera or from an image, which are some pretty sweet integrations implemented by Procreate 5. This is pretty cool as it will automatically create a new palette with all the main colors from the image, which is useful, especially if you're painting something realistic or doing a study starting from reference. Overall, I tend to keep the classic display as default, but each representation has its pros and cons. So I recommend you try them all first and see which one suits you best. Now that we have talked about color theory a little bit and introduce some of its key concepts and terminology. I think it's safe to move on to the theory behind lighting. For these videos assignment, I'd simply like you to familiarize yourself with procreates various colored tabs and create some color schemes using the harmony tools. You can always record your progress in the project that you can create in the project area of this course. And I look forward to seeing it. See you in the next video. 3. Theory: Colour pt. 2: Hi guys and welcome to the second theory video dedicated to color and specifically color schemes. I thought I'd give you some insight into my color palette prices, Since lighting and colors are very intertwined. And sometimes we can find ourselves in doubt when it comes to effective color schemes. In the previous video, I showed you how you can use the Harmony tab in Procreate to help your decision-making. In this video, I'm going to show you in practice how different color palettes can radically change the exact same sketch or character. First, I'm quickly sketching out a female character. Nothing fancy, just something to use as the basis for our color tests. Since we're going to experiment with bold colors, I'm feeling inspired by the 80s vibes and power pants suits. Now that I have my character with a clean line art and I encourage you to take my character design courses here on Skillshare. If you want to see this process explained in depth, I can start creating some color palettes. Whenever I'm working on characters that come straight from my imagination, that is, I am not color picking their original colors from a reference. I usually develop color thumbnails to play around with options. A color thumb is basically a rough color layer that I created underneath the line art, where I quickly color in the whole silhouette of the character. Then I pixel lock the layer by swiping, left with two fingers so I can color anywhere around the canvas, but the strokes will only appear on top of the areas that are already colored. I'm starting with the triadic color scheme. Using these aquamarine TO kind of color as the primary shade. I know I've wrote split complimentary in the Canvas. That was actually a mistake as I got confused, Sorry about that. This is the triadic color scheme. Places three differentiates on the color wheel at the same distance in relation to each other. This means that we'll have some very bold color contrasts as the shades have nothing in common with each other. This is a great color scheme for graphic design and more stylized drawings and illustrations. To create the color thumb, I use the selection tool to quickly create a mask around the outline of the character and then fill it with the primary color. When I'm done placing the other two shades in the picture, I duplicate the color layer, resize it, and place it on the side to be compared with the next one. The second color scheme is actually the split complimentary, which is my palette of choice. On most occasions, I'm using the same aquamarine as the primary color and the Harmony tab in procreate is finding the other two split complimentary shades to go with it. These two shades are going to be placed slightly higher and lower in comparison to the original colors, actual complimentary shade. So they create quite a strong contrasts with the aqua marine, but they aren't in strong contrast with each other, reaching a nice balance between bold but also harmonious. Of course, when coloring our character, rather than using these palettes for graphic design, we have to consider that unless we make a decision to stay very, very stylized, we are going to have to use more than three colors for the character skin tone and various accessories. When I make the color thumbs, I don't consider elements like lips, eyes, or any other detail. I'm simply testing out the options for the more eye-catching areas of the character. However, I do usually add at least a different more natural shade for the skin tone in order to create slightly more contrast between the outfit in the actual characters body. This is the case also for the third color palette and creating the analogous scheme, which puts together three shades very close to each other, creating a harmonious but perhaps not very eye-catching combination. I rarely choose this color scheme for characters, as especially on social media, viewers are attracted by bold colors and contrast. However, this can be a good choice in some instances. Again, especially if you're trying to do something rather stylized or for graphic design purposes like magazine illustration. The fourth color palette that I'm testing out, the tetrad, the scheme. Similarly to the triadic, these pilot puts together for colors that are equidistant to each other on the color wheel. Again, creating a very strong contrast, especially when you start from a rather bright primary color. This option will give the character a youthful vibe, perhaps reminding the viewer of the eighties and nineties where fashion and accessories favor this kind of color choices. As I mentioned before, I am probably going to use the split complementary scheme for this character is I do usually for most of my characters and illustrations. This is because this bit complimentary can be both bold and harmonious, having one color as the main shade, one as its highlight, and the third as the contrasting accent. Of course, as I said, since this is a human character, I am probably going to use a few more shades to fill in the details and give the character attach more realism. However, it's entirely up to you, and I recommend that you don't add more than two or three colors to the palette, keeping it around five or six colors overall, so that you can practice using small pellets well, before moving on to the more complex, realistic or painterly styles. As an assignment for this video, I'd like you to take the clean outline of one of your characters. Or you can use this one as I'm sharing the PSD file with you guys and play around with various arrangements that inspire you. Try and change the starting color and see how the color schemes also changes. At the end of the day, color palettes and aesthetics are very much a personal and subjective matter. And often the same person can change radically according to their mood and period of a year. So there is nothing that always works 100%, but rather a lot of experimentation and trial and error. Have fun. 4. Theory: Lighting and Shading: Hi guys, and welcome back to a new theory video in this class. In this video, I'm going to talk about how lighting and shading work in theory, what kind of shadows you can find and what kind of highlights we can see in painting. As we established in the previous video, when light hits an object, it bounces back, transmitting information to our eyes and so we perceive color. Another effect of any kind of lighting, heating an object is that it will create areas where the object is lighter and areas that are darker according to their proximity to the light source. This is the basis for lighting and shading in painting. Objects have two kinds of shadow, cast and form. Cast shadows are created when something blocks the light. So they can be caused by a character or an object in an environment or Bye part of that character or object to the whole, practically speaking, the dark area under someone's nose, for example, or the area on the neck right under the chin is a cast shadow, or even the shadow that a character projects on the floor or on some piece of furniture they standing behind them. That is also a cast shadow. Form shadows are much more subtle than cast shadows. They are softer and less intense because they are created not by an object impeding the path of the light, but simply by the light not reaching that area. Form shadows are essential to make an object appear 3D, and they are not necessarily used in all drawing styles. Cartoon style usually doesn't employ real form shadows, although more realistic styles and 3D cartoony style make use of them in order to define a shape without the use of the liner. The way that both form and cast shadows are painted and interact with the object or character in the scene has to do with the objects 3D shape. So if you want to paint them accurately, you should study anatomy or get a reference so that you can study it. A lot of mistakes are made by beginners. They try and implement shading without a reference because our mind tends to make up things that we don't know often added to a lack of realism. On the other hand, we have lighter areas on the subjects that are called highlights. And they can be more or less intense according to the object's material and the proximity to the light source. Of course, whether you choose to represent the different types of material or not is very much a matter of style. As I said before, more realistic styles prefer to show these detailed differences to add to the complexity of the texture. For example, if you have an object that is plastic or an object that is glass, or an object that is ladder. These types of material will reflect the light in a very different way. More cartoony styles ignored these kind of differences personally. And if you watched my previous courses on creating cartoon characters, you probably know this already. I have more of a cartoony style when I draw for personal projects. So sometimes I have to employ more realistic styles when working with clients. But for the purpose of this video, I'm going to stick to cartoony lighting tips and techniques. As an assignment. I would like you guys to take different everyday objects you can find in the house, like caps, fruit, or other solids. I am choosing candle here and point a lamp at them from different angles so that you can observe firsthand the type of shadows that develop on them. You can also take pictures like I have done all of these effects and try and replicate them with simple drawings on your Canvas. In the next video, we're going to start getting into the practice part of the course. So we're going to have ample occasion to do so at that point. Have fun as usual, and I'll see you in the next video. 5. Procreate canvas settings and tools: Hi guys, and welcome to the last episode in a theory session of this class. Before we get started on the practice sessions, you need to set up your canvas in Procreate. There are several standard size ratios already present that you can choose from. But I like to have my own. So I have created a few standard square canvases of various sizes. And I'll show you how to create yours. Top on the top right corner of the gallery. And you will get to a new window where you can input your preferred size and DPI. Dpi means dots per inch and refers to the amount of dots that can be placed in print on a line of one centimeter. Of course, screens don't have dots, they have pixels. So this shouldn't really matter if you intend for your artwork to stay digital. High value in the BI and ensures that your artwork will look crisp when printed. So if you're unsure whether you're going to print your artwork or not, It's probably best to keep your DPI quite high just in case I think the best of both worlds in a way is to have a square canvases that are best if you want to share on social media. And also keep your DPI resolution at 300 so you can still print your artwork if you want to run and you will not have a problem. Now that you have your Canvas setup, you can import a flat color character from a drawing you have repaired or simply open the PSD file included in this course. This is the flood color stage of the quick character I drew earlier on in the color theory video. And you are very welcome to use it as practice, as long as you crave me. If you post it on social media, if you want, you can draw your own character right now. Simply stop watching this video and go check out my previous courses on how to draw cartoony characters in Procreate or Photoshop. Further steps until you get to the shading and lighting part and then come back here when you're ready. Inside the procreate canvas, you can see we have a very large empty area, which is where you can draw. Around the drawing area. There are several sliders and buttons. Starting from the sliders on the left, we have the brush size and opacity. Moving to the top-right corner, there is the brush tool, does mere or blend tool, the eraser, the layer panel, and the color tabs, which we have already explored. In the right-hand corner of the top bar, we find the small wrench that stands for settings where you can toggle the canvas size, import and exports and things like that. The effect panel, the selection tool, and the move and resize tools. One of the few technical things we need for this class is to understand the concept of layers and blending settings, which is the foundation for achieving lighting effects in this workflow. Layers are different. Transparency levels in the Canvas that overlay each other on a logical and hierarchy whole level. You can find them in the layer tab and they work in a rather straightforward way, simply covering each other. As you move to the top, each layer is on top of another, covering it and not letting you see what's underneath if you color it completely. I have drawn a purple dot on the canvas on one layer. If I create a new layer on top and change its blending settings, that is the way that Procreate reads, that layers interaction with the layer underneath to overlay, for example, what I draw on that layer will also change the purple dot I drew underneath. If I do the same thing two more times, once changing the setting to multiply and wants to add. You can see that the same pale yellow color is behaving very differently on top of that purple dot. According to the type of blending setting. This is the core concepts behind to delighting in this workflow. As most of my tips and tricks, our experimentations based on changing blending settings and seeing what happens to the image underneath. Most of the shading I will create will be done with these neutral purple color using the Multiply blend in setting and most of the lighting using the pale yellow with the overlay blending setting. I'm going to approach these techniques more in detail in the next videos, but I wanted to start mentioning these terms now. For this assignment, please play around with Procreate for a bit and experiment with each different binding setting so that you know what to expect for the rest of the class. 6. 2 point lighting setup: Hi guys and welcome back. In this video, I'm going to show how the most common photographic setup, the two-point lighting setup works. I have quickly finish coloring the test character from before using the split complementary color palette. Again, if you want to watch the full process of how I approach character artwork up to this point, I recommend you go take the Creating a cartoon character in Procreate class. If you're occur up, Let's move on to point lighting unsurprisingly makes use of two lights to highlight the 3D shapes of the subject in the scene in a way that isn't necessarily natural, but that is realistic enough and especially draws attention on the details you want the viewer to notice. The first light to be put in the scene is called Key Light, and it's a strong light, either the sun or an artificial source. This slide will invest the 3D shape of the object by creating form shadows on the areas it can't reach. So, in a way, is just the counter element to a form shadow. I am drawing the light sources as a 3D arrow here because I think that it's very helpful, especially as a beginner, to have a constant reminder on the page of where the light is coming from so that you can analyze how it's going to hit the planes of the face and the body of the character and create accurate shading. The key light will bounce off the elements of the environment, like the walls, the sky, et cetera, and reflect back on the subject, creating a second weaker light called fill light is light will make the darker form shadows a bit less dark, although not as light as those invested by the key light. In this video, I'm going to show you how to create shadows, not by addition, but by subtraction. This is a slightly, an orthodox way of painting shadows. And I don't usually do it this way when I'm painting, but I think it's easier to understand the concept is way. I have created a new layer on top of the image, link to it via clipping mask. A clipping mask is simply a way to link one layer to another so that the only strokes that show up on the Canvas are those painted over the original silhouette below? I have said this layer on multiply, since it's the shading layer, and I fill that with a deep blue color. This is because shadows and highlights are never, ever just black or white. To make sure they don't desaturated the whole character. You should always use colored shadows and highlights. As I was saying before, without light, the character would be totally in the shade. So that's what I'm mimicking by placing a full layer of blue shadow on top of it. The second step is to figure out how the strong key light is hitting the 3D shape of the character. Which areas are convex and which areas are concave? What are the powers that the light will hit first, and which ones will be covered and in the shadow, as I mentioned before here, a good knowledge of anatomy will help you greatly. But in a pinch, you can also simply try and place yourself in front of the mirror in the same pose and take a picture so that you have a reference for the body. I create a new layer and set it to overlay the usual setting for lighting and start roughly marking on the character. The areas that I think are going to be hit full force by the key light. You don't have to be super accurate here. This is more of a guide than anything. When you're satisfied with your analysis, it's time to go back to the shadow layer, select the eraser tool and start erasing on top of the areas you have singled out as highlights. This is what I meant by subtraction process. We aren't painting the shadows on top of the character. We are deleting the shadow from areas where the light is hitting, which is exactly what happens in real life. And the reason why I think it's easier to think about it Does way to understand how light works. As you can see, by chipping away at the shadow with a hard brush, we are creating a strong contrast and highlighting very clearly what are the 3D shapes of the character and her accessories? Actually, you might even think that these shadows are a bit too strong, and that's true. This kind of lighting now looks like the spotlight setup, where you have just one strong light source bearing down on a subject, which is a very dramatic kind of setup. Two-point lighting. We have to add the second light source, the diffused fill light that makes everything a little more natural. So the third step is to take the shadow layer and lower its opacity from 100% to 20 or 30 percent, or even 15%, depending on what kind of color you chose for the shadow. This mimics the effects of the fill light, which is the light that bounces off the subject and around the room, given a diffused and softer source of illumination, erasing the contrast of the strongest cast shadows. As I mentioned, I don't necessarily use the subtraction method when I paint in general, but rather item to painting the shadows only in the areas where they are needed, as I am going to show you in the next videos. But you can work either way, whichever is more comfortable for you. When I've taken care of the shading, I usually add some highlights using yellows or various shades on a layer set on overlay or add, depending on the intensity of the light source, highlights are usually very limited areas that help lift some of the best details of the characters. Like the shine on the hair, little light dots on the eyes, earrings, or other metal accessories warmed by the character. Try to keep the contrast between the highlighted and non highlighted portions of the character quite high so that you can single out specific details instead of having a whole piece looking overexposed. If you want, you can also add a third light, which is going to make the setup look a little less natural, but can provide a very effective separation for the character from the background. The third light is called rim light. It's usually an artificial source of light coming from the back of the subject that highlights its silhouette. The third light is especially useful if you're drawing a night scene. The character shape is getting lost within the background as you can easily paint the rim light of a neon color and justify it with some nighttime neon lights, for example. We're going to talk more about artificial lighting and the rim lights in a later video when we approached dramatic lighting, don't worry. For now, these are the basics in order to set up effective too. And three-point lighting, again, a great all-rounder for generic character pieces that don't need dramatic settings but are just presentation pieces. As an assignment, I encourage you to download the PSD file with the flat color practice character, and practice painting shadows using the subtraction method following the three scenarios I created for you. 7. Practice: Daylight: Hey guys, and welcome back to the practice segment of this class. Now that we have introduced the setup and basic concepts behind 23 lighting, I wanted to practically show you how you can recreate different times of day using layers and blending settings. I'm going to start with a generic daylight type of situation. I have simply gone on the internet and googled lighting setup day to find this image. But you can also look up references on Pinterest or even shoot you're on. The first thing you should do is to observe the reference and identify the main light or key light. Notice how it hits the character by looking at the direction and inclination of the shadows, then you can identify where the fill light is coming from, which is usually from the opposite angle of the main light as it's the product of the rebound of the key light on the environment. Finally, you can scout to the image for a third light source, which is usually coming from behind the subject, and it's called rim light. It's possible to spot to the rim light because it usually produces very bright highlights on the silhouette of the subject. It's different from the key light, because if you put the level of brightness of these two lights, scale, the rim light is way more intense than the key light to the point that it burns the image slightly where it hits it, clearly marking the outlines of the character. This is why the rim light works particularly well in contexts where the character's arms or legs or some other body part or accessory is separated from the main shape and therefore leaves a hole for the light from behind to come through, making the whole silhouette easier to read and more engaging. Once you have analyzed and put down in your notes where the main lights come from. The second step is to approximate the color of the lights and shadows. I say approximate because there is no way that you can find it with 100% accuracy. But even if you don't get it right the first time, you can easily change the color later on as we're going to keep it on a separate layer, I usually use the color picking two in Brock rate to sample a highlight on the image and then go from there to define the color of the key light. They said for a full day when natural sunlight, usually the color will be a light, yellow. The rim light is usually a lighter shade of the same color you picked for the key light. So an even paler yellow in this case. While for the shadow, you can go back to the key light and select the complimentary color scheme in the Harmony tab. This is because apart from rare occasions where you're using artificial lighting, the shadow and the highlights are usually two complimentary colors, one worm and one cold, to balance each other out and give more harmony to the whole piece. Now what do we have analyzed the reference picture? Let's apply this knowledge to our test character. I'm going to consider the same direction and intensity of the light sources in the picture and apply them to the character. So I need to look at the big 3D key light arrow, and figure out how the light is going to hit the 3D shape of my character. First, I'm going to identify the areas of the character's body. Are going to be hit by the key light in full force. The light is coming from the top left-hand corner. Therefore, it's going to heat the characters right side of the face and body slightly from the front. As you can see, I have collapsed the character in just one layer for ease of use, but you can keep a backup of the characters, various layers in a different layer group if you want to retain the chance of making adjustments down the line, I encourage you to create a new layer on top of the figure and mark with a bold color like red. All the areas that are protruding, pushing out or convex, and will therefore catch the light first. When you draw these areas, try to remember the 3D volumes of these elements and follow their edge with curved lines to ensure they don't come out as flat. For example, the forehead, cheeks, and nose are all around protruding areas of the face and will therefore be hit by the light first at their rounder top, just like a bowl. The right shoulder, chest, the jackets label and a small part of the left shoulder will also be hit like the back of the right hand and the forward leg. These are all the highlights on the body. Everything else is going to be in form shadows, various areas of subtle shading, not directly reached by the light. The second step is to identify the shadows. Here, we aren't looking for form shadows, but for cast shadows, the shadows created by an object or body part blocking out the sun and therefore creating a harsh shaded area. Cast shadows can usually be found in the orbital cavity, under the nose and chin, on the neck, inside the ear, underneath or behind garments that create creases or falls on the body. Among the hair at the back of the head, in the bottom half over spherical body part like the breasts or the belly. You have identified these areas. Let's test out our assumptions by creating a new layer, linking it to the main image via clipping mask and changing the blending setting to multiply I color, pick the blue hue of the shadow and proceed to painting all the casts shadows with the dry ink brush, my favorite brush in procreate because it's so versatile and use it for everything from sketching to line art to color. Again, I'm not being particularly careful or accurate with my brushstrokes at this point because I find that it's better to quickly put down shadows and highlights, check if they make sense, and then proceed to erase the access to refine them. Once you're done with the first coat of paint, turn off the visibility on the shadow guidelines and assess whether the shaded areas work within the position of the light and follow the volumes of the body parts are usually reduce the size of the brush at this point to painting some finer details and use the eraser to make the shadow areas more precise and accurate. Naturally, the shadows will be pretty intense at this point, and I can already see that they are too dark in comparison to the reference. So I'm going to bring the opacity down to about 30 percent for the time being. I'll go back and probably do some work tweaking when I have the highlights painted so I can equalize them. Now, create a new layer, make a clipping mask, set it to overlay, and let's paint in the highlights with the key light color. This time, follow the areas you drew in red again and trying to be quick rather than accurate as that part comes in later. When you're done, you can turn off the guide layer and refine the highlights like you did with the shadows, trying to keep in mind if an element is curved or flat and how it's angled in relation to the light source. When refining the highlights, you also have to keep in mind the time of day in the scene and therefore the intensity and reach of the sunlight. If you're using natural light, looking at the character in the reference will help you in this. So for example, if I look back at the woman in the reference photo, I can see that most of our body is quite well exposed with only a few like shadows in the areas that aren't facing the sun. This is because in full day, the sun is quite high up in the sky and strong. Therefore, the rebound light, that is the fill light is very strong and providing lighting to almost the entirety of the figure. When I'm satisfied with the shape of the highlights, I'm going to quickly turn down the opacity to about 40 percent, just so that it's not in the way when I paint the rim light. I'm going to add the rim light on yet another clipping mask following the direction and intensity of the rim lighting the reference. So coming from behind the character and goings Latin in towards the left. Usually I put the rim light layer on ad as a blending setting since it provides a higher level illumination in comparison to overlay. Unfortunately, a lighter yellow on ad will basically become white, completely burning what's underneath. So you always have to bring down the opacity of the layer about 35 percent, although I may change it to an even lower percentage later on. I'm going to add one more layer at this point, a gradient, which is something I haven't talked about before. This step is essential to give the scene more atmosphere and help the viewer identify the time of day. This reading layer goes at the bottom under all the other multiply and overlay layers. And you should use colors that are prominent in the reference photo. So in this case, yellow and orange. Since Procreate doesn't provide a gradient tool at this point, I'm going to change brush and select a large soft brush from the airbrush category and then completely fill in the layer with the first color. Then I'm going to change the color to the second hue in the gradient, this time orange. And likely painting the part of the body that is more in the shade. Again, these will provide a nice color variation, making the character look less flat and adding atmosphere and temperature to the light. The gradient layer can be set to either overlay or multiply depending on the effect and time of day. The overlay gradient will lit up the scene even more while the multiply layer will make it darker and more saturated. So since this is a daylight scene, I'm going to set it to overlay. Now for the last step in this process, I will tweak the various layers capacities until I've reached a balance that resembles the reference picture. I can't give you a precise measure that will work every time in this stage. Sometimes you have to put the multiply layer at 30 percent and the highlight at 50. Sometimes it's the opposite. It really depends on the color that you have picked for the shadow and the effect that you want to achieve. This is the point where experimentation and time will help you find the best solution for your drawing. And no easy tip or tutorial can tell you what is right to achieve this particular full-day type of setting. I have put the overlay gradient at 15 percent, the multiply shadow at 40, the highlights on overlay at 35 percent, and the rim light on ad at 45 percent. As you can guess, the reason why the highlights and the rim light are quite strong is that it's daytime. So the sun is very strong. If there was only one source of light, like a spotlight in a theatre, the shadows will also be very strong. But instead, in this open-air setting, the key light is bouncing all around on objects and it's been reflected by the ground and the sky, therefore making the shadows not very intense. This type of analysis and implementation, like the proximity and intensity of highlights and shadows, helps the viewer to immediately understand what kind of hour of the day it is, even if your character is an placed in any type of background as an assignment for this video, please look up some daylight references or downloaded the one I use from the project materials and try and replicate it on your own character of following these layer structure and blending settings. In the next video, we'll approach it a different time of day, the sunset. 8. Practice: Sunset: Hey guys, and welcome back to the second practice video, exploring different lighting setups for different times of day. In this video, I'm specifically going to approach sunsets for which I have found a reference picture. The process in this video is going to be pretty similar to the one shown in the previous one, starting from the analysis of the light sources in the reference. Here are the key light, of course comes from the setting sun, which we see at the back of the character in the lower right-hand corner, the intensity of the sunlight is dwindling, making the field light also less intense, and therefore creating stronger shadows on the left than on the side on the subject in the picture. The key light color is a warmer yellow than the daylight sun, almost an orange really. And the complimentary color is a more intense blue for the shadows. The fill light is also a lot warmer in this case, given the character reddish, orangeish undertones. While the contrast between highlights and shadows in general is increased because of the diminished intensity of the field light. As in the previous practice, I'm going to try and replicate the same exact lighting setting on my desk character. Therefore, the key light should come from the back of the character. But since my character, as opposed to the woman in the reference picture, is facing the camera and will be completely in the shade. If I get to the sun in the exact same position as the reference, I'm going to bring it slightly more to the right in order to hit the left-hand side of the character and light up a little more of her face. Here, I'm defining in orange all the areas that are going to be hit full force by the key light. Then I'm identifying the cast shadows that again are going to be placed under the nose, Shane, neck, and on most of the bus and in the inside folds, increases of the jacket and the hair. When I'm satisfied with my analysis, I'll create the first of the clipping mass and coloring the shadows. First a little roughly, and then more accurately erasing the extra parts that are needed to create additional detail. When I'm happy with the level of precision, I'll turn the layer on, multiply and lower the opacity at around 35 percent. Moving on to the key light layer, I'm going to fill in the highlights with a key light orange, and then turn the layer to overlay, lowering its opacity to around 45 percent. In this image, there is no obvious rim light since the setting sun is too weak to provide the necessary contrast. So I'm moving on to the gradient layer. Immediately. I've decided to use a warm orange for the highlight part of the gradient and a pale blue for the shattered. Therefore, selecting the same colors used for the highlight and shadow, adding atmosphere and depth to the colors to enhance the feeling of the setting sun and the coming of darkness. Since the time of day is quite late. And I want to convey an increase of shadows to reviewer. I'm going to set the blending setting of this layer to multiply rather than overlay, which, as you can see, makes the whole character darker and more saturated, implying a lack of light. For the final tweaking of the layer's opacity, I've settled on 35 percent for the gradient layer, 20 percent for the shadows, and 30 percent for the highlights. As I said before, these aren't necessarily the opacity value that you would use for any censored. But they are a good starting point if you'd like to experiment a bit. As an assignment for this video, I would like you to find some more references of different sunsets and do some studies with your character or using the character provided. 9. Practice: Night: Hey guys, and welcome back to the last practice video in this class, where we talk about nighttime references and artificial 99 setups. The reference I've found is quite interesting because it uses contrasting and almost complimentary colors for the key light and rim light. Already doing a great job with the color palette. For the key light, the intense artificial light coming from the left-hand side corner, we have a pale blue, which is pretty common for Night Lights. There is not much field light in the picture contributing to the presence of deep shadows. The rim light instead is coming from the opposite side of the key light in bright magenta. The opposition of blue and magenta isn't just grade according to the color wheel. It's also been quite popular both in photography and illustration in the past few years. So it's definitely worth familiarizing oneself with this scheme. As you already know by now, I'm first going to identify the key light area, the cast shadows, and the rim light on my own character. Trying to replicate the same setup as in the reference picture. Then I'm going to create the first clipping layer set to multiply for the cast shadows, which I'm painting in a pinkish salmon color that is the complementary hue to the blue light. The area of the cast shadows is quite a sensitive and stark. In this case. By night, the recent much fill light bounced back by the reflectiveness of the environment and therefore, the shadows are much more crisp than in the daylight. When I'm done with refining the shadows, I'm going to bring the layer opacity down, but keeping it a lot higher than in the previous videos to about 65 percent. Next, I'm going to paint in the highlights in blue, setting the layer to overlay to about 50 percent. This highlights are also pretty crisp because without the feeling light evenly now the contrast highlights and shadows are going to be much more visible. Then I'm going to add the magenta rim lights to the characters right-hand side, keeping it quite extensive as it is in the reference picture. In this case, I'm going to experiment a bit with different blending settings, trying to find the one that fits best, the effect I want to achieve. I've temporarily settle for hard light. However, it doesn't look quite right at the moment. And I suspect is because the overall darkness, saturation and temperature of the image is still too bright. I'm going to move to the next step and add a dark purple to blue gradient to enhance the night-time atmosphere. And ensure that the highlights and rim light of more in contrast with the dark shadows. I'm going to set the gradient layer to multiply and bring it down to about 50 percent opacity for the time being. Now it really is just a matter of tweaking the layer opacity values and erasing parts of the shadows and highlights with a soft brush to refine the level of detail. The final values that I got to our 50 percent for the gradient layer, 40 percent for the shadows on Multiply, 22% for the highlights, and 53 percent for the rim light on overlay. You might have noticed that I also changed the blending setting of the highlight layer from overlay to add. This is because since the sort of light is artificial and definitely closer to the character than the sun to the earth. I wanted to add a starker contrast and the ad blending setting conveys that affect better than overlay, which has a slightly softer blend. You could apply these settings too many other night scenarios by simply changing the color of the artificial lighting. So I encourage you to explore a different settings both in urban and natural environments as your assignment. As See you in the next video for a sum up of the whole class. 10. Wrap-up: Hey guys, We have reached the end of our class. Thanks for sticking with me through the theory and practice. I know how hard it is to study with online courses on your own to improve your skills. So I want to congratulate you for your tenacity. Not everybody has the patience and determination for at-home classes. So well done you I just wanted to spend a couple more minutes summing up the basic concepts I hope you learned in this class. Starting from the fundamental idea that lighting and color are intrinsically related. Without light, there is no color and the amount, type, and proximity of a light source can change color dramatically, creating shadows and highlights on characters and environmental like. First, we need to identify or the side, if you are setting it up from your imagination, which one is the main light source or the key light, and approximate its color. After you have figured out which parts of the body will be invested by light full force, you can deduce where the shadows will fall. We can find two types of shadows, form and cast, which help us understand the 3D volumes of a character and realism to a scene. In cartoony style, we will still draw the shadows mostly flat using a hard brush. Same thing goes for the highlights and the optional rim light you might have in the setup. Once you have these three basic layers, shadows on multiply, key light or overlay, and rim light on overlay or add clipped to your original drawing. You can add a full gradient on Multiply or overlay, depending on the temperature and darkness of the scene and time of day. To give the image the correct atmosphere. From there is just a matter of tweaking the relative capacity of these layers to achieve a suitable balance. The effect that you were chasing, if you're unsure what the lighting would be best for a specific time of day, just look up any landscape picture of that situation on the Internet and experiment with gradients, light color and shadow color based on what you find, there is unfortunately no substitution for observation. And patients. Once you know the theory and you understand the basics, the best way to improve is to take those fundamentals and apply them time and time again, experimenting with color and blending settings. In Great further exercise to improve your mental library of lighting settings is to learn from the best lookup cult movies that are well-known for their photography and take screenshots of some of the best scenes. You can try and replicate them to really understand how the director of photography set up the lighting. Some of the best movies in this category are Blade Runner B, original movie from the seventies, Pan's Labyrinth, any Tarantino movie, one of my favorite is django Unchained, but there are many others that you can look up and enter the void. You can even just go on Google Images, n-type best lighting movies or something like that, to find tons of ready-made screenshots of fantastically lit scenes. By studying and copying these masterpieces, you can honestly learn a lot that you can then employ in your own art. Again, I hope you enjoyed this course and please do not hesitate to leave a review or a comment in the discussion board of this class to let me know your thoughts or questions. You can find me on social media across the board as MLM underscore illustration. Don't forget to tag me if you share some of your work so that I can give you a shout-out. I'm looking forward to seeing your projects in the project section of this class. So don't forget to update your progress. Bye for now.