The Procreate Watercolor Masterclass

1. The Procreate Watercolor Masterclass: Hello and welcome to the Procreate watercolor masterclass. Watercolor can be a challenging way of painting. You need the right technique and to understand the nature of watercolor now, as well as being a digital designer illustrator for decades. I've also used real life watercolors for decades, so I can explain how they work. Plus, I've developed multiple new digital techniques, especially for this course. I will take you right from the initial brushstrokes using dozens of watercolor brushes I've created for this course, you will practice using various sketches, color swatches, and files that I supplied that I take you through a series of follow along orioles, which gives you increasingly advanced techniques and resources. Some of these techniques and resources you won't have seen before. That's because I've used my more than 45 years experience to create brand new directions, using the tools procreate gives us, as well as having over four hours worth of follow along and have a go yourself tuition. I am giving you 35 new watercolor brushes plus 70 toothbrush heads, 22 watercolor splatter, 56 watercolor splotches, 14 watercolors cancels, 12 watercolor textures, 18 white plus 18 great paper textures, 20 pieces of line art to practice with. 52 color swatches based off of real-world paint around 256. New ways of working with color. You are getting serious value for money with the Procreate watercolor masterclass. If you can scribble with an Apple pencil on an iPad, you've got this. Enroll today. I'll see you on the course. 2. Hello and Welcome: Hello and welcome to the Procreate watercolor masterclass. Thank you for investing in this course. It means I get to make a living doing what I love doing. Okay, So what you're looking at right now are different segments from various bits of the course. But let's make this introduction practical because as well as all the tuition, I have loads of resources for you to download. So let's quickly see how to do that and then move on to the next video. I have got a load of files for you and you need to get them inside Procreate. So this is another course I have on Procreate all about creating rock art. But what I've done is temporarily attached to one of the brush sets I want you to have for this watercolor course. You can see down where I'm circling. I have DC watercolor wash brush that I am going to tap on that. I get a download file down the bottom and I tap on download, download, and I get another thing saying open in, tap on that. I am going to save to files tab there. It asks for a location. I want my iCloud Drive because if you've got an iPad, you have an iCloud Drive. And I'm going to save it to my Downloads Folder. Tap on Save. That's all nice. So now get out of Chrome. I sometimes find so far it gives me one or two problems with downloading. So I use Chrome and now if I open up Procreate, you can see I don't have any brushes apart from the default brushes. That is not a problem. I need to come to my file's app. I can see it down the bottom, but if you can't see the icon, just come to the top of your screen, drag down and go to Search. And I will answer files. There's my file's icon. Tap on that. Well, I saved it on my iCloud and night. So tap on the iCloud, Drive there and tap where was it download? Yep. That DC watercolor wash brush set. Zip, dot zip. Oh, okay. All I need to do is tap on that and it automatically unzips. Now, if I come back to Procreate, open up my brushes. I have the sketching brush that selected. It's at the top. All I need to do is come to the plus sign where I'm circling, tap on it. Then I come to import the top right where I'm circling. Then where is it stored? On the iCloud Drive in the downloads folder. And you can see it there. Dc watercolor wash, brush set, tap on that. It imports. Add a look at this. I have a whole new category with all my brushes ready to go. Now the Apple operating system is doing update pretty soon. Maybe things will change then and be a little bit more straightforward. But in the meantime, this is how you get the files onto your system. Sometimes they'll just be a regular file. It won't be zipped up so you don't have to unzip it. That will make life a bit easier, but now you know how to do that. Well, let's move on. Okay, Good luck with that. There's a whole load of resources waiting for you because as well as providing good situation, I wanted to give you plenty of new toys to play with. Alright, let's move on to the next video where I want us to start practicing with all those new brushes which are available as part of this course. Okay, Now, just in case you've never used Procreate before, I've included a 20-minute Procreate primer as the very last lecture on this course. So if you've never used Procreate before, skip to the end, take a look at the prime, always just explains the interface. And then when you're ready, we'll make a start with the watercolor course. I'll see you there. 3. Get to Know your Brushes: Hello and welcome to this video. And I want this to be as simple and as brief as possible. And all I wanted this lesson is just for you to start playing around with the various brushes we're going to be using on this course. So as well as the brushes, there is a file I want you to download, and that is simple watercolor file. There's also a couple of files for you called watercolor simple sketches 12. We'll take a look at those. So once you've downloaded the brushes, the simple sketches, and those simple watercolor file, the first thing I want you to do is to come to the Procreate gallery, come to this simple watercolor file, swipe to the left and duplicate it. Now I always want to keep an original and work on duplicate simple watercolor file here. Let's take a look at this. I have a number of different layers. I have Hughes at the top. These are just a series of the kind of watercolor hues that you do get when you buy watercolors in that thing called the real-world. Just so you have some colors to sample and play around with. And you may notice that for a lot of these colors, you're getting a lighter tone and mid-tone and a deeper tone all laid out left to right. You have a paper lab, much more on that later on in the course. And you have insert files here, draw here second Andrew here, first one that's come to draw here first, my fuzzy line brushes selected. Let's just choose a color. I get my finger. And if I like the look of say that orange right in the top left corner, just place my finger on, I got my little sampler, little circle. The bottom bit of the circle is my current color. The top bit is what I'm going to choose once I let go with my finger. So supposing I liked that deeper orange, I let go. That is now the currently selected color. And there you go. I can scribble with it. And this is all I really want you to do with this lesson. Just get used to the marks that these new brushes make. I have quite a few brushes for you. Experiment around with them just to get a feel for them. I chose fuzzy line brush. If I come to DC simple round, deep and use that a very different looking brush. And if I draw again, I can get colors on top of that, I can build up different layers to get deeper colors. If I want to get rid of a brushstroke, two-finger tap to undo and undo, undo, undo. Okay, So we are experimenting with various different brush strokes, DC splotchy brush stroke. Let's try a different color. Let's try green color and play around with that. And all of the brushes in these three different prices that are older help us create watercolor type effects. You don't have to become familiar with all of these as you go through the course, I will introduce various brushes as we go through the exercises. But if I can make one recommendation at this early stage, I provided plenty of brushes to give a variety of different effects. That doesn't mean you need to know how all of them work. You are a lot better off Mastering just a few brushes, then you are plowing your way through hundreds of brushes, thinking there's going to be a magic brush that's going to magically give you the magic effect that you want. There are people out there selling thousands of brushes. The biggest brush set you've ever seen. Well, if you get something like that, you will spend all your time trying to figure out what a particular brush does. I once you've done that a month later, trying to figure out which brush it was you are using in the first place. So become familiar and become comfortable with just a few. Now let's take the one we've got at the moment, DC, what adds textured? There's two ways to control that. One is the size at the top. Let's make it about what, 90%, or make your brush stroke, Let's make it a bit bigger, about 40 per cent, and make your brush stroke. The other way to control it is the opacity. Now you can see with this, this is set to a low opacity. If I crank that write-up and make it the same brush stroke, can you see I'm getting a much stronger effect? Given this is a watercolor masterclass, that opacity slider, absolutely crucial because watercolors work by having some pigment. You have some blue or some red. I'm mixing that in with various different amounts of water to create either a light washes where there's not much pigment on your paper, or heavier brushstrokes where there's more blue or red on your paintbrush. And you can control that here using the opacity slider. Okay, Let's come down to draw here first. Let's clear it. Now while you're experimenting, you might want a sketch so that you can try out the brushes against the drawing or an outline. So if you want to do that, this is what I suggest you do. Come to the layer which says insert files here, then come to the top left where you get that little wrench icon. That is your Actions menu. And there's various sub menus here. You want add, then come to insert a file. Now do you remember I had some simple sketches for you. So let's come to the bottom of the directory where I store mine and I have to hear watercolor simple sketches, 010 to 101. This is a simple PNG file, which means I get a transparent background. I have a series of sketches for you. All you need do now is find one you like. Now supposing I like save that little mushroom house just down the bottom and then finger and thumb on a pinch outwards. And I can resize it and position it where I want it to be. I will take it to about there, tap any of my menus on the right-hand side and that gets fixed. And I can use that just to base my sketches from now supposing I don't want those little bits of the sketches just to the side and at the top, that's not a problem. Come to our erase brush. That is not a problem because we have our Paintbrush, menu, smudge or menu and arrays menu and any Procreate brush can be used to either paint with, smudge with or erase with. So for this, the two brushes I find best if I wanted to do harder raising are in the DC watercolor line brush set. You have DC line blocking in it. And DC hard triangle ink pen, I want DC line blocker enter. My opacity is set to 100 per cent. My size is wherever I want it to be, I can make it big. And all I need do is just erase the bits just around the outside, like this. So I just have my mushrooms sketch. The next thing, come to our layers panel. I do not want to draw on this layer because if I have to erase things, I'll erase the line work and whatever. I don't want that. So one thing I can do is put my finger on the slide to the left where it says Lock, put lock. You get a little padlock. And that means I can't draw on that layer. Now, I'll come down to draw here first, let's choose a brush. Let's try DC hard wash buildup from the wash brush set. And let's try, let's try a fairly light ish, red brush opacity. And that's kinda the whole point. I want to experiment with these brush size, maybe about 11. And let's just come through to here. And if I press light, I get a light effect. If I press harder, I get a darker effect like this and I can maybe make the top of this a bit deeper like that. Now supposing I want to try a different color, darker red. I can do that and I can build things up this way and I'm getting quite a hard edge there. Why don't I two-finger tap to undo that and maybe try another brush. Let's try hard. Washington ragged edge, which is basically the same brush. But I have a more ragged edge and I can build up an effect like that. And then if I decide, oh dear, I've gone over the edges, I can come to my Erase tool. What do they have DC line blocker in it? Yeah, I can use that to arrays from around the edge so I can constrain where I want the paint go like this. And I'm working very fast here. Then if I decide I want that to be more blended in, I can come to my smudge icon and I've got all my brushes, all of which can smudge in different ways. Now the one I quite like is DC smoky and smudgy deep. That is from the watercolor wash brush set. And what size of maybe what size 8% opacity around about halfway. And I can start a smudge these different areas in like this. I can smudge the deeper color words. I can smudge the lighter tones in what's like this and build up an effect like that. Let's come back to my Erase tool, which is still has the same thing selected. And I can maybe make some white holes here. Or what I'm doing is I'm experimenting and seeing what works, what doesn't work so well, and what each brush does. Not concentrating on trying to do a good picture. I'm just playing with the brushes. Like for example, what DC Glaser. Let's try that one from the wash brush set, and I'll choose a different color, this green color. Brush size fairly large, my opacity pretty low. And I'm going to make repeated brushstrokes just in one part of the screen and you can see things are starting to take on a green hue. If I now come to, let's try a fairly deep ish blue on my brush the same. Now. Things are taking on a blue hue, but I can still see some dark to light details. So now I know DC Glaser can change the color of the things underneath, but it doesn't have as much an effect of the dark and light. Let's tap undo a few times to get rid of that because that's not really an effect I want. That were tapping sound. That's my fingers tapping against the surface of my iPad. Let's resize that just a little bit. Now let's try another brush. Why don't I try DC simple washed deep. I'll come to my reds again if I make brushstrokes. And now you can see that's very strong. And I realized maybe I don't want it as strong as that. So two-finger tap a few times to get rid of that and lower the opacity and maybe up the brush size. Now I can make repeated brush strokes. And that is a point that is DC simple wash deep. They're smokey and smudgy deep. That's fuzzy brush deep. Wherever you see the name deep on the end of a brush name, that means that fat brush can give you a darker tones than the color you have selected. Let's try fuzzy brush deep, drop the opacity down, make it fairly large. I will choose a pretty light yellow mate once your brushstrokes, and if I might repeat a brush strokes, that yellow I'm getting is a little bit darker than the color I have selected. And I'm going to stop now because all I wanted with this was just for you to have the ability to call a file, bring in a sketch if you want, and just play around with the three different brush set. Play around with the size of them, play around with the opacity and just to get a feel of the kind of things they do. And while you've seen, I've got a few sketches for you just to experiment with. But as you go through the course, I am going to be giving you walkthroughs. I'll also be giving you exercises, but bear in mind, you have a whole series of sketches so that once you've finished a walk-through, and if there is an exercise based off that walk-through which you've also done. You still have a whole load of sketches that you can call up at anytime and practice what you've learned. So this toad stool and all the other sketches you've got, keep on referring back to them that way. You've got plenty of different ways to practice what you're about to learn. In the next video, we'll start off with a very simple walk through using very traditional watercolor techniques. And if I say the name Beatrix Potter, that will give you a clue as to the kind of thing you're going to be doing next. I will see you in the next video. 4. The Simple Technique, Part 1: Hello and welcome to this first tutorial. And I'm going to try and keep things simple just to get us started. Now has anybody read the Peter Rabbit stories by Beatrix Potter? Well, I did this line drawing to hopefully look a bit like something she would do. We're going to color it in. And the reason I'm doing this particular style is in the past 100 years, the way we do watercolors has changed dramatically. And nowadays you get a load of really modern techniques. We will be looking at those later in the course. But for now, because this is the first tutorial, I wanted to take us back to a time when watercolor techniques was simpler. So this file is called prom night. It is available for you as a download. Let's get started. Well, the very first thing to do is to come to our layers panel where I'm circling, tap on it. And these are the layers we have to work with. The top three layers are locked because I don't want us to paint on those layers. I want us to paint on the layer called paint here. Before we do though, you'll probably find when you open this file that the layer called paper layer is invisible. And what I want you to do is to come to just where I'm circling and tap there to make the layer visible. Did you see that straight away? I'm getting something that looks more like hopefully a fairly old paper effect. Because, well, with watercolors, you need three things. You need a brush, and these are the brushes I've got for you. You need a color. Well, I provided those little blobs. If you want to select the color, just place your finger on one of the colors and you can drag around if you want. Then when you let go, whatever is under that little crosshair in the middle is going to be the color you're going to pick up. You've got your brushes, you've got your color. And because this is watercolor, you need to control how much color you got on your brush versus how much water. That is simple enough. And I'll show you this if I come to DC, simple hard wash and where I'm circling on the side of the screen. This is your opacity slider and you can see it's on a 100%. If I make a brush stroke, you can see I get a very thick stroke. That's because there's a load of color on my brush, two-finger tap to undo. If I take this down to something really low, Let's try around 25 per cent and do the same thing. I get much less painful it down. So this slider, the opacity slider, that is the digital equivalent of how much paint you've got on your brush versus how much water. That will vary from brush to brush, two-finger tap to undo that. So okay, so you have your brush, the color, and how much water there is. A third element is what you're painting on. And that is going to be crucial for achieving realistic watercolor effects. I've got my paper layer there that should help us to paint something more realistic. Anyway, let's get started. I want to come to my paint here layer. Now what brushing my using. Okay, I'll go with DC simple hard wash that is inside the watercolor wash section. Now how big I want this to be big around about 60 per cent, nearly maximum size. For my opacity. I want this down, nice and low. I've got 27% anywhere in the twenties percent should do. And as for the color, well, I want that very light yellow. So I hold my finger over there until they choose the yellow, let go. And using these settings, I'm going to put down a very light wash of yellow, just where the firm of this squirrel is. Hopefully, you realized it's a squirrel. Eventually I want this to be oranges and some deeper browns. But for now, I just want to put down a base layer on which to build on top of. So I've done that and you'll notice probably that I've gone over the edges in places. That suits me fine. I'll come back and erase I just afterwards. So the next thing, Let's try some of this orange on one, a lot of this orange on here. But I'm just gonna put it down just in certain areas. And here's the first tip for you when you're working like this and you put it down areas of color, get your brush as big as you can get away with. It's very easy to start concentrating too soon and all the tiny little details. And that's not going to work out very well for you. Get the big areas in. First. You'll notice I'm only putting it in certain areas and leaving it off other areas. That is the typical way that you work with watercolors. I can always come back in later and add more pigment colors deeper, but for now, I just want to get a range of colors. Alright, so now I'm gonna make my brush a little bit smaller. I've come to about 4445% and I'm going to increase the opacity as well because I want to put down some stronger areas like this. Let's get wanted to paint strokes as well. Because, okay, I'm not going for an exact reproduction of Beatrix Potter style, but I'd like it to look Beatrix. To ask a little bit. Again though I'm making this nice and big little bit darker around the ears, areas of color. But I'm still working in terms of areas. Little bit of shadow underneath a jacket, a little bit underneath. Definitely. Try and think about where the light is going to be, a weather light isn't gonna be able to get to in which case those areas are going to be darker. Yes, I am going over the line. Look at that. That's terrible. Well, that's okay. Because I'm going to come in and I raise these afterwards. Because while, as I explained elsewhere in the series, Working with a little plastic pen is very different to working with a flexible paintbrush. And also this paint dries. Immediately. You can't do wet on wet techniques, not with procreate, maybe with some other software, but you can smear the paint around it anytime when traditional watercolor paint water dried long ago. So you have to adapt your technique a little bit to take that into account. Okay, I've put down those areas now what about a little bit deeper red? I'll make this lower opacity because this is going to be quite strong I think. But can you see that? I'm starting to get just wanted to read touches in one or two areas. And I want that because doing a sea of orange, you can do that, but I'd rather a little bit of variety in the actual color. Instead of one color and making it darker or lighter, that you can do fairly easily like this. While we're here. Let's try a little bit of that deeper brown as well. Because like I say, I want to mix things up a little bit. But this is more shadow areas, so I'm only putting it where I think there's gonna be kind of shadows. And also I'm going to use a little bit of this blue because if you're doing something in the style of, I noticed with Beatrix Potter, she does have a little bit of blue in the shadows. So that's what I want to do. That was too much. I'm talking working at the same time. So it can be a bit difficult to concentrate on two things at once. Multitasking doesn't come easy to me. Now, just while I'm here, I've chosen my original orange again, but I'm going to come to a different brush. I've been using simple hard wash, but now what I wanna do is come up a little bit. I've got this brush, DC smoky and smudgy deep. Now the thing about deep is when you use it. Well, let me show you covered right at the top. I'll make my brush nice and small so I can make a local area. And I'll come here and I'll make wanted to paint brush strokes like this. Can you see how I'm getting progressively darker? But if I keep on going, I'm ending up with a color that is darker than the color I've sampled. So some of the brushes will do that. If you see a brush with a name deep on the end, it'll behave like this two-finger tap. There's few times to get rid of that. The reason I've done that is because sometimes you'll want these deeper colors, but you'll want to keep some of the original hue, like top of the head. I want that to be deeper. Top of the ears, definitely tip of the nose. The way these brushes behaviors that you do get deeper colors, but it also become quite saturated as well. So try not to make it too saturated because one of the things about watercolors is, well, especially with the more traditional techniques. Sometimes it can look a little bit washed out. Well, is washed out the right word, shall we say more subtle than oils or acrylics for example, or inks. Alright, so I've made some brush strokes here, but I noted as Beatrix Potter, you do see evidence of some brush strokes. So what I've done is I've created a brush here called DCB is brushed 01. It's the same color as I've been using before. I've got it on full pasty. I'll take it down to around about what I did put a notch right there. Notches in your opacity and your size. Or useful because sometimes you will be playing around with the size and the opacity of the brush. But sometimes you want to be able to say, I want my brush to be, say what, sixty-six percent opaque, and I want it to be twenty-six percent large. Well, that's pretty simple enough. Supposing I wanted a very, very subtle, almost non-existent wash. So I put my opacity on twenty-two percent. I tap on that little slider and I come to the plus mark and I can create a little, not just there, so I can come between the notches. I quickly get the brush settings that I want. If I decide I don't like that tap on again and this time I get a minus sign. The minus sign and the notch goes away. You can have up to four notches for each brush. And so that should help smooth your workflow along where you can find exactly the kind of price setting you want. Anyway. So I want my pasty on what was it? 66 per cent. I've got a notch there. I want my brush size fairly small. Let's try one or two brush strokes just to test out. Yeah, that's the size I want because I want a little bit of evidence. Just have some brushstrokes. Just in some of these shadow areas around here. Maybe put a little bit of an area here because you do see evidence of brushstroke in Beatrix Potter's work. That's very charming as well. Just put a little bit of line work in here, suggests that while I'm here as well, I'm going to come to this blue because I noticed that when she does some shadow areas with for she does use this kind of blue color and it's helping just break up that C of orange effect that I've got at the moment. Okay, that's come and take a look at some of the areas. Let's come back to our amber for this, I want my larger brush stroke, which is twenty-six percent because I want to do one or two areas just in the tail, which is naturally larger. And people do vary their brushstrokes simply by pressing harder on the Pro so you get the amount of brush there is all the people larger. Again, a little bit of this deeper blue just didn't want it to areas. Now I did say that the paint dries but at anytime you can smudge it and that can give you some wet on wet effects. So let's do that. Let's come to our smudge tool which I'm circling now. Tap on it. And for this, I want to come to my DC watercolor wash section. Just here. I've got DC smoky and smudgy deep. So I choose that. I want my size to be fairly large. What nine per cent, which is large for this picture. For my opacity, if I crank it right the way up, I'm gonna get some very strong smudging effects, which I don't particularly want. So I'm going to take this away down to around around about twenty-five thirty percent mark. Let's see how that gets on. And that's a bit too large to get down to 4%. Let's try that. And I'm not getting a strong enough effect that Let's take this up to around 50 per cent, and let's come to the table and see what we could do that yet. You can see with that, I'm starting to be able to move the paint around. I can soften some of these brushy edges. I can blend brush strokes into each other, which is useful. So if I want my wet on wet techniques combined with dry brush techniques, this is the way I do it. Let's make this very small because I like some of the line work around the eye, but not all of it. Let's get rid of some of it just around the rear of the eye and maybe a bit of the brushstroke just under the ear, maybe a little bit under the chin. And so I can blend things this way. Also. Well. A whole lot of hair, hair. If I come to my smudge tool again, and this time I'll come to DC watercolor extra and I have other top DC hair smudge large and DC smudge single. Dc has much larger selected, so that's good. My size is on what's on maximum. And I've set my opacity nice and low because again, that will control how much smudging I do with this. I said it very high. I'll get a very strong smudge effect and things will get dragged all over the place. But with a settler and let's come down to this leg and just do a few brush strokes. And can you see this? I'm starting to get the paint smeared around, but because there's very little dots, I'm quickly building up a further effect. And that's the kind of fact you do see in the example is Beatrix Potter's work, which I was looking at when I was doing my research for this. So Dr. backwards or forwards, if you drag from a blanket area to a painted area, you will get a lighter effect. If you drag the opposite way around. You'll get a deeper effect. That's me pressing very hard. It is up to you to experiment with how hard you press and also how far you press. Because if I press reasonably softly but do a long brush stroke like that, okay, that is not working. Two-finger tap to undo that. I'm going for fairly short strokes. Hopefully you can see the brush head moving on the surface of what I'm doing. Let's come around to this forehead area. Just do one or two areas around here just to break up. If that a little bit on the hands while I'm here, maybe down the bottom of the foot. 5. The Simple Technique, Part 2: Okay, So supposing I decide at this point, right, this is as much as I want to do with the firm. Well, looking at Beatrix Potter style, she does keep these outlines which you can see of the squirrel, but also she keeps within those outlines pretty closely. It shows a very neat painter. And as you can see, well, maybe I should go and stand in the naughty corner because look, I've gone over a little bit. That is not a problem. Come to our arrays tool and what do I want to use for this? I'm in my DC watercolor line brush set. I'm going to use DC fuzzy line brush. Now for this, I want the opacity set all the way onto maximum. I don't want this set fairly fine. I'll maybe go out 14% and see what happens with this. Because now I'm gonna come and I'm going to start erasing the orange bits from where I don't want them. That is maybe a little bit big to fit into those smaller nooks and crannies. Let's take that down to what? Six per cent. Yeah, that's giving me much more control. And I come in and I arrays the color areas that I don't want. Like this has come down to the outline. You need to be zoomed in fairly close. So don't forget pinch in, pinch out. And also at the same time to earn your picture around so you can naturally use whichever position is most comfortable for your hand because there are certain angles which are hand finds very easy to do. I'm right handed. So I'm finding these kinds of angles easy to do and use the brush set to fairly small for these final area. So I've got more control over it. But there will come a certain point where you're thinking, Oh, for goodness sake, it's taking ages to get rid of his broad area of color which I need to erase. So what I'll do is I'll make my brush size a tiny bit smaller, 5%, and our top, our grade a plus sign. Now let's try 2425%. That's giving me much more coverage so I can erase things faster when I'm not concentrating on the edge. So make another notch. There are around 24%. Let's come back to five per cent by tapping on my notch, which is making life easier. The other thing as well is that when you're doing this, I'll be honest with you, it's not particularly creative, but it is a nice, relaxing thing to do. But life has coloring in books, but the complete opposite in that you're erasing stuff so you can start to get relaxed and let's do it. I guess I've done this. I've done this, but this is all very nice. I'm all nice and relaxed. Don't go all the way up to here and this is great. And I made a little bit of a mistake. I need to get rid of that because I've got a whole load of fairly subtle transitions and linework in that. And so the only thing I can do as two-finger tap to undo and I've lost all the work I've done before. So my next tip for you is scribbling now, then take your pen off the paper and do a little bit more. Like go, pan down, do a little bit more, Go pen down a little bit more, and let go. Now if I make the same mistake, two-finger tab, I've only lost a tiny bit of that work. I'm just trying to save you a bit of time and a bit of frustration down the line. Oh, hang on. Bowtie. It's not for that is a bow tie. So lose that. Now. All I'm gonna be doing now is more of the same. So I'll either speed this up, I'll just fade out and fade back in again later. Okay, I'm back. If you are following along, I hope you remember to do just this little bit in the middle of the screen now in-between the air and the back of the tail. Now in general, I'm okay with this, but I'd like the color to be a little bit deeper in one or two places. But my problem now, some of those areas are going to be on the edges of the squirrel. If I come in and start painting deeper colors now, I wouldn't have to go through that whole erasing process again. All know, look, if I come to my layers and I tap on the little icon where it says paint here. I can come to alpha lock. I'm with alpha lock. It choose a brush, Let's choose smoky and smudgy tape like we were using before. An orange with alpha lock, I can only paint where there's already pixels on the layer which is locked. So I've taken my brush size a bit bigger and my opacity after I'd halfway. So hopefully you'll see this buildup quickly. Just around the bottom of the tail area. Can you see how I'm getting some deeper, richer red colors, which is what I want. But I was right up to the edge, also with a jacket and right up to the edge of the jacket. But because I got Alpha Lock turned on, I'm not going over the edge because I can only paint whether already pixels with paint on them. So let's just make this a little bit deeper, a little bit richer in one or two areas alike. This just the top of their head as well around the collar. Just draw the cursor or a little bit down here underneath the hand. And you know what? I know I'm gonna be doing this all the way through these tutorials. I keep on thinking or just do that bit? I'll just do that bit. That's just me getting carried away. I'll stop this video now. I'll let you catch up if you're working alone. And in the next video, we'll do some more with this painting. So I'll see you there. 6. The Simple Technique, Part 3: Hello and welcome back and look before I do anything else. I'm sorry, it's really annoying me. I'm gonna come down here. I've got that huge blob there, which I do not want. So let's come to our smudge tool, smoky and smudgy deepest selected, nice and small. And let's just get rid of that awful blob just down there. Spread around a little bit. Oh good. Now I can relax. So in the previous video, you saw me laying down various different colors to gradually create this effect. And then you sold me a raising around the edges using the eraser tool. And so now I want to carry on, I'm putting other colors and I'll start with a jacket. I'd like it to be blue, a bit like Peter rabbits jacket. But my problem is if I try and do the same thing again, and I go over the borders and I start erasing. Well, take this area here where the back of the jacket is against the tail. If I put down colors there and then try and look, I'll show you, that's fine. The blue of the jacket. Let's find our paintbrush That's come for. Symbol hard wash. I think. Great. And I start putting down colors like this. You can see I'm starting to paint into the origin of the tail. And if I come in arrays, I'm gonna erase all the work I've already done. This is no good to anybody. So two-finger tap, two-finger tap to undo that. Instead, look, it's very easy. You can to your Layers panel and you come to the plus sign and you create a new layer. That sounds very easy to say. But I've seen a lot of people learn to use Procreate who get very surprised and very happy when they realize you can actually paint on different layers. Think of a layer just as being a transparent sheet which you put over or under other layers. And you can paint on that and it will not affect anything on the paint here layer. Let's give this a name. Let's get in some good working practices. Let's call this jacket. So now let's zoom out a little bit so I can see all of the jacket. I have my DC simple hard wash brush selected. And I'll start off with the opacity below are my size high and as before, I'll just put down a general area. I've color. Imagine this as being the initial light wash that you often do with watercolor paints. Just to establish that this is a blue area, it will have a light bits, it will have dark bits, but it's still all blue. How much of the paper you leave. Well, that's going to depend on the style you're going for. And I noticed with Beatrix Potter, you do get your lighter and darker areas, but she doesn't really go to town with it. It's a traditional style, and so you don't get too bright, bright, or too dark, darks depending on what she's doing. And in this case, I'm particularly talking about the blue jacket. So as before, when you're laying down your areas, the biggest brush as is sensible. And put down yet areas and think about whether lighters and whether light can't get to like the light's coming from above. And so the light is not gonna be able to get to the bottom side of the arm. Also. The arm is putting a shadow on the jacket as well, so that bit's going to be darker as well. And also on the other arm as well, that's gonna be a little bit darker, a little bit down here as well. Now you may be wondering why I'm getting that slight textured effect, those little lighter areas, for example, where I'm circling now we'll look that is because if I come to my DC simple hogwash, I come to my grain. You can see I've got a mottled effect there. And those little lighter areas, that's what you're seeing there. I quite like it because it helped me to sell the idea that this is an old, old painting. Little bit just around that, a bit around the back and on the bottom of the jacket as well. Please bear in mind with this that I can also erase bits of paint to get back the lighter areas. Okay, So brush size smaller. And I want my opacity up a little bit more because I want to put down some definite deeper areas like this. Underneath the sleeve. I'm very much so, although I think I've gone a bit too far with that. So I'm going to come to what's my smudge tool? Smoking as much deep, that's fine. And I'll make this bigger. Because I think I went a bit too far and I want to just try and draw that back a little bit like that. And maybe a little bit on this corner of whatever that thing at the back of the jacket is. I have no idea. Let's just put in a few deeper areas just where I want them in slightly more localized areas. Now you can see when I'm painting on this, I'm getting rid of some of those lighter areas. I don't mind that fairly deep around here because the tail is gonna be hiding the back of the jacket from the light bulb and you're trying to put in a warranty with the creases that you would expect to see in a jacket. Because again, looking at Beatrix Potter, that is what she did. I'm going to make my brush size a little bit bigger, a pasty lower again. And I'm going to go over the whole thing just to try and take some of those too bright or highlights. Because at the moment, I think it's looking a little bit bitty. I just want to try and do the whole thing in a little bit to that and as well, I want to come to my smudge tool again. I'm going to get rid of some of these. Texture bits, I think they're a little bit too textured. I like they're there, but they're starting to leap out at a little bit about me. And so it's looking more like, Hey, look at this interesting texture rather than looking like some old paper, which is what I would like it to be. So let's do that. Okay, time is marching on. So I'll do what I did before. I will come to my Erase tool. I still have my fuzzy line very isolated. And let's get rid of the blue where I don't want it and I can do that now because look, if I come back to that problem area I had before, because I am on a different layer. I can erase all I want on the jacket layer and it has absolutely no effect on the layer underneath. That is how I can get these nice sharp edges. Whoops, I went a bit too far. So two-finger tap to undo that. And also, I would say to you, That's what I need to do to get these hard edges because I mentioned it before and I'm going to say it again because I already recorded the video where I do say it again. You're holding a stylus. You're not holding your paintbrush. You're holding your stylus. It does not have nice soft bristles on the tip. Has been one or two people who've experimented with bristles on the tip. But I think that technology is a long way away. Good few years. And so why do you can simulate what happens with brushes? You can't get the physical effect of a brush with soft hairs on a piece of paper. You can't see the bristles bending as you apply more pressure when you're using a hard plastic pen like this. If you want to put down large areas, that's in that you can do with a real-world paintbrush, but it's not something you can do with a hard tip pants or you have to have a little bit of a think about the way you're working. So doing it this way, you're applying paint and who cares about the outline, and then going back in and erasing the bits, you don't want what you can do that because this is digital. It's not where if you try and erase something, you're always gonna get a little bit leftover on you. Let's face it. I mean, try erasing some pencil. For example. You will see the mark on the piece of the paper. And the paper will always have little in dense where he was scribbling earlier. But this isn't traditional media, this is digital. And so when you erase something, it is gone. And so the way I'm doing this now, instantly becomes sensible, practical. Okay, I think I've done that. Oh, hang on. Let's do a little bit at the end, cuddle like that to be kind of a yellow color. Okay, So here's the thing. At the moment, I have two layers. One called paint hair, Michigan meet visible and invisible on water-cooled jacket. Now I could go creating loads and loads of layers here. One for the doorbell, one for that wall behind, one for the flower want for the buttons, one for the bow tie. But using this very simple technique, if I can get away with it, I will try not to do that. For example, I'm on my jacket layer at the moment. What brush do I have selected? Simple hard wash. Let's try B's brushes here. Zoom right in on that Bowtie and let's find color for it. What my brush set fairly fine. Let's try it down on that, not fair. The 8%, let's just try it out. And yeah, maybe that's going to work. Let's try making that a little bit less opaque. And one lay down a fairly light wash. There are one, the idea of a pinkish bow tie and I'll just call it the entire area in like this part for maybe one or two areas. In fact, maybe I can erase one or two areas. The paper do its job, then come back and I can paint more brushstrokes and they can gradually build up the form of the bow tie. I'm going for simple here. And build things up this way. And as long as I'm careful and I don't go over the border, which I can do with this because it's a fairly hard edge brush and I'm using it fairly small. I can do that. And if need be, I can always come back to what's my smudgy brush, smoking smudgy deep. Let's make sure it's nice and small. I want phi control over this and I can just smear the paint around. Let's make it even smaller, 2%. And I can smear the paint around. So as long as I'm careful, I can get away with putting this on the same layer as the jacket, and that suits me fine. Now, what else can I do here? Well, let's come to that light yellow that's come to this button down here. What am I using? Let's try symbol hard washing again. Nice and small. Pasty, fairly high. Can I just put down a little bit of yellow effect there while I'm here, let's choose some of that orange. And do that. Just to get a little bit of just a study. Interesting painter fact there. Oh my goodness. I just noticed something. Come down to our paint hair layer. My eraser selected make it fairly large because I realize there's been various parts. The tail, which I didn't erase. Well naughty me, but we've done that. So while we're here, I'm on the third layer. I will choose that yield again. Let's come to this. Let's make this a bit bigger and just scribble down just a little bit of a light wash, but you can still see the paint strokes like this. Let's come and choose some of that orange just to put down something a little bit deeper there. Some of that yellow just to get a little bit of yellow on that side are a little bit of orange and kinda get away with a little bit of brown and they're just want a deeper areas? Maybe? Yes. Okay. Excuse my Erase tool. Get rid of some of that off that button and I will choose that red. Let's take a look at one. It's got to be a red button, hasn't it? All one thing I do want to do as well. Another thing that I forgot, I'm on the paint hair layer. My eraser selected a whites of the eyes. I need them to be whiter. Do not want them being dark apart from, Let's just choose the colors directly from the canvas. This little bit just to the side. I want that to look brown because our young hopeful has brown eyes, because scribbles have brown eyes. And it's also my favorite color for eyes. Alright, let's try it a little bit more of that blue. Let's make a pasty fairly low and the burst size fairly large because I just want to put in one or two areas just around here. That's maybe a little bit too deep erase tool and just get that back a little bit and knock it back. What I'm doing at the moment is I'm looking fairly freely because it's a natural thing to do and everybody does it. Certain areas like the faces and stuff like that. That's where most of the detail tends to be. As you start going towards the outer part, towards the bits that people tend to look at less. Those also happens to be the bits where the artists simply isn't as interested or they don't want to overdo the painting with a whole lot of merciless, remorseless detail, which ends up overpowering the main subject. So you choose your battles, you choose the bits where you want the paint to go. Fairly concentrated with a lot of detail. That means a lot of small brush strokes. And you also choose areas like I'm doing now, where you just want broad brushstrokes just to indicates something is there without necessarily doing well. And anatomically correct doorbell that looks photo-realistic. There's just no point. It is a bit of a focal points, so I put a little bit of detail, but the wall in the background, I'm just putting a tiny bit of color there. Now. What else do I need it? Oh, I know what they are. Am I on? I'm on the For layer. I think I can get away with this. I'm going to compare our put down a wash of yellow just on the stalk of that plant and I'm going to come to green. What am I using? Simple hard wash. Okay, that's fine. But let's make it smaller and their pasty a bit bigger. Because I want to put in just a little bit of green. Why you're doing plants, you think, oh, great plants, plants are green. Let's put letter grade on their, we'll actually, if you develop photos, when you're working with grass areas, you will know you've got to concentrate on the yellow bits as much as the green bits because plants are mixture for the most part of your screens, but also yellows. So that's why I put some there below this in a little bit. Because I think that's too hard to transition there. Once I've done that, my Erase tool because I was careful not to go into any of the three areas. I can do this and just erase the bits that I want. Once I've done that, the only thing I have left to do, really I think, is gonna be that flower, which is gonna be very simple to do. Let's come to the jacket. I've got plenty of space to do stuff there. Now, what color should I do with this? I'll start off with a very light wash of yellow. Let's make that bigger because I'm dealing with areas just like this. Shading down the side and leave a little blank area. Just around the top, just where I would expect there to be some light onto it. And what are the colors should we do? Let's try to draw a little bit of the same readily use for the bowtie opacity down very low and just put it in it one or two areas like this, just to vary the hue. So I've got a mixture of yellows and fairly delicate pink, but I will use my Smudge tool because I can, I'm not keen on that texture that I'm getting. It's nice in certain areas. It's too much in others. But I can use my Smudge tool just to get rid of it where I don't want it like this. Just so I create a pretty simple effect on that flower. And of course, that's finish this off the same way you've done everything else. Just get rid of a brushstrokes at where I don't want them. Quick finger and thumb pinch in. See the picture as a whole. And yet straight away, I'm looking at this thinking, well, I could do this better than I could do that bit and maybe put a shadow underneath just so that our scribble isn't floating in space. And do I want to make the jacket darker in certain areas but no, I won't. Instead, what I will do is I will make the pilot invisible. Just before I go to the next video, can I show you something? Because I did say, you've got three things to worry about. The kind of brush you're using, the colors you're using, but also the surface you are painting on. Let me make the paper layer invisible for a second. I mean, you see the difference. Let's zoom in just on this area here. If I turn on the paper layer again, all of a sudden I'm getting a much more convincing effect, more on that. In the next tutorial, where we will start to harness the power and the possibilities that digital programs like Procreate can give you. I will see you in the next video. 8. Paint a Pear! Choose a Palette: Okay, We're getting ready to paint. To do that, we need two things. We need the paint brushes and also we need some colors. If you want to be lazy, the reference images open. And so if you just hold your finger on any part of the reference image, you can pick up that color and start to paint with it. Two-finger tap to undo that. Instead though, I want us to use a palette. Before we do though, come on, that's come to layer three and rename it to color. And then I'm going to select the top layer because I'm going to import a palette. And I want it to be imported right at the top of the layer stack. And that is why I selected the sketch layer because at the moment it's at the top of the layer stack. So wrench icon come to Add and insert a file. I have a folder called palate, and this is the one I want, watercolor main swatch, a 01. This is available as a download. If I just tap in my layers panel, you can see it comes in right at the top. I'll just move my reference layer over a little bit so we can take a look. These are the red, green, and blue values of the various different water colors I've used over the years from different manufacturers. And if you like the idea of basing your colors of real-world water color values than this is for you. But there are a couple of things to mention. One is there are two versions of Prussian blue and there's also two versions of Payne's gray. That is because I went onto the manufacturers websites for the watercolors that I like to use. And the first Prussian blue that I got, I thought, You gotta be kidding me. So I found another version of Prussian blue plus also another version of Payne's gray. Look, these are just names we use whatever you see fit. Okay. The second thing, if you look, they are graded dark to light. If you go towards the left on each of these swatches, you get darker values. If you go to the right, you get lighter values. But I think the main thing to say here is that these are the digital equivalents of pigment. Pigment works differently to digital colors. And if you are used to traditional watercolors, you might be used to, for example, mixing up a lemon yellow with a bit of parallel Scarlett. And then maybe adding some viridian to break the tone and get maybe a flesh tone, for example, if you do that in the real-world, it doesn't follow that you're gonna get the exact same results in the digital realm. Okay, so with that out of the way, let's pick some colors. I'm going to come to my layers panel. I'm going to create a new layer. I'll call this swatches. Because while I like this palette, Let's give me a good starting point. It's completely covering my screen. I want something a bit smaller. So from the DC watercolor lines, I'll choose aligned blogger in it because it's a very simple thing. Let's take a look at this pair. Two fingers pushed out to zoom in and take a look at some of these colors. I'm seeing some warm oranges, but also some cooler yellow. So it depends where you are. If you look on this side of the pear, I'm seeing some things fairly warm. On the other side of the pear, maybe something a little bit cooler. So what I'll do is I'll tap and hold on my lemon yellow and I'll use that as one of my base colors. And you can see me drawing it in down here. I'm gonna make this squarish like this. I could also do with a little bit of a lighter version of yellow. I'm gonna go with down the bottom, Winsor lemon. I'm going to choose something from there. I have a light version of that in notice how I'm drawing it right next to the first color I selected. I also need a deeper color as well. And for that, I think I'll try new gamboge. I need a deeper version of it about there. And I'm gonna put that next to my midtone. There. I could do something a bit deeper as well, but not quite as rich as new gamboge. So let's try, let's try some yellow ocher. See what I get with that. Put that down at the bottom. But also I want to cool this down with a little bit of green. Now which one? Let's try. Let's try some sap green. But I need something fairly light because I see the coolness in more of a lighter tones rather than the deeper tones. So I'll go with that and I'll put that underneath like this. I don't want to make sure I've got no little bits of the background showing through. And also if I look at the bottom and the stem as well, I'm going to need something fairly deep. I will go with Payne's gray to and I'll go for a fairly deep version of that. And I'll put that about here. Hopefully, that'll give me all the colors I want for the pair. Okay, Next thing, let's make the inserted image with a palette invisible. My swatches panel, I will swipe to the left and I will duplicate this. Then I will come to my transform tool. Uniform transform is fine and I'm going to drag the whole thing. And here's a tip for you. If you just want to drag something, don't drag on the inside. Drag from the outside. That way you don't accidentally resize things. That is all on a new layer. I'm going to come to my adjustments and I'm going to come to Gaussian Blur. I put my finger on the left-hand side of my screen and I start dragging to the right. And when I do that, you can see I start to blur the entire layer. The reason I'm doing that is because for the most part I wanted to get my colors off those 123456 different colors. But there may be times where I want an in-between color, somewhere in-between that mid yellow and the DP Ella, for example, if I Gaussian blur, I get those in-between tones. That is the reason why instead of putting down little blobs of color, I put down squares of color with no background showing through. That way, I get a consistent blur in between two colors rather than bits of background getting in the way. So I like that. I'll come to my layers panel and I will tap, Merge Down, that will take this layer and merge it with the layer underneath. So there I have my swatches. 9. Paint a Pear! Choose a Paper Texture: Okay, I've just exported that file and it is 01 blocked in case you want to download and follow along from the same place I am now, I could do with getting my swatches out of the way so I can paint on my pay directly. So I use the transform tool just to move them. Okay, Next thing, we need some brushes. So I have three brush that's available for you. Watercolor line, watercolor wash, and watercolor extra. The brush set I want to use now is DC watercolor wash. There's a couple of things I need to tell you about these. Let's start off with DC simple wash. And I will choose that kind of amber color to create a new layer. So I have an empty layer to paint with. And the first thing to say is all the brushes I'm giving you an, any brush that calls itself a watercolor brush lacks something very important. Water. What do I mean by that? Well, look, you can see now I'm painting in the real-world. I'm making watercolor brush strokes, but there's water there and that is spreading the paint around. And if I add more paint, if they store water on my paper, the paint will spread out. That doesn't happen with Procreate. I have DC line brush, dark edge selected. As an example. I'll make a brush stroke and you get something which looks like a watercolor brush stroke. I'm keeping my pen on the surface of my iPad. If I come back, you can see I can spread the paint and the edge of the paint out like this. But once I let go, I imagine that paint drying instantly, there's no more water. So if I make another brushstroke, you can see it sits on top of rather than spreading into the first brush stroke. If you want to do watercolor and he wants to do various different effects, you are going to have to make friends with the smudge tool, which is next to the Paint tool. And if I just choose say DC simple wash as a smudge tool, you can see I can start to smudge things into each other to get them slightly more natural effects. And that's clear what we've got. So bear that in mind. The second thing to say is, the worst color nearly always is done by applying your lightest colors first and then your darker colors afterwards. That is different as something like say, oil paints wherever you're applying the paint at all thickly, he tends to work safer mid tones to light or from dark to light. So what does that mean for us? Well, look, if I come to my wash brush set, I've got DC simple wash selected, I will make it fairly large, but I'll make it about say, 47 per cent opaque. And let's choose that nice amber color. And I'll make my brush strokes like this. And if I make repeated brush strokes, it gets darker. That's the key. Set. Your opacity low and gradually build up like this. But here's an important thing. If I choose, say, a white, I can paint over that area and I can paint the white back in with this particular brush. I can paint dark to light. You can't do that with watercolors. So let's undo that a few times. Instead, if I come to my paint brushes, you will see a lot of these paint brushes have the word deep on the end. Like with this one, I'm using DC symbol Washington above it, DC simple wash, deep. It is the same brush as DC simple wash, but it does one important thing differently. I still have white selected. And I'm making my brush strokes. And you can see it's not getting any lighter. This is designed to behave more like a watercolor brush does. On the other hand, if I select that original Amber and I make brushstrokes in the same place because it has the name deep on it. It'll get deeper. You can see how it's getting deeper than the original hamper. I'm getting a much deeper color. So the way I recommend you work with this is if you have two brushes like TC, simple wash and DC watch deep. Start off with a simple brush, the wash brush. And that will give you anything from a very, very faint light color going down to whatever color you've got selected at the time. And if you want to make it deeper, swap over to the deeper version of the brush. And you can start adding stronger shadows and what have you. And just incidentally you can see my brush head. Whenever I make your brush stroke, if you want that, come to your wrench icon, come to preferences and see where it says brush cursor. Look, if I turn that off, I'll make a few brushstrokes. I can't see my brush head. That is no good to me because I have a very fine pencil nib putting down a very large wash that is not a nice way to work. So wrench icon preferences, brush, cursor on. Okay, enough talk. Let's get started with this. I will, I'll just slide to the left and delete this layer. I don't need it. I will come down to my color layer, which if you remember, is clipped to the pear layer. I will choose a brush. I will choose DC simple wash, and I'll start to put down brush turns. My simple wash brush is selected. Double-check. I'm on the right layer, the color layer. And I'll start off just by putting down a wash of my lightest color. Opacity is around about halfway on my brush size. 1920 per cent, that should be fine. Just scribble in my basic shape straight away, I will swap over to my deeper yellow because I want it in some of these highlighted areas. There's a bit underneath as well. In fact, I'm going to be building color on top of this, so I'll just make a general overall wash with this. When you're putting in broad shading like this, use the biggest brush you can get away with. You don't want a really small brush like this or the higher pasty and start scribbling away like this. Not if you're laying down areas of color to your finger tap to undo that, took your pasty down. And the size I began. And I'm going to gradually build up the depth of this. Let's come to a slightly more amber color. I think I went a little bit of this darker color just in certain areas. Here's another tip for you. When you are working out the overall form, come to your reference image and pinch inwards to zoom right out. And now I can see all the detail which can be a bit distracting. I'm finding it easier to look at the dark to light values and some of the colors. So I straight away, I can see I have a dark band around the middle of the pair. Definitely some at the bottom, but there's still a little bit of a lighter area just at the bottom, just a tiny bit. There's also a slightly extended dark area on the cone of the pair. Let's call it fat. Do I want to put just a touch more green in them, maybe priced arguing darker. I'll give it a try just on the one side. And now I think I'm starting to go darker again, so add some more deeper color, but do it at the sides. And also as you start to do the smaller areas because the sides are slightly smaller than the overall pair. Dan start making your brush a little bit smaller. So you can do the flight areas, but still keep it as big as you think you can get away with. Maybe a little bit bigger for this central area. Again, I'm making brushstrokes look brushstroke. Instead, I'm going to two-finger tap a couple of times just to go back a little bit, maybe up my opacity a little bit to around 36%. And now instead of making brushstrokes, I'm going to tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap. And when I do that straight away, I'm getting a more mottled effect because you're seeing the brush head tap down once rather than tapping down many times. When I make a brush stroke, I like that it's giving me some of that slightly gritty area of the pair. Come down a little bit more. Now, I'm a little bit worried here that I'm going a little bit too far with this. I'm making it a bit too dark, but I'll show you what to do with that. If I just do a little bit more tapping, maybe just a little bit more green, I lower the opacity just a little bit. Just didn't want to two areas just to break up this yellowy brownie surface. And I think I'm getting close to where I want to be. Like a site. It's gone a bit too dark in one or two places there. Did you see that? If I just two-finger tap a few times to undo just on the left-hand side of the pear in the shadow areas, I was tapping down a lighter color on top of a darker color. And so the whole thing, if I hold three fingers down to redo, everything suddenly got lighter. I don't necessarily want that, so I'll two-finger tap a few more times to take that away. And instead, at this point, this is where I will come to DC simple wash, deep, and now with the same color, if I start to tap, Let's make this a bit bigger. Then I'm starting to get the deeper tones. Like I say, I'm worried that I've gone a bit too far in one or two areas. The upper side of that pair is looking a bit too deep, doesn't have quite enough highlights. So what I will do is I'll come to my Erase tool. Symbol washer selected, that's fine. I will take the opacity down, the precise up. It's a case of judging how opaque and how big you want the brush to be for whatever particular job you're trying to do. I'll just pinch out a little bit so I can see some of those highlights a bit more clearly. So with the erase tool, what's going to happen is I'm going to erase, which means that the white underneath is going to show through. So let's give this a try. Yeah, I think I've got fairly lucky with this. That seems to be about the right size for that central area of the past. Certainly Bring it around a little bit like this. I'm doing this a little bit tappy, a little bit Draghi, make it a little bit smaller. And there's this top area of the pair as well, which has some highlights in there. There's also looks like reflected light just underneath. Let's make this a bit bigger. Do that. And also, if I zoom in on that per area, I can see one or two bits of reflected light here and here, either from that white surface or the surrounding light areas. So let's put some of that in there. There's just a little bit here, tiny bit here, maybe still a little bit. If I make this a little bit smaller, there's also a little streak just on the other side of the pair, on the left-hand side. And maybe that's coming up the side of the body like this. I'm starting to get the overall shape of the pair. I quite like what's happening with that, but what I am going to do is come to my smudge brush, DC simple washes selected again. So you can see I'm using the same brush to do various different things. My brush size. Okay, I'll try it about there, see what happens. Because what I want to do is just come to certain areas. I just push those lighter areas around a little bit. Now, can you see me doing this? I'm not erasing. I'm pushing the areas now. Can I get it to work? Yeah. Hopefully you can see this. As I put my brush down, I'm starting to push just the bottom of that slight highlight down a little bit. And in fact, now that I'm zoomed in, maybe I want just a little bit lighter in one or two areas. And on the other side. Now that I've done this, I'm getting the overall shape of the pear, but I do need some smaller, darker areas. So come back to my paint brush. For this, I'm using simple washed deep so I know I'm going to get darker. Let's try My that slightly deeper brown color. A little bit at the top. That's too big, isn't it? And maybe make it a little bit more opaque. And I need a little bit just to the top of the pair That's quite dark, the very edge of it. Maybe just a touch down the other side, not too much. But I'm not seeing down here. And that's made my brush very small, slight indent to just there. I don't want too many details on this layer. I just want to get some little landmarks. Just want a few details in one or two areas. Just to make it stand out from the background, give it a bit of a 3D form. Now this bit at the bottom that definitely needs working up. I'm noticing, I'm getting quite a deep in the picture. It looks black. And so this is what I don't want you to do. Great. It looks black, gets a black. I'll start drawing that in like this repeated strokes. Because nothing kills your picture quite as nicely as black instead. Well, it's quite a common trick to mix colors together. For example, a deep brown like burnt umber with a deep blue like ultra marine. And you mix those two colors together to get a version of black but black which has variations of color within it, blues and browns. So I'll do that with this, which is brown and bear in mind, I still have simple washed deep selected, start off with a really large, just make repeated brushstrokes at the bottom. Then at a certain point, I'll hop over to my Payne's Gray and I will start putting that in. And can you see when I do that, I'm getting the same darker fact that I had before. But I am getting 12 little variations in color rather than just that simple black, which was to be honest, looking pretty impressive. So I will go with that. And yes, I know I haven't done the actual store to the power of I. So come on, let's quickly do that using same techniques because it is pretty dark, especially on the end. Just before cool Holt, I'm looking at what I've done at the bottom. And I think I've gone too far right where I'm circling here. Now I could use the smudge tool, try and move that dark area down. The problem with the smudge tool is that sometimes it takes away some of the texture that you've been putting down. So instead, I'm going to come to my Adjustments menu. Second from bottom, the wonderful Liquify tool I have pushed selected. I have no distortion, no momentum at all. Pressure on Macs, that's fine. I just need to play with the size. Let's try that size. And what this is going to do is just drag the paint around like this. You can see why my brush head is. And obviously I don't want that. I was just demonstrating it. Two-finger tap to undo that. But what I'm gonna do is I'm going to pull just part of this down a little bit so that it's further down, but I keep some of the texture. But while I'm here, we'll look a little bit at the side which I'm circling. That came out too far. I can push that into the side like this, maybe just this little bit here. And if I make this very small in deed, I can start pulling around these highlights just at the top of the pair, just to give them a bit more wiggle. Guy the highlights to where I want them. How useful is that? Select any other icon. Okay, I think I've got my basic shape there, so I'm going to take a break. Before I do though, I want to show you the number one easy trick to make your work look like a watercolor painting. One thing before you do the very next step, just in case you are zoomed in like this. I want you to finger and thumb drag inwards a little bit so you can see the top on the bottom of your image. Then come to our wrench icon. The Add tab is selected and insert a file. As part of this lesson, I have a couple of folders for you to download, to unzip, to put on your iCloud Drive. One is called paper grade, the other is called papal white. Tap on paper white. These are a series of watercolor paper textures. I will choose watercolor A4. Tap on that to select it. It gets imported finger and thumb pinch outwards. So the paper covers the entire image and then come to our layers panel again that will commit to it and I get something called inserted image. Let's be good. Let's rename this to paper. And at the moment, we've got a bit of a problem. It's completely covering my entire work. So this is what you do. You tap on the little n which I'm circling now. That's N for normal because every new layer starts out in normal blend mode. If you look up words, you get various different blend modes called darker color, Linear Burn caliber, right finger where it says normal and drag down. And can you see that? If I choose something like multiply, you can see everything underneath the paper layer. All the white bits of the paper layer are being made invisible and all the slightly darker gray a bit, That's the texture you can see are showing up just a little against whatever is underneath. That's what the dark and blend modes do. So you get this paper texture. If I close that and I'll zoom in, if I make the paper layer invisible for a second. That's our pair with some nice subtle textures but no paper texture. But with the paper layer set to multiply, turned on again. And the very last thing, I promise, I did say that this is the number one easy thing to do to make your picture look more realistic. But actually, there is a similar trick, which is much less commonly known. There can take this whole global watercolor effect to the next level, or maybe I'll reveal that in the next project. But for now, I think we've done enough. Let's take a break. I will see you in the next lesson. 10. Paint a Pear! Adding Detail: Okay, So we're back. Let's carry on with our pair. I want to put some of these details in there. You can see I have some darker bits. I want this to be a fairly watercolor effect rather than too realistic. So if I do get a little bit of brush marks, That's no bad thing in my book, I will come to my layers panel. I will come down to my color layer, and I'll add another layer on top. I will click that. So that now layer seven is also clipped to the parent layer. Okay, so next thing I want to choose a brush, and I think for this, I'll try DC for the brush deep. Let's choose a fairly dark color with that, set the opacity fairly high. Now what about my size? I'll try it fairly high first just to get a feel for how big it is. And if I do that, can you see I press hard to get bigger blobs. If I press Softer, I get a softer blobs. I think that size could actually do maybe a bit bigger for some of these overall effect. But it still gives me one or two slightly smaller areas that should do for me. But look if I do a brush stroke for the bottom, I'm not sure how obvious that is, so I will clear this layer. I'll choose this brownish color. There. You can see getting dark it if I come down to the bottom, it's actually getting lighter because I'm putting a lighter tone on top of a darker tone. I don't want that. So this is what I do. I come back to my layers panel. Do you remember with a paper layer, we set it to multiply our layer blend mode will, I'll do the exact same thing with this layer. Watch what happens to those blobs when I do. Because layer seven is now set to multiply, it still puts down curly. You can still see the brown, but it's making everything underneath this layer darker versions of brown. And let me just show you this look, if I come and I make a white color and I want to come to these darker areas. I'm going to start scrubbing that you can see my brush there. That's my brush out splashing down and now you can see it, but it's having no effect. But if I come and I choose a darker gray brush, that I definitely get everything underneath looking darker. That's how multiply it works. If I set this back to normal, there you can see the brush strokes. If I set that back to multiply, the white marks become invisible. Everything else get the areas different shades and hues have darker. I will tap and clear this layer. And now I'll try drawing in some of the blotchy marks, the color I want. I choose my darker brown. I'll try using a slightly lighter color, but it will still appear to be darker in certain areas. But what I'm finding is it's giving you a certain richness of tone. What I want it to be a little bit richer in tone. It's giving you more of a golden brown even early though with this, Let's see what green does. I'm not so sure about that. Let's try two-finger tap in a couple of times and adjust the opacity. And just in one or two areas just around the middle. You probably can't even see me putting that down. I quite like the overall effect, but it's gone down a little bit heavy for my tastes. So I know I want to take some of this back. The good thing about it is this is on a separate layer, look invisible, visible again. What it can do with this, it's come to my Erase tool. I'll use the same rush, DC fuzzy brush deep. I'll crank up the opacity so it's pretty high brush size. I'll try maybe around 50 per cent. And now I can do this just to erase some of those marks I already made. Because while I like it in certain areas, it's starting to look a little bit intrusive it others. I think that will do for me now. I'll come back to my paintbrush or the brush deepest still selected. I'll make it just a little bit smaller and I'll take the opacity right the way up because there are one or two really very deep marks here, which I'd like to put it in just on this side of my pair. Now, if I decide that effect is too strong, what I can do is tab again alone the M and I can take the opacity right the way down. In fact, I recommend you do this a lot. If you have a layer sitting on top of another one and you want the colors to start interacting with each other. But maybe the effect on the top layer is a bit too strong to take the opacity down to 0 and dial in the effect you want. When you do this, the temptation is to look at the slider, a little bit of this jiggling about now. Do not look at the slider. Take it down to 0. So now I have my pasty set to 0. Gradually bring up the opacity to dial in as much of this layer as I want. I think in the case of this, looking at the reference and comparing it with my picture. I think for me around, Hang on. I'll look. I'm around 80, 81%, it's not a 100%. I find that a bit too strong. I'm taking that down a little bit. And the reason you take it down to 0 and then dial it in is that if you take it from a 100 and gradually dial it down, you tend to get slightly stronger effects than you originally wanted. So for me, around the 7980 per cent mark, I quite like that. Now what about all those little dimples on the skin? Okay, let's create another layer. And we will click that to the parent layer. For this, we're going to come to DC watercolor, extra palette. And I want DC staples for this. I wanted dark. So definitely maybe a brown color. And let's take this up a little bit. I'll take it up to that second market. If you tap close to one of these little notches, your brush size or snap to it. So in the case of this, I've got thirty-five percent tapped down to this. I get 11%. If I tap up here, I get 69 per cent. I don't particularly want that notch. So I'm going to come to that little minus sign where I'm circling and tap to get rid of it. If you want a very small brush size, I can derive my little slide it down to about there and then tap on the little plus sign and I get a notch there. This is handy so that you can remember. Certain brush size is like in the case of this, I want my brush out to be thirty-five percent big. And then when I drag across the surface of my pair, I get ducts, which I quite like, but I'll two-finger tap to undo that because now I've shown you it. I think I get some bigger dots, more on one side of my pair, and I think I get smaller dots on the other side of the pear. So I come to my size slider, come down to this notch here, which is it's set to 11%. And I'll just tap in some more dots around here. Now we have the same problem as before. If you look at the very bottom, those brands are working nicely for the mid tones, but they're too light, the shadow areas. So I asked before, change the layer blend mode to multiply. And you're getting something a little bit more, like I want a few more just around the top bit of the pair. Then I think I'll come to my Erase tool. Let's choose, let us choose DC simple wash, a posterior set, fairly low brush size, fairly high. And I just want to get rid of these dots in the areas where I don't want them. Because it's a nice textured effect. But it's a little bit random, which is nice. But I'm a control freak. I like it a little bit of control over the randomness of it. The other thing about it is these are a series of round dots, but the pair itself is round. And as you go around the sides of the pair, those dots wouldn't appear to be that round therapy to be a little bit more squashed. So this is what I'm gonna do, come to my adjustments again and come down second from bottom to my liquify tool. I'll make it fairly big. Store such push. And you can see I can start to push these dots around. So what I'm doing is pushing just from the outside inwards a little bit. And if I make it bigger, I'm going to push from the inside outwards a little bit just to provide you a little bit of distortion and spreading out as the pair faces us directly. But then because I'm pushing outwards from the center at, in, from the outsides, the bits around the edge will start to bunch up a little bit more than the bits in the middle. And I think that's all I want to do for that. The reason that works, if I unclip this layer for a second, you can see I have plenty of dots splattered around the outside. And even though you can't see those dots, the clipping layer is attached, they are still there. So with the Liquify tool, if I start to push inwards, the dots which are invisible, other side start to become invisible as you go in. Okay, I'm gnarly there with this, but I'd like to do a couple of other things. I want to come to my layer, right? Well, what are we doing? Dots? I'm going to duplicate this layer. Everything gets darker. And in fact, what I'm going to do again, I'm gonna duplicate again, so it gets really, really dark. I want to take that middle dots layer and I'm going to merge it down, which means it gets merged with the dots layer underneath. Let's zoom in for what I'm going to do next. Come to our adjustments. And I want to choose Gaussian blur. To make this work. I take my finger and I slide it from the left side of the screen to the right side of the screen as I do, can you see that? I'm starting to blur the edge of the dots layer underneath, but I'm not doing anything to the dots layer on top. So what I'm getting is a slight blurred halo around the dots. The layer underneath is blurry. That layer on top is still hard edged. And so I get this kind of effect. Let's make that layer underneath which I just blurred invisible for a second and visible again. And you can see it's a subtle effect, but it is. Helping to blend those areas. In fact, you know what, I'm going to push this a bit further. I'm going to duplicate again, merge down. And I'm going to repeat that because I never really got what I wanted, but not quite so. Gaussian Blur again, like this. What about 5% here? Let's make that invisible for a circuit. Yeah, that's starting to merge those dots in, but overall, things are too dark. So I'll make this one invisible for a second. I will come to the top dots layer. And I'll set that to about, say, around about the 50% mark. Let's turn on the dots layer underneath and play with that. And again around about 50 per cent mark with that, come back to the one on top. Now that I've adjusted both and maybe adjust that. So it's just a little bit more opaque to get more of the effect. So now I have my subtle dots, but I also have a little bit of a halo around them that is helping that slightly dotty texture sit a little bit better on that pair. Okay, couple more things to do before I call this finished, I'm going to create one more layer. I'm gonna take this layer and I'm going to drag it underneath my pear layer. And I'm going to call it shadow. Because in the reference picture, you can see there's a shadow there. I want to do that. So the parent looks like it's sitting on something, but here's a nice thing. A couple of videos ago, I spoke about how this whole clipping mask thing is a bit like using masking fluid on a real-world watercolor painting, but this is digital. And so as well as painting inside that by using clipping masks, if I put a layer underneath the pear layer, I can paint on the outside of that area. Let me show you that. I will come to DC watercolor wash, simple wash deep. Now, if you remember, I use the beeper brown and the blue. For the underside of the pair. I'll use the same colors underneath for the same reason. Black is really good at killing things stone dead. Let's make that a bit bigger. So if you can make a deep blue shaded area by mixing colors together, you can get variations of that brown on that blue, just in this one particular area. And so it just makes your shadows are a little bit more interesting. Now, am I seeing a tiny bit of green in there as well? I think I answered, I'll make a few green brush strokes like this, come back to maybe blue and just fade that away at the sides. And here's a nice thing because we're in the digital world and make my shadow. But compared to the reference, it's a little bit too tall, needs to be squashed down a bit, not a problem come to our Transform tool. And because that is the only thing on the layer, I can easily adjust it. I will come to free form so I can squash and squeeze rather than justice, bigger or smaller, I'll push in a little bit from the bottom, pushed down a bit from the top. And straight away you can see I'm flattening that whole shadow area. If I want to move it around finger or pan on the outside of that box to drag it to where I want it to go and maybe I want it to go about say they're my layers panel just to commit to that. I'm very nearly there, but I'm going to come to the color layer because for this to work, I think I need a similar levels of darkness from the bottom of the pair with the shadow. Shouldn't be a problem because I have my color layer selected. I have my simple wash the brush selected, and all I need do is just make, well the brush a bit smaller. I think I just just a little bit more of a brown and that rather dusky blue just to keep the shadows consistent. And in fact, I think now I need to come down to that shadow area and make that just a touch darker because I don't really want to see a border between the shadow of the pair and the shadow of the surface. And I think I've got that now. One very final thing I do want to do as well. When I do the outline, I wanted to use a slightly rough outline to give a slight watercolor effect. Now in a real life watercolor painting, you will see very, very crisp edges. But the minute you take a digital photo, you'd never get a completely sharp edge with a digital photograph. It just doesn't happen. I won't go into why right now. So I would like to soften that edge just a little bit, which is very easy to come to our pear layer. Because the nice thing about clipping masks is you can alter them. If I zoom right up close and personal, all I want to do with this is can once more to our adjustments, gaussian blur and slide just by a tiny amount, one or 2%. If I blew it by too much, then all I get is a fuzzy edge to my power, which I don't want. So I'll take this down to try to percent see how we get on with that because it's a bit difficult to tell when you're zoomed in. Pinch to zoom. Now that I view it, when a zoomed out to where it should be, that slight softness to the edges, just helping the edge city in better with that paper texture on top. So for this, let's come and turn off our reference. Let's turn off our swatches. And there we have our basic pear using a variety of different techniques. I think right at the start of this project, I did say, don't try and match exactly what I'm doing on-screen yourself. Do your own version because watercolor, you can use watercolor for very precise work. But this course is more about the random chaotic nature of watercolor or why it can be such a nice thing. As an example of that, I did this project a couple of times because I wanted to practice what I wanted to say to you. This is the same project using the same techniques. And I got that. The same project using the same technique. And I got that. And you can see that all difference. So like I say, concentrate on the techniques and doing your own version on that score. What happens so often it, you do a project like this, you think, great, I've learnt a lot. What do I do next? Well, I have another photo from the same website and guess what? It's of another pair. And this is what I came up with using the exact same techniques. Here's a file for you to download if you want called pair 02. You have the sketch, you have the pear shape that you can draw on. You also have the color of 01 layer, which you can use as a clipping mask. You also have the paper at the top, and you also have the swatches and give it a try. Just use the same techniques that you saw in this project and see what you can come up with. Okay, let's wrap this project up. Please stick around for the next projects because there is so much more to show you. 11. The Kingfisher and Blobs of Joy!: Okay, let's move on to our next project. If I come to import, I have a couple of new files for you to download. One is king fisher 01, which has a PNG file. And the nice thing about PNG files is that you can have transparent backgrounds with them. So for this, if I come to my background color, you can see I just have the line work with no white background. While I'm here. I will rename this to sketch. And I will tap on the little. And I will reduce the opacity down so it doesn't get in the way too much when I start to work. Now if I cut a few seconds off the very end of this project, this is what we're going to be ending up with it a bit different to the previous project, that pair, and I was aiming for a more watercolor field, two-fifths. And with this there is a design or illustration or an art principle and that is blending opposites. What I was aiming for here is something that watercolor does really well. These wide areas of colors which softly blend from one into the other. Big washes or colors are contained within hard edges. And so you get those two opposites, wide and soft and textured and hard edges defining the areas. Also with this picture, I've incorporated something you see a lot within watercolors. That is where you have areas with no paint on just the paper, whichever it's done right. Can say a lot about the form of what you're doing. But without the painting getting too heavy and too covered in pigments. Alright, so that's what we're going to end up with all that together. Okay, So the reference image for this is this. This is from the Pexels stock photo website. And it's a beautiful little king fisher, very skillfully captured by a certain Andrew McKee, and this is also available as a download. Alright, let's start setting up this picture because we'll be using some techniques from the previous video, but we'll be adding quite a few new ones. Okay, so first thing, I want some watercolor paper for this. So I will come to my wrench icon and I will insert a file. Let's find my paper white folder. And for this, just to choose different paper from last time, Let's try cold press F9 with indents. There we go. I'll pinch that outward so it's covering the entire surface of my painting. Then if I come to my layers panel, I need to change the blend mode to, well, I'll go with multiply also with quite a lot of these paper textures. I made them quite strong because I was working on the theory that if it is a little bit strong for your needs, you can always just take down the opacity to where you want it to be. I'll take it to around about halfway and I can come back and adjust that at any time. Okay, So next up, I want some colors. In the previous video had a selection of my favorite watercolor hues. But with this, we're gonna do something different. And I don't think you've seen anything quite like this before. I'm going to come to my wrench icon is selected and insert a file for my resources. I want to come to palettes, and I have four files available for you as a download. Let's load up the first one, blobs of joy 01. Here we are. Little blobs of joy 01. And yes, I'm already regretting giving it that name, but let's press on. Why do you have here are 64 squares. And if I zoom right in to take a look at 3637, for each of these squares, I have a color on the left, gradually fading through to a color on the right, and that's the middle band. But if you go up in square, you get progressively lighter versions of that gradation. And if you go down, you get progressively darker tones out for many of these, I've played around with hue. So if you take a look at 36, for example, as things get darker, you get a slight brownish tint. The reason I did this is because a lot of times people ask, what color do I use or they're not sure about color combinations. With this, the idea is you come in and choose one of the squares that you like. And so for this, I want to try and use some colors to serve as a palette for my king fisher. No, I could do what I did before and open up Canvas, Reference, uncle up an image that way. Or I could always come and add and insert a file called Pexels Andrew, Mickey, pinch outward. So I get a closer look at the kind of colors I want. And if I drag that underneath, like this, come to the asserted image, drag it across like this, come through a layer below, come to our Transform tool again and drag that across like this, maybe make it a bit smaller so I can see more of it. I could do it that way as well. Or if you have a second monitor, call up this image there. So you got as much screened as possible to play with, without things like what you're looking at. Now. Getting in the way. I think for the remainder of this course, I will do that. So I'm looking at the picture on my computer and I'm working from here, and I'm trying to think, what color do I want from my little blobs of joy 01. And taking a look, if I come here, look, taking a look at that 061. I think that is giving me a good range of hues for the blue parts of the king fisher. So I make sure that image is selected. Come to my selection tool, I want rectangle and I'm going to drag out a rectangle Lego. So just blob number 61 is selected and I will come to copy and paste my Layers panel. There's my wonderful created swatch. Now I was taking a look at this earlier, and there wasn't any colors here that I really wanted for the warmer colors. So what I can do is I can swipe to the left, delete this, and I will come back and I will insert a file. Because I have four files called blobs of joy, 01234. Let's take a look at number two. And I have a yet more blobs here to play with for files with 64 blocks in each file, that's 256 different blobs to play with. And I came up with these blobs by going through many, many paintings and looking and thinking that color combination looks nice. And so I sample directly from the paintings. But also if I was looking at a painting thinking, well, those orangey reds go nicely with those fairly dusky blue we graze at soil, sample, the orangey grace, but I'd also sample WE grace because I thought they worked well together. So my tip for you is, if you find a color that you like, take a look at the neighboring colors because they might have been sampled from the same image, which I thought it worked well. So in the case of say, seventy seven, seventy eight, seventy nine, there's a good chance those colors are going to work quite well together because they did in the painting, but they were sampled from. Now for this, I did some searching around. And I think the color I like for the orangey bits is block number 123. You can see it's not really bright and loud and in your face, like a 125126, it's much more knocked back and natural. So as before, come to our selection tool, rectangle tool selected, drag out, select it, copy and paste. There's our new swatch. Now, is there anything else here that I quite like because I think from the background, maybe I'll put a background in. Maybe I won't I'm not sure yet, but just in case I do, Let's look, look around here. And I think a 110, those colors are sufficiently subtle, but with enough variation within that one blob that I think can be useful. So select tool again, choose it. I missed a bit of the very edge, but I'm in add mode which I'm circling now. So I can just add to that selection like this. Come on, let's do that. I can make it a bit more obvious. Okay, I have the right layer selected. I nearly had a gotcha there. I want from the layer with all the blobs, not just without previous blob I selected, come back to my select all and copy and paste. So now I have my three blobs and just come in here and also taking a look at the picture again, there's also the branch which has some very neutral colors. I think for that, what about 096? That gives me some extremely desaturated colors, but that's what I want for the branch. There's also a good range of light and dark, so I'll use that makes sure this time I come to the Inserted Image. Select, copy and paste. So now I have my four different blobs. I will swipe my original ones to the left because I don't need it anymore. But now I have these four little swatches. I'll take the one I've already got selected. I'll come to Move and I'll just move it down to here. I will come to the one above and I will move that one instantly. Those little guidelines, those blue lines you can see I've got those because I have snapping turned on. Can you see just where I'm circling now and where I'm circling now. So that helped guide things in cancer. The next one, my Reddy brown, drag that down to there. And the next one, for all my blues, I will drag that one down to there. Then I come to my layers panel. I'll take the top one. I will merge that down. I will merge down again, and I will merge down again. Next thing I do is I zoom right in and I take a good look at those blobs. And I'm just looking at the colors now, I'm thinking, do they work together? Are there any of those blobs which clash with any of the others bearing in mind, I've got a brightly colored king fisher with a much more neutral background. And I think, yeah, those colors do work together. And if they work together in blog format, the chances are when I start painting with them, they're going to work together on the actual painting. It can be a problem with a painting that sometimes you choose a color which just doesn't fit with the rest of the colors, and it just looks wrong. But if my four little blobs of joy look like they're working together, there is a reasonable chance they're going to work together when I do the painting or to put it another way, if there was one of these blobs that really didn't go with the others, I would consider replacing that for another one because if it's not going to work here, there's a good chance it's not going to work on the actual painting. And here's the other nice thing about this method. Every single one of these little blobs of joy is numbered. So this layer will rename too. Swatches. And I can make that invisible that anytime. And if you come back to a painting and you think, Oh, I like the colors I did with that. Where did I get the colors from? Well, you chose blob number 6100231096. So you know, immediately where you've got those colors from. I'm supposing someone asks you what colors did you use? You can say, I use the little blobs of joy, 6100231096. So now you have a common language that you can refer to, to somebody else, a bit like pants own, but Pantone only gives you solid colors. This gives you a blend of two colors plus the lighter and darker variations. I hope you liked this idea. I found it to be very useful. Now, the next thing I want to do is just choose some colors, which I think are going to work well on my painting. Because if I was doing something like an expressive oil painting or what have you, I might be tempted just to choose various different colors as and when I need them. But for this, I would like to select colors from the swatches so things can be just a little bit more predictable. So for this, I'll create a new layer. I can always merge it down later for my brush, I will come to my watercolor lines. I will choose my line blocker in air because it's a no-nonsense brush with a hard edge. For the king fisher, I'm looking at it. The light tones tend to be more the greeny end, blah, but I want something pretty light there, so I'll choose that. I'll make a square like I did the previous time. Then as things get darker, I think they get more towards the red end of those blues. So I'm going to choose colors in it, a line going back into the right. So I'll choose another color here. Again, make a series of squares so I can blur them afterwards. Another one around, say, here, make a square, add another deeper one way down here. All that is going to be deep. That will be for my blues, for the brownie, orangey bits. Again, the lighter areas look a little bit more yellow in tone to me. So maybe choose from the top left where the yellow tones are. Draw that here. Try and make sure there's no white in-between the swatches because I want to blow these into each other. As we get darker, I think it is getting a little bit of red in hue that I think it's one of the big advantages, sorry, one of the other advantages of the little blobs with joy, as it gets lighter and darker tones, I can move from one q to the other. We're out here somewhere. And finally, I want something really quite deep. Maybe down there, arches, it gets deeper. Maybe it's just a little bit not quite as red, so I'll choose a color or around about that. Or I want to do more colors underneath. So I will come to my transform tool. I will choose free form, and I'll just choose the bottom node and drag upwards so that things get squashed. That doesn't matter. I can happily do that. I'll come back to my paintbrush, the branches next. Let's take a look. I think there was a pretty neutral and color. Let's try it. Pretty bluish, kind of a light gray. I'll put that there as it goes through the mid tones, I think it goes a little bit more towards the brown, like this. I'll choose another deeper brown around here. But as it goes towards the very deep tones, I think it's going back more towards the blue area. So I'll come down to around about here. Because my move tool, move this up a little bit. And finally, for the stuff in the background on a fairly neutral and fairly light green, remember this is background color. I do not want the background colors shouting. I want them to be in the background rather than too bright, too saturated, and can be forward a bit too much. I will choose a slightly warmer yellow because I'm seeing wanted to warmer areas in that background. Maybe come down, choose kind of a brownie color. But also I'm looking at I'm seeing some fairly cooler areas in there as well. So I'll come to about there. And now I take a look at my little grid of colors and I think what they look like, they belong to each other. And I think, yeah, they do move this across. Then I will come to the layer and I will duplicate the layer and we're going to blur these colors like we did before. So move this across like this. And here's a little tip for you. If you want the colors, fade it out to the background. So if it's a white background, you get lighter tones, you can sample from. You can do that like we did in the previous video. But just to show you something different, I'm going to turn on Alpha Lock. Then I'm going to come to my Adjustments gaussian blur. And you see that because the alpha lock is turned on, the edges of those swatches don't fade away because there are no pixels beyond the borders on this layer. Now I've got this to about 13%, maybe take it to about 14%, and I'm getting some really quite soft transitions there. That suits me fine. I will take that layer, turn off alpha lock, merge it down. And I want to make the whole thing just a little bit smaller. There. A merge that down. And those are the colors I'm going to be using for the next stage, which is where we start blocking in the king fisher. And I will see you in the next video. 12. Blocking In our Kingfisher: Hello and welcome back. Just before I come to the blocking in stage, I just want to do a couple of things. I want to come to my inserted image, which is the paper. And I'm going to rename it to cold pressed in dance. That was the name of the file I imported in that way I know what kind of paper I used for this in case I come back and say, Oh, I do like that paper. It's right there now. I will also find now swipe to the left and I'll choose a lock. I'll do the same thing for my swatches. I will lock those that way. I can't accidentally draw on those layers. But what I do want to do is come down, I want to make a new layer and let's rest my finger on it until it lifts up a little bit. Drag it down underneath because I want to start blocking in this king fisher. But in the previous video, I used one layer alcohol, the layer block, I think. But for this project, this is more advanced. I want to use multiple blocking in layers. The reason being is I'm putting in big areas of color inside some sharply defined areas. If I try to do that with all the masking layer on one layer, I could do all the blues, for example. But then when I came to the oranges, because the areas are so close to each other, the oranges are going to go leaping over into the blue area. I don't want that. So I need multiple blocking layers. So for this one, I'll start off during the blues. So I'll call this block blues. Let's get started. I'll do the darker of the two blue areas. So I'll come to my brushes, my DC line blocker, I could use that one, but let's take a look at what it looks like. I'll choose the color I want to use for the deeper blue areas. Let's take a look at that. I'm going to compare that with DC hard triangle ink pen, make it a similar size and compare that. Actually make that thin. I think. I think I'm going to use that instead. Because look, if I zoom in on this area here, take a look at this area here that was for my blocking in pen. You can see it's rounded. I don't necessarily want that. I want a bit more character than a round blobby edge. If you take a look at where I'm circling now, well, that was for my triangle pen and you can see it's not quite as rounded as got just a little bit more character to it. That makes sense because I set up these parents or their line, block it in a performance, a useful function you can block in areas quickly with it. But you can also do that with a hard triangle pan, but with maybe just a little bit more character in there. In the previous video, I used the rough edge brush. But for this, because I've got these big wide areas, I want a hard, crisp edge to really hold them in place so I can get that blend of opposites. I can always come back to my block layers at anytime and edit the border with any of my pants. So let's come here and clevis, make sure I have chosen my hard triangle ink pen. I want it pretty small because I want to do a little bit of fine line work. I'll come to this area here and I'll just start blocking in my area. Maybe make this a little bit bigger. What I'm around three per cent, Let's try that. As I'm doing it. I'm not doing a huge smooth sweep like that. I want a bit of character to this edge. So I'm pressing a bit harder, bit softer, and I'm taking my time when I go around just trying to put in a little bit of imperfections. Kind of imperfections you might see when you're drawing with a brush which kind of meanders along. I'm noticing for my picture, I've got one or two little bits of feathers just sticking out like this. I can round here. Just try suggesting some detail. Just in one or two areas. And around here, I'm getting a little bit of detail from, well, one area turns into another. It looks like a few finer feathers. I'm not going to worry about this too much at the moment because I want to get my broad shapes and align this around here. I also want this area here not to be flooded. But now I have my enclosed shape. Let's do what we did before. I will drag down. Okay, that's too much there. So I drag to the left until I just get the area flooded but no more. So I've got 81.2%. You will have a different number if everything is flooded, no matter where you set your color drop threshold. Then go back in and look for any tiny little gaps in what you've done. Bear in mind when I do that. If I come to my eraser tool and just press and hold, I get erase with current brush. What happened there was because I held down for just a little bit the same pen I'm using to draw with a selected. So now I can erase with the same pen a pasty on 100% yes. Size. Because this is an important thing. If you've learned to draw using traditional media, especially something like pencil, you make a mistake, you have to rub it out. You still leave a mark there and you start destroying the surface of the paper. Or with this supposing, I want to just erase a little bit around here. When I erase, it's completely gone and no damage done at all. I can come back to my pen tool and just re-add it this line to get a few bits of finely detail. If I don't like that, come to my Erase tool again, get rid of those areas like that. And you can do this as many times as you want. So it is sometimes a little bit difficult to just keep on realizing this, that at any point you can adjust and get whatever you want. And there's no sacrifice in terms of the paper. So try and get into this habit, which is very useful at times of scrub, scrub off. So scrub on here, don't like it. Scrub off. You will find when you do that, if you do find slightly blobby areas, you can really hack into those areas. Say like this little bit here, I can just trim off and get a sharper edges I want there. Okay, I'm going to carry on putting in areas. Whoops, I accidentally put a bit down there. While I'm doing this, I'm gonna be looking at the bird to just to find out whether darker areas are. But supposing, for example, I've done my various different blue areas. And so now I create a new layer. And I'll call this block light blues. For this one, I'm going to use the latest version that I've got. Eventually our turn all of these blocking layers white so I can paint on top of them. But I find it useful what I'm doing this just to use a broadly similar kind of color to the color that finally going to go down there. Because it lets me know that if say I'm drawing on the lighter blue area using a lighter blue pen, like I'm doing now. Well, it helps me to be less confused. Supposing I was using a bright pink for this, I wouldn't be quite sure if I'm drawing on the right layer. So it gives me a little visual clue for this. But there is one thing I did say, I want to create some space with this. So if I come back to the block blues area, and I choose that same blue as before, not from the paper itself, from the swatches. So they're not affected by the paper texture. So I don't get a slightly darker version. And if I draw it right up to this area here, well, you can see partly it's disappearing underneath the layer on top. But also I want to leave a little bit more space here. So I'll undo that. I'll come back to my light blues layer and I'll start to erase area so I leave bits of my paper clear. Maybe I want a little bit of there, but this bit is light anyway. It's gonna be in the sunlight. So I want to see how much on my paper I can leave uncovered. I want enough there to show the form. And in certain places I want overlap between one area and another. So at this point it's a little bit of a balancing act, which bits overlap, which bits don't. How many layers I want? That's all going to be down to the decisions you make. So what I'm gonna do is carrying on blogging in certain areas, create a new blocking layer if I need it. And you kinda see me do all this before and you know the general principles. So what I'll do is I will fade out and fade back in once I've blocked in certain areas, then if needs be, I'll explain a little bit more about what I've done. So I'll fade out and now I'm back. Okay. Now let me explain a little bit about what I did. I ended up with four different layers. And one thing I found was I was doing it as I had to rearrange the order that these blocks went in because like I say, in certain areas, I want there to be a clear space between the individual areas of colors, but in other areas, I wanted them to overlap. Now if you take a look at the picture of the bird, if you take a look from the back to the front, there is a certain order that the various different objects go in. For example, with this branch the king fisher is sitting on, well that goes behind everything else in the picture apart from the background. Then next up you have the orange of the breast of the bird that is sitting behind a wing of the bird. So I had to arrange my layers with that in mind. So block branch is sitting at the bottom of my layer stack, then you have blocked breast. On top of that, you have blocked back. But now take a look. Just say on this area here for the block wing, if I make it invisible for a second, take a look at, say, these areas here which I'm circling. Now I'll turn on the block wing again. There's a bit of overlap going on there. If I make it visible again, you can see I've put a little bit of orange just behind those blue areas. That is because I want to play around a little bit with the borders of these different blocked areas. Because what I have now is hopefully a good start, but I want to refine those borders of the picture starts to take shape. So I'll export this file and send it to you. So if you want to follow along, you can do so. Okay, I'll see you in the next lesson. 13. Starting to paint our Kingfisher: Okay, I think we're getting close to the point where we can actually do some painting, will obey. But before we do, there's a little bit of housekeeping I do want to do my block branch layer is selected. I'm going to slide right to left to each of these blocks. And I'm going to group them. I'm going to call the group Kelly, Kelly the king fisher. And the reason I do that is at some point down the line, I want to flatten this group and I'll explain why when I do the next thing. Well, I need four more layers. One there to act as a clipped layer, one here to act as a clipped layer one there and one there. The next thing, well, I'll come back down to the block branch and I will come to hue, saturation and brightness from the adjustments. And I'll crank the brightness, arrive the way up. So now I have a white layer, which is what I'm going to need if I'm going to paint on those Clip Layers and above. And we'll do the same for everything else. And we'll look, here's an optional extra when you're painting, especially when you have multiple layers like we've got, I can almost guarantee it. Some point, you're going to end up painting on the block layer rather than the clipped layer on top. We can lock all the blocks layers to stop us from doing that. Alright, Finally, I think we're ready. Okay, So the first layer I want to do is going to be those lovely blue. So I will come to layer 12, which is on top of the block. When I know I keep on nagging you about naming your layers, but it can start to take you out of the painting zone and into that, let's organize everything zone, which can be a bit distracting. So it's up to you to find a balance, okay? Now, I think for this, so at least you can see what I'm doing. I did say I wouldn't refer to the reference, but I want you to see what it is I'm looking at while I'm building up colors, instead of me looking at it on my computer screen and you're having to imagine, so let's make this a little bit bigger. Let's choose a brush. I think for this, I'll come to my wash brushes. Let's come down to I'll come for simple wash. I'll start off by putting down a very light wash of my lightest blue. So nice and big. A pasty set pretty low. We go just so I've got an idea of where it is I'm supposed to be painting. The next thing, Let's try a slightly darker color. I'll make my brush size a little bit smaller, but still pretty big. And let's put in some more details. What I want to get here is a good correlation between dark and light. Maybe I could have made my brush even a little bit bigger in some areas, a little bit smaller and others just for more localized touches like this. And let's choose our next darkest tone. Make the brush. Well, let's see what 15 per cent is like. Yeah, I think that's giving me quite a nice finished there. I want the general darker areas as per the reference to be dark and I want the lighter areas to be fairly light. But I'm not trying to go for lots of detail here. I just want an overall impression of what I'm doing. Finally, let's come to our darkest tone and put some of that in there. When you're doing this against a white background, which is what I am doing. It can sometimes feel like I've gone too far. But come up. We can always knock this back later. Let's Be bold. Make do with that for now. And in fact, look while I'm here, let's try and find, I'm just experimenting here what smokey and smudgy, deep. Let's try that lower pasty, nice and big and I'm going to tap all that was nice. You see how just that one tap gave me a whole load of texture, but I think it's spread or way too far. So what I would do is I will come to a lighter version of my blues and I'll make my brush size a bit smaller and just tap down in one or two areas. This is one of the deeper ones, so it will make whatever is underneath it deeper. I just want to get a little bit of an idea of a watercolor texture there. Now, already I'm starting to think more. I'd like to do a little bit more with this, but instead, I'm going to come to, let's try block back because that's also blue, but a lighter version. And I just want to balance out the colors in the various different blocks before I start working too much on any one particular area. So for this, let's come back to RDC. Simple wash, lightest color is selected. Let's just that I was about to do the gotcha that I was just talking about. Locked layer selection. The current selection contains locked items will look if I came to cancel and I come here, I did exactly what I said, Oh, your bow to do this. And the reason I know that is because I do it myself. I don't want the block back layer, I want layer 11, don't I? So locking your layers. Good idea. And thanks to me messing up, you have a good example of that. Alright, let's just put in some of the areas here. I hope you realize that when I'm doing this, I'm making fairly big, broad brushstrokes. I'm not trying to go to the edge of my blocked in area and then stopping. The reason is they'll come a certain point where I want to edit the actual block layers. And to do that, I need a bit of color spilling towards the outside. Let's come down to the bottom here. There's quite a deep, but just down here on the underside of the wing, I'll put a little bit deeper just here, but I want to keep this layer, for the most part. Pretty light. Tiny bit at the top, you a little bit around here. At the bottom, come to a slightly deeper blue. I'll put some of that in there, but not too much. And getting a bit happy with where I'm splitting stuff down at the moment. I want this area to be light for the most part. So maybe like that tiny little deeper bit just at the top there and maybe just a little bit there. No more than that. Now, what about the orange areas? Let's not go to the block layer. Let's go to the layer above it. Let's start putting down some stuff here. Same brushes before, nice and big. Low opacity. Just to put down some general areas like this. Let's get a little bit more of a vibrant origin there somewhere. You can see how quickly the stuff goes down once you get started. I know it's a lot of preparation with all the blocking in and stuff like that. But if you get some effective preparation, it rarely does speed up your process. Later on down the line. I'm starting quite like what's happening here. A little bit darker just down the bottom there. It seems to be mainly darker in the front of the breast and also at the sides. So let's put in a little bit more of an intense, darker, orange brown. I'm not sure what we call it. In fact, while I'm here as well, Let's come to smoky and smudgy. Now that we're starting to get to the deeper areas and just tap down a little bit. Just to give the idea of some watercolor texture, make my brush smaller. Come on, let's zoom in a little bit because I am going into the detail areas and tap down just at this beautiful little bit, just on the side. A little bit more down the front on the breast. I think I've gone about as dark as I should do for that, but let's choose that very dark bit and just a tiny bit just on the very front of the breast. Still getting happy with it. You can hear my pencil tap on the front of my iPad. That's going a little bit dark and dead for me, I will choose a slightly more vibrant brown there. Third one along, because I know it's gonna go darker because we're using one of the deep brushes. But it's also just a little bit more colorful, a little bit more saturated. Now. Maybe just a tiny bit pretty small, just in this area. Maybe just a tiny bit just to the bottom of here. I want a good gradation between light and dark. I'm starting to get there now with this I think, Alright, go up, Let's do the branch. Choose. My light is great to start off with. Let's come back to that. Stay with smoky and smudgy deep, but I'll make it bigger and put in just a little bit of stuff here. Don't wanna make this too big on the main branch because it is round that branch. So I do need to get the appearance of lighter at the top, darker at the bottom. But for the branch, It's just something for the king fisher to sit on. I just need it to basically be there. Let's come to the darker bit. Zoom in a little bit nice and small and just tap, tap, tap. Just in certain areas, that's giving me a fairly texture. Maybe I'll take that Brown bit too. I just have maybe just a touch of color in there. You can see what I'm typing, I'm tapping just basically on the border of the actual branch. You can see that by the brush head splashing down off to one side a little bit like this. Just a little bit more here. A little bit at the bottom. Okay, I think I'll call it a hole for here. And in the next video, we're going to start adding in some finer detail to this, add editing what we've already got. So I will see you there. 14. Textures and Glazing: All right, We're back. Let's put in a little bit more detail. I'm going to start off with a wing because that is a layer that contains the eye of the bird in any picture. If there's an I in there, and that's the focus of the picture. I noticed with this as well, that now I've put in some of the other colors, especially those deeper browns. Maybe I could go a little bit deeper with the colors for the king fisher because against a white background, I thought, well that's pretty dark. Now I put in other stuff. I'm thinking maybe I can go a little bit further. But still at the same time, I'm going for overall dark to light rather than a huge amount of detail. Okay, So my brush, I'm going to stick with DC smoky and smudgy deep, but I will come in or zoom in a little bit more because I am painting detail. I'll make my pasty up a little bit more. I'll make my brush size. Well, let's try 4%. See what happens with that. Because I know it's around the back of the head. Yeah. That's kinda working for me. Be a little bit bold with these tones. Without being darker, it's helping making the light a bit appeared to be a little bit lighter, which is what I wanted, but also this eye as well. I want to do something with this. Let's darken the whole area because I'm looking at the detail. I can see that I want to create some of that, some of that nice shadowy areas. What I will do though, is this very dark, rather dull brown as well, because I don't want get all blue. I'm going to end up with a super-rich blue there. I want something a little bit data for the eye area in general. I know that doesn't sound particularly nice, but I just wanted to take the tone of this array the way down, but not all shades of blue. I want different kinds of hues in there. That's starting to look quite nice. But I think the sketch is helping this at the moment. Look away, turn off the sketch. You can see I need a little bit more definition in that area. Now I could add an extra layer, but I'm not gonna do that. Instead, Let's come down to DC soft light. And you've seen there are certain brushes which have deep on the end of the name, which means they work in something called multiply mode. When this one does the opposite, it lightens things. Now let's choose a color that we've been using. Let's try. Walked almost by that very light gray. Actually, it's not gonna be too much. I want to try a slightly darker gray because I want to make the area lighter, but that's slightly darker version I chose has gotten just a little bit more color in it. Or maybe I can get some of that color in there. Now let's do a test brushstroke with the settings I've got. That is way too big, way too powerful. Let's take this right the way down to one per cent can do it. But it's also, the opacity is way too much. Let's take the opacity down. I've got about 18, 19% there. Let's take a look at this garage and I'm going to build up this lighter area. The sketches helping me to see what I'm doing. But I might try and get rid of that sketch fairly soon. I kinda get rid of it, the sketch layer now, Yeah, I've got enough of an outline to carry on working on there. I think when you're working in fine detail like this, it is an idea every once in a while just to zoom out like I'm doing now. I can see what it looks like. Zoomed in. I'm thinking, oh, it's looking quite definite when I zoom out, much less. So I need to be a little bit bolder with this, so maybe make my brush size. Let's go risky. Let's go to 2% instead of one per cent. And make this whole bit a little bit of a lighter like this. I'm also noticing there's a little kind of a lighter area just off to the side. That's as much as I wanted to do with that. I think maybe just a tiny bit around here. That's a little bit more definition there. And also, as I'd maybe just a little bit just around that highlight in the eye. Let's zoom out a little bit with that. I quite like that, but I'm being a bit obsessive, so come on, let's make it a little bit bigger and bolder. So I can definitely see the eye because the eye is the most important part. Taking my time to do this. I'm not going to do every little bit in this amount of detail because remember I'm talking about an overall field rather than tight detail, so I don't want to do too much more there. The only reason I'm doing it now is because well, it is the area which is why people look at the most. So Mr. obsessive, heroic, right now, I need to extend that a little bit. But so packed fuzzy brush deep because if you notice that darker area does go back a little bit, am I using a different yes, I am. Obviously smoky and smudgy deep, but let's do that. Let's bring that back a little bit. They're still using that brown color, just a mix up. Some of the tones are a little bit. Now come on, Let's zoom out a little bit and actually see what we're doing rather than just going, oh, that bit at the back of our head is dark. Let's paint it without looking at the reference. Which is a very common thing to do. Let's take that back there. While we're here, let's take a look at a bit on the underside there. Now notice that is lighter, so let's come back. To DC soft light. And this time, let's choose one of the blues. In fact, let's choose a mid-tone blue, which is a similar term to what we got there. And let's see what the brush actually does. Brush size a little bit bigger this time, I think, at this speed. Now, can you see that when I do it, each successive brushstroke makes the whole area just a little bit lighter, which I can live with. I'm working quite boldly here. Look if I make the opacity a little bit more on the brush size, a bit more than if I just tap down. You can see the hue is starting to change slightly. That is part of the nature of this. But if I just tap down, just say in the breast area with the greater of pasta, you can see I'm starting to get a textured effect using this brush stroke. But I'm getting a little bit tired of this particular hue because it starts to look a little bit different to what I have there. So instead, I'll use the lightest blue I have. And that's quite nice, But again, a bit bigger. Just to provide a little bit more detail there. I know. It looks quite splotchy there. Let's put a little bit just on that bit just underneath the chin. And because I'm being a bit obsessive as well, Let's choose say them. Third dark is blue and come back down to smoky and smudgy deep. And just add a little bit more darkness and definition into this area around here again. Remember, I'm looking for kind of a watercolor effect, but transitions from dark to light. The outlines of my block layers. To do a lot of the talking. For this stuff. Just interesting textures. So let's make this boulder little bit of proud here. And I think I'm just about here with this, I will come to the slightly lighter blue, the second lightest blue. And just add just a little bit just around this bit of the wing. Because I'm tapping down, I'm getting that slightly textured effect, which is what I want. Now, here's the thing. Because I use my liner brush. I have a slightly different hue on the top of the head and just add a little bit on the side of the chin. Now the side of the chin, I quite like the top of my head. Not so much. I think maybe it's just a bit to turquoise. So I'm going to choose a third blue along, which is more of a blurry blue rather than a turquoise blue. And I'ma come down to DC Glaser. What this does look. I'll give you a very obvious example. Let's use a obscenely bright color. Crank the opacity all the way up and draw. Can you see that? It's taken that red and it's splat it down all over any areas it can get its hands on. It's changing the hue completely, but you can still see the dark and light. That is the glazes job to put down a new color, but to preserve your dark to light details. Now that's a very extreme example. But supposing I was to take this and take the opacity way down to what, 15 per cent and just posing for the sake of argument, I wanted a little bit, say purple out, you know, let's make this a little bit. More peaks at around 30%. So you can see what I'm doing. And I supposing I come to this bit at the side of the chin and go 12345678910. Can you see that with each successive brushstroke, I'm putting down a little bit and a little bit more of that red. So I'm starting to get a rather subtle variations in color by using the glaze brush. Okay. No, I did that ten times. So two-finger tap 12345678910, back to where I started. In fact, no. There. But what I'm gonna do look, I'll tell you what I'll do. I'll come to some of the local color which hasn't been affected. That's slightly turquoise. He finished, and I'll do what I did again. So let's zoom right in. I hope you can see this. This is going to be quite subtle. What I can do is just paint slightly to turquoise if finished out again like that. Or maybe I can do it around the side of the chin. The only thing about this is if you use say of a dark blue on top of a light blue, you're going to end up with something slightly darker. So it just be aware of that. That's that main area done. Do I want to do anymore in any of the other areas? Because to be honest, this was the main bit that I was worried about, the blue areas. But what about the breast area? Do I want to do anything with that brush to have I don't want the Glazer. Let's try smoky and some much deeper. Again, I want it fairly small just to get these areas to match up with, say, the blue areas are what I'm finding with this is that the third brown along is giving me slightly richer results than the 4th Brown along. Just while I'm here, I will choose the lightest version and come on. Let's come down to. Soft light. And again, because I want to put in just one or two smaller areas just to break up. Yes, I do. I quite like that. I'm getting a little bit texture, which I would expect to see. But it's a watercolor texture, which is what I want. Just while we're here, this very small area here. Yes, I do want to do something with that. So smoky and smudgy deep. Let's just choose all local color because now we've got some color down. Yeah, you can do that. Choose local color, brush size, small, and I just want to get to a little bit more of that dark area just underneath which you can see on my reference photo. Alright. The branch I'm not that bothered about because it kind of incidental to what we're doing here. Although no look I totally well, because if you take a look at this branch, you can see certain areas where you've got a definite kind of purplish cast of that. So I wonder, I'm using the same brushes I was using before. What was I using before? Smoky and smudgy deep, a little bit bigger. Here's a good idea. Let's actually come to the layer which has all the color on. Just a little bit more definition, just in this certain areas where I can see it tiny bit on the side of the branch there underneath. But before I get too obsessive with this, because this is not really a main subject of the painting. Let's try something. You see Glaser, pretty small, quite intense. I keep the dark and light, but I can change the hue of that branch just in certain areas. Which is very nice. And while I'm here, let's come to DC soft light and again, nice and small. A pasty still fairly high and just add in some of those highlights like this. But like I say, I don't do too much detail on this branch because it's not really the focus of the picture, but just to show you the actual technique. And since I'm being obsessive, which I should not be doing because it is supposed to be a loose watercolor painting. I just want to show you different ways of working. You go. Tiny little buds done super-quick. I did say couple of videos ago that one of the main things you can do to get a watercolor effect is to put in watercolor paper like this. Now, I want to take this one step further. To do that, I will zoom out a little bit so I can see my entire page and I don't really need my reference anymore, so I will come to my Canvas and turn off my reference. What I wanna do is make sure I'm either on my sketch layer or all my cold press in dense layer. And I'm going to come to Actions. Add, Insert a file I have supplied for you or folder called Paper gray. Inside paper grade, there is a texture that I really want you to make friends with that is modal texture, 01. Tap on it. It comes in like this. I'll use my two fingers to turn it around. I'll make it bigger so it covers the entire picture. There you go. Brilliant. Well, not so much because it's all gray, but it's layer blend mode time. This is mid gray with lighter and darker blobs for want of a better phrase. And if you've got something which is mid gray with darker and lighter bits, then you don't use a dark and blend modes. And you don't use the lightened blend mode, although you can get some quite nice effects. Instead, you come to the contrast layer blend modes. More specifically for this, you come to either overlay or if you want a softer effect, soft light. The other Contrast Blend Modes give some rather interesting, but not necessarily what I want affects. Know for this, you either want overlay for a fairly strong effect and I will zoom in on this so you can see more clearly what I'm doing. Or you come to soft light for a slightly more not back effect. Now let's take a look at this. This is what we had before. This is what we've got with a mottled texture file applied. Now the reason I recommend you do this is because often you'll find with watercolor paper, especially when you're doing med to slightly deeper tones. What can happen is the pigment which is suspended in the water, can naturally tend to pool in certain places. Because unless you're using something called hot press, watercolor paper, which has a smooth surface. One of the whole points about watercolor paper, as you have a textured surface, it's got high bit, a little craters. The pigment tends to pull inside the little craters. And so you can get this kind of an effect. And just while I'm here, you saw I imported the file and I made it a certain size. If I had a watercolor texture paper there with a much broader texture, I might be tempted to come to my transform tool and make the whole thing bigger. Can you see everything getting bigger or smaller? Depending upon the size of the texture underneath. Now I don't particularly want that. I was happy with the size as it was. So I'll undo that. I think as it was important, this is the right scale for the size of the paper. But we can refine this even more because I did say, you tend to get this pooling effect in the mid to darker areas. So I don't want it in the lighter bits and I don't want it in a completely dark bits because when you apply the paint so thickly that you get a very dark area than the pigment is going to be everywhere. It's not going to rest inside the little valleys of the paper. So what I do is I come to my inserted image, I tap on the icon and I come to this mask. While I do that, I get something called a layer mask and it starts out white. And with a layer mask, white reveals, black conceals. Have black selected. I will come to you, Let's come to a simple wash or maybe a pasty very high and I'll make the brush size a certain size. Now, let's take a look just in the area where I'm circling now and I will paint. You see that it completely disappears because I've painted black in that area. And you can see on my layer mask, you can see my little black mark, well, kind of a mid gray mark there. And so just in that area, I've hidden that mottled texture. But look, if I come to white, welcome to the same area again, I can paint it back in again. That is the beauty of a layer mask and it's pretty unique in that. All it does is make bits of your layer invisible or visible. And you can paint in black and white as many times as you want. You can paint but with a low transparency to gradually fade out certain areas. Because what you're doing is painting in gray effectively. I'm just going to get rid of this model texture just in the lighter areas and also maybe in some of the very dark areas. But in the mid to mid dark areas, I want this texture because it really gives the feeling of the paint pulling in certain areas, not done that in one or two areas. Let's take a look at this. If I turn the layer mask off, you can see I get the model takes jet everywhere with it back on. I already get them modal texture in the areas where I want. That kinda has the effect of making the effect a little bit less relentless. But the nice thing is, let's take a look at this. What we've got without all of a sudden looking a little bit smoother. And if I take off the original watercolor paper, that is not looking like a watercolor painting, but put a white paper texture on plus mottled area. All of a sudden it's looking much more like a watercolor painting. I think it's time to take a break here. We'll carry on in the next lesson. I'll see you there. 15. Using a Line Brush: Okay. We are back and we're getting there, but Kelly is missing something, namely a beak. So what I'm gonna do is come down to my Kali layer and I want a new layer for this. I'll just stick a new layer on top like this. It's not connected to any other layer because I just want to draw this in freehand. I will call it my sketch layer. I can make it even less visible as well. So I can just see what I'm doing. Come on, Let's come back to our Canvas called the reference image. There's my image, and let's just zoom in on the beak so I can see what we're doing. Now for this. Well, I want to carry on with the idea of the watercolor. And I'm turning this around because I'm thinking about the direction my hand moves. I'm right-handed and I'm going to have to draw some straight lines. I will find it a lot easier to do it like this. Where my hand and arm, we're just moving naturally as opposed to something like this where I'm having to pull things down and it's going to be a little bit difficult for me. I can always turn around this as well to get an idea of what I'm doing for this though, I'm going to use a different brush, one you haven't seen before. If I can do DC watercolor line, I have three brushes here. Line brush, Dark Age, chaos, H hard, and paint your water drops. Now let's take a look at the top one. I'm going to sample the color directly from the eye of the king fisher because once you've got enough colors on your Canvas, which you have made by layering colors on top of each other. Absolutely. Yeah, that's get the color from the canvas. Now let's just make a couple of brush strokes with this to show you what it does. Brush size around 3435%. I'll take the opacity, right? It's 100% and see about you getting a ward calorie type brush stroke with a dark edge. Now I might have mentioned this before, just in case I haven't, you put your watercolor down and it naturally tends to spread. But when it gets to the edge of the water and the dry canvas while it can't spread anymore. So the pigment Russ there, but the water behind it is still pushing outwards. And so sometimes you can get more and more pigment building up on the edge of your brush stroke. And so you get these darker edges. And that's what two-finger tap to undo that I've given you a couple of them to play around with. This one gives a more chaotic effects like this. This one DC paint, your water drops, vary the pressure and you get this kind of cloudy stippling effect like this. That's quite small. Family that a little bit bigger. You're getting all kinds of interesting watercolor type of effect. I haven't taken my pen off the surface of my iPad yet. And I can build up the border like this while I let go though and put my pen down again, then I get a new area. And I can't do what I do in the real-world work and just add to the border of my original brushstroke. Because remember, for most programs, digital watercolor dries instantly. So let's two-finger tap a couple of times to undo that, have a play around with those brushes. They should be useful for this one though, I just want DC line brush dark edge as my brush stroke. And look just while I'm here, you may find that dark to light ratio is what you want. But sometimes you might want a slightly darker bit in the middle. Sometimes you might want it lighter. So this is what you do. You come to your brush and you tap on it and you go inside the brush studio and Joyce off a practice brushstroke so you can see exactly what it is you're doing when you adjust the parameters for this one, there are two brushes combined. Once make the brush stroke on one which provides a little bit more texture. You can see I'm in the Grain tab. Scroll down by dragging up with your pan until you get to this one, Brightness and Contrast. Now what's going to happen here will depend upon your blend mode. The mode is set to light. And so with this, if I take the brightness slider, if I move it up, you can see a change in the brush stroke. And the closer to white I'm getting there, the more pigment is going to be put down. So if I bring that up or like this, or maybe you can play around with the contrast. Didn't do much in that case. I'll also come to this one, the top brush, come to the grain, to the brightness. And yet without one you can see because the blend mode is set to basically the opposite blend mode. When I take down the brightness, I'm getting more white in that area. So now when it comes to done, let's draw another brushstroke. Compare it with what I had before. And here you can see that's given me darker center to my brush, but I'm still getting the darker bits around the outside. So in case you're playing with these brushes, but you think I want more pigment in the middle of the brush. That's what you do. Tap on the brush, go to the brush and in June and play around with the grain and the brightness slider for both of them. But I want it to be where it originally was. So I come to about this brush and all I do is come down to reset brush. I show you. Yes, I do. Reset. Now. I've got my original brush stroke. I will clear this layer because what I want to do is just take a look at that bill. I've got my brush set to what? Thirty-five percent, a hundred percent opacity, press light start off with and then gradually press deeper as I go towards the bill to make my brush stroke larger. Now I want more than that, don't I? So I'm gonna do this. Yes, I know I'm getting overlapping brushstrokes like that, which I don't particularly want. But what I can do is come to my smudge tools. And this one here smoky and smudgy deep. The reason I call it that is because it gives us smoky brush stroke, but also I like it for smudging. Give it a name which lets me know which brushes I like. I'll take the opacity down a little bit. I'll make it nice and small and I can just blend in the color. If I was to get a little bit tappy with it, I can keep some of the texture that's being put down and make it even smaller. Just to blend this a little bit, I still want to keep some of that hard edge though, because I liked the idea of it being a watercolor effect. And I laid down successive brushstrokes. The theory being, if it looks like watercolor, can't be a bad thing. Now here's a good idea. Let's give them a bit to his beak. Let's see. Yes, I did go straight through that fish. Not a problem though. Maybe repeat a brush strokes because if I look at the actual bill, there is a little bit of a highlight there with a quality definite darker bits, so great, keep that there. And while I'm here as well, that bottom bit with the top belt packet is being darker as well. You know what, while I'm here, I'm going to choose it a little bit of that darker brown color. And I'm going to extend this down a little bit here as well. Because I notice that there is a bit of darker brown just where I'm circling now. So it helps blend in the whole thing a little bit more while I'm here. Can I get away with it a bit just to blend the bill in? It's looking a little bit thicker than it should be though. So let's come to our sketch layer. Kim all, let's crank up the sketch layer so I can see very clearly where it is. I go to my eraser. For this, I will come to, let's try fuzzy line brush. Pretty small, completely opaque. And let's just try and trim away some of that top Bill. I'm making it fairly fast while I'm making fast strokes, no two ways about it. But because I'm angled a painting, a natural movement of my wrist is helped me with that, but also just erase it from around the fish. That's how easy it is. It is just as easy to erase your pro strokes completely as it is to make them. So don't be shy of the erase tool. Sometimes just think of it as being just another paint tool that you can use if at all. I'm here, come on, come on arrays, arrays, arrays. Let's come to our washes. Let's come to simple wash. Take the pasty way down low. Psi is pretty low. I can just build up some of the brightness on that top part of the beak because it is fairly bright since I'm being obsessive. Dc brushed dark as it chosen. Let's make it nice and small. I want just a little bit, just erase tool again and get rid of that bit there. Because if I come down to layer ten, I did put down a block in area for the fish. Let's do that. Let's take a look at what we can see. It's a very similar color to the bill, and I will use my dark edge for this or maybe make it a little bit bigger. County council, let's come to the actual layer itself rather than the block layer. Let's put that in there a little bit around here, a little bit around here. You know what as well. I'm going to choose a little bit of blue there because I can see a bit of blue just in there. And I quite like what this brush is doing with the little hard edges. It's jesting scales which I quite like. I'll choose a black again because I just want to add in a little bit attorneys make it small because I just want to put in that either come back to the blue I had earlier, make my brush bigger and a little bit less opaque because I can just see just a little bit of text, you just around here, which you can gradually build up. Our main thing is, I want it to look watercolor. But what tends to happen is what I've done here. Because people look at the eyes are the main subject a lot in naturally tend to put more detail there, but as you go out towards the side, you tend to put in a little bit less detail. Now let's take a look at this, zoomed out a little bit more, but without the sketch layer and we're starting to get there, I think. But do you remember me telling you about how the paint spreads out and that's where you get a slightly darker bit around the edges of your paint stroke. I want to take a look at that because that's where you can really bring this to life. And let's make a new video just for that. So I'll see you there. 16. Refining our Edges: Okay, at the end of the previous video, I said we'll be talking about how to darken the edges of your watercolor shapes. Before we do that though, I want to refine the edges of my block layers because darkening the edges of your watercolor shapes works a lot better with the technique I'm about to show you once you've put in the final detail on your block layers. So let's get started. Now afford or anything, I'm going to have to come back in and unlock them and come here. Come here. You can tell they're unlocked because they lose that little padlock next to the name. Alright, let's start off with Bloch Wing. And for this, the tools I want to use on my brush tool, and I will go back to my hard triangle ink pen for that. I will also come back to my heart triangle ink pen for this, and I'll try and make them to make my life easier. Similar sizes, I want them both on 100% opaque brush size. Let's try 4% for that. And my eraser set to the same size because when you're adding ink and then erasing it, it makes life easier if both a pen and eraser or the same size, I have my block wing layer selected. And if I come in and I'll make it big brush stroke. Remember, all the colors you can see are on the layer above. And the only show up where there is paint on the blocking layer. That's how it works. So the good thing about this is you can use this to your advantage. Okay, so two-finger tap to undo that. Because a few videos ago I put down my journal areas, but at some point I was planning on refining them. Well, I'm gonna do that now. Because as well as being able to erase, you can also just use white for this because the blocked and layer is white. If I paint outwards, look, there's a whole load of paint splattered around the outside of the layer, sitting on top of the block layer. If I look, if I come and I unclip this layer, so it's just sitting on top. Look at that. One of the reasons I was fairly free with my brush strokes is that I wanted that outside area so that when I do clip it and they come in and edited, I got plenty of paint on the outside to come to my block layer and paint in or out as much as I want. Now that we've got a clear idea of where the paint is going, I can get really quite creative with this. One I'm looking for here. Balance between big, broad areas of color. But also because this is a king fisher, It's got some nice little details in there. I can rarely start to play games. And so we're getting an intricate border combined with these broad sweeps of color and blending the opposites. Which like I said before, is one of the keys to getting some really nice looking artwork. Bear in mind. I'm swapping in-between the eraser and the paint tool. The reason being is sometimes it's difficult to get a Paint Tool to behave exactly how you want it like supposing I do this night side. Oh dear, that's just too much. Remember it's digital. So I can always come in and I can always shave that down to an incredibly sharp point if I want. Same works the other way, like an array certain areas. And if I decide that's too much, come back to my paint tool and paint it back in and paint it back out as much as I want. Okay, that is the general principle on already just in this particular area, you can start to see, hopefully if I'm doing my job properly, that this balance between the big broad colors and some really quite intricate edges is starting to give me a nice effect. Anyway, I will carry on with this. I will probably just speed up what I'm doing because I've just got to do more of the same as for the music will look, I just bought myself a new guitar. I'm dying to do something with it. So I'll throw in a quick instrumental on the guitar while I'm working. Okay, here we go. Okay, Just to quickly pause at this point, I have been using the same brush all the way through. And I think I've made Paul Kelly a little bit scruffy than they deserve to be. But the point I want to make is it doesn't have to be just the triangle ink pen. It can be any one. Let's try DC rough edge, which we used in the previous project. And I'll also choose this one and make sure my block branch layer is selected. And you can use it to get slightly different kinds of edges. I think we got to a certain point now. Now let's take a look at this without the sketch layer. I got quite happy with this because I wanted to show you the point. You can play around the edges as much as you want. And you can see, I attack the branch quite freely because, well, it's a textured surface and I think he deserves it, but also around the edges of the bird, that one I've done that. I can always come back and look to my blog branch layer. Let's choose simple wash deep. Let's call up our swatches again. And let's choose that mid dark brown. And the paint layer is selected, not the branch layer. And I can come in and I can just take a look at some of those new edges I've created. With this one brush. For example, I can come back in and just play around with this new edges just to get the kind of effect I want. Also Come on, let's take a look at the breast of the king fisher. Now that I've done those different bits and refine the edges, I can come back in and darken the edges that way. No, wait a second. I will undo that a few times. And in the next video, I'll show you a very common technique that people describe to create burned edges on these big color areas. And then I'll show you a way which is non-destructive, very flexible, and very editable. Once you've done it. I'll show you that in the next video. 17. Darkening our Edges: Okay, so what about this darkening of the edge technique? I'll show you the one which I've seen on a lot of YouTube tutorials. I come and I choose. Well, let's try it the blue area again. And what you do, you come to your selection tool and you want free hand. And then you trace around towards the edges of, say, this wing area here. Oh, there's also a little bit around here. And there's also a little bit around here. I want also this bit down there, but you try and trace close to the area and you close it. So I have the middle bits of the blue area selected. I don't want that, I want to invert, so the outer bit is going to be selected, but also I want to feather. So instead of a very hard edge, I get a soft edge like this and you can kind of see what's happening there and you do that. So now that means the outer bits of the blue areas are selected and there's a fuzzy edge on there. Then I come to my adjustments and it came to hue saturation brightness. I take my brightness down. Can you see that? If I take it right the way down, you can see the outer bits are getting darker. And also you can play around with the saturation and maybe the hue if you want. And you come away and you select any other tool that is your darker areas. I have a problem with that. In that effectively, I think you're working blind. You're gonna get the same amount of blurring all around the area. You're not entirely sure which bits are being seen to and also that blue is spread across multiple zones. You've got the back of the wing, the front of the wing that head to try and draw out all of those and do it in one go is tricky. But my main problem with this is that once you've done it, it's permanent or you can do is start pressing undo to undo what you've already done. So let me propose another way to you. It's a little bit more involved, but you will get so much more flexibility. Before I do though, please let me undo this a few times. Come on. I'm back to that and I'm just going to clear. So I'm back to where I started. Alright. Back to where we started from. Let me show you the way I would do it. I will come down. Suppose I wanted to do the same area again, I will come to layer 12. I will add a new layer. It's not clipped to the layers underneath for my color, I will choose, well, let's choose that kind of French blue. What I will do, well, I want things to be darker, so I want to set this to a dark and blend mode. Let's try multiply. Then. I'm gonna come down to my block weighing the thing that's controlling everything that is seen, the block layer. Then I'm going to come to my selection tool as before, but instead of choosing freehand, I'm going to choose automatic. This is a fluid-filled you tap somewhere and it selects everything you can get his hands-on until it meets a border. Remind my block in layer for the blues is selected. I'm going to tap anywhere outside that area. And that blue area is the bit which I've selected. If I zoom in, I can come and select in other areas like here, for example. Now how much time you want to spend doing this is up to you. I'll take the time to do it because I want to impress you with how good this effect b plus o. We got these bits at the top. I haven't, we haven't done all of them, but frankly, I'm losing the will to live. Well, let's come down just to this bit here. Now this is all taking me a lot of time. Whoops, I went too far. So two-finger tap to undo, undo that. But some reason you have to tap twice to two-finger tap and then it gets rid of something else. I think that's a bit of a glitch, but just work with it anyway. That's everything I wanted to do apart from, come on, let's be obsessive. These bits here. That took quite a bit of time and I might wanna do that again. So what I'll do is I will come to save and load, tap on that selections, click on Plus. That selection is now saved. So this is what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna come to that later 16. And I'm going to fill layer that fills all of layers 16 apart from the block wing areas. So, so far you may be thinking, well, okay, so what now, this is the point where you come in and you turn on the clipping mask. Oh, it's disappeared. But wait. Now come to Adjustments. Gaussian blur and slide your thing across. Can you see what's happening when I do that? The more I blur, the more I'm getting, the darker areas around the outside of my selection. Let's take it to about there so you can see what I've got about 17%. Turn it off, turn it on again, and I've got the darker areas. But there's more. Look. I can control exactly how much I want by going from naught to 100%. I can also come to hue saturation and brightness. I can maybe take the brightness down a little bit to make it deeper. I can change the hue of it a bit if I want a bit of a color shift as I go down towards the deeper areas, do I want a little bit more purply, a little bit more greenie. Actually, I quite liked a little touch of green in there, but I could also control the saturation of it, which I don't really want to do. So supposing I go to about there that is not fixed in stone, that can be turned off or on. Anytime. But look, there's more because you're not going to get the paint getting darker evenly, which is what's just happened there. So you come to your adjustments and you'll liquefy tool. You want push selected. You do not want any distortion, you do not want any momentum. The size I'll make a little bit smaller. But the nice thing is, let's take a look at just the top of the head. I can take this and I can make it bigger or smaller as I see fit if app for that, I'd like to make just the top of my head a little bit deeper and I can start to mold the darker areas as it where I want them. Let's make this a little bit smaller because I want a little bit deeper area around there. What about the top of the wing? I can do that wherever I want. Well, I guess that's all I can control. Where abouts I have this effect. I could even use a layer mask on this layer and just take out the areas where I don't want the color to be, but I quite like what it's doing on their head. And I like the fact that even getting darker and lighter areas, I'll come on, let's go wild with this. Let's make that area darker, make it a little bit bigger. I can control around the base of the wings as I'll do that. Now let's take a look at it. All of a sudden I'm getting a much stronger, more vibrant effect, but it's all controllable. Do I want it the strongest that robotic, very, very subtle and not back. I got the choice. It's non-destructive. You can come back in a year's time and adjust this all you want. And if you don't like it, you can get rid of it and start again because you haven't permanently altered the paint layer underneath. You like that. Okay, We'll try this. Repeat it. Getting new layer, set the blend mode to Multiply. What am I thinking of? Look, let's come to this layout. I chose multiply. Let's try some of the different darker blend modes. That's dark and collarbones giving you a slightly more saturated color, Linear Burn darker color. What about the Contrast Blend Modes? I'm getting different effects depending upon the mode I've got. So I've got a huge amount of flexibility. Anyway. I did create a new layer. I set it to Multiply blend mode. I will come down to my blog wing layer. If I do, I really need to do that. No, I don't. Because if I come to my selection tool, I come to save and load. I have selection one. Remember, I saved it, tap on it. There's my selection. Layer 17 is already selected. So as before, I can fill this, Let's choose a slightly different color. Let's try something a bit darker and fill that layer. Then turn on clipping mask for this because I've been a bit too happy making my layer nice and dark and intense. And what have you are not sure how well this is going to work. Tell you what we'll do. Let's turn off our top layer for a bit, come back to our layer 17 and do the same thing again. Gaussian blur. This time. I'm just gonna do it by a very small amount. Can you see how it's getting just the edges? Take a look at those little white dots on the wing or on the top of the head, I'm getting just a much more tightly controlled Gaussian blur there. And I can decide how much I want it. I'll take it to a five per cent. How about that? Let's zoom in on that. Make it invisible, visible again, you can see that I can always come back to hue saturation and brightness. Or I can slide the lead for the left and I can duplicate it so I get a much deeper effect. If I decide, yes, I prefer that tap on that layer I just created, merge it down to the layer below. And there's my deep dark lines right on the edges of my paint. Let's turn it off. Turn it on again. You can see the effect as before. I can come to liquefy, wet my brush size a bit smaller and I can control the edge of that as well. Generally speaking, with this, when I'm doing the fine edge, I'll try and push things out of the way so I get a deep dark edge in certain areas and they don't get the effect in other areas. And by the way, I think I'm going to have a problem sending you this far because it's going to be, have so many layers that it's gotta be simply too big, right? A little bit at the top here, just try and lose at night I quite like that bit there. Alright, let's turn on our other layer on top. And so you can blend those layers as much as you want, maybe with this, I want to take it down a little bit, so it's a bit more subtle. Now that I have that layer on top with a finer, darker areas. Just to say it again because I'm feeling pleased with myself. You can come in and you can adjust this at any time. You can come back in and redo it if you want, because the underlying painting is not affected. If I come back in a year's time, I decided, well, you know what, that's way too strong. I can lower the effect as much as I want on both layers. That is the effect. I'm gonna do the same thing for the other layers, but you've already seen the effects. So what I will do is I will just do the effect and then come back in once I've done it. So I'll fade out and fade back in again. Now that I've done the other layers, I'll go in and just disable all of those darkening layers. But I'll cut out a little bit of recording so you can see a straight before and after. Okay, let's try and finish this off in the next video, I will see you there. 18. Add a Splat!: Okay, let's try and get this thing finished off, shall we? I will make the swatches layer invisible. I don't really need that. Now the next thing I want to do just to finish this off is what I like the overall effect. But I'm finding some of these edges where say the orange joins the brown, just a little bit too intense. I'd like to blow those in. Now I can do that using the smudge tool. But the problem I find now is I got so many layers there. And so I'll be doing it for example by coming to say the block breast, come to my smudge tool and coming to say this area here and smudging the area. Can you see the area smudging like that? I want to try and smudge one area into another that didn't really work there. What about the block wing because that's sitting on top. And if I do that, then you can see how it can start to blend the areas in. But I'm starting to reveal areas underneath which I'm not happy about to two-finger tap to undo that while I'm here as well, I just realized something. If I come to my blog breast and come to my Erase tool, I need to get rid of that little out-groups way too much. Although actually I quite like that effect. Get rid of just a little bit around here because I want the white dot on the wing to be there or not affected by anything else. But you can see the problem with that. I've got so many layers and even with the layers named i1 and to be playing, hunt the right layer to do the right job, I don't want to have to do that. So at this point, as with any painting, I have to make a decision. I have to turn around and say, well, look, I think most of the work is done now. So now I come back to my gallery. I'm going to slide to the left and duplicate. I'm going to choose the duplicated layer. And the whole reason that I put everything in a group called Kelly, everything you can see that apart from the papers and the sketch is that now I can tap on the group. I can flatten it. I've decided to commit to this. Now that I've done that, we'll look at, I'll duplicate. It goes, I mess things up completely, hide one of the layers, choose the top layer. Then I can come to, well, I'm going to use my smoky and smudgy deep. I'm going to come into certain areas like say this area just where the oranges me to the brown. I'll make my opacity down low. I make my brush size fairly small. But I want to start blending these areas and come on, Let's take the opacity up so I get proper Blender. You'll notice that I didn't do much work here. I didn't do much pen work here. That's because I knew I wanted these areas blended in a little bit. I'm finding I'm getting the best results when I'm pushing one area into another like this, just to soften up, let's make it a little bit bigger. I prefer the look of that what I had before. Let's come to this bit here and just soften that edge up. Looking very severe. Any other ideas? Yes, down here, this h down here, I prefer that to be a little bit softer, not everywhere, just in certain areas. And I don't want to overdo it because there are some some nice smudgy areas which I've painted in, which when you smudge, you run the risk of losing, you go to do that. Drag one area into another area. Let's just take a look at that area now. And if I make it invisible for a second, That's what we had before. Looking rather hard edged. That's what we've got now with it just blended in a little bit. Bare in mind as well. It doesn't have to be one area to another. It could be just simply against the background, like I'm doing now. Just to break up all these hard edges because you won't have a lot of hard edges in every single part of your painting that they could really do a little bit of work there. I'm starting to drag some lighter areas and darker. Not sure I want to do that. Let's zoom out. If you're going close and make sure you go out again. See what you've done. I think a little bit around here as well. That could do with being a little bit drag down just to soften up certain areas. So now I'm getting a blend of my softer areas. My harder areas, soft borders, heart borders. So I'm getting a little bit more of mixing things up a little bit. Just about here. Which you would get in a regular watercolor painting. Yeah, I don't like this hard edge here. That's a little bit too much. I'm finding with this particular case, I'm getting a little bit more successful results when I drag the lighter brown areas into the darker areas. If I try and drag it the other way, it's getting a little bit of that, but it's okay but it's done to get a little bit dead. Don't like what I did there. So just quick two-finger tap a few times just to get rid of that, we'll do a little bit just where it's looking a bit jarring like this bit here, I think that's looking a little bit not too nice and I made it bigger. I'm just plotting the paint around. For that, I'm looking now thinking all yeah, I want to do that bit, one of the, that bit, but it comes a certain point. We have to call a painting finished for the sake of your sanity as much as anything else. I know when I press the Stop Record button, I'll go back and think, Oh, I should have done that bit and I should have done that bit, but know that that's be disciplined. Also just sometimes you might get a little bit of a smudge of pink spilling out from the picture like that on that score. Know, I've done that. And if we compare what I had before, those softer edges, yeah, that definitely helping. But I will duplicate one small because with all work I've been doing and look, I've got some very rich deep colors which you get with the original king fisher. But one thing is always a good idea at the end of a project is to take a look at the dark and light and just have a quick tweak around. Now for that, I recommend using curves. This is all your values, dark to light. Imagine along the bottom, on the left-hand side are all your darkest pixel tones, and on the right-hand side are all your white pixel tones. And in the middle are all your mid brightness pixels. So look, it's a straight line at the moment, but I can tap and I can put a note there. If I move it around like this. I can affect the brightness of this. I want more. If I want the bottom, I can adjust just the darker bits in. If I was to move in on the top, that was to move it in like this. I can affect the lighter bits and you can see straight away I'm getting actually some interesting effects. But that's not really what it wants. I just want to know for lightening of this. So it looks just a little bit more watercolor it just by that much. Let's compare that with what we had before that was darker or lighter. And yes, I prefer that now that I've done that. Oh, yes, I'm being obsessive. Come on. Let's blow that bit just there because that was looking a bit too sharp. One thing you can do as well if you want to create a little effect is choose a new layer. Come to our paint brushes. Let's come to DC watercolor extra. And there's one here called DC splat, insert, alternate shapes. Tap on that. You want a nice big brush size like that and just tap down anywhere, you get a splatter brush stroke. I can come to my transform tool and I can use the little green dot at the top to move this around and rotate it to wherever I want it to be. Maybe I can put it just there to give the idea that I got a little bit free and easy with my paint. I just found a nice little spotty watercolor effects. For that. Look is just one splat. All I'll do is go to my heart triangle pattern. I'll make it nice and big. Just rub out the bits where I don't want it like that. But if you notice the name of that brush, DC splat, insert, alternate shapes will look. Let's show you this. Let's create a new layer. And I'll choose a reddish color like this. Then if I come, I tap on the brush and I go into my brush studio. You can see my little brush head is where I'm circling now. That is the shape of my brush. And there it is. But if I come to Edit and I'll come to import, and I'm going to import a fire because I have some files for you. There are a whole load of different watercolor splatters and splotches and things like that, which I created. And they are all in the watercolor marks, jpeg. What I want is watercolor splatter. I have no idea which one of those I was using. But look, let's choose another one at random. Let's try splat three. It's a different color splat. And then I come to dumb down again. Now, when you layer selected, tap down again and I get a different splat, we can tie that into place as before. Put that wherever we want, maybe just a little bit. Just erase tool again just to get rid of the bits I don't want. So I can get the idea of there being a splat down there. Whenever you see a brush from my brush set which says on the end alternate shapes. That's what it means. You tap on the brush and you go to the Shape tab, that's taper, That's grain. This is shape. Then you go to Edit, Import and import a file. And in the case of this, in my splat folder, I have a whole load of different splits and splotches for you. So you can adapt that brush at any point to choose one of these alternate brush shapes. Okay? But if I want to get back to the original brush, because I'm sending you this library. Just come to reset brush and I get my original splatter shape, click on Done. Now the reason I've done this is because I wanted you to have lots of different splatters and splashes and what have you, because watercolor is random and if you have the same splat all the time, it's going to what people are going to notice. So I want you to have lots of different versions. But you saw there that was what say 2530 different shapes in there. What am I gonna do? I'm gonna give you 25 different brushes, all of which do the same thing. But the only difference is the shape of the brush. Now look, I'm not gonna do that because, well, saying I've got hundreds of different brushes when in actual fact I have less, is a little bit dishonest, but also this way with just a little bit of a dive into the RStudio, you can choose whatever shape you want. And you don't have dozens and dozens of brushes, all of which do basically the same thing, taking up a whole load of space in this brush set, because let's face it. Nobody ever looks down the bottom end to see what brushes are there. They naturally tend to go to the brushes at the top. So alternate shapes, just a little bit of work and a little bit of knowledge about what the brush shape is there. You got access to lots of different ones. Okay. I'm not sure I want that layer to be honest, but I needed to show you the principle while I'm here. Come back to my blog branch because I'm still not happy with this particular area here. I know I'm being obsessive. Okay. So I'm being obsessive, but I'd rather, you know, the process. Incidentally with this one. Let's try and find an area, maybe down here, just down the bottom end. If I press fairly hard and push, this particular bus, can smudge and get some nice watercolor type shapes there. One final thing with all the work I've done that I inserted image with a soft light and a little paint bubbles. I could do that being a little bit stronger now at the moment it's soft light. If I change it to overlay, that gives me a stronger effect and it's giving me more the idea of the paint pulling into certain areas. So soft light. I need something stronger overlay and yeah, I prefer that. Okay. So that was a long project, but there were a lot of things I wanted to show you, a lot of techniques, some of which I'm pretty sure you've not seen before, but they can really help sell the effect that what you're looking at is a watercolor painting of Kelly picking Fisher. Okay, thanks very much. I will see you in the next project. 19. Simple Backgrounds: Yes, I know. I said we'd wound up their king fisher project, but just after I'd finished it, I thought actually this is a good candidate to show you something else. And so please stick with this just for a little longer because we'll take a look at this picture. I took a screenshot from one of the pictures on my Pinterest board or what I wanted to point out to you was around the outside of the painting, you get this very loose wash, which serves as a background, which has some nice loose watercolor effects. And here's another example. And it's the background that interests me because sometimes on the Procreate forums, you'll hear people say, I find backgrounds difficult. The other thing as well as take a look at the edges of that background. Trying to do that would be very difficult to do and very time-consuming. And so early on when I was working out this course, I thought there's gotta be a way to do this. And so this video is about the answer I've come up with. This file is called king fisher backdrop. It pretty similar to what we had before, but I made a couple of changes. You can see Kelly has their own layer. I still have the mottled effect along with a layer mask, but I changed the paper to watercolor A4. You can find that inside the white papers folder. And the reason I chose it is because it has a slightly larger texture. And I want to be sure that you can see the effect on whatever screen you're looking at. So to make this work, first of all, I create a new layer. I want this layer to be underneath the king fisher layer. The next thing I'm going to come to my brushes, and when it come to DC watercolor extra and it's the one right down at the bottom. Dc stands will insert alternate shapes. Tap on that. And I'm going to choose a loud color, which really makes its presence known and is not going to be confused with any other color in the picture. So I've gone for a magenta color and it's pretty bright. So now what you do is, I want to make my brush size big. Let's try making it about 4445 per cent and do a test brushstroke. And that's about the size I want. Maybe I'll make it a little bit bigger, say 65%. And yeah, I'll go with that. Then. I'm going to come and create another layer. I accidentally created two. Not a problem because I'm gonna be using them. Come to Layer seven, come to our stencil. And D, Remember when I said insert alternate shapes, there will be some brush head in a directory that you can use. So let's come to shape and Edit, Import, import a file. And inside the watercolor marks JPEG folder, we have watercolor stencils. And as we've done before, there was a series of stencils here which are designed for this purpose and this purpose only. I'll try say stands all six, which is kind of a triangle shape and come to Dan and Dan again. And I'm on my new layer. I want a nice big brush size and just tap down. And then I'm gonna come to my transform tool. I'm going to rotate this around. Now I can either do this by coming to the little green dot at the top and moving things around. Or I can just use two fingers and move this around and resize it to whatever I want. Maybe I want it maybe around here somewhere. And if I decide I like that, okay, That's fine. Commit to that and merge it down. Come to layer eight, come to my brush and repeat again. Edit, import in both file. Let's try stencil 08. Come to Dan. And again in the top left and Larry to select it and just tap something down there and move that to where I want that to go maybe to about say right about there. Know about what I'm doing is I'm looking at the general positioning of this, but also I'm looking how it interacts with the other stencils. I have all my picture like with that, it's crushed down quite close to that first stencil I slapped down with this. I'm getting a little bit more space just in the area around the branch. So I quite like that. And so I merge that down and create a new layer. Let's try one more. Let's try Edit, Import, import file. Let's try, let's try stencil 13. That looks quite an interesting edge and that is the point. Doing something like this, try to draw in a shape like this will be rarely, rarely hard. But this way I can very quickly generate a really interesting age which I can use as a clipping mask to get some interesting shapes. Say about it. But I do like that, so I'm going to duplicate it. And the new layer, I'm going to move over here. Because I'm moving it over. I'm getting some of it appearing on one side and some of it appearing on the other side. But I have got a slight gotcha here in that. Take a look at this bit and this bit which I'm circling, they are the same shape. That is a giveaway. So this is what you can do. Come to our erase tool and come down to watercolor, extra DC stance or ultimate shapes, choose that and maybe make this a little bit smaller. And I can, that's way too small. I make it bigger 18%. And I can cut into these shapes. Like this. And in fact, what I will do is I will merge down and merge down so I can get to the entire shape and I can start to cut in various parts to get this overall kind of a random shape. Now if you're following along, there's no way you're gonna get something that looks like this. But this is something I've mentioned to you before. This is a course about watercolor painting. A lot of it is random. Do not expect your work to look like mine all the time. You're gonna get your own version of this. While I'm here though. That's a little bit just around the shape of the woodpecker. Just so the background doesn't go completely over the woodpecker. Because while you can see, I've got pink bits inside the woodpecker. That's because those are just transparent pixels on the woodpecker layer. While I'm here with the erase tool though, I'm going to come back to watercolor line. Let's try hard triangle ink pen. Because one thing I do want to do here is I want to get rid of this texture inside the actual woodpecker. I'm fine with it around the edges. But I don't want it cutting into the word packet itself. I'll quickly speed up with this. And that's most of it down as a little bit just around here. And I think for the beak, I've been looking into my rough edge and just take out bits just to suggest a water texture and some of these finer areas. It can be fairly loose because often when people are doing these kind of masks, they'll often leave a little bit of white just around the outline of the main subject so that things don't get a little bit heavy and oppressive. One thing I'm finding is that this rough brush that I created is working quite nicely with this resupplied stanza which I've just stamped down. It's putting down a similar kind of a texture. Now I can always come back in and edit this mask at any point, but I will call that done for now. I may come back and tweak the edges, but the rest is actually pretty easy. So all I need do with this. Let's come on, let's call this background. We'll add a new layer and we will clip that layer to the background. And the last thing to do with it, now that I know exactly where it is, I could really afford to lose that very bright color. Oh, hello. Just before I do though, I'm going to come to my paintbrush tool, come to my line, triangle Harding pain because there's a little bit just here to having is way too hard anyway. Come to hue saturation and brightness, and just crank the premise right the way up. So we have what we've seen plenty of times over the course. Then come to our layer seven. Let's open up our palette. And those colors along the bottom, those mixture of very kind of knocked back greens plus slightly darker and slightly lighter. That's the stuff I'm interested in. Come to our brushes, watercolor wash, our tissues, DC simple wash for this. And I will select a color. And pasty downsize up. Actually rather than using that one, Let's try chaos washed deep because that puts down well, or rather chaotic wash. Tapping down very, very lightly and I'll do the tap, tap. So I get blotches of color, which you can get anyway with the cows wash brush. Let's try a different color here. Let's try a slightly more greeny color. And you can see very, very quickly, I can put down the kind of washes that I've seen. In fact, you know what, I'm going to come down to my little blobs with joy. And I want something a bit more yellow color and I'll swap my brush over. Let's try slope buildup. Large size. When you're doing stuff like this, for the most part you want a large brushes because it's a big background area. So if you're trying to make it interesting, different areas within it. While I'm here, come on, let's lower the opacity a little bit and build things a bit more gently. And I'm just throwing in different colors because like I say, I want different areas of interest. But also at the same time, I've got to bear in mind, this is a background for the king fisher. Now we can play around with the textures, but if the background starts to fight with the king fisher for your attention when you're looking at the picture there, maybe that's not such a good thing. You want to get a good balance here. Ideally, it's going to be the king fisher with an interesting background I'd won helps the other one to look good. That's the ideal. Let's come down to DC. Softer lighting, music, kind of a nice yellowy color. Let's take the opacity down or what this up gradually. Let's try just in certain areas. Oh, that starts to look quite nice. While I'm here as well. I will take a little bit from the king fisher because that Help create one too nice effects. And before I start getting too happy with this, Let's do a couple of things. One of them, you already know, we've seen this trick before. I will create a new layer. I will set it to multiply because we're going to darken the edges which we've seen before, then come down to our background layer. And let's just choose a color from the background. I'll choose that brownie color. I quite like that. Then I come to selections. Automatic is selected and we tap anywhere outside the actual area. But I won't go too overboard with this because we've seen the technique before. But let's keep the momentum going. Come to layer eight and we want to fill the layer, set it to clipping mask. I'll just duplicate this to create another layer in case I wanted to do different kinds of this effect. Two on the top layer, invisible come to the bottom one. Let's come to Gaussian Blur. Drag your finger from the right or left. Add that. Oh, yes. That is working quite nicely. Just getting a little burnt edges around the outside of the area. I will go with that. But I will come to my liquify tool and just pushed around certain areas because I think close to the king fisher, it's starting to create too strong an effect for me. You might like it. And quite often you'll find that things like this, that people work at a slight angle and so you'll get more of a darker edge on one side, then you get on the bottom. Sorry, another way of saying that is you might get a little bit more darker edges towards the bottom, or maybe some noise around the top, you'll tend to get more of a darker edge where there are darker colors anyway, because there's more pigment being slapped down of that area. So maybe in the slightly darker areas, pushed in a little bit. Also just a varying effect a little bit. I don't want it to look into uniform because otherwise that kinda takes away from the random nature of wolf killers. Alright, let's do one more. Let's take the one at the top, turn it back on so we can see what we're doing. Now for this one, Gaussian blur, but I'll make this one bigger. About what, 2930, 31%. Now, what does that look like? With it turned on and turned off. So turned off, turned on. I quite like the overall effect of it. Maybe I should push it around a little bit. Before I do though, let's try Hue Saturation and Brightness. Move the hue around a little bit. Yeah, when I move it, in this case towards 64%, I'm getting a greenish tint, which I do quite like. So let's take a look at that before and after again, before and after. If you want that effect, that can work nicely for you. I could come back in again and do the blurring, the Liquify thing like this. Nice and big and maybe just yeah, with a larger blur on funding that's working well, what I want to provide a little bit of bias just towards the bottom edge, just so we can pretend that it's watercolor papers, it's an angle. And if I do that, there may be at the top edge, maybe pull it away a little bit in one or two areas. So I will come back. What I will do, I'll select the background, pull us the layers above it, and I will put them in their own group called background. Before all of a sudden looking a little bit better. Now with an instant and very, very easy to create background and look while I'm here as well, I'm going to come to my main layer and maybe just fade it out a little bit because I just want to be sure that there's something interesting to look at, but I don't want it dominating the picture too much. Now I could do this by going back in with, say, my lightened brush and just fading it in certain areas. Instead, I'll drop this down to what, 71%. When you do something like that, you're failing against a white background. So you can lose some of the saturation of the colors. So you can come back to adjustments, hue saturation and brightness. You can add the saturation like this. You do tend to find though there is a correlation between how light something isn't, how saturated it is. Another way of putting it is, if you darken a color, it tends to get more saturated. And with this, sometimes when you saturate, it can appear to be a little bit deeper in tone. So this can be a balancing act. Alright, so there's a simple, easy to use background with some really interesting borders to it, all done using the stencil brush. 20. Build Up the Background, Part 1: Okay, that is the basics. And it's what I would call a low-risk thing to do with your painting. And of course, if there's a low-risk strategy like this, there's also a higher risk strategy. And let me show you that now. And what I mean by that is I'm going to now throw a whole load of brushes out that background to really build up the texture. And the risk is that gives a certain point where it was just so busy that it completely overtakes the painting. And you can barely see Kelly the king fisher anymore. But I want to show you different options or let's do this. Come back to our layers panel. I will take pasty up again and all of a sudden that is looking way too saturated. So I'm gonna take the saturation down again to about there. Let's create a new layer. I want to change this to add. Then I'll go into my brushes. And one of the brushes I've got is DC salt that. And then I want to choose basically a simple white color. Add layers selected. Let's clip it. Pasty on high Pro size to taste and a little bit big. Let's make it a bit smaller, 4%. Let's try just behind the king fisher. And I can put in little salt marks like this. This is a very common technique when people want to do snow or things like that and make that a little bit bigger, 5%. And I can put in various different salt marks like that. Now I used ad for this because image you get to see the effect straight away. Because add is a very, very strong, lightened layer. The only problem with that is that sometimes it will change the colors, like I'm getting it, very slightly yellow cast to some of those little drops. So instead, I'll change that to screen, which you can see is much more subtle. But if I want to make that stronger, I can simply duplicate the layer so I double up the effect. Things get lighter, but you don't get that slight color drift that I was getting before. So I'll take that top layer and merge it down. Let's call this assault on that score. I have another brush here which are designed to be used as a smudge tool. Come down to the watercolor extra. I've got to in fact DC salts manager and DC isopropyl horse merger. Let's come to salts merger. This is unpredictable. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. And I find it works best when you have a border between all light and dark area. So what I'm gonna do is I'll come back to my many colored layers. I'm just where I'm circling. That's what I'm going to place the head of my brush. Make it nice and big. And I'm going to drag from that lighter area into the darker area. See what happens. Did you see that? Let's try that in another area that's tried down towards the branch. And as I do, it starts to drag out a slight salt texture. Now I did design this to be used as a smudging tool. But while we're here, let's come back to our brush tool and DC splotch insert alternate shapes. Let's try that. But for this, I'm going to create another new layer that automatically gets clipped. I'm going to use a very strong blend mode like Color Burn. See what happens with that. I will choose a local color in the area I want to affect. My brush is nice and large. You can see it's a very texture brush. What happens when I tapped down? Oh, that is strong. In fact, that's a bit too big. A bit too strong for my tastes. Let's do that and tap down one or two areas. It's looking a bit too dark for me. Instead, I will come and I will choose a fairly vibrant brick red looking for she has breast and come and do that. Yeah. When I do that, I'm getting my darker areas, but I'm also getting a little flecks of red in there, which I quite like just while we're here, let's I chose Color Burn, but there are other ones like this. Multiply gives a fairly neutral dark and effect which can look quite nice. Darker, color burn. Linear burn is giving a slightly more intense effect, but looking a bit more natural. And I think for that, I would go with linear burn experiment with layer blend modes. It should yield up all kinds of interesting surprises for this. I like it, so I will merge down. Zoom out again. That's come out. Let's choose. I have soft light and chosen, I'll stick with the same brick red. And I'll just come to certain areas and tapping down, creating lighter areas but with a slight reddish halo around there. If I change that to a much lighter color and size a little bit small or quite a bit smaller. Twenty-six percent. Maybe draw one or two lines through that and I can start to build up areas like branches. I don't like those two already. So forget that. Instead, let's come to fuzzy brush deep. Let's choose a local color. Like this. I mean, we put in one or two areas and gradually build up things. Maybe I can do slightly out-of-focus branch shapes in the background. This, and again, this is risky because the more I do this, the more I start to overpower the central, central, main subject. But I want to show you these things and if I'm gonna do that, then let's come back to our salt layer. Let's choose a white color and maybe I can put in that's too strong. Lower the opacity, maybe make the brush size a bit bigger and I can put in a slightly lighter areas here as well. It's case a working up colors in all kinds of hopefully interesting ways which don't complete dominate. The main subject, Kelly the king fisher. On that score will look, we can play games with the border of the king fisher because this is something you do see happening in the real-world. Let's come to Kelly. Let's duplicate Kelly. Let's make the lower layer invisible because I want to experiment with this. Let's come to our smudge tool, smoky and smudging deep. And then I'm going to come to certain areas like say the head area, a pasty us at that a little bit lower. That might affect natural smudging and Anita, play games. Let's try six per cent with this. What I'm gonna do is I'm going to start smudging parts of Kelley into the background like this. And the reason I'm doing this is because sometimes when you're painting you might have a hard edge and the paint's don't start to bleed. But the more you start getting a little bit creative with these various different effects, The more you may find one area which is masked with paint starts to skip over into some of the wet areas. Basically, you don't get it right all the time. You get a happy accident like that, for example, maybe a little bit down here. Working zoomed in so you can see what I'm doing. If I zoom out a little bit, can you see that I'm starting to get main subject interacting with the environment in the way that real watercolor paper would do. While I'm here. I will choose that color that I just put down. I will come to my background. I will create a new layer and come to extra conduct a splat alternate shapes. And I'll just tap down something that is way too big. So undo that, make it smaller about there. And I can just come to my transform tool and just dock it into the area. I want just to provide a little bit more interest in that particular area. And already I think you're starting to see one of the dangers of doing this. I have a little bit of salt in one area. I have a very dark area towards the right. I have a little splatter of paint towards the left. The danger is that this starts to get a little bit too, little bit of interest here, a little bit of interests there. And it can start to not work together as a whole, rather a series of little interesting areas. But I want to show you these techniques because whatever else you can say, well, take a look at this. You've got the whole lot of really interesting effects. That's going back to my smudge tool because let's make sure I find the right layer. That's gonna be the top Kelly layer. And let's blur some of this stuff in because that's really starting to look quite artificial. In fact, I can start to blur it completely absolute wanted to places I don't mind. I'll do that. 21. Build Up the Background, Part 2: What you want more, okay, I'll give you more. What about the actual background shape layer? Because one thing that does happen is that you can get drips coming down, especially if the watercolor paper is at an angle. Eventually bits of watercolor will start to build up and start to dribble down. We can do that because we've been making big splatter brush strokes all over the place. And so there's plenty of color information outside the border of the background layer, but we come to the background. I will choose a simple white because that's what the background is. I will come to line, I will come down to DC rough edge. Now, let's see how big my brushes at 7%. I'll come down to this area I'm circling here just where you can see a big buildup of color. And I will draw a line down like this. I think that's too big, so I'll undo that. How big was that? Five. So let's try 4% and drag a line down. And I'm going to drag and hold. And when I do that, eventually you get a line created which can pull around like this. I can even come to Edit Shape and I get two nodes and I can move this light around to wherever I want. So maybe I have a little bit of a drippy shapes coming down there. Let's try a couple of others. Let's try making it big at the top by pressing hard and coming down like that. That's too much. Let's try somewhere else. Let's try. Press fairly hard and press lighter as you go down. Line created edit shape. And I can move the two nodes around to get exactly the effect I'm looking for like that. Because it was too thick. I thought like that. But if I pull it up, I can stretch out this effect. And again, the rough age is working quite nicely with the stencil that I stamped down. Let's come back and maybe put another one just hit Edit Shape. I can put down drips as much as I want, wherever I want, just while I'm here. One, if you can pick out a little bit more white on that branch, but a bit uncertain as to whether it's going to work. So I can always come here and I can always add a mask to this one. You add a mask, black automatically get selected in your colors. Come to my paintbrush. If I just chosen and a little bit bigger. And I can, oh, look at that. I can paint that slight border which you do sometimes get like save this bit here that work nicely. Just along the top of the beak. Often you'll find with watercolors, people will leave a little white edge just on the border of whether working, where they paint close to the border of say, the branch and the background. But they don't quite go all the way because they want to keep the clarity of the different shapes and what have you now I think maybe I've gone a bit too far there, so I just kept an eye choose white. I can paint this back out again, and I can fine-tune this. All I want. I think straightaway, one thing I would like to do with this is just get rid of that salt layer. I just don't like it. Whether you feel this effect is too strong. Whether you feel there's too much going on there. That's up to you because the fact of the matter is you can just keep on going. Come to later server and try Harry stroke. Choose a deeper color, make it fairly low opacity and make the size larger. And I can put down little heavy brushstrokes. The opacity for different strength of effect. Let's come to washers. Swash deep, set fairly low opacity and medium-size. And I can just come into these areas and start drawing in there. Let's choose a more vibrant color that will give me still dark but slight reddish tinge in there. Boy, I really am carrying the town where this, sometimes you need to, you need to take a few risks because watercolor, as I've said several times, watercolor is random. Especially when you're doing something like this. Let's make things darker or lighter as you see fit. And you've always got the undo button so you can come back in if you don't like what you're doing in a particular area. And just take things forward, not things bag or do you want to get these random series, but apparently random series of shapes, while I'm here as well, come to our background, smudge nice big brush there. And if I come to the back of the king, fisher will gradually fade. It's almost like. The paint runs out a strength in certain areas and it doesn't get to the borders of where you work. So you can fade it like this. I find it with this. It works best if you've tried Smith into the paint, we try smearing outwards and you're getting a lot of mucky stuff revealed in the background. You can fade those very hard borders, maybe just one or two areas like this. And let us not forget things like if we come back to our main color layer, we can come to glaze brush. And suppose they all want a little bit above that green. In that brown area, a pastel set to about halfway. Let's make this pretty large. And I can start to paint some of the green. See just underneath that branches suddenly got a lot less intense because sometimes it can happen that if I colored kind of clash with each other a little bit while I'm here. Let's try some that blue. I'm putting it just didn't want to see areas where the paint bled into the background like that brown here that that paint might've spilled out a little bit further. Why we originally were. And so you can paint the effect of the paint gradually dissipating. One final thing with this, if you're gonna do this, go and have your fun, take risks, hopefully get a little bit of excitement in there, and then take a break. Then come to it afterwards. And see what you think. Because sometimes when you're doing stuff like this, you're working so fast, you're on a roll, it feels good. There's so much chaos going on in here. But sometimes it can be very difficult to judge whether what you're doing is either working nicely or it's just a complete incoherent mess, like right now I'm looking at this thinking that's a little bit strong. Lower the opacity of this layer just a little bit. Just so it's not fighting so much with the king fisher for attention. But then when I go away, have a cup of tea and then come back in, that might either say, yes, you've gone too far, use the one you did before, or I may come back with other ideas. Like I might think, well, I like that darker area on the right-hand side. Let's build that up a little bit. Or I may decide I want to lighten the area or change the color using the glaze brush. Or I may decide I want to come to hue saturation brightness and play around with the hue a little bit to get a completely different look. Oh dear me know, interesting possibilities. What about lowering the saturation? Maybe do that, or I can just tap once on my screen and come to reset. And instead, I might want to come to my pencil. Choose o wonder, Let's try feathery edge. It's like the rough edge but a little bit softer in general, a pastel full process, fairly large. And let's try drawing in a couple of bits too big. A couple of thin areas like this. And maybe change the hue just in that particular area or just the brightest in that particular area. And see what happens with that. In that case, I'm thinking, oh dear me know, I'm not particularly keen on that. So I can tab again and come to reset. But this time I'll just choose DC splotchy brush stroke. Let's try that. Pasty on full size. Right now I have no idea around 23%. And let's put it in one or two effects. Let's make this larger, fast random brushstrokes there and change the brightness. So I'm getting something that looks like it fits in the world I'm doing. Make the brush size large and make the opacity lower. And see what I can do with this and paint in different areas alike. This, if I'm a bit uncertain about what I've done, I can always come back in and change it to where I want it to be. Lower, the saturation, change the brightness so it's more subtle or make it brighter light vis. Learn the tools and techniques that I've shown you in here, try and learn them well. So if you're doing something like this, you tend to get the most interesting and most vibrant results when you're thinking instinctively, you think, what if I do that? What if I do this? And once you learn the techniques, you don't have to think about all now, what was that technique I saw in minute 11 of that lecture about the backgrounds. Once you know the techniques, you can work in a much more intuitive and fast way, which is something which doesn't always happen to be fair. When you're doing digital painting. Sometimes it feels a bit methodical with these techniques. Learn them and who knows what you're going to come up with. Okay. I'm going to stop now. And hopefully I've given you a whole heap of ideas for things that you can do with your background. Oh, here's another one. Come on, let's go to our layer mask. I'm no idea if this is going to work. Let's just try it. Watercolor, extra isopropyl or smudge and pasty, way up and size, nice and large and a painted black on the layer mask. So I've rubbed out that background layer in certain areas. So I've got that kind of effect. I'm not sure I like that. Let's try it another way. Tap to undo that. Instead, I will come to all, come on. Let's create another layer and choose a color from the area. Maybe like that. And let's try something a bit more greenish light that size on full opacity is on full. I can draw on a whole different texture just like that. Let's change the blend mode to one of the other ones. Let's try. Hard. Light is going to be one or two interesting effects. Vivid light is changing the colors in interesting ways. Linear Light that can work in or what about multiply, darken, color burn, linear burn? Yeah, they're all giving me interesting things and I can vary the opacity as well. Before and after. Maybe, maybe not, I don't know, but I have the luxury of turning it on and off Because layers gave you more flexibility. Okay, I can still think of other things to deal with this. By now, you've probably figured out, I don't really want to stop. I'm enjoying myself. I'm thinking, what if I do this? What if I do that? I'll have just done three or four things here, which are simply wasn't planning on doing. And I was planning this video because I managed to get into the creative zone, these different techniques because I know them I've learnt and then letting me get into that bit of my head which is creative and wants to have fun. I want you to experiment, or what if I do this? Or what if I do that? I'm having fun, which is what I want for you. Okay. I promise I will stop now. And I'm sorry if this video got a little bit random, but if it inspires you to try out these techniques and get into the same mindset that I'm in right now. Then I'm not sorry at all. I'm very pleased about it. And I encourage you to have fun with this. I'll see you in the next video. 22. Your Turn! Paint a Frog: Alright, you lovely people. It is your turn again. The image on the left is by David, close on Unsplash. So all credit to David for a very lovely photo. And the image on the right is the watercolor painting I did from it. And that is what I want you to have a go at. This is probably the most advanced task I'm giving you to do on this course because we've just done Kelly the king fisher. And so I really want you to practice the things you've learned from there. With this picture, I've provided you with a base file called frogs 01. It has the sketch, it has the swatches are used, plus also the watercolor paper plus the mottled texture. So you don't have to worry about anything like that? No. What I want you to do is use some of the techniques I've used for Kelly on the frog. And you can see on the right, this is my version of it. Please don't judge your work on how much it looks like my painting. If you're going to be critical of your work, ideally, I'd like you to think whether it looks good, be whether it looks like a watercolor painting and see and this is more for me than it is for you. Did you manage to learn any of the techniques you've learned from Kelly the king fisher, or the previous projects. Okay, you have a go, have some fun and let's get started. 23. A Procreate Interface Primer: Okay, now this video is just a very quick primer for procreates. It's just in case you've never used the software before and you don't know what anything is. It's more just a quick tour of the interface. If you need more of an introduction than I have, procreate the first guide or Procreate solid foundations on both courses have gotten very nice reviews. Thank you very much for that. Anyway, let's get started. There is your procreate icon. I'm circling it now. And if I tap on it, the first place you come to is the gallery and you can see various bits of work I've been working on. Now yours will look different to this, because if this is the first time, you won't have created anything yet. And so you will just get the sample images that come with Procreate anyway, come to the top right, there's two icons that I want to show you. One is impulse. If I tap on that, That's where you can load up various files that you may have downloaded from the internet or from one of my courses. But I'm going to cancel that because instead, let's create a new file for you to work on, to do that, come to the plus sign, tap on it. And you have various different presets that you can load up. Let's just do this as simply as possible. The very top one where it says screen size, tap on that. And you get a new file. If you take your finger and thumb and you pinch it inward, you can resize it. You can rotate by moving your finger and thumb around. And let's just move that to there. Great. You've got a file. You want to create something. And to do that, you come to the top right. You've got 12345 different icons. Let's show you what they do. The first one is the brush icon. If I tap on that, you can see you have a whole load of different brushes. What you're looking at right now are a series of pastel brushes, which I'm working on for a new course. But what you will have on the brush sets that come within procreate. If I come down to where it says sketching and I tap on that, there's various different pressures and you have a whole load of different brush sets which have brushes in. Okay, so let's choose one. Let's try Nicole roll, tap on that. Okay, So the next thing is, I need a color to do that. Come to the very top right where you can see that yellow circle, that is my currently selected color. If I tap on that, I have access to various different colors. I'll have various different ways of choosing the colors. If he come to the bottom, you can see I have pallets highlighted in blue. Now these are various different squares that you can get. So if I tap on, say, this red, I can draw with that. If I want to choose a different color, tap again in that little red circle, and you'll notice whatever color I choose, that little circle in the top right changes to that color. That lets you know what you're currently selected color is to tap away, and there you go. Now at the moment, I'm not very pleased with that. It's not a work of art. I wanted to get rid of it. So take two fingers and just tap. That's two-finger tap once, tap again, and you can step backwards through the brush strokes that you made. If I then realized actually that was a masterpiece, I can three finger tap to redo, three-finger, redo, two-finger tap to undo. And if you hold down two fingers on your iPad just for a short while, you'll start to rapidly step backwards through the undoes, hold three fingers down for just a short while, and you're rapidly go through any reduce, alright, back to these colors. So I have pilot selective at the bottom. If I go through these where it says disk, tap on that and you end up with a desk. And you can see around the outside all the colors of the rainbow. And I can move this around so you can see I'm selecting greens, yellows, oranges, reds. And these are quite intense reds because that circle in the middle that controls how intense the color is. And you can make it much less intense and a lighter or much less intense and darker. So you've got your full fat red there. You have darker versions down here. You have a lighter versions across here. But as you go across, you get less and less saturated colors. You can see that is a very, very desaturated red. It looks like a brown. I can move it back towards saturation, and I can move it here to achieve more of a pink effect. So that's the desk, the classic. This is my favorite when it comes to selecting colors. You've got all the colors of the rainbow laid out on a slider here. And you can see the full fat color isn't the top right. Darker versions of it are here as you go down and as you go towards the left, you get less and less saturated colors until eventually you end up with gray, white, black. And the color is available to you. And if you want a little bit more controlled, rather than dragging this around, you've got your hue slider here, but underneath you have your saturation slider. And you can see as I move it around, that little circle in the big block of color goes side to side as well. I also have my value or my brightness slider at the bottom. If I move that, you can see my little circle in the square goes up or down to get lighter or darker versions of my base color. Just underneath that you have your history, which has all the colors I've chosen recently. Then harmonies, you have lots of different modes here. Split complimentary. I'm not gonna get into all of these. These are just a way of choosing things according to color theory. And he can move that central reticule around like this. And you can control the darkness or brightness of it with this little slider at the bottom next to that value. Well, it's a computer and any color has a numeric value. Those three sliders I was talking about the hue slider will love there's a value 193 degrees, 73% saturated. Now it's 46% saturated and 75% bright, and I can adjust it that way. Also. You have red, green, and blue sliders, and you can achieve lots of colors that way. And finally, we get back to palettes, and let's choose a color again, that nice red. Let's come back to our brush tool. That's my brush library and Nicaragua selected. Did you notice that this seems a little bit small and it's not quite as intense as that color I chose in the top right. Well, the reason for that is because of these two sliders on the left, the top slider controls how big or small your brushes and you can see the brush size is getting bigger or smaller. That's what 39%, 40%. And yeah, sure enough, you can see the brush is bigger, but it's not very intense. That is because the bottom slider controls the opacity of the brush. And at the moment it's set really low. If I take it up to 100%, I drawn out, oh yeah, you can see that's a much stronger color if I take the opacity. So it's way below. You can see I can gradually build up the brush effect more subtly. And at this point I should say these two sliders learn to use them and learn to vary their pasty a lot. Learn to vary the size a lot because then you get small brushstrokes, you get bigger brush strokes and you vary your work. And if you alter the opacity, you can build a much more subtle effects. Let's choose another color for this. Let's choose a nice, not very subtle yellow and crank up the opacity on the brush size there. Too, rarely subtle brushstrokes. Now supposing, I want to get that red I was just using well, that's okay. If I just press and hold my finger up in the top left where the little color circle is. Just hold it for a couple of seconds and you'll get the last color you are using back. Okay, That's our brushes. But you can do one of three things with every single brush in the brush library. You can paint with it like we've been doing. But if you come to the icon next to it, which I'm circling, this is your smudge function. And if I tap on so much and come down to painting again, you can see I have Nico role, but this time, instead of painting with it, let's come to that border. I'm zooming out by dragging outwards with my thumb and finger. Let's come to that red and yellow border. Amend my brush size a little bit smaller. And if I just rub along that border, can you see what's happening? I'm smudging like this. And I can blend different areas of color. And if I come to a different brush, Let's come to what's come to airbrushing. Soft airbrush. Make my brush size larger because the brush size doesn't stay the same no matter what brush you select, I chose a different price. So now I have a different both sides. And if I come to that same area and I start smudging, can you see I'm getting a much smoother blend because the soft air brush is a very soft, simple blending tool. Alright, so that means we can create brushstrokes with the brush function. We can smear the brush strokes around with this much function, but we can also erase brush strokes using the erase function. Again, it is the same brush, but this time we're using it as an eraser. So let's do this. Let's take their pasta right the way up. Let's make our brush size. Any old size. And there you go. I have now erased the paint strokes from that area. And this is a very important point in traditional media. You use an eraser on a piece of paper. You can all see a bit of pencil leftover and the paper has been flattened where the brushstroke was. But this is not traditional media. This is digital. If you rub something out, it's gone. There is no trace of the brushstroke two-finger tap to undo the arrays or anything else you've put on your cameras that was 100% opaque. If I take this down to a much lower pasty, say around 33, 34%, and I start building up. You can see I'm gradually erasing in this area for make repeated brushstrokes or I press pretty hard, I can vary the brush stroke. And here's another nice thing. If I come to textures, Let's try dove Lake. My brush size, six per cent. Now pasty is about halfway and then. See that I'm erasing, but I'm getting the pattern that the brush makes as part of the Raising process. So you've got lots of different ways to paint lots of different effects when you smudge and lots of different effects when you arrays are, I'm going to pinch inwards to see more of my Canvas. And either one icon we haven't looked at, is this warm with like two squares in there? I'll tap on that. This is my Layers panel and you can see I have something called a background color and layer one. Alright, well, let's take a look at background color. If I tap on that little white rectangle, that is the Layer icon for background color. You can see I have my colors open up again and I can choose whatever color I want. For the background. That's useful. Let's make it lighter. But for my layer one, if I tap on the little icon which I'm circling now, I get a whole list of options. I can rename it, which is always a good idea if you can remember to do it. And I can do various things to it, like e.g. if I made a mess and I just want to get rid of everything, I can clear it. Two-finger tap to undo that, can bring back what I've got. But what I'm about to show us something, I've seen a lot of beginners not do, which is a real pity because it's very, very useful. Come to the plus sign at the top right, tap on it and I get a new layer, layer two. If I come to my paintbrush, let's try oriental brush, and let's try any color at random. Let's just try green color so it stands out. Brush size is big enough and I can draw, That's not starting up very well. Let's try upping the opacity. Yeah, that's better. Yes, I know it looks like a mess, but here's the thing. See that little tick mark right where I'm circling. That is a toggle switch. And if I tap on it, the layer becomes invisible. Tap on it again, it becomes visible again. See the little n sign next to that. If I tap on that, we'll have a whole load of things called layer blend mode. We won't talk about those, but you can see I have a pasty, it's a slider. I can make this top layer completely invisible, partially visible, or fully visible, and everywhere in-between. If you decided what you did was nice, but it's in the wrong place. We'll look at this, come to the top left and look at this icon with the arrow. Tap on that, I get a box around everything on that layer where there are pixels. Because at the moment we're using our transform tool and look, if I tap anywhere. Normally it's an idea to go on the outside and move around. Look at that. I can move this. What's more? You see that little green circle on the top which I'm circling now. If I tap and drag that, I can rotate this around like this, you know, to get an elastic line. So if you want to move it very subtly, drag the green line out and you can move things very slowly like this. If you want to move it fast, take the little green elastic line around and look at that. Alright, we've got different modes here at the moment. I mean uniform, which means I can re-size it as well as moving and rotating. But if I come to something like free-fall, I can stretch it like this. If I come to distort, I can take just one of the corners and move it out. Or n like this, as well as the corners around the side. You want to do a quick bit of symbol perspective. You can do that. If you come to warp, I get a grid. Drag where the lines cross. I can warp this. And if that's too much, I've got a reset button down the bottom. Let's just quickly walk around like that and say I tap on my Layers icon. That's now committed. The changes I've made a permanent unless I hit undo. Now let's come back to layer one. And the next thing we're going to take a look at is this looks like an S shape. It's the selection menu. Now remember we're not on the layer with the green squiggle around the layer with those big red and yellow marks. And you can see at the bottom I have various different ways of selecting areas at the moment, I've got rectangle selected. So if I come here, drag out a box, you can see where I've dragged a box. That area is clear, but I'm getting these little moving lines which let me know that wherever there are moving lines, it's not selected. If I then come back to my selection tool and let's just come back to it. Let's try free form. I can move this whole area around wherever I want it to go. I can stretch it like this. Once I'm happy with that, I can just tap on, say, my selection icon again and that gets committed. If I come to my selection tool again, you've got things like freehand. And if I drag out an area like this, if I come back round to where that little white dot is, tap on that little white dot. I now have an area selected, which is a free hand shapes. So that is the select tool, various different ways to select things. Next to that, I have my adjustments. I don't want to get into these too much because there's a lot to cover. But supposing we come to hue saturation and brightness, I can take this entire layer and change the hue and swap it around. Can you see that? When I do that, the red's getting more pinky and the yellows getting more orangey because every color has been shifted around the rainbow. I can also alter how saturated it is like completely gray to pretty bright. I can also alter the brightness as well. You can alter the entire layer, but come to the top in the middle where it says hue, saturation brightness. But if I come to this little triangle which I'm circling now, instead of working on my layer, I'm now going to work using my pencil. And you can see my little brush icon is now turn blue and it's got little sparkles there. What that means is, let's choose something. Let's try wildlife. That sounds dramatic. Chatbot size. The opacity is up full. I'm going to paint in a certain area like this. You notice how I went underneath that green area. That is because the green paint stroke is on the layer above my little brush stroke gets hidden. I've painted with this, but I can move the hue around and change this color, saturation and the brightness just in that area. And if I take my opacity down on my brush and make my brush size larger, e.g. painting a different area, you can see I can gradually build up the effect like this. And if that's not enough to look, if I tap on my Erase tool, I can erase these brush strokes while I'm painting in this mode. And if I come to my smudge tool, I can blend the effect I'm doing whilst I'm using hue, saturation and brightness. So tap again on the adjustments icon. To commit to that. You can see I have a whole load of different adjustments and I cover all of those on the solid foundations clause. Okay, So now the one final icon is this little wrench icon, which is your actions icon. This is where you come if you want to add something like insert a file, okay, let's do that. Let's go to palettes and I'll load up blobs of joy 01. This is something that I created for the watercolor course and it gets loaded into its own layer called inserted image. Now at the moment, I don't want it in the middle of layer one and layer two. So if I just tap and hold, I can drag it up to the top of my layer stack. I want, I do watch that green brush stroke suddenly gets placed behind those little blobs of joy. Because whatever at the top of the layer stack covers up whatever is underneath it, things like layer two and layer one. Now supposing I liked that layer, I can lock that layer so I can't draw on it or I can unlock it. I'm supposing I don't want that layer at all. I can come to Delete and get rid of it. Supposing I want to keep the layer, but I don't like for that to green brush stroke. I can clear the layer. Various things you can do quickly. Coming back to our wrench icon, you can add various different things you can cut, you can copy canvas. You get various different assists, which is beyond what I want to do here at the moment. If I decide that my little maroon and orange blob with cutout is a masterpiece icon. Share it. I can tap on Procreate JPEG if you're going to place it on the internet and you can export it, I'll use AirDrop, top of my iMac. It gets exported. And we're good to go. You can also export videos. That's probably the videos you've seen on the forums. Preferences. That's more than I wanted to get into and help. Well, what we're doing right now is the help file. So that is a very basic walkthrough for Procreate. And it's just there to give you a quick heads up so that you can follow along with this course a little bit more easily. Go back to the course, go and have some fun. And I will see you in whatever video you land on.