A Basic Introduction to Illustration in Photoshop with Aaron Blaise

Oh you you hi everybody you know I've had a lot of students a lot of different people might as a matter of fact that come to me and say hey you know what I don't know how to work in Photoshop I feel like in behind whether you're a student coming into college and you've never worked in it before or you're an adult trying to figure it all out well today I've been in your site I want to tell you I've been in your shoes before I've been working in Photoshop for about 10 years before that I was a traditional artists job I worked in animation for 21 years at Disney and I was always pencil and paper and that sort of thing but about 10 years ago I decided you know I have to make the transition I got to work start working in a digital medium gotta work in Photoshop I was scared of it the the technology I'm not a computer guy so for those of you out there that aren't computer people don't be afraid because I'm not either and I'm here to help you through it okay luckily for me when I was working at Disney I was surrounded by a lot of people that knew the technology and they were there to help me so today I want to be able to give that back to you guys so I'm going to take you through the very simple beginning stages of illustrating in Photoshop they're just a set several very simple steps that you can take and I can have you drawing and painting in no time at all so even I'm going to back up from that a little bit more I want to tell you about myself and how how I work in Photoshop so first of all I just want to say once again that I'm a traditional artist I started with you know paper pencil canvas paint that sort of thing and so when I started working digitally in Photoshop the great thing about Photoshop is that it's a very robust program that you can there's a hundred different ways that you can do any one thing so take what I'm going to show you today but then evolve and develop your own ways of doing things if you if you feel fit but what's great about Photoshop is that because of my background I kind of took my traditional thinking the way that I I build up my drawings or I build up my paintings I was able to take that thinking and do the same thing in in in Photoshop so it's very forgiving in that way and it lets people adapt to the program in the way that they want to adapt to it okay so now let's back up even further and talk about the tools when you want to create an image in Photoshop first of all you've got the software which is the program itself but then there's the hardware there's the computer what are you going to use for a computer now some people will just start out and they're going to have their monitor they're going to have their computer and they've got a mouse I've got my mouse right here well I got to tell you you're going to need more than that okay so you can create images with your mouse it's extremely difficult if you want to draw and paint and have images that look like what you would do on paper or that sort of thing you can't do it with your mouse you need to do it with a stylus now there's two ways you can do that you can either use what's called a tablet and it is hooked into your computer and your monitor and you can draw and and on the tablet itself and you'll see the image come up on the computer on the on the on the monitor now that works great and it's a cheaper way of getting into it but the problem that I've always had with that and this is my personal preference is that I'm my hand is in one place and my eyes are in another and it takes a lot of hand-eye coordination to finally get used to that kind of feel now the equipment that I use that I highly recommend but is a little bit more expensive to get started is what's called a Cintiq now it's a pressure-sensitive monitor that's made by the company called Wacom it's w AC om that's and that's their website also if you want to check them out W a c om comm now what a Cintiq is is actually a big screen think of it as a big big drawing pad where I use my my stylus and I can draw on paint right on the screen it's pressure sensitive the harder I press the darker the image will come out if I'm if I make a mistake I've got an eraser I just turn it over and I can erase it's just like I'm working on paper or canvas I can't recommend it enough if you're very serious about getting into Photoshop and very serious about creating images that I highly recommend using a Cintiq there's several different sizes there's several different kinds that you can go with I really recommend at least going with the 22 inch and above because it gives you a nice large surface area to work on that I work on actually a 24 inch HD it's the largest version that they make and I can't get enough of it so I just wanted to get that out of the way it's very important that you get the right equipment to start with either get a tablet or work on a Cintiq okay so now let's get into the program itself so once you've downloaded it and you've installed it in your computer I'm going to be working on a Mac today so that's what I'm going to be doing if you're working on a PC using Windows or whatever it's basically the same but once we once we get into the program so also I'm working on the latest version of Photoshop which is Photoshop CC I'm going to open it up and close that real quick first I'm going to open it up and this is going to be your interface once we're in the center face whether you're working in Windows or you're working in on a Mac it's all basically the same okay also because I'm working in the latest version don't be don't be afraid if you have a later or an earlier version because what I'm going to be showing you today is very very basic stuff I'm not going to be showing you something really advanced that your early version won't have we're just going to do some basic drawing techniques and anyway that's that's what we're going to do so once we've opened up Photoshop like this the first thing we want to do is we want to open a document but actually before we do that let's look over to the left here and you can see over on the Left we've got all these different tools and today we're primarily going to use our brush tool and you can see it looks like a paintbrush we're going to use our fill tool looks like a bucket and you just it's like you you pour it out you fill and there might be a couple of other tools that we use in here but primarily those are the two tools that we're going to use then we're also going to use our color over here okay but before we do any of that we want to open a new document okay so what you do is you go up to where it says file up in the upper left click on it and then come down to new click on new and this is going to give you this menu right here now I always go by inches so you can see it's set by inches over here you there's pixels centimeters millimeters points pikas columns whatever I go by inches I usually make my images no bigger than 20 inches in any one dimension and I try not to get any smaller than you know five or ten inches in the lower dimension I also do a resolution of 300 dpi so with those that those dimensions and inches and combined with 300 dpi it'll give you an image that is not too heavy but it's also able to blow up into large images if you want to have something printed large okay so in this particular case we're 15 inches wide by 10 inches high at 300 dpi I would be able to blow that up to the size of a wall almost and it would hold together okay so I'm going to hit okay oh also I do it in RGB that's RGB is a red green blue and that's a setting for color for if you're going to be showing your image digitally whether for websites or that sort of thing if you want it to be done for print you might want to think about doing it in CMYK that cyan magenta yellow and this is your print these are your printer colors okay so I'm going to do it in RGB for today and you can remember you can always you can always switch them over okay and as a background you can see background contents you can do it transparent you can do it with the color I like to just do it with white to start that's my good place to start and we'll hit okay now you can see now we've got a document it's untitled and this is where we're at so the very first thing I like to do is when I start to work and once again I'm doing this in the same way that I would work traditionally so if I get a big white canvas and I put it on my easel and I'm going to start painting well the first thing I like to do is I don't like I don't like all that white I hate working on white because working on white it's very hard to judge your values it's hard to judge your light and your dark if you're already working on something that's white it's already at one end of the spectrum which is the lightest the brightest and so anything that's darker than that looks too dark so I like to start in the middle with a gray that way if I do things that are lighter I can judge them a little better and if I do things that are darker I can judge that a little bitter it's much easier to judge your values values meaning light and dark okay so I'm going to go over here and we're going to touch this see this at least two little squares over here we're going to touch that and it's going to give us our color picker okay you can just grab it and you can move it around and what I like to do is go all the way over to the right it doesn't matter where we are in this color wheel you can see I can pick all kinds of different colors doesn't matter where I am because over here it goes all the way to gray and I like to pick something right about in the middle maybe a little brighter than the middle and we're going to just touch our stylus to it and you'll see right here it gives us our color that's that's the color we're going to pick the color underneath is the color that we were but now this is our new color up above and we're going to hit OK so now you can see over on the left side that that color is changed and that's the color that we that our picker is currently using and then we're going to go to our bucket alright and that's our fill click on that right there and then come over here and touch this background and watch what happens boom it fills it right in okay so now we have a nice gray file or a project and that we can start working on top of the next thing I want to do is I like to have my my image flow I like to be able to work to the edge of it okay and the way the documents it's like this you can't really do it when I'm drawing and you'll see what I mean so the what I like to do is I my keyboard when I'm working on my Cintiq if I hit F you can see see what it does now I can move this around and I can draw right off the edge of it if i if i here we go i can draw right off the edge and nothing it doesn't move around if i keep it a floating document like i just showed you before then it gets kind of all screwy and messed up so what I like to do like I said is once that document is opened hit F and we can work in this floating field okay now if we hit F again watch what happens it gets rid of all your tools and you can see what your image looks like all by itself now you'll see it jumping up and down in size what I'm doing is I'm hitting command and then plus or minus if I hit - it gets smaller if I hit plus it gets bigger if I hit command zero it will automatically fit to your screen okay so think about those experiment with that hit F a few times you can see it go it'll cycle through there's this version and then you hit it again I'm going to make that smaller so you can see hit F again it gets rid of the tools and then if you hit command 0 it'll fit to the screen command - will shrink it command + will make it grow so you can get in really tight so when I'm drawing you're going to see me doing that back and forth that's that's key to this okay so I'm going to bring it back to our floating document like so we've got a gray background okay now the first thing we want to do is just start to draw alright so the first thing I want to impart in you and really I can't tell you enough is to work in layers the beauty of Photoshop is that you can work a layer upon layer upon layer and that way you can break up all the different things you want to do to your illustration so if one thing doesn't quite work out you can get rid of it and you can do it over again and then you can adjust things individually also so let's start with a drawing layer so the first thing we're going to do once we've got this document all ready to go we're going to come over to the lower right and see where it looked you got the little looks like a piece of paper you know fold it up on the edge that's a new layer so if I see and see what if I hold that it says create a new layer I'm going to push that and look we've got a new layer right above our background always always work above your background okay leave that background gray don't don't work on it because you can't adjust anything on the background the background you'll see a little lock right there it's locked you can't adjust it so just keep things simple once you open your document when you want to start drawing you press new layer and you'll see it says layer rot one that's where you're going to start drawing and if you double click on it like so I just double clicked on it it gives me the option to rename it so I'm going to call this rough drawing now look at that so now we've got our rough drawing layer we're going to fur for one we're going to start drawing and we're going to then okay so now we're ready to start drawing so now I'm going to blow this up once again hitting command + I hit my paintbrush and look these are the paint brushes that come with Photoshop CC now you can pick any other brushes that you might want to try if you have an earlier version and you don't have this set but these are the brushes that come with this version I don't have any special brushes that I'm using today but with one of the things that I really like and some of the later versions of Photoshop are these right here you can see they look like they look like little pencil tips and what they are is that they're they're erode Abal brushes so the more you use them the more they'll wear down some of them and they work just like a pencil just like a graph just like graphite and it'll actually wear down this one right here in particular this number 9 it's set all the way so that it won't wear down but it has a great line and so I use this for sketching so I'm going to click on that right now and and then so now you can see I've got if you look in the upper left we've got this little pencil tip and the number 9 now if I click on the arrow right here I can adjust the size I can make it a larger a 42 pixels as opposed to the 9 that it was 8 that it was at and you can see I can slide up and down now look if I bring it over here look look how big that that pencil tip is alright that's really big or I can bring it way down and you can see it's a lot smaller okay so I'm going to go with the 23 pixels and I like I kind of like that size and let's go ahead and adjust our color so I'm going to go into I like to start drawing with like kind of a dark brown so I go into kind of an orange area once again we get this color wheel and I go down to the bottom I want to go kind of dark so I usually start drawing in this area okay and then I hit OK alright and if I scribble on here real quick you can see look at that it looks like kind of a pencil sketch and what's really neat is that if I with my stylus if I go on the edge it makes a broad line just like with a pencil but if I hold my stylus straight up it gives me that sharp tip just like with a pencil if I go lightly it's a light line if I go dark it's a dark but if I press it's a dark line it's very cool if you don't like what you've created let's say you know so I want to get rid of all this stuff I can do one of two things I can either drag this rough layer down to the garbage we can see there's a little garbage can down there I can either drag it down there like so or I can take my stylus you cannot do this either with your tablets or with the Cintiq the big screen I was talking about that you can draw paint on you can just turn it over and look there's an see this this icon right here it's called the eraser tool I watch I'm going to enlarge that quite a bit so you can see it's right there now watch what happens when I turn my stylus over and I start erasing I'm going to just erase look at that and it just erases everything right off the right off the screen see that it's very very very very cool there we go let me grab this yes all right so let's go ahead and start drawing you're going to see these I'm going to show you these icons up here I'm going to show you what we can do with those in just a sec so let's go ahead and once again push our I brush button we've already got our brush selected which is that pencil you know that little irritable tip and let's go ahead and start drawing okay I grabbed it I made another layer by accident so we've got our rough drawing layer let's draw let's just draw a face okay so if you look up here you've got different settings right here is a thing called opacity now I can drop this way down and it'll make my lines much lighter so I can draw later if I want to okay I'm going to go ahead and erase that okay so I can drop that opacity way down oops there we go or I can I can also come over here and this adds to my pressure sensitivity on my brush so the lighter I press on the screen the lighter the image okay the more I press the darker the image just like a pencil okay go ahead and erase that just bring that up there we go go ahead and erase that okay so let's go ahead and just roughly draw in a face got once again I've got the size I like and once you'll see me moving the size up and down that's just me pressing command + and - okay there's - there's plus all right so let's just sketch in a little face here all right so let's say I'm right now I'm directing a movie called art story and there's this boy that I'm designing his name is Walter so let's just do a little drawing of Walter for right now I'm going to go ahead and make the size of the brush a little smaller you'll see me constantly doing that now there's a shortcut for making your brush size smaller or bigger you go to the brackets and if you press the right bracket you'll see it'll get bigger if I press the left bracket it'll get smaller I sometimes use those or I just do you know the the old fashioned way and come up here which is kind of my habit I don't do a lot of shortcuts but anyway so here I am and look one of once again I want to stress the beauty of working on a Cintiq in Photoshop is you know I'm drawing just like I'd be working on a piece of paper so here I'm just very roughly working in what he might look like okay keeping it very very rough just like I would with a pencil let's just give them a small just a nice little smile there we go I make that brush a little smaller let's blow it up you see that you can start to see the texture some of the texture and some of this line work which is really neat and you'll see notice how some of the lines are darker and and some are lighter it's because I'm varying the how much I push just like I would with a regular pencil you know I can push a little harder here to do his eyes just like I would with graphite okay there we go so here let's put a little bottom lip in there so I'm starting to get something that I kind of like a nice little expression throw some hair in there there we go I'll get the get his neck in there might even throw a little bit of shadow maybe a little shadow off his nose just to show some form once again we're keeping it very simple I'm just working on one layer right now that's all I've done I've got that one brush that I'm using and I'm varying the the the size of it you know I get a little smaller with the brush a little bigger I go you know command - command + - blow it up and down okay just keep it very simple now the other thing I want to stress to you too is you know don't be afraid to just really explore the program and just discover stuff that's kind of what I've done in the past and and you you'll you'll figure things out you find new ways of doing things okay so there's something right there so let me let's go ahead and just put a caller in there and the other thing too if you want to move the image around see this little hand you can either press that and move it over and then that allows you to move the image around so you can find a better place on the screen to draw from then you just go back to your brush or there are shortcuts on the Cintiq and on the tablet where you can press certain bushed buttons and it will give you different tools like your panning tool which is that little hand okay so you'll see that little hand pop up every once in a while well I'll just move stuff around that's that's all I'm doing is I just hit you activating that tool in order to move the image to a different place to draw from okay so let's go ahead and finish this up so I've got this let's put a little collar on them let's say and let it out it up there we go we're just going to keep this very simple now what if you want to resize something so we've got this image we got this rough drawing over here on the right but I don't like where it's sitting in the composition well let's go up to edit right here and see where it says free transform watch what happens when I click on that I can click on free transform and see it creates this box all the way around the image well if I hold down the shift key and then grab a corner I can make it go up and down in size see that so now let's make it right about there and then we can just grab it if we as long as we get off the corner I can grab it and then move it around and then hit return see now I've got it in a place that I like a little bit better now the other thing too is if if I go back I'm going to show you what happens if we don't press the shift key remember I showed you a press shift and you can make it go up and down it stays at its same scale it doesn't get distorted watch what happens if I don't hold down the shift key see what happens you can do all kinds of different things with it okay so let's do that and we'll bring it back to the way it was the other thing to look over on the right you've got this history alright if there's anything that you've done that you don't like you can always go back and you can take you can go back and you can drag these different steps that you've done you can drag them into your trash and you can revert back to an earlier version that you had okay the other thing make sure that you're always saving so the way to do that let's go up to file we're going to hit save as okay and it's going to give us an option I'm going to call it Walter and today I just want to save it on my desktop you probably should save it in someplace other than your desktop like your documents or something like that today I'm just going to save it on my desktop we're going to go ahead and hit save keep it as a Photoshop file which is is what it is now alright so now we've got to sketch it's the rough drawing I've shown you how to kind of adjust the size I've shown you your history tool over here your history window where you can drag things out like for instance you saw that we free transformed it we resized it if you go over here and then you drag that into the trash watch it reverts it back to the way it was okay so I'm going to go ahead I'm going to go to edit free transform because I want to resize that back to the way it was there we go and hit return there we go remember I hold shift and I move the corner and it stays at its proportion now we've got our rough drawing now I want to I want to create a more refined drawing okay so let's create a layer on top so once again we're going to hit that little piece of paper it looks like down that little icon down on the lower right let's press that and look we've got another layer that's up on top double click on that and we'll call it refined drawing okay now we want that refined drawing to show over the top of this rough drawing the only way we can do that is to make this rough drawing lighter so what I'm going to do is I'm going to click on that rough drawing all right see I've clicked on that layer and I'm going to go up to the opacity see that on the upper right click on that and I'm going to drag the slider down look up and see how it gets lighter and darker right here so I'm going to go ahead and drag it down to about 33% and hit return look now we've got a much lighter version and I can go up back up to the refine drawing we're still on our dark color we're still the same pencil but now I can come in I can start I'm going to make that even a little smaller I can come in I can start to really refine the drawing and get it nice and exact if I want I can make start making small adjustments hit some of that so I that Anatomy shrink that a little bit okay here I want to get the drawing in the eyes just a little bit better maybe he's got eyelashes want the roundness of that eye to be a little better defined so I'm going to do that let's slightly color it in okay now once again all we're doing is working on two different layers right now and I'm just like you would with a piece of paper you might lightly draw something in and then go in and refine it with a darker line well that's all we're doing here let's go ahead and find some of that eyebrow darken up some of these eyebrows here and we'll come in and refine that even more when we decide to do the color later on so let's go ahead and fill this in okay you can see that by doing this refined player we're getting a much better look to the drawing it's getting it's getting better okay just adjust the smoothness of this cheek now this method that you see here I'm doing this for a cartoony character but I do the same method for even my my my more realistic pieces whether they're animals or concept art or whatever this is the same process that I use for every piece of art that I do in Photoshop that's the thing there's like there's a key there which is find a method and then do it that way all the time that way you're not working worried about process anymore the creating the image becomes a much more second nature for you and you don't have to worry about process anymore so this is basically my process which is you know other than the basics that I just showed you in opening your document and getting it ready I create a layer and do a rough drawing then I create another layer and do a refine drawing and then we'll do more layers and do our coloring which I'll be showing you next okay so we're getting through this I'm going to move through this a little more quickly I might take a little more time if I were doing this and didn't have to worry about time but I don't want this tutorial to go too long it doesn't need to because we're going to just get through some of these basics okay so there we've got a somewhat refined drawing this is a little boy Walter looking at us here there we go okay so now we've got our rough drawing and we've got our refine drawing and he's looking pretty good once again I'll hit command 0 and it adjusts it and adjust the size to fit the screen so there we go so now we want to start adding some color well the beauty the advantage that Photoshop has over working in traditional media is I can create a base color but I can do underneath the drawing layers that I've just done so watch come over here to your background I'll come over here and I'll click on the background and then once again we're going to create a new layer but because I've clicked on the background it's going to create a layer above the layer that I just clicked on that's how it always works wherever your whatever is activated like if I created a new layer there it creates a new layer just right above that refine drawing or let's undo that if I go to the background and I create a new layer look at that it'll create it right above the background well let's say you want to move a layer well I can grab it put the cursor on top of it and move it around and you can put it anywhere you want so remember you can always change the layer order okay but today I want to put a layer underneath both drawing layers that I've created I'm going to call this local color now the term local color means the color of an object when it's not lit it's just that's the color it's it's if an orange isn't as orange its that base color orange not the shadow color not the light color it's the local color okay so once again we're going to have some fun I'm going to go up to our brushes icon we're going to and we're going to click on it and it's going to bring down this menu see number 55 I really like to use this brush to start creating some of my paintings painting colors so I'm going to click on that I'm going to increase the size up to about 125 pixels you can see the brush right here and say okay so I'll just touch touch the touch the screen and it gets rid of the menu now one of the things I like to adjust my brushes and this is a way that you can kind of you can change some of your brushes and then save them and refer back to them later on so if I press this icon right over here on the right or I touch it over here it works in both places touch this icon right here and look what it does it gives you this menu these are all the properties that are set for the current brush that I'm working in so look at the spacing I can adjust that spacing and look it creates so that if I keep it like that watch when I draw look at that see it just creates all those spots and erase that or if I pull it together and bring all those spots really tight like it creates a nice line all right I'm going to turn these wet edges off so I get something that's a little bit more solid and I'm going to turn that off actually I want to turn that back on and let's see here I want to hit new brush preset okay and I'm going to say okay I like that and then hit OK now watch when we come back over to our menu look there it is we've got a new brush that's saved at the settings that we've just created okay so it's very cool so now let's go back over to our color right here which is on the lower left let's click on that let's start with this flesh color so I'm going to go a little more red and let's move up into this area this is a nice base flesh color right there I'm going to go to that and we've got our local color it's set underneath our drawing layer now watch what happens whoops on a turn and I want to turn this off see this is if I press hard you can see there's varying degrees of opacity depending on how hard I press that's because I have this turned on that's my pressure sensitive or sensitivity setting okay if I turn that off it just creates the same weight color every time okay and I like to lay down my my local color with this turned off that's how I do it so we've got this turned off we've got our opacity set all the way up to 100% and we're going to go ahead and lay start laying in our flesh tone now look at this because our lair is underneath all of the other layers they the line work stays on top because it's sitting on top ok so I can I can just sit and scribble away and not worry about having to cover you know worry about covering up the line work or anything like that because the line work is just sitting right on top ok there now let's grab a shirt color let's make his shirt red let's kind of move it over here and I can come over here and just start coloring in his shirt no now watch this you see this button right here so if I if I do that without that button turned on this is that's our line if I turn this on now it'll give me a tapered line i watch if I lightly touch it gives me a skinny line if I press harder harder harder it gives me that thick line and so you can just like a paintbrush you can control your line weight just by using turning that on or off okay right now we've got it on which means I can control my line weight okay just erase this so if I get into areas like so I can just lightly touch it and there we go and if I maybe go like light touch thin line hard touch thick line see that let's go ahead I'm going to touch the color again let's uh let's give them a different color collar once again this is very basic this is how I started working in Photoshop when I first came into it let's give them some hair color now let's go brown put it in here somewhere I'm going to turn this off so I can cover more more space and I can get the details in just a minute so I'm just going to do something like this just quickly sketching in alright now if I turn this back on maybe make my brush just a little bit smaller now watch I can get more details I can get it nice and tapered just like a paintbrush because I've got this turned on see that alright harder I press the lighter I press I can control different bearing line weights okay I want to get that hair going right down into his face color around some of these areas here there we go color into the background there so now we have our basic local color except for the eyes we got to do the eyes sorry I kind of remembered to do that so let's do the whites of his eyes first I'm going to pull that into the red make them a little bit very light pink ish somewhere in there let's color that in once again we're still on this local color alright and now let's give them some blue eyes got a blue gray somewhere in there I see we're going to just color that in once again I just keep touching that color wheel or the color icon over on the left and it gives me my choices every time I touch that gives me I can change my color so now there's our basic local color for Walter I'm going to go ahead and touch let's go ahead and touch the rough drawing layer now that everything's kind of laid in now watch I can go in on that layer selectively and I can start erasing erasing some of the areas that I want to clean up so I'm on that rough drawing layer I've turned my stylus over I'm just lightly erasing some of those areas like these lines here don't Chrome not crazy about them I want to get rid of some of them I'm going to go back to my refine drawing layer let's go back I'm going to grab the brown again because I want to draw a little bit more go to my pencil like I just did there now look I can draw in that eyelid shape because I had forgotten to do that there we go still on right on that refine drawing so there we got basic three layers all we've used so far we've done a rough drawing we've done a refine drawing and then we've done that local color underneath so let's start let's do something a little different now we want to start doing the light and shade okay but the other thing we want to do especially within the local color stage our skin is never especially mine our skin is never the same tone all over the place it's going to change it's going to get warmer and cooler and that sort of thing so I'm going to create a layer on top of the local color because that's going to enable me to if I don't like what I'm going to do next I can get rid of it and I'll still have that local color underneath so I'm going to go in and watch this this is another cool thing so we've picked our color picker now if I take see how it looks like a little ink dropper if I touch it to his face where I've painted already watch all of a sudden it goes right back see over here it picks the color that I'd already used see there I just touch that and there it is well I want to go a little redder with his face let's go a little Pinker up there I'm going to change brushes I'm going to come over here and look at this there's like this airbrush right here I'm going to click on that and to make it really big like so okay I'm going to take this pressure sensitivity a tapered brush I'm going to take that off I'm going to push our pressure sensitivity and I'm going to take our opacity and turn it way low like in a thirty thirty eight percent range somewhere in there now watch what happens when I paint on his face now and on this new layer watch oh look at that I'm getting those nose a little redder maybe his cheeks are a little rosy see that can start to get a little variance of color in his face let's come into his ears you know our ears tend to be red it's a lot of blood there let's turn that turn that a little brighter that's just because now like I can turn that layer on and off see that and that's this new red color that we dis laid in actually that's something I didn't show you guys if you look on the left there's these eyeballs on these layers you can turn individual layers on and off by hitting these eyeballs so let's start with our rough drawing let's turn it on that's where our rough drawing is turn that refine drawing on turn the local color on now let's turn this new red red color that we've added to the face we'll put that in there okay so now we've got something that's starting to come together really well let's go ahead and start creating the light and dark shadows now so one thing that's kind of fun to do I'm going to go ahead and let me hit this refined area I'm going to take my eraser and knock it down just a little bit there we go just want to clean that drawing up just a little bit alright so we want to start creating shadows okay let's create a shadow of the shadow areas of this character now I'm going to imagine a light kind of behind my head over to the left a little bit that's going to be shining down on his face so maybe some of this area over here will start going in the shadow this will be light yeah let's do it that way okay and not actually we've already set our highlights up for that so that our light source is coming in it's going to be coming in kind of from this direction okay let's get rid of that so let's create a layer on top we'll call this shadow okay now we're going to do something different you see this is uh this much for this layer you can change it and there's a whole list of different modes that you can put that layer on now I'm going to go to this we see where it says multiply I'm going to click that and we're going to put this shadow layer on multiply and what that does it takes the paint that you apply the pigment that you apply on that face but it also lets the it multiplies it with the pigment that's underneath so you get a blending of the two colors and that works really well when you want to create shadows and I'll show you what I mean let's go in here let's grab a cool color shadows tend to be cool and let's make it kind of mid-tone let's start there I'm going to whoops I'm going to grab there we go grab my brush tool and to keep that opacity let's keep it about 37% let's bring the size down actually I'm going to grab remember our brush that we created I'm going to create that now bring the size down just a hair there we go now I'm going to start creating a shadow now watch our opacity is light we've got this set for multiply we've got that cool nice cool setting and watch when I start working over the top just create that side of his face is going to go a little dark I create actually I want to go in here a rough drawing I want to want to erase this line work that I did here once again you can that's the beauty of working in layers you can always change what layer you're working on and make adjustments that's why I work in different layers because I can make adjustments let's go back to our shadow and I'm just going to create a shadow right there it's being it's a the shadow of his his neck as chin right make the brush a little smaller once again remember you can either do that with your brackets or you can just do it the long way like I do I'm just going to add nose I'm going to create a shadow so I'm doing that there once again I'm going to go back to my rough drawing layer and just clean that up it's a race go back to my shadow layer I think the side I'm going to change the size this will all kind of go into shadow there we go okay go a little bigger with the brush whoops a little bigger with the brush there we go now we can get softer transitions let's do the side of the head I'm going to push that opacity up a little bit so I'll put this side of the head in shadow maybe this his head is casting a shadow let's do that now see how that the color this is why we have it on multiply see how that color shines through the color that we're applying and it looks like a shadow see how that works go into the beauties of working in Photoshop that you can't do with regular pigment this is one of those advantages you know the backside there once again I want to get that shadow just right maybe the underside of his lip is going to be in shadow here create a little shadow in there okay once again this is just the basics I'm doing a very simple illustration just to show you how to get started but once again I use the same basic method on all of my illustrations no matter how complex on there we go then I can go in with my eraser and I can clean up some of this if I want I'm going to go touch my eraser bring that opacity down there we go hit that pressure sensitivity look at that I can get very very sensitive with the with the eraser there there now look we're starting to get some shadow going go back and touch the the paint brush now I'm going to touch the tapered tip and I can start getting hair shapes and there's some some of these shadows here see that cool stuff huh great so now we've got our basic shadows laid in we've got our line work done and we've look what we've done we've all we've got our five different layers so I'm going to turn these off again and start start from the bottom up we've got our background okay we started with that rough drawing and you can see I've erased some areas that's okay then on top of that and then we brought that opacity way down remember and then we created a new layer on top of that and we did that refine drawing okay then we went and created a layer underneath and we created our local color and then we worked on top of that and added a little bit of color to the nose and cheeks just to give them a little just to make them a little flushed and then on top of that remember we created a new layer on top of everything set it to multiply and remember right here this is your where you set it to multiply and we created our shadow using cool colors okay now let's create another layer and I'm going to put it right on top now there's two different ways that we can add light to our painting I'm going to show you one way which is adjusting your layer properties or we can just paint them okay so I'm going to start with the layer properties so once again instead of going to Multan or Mille we're not going to go to multiply this time we're going to go to overlay see where it says overlay and this is a method that I use every once in a while now let's go to a warm color now somewhere in here hit OK ROCK done opacity down we're going to turn that tapered brush off now watch remember the light is coming from the upper-left I'm just going to lightly start drawing on here you can see it'll start lightly creating a light layer but you see how it's kind of turning it yellow that's where it see sometimes it works sometimes it doesn't so I'm going to take it off of overlay actually I'm going to get rid of that layer altogether I'm going to create a new layer that's the beauty once again of working in layers I don't like what I just did I get rid of it nothing else is hurt so let's call this light okay and we're just going to leave the setting normal okay now I don't want to keep it on top actually I want to put it down underneath let's put it under our rough drawing so all I do is grab it put it under the rough drawing there we go once again touch your color and I'm going to come over here and I'm going to grab my local color don't grab the shadow area grab the local color there you can see we've got kind of this light pink well I'm going to go a little warmer with it like so I'm going to go bright okay so yeah I've just made it a little brighter I'm not all the way over to the white but I made it a little brighter I've kept my opacity that's set fairly low at 44% okay now watch I'm going to come in here it's very lightly I'm going to start to work where I want the light areas to be lighten up that cheek I want to make that a little Pinker see there hit this the tapered tip there I watch I can get a little more sensitive with the with my light here and I'll you'll see I constantly will grab new color let's lighten the top of that lip because the light will hit that once again hit that nose and when I'm as I'm doing this just thinking about three different values I'm thinking light middle dark and so now we're starting to work towards our light area here I made the brush a little smaller and see I'm still working underneath all of my drawing layers okay right there let's go ahead a little bigger take the taper off we can brighten that up a little bit take our shirt color make that a little brighter watch you can hit that a little brighter see how it gets a nice little just a little bit brighter in there same thing with our yellow let's grab that go a little brighter with it boom there we go nice bright color so now we're getting a little variance in the color come back over touch this again let's just hit brighten that up a little I'm going to erase some of that just to get a smoother transition and maybe you know what maybe even the tops of the eyelids will be a little brighter okay so there we've got a basic shadow layer and we've got now a basic light tone area I'm gonna brighten that just a little bit more make that a little bigger let's get that just a little brighter on that face there we go oh you know what let's get let's get a little bit on his chin let's brighten that chin up go a little brighter with that smaller with the brush there we go okay there we're starting to get our basic look to our our illustration this little character concept okay so once again while we've done is created a local color on underneath our rough and refined drawings and we've created our shadow and we've created our light layer now let's create a layer on top once again touch the shadow create our new layer I'm going to call this highlights and so now I'm going to go ahead really grab some really warm very light color very very bright and very tastefully on top of everything so I'm going to go in and say just like you'd see in nature oh let's hit that tapered tip and go boom just very nice and subtle let's hit that there maybe a little bit right here look at that I'm going to put a little highlight along the bottom of his eye where the wetness kind of catches light right in there let's knock that opacity up maybe just right along the bottom of the eyelid right there a little catches little bit's catch light right there so see that and that's for let's work on top of this I'm going to create once again click on the shadow boom like that create a new layer let's do I color I like to do keep my eyes separate so remember we wanted that blue color I'm going to go somewhere in the middle now watch I'm working on top of the drawing layer so I'm just going to paint right over the top let's knock that opacity up a bit I'm just working right over the top of our drawing but underneath the highlight layer because I want to get this eye really really nicely rendered keeping it very simple now our eyes the iris is shaped like a bowl so it goes in as you look into the eye the pupil is at the bottom of the bowl so if there's light coming in from this direction over here if you see that blue the light's coming from that direction this part of the iris will actually be a little darker it'll be a little more in shadow so let's go darker with it I'm going to turn that tapered brush off I'm just going to make that a little darker except this like so see that make it a little darker they're working on top of the drawing layers they are see that and if the light is shining this way once again then and if this is the bowl then this side will be a little brighter so let's grab that color and make it a little brighter like so and let that fade out let that fade out like so okay now go dark almost black let's make our pupil see that pupil there see that nice looking pretty good huh and now what we're missing is let's go back to our highlights let's grab a nice bright hot light let's turn on our tapered brush and just touch it right to the top of this piece right here right there or the top of his eyes catching some light and look at that we got a nice high light happening on the eye maybe a little bit along the edge there I think there might be a little piece there maybe there look at those Isaac just pop it right there I'm going to come back and hit this a little better all right now our illustration that basic illustration is starting to come together now there's something else I like to do I'm going to create another layer boom like so I'm going to call this secondary light I'm going to create another light source so here is our main light source you can see where the that blue arrows shining that was our main limited let me turn this up here turn my eraser up there we go I get rid of that arrow so that was our main light source coming in where the highlight layer is but now I want to create maybe a cooler secondary lay a second light coming in from another direction maybe behind him and off to the right so let's go ahead and grab kind of a greenish maybe a greenish bluish color let's bring it up maybe in this range I'm going to go to the secondary light and I'm going to bring that way down turn our tapered tip on and watch what I'm going to do I'm going to make that a little smaller and I'm just imagining that light coming shining in the background and some of the edges of this form some of the edges of this form here just catching some of that light okay so it helps to find some of that form once again I'm working right up on top on top of that secondary light okay I actually grabbed the wrong I was was on my eraser setting there we go so here we go I'm just going to look kind of weird at first look at that bright a bright color as I get into this well imagining certain edges turn that down a little bit the edges that might catch some of that light you know I know like the part of this part of his head here some of these hairs some of the texture and the hair will catch some will be brighter than others just bring this down maybe that'll be a little brighter this part of the hair definitely catch some kind of fade out his neck will catch some of that definitely the side of his face but I'm going to make it a little bigger watch I'll see how big that brush is because that face is a smoother wider transition so let's just bring that around like that see that back of the back of the shirt will catch a little bit of light maybe some of the patterning in the shirt will catch a little bit of light catch a little bit over here see how I've used that secondary light and I've created kind of some fun alternative lighting there looks kind of neat like there's a you know a neon sign behind them or something like that let's create a background I'm going to touch the background layer create another layer on top let's get a big brush let's describe the same one we've been using and make it really big like so and I'm going to grab whoops I'm going to grab my color let's make it a nice dark cool blue gray somewhere in here now watch because it's whoops I'm going to turn the tip off because it's on the bottom layer see this it's behind so I can just brush away and just paint in this background behind them let's now let's create a little darker so we can get some varying values there there we go it's something a little darker there look at that you got a nice thing going on let's go back to our highlights or actually let's go to our light okay because you know what the one thing I didn't do I didn't do is hair so I'm going to touch his hair let's go a little lighter make the brush a little smaller turn that tapered tip on imagine where that light is I'm just lightly drawing in bring that up a little more there we go some of this these hair textures shapes there we go see that now if I go to the highlights which are sitting on top let's go a little brighter with this okay let's go way brighter with it we'll go smaller and we can imagine that these are the parts of the hair that's really kind of picking up some of that bright highlight from the wherever that light source is like so create some of these hair textures there there we go so again let's go back to the face I'm going to touch some of that skin color go a little brighter with it I want to just go a little brighter along the edge here have you bring it down underneath a little bit oh that's a little too much for me there we go just a little bit there make that brush a little smaller there we go now let's just get a little bit there and we're just kind of hitting our final details let's get a couple little highlights here and there maybe a little highlight on that lip a highlight there something along the edge a little shine on his chin look we got a basic illustration a basic little character illustration so that's what I just wanted to stress you today was just keeping it very simple it's not a great drawing but it's something that'll show you kind of my process where I start let's turn all this off and we'll just do a quick review turning everything off individually we start with that document remember and we fill it in with gray all right because we want to start with a mid-tone we don't want to start with white create a new layer we're going to call that our rough drawing and we just start drawing roughly with our paintbrush okay experiment with different brushes you may find a brush that you like better than what I use once you get that rough drawing in go ahead and drop the opacity down way over here on the right and touch that you see that opacity right here can make it darker or lighter see then you create a new layer on top we call it the refine drawing and I turn that on here we go there there we go we're fine drawing and that's sitting right on top of your rough drawing all right then we want to create our local color so we're going to create a layer underneath and we fill it in then I went ahead and added some rosiness to the cheeks by adding a new layer on top of the local color and just adding some color go ahead and experiment with that okay then we wanted to add shadow so we went there and we let's turn that on we set it to multiply remember that we set it to multiply and we just paint it in our shadow layer using cool color okay then I wanted to create my highlights or my light areas so I went down underneath just above right above my my local color and the rosy cheeks I'll turn that on you can see I added kind of a highlight layer that continues to model the character once again I wanted to push those ranges even further I like to go back and forth between shadow and light then darker shadow and lighter color so let's turn those highlights on you can see pushes it even further we got a nice little rendering happening there and we also at that point created a layer and filled in those eyes got the eye color looking really good okay and then remember we put a layer on top of all of that we created a secondary light that helps show off that kind of that form and then to finish it all off we created a layer underneath and we created that background and that's my approach it doesn't matter if I'm doing a big animal painting that you've seen in my on my website creature art teacher that you ordered this from I do that all of those no matter how detailed they are they're done exactly the same way that I just showed you today so I hope you learned something and if there's something that you don't quite understand go ahead and message me I'll talk to you next time thank you you

Channel: The Art of Aaron Blaise

Views: 857,525

Keywords: Aaron's Art Tips, Illustration (Industry), Adobe Photoshop (Software), Tutorial, Drawing, Painting, Software (album), Artist, digital art, instruction, learn, Intro, teach, digital

Id: MhSQlPwtd4c

Length: 71min 44sec (4304 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 09 2015

Reddit Comments

[u/p3rsonaa]

Great stuff Mr. Blaise!

[u/[deleted]]

How do we get good at color? Great vid!

[u/aaronblaise]

This is a walk though to my approach for digital illustration in Photoshop