Animation Stuff: Forest Background Painting

[Music] hello my name is Andrea and today I'm going to paint this back in my last video I designed this background and now it's time to slop on some color this background has a few different planes and I made sure to do the line work on separate layers in this shot in particular the foreground needs to parallax and elements from the mid-ground overlapped with the characters so while I color it in I need to maintain these layers the first thing I'm going to do is put a solid color behind each plane I'm also adding a layer in the distant background in most cases this would be the sky layer but here it's more like undefined forest I want to thank me from the previous video for blocking in the middle ground and foreground for me because it makes my life a lot easier I just need to change the color right off the bat I'm making sure to choose colors for each plane that creates depth dark in the foreground and lighter in the background I'm also creating a shift from a more blue green to a yellow green I'm going to use these colors as a sort of middle tone for each plane once I have each plane I start blocking all the smaller shapes in namely anything with an outline and I actually do this all on the same layer I just make sure that I am working aliased that is when you can see hard pixels when you zoom in to do this you have to change the brush to pencil change the mode of your eraser to pencil and make sure all your selection tools have the anti-aliased box unchecked I really wish it was just one button that would be really nice one thing I like to do when picking colors is to I drop an existing color and then change it when we read colors we do so comparatively not absolutely if you I drop one color and change it you will see the original color here where it says current and you can change the color above it where it says new to be the color you want this is especially handy for subtle differences like when you want something to be slightly lighter or darker if you want to shift the color you can shift towards the two neighboring colors or if you want to shift across the color wheel you just take down the saturation if color Theory really isn't your strong point you can just grab the strong version of the color that you want to change it to and fill it at a low opacity or select the section you want to change and do a color adjustment there are a bunch of different color adjusting tools try them out and see which ones make sense to you and get you to the right color but the main thing is that you can easily adjust these colors this method of working is highly flexible if ever you decide you don't like a color you can just select it and change it and there's no confusion with a million layers as I move on to the middle ground I want to make sure it is darker and higher contrast even in smaller spaces it's good to create atmospheric perspective so your art has depth it's like a haze that reduces contrast lightens intense more and more towards the background typically a natural haze is a bluish purple color but I made mine yellow because I'm a rebel I guess it's fun to experiment and try different things I quickly do the foreground and the forest is blocked in at this point it's a good idea to take a step back or look at a small thumbnail or blur your eyes or something is there anything that blurs together that shouldn't this grass could be a light of color and I could lighten the background layer slightly there I'm happy with those colors moving on I'm going to paint on this background layer and add some foliage there are more trees and bushes and stuff back there you just can't see them very well now I know this is looking very flat so let's add some shadows I'm going to duplicate my paint layer and adjust it to make it a shadow color I like to make it both cooler in tone and darker I find using exposure is pretty handy but there are many tools in Photoshop so do whatever you like best now if you hold alt for PC or option for Mac while clicking on the mask button it will mask out this layer that I put my shadow colors on then if you make sure you have the mask selected you can select any of your fill colors and paint in the mask where you want your shadow color can be visible painting in white will make it completely visible and black invisible every shade of gray in between is some amount of translucent if you don't like any shadow color in particular for instance I don't like how green this log is looking you can just click on the paint part of the layer select and adjust it just make sure to click back into the mask to continue painting the shadows for the shadows you can use texture brushes and you can even I drop the shades of gray in the mask it won't pick up the actual color you see [Music] if you want to color the line there are two ways you can do it you can click this button up here and lock the transparency in the line layer or you can make a clipping mask over the line by holding alt or option and clicking on the line between the layers personally I like using the clipping mask because I like to be able to select the color and adjust it rather than painting over it all the time I think it's important to paint in a way that encourages you to take risk and play attempt something a little bit out there and if it doesn't work it should be easy to fix now painting on line is a bit harder if you did it by hand on paper or if you've got line work that is merged to a white background a lot of people will just set that layer to multiply and call it a day but if you want to paint the line you have to remove the white and here's how you do it first make sure the background is all the way white no slight color or paper texture I find using levels is handy to make those Corrections now if you've already painted behind it that's okay just turn all those layers off and make sure that the only thing visible is the drawing on the white background then go to your channels tab and press ctrl for PC or command for Mac and click on the channel layer if it's black and white all the channels will be the same now the white is selected and if you invert your selection and create a new layer you can fill the layer with black now your line work is on that layer saw white and you can color it to your heart's desire it captures all the gray tones as well in transparency so if you have a scratchy line or a texture to it it will translate perfectly back to painting I'm just adding some spotty leaves in the background and adjusting some colors adding some faint tree trunks back there I want to add a little bit more texture so with a new layer I'm sending it to overlay and just shifting the colors until I like the color it produces and I'll mask it out and paint some texture in I like how that looks now I repeat the process with the middle ground [Music] in the foreground rather than doing a shadow pass I'm going to do a highlight pass giving it some rim lighting I also create a slight vignette to keep it simple for compositing I make sure to apply the vignette separately for the foreground middle-ground and background now I can call this just about done but I had an idea for something neat I'd like to try you know how in for us there are often little patches of light that shine through the canopy of leaves they dance with the wind and make it look magical I thought of a way to get that effect let's give it a shot the current version will be the shaded one and I'll make sure to export a PNG of the foreground middle-ground and background separately now for any where I want it to be possible for the light patches to go I'm going to lighten those areas namely the ground and the top of the log maybe the bushes and some other places but I'm not lightening the whole thing I don't want it to look like light patches are going in the shadows that would look weird and then I'll make sure to save out P Angie's of this life version now I'm going to create some shapes mimicking the shadows of the canopy the color doesn't matter so I'll do orange and make some blobs here and there and everywhere and then in a new layer I'll make more these ones can be pink lots of blobs and I'll save each of these as PNG s now in After Effects I create a new composition make sure it's 1920 by 1080 pixels or 1080p that's the size of high-definition television flopped in all my PM G's resize them to fit and reorganize them so that the foreground is on top and the background is on the bottom I also want to make sure the light version is underneath the dark version in each group now I'm going to bring in my orange and pink blobs scale them down and with both selected I'm going to pre compose I'll name it shadow now in the effects panel I'm going to go into channel and grab set met and drag onto my normal middle ground in my normal background I'm gonna just throw this pink and orange shadow thing underneath everything because that's obviously not what we want to look at now in my set Matt effect under take Matt from layer I select my shadow layer and it's automatically set to alpha channel you could just as easily use it on the light layer but you would have to turn the invert mask on now I'm just doing the same thing for my background and now you can see where I was going with this we have some light splotches but I'm not done let's make them move I double click on my shadow pre composition and I'm just gonna make it a bit bigger because the shot needs to pay now in the timeline I'm just going to move these layers of blobs around so they overlap in different ways leaving different holes for the light to shine through I play around with it testing it until I liked the overall effect now I'm just going to finish it off with that pan and have the programmed parallax by moving further in the same distance and here is the end result I hope you enjoyed this video feel free to leave a comment or hit that like button and make sure to check out some of my other videos I'll be making new videos so make sure to subscribe thanks so much for watching and I'll see you in the next one bye

Channel: Andrea Gerstmann

Views: 76,262

Keywords: Background, painting, digital, animation, cartoon, tutorial, Adobe, photoshop, forest

Id: zijtkZ03XLg

Length: 13min 39sec (819 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 05 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/Rhumald]

There's so much compressed goodness here. I love it.

[u/DBenzie]

Really great stuff, I wasn't quite convinced by the dappled light at the end, and I would have placed the layers in 3D space and used an After Effects camera to create the pan, rather than simulate it, but the painting itself was lovely!