Art Ritual 16: (Real Time Sketching Tutorial)

in this video I'm going to draw this thing we have our heroic character on an amazing Epic Journey traveling with his look I'm not quite sure what this thing is yet so this is going to be laid back real time I'm going to be creating this illustration in Photoshop and I'm just going to share with you my process and thoughts along the way however with this particular episode of the art ritual I want to do something different I'm going to take this image which is actually something that I thumbnailed many many years ago and I had a failed attempt to create a finished illustration from it I think this topic of why some things either lose energy or momentum just kind of don't work is a super interesting idea I really think the thumbnail for this image worked and I was expecting it to go really well but I kind of just ran into some trouble with it I'm not quite sure why that's a big part of what are we chatting about as I create this anyway this should be a fun one hopefully you'll join me and hopefully I'll end up with something good in the end an image that actually works this time foreign welcome to the drawing codex my name is Tim mcboney I've been a professional working artist for over 20 years and on this channel we're all about drawing cool stuff from our imagination embracing the challenge of drawing and mastering the craft of line and color illustration now if you'd like to learn more about line of color illustration you can check out my free quick start guide It's aimed to get you up and running quickly in Photoshop developing your own simple reliable line and color process and style you'll get access to all of the brushes and Photoshop documents and tricks and tips that I use as I create the illustration in this guide it's free the link will be in the description so go check that out if that's something you're interested in all right here we are in Photoshop tools for today are a Wacom cintiq 24 Pro I don't think it is the Touch version just using a PC workstation and I have no idea what version of Photoshop I am running the brushes that I'm using in Photoshop are actually very similar to the ones that are part of the quick start guide the goal here is just to limit the amount of silly photoshop brushes we have so kind of show you that process here but first let's look at this image and again what actually kind of happened here so one of the things that again I'm often talking about as well in courses is that I like to separate the ideation process the thumbnail process from the kind of actual production process and and this is mostly just to take the pressure off that creative process I think it can be good to just ideate and come up with a whole bunch of cool ideas and also it means that you know when I'm sitting down and you know maybe I have time and I feel like drawing but I'm not quite sure what to draw I have kind of a collection of things that I can kind of draw on let's say so again that's a big part of what we've got going on here I had a bunch of these thumbnails and this is one here that again I I kind of thought was going to work and it just kind of didn't work out that well this is one and this is also one that I sort of have tuned into an illustration and I'll show you that in a minute this one here is one that again I haven't really turned into anything yet but it's very similar to an image that might have been part of the intrude again I forget whether or not I kind of show this one but I have this image of you know this kind of guy floating through the clouds he's on this weird boat and the engine is this kind of sort of organic weird engine anyway um so this is normally what I'm I'm dealing with I have these thumbnails and this is an image that was created from you know uh this thumbnail here get this up so you can kind of see what happens there and this is oh sure another one here right where you can see again that's kind of what we're what we're working with so you can see that you know very closely I tend to follow these thumbnails in terms of what's there and I really try and figure out and get most of it working now this is an interesting one because this one just kind of didn't really work out um and and I thought it was kind of good and probably a big part of what went wrong is is something that I'm also always talking about in most of the courses and advice that I give is the sort of um development of secondary form so here's kind of what happened to that image and I just felt like it was kind of falling a bit flat I felt the anatomy I I wasn't able to sort of bridge the gap between the thumbnail and these Finish Lines and and really kind of make it work let's say so that's you know something that often happens and you know sometimes if it's just a sketchy image and I'm kind of like yeah okay like whatever you know it didn't turn out that well but you know this one I felt like you know look it had a lot of potential and I kind of had big hopes for this image and it kind of didn't necessarily turn out that well so um yeah look I think that often happens so what I'm going to do is just ditch these lines and I'm going to ditch whatever is there in this in this file and I'm gonna focus on creating a second construction drawing so this is the thumbnail and I'm gonna do like a pencil pass let's see this if you're inking or creating normal comic book art that this would be your sort of penciling phase right where what I'm going to do is construct what's there I'm going to build scaffolding for that secondary form so that hopefully this time when I create the lines I've got a better sort of foundation there to work from and again this is exactly what I would recommend you do if this kind of thing happens I'm using the most simple tool possible for creating um you know the pencils which is just super basic round brush but this is going to be all I need so what I'm going to do here is look at constructing some of this character's anatomy and and see if I can just do do another pass on it here right see if I can think about where the the Torso is and again I'm going to do another pass on this a minute but but really the first thing I want to do is just sort out the proportion because I I don't think I did it well enough in this first version so I've got the opacity set to 40. I'm just painting with black on this line and and this means that I can kind of go over these lines a little bit and I get this build up so I want this character looking kind of at us well here we go that's roughly the the kind of idea that I want and again I'll do a bit of flipping of this as well sure we get there so here again he had this kind of long torso and I don't I don't really feel that that was working so think about where I have the head right here we've got neck got the spine coming down here right and really need to have the well pelvis here now you've if you've been following the channel for a while you know that I have a lot of figure construction tutorials that really talk about what I'm doing here using a you know pretty sort of modified version of of the Loomis method and this is typically exactly how I will do things so again just roughing this in it'll be interesting to see once this is all said and done what this looks like in comparison to the the other sort of stab at this that I took so I'm going to do very similar things right this is it's going to look very similar just hopefully it'll be a bit better kind of organized so the other you know sort of tool you can use in Photoshop to tweak that you know it can be can be useful is just doing the lasso lasso plus move around now this is not recommended from a learning perspective I think it's better to just erase and treat it much more like um you know you've just got an old school Implement and they're tweaking with warp or anything like that I think that'll improve drawing in general but yeah if you're in a rush and you know you could sort of redraw it then I think it can be a good idea we got this thing here boom see if we can get this shape working rough all this stuff in and again I feel like uh you know for me I'm I haven't been doing heaps of drawing lately I've been writing Comics storyboarding plotting um last few weeks I haven't been sort of in the saddle doing heaps of of actual drawings so often when that happens yeah it takes me a while to kind of warm up so I'm gonna be just that's just that's okay if some of these drawings don't turn out that well fine that will it'll get better and I'm kind of confident of that hopefully so yeah good to get like an indication of where the hardpoint for the knee will be here right if we're trying to create fall off right because that way I can kind of really think about where the folds are going to be again this is not necessarily A an anatomy lesson or how to draw a lesson this is just me right showing you how I go about this stuff go again I'm going to try draw as much of this Anatomy as I can because I think it'll it'll help me in in the long run now interestingly here we sort of have this situation where like this arm is I think kind of meant to be going away from us a little bit boom right and then it's sort of going over here and I think this is one of those areas where you've got to really be careful what what you kind of do and what you sort of Hope for um because it can be really tricky to to place situations where you have a character with interaction on another object so I really want to make sure that I'm kind of placing this hand here and that there there is some chance that this hand could actually go up there and it's often these little things that will really kind of throw me off because I'm never quite sure right like how difficult or challenging that will be but I really do think I need to have this going going back well right pump now this is all sort of covered up we've got some masses here right some cloak costuming boom just keep going down here bump so this this what I'm doing here is a very particular type of drawing let's see I kind of know what I need to do and and the reason I call it construction drawing is because it it is about building right it's not about the Finish it's not about things looking good it's just about me getting stuff in the right spot thinking about structure and so I'll often do multiple passes on this and I will what I'll try and do is make sure I've got version of the thumbnail that I can view up above so again always remember like you you can kind of look at the thumbnail the thumbnail will have always like really interesting elements to it right interesting elements that we kind of didn't necessarily think about again we've got I think we have like a scarf kind of thing here and the other thing that's worth considering is that I still have this thing underneath and what I'll do is probably try and get rid of that if possible pretty early on so I might try and do that soon as create this secondary version [Music] that's going to give me the lines that I can use as construction here now again I don't have heaps of time to do this right I'm really trying to create something boom something still pretty quick terms of the speed I need to make sure in the beginning and again I don't know what this kind of creepy creature is right I have this idea of light again these kind of growths and weird things kind of growing down right it's like a mix of sort of something aquatic and you know you're just not quite sure what that what is going on there and I think again that gives it a little bit of like an alien weird vibe I've got like a bit of like a whale kind of look here boom boom so yeah lots of details here that need to be resolved that will be interesting to resolve so trying to think about the form right what's happening with the form yeah but mostly I think this is succeeding on a shape level at the moment boom boom boom boom so yeah and again sometimes it's like I don't know where this idea came from these kind of weird creature design bits and pieces um these amorphous ideas of kind of like weird growths um and again we will see it could be that this is one of those things that just exists in idea space right and it's just really hard to get it to work who knows but you can see here again like I did a lot of work on this saddle right I really tried to make sure that you know it was it was gonna work but uh yeah I think this often can be just awkward levels of finish right where I think I put enough in there but you know it didn't actually end up being enough and you know that just causes um much tension because there's specificity there but not enough specificity for me to actually complete the drawing which means It's tricky to add lib as you're creating like Finish Lines because you kind of have something that sort of is is meant to be there well yeah so again I've got something here like this the idea here is this is this guy's tail part of the I think part of the problem also is really selling this idea of depth here right of like where these rocks are so I think one of the things I'm gonna do is yeah try and not like copy what I had there before because to a certain degree I'm not I'm not entirely convinced it was working um so yeah let's create a still going to have some of it there so I can kind of see it but yeah now I've got basically what I'd call step one which is me doing a bit of warm-up I I've kind of copied that drawing over and now I have like a good construction drawing that doesn't look that good but that's okay so I'm going to duplicate it let's hide this one and you can use just big soft eraser and see if I can refine and figure out some of this detail probably a bit a bit much I feel like the sensitivity on this particular Wacom it's weird even going from two Wacom cintiques like the one I have over there is very different to this one which I normally record tutorials on all right so the reason again I like to simplify the process and the tools simple layers is that you know I often really like to work this way where if you have a big enough cintiq it can be you know possible to kind of just make the image really big and then just kind of imagine it's a big bit of paper I think that can be a really good way to you know go fast and going to reduce the opacity of this brush a bit yeah just kind of Go Fast and figure things out not really not really worry too much about you know zooming in I think if you if you keep the level of detail that you can see like consistent it especially in the beginning one of the this is one of the best tricks you can use to improve things early on um you know digitally drawing because it's so easy to just zoom up add a whole bunch of detail for no reason it's just set your zoom and then don't don't go past that right like don't don't increase past that but you need a big enough cintiq or drawing tablet to do it right it's a little bit harder on a on an iPad so again like a big a big part of what I'm trying to do is sort of figure out like what what is the form here right like what is actually going on do feel like when I initially did this wasn't 100 sure on the form thus yeah didn't entirely work out well try to refine this guy but and yeah very tricky to know like what what marks to make that are gonna help me really sell this idea because I did a lot of Mark making in that thumbnail that was a bit kind of unique um and this is also a design process right so there's certainly a degree to wear the more I you know draw this character and really try and figure it out this sort of creature really figure out like what what's happening the easier all of this will be because there's there's just going to be things that work and things that don't when it comes to these types of designs but mostly a lot of what I'm dealing with here is just the abstract nature of how these things kind of overlap and it does seem like you know what I need to have is is some kind of feeling or that there will be some lines that are kind of indicating write this form and also when you're designing these types of creatures there's there's rhythms to the way that the particular little sort of folds of the Flesh and right all these bits and pieces sort of flow together right we need to make sure that there's there's some sort of logic to it which again I'm not entirely sure I've I've figured out yet let's think about perspective I I feel like this tentacle thing right should be about there or at least I mean maybe let's think about where that perspective is right that's gonna that's gonna really Define a lot of a lot of stuff so again you know I feel like we've got a horizon line pretty low although there's no reason for these different structures too you know be blocky or anything like that I I feel like it does help us to understand them to to have some of these lines in the Rocks follow that perspective at least a little bit normally when I'm just roughing in these types of rocks yeah mostly what I want is just where they are right I just need to know just need to know where they are and I'll kind of hash out the details later what I'm trying to do is just create an overlap of space so that we get a Feeling that I have multiple objects in front of each other and that will create the sense of depth that I need well and oh so yeah like uh you know refining a sketch like this I think can be can be super challenging one of the things I've got to do is is kind of look at which of these which of these lines that I created are actually part of the the major form right so there's this sort of a flow to this character in general that I need to maintain so here's me zooming out a little bit that's probably not what I should do but I feel like I need to zoom out in order to treat this a little bit more like a thumbnail again so we've got different but different forms intersecting so yeah I feel like if I re-establish some of these overall lines some of these lines of motion this is probably how I did get to this form that I had right got this kind of whale like head and then if I try and think about yeah like what's happening with these overall shapes here right so going back to Construction you there right hip somewhere here what does this leg look like I don't know but yeah for me this this is helping me a lot to really really get in there and hash out what's going on well and you can see again like the brush I'm using doesn't matter right it's all it's all good it's all it's all working all right and often this is where it's so important is that like you know probably I could take this right I could take this level of sketchiness where like at least now I have right I have some of the form planned a little bit more I have a better understanding of where some of the anatomy might be which is going to hopefully allow me to be a bit more sort of precise with the details that I place on top now that I've got that yeah it should be a bit easier for me to wing it let's see so again I feel like the more the more overlap here the better I'm sure I can see things properly well that those are the major forms and yeah once I kind of have the flow like the overall flow I'm finding a lot easier now to add stuff onto it and also I need to break some of these Silhouettes here right so there's there's like a rhythm from a design perspective about the pattern right the patterns that it created where there's detail where we break the silhouette right where we create these sort of weed growths or whatever um and again I I think it's so important just to to really pay attention to the thumbnail I know I keep I know I'm like a broken record with this stuff but there's often so many little marks that give feeling and emotion and the easy to miss as we add structure right so it's easy to say add secondary form all right let's really think about okay like where are these different things coming right they're just coming down are these like flat like what what's happening here that'll help me render it shade it if I need to do all of that stuff so yeah really trying to think about how these lines kind of intersect now which one of these lines am I actually going to draw because I'm going to be you know making this a fairly clean line style look I have I have literally no idea um but there is a point to where I start to kind of feel the flow about how much detail I kind of need to put in to like the construction phase to really understand it and I think there's a point at which we Flip or at least I flip from you know thinking about the drawing that I'm doing and the way that it relates to the drawing that I'm actually going to do versus trying to kind of get these lines to to work right um as sort of final lines there's a point at which I'm starting to think about okay where does this form go what's happening in the lines that I'm drawing here uh uh then switch to a stage where they're kind of informing and testing out the lines that I will draw but there's not necessarily 100 overlap what that means is that the lines I'm drawing now are not necessarily designed or nor am I conceiving of them as lines that I will be copying or tracing or replicating but they're there for me to explore the form and to play around with it see if I can show some depth and it's this it's all this little subtle stuff right the secondary form right where like how does this thing overlap right and again how do we get the Rhythm of one line right sort of moving into another because there's a degree to where you know some of the designs I do have a real clean line look this one though feels like it is going to work with a little bit of texture in it so again I think I have like a bit of a yeah feeling there's like a sag there well and I normally just going to hit eraser hit e to go into a razor mode and you know erase out stuff just refine sometimes the structure can be there but what I need is a good good indication of what line is actually going to go in front of what line sometimes you can figure this out in the final lines you don't need to you know make sure that we erase and and figure out what goes in front of what other times you totally do need to erase and figure it out because what we're doing is um yeah planning for that so if I can plan for that then everything kind of works out well so I like the idea of two major forms here see if I can get that even though there might be some smaller growths on them I'm gonna make sure that yeah we feel that and again I should I should look up some animal anatomy and really do a better job than I'm probably going to do on this but we'll probably be okay by winging it all right let's look at this two get these ellipses working this way right in there in there let's see what we're doing in the thumbnail I had some weird stuff in the thumbnail I had like so where's the again What's Happening Here this weird kind of humped all right well yeah so I think this guy has like this kind of hunch hunchback right it's a bit more like that yeah I think that's right and so this thing here is designed to kind of to sit on top of that see if we can break down some of that form and I think the idea was that we have this very organic look to the way this saddle is created so again it's not it's still not making sense to me 100 but I'm just working through it right I can't make sure all these things line up boom boom the idea is this thing here is it's kind of like handlebars or something that you can hang on to put a few bits of random cloth around there to sort of break that up some stitching at some point you kind of need some dirop source of some kind again probably not an actual where your saddle would work but it's gonna do this thing coming here that needs to come at a slight different angle boom boom and here again I'm not sure what this shape was in the original oh but basically again I'm going to try and create some sense of overlap here and then yeah I think these little lines here but again it's just this is often what happens is is I have like one idea for how you know some of these Saddles could be created though you know how you would sort of store stuff on these creatures and then because I'm lazy I just kind of copy it a million times I feel like this is better off if it's a bit a bit smaller we've got enough silhouette play there so again how's how does all this stuff connect and join up like um I'm I'm not 100 sure right still it's kind of Fantasyland right and you know like if this was actually something that you know I made into a comic book character something like that would certainly need to you know figure it out and redesign it for Simplicity and brevity and how much fun it is to draw if this was a you know designed for a game you'd have to redesign it probably a bunch of times to make sure all this stuff worked and you know sort of flows goes together you know you do mock-up models see if it kind of animates okay um you know see if all these things move together in an interesting good fashion and that's where you kind of hash out and figure out a lot of these details so again I'm not always trying to make them function 100 percent putting some ropes here just all those little secondary details let's refine this because this is like a weird thing I'm imagining this is kind of some organic bit but it's kind of going together this doesn't really make it doesn't make 100 sense to me yet but again it might be one of those things that kind of turns out it might be one of those things that just ends up looking complicated so trying to visualize and think about the draw through on this but again I'm not actually drawing through that much if we have this saddle on the other side all right it would probably be something like this there we go cool so yeah It's Gonna Keep thinking about what we can add to Aid with the silhouette break up make this logical more things hanging down baubles Etc and yeah you know like I feel like I feel like that's starting to come together [Music] can go to really refine these areas make sure we get some good flow happening there from one thing to another and you don't really need to worry that deeply about what is happening there because the character is in front but we'll just make sure we're not gonna yeah it's at least going to be okay so we can't just playing with like how the rhythm of these lines and how these forms are connected together and how that's gonna work right again there is a degree to where I want it to be a bit gross right it's it's going to trigger a weird things in people's mind to have this kind of look like this that's kind of the point it's meant to be like uh what's that I feel like camels can be a bit like that like a lot of these animals kind of kind of weird weird stuff you know like the um the knees on camels and there's a lot of animals with like weird stuff right on them and this is kind of a it can be very triggering and that's kind of the goal right with a lot of creature design right like alien um design a lot of those classic things you know your classic Geiger um you know that there is like a subconscious degree to where you know that stuff is sort of provocative and triggering um you know a lot of these classic designs are phallic um in some way shape or form uh and uh you know that tends to be effective uh there are many instances in in many instances where I have people talking about uh that like you know as like an unstated goal in concept design right like how phallic can it be um and yeah often that stuff is purposeful right people are really thinking about why that works um and again it doesn't have to be like that there's a lot of these kind of psychoactive imagery things that kind of just make you feel a certain way often our job as concept designers is to kind of spot these so one of the other things you're kind of noticing here is is I've sort of like found a um like a pencil size that kind of works that's allowing me to do what I want that's allowing me to get the the level of detail that I want here and yeah the next step here is just this character like can we fix this can we can we plus it one of the things that was yeah pretty boring about that initial design is that you know the character was just pretty standard so it might be a good chance to you know just kind of play around see see what we can do see how we can make this character a little bit more interesting just kind of block in some features here see whether the general kind of angle is working fine Santa if we zoom up again I normally wouldn't zoom up but might be easier to see what I'm doing think about where those cheekbones are I'm just gonna find the middle first this is often something I've been doing lately as a construction that way we can find the jaw and I can I can think about where that mouth will be well if we follow this round put some ears in right ears over here and then I think the shape I had originally was something something similar to this think about where Center is getting not entirely sure what we're going to end up with but we'll just keep playing around with it I've got Center here yeah so I'm just gonna before I mess around too much with the um expression or anything like that I'm just going to make sure that the basic thing is kind of sorted all right by basic thing I mean let's make sure the structure the size is right so we can see there again that head has become too big that is what happens when you zoom in to be like oh now I'm drawing a head let's zoom in let's see if we can fix that here again it was looking sort of a little bit sort of cartoonish right like I do like him feeling a little bit younger and then we had this Tupper design for the kind of scarf thingy but I think we also had a simplified shoulder pad and then this Cape was going over here oh let's see if I can still make it come roughly in that direction something like that now putting in that sort of it may seem like I'm sort of redrawing this but putting in that initial rough anatomical version makes this a lot easier so this thing that I'm doing now where I'm kind of going around and really looking at where right like where all of those larger forms are going to be this is yeah a lot easier now that I have that initial proportion there and yeah a lot of these shapes that I drew were kind of just for fun right like I didn't really figure out what what we had over here right like this yeah some sort of fur lined Hood mostly I think it was just there because I thought it would look cool which is not always that's not what you should do with design right should be more functional than that but again that's just what we're working with well all right and again I can go in and modify the facial features a little bit they make them more or less boyish as I want but the main thing here is that this character is kind of wearing like a poncho style thing all right so we're gonna see well and I think this is gonna kind of bunch up here I think like if this is where again if you're posing things it can be really good to just like imagine if I'm kind of sitting there and my arm is is kind of out to the side like like kind of just what happens right like what what is happening to the right to the overall kind of look right well so that's going that way then which way does this one go and I think just kind of relaxing that pose a little bit it's gonna be a good idea something like that this will be shadow and we'll try and put some kind of pattern so yeah again the way I normally do this is I just kind of try and act it out really like putting my hand and sort of thinking about like right you know sort of where where are these things gonna go I'm just going to be drawing out right like a very kind of simplified hand here nothing nothing kind of crazy but that's normally how I try and solve the problem right I still have a feeling that right like this is going to be a little bit awkward see this we want to try and push some of the shape design we had here all right think about this sword slash knife thing he's got get a good shape out of it again it's there's like a million bad tangents here I gotta remember this there's this kind of leg back here it's going to be pretty sort of toned down it'll also be one over here yeah but I mean either way I think like you know the bottom line is is I feel like the whole thing is kind of working a little bit better than it did the last run through so still going to be like I'm doing a lot of this work but that the goal is not to create some you know crazy level of detail on this right the the goal is still for this to be just a you know like a sketchy a simple illustration there we go it's got weird crazy sort of Scabbard slash sword thingy again I'm trying to replace some of these little Baubles and bits and pieces give this some complexity belt here belt buckle things hanging down again we've got different it's on the sword and think about what's Happening Here with these clothes maybe a maybe a patch or something like that on here again I want it to make it clear it's like there's a little bit of a vagabond here and I feel like that kind of fits with the weird look of this thing right it should be a certain degree to wear we're questioning what is going on a lot of these details are what I would describe as kind of like as long as we don't mess them up they're going to work around they're just going to fade into the distance again giving him some earrings or something like that it's like the again that kind of weird traveling look yeah so again I feel like I'm like yeah some of this stuff is some of this stuff is working we're sort of going going in a better Direction now this was a cool shape for the tail uh uh it doesn't really seem to fit the rest of it but maybe if we add some of this other and make it feel kind of right yeah not sure so this is the point where the reason I'm often sort of talking and prattling on about like ah it doesn't like look this is just a sketch is that this is the point where I'm trying to decide like what when when is enough enough right like like how much how much do I actually have to do here how much is gonna you know actually matter for me in terms of you know doing extra drawing a good way to think about this is like if you only have an extra half an hour or 10 minutes to kind of plus the drawing right like what what do you do like what are you what are you gonna do um if you're uncertain I think a good thing to do is to sort of duplicate the the layer which is again just the simplest way I have you know just making sure hey still got that one you can go back there and that way we can progress we can we can try some stuff thinking about like where where am I gonna want detail right like where should I plan stuff where is gonna help me where am I going to regret not putting in effort so I think that I really should have a go at this face right and I don't really have I don't really have a lot to go on so again it's like is he friendly is he not friendly what is going on what we're gonna do like a bit of like the eyes not so friendly the mouth is kind of in the middle I like that kind of feeling of ambiguity there I think that's all right all right what's going on with these things look I think I'm gonna have to figure this out as we go um but yeah there is this feeling that they're kind of in this Ravine or something so again I'm gonna create like a bunch of little rocks here to tell the story that like this thing is far away over here all right over here is very far away these rocks here that are big are actually vegan and that lens scale too some of the scale that I've got here gives us a bit more of an indication of where we are right so again I I describe this as telling the story of where we are and maybe there are other rocks and formations in the background that we don't we're not quite sure about yeah but again I think that'll do for a for a sketch and I'm not sure what's happening in the right in the clouds up here again I feel like that might be a bit much information just keep it right even more even more vague although a lot of this will be um like faded out quite a bit anyway that's probably enough for what we got so yeah I think this is enough now you will notice that I think this was flipped um and this was the original sort of composition really know which one I prefer but um what I will do is just spend a few minutes right sort of fiddling around with it flipped just to make sure that I'm doing the you know the most I can with the form so I'm kind of changing it a little bit here right um push pushing it into the third dimension there now does this face hold up look that looks like it would actually work which is not always the case well let's move that down the Eraser smaller yeah get that right right if I can get I just want like a nice line here right like nice flowy line now we get the feeling that there's some wind which doesn't necessarily track with what I've got here right because these are flowing so this is where again I got to decide like what am I right I've got these things flowing it's so easy to do this right to be like I'm going to create a cool shape here um but then I don't know whether that actually works because I've got lots of wind going this way so I could just kind of keep it the way it is right because that's just we're in Fantasyland it's okay um and again that might be that might be something that works I really think that this should be a little bit simplified all right so yeah we're getting there kind of coming along well yeah all right I think that's gonna have to do I'm not seeing anything major right that's gonna you know what like I think ruined my day I feel like this look like it's coming over more but it's hard to see I think I think we probably have to call it a day for this so all I do here is just create a new layer I'm going to fill it with white we're going to reduce the opacity and then do I want it this way or this way I think it's really hard to tell um I think this way works yeah so now we're just going to create some finished lines so in thinking that we're going to have a bunch of stuff in the foreground and that I'm just going to Ink this shift to b gets me to my inking brush how big is this it's pretty big I think I'm like will right is this the right brush size not quite sure if I make it 10 I feel like 10 might be better um so again sir the reason I think it can be useful to so I'm just going to start in foreground the reason I think it can be useful to is that going to be too big let's let's go for 15 in the foreground here with some of these background elements foreground elements yeah the reason I find it so useful to just make sure you know as many of those brush switch brush switching things as possible right as much of that stuff as as I possibly can all right let's just keep it let's just keep it simple um you know having a shortcut set up for that right where I can just flick and Bam you know now I'm on the right brush is a so useful mostly because it doesn't take Focus away it's not actually saving that much time but I really do think it saves a lot of focus to just know what the tools are know what the next step is and to just be able to get there easily so again I'm using a very simple Rock props here that's funny because these are like very similar to what I've been drawing in Star Atlas core there's so many rocks in that comic so many um crazy asteroids living rocks and things um so yeah um I I should try and if I had a little bit more time I'd really try and design these a bit better but because I'm suppressed for time here I'm gonna try and just do this quickly so I'm going to call this I'm just going to name the layers because I do think it is it it does make things easier you will get a foreground [Music] foreground two and just a little bit of stuff here we'll make this much easier as we progress right got some rocks bomb because these are very simple rocks and I and I'm not going to pay heaps of attention to rendering them that differently so I'm not going to do you know like a lot of shading or I could really sort of shade them and make sure we put tonality in there from foreground to background what I'm going to do is again Leverage The the clean line style that I'm working with and I will try as much as I can to separate out these different foreground elements with color so boom boom and and the point there is like if I create a few more lines if I create uh layers sorry if I create a few more layers it can really make a big difference I feel like this really working um yeah it can make a huge difference in the the feeling of complexity and um sort of finish that we get in the end with with very little actual difference right just to put a few extra layers in here right a few of these rocks on separate layers and this means that I'm going to be able to create a much better sort of foreground Middle Ground background dynamic right foreground there this one and this one I think is going to be kind of everything else like this one here and yeah what I find is like even if I'm just drawing very very basic basically just like like this right so if I do that but if I put them on separate layers makes everything feel a lot better I'm just gonna Block in the basics of these shapes first boom boom let's get this one zoom in make sure this goes behind here nicely and hmm yeah I'll probably just make this go in front of this otherwise it'll get complicated all right I think I had another rock here well boom boom so I'm I have a second monitor that's like above this one and I'm looking at it just to kind of check how some of these details look this just gives me a feeling for like the complexity is this working is is it not working right do I need to vary and and this really is as I often say just an abstract exercise in pattern making it's like a little bit here a little bit there it's hard to learn this stuff you kind of have to to a certain degree just play around with it right you kind of just have to figure it out now It's tricky because I kind of got all these characters on the same layer and I'm not sure I'm not sure how exactly that is going to work out so what I probably will do is have me go mount and then in front of that is character okay let's call this creature so I'm gonna kind of basically just so you know where I'm going all of this right the creature the rock that it's standing on all right that'll be one layer and then that character will be its own layer that's that's the that's the basic idea so I'm going to do the character first and the reason for that is you know I kind of have like this overlapping this but I don't want to do some tricky thing where I'm kind of putting this leg on its own layer now I could obviously just put the character on the same layer as the creature but I think it'll be useful to kind of treat them as if they are on the same layer but then be able to kind of just separate a bit between them with a bit of atmosphere um here and there I think that might be useful so here's the character all right here we go boom and this is what I want is a is a 10. now I don't often in terms of just brush size now I don't often change brush size from foreground to background but in this case I feel like just drawing those rocks with slightly bigger bigger brush is going to allow me to just do them quicker and again you know that the general rule is yeah you know foreground lines are bigger so that makes sense but generally with this kind of style I'm imagining that you know I'm just kind of doing it all with the same brush boom now again part of the thing here that I think from a design perspective works is right this guy kind of has this hair but it kind of mimics the the weird growth that that creature has right and like I wonder whether right they're kind of like the same size right there's something design wise about that that's kind of fun all right here's the earring connected up there yeah it's gonna suggest what's happening with this thing as it goes behind there God the eye so it's often like this the the precise way that we draw the like the mouth makes like such a difference right and again putting a few little indications of a form here and there boom boom boom basic shoulder pad very silly simplified shoulder pad all right this is going up here this is going what's happening here got this earring this so always I mean one of the major things to sort of doing Finish Lines or inking whatever you want to call it I think so much of it is about understanding when do you need to keep going with a line when can you break right so again you know do I do I do your line here and then we keep going right is this is this one thing is it two things who knows not not getting caught up where we need to you know do too much all right there's a bit of vagueness here but I was like can we get away with that probably not um so yeah often if I need to join a line I'll do this thing where I kind of erase a bit of it just that makes the the smoothness of it join up together a bit more a bit of weathering on this cape I'm just going to make sure I join that up properly though all right what do we got here this Poncho thingy so again you know is it one line do I need to do it in one line do I need to do it in two here right sort of faded off a bit rotate make sure like that I can continue that line I mean the surprising thing that I find is that um coming from someone who is a digital first kind of artist straight I kind of learned to do all these things digitally you always kind of Imagine when people are inking that um you know they get these lines that really look very perfect um then you kind of see people actually doing those lines and yeah there's a lot of sort of chicken scratch there's a lot of people um you know kind of finding a line with multiple you know multiple lines right so you know right you see some big swirly line and you imagine someone's got that but you know they're kind of like doing one two three you know four or five and then they're touching it up and getting the the lines that they get in really interesting ways right I think with this it's it's just important to understand there's there's far less rules than we imagine um you know the major thing is just look does it does it work right okay think about all right this being like a separate color and let's put a little shedder under here see if we can push a couple of these bits and pieces boom boom all right so it's going to be sort of vague back here again this is not this is not important to the success of the illustration because what I often sort of think of is like yeah a very a dangerous dangerous area right there's like a hand um you know I haven't drawn or constructed it that well how important is it to the overall imagery is it something where like if if it right if it fails is the whole image going to be no good if I if I get it right is it going to make any difference like does anyone actually care all this stuff so there's often things that are very important to the success of the image but um you know are not necessarily anything to do with good or bad drawing or pain or something being a challenge and then there are there things like that where it's like oh it's a hand in the background I kind of sketched it in I don't really know you know whether it's that good or not as I come to render it I realize like oh I have uh I have underestimated how good that sketch was this is now going to become a nightmare so I think you know honestly that the more that I look at you know artists who I really admire the thing that people are good at is making you and I keep saying this all the time is is making you not look where they don't want you to look so if there is like a bit of a hand somewhere that's you know a bit sort of fugly you probably won't notice it because the artist is good at making sure you don't you don't look there right that's not important um and that often is just the the difference so you imagine like all the hands are drawn well except for these ones that you know you never saw because they didn't want you to see them that's not the ideal but that is frequently the reality um and yet really important to be able to sort of like spot that and just do the best job you can with a particular area of the image and realize like is this in the focal area does this need to be drawn does it need to be executed really really well right can you get away with it who knows and and again everyone's opinion of this everyone's you know sort of tolerance for that is completely different there's many many artists who are known for like obviously caring about all the little bits and pieces right and they create this kind of high level of Polish um to everything they do and look I personally have realized I'm not I'm not that type of person which doesn't mean that you know like I can't do that type of art it's just realized I've just sort of realized that um yeah I'm more interested in the the sort of story side of it and and creating sort of quicker work let's see so yeah everyone has to figure out like where they sit along those lines and what strategies and techniques you use to again get the look you want so again this feels like my hand is not going to be able to go over it so let's make that two lines again let's have the feeling of maybe there being a seam there uh all right like this hand is probably a little bit more important and still I'm just gonna make it a bit wobbly again sometimes it'll work out better than others see if we can create some dimensionality on top of this bomb boom boom boom there we go yeah uh yeah I mean that hand really bothers me but we'll see this one bothers me too but uh again I feel like it's all right so this area here where these characters meet is going to be super important because there will be this whole thing is going to be on its own layer well well uh again what's happening with these boots I have literally no idea I will probably have to do so again you know like whether or not I add a bit of this sort of Feathering here um you know a bit of stuff right bit of texture um you know it's just all up to taste these are the the subtle changes the subtle little bits and pieces so I'm going to trace that in my head here we go let's draw this one again see if we can break that up think about where we might have holes in this KP thing again and then this is sort of coming over here we're going to go down here come up here again I think I sort of had the idea that maybe right this is going to come over here so all that's happening is this bit of the keep here is kind of Disappearing into Shadow so I'm giving it some abstract kind of hatching and these things can kind of join together to a certain degree now this one is a little bit more challenging because I feel like we have a bit of form that I'm trying to describe so again I'm kind of thinking like okay like this is a this is a cylinder and so you know I'm just kind of creating some of these hatch lines at least with that form but this is very rudimentary and 100 abstract right by that I just mean these marks do not realistically represent what is going on um but once we color it I think it'll I think it kind of all make sense go again in a similar way do we put some marks on the top to show what's going on like yeah I think that kind of works about this guy I feel like a bit of kind of haggedness under the eyes might might be good but other than that I'm like yeah that look look it works we need to Scabbard in there [Music] pump all right let's make sure we don't create a weird tangent there and again in a similar way this is gonna fall into shadow all right done all right now we need the creature okay I'm I have no idea where to start I have no idea whether or not whether or not this is going to work let's start with this thing join these up and yeah I'm expecting to maybe have to do like a few undo's on this one I I don't really know I'm gonna start smack Bang with the focal area and just see if I sort of build this out whether or not it's going to work for me because what I did have was was this sort of breakdown of like right I sort of created like a bit of a like a compound Shadow there I'm not sure if that's going to work with the style or not again a lot of this is stuff I'm figuring out as I go just trying to think about what is going to create the right textural pattern for this particular look but yeah I'm like not really buying any of that I think it needs to be a lot simpler foreign working a little bit cross purposes with my with my body trying to get some of these marks happening so I'm just rotating the page making sure I can get these now this is really easy to do if I have another screen like I do or I can kind of see what's going on with it now I kind of want to be able to do these in one go that feels like that's going to end up poorly let's see if we can join these up Bang there we go all right what about here should we go get a lot of it I'm not really drawing with my shoulder I'm kind of just drawing with one sort of stroke of the pen there I forgot my character I've got this again do I need this do I need this stuff oh maybe maybe not oh boom boom yeah I mean I think that adds something it adds a little bit of texture Maybe here we go yeah needing to focus on this like there is a degree to where if we're dealing with abstractions I.E marks that kind of don't really represent anything but it just kind of meant to evoke a feeling or something so it can like if I can really optimize the flow and the look of these it it'll have a fun look if if I get too caught up in like trying to you know sit there rendering the form right and really just sort of saying oh that's not accurately rendering the form or this is happening or that's not happening um I I feel like personally that's where things can start to tighten up and it's so important to get that mix of realism versus abstraction sorted but yeah there's this like doing this thing is definitely something that's like a little bit new for me trying to get this particular texture and I always like the idea with creature design of like multiple potential faces multiple potential heads just exploring some different like textural bits and pieces that I can add to this to to give it again a feeling of light actually I don't think that works at all so and also you know other things that I feel like can make these decisions easier is is just speed right my subconscious mind can probably make better choices with some of these lines than my conscious mind if I focus too much on it being perfect it can be very easy to kind of end up with a nothing if I just kind of say look I got it right I gotta do it it's got to be done uh then yeah that that might be easier to just kind of start letting things go so you can see there again this is like perfect example I'm kind of tightening up losing like this line is just a nothing right like that one is kind of just complete nonsense but like can I can I should I put it in like does this still this still fit again should we try and make this right like add some textual elements to some of these areas that are you know probably going to be a bit darker or in the in the background I don't know could be good to do that on a on a separate layer um I'm just going to do it here because I because I think that's something that will work and we've expressed that in the character yeah that might be something that kind of feels sort of viable I don't know I don't know could easily be just ruining what would be a nice clean line kind of look by adding a lot of texture to it so what I can do is just let's do a lot and let's delete it all or delete as much as we can we gonna be able to get all the way back to nothing like like oh yeah without adding hmm I don't know I don't think we need it I'm just gonna go without again I I might try to put it on a separate line maybe maybe here and there right we could deal with that but yeah in general all right let's whoa and it can be hard to know like how much of this is going to make a difference once you kind of put color on it many many things start to kind of fade away become way less important and you know often I've had feelings where like yeah I'm working on something I feel like the lines are really working it's going well and then you know it just doesn't work frequently I've been working on stuff where I feel like look this is basically just an abandonment project right like this is never going to work and then you know it turns out to be you know one of the best things I've ever done or you know again something that a lot of people respond you know respond well to um all right getting there creating some slight sense of texture with these initial lines right and uh you know again I often find that about you know looking at other people's you know inking work and stuff they've done I don't always understand how they're gonna color it you know how the decisions they're making are going to work but you know frequently little things people are doing that you look at in the moment you know kind of kind of ends up being okay and uh yeah it's so important to just appreciate that uh can be a major hurdle in the beginning of your sort of artistic Journey when you are thinking about is this good is this not good right um yeah can can be very hard to tell whether the thing you're doing is actually looking good or is not actually looking good and mostly what we're building is a sense of um like instinct for these things that's what I think anyway well all right so again we kind of got like this sort of working again I've put like a little bit more detail in in some of these areas than others so I'm like part of me is kind of wondering put a bit more here and there help like maybe a feeling of this always felt like again like probably part of the part of where this is coming is from that sort of the never-ending story like sort of foul core look that's probably subconsciously where it's kind of coming from this idea of this kind of weird bubbliness like underneath I don't know whether this is working either it's always like that that thing always freaked me out about that design I was like why does it look like that what is going on a lot of good psychoactive movies in the um in the 80s uh uh yeah anyway so here I'm just trying to kind of balance like like there's this detail here that's more high frequency and I'm just kind of thinking like okay can I put a bit of that over here and again I was playing around with it before I'm doing the same thing again and expecting a different result I don't know hmm let's see let's see what happens pump we will we will find out I'm going to see whether putting in some of these contour lines work as well right again like maybe one or two I don't I don't know honestly really hard to tell I got a whole pile of details here that we just need to work through right because that's basically it whether or not this works is going to be down to you know those decisions I made there right like like you know does this does this face work um again going to be hard to tell until it's actually done I think all right getting there so here got a make sure this matches well all right boom boom yeah so again I feel like like I feel like that's kind of going in an interesting Direction but lots of lots of kind of unknowns that I feel like will be really tricky to figure out until we get to the finish and and part of me is like um like how simple should this should this stuff be right like like should I take another stab at this all right like because I feel like could be better to really break up and have less right just make some of these lines a little bit right a little bit cleaner so we get that nice balance so I might play around with that just making these lines a little bit simpler and I think that might help me out over here where again I have some of this stuff that was looking a little bit messy right well and so much of this is just design it's just complexity right like how much complexity like how do we represent particular types of skin with this particular style right um again so many unique questions that every new image we create kind of brings up um but yeah honestly I don't I don't really know but I'm gonna take a break in a minute and come back at it with fresh eyes because I think that's often a good thing to do even if it's just five minutes take a break come back and then see if we can make some of those decisions because yeah some of them um it's hard to know how that's gonna how that's gonna turn out until we actually get color there all right so I've taken a break I'm coming back I'm looking at this I have opinions we've got things that I think are kind of working things that I think aren't working just in terms of this this overall concept of how much detail to put in there how much to think about texture versus not texture and yeah I think I'm going to take a lot of this back really trans streamline the iconic representation of how these things look so gonna think very much about putting purposeful marks and just kind of leaving it a little bit simpler I think that the thing I was sort of noticing is with the shape of these things some of them maybe just trying to dial back on the randomness of some of these forms and I think I'm going to get rid of all of this texture and some of these more random looking marks that I've got here and again you know a lot of this just comes down to making sure my muscle memory is is making the right decisions so here very much trying to solve these problems on the conscious level the more that I draw this creature or think about you know how this kind of works the more that you know I think I'll just be able to kind of flow along and do it but yeah I'm gonna try and see whether just simplifying some of these lines will help me we'll see and uh you know I feel like this is the kind of stuff that normally I wouldn't do and this I think is like a big reason why I wasn't why it sort of wasn't turning out how I wanted right it's all these subtle things there's like obviously something here that is fundamental that I'm kind of seeing in the original design that is not coming through when I'm doing the finished lines which to me is super interesting I also really like again just revisiting the sketch and the thumbnail just bring that here so you can see again I I like how some of these feel a little bit more like they are these anatomical markers as opposed to sort of growths and weird things I think the mix of that is super important and yeah something I'm gonna try and play around with so we still just make sure I'm still in the right layer I'm just gonna decrease the like the taper and the feeling of these things dripping a little bit yeah I mean I feel like that that to me makes more sense and a lot of this comes down to the fact that when we simplify tools which as you know I'm always about you start to think more about the tools that you do have right so I don't necessarily have a lot of if we think about style I don't necessarily have a lot of let's say textual abilities in my Arsenal I don't have a lot of form in my Arsenal but what I do have is this kind of repetition of shape and the patterns that I'm often dealing with as I create that the other thing that I kind of hard to see here that I think is important is that I really feel like in the sketch this line right kind of comes up a bit super subtle but I feel like that's quite important see these lines are getting messed up a bit and you know often what I'll do is you know once I've kind of figured them out I'll just go through and arrays and see if I can do a better job at it now another thing that you know is sort of worth mentioning here is you know you obviously couldn't do quite the same thing if you were inking for real but I've always been surprised at the degree to which you know artists that I see um do actually within hack around and delete stuff with white out and all sorts of different tools so it's definitely definitely something that is possible to do with with ink right like go through and mess around with all these different bits and pieces tweak things all right so again I'm not sure about not sure about that well but I'm gonna tweak this and I think just giving these things a consistency again defines the difference where it is like a again like something that's like like a weird anatomical feat and again I I like blending the line between that a little bit making it not entirely clear whether it is purposeful or not purposeful so again here I'd like to see if we can make this right something a little bit more purposeful try and make these more iconographic if that makes sense again these are just more purposeful less based on form more based on what's actually happening in terms of like the patterns so you know if I kind of create these these series of lines here it's not that I'm trying to think about the form I'm sort of simplifying the fact that we're having some sort of texture or element there and trying to break it down into those different shapes same way here all right I'm just trying to find some lines that will kind of represent what's happening with the form very very subtle difference um anyway we'll see how that goes but that that's what I'm going to try all right let's see what else we can do here now you'll probably be surprised the degree to which I'm kind of obsessing over that stuff and then probably I will not obsess over a bunch of other stuff that can just get done really quickly because not everything is critical to what I care about with this illustration and what I think anyway is going to make the difference and I feel like this is definitely part of that I don't think this saddle thing in this particular image is going to make or break this again just coming through this is another area where your ability to create you know kind of let's say average details here where it's creating a few weird tangents but you know to kind of sort out some of the details here based on very rough sketches is is based on you know time that I have spent drawing similar things again and again and again oh that's right we go let's make sure that overlaps got some ropes here just winging all these shapes a little bit being super rough so what are these what are these things actually made of here sure I'm imagining it's some kind of you know sort of bone and leather or some kind of more medieval slash you know probably pre-medieval mix of raw materials but you know part of the part of the story here is is getting the mix of it feeling like this this saddle seems very manufactured right it seems like someone has thought about the sheep that it is creating and that you know there's a lot of sort of craftsmanship in here because because normally to create you know something that has this level of curvature you would need to you know really think about it first and I think there's that interesting element of sort of juxtaposition between the the Vagabond look this weird creature that kind of doesn't necessarily look that healthy or has sort of this weird look versus this kind of heavily engineered saddle right that looks like it hints at the world of this inhabits so again being pretty being pretty pretty brutal with that design goes under there have something under there oh that doesn't really work let's shift this over well well this is pretty rough but don't think it's gonna matter too much that is my assumption creating a few little weird shadows here I think if we fill these in this all kind of work and again like this treatment of texture that you know if I was to look at this normally like and and give it the same level of criticism that I gave a lot of those other things I was working on yeah I'm not necessarily convinced it would it would hold up either but I've just done it so many times and I kind of know how it's going to be colored that it's not really a problem well giving this a bit of structure yeah I think that works um and typically as well like the the degree to which personally I would play with things like texture and you know thinking about all these little weird marks I've got everywhere I'm much more likely to add texture to inanimate objects or things that don't necessarily have a lot of um character within the story but I feel like the characters often for the art style I use inhabit a more iconographic Realm so we really need to think about the the way that they're portrayed or as this stuff is still important but less important boom boom I'll put some kind of again just different shapes and forms here and here we've got yeah I forget what this was I think we were gonna have some some ropes and things over here somewhere I might have forgotten exactly where they go I don't know what that is about against some of these shapes are just super basic thinking about this type of blanket with the tassels and again all these little bits of you know extra lines and extra detail will will kind of make a difference in the long run little Shadows here and there it kind of means that as I add the color I'm not going to need to do anything else right like this will probably survive on its own about Shadows for these things I don't know what this is it doesn't doesn't necessarily really matter so being super rough with that and here we've got this weird this weird shape created here boom oh oh it's getting in the zone inking apologies if not doing much talking again there's not much to say after a certain point we're just filling filling things in so a lot of this is you know getting these kind of types of images to work here it's where you've got like a lot of stuff right just a matter of adding bits and pieces one by one creating interesting shapes and pattern and overlay overlap yeah I think that'll all work again we can kind of feed some of that out boom all right so here yeah I do think I want to represent this as being in Shadow and often that the trick is just for me again is to be rougher right makes it really clear that you know that's not meant to be too pretty we'll see how that works out I might regret being that rough on something okay I've got these rocks [Music] pump so again let's try and be a little bit simpler with that look so here as well anyway we'll see whether this works if not I'll do another thumbnail try and come up with a better way of describing these different feelings of what this creatures skin is like oh well right here we go again pretty much pretty much finished that thing think the rest of it is just downhill from here right again touch wood just a matter of adding detail so just making sure I'm looking at you know where the how some of these details and things are looking when I'm viewing them on the smaller sort of version of this that I've got there um but yeah I think for the most part it's all going to be fine so here again just adding simple overlaps oh it's a bit clumsy boom boom all right yeah boom boom boom most of this is just to keep building the overall Silhouettes that we've got here but yeah I think that's that's getting close again I want to leave it to breathe a little bit yeah and here again uh this is probably here probably in Shadow yeah and here we go the tail that's pretty good let's try again let's get that one hook it over let's rotate see if we can better line there well I'm just trying to make it a bit simpler and again totally we'll see if this works right again could be a huge huge mistake but yeah make this feel as if it's kind of maybe beat up a bit cool again one or two textural things here is probably a good idea and yeah let's see if we can polish off some of these little areas so I'm kind of thinking like like sort of leather stitching right we've got sort of different similar to the way Saddles and things look right got different sort of buckles ways that these things tend to look and again there's going to be sort of patterns beating into it Etc and that's what is to a certain degree giving us some of these patterns and lines that we see anyway I think I think that's pretty that's pretty much done there what else do we have so again we'll just see whether that face works I mean I do feel like maybe some of these lines are like a bit right like some of these are a bit much but so hard to know again I like the idea of some of these lines kind of like this floor kind of coming up there right but uh yeah just not sure not sure how much of it's going to work I think I think I just need to color it and see so let's uh let's call that done and he will have a BG black back ground layer right and boom boom boom so I'm just creating this in a very sort of simple procedural manner so that I optimize for how much time it's going to take because because I because I have a feeling I'm gonna end up yeah sort of really sublimating it with the color let's think about how we can make something basic back here because yeah it really is not gonna not gonna matter a whole bunch um but yeah I do want to consider like the tangents and all these other bits and pieces but yeah this is this needs to be like a five minute background and as I was saying in the sketch phase that the main thing I need to do is just talk about how these rocks that are going into the distance are getting smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller so a big part of I guess again similar to the to the other textures that I'm trying to do is beyond a certain point I'm not actually trying to draw different rocks right at some point it becomes more a matter of trying to represent rocks right so it's like we have a few rocks here a few rocks there right a rock here a rock there maybe in the background there's there's a few but it's much better to suggest this detail here I think because it will kind of make it feel a little bit better because otherwise we get a whole bunch of hyper detail here and we don't necessarily want that um the you know the basic concept there is I'm trying to deal with two contradicting things nothing to happen one is that we are going to see a higher frequency of items in the background there because it is further away and so we can have a whole bunch more rocks but I don't want to you know show a high frequency of detail so that's where suggestion or losing edges or other kind of textural ideas become so important right you can't paint a million rocks but you can suggest a trillion rocks it's just with little brush strokes and things that you know don't seem like they matter all right so again that feels like it's sort of sufficient back here we're going to have the same thing I'm just going to carry this through this it can look a little bit weird but just means you know it's going to be easier for me to do the the flatting and again these Marks here are super super abstract and almost meaningless but it's going to get us what we want back here again just need to show that there is now would there be something there right we've sort of got something here maybe I do want to right put the put a silhouette line there anyway I think that is done with the lines okay so we got our finished lines here now for The Coloring I thought I'd do something a little bit different with this tutorial normally I just kind of go through the flatting but with this one what I wanted to do was talk a little bit about the thought process involved and often when I'm just doing the flatting it's kind of hard to do those two things at once so this is where we are here we have the very very simple lines I've gotten rid of all of the stuff in the background and what I've gone and done is created the flats now the reason I still create Flats with the pencil tool and I use this kind of very simple technique where what we do is separate out it's going to show you what I've done just briefly so normally what I'm doing is I'm taking something like the character and I have these on separate layers now I have them on separate layers for a number of reasons one it does make it a little bit easier to Ink means I can erase stuff behind um you know it just generally makes it a little bit easier to edit the other thing is it makes this selection process for the flats easier now there's a number of ways you could do the flats you could just create a new layer underneath your character or whatever and just kind of create your Flats by painting them in this is you know one of the easiest simplest ways to do it and probably honestly the best way if you're just beginning if you're really just new to you know Photoshop or digital art just painting it in is super basic from a sort of conceptual point of view and uh you know one of the things I see in general is that you know even though often I probably could pay someone to do my flats as a professional comic book artist and you know do the step I I often found that this is both a really good way to kind of key in your hand-eye coordination so just kind of putting in these flat colors underneath the lines creating your base flat color layer for each element and again there's lots of things you can do if you are using the pencil tool so again I'm using the pencil tool right here we've got the brush so a good sort of thing to do here is to just look at the brush tool in Photoshop and you've got the brush tool pencil tool mixer brush tool color replacement tool so I use these to the brush tool and the pencil tool and the difference is very simple though the pencil tool is um sort of allies right it has these sharp edges it's not softened it's just pixel on Pixel and that makes it really easy to do things like this if I have the paint bucket tool and I also turn off anti-alyzing there I can sort of Select and it functions in a very particular way I think inner other programs have different ways of of dealing with this particular problem um procreate you know allows you to sort of drag and drop stuff it's not always 100 percent um you know going to give you the exact sort of pixel pixel accuracy I think Photoshop is a little bit better if you understand how to use the tools but procreate is a lot a lot easier to understand um and the results are perfect right um similarly I think there's things with the clip studio and other programs that automate this process a little bit um but I think that a just getting your hand eye coordination here is is really useful right you're kind of training your brain to use your Wacom tablet or whatever and especially if you are using a normal Wacom tablet not a cintiq or something like that this is actually a really good exercise to just kind of really key in your hand-eye coordination so there's lots of reasons why I think even though it's boring doing it um the old school way just sort of painting it in is is really useful you can also just you know paint it with a brush and right like even if you don't get this kind of perfect flat thing that's selectable and reselectable then look it doesn't matter um so yeah that's kind of what I'm doing but uh the way I do it with is with selection so I'm going to hit the selection tool tool the wand magic wand which is W I'm going to make sure anti-alyzing is turned off I've got the tolerance set to 10 I think that'll be sort of pretty good sample size is Point sample I'm sampling all layers and what I do is just collect I just click and this particular workstation I think has some setting clicked in in a weird spot so so it is very easy for me to move this selection which is super annoying but um basically what I'm doing is selecting hold down shift to plus add to that selection I am selecting the white space around the character um and what that's done is is it's given me a really good base that I'm going to use to create that and this initial kind of flat shape from and I'll show you how that works so I'm going to hit Q to go into Quick mask and that basically visualizes that selection that is being made the next thing that I do is I use the same pencil tool that I would have if I was flatting and that I am going to add a lot of the flat colors with and I'm kind of just making sure that this red sort of paint right that is uh representing uh sort of Ruby lift masking film from the old school sort of paste up days that's kind of why it's red and I'm just painting this which is essentially a mask I'm painting this with the pencil tool and again you could paint the whole thing or in a similar fashion you could I can start using the Paint Bucket because I'm creating right if we think about this is often what we have I've got some lines that are creating this mask and they're sort of not closed so if I try and fill in there pressing G for paint bucket um again Paint Bucket also has anti-alyzing off the wand also has anti-alizing off everything is just basic pencil tool so if I click in there it's just going to fill everything because it it sort of escapes this container if I click in there right again I can create a shape and fill it so that's the basic idea I'm using the initial selection to create that like little container and if I go there right you can see again I've managed to fill it all up so this is a very particular skill that you know I put you know a lot of time into kind of perfecting it's it's a common technique for selecting things um and yeah it does make things a lot faster but in the beginning just do it however you can there's a couple of things though that again I like to do from a process standpoint because a big part of what I'm about is efficiency one of the reasons I can do you know so many comic Pages a month and and color them all it's just all these little tricks that just shave off like a little bit of time here and there um but again if you're just doing an illustration it's probably a lot of this stuff is probably not necessary but I actually have an action that automates this process so for me it's shift F4 and what this does is it creates a number of things here so you can see there right I've sort of missed a bit in the selection that doesn't really matter too much but yeah that's kind of what we that's kind of what we get and this selection that I've got is very well matched through the lines and what it means is that if I put this over you know something else if we put a color behind it right it doesn't matter what color it is I I'm always going to get like a very clean good Edge and that also means that right this is not pursuant to this tutorial really but um it is also a lot easier to create uh with the line and color style using this particular technique and um allow those things to all be on separate layers and have the colors how they have the lines be colored so there's a lot of reasons why I'm doing it um in this particular way but in most cases you don't have to worry about it um the key is that I am getting all of those different elements that I drew on separate layers the foreground the middle ground background I'm selecting them um and and making sure that they have a flat layer of color behind them and then I'm basically just clipping the lines to that and then I'm clipping all the subsequent color between the lines and that sort of first flat layer so again I'll show you exactly what's happening there but that's the technique that I'm using to get there I do need to make a video about how to do this and put it on YouTube again this is a big part of the line of color Academy course that I have it's all about you know as well as building a ritual and a lot of sort of very artistic things there's a huge variety of you know really sort of nerdy Photoshop tricks in there to make things simpler and easier um but yeah for me it's like you know anything we can do that makes the process more fun I think is a good thing so that's basically the the way that we've gone and this is my first initial set of flat colors so you can see what I have is all these different elements on their own layer right I've got the foreground rocks here right well they're on their own layer we've got the creature right it's on its own layer so you can see like with this particular illustration um this is not really meant to be animated it wouldn't animate well because I haven't drawn anything behind sometimes um for particular jobs people do want to have the the elements behind right so if we take the character out they would kind of want the creature to be drawn fully so that um you know if it's animated in some way right that keeps flapping in the wind um you know what's behind it will kind of you know feed in and out of our view again pretty simple um but yeah this this basically just allows me to do that a little bit easier cool so what I want to do next is talk about the color theory side of it because I think this is something that's really important now I have if we look at the thumbnail all right not the yellow crazy psychedelic one I'm just going to close that actually boom so it's not chugging up this machine right so if we look at this it's kind of like all gray and and you can see that there's a lot of there's a lot of stuff here that really is feeling like it should be or could be more rendered than I'm gonna make it I'm gonna stick with that kind of you know again what I Define as a classic sort of uh French clean line style uh like OJ with Tintin um or Jean Jarreau Mobius you know that kind of uh where we're really leaning into flat color um again you know a lot of those artists were able to render there's plenty of um you know paintings that Mobius did but you get the idea I kind of always had the idea that the creature is white or light I don't know why but that's kind of the idea that I had and I'm kind of going with a very basic simple color scheme and again not to keep talking about the courses that I I have but again one of the other things that I talk a lot about in um you know the courses where I go into detail about color is the concept of having like simple color plan right so we want to think about what is there um from an environmental point of view and what is there from a sort of character point of view like what what what already exists there and if I figure out what exists there then I can create colors that support that let's say so start with what I know and what I know is kind of like in my head this thing is white I don't know why um but it is white and the other thing which is a little bit more tricky is that I kind of have in my head that I don't want it to be a um sort of warm yellow desert background with a white character because I've done that a whole bunch of times and I just wanted to do something different right so I was like well if I make the the main character and this creature like fairly bright fairly white but I make them warm then if I make the background cool then that'll give me a warm cool contrast again it's quite challenging to have these warm backgrounds because they they do kind of tend to pull Focus so super simple color theory warm things come forward cool things recede the background being cool right blues or just sort of desaturated Grays is a little bit easier right so I also noticed you know I did have this kind of dark sky there so I'm keeping the sky dark I'm keeping the rocky kind of environment that he's in like um inner sort of granite right it's this kind of um and I know granite comes in a lot of colors but but from a color perspective I always imagine sort of granite being like um you know sort of slate gray or let's say slate gray or something like that that's kind of what I'm imagining and again I have this kind of weird color psychedelic idea of just kind of putting a little to the underside of the rocks make them red again that's kind of partly because I've been doing that a lot with one of the comics I've been working with and I think it sort of looks cool we'll see how this goes but the basic idea of how I do this is I kind of just start with everything as a basic color right so yes I have kind of changed these but all I'm doing initially is kind of just wanting to get a good read making the stuff in the foreground a little bit darker stuff in the background a little bit lighter but I'm going to be using atmosphere to create a lot of that color separation so the main thing that I have to do now that I've kind of done that background is go along and think about how we deal with the the character and stuff and this is for me very much a situation where look I'm just making it up as I go along let's be frank I don't really have a solar plan so what what I find is a good way to do that is to just progress with what we know so what I know is that I want all of these elements that are on top right like the saddle that is going to be a different color and I'm imagining it's probably going to be like a ready right oh where did we go yeah I imagine it's going to be sort of like a Reddy brown or something like that so I'm not going to try and make things too dark I'm trying to kind of cap out the darkness you know makes make sure things aren't going into that black I want to make sure we deal with color contrast not value contrast but what I'm doing here is again I've got my flats for the creature and I've here you can see that same thing with the lines on top and what I'm doing is creating a layer in between and this is a really simple way of doing it and I'll show you why or you you will find out why as I progress but this is where again you know I haven't done that basic I haven't done the basic flatting but I'm just going to do this and I want to reiterate how important I think it is to make sure that yeah we still do some of this type of work if if possible it would be easy for me to pay someone to do flatting on the comic books and and sometimes I do but I I often find that it is nice to just do it myself and I always found that I actually found that doing this type of flatting is one of the best things to do for just kind of chilling out like watching watching a movie while you meditatively you know or listening to some music things that you know normally are not good for productivity if you have something really boring to do look this is not going to work if you're on a crazy deadline but I think it does really get you into the zone if you're just doing this sort of yeah you just get into the zone of like I just see colors and I see um connections and there is a speed that you can play with where you do try and create these things faster by thinking about the sequence that you color and flat things and that in itself can be helpful but I find that again it's kind of like a coloring book but it's your coloring book right you know people maybe coloring books for adults these days um and I think it is because there's just something really nice about sitting there you know coloring in your thing so from a meditation standpoint a catharsis standpoint I think it is good to not necessarily rush if if you don't need to and I found huge benefit also artistically doing this where you know I really spend a bit of extra time thinking about the image and what works and I remember all the little bits I put down and I think that does help me to make better decisions if I'm pushed to just jump in there all right bang you know create the um you know the finished art I often find I kind of Rush a little bit and I don't have this contemplation time so anyway that's a lot of sort of uh you know quasi-waffily artist nonsense to say that I think it's still good to do your own flatting it is also something that if you're beginning I think this is so so important if you're beginning and I'm just going to move on to the character now and do some kind of similar things yeah if you're just beginning and just starting out it's really useful to have some tasks like this that are good for warming up so what that means is that in the beginning right at the start of the day I think it's really good to have one of these things to do or a couple to do so I I wake up I'm not really sure what I want to do again you know maybe if I just jump into drawing things are going to turn bad badly right not not going to be able to you know Ace it if I just start by doing this type of flatting work I always found that you know by the time I actually got to oh forgot to cut that that bit out yeah but by the time I actually got to do you know my my actual work I was kind of warmed up right I just do this for an hour or so chill out um again you know it's so easy to waste time fiddling about as an artist um you know if you're working full-time or whatever and I think it just having some of these things where you know you know like look I'm going to be out I'm just going to go in there I'm going to go straight away and I'm going to do this and you know it doesn't matter quite as much if you know if we sort of get interrupted or you know any of those things um I think it's just a major A major benefit to have these little tasks here and there um but again that's just my that's just my sort of two cents right so again I'm finding some of the colors here and I'm not really sure what exactly I want to do um I think I'm gonna find like a skin tone for this character so yeah I'm normally just bouncing around I'm trying to think about what's going to work what's not going to work now with doing the character flatting like this I am just doing it all on one on one layer here because I I don't think it's going to be a huge benefit to put things on a separate layer but the the creature again having this thing with a saddle on a separate layer I think will that will help me in the end I'll show you some techniques for playing around with both well boom so I've got a kind of metallic color here all these um colors are very toned down right they're very neutral I'm trying to create a like a bed of neutrality so um still thinking of this character as being kind of red and this is where I might play with with some of the colors as we as we progress right I might think about what what goes where [Music] well yeah I think yep trying to create the belt so just separating out different colors and patterns here that's basically all I'm doing think I kind of wanted mixer the wrap there Brown all right there we go that let's make a lighter version for the sharpened blade bit again also very iconic oh there we go okay so again I'm laying down the bed of neutrality as a right as a start um yeah and not sure about the Poncho bit to make whatever top he's wearing just sort of a dark and neutral it's all just neutrals so I'm playing with neutral it's more about like is this warmer is it cooler right are we going up or down the value stack right but nothing nothing too crazy these things are also metal I think as is this thing for Simplicity again we'll keep playing and I kind of want his hair to be the same color as this thing this creature to kind of link them a bit and also because it works from a value perspective so the key here is that um again I'm if we look out we're still dealing very much with neutrals I'm trying to replicate some of these colors and and see whether that sticks right like having these sort of cool Reds these purpley Reds in involved there somehow not sure how much of that will persist so there's many different ways we could all right let's think about this stuff being a bit lighter yeah an easy way to play around with the color for instance is to all right if I want to think about adding color to the keep I make a new layer above and I'm just going to Flat this by hand again there's a million different ways we could do this I have some of the selection below that I could potentially use but often just doing things will make it go really quickly fill that and bit over there boom so there we go we've sort of got the red there now I feel like something like that is is probably what I need to do to really kind of Center everything around the the main character and this is really just a matter of using Color contrast not value contrast um again I have the warm background so you know making this really pop is I think a good idea question is what color should it be so this is where again having it on its own little layer right it's kind of useful I'm going to hit control U and now I'm just going to sort of look at it where I'm studying stepping back chilling out and what are we gonna do right I can change the the color of it here and I can look at it right and just kind of see and for some reason yeah I mean I feel like the the pink is like in line with everything else it makes it very yeah I don't know something like that again I might try that um again we can go I feel like the other option would be like a yellow right like a yellow might work like orange like that I really like I really like that color right that kind of look warm all right instead of foot warm boom like like that kind of bright orange is always good and and that would kind of feel a little bit more natural so again this is where you know I sort of zoom out right I'm really sort of looking at it like that like it's pink better is is yellow better right like what what is good now here's the interesting thing though I can just duplicate all right so I can just have two versions of it right and you know that's all fine you can also just put a little sort of Shadow on there so Define what's in Shadow what's not again just using some of those selections let's add a bit of that here deselect and yeah that obviously seems a little bit bright to me but we can we could either change the temperature of that to be right more cool right and then we could all show reduce the opacity and then what you could do is you know literally just like merge those down and then I could all right really play with the color some more make it a little bit more sort of gray again like just play with things um I really do think that understanding the um let's I'm going to select wand I'm going to turn off contiguous so this selects all the skin color and again on this I'm going to go control h to hide Ctrl U and now I'll look at trying to just make that skin a little bit brighter but also a little bit darker well Ctrl D to deselect to do the eyes I'm going to select the skin color I'll do this the same for teeth and I'm just making it brighter until it kind of moves towards that white so it's just a much lighter version of the skin color not necessarily bright white yeah see if we can clean this up around the character let's make the ears a bit lighter yeah boom okay so again I feel like look not 100 sold on the whole thing yet but but I feel like that is like a decent blocking at least and again we're like do we need do we want purple all right like what do what do we want boom boom boom boom boom pump pump again what do we need oh I think Photoshop is bugged out again there's another bug in Photoshop this workstation is super buggy I don't know why what its problem is um but yeah if you're ever if you ever hear and your thing starts being funny just go arrange new window and we will close close this thing and that one normally that'll normally sort of get rid of every of that sort of problem that's just if you're if your window freezes just go window new window right window arrange new window for this thing and that'll basically I've got a shortcut for it that'll create two versions of the same thing there boom right nice um so yeah that's starting to right this like starting to come together it's a little bit weird it's not exactly what I had in mind I'm still not sure whether like you know orange or you know I feel like orange makes a look is a bit safer here with this idea um so yeah all I really have to do now is I'm going to create some different patterning on the saddle and then we're going to create some different patterning on the creature itself and I'm going to do the saddle first so I've got this layer in between there we can hit the forward slash key to lock and that means that again I can start to put some different tonalities in here now I'm going to do this really rough like a bad coloring in job right something that would kind of get you um kind of get you uh not good marks at school I'm gonna make this lighter for some reason that's kind of what I what I have in mind and but but I'm gonna sort of keep some of the leather straps as a slightly different color but as you will see I'm gonna make it a little bit rough and this will hopefully add a little bit of texture hopefully it won't look too bad obviously that's a little bit too much with this let's make make these ropes a little bit darker than everything else and this again is the sort of thing where like sometimes I'll just do it quickly because I'm like look I'm running out of time I don't actually have that much to to you know finish this but um you know if it like really bothers me I'll just go back and you know change it later right now the beauty of this kind of sort of Simplicity of style and technique is that yeah once I'm kind of here and I've made these decisions that the rest of it is pretty much downhill right it's either going to work or not work based on right based on what we've got here oh huh oh yeah let's turn contiguous off well I'm gonna delete that delete that so you can as you can see here I've got pretty ugly edges maybe I'll just leave that it's probably not going to be super important all right so this this makes it pretty simple for me to just go through I've already locked the outlines I can be super messy here and I'm still going to get something that's like pretty pretty decent well and I'm using the looseness here to a certain degree to you know maybe suggest add some texture one of the things we could try is putting let's turn it down a little bit but yeah put all right put the same color on the creature all right maybe the tassels so often when I'm trying to get subtlety I will just sort of Select colors right and then I'll reduce the opacity right so I've sort of got this gambling sort of glazing look going same thing here right I want sort of different intensity so we can kind of build up but they're still flat colors right again same thing here I kind of want this to be different color some of this to be in Shadow right I can same with some of this and yeah I reckon some of these could be different we could probably play with different colors right if I you know if we really had time but I'm just keeping it super simple and this just kind of makes all of this stuff sort of blend into the into the background right it makes it non-specific um it just sort of signals to the viewer like hey this is not important right don't don't freak out about this don't worry about this okay so I think we're I think we're kind of kind of done with this okay what's going on now we got this guy so that's going to make a new layer and I'm really going to think about okay what what what do we have going here right like what what is the what is the general idea so we could play around with making right again our standard sort of two-tone animalistic look happen here something something like that I like the idea of this because it kind of has a bit of like a like a shock vibe and and it kind of it sort of makes sense of the characters a little bit better because now we can sort of tell a little bit about sort of what's on top what's not on top well oh that needs to go back yeah so it can be can be sort of useful again I'm keeping it pretty oh Let's uh select [Music] just the creature Ctrl H to hide this way I'm not going to go over any of the other stuff so I guess the question here is like how much of all right like how much of the character is one color versus another color I mean I think that that's not this is not terrible so just start big right because to a certain degree you know what a lot of what I do is creating these concept design style images where I'm creating stuff for the first time and yeah a big part of that is is the thinking process right like what what is happening here so thinking about you know like zooming out right like what is what does that look like I think can be can be kind of useful some of them are going to get that exterior right um yeah just playing around again like I don't want to sometimes find it's really hard to tell whether some of this stuff will matter um now what I do have here I think is like quite a few different I've sort of painted into it and over a bit which is a mess let's get rid of that let's clean this up one last little cleanup and this what I'm doing here is really just local color local value right like what's there what's important what's not important so I think yeah we're probably on about probably just crossed the three hour mark on this one um which is again like probably a little bit longer than I was imagining I reckon I would have been able to get this done quicker if uh if I didn't have to mess around with the with all that other stuff um you know with the creature like redrawing a bunch of times but again you know it's the end of the day it's not that much um so yeah what I might do is this is another technique you can use for for coloring so I was going to think about like okay could we make right could could we make some of these right some of these colors like a little bit red or something like that so this is another case where it's creating that that second second layer right and now we're just going to sort of see all right anything it's kind of really under there it's gonna get this kind of disconnected now again this is something I can clean up this is also like a fully psychoactive weird sci-fi fantasy thing to do but uh yeah I'm gonna change the color here so it's this just kind of allows me to see kind of what that what that might look like so yeah again we can control you all right you can think about right exactly what's going on there and and to me again like the the main thing that I think could be cool is just like yeah like that that slight that slight tweak that probably is not really even going to be visible but it just kind of makes it a little bit more kind of fleshy Pasty now I'm going to try and clean up around the face all right see if we can this kind of working now we could also try and yeah no I don't reckon I think boom yeah I mean I think it's interesting right like this is a weird this is a weird shape and stuff but I feel like to a certain degree it kind of works right Maybe so yeah this is another thing you can do just make another layer right new layer I have a shortcuts for making layers and things so it's just a button right Don't Take Your Eye Off the actual off the actual ball again not sure whether this helps hinders so it's probably something that if I was designing something to do with Comics I wouldn't do this because it's going to be just extra time right but it might be cool all right we're done with that so let's look at what else we could do in terms of getting the atmosphere in there and then normally what I'll do is I'll just kind of like get most of this there and then I'll take a break because that is a really good way to also get some perspective on it but let's block this in and the way I'm going to do that is just with super simple gradients and I've created just sort of layers that are kind of behind and in between each in between each um sort of you know item right layer group and yeah now I'm just gonna try and think about what what should be there in terms of value right should it be dark let's get a big airbrush going to kind of zoom out still in that that sort of gray area here which again it feels like a little bit of a a trap right I don't want to get too too Gray so often again I'll sort of do this in you know separate separate layers and again you know I can try and make the you know what what's there a little bit more interesting later on let's think about you know just maybe putting a simple gradient up this character right so this is building on the idea that we have a darker character going back to the thumbnail like darker subject boom against a lighter background as a contrast [Music] and here I've got I've got a layer that's kind of just behind the character so again this looks a bit weird kind of hoping right maybe if I just separate out the character a bit that'll give us a bit of a bit of extra pop on the character now if the if this creature kind of Blends into the background that's that's okay with me that is okay with me that's not necessarily the worst thing this is a very silly design a very silly sort of simple image and and I think kind of you know fading it out and giving it a naturalistic look like oh yeah this this thing's just there right it's not really jumping out of this there's a feeling of like if I can get this thing to feel like it's kind of built from these rocks and then it'll be a little bit more exciting and I'm really going to try and play with this idea of again this is me just thinking aloud right but you know I really like the idea of yes there are some of these rocks in the background but what we're mostly playing with is the idea of these Silhouettes against each other um all right so I put some stuff in front of the character now we could also and I did have some stuff with the character there all right I can actually also with this particular technique I can clip something to the character and again this is all super nerdy Photoshop stuff but the way this layer stack is set up I can click something above the lines on that stack here and that means it's only going to fade out stuff on that line so that allows me just grade like give the characters in different elements on these layers to kind of blend into each other it's often this really subtle stuff that gives it that extra two or three percent right that you really need um to make it look high-end all right so there we go again um just creating the base so this is like the sort of the base grade right like like does this does this image work right is this is this any good and as I said earlier on right just being able to separate out these elements from the foreground right so I've got foreground right just being able to kind of push them is going to help a lot with the depth but yeah so that's like a pretty you know that's like a pretty good initial blocking and yeah the things that I normally um like to do after that are just you know literally where I would drag and drop sort of texture textural elements that I have onto the page and and then think about um you know sort of color grading and all those bits and pieces so again that's what I might do now I'll go get a few of those textual elements and we'll sort of put them on and again that should give us a pretty good indication of you know how the final grade is going to look but at the moment it's looking a little bit desaturated a little bit kind of meh um but again that's okay at this point okay so here's where again you can start to make things even more efficient and I've uh you know explained how I added a lot of this textual stuff when I did this um sort of lion Rider version of the art ritual so if you haven't checked that out check that out that is also on the channel this image from start to finish and here what I'm going to talk about is like you know what was this one yeah it's the same size so I can just literally drag and drop this texture on top and the other thing is you know once you create a whole bunch of stuff right uh you know in this image we had like quite a few different let's see what we got quite a few yeah different kind of blurry lines and things so I can probably like like wondering how much of this I can drag and drop now grab that and I'll grab that I'll drag that on top as well so you can see like uh look you know that's not it's not really sort of working um but what what I can do is maybe just think about what is working or I can add these things myself right so thinking about the the dust particles again you know similar kind of tonality but you know if if something I drag kind of works then yeah it works if if I need to create something different then need to create something different but these are things that I just like these days I'm kind of just adding all of these as a stylistic sort of bent it gives everything like a pretty unique sort of textural look and I'm going to select some sort of a few dark ones and light ones right that means we have you know some texture in the light areas that's dark and some texture in the dark areas that's light and again we're just kind of pulling stuff down now again this is not the final grade because this is looking super low key but might work and now we got these things now this is where again what I can do is control U all right let's change these to be right more of a blue or we could even try make them like a similar red I don't know I don't know whether that's going to work the other thing you can do is literally just lock forward slash and let's let's fill them right let's fill it with some tonality and now I'm gonna go uh normally have this on a fingers on a um normally I have this on a so I was just checking whether I was recording that often happens normally I have this on a keyboard shortcut key Warp all right let's warp this a slightly different way and the the key here is like just you know what once you kind of understand this process um you understand that yeah you can get stuff happening really quickly right you can really quickly add some sort of cool effects right let's put this sort of over here and you know just sort of dragging and dropping I'm going to put my stuff up there and yeah boom boom and then I had this one right and again if we just lock that I'm going to fill it it's got the same stuff in it now let's unlock it let's move it around you can see it's like much more subtle now all right boom again little textual components see if we can add some extra bits and pieces okay just it's this is it's it's funny because I keep trying to basically make this more interesting than it than it can be right it's just like a standard character design image right um but yeah that's the basic idea so other things that I could add is again you know I think I have a right signature from here boom put that over there and the other thing that sometimes I'll play with here's the texture that I often put on from the Star Atlas core pages so this will give us a really texturey look I know this will also completely make chaos with the um oh that's good texture on as well so I don't need I probably don't need those let's just reduce the opacity of that reduce the opacity of that yeah and there we go so again just playing around with with different textural sort of elements now also important to understand that look look all of this stuff that's kind of on top here It's Not Really Gonna you know make the image go anywhere so like you know it's still pretty dull right so we can very much play with the idea of gradients or let's select the creature and I'm going to select the character and then I'm going to think about well just adjusting the color a bit mostly just to kind of warm things up that on overlay yeah let's so again we could play around with something like that let's go hide now this is a bit extreme right but you see that you know this kind of idea is really going to let the the character come forward so again we can play with the tonality here don't again it's making it a little bit more more psychedelic so at some point inner I just start kind of playing with stuff right like it's not really it's not really important that it um you know is necessarily realistic or anything like that um again you can play with making actually want to do is I've got this I'm going to add that as a mask that'll just make my life a little bit easier later on but so again we can play around with you know adding a bit of drama overall to the image I feel like we could increase the contrast and maybe sort of pull that in a few different areas right think about again yeah maybe pull the contrast there let's make another levels let me just pull the pull the lights up let's do select color range see if we can get the character yeah well I think that kind of works here I don't know whether it works down here but you can see yeah I've just sort of color greeting playing around with levels just in general now that I feel like things are a little bit a little bit um better separated right now you can also like a good thing that I sometimes like to do is if you proof setup where are we let's do custom let's just basically simulate black simulate paper color this is a really good thing to do if you're trying to play around with Printing and if your image turns to complete mush at this point then that's a good sign that you know you don't have a good sort of color color contrast or anything like that but you can see here again I I'm kind of just messing around right like really um not not a lot of logic here in terms of you know is is the grass green is the grass blue right like what what is happening and uh again you know sometimes I care about this stuff sometimes I don't we're just trying to create a little bit of Rhythm within the image um and yeah this is normally how I'm going to do it I'm going to step back a little bit um I think something oh sure that I'm noticing is I feel like we could bump really try and oh yeah full screen see if I can let's grab like one of these darker colors see if we can just homogenize this character in the background into a little bit more of a silhouette just because I think that that kind of help kind of help things a little bit again not everywhere but just in some places right like really make it clear that that's one big mushy thing now what you notice is all these sort of marks that I make on top of it have right that they're a bit much now right like these ones are really popping out so just take them back but yeah just try and push that back a little bit more okay so if we put our texture back on you can see yeah some of that some of that is working oh but I do think we could add now that we've got these kind of separations do you think we can add a little bit more kind of noise and variation to everything and this is just you know trying to create some textural variation but it's it's not based on like just spamming something everywhere right I'm putting particular colors blending them into other colors and it just increases the visual complexity of what we've got um and I've also got this texture here right I'm like see if I can all right pull this down okay yeah I feel like I like my texture that I had here I think that's a bit crisper that texture in there let's delete these ones so yeah lots of like fiddling around at this stage and and I think um you know it's important to understand and appreciate that you know you can do this for quite a while where did that signature go it's down there somewhere that we're just gonna put that right on the top right on the top there we go so again keep assessing keep thinking about it um probably one of the things that I I think is interesting that could be done is let's just make these rocks a little bit more varied right I think about foreground right can I can I create a little bit more value separation between that foreground Middle Ground background yeah because I think that that will kind of help ground things just a bit and again having those separate you know elements on you know different different layers just makes that so so much easier all right and uh again this is probably where I will take a little break because I think otherwise it's very easy to get a little bit lost but yeah I kind of really try and create a bit more color set color separation and yeah just mess around use saturation right like where exactly do we want do we want the color to be take it away from the background a little bit but yeah it's okay for me if this one's like a little bit vague right the the concept is you know we don't really know what this thing is we're not quite sure that's fine um yeah they're in some alien landscape that kind of makes it feel fine even more but yeah that's probably where I would leave it for now again I might do a little bit more color tweaking I'm not quite sure um but yeah other than that um yeah this is pretty much uh you know where I would uh where I'd leave things um otherwise I just kind of end up you know tweaking and fiddling for hours and hours and hours and hours so hopefully this has been sort of useful again just seeing one of these processes how I handle this and again in this particular instance you know I for me it's been very interesting to see I really think there was something about this thumbnail where I had a lot of potential for it I really wanted to make it into something and there's something wrong with it right it maybe it wasn't a good idea and and maybe again it's it's a talks to the fact that you know I need to do more of that design work I need to think about it earlier on really kind of nail down that design before I start playing around um at this stage or just adjust my expectation right for how long that's going to take this took longer than I thought it would be um to kind of create this type of image and again um you know I think that's like an interesting Insight hopefully but anyway let me know whether you know you've got images that you haven't finished I have an entire hard drive full um terabytes probably of Unfinished junk lying around um and yeah I think it can be a really good exercise too as you progress with your skill set to try and pick those things up figure out you know what was wrong with them what happened it offers so much insight into your own process and I've done that a couple of times and I found it's really useful and cathartic and uh feels a bit Victorious if you kind of succeed and feels really bad if you don't um but yeah it's so interesting and I think it offers a little bit of insight into how our mind works where the image we have of the image we're wanting to create in our mind is such a major part of how we feel about its success right so again I could have created something out of this maybe people would have been like hey that's cool but you know I'm sitting there going hey this is not kind of what I wanted right it's not living up to my sort of image of this thing um and uh yeah you know maybe if I get it right then this image could become something right I've created entire Comics based off just one little sketch of a character so it's really important to care I guess about these things to care about how it turns out to care about um the the subtle details and the quality right that's often what makes all the difference um training your eye bit by bit year by year anyway that's all I go for now catch around [Music] thank you [Music] [Music]

Channel: Tim Mcburnie - The Drawing Codex

Views: 200,344

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Id: CWA0DcQDqII

Length: 210min 21sec (12621 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 19 2023