Concept Art Tutorial: Photo-bashing Sci-Fi Environments

[Music] photo bashing is a technique often used in digital media production that utilizes both digital paint and photo reference together it's usually used in a production atmosphere because of the massive amount of time it saves you during the creation of your images if you plan on becoming a concept artist in the game or film industry is absolutely essential that you know how to photo bash throughout this tutorial we'll cover what to look for when choosing and integrating photo F into our scenes how to blend ref images into our paintings where to find decent reference as well as a bunch of other techniques concerning the use of lighting perspective colors and Composition we'll also be covering the use of hue saturation and color balancing tools adjustment layers and some advanced techniques on masking and Lincoln hues welcome to photo bashing sci-fi environments let's get started before I start painting I thought it might be a bit helpful if I explained the way that I use a few tools there's probably some really useful stuff in this section for artists of all skill levels but if you're already an advanced user of Photoshop skip ahead to the 13 minute mark you can use the color balance tool to really narrow down the colors of your image and tweak them accordingly you can choose between either shadows mid-tones or highlights and with the color sliders for the desired result you'll see me use this tool a bunch of times throughout the tutorial that's incredibly useful for integrating reference images into your paintings or tweaking your final image so that the colors actually make sense the hue/saturation tool is great for quickly shifting hues in your painting to something entirely different you can use it to tweak all of the colors in your image at once like this or to focus in on individual colors and tweak those one by one you can like selectively choose the colors that you want to tweak just by choosing the color that you want to change in the drop-down menu so it's you know you want to change a yellow change that drop-down menu to yellow and then click the eyedropper in the tool and then with the eyedropper select the yellow in the image that you want to change and then you can just shift the color with the slider adjustment layers act as a sort of non-destructive filter that sits on top of your layers and tweaks your image for you you can find them here they all come with a mask that can be used to either remove or add them wherever you want in your image they're really good for just putting on top of your layers and tweaking your colors with them or tweaking your values or there's a bunch of different tools that you can use in there it's just it's way better sometimes to do it this way because they have the mask so you can paint out certain areas of them or add them back in if you want to change it it's just it it's better to use these than to actually edit individual layers with you know say the leveling tool or the hue/saturation tool the blending modes I'm not going to specifically go through every single blending mode that exists in Photoshop but I'll give you a bit of instruction as to how you can use them to integrate your photograph into your concept or any layer that you want to blend into another one you'll have a basic understanding of how it's going to work you can find them here and when you click you can scroll through the drop-down lists to see what each one does you can see in the drop down menu that each category is separated by a line and starting at the top it goes from darkening your image to lightening your image to lightening and darkening to just some weird ones which I never use to sum over all a tonal shifts that can be really useful at the bottom I tend to just scroll through them really quickly whenever I'm putting an image in and then choose the one that works the best for the image that I'm trying to integrate if none of the blending modes works the way you want I'll just lasso tool the bits that I want to keep and switch the blending mode to normal and then tweak the colors so that the ref image blends seamlessly into my painting you you you can use the transform tool to align objects onto perspective grids or to tweak the size or shape of specific layers I'll use a for a ton of different things throughout the tutorial but here are some quick tips on how to use it like I do the shortcut for it is ctrl T once it pops up you can hold ctrl and move one of the points to alter the shape of your layer whenever I bring a reference image in the first thing I do is usually align it to my preset my perspective grid by pulling it down so that the horizon line matches and then I'll usually scale up the size of my image so that it makes sense in relation to the objects in my painting already and then all tweak the width of the top so that all of the lines are perfectly vertical or they match the three-point perspective in my grid and also make sure that the vanishing points actually lead to my vanishing point sometimes you have to tweak it a little bit you know if there's one specific piece that you just want to cut out and then do it that way yeah there's a bunch of different ways that you can do it but that's the basics of it for now we use masks to non-destructively remove bits of our layers or bring those parts back in as an example let's hit the layer mask button here you'll see that a little white thumbnail will pop up beside our layer this thumbnail represents a mini version of our entire image so like while using masks white means visible and black means invisible so if we select our layer mask and choose black in our palette anywhere we paint on our image will become invisible likewise if we change our color to white and paint again our layer will reappear using masks can be a lot better than just erasing parts of our layer because if we screw up or want a piece of that layer to return we can always just paint white into the layer mask and it's going to read reappear another little tip you a little pin in between the layer and the mask this pin locks the mask to the layer so if we uh net by clicking on it we can move either the mask or the layer independently from their counterparts the lasso tool is great to use in combination with layer masks because it makes it really easy to mask specific parts of your images as quick as possible like you'll see concept artists use this all the time it's incredibly important to just start integrating it into your workflows you can quickly use it to draw a selection around your object and by holding alt and hovering your pen just above the tablet the lasso tool will switch to the polygonal lasso tool allowing us to map out straight edges with organic ones you can use this to brighten or darken your image or just to add contrast to it it's located here it's quite basic to use but when we combine it with our layer blending options we can get different results while blending reference images into our scene if you're having trouble integrating a piece of photo Ref don't forget to try playing around with its brightness and contrast while using the blending modes I usually use the radial gradient tool to create little pockets of light to use it select the gradient tool and change it to the little circular icon here make sure that it's set to the transparent setting with a low opacity of around roughly 30 percent you could change it depending on what you want to use it just lasso tool where you want to add light and then paint it in with the brush it's great for silhouetting objects pushing objects into the distance and also differentiating the different layers of depth in your painting by using the match color function I can grab the colors from any layer and almost leech them into my painting to use it grab the tool here choose your source image the image that you're trying to steal the colors from and then choose the layer that has the colors that you want play with the values until they work with the various sliders and then lower the opacity of that new layer or change the blending mode until it gives you what you want there are a billion places online to find good photo F but finding free photos without any potential copyright issues not usually the easiest I think over the past year I've spent about 60 bucks investing in these amazing photograph packs from photo batch org most of them contain hundreds of photos like all of them are super high-res and nobody's ever going to be able to say that you copied their work it's totally worth the 3 to 15 dollars that you might spend on a pack that contains hundreds of photos just to put this into perspective check out how much a single royalty-free photo on Adobe stock costs it's insane if you're serious about getting into concepts invest in some decent photo F because using images on Google it's a time bomb waiting to go off for the brushes that I use if anybody's wondering I just use Gregor Rakowski 'he's free brush pack they have some pretty interesting paint textures in them and they help to add more of like a traditional feel to your painting so yeah if you're looking for them just go on google and search for greg rut Kowski brush pack and i think there's a few different links there might be one on deviantART another on Gumroad there they're all free as well so definitely grab them tool presets save you a lot of time by saving the settings that you have for each tool and putting them all together in one easy to reach location to find them go to the window drop down menu and make sure that the tool preset menu is visible in your workspace from there you can save any brush or eraser or any other tool that you want here and easily access them as you work through your image just click here to create a new preset if you're creating brush presets though be sure to uncheck the include color tick box so that your brush will always retain the color that you currently have selected in your color palette the color dodge brush can be used to add really hot spots to your image and can mimic the way that light will mix with the colors of your layer it's usually really good to use this when you're almost on your painting as it can be used to really make your focal points stick out from the rest of your composition just be careful to not go crazy with it because it can quickly make your highlights too bright and ruin the feeling that you were going for in your image to use it select a soft airbrush from the default brushes and change your brush blending mode to color dodge change your opacity to roughly around 15 to 30 percent this tool is really useful for choosing what colors you might want to use in your scene look at reference for the type of mood that you're looking to integrate into your painting choose a color and go from there pretty much every combination of color that comes out of this thing will be mathematically perfect you can find it by searching google for the Adobe color wheel and then choosing the color scheme that you want the rule of thirds is a compositional tool that can be used to make your composition more interesting and balanced when I create thumbnails I'll usually plan out my focal point at one of the intersection points of the grid and then a less prominent object of interest at the opposite grid point in my image by clicking ctrl R I get access to these rulers on the side of my frame by clicking and dragging out of it I can get a reference for a vertical straight line that will help for straightening out photos or snapping layers to specific locations in my image if you want to hide or make these lines visible again just click ctrl H to select everything on a layer just hold ctrl and click on the layer thumbnail this is great for creating masks for things really quickly or only selecting something on one layer to paint over top of okay let's get started yeah let's create like a brand new image pretty small resolution I usually start with three thousand by three thousand and then just go from there we can uh Perez later it's kind of nice to set something small to you know get like all the base layout and base composition based values in yeah I usually just grab a brush quickly dot out what my environment is gonna be pull up some reference you know just so I have an idea of what colors I might use what shapes what the composition will be you can see I kind of put my horizon line like really low you never want to have your horizon in the very center of the image it looks kind of weird so I usually do like either a high camera angle or a low one just dot my perspective in setup like all just kind of the base values I know I want it to be like a normal Street all my perspective is just kind of indicated right now we can add like a firmer perspective grid after I know I want to have cars and kind of the light pouring from all my buildings and all the lights that happen on the street all over so I'm just using the radial gradient tool right here let's lasso tools and shapes of people objects just give like a bit of a scale reference to things in my foreground I tend to have darker values and the further my image goes off into the distance I'll have lighter values you can see I'm just using the lasso tool for almost everything it just it really helps give me those like crisp shapes right now it's just kind of good to throw that in there and have an indication of it I kind of want my focal point to be on at the right side of the image so I'm going to start adding shapes that really kind of draw your eye there you can see I have like the lightest values in my image in that right corner right now yet more radial gradient tool' just setting that up so that my brightest area is my brightest values are in that area so your eye will naturally drift towards the right side of my painting even like all of my directionality and my lines kind of point towards that area and I'm just like hashing out some windows that they're all gonna change later because of the photograph that I introduced but it's kind of good just to have an idea of what those shapes are gonna be adding some cars in just sketch a sketch quickly you don't want to go too but you don't want to like hamper yourself right now with with big details you just want to have the base skeleton of what the image will look like at the end always at this phase you can't see it but on my other monitor I have some reference a cool image from one of those photo Bosch packs that I showed you guys earlier that radial gradient tool you can just use it to add pollution and light kind of hitting fog and mist and bouncing around all over it just adds that kind of realistic feeling all over everything it adds like a hint of softness to it as well because like depending on the brush that you're using it might be really hard or a bit too hard to simulate say atmosphere so there's a number of ways you can get that kind of fogginess across it you could use an airbrush but I really like using the radial gradient tool and here I'm kind of adding like a big shape in the foreground that's gonna pull me down to the right side of my image just sketching that out could be cool kind of that I have like a big sign on the left side just adding that bright spot in the bottom right and even like some reflections hitting that overarching bit on the top and I'm just going to crop everything add a little bit of rim light on some things just simulate the light bouncing around and hitting different objects some signs it's just so you know what those shapes actually are you can see that I'm last so tooling like the shapes and then using the radial gradient tool around them that actually really helps to silhouette my objects and break them apart from the background it really just pulls objects into the foreground you can see I'm like darkening my foreground objects a bit too as I do it that'll just really differentiate the different layers of depth in your painting just further quick detail for the room lights the thumbnail is almost done at this point okay it's nothing too complex so let's let's up raise our image usually if it's print I'll switch my dpi it's in the resolution tab at the bottom to 300 I'll start off at 72 and then switch to 300 that makes it so that when I actually print my image it will be high enough quality that it will seem clear seeing an image on a PC screen is one thing versus actually seeing it when you print it an image that has 72 dpi depending on the resolution might look really really crappy when you print it versus if it's 300 dpi you can actually go into the inches or like into the size where I just was and you can see how like if it's 24 by 18 inches then you can see okay at 300 dpi 24 by 18 is gonna look solid I guess now is a really good time for me to bring up how slow your computer will go with high resolution images if you up res it to 300 dpi and then you have a ton of different layers and they're all blending together if your machine isn't up to it if you're using a laptop a lot of the time that can really affect your performance going forward the less layers that you have the faster your system will run let's hash out our perspective grid just going to do it on a separate layer just really quick and for this image like we're gonna do one point perspective just to make it easy I'm not the best at doing perspective but you can see I bring my first reference image in and I'm immediately I'm aligning the horizon of my reference image to the horizon of my image and and then I'm scaling it so that the image actually matches the same scale the people will be the same size the shops will roughly be the same size as they are in mine even the vanishing point is is making sense I can bring my ruler tool I can bring those vertical lines in just to make sure that the image is perfectly straight right now vertically and then yeah just going through my blending modes seeing what kind of works what doesn't I usually select it and then hit up and down on my keyboard and it'll quickly cycle through them and then I'm just gonna take my base thumbnail and colorize it just so that I have a bit of color in the scene immediately yeah let's go look for some reference for really cool kind of palettes that we could use I usually like like anything that's cyberpunk or played runner this one's kind of cool Blade Runner it's always Moody so it's got that definitive kind of cyberpunk feel to it Purple's yellows blues this one's cool let's bring that in just copy it paste it in here now let's just take our base thumbnail and just make it match our reference image a little bit more so I'm gonna make the ambient color of the background kind of blue then I'm gonna create a new layer and fill it with that yellow just so that it matches the reference image it's the backgrounds gonna be purple and like all the area at the bottom of the image is gonna match like the street light color kind of so that it yeah it matches that reference image above switch it out a little bit and then yeah you can grab your reference image and hue/saturation tool like just slide it like right now like we're just looking for happy accidents when we bring our reference images in we just want to see like okay well what works what doesn't we're just looking for cool random things that will happen based off of the shapes of our efference images masking out little bits of a reference image out just so that if we see something cool we'll keep that and then a race every not a race but mask out and you can that doesn't quite match at this point it's it's really easy to put too much in because you know a lot of these images they have lights everywhere and when you blend them in there's just gonna be a billion different signs so yeah you just got to be careful about how much of that detail we add in so that it doesn't disrupt the composition yeah I'm bringing it in I'm gonna transform the image a bit at the top you can see I have those blue kind of rulers and I'm just gonna straighten out the verticality of my image there at my ref so that it actually matches the same perspective of mine scale it apps that the scale matches and the rest of the image is really blurry so I don't really like it that much so I'm I think I'm just gonna keep the car just mask it out it's the mask button remove it you can see that the perspective is is really off we're actually just going to tweak that right now with the transform tool I'm going to tweak the colors with the color balance tool so that my wrath image is matched and my ref image matches the color palette of my scene and then I'm just gonna take the left side of the car and use the transform tool on that and you can see I bring up my grid I match up all the lines just tweaking it one of the big questions that I really wanted to answer throughout the development of this painting was how can you make something look futuristic what is a futuristic environment like what what does that mean to me it means your shape language it means the lighting that you use and it means the colors that you choose but it also means like what are all these things in the context of the future that you're trying to create in the story that you're trying to tell for example in the movie Man of Steel the Superman movie from a few years back the shape language on the planet Krypton was based entirely upon organic shapes like why why did they choose that like what's the story behind that how does that play into the story that the writers are trying to tell and the answer is really it's because their entire society was grown the buildings were grown the people were grown and biology played a massive role in the development of their society so that really dictated the shape language of their buildings in this painting I'm gonna go for a more kind of utilitarian brutalist style of architecture for the really tall buildings so really aggressive angles really big looming shapes and I want those to be mixed with a more compact kind of Shanghai market style Street for the lower sections of the buildings in the closer bits of the frame I created a new layer and change the blending mode to color so now I'm just gonna eyedropper colors from this reference image at the top and I just spread them around and the color blending mode is good because it doesn't actually change the values of your painting it just changes the color so all of my values are going to be the exact same but the color will actually go more to the pallet that I'm trying to accomplish in this it's pretty kind of muddy right now and that's okay though I don't don't worry about screwing up at this phase like everything is just like we're just creating a roadmap for how we're gonna be introducing a reference in and what shapes are gonna have I don't don't fret at this point it's gonna grab certain bits of my references and kind of experiment you know remove bits of them bring in other bits from other references tweak my lighting like just add little lights here and there the palettes all over the place right now but I have that color of this sign on a different layer right now so it's easy to just change it and tweak it it's a bit intense but yeah don't don't worry about that constantly change using the hue/saturation tool and then changing the blending mode like I seriously think like while recording this I probably made a ton of different mistakes but that's part of what the process is really you just want to experiment don't hamper yourself down with it always having to be perfect every time just hammer it out get it in there tweak it see what works what doesn't look for those happy accidents that we talked about earlier as an example when I first started this tutorial I was just so worried about actually just putting pen to pad because the thought of screwing up midway through or having like a bad final image it was overwhelming a friend of mine actually just said to me like why don't you just showcase those mistakes what's the point of not making them you need to make them right sometimes it's actually like really hard to watch some of these pros paint and say like things ooh Ryan Church they're just so good and when you watch them they almost never screw up they just know exactly what they're doing at all moments it can actually be really discouraging for somebody that's just learning to actually watch these people paint it's almost like their brains don't function on the same wavelength as yours does it's almost like say going to a party and then you're really excited to play guitar in front of the crowd and then as you show up you realize that Jimi Hendrix is playing there it's quite discouraging to actually start playing or to follow Jimi Hendrix so long story short just don't worry about screwing up just go in there and paint an experiment see what works it don't ever allow that fear of screwing out to dictate whether or not you're painting or whether or not you're gonna try something new or I know so this sounds like more of a motivational speech I guess but I find changing my mindset when it came to that really helped me further my art so I hope it can help you guys too so back to the actual tutorial you can see that I'm actually blending a reference image in with just a normal blending mode I'm not using lighten or anything like that if I've actually synced out the colors so that they match the color palette of my image then it shouldn't be too hard to actually just mask that in where I want it going through and last so tooling my shapes and removing those from my reference image it just immediately adds that detailing and once it's there you can tweak it change all the shapes add new reference images over top or just paint here I'm just grabbing some kind of smoke I want to add like some kind of fog and atmospherics into this yeah I'm just gonna grab that masking in a little bit with the blending mode see what works not that you just fan of it right now it's kind of just muddying at my image but no I think this is one of those mistakes the heck I was talking about earlier it's kind of good to do the smoke and fog and stuff at the very end it really adds a lot at the end but up until the end it's just muddying things up but you know when you're painting you kind of get how do I say this you you get excited like you just want it you want an idea of what it's gonna look like in the end so you start adding all these extra details that you don't necessarily need at this point and that can just create issues for you I don't think it matters too much for me right now like I'm just gonna continue putting reference images in and it's going to get my T no matter what but I just keep that as a note for the future don't worry about atmospherics this early in the painting yeah you can you the radial gradient tool and you know paint fog in here and there but wearing like small details like smoke texture and stuff like that I wouldn't do that right now so Leggett by now you've kind of got a grasp as to how kind of not complicated it is to mix the photograph in this step is basically bring it in set up the perspective choose a blending mode that works and tweak the color so that they match your image if it's not kind of looking right if you match the the colors and then just switch it to normal blending mode then all of your detail will just be in the reference image and you can paint over it after you I don't want to disrupt my composition too much so I'm trying to keep that bright patch underneath my reference there's that your eye wants to travel to that area like typically for your focal point you're gonna want the most visual discordance around that so whether discordance be contrast whether it be saturation whether it be a different color than the rest of your image that's that's a really good way of drawing your eye to a specific location so just always keep that in mind as you're adding your reference in it's gonna be really easy to mighty it up and have too much stuff like you can see right now there's just like a thousand signs thousand different shapes it's kind of going all over the place and it gets to a point where you have to paint over top of that or remove things to bring back your the original idea that you had in your thumbnail I thought it would be good to talk about the question of what's the story that we're trying to tell with our painting and when I say story that's a pretty broad term for what is our mood what are our colors what is our lighting for this I think we should go back just to the basics of like look at our current world like what is the future of our world if we look at say our current geopolitical landscape it seems as though China and Asian countries in general are gonna have a massive impact on the languages that we speak in the future and because of that it's that's gonna massively affect the branding that we see everywhere so one of the big things that you can use to help you tell your story and to help you ground the viewer in the reality that you're trying to create is to have signs that reflect that story that you're trying to tell in that future go look at Blade Runner why are there Asian signs all over the place because it makes sense and in our brains we can naturally agree that that is a future that could happen just because you're trying to tell a story that happens in the future doesn't mean that you can't borrow from even a visit that you took to say Vancouver or Shanghai and the culture that you learned about and the people and you know it might take brainstorming it might take looking at reference it might take studying architecture it might take studying fashion but all of these things can kind of come together and ground the viewer in the story that you're trying to create in my tool presets when I have my brush selected there's like ten different tool presets that I use all the time and you guys should definitely make some tool presets it's super easy just on the bottom right of the tool presets thing on the left side of the screen you'll see it there's just a little new button and if you click that with the tool that you currently have it'll just make a new preset for that so it's really nice you know if you're using your brush you can immediately switch between a hard brush or airbrush or whatever you want I'm just gonna go through here airbrush in some of the layers and pull some stuff into the mid-ground and pull some stuff into the foreground just using that kind of radial gradient tool and even this building in the foreground I really want to differentiate it from the one in the background and I'm just gonna grab my background color and start airbrushing that in yeah there you go really really pay into your silhouettes and your value the values of your silhouettes like are they different in your mid-ground than your background are they different in your foreground to your mid-ground really push them so that it's obvious what's close and what's in in the background if you don't do that your image is just going to look flat and there's going to be no depth right now I'm just trying to find a specific brush I'm just going to paint some bright values near my horizon line and then some darker values in my foreground and this is another trick that I like to use like to grab there's this specific image if you search for sunset on Google it's kind of nice just to bring in and there's such contrasting colors and values that'll just blend it in over top usually with overlay or soft light and then mess with the hue/saturation just see how it'll affect my image it's just another kind of happy accident experiment desaturate it lower the opacity just tweak it it just gives a slight color variation to the entire image it also make so that you get not just a gradation of colors but if let's say you're trying to push your composition to the right side of the image based off of the lightness or darkness of a gradient or say that sunset that we just used you can push the eye to the right let's plan out that sign a little bit not to sold on it right now always race out of it or change it see this menu is extremely useful so if you right-click any layer and go to blending options you'll get this and there's a bunch of different features in it I usually use it first say outer glow but you can stroke around text like add like a border around it there's a bunch of different options it's worth it to just go in there and experiment I'm constantly going to be going through and adding adjustment layers experimenting with the types of colors that I'm using I'm still not sold on the colors right now so I'm just gonna continue playing with them you can see that I'm constantly going in there and like rim lighting things as well adding like tiny little reflections on my objects right now I'll go into the background just tweak the shape of the silhouette like right now I'm kinda all over the place just generally adding a light blending across the entire image kind of silhouetting the people and taking like that yellow light that's all kind of bouncing around and adding it on to things you don't want to use the exact reference image like you have to change it imagine if somebody sees their picture being used in a painting it's it's not gonna end well you know at this point you could tell like I'm just adding bits of detail here here and there just trying to see if it's working what can I do to make it look better sometimes you just don't know you just have to try things out here I'm just putting some reflections on the top just bleeding some of the colors around see my drop earring I like all the colors underneath so from now on I'm actually just gonna speed this up because if I didn't the tutorial would be about five hours long if there's anything really important that I need to show you guys I'm going to slow down I really like to once no-one I'll just grab an airbrush and go over all of the lights and usually it's on a separate layer just go over everything and if it's nighttime the further the camera recedes into the distance or the further the shot recedes into the distance the more light pollution there will be yeah I usually like to take like all those neon lights and kind of add a big kind of glow around them just going to scale up the car cuz it feels a little bit small compared to the people so I actually just duplicated the entire layer and then lasso tool masked the car and then scaled it up it's more glows so what we can do with those signs maybe make it more of a cyberpunk add a ton of them in there just say a Shanghai shopping district it's gonna see what I can do with this car like what types of shapes do I want how do I make it look futuristic do I need to make it look futuristic just adding that yellow light all over it by dropping all the colors and really kind of rim lighting it and separating it from the rest of the environment make it a bit darker because it's really close to the camera so we want more value in the foreground and here I'm just gonna see if I can differentiate the different layers between the foreground mid-ground the background here so I just grab that building and see what pieces of it I can actually use an interesting thing with adding people into your scene the heads of your characters should usually be almost level with the horizon depending on the camera angle of course but I usually like to do mine almost as if I was taking a picture at ground level which would actually mean that the characters would have the Hat tops their heads would be at the horizon level so I'm just gonna slow it down for a sec a really good technique for adding reflections is to flatten the layers and flip the image vertically and then motion blur it in the filter tab and then change the blending mode appropriately I used lighten and then just mask it in just so you get some quick reflections on the ground yeah I'm just gonna start adding some detail on this stuff and buy detail I mean actually just painting over top of it and removing a bunch of the photo RF detail you don't want it to look like a photo and then you want it to look like a painting what I really like to do is I'll just actually likes eyedropper sample colors from around the image and start filling them in in certain places like you saw me just do it on those characters there and then I'll just start taking like the various light sources around and just adding rim lights on things like you can see I like I'll grab a color of somebody's skin tone from the painting and start using that to paint over top and adding skin wherever I need to it's a super quick way of just establishing a base value for what the shapes and the lighting and the colors are going to be on that character on that sign whatever you happen to be painting that's where it'll start off as a base and then you can slowly add more detail and build up the detail on it as you go here I'm just really not the hugest fan of the car that I had in there it just wasn't really fitting in terms of lighting reflections everything like details it was kind of too dark there wasn't really any detail on it so I thought like why not just go search through those reference photos see if I can bring it in and if there's any changes that need to be made you know painting reflections just integrating the colors from that car into the colors of the rest of my scene maybe you guys are wondering how do I choose my color palette well right now I'm not actually that happy with the overall colors which is why I'm randomly adding an adjustment layers constantly to see if I can come up with something that's and different I started with that Bladerunner image with a more kind of complementary purple yellow color scheme but it's slowly becoming something different as I'm painting it and even near the end you guys will see the colors change so much as I'm trying to figure out what works and what doesn't this is because I didn't really have much of a plan for what my colors were going to be before starting paint my image I just found a reference image and went with that and that was my mistake so tip number one come up with a plan before you start you have to think about how you want your viewer to feel as their eyes go from left to right through your composition different colors promote different feelings for example red usually symbolizes passion or anger maybe even murder but blue might mean serenity peace or boredom for this image I want the city to feel neon dark gritty should be filled with life and kind of have a bit of a seedy atmosphere to it at the end I eventually end up with a complimentary orange and blue but in my last painting which was actually at the beginning of the tutorial it's a cyberpunk one it was set in a red-light district with sex clubs and the notion of drugs and sex being sold on every street corner so I ended up using lots of pinks and reds which automatically gelled with that seedy story that I wanted from the start so for you guys I would suggest to brainstorm what story you want to tell and how the colors that you choose can accomplish that and if if you have a plan from the start it'll save you a lot of time and effort you won't have to constantly go back and change things a billion times like I am throughout the painting as soon as you bring your smoke in ya just mask out the stuff that's in between the camera and the smoke and it's it's a good way of pulling things into the foreground it's also a really good way of directing your eye to a specific location because as soon as you silhouette something like that you're if there's more contrast with the silhouette then your eye is naturally gonna go to that location in the painting because like overall like right now doing this painting was a bit of an uphill battle for me especially around this part in its development with all the different photograph that I was integrating there's so many lights going on right now your eyes bouncing all around the image like you don't even really know where to look as soon as I put that stuff in it means that I have to constantly be aware of the base thumbnail that I had and you could see me like turning it on every once in a while checking to see if I'm still following that but sometimes you know with the combination of those happy accidents that we talked about earlier it means that you really lose sight of what your initial idea was with what I'm trying to accomplish right now it's it's it's really easy to do that you at this point I realized that I really need something on my left side it's almost like a balancing act between the left and right side in this image in particular because I kind of have I have my car in the foreground on the right which I really want my eye to focus on but you also have to have something really interesting in the background because as the viewers eye is actually going to travel throughout my composition I need them to enjoy every moment of it I can't just have them look at one thing and that's that the whole image has to look nice but I typically like to have my kind of really cool area in either the background on the left side or the foreground on the right side or vice versa a left or right doesn't matter and then after I have that I'll usually set up an object that's almost as important but not as and the other side of the painting I'm gonna take my image flatten everything and start putting that three-point perspective on it I would advise against doing that because if you have to paint anything that means that you have to go back and then all of your lines are going to be perfectly straight just using that match color that I explained it a tool section at the beginning of the tutorial I just kind of leached some of those colors from the Bladerunner image that I just copy and paste it in here more adjustment layers and this is the rooftop structures pack from photo berg I'm just using it to add some futuristic silhouettes on the backs of my buildings back there actually use a custom shape right here that's I'm gonna explain that in a different tutorial it's it's not really used in this one that much though so don't worry about it for now just gonna speed this up a little bit right now I'm kind of struggling to make my foreground really interesting and I'm also trying to create shapes to push your eye towards that section of the car over there and I'm also kind of having a bit of an issue with my colors like they're just all over the place so I was kind of experimenting there with the smoke having like more of like a blue on the left side and then an orange on the right it could be a nice color transition and you can see here I'm just doing what I did before adding reflections onto things just drawing out my shapes and just using the eyedropper tool like usual changing the photo image make it more look like a painting even with the people's lasso tool so make sure they're silhouetted properly make some kind of trench coats on everybody and here this is another image from the rooftop structures pack you could see the process if you add reflections you silhouette it you add more detail to it you remove detail from it now you can see I'm just really struggling to pull your eye to the right side there's just too many bright shapes everywhere and I kind of feel like my foreground could be a bit more interesting more interesting silhouettes so I'm just gonna try out some of these rooftop structures and see if I can get them to work properly cutting them out with the smoke adding some wires like once in a while when I do this stuff I'll throw some extra photo F and try something new and my foreground if the original one just isn't really speaking to me we're kind of custom shapes don't don't worry about this stuff right it's actually quite easy to do you can if you just look up custom shapes you can find that out but I'm gonna do another tutorial on those yeah that that area where I'm adding this photo effing is really kind of muddy there's there's no defined shapes in that area for how close it's supposed to be to the camera I'm gonna see if I can just grab some stuff and add an extra layer of detail to everything with it and pipes always make stuff look a lot more futuristic so let's throw some of those in those are actually from the dirty alley pack I believe just mash those in cuz yeah a lot of the stuff it's it's really mighty and there's too many photos that are overlaid you have to kind of go back and really crush out some of that detail and then we integrate the new photo F on top of it even here at lasso tool creating those diagonal shapes getting rid of some of the writing that's inside of the photograph from earlier it's creating new designs that are roughly the same as before even with this car adding a bit of ambient occlusion on the bottom of it so it blends more more interesting shapes kinda had like that futuristic look to it it's changing it a little bit you can see how useful that transform tool is just grab a tiny little chunk of it flatten your layers grab a tiny little chunk and then change it with the transform tool it's gonna see if I can tweak the shape of those lights just give it a different kind of look more futuristic think I end up going back and erasing this but for now it's something and the light on the front of the car I keep it on a separate layer usually when I airbrush stuff in like that I'll keep it separate even here further defining their clothes shapes push those guys back a little bit bring out some of the shapes of the trees see these people here spreading them up usually when I start painting something new I'll just bring it in on a separate layer and then a lot of the time I might end up even deleting it but I like just hat being able to see the before and after you can see sometimes I'll just turn it on and off really quick and then see what looks better and then if I don't like it I'll just delete it I'm really kind of struggling with that building I actually unlinked the layer or the mask from the layer and then moved it around there it's super useful for stuff like that so then you can get different happy accidents with your reference images further color tweaking actually just darkened my image here and I'm using what I call like a light brush where I flatten my layer and then after darkening it I'll change my blending mode of my brush at the top where it says normal I'll switch that to color dodge it's really good for just brightening up like hot spots in your image can be like really really useful but don't don't overdo it because you don't want perfect whites and you don't want perfect blacks so it's really easy to overdo and I'm just going to do that match color once more further leach some colors and here I actually just took a reference image and overlaid it over top of the entire thing just to see how that might affect the colors it might change the overall composition now is probably a good time to talk about resolution synchronicity making sure that all of the resolutions of the different textures that you've been importing your photographs all match up so I've seen this a bunch of times a lot of people will just use Google go find reference images from there and that means that some of those reference images are low res some are high res and then everything kind of gets muddy and like you might not notice it until you really zoom in and see but if you ever print something or if you know somebody really wants to zoom in and click on one area and it's definitely noticeable so just be really careful with that I think it's it's a really big problem for anybody that's integrating photographs and that's part of the reason why I would HIGHLY advise you guys to buy photo F or to just take photos yourself and establish a library of high resolution images that top-left corner it's drawing your eye a bit too much so I wanted to darken it up and even this photograph in the foreground it's going to change the values a little bit and the colors just so that it blends in a bit more just going to add detail to things make it look more like a painting get rid of some of the photograph detail kind of going over everything with a light airbrush masking certain things pulling them into the foreground like exaggerating the silhouettes on everything adding atmosphere and here I just duplicated the image D saturated it and here I'm actually just adding more colors with color blending mode over top and this whole dark area in the top right corner it's it's not really speaking to me right now so I'm just gonna grab a shape from those custom shapes that we talked about earlier and just create a bit of a silhouette they're just super quick it can be anything at this point I just want to add a bit of detail there and even here I'm still just taking photographs and overlaying it trying to see if I can pull my eye over to the right side even more just gonna grab one of these light posts and see if I can add some type of repetitive element that goes off into the distance it's a rim light on them tweak the brightness contrast you can see I actually just delete them and then like that's the thing about photo f/8 sometimes you'll bring stuff in and it won't work out but that's okay you didn't spend five hours painting it some of these people I'd rather just bring them in and see if I can add something that's more interesting in the foreground just in the car so it could be interesting just to have a bit of nightlife or just people walking around this last bit brings up a really good question like what types of clothes will the people in my scene be wearing and how do I know what to paint for those clothes like what angles will they have what shapes will they have a lot of these things you're not just gonna know off the top of your head you're gonna have to come up with a story for your environments like typically in these scenes I'll usually just put trench coats earrings that are illuminated go take a look at the clothes that Deckard wears in Blade Runner a lot of the people are wearing really angular dresses long raincoats some of them are even trans loose and study reference of current fashion so that you can get a better idea of what the people might be wearing don't go crazy with it though because even though it's in the future we still need to see a shape language and everything that still resonates in present time it's a good idea to start with reality and then exaggerate it a little bit through technology and shape language and that'll give you a really good base for how you can take those things and detail them and make their designs stronger and more grounded in the reality of the city or the world that you're attempting to paint when when you're bringing photos in just be careful with anything that has words on it or ads you're gonna want to go over it and just erase it out or change it into something that won't be traced back to anything that's copyright a lot of those colors on the left side were really discordant and your I would really flock to them so if I can go over them with a color blending mode and just sync it up so that I have more oranges on my right and Blues on my left then your eye will naturally go to the side the front of the car is just um I'm not really sold on it so I'm just gonna go over it really quick maybe look up some photograph of cars and see what I can do there I think the lights on the car are a bit off right now so I'm just gonna play with those a bit and see if I can get something a bit more interesting I think the airbrush that I put on the lights is a bit too much so actually gonna find the original reference for the car and bring in the front of it again and just realign it and cut out the front of it airbrush out the edges repaint the lights really quick like at this point I already kind of know the shape that I want on it you can see the difference it's a lot nicer this way than it was before yeah I'm just gonna cut out those words sometimes it's a really good exercise to just desaturate your entire image and see what the values are doing because the colours can really confuse your eye so it's nice to just have values and then check it and it'll just give you a clearer idea of how the composition is working just cut out some of that smoke and grab those layers from earlier and cut cut them out of it here I thought would be cool if yeah you had like a little bit of smoke that was coming from the car but it didn't really work I pulled your eye to the middle of the image where as I'm trying to get it to the right so more value tweaking photo filters overtop changing the colors like you can see that this image is so different from the thumbnail well at least color wise so different from the thumbnail it's that's okay you just experiment and change it as you go unless there is a specific palette that I have to stick with because my art director has that in something like this I can just do whatever I want so I'm just going to change it accordingly so I'm pretty much almost done I'm just adding some finishing touches the colors are pretty good but could be nice to grab a Blade Runner image see it do the match color trick on it and see if I can just get those colors up to in the next level and yeah sometimes I'll just duplicate my image put it on top change a hue/saturation see if there's something that I like more maybe use that kind of selective color thing with the hue/saturation tool and change my oranges to a different color or war here I'm just connector mattes eyes my camera angle a little bit by adding a bit of three-point perspective and I'm just going to crop it properly as a final touch I'm just going to duplicate the layer and use an unsharp mask and it just it adds a bit of contrast around the edges of your pixels and it can really bring out some of your brushstrokes and just adds a bit of a finishing touch to it so that's it thanks a lot for joining me if you enjoyed the video be sure to LIKE and subscribe and if you have any feedback for the painting or suggestions for the video leave them in the comments

Channel: Art of Lincoln Hughes

Views: 202,203

Keywords: concept art, photobashing, photo-bashing, digital painting, digital paint, game art, painting sci fi, digital art, concept art tutorial, photobashing tutorial, photoshop tutorial

Id: LWb_4lYLlds

Length: 75min 16sec (4516 seconds)

Published: Sat May 25 2019