HOW TO DRAW SIMPLE ENVIRONMENTS (easy mode engaged)

okay a mark a nard teacher a professional artist and in today's weekly Friday video we're going to learn how to paint simple environments now environments require a lot more Skills than drawing characters for example so it is a lot harder but if you follow along this tutorial you will get better at it have I ever lied to you [Music] all right so I heard you wanted to get better at drawing environments or painting environments if that's the case well done you're watching the right video with that said environments environments are hard it's a very very complicated subject there's a lot of different skills involved and there's of course a limits as to what I can show you in the context of a shorter YouTube video like this compared to what the hours that I would spend with my students my art program for example so what I'll be showing you today is a recipe a recipe for an environments that you can follow and get very similar results or you can you know if you feel a little bit more confident deviate from it may exaggerate some parts change some elements play around with different colors whatever you feel confident enough to do but the kind of environment that I'm talking about here would be kind of your typical landscape based environment so we're not going to be focusing on anything that has man-made structures which also means that there's not going to be any real mention of you know things like perspective lines vanishing a line vanishing points instead we'll keep it simple with something like just mountains so in our background we're going to have smaller mountains they're not really smaller but we see them smaller because they're really far then we're going to have a middle ground where we're going to have bigger mountains once again not really bigger they're just closer to the camera so they appear bigger and then in the foreground we're going to have some something a little bit closer maybe a part of a mountain part of a cliff so we can see a little bit more of the details because that is going to be the part of the painting that's closest to us so real quick a couple of notes about this this painting here that we'll be doing that will be tackling of course something better than this but we're going to start from the background and make our way towards the front of the painting we're also going to have a landscape type of canvas or composition because this is going to allow us to show the vastness of the environment if you wanted to display or to feature something that's maybe a little bit more imposing something that's tall really big in scale for example well you might be better off with a portrait type of canvas in that case but back to our generic recipe here the last thing that I haven't really mentioned is going to be the horizon line so when it comes to the horizon I usually recommend that you place it at at the third in the painting so either at the third towards the top of the painting or towards the bottom you can also do like halfway but that tends to look a little bit too too static a little boring now the difference between the two when it's high and when it's low it's well it's the line that separates the sky in the earth right so if you have a lower horizon line it means that you're left with a lot more sky to paint sometimes that's great if you have a shot that maybe is looking up at something you might want to have your horizon lower so she can feature more of the sky if that's important and with that establish let's get started the very first thing that we'll be placing down on the canvas is going to be our horizon line in my case I'm choosing something that's a little bit a little bit higher so I want to feature a little bit more of the ground then the sky and so I'm going to have my horizon line at the upper third the line then like I said we are going to be starting on our background what we're painting here is a like a plane full of tiny Hills and with distance everything tends to shrink everything tends to get a little bit smaller the farther away it is from us at least that's what we perceive so starting from the back here we're going to start with some very flat hills that don't stick out that much past the horizon line don't go below it though and of course I'm not going to leave everything white let's slap some colors in here all right and then we're ready to move on to the middle ground so we're going to do something very similar we just want to warm up the colors as we get closer and closer to the foreground with distance you'll want to add a little bit of a blue tint to everything and this completes our composition so as you can see very very basic but from here we can add a lot of different things such as this little path here and that it's going to basically start in them in the foreground and travel through the entire piece and end somewhere in the background and far distance right now we have all the building blocks that we need for our environment we have our backgrounds with those mountains in the far distance in the sky we have a middle ground and if foregrounds and actually real quick I'm going to add a little bit more to the middle ground out of like another mountain up here because it's kind of empty without alright that's much better and we even have the little pad that goes all the way in the back now let's add a slight gradient to the sky so that it's not so just flat alright it's getting somewhere and now the sky looks better but the mountains themselves look really really flat so we're going to remedy to that and basically shape them as if they were really really big balls big sphere so it can kind of imagine you're like the top of the mountain here being like this huge sphere we're going to have a a sunlight coming from well the top of the image for sure it's coming from the top right corner so everything that's facing the sunlight the Sun Direction maybe a little bit more directly we'll get more of that light we'll be able to capture more of that light and beyond that I decided to add a little bit more details to those mountains so that they're not just big spheres and instead look a little bit more organic a little bit more believable by having the crests and and basically like smaller Hills within the bigger shape and now we have a really good base to get started and to add details to this and this is the fun part so I always like to start with a sketch and this is what we'll do here once again and that sketch is meant to be extremely rough and it's only really to try to figure out where we're going to place the different groups of plants nature is always random it's chaotic and so nothing is following any kind of real pattern especially not in the forest and so what we tried to do here is spread out the different different groups of plants in a way that makes it look natural again if you don't know exactly and how you should do this and how much plans and what plans to even paint or if you want to paint something else you know it could be like a field of rock you know whatever look up references either way the idea with the sketch is just to spread things out and get kind of a good idea for the the composition of all your smaller details next once you're done with your sketch you can move on to actually painting the colors this should be on a separate layer and at the beginning and recommend to not worry too much about the colors and the values and anything anything like that just select a color that's a little bit darker than the grass usually plant or darker than grass and well place all your plants according to your sketch at this stage is really good time to to whip out your your custom brushes if you have any or to create some because this is the time-consuming part of the process right where we paint all the vegetation if you have a million leaves in there to paint and I was going to take you a while so yeah sometimes it makes sense to have a custom brush with that and if you're looking for brushes well you can download my own find a link for that in right corner of the screen and down in the description below now once you're done spreading out your details painting them in now it's time to lock your layer and focus on the value so everything like I've said at the beginning everything that's in a far distance going to be a slightly lighter less contrast and also a slight bluish tint if you have a blue sky out if you have like an overcast day then the tint is going to be just white it's the color of the sky once all your details are kind of laid out and you feel good about you know the overall composition of everything now we can move on to lights so the way that I like to apply the lights initially is to apply it onto the each individual group of plants so just like we've shaded our hills you know as bigs fears well our plants are kind of like that you know we can think of all the different chunk of leaves as a big sphere and have all the leaves on one side of that sphere the the side facing the Sun be a little bit brighter and everything else that's facing away from that is going to be a little bit darker why more color for the highlights cooler colors for the shadows and once your plants start to feel a little bit more 3d like they're not just flat brush strokes anymore then we can start to look at the overall lighting for the scene and that's where things can change a lot so now I'm pretty happy with the spread of my details it's very rough still but it's a good time to move on to light and really finalize the composition of our piece here so what I like to do is create a new layer on top of everything and set it to hard light blending mode next with a soft brush we'll select like a nice blue dark blue color and this is completely optional of course but I like to like to paint over some regions of the count of the landscape as if there were clouds in the sky covering the light of the Sun in my case I don't have clouds yet but we will add some later but the overall lighting tweaks here really allows us to focus on a particular plane right so right now it's very clear my focus is on the foreground not so much on the middle ground anymore once again usually the focus tends to be where the light is and then once I'm happy with that I can finally add the missing piece which are of course the clouds so having a nice nice blue sky like this was too tempting I couldn't resist so I had I had to toss some clouds in there and then finally I'm just going to wrap this up this entire process by finalizing my details so as you see me here I'm using a couple of custom brushes to speed up details but at this stage most of the time I like to brute-force until the end so I really like the more crafty a hand paint and look but those are the final stages so we really really want to make everything shine have a lot of polish make sure everything he reads nicely and yeah really make it your own so I've to a little bit more work this is what I have here so yeah I mean still super rough you know it's probably not meant to be seen this close up this is probably best seen at this kind of resolution like 12 percent but all that would be left is just adding more and more detail so that you can zoom in and still be able to enjoy all the details there's still a couple of things I like to do once I'm at this stage here one is to help separate the planes so in between each plane I like to add a little bit of a little bit of mist in between the mountains so in the valleys between the hills adding that little bit of mist at that brighter color I feel like it really gives it a lot more doubt and then a couple more details like flowers and things like that and shadows to that I was missing not much just small stuff and then some some final color adjustments a little bit of a vignette effect nothing much but yeah I think it's a little warmer now feels more sunny feels a cozier this is going to be the final image for today of course I could go in there and spend another another 20 Hertz detailing this stuff that looks really really crisp and we can zoom in and still be able to appreciate everything but right now we'll have to zoom out just a little bit like that for it to look decent also just for fun I decided to try and add a little bit more sky to see what this would look like so this is what I get in the end yeah I don't know I think that was kind of cool but yeah there we have it so this is what we started with and what the details added as you can see I've followed you know followed my sketch pretty well and uh I'm kind of happy with the result it's not bad it's been a lot more time on this but for the little amount of time that I invested in this painting I'm fairly happy now of course you don't need to do anything this detailed you know you don't need to have as much stuff in here from this point it could be just a couple of a couple of trees along the road a couple of rocks maybe or it could be like a desert with like a little oasis okay it could be mountains of snow you could be really tall mountains instead of little plains like this either way this process here should allow you to you know quickly come up with a couple of environments and as you saw the first steps really take no time at all and so it's really from this point on what you do with it so yeah I had a lot of fun and I'm really really looking forward to see what you create if you tried this tutorial so please please please let me know tag me in your stories on Instagram and tag me on Twitter I'm really curious to see what you guys are gonna come up with remember though always remember at any point if you're not sure of how to paint something Google references you don't learn anything unless you're using references now then I hope you have fun trying out this little tutorial as usual let me know down in the comments below if you have any ideas for a future tutorial like this more often than not I tend to select the one that's uploaded the most in my previous videos so if you enjoy this video make sure to hit luck [Music]

Channel: Marc Brunet

Views: 594,363

Keywords: speedpaint, bluefley00, free brushes, speed painting, digital painting, digital speed painting, concept speed paint, time-lapse, marc, brunet, marc brunet, imaginefx, tutorial, painting, Drawing, Paint, Photoshop, Adobe Photoshop (Software), Paintings, Paint (software), timelapse, tutorials, bluefley, bluefly, cubebrush, cubebrush.com, art school, art schools, artschool, art college, art education, learn art, how to draw, how to paint, jazza, portfolio, portfolio review, brushboost, digital art

Id: 1wXv4TZuG1k

Length: 13min 12sec (792 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 04 2020