Total BEGINNERS guide to drawing in photoshop 2021

[Music] my dudes what's happening man this is trent as you know i've been a concept artist working in video games for almost 20 years now the majority of concept artists working in the video game industry use photoshop this is a software that you will need to know how to use if you want to be a concept artist working in the video game industry now yes it's true uh a lot of different artists if you're instagrammers you're an illustrator or do other jobs you know you can use those those other software such as procreate on ipad or sketchbook pro or you know krita there are a lot of other digital drawing tools to use software to use but we're going to be doing photoshop because that is what a pro concept artist is going to be using when you could go and actually get a job at a game studio and this is going to be for beginners but it's also going to maybe open up your eyes to some techniques and tools that you might not be aware of all right so enough at the intro this is gonna be a pretty meaty video it's gonna be pretty long so uh you know hopefully you can go along with me and i'll show you what all these icons and buttons do and the basics of drawing using photoshop now first and foremost you're gonna be like yo can i just uh be a concept artist with a mouse do i need what do i can i draw on paper no you got to draw with a wacom tablet or an xp pen you need some kind of input device that has a pressure sensitivity to it watch some of my reviews if you want to pick up a really good one i recommend the wacom 16 for a good starter it's a few hundred bucks though all right all right all right now here we are in photoshop this is the 2021 uh version so you're going to notice the slick gunmetal dark interface here and the first thing you're going to want to do is go to file new you could also hit command n as in nancy and here we go we're going to set this resolution to 300 and uh let's uh you know what what you could do here is just pick one of these these uh preset a lot of times you'll find these preset ones you know there's like for print or art and illustration you might want to just go with something like this one thing you'll notice is that they're all set to 300 dpi it says ppi that's the same dots per inch or points per inch which are just pixels per inch basically so what you could do is just uh you know click on that right there that's going to give you a thousand width by a thousand height and that's fine but usually i like to go a little bit longer like wider so i'll do like a i don't know like a 3000 across by like a 1500 tall and it's okay if this is set to you know uh rgb you don't need to change this you know like just square pixels is fine all these other settings are really unnecessary these are the important ones which are really just your pixel dimensions and your resolution don't go lower than 300 uh resolution though pixels per inch because if you want it to be something that can print or just look nice you know you know that's going to do it if you don't like what you've done you could go over here to this icon right here this is the cropping tool and you could say well i just i want it to be a little bit you know more in like that you know or you could go up here to uh image and go to canvas size and this allows you to make some adjustments to your canvas uh you know if you wanted to change the size of it like go you know maybe you wanted to do like 8.5 by 11. let's do 11 wide by 8.5 tall so that's like a uh you know like something that you would get uh you know a note paper or something like that now obviously you know we've got all this uh now i have these colors here set to this so it fills in the new area with this dark blue but like let's say we just want that to be a completely white canvas well what you can do is you can hit command a which would select everything you see these little ants that means that's selected but another way to do that is to just click on this a little button up here in the corner and then that allows you to make a selection and then once it's selected you could fill that in using the edit and then fill which allows you to just fill it in with whatever color you have selected or i'm going to show you how to change colors here if you click on this little color button here yours might already be white or black and then what you could do the top one is the one that you have selected so i'm going to set that to white and then i'm going to go up here to edit and fill with the foreground color if you choose the background color that's related to the second color here and that's like your basically your eraser color okay so that's fine and dandy we're all set up let's get to drawing here so the first thing you want to do is click on this button right here this is for the brush and the brush tool allows you to draw now if you've got a white canvas and you've got this set to white and you try to draw you won't see anything because you're literally you're drawing with white but let's say that we change that color click on the color icon and then select a new color and then we make marks whoa okay now we're cooking now we're cooking with something here now obviously just like any program command z is gonna undo what you just did so i'm going to hit command z if you're on windows it'll be control whenever i say command just it's going to be control okay so command z undoes everything and shift command z redoes it uh this also walks you through your history here so the history here allows you to do and then undo and then redo all of your actions every brush stroke so like let's say that i do a bunch of strokes let's say i just did like you know 50 different strokes and this is kind of neat to watch by the way okay so we let's go up our history you can see here how uh you can hit control z or you can actually click on where you want throughout your history to go backwards or by again holding shift going forwards through your history so this allows you to make a few mistakes and you can easily clean them up but again i'm gonna fill that in the same way that we had filled it in before and i'm gonna say go up here to edit and then fill with the four let's do the background color because it's white okay now brushes the thing you have to understand about brushes if you right-click you pull up all of your brush shapes now think of this like you've got a brush let's say that you've got like a stick and you want to choose which kind of a stamper which kind of a shape you want to imprint onto the paper these brushes now these are my custom brushes and different brushes are going to have different properties so some of them are going to look really like grainy and noisy and some of them are going to have different kinds of pressure sensitivities set to size like this one for instance if we barely press we get like a very small line if we press really hard we get a very thick line and this is the value of having a pen input device okay is that we get this broad range now some of our other brushes are set to opacity so if we barely press it barely leaves any kind of it barely leaves any kind of an imprint but if we press really hard you can see the opacity it's very opaque it's very solid color there's a few quick keys that you're going to need to know if you're using brushes so if you want to increase the size of your brush you use the right bracket to decrease the size of your brush you want to use the left bracket and then of course if you uh you'll notice that you can increase the size this really comes in handy if you're trying to get a broad range out of your brush you know if you're doing a very large painting for instance you don't want to do the whole thing with a tiny tiny tiny little brush you want to have a good range there the other key quick key that you're going to need is the option key this is also the alt key on windows and you'll notice how it changes the icon into this little eyedropper here which allows you to color dab you can color dab blended colors and mixed colors this is an effective tool if you're just getting comfortable with blending and creating gradients and shading you know because you can kind of color dab you can blend two colors together and then colored out that gray and then now you have that new gray and then you can color dab the blend of that especially if you're using a brush that only has like a 50 opacity for most artists they're kind of hovering their left hand over the option key at all times so i wanted to show you how the icon looks different when you change brush sizes and use the option key but my capture software doesn't capture the brush size or shape anymore so for the rest of this video it's just going to look like a normal mouse icon i know even in the future nothing works right so let's say that you don't want to color dab let's say you want to pick a specific color well you'd click on this icon down here this is your primary color that's whatever color you have selected but you can quickly begin to see how you could blend colors doing this by for instance color dabbing and then using light pressure over another color and your colors begin to blend color dabbing in between and this is one way that some painters will blend their colors this is kind of like having a little mixer board if you're used to traditional paint having a little mixer board and then uh being able it's a beautiful thing though because in real life you can't color dab you have to mix those colors again to get the ones that you want but with the digital you can just lay them down and then blend them later there you go so we get this nice gradation right and this will be nice for us to practice with as well because another tool that i use is the uh eraser tool now when you're in photoshop if you just flip over the pen a lot of times like a wacom pen will have an eraser and all it does really is take this secondary color and uses that but if you were on a new layer for instance it would erase or completely make transparent that layer below and what am i talking about when i'm talking about layers this is going to be an essential thing that you're going to need to know about if you're doing things with photoshop well first of all we need to understand the layer stack now think of this like a layer of a series of transparencies we're going to create a new layer here which you can also do with quick keys by hitting shift command n as in nancy and that creates a new layer that layer is set to normal so everything that is transparent is going to be see-through you can look down at the image below it because the whole image is transparent the whole layer is transparent nothing's changed in our image but let's say that we drew something let's say that we drew something with a bright red so you can really see it here we draw over the top of this now it looks like we're messing up what we have right but the thing is that's only on this new layer that we have here so if we click off the visibility of that we can see that we haven't really changed our image at all because this is only isolated to this element what we've painted here is only on that one layer now if we hit the eraser tool over this you'll see how it just erases to a transparency rather than using that secondary color that i was talking about before and that is because we are on a new layer so think of it like an eraser on that layer which creates the ability to do well you can make a lot of mistakes if you do this for instance so for example let's say that you wanted to add in details you know around the outside of something and this isn't i'm not drawing anything particular this is just to showcase how you could use this so even using white by the way which white is an opaque color so you could carve or cut or create shapes or even use this to create masks that could be selections all on this one layer and again that is on one layer so we're able to move it or manipulate it without disrupting or disturbing the layer below now when a layer is set to normal that's how it's going to behave but there are other layer effects that you can use but uh the two that i will use the most is darken which essentially only allows darker elements to be visible so for instance if i use this color over this it's going to show but if i use white it won't show at all because it's darkening it and white is lighter than what is beneath so if you wanted to for instance just have you know this be the darkest element of your drawing you could use a darkened layer and then paint over your lighter elements the lighten layer effect does the opposite so if you remember i had a lot of white that i had painted in and because it's on a lightened layer anything that's lighter than the color beneath it will be visible if it's darker than the color beneath it it will not be visible another layer type that i use or layer effect is the multiply and multiply is nice because it will sometimes allow you to create shadows a lot of times i'll just do like a 50 gray to add shadows and that is pretty much the equivalent of just adding black to a color if you were mixing it in acrylic or oil multiply will multiply your colors together all right so you may be wondering well you know i've got these these uh gradations but it feels like hard edged and chunky you see this is like it's not a smooth transition right so there are some other tools that you can use to make it smoother uh probably you might want to like your first impulse would be to go to this blur tool but you'll notice that the blur tool just doesn't really do much blurring at all it's very minuscule it's only for subtleties and like backgrounds i barely ever use that your second option is to go to the smudge tool here and this is going to have a little bit more of a blending going on you can change your brush remember i was talking earlier about how you can use different uh brush tips to get different shapes and you'll want to find one that's got a lot of noise though with the smudge tool i like to use this one personally but this is one of my own personal ones usually it's one with a lot of space you may want to explore which brushes are going to get you the kind of texturing and material that you like there is also uh in the last couple of years they added the mixer brush which is this one here it looks like it's a brush with a little bit of a water kind of a stain looking thing and this one does a just a heck of a job blending colors let me pick a a brush that i think will work pretty well i like this one with the mixer brush because it's got a little bit of a chalk texture to it and then you'll color dab and this creates like a nice grainy kind of a color blend so if you want to get a much more natural kind of an oily brush texture or paper texture this is a good way to get that so there you go so that's a nice way to get a little bit more organic with your brushes but i don't want to go too much more complicated than that other than to say there's a lot you can do with this and you can get some very natural looking brushes using photoshop using this combination of some of these tools that i've just shown you another technique that a lot of artists that i know use is the selection and fill or airbrush tool so up here you'll find this this little icon right here and this is a lasso tool now you can use the polygonal lasso tool or the lasso tool the difference is this so with the lasso tool you can do rounded corners and shapes and things like this and you can hold down the shift key to add even more to it for instance and draw in multiple shapes and then if you use the airbrush let's create a new layer real quick and then use the airbrush you can do a you can see how you could create some really neat airbrush selections using that and this is very handy if you're filling in large spaces because i did it on another layer remember you could move it around for instance and the polygonal lasso tool works the same way except that when you click uh it creates a straight line and then the second time you click it creates a corner so this this is really useful for creating geometry or i'll give you an example here like let's say you're going to draw in a box you know you can make it look like a very convincing box by using the polygonal lasso tool to create uh perception of depth there we go let's choose a little yellow for that side and then we'll for the top we'll do something that's like a lighter yellow watch watch how this works so this is really cool for creating the illusion of geometry there we go look at that pretty neat if you wanted to select one of those faces for instance say you already laid it down you can't go back to reselect it right so you could go here to this uh this selection tool this is the magic wand tool a classic this has been around a long time and what that does is it selects the the solid body of a of a surface so for instance here uh it has to be on the layer that's selected so if we go to that layer below and we select here you'll notice look it's only grabbing colors that are that similar they're connecting they're um they're one sort of an object i guess in a sense it's the way it's seeing it is because the pixels right next to the pixel is the same color so it grabs that and like here if we click this one it'll just grab all the dark ones here you know and now that's your selection so if we go back to our layer above it where we had done that polygonal lasso and then we select this face for instance we could even go in here and add in a little bit of airbrush to that selected face and you can begin to see how you could even just do entire drawings just using the selection tool with an airbrush and i know some artists that do their entire paintings with just selection tools and airbrushes and just a little bit of that mixer tool that we that i had shown you earlier there's some other key things that you're going to need to know if you're going to draw with photoshop one of which is the transform tool and how to use the transform so what i'll do is i'll use this selection tool i'll make a selection i hit command c which will copy it command v will paste it right once it's pasted you'll notice it pasted onto a new layer so that's on its own layer right there now if you hit command t you can do the transform transform allows you to rotate it skew it if you hold down the shift key you can squeeze it and if you hold down the command key and grab a corner you can even do one of these things to squeeze some of your objects into a perspective for instance so i use this a lot for instance if i've got to like resize a character's eye or just resize a part of something you know if you had like an element here and you're like maybe i want to make this part you know a little bit longer you know then you could do something like this and uh maybe do a distortion like that and then you could just go in and like clean up while it's on its new layer so that's a technique that i use an awful lot and you're gonna see me do that a lot in the the drawing that i'm about to do all right let's hit it with the time lapse all right how does all this stuff come together all right you're going to see me drawing on the bottom layer here and that's basically they're just doing the sketching you know you the digital tool isn't going to do the drawing for you you're still going to have to learn how to draw okay okay the digital tools are just there to make it easier for you all right it's a bit of a common misconception a lot of people think that digital means it does it draws it for you no man you still gotta learn how to draw you still gotta learn your basic fundamentals how to create perspective and how to create uh depth and how to create uh clustering of your details and clustering of your your uh shadows and all that stuff you're going to need to learn how to turn forms you're going to need to learn your fundamentals the drawing tools they don't do it for you just getting my brushes isn't going to make you draw like me you're still going to have to understand how to turn forms and how to design and how to like control the viewer's eye and that's why i made all my other tutorials if you're getting into drawing you know you can check out my easy art lessons if you're really early on if you are a beginner you can learn to draw pretty cool stuff in just a matter of a weekend you know and then it's just a matter of practicing and getting comfortable with using the tools to get the results that you want so hopefully this video is going to help you along in that regard my advice is to not compare yourself to other artists don't compare what you're doing to what i'm doing don't try to draw the exact same thing try to draw your own face of a character using the tools that you just learned to do this drawing i just used two layer types normal and darken i didn't even use a multiply layer and then i used my watercolor brushes which is a lot of what you're seeing here you can get that in my brush pack and then i also use my spatter brush which is just like a toothbrushy kind of a spatter simulates like a like if you were to just spray you know white paint across your image you could see it in the image to get that texture that's what i'm that's what how i'm getting that texture is mostly was with the brushes so you're going to want to explore your own brushes you're going to want to explore other people's brushes a lot of artists post their brushes and they make them available online if you want to get a specific artist's look or feel but make no mistake just using somebody else's brushes won't make you draw like them it'll help you to get a certain look or effect but you'll still need to learn how to draw this character is the ancient tenza who appears in the twilight monk series of novels and art books that i work on if you want to learn how to draw if you want to learn how to turn forms and actually create cool looking buildings and characters like what you're seeing me draw and like what i draw here on my channel well guess what man i've created a series of easy art lessons and these are super simple broken down real time videos teaching you how to draw you can draw within a weekend and of course i also have a lot of other art tips here on my youtube channel so don't forget to subscribe and dudes i am here every wednesday and sometimes more so i will see you then a ciao baby oh yeah

Channel: Trent Kaniuga

Views: 134,606

Rating: 4.9581347 out of 5

Keywords: Trent Kaniuga, Twilight Monk, World of Warcraft, Diablo 3, league of legends, final fantasy, naruto, how to draw, photoshop tutorial, speed painting, time lapse, art, sketchbook pro, art tutorials, art process, how to, skottie young, joe mad, zelda, procreate, sketchbook, fantasy, artist, best art tutorial, best artist, indie, art tutorial, digital art tutorial, comic, comic tutorial, cartoon network, speedpainting, timelapse, anime, anime tutorial, drawing tutorial, popular, fortnite

Id: ZOQ0A46IAGI

Length: 22min 32sec (1352 seconds)

Published: Mon May 03 2021