Lessons

Lesson Info

Fine Tuning the Image

Well we're going to add a bit of a stamp now with some texture. And I'm just thinking we'll do that now. What I'm going to do first, is I'm going to duplicate at this particular layer and I'm going to add a new drawing layer above that. I'm going to use another trick here to work with. This again, this is something I do quite a lot in Illustrator draw because if I use, I'll just do this here, too. This is a real hosh-posh of techniques by the way. So I'm just bring it down. Taking that to about 30% opacity. Actually, I'm going to go even further than that. I'm going to go to about 15 just there. In the drawing of the tank, you might remember you saw that at the beginning. There's a lot of smoke coming out of the back of the tank because it's going along. What you won't have noticed in there is the detail, it's not actually a war machine, it's an ink tank because the little missiles on the side are full of paint and ink, you see? It's an ink tank. What I sometimes do is this. I'll paint...

over the top like this. I might even use wobbly lines like this so I get an uneven texture and then I come back and I build that up and keep building it up so that I get this sort of shading effect here. Can you see that? That's, I think that's actually enhancing that quite a bit there around that. It's certainly getting some real, real darkness and definition in there. Now the thing is, is if I continue doing that, I then got to switch to the eraser and go around and manually clean all of that stuff up. Like this. Which is fine. There's nothing wrong with doing that but there is an easier way and this is 100% the technique I use all the time. On a draw layer, and I'm just going to get rid of this one. I'm just going to delete it. I'm going to add a new one here. I actually draw myself a mask. So draw a layer here, and an investment of just a few minutes in doing this is worth quite a lot in the long run. Then I work around the edges here like so. I'm just going to go around there. I don't have to worry about where the lines begin or end. Obviously I don't want them going into the actual shape of the cat like I did just then. Like so, work around there. I'm going to spin that around. Somebody asked me the other week, "Why do you do that? "Why don't you turn the iPad around?" I said, "Well you know, "when I'm drawing on my desk on a piece of paper, "the last thing I do is move my desk when (laughs) "you know, when I want a slightly different angle "and this is the same thing." Especially when I've got this on a stand, yeah, like so and I'm working like this. Just being able to spin that around and zoom in and out makes it so much easier for me to work. Woops. A way that's very natural for me. Of course, the curvature of our bodies is the thing that changes this particular variable. You don't draw straight lines naturally, or if you do, you do it from a higher up part of the, part of the arm. You don't do it from the wrists or from the thing. You use the forearm to do longer lines like that. And at any point, the fact that you're hinged at the shoulder there changes the way that the line tapers off. Of course, I've got quite a lot of curvature going on just at the minute. (laughs) I'm especially sensitive to just taking time with doing shorter lines here. Plus, I'm going live on here, my first, view with CreativeLive in front of all you lovely people who are being so great joining for this. I go around like that. Once I've done that, and that's a reasonable line there, I make another one here. I am actually normally a little bit tidier than that for no reason other than I like to be tidy and a long press in there, and if that's all closed together that should fill with color. Apart from of course, it's resolutely failing to do that at the moment. I'm just going to undo there. Let's just have a quick scout around and just make sure all of those thing overlap. There's no breaks in there. It should be one complete thing. I can't see any breaks there. I'm going to make another shape here and just make sure this is filling okay where it is. Good. Right, so. Do you know what? I'll use one of the shapes here. I'm going to zoom that out like so, change its orientation slightly with this little slider widget under here. Let's get that out to there. I normally get it to exceed the canvas dimension by a bit, like so. I'm just going to draw around that. In fact, like to double tap on that. On the line there and it will draw it for me. I'll long press in there. Use my finger to do that. Why is that not, oh, it is now. Now it's filling. (laughs) Hurrah! I sometimes name things like this, I tap on the name call it something like mask just there, and then hide it. I tap the visibility on. Can't even see if there's one just here. In the top I'll double tap it in the layer stack to hide it. I've got that mask there and like those game shows your mask is safe, do you want to go for the Jeopardy question? I'm just going to add another draw layer. It's not in the right stacking order so I'm just going to pull that down away like so and let's go for broke with that, this should be low opacity. Very quickly, I'm going to make this real big like so, and I'm just going to come in here and just add some random vector shading underneath this like so. I know the end result on this particular one is going to be rastered but that doesn't matter. You get the idea. The idea is to show you that you can do this. With these big strokes this isn't going to look too attractive but I'm not worried here at the moment. Get some of those in there. Just building that up and you can see how I'm using pressure now to change the brush size to get in there tighter and go across that first off along here. Do all of those things, color that stuff up, get in there, just making some single stokes along there. That's too dark. He's been out all night though playing with his friends and his sister. Get in top here, do some of these. Cool, so good other way. There's nothing to stop me switching out to, this is the beautiful thing about working digitally. If you want to add in highlights, you can do that as well. Real simple. As it happens, I don't, but you can do it. I'm just going to get in there, do a few things. I think that's changed, changed that sufficiently. Yeah, agreed? Now erasing that, if I long press with the eraser, it will only erase the sections that share the same appearance and attributes underneath it. That's where the mask comes in. What I typically do is I target it, I duplicate it, because that way I've got one that's protected. I then tap on the visible one, and choose merge down. That pushes that down on top of that shape which means I can then long press with the eraser and all of that additional texture is gone. It doesn't matter if you're working on a vector only illustration, or a really oddly structured hybrid like I'm doing here, right? That's a quick way to block erase a whole lot of content based on the drawing that you've got there. Let's just add in some, just a couple of stamp-y things here which is kind of where we were. I'm going to go, we'll go with the CreativeLive thing here. I should have made it a slightly different texture but we'll put some in on a new layer, and then we're going to push this over to sketch here. I'm just going to add some of these. I'm going to make this real big. Okay, on a brand new layer, like so. I'm going to use the properties of the currently targeted brush. I'm going to press on that. Which it happens to be the eraser so that was awesome. There we go. We'll do some of that. We'll bring these in. If you've got more interesting shapes than this, so I've got a cross-hatching thing but I didn't bother capturing about. I did this. I'm moving these things around. You can see how very quickly you could build up this texture over the top. Just move this around, just keep applying it. I'm just long pressing on all those different places there. Great thing is, if you don't like it, you can just undo. Those strokes at the end work beautifully because they like, they will kind of enhance what I've got going on there. I can change the size of it. Like so, and do that. Now we can use that. I'm just going to send that tonight night. I'm just going to make this one awake. Going to bring it down on top of that one. Double tap it to turn it on. Merge it down, same as before, switch to the eraser, and then just get rid of that content just there. There's a couple of other places I'd like to remove it like in the eye. If I had a cross-hatch texture for example, that would have worked really nice inside of there. I still got a bit more on and there you are. Now I'm going to push that back to Photoshop Sketch. There's a few different ways I could do that. I'm going to use the clipboard method that I used earlier on. You could actually export this as an image and re-import into Photoshop Sketch but here, I'm just going to go clipboard, all of the visible layers get copied, let's go back over to Photoshop Sketch. I'm actually going to create a new thing just here. I'll go with iPad Pro just there. I'm going to do a new image layer here, paste the image, similar to before. I'm just going to zoom out and pinch along the side there. Resize that like so. Okay, done. Now, I'm going to duplicate that very quickly because I want to just show you that one of the awesome things, if I hide them underneath, you can do here is actually, convert this to a sketch layer. In that way it behaves exactly like pre-drawn pixels. You could do that with a photo that you bring in. If you just want to enhance something there, do something, your kids, your cat, whatever, your wife, your husband, whatever. That's now converted to a sketch layer which means if I wanted to erase any content here I could just come along and just tidy that up. I'm just going to make an erasing line right across the middle like that. You could see I'm actually removing those pixels. I'll undo that. Here's a really cool thing. A lot of people say, "Well all you can do with the eraser "in Photoshop Sketch is change the size "and change the opacity. "That's absolutely rubbish. "I want to be able to add my own brush tips onto there." You don't need to do that. I'm going to go to Teri Hatcher, not literally of course, more's the pity. I'm going to go to my Teri Hatcher brush just here. I'll just use that just there and make it a bit bigger so you can see what it's going to look like. I'm going to come here to the blend modes and I'm going to tap clear. That turns, and you have this in Photoshop, too, and it turns any brush into an eraser. Can you see that? You can remove that stuff. I'm not painting with white. If I turn the background off, you can see the underlying pixel grid there. You have got a bewildering array, of course, it's totally removing all that inking I did earlier on but I've got the original underneath. You can actually remove, there's the original there so it's all still safe. Even that, if I change the blending mode of the layer as well, something else occurred, if I change that to multiply and maybe drop the opacity down a little bit, that's just adding to that overall texture. Now all those mixed up things that we did earlier, they're now really building up into quite a lot of texture on top of that particular shape. You've also got access to your Creative Cloud libraries as you know for your brushes. One of the things you can do is download the Carl Webster brushes, Creative Cloud subscription gives you all of those, and you can bring quite a few of those into Photoshop Sketch. I'm just going to go to the Webster brushes just here. I've been using our own brush on that so I was using the Teri Hatcher brush just there, and what we're going to do here is go on to, one of these brushes just here. I'm going to use maybe this one. Beautiful mess which I'm very, very fond of. I'm going to get told of in a bit for not using my, not using my own brush a bit more than I did and not warning people that I've done it. I'm so naughty. I'm just going to turn this layer on, add a new sketch layer just there. I'm going to come out to this beautiful mess brush. Let's just choose something from the cat. Round about there, let's just go out and get one of those other color themes here. Let's go for analogous. Something off to the side if that maybe, that green will be pretty good. Make this quite a lot bigger. Now I'm going to paint underneath this shape. Look there, go, see? Just brush in some content there. I'm going to swap out, choose a slightly darker variation of that, just underneath the cat. Just here. Like so. Go still darker and a little bit more around the wheel. Let's introduce a bit more here. A bit of, it's almost like he's jumping out of the, I'll go much further and go dark and bring that size down. You can almost imagine that he's jumping around with the trees around him. That's got a bit same-y just there in terms of that color. There's a few different things I could do there but what I'm actually going to do is just drop the opacity of that down slightly. Change it to multiply, so it'll still be dark but it's against that. Now we've got that nice background in there.