Turning a basic drawing into a 3D character in Photoshop - Round 2

Heat. Heat. Heat. Heat up here. Guten Morgan. Hello. Here we are again. Oh my goodness. Bright and early. Hey, thief. What time is it where you are? Are you at you you afternoon at this point? This is a little bit different. I wonder I wonder who is around at this time. We will see. So you're going to carry on from it's going to say yesterday then last night. Hey Raymond 318. Oh okay. So you're like what's that mess? Four, five hours ahead. Yeah. So last night got this far and I just I'm itching to carry on with it. I think today is going to get quite busy for me as well like later on. So, I thought I'm going to try and sneak in a stream a bit earlier. 4:48. Okay, cool. Where about you based? I'm thinking east of the UK. So, for anyone who didn't see yesterday's stream, it was a bit uh spontaneous last night. So, just tracing over an image of a Jolton. It's a Pokemon. This is like a really good exercise for drawing digital painting and all that sort of stuff. And added the colors in. So we've got the solid color version. We got rid of the stroke. So this was kind of broken into pieces like so. And then we can whip it into Photoshop. And then the whole thing was just kind of shaded and sketched. The techniques are very similar to what I use for photo manipulation. I cover this in my Photoshop courses. If you want to look at like learn these illustrative techniques in more detail, there's a pinned link in the chat doodle. But um yeah, I just I woke up this morning. I was like, I got to carry on with that. I got to carry on. We gota It looks really cool. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah, it turned out pretty good. Uh, I did a Charmander. You probably saw in the thumbnail. Uh, where is it? Oh, my desktop needs a tidy. So, yeah, this is what kicked it off the day before I did this one completely offline. And, uh, it turned out all right. So, I thought it'd be fun to try something a little bit trickier. And this was definitely trickier. What I did with this one was I got it to kind of version one. That was what I did on my own. And then I ran this design through Firefly and said, "Make this more 3D." And so it did a generation. Obviously, it AIified the heck out of it. But it showed me where some of the shadows and lighting could be improved, which is really helpful having that as a reference. And then it got me to that point. I was like, "Okay, right. Need more shadows here. More shadows on this bit to make the little thumb thing more pronounced. It was really helpful actually. So I've done the same thing today. I've got Jolon. I've got him to version one here. I've just ran this through Firefly with the simplest prompt like make it more 3D. And that's what it did. And even just looking at that, it it just gives me an indication of where I can add shadows and different bits and how to detail the paws. Ah, just this is going to be so helpful. So, I've kind of got this offscreen as a reference I'm going to use as well, which is going to make my life a lot easier. But it's also going to educate me because I'm not like a I'm not a digital painter, illustrator in Photoshop kind of person. It's just applying the skills that I've got and trying to trying to push it in a direction that is a little bit different to what I normally do and just try and practice that sort of those digital painting techniques. So that's the plan. All right, I need some music. Music music. Right. So, first of all, we're going to go duplicate this. We got V2. If you missed last night's stream, then uh it's on the channel. But long story short, we've got all the body parts. It's really simple, actually, when you break it down. We got all the different body parts, the vector shapes from Illustrator copied over. So, we've got like his leg. It's a separate piece. And then we've just got all the shading brushed onto separate layers that are then clipped to that layer so they don't extend beyond that body part. So, let's uh see what we can do. I'm going to start with the face. I started with that on the Charmander because there's quite a lot of I'm just going to zoom in. Is that my phone doing enough? Swear something's ding off. Okay. Right. Okay. So, have I got the head? No. Let's start with the head. We can see we've got a bunch of layers on there already. Right, we need more shadows. In fact, I need to grab my colors as well. Got my little color palette up here. This is what I've been using. So, have that hover around here. Right. We need that darker color, I think. Brush. This one here is the best brush in the world. It's amazing. Just use this. If you're trying to get into digital painting, don't muck around with brushes like I did, thinking a brush will be the solution. It's not. Use this one. Adjust the hardness. Adjust the flow. That's all you need to get started. I can't believe I didn't I I wish I knew that sooner rather than downloading brushes, trying them, and get frustrated. It's tricky. I'm trying to sort of lean over the pen display, but the microphone's in the way. So, it's fine. We'll just have to deal with it. They're going to come up there and enhance the shadow down the right. Yeah. Oh, thank you. Yes, there there is a missing tooth. There is a missing tooth. So, the AI missed a tooth off and I traced over it. But that's fine. We can add a tooth back in. No problem. That's pretty straightforward. This is This is where it gets hard. I'm going to switch to the other one. So, I'm dropping that flow value. Got to try and shade around here to add a bit more of a three-dimensional uh look to the nose. So, it's kind of coming forward a bit. Then over here, bit more shading as well. This reference image is so helpful. And it's I don't know. Hopefully I'll I won't need to always rely on it. But doing this one after the Charmander I did, I definitely learned a few things. I think I did a better job with this. So, we're just varying the brush size as well. effectively just kind of sculpting and contouring this a little bit. There's a few Yeah, there's a few highlights in some places. So, I'm using the eraser brush as well. does get does get a bit bit layericious sometimes. Right, this is where this is where it gets really hard. I've shaded this, but I need to add some like definitive lines like this. So hard to know how to add these. So something that comes up like that. But obviously this whole illustration isn't a linear style. So when you start adding those linear element elements, it looks a bit weird. Let's try adding bit of this buting up against And then underneath here, it needs like this super tight dark shading as well. And if anyone does fancy having a go at this, I'd recommend watching last night's stream because, you know, it wasn't that long ago that I would have look at something like this and go, there's no way I can make that. But it's not it's not as hard as you It's just the brush stuff that takes a lot of practice. Not even practice. Just going over it over and over again. Crank the hardness a little bit. Yeah, something like that. I mean, even look at that. That's just literally the first what? 5 10 minutes. My goodness. Flipping it. That's way better. Oh my god. Wow. This This might look really cool. If you're really confident, I'm trying to do this more, you can try doing it on just one layer. So, brush your shadows, highlights, and everything on one layer. The advantage to having multiple layers is obviously you can turn some on and off, but try and be a little bit a little bit braver here and there. So, we got this. It kind of goes up and then leads into the eyes a little bit. And a slightly softer pass there. Maybe down here. Bit harder down this side. The trick is using a really low flow value as well. What's this? Got a bit of highlight around there. Let's get rid of that. Yeah, we'll do something like this. NBA jersey swap possible. What's that? You might have to remind me. Yeah, it's hard if you want to make like a like an eyebrow, like a crease, you know, you like you frown, you get creases and I mean I've got wrinkles all over my forehead or whatever. It's so hard. You got to have like a dark sort of a dark line in the middle like that. And then either side you need like a softer softer one. And then on the other side a lighter one like that. It's just so I find it so hard to get it looking quite right. Let's change that to white. Actually, we'll try that. Yeah, kind of like that. You sort of see what I mean. It's not turned It's not turned out the worst, but I find it a lot easier on photo manipulation. It's quite good if you've got like scars on skin. You can sort of draw the line of the scar and then add a highlight and a shadow to either side and it like makes it look raised up. Yeah, I mean you could do uh you could swap jerseys and things. This is a a little a little bit different. There we go. Let's just try and get a nice nice smooth eyebrow. There we go. That'll do. Yeah, this actually know this one's a bit subtle. This one's a bit bit more subtle. Right, let's get rid of this highlight. We'll start start fresh. So this one's like something like this. It sort of tapers off and then gets a bit thicker. You can sort of shape shape it a bit with the eraser tool. We got some light coming in there as I think over here we need a really hard. This is the difference though. First 20 20 minutes, half an hour. It's definitely worth doing. Just looks a bit a bit scrappy in places. A little bit a little bit rough. Then around here, I'm going to have to build up on this here. Kind of going around the eye. and then add a little bit of a highlight. Might have to stick this on a new layer. Oh, I'm using the eraser tool. What an idiot. Whoops. I was like, why is it not showing up? We go. Something like that. And then a little bit of a shadow. Falling off down here. Let's try blurring it a bit. Oh, that's that's a bit better. That helps actually. Yeah, that's actually that does help. Ah, maybe that is the the missing thing just to Yeah. get the lines in and then just soften them a little bit. Whoops. What have I done there? Oh, yes. I mean, this one still looks terrible. But let's try that again with that as a approach. So, we'll go in here and we'll line this out with a bit more bit more punchiness. We got the side there. Can't do that side. We're going to run the blur tool over it. It's definitely better. That's pretty cool, actually. That's a good trick. Have I drunk some water? Uh, not yet. No. I probably should drink some. Hey again, Danish. Andrea. Hello. Hey, Moose. 6:00 a.m. Nice. We're doing more Pokemon. So, this is uh this is this morning's efforts. if anyone saw last night, that's where it landed. This is this morning. This is what I'm using as well, an AI version of where I got to yesterday, and it's just helping me so much look at and figure figure out where the shadows could be improved. So having it as a a reference image, yeah, that sort of use of AI is I'm finding really helpful, especially doing something I don't normally do. Oh yeah, that blur tool is a a real nifty trick actually. Oh yeah, I think you'll really enjoy it, Andrea. You will really enjoy it. It's incredibly simple, the techniques and the tools as well. Let's do a bit on the tongue cuz that doesn't really look like anything right now. kind of brush around here. Make this darker. It's obviously really dark at the minute, but we can fix that in a sec. And then it comes down here, the middle of the tongue. And let's just try and whip a highlight around the side. There we go. Just make it a little bit redder. And then again, we can run the blur tool over some of these parts. Yeah, I mean I mean the improvement is not even close. It's ridiculous when you actually turn it off and on. Makes a massive difference. And even that I would look at that and go I could keep refining and refining. Oh, thanks, Mush. Uh, I'd say the brush shading is infinitely harder than the pen tool. Yeah, we did. We used the pen tool yesterday to uh do this. The pen tool's horrible until you learn how to use it. Like I've done a video, I think a couple of videos recently on Yeah, check out one of my latest videos. The clock method makes the pen tool stupid easy. It's so easy after that. Right, we got to do more. Got to do more face shadings. pencil shading. Oh, I don't know about that. I wouldn't attempt shading with the pen tool. I mean, you you can do, but Yeah, we go. A little bit softer up in there. That blur is so good. Yeah, this will look really cool when it's finished. And these skills are like transferable as well. You know, if you do product retouching, you'll find that you end up using these same skills for brushing shadows. Maybe you want to retouch the lighting on a product. got a little piece there. Let's give you some shading. In fact, this one's behind actually. So, I think I'm going to give that a slightly darker pass just so it looks a bit more like it's behind Love to see people giving these tools a go. Hurts to see so many people calling us designers archaic after AI. Yeah. No, I wouldn't I wouldn't say design is archaic at all. I think a lot of people don't understand uh you know the hallmarks of good design as well. So I think it's very easy for people to use AI to get things done and then someone with experience would look at it and go probably wouldn't use that right out the box, you know. like um like I see logos all the time like uh sometimes for people I know, sometimes for local businesses um all sorts of different things and I know that they've been um just quickly either generated or just grabbed from somewhere online and I could poke holes in them all day. about what what works, what doesn't work, why blah blah blah blah blah. But I think you're going to you're always going to get some people that don't care and appreciate those those details and you know that's fine. Some people just they won't get it. They can't see it the way you see it. Do you know what I mean? That's a good question. Yeah, there's a few different ways to go about it. We could we could keep it more sort of 3D model illustrative or we could go and make it more furl like. What? Oh, I don't know. I need to see what it looks like when it's fully done. What I might do is just shade it like this. But then some of these spiky bits just add a little bit of subtle something to it. We There needs to be lightning somewhere as well. So maybe maybe on his ass here. We'll give him a bit of lightning. I told for a rental company for some town homes. After I showed them the logos, they said those are good, but our head manager guy was playing with AI and we liked these. Yeah. So, I mean, they just ain't got a clue, you know? It's it's fr Yeah, it's it's frustrating. Like, like that would obviously I'd find that frustrating, but at the same time, I'd be like instantly you're not for me. we're we're not a like we're not a good fit, you know, because if your head manager can I mean to in my brain, right, I'm like your head manager who probably doesn't have any design experience, doesn't understand the nuances of design, has just whipped something up, not knowing what on earth he's doing. Do you know what I mean? like a it would be like me having a problem with my car, taking it to the mechanic and going, "Actually, do you know what? I think I think it's this. I'm going to muck around with this." And then when I leave the garage and I've fixed it and my car doesn't work later on and it falls apart, it's I just I Yeah, I couldn't even imagine even imagine that. I think sometimes people think they know about things they don't know about because if someone did their own logo like and they used AI and they said, "Oh yeah, actually I like this." The first thing I would say to them is like, "Okay, what are your brand values?" like this this this. Rattle off some stuff from my questionnaire and then say, "Okay, how does this logo convey those values and you could slowly, depends obviously on the conversation, but you could very easily, if you were like reviewing or critiquing it, pick apart the fact that it might look pretty and you might go, I like that." But whether you like it and it looks pretty has no bearing on whether your target customer is going to resonate with it. We're not designing a pretty logo that the office goes, "Oh, that's nice." We're designing something for a specific group of people, i.e. your customers. They're the ones that it needs to resonate with. Right? So whether Bob or Janet from accounting like it or they prefer squares and they hate the color blue, kind of irrelevant. It's totally irrelevant. You always bring it back to the brief. We're designing for the This is for the customer. We need the logo, the brand, every point that they're going to interact with us, it needs to resonate with them first and foremost. They ended up going one of my logo. Oh, good. There's a happy ending there. Yeah. Yeah. I know. I know. Moosh. I think as well as you as you get experience, it becomes not I wouldn't say easier to tie people in knots. It's probably the wrong way of saying it, but if if there is like you get feedback sometimes where people will just say like, "Oh, what if we did this?" And then I think if you can demonstrate with confidence as well, yeah, yeah, that's a good idea. I totally get what you're saying, but if we do this, then this could happen. This might not work, um, perhaps if we do this. And you demonstrate the potential whatifs, the negatives and the positives of going that route. So like, oh yeah, no, I did think about doing that, but then I thought, oh, what if this, and then this, and then this color could not work with that. Um, so I think confidence again is another big part of being a creative professional that I mean I certainly didn't get taught about. I just had to kind of learn it as I went. But it's definitely very important and it's hard as well because you don't want to get, you know, if as soon as you get defensive or, you know, a conversation turns combative and it's defensive like, oh well, it's just, you know, it's it's not really good for anyone. Right. I think I need a slightly harder brush here. Oh yeah. Yeah. I think see I I've found ways that I can use AI in my process as I was talking about and showing you a minute ago, but for me as soon as the quality takes a hit and we're taking shortcuts, it's like nah. like this. Do you know what I mean? Especially if you're a person or a company that that prides themselves on doing high quality work, you know, 100%. As you get more exper Well, it's like anything a thief. The more uh experience you get, the more you know your craft and your subject, the easier it becomes to talk with confidence as well, just because you know it inside and out. And people see and feel that as well. Also, a really handy trick that I can't remember where I learned it from. I'm going to just say the internet. Um, actually, no, no, I remember who I learned it from. It's a guy called, um, this guy, and I'm going to butcher his name now, and I'm terribly sorry, but Vin Vinyang. Follow this guy on YouTube. He does communication videos, and like he he talks about like the art of speaking slowly as well. So, and I I'm I'm doing it now. I naturally do it sometimes where you speak slowly and you pause as soon as you start going um um and I I do this all the time. You'll see me doing it all stream. Like I'm not saying don't say um ever, but when you're presenting to someone, sometimes a a subtle pause is more effective because you give yourself time to think about what you're going to say rather than filling it with ums that comes across sometimes as uncertainty. And I've always remembered that. So whenever I'm in conversations or certain conversations, I'll make a an intentional conscious choice to speak very slowly and slip in some pauses as well. And the same goes for movement as well. If you're This is This is I don't know what this is turning into, but it's just like things that I've learned over the years. If you're in a an environment where you're not feeling particularly confident, move slowly. Move very slowly and move intentionally. And if you feel like rushed, like someone's rushing you or pressuring you, intentionally move at your own speed. You set the pace that you're moving at. Sorry, a bit of a bit of a a tangent there, but but it is. Yeah, communication is just so important. So important. Not for just designers, anybody in life. Is this actually looking better or God? This is definitely one of the harder bits. You didn't have to convince them to work with you. They were already totally good. Nice. How did they come across you? Did they like Did they seek you out? Did they know your work already? Had they seen your work? Like they must have they must have either seen your work or just really liked you and got a good good vibe and they were like, "Yeah, yeah, you're the one we want to work with." What was it? What was the the thing? You know, there's the cat going off. Yes, they are a little bit strong. I can go in and blur some of these though at some point. It's really difficult as well to get it looking as good as you think cuz each one needs to sort of almost have like a defining line as well. Oh, this is flipping hard. Yeah, he's amazingly mish. He's so good. Yep. Yeah. That sounds like a kitty cat. quiet. It's definitely hard to get it looking really good on these bits. You all right, R? D. Nice. Easy. Bosch. It's nice when things are simple in life, isn't it, Mish? Things just just work. I'm really liking this brush actually at about 50% hardness. Not something I normally do. You sort of get like more the strokes look more paintlike, a little bit more intentional. Even if some of these are touch too hard, you can easily just soften them. And what is that layer? Cuz that looks bloody awful. There we go. Cool. Yeah, it's definitely a work in progress. We're getting there though. What is it, R? He's meowing about something. This bit here is probably going to be a bit darker because it's behind his head. So, I definitely do want some sort of shadow bit here. Maybe some of this right by the ear is a bit darker maybe. Then we could run the blur. Some of these bits where you got like the scrappy looking lines, we can run the blur tool over that. Yeah. And just blur it all together a bit. Let's just try a gausian blur. Actually, could be a good way to just blur everything a bit. So, this is what we've done so far. Coming up to an hour now. Before. After. Totally worth it. Definitely makes a difference. Even if it's still got a ways to go. Cheers, Moosh. The brush name is the default brush. Nothing nothing fancy. This one here. Soft round pressure opacity and flow brush. Leah, are you right to let the cat in? Huh? Yeah. As I was saying earlier, don't don't spend loads of time uh trying to find fancy brushes to become a better painting person. I've I've got all the best brushes, but actually, you just got to practice with this. Change your hardness, change your brush size, change your flow value, change your colors. Those are literally the only four things that I'm doing and have done through this entire process to get to this point. And I'm not a a digital painter. I need to stress that. I am not a digital painter. This is not what I do. I'm just trying to apply the skill set that I've got to something a bit different for for funsies. So, I would definitely encourage uh people to have a go at this. Even if you don't think you could do it, you might be surprised because I know when I first did it, I certainly was Oops. My boy Jolt on looking crisp. We're getting there. We're getting there. I'm not 100% on this style if I'm honest. But I'm not I'm I don't know. I'm not averse to a bit of Photoshop if we end up throwing in some real fur at some point. If I can get like a triangle of fur, I could then make this into a photo manipulation thing, but I want to try and keep it digital painting as long as I can because that's what I'm really trying to train here. Trying to do the thing I'm not as proficient at to get better. There we go. Just brush in some shadows under here so the head kind of sits bit more firmly in front of everything else. Go. Something like that. Oh, it's fine. When you zoom in and like I scrutinize one bit, I'm like, "Oh, like this looks terrible." But when you actually zoom out and just take it as what it is, it's all right considering it started like this. coming from Illustrator and these techniques. Just to reiterate, I do teach these in my Photoshop courses. There's a whole module in the Photoshop course on this type of illustration practice exercises from shading to doing a full 3D product using all these techniques. So, if you're in that course or even if you're just watching this and you want to have a go at it, please do join our Discord and share what you make. I really want to see it. I'd love to see someone have a crack at this. The lighter the shadow, the more I lower the opacity and hardness. I feel I get a better blend that way. Yeah, I mean, you can use opacity. Um, I use flow probably a lot more, but you can flip between the two. I think part of what I'm doing here as well is I don't know what style I'm even trying to do. So, I'm just almost meandering, figuring it out as I go along. Just kind of doing things and going, "Oh, that looks good." Like yesterday, it all looked a bit soft and fluffy until I started using a harder brush, these harder streaks, and then it was like, "Oh, this is kind of cool. I want to do some work on some of the feet. Actually, let's do one of the eyes first. There's a really cool look that these have got for the eyes. I want to give it a go. Cool. Flipping heck am I going to do this? Um, okay. We're going to sample this bit and um we're just going to brush something like that. Just going around the eye. Drop the opacity. I don't know if this is going to work or not. And then you've got these kind of little highlights. I need them to taper off. So shape dynamics uh control size by pen pressure. I'll do it quickly just to see if it looks good or not. It's kind of that approach. And we could just slap on a little bit of blur. Something like that. I think I might need to do that with perhaps a little bit more precision at some point. I'm going to download all the fonts would blend if I don't think so. No. I mean, I'm sure I'm sure you could use it. You could probably use anything for anything. But I think for these ones in particular, I'm trying to use very particular painting techniques. Thanks. Yeah, I'm just doing these quickly for the eyes. Always come back to that later. Bit more on the eyebrow here. I totally missed on this side. And on this eye here, I think a harder brush. So, there's like a this bit. It's kind of catching the light. You can still use blending options. Some of them might work quite well. Oh, flipping takes a long time. Love your videos, by the way. Nice to catch your live stream. I may join later if you're still live. Have a nice day. Ah, cheers, Robert. All right, the dreaded pause. If I can do one of these, I think I'll be able to do them all. Yeah, they're quite dark on the bottom. I got to really commit to it being darker. The line has to be really thin. The bottom's got to be properly dark. And this is dark on the bottom because it's in contact uh close proximity to the floor. And some of these bits here, they need a highlight as well. It just cements the definition of the that part of the pore. Flick that up there. It's so hard to have the paws not look terrible at the bottom. Yeah, even that's an improvement. But when you zoom in, it's Oh, it's so rough. It's these bits. These creases. I find doing the creases so flipping hard. I'm sure I'll get it though. I'm sure I get it. This might take a bit of bit of practice. Even that's a little bit better. No, Carrie, we can't have any accidents. Oh dear. I just I've got this image of you just like driving into like a building or something, some sort of structure whilst watching the stream. Yeah, we'll run that up there as well. And then we need a darker much darker edge down here. And then Oh, yeah. It's going to get super dark under here. Yeah, of course it is. Oh, it looks better. It definitely does look better, even if it's just a bit murky. Let's just maybe blur some of it. There we go. It's a bit better. Oh god, I don't want to do more feet. We got to do another three of those. There we go. Start to start today so far. So, it's moving in uh some sort of direction. Not entirely sure what direction that is, but Mhm. Right, let's get these feet done. I suppose the good thing about doing all four paws is that it pauses me to go through this process over and over and maybe get a bit faster at it and a bit better. There we go. Pause. Let's just give it a little blur. And this bit on the paws. Just going to lay in a bit of white. Nice super thin brush. That's a bit better. That was definitely easier than the last four. I think it's like when you get a tattoo actually as well. should probably look at my own arms because a lot of the ink work I've got done is all black. But then my tattooist always goes in at the end with a very very fine, very painful white ink brush. And that's where he does some of the details because adding the white helps certain bits pop. Oh, nice. Oh, Andrea. Oh, Andrea. Is that Is that for my eyes only or you let me know? Very cool. Very cool. Worth being kept in suspense for days on end. only for you. Gotcha. Yes. My this entire my right arm is Scorpio. My obviously my astrology sign. So the whole arm is Scorpio themed and then the whole left arm is Viking Norse themed. All right, let's go a little bit darker for this one, I think. Yeah, it's like for the pore it's like you need the soft shade bit, you need the hard dividing line, you need the white. I think I've cracked it. I think I've cracked it. You need the highlight there. Yes, that is it. So to demonstrate this like you've got especially relevant for the pores and stuff like this eyebrows, little creases. That's my favorite paw so far. I like that. It's a good paw. Yes, I do play video games. What about you? What you playing? Oh, something else. Oh god, the teasing never ends. Flipping heck. I don't know, Andrea. I feel like you could say that and there's always going to be another another thing to tease me with. Like you reveal the next thing and then it's like, "Oh, no, no, no, no. There's another one. You can't fool me." Uh, okay. Right. So, these lines are a bit too hard. So, we're going to go soft. Soft. Crank it up. Do the pronounced the pronounced one almost like the sort of the crack the canyon in between the paws. Think of it like that. And then we're going to just add the highlight. It's too much. Oh yes. See, and I've only figured this out from banging my head against the wall going through this process. Now I don't like the other feet. I feel like these last two feet are better. So I got to go back and fix these now. Oh, what on earth was I doing here? What a mess. Right. Let's go. Let's go and fix these poor feet. Uh, so crank it up. So, I'm just changing my flow value quite a lot. If you want to do it quickly, the shortcut is, you know, you press the number keys to change your opacity at the top. Hold shift and then you can change these values. So, I'm just constantly doing that. progress. Let's have a look at the feet before and after. I feel like this is Yeah, much better. Oh, yeah. Look at that front foot. Look at that. Goodness me. Right. So, this one then needs the hard line. Yeah, this is definitely something for me to practice. And then the more pronounced one I also painted over the other sketch in Photoshop just to get an idea if you want to take a look. It's going to be complicated to add color to it. That is really cool. Yeah, I guess you Yeah, that that's really cool. I guess you're going to have to Yeah, have it maybe two colors. Maybe a purple. I don't know what you're thinking for your eye in in the eye and the mouth, but maybe a purple black and the purple color. Not too dark could look kind of cool. And then your background would be black. Oh, Discord. Hang on. Um, yeah, if anyone doesn't want to join the Discord, you can go to dansky.com. There's a link on the homepage or just go straight here. Orange, black, and white. Okay. Orange. It's It looks red on my screen. I'm just going to mention that. It's very close to orange, but I would say that's probably more red. I That's not a MacBook Pro screen, so I don't know if there's like a color calibration thing or something. Oh, it's going to look different, is it? Okay, cool. What we doing? Oh, flipping out. Has that been two hours already? No. Hour and a half. I've lost my my marbles. All right. What's next? All right. We got some more work to do down here. Oh my god. Jesus. Where did you come from? Flipping heck. I thought I heard a child. There you go. This is yesterday. That's today. It's getting It's getting there, is it? I like it. You like it? Have the 10year-old seal of approval. Level up. Something. Go to bed. Funny funny boy. Sorry. Not sorry, Carrie. Just don't crash into anyone. That shading looks awful. What on earth have I done here? This looks terrible. Uh let's Yeah, that's that's a good trick actually, the blur if you go a bit heavy with it. And then here on the day. This bit down here, it needs to be even darker. so it sits properly under and behind that leg. And then maybe on the back we've got like a little bit of a highlight. Yeah, really just on that. This bit is hard. needs a shadow from this spiky bit. Let's try blurring it. This is looking unreal. Oh, thank you so much. Thank you. Yeah, it's it's turned out like yeah, way better than I thought it would until I mean I gota be honest until I did the Charmander the other day. It's like um it's like I've got this sort of skill set where I can do a lot of things with Photoshop, but I'm always trying to push it a little bit more and make the things I do like a little bit harder or try something like this where I'm taking those skills and logically I should be able to do it. But obviously logic and actually being able to do it are two different things. So, it's like I've got it's like the theory. In theory, I should be able to do this using these skills and these techniques, but until you actually start trying it, it's uh you don't really know. Definitely. I mean, I've already got the utmost admiration for artists, very talented people, but when you do this sort of stuff, it's like, my god, how how do they do some of the things they do, right? We got to layer in some shadows. Now, this is this is going to be hard, but if I pull it off, look really cool. So, we got to get some very thin hard lines in there. And then we're just going to slowly build this out. It should, if I can get this looking right, lift these spikes up a little bit. I forget. Is there a way to draw a straight line with the pencil tool? Uh, sorry, the brush tool. Like I want to just No, there is. I know there is. What is it? There's something like where you can That's pretty good. There's a thing. I forget what it is. You have to maybe click, hold shift, and click again, and you can draw a straight brush line between them. My favorite Pokemon, uh, it's probably Jolion, actually. I think if I had to pick one, I'm playing the original games again. The they re Nintendo re-released, what was it? Fire Red and Leaf Green. So they I played like OG Pokemon Red and Blue and they released these ones in 2004 I think the uh the kind of re remade versions the updated ones and they've now just released them for the Switch. So I'm playing through them again. Leo's playing it as well. I had my first Pokemon battle ever on those games against Leo and he flipping beat me. I lost to my 10-year-old son. He had a flipping blastoise and he just just decimated everybody. I nearly beat him, but nearly doesn't quite cut it. So, he's got he's got bragging rights at home now. Shut up, Andrea. It's a damn loss to a 10-year-old. No, it's nice. I'm I'm happy for him. That's what I tell myself at night. Well done, son. I'm proud of you. He says, he's hissing. Oh, a child has entered the chat. Can you not use a small hairbrush to add more texture to the M? Well, yeah, I think AI said something similar earlier, Carrie. Like, I could use the You know the hair brushes. Have you done the hair lessons in the course yet, Carrie? I could use that and try to turn the mane, if you want to call it that, into more hair and fur, but I don't know yet. So, I'm just going to continue the style I've got going, which is a more of a illustrative style. But then maybe maybe all of this not being so perfect and being more like hair would be be better. I'm honestly just not sure yet. I think it's the kind of thing I'm going to cross that bridge when I come to it. But yeah, you might be right. Some of this isn't too bad actually. This one here kind of needs a You need to do like this a bit different so it kind of looks like this one is behind the one on top. And maybe this one here could just actually No. Let's run the blur over it. There we go. Not my favorite bit, but it it'll do for now. little bit there right earlier today. Makes such a difference, doesn't it? Oh, it is that simple, isn't it? Yeah, you're right, Andrew. So, click, hold shift, and click. Yeah, it's one of those little things that just completely escapes my brain. I have to remember that. I need him. I mean I mean we could try something for this. We rasterize the hair, merge it onto a single layer. I think the smudge tool would be the best bet. strength at maybe 90. We could obviously got to get the the brush size right. Do something like this. And we need to move this to the top, don't we? Just taking these brush strokes. We'll do a first pass with um bigger brushes. Let me know what you think to this, whether it looks better or worse. So, I'm still got no idea if this is a good idea or not. Yes, it would it would be fun to to do a Pokemon card design. It take the the thing and do the card, get it printed. would be quite cool, I think. Ah, yes. They need to be more more sharp. And this is just a real, you can't really see, but I'm just flicking my wrist here and trying to Where did I put the original one? I've not deleted it, have I? Oh, no. I moved it, didn't I? I moved it White jagged object. Yeah, we'll remember that. We'll call this white hair merged. It's quite good actually, the smudge tool for texturing as well. Not just the bits I'm sort of flicking outside, but inside as well. You can see I could pull some of these shadows in and push whites back out, which is quite a nice technique for the hair actually. Pull some gray, push some white in. just effectively like zigzag backwards and forwards and blend the white. I don't know if I like that or not actually. I really don't know. Hey Reco, we are indeed maybe using a bigger brush so it's less tiny. H maybe. Yeah, there's little crevice gaps as well. Do you think? I honestly don't know. This is before with Well, this is before today, actually. I've done a lot of work on the fur. Yeah, maybe you're right, actually. It's just so different from everything I've been doing. I think I think I prefer them when they're straight. Like it's just getting the right look right look for the strokes. Really pointy. So there's like lots there's some little ones in there, but there's also some just big daddy strokes that are just blasting out from the center like less like right. I know I know what I'm saying. Less like hair, which is what I was trying to do just now. More like electrified lightning fur. Yeah. So, less of this and more having it blasting out from his face, which isn't something you hear every day. And maybe some of these just blur them a little bit so we get less. Yeah. Less granular hairs here. Let's just try and blur a second. I think I like it. You like it more now? You like the one I'm going with the fur? You want Carrie wants to do a Pokemon card. Hey man, welcome home sunshine. Let's just fill this bit. I think I might have pulled a bit away from his face there. We'll just fill that in. There we go. Little bit here as well. This is the problem with the smudge tool. You can quite literally just smudge everything all over the place. Um, I'm probably jumping ahead a bit, but I might see if I can get some lightning Oh, no. Wait, hang on. Haven't done his finished his fur yet. Steady on then. We got more fur here. So, I'm going to keep the original. Merge this. Yeah, we'll just do this quickly with the smudge tool. I mean, the smudge tool is great. It's so good. And then you you lurking over here. And then we're going to flick When it comes to drawing hair, there's a few different ways you can you can do it. I cover this in the course. There we go. Little little shameless plug. Um, you can use the brush tool and you can brush in specific hairs and certain colors and things. Raquel, I know you know all about this. Uh, you can also use the smudge tool as well as you can see me doing here. This is slightly different. This is like, you know, I stuck my finger in a plug socket kind of hair. Normally when it's photo retouching, it's, you know, normal wavy line hair. I feel like I want to add some kind of coming out here. This bit feels like it's missing a bit of a bridge. So, we can do that there. Then we could actually just chuck in like a blob of white and then smudge that. So, you can throw in different colors. You know, we could throw in a bit of a shadow as well. Just stick a little smudge there. It's probably too small actually. Yeah, it's a bit too small, but you get the idea. You can chuck color in and just smudge it. Little flick of the wrist. There we go. I think the shadows on the lower collar are too close to the neck around here. lower collar. Wait, where's his where's his collar? Where where is his neck? I can't see his neck. What could I do to electrifi? Like I think I've got some electric brushes. Got some new ones I've not tried out. It's not like typical lightning. It's like that sort of Well, that one more is, but like the cartoon lightning, you know, like if you're watching like an anime and a character cast a lightning spell or something bit like thicker. So, I want to find a nice good straight piece like that. In fact, I'm going to We'll keep that. That's going to be master lightning. We'll see if we can put that in position. I have one there. Maybe a smaller one. Yeah, there we go. We should be able to It's more just the lightning that I want, not a glow per se, but that's fine. If it has a bit of glow with it, not the end of the world. And then this bit of lightning is going to connect to under his main. So this is kind of coming more from him and it goes off up here. Then I'm gonna have to try and fizzle this out into like a little little stump. So just something like And then just peel back the peel back that fade around the edge without touching the lightning too much. Because if I start doing that, you can see it mucks up the lightning. And then color. I don't think I want white. I think it needs to be like a yellow. So, we'll colorize it. We should be able to push the darkness down and crank the saturation all the way up. And we should, what's that? 50. Go 55 on the hue. We should be able to introduce a bit of yellow back into the lightning. So 55 100 minus 10. Just try and remember that you see the difference. So we go colorize 55 or was it minus 55? Can't remember. No, I think I think that's right. Is it right? 55 minus 100. No, plus 100. - 10. Yeah, that's cool. I'm just going to be lazy for now and just chuck a few of these. Chuck a few of these in and just see how it looks. If they look good, then we'll we'll do more. Hey, Gorav needs more glow. Of course it does, Carrie. Oh, damn it. Thy chickens have come home to roost. So, we'll we'll try this for a little bit. Um, actually, not even thought of using a blending mode yet. Have I? Oh, hard light. Even better. Yeah, boy. There we go. A little bit more yellow. That's going to add some glow as well, but we can't do it because the brush has got loads of other bits of fadiness around the edge. So, we're going to have to get rid of that. Just clean that up quickly. And then I can go and add my own glow. So, yeah, Carrie, we're gonna we will get to adding some glow. Show, but I've just got to remove the existing glow. The thing as well, if you do decide to have a go at this, it's fun with Pokemon because they're all different. Some have got scales, some are made of rocks, some have got fur, some are just just skin. So, it's really good practice. I picked Charmander first because he literally just was like skin and pretty pretty simple in terms of his geometry. Whereas this one, I knew it was going to be harder. We've got fur, we've got lightning, we've got lots more to contend with. So, it's a slightly different approach in some places like the fur around the head. Hey, Pops. Oh, have you finished for now? Oh, we got about another 5 10 minutes and then we're going to go um going to get a nice glow. This is a really easy way to add glow to something. We're going to start with linear dodge. Uh we want a soft brush. We're going back to good old faithful here. Best brush in the world. I got to do a video on that. It's just it's so good. Start with five on the flow, zero hardness. And then we're just going to Yeah, there we go. Just going to brush around where the lightning is. Like this. This is really simple. If you want, you can follow the lightning, this we're just going to brush over quite loosely like that. And then if I darken the background, you'll be able to see. I know you won't. H. It's quite hard to see, but if I turn the layer off and on, you see there, it's a bit of illumination happening. Yeah, it's pretty subtle. And I think this one here. Probably going to fizzle that out if I can get away with this. And then maybe this bit of lightning. Where is it? This one. Let's try puppet warping this. And then I could get certain bits to follow the edge a bit more. Let's make the color go weird. What on earth is that? All right, we'll leave that alone. It's cuz I got all those other fad bits. I think Yeah, we can get rid of all this now cuz we've got uh extra glow. Let's just re might as well reshape that a bit while we're here. Nice. There we are. We are sculpting lightning. Maybe we'll build on that. Maybe we'll leave it quite subtle. Mom and dad. I'm the glow master now. Yeah. Yeah. Mom's going to meet us there, Pops. So, this is before today. This is after car flipping bonkers. I think I think I made the right decision with the fur. I'm not sure. I don't know. Oh, I don't know. Let's go and look at it before So that was the original with the fur a bit more contained. And then this is where it is now with the fur a bit more wild and free. What do you reckon? This fur or the original fur? I think something else I quite like to do is add a bit of grain as well. Just maybe 15 10 like a really just a subtle grain effect. We could actually adjust the colors. So, this is what I did for Charmander. We really can pull some of the colors around. So, I gave I just gave the Charmander a little a little contrast boost as well, just to make the contrast between the darker areas a bit more pronounced. The lightnings, they are kind of like a very very light yellow technically. Very very light instead of white. No, I had them white before. I wanted them to be slightly yellow. I just don't know about the fur around the I don't know if I've gone too over the top with the spikiness or You could make the body darker, but I quite like him being nice and bright. The electric doesn't need to be like a a big thing. Yeah, I mean you could go darker and make the electric pop, but yellow is a funny one when it comes to going darker. I think with Charmander I did the lighting a little bit differently. Very similar. Yeah, because I wanted the flame to illuminate part of his body, but I think the lightning is meant to be a bit more subtle. Um there is one thing actually that can be quite good. You see these gaps you get you get these pixel lines. There is a way that you can fix that and it might actually fix everything because everything's so perfect and crisp and I quite like things to be a bit tiny bit more realistic. So sometimes just that one layer of blur or what you can do is get the blur tool and just run it over these areas like this. I think I've got the strength a bit high, but dial it down a bit. Just run it over the lines and you'll see them disappear. And if you get the blur at the right strength, it's nice because you get rid of those gaps, but you also get a more natural edge rather than everything being too sharp. You see here, it's just a little bit softer. Here it's like it's almost like pixel sharp. You get like a bit of aliasing around the edge. And here it's just a bit softer. This that's how I cut out stuff. If I was cutting out products for an ad, I wouldn't cut them out like that. I'd cut them out and I'd soften the edges because it's more realistic. So that would be the final thing to do. But obviously doing that you need to work on a flattened layer. So you have to commit to I can't change any of this anymore unless I'm going to paint on top of it which is ultra scary. So we're going to avoid that. I think there's just a few bits of hair I don't really like. So, I'm going to use a tapered brush. I think I prefer this over here to this. So, how can I fix that? Can I just go through and just just brush some white in to make it all a bit more subtle. I don't know that work. Oh yeah, I actually love that way more. That's way better. Oh god, this funny old thing, isn't it? Yeah, that's better. I realized I liked it over here, but not so much here. It's just too much detail going on. Oh, is that what you were saying? What the you want about? Oh, okay. Sorry, Ra. So, this bit the shadowing was too dark. Sorry. Yes. Well spotted that. It's funny as well, like obviously not not doing this regularly. Like this isn't what I do. I if I don't know something, I'm just Oh, well, what's going on there? I'm just mcking around and throwing brushes around until I get something that works until I get something like look at visually and go, "Yeah, that's what it should look like." But up until that point, I don't really know. Right. We're going to leave it there. Um I think I'm almost probably going to call that one a day. Actually, I could screw around with it for forever, but I was watching round one. Had to pause to come here. Oh, yeah. It definitely Oh, wait. What? Oh my goodness. Thank you so much. $50. Oh, I didn't I literally just I saw you and then I saw that. I was like, what? Oh, you absolute legend. Oh, thank you so much. Oh, I appreciate that. That's made my day. Thank you. Oh, you are spoiling me. Oh, thank you very much. That is incredibly kind of you. Also, while I think of it, is anyone going to Adobe Max this year? I think it's no I want to say November. Yeah. If if you want to see the full process, I would watch round one as well. That was yesterday. Um I cover all the techniques in my full course, but you can see it free on the on the live stream. Anyway, it's slightly different, but a lot of it is very similar. It's Illustrator, get your shapes, get them in Photoshop, and then go mad with the brushes. Oh, what's that? Oh dear. Naughty Dan, you've brushed something onto the background. Kodos, you all right to get your shoes on? Ta. Okay. After all of it, uh, just a speedy recap. Lime work. just traced over the original colored solid color. Get rid of the stroke and separate the shapes. That looks pretty cool. That's like a That would make a really cool logo for like some sort of crazy rabbit or something. Um, solid colors into Photoshop. That's yesterday's version. And then we got an AI version as a reference, which is pretty nuts. And this is what I used to help me figure out where I should or shouldn't be putting certain shadows. So, this has kind of been a bit of a guide. And then this is where I've ended up. Oh, he definitely looks more angry. He's still missing a tooth as well. We might have to Oh god. I got I'm supposed to be there in a minute. Pops, I'm sorry. I've just realized he's missing a flipping tooth. Hang on. Hang on. Can't Can't forget that. Uh we could pen tool this in Photoshop. I'm just going to use a brush. Draw a tooth. So, we'll just we'll go something like this. Okay. Move it over there. There you go. There we go. We can't forget his other tooth. Poor fella. And then we're just going to sharpen it And I think that looks okay. Little bit more curvature. Shuffle it into that corner. New layer. Dark gray color. it's not the best tooth I've ever done, but I think it'll probably probably do, won't it? Maybe we just distort it. Just curve the angle back a little bit. Yeah, I think that's that's an okay placement. Maybe just make it a pinch bigger. That's all right, isn't it? Hey, Christopher. Oh, of course, of course. Justin, you absolute legend. yeah, hang on. Yeah, flip an X. Sample all layers. Why didn't I think of that? So, hang on. If I blur What does that do? Does it It only applies the blur to that layer. Oh, Justin, you are an absolute babe. Wow. Did I not think of that? I totally forgot you could do that. Right. And it just slaps the blur on its own layer. Oh, that is amazing. Right. Perfect. So, we Okay, that's amazing. That gives us loads of flexibility still. There's just a few bits that are like a real problem. Like a lot of it's not really an issue, but it's some of those bits where you can see the aliasing I'm going to call that a day because I should have been somewhere else five minutes ago. You're dancing around the salon to Michael Jackson. Mom's going to be like, "Where are you, Jolton? There we go. I'm glad we got one one Pokemon recorded and we could put Charmander and Jolon together and they can uh be friends in the same document. Wow, that was fun. That was really fun. Is that my phone signal? Right. I gotta go. Yep. the boys. Uh, sorry, I'm just catching up on the chat. She's there at the minute, Pops. So, mom's there at the minute. So, uh, just let her know I'll be there in a second. I'm still in my pajamas. I can't go to I can't go to go out for coffee in my Peppa Pig pajamas, can I? Cool. Right, thanks everyone. Um, and oh goodness me. Have an amazing weekend. You can join the Discord if you want to. I've got my Photoshop course if you want to learn how to do all this crazy stuff pinned in the chat. And yes, have an amazing day and weekend. And I'll see you soon. Bye. Heat up here.