530 Painting with the Blend and Combine modes

- Hey gang, this is Deke McClelland. Welcome to Deke's Techniques. This week we're once again inside of what is currently my favorite Adobe mobile app and that is Photoshop Sketch, which allows you to draw anything you like directly on the screen of your iPad or iPhone. Now as you may recall, last week we took this photograph and we traced it using the ink pen to create this very simple line art. Well this week we're gonna learn about Sketch's three blend modes, which are normal, blend, and combine, and we're gonna use them to color in the model's face with the ultimate intention of creating this final artwork here.

Let me show you exactly how it works. Alright so once again we don't want to run the risk of harming what we've done so far. So I'm gonna go ahead and tap the edit icon in the top right corner of the project window and then I'll select my most recent line drawing and I'll create a copy of it by tapping on that icon that looks like a little plus sign with two rectangles around it. Now that I've finished, I'll tap the check mark and then I'll tap inside of my most recently duplicated artwork. Alright, now we're gonna color the artwork using the next tool down, which is this guy right here, and if I tap and hold on it, you can see that it's the marker brush as highlighted at the top of the menu.

Now you can switch to some other tool if you like, but the marker brush happens to work really well for this purpose. Alright so I'll go ahead and select that brush. Now we need to lift a color from the original photograph and so I'm gonna tap the image icon in the top right corner of the screen and I'm gonna go ahead and increase the opacity value not to about 50% because if I were to stop here, then Sketch would just lift the color it sees. In other words, it would lift a too pale color and so we want to go ahead and take that guy all the way up to the right so that we have full opacity.

Now, very important and I want to stress this as often as I can, before you do anything else at this point, tap the word Done down here at the bottom of the screen so you don't end up ruining the alignment between the image and your artwork. Alright, now what we want to do is tap on that marker brush icon over here on the left side of the screen. Alright, now I can tap on that color circle, which by default is yellow in the case of the marker brush, in order to bring up the picker, but that's not what I want. Instead I want to lift a color from the artwork itself.

So I'm gonna go ahead and tap and hold on the color option in order to bring up this eyedropper target. Now remember that you don't drag inside of it because if you do that you'll just drag it to some wacky location. Instead what you want to do is tap on the color that you're looking for. Now I could tap on a really pale color if I like such as this left side of the nose. That's gonna give us the lightest color in the skin, which really isn't what we're looking for. We're looking for a kind of medium tone. So what I'm gonna do here is just move this guy out of the way by tapping in the forehead and the color that I came up with that looks the best is right between the eyes, so right there at the top of the nose between the eyebrows.

I'll go ahead and tap and we get this flesh tone right here as exhibited by the top of the ring at which point I'll go ahead and tap OK down here in the bottom left corner of the screen. Alright, now at this point we no longer need the image, but I would recommend one thing, that you go ahead and print a copy of this photograph and that way you can look at it when it comes time to shade because we're gonna be filling the skin with entirely opaque paint as you'll see in just a moment and that's gonna obscure the original image in the background.

Having offered that bit of advice, I'll just go ahead and tap on the image icon in the top right corner of the screen and I'll reduce the opacity value to zero and then I will tap Done before I mess things up especially since the photograph is invisible and I can't see what I'm doing. Now that I'm back in regular editing mode, I'm gonna zoom in on the forehead here in order to demonstrate the blend modes that are available inside Sketch and so notice down here at the bottom of this tool list underneath the color option we have this double circle icon.

If you tap on it, you'll see that we have three blend modes available to us, normal, blend, and combine. Let's start with normal, go ahead and tap on it, and then I'll grab my stylus, my Apple pencil, and I'll paint over this line right here and you can see that we are totally obscuring the line and that by the way assumes that the flow is set to 100 and so if you're working along with me, you need to make sure that's the case as well, but fairly obviously we're just painting opaque strokes as we work along here assuming that the flow is 100 once again.

That's not what I want so I'll just go ahead and tap the undo icon up here at the top of the screen a couple of times. Compare that to the next mode, blend, which is going to blend the paint strokes as if they're painted on top of each other in the real world and so what that's gonna look like in the case of a black stroke is that initially we lose a little bit of the blackness. Black is so dark that it's gonna hang on for dear life. But if I paint over it again, then I'm going to obscure it that much more and a third brush stroke will mean that much more and so on.

Obviously it's not what we want, but I want to demonstrate something. I'll go ahead and backstep here a few times by tapping on that undo icon. Let's say I paint a little bit of beige here in the middle of the forehead and then I tap on that color circle in order to bring up the picker window and I've got this guy set to wheel by the way. So let's say I decide to lighten things up a little bit. So I'll drag this brightness slider little bit over to the right and then I'll tap outside the picker to hide it and now notice if I go ahead and paint over this other brush stroke, what's happening here, we're getting a blend at the intersection of the two brush strokes.

So it's as if the first brush stroke is being treated as if it's dry paint. So in other words, it's not bleeding back and forth. But the two paints are blending together and so that can be very handy as we'll see in a moment. But for now I'm just gonna undo these two brush strokes 'cause the one that we want, if we're gonna paint over black, the one we want is the final mode, which is combine, and so notice let's say I go ahead and switch back to my original flesh tone by tapping on the color option right there and instead of working inside the color wheel, I'll tap on the wheel option and select History and that's gonna show me my most recently used colors.

The one that I want is this darker flesh tone right here. So I'll go ahead and tap on it and then I will paint over the black lines and notice this works out beautifully. Here is the downside of combine, which by the way is analogous to the multiply mode in Photoshop, Illustrator, and the other Adobe applications. What happens is if you paint some more, then you're gonna get further darkening, which can end up being a little challenging. So I'm gonna go ahead and undo and I'm gonna do it by the way by two finger dragging to the left.

So I'll just two finger swipe three times in a row to get rid of all that stuff and then I'll zoom out so that I can see all of Colleen's face here. We don't need to worry about the neck so much, but notice if I go ahead and paint in, and I'm being sloppy here because I'm not gonna use this, well let's say I paint and I paint and then I grow fatigued let's say and then I release and now I think okay I'll start painting again and I get this. Now that's not necessarily always a bad thing if you're trying to shade as we're gonna do in a moment, but it is a bad thing if you just have random brush strokes overlapping each other.

It's that thing you used to do when you were a kid with a marker where you just kept scribbling and then you release and you just kept scribbling again and it looked like you scribbled all over your artwork, which is not what we want. So I will two finger drag a couple of times to get rid of those problems and what I'm gonna do, and this takes a lot of effort by the way, I'm going to drag all over the face and now I'm gonna have to be pretty darn careful. I'm gonna start at the eye just because that's where I have to be the most careful after all.

Don't worry too much about the hair. The hair we're gonna be filling with darker colors so it doesn't really matter if we slop over a little bit, well maybe not that much, but still it's better that I make the mistakes for you. I'll show you how that will work out just fine and now I'll just go ahead and paint over the nose. I am not releasing, I have endurance, I am going to follow through on this brush stroke, it will be the biggest, mightiest brush stroke I've ever drawn in my life and it's only started because I'm only up here at the forehead so far, but we are going down.

We're just gonna make it to the chin, folks. So just stick with me, just trying to make this work. It's a big brush stroke, okay. So I'm leaking over into the hair a little bit. That doesn't matter. If I leak down under the chin, later I can erase, but I'm doing pretty good so that's cool. I'm going to shift my hand as I'm keeping the pressure applied to the stylus. This is really a matter of endurance, folks. You just want to keep painting as much as you can and then when you come to details that really matter, like the eyes that you don't want to drain into, just make sure that you take some care around those areas.

Whatever you do, do not release, keep on painting. I know it's a lot to ask. But this is the best way to work inside this specific application. Now if we were working inside of something else like Photoshop, it might have something like a paint bucket, which could help us out a little bit, or we could use a selection tool and then fill in the selection. So you might ask me well then why are we working in Sketch, which requires this much attention, this much fortitude, and I'll tell you it's because we get to work real time.

We get to scribble directly inside of our artwork, which is not something you can do inside the other programs. I am done, just need to make sure that happens because if I stopped at any other location, I would have gotten this effect here. Alright, I'm gonna undo that obviously. Now I want to show you another problem you can run into, another kind of gotcha. I'm going to press and hold two fingers so that I'm getting that blue movement indicator and then I'll go ahead and drag upward like so and let's say that I'm not quite seeing the bottom of my artwork and I start scribbling and notice that I'm getting a buildup as I scribble and that's because when you can't quite see the bottom of your artwork, but you're hitting the bottom of the screen, you end up compiling your brush strokes and I'll go ahead and press and hold two fingers once again and drag upward and you can see that we did not quite hit the bottom of the artwork and each one of these brushes, by the way, even worse is treated as a separate brush stroke.

So I can sit there and two finger drag to the left a bunch of times or I could press and hold three fingers like so so that I get the history bar at the top of the screen and I could drag over to the left very carefully because you never know what's gonna happen. I lucked out there. I went ahead and got rid of all the bad brush strokes without harming the good ones and now I'll release and this time because I can see the bottom of my artwork, I'll just go ahead and paint back and forth, doesn't matter this time around, we're not gonna build up the brush strokes, and I'm just gonna paint along here and up to the edge of the chin.

I don't really want to paint into the chin if I can avoid it even though we will be darkening up that area and then I'll just paint kind of into the hair, it doesn't really matter, and on down to the bottom of the image once again and then I'll paint back and forth into this area here, up and down and so forth, scribble, scribble, scribble as much as you like or really as much as you don't like because this is a very painful part of the process and I missed one area right there.

Alright, good. Now, let's say that for some reason you do have to release and you create this effect here where you've got a couple of brush strokes that are intersecting each other. In that case, the thing to do, as long as you're not overlapping any of the black lines, the thing to do is to just go ahead and click on that mode icon once again and switch to normal and now if you paint over you'll just go ahead and get rid of all that junk. Now, the thing about the combine mode, especially where you're combining one color with itself, is it's a great shading tool.

So I'll go ahead and click on that blend mode icon again and switch back to combine and now I'll paint up here along the top of the forehead except I'm gonna paint with a much larger brush. So I'll go ahead and undo that stroke and I'll tap and hide on the size option and I'll take it let's say up to 28, should work out pretty well, and then I'll just go ahead and paint here. That's a little bit too big so I'll undo that. I've got to start fairly far out like so and paint over this area in order to paint a big shadow from that hair.

Alright, now let's say I want to emphasize the shadow. Then I'll take the size value back down to where it was, 16 or so, and I'll go ahead and paint like so in order to create a little bit extra shadow. Alright, now let's say I want to blend one of these edges. Then I'll go ahead and switch to the blend mode and assuming that I'm working with that same like color, I can go ahead and blend this edge right here. So we still have some stepping and I don't really want to blend here because then we have some other problems, but we have less stepping than we had before and if you really want to smudge things around, there is by the way, I'll go ahead and tap and hold on this brush icon here, there is a smudge brush, which you can try out, although it's a kind of chalky smudge, but you might find it useful at small sizes.

I'm gonna stick with what I have though. I have a 16 pixel size going. But I want to work with the combine mode once again. So I'll switch to that because I want to paint some darkness under the eyebrows like so and then I want to take another line of paint down along the right edge of the nose and this way we've got some interaction between these brush strokes. I'll go ahead and do the same thing over here underneath the left eye and down along the left edge of that nose and up underneath the eye as well.

I want to paint a little stroke right there at the top of the nostril and little sort of edge at the top of the nose as well. I'll go ahead and paint here underneath this eye and I'm kind of scrubbing back and forth every once in awhile. You can take advantage of any artistic technique you like, crosshatching, what have you. I'll go ahead and scribble down here. I am working with a very large brush so I'm making some pretty big modifications here. I'll paint along the chin line like so and I'm also painting underneath the lip. We need a little more right here at this location and I'll paint down here underneath the chin.

Now it's looking like a kind of bad tan job, but it will end up reconciling before I'm done. Alright so we need some more shadows along the hair. We've got a copious amount of hair going and we need a neck line as well and I might emphasize this smile line. Now if you feel like you're going too far with any one modification or you want to blend it a little better, then of course you have the blend mode and what that would allow me to do, especially if I zoom in here to make it more clear, is we can blend some of these interactions here so that they're a little softer and you can work on this as much as you like.

You can change your brush size, you can spend as much time as you see fit and the blend mode can also be useful for getting rid of bad combine interaction. I'll go ahead and switch back to combine right here and let's say for example you're not very satisfied by the way these two brush strokes interact. Why then, you could very carefully paint inside that one region in order to make that interaction go away and I could spend some more time here under the lip, for example. I'm painting.

Also next to the right edge of the nose, I want to clean that up a little bit and on the smile line on the right side of the mouth we've got a little extra shadow going on. But you've got to be careful. Notice that the blend mode will make your black lines lighter as you can see on the top of the smile line and if you don't want that, then just undo that brush stroke and I'm just gonna paint this little area down here away, the area closest to the mouth, and so again she looks like somebody who's had a bad day at a tanning salon. But bear in mind that everything else around her is white.

I'm gonna go ahead and close out of this image and I'll switch over to my final image. Notice that this version of the sketch also looks very bizarrely tan because the eyes and the lips and the hair are absolutely white whereas once we get done adding the other colors, we end up with this final effect here and so that, friends, is how you take advantage of the three blend modes, normal, blend, and combine, when painting inside Adobe Sketch.

Alright, if you're a member of lynda.com, I have two, count them, two follow-up movies. In the first one, we'll take our artwork so far and we'll paint in the lips and the eyes and add some specular highlights to achieve this much improved effect. In the second movie, we'll create this multi-color hair and we'll add those awesome gray streaks. If you're waiting for next week, that's when we're gonna take this image into Photoshop and combine it with the original photograph in order to create this absolutely stunning effect.

Deke's Techniques each and every week. Keep watching.