From the course: Deke's Techniques (2018-2021)

788 Coloring outside your line art in Photoshop

From the course: Deke's Techniques (2018-2021)

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788 Coloring outside your line art in Photoshop

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- [Deke] Hey gang, this Deke McClelland. Welcome to Deke's Techniques! Today we're still inside Photoshop and we're still working on that cartoon version of my face. Now in case you're thinking, 'Deke, we are all sick of your face buddy,' take it easy, today's my birthday! Yes, I turn 57 years old today. I'm officially entering geezer-dom. Which is why I'm going to do whatever I want and I'm going to show you how to color in the background using yet another watercolor wash. Here- let me show you exactly how it works. Alright, here's the final version of the artwork with that blue watercolor wash in the background. And here's how it looks now. I want to put that blue wash right in front of the layer at the back of the stack. So I'll go ahead and click on it and then I'll switch over to this image, which again comes to us from Dreamstime image library, about which you can learn more and get some great deals at dreamstime.com/deke.php. Notice that the blue watercolor layer is selected here inside the layers panel and so I'll go ahead and duplicate it by first selecting the rectangular marquee tool up here near the top of the toolbox and then I'll right click inside the image window and choose duplicate layer and I'll go ahead and send it to this document right here, clipped to group .psd and then I'll click okay. And now I'll switch back to that layer and you can see, sure enough, that it has been added to the stack. Now while I do want it to appear in the background, I don't want the blue to cover my face. Notice this layer mask that's assigned to this floral pattern, I'm going to go ahead and duplicate it by pressing the alt key, or the option key on the Mac, and dragging that layer mass thumbnail to the new layer down here near the bottom of the stack. And notice my cursor; it appears as a double arrowhead which is telling me that I'm about to duplicate the layer mask as soon as I release like so. And if the layer mask was everything that it needs to be that would take care of the entire artwork. However, we do have a couple of problems. I'm going to start things off by zooming in on my chin right here. Notice how we have a little bit of extra yellow that's not covered by the blue. And that's because for whatever reason when I was creating the layer mask for this floral design last week, the magic wand tool didn't get into that particular crevice. So what I need to do is select the layer mask for the blue layer right here, so make sure that the layer mask, not the layer, is active and then go ahead and select the brush tool which you can get by pressing the b key. Currently my brush cursor is fairly enormous, as you can see and so I'm going to right click in the image window to bring up this pop-up panel. I'll make sure my hardness value is set to 100% and I'll take the size value down to something more reasonable, such as, let's say, 50 pixels. And then I'll press the enter key or the return key on the Mac to dismiss that panel and I want to paint this stuff away which is to say, I want to increase the region covered in blue, which means I need to paint with white inside this layer mask. So I'll just tap the d key in order to instate my default colors, which when inside of a layer mask are white for the foreground color and black for the background color. The brush tool always paints in the foreground color, so that means when I paint along the chin, I will paint with white. Now notice that we're still missing a little bit of floral pattern, we'll come to that before the movie's out. So I'll just go ahead and zoom out by pressing control zero, or command zero on the Mac. Alright now notice that we have an issue where the hair is concerned. Notice how very brittle it is and the transition up here at the top doesn't even make any sense. So what I'm going to do is increase the size of my cursor by pressing the right bracket key a few times and then I'll right click inside the image window and I'll take the hardness value down to 0% this time around and I'll press the enter key, or the return key on the Mac, and I will once again paint with white in order to paint that blue background into the hair. Notice that I've gone ahead and painted around my entire ahead; that's a little bit too much, so I'll tap the x key in order to swap my foreground and my background colors so that the background color is now black. And then I'll paint inside the head like so up into the top of my head and down the side in order to paint some of that blue away. And thanks to the fact that I'm using a soft brush we're getting better transitions, except in this little bit of ear, right there. That's a problem, that bit of blue that we're seeing. So I'll right click inside the image once again, crank the hardness value up to 100%, press the enter key or the return key on the Mac to dismiss the panel, and then press the left bracket key to reduce the size of my cursor until it matches the size of the ear. I still want the foreground color to be black as it is, and so now I'll just paint inside of that ear in order to bring it back and make it kind of yellow-ish, once again. Alright, now we want to make these same modifications to that floral pattern and so I'm going to press the alt key or the option key on the Mac and drag this newest layer mask right there, and then drop it onto the floral layer. Notice because I have the alt or option key down, I'm once again seeing the double arrowhead cursor, at which point when I release, Illustrator's not only going to duplicate the layer mask, but it's going to ask me do I really want to replace the existing one? The answer is yes, so I'll just go ahead and click yes and the replacement occurs. Now we have some nice soft transitions between the floral pattern and the hair, and notice down here at the bottom of the chin we bring back the floral pattern at this location as well. Alright, I'm going to press the m key to return to my rectangular marquee tool, I'll press shift f in order to switch to the full screen mode, followed by control zero control plus, that's going to be command zero command plus on the Mac, in order to center my zoom and then zoom in slightly. And that is how you change the color of the area outside your line art using a very basic layer mask here inside Photoshop. Alright, just when you thought you were out of the woods, next week we're going to take my cartoon face and we're going to flip it horizontally using a new command inside Photoshop CC 2019. Deke's techniques, each and every week- keep watching.

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