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

844 What if Joan Miró had met Jordan Peele?

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

844 What if Joan Miró had met Jordan Peele?

- Hey gang, this is Deke McClelland. Welcome to Deke's Techniques. Now, on previous weeks, we've been exploring how to paint abstract art, in particular in the style of Spanish surrealist, Joan Miro. Now, if you know anything about Miro, and who doesn't, you know that he dabbled in Fauvism and Cubism before ultimately developing his own visual vocabulary. So, I thought we'd spend some more, additional time, exploring such pieces as, for example, "The Sun" or "El Sol," in this case, as redrawn by me. But it's just such an awesome piece. But then all of a sudden, it occurred to me, wait, it's just nine days until Halloween. One of this year's biggest grossing movies also happens to be one of the scariest movies I've ever seen, Jordan Peele's "Us." I thought, why not do the obvious thing, work with me here, and merge Joan Miro with Jordan Peele in order to create this terrifying moment, from the most terrifying movie of 2019. That's a rabbit, by the way. Oh, gives me goosebumps just to look at it. Here, let me show you exactly how it works. All right, so here's my take on Joan Miro's 1949 masterpiece, "The Sun." We're going to be borrowing from a lot of the shapes here, starting with this, kind of, bean of a head. These eyes and nose, these legs down here at the bottom. We're also going to convert this shape right here into a kind of rabbit. We're going to use this zigzag as whiskers and we're also going to borrow these curly arms, these dots at the end of the feet, these asterisk-like stars and so forth. All right, so, I'll go ahead and switch out of this piece of artwork. Once again, I'm working inside Adobe Photoshop Sketch, running on an iPad Pro, but the platform really doesn't matter. I'm going to start with this piece of artwork here. So you can see that we've got those bean-shaped heads. We have the eyes and the nose. We've got the feet. We've got the bunny in the bottom-left corner and so forth. And by the way, if you'd prefer to work along with me inside Photoshop, then I've created an exercise file for you called, The white lines.psd. All right, but as I say, I'll be working in Sketch. Now, notice that the active layer here is filled with black. Let me show you how I accomplished that. I'll just go ahead and tap on that layer thumbnail and tap Delete in order to get rid of it. And then as you can see here, it's a little bit hard to tell what's going on. Notice that the background is selected, over there, on the left-hand side. And I'll remind you, in case you didn't watch the last couple of weeks, that I've switched around the layers, which normally appear on the right and the brushes which normally appear on the left because I'm lefthanded. That's just a preference setting. But in any event, I'm going to tap the plus above the layer thumbnails and I'll tap Sketch Layer in order to create a new independent layer. Then, I'll tap on my Pen icon, over here on the right-hand side. It'll be on the left-hand side for you. Then I'll tap the color circle, right there and I will drag the brightness slider all the way over to the left, so we have black. Then all you need to do is tap and hold inside of that layer and that's going to fill the entire layer with that color. All right, now I want to add some more lines and so I'll tap on this Outlines layer right here. Then I'll tap the plus sign and add another sketch layer. If you like, you can go ahead and name that layer by tapping on its thumbnail and then tap on the words Sketch Layer, like so. I'll just go ahead and call this guy White lines is what I'm looking for. I'll go ahead and enter that and tap the done button. Now, I'll tap on this color item, over here, on the right-hand of the screen once again, and I'll drag the brightness slider all the way to the right, so we end up with white. I'll go ahead and drag this size option right here until it appears as 10.0. The main character, who's name is Adelaide Wilson, she's played by Lupita Nyong'o, and she's got sister-locks. I'm just going to go ahead and draw right here in order to paint them in. But, instead, I'm going to paint in a little circle, over here, on the left-hand side. I'll undo that a couple of times in order to get rid of that stuff. This time, I'll just try and depress the side of my hand to anchor it. I'll go ahead and paint these three lines right here. We're just roughly acknowledging the hair. Then, the bad character right here, who's name is Red she is more unruly hair. I'll go ahead and drag three lines directly up, like so. Now, I want to take my bunny down here and I want to give him some whiskers. I'm going to do that using that kind of spiky form that we saw in the sun. Then I'll go ahead and fill these guys in, right here, like so. I'll add a kind of asterisk-shaped star, over here, to the left. Now, I'm going to focus my attentions on Red, over here. I'll go ahead and zoom in on a foot and I'm going to add a, kind of, eight-pointed star, here, so that the feet look nice and dangerous. I'll go ahead and add another one at this location. Now, this hand, right here, actually, should be a pair of scissors. So, I'm going to add another circle, right there. They're less scissors and more shears, by the way. So they have extremely long blades like this. I'll make the blades even scarier by adding a little bit of extra form to them, right here, so that they have some heft. I'll go ahead and color that guy in. You can see, as I'm coloring these guys in I'm also making them longer, so that they're nice and terrifying, of course. I'm going to add a little bit of extra dimension to the handles, down here at the bottom. I'll do the same for this bit of handle that's actually connected to Red's hand. Having done that, we now need to add the glove. Each one of the bad guys has a single fingerless glove. I'm going to go ahead add a few more fingers. Now, this is a little bit out of keeping with that Miro painting that we saw just a moment ago. But it'll hell me indicate that these are, indeed, fingerless gloves that I'm about to draw, right here. They've got a kind of strap that are holding them to the wrist. I'll go ahead draw that strap independently, like so. Now, we've got to add some horrifying eyes. So, what I'm going to do here, is I'm going to increase the size of my brush quite a bit, to about 80, like so. Then I'll tap on the color. Actually, I can't tap on the color this is the eraser that I switched to, somehow. I'll just go ahead and tap on the Eraser icon at the top there, and I'll switch back to my ink pen. I'll go ahead tap on it and increase its size to 80. Then I'm going to change color, right here, to black, once again. I'm going to go ahead paint on an independent layer because, after all, I don't want to mess this one up. I'll tap on the plus icon, above the layer thumbnails and I'll tap on sketch layer. Then, I'll tap on that thumbnail, right there, for the new layer. Let's go ahead call this layer Black lines this time and then I'll tap the Done key. Now what I'm going to do, is cheat a little bit by just dragging, a little bit, inside the eye for example, to create this big circle. Then I'll drag over here to create another big circle like so, and that'll just help to make sure that the circle is, more or less, circular. I really wanted to be a, kind of, circular outline. I'm going to switch to eraser, down here at the bottom, the checkerboard-looking thing. Then I'll tap on it so I can change its size to 100, ends up working. I'm not sure why the eraser has to be bigger than the pen. I guess it's a different kind of brush. Notice now, if I drag inside of there I can erase away the interior. I don't want to erase that part though. So, I'll undo that change and then I'll just go ahead and erase, like so, so that we have these outline circles. Now, I'm going to switch back to the ink pen which is the second guy down, right here. Then I'll tap on it so I can change its size value to 20. I'm going to take it way down. It's still black, you could see. I'm just going to go ahead and draw in, an horrifying eye, like this. Then I'll go in and add some scared eyes to Adelaide here. I'm not sure that eye's in the right place. I'll tap the undo icon, up here, at the top of the screen. I will, once again, paint this guy so it's just down and over to the right, like so. Now, the bunny needs an eye, so I'll go ahead and zoom in on it. I'm doing that by pinching. Now, I'll tap on the color icon, right there, and I'll drag this guy all the way over to red and I'll increase the brightness as well so that we have a bright shade of red. Let me see if the current cursor is going to work. Let's go ahead and paint again. Somehow, I've switched over to the eraser. What I mean by somehow, is if you do a double-tap with your stylus, in my case it's an Apple Pencil then you end up switching from the current tool to the eraser. I could double-tap again in order to switch back to the brush, but I'm just going to select it manually. Now, I'll draw in that rabbit's eye. Now, the name of this layer is Black lines. It now contains a red circle but that doesn't really trouble me. Now we're going to add some sweat, but first I'm going to tap those close button in the top-left corner so that I can bring back the sun right here. I want to show you these guys. Notice these tears, or whatever they are that's the motif we're going with. I'll go ahead and close out of that guy. Then I'll bring back out work in progress which is this guy right here. I'm going to add a new layer by tapping on the plus sign. I'm going to marketing make it a sketch layer. Image layers, by the way, are for imported photographs. I'll go ahead and tap on this thumbnail, once again. Tap on sketch layer in order to rename this guy I'll call it sweat and then tap Done. Now, I'll tap the thumbnail again in order to dismiss that screen. I'll tap on my ink pen cursor and I'll change the color, once again, to white. I'll just drag this guy to the center. Notice how it snaps into place. Now, I'll go ahead zoom in. I want to make sure that the size of my cursor is pretty tiny, 8.0 should be good. I'll go ahead draw one sweat, right here, all the way through and I'm going to fill the entire thing with white. Even though the tears that we saw just a moment ago had two colors, we're going to start with just white, like so, and we're going to make them two colors in just a moment. Now, I'll add a second bead of sweat, right about there, let's say. I'll go ahead fill it all the way in with white, once again, as well. It's going to take me a moment or two just to make sure that I've filled it all the way in. You don't have to be too careful, after all, we do want a little bit of Expressionism to survive here. Now, I went ahead switched to the eraser, once again. I'll go ahead and tap that icon, and switch back to the ink pen, tap it and change the color to that same bright shade of red or something very close to it, that we use for the rabbit eye. Notice, if I were to just start painting now, like so, that's just beautiful, then I'd end up painting all over the layer. That's not what I want, so I'll tap the Undo icon, up there at the top of the screen, to get rid of that. What I'm going to do is lock down the transparency by tapping on that sweat layer thumbnail. Notice this guy down here at the bottom, Paint inside, I'll go ahead and turn it on. Now, if you paint inside that area once again, notice that you're just painting inside the sweat and nothing more. I don't really want the sweat to be on top of that line. Notice that it could end up covering it, if I'm not careful. So, I'll undo that brushstroke. I'll tap and hold on this thumbnail, right here. I'll move it down the stack, to below the original outlines layer, so just above that black layer. Then I'll go ahead and paint in this guy, as well. You can see that we have managed to lock down the transparency. Now I'm just going to pinch out so that we can see all of the artwork. I've made a mistake. Notice, Red's left foot over here doesn't have enough lines. So, I'll switch back to the White lines layer. It's hard to make out, but it's this one, right here notice that, it's labeled White lines at the top. I'm going to tap that color circle once again. I'll go ahead drag this guide to the center so that we have white. I want the size to be a little bigger it should be 10 and then I'll go ahead and drag another line across there, so that we have an eight-pointed star. Which is implied, by the way, by this foot, down here, coming out of the star. I'm going to undo that stroke, as well as this guy that's going up, which I'm going to extend. I'm going to tidy it up a little bit with the eraser, which actually want this time. Whoops, that's way too big. So, I'll undo that change, tap on it and I'll take the size way down. I'm going to drag on it directly with my finger, in this case, I'm going to take it way down to four. I'll go ahead and switch to the original outlines layer, right there, and I'll go ahead paint this guy away, like so. Now it looks pretty good. But now, I'm going to tap on the White lines layer in order to make it active. I'll go ahead switch back to the ink pen. I'll go ahead tidy up this edge. Now, I'll pinch out to take in my entire artwork. I'll tap that icon, in the top-right corner of the screen, in order to hide the interface. That, my friends, is how you paint a horrifying scene from the movie "Us," just as Joan Miro might have done here inside Adobe Photoshop Sketch. If you're a member of Linkedin Learning I have to two, count them, two follow up movies in which I first color in the rabbit, human faces and signature red jumpsuit. Then, I paint this amorphous red background which is horizontally symmetrical like a crimson Rorschach test. If you're looking forward to next week we'll finish off our masterpiece of horror in Photoshop. Deke's Techniques, each every week, keep watching.

Contents