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

846 Painting a Rorschach background

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

846 Painting a Rorschach background

- [Deke] In this movie, we're going to create this kind of red Rorschach-style pattern in the background, complete with horizontal symmetry using what's known as the Watercolor Flat Brush inside Adobe Photoshop Sketch running on an iPad Pro. Now if you'd prefer to work inside some other application such as Photoshop proper, for example, then I'm providing you with an exercise file called Red jumpsuit.psd. All right, the first thing I'm going to do is escape to full screen mode by tapping on this icon in the top right corner of the screen, and then I'll tap the word Close in the top left corner of the screen in order to return to my project. And as you can see here, I've created a bunch of different versions of this file just so that I'm protected as I go along, and if you want to do the same thing, then notice this dot-dot-dot icon in the top right corner of the screen. Go ahead and tap on it right there, and then you want to tap Select Documents at the top of the menu. And now, I'll just go ahead and select this guy, let's say, which is the last one in the second row in case you can't quite see it. And then, go ahead and tap on the plus sign at the very bottom of the screen, right there, center bottom, in order to create a duplicate of that artwork. And then just go ahead and tap either the original or the duplicate to open it up like so. All right, now the first thing I'm going to do is create a new layer at the bottom of the stack, and because I'm left-handed, I have things flipped around, so I've got my layers on the left-hand side, and my brushes on the right side. By default, it's the other way around. And so I'll just go ahead and tap on the black layer down here at the bottom of the stack and then I'll create a new layer by tapping the plus sign up here at the top of the layer stack and I'll select Sketch Layer like so. And now I'll go ahead and rename this guy by tapping on this thumbnail, and you name a layer inside Sketch by tapping on the words Sketch Layer, and then you can enter a new name such as Red. All right, so we'll go ahead and tap that thumbnail once again to hide the panel, and now I'm going to select one of the lower brushes in the list over here on the right-hand side, again, for you, it might be on the left side, and it's this guy right here. I'll go ahead and tap on it in order to make it active so that we can see its settings, and then I'll tap the Settings icon down here at the bottom so that we can see that this guy is the Watercolor Flat Brush. All right, so I'll go ahead and hide that, and then I'll tap on the color in order to bring up my RGB values. If you're not seeing RGB, then you want to switch to Picker right there and then tap on this guy, RGB in my case, and by default, it's set to Wheel. We want RGB once again. So you can see that I've almost maxed out the red value there on the left, and I have a much lower green value, just 16, and then a blue value of zero so that we have a very vivid shade of red. All right, now I'm going to tap that icon in the top right corner of the screen in order to switch back to the full screen mode and I will go ahead and paint. Now I want you to see something. Notice as soon as I release, that the paint actually grows, and so that's something to bear in mind, which means that unless you want a very pronounced effect, you want to take it easy. So watch, I'll go ahead and paint down to this foot, this sort of star foot here, and as soon as I release, the paint grows outwards as if you're painting with a watercolor brush on a piece of wet canvas or paper. All right, so I'll go ahead and paint some more like so and I'll release to let it grow, and so I'm going to take it easy the whole time here, and I'll just go ahead and paint up into the scissors, let's say, and above the head over here on the right-hand side, and this is the head belonging to the shadow creature, Red, by the way. All right, now I'll just go ahead and paint on the inside areas. Now something to bear in mind, and I'm just going to tell you, I'm not going to show you, is that the paint will continue to behave as if it's wet. Notice as soon as I paint right here, it bleeds into the previous brush stroke. However, that's not going to be the case, at least the way things stand now if you undo. Anytime you undo, or switch to a different tool, the paint is going to dry, so that's just something to bear in mind. All right, so I'll just go ahead and paint down like so, and I'm going to bring back the interface by tapping that icon in the top right corner of the screen so that I can see what this layer looks like where its thumbnail is concerned over here in the bottom left corner is at least where it is for me. So notice the thumbnail for the red layer, bottom left corner once again. It's got some gaps in it, and I'd like to fill in those gaps so I'll just paint in some regions and then I'll look to make sure I got the gap, I did. Now I have a gap toward the top that's presumably behind the head and so I'll just go ahead and paint behind the head a little bit and that fills that in as well. Might just add a couple of little bits of paint here and there to fill things out. All right, now we want to duplicate this effect and flip it horizontally. And you do that by tapping on the thumbnail for that red layer, and that'll bring up this panel right here. Notice the third option down is Duplicate, so I'll go ahead and tap on that guy to create a duplicate of the layer and then I'll tap on the thumbnail again and this time I'll select Transform, so the very first option right there. And notice down here at the bottom, we're now seeing three different icons, including Flip Horizontal, so I'll go ahead and tap that guy and now I want to drag this guy over to the left like so. Now notice that I don't really have any constraints, so I'm just going to have to eyeball things, and what I want to do is move this boundary so that it's slightly off screen to the left here, and then I'll move it back. So we just want to make sure that we have a lot of room right here, and then, when you like what you see, just go ahead and tap the Done button in the top right corner of the screen. All right, now you want to zoom in and see if you've got any issues here, and so notice if I zoom in on Adelaide's head, that is the head of the person on the left, that I do have some brown leaking out of the head region, and so I'll go ahead and tap on the Faces layer, the thumbnail for the Faces layer, that is. Then, I'll tap on the Brush icon over here on the right in order to see all my brushes, I'll tap on the checkerboard pattern to select the eraser, and I'll just go ahead and erase some of this excess like so, so that we have a tighter effect, and I'll go ahead and paint down below as well and over here in the bottom right region of this sort of bean-shaped face. And now, I'll pinch my way over to Red, that is the shadow creature over here on the right-hand side and I've made a mistake here. I accidentally undid a brushstroke, and that's because it's very easy to do a two-finger drag which does undo inside Sketch, and if that happens to you, then tap on the Undo icon in the top right region of the screen, and then tap Redo right there, that second icon down until it dims, which shows you that you've redone everything that you can. All right, now, oops, I went ahead and switched tools there, that's no good, so this time I'll purposely undo by tapping on the Undo icon there, and they'll switch back to the Eraser tool, so somehow I switched away from the eraser there, and now I'll go ahead and paint this stuff away up here above the head over here on the right-hand side. And then I'll just deliberately two-finger pinch to make sure I don't undo and I'll go ahead and paint away some more like so. All right, now this is looking pretty good, but I want the mouths to be black, and so I'm going to create a new layer by tapping on the red layer, the top of the two red layers, that is, and I'll create a new layer on top of it by tapping on the plus icon at the top of the layer stack and I'll select Sketch layer, and then I'll go ahead and tap on this blank thumbnail, and I'll tap on Sketch layer, and I'll go ahead and name this guy Mouths, and tap the Done button, and then I'll tap the thumbnail once again in order to hide that panel. I'll go ahead and zoom in on this mouth right here, and I'm going to switch to the second brush down and just so you can see what that is, I'll tap on it a second time and I'll tap its settings icon, at which point you can see this is the ink pen. I do not want it to be pink, however, so I'll tap on the Color option, and I'll switch back to Wheel, and then I'll just go ahead and drag this Brightness slider all the way to the left so that we end up with black. All right, now I'll just go ahead and paint inside of the mouth, and this time around, I don't have to be very careful because there's a bunch of layers in front of it. And now, I'll go ahead and move over to this big droopy mouth right here; so scared. And I'll go ahead and paint it in. And then finally, I'll paint in the holes over here, make sure I didn't undo, I did undo, notice that, didn't want to undo, so I'll tap on the Undo icon, well actually tap and hold on it, and I'll tap the Redo icon right there until it dims so I get everything back, and now I will much more deliberately two-finger pinch until I'm seeing the scissors. Notice these guys, and I'll paint inside of the handle like so. All right, now I'll do a quick two-finger pinch, just so that we can see the entire artwork, and I'll tap the double arrow icon in the top right corner of the screen in order to hide the interface. And that is how you paint a kind of symmetrical Rorschach-style background of Halloween blood in Adobe Photoshop Sketch!

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