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

852 Adding color to your hand-drawn hand

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

852 Adding color to your hand-drawn hand

- [Deke] In this movie, we're going to take our highly-articulated line drawing and we're going to infuse it with some much needed color. All right, here we are inside Adobe Photoshop Sketch running on an iPad Pro. Now frankly, things change so frequently that I don't know if Sketch will be a viable app by the time you watch this movie. For all I know you'll be able to run the full version of Photoshop on an iPad, so you can use any app that you like. All right, I'm going to tap on the background down here at the bottom of the layer stack and, because I'm left-handed, I have my layers over on the left-hand side and my brushes on the right. By default, things are the other way around. All right, now I'll add a new layer by tapping on the plus sign above the layer stack and I'll select Sketch Layer, which allows me to paint on the layer as opposed to import a photographic image. All right, now I'll select this brush right here, right near the bottom, and, by default, go ahead and show you this is the watercolor flat brush. I've set the color to this shade of blue right here and I have a very large brush of 180. All right, now I'll tap this double arrow icon in the top-right corner of the screen in order to hide the interface and I'll zoom out just a little bit with a two-finger pinch and I'll go ahead and paint inside of my image. Now I want you to notice that first things look pretty rough, but as soon as you release, that is as soon as you let up on the stylus, you can see that the colors begin to mix together as if you're painting with watercolor on a wet canvas. All right, also notice that at first, as I paint a second brush stroke, that it looks very independent from the first one, but as soon as I release, all the colors blend together. And they tend to magnify, incidentally, so that's something to bear in mind. And this process will continue, where the colors bleed together by the way, as long as you continue painting with this brush and you don't undo. So, if you undo, as things stand now, then you have to basically start over if you want the colors to bleed in with each other. All right, I'm going to go ahead and fill things out. Now notice, in case this isn't obvious, that I am not taking the hand into account at this point. I'm just brushing in my watercolor wash background. And so I'll continue to do that. I want to make sure that I fill up the entire canvas, so I'll paint down left over here. And then if you feel like you need areas of more intense darkness or saturation, then just continue to paint more and more brushstrokes. And you don't have to wait for the last brushstroke to catch up with you, by the way. Notice that those colors continued to blend and bleed outward even as you continue to add more paint. All right, so assuming this is more or less the effect we're looking for, might go ahead and add a little more blue in this region here, as well as up here at the top and around the thumb. Then, go ahead and tap that double arrow icon in the top-right corner of the screen to bring back the interface, and now I'm going to add a new layer for the hand coloring. And so I'll tap that plus icon at the top of the stack. Image Layer is if you want to import a photographic image, Sketch Layer is for painting, and so I'll go ahead and select that guy. And now, I'm going to switch back out of the brushes so that I can see all of them, and I'll tap this second guy down right here, which is, as we can see, the ink pen. Now, by virtue of the fact that I tapped on that little settings icon, we can see the settings. I'm going to turn off Velocity Dynamics, which varies the brushstroke depending on how fast you paint, and I'm going to leave Pressure Dynamics on, but I'm going to crank the size and the flow values up to 100% so that we have a bunch of variation. And you possibly can see it better if the color is something other than white, so I'll go ahead and set it to red, let's say for the moment. And then I'll bring up the settings once again so that you can see that red brushstroke. Notice how, because it's more uniform, when you move the size value down to 0%, right now it's at 2% but you see what I mean, and it becomes less uniform when you crank that size value up. So you can really vary how much paint you applied, depending on how hard you bear down on the stylus. All right, I do however want the color to be white. So, I'll bring up the color again and move that little circle to the center of the wheel. Make sure the brightness slider here is cranked all the way up, so that we're painting with white. And that way we're painting in the boundary for the hand. So even if your flesh tones are actually quite dark, as opposed to mine, which are quite pale, you want to go with white because you're just establishing a base. All right, now I'll bring up this size guy right here and I'll crank it up to what is currently it's maximum for this brush, which is 80. All right, now I'll tap the double arrow icon in the top-right corner of the screen in order to switch to the full-screen view and I'm doing a two-finger pinch in order to rotate and zoom my canvas. So this is just the view of my canvas, by the way. Not actually rotating the image. And I'm going to zoom in even further. And now notice if I paint lightly along the pinky, then I lay down just a little bit of paint. So I'm laying down a fine line right next to the edges. And then, after I get the edges in place, I'll go ahead and finish this up. Then you can bear down quite hard in order to increase the size of your brush. Now in my case, I've gone too far, I'll just come back with the eraser in a moment. And so again, you want a light touch when you're painting next to an edge and then more vigorous pressure when you're working in the middle of the finger, in this case. All right, now I'll paint very delicately along the edge of the hand, like so, and then I'm going to paint like heck on the inside of the hand so I'm really bearing down in order to get those big, thick brushstrokes. Now, you probably want to paint just a little at a time. That way, if you make a big mistake, you can undo. And let me see if I can demonstrate that. I'll just go ahead and switch over to the thumb, which is the most articulated of the fingers, and I'll go ahead and paint in that knuckle. And notice that I've made a big mistake. Well, if I want to undo that, all I have to do is a two-finger drag. So two-finger swipe to the left, by the way. So from the right to the left. And then I can paint in a tiny brushstroke like that and another one, and that way, if I have to go back and undo, I can do so without losing a bunch of work. All right, now I'll paint up the edge of the thumb and I'm using very little pressure to go around the thumb, as you see right now. And I'll add a little bit right there in the top-left corner of that thumb, and then I'll brush in with a little more pressure on the inside. Don't really have that much room to work here so I don't want to go too nuts. And now, I'll paint very delicately up this edge. Made a mistake, I went outside the line, don't want to do that, wouldn't be easy to erase. And I'll paint a little more carefully, like so. All right, now I'll go ahead and paint on this side. So again, light touch against the edges. You can go with the bigger touch on the interior. And if you want to just get those interiors taken care of you certainly are welcome to do so, like so. And I can even do that up and down the fingers as you see me doing right now. All right, so I'll go ahead and paint up into the ring finger right here and then down into the crack between the fingers and over to this side as well. Aren't fingers amazing? The reason I say that is because not only are they so deft and they define us as human beings, they really do. But also because they're so complicated. There's so much going on here. And the fact that the fingers don't just split away from each other, that the muscles and the tendons and everything keep them together, I think is just an absolute wonder. My drawing however leaves something to be desired, so I'll go ahead and undo that brush stroke. And I'll paint up into this region right here. Now at this point, I think I need to take advantage of the eraser. So I'll bring back the interface and tap on the brush at the top there to bring back all the brushes and tap on that checkerboard pattern down at the bottom to select the eraser like so. And I'll just go ahead and paint along the top of that finger and then paint along the side of the pinky right here in order to make that stuff go away. And it does pay, by the way, to be careful. I'm going to switch back to that ink pen and paint right about here. Actually went too far. So might as well just go way too far and bring back the eraser and paint in here. And the reason that it's useful to be careful at this point is because in just a moment, if we ever finish painting the interior of the hand, we're going to be very not careful at all and we're going to be able to paint inside of what we've painted so far, which is a ton of fun. Very expressive, as you can imagine. So all this care that I'm not really employing very well at the moment, is going to come in handy later. Well apparently, I'm going to have to once again take advantage of the eraser in just a moment here, 'cause I'm making a mess of the third finger, but by golly, I'm getting impatient. I'm worried that you're sitting there going, "Gosh Deke, you're taking way too long to do this. "Why don't you just fast forward through the process." I don't want to. I want you to see every bit of this process unfold so that you know the kinds of problems or the kinds of wonders, the kind of magic, that you can run into here. All right, so I'll paint up that index fingers, where I'm working right now. And I'll move over to this joint right here with the thumb. And then I'll just paint up this knuckle of the index finger. Somehow I'm doing a little better than I was doing before. I wouldn't bet on that continuing however, so I'll just go ahead and do my best. Sure enough, we kind of flubbed there and I'll go ahead and paint along this edge. And then I'll paint along the top of the finger, like so. All right. So, I'll grab the eraser, which is the checkerboard pattern down there at the bottom and then I'll erase the stuff that I don't want. I don't want to spend too long on this. Probably, if you were doing this, you'd want to be perhaps a little more careful than you see me being. But I want to show you the really fun step, which is coming up real soon. Now apparently, I haven't finished painting the hand because that bottom area, down below the thumb, still needs some attention. Oh joy. So I'll go ahead and finish up the erasing and I'll switch back to that ink pen, which is the second guy down, and I'll go ahead and paint up the wrist and then up whatever this part of your hand is called. I'm too busy to go Google it so you can look into it if you like, and then up to the knuckle of the thumb. Looking pretty good. And I'll go ahead and finish that off. All right. So, takes a ton of time in order to lay down that white, but now here's the fun part. Go ahead and tap on the thumbnail for that layer in order to bring up its properties right here. And notice, down here at the bottom of this panel there is an item that says Paint Inside. Go ahead and turn that guy on. And now you can tap away in order to hide that panel. Switch back to that watercolor flat brush, this guy right here, and then change the color to whatever skin tone you like. Now I happen to be pretty darn pale and a little ruddy, so I'll go with, let's say, this color right here. Go ahead and give it a try. Maybe it'd be a little aspirational, as if I'd spent a little more time in the sun with a color like this. So let's see if that works. And I'll go ahead and hide the interface by tapping that double arrow icon up there in the top-right corner. And I will paint inside of my hand. And once again, because I'm using that watercolor brush, all the colors are running together. So you're going to see your brushstrokes expand. So that's just something to bear in mind. I'll just go ahead and roughly paint in all the fingers. And because we're painting inside all that careful work we did, we can be very sloppy. That is, you can be sloppy and I can be sloppy, independently of each other. All right, now I'll paint over here on the side of the hand and up on this side as well to add some shading, if you will. And I can shade the fingers. And so, as you paint, you're going to darken your previous brushstrokes and they're all going to blend together. And so you can add as much paint as you like, as you see me doing right here, and you're going to get all kinds of shading going on and it's all going to happen inside those fingers. All right, now I'll just go ahead and do a quick two-finger pinch in order to center my zoom. And that is how you add some much needed color to your articulated hand line art that you drew with your very own hand here inside Adobe Photoshop Sketch running on an iPad Pro, along with an Apple Pencil.

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