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

853 Painting your hand-drawn fingernails

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

853 Painting your hand-drawn fingernails

- [Instructor] In this movie, we're going to take our colorful, hand-painted hands, and we're going to paint in the fingernails. And I don't mean that we're going to paint them salon like, that is, we're going to add different colors, rather we're going to make them look naturally lighter. By adding the fingernails for starters, and then adding the cuticles, along with the lunulas, and distal edges, if you will. Now, I currently have this artwork open inside of Photoshop running on a Mac, by the way, and so I'm including this file along with the exercise files. But I'll actually be doing all of my work here inside Adobe Photoshop Sketch, running on an iPad Pro. All right, so currently I have my hand layer selected, which is this guy right here, and so, I'm turning it off by double-tapping on its layer thumbnail over on the left-hand side, and so I have my layers on the left, and my brushes on the right, because I'm left-handed. In your case, by default, they're the other way around. And so if I want to bring that layer back, I'd just double-tap on its thumbnail, once again. All right, now I'm going to add a new layer for the fingernail painting. And so I'll do that by tapping on the plus icon, up here at the top of the stack, and selecting Sketch layer. All right, now I'm going to zoom in on the thumbnail, and I'm doing that with a two-finger pinch, which allows me to zoom, pan, and rotate my view all at once. And now I'll select the second brush down, over on the right-hand side, again, for you, it would be on the left-hand side, if you're working along with me, that is. And I'll tap that guy again, and tap on its Settings icon right there, so that you can see that I'm working with an ink pen, and I'm going to go ahead and reset the brush by tapping on the words, Reset Brush, down here at the bottom of the panel, and that will restore the default pressure, and velocity dynamics, at which point, I'll just go ahead and hide that panel. Now, notice that my color is set to white. I'm going to leave it that way so that I'm uniformly brightening the background colors. I don't want the size to be this huge, so I'll take it down to 30, let's say, just for the sake of demonstration, and then I'll grab my Apple pencil, and I will go ahead and paint inside this thumbnail as well. Now, one of the things that's displeasing me about the thumbnail is that the outline has these breaks around it, and so, what I'm going to do is figure out which of the layers is responsible for that thumbnail outline, and it happens to be this guy right here, near the top of the stack, about three down, and I can confirm this is the one by double-tapping on its thumbnail. Notice those lines disappear, and if I double-tap the thumbnail again, they come back. And now I'm going to tap on the brush icon up there at the top of the brushes list, and I'm going to tap on the first guy, which is the graphite pencil, set to black, by the way. And so I'll just go ahead and paint very delicately around the thumbnail like so, in order to create a continuous edge. All right, now I'll tap on that brush icon to bring back all the brushes, and I'll select the second one once again, the ink pen, and now I'll go ahead and two-finger pinch my way around to the index finger, and I'll paint in this guy like so. So I'm just painting in the fingernails, pretty easy stuff to do. You just want to make sure you're painting on the right layer, which I'm not. I just got done painting on that graphite layer, so I'll do a two-finger swipe to the left, so right to left in order to undo, and then I'll tap on that layer, this guy right here, just happens to be called Sketch layer, because I haven't renamed it, but it's the one that currently contains the thumbnail, and now I'll paint inside the fingernail for the index finger, like so. All right, now I'll go ahead and do a two-finger pinch, in order to switch over to the third finger, and I'll go ahead and paint inside of it, and by the way, if you try to do a two-finger pinch, but you accidentally undo, like so, then press and hold on the Undo icon up here in the top right region of the screen, and go ahead and tap on that Redo icon, the second one down, until it dims, and now I'll go ahead and paint in the ring fingernail, like so, and, looks like I could've painted more of the third fingernail, so I'll just go ahead and fill that in, and then I'll go ahead and switch over to the pinky nail, this guy right here, and paint it in as well. All right, now I'll do a quick two-finger pinch in order to center my zoom, and I'll tap on that layer's thumbnail to bring up its settings like so, and I'm going to take the opacity value down, so that we have a more subtle lightening effect. All right, now I want to add in the cuticle details, and so I'll tap on the plus icon, at the top of the layer stack, and select Sketch layer, and then I'll go ahead and zoom in on the thumb, doing that once again with the two-finger pinch, and now I'll tap on that brush icon over on the right-hand side of my case, and I'll take the size value down, just by dragging in this little circle here, down to 10, let's say, and now I'll go ahead and paint in the cuticle, this guy right here, and apparently I'm oversimplifying the nature of the cuticle, that it actually also includes the lunula, in case you're curious, and that's something I looked up on the web. You can look it up as well if you like. This guy right here at the top of the thumbnail is the distal edge, and now I'm going to add a little bit of highlight, like so, in the form of crosshatching, which is consistent with the artwork so far. That is to say, I don't want to create a kind of airbrushing effect, but if I do that fast two-finger pinch, you can see that it's actually in the opposite side of what I want. I want it to be on the top right edge, and it's currently on the bottom left, so I'll tap on the little clock icon in order to bring up the history, and drag this bar over to the left, until just the highlights go away, like so. And then I'll zoom back in there, and I'll add my crosshatching highlight lines on the other side. All right, now let's do the same for the fingers here, so I'll add a cuticle to the index finger. I might even go ahead and add a cuticle to the third finger while it's here, and I'll add those distal edges along the top to both fingernails, like so, and you can fill them in, and make them nice and round to whatever extent you like, and now I'll add the highlights to both fingernails. And let's go ahead and zoom in on these guys right here, I accidentally drew a line, so I'll tap that Undo icon to get rid of it. And then I'll just go ahead and paint in the distal edge, and the cuticle as well, or the lunula if you prefer. I think the cuticle is the soft, fleshy part, whereas the part inside the nail is the lunula, but don't quote me. And if you're at a salon talking to a professional, lay low. All right, now I'll go ahead and add the highlights, like so, and then I'll do a quick two-finger pinch in order to zoom out, like so, so that I'm centering my zoom. I'll tap on that layer thumbnail to bring up its properties, and I'll take the opacity down to, let's say, 70% this time around. And now it dawns on me that I'd like to infuse a little bit more colors, and color variation, into the background, and so I'm going to go ahead, and scroll down the layer list on the left-hand side, and tap on that blue layer, second to bottom in my case, and I'll tap on the brush icon over there on the right-hand side of the screen, your left, most likely, and I'll select this guy, the second to bottom brush, which is, by default, the watercolor flat brush. Notice that I've set the color to a vivid shade of purple, and I have a pretty big brush as well, it's 180. All right, so I'll go ahead and pinch my artwork a little bit, and I'll switch to the full-screen view by tapping on that double-arrow icon in the top right corner, and I'll go ahead and paint in that layer. And because the hand layer is opaque, you will not paint into or on it, and then just go ahead and release in order to let the paint flow. And because we're working with the watercolor flat brush, every single brushstroke is going to blend in to the last one, as long as you don't undo or switch to a different tool. Now the thing that you're not going to see blending is the purple with the blue, so because the blue comes to us from the previous movie, it is dried, that's the way Sketch considers it to be, anyway. The purple, however, is remaining wet, and so the wet brushstrokes blend in with each other. The blue brushstrokes do not. All right, so just continue painting as much as you want right there, and you don't really have to cover the entire hand. Notice if I switch out of the full-screen view, and I double-tap on that hand layer right there above it, you can see that I haven't really painted in too many of the details there. I will paint all the way into the thumb, and all the way into the crevice between the index finger, and the third finger, like so, but it really doesn't matter what's happening inside the body of the hand. I'm going to double-tap on that hand layer to bring it back, and then I'll go ahead and do a quick two-finger pinch in order to center my artwork, and I'll tap the double-arrow icon in the top right corner in order to hide the interface. And that is at least one way to paint in the fingernails associated with your hand-drawn hand art, complete with cuticles, lunulas, and distal edges, using, in my case, Adobe Photoshop Sketch, combined with an iPad Pro, and an Apple pencil.

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