Starting from this lesson, we are going to cover more fundamental techniques of digital painting. And the best way to do that is to actually practice them directly by drawing something. So for that reason, we are going to draw this skull illustration from sketching, to shading and finally detailing. I chose this skull object because it only has one surface or one base color, but the shape of it is complex enough for us to practice the shading techniques. In later project we teach the three illustration project we will cover more complex drawing that consists of more than one base color. Okay, now, when I record the video, I actually have no idea what the final result will look like.

I only have this abstract image in my head that I want to draw. So you actually see this image ahead of me. Okay, in this lesson video, we will cover how to create sketches and then prepare the layers for a non destructive digital painting workflow. And then we will add base color using simple selection method. Then add shading using our previous basic method and using a more advanced detailed shading method with the help of selection. Next, we will cover how to add highlights and finally, how to add details and textures to our growing.

There are a lot of things to cover. That is why this is called rowing project will span across multiple lesson videos. Okay, before moving on, starting from this lesson, you may see my mouse cursor jumping around from one place to another place directly we don't any moving transition and also you will see all A lot of jittering when I stop and explaining something, this is because I will mostly use my drawing tablet instead of my mouse. If you see the cursor stop perfectly, usually it is because I lift the pen very high or I switch to my mouse or I paused the video in a video editing process. It may be harder now to follow the mouse cursor location, but I will try to give a clue to you by moving around the pen first before doing anything with a pen. Okay, let's start sketching our scalp drawing.

I am using the pencil brush from our production brush set. Make sure the foreground color is set to black. For this we can simply press D in the keyboard. Okay, let's start drawing. This large ellipsoid shape will be the parietal bone This will be the cheekbone. We are creating a simple stylized skull that only has four teeth.

Let's create the eyebrows. It should looks angry. Of course, a real scowl cannot show any emotion as unit muscles for that. But again, we are not trying to create realistic scowl in this lesson. I'll speed up the video for now, as we will only use the same basic technique throughout the process. I cut out some of the bridle bone because I think it was just too big now compared to the facial structure.

Okay, now let's rename the sketch layer to sketch and rename the bottom layer to BG for background. And when coloring, it is better to have more neutral color. White is not good as it is the brightest color that we can get If we have wide for the background color, it will influence us so that we tend to pick brighter color also for our illustration, let's pick more grayish color, and then hit Shift Backspace to fill the background layer with that gray color. Okay, now for coloring. Let's create a new layer below the sketch layer but above the background layer. Let's name this with B, which is actually stands for base color.

I usually named base color layers with just be electronic key. Now let's reduce the sketch opacity to 20% we can just right click in here and then type 20 then enter. The sketch drawing now looks very subtle, but we can still see it and use it for guidance. To create the base color. Let's use the outline selection tool. Remember, we already changed the shortcut to z rather key, draw the radian with the selection tool, we can hold the control key so we can access both the outline selection tool and the polygonal selection tool at the same time.

After we have the selection created, let's pick a light brown color and then press Shift backspace again, to fill the selection with that color, Press Q to remove the selection. Now, I just realized that the background color is competing too much with our skull base color. So let's revise the color first, pick our previous background color and then slide it down to get much darker color. And then shift backspace again. Okay, now let's lock the layer to make sure nothing will happen to it. Okay for us shedding.

We won't be adding shading colors directly on the B layer as this will make it harder for us later. If we need to make any changes or revisions, we want to create a dedicated layer for shading located above this layer. Now, because later, we will use offer inheritance for the shading layer, but we don't want the shading layer to inherit from the background layer, we need to wrap the base color layer and the shading layer together in a group layer. Previously, we learned how to use Ctrl G for creating group layer. But with this method, we need to create our shading layer manually. Let me undo this first.

The faster way to do this is by using the quick clipping group command or by pressing Ctrl Shift G. Or if you forget the shortcut, you can right click group and then quick clipping group in here. Notice by doing these, we created a new group layer, our current layer is already placed inside it. But the difference from the previous method is that we have a new layer above our current layer, which already has our inheritance option turned on. So all we need to do now is just changing the Blending Mode to Multiply and then rename the layer to S for shading. Remember our previous lesson multiply will make colors below with darker which is perfect for adding shadow colors to our drawing. And let's rename the group layer to style.

So again, we have a group layer named scowl which is on top of the background layer. And later in this as our shading layer, we will add the shading colors before doing any shading as always, we do To define where the light sources will be, we can imagine that we have one light source on top straight at this position, but at second thought this will be too dull. I think we should have a light source more or less to the right at this point. Okay, now to share the scowl with basic shading, we can use the techniques we discussed earlier. Let's use the heart brush and blur method for this. Go to the brush tool mode.

Pick the existing color. Then press key once to pick a darker version of the color. Pick a hard edge brush, but don't use on hundred percent opacity. Reduce the opacity by pressing it several times until we have 20% opacity. Again, we need to imagine that the light source is at the top right area and just shade like this. speed up the video for now, after we have applied one layer, let's apply another layer on top of it, and another one, and so on.

Okay, now let's use the blur tool and just blur out all of the heart ages. So now we have a basic or initial shading where we can add more detailed shading on top of it. Okay guys, in the next lesson, we will continue our skull drawing and add more details on it.