Hi everyone! Chiken here.
In the last chapter, we covered how to select colors,
and blocked in the colors of our painting plan.
In this chapter, we will be learning how
to render various parts of our character, and
turn our painting plan into an illustration.
This is where all of our knowledge from the previous
chapters will all come in and help us paint.
So I'm really excited!
In this first lesson, I'll be giving you an overview
of rendering, and introduce you to a couple of techniques.
Let's get started.
Firstly, rendering is the process of turning a
base into a finished and detailed piece.
There are several methods to do it.
If you do line art, you can block in the
colors, and slowly add layers of shadows and light.
Or, if you're painting loosely, you can start off
with big shapes first, then slowly add more detail.
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There's really so many different techniques out there, and it
all just comes down to what you like more.
Personally, I've used two methods of rendering.
Rendering from line art, and rendering from blobs.
The first, rendering with lines, involves first
sketching, then producing a fairly clean line
art, blocking in the colors, and finally
rendering everything, usually separating each component like
hair, skin, clothes, etc. into different layers.
And the second rendering from blobs, involves
blocking in colors without lines, then detailing
and rendering in the details slowly.
I currently use the second method more,
however, they give really similar results.
It differs more in the process itself.
Let's now practice both of them on a portrait,
and I'll go into some tips for each technique.
Their pros and cons and why
I switched to the second technique.
So for the first technique, we are
going to be rendering from lineart.
We will start with a sketch and then
go over with a fairly clean line art.
For this demo, we will just be trying to replicate the
drawing over here, and because we are starting with lines, we
can draw our head guide to guide us on the face.
With this method, a lot of the tips from
the sketching and anatomy chapter will come in handy.
We can draw on the hair according to
the three components that we learned the bangs,
the side hairs, and then the back hairs.
And now that we have sketch ready, I'm gonna start
with the line art. I lower the opacity of our sketch
layer, and then start going on with some line art.
Personally, I don't really like to do super clean line art
because later on I'll still be painting over it.
But I'm trying to get everything as
proportional as I can at this stage.
Now that I'm done with the skin, I'm going
to create a new layer for the hair.
Like I mentioned earlier, using this
technique, I usually separate each component
into different layers for easier rendering.
With the lines, I'll draw them pretty detailed.
At this stage, I'll try to draw
on the singular strands and everything.
And again, a new layer for the flowers.
Now that I'm done with the line art, I'll
remove the sketch layer, and I'll just adjust a
few things before we go on to the next
step using our trusty liquify tool.
It's quite important that we try our best to
fix our proportions earlier on rather than later, because
once everything is detailed in, when we use the
liquify tool, it will get distorted even more.
And now I'm blocking in the colors separately.
When I'm done with the skin, I create
a new layer for the hair again because
we'll be painting over everything later on.
I don't worry too much about
making everything perfectly within the lines,
but this is just personal preference.
And finally again, a new layer for the flowers.
Now that all our colors are blocked
in, we can start shading them separately.
I'll go to each layer and add shading accordingly.
And this is one of the pros for this method.
Because all our different subjects are separated onto different layers,
we can Alpha lock each layer and just work on
them without it messing up the other layers.
And now I started to paint over the
line art and detail it even more.
Also, again, because they are all separated,
I can individually liquify each layer.
Now I'm moving on to the hair and
going on with the same shading process.
I'm blocking in the big shadows first.
Then I'll combine this layer with the line art
layer and I'll start painting it over.
I start by detailing in the most shadow or the most dark parts.
And just slowly start sculpting the shapes and shadows.
And as I detail things, I'm also cleaning them
up because my line art layer wasn't that clean.
In this stage, I'll start making things tidier.
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And now let's introduce a secondary color.
I picked an analogous color for this because I'm just
trying to follow the reference as closely as possible.
There's some blue in the reference, so I'm
just trying to add that in as well.
I made yet another layer for the eyebrows, and you can
see how useful it is to have it on another layer
because I can just work on that without affecting the hair.
I can even move it independently like that.
And now I can shade in the flowers.
Another good thing about using this method is
that because we have our line art and base
colors separated on different layers, we can do
some base shading without affecting the line art.
And here I added some shading using a
multiply layer underneath the flowers, which is easily
done because our layers are all separate.
Now I'm just finishing off with the final lighting, and I'll
go through some of the pros and cons of this method
because we have a line art at the start.
How our final product looks is quite dependent on the
quality of our initial line art, and that can be
a pro or a con, depending on how good your
line art skills are. For the pros,
because we are using lines, we can make use of
the guides like the head guides or the shapes like
in the anatomy chapter, and we can work cleanly on
each separate layer, and not worry about going past the
lines when we have our Alpha lock on.
However, I do find this method less fluid.
If we want to change something, we have
to draw the line art from scratch again.
And if your proportions look off from the start in the
line art phase, it can end up showing in your final work.
Also, it can be more time
consuming to switch between layers.
Although it can seem quite quick to
switch between layers, it can really build
up to a significant amount of time.
Now that we're done with that first technique, let's
move on to the second, rendering from blobs.
For this method, we will start by
blocking in the rough shape of everything.
We focus on the large shapes
first without worrying about the details.
If we are working with a reference, like we are
now, one practice tip is to blur the reference image,
draw what you see, then gradually unblur it and paint
more and more details that become visible.
As you can see here, I'm forced to just focus
on the large blobs of shapes that I can see.
This is a study technique used in traditional painting.
Artists will squint their eyes so that their
subject is blurry and paint on the blurry
blobs that they can see and slowly detail
it by gradually squinting less and less.
But in digital art, we have the trusty
Gaussian blur to do that for us.
The reason why this method is so good is
that we see the world in shapes, not lines.
So when we are painting the blobs, we are
literally painting what we see.
And you can see here we've done everything on a single layer.
Now I'm going to unblur it slightly less.
Just now, we were blurring it at 10%, so now
we're going to blur it to about 7% only.
And with that, a lot more details are starting to show.
So again, we paint in what we see.
Another reason why I like this method so much
is that I find it very mistake friendly.
If the proportions look off, I can very easily
use my liquify tool or even lasso and
transform tool to correct it as I paint.
Because everything is so rough at the start, it's
really easy to paint over my mistakes and it
won't show up as much in the final product.
However, one con is that I do
find this method not as beginner friendly.
If you don't have a good sense of
anatomy, for example, the lack of guidelines can
cause some problems in getting the proportions right.
Also, if you do work for clients,
getting a decent looking thumbnail is not
as fast as just sketching with lines.
As you can see here, by this initial blob that I
started out with, it looks kind of terrible, and I don't
think a client would be pretty happy to see this.
It does take a while before it
starts looking somewhat like a proportional human.
You can see here, I'm adjusting everything while it's
still really rough. And now I can go to
my unblurred image and start really detailing in everything.
Instead of coloring below my line art, I
color first, then draw on my line art.
We can use the shading that we did and the
initial blobs to guide us where to put our lines.
So actually, even if we are not doing
line art, all the skills that we learn
from the sketching chapter will come in handy.
I find this process very enjoyable.
I can change things up as I go, and I
think it's a lot more fun and allows my creativity
to flow better, which is why I switched to it.
Also, like I mentioned from the previous method,
going through the layers and switching between them
can be quite time consuming, especially when you
have a lot of layers and you're trying
to find the right one to work on.
Not to mention procreate has a layer limit, so
if you have an extra big canvas, you'll be
limited to around ten layers or less.
So this method eliminates that problem.
Because most of the painting is done on a single
layer, we don't have to worry about all that.
Usually if I do struggle with working on individual
layers, I can separate or add another layer on,
but at most I'm working with around three to
five for a single character, and they'll all be
gradually combined again to a single layer.
And now as I start detailing in her
face, it's really starting to look more alike.
But again, if you are still starting
out, this can be a bit challenging.
If you haven't developed a good sense of where
to place each of the facial features, we are
really relying quite heavily on eyeballing it and just
getting it at the right place.
Again, with this method, I start out with the
shading, then finish up with the lines on top.
Another good thing about this method is that we are
always focused on the big picture with the first method.
Because everything is separated into layers, it's very easy
to get tunnel vision when we are rendering.
Because you are so focused on a single layer,
it's always better to render everything as a whole,
instead of rendering things one by one.
And I find that this method is really conducive for that.
And at this stage I can still
use my Liquify tool to move things around.
Here, you can see I ran into a little bit of a
problem, because the eyebrow is on the same layer of the hair.
When I try to liquify it, it will liquify
the hair as well and distort that. So that's
why when I'm doing full illustrations I will usually
separate things like eyebrows, onto another layer.
Here, when I'm drawing the side hairs, you can see I
completely changed the shape of them, and that's what I like
about this method. That because everything is so rough I can
change shapes very easily.
And here again, using the blobs to
guide where my lines are.
There's a bit of a light
spot near her face in the reference, so I'm going to
paint that in as well.
I think this works pretty well as a base
already, most of our details are in and we
have a general idea of the overall colors.
From here, between the two different methods.
The way of rendering and detailing in the rest
of the illustration will be fairly similar. With the
only difference being that one is separating everything into
different layers, and this one has everything on the
same layer. Although this second method is a bit
more unorthodox within anime art style painting.
I really hope you can give it a try
because it can be really fun. But at the
end of the day any methods are totally okay.
It all depends on what you like
and what you find more manageable.
That's why, I think it's so important to keep on trying
new methods and exploring different techniques.
For the mission, use both
techniques to very simply render a character. Don't worry about going
into too much detail. I just want you to get a
feel of these two different techniques. When you are done, feel
free to share if you ran into any trouble with either,
and which method you prefer.
In this lesson, we learnt about rendering and
the two techniques that I use.
In the next lesson, we will be starting to render
our characters together starting with the eyes.