Hi everyone! Chiken here.
In the last lesson, we went through the principles of perspective,
and learnt how to use the drawing guides
in procreate to compose a scene.
In this lesson, we will learn how to render plants
and bushes to paint organic backgrounds
I will also show you another quick hack
that I use, to create really quick plants
in the foreground.
So, plants are a really great way to frame
and also bring your character illustration to life.
When we are drawing plants, it’s always good
to have references because understanding
and replicating the organic way
petals and leaves fold is crucial in drawing
realistic and dynamic plants.
And the best part is that it’s really easy
to get plant references in our daily lives.
If you're out on a walk,
you can take a few photos of any plants
you see along the way!
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If we look at this photo of a bush I took here,
we can see how the leaves fold.
Because the leaves are all kind of curved,
the shape won't be perfectly flat.
We will have overlaps.
Which can make really interesting and different shapes.
I've just outlined them here, and you can see how they all differ.
Although overall, the shape of the leaves are the same,
because of the natural way they fold,
and the angle at which we view them,
They all are slightly different.
Now, with the shapes of the individual leaves in mind,
let's try to draw a bush.
First, I'll go through the colors present in green plants.
As we travel from shadow to **light,
we will obviously go brighter but we
will also be increasing the saturation
and moving from cool colors to warm.
So, our first color here can be a green
with more blue tint.
Then, slowly, as we transition to
the light part, we will have more
yellow tint present in the green.
And now we have our general color palette
for the bush.
When drawing bushes, the key is having
the right brushes. Here, I'm using
Marc Brunet's bush brush to block in the shapes of the bush.
It's part of his free brush pack
which I will link into the class notes,
but you can find many other bush
block in brushes like this on the internet.
Because having irregularities of leaves is important when painting bushes,
drawing the shape out manually is not the best.
So here, we've just used the darkest colour to
block in the base shape of the bush.
Next, I'll start layering on the details.
I'll create a new layer, and set it to clipping mask.
Then, I'll use our second colour here
and start patching on the highlights.
We can imagine that our light source is coming
in here, from the right.
So, majority of the highlights will be there.
But it's great to add some patchiness to the middle as well.
Just to show that the bush is not perfectly round,
and we might have some branches sticking out.
Now, we have our second layer on,
I'm going to alpha lock this layer and
use an airbrush to airbrush the darker colour
onto the bottom.
Just to create some dimension and show it's 3D shape.
And now, I'll move on to the next color,
with another new layer.
As we get to the brighter colors, we will
patch them on a little more sparingly.
But, still following where our highlights
are mainly condensed at.
And we'll do the same of alpha locking it
and airbrushing on the previous color.
And now, our last highlight color.
And with all 4 layers on, it
looks like a pretty nice bush already.
We can stop here, but I like to detail it a little more.
I'm just gonna bring up our reference from before,
so that we can take a look at the shape
of the leaves and try to copy that.
Using my hard render brush, I will
use the reference as a guide, and draw in
some individual leaves.
To blend it in better,
I will make sure that my leaves are the same colour
as the part of the bush they are sticking out from.
So, if they are sticking out from the top here,
I will get that same light colour of the bush.
And similarly, if they are sticking out of
this darker part here, I will get that darker color,
and paint on the leaves.
And we're gonna do it on the other side of the bush as well.
Now, let's work on detailing the inside of the bush.
Like the leaves sticking out from the silhouette,
I will make sure that the colour of my leaves is
the same colour as the part of the bush
it is sticking out from.
So, I colour pick that colour and use it
to extend the leaf out of that portion.
The reference is very useful in
this step. Because it can show us
the shape that the leaves will make
when they are in that orientation.
Now, I'm just gonna add some very,
very slight highlighst to the dark area.
I do this quite sparingly and with not
much of a brighter colour, just slightly brighter.
So that it doesn't look too stark.
And now I'm gonna go in with a brighter
but less saturated colour,
and just highlight a very small
amount of leaves.
This makes the lighting really pop!
And adds that extra dimension and layer.
Now, using a darker colour,
I will start to add that fold of the leaves.
Again, I will reference our picture
that we have. And see what kind of
shapes that the overlap creates.
I find that adding this overlap, really
adds to that 3 dimensional feel of the bush.
And makes the individual leaves read a lot better.
Now I'll go in with the final touch ups.
I will add some dark areas into the
bright portions, to show the
depth of the individual branches.
And finally, for a really optional step,
I will add a secondary colour to our darker shadows.
I fins that blue works really well in
green plants. Because it is also an
analogous colour.
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And that's a simple bush done!
Now that we're done with a simple bush, I would like to
show you a quick little hack for
plants that are really up close, or in the foreground.
Usually, if I’m looking for a simple and quick
way to finish off my character portraits,
I will frame it with some plants, usually flowers,
but sometimes leaves.
Here, I have a photo of some red leaves because
I think it fits the vibe of the painting.
Then, I'll go into the selection tool,
on auto select,
and I'll select the areas outside the plant.
We can select the plant itself too,
but usually I find it easier and
easier to selct the areas
outside the plant and erase them.
If the selection is too sensitive,
or not sensitive enough, you can just press,
and slide to the left, or the right.
This will adjust the sensitivity of
of the selector.
So now, I'm gonna keep on tapping the
areas outside of the plant.
If our plant gets selected accidentally, like this,
I'll just undo it and go again.
So now, I think we've got a pretty clean selection,
I'm gonna drag 3 fingers down.
And cut and paste.
Now, we can delete the background off of the plant.
And we're left with just this!
We still have little bits left,
from where our selection tool didn't manage
to select. So I'm just gonna go in with
the erase tool, and manually erase them.
But it doesn't need to be that clean. Because we'll be
blurring it later.
Now, I'll just transform and position it
And I can adjust the colours, using the hue,
saturation and brightness, and the colour balance.
I'll usually shift the tones
more towards what we have on the canvas already.
So in this case, I wanna bring it to a more orange hue.
And I'll do that by increasing the yellow.
I'll also adjust the gamma curves a little bit.
Now that our colour is what we want,
I'm gonna duplicate it, and
add a second one to the right side of the canvas.
Just so it frames her a little better.
Now, I'll just apply a gaussian blur to it.
And we have some really, really quick foreground plants done!
For the mission, Render a simple bush with me,
like what we did at the start of the lesson.
and then, try out the zoomed in plant trick!
In this lesson, we learnt how to add and render simple plants.
In the next chapter, we will be finishing
up the class by going through some tricks I use
to finalise our illustrations.
Starting with the first lesson on final adjustments.
See you there!