Hi everyone! Chiken here.
Welcome to the last chapter!
After all the hard work and time we put
into rendering our character and background, we need to
do some final adjustments to optimize the artwork
and bring it to its full potential.
Let's get straight into it.
Firstly, I'll airbrush a light color onto the
corner where the light is coming from.
We don't need a lot,
just having it on on a very light opacity will give
the feeling of a bright environment. And it mimics the way
bright light shows up in a photograph or a camera.
And like how we airbrush a light color onto
where our light is coming from, I'll also airbrush
a dark color onto the opposite corners.
This not only emphasizes the light, but also
brings our focus more to the character.
Next, to emphasize our lighting even more, we
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can add a layer on add mode and
brush on a light color to the highlights.
So because our light source is a yellow colored light, I'm
going to use a light yellow and I'll add brush it
on onto the areas where the light hits our character, and
I'll change that layer to add layer mode.
You can use the add brush like I did
just now, or we can even use a textured
brush like my hard render brush, and I'll paint
it on really, really lightly in many layers.
This just kind of fits the painterly style a little
bit more than the clean look of the airbrush.
If it's too streaky, we can always go in
with our smudge brush to soften it out.
Now, to blend our character into her surroundings, we
can add the background color with an overlay layer.
To do that, I will duplicate the background
layer, drag it above our character,
set it to Clipping mask, and I will apply a
Gaussian blur to it under the adjustments.
Now, the colors of the background have been applied
to our character and I'll set it to an
overlay blending mode and adjust the opacity.
Finally, I'll adjust the hue, saturation and brightness
just to fit the background colors and lightning
a little bit more.
And now she looks a lot more blended into the background.
This works especially well for portrait art with
a blurry background. And with that done, we
can move on to our final adjustments.
Usually I will make my work slightly more
saturated and adjust the color balance if needed.
We can also play with the gamma
curves to increase or decrease the contrast.
Generally, things that are further away from the
camera have a lower contrast, while things closer
to the camera have a higher contrast.
Now to adjust the color balance.
When we are painting, it can be tough
to control our color usage, so this is
a really good way to manipulate it at the end.
We can make our shadows more blue,
or even add more of a yellow tint to the highlighted part.
And those are our final adjustments done.
This is before...
And this is after! We can see
that our colors become a lot more vibrant and our
character blends into her surroundings a lot more.
I also think it just feels a lot more atmospheric.
To finish off this class, let's go through a technique to
add a glow to our character.
I usually reserve this technique for portraits that
are drawn very character focused like this one,
and I won't use them so much for
illustrations where our character is drawn into an
environmental background, as it doesn't look as natural.
So I have my portrait up and
I'll first duplicate my character layer.
Next I'll go into the adjustments and
apply a Gaussian blur to it.
I set it to 12% and you can
see the blurred parts peeking out of her.
Next I set the layer to overlay and
I will adjust the hue saturation brightness.
Usually I'll turn up the brightness and saturation
so it has that glow effect and that's
a great way to highlight our character and
separate them from the background.
For the mission, make some final adjustments to your character art.
In this lesson, we went through the adjustments
and simple additions we can add to really
make our character art stand out more.
In the next lesson, we will
go through some particle effects.