Looking for the sketch file? See here!
Layers! The most important fundamental of digital art. They can seem simple, then really daunting when you see what they can do. But it’s a topic that you can learn at a comfortable pace as you advance in your skills. I want to show you how they work, and then I’ll introduce a practical use of them by showing you some actual artwork – artwork that you can follow along with!
Welcome! My name is Mt Kanjon and you’re watching Digital Dabbles – a series on learning digital art! If you like what you see, subscribe and share with your friends: these take a lot of work to produce and I want as many people as possible to be able to benefit from them. If you’re interested in general learn-do-draw skills and motivational tips, check out the rest of my channel! You can also find quick-start learning resources on my website.
I’m going to show you two examples. The first is a quick showcase of shaded spheres, like you’d do in an art class practicing light and shadow. The next is an art study I did just for you! We’ll start from just a sketch and transform it into a full-color painting over the course of this… course. I’ll even share the base sketch if you’d like to try it out yourself!
To be very clear, unless you know digital art well, I expect you to see these examples and be confused, maybe even a little bit frightened! This is a quick tour of what you can do, and in the videos after this one we’ll calmly learn each concept. My goal is to convince you that you can do this.
Painting Spheres#
Here we go! Don’t worry about canvas size or properties for now, we’ll get to that. I tend to use 3000x3000 to start – can always crop it later. Also, you’re going to see a lot of brushes in my brush library; don’t worry about those either: one concept at a time. I’ll be using a “hard round brush” and “soft round brush”, which every art program is going to have out of the box.
I’m just gonna go ahead and draw a circle with a big blobby hard round brush. It’s not a perfect circle. It’s got a little bit of a mess up there and kind of a blobbishness down there, but that’s fine. That’s all we’re gonna really do for the moment. What can we do with this? What does this actually have to do with layers? Let’s take a peek up here. We only have one layer at the moment, so we’re gonna add another one. Let’s use this to turn this circle into a sphere!
I’m going to switch brushes to a soft round brush, and… well, it’s still the same color. Let’s pick another: white. So I can brush this gently onto this circle and… ok, nice, but let’s undo that, and do this on the top left so it looks like there’s light from above. You’ll see that I got some of this paint on the background too, so I’m going to use a little trick here to make that not happen. Cool!
Remember! I’m gonna make you feel a little confused: don’t worry about memorizing all of this yet.
But hmmm… gray is a little dull. What if we made it green? I’m going to use another related trick to quickly swap the colors of the original blobby circle I made. What about changing the color of the light? Let’s try that. I’m going to do the same thing as before: new layer, that funky trick again, and pick a nice color here like a pastel blue. I’ll paint it on and… well, that doesn’t really look like a blue light, it just looks like a blue blob. I’m going to open another secret menu and change something called the “blending mode”.
I looooove to talk about blending modes, but they’re a LOT. If you’ve ever seen this menu in an art app and felt totally lost, don’t worry, I was too, but there is actually a way to explain all of this madness. We will get into this later, I promise!
Let’s pick a mode like… this one. And do the exact same painting as before. Look at that! It actually looks like a light is shining on it. Let’s do this stuff again to make a shadow. New layer, some tricks and a blending mode, and let’s put a shadow onto this. I can make some brush strokes, undo, make more, see what works.
You’ve been practicing your undo and redo from past assignments, right?
And that’s what we’ve done with a few layers! I’m going to put them into a group, because if you watch closely, moving one layer kinda messes the shading up a little bit. But if I group them, I can move the group and it all stays together. And that’s what this group here is, that definitely wasn’t there before.
I’m going to pinch the canvas to zoom in, and we’ll see three different circles here. One basically how we just did it, with a red circle layer, a layer with shading on top of it, and another where I was trying to make it look realistic in another scene. It’s also got this shadow at the bottom.
What’s this one back here? This one has purple, it has a stylized shadow and highlight on it, but in concept it’s the same thing. It also has this funky looking purple shadow behind it, but if you’re looking closely you’ll see that even though the shadow is purple, it’s green on the layer list? Whaaaa? Well, yep, blending mode and we’ll get to it at some point.
And then there’s this yellow disc. But… it’s got a lot more than just yellow on it. If I turn off these layers you can see that it is actually yellow! But I used a funky mode to make it this purple, then another layer to add a glow with yet another blending mode. And then another new thing that’s actually making this see-through! I can move this around and you can see how parts shine through. With this purple one especially you can see how the shadows change color in ways you might not expect!
Painting the Fox#
Let’s raise the stakes a bit. I’m going to show you the actual process I use to create art, and we’re going to take advantage of lots of features of layers to do this really fast. Just like before, you might feel confused, but this is just the teaser. We will be using this sketch in upcoming videos and shade it, add backgrounds, lighting, linework, all that good stuff.
This fox is a mixture of a photo study with my own stylized features thrown in. The photo is by Charles Jackson, and it’s on Unsplash. Its license makes it free to use and study without needing to ask for permission. Similarly, I’ll share my sketch and you may use it too. If you’ve seen my video on art studies, you might wonder about the ethics of this. I’m giving you explicit permission to use my sketch to learn and study digital art, because that way you don’t need to worry about your drawing skills while you’re still learning those. Don’t go and take random peoples’ sketches and digitize them though. That’s tracing. Using my sketch is tracing too, but, I’m telling you, right here, you may do this for this sketch. You can even share what you made online, I just ask that you mention that you did it as a part of learning along with this video series. Anywho, link’s in the description.
Now, this sketch layer is just one part of the digital art process, but it’s probably the hardest one! It’s where your general “learn to draw” and traditional art skills come through, and what most of my channel is about. We’ll talk about some digital tricks to help with this part in this series, but this is why I very much recommend you still practice your sketches and traditional work. Everything else, digitally, falls on top of this to make it look better. But if your sketch isn’t right, you’re going to struggle to cover that up digitally. Now let’s give this guy some color.
I’m looking at the reference photo to find a good shade of orange, but I’m not trying to be exact. I’m pinch-zooming a bit so I have more room on my tablet to work on it. Let’s swap to a hard round brush and use that and – oops! It’s covering it up. Let’s drag this layer down underneath the other. I’m going to put on a messy shape onto this, and won’t concern myself with going over the lines just yet. Because now, I’m going to use this same brush as an eraser and clean it up a tad.
I’m going to leave it a little rough for two reasons: One, I’m making a video, and don’t want to spend a lot of time being perfect. Two, sometimes messy drawings look more lively than super clean ones. Really! There we go, now we have our fox. Let’s give him something to sit on. I’m going to get some yellowish-green here, make my brush huge, and just blob down a patch of grass. I’m going to tap this smudge tool and mash this grass down a little bit to smooth it out, just a little.
Let’s also pick a background color for the sky. Some apps like Procreate have a specific background color that you pick, but a lot do not. If your art app doesn’t have one, all you have to do is put a layer at the bottom and fill it with a color. But that’s a topic for later too.
I’m going to do some blending mode magic and just gently brush in a broad shadow, as if there’s a sun coming from the top left. I’ll smudge it again to give it a stylized treatment. But now I’m looking at the fox and thinking, hmm, that’s a little bit orange. I’m going to use another feature to re-paint the coloring back on a couple times until I find one I like.
And then, just like the spheres, I’m going to add some gentle light onto this critter.
Light theory is a whole-ass topic on its own. You will mess this up, but let it be a mistake. Gotta get that bad art out before you get to the good art!
Another blending mode, and I’m going to spend some time adding on some brush strokes to brighten it up. Already he’s looking like he’s got form! I’m then going to do this again to add in shadows. I’m actually going to color-pick right from the grass here, and just like before, brush in parts where there is less light. Why the grass? Even if it’s difficult to see in everyday life, light reflects off of everything, and it’s not out of the question that the shadow might have a slight green tint to it from that.
I’m not going to be afraid of getting this too dark because it’s on its own layer, which makes it easy to try again if I don’t like it. Plus! I can drag this slider here to change the opacity to make the effect a little less intense.
Let’s jump back! Foxes aren’t just blobs of orange, they’ve got a little more going on too. I’m adding in a layer between these two, and just painting directly with some other colors – no fancy tricks here. Cool! Looking a little better. Let’s go ahead and paint the eyes too. Now, the reference has orangeish-brown eyes, but… I’m going to pick blue, because this is art and in this art, this fox has blue eyes. Maybe a little highlight here. And we’ll add a little bit of shading to the ears. And then, let’s paint these legs too, maybe smudge them a bit to soften it up. There we go!
Just like that, we’ve taken something kinda empty and made something that already is looking quite nice. Sweet! Let’s hop over to another variant of this same image.
You can tell I’ve painted this one a little bit differently. Basically the same stuff though. But I also had some fun making a background! Woah – lots here, but the same general techniques. I love making backgrounds. We’ve got trees on their own layer, the sky’s in a layer, the sky has clouds, the sky has, well, the sky.
The trees have a lot of stuff going on and I kind of just did a bunch of things until I got a blobby tree shape. And you can even see that one of the tree layers is just a copy of the other, but it’s rotated a little bit. That’s part of the fun: you can re-use parts you already painted. Over here, I’ve put in a shadow, but then thought, what if it actually had a bright glow to it? It looks more fantastical, like it’s out of a story, just kinda nice.
And all I did was swap blending modes.
I also messed around with the eyes a bit more: you can see I have a couple layers to add some subtle shading to give them depth, and some quick shine marks. Livening up the eyes of a character can add so much to a piece of art. I’ve also got some older copies of my sketch on here, because I wanted to make sure I had a somewhat cleaner one for this video. Loads of tricks at work!
AND LOOK! It’s our balls! I can take this red one and move it on over and – boop! But let’s put that back down. And the others are here too, don’t worry. We can look at the fox through this… spyglass. And this spooky purple one, maybe he’s wearing it as a hat. But… maybe I don’t want such a glowy effect on his face. I can try some things, in the end I might end up just erasing a part of it – totally valid.
There it is! What a little bean. I haven’t even bothered to line this sketch properly yet: it looks kinda nice as a sketch! But we’ll do that anyway later on.
If this seems a little overwhelming: that’s what I expect! We will take our time getting into each concept as we continue, and at the end of it, you’ll be able to take a look at this again and realize that this wasn’t so scary. Here’s your practice work! Try a fresh canvas and make your own sphere, just like we did in this video. Make a circle, doesn’t have to be perfect, then try shading it on a new layer. Instead of trying to figure out clip masks or blending modes, just use layers as-is for now and make it messy. We’ll get to it in the next video, but see if you can figure out how to re-order layers and move them around independently on the canvas. And share what you’ve made! YouTube tends to eat links in the comments, but feel free to tag me on socials! See you for the next.
Thanks for watching! This is my first time teaching a digital art course. Feedback is welcome: I know this will seem confusing with so much information up front, but we’ll slow down and take things easy. If there’s anything you’re feeling lost about, or things you’d like to see, feel free to leave a comment! You can also message me directly if you prefer. And again, if you liked this and would like more, subscribe, and share with friends and other potential artists.
| Production Info | |
|---|---|
| Music | sero - Change - Instrumental Version; sero - Ease |
| VRChat World | Sea Breeze by WispyWoo |
| VRChat Avatar | Vulper by Royalty, Meaty, and Reval |