Look! It’s a piece of art. It’s done right? Not quite: let’s do more refining! What’s left to change? Well, this is actually the last video involving this piece. We’ll mess with some more blending, touch up linework, eyes, and add in more lighting to give this even more life. My name’s Kanjon, and If you’ve not seen this series yet, it’s part of a free digital art course called Digital Dabbles. My channel also has tips and tricks about tackling tough thoughts on learning art and creative skills. I’d love if you subscribed and shared it along.
90% of the time you spend on a piece is often on what feels like the smallest details. That might feel like the case here, and it’s tough to figure out what to work on. If you feel like you’ve finished your work, you don’t have to keep going on it. You could keep doing this forever, but there’s gotta be a time to stop. I’m going to show you how far I want to go with this today and then call it there. Don’t feel like your art has to always do all of this. There’s value in quick sketches, and there’s value in knowing the limits of your skill. Made a video on that here. Anyway! Near the finish line.
Let’s start with these little grass blades on the sketch of the fox. Didn’t forget about these, did you? These help give a sense that the fox is there in the environment, instead of just a sticker on top. Pretty easy here: new layer, just under the line work but on top of everything else. I’m going to color-pick something close by and brush these in. Like some of our other efforts, a mixture of the brush and smudging to put things into place. I might vary the color here and there but otherwise, nothing fancy.
Next, let’s go back to that background. In the last video, I accidentally smudged a bit of this too much, and you can see a ring here. That wasn’t intentional, and I didn’t notice that until editing the video! That’s how art works though, so let’s go back and clean that up. Smudging, brushing in colors, maybe adding in more bright light bits now that I’ve had some time away from this and can look at it with fresh eyes. There we go, fixed!
Now: eyes! Us humans are wired to notice a lot about eyes, and getting these right can be tricky! Small details can make a huge difference, and adding little bits of shine, adjusting the positions of pupils, and general attention to detail can change a lot about how your art feels.
That in mind, I’d like to work on the eyes as new layers. This lets me try things out multiple times in case I mess up, and I can even easily move the pupils around and adjust effect opacity separately. Layer for the pupils here and some simple dark fill near the lines. Not too bold and not too dark, that’ll look a bit too intense. I might even mess with this later on, but let’s keep going. Using an Add layer, I’m going to add some bright shine. Why Add and not Screen? Add, as we’ve seen with the background, ramps up the brightness a lot faster – that’s useful for bright reflections and light sources. Just a touch of that. Then, a hard light layer: this is our combination Screen and Multiply, and we’re going to use a little bit of it to add some depth, shading it a little bit like a sphere, but also getting in some shadows near the eyelids.
Again, it takes a lot of practice to get these right. I’m not perfect here, but… good enough. Much of the art style you see in artists’ work is how they draw eyes: if you’re looking to develop your own style, try studying a few you like.
Now one of my favorite parts: adding edge highlights. This can really bring out the brightness of the sun in the scene. Rim lighting is a similar idea if a character is lit from behind, but here we’re just considering the edges up towards the light source, adding in bits of detail. I’m going to make a layer here, blending mode Add again, and I want to show you the kind of color I’m going for. I’m also going to use this opportunity to flip through a few modes and see if any look better for this, but I think Add works well.
Watch out with how much you do here: too much can have the opposite effect and make your character appear flat! Same with too much shadow on one side. This is super tough to get right. Try flipping your canvas horizontally as you work to check your progress. Flipping it resets your brain and helps you spot errors in the process.
Just like our other refining stages: brushing in marks, and using smudge and sometimes eraser to clean them up. You’ll see here how I try adding in more light, zoom in and out, and decide to scrape it back off. At this point I don’t want to over-do it, so I’ll leave this part here.
Now for the last bit: we’re going to color our linework! You don’t have to do this. I think it can help add to the vibe of a scene when done right, and for this we’re going for something warm and outdoorsy, so we’ll change the tones to match the light a bit. We’ll put a clip mask on our line work: yes, you can do that! Otherwise, nothing fancy: I’m going to use a smooth round brush to change the colors around this fox. I want to make it warm and brighter on light areas, but not too bright. On the dark side, I want to preserve some line contrast so that we can still see some outlines clearly. This takes some practice to make sure you don’t make your line-work distracting; it might take a few tries with various colors. When I’m done, it’s given it a nice variation that blends well with the scene. And for fun, here’s what I just painted without the clip mask… but we’ll leave that on.
Oh my dog. We’re done! The small differences from the past few videos probably feel hard to tell, but compare them again and you can see what little details can do. Let’s sign this! Slap a new layer on top and doodle on your signature. I’m just going to use a brush stamp I’ve made of mine. Then export two copies: one as PSD to archive, in case you ever want to see how you did things, and another as PNG. We’ll talk about the differences in image formats some other time; for now PNG will get you a nice result without quality loss.
Try this stuff out yourself and finish up that painting! If you’ve followed along, I’d love to see what you’ve made. Tag me! Up next: uhh… wait, that’s it! We did it! Thank you so much for watching this Digital Dabbles series: we’ll call that “season 1” for now. We’ll start season 2 in a bit, but in between I’d like to return to some of my general art videos and Q&A. I hope you’ve had some fun watching these, and have learned a trick or two even if you’ve done this stuff before. I’ve had a lot of fun making them. Chase that passion, artist, and go make some art you can have fun with. See ya!
| Production Info | |
|---|---|
| Music | Ben Hendler - Miss You; sero - Ease; Barrell - Takin a Walk |
| VRChat World | Sea Breeze by WispyWoo |
| VRChat Avatar | Vulper by Royalty, Meaty, and Reval |