Original subtitles

Thank you.

Hey everyone, how's it going? Yeah, so I wanted to do

a tutorial going from black and white to color because I think it's an important thing to

talk about and to explain because, yeah, I get a lot of questions and, yeah, so I wanted to

make something. I came up with a couple references here. I found these photos online. I want to make

something out of this and then something totally different. This is a photo I took

one of my trips to Japan. So two different, very different subjects matters. Something very,

like, man-made, hard-edged versus something organic and nature.

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So I'll start with this one.

This isn't going to be a tutorial necessarily about teaching how to render this and color

theory, stuff like that. It's more like the process and then me giving tips and stuff along

the way. So starting in black and white, I'm going to plan out my composition first. I'll

leave it kind of a square. What I'm doing, I've got my shape here, which I'm going to sketch in,

paint in, and then I make a clipping mask. So I just keep everything contained within that.

And then you do that just by right-clicking.

And then you go to Clipping Mask here. Cool.

So let's see, how do I want to... For me, like my process, it's always

changing, evolving, and I like that because it pushes me to become...

To try new things and learn new things and become better.

If you just do the same process over and over again, your work will

start to look the same, you won't grow as much. So this, like I'll fail quite a bit,

but I'll learn something through those failures.

So what I did, I kind of like created like some perspective kind of coming in,

some lines that kind of follow my perspective.

And with this kind of like plain air, kind of like loose sketching that I'm doing.

It's, I'm not trying to like plot out the exact

perfect perspective. It's more about getting the feeling of it.

the feeling of creating something realistic rather than, you know, going in

and mechanically, like, drawing every little, every little perfect perspective

line. So I'm doing a combo of both of these references. I love these rocks and

this, like, big foreground and then I like this bridge and these trees. So I'm kind

of combining these, seeing what I can come up with.

Giant rocks, very loose and expressive with my painting, thinking about composition, lines,

creating a pathway.

Something I do a lot, creating a pathway from foreground to background, that'll help push

the atmosphere, the perspective, the feeling of depth and space.

I'm just keeping this two values for now because I think, let's see, yeah, and then these trees

will follow perspective as well.

So I'm defining the perspective in this space with the elements that I'm painting.

I'm stepping back, I'm taking this in, it's this composition that I like, do I want to

try a new one or do I want to stick with this one?

I'll just do another quick one, just now that I'm kind of loosened up, just to kind of see

what I can come up with.

Scribbling around, making it really...

expressive, loose. I'm already kind of feeling that just by doing that one sketch I've kind

of loosened up a bit and I'm feeling like a little bit better. Yeah, these rocks coming

in. My horizon line is right in the middle, which usually I say never do, but we have

rules that are meant to be broken in painting. So we'll see. We'll go with it for now. Maybe

we'll push it, push it later. Similar kind of like snaking back composition. I like that

light hitting some of these rocks, going back into space.

Stone bridge.

Like hitting these rocks.

I'm getting some character into this bridge a little bit, make sure it feels like it's

made out of stone.

I can take all this, nice thing about like using this technique with like the clipping

mask, I can move this around and see like other compositions and stuff.

I kind of liked it where it was.

Peace.

I'm doing everything with this square brush right now.

Get some, some other textures in here.

Back to this one. I don't know, which one do I like better?

This one feels a little bit more unique, so I'm going to go with this one.

So that's my black and white sketch.

water. So from going from black and white to color, there's a lot of different ways

that you can you can approach this. And it all depended on kind of like for me

it's like the subject matter what kind of makes sense for this kind of painting.

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So yeah I'm gonna try something. Let's let's take this. I'll just duplicate it

so I can always refer back to it. I'm gonna pull my values a little closer and

then let's command B brings up color balance and then you can kind of just

push some color into it. And I'm giving myself an underpainting and I want it

to be fairly warm underpainting because

you know we're in nature there's a lot of warmth and then I can add in that cool

cool light on top of it um command u bring up some saturation

um and then you know one of my one of my favorite artists Richard Schmidt

um you know what if let's see Richard Schmidt

watcher um maybe we can take some inspiration

that's good um

you

I'll look at this for some some color inspiration. I something I'll do a lot is look at master

painters for some inspiration rather than just looking at a photo because I do not want

to create art that looks like photos. I want to create something that looks like a painting.

That's why we're painting. Okay, so I've got my underpainting. Now, what I'm going to do

is kind of forget about the underpainting. I'm keeping it in my mind. I know it's there.

But now let's just paint this without establishing the without using this this like tied down value

first and you'll see why. So I'll use like

Very, like, textural brushes, let's see.

Okay, I'm getting in some darks. I like these blue shadows.

And remember, I want things a little warmer, so if I do use blue, it's going to be like

a desaturated blue-gray.

Get some of these gray and the rocks in here.

And I'm allowing my colors to mix on my palette because you'll see I'll paint and I'll be like,

Oh, that's a nice color in there. And then I'll paint that color.

Let's get the lights in here.

Push this back into the atmosphere.

As I'm doing this, I'm painting much bigger than I normally would paint, so you guys can

see.

Normally I would be doing this small thumbnail size, I do that so that I can see from a distance

what I'm painting.

Let's get that right from the water.

Cooler

blue. I do like this bright spot in this image, so maybe I'll do that.

I love all the color variation Richard Schmidt has in here. It's like purples, oranges.

So let's, I'm gonna make another layer. Make a big brushy brush.

I can erase out some of this but that just kind of helps me to like sprinkle

in some of these these worms then erase out where I don't want them. That just

overall added a bunch of warmth to my painting. And this is exactly how I would

do like an ounce up to piece for a movie or like a Vista painting or something

or a color key. I would paint in this kind of like painterly loose way. It's

all about capturing that atmosphere, the feeling that I'm going for. I don't want

to turn this into like a math problem and worry about like my layers and

all of that. I want to be loose and expressive.

Um, okay, now you're probably wondering, like, why do that value sketch first if you're not

even using it?

And, let's go back to that now.

So we go back to this, and, so what I can do is take the magic wand and select, select,

similar.

I can select all those dark values.

Now I can, um, pull in that, that structure that we came, that we initially did.

So if you see, now I paint, it goes, it's, it's locked into that, into that value that

we, we painted with.

Um, and, oh, and I hit it with just command H. I'm using Mac, by the way.

I don't know what it is on PC.

I don't use PC.

So now I can save this.

I can get some of those sharp edges.

As I'm doing this, I'm looking at my navigator window, which is on my other screen right

next to me.

It's very small.

Looking at that, making sure it's all feeling good.

I'll just make a new layer once in a while. The way I use layers is I paint

as if I'm painting a jpeg, you know, just everything on one layer, but I'll make a new layer

um to every once in a while to like try new stuff or whatever to experiment so

then I can always go back a previous step.

As things get closer to me, I want to add in more contrast, some of these rich darks

in here.

As I'm doing this, I'm going to be kind of designing my shapes a bit and create areas

of interesting dark shapes.

As they go back, they will get lighter because of atmosphere.

We're seeing through more layers of that atmosphere.

And now, Shift-Command-I, that inverses the selection.

So now I've basically just selected my lights.

I like some of these greens in the water.

I'm going to see if that's maybe another color I can bring into here.

Light, these lights hitting these rocks.

Here we go, I thought I had...

Oh, I was thinking of my other sketch, and this one I didn't have the light hitting the

rock, so I'm going to deselect.

I'm going to add some of that in.

I'm going to be looking at some of these rocks up here.

Give some form to some of these rocks, smaller shapes as we go back into space.

Well, when I'm doing this, it's difficult to be talking the full 100% of the time, so

feel free to, you know, speed up a section if you want.

I know some people watch my videos at double speed or something.

I'm a slow talker anyways, so.

Or if you're trying to fall asleep, just put this on.

Creating some depth back here, shadow underneath, bridge.

Apple light hitting the tree.

My light is very neutral, so.

Kind of like a high-key overcast kind of day, which can be really beautiful with the warmth

that we started with, so you get that kind of like warm and cool relationship.

Let's flip this, flip horizontal, see how it's looking.

Finding some of these shadow areas.

You'll see as I'm painting this, I'm jumping around.

Foreground, background, rocks, water, you know, I'm not going to go in and just, like, render.

Render the water for 30 minutes, you know, I'm going to jump around and make sure things

are all feeling good together.

you know, figuring out where I want to place some bits of detail.

you

Yeah, this dark shape helps to define this rock here a bit.

Push this back a bit more.

I'm figuring out where I want the details to be in this piece.

I think I want to keep it in here, so I'm going to put in a few details in this area.

Uh, stepping back, how's this looking?

Looks pretty interesting from a distance.

I'm fairly happy with it.

Refined.

Refined, nice.

I'm not going to get too detailed. I want to just capture the feeling of this and

show, you know, show going from black and white to color and then, and then move on

to the next one. I don't want to over labor, over labor this.

rock shapes in here.

I kept debating, do I want to put these greens in?

I'll leave those greens out.

I'm looking for anything, any shapes I can put in here that help to define the space,

push things back, our eye focus.

You can see I'm putting down a brush stroke, deleting it, trying something new.

You may need to rock some forearms.

I pick out like one area to have the brightest bright and then I can have a

couple other areas that are similar brightness that kind of draw our eye

through this piece. That's gonna be important for composition. You can see

if you look at this value like 95 something versus this one I'm like 89 so

this the sky is very bright but it's a conscious decision to make this

highlight brighter because I want our eye to focus here you know I think

realistically the sky is gonna be the brightest bright in a situation like

this but for the sake of you know a painting you might take some artistic

liberties

that's why I'm not like too much into like things like color theory or like

all these rules because like you should know some of these rules but it's there's

always so many times where you need to break them for the sake of a painting

I like omitting the green in this, so I'll leave the green out for now.

You know, I might come back to this later, and if I do, I will save the steps.

I like some of these trees just a little bit.

I like what Richard Schmidt does.

He's got like a couple sticks and things in here that are just beautiful.

You know, to make a painting feel finished, it's not about like rendering everything,

it's about, you know, a couple well-placed edges a lot of times.

That's what I'm doing. I'm kind of picking out a couple edges here and there.

It's feeling a little weak structurally so I'll just bump that up a bit.

Maybe push the depth a bit, you know, hint at something going back in the space there.

And I think that's it.

I think we'll call it done.

Yeah, we pretty much stuck to our initial sketch.

Yeah, let me zoom into this so you can see.

That style looks pretty low-res.

Let me check image, image size.

Yeah, it's pretty, pretty low-res, especially when you're just taking like a portion of it.

So let me bump this up to when I'm recording a video, painting, Photoshop and all that,

but I like to keep my...

...

... file size a little bit smaller, as small as possible, so I can flip my canvas around, I don't have any lag, stuff like that.

So I would normally paint a bit bigger.

Um,

Okay, one trick, you can posterize, you can play with the levels.

Sometimes this can give you some ideas for some shapes to add.

Yeah, what I like about this is he's simplifying some of these rock forms.

So maybe I'll go in and just do like a select, select similar, I'll hide that, and then I'll

This orange color, move this down to 10. Let's try that.

Ah, I don't know why Photoshop does that, sometimes it'll select a very specific color

and then it'll just, like even if I put this at 1, it'll like select, okay it did an okay

job there, but sometimes it makes the selection bigger than it should be, I don't know if

it's like a bug.

and Hid like.

There we go. Select those grays. See if we can simplify that a bit.

Let's see what that added to it.

That was before, after, yeah, I like how it simplified some things.

The last thing I will do, there's a couple of light rocks over here, maybe we need another

light rock on this side to kind of balance.

Yeah.

But, so what if I keep messing with it, but I want to try one more thing, but if we took

all of this, pushed it way back, how does that feel?

Does that help us?

You know, you can do this mask thing where you can like try, you can paint something,

you can try it, and then you can, you know, paint the black and kind of erase some of

it.

I like it, yeah, let's try it.

Bring back some of those darks in there.

Yeah, I like it being pretty atmospheric.

It's kind of nice.

Give us some depth with some more trees.

I'm pushing the cinematic feeling of this, you know, really making it feel epic.

Some of these purples that we're getting in here.

All right, I need to leave this, I'm going to leave it at this.

Yeah, there we go. I'll call this done. We started with that, went to that. Great.

Cool. In the next video, I'll do something different, a different process,

something more graphic than this one. Thank you so much for watching.