SAVING YOUR ART. (step by step)

If you don't know how to actually shape the front of the face here and it looks very complex, try the staircase method. You're going to follow the angle changes on the front of the face. So, up, down, up, down, up, down, up, down, up, down, back in, back down to the neck, and there you have a profile view. What's up, my beautiful nieces and nephews? Today, we're going to be taking a look at some of your guys' art, and I'm going to try to rescue them from the depths of art hail. Please sit down and open your brain now as I perform these life-saving plastic surgery procedures. Remember guys, no piece is too far gone and no one is beyond help. That being said, here is our first Patreon member and victim, Pavin Art, who says, "I've been studying Whoops. Art style for around 9 to 10 months. Not fully consistently, but with focused intent." Oh yeah, I can tell. My work here uses lighting inspired by one reference and a background inspired by another, blended with my own approach. Now, the results here that we see on the screen is fantastic for somebody who's been studying for a year, but I'm not here to blow smoke up your butt. I'm here to help you improve. So, how can we save this piece? Two things here. Okay, I think the nose is a little bit too short or the eyes are a little bit too low. How can I tell? Well, if we draw a line across the eyebrow and the bottom of the nose, we can find where the ey line intersects the midpoint between those two lines. This gives us a ratio for how the features sit in the middle of the face. Now, if you draw the same line across Bloop's drawings, there's the eyebrow, there's the nose, draw a line down, and let's cross the ey line. You can see that sits much further up. So, that's point number one, and it's a very easy fix again in liquify. But point number two is where we're going to have a little bit more trouble. So, all I've done here is bring the nose down a bit and bring the eyes up a bit. And this way, we've established the right ratio in the midsection of the face. You can see the ey line now moves a lot higher. There's the before and there's the after. Before, after. Before, after. The second thing that we're going to do is very tricky because it involves lighting. Now, if you guys recall in the original message from our Patreon member, they mentioned that they used two different lighting scenarios to create this piece. Now, this is where we've made a big boo boo. So, the background here borrows from this piece, which is a sunset. We're looking into the sunset, which means our character is back lit. The light is hitting them from behind. They're getting light back. But for the lighting on the actual character, we referenced this piece. And in this scenario, the light is hitting the character from 3/4 angle from the front, not from the back. Now, if there's one thing about Whoop that I'm absolutely certain of is that he is very consistent with his lighting. If the background is being hit by a certain kind of light, you can be sure the character will be hit by the same light. Now, you're probably wondering, how are we going to rescue this piece? I'm glad you asked. So, the first thing we're going to do is we're going to start with an overlay layer. I'm going to select a very bright orange color and just try to make the background brighter. What I'm doing here is I'm just accentuating the power of the backlight. I'm going to take this purple color here and I'm going to very, very slightly darken the surface of the water. We can't really expect the water here to be the exact same color as the sky. I want it to be a little bit darker so there's some differentiation. Now, I'm going to merge that layer down and we're just going to select the entire background here with our lasso tool. And now I'm going to bring up the curves adjustment to make the background even brighter. So I'm just playing around a little bit with the top of the curve, the highlights, as well as the shadows. This gives us a pretty good starting point to work from. Now you guys can see I'm paying a lot of attention to the lighting in the environment, and I'm using that essentially as a guide to how we should light the character because the way I think about it is the background is an entire environment surrounding the character. and the character is not necessarily separate from that background. So, they're going to be affected by all the lighting shenanigans happening in this world, which means we are going to start a new layer and set it to multiply. Now, I'm going to use a purplish blue color and I'm going to just brush it over the character caster in a shadow. Now, when the character is being lit from the back, there's a thing that happens called rim lighting, which is when the light catches on to the side silhouette of the character. So here what I'm doing now is adding in some rim lighting elements onto the surfaces that I think the light would reach. One of the very common things that I see a lot of beginners tend to do is they try to over complicate the lighting when really less is more. Sometimes the simpler you make your lighting scenario the easier it is for the audience to comprehend it and as a result the more believable your painting becomes. So there is a before and there's an after. Before and after. Now we can try to maybe turn this into a hard light layer. So, for the most part now, I think the lighting is already working a lot better. But what I'm going to do now is add in even more detail. We're going to darken the character's irises and add some shadows to the eyes because she is facing away from the light. So, there's not going to be a very harsh kind of light being cast onto the surface of her eyes. So, you're going to find a lot of darker shadows, a lot of ambient occlusion in this area. And also, we're going to add some shadows to the other areas such as where the hair might meet the character's face, the cheek, the forehead. Maybe a little bit of ambient occlusion under the chin as well. And of course, we want to take a blending brush and just soften these areas up. I'm also going to use this chance to add in a little bit more color onto certain parts of her face, such as the under side of the nose and maybe on the bottom half of her face, just a little bit of orange color because I'm thinking about how the sunlight is going to bounce around the environment and maybe some of that bounce light is going to be caught on the downward-facing surfaces of her skin. Now, of course, if we're thinking about bounce light, we're also going to have to add in ambient lighting in the environment, which in this case is going to be represented by a bluish purplish light. Most of this is going to be caught on the upward-facing surfaces of our character's skin here. So, we're going to take a slightly more detailed brush and add in some loose strands here that look like they're kind of flowing away from the character's head. That's very dynamic. There's a lot of movement there. But now we can take our lasso tool, select the elements that we've just added. We can give it a bit of a blur. Maybe like a path blur. Have it fade off to the side. Something like that. And there we go. Look at that. Now the hair has a little bit of movement. Now we'll take the strands from the other side and apply a bit of path blur. And you can see there's a lot of movement in the hair. Looks like there's some kind of wind. But that's not all. So let's select the background here. Let me show you guys one of Uncle Sam's oldest tricks in the book. So we've selected the entire background. Now, we're going to give this a little bit of a gaj and blur or in Photoshop it's called field blur. This basically allows the background to fade out and be more blurred and allows your eyes to set on the details of the character. You see this a lot in movies, in photographs, you know, the background gets blurred and you can only focus on the subject in the frame. So, we can apply that there and I think that looks really good. Now, in Woodup's pieces, he has a foreground, a midground, and a background. Same thing here. Foreground, midground, and that's the background. We only have a foreground and a background. So, we're missing the midground. The midground just gives the piece a little bit more context, a little bit more depth. We can honestly do something very simple. Let's just take this motif right here of the kind of railing. Paint this in very loosely. And again, we're going to apply a gajon blur to this. So, it doesn't really matter if it's not super detailed or super refined. Now, we're going to go to the blur gallery and apply a field blur to this railing. And there you go. As a final touch, let's add a new layer on top and set it to hard light. And we're going to pick a really bright color. And what I'm doing here is I'm adding a bit of a bloom effect to the light to make the background lighting look even more potent. And by now, you've probably forgotten what the original piece looked like. So, let me show you. There is the before and there's the after. Before. After. Before. After. Always remember guys, when it comes to lighting, less is more. Keep it simple and try to understand your light source. So, that was a lot of fun, but we're not done yet. Here's victim number two, Vamp Brier, who said they were able to make this piece following my angled faces and color picking tutorials. Feeling more confident in the face angle than the color picking. Now, I would actually argue the opposite. You should probably feel more confident about your color picking and a little bit less confident about your face angle. Let me just show you guys why. So if we do a very simple measurement from the forehead to the chin, okay? And we divide the nose and the brow, you can see we get the most space here, second most here, and the forehead is the smallest because we're viewing the face from a bottom up angle. Now, let's do the same measurement on the drawing. Okay, so this is the space between the chin and the nose. Here's the space between the nose and the brows. So we've got big, small, and big. Now this doesn't match up with the reference. Now other things that we have to pay attention to as well are the angles of the facial features. For example, let's look at the eyes. The eyes are sloping downwards like so and like so. Whereas on the drawing, it's kind of going upwards. We've got a different angle. We also unfortunately have a case of Medusa hair where the hair strands are way too solid for what they're supposed to be. Remember, when we're painting hair, we want it to be wispy and light and have the texture of hair. And I'll show you guys how to do that in just a second. But first, we must liquefy. Guys, I fear I'm becoming too predictable with this. So, the first thing I'm going to address is the eyebrows and the size of the forehead. I'm just going to bring up the brow line. Okay, make it really high. And I'm also going to just bring the hairline down on the forehead. So, this entire process is helping me rework the proportions of the character's face so that the top of the head takes up less space and the bottom of the head takes up more space. Now, I can't exactly fault you 100% for this because the reference admittedly is kind of weird looking. Unfortunately, sometimes we get stuck with weird looking references and we just end up accentuating their weird traits. Now, something else that you probably notice is that the shape of the chin is not really matching up with what we see in the reference. the reference has a very flat chin because we're seeing it from an angle. Whereas in our drawing, you know, you're getting more of a curve. So, we have to flatten this out and make it a little bit more straight. All right, there we go. And here is the before and the after. Before, after. Before, after. Much much more natural looking, right? So, we can see there's a lot of very dark values in certain pockets of the hair where there's some ambient occlusion from the light. And we can use a darker color here to mimic what we see in the reference. Let's add in some shadows. One thing that I noticed is very common with a lot of beginners is they tend to be afraid to add in too much contrast or too much darkness. Remember guys, the shadows cannot hurt you. Never be afraid of shadows. Just like that. It's not perfect. You know, I'm not following the form exactly one for one, but you just want to add it in there first and make sure all the values are working. So, I used the round brush to add in a bit of color variation. Now, the next thing I'm going to do is just get rid of these Medusa snake heads. Look, sometimes you're going to see weird elements in a reference. You don't have to replicate all the weird elements. And these hair strands are very weird. Use the colors we've already put down. Okay? And we're going to just use some nice soft wispy strands for the hair. Now, I like to use flat brushes when it comes to drawing hair because a flat brush gives you the option to have thin and thick and it looks like a little ribbon. And that's exactly the texture that we want for hair. Honestly, any type of flat brush should do for the work that I'm doing here. I'm going to add in some final highlights, some final kind of dark details. Now, of course, I am doing this very quickly, so we're not getting as much refinement in the hair, but if I were to really take my time, I would probably pay a little bit more attention to the actual shapes of the hair strands. Now, since we've used a pretty dark value here for a lot of the hair, I also want to bring these dark values into the face of the character. This is one of the very common mistakes that again I see a lot of people make which is they might add dark values in a certain part of the painting but it doesn't go to the other parts of the painting. You want to make sure all your values are consistent. The darkest values should not be present in only one part. So I'm going to add this dark value to just under the eyelid as well as in the dark part of the iris, the pupil. Why we do this? Well, it's for harmony. You want your colors to be relatively harmonious and look like they belong in the same scene. The lips are a little bit too pink. So, we're going to add in some more orangey kind of saturated red colors here just to give it again a little bit more depth. Let's also just add in some more warm values into the shadows here. So, what I'm going to do is I'm going to try to flesh out some of these uh saturated colors a little bit more and also just reduce the visual impact of these chicken scratches. And I really like the fact that you actually picked a blue color for the highlights on the face. That is exactly what I taught in that tutorial. You know, you want to use a bit of a complimentary color to make the highlights stand out even more. Uh, and I think you've actually done a really good job at that. So, I'm going to pass this blue over to some of the other areas of the face as well. And there we go. Now, for the moment of truth. Let's compare it to the original. Are you guys ready? 3 2 1. That's the before. That's the after. Before, after. Before. After. Before after. Now, here's our final victim. And we're going to end it off with some line art. I know I have to work on my confidence with those lines. I'm glad you're aware, but overall, I think it's okay. No, it's not. So, what is the problem here really? Now, the drawing itself is actually really good. I think the proportions are great. I think you've captured the overall shape and the form of the character, but the lines, my brother. Oh, the horror in the lines. You're killing me. Remember, when we're doing line art, we want to make it as simple as possible. It's just like lighting, okay? Less is more. In fact, a lot of things in art revolves around that quote, less is more. So, you know, in areas like this where you see a ton of overlapping lines, it doesn't really add anything to the drawing. In fact, it just makes it more distracting. By adding in all of these uncertain lines and chicken scratches, what we've done is we've broken up the path for our eyes to travel down. It should be a smooth path. But no worries, my nephew's Uncle Sam is here to help. The first thing I'm going to do is set the layer on a low opacity background, and we're going to work on a new layer. For the most part though, I'm just going to trace over what's already here because I think the proportions work great. The shapes look great. Now, I want to show you guys a very cool method for you to remember how to draw a profile view. If you don't know how to actually shape the front of the face here, and it looks very complex, try the staircase method. I don't think that's what it's actually called, but I'm going to just coin it right here. This is the staircase method. You're going to follow the angle changes on the front of the face. So up, down, up, down, up, down, up, down, up, down, back in, and down. And there you have a profile view. Did you miss that? Let's do it again. Okay. Up, down, up, down, up, down, up, down, up, down, back in, back down to the neck. And there you have a profile view. That's why I think of it as a staircase method, because you're literally going up, down, up, down, up, down, up, down. Now, within these shapes, we can add in a nostril, and we can add in the corner of the mouth. Now, I'm going to make some minor adjustments to the shape of the lips, and we should get something that looks like our reference staircase method. Guys, remember this for when you draw your profile views. Something else you're going to notice on the original drawing is the jawline is so prominent. This is another common beginner mistake, which is feeling the need to outline everything. You don't need to outline the jawline like that. You can just use a very faint line that kind of hints at the positioning of the jaw. Always remember guys, less is more. If all of your lines are heavy, then none of your lines are heavy. Same goes for the other direction. If all of your lines are light, then none of your lines are light. So, what I'm doing here, as you guys can see, is I'm varying up a lot of the pressure on my pen so that my lines come out dark and light. And there's a variation between light and dark. Now, this is generally what we call line variation. And this is what gives your lines that line quality that we're always looking for. All right. So now at this stage, what I'm going to do is turn off the original layer. And I can see that I've got a drawing that we can work off of. To me, I think this already looks pretty good. But of course, we can add more. Let's increase the line variation here. So in the areas where there's a little bit of ambient occlusion, a little bit of shadow, you can see we can add in some darker shadowy elements. We can use areas like this to make the lines thicker. On some of the surfaces facing downwards, we can add in some darker lines. And of course, on areas where you're going to see a lot of shadow, we can also add in thicker and darker lines. Now, as I'm doing this, I'm also increasing the size of my brush so that we can get thicker and more natural looking brush strokes. Now, you want to remember the key to getting great line quality is to have variation. You want thin lines that are barely visible and you also want lines that are very much thick and heavy and powerful. The contrast between these elements is what creates that visual interest and makes your line art very satisfying to look at. So there we go. And sometimes when I'm doing line art, I like to add in some shadow elements very very simply just to indicate where the shadows are going to fall on the face of the character. But this is completely optional and you don't need to do this. All you need is some good line variation and good line quality. I'm going to take this chance to add in some final details to the hair. Just some final stage refinements to the forms, the shapes, and maybe some final details to the silhouette of the character. And there we go. I hope you guys are ready for the big reveal in 3 2 1. There's the before. There's the after. Before, after. Before, after. Simple changes, guys. Remember, when it comes to line art, less is more. And there we go. There's three more art pieces from our Patreon members. Rescued by plastic surgeon Professor Sam. Please let me know guys which one was your guys' favorite. I think my personal favorite has got to be the one with the lighting change, which is also the most complex one that we did today. That being said, guys, I do hope this video was helpful for you. Now, please go look at your own art and see if there's anything that you have gathered from this video that you can now apply to your own drawings. Not going to lie, if you watch a couple more of these videos, you might just become an art god. Subscribe to my channel if you want to see more art related content, and check out my Patreon for monthly tutorials where we go super in-depth on specific topics. And remember guys, in all of these videos, all of these paintovers are done with the consent of the original artist. Don't go and do this to other people without their consent. All that being said, I love you guys and I'll see you guys on the next video. Holy Christ, that was like 2 hours of recording. I'm dead. I'm dying. Go on now. Get out of here. Why are you still here? What are you waiting for? There's no punchline coming at the end of this video. Nope. Absolutely not. Just a very awkward moment between the two of us because you won't leave the premises of my house.

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