Lesson 2: Choosing Colors and Painting Chapter 1, Video 1: "Lesson 2 Introduction"

Transcription

1 Chapter 1, Video 1: "Lesson 2 Introduction" Welcome to Lesson 2. Now that you've had a chance to play with Photoshop a little bit and explore its interface, and the interface is becoming a bit more familiar to you, we can start exploring how Photoshop uses color. It lets you choose from an amazing number of colors, and you can blend and manipulate those colors in surprising ways. I think you'll really enjoy this lesson.

2 Chapter 2, Video 1: "Using the Color Picker" You can choose a new color for this foreground color patch without even needing to have an image open. First let's switch to the Essentials again. Now we're going to press the letter D or click here to set the default colors back to black. In order to choose a new foreground color for this black, I'm just going to click it. And the color picker opens. The way you work on the color picker is that first you look at the colors in the field. Let's say I want something that's about this bright. I can click, and anywhere I click, you can see the color changes. I can also just kind of hunt and peck by holding the mouse button down and scrolling around. The only problem is this looks like I can get from bright red to white to black to grays. Uh, how do I get to green? Well that's really very simple. I'm going to just pick something in this field right now. And now if I want green I just bring the slider up until I see the shades of green that I want in this field. Things that are to the right are very saturated and bright. Things to the left are dull and desaturated and grays. Things all the way at the top are light. Things all the way at the bottom are very dark. So you can go from a fairly light, saturated green to kind of a darker gray-green. Let's pick this one. Once you know that you found the color that you want, just click OK.

3 Chapter 2, Video 2: "Working With the Swatches Panel" Another way to change the color here in the Foreground patch is to click on the Swatches panel. I just bring it up in the Essentials workspace by clicking the Swatches tab. Here's a list of my frequently used colors. And if I click on any one of these little squares, you can see I click red, and red appears in the foreground color. If it does not, if for some reason the red appears here in your Background color, you need to check the Colors panel. If you notice in this panel and your tools bar, there's no way that I can make the Background color appear on top of the Foreground color. I can swap my color so the red becomes the Background. I can change my colors to black and white. But I can't put this icon on top of the black one. On the Color panel however, if I click the Background color, that's left in a way that you can't see it easily. And if I go back to the Swatches panel and I click the same red that I want for my foreground, it shows up in the background. Whenever that happens, you need to switch back to the Color panel, click the Foreground color to make sure that it stays your Foreground color. Now switch back and you'll see if I click red, red appears in the Foreground color. Let me clear those. What happens if you actually want to change your Background color using the Swatches panel? Just hold the Control key and click or the Command key on the Mac. And you'll see you can t see me hold down the key, of course but I'm holding the Control key on my PC, clicking the yellow, and the yellow appears in the Background color.

4 Chapter 3, Video 1: "Painting Some Simple Shapes You need to make the Brush tool active by clicking on it in order to allow the Brush Presets to become active. For this very basic, primitive kindergarten art piece, I want you to select the very first Soft Round Brush. Usually selecting it will not open the dialog box the way mine just did. Now once you have that, you need to set the brush size to 100 pixels thereabouts. Just to make this process go a bit faster I want you to paint this full of sky. So we'll pick number four in the Swatches panel, which is a cyan. And just kind of quickly run the brush all over the image. Now we want some grass. So let's pick the green. It's number three. And the grass is only on the bottom. So we're going to pull just the bottom of the picture. How about a brown tree? Well, let's use the Color panel for that. As you can see, it's not on your Painting workspace. So you can go up to Window and come down, come over to Color. And it does appear. I want you to change to a brown. And in order to do that, we're going to drag the Red oh to about 96. Drag the Green slider to 57. If the dragging gets old, which it certainly does for me, in order to set the Blue slider, I'm just going to select zero in the number. And type in the number 19. And that gives me a brown here in the foreground, here in the foreground. I think that's a bit thick though for a tree. So we're going to adjust the brush size again down to about 19. And I'm just going to paint, as I said, a very primitive-looking tree here. Using a mouse to paint things this is like trying to paint with a bar of soap. It's not particularly successful, but I don't want to dig out the Wacom for this. If you are not planning to do a lot of painting, you don't really need the Wacom tablet necessarily. But if you want to paint, then a tablet is a huge help. Well, generally trees get smaller little branches on them. So let's change this down to about a seven, and I'm going to draw out some smaller branches. I could be a little bit more careful and a little bit more artistic for this. But you get the idea, and that's really all you need to get from this video. I would not be surprised to see that your images look a lot better than this. But that's okay if they don't. The whole idea is just to look at what you're painting, to use the brushes, and to have fun playing.

5 Chapter 3, Video 2: "Adding Leaves and Grass to an Image" Let's add some leaves and some grass to this tree. I want to choose first the color for the grass. I can pick the Eye Dropper tool and click. Or I can choose my Brush tool, which was active to begin with, hold the Alt or the Option key down. Watch the cursor change into the Eye Dropper tool. And then click. Now I need to pick the brush. We're using the Soft Round brush to begin with. We need to scroll down in the list to get to the Maple Leaf brush. It's about halfway or a little bit further down. And click. We want the 74-pixel Maple Brush. But if I start painting with that, I can see that it's going to be too big and too bright. So I'm going to undo that. Click and choose a new color. I want a color that's a little darker and a little less saturated. And I need to make this smaller. I can choose to make it smaller this way. Or I can choose to make it smaller on the Brush Presets up here. And I can drag that to 24 pixels. Click somewhere to close the dialog box, and now paint. And just click and let go. You don't need to paint the entire tree. If I want to choose some other colors, we go into the Swatches panel and quickly pick a yellow. Notice how, at this point, my colors are changing. They didn't change noticeably on my lowersaturation color. But you can see the color change when I choose yellow. Pick an orange, and let's see what happens. And we get a little bit of red and orange as well. Now I want to draw some grass. I'm going to pick the grass brush the 134 pixel that's above it. Notice how my brush size changes to 134 pixels. That's pretty big for grass. So let's drag the brush for the grass down to something smaller. And I'm going to try about 43 and see how that one works. But I don't think I want orange grass. So let me pick up a darker green. And scatter some grass around. Again the colors get fairly random. And I can still go back and click some of the green if I want it or another color in my image. Notice that I'm not changing from my brush tool, which means that I'm holding down the Alt or the Option key. Don't be frustrated that the color is not the exact one that you chose. That's built into the brush to make it random. Let's see what the next brush up this 112 looks like. Again too large, so I think I'll bring it down here, 64, and get a nice dark green. And watch what it does. Well, it does a lot of things, but notice dark green is not one of them. This is because again the brush is completely random. You'll learn in another lesson how to tame the randomness on these brushes. But for now, just play and experiment and see what you like.

6 Chapter 4, Video 1: "Painting With the Mixer Brush" Now it's time to paint another tree. We're using the Mixer Brush tool on a Moist setting. And we're using the first fan brush that's in the panel. We need to pick a nice cyan for the background and paint the sky again. This time when you paint the sky, notice you're not getting a solid color. You can make it solid if you continue to hold the brush down hold your mouse down. But it's not necessary. You can leave the streaky sky. When you've done the sky, you want to come down to the next fan brush in the panel and click it. Now let's pick a green. Oh, maybe this green. And paint across your lower third. Again it doesn't have to be solid. The next brush that you want to choose is the Round Blunt Medium Stiff bristle brush and a brown swatch. I find it easier at this point to go up to my Brush Presets Picker. And look for the little icon. I know I want something round, which would be this set. And, therefore, I guess the Blunt Medium Stiff would be right here. So I choose that and then click away to close it. Now I pick a brown. This brown might work. And this looks like it's going to be possibly a little bit too large. So let's change the brush size. I'm going to make it just a little bit smaller make it easier to control down to about oh 27, I guess. Again click. We're going to paint this from the ground up. But oh my goodness! Look what happened. We changed to brown, but I'm painting in green. That's because the Moist setting is going to pull color rather than use the color that's supposed to be there. So let me undo this, Step Backwards. And I want you to change the setting to a Dry Light Load. So we come up here and choose Dry Light Load. Now if I come back down and I paint, the tree doesn't look particularly good. But at least the brush is actually painting in the color that you gave it. If you find, using the Mixer brush, that you're not picking up the color and you had meant to, you always need to check this setting. Now we need to paint some smaller branches, because this just won't do for the little babies. So let's change the size again. And bring it down, oh maybe to about 17. Pick whatever size you want that you feel like working with. And bring out some smaller branches. If these are still too large, again you can drag your size in either one of the panels. And it doesn't matter at all. If you want to add some additional colors to this, be my guest. Pick up an orange and paint a little bit on the trunk. And you can pick up a little bit more of a reddish brown and paint on the trunk because in the next section I'm going to show you how you can blend.

7 Chapter 4, Video 2: "Blending As You Paint" Now we're going to switch to a new brush. In this case, we want the Flat Point Medium Stiff, which is right here. And I also want to be able to blend this. So I want to choose a very wet brush. Now with this brush, I can bring the brown into the orange and mix them. I can blend these colors where I want them to go. Again, if you happen to have a Wacom tablet, you've got much more control than using a mouse. I can also pull colors out. If I want to pull some of these bristles out to make it look like more little branches coming up, that works, too. Think about it. A moist setting reminds you of watercolor. And when you use watercolor, you can pull colors along. So moist very wet. Anything as it gets very, very wet is going to cause your colors to run and flow and blend together. Now let's hunt for that leaf brush again that we had used in the last chapter and see if we can find it down here. Here it is: 74-pixel Maple Leaf. Using the Maple Leaf brush, we want to pick another green. And we're going to change the setting this time to a Moist Light Mix. Here it is. A Light Mix means that it's not going to pick up the color underneath it or pick it up very little. So we can just kind of pick and choose, and now we've got falling leaves as well. Of course, they're still too big. So we can go back and choose Edit, Step Backwards, Edit, Step Backwards, Edit, Step Backwards. I think one more should do it: Edit, Step Backwards. Nope, one more time: Edit, Step Backwards. Now let's choose a smaller brush. I believe we did something like 24 the last time. 35Thirty-five should be sufficient as well. I'm just going to spray a couple of groups on here and pick up some colors, or try to pick up colors, because again it doesn't always give you the color that you had wanted. But I've got some leaves on here. And again we're not going for great art. We re just going for learning how to use the tools.

8 Chapter 5, Audio 1: "Lesson 2 Conclusion" Congratulations on finishing another lesson. The more you practice with the different brushes and colors, the easier it will be to get the effects you want, whether those effects are dramatic or subtle. In Lesson 3, you'll find out more about the brush tools. You'll learn how to airbrush and how to finger-paint, and the best part is there will be nothing to clean up afterward.