how to do create paint sci fi environment. Layer by layer short demonstration

all right guys this is Camille so today I'm gonna talk about how to turn the grayscale environment into color one my first course you block in a huge chunk of shape so and for the composition it's not gonna be a straight up it's gonna be slightly a diagonal and and then I'm going to use the Photoshop default brush like this one and I'm going to adjust this shape so it's not fully rounded of course adjust the opacity to probably 50% of 40% and choose the solid solid black color and then I can't f

reely block in the shape what I want to do is sci-fi scene with spaceship flying through so I lay down my perspective ahead I tried to draw along the perspective line so it would give me a dramatic feel of depth through the perspective and I choose the smaller size of brush just adding the detail of the faraway shape well I forgot to talk before ahead of course I set this layer into its own and I have it's separate from the background layer it's all going to follow this perspective line and sinc

e I have the brush opacity set kind of transparent so you can see how brush stroke that overlaps and it gives it more information and details and remember that the technique I use here is for the object that's closer to us will be a more gloomy and for the object is further away from us will be fainted away and you can also adjust the hardness of the brush edge if I want I can always select brighter color brighter gray for the upper-left spot I want a light source coming from there so I'm going

to try to lock my layer and just do white you want to add more detail to the spot that's light up by the light and try to keep it less detail in the shadow area well since detail in the darker tone value of light will not be that obvious so you want to push up the detail level at the spot that's that's where the light is I mean not overexposure light except that so the definition of the lighting area is going to be readable so anyway I hope that gives you an idea of how to start lay down the bas

ic silhouette first so now I want to give it some huge huge columns horizontal columns go back to the same brush I'm just laying down you know very basic silhouette shape I can tilt the brush in any way and for now I just gonna keep using color black and the cool thing you can lock the layer I'm gonna give it some shade just use airbrush so the further away from us it's gonna be a bit lighter gonna choose white paint maybe this white is too white so mm I have my layer blocks so I can freely just

do painted on the area that I feel it's the light reflection is gonna hit with further away object just gonna use smaller size brush and I'm just gonna add in some lines and details and I can always go back to the black color give it more detail I mean adding more you know smaller stuffs so I just create a new layer gonna add further columns I don't like the transfer so I'm gonna turn it off because it makes my I don't want that pen pressure effect so I'm just doodling here and again block my l

ayer adding some lights well keeps your brushstrokes simple so I can always adjust the shape of and the size of the columns if I don't like it I would just select it and enlarge so here's the polished final yeah by the way I add some line strokes in the background and this step I'm going to add texture and the texture I just you know just grab it from cgtexture.com its royalty free or you can do it from any website that offers royalty free photos I would just desaturate all the texture photos I

have and adjust the opacity this photo actually looks just like some pipes or some machine so I just roughly you know erase some part of it lower the opacity probably like 18 can hardly read but it fills in some of the details and for this one I set it in overlay in normal mode it actually looks like this like very sloppy erased and it just a texture that's being reused and reused and this one is in soft light and in normal mode it just looks like this it's like a concrete wall or something with

multiple straight lines so I would set it in overlay you can do it soft light or overlay depends on which you find it better by the way I want to add something when you're doing texture or when you applying photo texture try to just apply the photo texture into the mid-tone value not the darkest tone or and not the the lightest tone because the texture in the darkest tone tend to fade away and that's the same thing in the lightest home so when you apply photo texture you want to just apply in t

he mid tone volume of range and so here I'm gonna demonstrate how to quickly do a spaceship so I just block out a silhouette I would apply the paint 100% because then I can block the layer and paint in any any value and I will erase just make the shape off from this big chunk of black so after you have the silhouette laid down you can just go to airbrush choose lighter tone I'm just doing some highlight from the top I'm going to add in lines of detail just using just black color of course you ca

n always freely zoom in to add in more details if you feel it's too light on the bottom just adding more black then honestly since the spaceship is a little bit far away from us it's gonna be fruther away from this huge column on the top the darkest tone of its darker shade is gonna be lighter gonna use the opacity and just brush in really light tone here and you can always use smudge tool and now I'm gonna apply some blast light from the spaceships I'm going to give it a shape dynamic based pen

pressure well I'm just going to erase it then with airbrush so give it an effect that the blast light is getting thinner and thinner at the end and the blast light is going to be you know kind of fainted away at the end but having this sharp little sharp hard edge at the beginning where it's gonna boost out and by the way I also kind of light up the area on the spaceship will be affected by the blast light so it will not be that dart and now going to add some filter effect like sharpen and blur

so with one layer visible I'm going to click ctrl shift alt e' flatten everything to one new layer so just go to filter and then sharpen then sharpen more and it doesn't seem that it does that much so you got to zoom in and see so that's before and after before and after and you can add more until you feel it's up enough but do not overuse it I'm just going to duplicate this layer because I'm gonna add a blur effect go to filter blur Gaussian I'll probably add amount like this adjust the opacit

y to probably 40 oh no 30 to 50% is enough set it overlay and that's that's before that's after but what this does is just it will enhance the contrast of the lighting value and balance the lighting contrast also however this overlay blur effect will oftenly makes your image darker so what I do is just light up the mid tone of the blur layer so I just created a new layer with everything flatten into one because I'm going to paint onto this grayscale image I have my brush mode set in overlay and

choose the orange color since I want the lighting source tipping orange and the background that's a background it's in kind of blue cyan blue I want to make sure the panel that's close closer to us is gonna be having more Orange I'm gonna choose a blue cyan warm kind of blue a blue color because the complementary color of orange is blue I'm gonna choose a darker tone of blue to darken the bottom of the panel or that panel that's further away I'm gonna adjust the brush mode to hard light back to

kind of the cyan blue since overlay it's hardly take any effect in the wider area so that's why I use hard light do not need to add in too much to color because you can always adjust it later if you add in too much color well I mean you can adjust it later but it's gonna be a little bit hard of course here's gonna be like golden yellow and the same thing I set in hard light and remember we still have the silhouette layer in greyscale separated so I'm going to go back to the grayscale layer and c

ontrol clicked automatically select the layer just collect layers for me I'm going to have my brush mode set in color dodge because the highlight on those metal is gonna be the reflection light is gonna be very strong so I used color dodge and if you don't want to see the selection line you want to hide them you can control H to hide and see that's a really fast way to just light up and I can just deselect squeeze flatten the brushstroke add in some effect or even some highlights if you don't wa

nt the color color don't need to be saturate color just choose a bit grayish yellow or more grayish yellow I still don't find the bottom is dark enough so gonna do overlay just choose very just whatever dark color and I can't just control B bring up color balance add some cyan to my mid tone the highlights probably not too much probably not too much blue just to fill in some highlights here also my spaceship so now I want to add some red to the place that's closer to us probably not too saturate

d red I adjust the brush mode to hard light and choose the cyan I'm going to paint the blast light of the spaceship remember I choose the hard light is because overlay just doesn't do much effect on the whiter tone volume maybe do the linear dodge blast light is gonna be very bright select spaceship and then paint let's do hardlight as well and I want to make the wing of the spaceship that's really obvious so I'm just going to deselect the part that I want and back to the squeezing tilted brush

100% percents and I can always used overlay to enhance the contrast I'm gonna hide selection and just use overlay to select a darker tone color to enhance the contrast this spaceship is closer to us so it will have stronger contrast I'm going to select inverse and I'm gonna add a probably a lighter tone behind the spaceship going to just control h to hide the selection it doesn't do much effect so I'm gonna do a hard light back to it's orange so purple blue the yellow doesn't do much good here s

o I'm going to make it purple so I'm gonna add a little bit purple blue here just slightly brush up to see the effect and so here I'm just going to add some lighting texture to just to test and see how it's going to be like and this texture is going to be city light at 100% opacity the opacity drop it like this and I have it on soft light it will add some more information to it and here's the same same thing I just have it at the hard light and erase a lot of part and it's actually the city ligh

ts because since the thing is sci-fi so you'll be able to have some lights here and there on the panel so I want to flatten everything to one layer to work on it more brush brush mode in overlay and the colors too saturated so I want to desaturate the color but I want more colors here so I forgot to deselect the layer of the spaceship also I want to light up the panel right here use overlay because it will preserve any information underneath I'm just adding some highlights I'm just using overlay

to add in highlights here so probably more saturated right here well to enrich the image more further you can clean up those details like the shape right here it's off from the perspective so I just turned back onto my perspective I can redo the shape on a new layer well my brush mode is gonna be set in normal and you can really clean up the shape if you want eyes to read the edge of the shape is super important to be clean gonna add some highlights and I can really squeeze it and for the contr

ast right here in the lightest area remember I say if you want the contrast to to be strengthen more you can use overlay and choose a darker tone and it instantly will just darken your darkest tone don't need to worry about it have to go in stroke by stroke line by line okay just gonna adjust the color I want this huge column have the color more purple gonna give it light here I could go back to normal brush mode just kind of to brush in and give it a roughness I want to add some color to the da

rkest tones so I'm going to lighten choose lighten mode so you'll only paint in the darkest tone go back to normal layer normal brush mode just gonna adding some lines here go back to the flatten all every layer and brush in some well that's too saturated so boost up the lights more I'm going to use hard light give it a dynamic shape well I can do it on other layer just to be ensure because then I can erase whatever I want go back to hard light mode layer a hard light brush mode and I can also

do color mode to adjust color if I want so here's the slightly more detailed version and the next step I just grab an image of rusty metal set it on soft lights in the normal mode it looks like this and the opacity is I put in 56 just give it some texture and this layer just a minor adjustment for example I felt the original image the column further away right here it's not obvious the most important thing when doing environment art is you want to make sure that you separate object obviously lay

er by layer visually clear that you can tell the object is closer or further so I just use the lasso tool you know just to select out the shape adding the color darker tone color and it will instantly you know separate this object from the further background and I also fixed the information or the detail right here the line to make it more readable and also darken the area here and here just make sure the column is more readable and the last if you want you can also add the two tips I always use

which is filter others and high-pass and also the blur Gaussian blur and then set the Gaussian blur layer in overlay which I already covered those in my previous tutorial you can find it there so I guess that's pretty much it