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hi there. thanks for joining me
in this video, I'll show you my technique for painting mountains using Corel Painter
once you get these principles down, you can apply them to painting
any kind of mountain you like, in any environment that you like
so let's just go ahead and get started here
this is what we're going to try to accomplish, more or less
your copy might not look exactly like mine and what I'm about to paint might
not look exactly like this.
each one is going to be unique and that's the good thing about it
we don't really want to make
an exact duplicate this, but we want it to be pretty similar and we want to follow the same
techniques
I'm going to make a new canvas here by going to File > New
and I'm going to choose the same dimensions as what i have here, which is
14 inches by 7 inches at 72 DPI
you want to set your
DPI first
if it's set to something different than 72
and then go ahead and change your width and height.
if you need changes it from inches to pixels or vice-versa, you can get to that here
your paper color and paper texture don't really matter right now and if you want to title it,
you can. if you don't want to, don't worry about it. I'm going to call it "MTN" just for example
and then we'll click OK
now I've got
a new
canvas here.
now, I'm working on a pretty big screen. It's
pretty much the kind of TV that you would sit in front of and watch
television. it's not really a computer monitor,
so I have a lot of space to work with here
if you're having trouble seeing
your whole canvas here and your palettes are in the way
you can, at any time, hit TAB on your keyboard
and your palettes will temporarily go away. if you hit TAB again, they will come back... so I
might do that periodically.
also, one thing to know
if you hold down the SPACE key at anytime
your cursor will turn into a hand
and you can use it to
click and hold. or use your stylus pen to tap down and drag your page to
navigate around
so let's go ahead and get started. the first thing will do is we're going to make a new
layer by clicking the NEW LAYER button, down in the Layers Palette
and we're going to name that layer by double clicking on the name
and we're going to call it "sky"
now I'm going to use a lot of layers in my technique because
if I screw something up
it's pretty easy to go back and fix it. and I screw up things a lot
so let's fill that sky with
a sky color
so we're going to take the Paint Bucket Tool here
and we're gonna pick a sky color. when I pick color, I like to pick from the Hue Ring first
and I think my sky is going to be somewhere right here and then
try to find the exact color want. And I think that I want it a little more towards indigo.
something like that. And then we tap to fill
I don't think I like that, so I'm going to change it a little bit
still needs to be more indigo
you can pick whichever kind of blue you want. it doesn't really matter
and then the next thing I'm going to do is, I'm going to take a custom
digital airbrush here
you want to want to make sure that your settings are
opacity: 25%
resaturation: 100%. bleed: 0%. jitter: 0%
and make sure that you're drawing freehand strokes
size doesn't matter because we're going to readjust that
I'm gonna hit TAB to make my pallets go away temporarily by using the keyboard shortcut
of CONTROL + ALT and then dragging with my mouse to resize my
brush on the fly
I'm going to make it pretty big here
and then I'm going to take
a darker blue color
and I'm going to paint in some
light-pressure strokes to kind of
taper the color
as it blends down
and then I'm going to darken the color more
and add more at the top
so we have this
gradient of color that goes down. that's what we're going for
and then I'm going to
hold down the ALT key to get my color sampler and I'm going to
tap here to sample this color
then I'm going to lighten it
and I'm going to put in some
lighter area here towards the bottom
and this will kind of be right around where the horizon
might be.
then I'm gonna go to yellow here and I'm going to make it almost white
and then I'm going to put in a little of that which will kind of make it
pop a little more.
and I think that's all we need for our sky at this point
so let's make another layer now
by clicking on the New Layer button in the Layers Palette. then we'll double click on
the name and we're gonna call it
"MTN" for "mountain"
there's no reason to put in really long complicated names because we might not even
be saving these layers, we might end up
merging them
let's use
the loaded palette knife
you can find it in the palette knife category.
you'll want to make sure that your settings are the same as mine.
size doesn't matter for now, but let's make sure the opacity is 100%,
resaturation: 100%, bleed: 100% and the Feature: 0.8
and then another thing to note
I have color variability selected. if you can't find this pallet, you have to go to
Window Menu >
and then Brush Control Panels >
and then Color Variability
so if you check this, it should appear somewhere. and I've just moved it over here
now, color variability
will change the color of your brush
in different ways. it kind of lets you add multiple colors at once
I'll just show you how it works
I'm going to crank this up
to 43%
and I'm going to do a test stroke here. I'm going to pick yellow
now with this brush, it makes kind of rainbow things which isn't that useful, but
for other brushes
like the scratchboard tool
it changes the color of your strokes
we're gonna make this a little more useful because we're not going to make any kind of
rainbow art here today.
let's take the loaded palette knife and
take a darker blue and let's put this
first setting back to 15%
and we should get something like this. it's just going to look like a dark color
and it's not going to look like it's really doing anything, but trust me... later, when we
blend, it'll make it really cool
using a pretty good sized
brush here with our palette knife
let's start our mountain. now this is going to be our horizon, right about here
so we want to start a little bit above that
and makes some
triangular or kind of pyramid, hump shapes
and don't go all the way down. go about to where the white begins
and let's make maybe three humps here
The more humps you make, the more you're going to have to detail
So just keep it
kind of minimal for now. Once you get this down you can make any kind of
mountain shape you want
now I'm making my brush incrementally smaller and using that same shortcut by
holding down Control+ALT
And dragging
Or tapping down and dragging with my pen
to get a smaller brush
so I can make in these
finer shapes
on the edges of my mountains
and once you get something that you like
we can start shading it
I think that's good for now
the next thing were going to do is take another brush, which is
the Just Add Water Brush. That's in the blenders
And make sure that your settings are: 100% Opacity, 0% Resaturation
51% Bleed
no Jitter
and
we'll get a
medium size brush here
and we're going to
tap and pull down
like this with really hard pressure and then lighten your pressure
So if I do it with another brush as an example
This is an example stroke with a different brush
I'm doing something kind of like that
I'm tapering off
Use heavy to light pressure
Back to this Just Add Water brush
so we're
smudging this out... we want it to
get lighter as we smudge it out and
makes the bottom of the mountain look kind of foggy
something like this. And if you want to use a bigger brush, you can
You want to avoid smudging that edge too much
you can see here
that we get this
variance in green,
blue and purple. That's happening because we used the color
variability earlier with our palette knife
and even that you can't really see it, it just looks like black... when you blend it out
you will get this variance of color
it's just going to make your painting look more interesting
So the next thing we'll do is add some snow to add texture
so there's a setting here called preserve transparency. This will stencil
off anything that's on the layer
and another video go into more detail about what that does. I'm not going to waste
a lot of time explaining here
but let's turn it on
and you'll see what it does
next we're gonna take the Square Chalk brush under the chalk brushes
and the chalk brush works in tandem with the papers
to get
really cool texture effects
first thing we want to do is select a paper texture by opening the papers
palette. If you can't find that
any palette I have that you don't have can be found in the window menu
they're all in here
paper panels. papers
click here to select to a paper. let's take
simulated wood grain
and you want to crank the paper contrast setting up all the way up
as well as
the paper scale
paper brightness as you can leave at 51%
so when we make a stroke now
I'm going to show you an example stroke
you can see here it picks up that texture. if you press lighter
you get more texture and if you press heavy you get no texture
so we want the lighter
so to accomplish that
you need to make sure your tablet is functioning properly and that it's
calibrated properly. So we need to go to the brush calibration menu
and you can calibrate each brush individually
by clicking this little button here
now we want to do is we want to make sure that no matter
how hard we push down with our style s span that we're gonna get minimal
pressure so
push down really hard. as hard as you can. Make a really thick stroke and go to OK
now we know that
it's really really hard to even get it to show up at all
so that will get maximum texture and that's what we want
make sure your settings are the same as mine: 66% for opacity
12% for green, resaturation 100%, bleed 0%, jitter 0%
let's put our color variability up to nine
and let's pick a
blue color here
and an almost white, very light blue
and what we want to do is, we want to have a stroke that
starts out heavy and gets lighter
that's kind of exaggerated but I'm going to make these strokes quick because the faster you do it
the better it's gonna look
and we also want to follow the angles on these mountains to get it to look right, so
for example
if you were to divide this peak
and every peak
in half
so that's your peak
you want what's on one side to go in one direction. And what's on the other side to go
the opposite direction
and you want to keep it that way because if you don't, your mountain is going to look flat
It took me a long time to get this technique down for my mountains to actually look right
To show you
I'm going to take the square chalk brush and I've got this light blue color here
And I'm just going to do some
angled strokes. See how I'm angling down?
and eventually kind of ending up at horizontal from vertical
do the same thing with this peak here
and this peak here
so we have part of our highlight side. Our highlights are going to come from over here
on the right
and so were going to put some shadows on the left side. Now let's sample
(by holding down the ALT key)
this blue color in our sky and let's shift it
to the left
so were going to make it desaturated a little bit
a little more gray
That will be our shadow color. Now we want our shadow to go in the opposite direction of our highlights
I'm pulling with my pen
in the opposite direction of my highlights
don't cover up all this dark area either. We want there to be some gaps. These are the cracks
in the rocks and everything
let's take almost white
so not quite white, but still
pretty close to it
and let's use a little bit of
white here, sparingly
and then now let's change the paper scale and the paper
contrast
to about the midpoint here
Let's take it down about halfway each
this is going to make the texture smaller
with our chalk
we'll make our brush a little bit smaller too
I'm using these quick
heavy to light pressure strokes
so that the texture kind of tapers off
So that's our snow there on our mountain
And I don't think we need any more for our shadow
Now one thing we can kind of do to add some extra
little cracks and things here is, if we go to our scratchboard tool
And you may have to kind of play around with these settings
in the "General" Menu
I changed a few things to get it to work like this
but it should suffice the way it's working for now.
all we need to do is make a few little lines here and there
Make sure your
opacity is at 100%, your resaturation is 100% and your bleed is 0%
First, let's sample this dark color
and then we'll put some little lines
kind of going in the direction of our angles
these will be little cracks and
chasms and gaps
then go the opposite direction on you shadow side
if this pen doesn't work properly, just use something like the Detail Oils or
a Pencil or something. anything that will make
pretty thick, opaque lines.
and then
now we want to blend that out to make it look like it's a more painterly kind
of rock
texture
so we'll take the Coarse Oily Blender
and the Coarse Oily Blender works similarly to the Chalk brush, where it works
in tandem with the paper texture
so you want to make sure you still have this paper texture selected
and then we want the Opacity to be set to 4%, the Bleed to 100%
Jitter to 0%
and hopefully it should be functioning
properly here
so to ensure that it is, let's do a practice stroke
and...
if you see this texture happening here
then it's working
if not, and it's doing something like
this
where it's just smudging more and not really doing anything
you may have to kind of refine these settings, they may differ
on your computer. so you might want to raise them higher
to get more texture
so you want something like this to happen. so we're
blending and pulling down, following the same angles
and we're doing just the highlights
and then we'll do the shadows in the opposite direction
doesn't matter really if you pull up or down
just as
long as you follow the angles
now let's scale our Paper Texture and Paper Scale down a little bit
so we can do some more blending
following the
angles
now it's starting to look like a mountain. it starting to look like something that
you painted with oil paint
perhaps.
I think that
will suffice there for blending
we can put little more texture over it by using a Custom Sponge
you may need to change the settings for this in "General Settings"
uh... just make it's set to
what you see here
the sponge I started with was the Loaded Wet Sponge
and I just called it "Custom Sponge" this is a custom variant.
I think just about any sponge will work
I'm going to make it about the size here and
I'm going to
a new Layer
and i'm going to turn off Preserve Transparency
this is kind of a cool trick here to do some
texturing and tinting
so I will call this... "tex" for "texture"
now if I go back to my mountain layer
and I Right-Click
on the layer itself
and do "Select Layer Content"
it's going to put a selection around everything that's on that layer
and then I'll do a "Ctrl+Shift+H"
to hide that selection. Everything will still be selected, but those dashed
lines will go away
so it's essentially going to work like Preserve Transparency did, to where it's
going to
only allow me to paint
on a certain part of this new Layer
so I'm going to go to that new layer and I;m going to change it's Blend Mode or "Composite Method"
to "Multiply"
and then I'm going to take
a
blue color here. something maybe more blue-grey
like that
and then I'm going to tap
a couple of times
and you can see that
texture is being confined to the selection.
that selection is based on the contents of the layer below it
and then I'm going to reduce the Opacity
down a little bit
to where this makes the texture more subtle
now
let's
combine some of these layers together.
let's take the texture layer
and
hold down "Shift" and select the mountain Layer
and do
"Ctrl+E"
and "Ctrl+E" is going to merge them (fuse them)
into a single layer
and let's rename that
"mtn" -- "mountains" so we don't get confused
now let's turn Preserve Transparency back ON and let's do a "Ctrl+D"
"Ctrl+D"
or you can go to the Select Menu
and then do a Deselect
or "Select None" to make sure that we deselect
that selection that we had. otherwise everything's going to go really wacky on you.
so make sure you do a "Ctrl+D" right here.
Preserve Transparency is ON, so let's
sample a color
by holding down "Alt"
this white color here, towards the bottom.
let's go back to the airbrush
and make sure the settings are still the same
make a pretty big airbrush
and let's lighten the bottom of this mountain
so it kind of blends into the background a little better
and then
let's go ahead and merge the sky and the mountain layer together... so hold down "Shift" to
select both
and then do "Ctrl+E"
to merge those layers... now labeling doesn't really matter at this point because I don't think we're
going to really
add too many more layers
turn OFF Preserve Transparency
turn OFF Preserve Transparency
and then we're going to take a Blender called Diffuse Blur
make sure your settings are the same here
and with
really light pressure, (it may take a couple tries to get this right)
blend
with the angles, from the bottom up
so... the shadows are going one way
and highlights are going the other.
towards the top, don't blend it as much. I'm using really light pressure
something like that
and then
a little more firm pressure towards the bottom using circular winding strokes
to blend out the bottom
and there you go, you have
one mountain.
now, to make it
look a little more realistic
and more like our example
let's add
a couple more peaks in front. I'll do these a little faster. I won't
be so slow about this..
so I will make a new Layer
and call it "mtn2"
just for the heck of it
then I'm going to take
the same Palette Knife
and sample this really dark color here. the darkest one I can get
and I will make it a little darker
for the mountains we'll put in front of it
I'll make sure I still have this
Color Variability ON
and then I'll just put in
some really quick mountains.
you can see that if you're not
teaching people how to do it, you can actually do it pretty quick.
I encourage you to
just keeping mountains like this
make several different drawings and try some different colors.
I've been painting mountains for a few years now. And it wasn't until pretty
recently that I actually found a technique
that works
and that is easy to do.
and then...
the Just Add Water brush.
I'm pulling out this
color here
I see some spots I want to fix on the top of my mountain
so I'll just use my eraser to shave that off. that's better...
Preserve Transparency ON,
Square Chalk brush
you can sample these colors from the background, that saves you a little time
next, pick our highlight sides.
a little spot there will make it look kind of cool
then change the texture a little bit
and then sample our sky color
make it a little more gray to dull it down
and then do our
shadow color
going in the opposite direction
and then let's take an "almost white"
to put in some
snow here... now, the foreground ones can be a little darker
and then we'll take any kind of line-making brush. I use the
Scratchboard Tool
and put in some
craggly, jagged lines here
to give it some character
following the angles
that's good. and then...
let's do some blending with the Coarse Oily Blender
when the textures really large, it doesn't really seem to do much,
but as you make it smaller, it has a little more influence.
you can kind of destroy these lines here... or at least blend them a little bit
something like that
let's add some texture.
turn OFF Preserve Transparency, Right-Click on the layer and "Select Layer Content"
hide the Layer Selection by doing "Ctrl+Shift+H"
add a new layer
call it "tex" just so you know what you're working with
changed the Blend Mode (Composite Method) to "Multiply."
pick a
blue-gray color.
sponge tool.
tap to add some texture.
turn down the Opacity to get it looking
more subtle
and then let's
select both these layers together by holding "Shift" and then do "Ctrl+E" to merge the layers.
and then we'll take the airbrush
and we'll sample (by holding Alt) this white color here
at the bottom
oops. so this is what happens if you forget to do a Deselect
it's still selected, so it's going to look wacky
even I forget to do this, and I paint a lot
so go back a couple (Ctrl Z to undo)
do a "Ctrl+D"
because you can see the selection is still there if I show it
"Ctrl+D" deselects the selection... now it will work as it's supposed to here.
then you can lighten the mountain without it
getting all psychedelic on you there
then we'll take our Diffuse Blur blender
Diffuse Blur blender?
it's still not working...
sometimes the brushes get stuck... okay
use pretty heavy pressure and blend the bottom
to where it blends into nothing
I'm using light pressure and following the angles to blend the peaks
now if we want in the background mountain to look a little further away, we'll go back to it
and we'll turn Preserve Transparency ON.
we'll take the airbrush
sample this background color here, kind of near the bottom
and with light pressure, tint it
now it goes way into the distance... now if you want to make the foreground
mountains look a little more distant
so the same thing to them
so there you have it
and now let's just flatten everything down to one layer
and before you do that
if you want to save a copy just for example sake, you can
but in this example, I'm just going to flatten it
let's do "Layer Menu > Drop All"
and then we'll be able to blend everything together
and
let's take our Coarse Oily Blender
and we'll just blend along the bottom using winding circular strokes
to kind of makes something that looks like some rolling clouds or mist
and then we'll blend over that with a Diffuse Blur brush
now you can see that all these brushes are brushes that I use repeatedly and they are
really the only brushes I use for just about any painting. It's a really versatile set
you don't know really need all the brushes that Painter comes with. -- you only really need
a few depending on what you do.
so it's good to save Custom Brush Palettes and I'll show you how to do that in
another video
this should work pretty well for showing how to paint mountains.
try it with some different colored mountains and different colored skies
your shadow color is often your sky color
and there should always be some kind of tint
within your snow color of the sky if it's going to be snow...
if it's stone, then it doesn't matter too much
so tune in again. I'll be making more these videos
regarding different topics and techniques thanks for watching