hey everyone my name is Dave Greco and I want to introduce you to my brand new tutorial series I'm doing right here on YouTube the channel still pretty new and I get a ton of questions already about kind of how I go about certain methods and how I create certain piece of art and so I really wanted to break up a whole bunch of different tutorials so you guys can watch in the future it could possibly help with your own artwork you know I'm an RSS always still struggling to bring my art to the next level so I'm always learning from other artists around me I love seeing the process of what other people do and so if I can give you guys just a couple things that I do maybe I'll help in your own work as well and that would be amazing but today I think we can start pretty basic as our first tutorial and you can go from there if you guys like what you see today you can definitely post in the comments what kind of subject matter you want me to tackle in the future whether it's basic anatomy or composition or just what inspires you as an artist or finding your own art style so many things that other artists ask and are really important alright let's get started so I basically want to record these in real time as I worked on these and try to have as little sped up is actually in someone they're gonna be probably quick 20 30 minute painting right here at least a start of a painting how I would approach going into a concept art piece and I think that's gonna be pretty important just to see kind of my methodology where I'm thinking as I'm starting a piece and then we can tack you know tackle some more specifics as we get into it so basically today I had this idea of our night and crowfall what if he was some type of death or dark night I might just do kind of like an upper body piece for this one just to save us some time and then we'll go from there so basically when I first started pieces I don't like to start on a white canvas I like to at least get some type of mid-tones so I can actually see my values a little bit better sometimes I may not go straight cry and I might add like a little blue or a little red to it but we'll go straight right today and then basically what I wanted to I'm gonna go straight down to black at all but I kind of want to grab a Messier brush now I'm gonna have a tutorial later about all these brushes I'm gonna provide these brushes for you guys to download so definitely um follow the channel and subscribe to it for future updates when I do a kind of some of these brushes that we use basically what I'll start doing here is I kind of like an idea in my head and I'll start going pretty messy with how I begin in I kind of started rough shaves I want to find like an interesting silhouette so this could be his head you know where his eyes are like I said I'm pretty messy I'm just trying to find some of the forms the head in some silhouettes that might be interesting we're not married to any us so we're still getting pretty loose you know this part of a piece is always pretty relaxed and you're just kind of exploring around you know at least this one's on different layers so I can shift it over a little bit if I want you know it's like it's funny how like your ideas can change while working on peas too like I already see it I was like maybe we could just make this like a grizzled old night he's tired of battle I'm not sure that's what's nice about this is we kind of make this whatever we want which is good so you can tell I'm just kind of in some type of little bust but we're not real specific I'm just blocking out of silhouette right now and this goes the same for like I'm doing a full body piece I think nailing it down an interesting silhouette helps quite a bit at first cuz then you can get you then you can get yourself bogged down in the line drawing I figure out how you actually want to treat the piece you know so we could get some little bit darker here to kind of figure out a little more of these shapes see how we might want to do it uzo that this like kind of little shawl thing over my mix up between little shape and line work right here almost i'm staying totally in grayscale i don't want to think about color right now when I get my values down then I thought it'd be kind of nice to do a like a male character you see a lot of odd tutorials on a painting female some pretty girls inside wish don't get me wrong I love doing well we get a little variety here and see what we can think of I'm just kind of painting how some shapes here maybe where the eyes are maybe his mouth also pretty loose and then we'll get in some and with some clean cool line drawing maple stylized up a little bit more as we go so right now who knows what he's doing you just kind of glaring at someone brooding night we kind of do this for a little bit here usually this is around the time where I'm pretty well acting the morning have my coffee finding out what kinda music I want to listen to while working alright and then one thing that's great to do too is flipping your canvas as much as possible and we can do two so I'm using Photoshop bus you see and you can go down to edit keyboard shortcuts go to image and go down to image rotation right here and flip canvas horizontal I set mine to all aptitude but you can set that to whatever you want and so super easy because I'll flip your layers too so it's a great easy way just to flip your canvas real quick ie be surprised how long it actually took me to find that keybinding where I was kind of manually flipping things and wasn't something that seemed super obvious to me and so hopefully something like that helps all y'all as well okay so you can see the areas where I'm kind of finding shapes he doesn't really have any character right now it doesn't have hair do I want to put a helmet on this guy I'm not sure maybe we do we could figure out something up here like he's got something flipped up maybe if things at this stage you can play with a lot like that looks awful you can always swap it off like I think as far as silico is that's something like I wouldn't like so you can ways tag that off sometimes it'll just pop in delete the whole layer but out all right so same deal I'm gonna push the darks a tiny bit more here try to figure out someone who's James I can tell right now that his nose is a little bit too close to his mouth we haven't figured out much for his eyes and all these other designs here I try to remember I want to keep my hand loose during this stage and I'm gonna get too bogged down detail you know that tighter you get you lose a lot of kind of movement and personality to a piece and I cannot I can definitely be a detriment to your work so it's just real loose lines I'm not sure what kind of shapes are actually making right now but that's okay we're just kind of blocking all these alarians like I said I'd like that a little you know I'm always one trying to stylize my work more it's uh it's the type of work that I really love that's when I see good stylized work that's really what gets my heart pumping and I think that's important that's a great thing we can talk about in future videos as well as like where my inspirations for your guys's inspiration and they'll ties into like your own style you know I think a lot of us growing up we kind of mimic our favorite artists but at one point it kind of takes a turn and it becomes your style and then you take other influences from other artists and that'd be you know goes into your work and that peak then all those amalgamations of all those styles that's what makes your own style and then from there you just kind of just go nuts and do whatever because I know that's the stressful thing for a lot of artists it was for me as well so I'm gonna put like some type of hairline in here just get something and figure it out like I said we're kind of just winging this piece right now just gonna show you how I might start something all the concepts we have going on in this torso area is what I carry through to the rest the body as well I want to give them like some type of stubble as well so kind of darken this up I'm going to these like big mustaches lately maybe it's cuz I wish I had a big mustache all right we'll throw all these cool little shapes all right let's flip him back around see what he's doing kind of weren't like he's got these little quirky eyebrows just kind of has like a people's eyebrow kind of thing happening sometimes it's nice and you kind of work in these pieces at home you know you don't necessarily have like a client to please or yeah art director you can just kind of do what you want a little bit I can make these things a little bit more fun give him some kind of chops one thing I'll do as well is um I don't want to totally flat background back here yeah let's get like a little bit of interest you know I love this brush right here it's pretty messy but it I feel like I still have control over and you know I very much treat a lot of my digital painting like a UH I would a traditional one and it's a lot of fun working in black and white at first I don't have to worry about a lot of color stuff just working on it worrying about value and if it reads right and if it's it's easier to make changes you know I used to hop into color real fast um a few years ago I realized the values in my my work was really hurting like I'd take the piece of black and white after and the values were a mess like I was not just I was not dressing my value properly and I think I had a hard time doing it with just color so this is something I've actually been doing in the past six months and spending a lot of time in the black and white things I feel like it's been helping quite a bit so now it's legit brush around you know this is definitely come over portress piece but like I said this is something you can carry into the rest your work alright let me just save this thing out real quick Wilkin call this guy since who knows actually he if he's even in the same area as our who initially says four hearts like a death knight or dark and echoes like a more we kinda just liking the vibes dude already so let's just stick with it you know I'm really more interested in showing kind of like a workflow you know if you have guidelines based on your art director or clients it's totally different well like I said I think you guys want to see me do or tack about or talk about on future videos this is something that I'm gonna be quoting quite often so I'm going through a lot of steps little bit faster in this one just as an introductory into all how I work and just you know introduce myself to you guys I've had a bunch of time glasses up on the channel well that's just kind of what they are there's time lapses and I think people can try to learn some stuff from them but I feel like those things are a little bit they're more kind of like as a fun thing to watch they could be tough to learn from since you're kind of having to do a lot of self-discovery yourself alright like his eyebrow maybe like super high up right here but I cannot try to figure that out later so I'm so having a little bit of highlights not well right or the highlights but getting more mid tones to figure out what some of this form you know here we go figuring this guy out abital listen here you know we're just gonna have like a sort string of lighting out cause we're just gonna go pretty standard lights coming from this direction coming down on them we won't get too complicated we're not gonna like underlie them and all this other stuff we can actually do some more kind of lighting studies in the future as well it should be pretty cool and so one thing I'm always in to Leigh Leigh is shapes within shapes like the interest of them what I mean about that is so it's going here so if I'm thinking about like these shapes of his hairline and stuff like this right here is this shape right here interesting enough is the shape from his eyebrow to here is that interesting and I want to break up these areas of paint into smaller little areas of interest I do a lot of like weird cutting of shapes inside it just to give it like a little more personality it's something I'm my works been kind of turning into with that it's weird because I don't think it was ever like a purposeful thing but something I find myself doing more and more and I feel like it's been working because I might be not far enough out I'm not sure and same with the ear we can maybe we can figure out like a little bit more interesting shape here we're almost ready for me to go into some type of line drawing like this eye over here you can kind of tell is probably a little bit too far out maybe I think about where his eyes are it's a little funky so when I do these quick blockhouse but something I can do it you can control or shift see that'll just copy everything that you see no matter what layer is on and control-v it and then sometimes I can move it around a little bit that I might have to be like a little bit closer and I can tell right now that his pupils are kind of like in weird areas compared to each other so it's something we cannot tackle on a stage as well that's something I always have a problem with recently as I feel like my pupil positions on eyes is uh always wrong okay there you go guy don't be so angry all right so basically I'm gonna do right now is gonna make a new layer and you may notice I do make a lot of layers in Photoshop when I paint but I don't treat my layers like I think of like a lot of other artists or cons of ours - I don't do a lot of lasso work I kind of paint really freeform like I would a traditional piece so I'm kind of just creating new layers just to keep a little cleaner in case I want to change something but later I may just squash it all right so what am I get do now is go over with a darker line drawing I'm still staying pretty loose I'm not getting like totally bogged down I love this detail and stuff yet but I want to kind of figure out like I'm using this under painting to give me more ideas of like where these shaves may go I think it's not just I have his nose and then I can really figure out somebody's shaves which is which is pretty nice like I said we're definitely not married to anything here we can easily change wherever we won I'm getting these guys figured out get that upper lid until I get some type of brow here like I said there might be some like pupil issues but something we can figure out later Garin Eve at least when you're doing guy characters to like it's a lot easier to add like age lines and cool wrinkles and all this other stuff that were like well I think my character is you do have to be pretty careful about and so I like to just kind of cut in kenan some lines figure out what's going on this guy he's got some pretty big brows over here like I said try think kind of loose still three hours lip is and this is top of his moustache pie go over his lip here and we're these chops doing so basically I'm just kind of like slowly moving through the piece see we're gonna do here you know these your shapes aren't like exactly I cry right now that's okay he's trying to have kind of a strange look to him I think it's since we did the Tracy character for the outstation challenge that uh we're doing these weird chops and handlebar mustaches but you can see I'm still just using a lot of information for that under painting of all this black and white just see where we might want to go let's flip this around definitely kind of something like eye situations on would be making that feel like uh you know you always want Mike I feel like I'm like a sphere in there you know we could do a little bit more here maybe this kind of comes down but I almost have like my hand offs in T tablet like I'm saying pretty loose and we're just finding cool lines like I love good line work like I don't you know I don't know how many like comic fans we have out there but I love good like Inc work and line work in comics that was always a big part of inspiration for me when I was a kid you know I grew up in the UH in the late eighties and early 90s and huge in leaf and huge in a you know MacFarlane inspire man and spawned all that stuff that really had a big influence me when I was a kid you know I spent so much time drawing spider-man and spawn variations and which was pretty great all right so we're just kind of pepper and s'more stuff and I want to kind of have a little more forehead wrinkles and stuff like that and maybe they'll give him a little bit more bring these down there we go we zoom a little bit here let's see what this dude's up to you and like that stuff over here I don't really figure out too much what's going to be but we're just kind of like just making shapes see what could work sometimes I get a little thicker on this right here just uh give a little more spice but I'm keeping my eye and hand moving around the piece as much as possible I think a big thing a lesson to learn that a lot of our essay is you want to kind of work on the whole piece at once and I think that is super important like I don't want to spend like an hour kind of working on his eyes and nose you know trust me I love working on the face it's like I think the most are especially cared for us is when I can one of the most fun areas to work on we kind of like force yourself to move on tack a lot of this other part of the piece and then you get rewarded later when you get to go back to it and everything works I think that goes in with when you want to work on highlights and all that stuff - yeah because you know those highlights really gonna make this the piece pop I like no gotta be patient gotta wait we'll get there we will get there that's right now this you just kinda has like some I know shawl slash tunic thing but it's kind of neat where's kind of going from work some more saw blacks and stuff right now you know maybe this dude's got some no scars or something these guys been through the business and we give him some crow's feet so this is a stage two where you record something's in here it's like okay I mean you can start to think about where we want to push this piece next do I want to spend more time rendering out the black and white that's definitely possible like we could push this piece to a pretty final black and white we hop in a color do we start random stuff these are all great questions I think you ask yourself as an artist and especially as a concept artist um where do you go from here and you know time is always important you know a big part of being a con savaris its ability to work and produce to work fast so that's definitely factor but I think that's something that's gonna come in time I think a lot of people will worry that like how me and that piece was done very quick but you kind of start learning shortcuts over the years of painting what works for you and what's gonna make it go a little bit quicker and that type of stuff and so I'm just kind of moving around the piece just kind of pushing some things around still getting a little more of these shapes in here once-great is right now you can tell if I look like a color picker here where my values all are I look where my highlights are on the color wheel still very very low like I'm not even closed up here I'm taking a very long time to push up into my highlights which which I actually do quite a bit I want like a slow build up and it's gonna really pay off when we get there in the end so see you thinks just work on the black pointer first not to worry about a lot of other kind of stuff and this is great too especially when you're looking for um art director or career director approval to show them a black and white is supposed to time to not be that concerned with the color at least and uh where I'm working right now lately is I can kind of show them to design but like yeah this is kind of work this is where our heads at right now what do you think about this and then if they want to make some changes like oh I don't really like that shoulder pad or you know give them an eye patch or who knows super easy to do at this day super super easy it was crazy eyebrow I know what's coming outside was head will keep it maybe he's got like some crazy ones over here too then we'll kind of cut some lines out of this he's like watch let me just change part of this thing here this part is eyebrow or is Island alright so basically what we can do also is I go to a new layer here maybe I'll make it a multiply layer if I want to darken something right here multiply I'll take this light gray color and see when I push this down on it it's gonna leave a little bit of the pin behind it and so just go and light or maybe I'll just drop this layer down to like 50% and so I slip just adding a little bit darkness but I'm not losing detail you know what I mean so we kind of come in here using the same brush I was using before and just kind of maybe darken up some parts this still I'm still tan saying loose loose I can like me will get about a little bit more darkness it was mustache and beard here and all that stuff it'll work into this right here I find little areas we can break it up so it's not all it's just one solid color on that same note let me grab a different brush maybe something with a little more texture in it I have a whole list of em here and we can just darken up the background a little bit I think you want him to pop off it a little bit you know we get there let's darken us down here too so now we're really far away from anything past like our mid-tone and higher which is totally fine we can't we're gonna we're gonna fix that later there we go and you could even grab a brush let's try some of these out sometimes like I have brushes in here that I don't even use that much and sometimes when you're doing these little backgrounds it might be worth checking out some brushes you don't use maybe they add a little bit of texture this one's not gonna work I think this is like a weird splatter brush button I could add something back there you know what actually don't like that one we'll take that one off all right kind of flip it at least you still reading I still kind of like it from this angle here all right from here I think we're gonna add a little bit more mid-tone and highlights as we kind of wrap up this black and white stage so our bellies are kind of round here right now let's just kind of go up to back here I don't want to push it too fast I want to contain still take my time but building it up a big thing I like to do is like what are some interesting shapes we can use with lighting to give the piece a little bit more personality Oh before I proceed with this new layer when I add it on I like to go to your layers and go down to overlaying and I found that that is a good one to kind of slowly layer on some better value and then I can take like a soft airbrush kind of eraser and I can kind of so I'll take out little areas we're just starting to build up some areas that we want it's almost like we're adding this just to build up the form some we're not getting crazy with some like beam of light blasting through his face or some crazy room light on the side we're still just playing around building up these shapes we just obviously needed a lot more of some lighter color in here to really figure out what's going on with this guy you know we're gonna hit up top that year here maybe the some of the lights hitting down here hitting this side of his neck coming down and then I do a little bit on the side too because you still want even the ones who are in shadow should still feel like they have some form and depth to it I add a little bit more to the hair up here and then we'll find some cool shapes down here and all this stuff so we can just use this layer to understand all this a little bit on where this chin would be it's fine out look at it now it looks like that his chin is almost getting like enveloped by this other purpose mustache which is kind of weird so I can just kind of color pic over here and maybe we'll just read your out part of his chin here these are some things very easy to miss sometimes keep a little bit of shadow underneath words must I should be falling on his limb and one thing too is like the value of a his lip would be a little bit different than the rest of his skin as well I'm going in I'm just kind of like cleaning house from safe she was just some shapes I can't even talk still playing with a bunch of it does he have like a little butt chin I don't know I said I still want to use shades to be interesting so I'm still kind of breaking off silhouette and seeing what well it's like does that get too big you can always come in and clean it up like I said this black and white stage is really perfect for that really determining this stuff i if you can solve these problems now before you get into color it helps a ton cut into a little bit here it's funny I almost don't like it as round I can't figure out these small shapes will determine the character quite a bit so sometimes they are pretty important so I'm just come over picking out little areas here bring out some little highlights I'm still staying loose I want these things that still feel like hair not too blocky but we're just playing around or playing all right and then we can kind of color pick these other areas up here to use for certain highlights it's fine because you know some things I like keeping a lot of this line stuff and sometimes I'll totally paint over it all all depends on the piece and what you think looks good I think as long as it works for the piece and doesn't feel like you're flattening it out you know line work and have a bad habit of really flattening work out but I think that piece is built around it I mean up you been there you go I'm still kind of picking that out and zoom out a little bit in super-rad and this entire type of rendering is the way I'm laying it out like I said before or something you totally carried through to the rest of the piece his eyes I was kind of weird but sometimes we can't support - especially if I'm under a deadline they might not mind that much be like well who died like how much I bribed it would give him give him quite a bit you know all these little techniques of how I treat edge hair and eyelids and all that stuff you know you guys see you pick it up from different artists over time and we're certain highlights are and all that stuff you know we're just gonna pick this stuff so I know like I want sometimes my color picker likes to mess with my brain I will go up a little bit higher here I went a little bit of this catching off those have is brow and then I'll blend that in and we're definitely at videos in the future kind of like how I blend value how I blend color so I'm very excited to get through all that stuff so this is definitely more of a general introductory video let's see here all those popping down we don't need like a tiny detail on his shirt for this it's kind of a lot of implied folds you know if this was having to get sent to a modeler later it may be different we may have to figure out a lot of these specifics nothing like giving like a really ambiguous piece to a modeler to really have them give you the stink eye and trust me I've gotten to plenty of those before they're like what am I supposed to do with this oh my god I don't know so you do usually want to figure out a lot of that detail for the end modeler and the best thing we can tackle in the future too like people have questions about getting into the game industry you know what to look for in your portfolio portfolio development I have reviewed a lot of portfolios when it comes to hiring into the industry and so I've always helped whenever I can I talk to certain high school students about prepping portfolios for art school applications you know it's stuff I wish I had available to me when I was younger I feel like I with a few tips when I was like a senior in high school would have completely changed how I looked at art my portfolio how I looked at art schools it really would have changed so much yeah I feel fortunate that things worked out but it would have been amazing you know Internet in the late 90s I was today although Napster was pretty sweet and I'm gonna throw that out there alright so we're just kind of messing around and clean this up put some cuts and little things of interest in here you know all right and so you could span as little or as much time in this phase as you want or have available like we could really polish this thing up until looks like a finished black and white and then move to color so he's gonna clean up a little more here maybe actually has a lot more shadow from this brow coming over there so something's one chest I'll make a new layer here maybe we can do more of a severe shadow on that side but it looks like this a little too much maybe you can take that layer and drop the opacity on it so that's one things that layers are kind of nice you can go into him so maybe it's just like to do a little bit pretty subtle I'll bring that up a little bit and we can do that for all these little areas it's real subtle but it's something that's gonna make a new layer here since I want to kind of tackle a different value and this is kind of where we are on the scope of right here so our highlights is probably I feel like our brightest area is right here and this is where we are on the piece let's go for just a tiny bit higher and I really want to just slam in a couple of highlights right here not really like highlights we're not hitting like those real crazy like tip the nose you know I highlights right now I'm kind of just playing a little bit I'm still cutting shapes within the highlight just so it's not totally smooth I like those shapes inside it's also had like a little bit of personality of their own that makes sense like every little shave counts shape design is something I I wish I had pushed a lot further and it's something I'd really been focusing on these these past few months so you're gonna see in these videos a lot more focus on it all right so I look at this nose right here so this kind of highlight right here and it feels very flat and so sometimes I might take this bit sorry here I just might cut in a little areas like what can we do just to make it a little more interesting just to break it up I just like breaking up shapes you know maybe that's something maybe that give us a little bit then maybe I get rid of some of this line on this other side of the nose you really don't have a line that defines the bridge of your nose it's basically the shadow on the other side that makes it look like the line there so sometimes it's worth getting rid of it a little bit but then there's an easy stage too it's like we could actually even change the shape of his nose just by this right here we can make it he's got like a more of a long nose like that that's that seems a little bit cooler that's little more interesting like that shapes he feels better to me then take Inez and maybe we'll just do like a little cut into it one thing we change to is changing these circles in sizes pupils here when we try to remember that like these are sitting on a sphere in your head right like it goes into like usually creating some type of shadow underneath your lid on top of your eyeball I hope you guys can see me grows in ours too is how I tackle eyes in future however she never really happy with my treatment of eyes so it's something we can all work on together and so it's something I usually do I've kind of have been doing the same thing for a while when it comes to eyes this is kind of like dark circle and Center it kind of connects to this top part and then you kind of have like a thin line around it right here and I kind of do the same thing over here sometimes you can have I like these little which kind of shapes in here and add a little bit and sometimes it can be too much and some and then I'll kind of dole it out right here so you can tell right here that looks like his pupils kind of might be kind of looking in two different directions like so that's definitely something that I struggle with right so it's like sometimes you take this control shift C control V maybe I'll bring it up a little bit there you go it's like it's real subtle small things I also it looks like it's people a little bit smaller I think a big thing that I do is I end up making the eyes that's further considerably smaller one realistically they should be about the same size it's not like the other eyes down a mountainside but more I look at me I wonder if I just darken this in here maybe was too late either way it's not it's good to not get bogged down just keep moving on the piece maybe that's something that we tweaked later when we do the color and I think well also will break this piece up into this stage and apply color so for next week's video we're gonna take this piece and how I go into applying color I think that'd be a good way to do it just so these videos aren't too long so you guys can easily digest these things and I can get feedback immediately on this one and then we can maybe apply it into the next penis I'll least into finishing this piece because this guy is pretty cool I like this guy and then in the comments maybe let's give this guy name or something well name him that's definitely something we do a lot on my add to a channel when we make character is as we like to give them a name and personality and all that kind of stuff this guy looks like he's mix between some type of detective or I don't know let's see where we can take it maybe he has some post some ideas of interesting things that we can give him equipment wise or this could be a whole creating concept right here on YouTube that'd be pretty cool that makes things interesting for me as well override then we kind of slowly we're still building up shames figuring out shapes just like move around the PC what works what doesn't alright so that was a little bit of time this is like a good way for us to start a character that I might start concept art was and this is usually a stage where I pop it over to an art director or something like that I think what do you think about this guy he may usually have a little more equipment since it's a little more specific like oh we need a assassin or a knight and usually the equipment itself will help define those things but sometimes we need like head studies or if it's actually like a main character like it's this guy gave like a vibe that we're looking for you know what do you think Shay you know this might be a stage to were our talk to me like yeah you know I like these parts of their face what if we tried different mustaches on let's try different hair let's make a ball let's make um you know he's gotten 12 years all over his head who knows that'd be weird I'd look at my art director in a strange way if he asked me that but sometimes things do happen but awesome guys I think we can wrap this one up for now for this video I think this was a great start hopefully just seeing me talk through my process and how I started piece gives you guys a little bit of a insight into it and definitely comment and like and subscribe you everyone subscribing in the past month or two has been amazing and has really pushed my inspiration for creating new work for the channel and more and more people again involved in the channel the more content I'm gonna produce for it so guys thank you so much and I will see you in the next video when we take this thing to color thanks bye