today what we're going to be doing is we're going to be going over blending. blending is a pretty
broad topic because there's so many different types of blending and what you -- and how you
blend, and sometimes people don't blend it all. right? so we're going to be going over a few
different types of blending and a few different ways you can blend -- we're going to just end off
with a fully blended character, um, just kind of the way that i blend! usually blending kind
of goes hand in hand with shading as well, so i'm gonna talk a little bit about that as well. let's
talk a bit about cel shading. no...no blending at all, it uses blocks of color instead. so i'm
going to use these skin blobs to kind of show these off so if we have our skin blob here...
maybe we have a little bounce light, and then there's some highlight,
and then there's some subsurface scattering which we will also talk about.
this is kind of celled-in right, so it's not blended at all, right, you kind of just leave
it as a block of color. right? totally valid -- this is what i do 99 of the time. right,
cel shading is kind of the one that most people do. this is something a little more cartoony.
another kind of blending that you see a lot of sometimes...rough blending actually tends to
be... it -- it's a little more stylized, so i -- cel shading or blending no blending at all.
our rough blending... so it's not perfectly smooth and little bit more stylized so i'm going to turn
on my opacity by pressure this time. right, and this time... and i have opacity my pressure on so
depending on how hard or light that i press, it'll change the opacity right so if i press
really lightly, the opacity is really light, if i press really hard, the opacity is really
heavy. and you notice now i'm kind of picking the color and going back and forth between it -- it's
a good idea to have alt as a pre-programmed button somewhere. alt. so if you're on a keyboard,
your alt key -- it shortcuts your eyedropper tool. your eyedropper tool is what you want to be able
to pick your colors back up. so you kind of see i leave a lot of my brush strokes in there -- a
lot of my texture is remained in there. if i had a bunch of different brushes i would be using them,
right? so your rough blending is tends to be a little more stylized, right, it makes it kind of
feel like more of a rough painting, like an actual painting. this is soft blending -- so this is
based a little bit more on realism. so everything is very blended almost no strokes visible.
let's go down to the airbrush, now this is where people would end up using the airbrush,
right, to get a very soft super blended look. right, so this is a super blended
soft blending kind of look, right, it's based a little bit more on realism, right?
and everything with soft blending is very, very blended and there's almost no strokes visible.
so let's talk about gradients -- generally you shouldn't use the gradient tool as a blender or
to shade. let me show you the difference. let's say we make a circle -- ellipse,
right? i use the gradient tool...this looks a little flat, doesn't it?
usually you don't want to do that, right, tends to look a little flat, right, you have less control.
that's the main one, right, if you use a gradient tool to shade in your work, you have a lot less
control than if you were to use a brush, right? because you're either stuck with the linear or
you're stuck with the circular. right, we want a lot of control when it comes to our blending
because, you know, blending all depends on material. so how do i know how to blend?
it depends on your material and your lighting. lighting is what we're going to go over in another
stream, so we're going to be mainly focusing on material. material all has to do with texture,
which is an element of art. right, and it's all about how the light reacts with whatever it is.
if you look at a piece of fabric, obviously you're going to blend in everything on a piece of fabric
differently than you blend stuff in on a piece of glass. right, a glass will have like very,
very sharp -- super reflective stuff. we're gonna draw a full character. now, this character i'm
gonna try to put on as many textures as i can... let me just start by sketching in this character.
so there are the flats, right, flat colors. so what i would do is i take this... merge everything
i merge all of my layers together, and this is what i paint on top of. so i have one layer that
i use to paint on top of everything. i would also find my subsurface scattering color,
which is probably this. turn my opacity my pressure back on... and now what i've got to do is
just press alt and continue going back and forth between my colors. now it's just going to be me
blending everything in... right, so we take...kind of the lines, blending everything
in to work, right, adding more darkness, adding more lightness, depending on where
the thing i am. but for skin, absolutely for skin, you really want to keep texture in. right, skin is
not perfectly smooth no matter how much instagram lies to you, right? skin has texture and you want
to keep that in there usually. the thing with blending as well when it comes to blending in your
portions is you get to choose how much you want things to be blended, right?
so i like the smoothness but i also try to keep some of my brush strokes in there.
add some blushing in there as well because just the singular color is very, very flat. right we
want to kind of blend more in there. so this is kind of me focusing on the skin portion for now.
some things that are a little bit more shiny, right, the light is going to be concentrated
on them, right, they're not going to be super super blended in. right, if you have something
that's more shiny, the light is going to be concentrated, right? if you have something that's
not very shiny, the light is not going to be concentrated, right? it's going to be scattered.
so i'm also -- while i blend i'm fixing up my values. now there's some areas where i can
tell that i probably need to bump up my values a little bit. when i say bump my values i mean
like make it darker, make it lighter, stuff like that. sometimes we struggle with our values -- how
dark or light something should be, right, a good way to check
is if you just kind of completely zoom out. if there's some areas that kind of disappear,
you're gonna have to fix it. but if it doesn't disappear, then you're all good,
right? and sometimes when you over blend, it can end up looking a little bit boring, right, when
you over blend stuff, right, and you end up losing all of those brush strokes, right? sometimes people
like to have the brush stroke, sometimes people don't. right, it's all about preference generally.
so this horn section here... right, the horn is very, very
shiny, right? so this shadow is going to be very, very concentrated. it might have some bounce light
as well, so i'm actually going to take a bit of the skin color and bounce it on this as well because
it will be affected -- because it's so shiny it will be affected by the colors that are surrounding it.
hair is another kind of shiny thing, right, there are so many ways to blend hair. i mean SO many ways,
right, this is kind of one technique that i use sometimes, where like the shadow
clashes directly -- the darkest part of the shadow clashes directly with the highlight,
it makes everything feel very shiny. it's a very cartoony kind of way to shade hair.
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uh, fabric is one of those things where, like, your lighting is going to be very, very scattered
and that means there's going to be blending, but there isn't going to be a lot of highlights.
so most of what you're gonna see is just blending with fabric, and a lot of texture so i'm really
going to not blend in a lot of this portion. this part is satin. satin, however, is a shiny fabric,
so that means that i do have to blend this one -- or i don't have to blend it, but i have
to blend it a little bit differently. it's going to have strong highlights at that.
yeah this section especially, um, the thing with, like, working with blacks or really, really dark
colors is that your highlights on them are going to be very, very scarce unless if they're shiny,
right, it gets a little bit tricky to work with them.
the fun thing with hands, um, a lot of my blending techniques and a lot of where i know
or where i decide to blend with stuff -- all of my techniques come from doll artists. and the reason
why is because doll artists know everything. but one technique that i picked up illustratively from
doll artists is body blushing. and body blushing is when you kind of add extra blush or redness
to certain areas of the body, and that gives it a bit more of a lifelike feel. right, so the
tips of your fingers, add a little bit of blush to them, your joints, tip of the nose, shoulders, knees...
yeah it's like some points i'm like i gotta figure out what i'm doing here...
yeah so fur, fabric, everything kind of within that realm tends to be a little bit shinier, depending
on what kind of fur fabric it is, right, some hair reacts a little bit differently than other hair.
right, very tight coils tend to scatter light a lot more than very shiny, sleek fur or sleek hair.
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but there we go, that's it, that's the -- that's the full render. look at that -- you start... it's fun to
kind of look back and forth. this is the final, that's what we started with. right, kind of cool
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