transcriptions/Value Able_transcription.json

{
  "text": " Hey guys, so now that we've learned a little bit about concepting and researching, I'm really excited to start diving in to some actual design. Today I'll start by talking a bit about value, contrast, and limited color palettes, and then we'll actually dive into Photoshop and begin designing. So PortaPo came back, but they came back with a mood board this time, and it was their own mood board because they really liked our concepts and ideas but their creative director had this other style in mind. So it doesn't mean that my ideas were bad necessarily, it just means they really liked that this visual direction that they saw somewhere else. So they provided some reference and I'm gonna go in and choose my favorite storyline and turn those three frames into the design style that they want. So last week along with sketches I sent these three mood boards to the client. I sent them the abstract mood board, the literal mood board, and and the safe mood board. And it seemed like the client was leaning more towards the safe option based on what they sent back. So they seem to like all of the different concepts we came up with, but style-wise, they're wanting to go with something more like this, which does feel kind of like the safe option. It does seem to me like the client always tends to go with a safe option, but they put together this nice little mood board for us, which is super helpful because it gives us some insight into what they want. It seems like they want this black and white line work feel. They want it to feel a little bit elegant, but they also want a spot color of blue, which is in their logo as we saw in the brief they sent us last time. So it will feel very on brand. It will be very focused on their blue color, but it will also bring the narrative and story to life through this line work. So I'm gonna be using the style, but it seems like they're pretty open to the different types of styles. Like we see these two characters over here are pretty goofy looking. And then we've got like a more elegant shape style over here on the left and a couple more goofy characters in the bottom here. And then we even have some light play in here and an even more basic version in this middle right up here. So it seems like they're pretty open and I'm gonna go with something that feels very safe in this field house. And I'm gonna go with maybe this more basic, simple, uniform line work. It just seemed like they have a bit of texture in here just slightly. So it seems like they're not afraid to go with a bit of texture. So maybe that's where we can bring a little bit of humanity and quirkiness into it by adding a bit more texture while we keep the line work pretty uniform. I'm glad the client sent this and I think it'll be really fun to explore this style. It'll also give me a chance to focus more on the shapes and what's happening in the frame rather than trying to worry about a color palette, which is really nice. So I'm excited to get working on this. But before I jump ahead and start trying to bring this story to life, I wanna pull back the curtain a bit and talk to you about some of the basic design principles that are behind these boards I'm about to work on. It's best to understand what they are and the techniques that you're using before just blindly applying them. I'm sure a bunch of you have already learned some of these design principles, but it really doesn't hurt to brush up on your knowledge a bit here. Okay, so I'm gonna do a real quick overview of value. Value in art is basically how light or dark something is on a scale of white to black, white being the highest value and black being the lowest. While looking at something in gray scale, value is pretty easy to define. However, once you start adding in color, it can become challenging to grasp. Even I still struggle with understanding how it works. And tints and shades are different values of the same hue or color. So if we're looking at all these different colors here on this color wheel, the closer we get to the center, the darker it gets. So this yellow here has all these different shades of yellow leading it to the center. And if we look at it in the opposite way, This color has a bunch of tints of it as well. So these are the lighter tints and these are darker shades. If you wanna think about tints and shades and value, think about painting and mixing colors. You can make a tint by adding white to a hue and you can create a shade by adding black. So if we look at the color wheel here, we can see those tints and shades. But if we look on the right here with the color wheel in black and white, this is how we determine the value of all of those. So these are in the center of the darker values and on the outer rim are the lighter values. And you can see as the plain hue of the purple has a much darker value than the plain hue of the yellow up there. But if we look at this painting by Matisse, Fruit and Coffee Pot, 1898, we see that all of these colors are super inaccurate, but since the value is correct, the scene still feels realistic. So if we're looking back at this color wheel over here, say this blue and this purple right here, you can look at the black and white color wheel and you tell that they have the same value. So you might be able to use those interchangeably to shade something in an unrealistic cue, but since they're a similar value, they're gonna create the same darkness as each other. So if you add them interchangeably into a piece, they're probably gonna create the same light play, form play, any of that. Your piece will just have a different feel depending on whatever hue you use. And we see a lot of this in the motion design and illustration world as well. And I'm gonna show you a couple examples of illustrations with unrealistic cues, but value is used in such a way that we can still distinguish what's happening. So using unrealistic hues is how we get a lot of these stylized looks in the motion design and illustration world. As you can see in almost all of these, none of them look realistic, but we can still tell what's going on because of the way that the value is being used. So here on this right side, obviously we've got black for the shadows, but we also have this unrealistic pink, and then everything kind of has a purple undertone to it, which is super unrealistic, but since value is being used correctly, we can really see where all that shading is happening. Like this very saturated purple is being used as a shadow, but it still feels like a folded dress. And then here on the bottom, even though the water is peach colored, we still kind of get that feeling of a reflection with this crazy periwinkle color. And this one's pretty cool because it seems like Matteo Burton, who illustrated this has applied some rules to it. So anywhere you see something warm colored or purple, it's a human made thing, like a man made thing. So we've got like the purple boats and the purple building and he's definitely using warm tints and shades to create value here. But anytime we see something that's organic, it's usually this complimentary tone of blue-green right here. So he's using color in a really interesting way here, but because of the way he's using value, it's still obvious what's happening. Same goes for this piece by Sarah Wong. It's almost a monochrome piece here, so it's a little bit different, but because it's almost monochrome, it's like she could have painted this in black and white values and then gone and applied a hue saturation filter over it and made it this more turquoise color. And that actually could be an interesting technique to use as well. But we also have these other two pieces and they follow a lot of the same rules that I just discussed here, but they're also great examples of using value in interesting ways to create stylization while still being grounded in realism to not confuse the viewer. And today, since I'll be mainly working in grayscale, I'll have to pay close attention to value to make sure that my frames are working. I also wanna talk to you a bit about contrast. Contrast in art refers to the striking difference between two elements. It's a strategy to break up a work of art or alter its unity. It's basically the opposite of unity and it commands attention because it's so different and striking. So contrast can be stark difference in color or value, say black and white, or it could be where we see a harsh texture next to a soft texture. We can see it in value, hue, saturation, texture, detail and more. You can also be applied to form, placing large elements next to tiny elements. And I've got a few examples here. And in this first one here, we have a really stark contrast between the background and this fire element. Basically, this is the color and value contrast because we've got value, which we just talked about. We've got a very bright, light tint and hue popping forward from the fire. And then the background is just completely void of color. It's black. And then in the second piece right here by Yuki Yamada, this is kind of an example of limited contrast. We still have some contrast in the shadows here for sure, But this whole piece kind of evokes like a peaceful feeling because everything is pretty close to each other in contrast. It also is very close to each other in a hue and saturation. Like nothing is too brightly saturated. It all kind of just sits there and works really well together. It's got low contrast, at least in color and value. It does have a bit of, you know, like size contrast because we're seeing lots of variations of shapes here. overall pretty low in contrast. And on this right side as well, this is a piece by Merzion Haas. It's also pretty low in contrast, even though it's a darker piece than this one over here. Like these two pieces are contrasting against each other. This piece on its own is so dark overall that there's not too much contrast. I mean, we do see this part on the top here jutting forward because it is a lot brighter and more saturated even than the background, But overall, it's got a very dark vibe and has decently low contrast in comparison to something like this. And then I love this piece because it's got all types of contrast. It's got size contrast. So we see that this character is tiny in comparison to the scene around him. We also see texture contrast. So we've got so much texture and so much happening on this left side. And then in the right side, there's just crazy big spot of negative space. That's really jarring. It seems like this character might be entering a more calming world maybe, or a world void of energy, who knows? But we also have color contrast because we even see contrast on this left side here. Overall, this left side is really dark, but there is contrast within it. And then this whole left side is contrasting really greatly from this right side in all ways. So this is just an awesome example of contrast, and we see this all over the motion design world. There is lots of animated pieces that also utilize contrast. And here's a loose example of contrast in motion. We see this lot in motion going from something really simple to extremely extravagant all of a sudden. And this is contrast and it's kind of emphasizing how crazy or exciting something is by expanding upon something all at once. So right there, kind of where we're looking at this simple book and then it pops open and there's this whole world inside. To me, that's an example of contrast in motion because you're really trying to emphasize a point by showing the distinct difference between a lot of information and a little information at once. And we can find this all over the motion design world. This one in particular I wanted to show you because it's actually also a really great example of line work with a simple spot color. So this could be some nice inspiration for our piece today as well. And I don't wanna go too deep into this, but a related term is simultaneous contrast. This refers to the way in which two different colors affect each other. Basically, it means that one color can change how the eye perceives the tone and hue of another when they're placed side by side. And you can really see that in this example here. The middle colors are the same for each pairing, but they look pretty different when they're put inside of different colors. So when you put this gray in the bottom left here inside this darker color, it really lightens it. but when it's next to this pink, it's really vibrating and kind of hurts my eyes. It also kind of just looks like it's a different color than the gray inside of the purple. And same with this red, like this red is a really good example. The red in the center of this teal color, it looks so much brighter and poppier and more saturated than this red within the light blue color because it plays with the hue it's on top of differently. And I just wanted to mention this really quick because I actually run into this a lot with my designs. Sometimes I'll need to change a color to appear to match its counterpart somewhere else in my frame because it doesn't actually look like the same color, it doesn't look like the brand color when I put it against a different background color. So I've even had art directors ask me if I was actually using the correct brand color before because it just looks so weird. So that's just something to keep an eye out for as you're working as well. And last but not least, I wanna talk to you about color palettes in specifically limited color palettes. Of course, we see all types of color palettes every day while scrolling through our Instagram feeds and my brain starts to recognize patterns in them. I start noticing what works and what doesn't, what I like and what I'm not really into. Now, there are tons of types of color palettes out there. There's monochrome, analogous, complimentary, split complimentary and more. These are all standards that I learned in art school. And if I'm being completely honest with you, I don't think much about how I'm using them on the day to day. They're great to learn upfront and I encourage you to do further research on it, but I really want to hone in on one particular type of palette today. We will be going into further depth about color palettes later on, but right now I just want to talk to you about limited color palettes. And when I went to research limited color palettes, I found a lot of information about painting. A lot of painters will use just a few colors and create new combinations of these colors by mixing them together. And then by using, say, blue and mixing it into all the other colors, as if blue were the shade that you were mixing in, you end up getting a nice blue tint to everything that gives the painting a really cool mood. And you can see an example of that right here in Kathleen Dunphy's work. She does a lot of this without her fine art paintings. You can tell that there's an overall blue tone to this whole piece. Even where we see yellow, it's got a bluish tint to it. And that honestly seems like a fun challenge. But I just wanted to clear that up because it is different from the limited color palettes that I will be talking about right now. So limited color palettes and painting is not exactly what I'm talking about here. When I say limited palette for this lesson, I really just mean that we're gonna be using a very minimalistic approach to color here. We'll be using grayscale with a spot of color. But why would you limit yourself to a few colors when you have all the colors in the world to play with in Photoshop? The answer to that is clients might like that you're focusing on their brand colors and it's a good way to add emphasis in certain moments. It's also a good challenge to think about value and contrast and tints and shades. And I'm gonna show you a couple examples of this. Here's a piece by Giant Ant that I love. It feels extra clean and I love that they kind of have like this Mondrian color palette going for them. They've used black and white as their main design and gone in and added the Google colors elsewhere later. So you really remember the yellow, red and blue that appeared to you in this whole piece. It really feels Google branded when I watch it. So this is a great way to make the viewer remember the brand as they're watching it and really catch their eye. Another awesome example of how it's used for branding is in this punanimation channel, and I know they're probably changing their names soon, but this use of the triangle everywhere and the colors of black and white and yellow really make this stand out. Whenever you see a triangle with black and white and yellow, I immediately think of punanimation, so it's a great way to become recognizable and iconic. This is kind of just an example of one of those bumpers close up by Yino Juan. She's one of my favorite animators. She's so talented, but you can really see how that yellow on her jacket just really keeps your eye focused on the character. If she was all gray and this whole thing was black and white, it would still look really cool, but it wouldn't be as memorable and it wouldn't stand out as much. So that adds brand continuity and really grabs your attention. That's something we should definitely keep in mind as we're working today. So if I follow some of these techniques here, hopefully this will make PortaPill's brand pop among a desaturated world. This will really help the viewer to remember PortaPill. So whenever they see that blue color in the future, they'll be thinking about PortaPill's brand. And after seeing some of these references and techniques applied, I'll swear I feel that it would make sense for our project to be filled with line work, black and white line work, and a few pops of the PortaPill blue. This will help us to think more about the design and composition as we're working rather than the color. There are still a ton of other elements to think about, like will the line weights stay the same throughout the entire piece or will there be different varying line weights? Like maybe there's a really thick line that's used for the window, but then all the details are thin lines. And we also need to think about the brand color. Where is the best place to put the brand color? We don't want to just add that blue in wherever we think it looks best. We want to make sure that we're using colors purposefully and not just willy-milly. And should we add some overlap? Should the color be in front of the black and white lines or should it be below? So let's go ahead and get started with this design. So to start off, I want to show you an example of something I worked on that felt kind of similar to this brief. This piece I worked on with Jorge, Canada Estrada, JR Canest. It feels similar because we've got this grayscale background. We've got a little bit of line work and then we've got these three different spot colors that happen throughout the piece. So it starts with the red and then it moves on to the blue spot color. And then in the third one, we have the yellow spot color. So I have played with this style before, but I definitely want this one to feel different. This style worked really well for this playful, goofy vibe that Jorge wanted. But based on the client's new mood board, it seems like they want it to feel a bit more elegant than these chunky textured lines I have here. Also, my piece that I did with Jorge has a lot more fills in it, and we wanna play with mainly just line work here. So I definitely wanna go a little bit more elegant with it and I'm probably gonna have a uniform colored background and I'm just gonna play with one spot color throughout. And hopefully that spot color will add a little bit of value and contrast to my piece that wouldn't otherwise be there. So here I am back at what I worked on last week. I've got my brainstorming and I've got my mood boards that I worked on before but I'm really just gonna focus on the sketches here. So the client said that they're pretty happy with whichever version I wanna go with. And I mean, this one was pretty cool, but I haven't really fully flushed it out enough. And I feel the client will probably just be happier seeing something a little bit more related to the topic at hand. I actually really like the composition I did with this one, even though it's the client safe version. I think that this window composition will be really fun to play with. So I'm gonna start by working on a refined sketch of this first frame. What that means basically is I'm gonna take this really simple storyboard sketch I have, scale it up, and then I'm going to start designing it out with more detailed fine lines so that I can see what the composition will actually look like, what my details are gonna be, and if I wanna add anything in. So right now as I'm doing the refined sketch, I'll mainly be focusing on composition, looking at everything holistically, and thinking less about like color and line weight right now and more about just how everything in this first frame is gonna fit together. I am going to double check my image size here, make sure that it's what I want. Okay, so it's pixels, it's 1920 by 1080. It's 300 DPI, which is a really high resolution for animation. As I said in an earlier lesson, I do like to work in 300 DPI because say we decided that we really wanna push in, which we are pushing in in frame three into this piece. like we don't want our edges of the window to get pixelated as we're pushing in past them. So we wanna make sure we have a high enough resolution to where we can push into the frame a little bit and it won't get pixelated and we won't lose any of that detail as we animate. I think this is a pretty good size. So I'm actually just going to save this as a new file. Just save it to my desktop, portapill frame 01. I'm gonna get rid of all this extra stuff I have in here because I don't really need it right now. I don't need my brainstorm. I've already got everything laid out here, how I know I wanted the client seems to like it. So I'm just gonna keep the sketches safe group and delete the rest of the stuff that I don't need. So I have this here and I'm gonna leave this in here just as reference or if I need to make the second frame and I wanna keep these sketches in here just so I have them. I'm gonna leave that folder in here but I'm gonna duplicate it by pressing Command J and then I'm actually gonna merge it all together because I don't need all of that information. I have it saved here in this other group. So I'm gonna merge it together by pressing Command E. And that means I can just take pieces out of it if I want. I can select with my marquee tool, I can select this first frame. And to put it on its own layer, I'm gonna press Command J. So that basically just cuts that piece of the frame out and pastes it onto a new layer. And since I have that, I can just delete that extra sketch layer. I don't need this because I have it saved here. And now that I have this little frame here, I'm gonna scale it up using my transform tool. And here's the content that I want in this frame. And I can change it up a little bit here because it's not like I sent the client a really detailed sketch and they really liked the way the coffee mug looked. You know, like I can make this a little bit different and I can refine it a bit. I am gonna keep this general composition. So to start my refined sketch, I'm just gonna turn down the opacity of this frame. So I have it basically as a guide, but I'm actually gonna use that layer as my final sketch. And I'm gonna start by making a group and call that refined sketch because I just wanna keep everything separate. So my old sketch from my storyboard is called just sketch in caps. And then I'm gonna have a whole group for my refined sketch. So I can put different layers in there if I want. But as I have said in the past, I don't really need to think about keeping everything on separate layers here because these strokes that I'm gonna put down right now are not the final strokes. Even though my final image is gonna be kind of like this black and white, elegant look that the client has provided, I'm still gonna be creating like a rougher version of that with my refined sketch here. Don't worry too much about keeping everything on separate layers at this moment. Okay, so I'm just gonna start sketching out this rectangular window frame. And it doesn't really matter what brush you use. I just like using this thin sketch brush I have because it feels more like a pencil to me with the pressure sensitivity and everything. It just, I like how it looks, but it's not gonna be my final brush. So I'm using shift and holding that down as I'm drawing my lines to keep them straight. And that really only works vertically and horizontally. It doesn't really work diagonally or anything. So it's great for creating structured shapes like this window here. I'm gonna use my guides and just see if it's centered. It might not actually end up being centered in the end because I'm gonna have this mug jutting off the side and we have our curtain and our thermometer. So I don't really need to worry too much about if things are centered right now. And then I'm gonna create the top of the window frame. But I do like using the center guides to make sure that my window and the top of the window frame are actually both centered. And the way I do that is just pressing command T and checking to see if those center points of my transform tool are on my center line. And they are right now for both my window frame and the top of the window. So those are lined up, which is great. And I don't really need to worry about like naming all my layers right now because I am gonna be flattening it at some point. And here's my tissue box. And as I'm drawing this, I was thinking it would be kind of nice to create a little bit of depth here. And even though we're not doing perspective yet, We're just using flat shapes. You can imply some depth by having each object have a different horizon line. So this front rectangle is gonna look closer to you if it's further down, or at least that's the way we're gonna make it work here. You can go back in and mask out my window so that you can't see it behind the box. And a lot of times when I wanna create straight lines, but they're not vertical or horizontal, I'll just draw a straight line and then I'll use the transform tool to rotate it. So that's what I wanted to hear with these tissues because I'm still trying to keep them in that geometric universe. So I don't want to make them too organic feeling. I want them to feel structured, kind of like it's counterpart the box here. I'm gonna use actual straight lines and I'm just gonna actually duplicate that one by pressing command J and using it for the other side of the tissue. And flattening those because they're part of the same shape. A lot of times I'll use lasso tools to grab those straight lines because I just want to make sure they're almost at the same angle as each other. You can also rotate your canvas to try to get straight lines that are at the correct angle, but a lot of times it takes me a couple tries to get it the right way. And don't worry if you're erasing a lot of things here, it doesn't have to look good from the start. You can go back in and mask things out or delete them or change the sizes. And later it's not a huge deal at this point. One thing that I'm starting to notice here is a tangent. So I'm going to talk to you a little bit about tangents and I'm starting to see that this is getting close to a tangent here. So this moment where the tip of the tissue is hitting the top of this window frame, it's a little unsettling because it feels so close to it. And a tangent is basically when two or more lines interact in a way that insinuates a relationship between them that I did not intend for it to. So I'm not meaning for these lines to meet up like this. It's not intentional. So it does feel a little weird. It can create confusion on part of the audience as to what they're looking at. And this one isn't really a major one. It's not gonna affect the audience in the same way that it will bother me because I just know it's there. There are times when tangents can become really bad. They're two points meeting where they definitely shouldn't and it just becomes very strange looking. So it's just an unwelcome aesthetic response and there just really can be ugly to look at. So I'm gonna try to get rid of that tangent there. And I'm just gonna make that part of the tissue like lower. And now everything feels like kind of even and I wanted to create a little bit more contrast with the tissue shape here. So adjust the other parts of it too. So that feels a little bit less awkward, which is nice. And now that I have that tissue box, I'm gonna move on to the coffee mug. And as I've shown you in the past couple lessons, if I'm creating a symmetrical shape, like this coffee mug here, I will basically just try to create one side of it. And it's a gamble if it's gonna work or not, but I'll try to make one side of it, duplicate it, and then flip it horizontally and see how it looks. So obviously that looks like a butt. It's basically just a butt, which is not what I wanted. I can combine and merge these together using command E and just fix that little mistake right there. Draw a straight line or any kind of line between them that makes it feel less butty. So that's feeling a little better. And I'm actually gonna put this coffee mug a little further forward than the tissues as well because I'm trying to create that depth still. And maybe I'll add a little bit of shape variation to this though it's not just your basic coffee mug. Maybe I'll add like a little tea cup feeling to it. Make it a little bit more interesting. And I've gotta add the handle still. So I'm holding it on shift actually for this. And I think for this, I'm also gonna use that symmetrical trick. This one I'm flipping vertically. I mean, we've got this petite little handle because it's pretty cute. I'm gonna rotate my canvas here so I can get a better look at what I'm doing and I can draw towards myself, which makes it easier to create those straight lines. So that's cute, kind of into that, but I don't want to over-stylize it, so I think it's looking a little long and weird. I'm just gonna increase the size on that and delete part of it. So yeah, I kinda like how that's feeling and I'm gonna turn this background sketch off just so I can see a little bit more clearly. But I think it's pretty cute actually. And I'm gonna mask out the parts that I don't wanna see behind the mug. So the window frame and the tissue box. And looking back at my sketch here, I guess the next step would be to create the curtain maybe, but I wanna give it a little bit more of an organic feel so it's not just straight up and down like it was in my sketch. Maybe it extends a little bit past the window frame here and swoops out a little bit. It's definitely no wind in it, but it at least has a little bit more organic feel to it with this curved line. I'll just mask out the window frame. I'm gonna add a couple little detail lines in here. I just kind of randomly placed those, but I wanted to put them evenly throughout curtain. There's a couple line breaks and separate ends of the curtain to balance it out. I also want to make sure that I put the curtain on the other side because if you remember in our sketch here, our original storyboard sketch, we do actually see two curtains in the second frame. So we just want to make sure we actually have two curtains here because if we don't, that will be problematic when we move into animation because we don't really want just a random curtain to pop on halfway through the spot. So I'm going to add a really straight subtle one over here because I don't want to distract from all that's happening. And I'm going to try to avoid this tangent right here because I am creating another tangent. I'll just place it a little further to the left. That's kind of nice. It almost like frames up the tissue box a little bit more, which is nice. Looking back at my original sketch, I have the thermometer left. I also have the window frame and the rain. And I'm trying to figure out how I can make it a little bit more unique. How can I make it more interesting. I'm wondering if I draw the thermometer and it's just kind of like laying there flat. I wonder if maybe I can have it leaning against this box instead so that it has a little bit more angle and interest. By adding a little angle in there it'll feel less gridded. So maybe I'll try that. So I'm gonna draw the thermometer. I'm gonna do my symmetrical trick again. So I'm gonna draw the long part of it with a little bottom and flip it. I'm just gonna kind like free hand circle at the top. Not too bad, but also weird. I can fix that later when I get into design. And then maybe it also has those thermometer lines. And the left edge of these thermometer lines is getting pretty uneven. So I'm actually gonna press E for my eraser button and I'm gonna hold shift as I erase down. So it should create an even edge on all of those thermometer lines. And now that I have my thermometer, I'm gonna have it lean against the box. Okay, and obviously that is way too big, so I'm gonna scale it down with transform. And I kind of want it to be on the same horizon line as the box because it is leaning against it, so it has to be in the same depth and same place and space. So I'm gonna use my guides here to just draw a guideline from the box's bottom. And then scale down my thermometer till it feels right. Because if I had my thermometer as large as the box, they'd be kind of competing for attention there. So I wanna create some variation in scale here and some contrast in scale to make it a little bit easier to look at all while keeping that horizon line the same at the bottom. And if I wanted it to be bigger, I could also create more of a diagonal. Okay, well, that's feeling pretty good. I like this a lot better than the flat thermometer because it has a little bit more personality and quirkiness, which is what the PortaPill brand seems to want. So it's subtle little things like that that can really liven up your frame. So anywhere you can add a little bit of quickness or you can vary up the composition slightly and break away from a grid that will make your frames a lot more interesting. And it does look kind of weird just like floating there. I know that the box bottom feels fine because it's grounded, but we don't really see a ground line for the thermometer. So I'm just gonna add a little place for it to rest on. Grounds it a little bit more. And then I also wanna add like a window line behind everything because we want to show that this is a window pane. How could I make that more interesting? I'm thinking I might actually make it offset because why not? It doesn't have to be super realistic. Obviously this whole composition isn't realistic. Let's play with that. And there's so many opportunities for tangents here. So I'm just gonna do my best to not create any and I'll erase the bits that are overlapping. I think that's feeling pretty good for my refined sketch. So from here, since I have this, I will go ahead and start working with my final brush. I also will start thinking about color and where I'm going to put that spot color. Okay, so now that we have finished our refined sketch, so it looks a lot better than what we have here, we have the frame for basically everything we need to do here, but we need to start adding color. But I want to first address is the background. So when we're looking at this mood board from the client, I've noticed a few things. Everything pretty much has a light colored background besides these two images. So I'm going to stick with that light colored background because it'll really make that porta pill blue pop. But I've also noticed that most of these white colored backgrounds aren't actually white. And I think there's a reason for that. In my opinion, when something is pure white and pure black, it actually just looks like a sketch you made in Photoshop. It looks unfinished, it feels unpolished. So I wanna make my background probably off white, so it feels like there was a little bit of intention put into it. It also will work better on pages like web pages that have white backgrounds. So if PortaPill's web background is white, then this video won't blend into the background. So now that I'm looking at all these references, I know that I wanna do an off-white background, but since PortaPill's logo is blue, I'm thinking it might be kind of nice to compliment that blue with maybe a very, very slightly warmer toned background. So I'm gonna color pick the background, which is just your basic FFFF right now. And I'm gonna go to a more orange-y palette here and just pull my picker around until I find something that feels kinda right. And I just wanted to feel off-white. I don't want it to feel like yellow or anything. I'm just gonna drop that in there and see how that feels. Feels like maybe a little too yellow, so I'm just gonna keep playing with it. And obviously I can adjust this later. Now that I've gotten this, it feels a little bit more bluish, but it's got a slightly warmer tone than this blue here. Okay, so I've got my background color, and I'm going to start filling in this frame with my final lines. So a couple things to keep in mind here, as I'm creating this, I actually wanna start using named groups and layers here, I don't want to erase any lines like it was with my refined sketch I want to mask them out because say the animator wants the cup to animate in or the animator wants The tissue box to crumple or something whatever they want to do You want to make sure that none of this is erased So there's still the information there for them to use they could turn the masks off if they wanted and they wouldn't have a weird Looking frame behind this tissue box here. It wouldn't just be blank. You see more of the window So I want to make sure that everything is staying in their proper groups, masked and not erased and labeled properly. So let's get to work. I'm going to choose my brush first and I'm going to create a new group and just call this design. And I'm going to turn the refine sketch down to maybe 10% opacity. Just to compare and figure out what brush I want to use, I'm going to start scribbling a bit. So here's the brush I used for my outline, just my refined sketch. And that's just my thin sketch pencil. We also have something like the soft pencil, zoom in so we can see that. The soft pencil, which doesn't feel too different, but it's definitely not as like crispy as my thin sketch brush. I also have a like an ink blotting brush, which doesn't feel as like charcoally or pencil-y, but it has a very crispy edge, which I'm not sure I want. And I feel like this one might be the winner, this hard pencil. It still feels organic. It's not as harsh on the edge as the inking pencil. It's also not as dirty as the thin sketch line I'm using. And it has some nice line variations, so if I'm putting less pressure on it, it's a little bit lighter and thinner. And if I put a lot of pressure on it, it's thicker and darker. But you may be asking yourself while you're watching this right now, like, why isn't she just making this an illustrator? That's a great question. I could be making this an illustrator, but If I am being 100% completely honest with you guys, I prefer Photoshop for almost everything and that's just a personal preference. I really like that anything I draw in here has a little bit more of a handmade quality to it. Even if it is a line I drew where I just held shift down, I could change the line weight as I go by putting less pressure sensitivity on it. So it gets a little bit darker in this area and it gets a little lighter and thinner in this area. There's a lot of flexibility with raster that I love. I also am kind of looking at what the client wants and they did send me these references. Like this one on the left seems like it could have been made with beziers, so they seem open to that. They also have some moments where it does seem like they use raster. So in this one here, it does feel like actual pencil sketch. This top reference feels clean, but you can definitely see these like organic mishaps in the line, like someone actually drew it. It just seems a little bit like quickier and it feels more relatable to me when I'm using hand-drawn lines. And that's just me. Like if I can get away with selling any client hand-drawn lines in Photoshop, I will. I'll try to do that as much as I can and I'll push it because I just enjoy it more. I'm better at it and I know that's where my strength lies. But you should also go with where your strength lies. So if you have a client like Port-A-Pill and you see that their brand is very Vector, which it totally is, and you can sell a vector style, I would definitely go for that because you gotta play to your strengths here. I mean, we are learning Photoshop here, but if you're super comfortable in Illustrator, then go for it. I think that you should use Illustrator here because it still does feel pretty on brand to use Illustrator. So now that I've decided what brush I'm gonna use, I'm gonna use this hard pencil brush. I'm gonna go ahead and start drawing it with my final lines. And as I'm designing, I will be trying to figure out like where I wanna use thin lines and thick lines and where I wanna show contrast in the lines. Maybe I'll even be adding some like black fills in here because they do have some moments of black dark fills in here that adds some really nice contrast and hold down the piece. So I'm gonna start with the window because it's in the back and it's the biggest element we have. I'll just try to label everything as you go because it will save you a lot of headache later. And if you're trying to create like a consistent line but you want to have a detail break in it, I would draw the whole line first and then just erase or mask out the part that you want to have the break in. So there's my window and I'm going to work on the tissue box now, which should be pretty simple since I already kind of have everything laid out for me. And I'm going to keep the actual box and the tissue itself separate just in case it needs to be animated separately. And so as you can see as I'm drawing here, I'm just going to speed through everything really quickly. But I just want you to know that I'm keeping everything on separate layers and I am labeling everything properly as I go. Now onto the teacup. And I'm well aware that even though I'm keeping things on separate layers, that an animator might not actually use all of these layers. An After Effects animator might actually want to recreate some of this in After Effects on shape layers, but it's nice to at least have the option there if they decide that they wanna animate something more simply or if they need the information there for another reason. Okay, so I'm definitely noticing a gross tangent right here and this is really awkward. So I'm gonna actually just get rid of that whole part of the line, because no one's gonna really notice that that little piece is missing right there. Because you can't even tell that it's supposed to go and meet there, it could be meeting like the bottom of the frame a little bit further to the left. It's not very visible with the plain eye. And so moving on to the thermometer here, I'm not too worried about everything being perfect. Even that circle at the top, I just really want it to feel a little bit handmade. So it doesn't need to be a perfect circle and not everything needs to be evenly spaced here. Okay, so now I'm sure someone's like, cool Sarah, you literally just drew the exact same thing that you drew for your refined sketch, but with a different brush. No, that is exactly what I would say too. And it's partially true, But it really helped me to plan out this refined sketch without having to worry about my actual masking and making sure everything is completely straight. It is really nice to plan out your projects without that restriction, because if I was just trying to make this from the start, I'd probably get a lot more frustrated and it might not even look the same because I didn't give myself the freedom to play. But now that I have already done that, it was much easier for me to go in and make sure that all of my masks were correct. Nothing was flattened and I labeled everything clearly as I was going. So it was a really helpful step to create this refined sketch. I am looking at this and I'm like, okay, this really just looks like a sketch. What can I do to make this feel more like a design? So I'm thinking it might be really nice to go ahead and add some of those darker fills in. Obviously we still have the blue to play with, but I think we can ground it a bit with some of the dark. So I'm actually just gonna go ahead and fill in this top bar and see how that looks. I'm gonna actually fill in a new layer just in case it doesn't work. Use my fill action for that. And clearly it's covering up the tissue, so I'm gonna actually turn down the opacity on that so I can actually see where the tissue is and I can mask out the parts that I don't want showing. And the reason I'm doing this top bar, even though it feels really heavy up there, is I want to create kind of like a composition that will frame this scene. So I'm thinking I will fill this top bar and then I'm actually gonna try filling in this teacup as well, because it is heavy enough down there that it offsets the dark bar at the top. And then I'm wondering if maybe adding a little bit of pattern to the curtains might give it a little bit more fun. Because if I'm looking back at this porta pill brief, they do say clean, safe, trustworthy, serious. So this already does feel pretty serious, but they're also infused with a bit of fun. So I wanna make this feel a little less serious and drab. Of course, this is the first frame where Portapil hasn't entered the protagonist's story yet, but it can still have a little bit of playfulness to it. I'm thinking I might add some polka dots to the curtain. I'm going to draw these by hand because it gives it that more organic feel. If I just dropped a shape layer in here, it would feel way too clean in comparison to the rest of everything else. It just has a totally different edge and it's a vector shape, so it's just not really gonna fit in. So I'm gonna draw everything by hand. And the reason I'm using such giant polka dots at here is, one, it'll be a little bit more eye catching. Two polka dots could be really, really hard to animate. And the less polka dots there are, the better for the animator. Because if you're trying to animate curtains blowing in the wind and you have to animate frame by frame, each and every polka dot that is moving with the curtain, and you have to create different angles of it and you see it being whipped around, that's gonna be a lot more work than literally just doing the curtain by itself. So I'm gonna try to make it as easy as I can for the animator by making the polka dots big. So that is actually starting to look a lot more like a design. The only thing that feels more like line work and less considered is the thermometer to me right now because it's not interacting with any of these hard shapes. So I might just add a tiny little implied shadow on there and we will get a lot further and deeper into shading and further weeks and lighting, but right now I'm just gonna add this tiny little one really just to create a little bit more contrast in the center of the frame. So right now this whole frame is just really about contrast. It's a really stark difference between the background and foreground. We also see the difference in value because it's just really dark and really light all at once. So that creates a lot of contrast. And maybe we actually see a little bit of the fluid inside the thermometer here, just to give it a little bit more of that darkness to balance everything out. And now that I'm looking at that, the lines look really awkward with the darkness there. So I'm just gonna move them to the other side. So yeah, that's really coming together. The only thing that I'm looking at right now is like maybe we do need a bit more weight at the bottom because the top of the window frame is actually really heavy. So I'm going to just add another layer in the window and just say like thick line. And I'm thinking that the bottom of the window frame could just be like a few pixels thicker to ground it. I'm just gonna mask out the parts they don't need. And there we go. And don't worry, I haven't forgotten about the rain. So I'm just gonna add that in real quick. I just wanna point out here that in our original sketch, the rain was going to the right. And I'm really excited about this actually because without even realizing it, I've created some kind of contrast. So I'm drawing the rain flowing to the right, but that actually creates like a 90 degree contrast with this thermometer here. It's aesthetically pleasing because it's the complete opposite of the thermometer. So I'm just gonna make sure that all of my rain is in that exact diagonal. Really, I'm just gonna create like one raindrop and then I'm gonna duplicate it and use it everywhere. I know how to be the exact perfect length. And really I'm just trying to visually distribute these evenly. There's no perfect way to do this. And this is a layer that I might actually flatten because it's easily separatable and will probably be recreated in After Effects anyways because they're just straight lines. So if it's hard for you to go back and edit one because you're not right clicking or it's hard to grab the layer with auto select, you could just flatten all of them. It's not a huge deal here because they're all the same. So it would be easy to duplicate in After Effects. Oh, and it actually creates a nice contrast with the tissue as well. Okay, so there's my rain. It seems like the only thing I really have left right here is my blue color. Now, I've been saving this for last because I'm not entirely sure what to do with it, but my thinking here is that looking back on the storyboard, we really introduced Porta Pill in the second frame. So I do wanna keep blue in all of the frames to just keep everything consistent and make sure that the brand color is always visible, but we don't really want it to become extremely prevalent and it doesn't become the hero of the spot until the second frame. So I do wanna include it in frame one, but I need to be strategic about where I put it. You can see I have these coffee or tea lines creating steam in frame one, and I'm thinking it'd be nice to include it there because that is just a subtle indication of someone trying to feel better. And the blue is supposed to be relating back to your health. Then I think that would be a really good place to put it. I'm gonna try putting it on top of everything first and see how that looks. And if it looks a little weird, we could try putting it behind. Ooh, I kind of like that. So I like that it's the only color in the frame and it's kind of off center. So it's calling attention to this little cluster of items here. Now, I think it looks pretty weird on top of everything. So I'm gonna drag that blue group behind everything. And I actually think that's pretty neat looking. Of course, it does create some weird tangents with this line here. So I'm just gonna adjust the size of it. And there might be a little bit too much detail back here. Maybe I don't need this rain now that I'm looking at it, or maybe I can just move it over. So yeah, I'm actually really liking how that looks and it feels like its own style. Like I've created my own style direction. So looking at this as own style now, I can think about the certain aspects that make it this style as I'm creating the next two frames. We have a pretty similar line weight throughout unless we need to balance out with contrast. The blue is used very purposefully. It's never a line, it's always a fill. And we do use black fills in certain places, but only merely as a stylization. It's not as purposeful as the blue. Another thing you can do to make sure that everything is working properly is I can put my frame next to this mood board and see if it works. So I'm just gonna make it small like the rest of the other frames and compare it. So yeah, I mean, if I'm looking at this one On the left, it feels a little heavier than that, but if I'm comparing it to the one on the bottom left and the one in the middle here, it really does feel like it could fit in this mood board because not everything in this mood board has the same style, everything's slightly different. So yeah, it definitely seems like it falls into their style decision. So I'm pretty excited about this and I'm just gonna go ahead and start filling out the other frames and walk you through it a little bit, but now that you kind of seen how the process works here, I'm not going to explain too much about what I'm doing because my workflow will be very similar. So now that I have my first frame done, I'm gonna go back and look at my sketches. So in my frame two, I'm focusing on a transition, which will also include a local lockup. So the action I wrote is suddenly a gust of wind from the window pushes all the sickly objects out of the way. The sun rises out of the gray sky as our healthy hero, Porta Pill, is introduced. So this moment is kind of that wind-swept moment where everything is kind of blasted out of frame when PortaPill arrives. And we wanna imply movement in here. We also wanna make sure that the PortaPill logo is front and center. And we also want to try to incorporate some more of that blue as we're working here because this is where PortaPill's introduced and we wanna make the blue of their logo the most important part of the frame. So I've gone ahead and prepped a second frame two folder here. And I'm just gonna make a background so that when I turn this frame two on and off, I can see it separately. It's not gonna be overlaying this frame one here. So one thing to note here is in my original storyboard, I have frame one very close to camera. And then in frame two, it pulls back a bit so that window frame gets smaller. And then it pushes back in. So that's what I like to call ping ponging, where you are close on something, then far away, then close again, or vice versa, and it just happens really fast. And it's honestly not a very desirable thing. And that's mainly because it's a little bit disorienting for the viewer when they're watching it. Unless you use it tastefully and with purpose, there's no reason you should really be ping ponging in your storyboards. And when I drew in the storyboard, it wasn't a huge deal. I wasn't pointing it out, and the client probably didn't even notice. But now that I'm looking at it, I wanna make sure that I don't actually do that in my design frames because I don't want the animator to ping pong in animation. So I'm actually gonna try to use the same size window frame as we have in frame one and use that window in frame two just to make sure that everything is lined up pretty well. So I've gone ahead and copied the window frame from frame one into frame two just to make sure everything's perfectly lined up. I don't wanna move it around now because I know if I do that, it won't be lined up anymore. So I'm just gonna keep that there. And with this one, I might not do much of a refined sketch because I already have this framework. I already know what my style is gonna look like. I know all of the rules of my style. So I'm gonna probably start by just sketching the windblown curtains and making sure that the portapil logo is centered. So as I begin drawing these curtains, I'm trying to stay true to my rule of keeping everything slightly geometric. And I will be going a lot further into depth about abstracting shapes and turning organic shapes into more geometric forms in our next week's lesson, form play, but right now I'm just working with what feels right and trying to keep everything true to the style I created in the first frame. And as you can see here, I went through a very long and frustrating process of trying to get the shape of this curtain correct and don't be alarmed or concerned if it takes you many tries to get something to feel right. I often have to erase things many times. There's many command Zs all over my work. It's totally normal and fine to start over if you need to. And now that I feel I have the shape of the curtains down, I'm gonna go ahead and add in a couple of dots because that's what I have in my first frame, a polka dot curtain. And since it's moving and it's a little bit windswept, I'm gonna distort them a little bit so they look like we're seeing them from an angle. And as I quickly fast forward through some of my process here, I wanna talk to you about adding the blue in. So I looked back at the storyboards and I remembered that the port-a-pill logo appears when the sky clears, the rain disappears, and the sun comes out. So the sun definitely should be that port-a-pill blue. And to create that circle, I actually use a vector shape and then traced around it just so it still had that organic edge. As far as the curtains go, I really wanted the blue to be more prominent in the frame. So having that wind blowing through the curtain and the wind that is Porta Pill pushing all of those sickly objects out of the way kind of made sense. We see the sun shining through those sheer curtains. So the curtains were a really good place to put the blue. And I also wanted to offset it a bit just like I did in the previous frame. So there was some overlap between the blue and the line work. Okay. So now that I've got the blue where I like it, I'm looking at the middle of the frame and it feels a little bit empty to me. Like we really want the Porta Pill logo to feel like it's integrated here. So I'm thinking I might add those center lines of the window frame back in like we have here. But I'm not too worried about their placement being the exact same as in the previous frame because when this winds so at moment happens, the animator could totally have those vertical and horizontal lines move with the wind. I want to make sure their placement feels right around the Porta Pill logo. I don't want it to intersect with it like it was when I first dropped the port-of-pill logo in here So maybe it's still offset, but it's higher up I kind of I like the placement of that but I think that it feels very strange interacting with the port-of-pill logo like that, so I'm gonna mask out a little chunk around the logo and That we could just use a mask in After Effects to affect the frame layer like that So hopefully this is okay with the animators, but I think that looks better than it touching it directly It's really starting to come together here I'm thinking it might be nice to add some like energy lines or like something to indicate that there has been some wind moving through the frame So for these energy lines, I didn't really want to go that traditional Radial energy line route I wanted to play with something a little bit more abstract and I thought these lines could be fun and a little bit reminiscent of the rain in frame one. And yeah, so I feel like this is really coming to life. And just for proof of concept, I'm gonna look at our two frames next to each other. So I'm really liking the difference in scale between seeing this crazy giant overwhelming box and all these items that feel like overwhelming objects that you don't wanna see when you're sick and then looking over here at the Porta Pill logo and it's kind of in the distance, but you know, it's there to save the day and it's pushed all of these big distractions out of the way. your medication, you're ready to feel better. Okay, so now that I've finished two frames, I'm just gonna quickly do the third frame and talk to you a bit about it when I'm done with it. So for this one, I really tried not to overcomplicate things. I made sure that we still saw the curtains from the previous frames. So when we push in, they're still there, but we're assuming that we push past that window frame so we don't need to see it anymore. And then we see a delivery truck outside, which I have overindulged a bit and added a little bit of force perspective in, which we will be talking about in future lessons. Just a very simplified version of a delivery truck here with the portapil logo on it front and center. I've also kept the same sun shape that we had in the previous frame as well as the polka dotted curtains from the last frame as well. I also made sure to include a good amount of blue, so blue still seems to overtake the frame. And if If we look back at frame one, we can tell there's a distinct difference in the amount of blue. So we just wanna make sure that blue stays really prevalent here and is still the main eye catching component of this piece because that's kind of what we're selling through to the client. I've also added in a couple abstracted plants in here just to frame the truck a bit. So it's kind of leading our eye into the truck into the center, which is a really nice way to frame your compositions. So when in doubt, add plants. That is the best piece of advice I've ever given. So if we look at everything altogether here, it feels like a really consistent story. If I'm looking at everything, everything feels the same style wise. We've got a little bit of overlay in our blue fills. We have a good amount of more rigid shapes. So we see that in the truck and the window frame and the tissue box. We also have a mix of organic shapes in there. So it's pretty evened out. We also see an even amount of these dark shapes throughout. So in the first frame, we see it in the window top and in the coffee mug, as well as in the second frame, you see it in the window. And then in the third frame, we are grounded by these wheels and the delivery truck. So all in all, I'm pretty happy where the rid of this is and I am feeling confident to send it to the client and see what they think. So I hope that you learned a bit about value and composition and using line work in your exercises this week. And I would just try to incorporate all these little tricks into your own project as you're working on it this week as well. Yeah, I'm excited about where this is going. And I can't wait to see what you come up with for your client. Music",
  "segments": [
    {
      "text": " Hey guys, so now that we've learned a little bit about concepting and researching, I'm really excited to start diving in to some actual design. Today I'll start by talking a bit about value, contrast, and limited color palettes, and then we'll actually dive into Photoshop and begin designing. So PortaPo came back, but they came back with a mood board this time, and it was their own mood board because they really liked our concepts and ideas but their creative director had this other style in mind. So it doesn't mean that my ideas were bad necessarily, it just means they really liked that this visual direction that they saw somewhere else. So they provided some reference and I'm gonna go in and choose my favorite storyline and turn those three frames into the design style that they want. So last week along with sketches I sent these three mood boards to the client. I sent them the abstract mood board, the literal mood board, and and the safe mood board. And it seemed like the client was leaning more towards the safe option based on what they sent back. So they seem to like all of the different concepts we came up with, but style-wise, they're wanting to go with something more like this, which does feel kind of like the safe option. It does seem to me like the client always tends to go with a safe option, but they put together this nice little mood board for us, which is super helpful because it gives us some insight into what they want. It seems like they want this black and white line work feel. They want it to feel a little bit elegant, but they also want a spot color of blue, which is in their logo as we saw in the brief they sent us last time. So it will feel very on brand. It will be very focused on their blue color, but it will also bring the narrative and story to life through this line work. So I'm gonna be using the style, but it seems like they're pretty open to the different types of styles. Like we see these two characters over here are pretty goofy looking. And then we've got like a more elegant shape style over here on the left and a couple more goofy characters in the bottom here. And then we even have some light play in here and an even more basic version in this middle right up here. So it seems like they're pretty open and I'm gonna go with something that feels very safe in this field house. And I'm gonna go with maybe this more basic, simple, uniform line work. It just seemed like they have a bit of texture in here just slightly. So it seems like they're not afraid to go with a bit of texture. So maybe that's where we can bring a little bit of humanity and quirkiness into it by adding a bit more texture while we keep the line work pretty uniform. I'm glad the client sent this and I think it'll be really fun to explore this style. It'll also give me a chance to focus more on the shapes and what's happening in the frame rather than trying to worry about a color palette, which is really nice. So I'm excited to get working on this. But before I jump ahead and start trying to bring this story to life, I wanna pull back the curtain a bit and talk to you about some of the basic design principles that are behind these boards I'm about to work on. It's best to understand what they are and the techniques that you're using before just blindly applying them. I'm sure a bunch of you have already learned some of these design principles, but it really doesn't hurt to brush up on your knowledge a bit here. Okay, so I'm gonna do a real quick overview of value. Value in art is basically how light or dark something is on a scale of white to black, white being the highest value and black being the lowest. While looking at something in gray scale, value is pretty easy to define. However, once you start adding in color, it can become challenging to grasp. Even I still struggle with understanding how it works. And tints and shades are different values of the same hue or color. So if we're looking at all these different colors here on this color wheel, the closer we get to the center, the darker it gets. So this yellow here has all these different shades of yellow leading it to the center. And if we look at it in the opposite way, This color has a bunch of tints of it as well. So these are the lighter tints and these are darker shades. If you wanna think about tints and shades and value, think about painting and mixing colors. You can make a tint by adding white to a hue and you can create a shade by adding black. So if we look at the color wheel here, we can see those tints and shades. But if we look on the right here with the color wheel in black and white, this is how we determine the value of all of those. So these are in the center of the darker values and on the outer rim are the lighter values. And you can see as the plain hue of the purple has a much darker value than the plain hue of the yellow up there. But if we look at this painting by Matisse, Fruit and Coffee Pot, 1898, we see that all of these colors are super inaccurate, but since the value is correct, the scene still feels realistic. So if we're looking back at this color wheel over here, say this blue and this purple right here, you can look at the black and white color wheel and you tell that they have the same value. So you might be able to use those interchangeably to shade something in an unrealistic cue, but since they're a similar value, they're gonna create the same darkness as each other. So if you add them interchangeably into a piece, they're probably gonna create the same light play, form play, any of that. Your piece will just have a different feel depending on whatever hue you use. And we see a lot of this in the motion design and illustration world as well. And I'm gonna show you a couple examples of illustrations with unrealistic cues, but value is used in such a way that we can still distinguish what's happening. So using unrealistic hues is how we get a lot of these stylized looks in the motion design and illustration world. As you can see in almost all of these, none of them look realistic, but we can still tell what's going on because of the way that the value is being used. So here on this right side, obviously we've got black for the shadows, but we also have this unrealistic pink, and then everything kind of has a purple undertone to it, which is super unrealistic, but since value is being used correctly, we can really see where all that shading is happening. Like this very saturated purple is being used as a shadow, but it still feels like a folded dress. And then here on the bottom, even though the water is peach colored, we still kind of get that feeling of a reflection with this crazy periwinkle color. And this one's pretty cool because it seems like Matteo Burton, who illustrated this has applied some rules to it. So anywhere you see something warm colored or purple, it's a human made thing, like a man made thing. So we've got like the purple boats and the purple building and he's definitely using warm tints and shades to create value here. But anytime we see something that's organic, it's usually this complimentary tone of blue-green right here. So he's using color in a really interesting way here, but because of the way he's using value, it's still obvious what's happening. Same goes for this piece by Sarah Wong. It's almost a monochrome piece here, so it's a little bit different, but because it's almost monochrome, it's like she could have painted this in black and white values and then gone and applied a hue saturation filter over it and made it this more turquoise color. And that actually could be an interesting technique to use as well. But we also have these other two pieces and they follow a lot of the same rules that I just discussed here, but they're also great examples of using value in interesting ways to create stylization while still being grounded in realism to not confuse the viewer. And today, since I'll be mainly working in grayscale, I'll have to pay close attention to value to make sure that my frames are working. I also wanna talk to you a bit about contrast. Contrast in art refers to the striking difference between two elements. It's a strategy to break up a work of art or alter its unity. It's basically the opposite of unity and it commands attention because it's so different and striking. So contrast can be stark difference in color or value, say black and white, or it could be where we see a harsh texture next to a soft texture. We can see it in value, hue, saturation, texture, detail and more. You can also be applied to form, placing large elements next to tiny elements. And I've got a few examples here. And in this first one here, we have a really stark contrast between the background and this fire element. Basically, this is the color and value contrast because we've got value, which we just talked about. We've got a very bright, light tint and hue popping forward from the fire. And then the background is just completely void of color. It's black. And then in the second piece right here by Yuki Yamada, this is kind of an example of limited contrast. We still have some contrast in the shadows here for sure, But this whole piece kind of evokes like a peaceful feeling because everything is pretty close to each other in contrast. It also is very close to each other in a hue and saturation. Like nothing is too brightly saturated. It all kind of just sits there and works really well together. It's got low contrast, at least in color and value. It does have a bit of, you know, like size contrast because we're seeing lots of variations of shapes here. overall pretty low in contrast. And on this right side as well, this is a piece by Merzion Haas. It's also pretty low in contrast, even though it's a darker piece than this one over here. Like these two pieces are contrasting against each other. This piece on its own is so dark overall that there's not too much contrast. I mean, we do see this part on the top here jutting forward because it is a lot brighter and more saturated even than the background, But overall, it's got a very dark vibe and has decently low contrast in comparison to something like this. And then I love this piece because it's got all types of contrast. It's got size contrast. So we see that this character is tiny in comparison to the scene around him. We also see texture contrast. So we've got so much texture and so much happening on this left side. And then in the right side, there's just crazy big spot of negative space. That's really jarring. It seems like this character might be entering a more calming world maybe, or a world void of energy, who knows? But we also have color contrast because we even see contrast on this left side here. Overall, this left side is really dark, but there is contrast within it. And then this whole left side is contrasting really greatly from this right side in all ways. So this is just an awesome example of contrast, and we see this all over the motion design world. There is lots of animated pieces that also utilize contrast. And here's a loose example of contrast in motion. We see this lot in motion going from something really simple to extremely extravagant all of a sudden. And this is contrast and it's kind of emphasizing how crazy or exciting something is by expanding upon something all at once. So right there, kind of where we're looking at this simple book and then it pops open and there's this whole world inside. To me, that's an example of contrast in motion because you're really trying to emphasize a point by showing the distinct difference between a lot of information and a little information at once. And we can find this all over the motion design world. This one in particular I wanted to show you because it's actually also a really great example of line work with a simple spot color. So this could be some nice inspiration for our piece today as well. And I don't wanna go too deep into this, but a related term is simultaneous contrast. This refers to the way in which two different colors affect each other. Basically, it means that one color can change how the eye perceives the tone and hue of another when they're placed side by side. And you can really see that in this example here. The middle colors are the same for each pairing, but they look pretty different when they're put inside of different colors. So when you put this gray in the bottom left here inside this darker color, it really lightens it. but when it's next to this pink, it's really vibrating and kind of hurts my eyes. It also kind of just looks like it's a different color than the gray inside of the purple. And same with this red, like this red is a really good example. The red in the center of this teal color, it looks so much brighter and poppier and more saturated than this red within the light blue color because it plays with the hue it's on top of differently. And I just wanted to mention this really quick because I actually run into this a lot with my designs. Sometimes I'll need to change a color to appear to match its counterpart somewhere else in my frame because it doesn't actually look like the same color, it doesn't look like the brand color when I put it against a different background color. So I've even had art directors ask me if I was actually using the correct brand color before because it just looks so weird. So that's just something to keep an eye out for as you're working as well. And last but not least, I wanna talk to you about color palettes in specifically limited color palettes. Of course, we see all types of color palettes every day while scrolling through our Instagram feeds and my brain starts to recognize patterns in them. I start noticing what works and what doesn't, what I like and what I'm not really into. Now, there are tons of types of color palettes out there. There's monochrome, analogous, complimentary, split complimentary and more. These are all standards that I learned in art school. And if I'm being completely honest with you, I don't think much about how I'm using them on the day to day. They're great to learn upfront and I encourage you to do further research on it, but I really want to hone in on one particular type of palette today. We will be going into further depth about color palettes later on, but right now I just want to talk to you about limited color palettes. And when I went to research limited color palettes, I found a lot of information about painting. A lot of painters will use just a few colors and create new combinations of these colors by mixing them together. And then by using, say, blue and mixing it into all the other colors, as if blue were the shade that you were mixing in, you end up getting a nice blue tint to everything that gives the painting a really cool mood. And you can see an example of that right here in Kathleen Dunphy's work. She does a lot of this without her fine art paintings. You can tell that there's an overall blue tone to this whole piece. Even where we see yellow, it's got a bluish tint to it. And that honestly seems like a fun challenge. But I just wanted to clear that up because it is different from the limited color palettes that I will be talking about right now. So limited color palettes and painting is not exactly what I'm talking about here. When I say limited palette for this lesson, I really just mean that we're gonna be using a very minimalistic approach to color here. We'll be using grayscale with a spot of color. But why would you limit yourself to a few colors when you have all the colors in the world to play with in Photoshop? The answer to that is clients might like that you're focusing on their brand colors and it's a good way to add emphasis in certain moments. It's also a good challenge to think about value and contrast and tints and shades. And I'm gonna show you a couple examples of this. Here's a piece by Giant Ant that I love. It feels extra clean and I love that they kind of have like this Mondrian color palette going for them. They've used black and white as their main design and gone in and added the Google colors elsewhere later. So you really remember the yellow, red and blue that appeared to you in this whole piece. It really feels Google branded when I watch it. So this is a great way to make the viewer remember the brand as they're watching it and really catch their eye. Another awesome example of how it's used for branding is in this punanimation channel, and I know they're probably changing their names soon, but this use of the triangle everywhere and the colors of black and white and yellow really make this stand out. Whenever you see a triangle with black and white and yellow, I immediately think of punanimation, so it's a great way to become recognizable and iconic. This is kind of just an example of one of those bumpers close up by Yino Juan. She's one of my favorite animators. She's so talented, but you can really see how that yellow on her jacket just really keeps your eye focused on the character. If she was all gray and this whole thing was black and white, it would still look really cool, but it wouldn't be as memorable and it wouldn't stand out as much. So that adds brand continuity and really grabs your attention. That's something we should definitely keep in mind as we're working today. So if I follow some of these techniques here, hopefully this will make PortaPill's brand pop among a desaturated world. This will really help the viewer to remember PortaPill. So whenever they see that blue color in the future, they'll be thinking about PortaPill's brand. And after seeing some of these references and techniques applied, I'll swear I feel that it would make sense for our project to be filled with line work, black and white line work, and a few pops of the PortaPill blue. This will help us to think more about the design and composition as we're working rather than the color. There are still a ton of other elements to think about, like will the line weights stay the same throughout the entire piece or will there be different varying line weights? Like maybe there's a really thick line that's used for the window, but then all the details are thin lines. And we also need to think about the brand color. Where is the best place to put the brand color? We don't want to just add that blue in wherever we think it looks best. We want to make sure that we're using colors purposefully and not just willy-milly. And should we add some overlap? Should the color be in front of the black and white lines or should it be below? So let's go ahead and get started with this design. So to start off, I want to show you an example of something I worked on that felt kind of similar to this brief. This piece I worked on with Jorge, Canada Estrada, JR Canest. It feels similar because we've got this grayscale background. We've got a little bit of line work and then we've got these three different spot colors that happen throughout the piece. So it starts with the red and then it moves on to the blue spot color. And then in the third one, we have the yellow spot color. So I have played with this style before, but I definitely want this one to feel different. This style worked really well for this playful, goofy vibe that Jorge wanted. But based on the client's new mood board, it seems like they want it to feel a bit more elegant than these chunky textured lines I have here. Also, my piece that I did with Jorge has a lot more fills in it, and we wanna play with mainly just line work here. So I definitely wanna go a little bit more elegant with it and I'm probably gonna have a uniform colored background and I'm just gonna play with one spot color throughout. And hopefully that spot color will add a little bit of value and contrast to my piece that wouldn't otherwise be there. So here I am back at what I worked on last week. I've got my brainstorming and I've got my mood boards that I worked on before but I'm really just gonna focus on the sketches here. So the client said that they're pretty happy with whichever version I wanna go with. And I mean, this one was pretty cool, but I haven't really fully flushed it out enough. And I feel the client will probably just be happier seeing something a little bit more related to the topic at hand. I actually really like the composition I did with this one, even though it's the client safe version. I think that this window composition will be really fun to play with. So I'm gonna start by working on a refined sketch of this first frame. What that means basically is I'm gonna take this really simple storyboard sketch I have, scale it up, and then I'm going to start designing it out with more detailed fine lines so that I can see what the composition will actually look like, what my details are gonna be, and if I wanna add anything in. So right now as I'm doing the refined sketch, I'll mainly be focusing on composition, looking at everything holistically, and thinking less about like color and line weight right now and more about just how everything in this first frame is gonna fit together. I am going to double check my image size here, make sure that it's what I want. Okay, so it's pixels, it's 1920 by 1080. It's 300 DPI, which is a really high resolution for animation. As I said in an earlier lesson, I do like to work in 300 DPI because say we decided that we really wanna push in, which we are pushing in in frame three into this piece. like we don't want our edges of the window to get pixelated as we're pushing in past them. So we wanna make sure we have a high enough resolution to where we can push into the frame a little bit and it won't get pixelated and we won't lose any of that detail as we animate. I think this is a pretty good size. So I'm actually just going to save this as a new file. Just save it to my desktop, portapill frame 01. I'm gonna get rid of all this extra stuff I have in here because I don't really need it right now. I don't need my brainstorm. I've already got everything laid out here, how I know I wanted the client seems to like it. So I'm just gonna keep the sketches safe group and delete the rest of the stuff that I don't need. So I have this here and I'm gonna leave this in here just as reference or if I need to make the second frame and I wanna keep these sketches in here just so I have them. I'm gonna leave that folder in here but I'm gonna duplicate it by pressing Command J and then I'm actually gonna merge it all together because I don't need all of that information. I have it saved here in this other group. So I'm gonna merge it together by pressing Command E. And that means I can just take pieces out of it if I want. I can select with my marquee tool, I can select this first frame. And to put it on its own layer, I'm gonna press Command J. So that basically just cuts that piece of the frame out and pastes it onto a new layer. And since I have that, I can just delete that extra sketch layer. I don't need this because I have it saved here. And now that I have this little frame here, I'm gonna scale it up using my transform tool. And here's the content that I want in this frame. And I can change it up a little bit here because it's not like I sent the client a really detailed sketch and they really liked the way the coffee mug looked. You know, like I can make this a little bit different and I can refine it a bit. I am gonna keep this general composition. So to start my refined sketch, I'm just gonna turn down the opacity of this frame. So I have it basically as a guide, but I'm actually gonna use that layer as my final sketch. And I'm gonna start by making a group and call that refined sketch because I just wanna keep everything separate. So my old sketch from my storyboard is called just sketch in caps. And then I'm gonna have a whole group for my refined sketch. So I can put different layers in there if I want. But as I have said in the past, I don't really need to think about keeping everything on separate layers here because these strokes that I'm gonna put down right now are not the final strokes. Even though my final image is gonna be kind of like this black and white, elegant look that the client has provided, I'm still gonna be creating like a rougher version of that with my refined sketch here. Don't worry too much about keeping everything on separate layers at this moment. Okay, so I'm just gonna start sketching out this rectangular window frame. And it doesn't really matter what brush you use. I just like using this thin sketch brush I have because it feels more like a pencil to me with the pressure sensitivity and everything. It just, I like how it looks, but it's not gonna be my final brush. So I'm using shift and holding that down as I'm drawing my lines to keep them straight. And that really only works vertically and horizontally. It doesn't really work diagonally or anything. So it's great for creating structured shapes like this window here. I'm gonna use my guides and just see if it's centered. It might not actually end up being centered in the end because I'm gonna have this mug jutting off the side and we have our curtain and our thermometer. So I don't really need to worry too much about if things are centered right now. And then I'm gonna create the top of the window frame. But I do like using the center guides to make sure that my window and the top of the window frame are actually both centered. And the way I do that is just pressing command T and checking to see if those center points of my transform tool are on my center line. And they are right now for both my window frame and the top of the window. So those are lined up, which is great. And I don't really need to worry about like naming all my layers right now because I am gonna be flattening it at some point. And here's my tissue box. And as I'm drawing this, I was thinking it would be kind of nice to create a little bit of depth here. And even though we're not doing perspective yet, We're just using flat shapes. You can imply some depth by having each object have a different horizon line. So this front rectangle is gonna look closer to you if it's further down, or at least that's the way we're gonna make it work here. You can go back in and mask out my window so that you can't see it behind the box. And a lot of times when I wanna create straight lines, but they're not vertical or horizontal, I'll just draw a straight line and then I'll use the transform tool to rotate it. So that's what I wanted to hear with these tissues because I'm still trying to keep them in that geometric universe. So I don't want to make them too organic feeling. I want them to feel structured, kind of like it's counterpart the box here. I'm gonna use actual straight lines and I'm just gonna actually duplicate that one by pressing command J and using it for the other side of the tissue. And flattening those because they're part of the same shape. A lot of times I'll use lasso tools to grab those straight lines because I just want to make sure they're almost at the same angle as each other. You can also rotate your canvas to try to get straight lines that are at the correct angle, but a lot of times it takes me a couple tries to get it the right way. And don't worry if you're erasing a lot of things here, it doesn't have to look good from the start. You can go back in and mask things out or delete them or change the sizes. And later it's not a huge deal at this point. One thing that I'm starting to notice here is a tangent. So I'm going to talk to you a little bit about tangents and I'm starting to see that this is getting close to a tangent here. So this moment where the tip of the tissue is hitting the top of this window frame, it's a little unsettling because it feels so close to it. And a tangent is basically when two or more lines interact in a way that insinuates a relationship between them that I did not intend for it to. So I'm not meaning for these lines to meet up like this. It's not intentional. So it does feel a little weird. It can create confusion on part of the audience as to what they're looking at. And this one isn't really a major one. It's not gonna affect the audience in the same way that it will bother me because I just know it's there. There are times when tangents can become really bad. They're two points meeting where they definitely shouldn't and it just becomes very strange looking. So it's just an unwelcome aesthetic response and there just really can be ugly to look at. So I'm gonna try to get rid of that tangent there. And I'm just gonna make that part of the tissue like lower. And now everything feels like kind of even and I wanted to create a little bit more contrast with the tissue shape here. So adjust the other parts of it too. So that feels a little bit less awkward, which is nice. And now that I have that tissue box, I'm gonna move on to the coffee mug. And as I've shown you in the past couple lessons, if I'm creating a symmetrical shape, like this coffee mug here, I will basically just try to create one side of it. And it's a gamble if it's gonna work or not, but I'll try to make one side of it, duplicate it, and then flip it horizontally and see how it looks. So obviously that looks like a butt. It's basically just a butt, which is not what I wanted. I can combine and merge these together using command E and just fix that little mistake right there. Draw a straight line or any kind of line between them that makes it feel less butty. So that's feeling a little better. And I'm actually gonna put this coffee mug a little further forward than the tissues as well because I'm trying to create that depth still. And maybe I'll add a little bit of shape variation to this though it's not just your basic coffee mug. Maybe I'll add like a little tea cup feeling to it. Make it a little bit more interesting. And I've gotta add the handle still. So I'm holding it on shift actually for this. And I think for this, I'm also gonna use that symmetrical trick. This one I'm flipping vertically. I mean, we've got this petite little handle because it's pretty cute. I'm gonna rotate my canvas here so I can get a better look at what I'm doing and I can draw towards myself, which makes it easier to create those straight lines. So that's cute, kind of into that, but I don't want to over-stylize it, so I think it's looking a little long and weird. I'm just gonna increase the size on that and delete part of it. So yeah, I kinda like how that's feeling and I'm gonna turn this background sketch off just so I can see a little bit more clearly. But I think it's pretty cute actually. And I'm gonna mask out the parts that I don't wanna see behind the mug. So the window frame and the tissue box. And looking back at my sketch here, I guess the next step would be to create the curtain maybe, but I wanna give it a little bit more of an organic feel so it's not just straight up and down like it was in my sketch. Maybe it extends a little bit past the window frame here and swoops out a little bit. It's definitely no wind in it, but it at least has a little bit more organic feel to it with this curved line. I'll just mask out the window frame. I'm gonna add a couple little detail lines in here. I just kind of randomly placed those, but I wanted to put them evenly throughout curtain. There's a couple line breaks and separate ends of the curtain to balance it out. I also want to make sure that I put the curtain on the other side because if you remember in our sketch here, our original storyboard sketch, we do actually see two curtains in the second frame. So we just want to make sure we actually have two curtains here because if we don't, that will be problematic when we move into animation because we don't really want just a random curtain to pop on halfway through the spot. So I'm going to add a really straight subtle one over here because I don't want to distract from all that's happening. And I'm going to try to avoid this tangent right here because I am creating another tangent. I'll just place it a little further to the left. That's kind of nice. It almost like frames up the tissue box a little bit more, which is nice. Looking back at my original sketch, I have the thermometer left. I also have the window frame and the rain. And I'm trying to figure out how I can make it a little bit more unique. How can I make it more interesting. I'm wondering if I draw the thermometer and it's just kind of like laying there flat. I wonder if maybe I can have it leaning against this box instead so that it has a little bit more angle and interest. By adding a little angle in there it'll feel less gridded. So maybe I'll try that. So I'm gonna draw the thermometer. I'm gonna do my symmetrical trick again. So I'm gonna draw the long part of it with a little bottom and flip it. I'm just gonna kind like free hand circle at the top. Not too bad, but also weird. I can fix that later when I get into design. And then maybe it also has those thermometer lines. And the left edge of these thermometer lines is getting pretty uneven. So I'm actually gonna press E for my eraser button and I'm gonna hold shift as I erase down. So it should create an even edge on all of those thermometer lines. And now that I have my thermometer, I'm gonna have it lean against the box. Okay, and obviously that is way too big, so I'm gonna scale it down with transform. And I kind of want it to be on the same horizon line as the box because it is leaning against it, so it has to be in the same depth and same place and space. So I'm gonna use my guides here to just draw a guideline from the box's bottom. And then scale down my thermometer till it feels right. Because if I had my thermometer as large as the box, they'd be kind of competing for attention there. So I wanna create some variation in scale here and some contrast in scale to make it a little bit easier to look at all while keeping that horizon line the same at the bottom. And if I wanted it to be bigger, I could also create more of a diagonal. Okay, well, that's feeling pretty good. I like this a lot better than the flat thermometer because it has a little bit more personality and quirkiness, which is what the PortaPill brand seems to want. So it's subtle little things like that that can really liven up your frame. So anywhere you can add a little bit of quickness or you can vary up the composition slightly and break away from a grid that will make your frames a lot more interesting. And it does look kind of weird just like floating there. I know that the box bottom feels fine because it's grounded, but we don't really see a ground line for the thermometer. So I'm just gonna add a little place for it to rest on. Grounds it a little bit more. And then I also wanna add like a window line behind everything because we want to show that this is a window pane. How could I make that more interesting? I'm thinking I might actually make it offset because why not? It doesn't have to be super realistic. Obviously this whole composition isn't realistic. Let's play with that. And there's so many opportunities for tangents here. So I'm just gonna do my best to not create any and I'll erase the bits that are overlapping. I think that's feeling pretty good for my refined sketch. So from here, since I have this, I will go ahead and start working with my final brush. I also will start thinking about color and where I'm going to put that spot color. Okay, so now that we have finished our refined sketch, so it looks a lot better than what we have here, we have the frame for basically everything we need to do here, but we need to start adding color. But I want to first address is the background. So when we're looking at this mood board from the client, I've noticed a few things. Everything pretty much has a light colored background besides these two images. So I'm going to stick with that light colored background because it'll really make that porta pill blue pop. But I've also noticed that most of these white colored backgrounds aren't actually white. And I think there's a reason for that. In my opinion, when something is pure white and pure black, it actually just looks like a sketch you made in Photoshop. It looks unfinished, it feels unpolished. So I wanna make my background probably off white, so it feels like there was a little bit of intention put into it. It also will work better on pages like web pages that have white backgrounds. So if PortaPill's web background is white, then this video won't blend into the background. So now that I'm looking at all these references, I know that I wanna do an off-white background, but since PortaPill's logo is blue, I'm thinking it might be kind of nice to compliment that blue with maybe a very, very slightly warmer toned background. So I'm gonna color pick the background, which is just your basic FFFF right now. And I'm gonna go to a more orange-y palette here and just pull my picker around until I find something that feels kinda right. And I just wanted to feel off-white. I don't want it to feel like yellow or anything. I'm just gonna drop that in there and see how that feels. Feels like maybe a little too yellow, so I'm just gonna keep playing with it. And obviously I can adjust this later. Now that I've gotten this, it feels a little bit more bluish, but it's got a slightly warmer tone than this blue here. Okay, so I've got my background color, and I'm going to start filling in this frame with my final lines. So a couple things to keep in mind here, as I'm creating this, I actually wanna start using named groups and layers here, I don't want to erase any lines like it was with my refined sketch I want to mask them out because say the animator wants the cup to animate in or the animator wants The tissue box to crumple or something whatever they want to do You want to make sure that none of this is erased So there's still the information there for them to use they could turn the masks off if they wanted and they wouldn't have a weird Looking frame behind this tissue box here. It wouldn't just be blank. You see more of the window So I want to make sure that everything is staying in their proper groups, masked and not erased and labeled properly. So let's get to work. I'm going to choose my brush first and I'm going to create a new group and just call this design. And I'm going to turn the refine sketch down to maybe 10% opacity. Just to compare and figure out what brush I want to use, I'm going to start scribbling a bit. So here's the brush I used for my outline, just my refined sketch. And that's just my thin sketch pencil. We also have something like the soft pencil, zoom in so we can see that. The soft pencil, which doesn't feel too different, but it's definitely not as like crispy as my thin sketch brush. I also have a like an ink blotting brush, which doesn't feel as like charcoally or pencil-y, but it has a very crispy edge, which I'm not sure I want. And I feel like this one might be the winner, this hard pencil. It still feels organic. It's not as harsh on the edge as the inking pencil. It's also not as dirty as the thin sketch line I'm using. And it has some nice line variations, so if I'm putting less pressure on it, it's a little bit lighter and thinner. And if I put a lot of pressure on it, it's thicker and darker. But you may be asking yourself while you're watching this right now, like, why isn't she just making this an illustrator? That's a great question. I could be making this an illustrator, but If I am being 100% completely honest with you guys, I prefer Photoshop for almost everything and that's just a personal preference. I really like that anything I draw in here has a little bit more of a handmade quality to it. Even if it is a line I drew where I just held shift down, I could change the line weight as I go by putting less pressure sensitivity on it. So it gets a little bit darker in this area and it gets a little lighter and thinner in this area. There's a lot of flexibility with raster that I love. I also am kind of looking at what the client wants and they did send me these references. Like this one on the left seems like it could have been made with beziers, so they seem open to that. They also have some moments where it does seem like they use raster. So in this one here, it does feel like actual pencil sketch. This top reference feels clean, but you can definitely see these like organic mishaps in the line, like someone actually drew it. It just seems a little bit like quickier and it feels more relatable to me when I'm using hand-drawn lines. And that's just me. Like if I can get away with selling any client hand-drawn lines in Photoshop, I will. I'll try to do that as much as I can and I'll push it because I just enjoy it more. I'm better at it and I know that's where my strength lies. But you should also go with where your strength lies. So if you have a client like Port-A-Pill and you see that their brand is very Vector, which it totally is, and you can sell a vector style, I would definitely go for that because you gotta play to your strengths here. I mean, we are learning Photoshop here, but if you're super comfortable in Illustrator, then go for it. I think that you should use Illustrator here because it still does feel pretty on brand to use Illustrator. So now that I've decided what brush I'm gonna use, I'm gonna use this hard pencil brush. I'm gonna go ahead and start drawing it with my final lines. And as I'm designing, I will be trying to figure out like where I wanna use thin lines and thick lines and where I wanna show contrast in the lines. Maybe I'll even be adding some like black fills in here because they do have some moments of black dark fills in here that adds some really nice contrast and hold down the piece. So I'm gonna start with the window because it's in the back and it's the biggest element we have. I'll just try to label everything as you go because it will save you a lot of headache later. And if you're trying to create like a consistent line but you want to have a detail break in it, I would draw the whole line first and then just erase or mask out the part that you want to have the break in. So there's my window and I'm going to work on the tissue box now, which should be pretty simple since I already kind of have everything laid out for me. And I'm going to keep the actual box and the tissue itself separate just in case it needs to be animated separately. And so as you can see as I'm drawing here, I'm just going to speed through everything really quickly. But I just want you to know that I'm keeping everything on separate layers and I am labeling everything properly as I go. Now onto the teacup. And I'm well aware that even though I'm keeping things on separate layers, that an animator might not actually use all of these layers. An After Effects animator might actually want to recreate some of this in After Effects on shape layers, but it's nice to at least have the option there if they decide that they wanna animate something more simply or if they need the information there for another reason. Okay, so I'm definitely noticing a gross tangent right here and this is really awkward. So I'm gonna actually just get rid of that whole part of the line, because no one's gonna really notice that that little piece is missing right there. Because you can't even tell that it's supposed to go and meet there, it could be meeting like the bottom of the frame a little bit further to the left. It's not very visible with the plain eye. And so moving on to the thermometer here, I'm not too worried about everything being perfect. Even that circle at the top, I just really want it to feel a little bit handmade. So it doesn't need to be a perfect circle and not everything needs to be evenly spaced here. Okay, so now I'm sure someone's like, cool Sarah, you literally just drew the exact same thing that you drew for your refined sketch, but with a different brush. No, that is exactly what I would say too. And it's partially true, But it really helped me to plan out this refined sketch without having to worry about my actual masking and making sure everything is completely straight. It is really nice to plan out your projects without that restriction, because if I was just trying to make this from the start, I'd probably get a lot more frustrated and it might not even look the same because I didn't give myself the freedom to play. But now that I have already done that, it was much easier for me to go in and make sure that all of my masks were correct. Nothing was flattened and I labeled everything clearly as I was going. So it was a really helpful step to create this refined sketch. I am looking at this and I'm like, okay, this really just looks like a sketch. What can I do to make this feel more like a design? So I'm thinking it might be really nice to go ahead and add some of those darker fills in. Obviously we still have the blue to play with, but I think we can ground it a bit with some of the dark. So I'm actually just gonna go ahead and fill in this top bar and see how that looks. I'm gonna actually fill in a new layer just in case it doesn't work. Use my fill action for that. And clearly it's covering up the tissue, so I'm gonna actually turn down the opacity on that so I can actually see where the tissue is and I can mask out the parts that I don't want showing. And the reason I'm doing this top bar, even though it feels really heavy up there, is I want to create kind of like a composition that will frame this scene. So I'm thinking I will fill this top bar and then I'm actually gonna try filling in this teacup as well, because it is heavy enough down there that it offsets the dark bar at the top. And then I'm wondering if maybe adding a little bit of pattern to the curtains might give it a little bit more fun. Because if I'm looking back at this porta pill brief, they do say clean, safe, trustworthy, serious. So this already does feel pretty serious, but they're also infused with a bit of fun. So I wanna make this feel a little less serious and drab. Of course, this is the first frame where Portapil hasn't entered the protagonist's story yet, but it can still have a little bit of playfulness to it. I'm thinking I might add some polka dots to the curtain. I'm going to draw these by hand because it gives it that more organic feel. If I just dropped a shape layer in here, it would feel way too clean in comparison to the rest of everything else. It just has a totally different edge and it's a vector shape, so it's just not really gonna fit in. So I'm gonna draw everything by hand. And the reason I'm using such giant polka dots at here is, one, it'll be a little bit more eye catching. Two polka dots could be really, really hard to animate. And the less polka dots there are, the better for the animator. Because if you're trying to animate curtains blowing in the wind and you have to animate frame by frame, each and every polka dot that is moving with the curtain, and you have to create different angles of it and you see it being whipped around, that's gonna be a lot more work than literally just doing the curtain by itself. So I'm gonna try to make it as easy as I can for the animator by making the polka dots big. So that is actually starting to look a lot more like a design. The only thing that feels more like line work and less considered is the thermometer to me right now because it's not interacting with any of these hard shapes. So I might just add a tiny little implied shadow on there and we will get a lot further and deeper into shading and further weeks and lighting, but right now I'm just gonna add this tiny little one really just to create a little bit more contrast in the center of the frame. So right now this whole frame is just really about contrast. It's a really stark difference between the background and foreground. We also see the difference in value because it's just really dark and really light all at once. So that creates a lot of contrast. And maybe we actually see a little bit of the fluid inside the thermometer here, just to give it a little bit more of that darkness to balance everything out. And now that I'm looking at that, the lines look really awkward with the darkness there. So I'm just gonna move them to the other side. So yeah, that's really coming together. The only thing that I'm looking at right now is like maybe we do need a bit more weight at the bottom because the top of the window frame is actually really heavy. So I'm going to just add another layer in the window and just say like thick line. And I'm thinking that the bottom of the window frame could just be like a few pixels thicker to ground it. I'm just gonna mask out the parts they don't need. And there we go. And don't worry, I haven't forgotten about the rain. So I'm just gonna add that in real quick. I just wanna point out here that in our original sketch, the rain was going to the right. And I'm really excited about this actually because without even realizing it, I've created some kind of contrast. So I'm drawing the rain flowing to the right, but that actually creates like a 90 degree contrast with this thermometer here. It's aesthetically pleasing because it's the complete opposite of the thermometer. So I'm just gonna make sure that all of my rain is in that exact diagonal. Really, I'm just gonna create like one raindrop and then I'm gonna duplicate it and use it everywhere. I know how to be the exact perfect length. And really I'm just trying to visually distribute these evenly. There's no perfect way to do this. And this is a layer that I might actually flatten because it's easily separatable and will probably be recreated in After Effects anyways because they're just straight lines. So if it's hard for you to go back and edit one because you're not right clicking or it's hard to grab the layer with auto select, you could just flatten all of them. It's not a huge deal here because they're all the same. So it would be easy to duplicate in After Effects. Oh, and it actually creates a nice contrast with the tissue as well. Okay, so there's my rain. It seems like the only thing I really have left right here is my blue color. Now, I've been saving this for last because I'm not entirely sure what to do with it, but my thinking here is that looking back on the storyboard, we really introduced Porta Pill in the second frame. So I do wanna keep blue in all of the frames to just keep everything consistent and make sure that the brand color is always visible, but we don't really want it to become extremely prevalent and it doesn't become the hero of the spot until the second frame. So I do wanna include it in frame one, but I need to be strategic about where I put it. You can see I have these coffee or tea lines creating steam in frame one, and I'm thinking it'd be nice to include it there because that is just a subtle indication of someone trying to feel better. And the blue is supposed to be relating back to your health. Then I think that would be a really good place to put it. I'm gonna try putting it on top of everything first and see how that looks. And if it looks a little weird, we could try putting it behind. Ooh, I kind of like that. So I like that it's the only color in the frame and it's kind of off center. So it's calling attention to this little cluster of items here. Now, I think it looks pretty weird on top of everything. So I'm gonna drag that blue group behind everything. And I actually think that's pretty neat looking. Of course, it does create some weird tangents with this line here. So I'm just gonna adjust the size of it. And there might be a little bit too much detail back here. Maybe I don't need this rain now that I'm looking at it, or maybe I can just move it over. So yeah, I'm actually really liking how that looks and it feels like its own style. Like I've created my own style direction. So looking at this as own style now, I can think about the certain aspects that make it this style as I'm creating the next two frames. We have a pretty similar line weight throughout unless we need to balance out with contrast. The blue is used very purposefully. It's never a line, it's always a fill. And we do use black fills in certain places, but only merely as a stylization. It's not as purposeful as the blue. Another thing you can do to make sure that everything is working properly is I can put my frame next to this mood board and see if it works. So I'm just gonna make it small like the rest of the other frames and compare it. So yeah, I mean, if I'm looking at this one On the left, it feels a little heavier than that, but if I'm comparing it to the one on the bottom left and the one in the middle here, it really does feel like it could fit in this mood board because not everything in this mood board has the same style, everything's slightly different. So yeah, it definitely seems like it falls into their style decision. So I'm pretty excited about this and I'm just gonna go ahead and start filling out the other frames and walk you through it a little bit, but now that you kind of seen how the process works here, I'm not going to explain too much about what I'm doing because my workflow will be very similar. So now that I have my first frame done, I'm gonna go back and look at my sketches. So in my frame two, I'm focusing on a transition, which will also include a local lockup. So the action I wrote is suddenly a gust of wind from the window pushes all the sickly objects out of the way. The sun rises out of the gray sky as our healthy hero, Porta Pill, is introduced. So this moment is kind of that wind-swept moment where everything is kind of blasted out of frame when PortaPill arrives. And we wanna imply movement in here. We also wanna make sure that the PortaPill logo is front and center. And we also want to try to incorporate some more of that blue as we're working here because this is where PortaPill's introduced and we wanna make the blue of their logo the most important part of the frame. So I've gone ahead and prepped a second frame two folder here. And I'm just gonna make a background so that when I turn this frame two on and off, I can see it separately. It's not gonna be overlaying this frame one here. So one thing to note here is in my original storyboard, I have frame one very close to camera. And then in frame two, it pulls back a bit so that window frame gets smaller. And then it pushes back in. So that's what I like to call ping ponging, where you are close on something, then far away, then close again, or vice versa, and it just happens really fast. And it's honestly not a very desirable thing. And that's mainly because it's a little bit disorienting for the viewer when they're watching it. Unless you use it tastefully and with purpose, there's no reason you should really be ping ponging in your storyboards. And when I drew in the storyboard, it wasn't a huge deal. I wasn't pointing it out, and the client probably didn't even notice. But now that I'm looking at it, I wanna make sure that I don't actually do that in my design frames because I don't want the animator to ping pong in animation. So I'm actually gonna try to use the same size window frame as we have in frame one and use that window in frame two just to make sure that everything is lined up pretty well. So I've gone ahead and copied the window frame from frame one into frame two just to make sure everything's perfectly lined up. I don't wanna move it around now because I know if I do that, it won't be lined up anymore. So I'm just gonna keep that there. And with this one, I might not do much of a refined sketch because I already have this framework. I already know what my style is gonna look like. I know all of the rules of my style. So I'm gonna probably start by just sketching the windblown curtains and making sure that the portapil logo is centered. So as I begin drawing these curtains, I'm trying to stay true to my rule of keeping everything slightly geometric. And I will be going a lot further into depth about abstracting shapes and turning organic shapes into more geometric forms in our next week's lesson, form play, but right now I'm just working with what feels right and trying to keep everything true to the style I created in the first frame. And as you can see here, I went through a very long and frustrating process of trying to get the shape of this curtain correct and don't be alarmed or concerned if it takes you many tries to get something to feel right. I often have to erase things many times. There's many command Zs all over my work. It's totally normal and fine to start over if you need to. And now that I feel I have the shape of the curtains down, I'm gonna go ahead and add in a couple of dots because that's what I have in my first frame, a polka dot curtain. And since it's moving and it's a little bit windswept, I'm gonna distort them a little bit so they look like we're seeing them from an angle. And as I quickly fast forward through some of my process here, I wanna talk to you about adding the blue in. So I looked back at the storyboards and I remembered that the port-a-pill logo appears when the sky clears, the rain disappears, and the sun comes out. So the sun definitely should be that port-a-pill blue. And to create that circle, I actually use a vector shape and then traced around it just so it still had that organic edge. As far as the curtains go, I really wanted the blue to be more prominent in the frame. So having that wind blowing through the curtain and the wind that is Porta Pill pushing all of those sickly objects out of the way kind of made sense. We see the sun shining through those sheer curtains. So the curtains were a really good place to put the blue. And I also wanted to offset it a bit just like I did in the previous frame. So there was some overlap between the blue and the line work. Okay. So now that I've got the blue where I like it, I'm looking at the middle of the frame and it feels a little bit empty to me. Like we really want the Porta Pill logo to feel like it's integrated here. So I'm thinking I might add those center lines of the window frame back in like we have here. But I'm not too worried about their placement being the exact same as in the previous frame because when this winds so at moment happens, the animator could totally have those vertical and horizontal lines move with the wind. I want to make sure their placement feels right around the Porta Pill logo. I don't want it to intersect with it like it was when I first dropped the port-of-pill logo in here So maybe it's still offset, but it's higher up I kind of I like the placement of that but I think that it feels very strange interacting with the port-of-pill logo like that, so I'm gonna mask out a little chunk around the logo and That we could just use a mask in After Effects to affect the frame layer like that So hopefully this is okay with the animators, but I think that looks better than it touching it directly It's really starting to come together here I'm thinking it might be nice to add some like energy lines or like something to indicate that there has been some wind moving through the frame So for these energy lines, I didn't really want to go that traditional Radial energy line route I wanted to play with something a little bit more abstract and I thought these lines could be fun and a little bit reminiscent of the rain in frame one. And yeah, so I feel like this is really coming to life. And just for proof of concept, I'm gonna look at our two frames next to each other. So I'm really liking the difference in scale between seeing this crazy giant overwhelming box and all these items that feel like overwhelming objects that you don't wanna see when you're sick and then looking over here at the Porta Pill logo and it's kind of in the distance, but you know, it's there to save the day and it's pushed all of these big distractions out of the way. your medication, you're ready to feel better. Okay, so now that I've finished two frames, I'm just gonna quickly do the third frame and talk to you a bit about it when I'm done with it. So for this one, I really tried not to overcomplicate things. I made sure that we still saw the curtains from the previous frames. So when we push in, they're still there, but we're assuming that we push past that window frame so we don't need to see it anymore. And then we see a delivery truck outside, which I have overindulged a bit and added a little bit of force perspective in, which we will be talking about in future lessons. Just a very simplified version of a delivery truck here with the portapil logo on it front and center. I've also kept the same sun shape that we had in the previous frame as well as the polka dotted curtains from the last frame as well. I also made sure to include a good amount of blue, so blue still seems to overtake the frame. And if If we look back at frame one, we can tell there's a distinct difference in the amount of blue. So we just wanna make sure that blue stays really prevalent here and is still the main eye catching component of this piece because that's kind of what we're selling through to the client. I've also added in a couple abstracted plants in here just to frame the truck a bit. So it's kind of leading our eye into the truck into the center, which is a really nice way to frame your compositions. So when in doubt, add plants. That is the best piece of advice I've ever given. So if we look at everything altogether here, it feels like a really consistent story. If I'm looking at everything, everything feels the same style wise. We've got a little bit of overlay in our blue fills. We have a good amount of more rigid shapes. So we see that in the truck and the window frame and the tissue box. We also have a mix of organic shapes in there. So it's pretty evened out. We also see an even amount of these dark shapes throughout. So in the first frame, we see it in the window top and in the coffee mug, as well as in the second frame, you see it in the window. And then in the third frame, we are grounded by these wheels and the delivery truck. So all in all, I'm pretty happy where the rid of this is and I am feeling confident to send it to the client and see what they think. So I hope that you learned a bit about value and composition and using line work in your exercises this week. And I would just try to incorporate all these little tricks into your own project as you're working on it this week as well. Yeah, I'm excited about where this is going. And I can't wait to see what you come up with for your client. Music"
    }
  ]
}