Hi guys, welcome to part two of Creating a Fantasy Landscape. You can find part 1: Concepts and Line Art at the link below.

Preparing your layers for shading

We left off after finishing our line art. Now it's time to set up our layers so we can add shadows and highlights over our lines.

 

In the layer window, create a new layer and change the layer mode from "normal" to "multiply".

You can download the brushes I use for the majority of this tutorial below.

If you'd rather edit the default airbrush, you can find the setting I like to use below. You can adjust the density and softness to greatly affect the "flow" of the paint and the amount of pressure needed.

On the newly created multiply layer, I softly airbrushed the canvas with a light grey. I left the farthest edge of the environment alone to give the impression of depth fog.

Typically contrast gets lower as an object moves farther away. The object also gets "lighter".

The opposite is also true.

The closer an object is, like our foreground elements are, the darker it is, and the higher the contrast is.

Keep in mind that if you have a very dark, very close object, it won't have the same bright highlights that something in the middle ground might. Less light is hitting these objects after all.

 

I drop in a 3D figure to use as a base for my character. He's a source of light with his torch so it's important to consider his position when painting in the shadows.

I pose him, and zoom the camera out so he's about the right scale. I also keep in mind the angle of the ground on the 3D plane so it matches roughly with what I have drawn.

Just like I did with the thumbnails, I add in another layer over my 3D figure and fill it with a solid color, then drop the opacity slightly. This time I used an eggwhite color so it separates the background greys a bit. On a layer above the fill, I draw the figure.

This is not a character creation tutorial so I'm not going to go into too much detail, but he's still worth noting.

Once the figure is in, we can delete the eggwhite fill, and the 3D figure. We won't be needing either of them again.

I put the character in a new folder and name it "character" so he doesn't become part of the background. I want to be able to hide him as I work. I also add a new layer underneath the lines for the character, in the same folder, filling inside of his lines with a light grey so the background doesn't show through him. I did this with a default G Pen brush.

 

With the figure taken care of for now, I create a screen layer over the multiply layer and add the beginning light for the torch.

Erasing highlights with transparency

Time to actually start "sculpting" the forms with shadows!

 

I create another multiply layer, set to 100% and fill the entire layer. I use as close to 50% grey as I can for this.

Using my soft airbrush, with the hardness increased to 4, and the density dropped to 56, I started painting in light with transparency. I'm essentially erasing the grey that we just filled.

For areas that I want to smooth out, or that are too hard, I like to use the default "blur" blending tool. This is especially good for fog or mist. If it gets too smooth, you can always go back in with a brush and erase more to harden your highlights, or, using the same grey you filled the canvas with, paint the shadows back in.

If you have trouble selecting the same grey again, Clip Studio Paint has a "color history" where you can find your recently used colors. I personally forget to use this feature, and just change my layer mode back to "normal" and color pick the fill again, then change it back to multiply to continue lighting the scene.

Here's where to find the default blur tool. There are so many options for blending and drawing tools on Assets, I highly recommend browsing and trying a few.

After erasing all of the brightest highlights, I chose a grey that is lighter than my fill color and paint in some highlights with the sketch/digital brush. This makes harder edges and give me more control. I continue to blur and blend things as I go.

Here are the two greys used so far.

Deepen your shadows with Multiply

 

Now I move onto a step I like to refer to as "glazing". It's sort of similar to glazing in traditional media. We are going over the entire image in a semi-transparent color to change the color, or in this case, add more shadows.

Create yet another multiply layer and continue adding deeper shadows, starting to build up where objects meet. This is where the shadows are the deepest. We also start adding in cast shadows like the one on the left wall created by the trees and the pillar.

 

Every once and awhile I merge this layer down by right clicking on it and selecting "transfer to lower layer". You can see what this window looks like below.

 

This is useful whenever you want to merge down a layer, but then create the same type, like a multiply layer, that is empty and paint on it again and again. This is probably one of my most used techniques. It saves you the time of making a new layer and setting the mode over and over again.

Above you can see I've added the last of my shadows.

 

At some point here I decided that the fill color of our character was too bright and was distracting me from the area around him. I neutralized this by locking the transparency (this icon looks like a lock and a checkerboard in the layer window) and fill his background color with a grey closer to the area directly around him.

 

Now it's time to brighten some of the highlights.

 

Painting light with layer modes

 

Create a new layer set to "screen" for the layer mode. This mode type does the opposite of multiply, by "adding" the value of the color you paint with and brightening the image.

Unlike the "dodge" modes, screen gives less saturated, muted, and controllable highlights. At the moment we don't want to paint with super bright saturated colors so screen works best. Dodges will be useful once we add color to our landscape.

 

Because it's additive, we want to use a darker grey than our original 50% fill color. Here I just color picked an existing grey from my image and started painting in the brighter areas.

I added fog, refined the brick edges, added reflections to the water, and defined the general geometry of the stones and environment.

 

You can glaze these just like we did with multiply. To do this, create a new layer set to screen, and transfer it down as you work.

 

Final thoughts

 

With these last few steps I decided that it was time to move on from the greyscale stage and begin painting the colors in. There was so much more I could have done here, and you absolutely can if you want to. It's fine to push the shadows and highlights even farther. You can even merge your image to paint in values directly. If you do decide to do this it makes it much easier to adjust the contrast and smooth things out.

 

Because I painted my lighting as additional layers over my lines, the line art itself stayed unaffected. You might decide you do want to change the line art as you paint your values though. To do this just merge visible and transfer your multiply and screen layers down to the merged layer instead of another multiply or screen layer. Then you can also select the merged layer and clean it up as you like.

 

 

Part 3: Colors and Rendering is linked below.

 

 

Thanks for reading and I hope it was helpful in someway!

 

 

 

 

 

 

About the Author

My name is FalyneVarger. I have been drawing for most of my life. I started working commercially about 10 years ago and have created artwork for books, games, comics, and more non-commercial commissions than I can remember.

You can find me online in most art communities under the same name (falynevarger) but here are some links for you!