1- Objective of this tutorial

In this tutorial we will learn to create illustrations that tell a moment / action in a story (storytelling), this type of illustrations visually narrates a moment or action of one or more characters in an emotional and simple way.

 

 

2- Brainstorming de ideas

First, we must think what we want to illustrate. For this you can do a small brainstorming of ideas in your mind. What I do to generate ideas, is to look at photos of landscapes that I like, such as forests or mountains and imagine stories and characters in them, your favorite animals, you can think of movies or video games that inspire you, imagine scenes from your favorite books or even look at works of artists that you like and get inspired.

Maybe long ago you played this video game that had such a dark setting, with enchanted knights and forests that now you want to create an illustration in a dark forest with a brave adventurer exploring it.

Or you might be on vacation at the beach, and now you want to illustrate a monster coming out of the water.

Both are simple ideas, only that they represent an action, even if it is just walking, they would already be telling a story.

 

3- Choose idea

Once you have the idea in your mind, you can start!

For this tutorial I wanted to draw a mysterious forest with vegetation and moss around, perhaps also with fog, in which a young woman meets a giant wolf while walking.

As you can see it is a fairly simple idea, it is not necessary that the ideas are the most original in the world, often simple ideas work perfectly and are valid like any other.

 

4- Simple sketch

We begin to elaborate on the idea, with a pencil brush we generate small sketches until we find something that is similar to what we have in mind.

4-1 Once we have the simple sketch ready we will redraw the wolf to make it more realistic and prepare it for the color phase.

• In a new document we take the previous reference of the wolf and redraw it.

4-2 For the next steps, we lower the opacity of the layer where you have your initial sketch. In this way it serves as a guide for the next step.

 

We copy our new wolf sketch on top of the initial "Sketch" layer and begin to refine and detail the drawing more or less. In this case I have used a simple brush to ink.

 

And we redraw everything step by step. Once finished, we can erase the initial sketch layer.

 

5- My brush settings for the next steps

To paint the truth I only use a brush or two, each artist has their favorite brushes, so everyone must use the brush with which he feels most comfortable.

In this case I teach the two brushes that I will use in this tutorial, a normal one with nothing strange, and another with a traditional brush bristle shape.

Clip Studio lets you configure brushes very quickly and easily by sliding the bars below.

If you want to lower the opacity, just slide the bar to the left, and you will get a semi transparent brush.

If for example you want to mix colors, check the [Mix colors] box, and configure the three options until you get the desired result.

Paint Brush :

 

Cross Brush :

A very interesting effect is as follows:

• If we want to mix a color completely with the background and in a very fast and simple way, simply slide the bar [Amount of paint] to 0.

If you use textured brushes you will get a very original and unique effect

Although you can also do it with the normal round brush.

Also for example we can determine the hardness of the simple brush simply by choosing the hardness

With these two tricks we can paint almost anything, without using complicated brushes. I'm going to show you an example I've done in a couple of minutes.

First we paint what could be a spot of grass on a white background, and with the brush we drag the colors to create the illusion of leaves and grass.

 

I recommend that you try your own ideas and practice this technique a little if you did not know it, since it is the technique I use to create this tutorial.

6- Decide where the light comes from

Before starting to paint we must decide in which direction the light comes, in this case I wanted the light to come from the right and illuminate the wolf in the head, and part of the forest. The shadows help create volume, for example in the stones on the right, the shadows help them not be flat, and acquire a geometric shape.

Keep in mind that the illuminated parts are going to attract more attention than the dark parts, so look well to highlight the parts that you think are important in the drawing with light.

In a layer under the sketch and with a simple brush simply start drawing shadows to be more or less clear which are the darkest colors, and which are the lightest.

This is just to give you a general idea of where the light comes from.

7- Choose a base color

It is also important to choose a predominant color for your illustration.

Simply under the sketch and the shadows, create a new layer and paint the background of the color you want.

In this case I wanted the setting to be quite mysterious, so a dark blue or purple work pretty well for this. But you can use any color, just keep in mind that light colors are more cheerful than dark ones.

 

8- The painting process begins

In the same background layer, just start painting with your favorite brush the colors in general, nothing complicated, as we have the shadow layer of the previous process, this step is very simple.

You just need to lower the opacity to the shadow layer that is a bit transparent and let you see the colors underneath.

 

I used greens for vegetation, and blues / grays for the rest, the wolf with a very light and saturated blue to get attention and stand out from the rest

Once I had the base colors painted, I thought it was a bit dark so, with the gradient tool, I added touches and highlights of the grass and trees.

 

As you can see now, the trunk on the left and the trees in the background look a little brighter, I recommend trying different layer opacities to achieve the desired effect.

 

9- The details

Tree

This is where we started using the brush to mix and drag colors.

I like to work in a single layer whenever possible, I think it is a more natural traditional look, especially because we are mixing the colors as if it were oil paint, or acrylic. To do this we combine, the sketch layer, the shadow layer and the base color layer, all of them in one.

Simply by right clicking on any layer and choosing the following option.

Now we start drawing the texture of the tree, with darker colors, to blend in with the black sketch line.

It doesn't matter if you go outside the tree, with the mixer brush you can drag the color from the outside to the inside without problem and touch up or clean up any errors.

 

And with the brush with zero paint quantity, we mix and drag them, until we get a more stylized paint.

We can also begin to give small brightness of light and mix them with the other colors. It is much simpler than it seems!

Remember to add paint again to repaint.

 

Plants and leaves

Now we start with the plants that are next to it, we repeat the same process, first we paint with some colors in green to clean the sketch, and then with the mixing brush we drag the paint and mix it to create leaves.

As you create triangular shapes of sheets, you can add different shades and create more sheets and details, ahead of the initials to create depth.

You can even draw new plants and mix the line with the background, little by little you add detail and expand with different plants and leaves. You can use photographs of reference plants to see how they are if you don't know how to paint them by heart. You can create new layers, but I recommend doing it in one layer only, to practice the technique of mixing paint.

Little by little we are correcting things that we don't like about the initial sketch or we are adding details, different plants, with other tones and reflections.

Remember to play with the amount of paint, for when you want to mix or add color.

 

And this would be the final result of this area of grass, as you can see it is a look quite similar to traditional painting, the number of details depends only on you, at this point I was happy with this area, so I decided to move to the next.

It took me about 2 hours to do this area. Nothing bad!

 

10- Rocks and moss

Now we go with the rocks and the moss. The truth is that the girl in front of me hindered me a little, to paint such a large area it was best not to have obstacles, so I decided to erase it to add it later. Also, the pose didn't convince me too much, so I would probably design it again in the future.

As in the previous step, we started cleaning the sketch with the brush, and ordering the rocks and moss.

Gradually you are retouching and shaping everything, until you get the look with which you feel satisfied.

I made the grass stand out from the rocks, and added details to the trees.

 

11- The wolf

It is the wolf's turn, for the wolf I recommend using a brush with some texture that is similar to a real traditional paint brush, this will help us greatly for the fur.

 

We begin by adding shadow areas in the wolf's body with a darker tone, this serves to create volume and not be so flat the body, remember to make the strokes trying to simulate the wolf's body, and following its muscles and shapes, it does not have Why be perfect, and always have the reference close if you doubt how it is.

The process is very similar to drawing the plants and the grass, little by little we are combing and retouching the body and the fur, until we get something we are happy with.

Now we focus on the head. With the reference close, we are adding the details of the head. This is a very important area of the painting so I'm going to give it a little more detail.

We add dark areas to create contrast, we correct errors and continue with details.

Finally we make sure that everything has more or less the same finish. Cleaning up any mistakes and adding as much detail as we can.

And the wolf would be finished! (More or less), later we will tweak it a little if necessary.

 

The tutorial continues in the second part.

The tutorial continues here: