4.4 Blending Textures

Hello and welcome to lesson ten of creating a fantasy book cover. I hope you've got this far and are still with me. So let's get straight into it and I'll start off where we start off last, which is right here. We added the grass to our character but we haven't started to blend it. Let's get right into it. So, I've saved our changes to the options there, trying to make it a little bit more blended into the character. It's getting a little bit flat and uneven. So, what we're gonna do, right click on our mossy grass, get a blending options. As I showed you in a previous lesson, this is a really good tool like the grass. So what you'll do on the underlying layer, what I showed you before, hold ALT on your keyboard, click on the black little dagger on the, see the arrow tip type thing, the right-hand side one. And just bring it up. As you can see it starts to fill some of the shadows, that's really cool. I'm thinking you don't want to go up too high, or else it loses some of the color. Something like there, bring up some of the highlights as well just to bring back out the spear now, so we don't have to do that later on. Something like that would be fine, click okay. Okay, take it a step further now. What I do is change the letter style to darken. As you could see, when that's done, it has just brought out all the dark bits that just come through the grass. It just makes it a little bit more easier for us to see the detail of our character. Okay, so I'm not really liking the area around his chest. It's a bit too heavily grassed. There's too much foliage there, so what I'm gonna do is move this around a little bit. Now I've unlocked the actual layer from the actual mask. So I didn't actually move the masks. We don't wanna do that. So make sure you just unlock that. And then just move it around until you think it looks good. Also resize it if you have to. I think it needs a bit more detail, so I'm thinking resizing is a good option. Some think, something like that possibly. That looks pretty good. I like the arms here, sitting on one side of lap. Okay, let's leave it like that, that's fine. So on the mask, let me get the black brush and just take out anywhere. You don't need this on the face, get rid of that. We could always add that back in later if you wanna add a bit more texture. Okay, so something like that around there. So where else would it be? Of course, it wouldn't be on the spear, so make sure we get rid of the spear area. Unless you want it on the spear, but I don't really want it on the spear. Okay, just something like that. His hand is quite heavily green there. I don't want too much on there, so I'm gonna try to refill back some of the fingers. Maybe just do that right at the creases where the fingers are. A bit softer, so it doesn't come through it as much, so pass it down. And just roughly try and bring back some of the finger detail. So get a bit more visible. Something like that, that looks okay, little bit better. Okay, so underneath where you can see a repeat of the pattern, you can see where it's joined up. So this grass bit here is joined up on his arm. Now, that wouldn't be realistic. It would either be on his arm or on his chest. It wouldn't just join up like that. So let's make sure that we try and separate these two. So something like that is fine. Again, turn down here so you get rid of this one. At the top it looks fine, actually. It doesn't look like it joins up, it looks good. Over here, let's get rid of that section there. So it doesn't join with the hand, that looks good. So if you're on hat, I'm not sure if you do or not. I'm thinking it doesn't look very good on the hat. So, maybe just get rid of most of it, or get rid of all of it first, and then bring it back slowly. So in certain areas, maybe if you want it. I'm not sure where we're gonna put this, so maybe just on the edges, or just certain areas. I don't want it to be too heavily green. Okay, let's zoom out, see if that looks okay. Yeah, it's okay, it's like a hint of green in there. You can always add more later on. Okay, so something like that. So now, I think I need just a little bit more on the hat. Just add a little bit more. Let's join, actually interlock the two, so it doesn't get past the mask. Okay, just a little bit. So okay, get rid of that. I think that's a little bit better. Yeah, that's good, let's darken the actual moss a little bit. I'll actually add a levels adjustment. Attach it to the moss. Bring it over here and let's just play around with it a little bit. The lighter it goes, the more revealed underneath the skin. The darker obviously the opposite. So let's add a bit of both. A bit shadow work with highlight, I don't want it to be too green and too yellow. So something like that, a little bit of an adjustment. That's fine, okay, so now that we've done that. I'm actually gonna make the color a little bit different again, because I think we see the green with the green moss on the floor. It's a little bit too bright and a bit too green. So let's add in a hue saturation layer. Okay, and then what we're gonna do, just lower it down a little bit to the left, like that. The saturation down a little bit, not too much though. And like that, that's fine. Leave that, that's cool. Okay, so now you can see on his arm the boss isn't actually reaching down to his leg and his hand, let's fix that. So on the actual muscle layer, get your clean start tool. Now at the top here, mode normal, opacity 100%, flow 100%, make sure this is current layer and not any of the others, otherwise it won't work. Other reason why it wont work, cuz if I go to current and below and selected one of these selections, it'll actually put into that selection the character below. On that we just want natural textures. And make sure it's on current layer, clean stamp. Select [INAUDIBLE], that seems to be the best place for most of the texture. Add it to the leg, okay. And then add it to the hand as well. So we're gonna do the same thing. Clean stamp, certain area. And then just place it onto the hand. Okay, so on these fingers, let's zoom in a bit through his fingers. And you can see on this actual photo of the character, his finger gets a bit softer. So we're gonna fix on this later on just by adding a bit shadow work, not sure why it does that, must be the data field or the f-stop of the camera. I'm not sure about that. But we can't always get what we want when you actually choose stock images. Sometimes it's good too take it ourselves, so that's quite expensive. Anyway, so basically we got that there, so I'm thinking now that I look at it, there's way too much green on him. It's not enough of the actual texture underneath. So let me get rid of it. Get your brush, I'm going to get a black brush, soft brush. I'm just gonna get rid of certain areas. Zoom out a little bit to see more of what the character looks like. So this just gives his shoulder. Get rid of some of that. Maybe up here, we're done here. No, we're not, let's go back. Ctrl + alt + Z, that's what I'm using to go back and forth. I may have put on his chest a bit too much. Okay, that looks better already. Just a bit more. Let's get rid of some on his neck. That's one if you like spotted. Not just all over his arm and all over his body. So now that I've done that, maybe the fingers aren't a good idea. Maybe just some of the fingers, okay so just get rid of that. [INAUDIBLE], bit more of control, I'm thinking that looks a little better there. So not too much on the fingers, just a little bit. A little hint of green in there. Something like that, maybe a bit more onto his arm. Okay, that looks good. Okay, so now that we're done with that, let's actually work on his face now. So what we're gonna do, bring back the perforated edges layers, so the texture's here. Let's use this one here, the bottom. So you want to get a certain area which is not too heavily detailed with perforation. We just want a few holes just to add to his face. So maybe this area, maybe this area over here. Let's try this one here. They were actually using the wrong texture. [INAUDIBLE] trying to find which part of the image I'm using. Just get a little, a similar one, similar piece. We've gotten his face. Let's zoom in. Okay, select w four, let's name it to face perf, so face perforated is the same thing. Okay, so then we get the actual selection of our character like we've done before to create the mask. So control and then hit on the character image, hit on the mask, and then so change the layer style to let's try multiply. Now that's pretty good. Let's change the link, get rid of that, and move it around to what we're liking. Maybe change the size of it slightly. Somewhere around there. Bigger if you need to, but if you want to go bigger you're gonna have to go back and make a smart object just so it doesn't get blurry. Okay, so let's actually just mask away the bottom part of here to with his neck, and the hat as well. On his ear, go to the part above his ear. Okay, so we can get rid of the part on his eye as well, sort of reveal his eye a bit more, his nose. His mouth, make sure the mouth's clear, it's [INAUDIBLE] that. Okay, so it's a bit too dark, so control l, or plan l, let's just lower that down a little bit. The mid tones, get rid of that basic texture in the middle and just leave the holes. Okay, then add the shadows to bring back the holes a bit more. Again, bring up the mid tones and the shadows again. Bring up some highlights as well. That looks pretty good. Let's zoom out. So I'm liking what that's doing. It makes it look a bit more realistic. But it still looks like there's just holes on top of his head, [INAUDIBLE] ]. So to make that a little bit more like it's textured like a skin texture, let's bring in another texture, will you go got here. So let's bring in this texture here. Which is called perforated or rock perforated 0021. So decrease the size down to his face, zoom in a little bit. Okay, so we've got this face texture here. And we're gonna add in the mask again, same with what you did before, so select on the thumbnail or on the mask. Click on the mask, you got same thing here. Okay, so obviously we can see the texture which is gonna be applied here. Let's go through all of the layer styles, see if we can find a good one to suit us. That's not bad, seeing as it actually adds texture to the face, but obviously it's the wrong color. Let's get rid of all of the texture in all other areas, so as you can see it's on the spear here. Let's get soft round, flow 100% black. Then just get rid of all this here and his helmet as well. And around his neck. Okay, so now what we need to do is just change this to the same sort of color as his skin. So let's get a new layer adjustment. Let's get a color balance. Attach it to the rock texture. Let's get the shadows first, let's just change the red and the yellow. Go back to midtones, yellow and the red. And then that's pretty much it. Yeah, it looks good. So, I can see this little brown spots here and I've also got a little bit on his shoulder we should get rid of. Definitely don't want it anywhere near there. Now there's a few bits that I didn't really like. This brown texture here, these cracks, I didn't really like that. I'm gonna get rid of that. So same as what we did before, I'm gonna use the clone stamp tool. You can use these at a top with a healing brush but I think the clone stamp is the far easier way to do it. So hold alt, click on a texture which hasn't got an area, which hasn't got any of these brown parts and just get rid of those as such. Okay, that looks perfect, maybe on the eye here, get rid of that a little bit, just above his eye. Okay, that looks good. Now, before we do anything else, let's make sure that we actually group our layers correctly. So as you could see, we've got knee here, and foot. Let's call this Bottomhalf. So it's at the bottom half of our character, Statue. The face, [INAUDIBLE] the face, same with this. Let's group these called face. This is all under our character groups. They are all inside that group there. But these textures here which we can put above. Just [INAUDIBLE] them spare. In case we need them again, this one here is gonna be our main texture, so we could call this Middle. And then that's pretty much it. Okay, cool? So now, we can actually work on the bottom part, right with whatever he's wearing. Make that a little bit more textured and a bit more green and grassy. So what you wanna do is bring in the texture I got for you as rock mossy 008 or 88. So this is gonna go in to the middle part of his, or in the bottom part. Let's put it into the bottom half, bring into there. So, make it a bit smaller. Let's just get a rough selection of around this rock piece. So rasterize it first. Just get around the selection, there or about too much. So we need, we're not gonna need the top part of the rock, just the part with the green. Ctrl + C, Ctrl + V. Let's convert this to a smart object, narrow it down. Now, because the green actually abruptly stops, it's a quite nice image to use for dirty clothes. Because obviously it won't matter for the man or the swamp or grass. It will only reach a certain point. So this is why this is a good image to use. It's looked a bit bent to the right hand side. Let's fix that a second. Distort, just get rid of that. There we go, so now, it's a bit more straighter. There we go, okay so same what we've done before let's add a mass to this. The same one's we've been using all along. Let's get this one here. Add a mask. Nope, wrong mask. Let's use the actual one from the proper character image, there we go. Okay, fill up this. Now, the beauty of this image here is it really blends well into the shadows of the clothing. So, right click here onto blending options. I'll just see what I can looking at. Let's actually zoom out a little, so I can see. Go a bit to the left as well. Have room for my dialogue option. Okay, so here we go, blending options. So I get the underlying layer and then just bring it up. As you can see, it works really well with this image. Bring out the white as well, and then presto, it looks brilliant. So that's all we've got time for for this image. We're gonna refine this at the next lesson, make it a little bit more detailed. But yeah, please join me in the next lesson to continue doing this course.