5.1 Finishing Off the Headdress and Adding Bushes

Hello. Welcome back to lesson 14 of Creating a Fantasy Book Cover. So we've pretty much nearly finished our character in the center here. All we have to do for the last little touch is add a few horns to his helmet. So open up the elephant layer. Or the picture. Unlock the actual layer. And all we're gonna take is these horns here. So I'm just gonna quickly use the quick selection tool. Holding the bracket on my keyboard to make the size of the brush a little bit bigger. And then I'm just gonna quickly select that one, and we'll quickly select the other one as well, holding shift. Okay. And that one there. So we've got a little bit of skin there, so we get on the quick selection like we've used before. Get a black brush, point to point and just get rid of that skin there. Okay, then you hit control and then j, or command and j on a mac, just to bring out the layers. Don't need a mask on this one. So you've got a bit of a line here, so what I'm gonna do hold control, hit on the thumbnail, go to select, modify, contract by two. If I delete it now, we'd only get that line on the outside which was bugging me. So now we're going to invert the actual selection. So control, shift and i. Hit delete and then that line is gone. So bring this into our character group, so that we've attached it to the capture. We do that so that it doesn't confuse us. So let's bring up the top again. Okay, so open up Character. And we're gonna put it above the skull and all that. Also, but as you can see from the last lesson, I've made the skull a little bit smaller, just because I think it was a bit too big, and it was encroaching onto our character. So just a little heads up, if you want to pause it and make the skull a little bit smaller from the last lesson, you can do. So we're gonna actually transform this now. Let's try and add it to our character, so let's resize this. You don't want too big. Let's zoom in so you've got a big solid area you can view at. Okay, let's put these in their layer, so I'm just gonna go lasso tool around here, control C, control V, and then do it again. Just delete it from the second layer and the first layer. Okay, so then let's figure out where we can put this. I think this one should go at the back. So I'll group these into horns. So of course one of them is going to have to go behind the actual characters. This group again is called horn back. And this is going to have to go behind his head, so find where the actual head is. It's behind this character, so there, there we go. This top one, just call it horn because there's only one horn in there now. Try to put this one here. So we're going to have to try and bend this, so I'm gonna right click and then convert a smart object just in case we need to go back. Edit, transform, distort. Gonna try and make a reasonable horn, that'll make it look a bit silly, which it might do. Leave it there for now, let's actually focus on the other one first, it's a wee bit easier. This one's looking quite good. Put the horn back. Might get have to use the same horn twice, just to make it a little bit easier for us. Revert small object, restore, and then just try and get a reasonable-looking horn, so that's a little bit better. Okay, something like that, maybe? Let's Ctrl+T and then make it a little bit more like it's going up, something like that. Let's zoom out. So the front one doesn't look as good as the second one. So I'm actually gonna duplicate this one. And we're gonna replace it with the front one. Cuz the front one's a little bit out of proportion and it's looking straight at us and it's not exactly the same. So, there we go. It's already looking better. Now we just need to make sure that it doesn't look exactly the same as the other one. So we just use the warp tool. I'm gonna try and warp some of the edges, to make it look a little bit less like it's a complete copy. Something like that. Okay, so I'm actually going to desaturate this, so I actually add a saturation layer, which is gonna be a saturation. Attach it to the actual horn. Lower the saturation slightly. Something like that is fine. We're also going to have a adjustment. Going to brighten it up, so increase the mid tones, increase the highlights slightly. Then increase the shadows a little bit more as well. Possibly have to remove some of the blacks. So something like that. Zoom out. Yep that looks pretty decent. So do the same thing to the horn in the back. Saturation, attach it. Bring down the saturation slightly. Add in a levels. Just play around with some of the mid tones. So if it's farther away it would be less actual clarity, imagine you could add a little bit more of the mid tones in this one. Also if it's farther away, it also be shorter than the one in the front, let's make sure that we're doing that respectively. So, something like that. Maybe even in, like that. Make it a bit thicker. Something like that. Let's have a look. Okay, so I'm pretty happy with that. Let's just zoom into the front one. Okay and let's just blend it into that mask, get a black brush and just try and blend in a little bit past the actual feathers, maybe we'll make a bit smaller of a brush. Let's make it a little bit like the feathers are actually encroaching to the actual horn, make it a bit more realistic. So something like that, okay, so maybe a little bit more on that bottom side there. Maybe the flow a little bit, just to get a little bit more of a passivity in there. Okay, something Like that. Now we see that lot, so that look okay. Yep, happy with that. Okay, so now we've basically done our character. He's basically finished. So what we're gonna do now, is work on the area surrounding our character. Make it blend in a little bit more, and maybe some little bit of foliage in the background. So the first thing we're gonna do is add in some foliage around our character. So at first we're gonna bring in is a nature plants 0071. This one here. Okay, actually be zoomed out for most of this. Just we can add it in certain places to see if it looks good. So somewhere maybe there. Add another one, control j, just flip it, edit transform and flip horizontal, add a few more. Just going to try and make this a little bit more populated with a bit of details. Maybe bring several branches 0018. Lower this down to size, just add in some more foliage. So like that. Maybe a little bit behind him. Let's try it in front of the character as well. So somewhere around here. Maybe something like that, Ctrl+T. We're just gonna try and make this a little bit more detailed, a little bit more like it actually fits with the scene. Add a different branch this time. Make this a little bit smaller again. Something like that, maybe attach it to the wall. Okay, so you need to remember that we're actually going to add some text to the front of our rock, so don't add too much detail to it. Just try to make it a little bit more populated, but not too much. This left hand side branch could get in the way. I am going to bring back the actually rulers in the middle, putting control of the semi curler. Just to bring it back to see where the actual spine is going to be. So this part is going to be cut off a little. If you wanted too you could actually add in a box and make a new layer above everything. Let's add a box to that right hand side one of the lines. Fill it in with the same color as the background of our actual paper on the canvas. That way it should blend in fine. And this is actually the front of our book. As you can see this right hand side one's cutting out a little bit too much. So I'm going to try and make it a little bit more attractive. This is probably an easier way to work. So you can actually see what is the front cover going to actually look like. Now if you actually need to actually move the character. Because you might think it's a bit too much to the left. Which I think he might be, you have to group these together, make sure you get the above layers, the attached layers, and just bring it across a little bit. I'm using the key pad on my keyboard, it's a bit easier. Something like that is a little bit more centered. Now if you're getting a little bit of a weird effect to where you're moving it, but the textures on the body isn't. That's because you've got some unlinked layers like this, so I actually moved it now. You get this error. Cuz they're not joined up with the actual mask with they layer. So make sure you go through everything if you are going to move everything. And make sure you attach or link all the layers together. We did do that in the previous lessons. So this is good I mean that's a good placement for him. Let's go back to actually our branches. Something like that, it looks good on the right hand side and the left, little bit of detail. Okay, so that looks really good. Now at this point we're not gonna actually blend them in in the middle, we're gonna actually figure out what we're gonna put in the background. So you could add some rocks, make this a little bit more like off to the side. You wouldn't see one rock in a massive swamp, you'd probably see quite a few. So you might want to put some more rocks in the back, it's up to you. I'm going to add some more pyramids, I think, cuz I think that's the best option. Make it a little bit more like it flows across the page. So let's actually hide our gray cover layer, this over here. We're actually gonna duplicate this whole group of the pyramids. We're gonna open up the background layers, and I'm gonna duplicate the pyramid group, control j, bring it just below the character, I'm gonna bring it across. So we're not obviously gonna completely copy it, let's make it a little bit bigger, so hit control and t. Just a little bit bigger here like that. So again it's already quite a lot bigger, which is obviously different. So zoom in. So to me this looks like he actually is a complete copy from the left hand side ones. Some might know if you're doing a proper book, and it's going to make a lot of sells, some of them will critique your cover. I'm actually going to actually hide the trees layer for now. So the pyramid's here, so make sure to find the left hand side one which is this bottom one. Okay, I'm gonna open it up, so right click on the actual layer. Edit content. So we've got this here. So what I'm gonna do is just play around with the texture a little bit. So move the mouse here, right click, and click patch tool. Select a certain area. Let's just select there and then it copies to there. Do the same for somewhere else, so big selection there, copy there. So we're just changing what the actual texture of the pyramid is, so that if someone looked at it it wouldn't look exactly the same. Okay, this translates to an area on this side, down here maybe. Now this patch here is pretty decent, we will try to copy it as best we can. It probably won't get the proportions right, or the angle of the rocks, but it does a pretty good job. Okay, so when you've done that and you feel it's good, go to file and save and open it up and it should be changed. Okay so I'm gonna zoom in here back to where we were. Okay, so it looks good, but the angles are exactly the same. So we need to change that. So, to do that, just open up the layer, and because we used a smart filler on these pyramids, what I think I'll do is click on this perspective warp, bring out these icons and just bend in the middle ones. Like that. That's it. And you can see if I zoom out, they're completely different shapes. That one's got a little less on the left hand side than this right hand side one. You can see a lot more of it. That's an amazing tool to use, the Smart Object. I advise you to use it for most of your projects. It does make the size go up a bit on the file size of your file. But it's always worth it. We have a little bit of an error here, where you've used the perspective warp. So what I'm gonna do, make a new layer, attach it to the pyramid, get the clone samp tool. I'm just gonna select certain areas and just go over it just to make sure we get rid of that little line you've got there. Make sure that the sample's on current and below, alt, click on a section, and just get rid of that line like so. Okay, that's fine. So now let's do some work on the other pyramid. We need to space them out accordingly. So this one here, just place somewhere. So maybe like there. We could actually flip this one, so edit to transform, and then flip. I'm also gonna use this skew as well, just to make it a little bit more straight. So I'm thinking that looks okay, actually, like that. [INAUDIBLE] looks good. Let's zoom out, see if it matches our scene. Looks good. I could even bring back our little brown grid, see if it looks good. So let's leave it on for a minute. So, I think the left lump here is a bit big. It's a bit distracting from our actual scene, so I'm just going to reduce the size of this. Just a little tab, so something like that. I think that looks a lot better, maybe a little bigger, but not too much. Like that. That's perfect. Okay, so now we're gonna add in the back our actual trees. So let's click that. Okay, so open that, so edit contents. Now I'm actually gonna get rid of the actual fog. We're actually gonna apply that afterwards. So get rid of the fog layers. That one. And we should find the right ones. That one there. And that one there. Okay, so I'm gonna move these trees around as well to make it a little bit different. Resize them as well. So be aware, you can't see where they are. We're just gonna try and make it a little bit different, so you can see they don't look exactly the same as the ones on the left-hand side. That's basically the idea. Okay. File > Save, go back. All right, that's a lot better. Okay, so now we're gonna have the smoke here, or the fog, so make a new layer. Same as what we did in previous lessons. Hold down Alt, click on the sky for that nice orange. Go to your soft brush, and then make the flow down to really low. Same with opacity. And then just go over it, maybe a bit more flow to make a bit more of a Fall effect. So something like that. Same way over there on the right hand side. And it basically disappear slightly. Okay zoom out. So that little bit too much, and I think it's a little bit too saturated. Image. Adjustments to saturation. Lower saturation slightly. Right there. Lower the opacity as well, down to zero. And bring up until, I'd say about 60% on this one. Depends on obviously how hard you applied it. Okay, I'm happy with that so that's the end of this lesson. So in the next lesson, we'll begin to actually make these trees look a bit more bended in, and basically finish our piece. So please join me in the next lesson to continue the course.