3.5 Fill, Gradient, Airbrush

Hi, welcome back. In this lesson, I'm gonna show you how to use the spray paint, blend, fill, and gradient tools. So by now we're fairly familiar with all the different settings we can change on our tools, and we've got a few last ones that we can go through which have some very specific functions that we can change. So first up, we have the spray paint tool. So you can click on the small spray paint icon there and we can go to our sub tools and you can see we've got quite a hard spray paint, some soft spray paints and some spattering ones there. Up to our tool properties, we can change our brush size, just as we could with a pen and pencil. And we can change our graphics tablet settings. Unlike the pen and pencil, we have a combine mode. So if I just choose a light blue color and just draw on the canvas you'll see that every time I make a mark it just stays at this uniform color. But then when I change my mode to, for example, Multiply, that will keep adding our color and it'll just keep getting darker and darker the more I add. And we've got several different combine modes to choose from there. I won't go through them all, but do go through them all, play with them, and see what they do. Just change that back to normal for now. We can change our hardness, so we're on 0 hardness at the moment, so we've got these really, really blurry edges. We can turn that up, and you can get quite hard edges. We've got brush density, so as you turn that down, you can see it becomes less and less dense. And we can change our spray paint tool to continuous spraying. That makes it act a bit like a spray can, so If I draw a line on the canvas and stop, you'll see the line just stops. But when I turn on continuous spraying, I draw a line, stop, and it just keeps filling with color until I let go. We have stabilization, just like in the pen and pencil tool, so you can draw nice straight lines. And we also have, do not exceed line of reference, so that we can fill in our line work. We also have an eraser here, and the settings for this are exactly the same as the pencil tool, so I won't go through these in much detail. We've already covered this in the previous lesson. And I'll just move on to the blend tool. So the blend tool, as the name suggests, blends two colors together. In our sub tools we have different types of blending, so we have just straight up blending, we have blurring, we have fingertip style blending, we have blur by fiber, which adds this funny sort of fibrous edge as it mixes our colors together. We have a watercolor mix and we have a copy stamp. So if I just go to the standard blend, we can change our brush size, hardness, and density just like we could with the airbrush tool. But we also have the added option of changing our color stretch. So I'll just increase the size of the brush and you can see what's happening. Color stretch is set to10 now. So, if I click once in here and drag outwards, you'll see that the paint eventually runs out about here. But if I increase the color stretch, you'll see that when I click and drag, the pain lasts a lot longer, and fades out around here. If we move on to our fill bucket tool, I'll just delete this layer here. Create a new one. And I'll just draw a quick shape to show you how the fill bucket tool works. So, I'm gonna fill in this gap here with our foreground color. And you'll see that just fills in as you'd expect. If I undo that and then untick follow adjacent pixel, what we're basically telling Manga Studio to do is not just to fill in this white gap inside the shape that we've drawn, we're telling it to fill in every single white gap. So if I click inside here, it's filled in all of the white out of here and it's left our line as it was. I'll turn that back on. You can also choose to close gaps, so if we had gappy line work we could just fill that in and it would compute those. And we can change our color margins. So if I zoom in here, and I fill in, leaving color margin about 6, you'll see it leaves this white halo around our line, because what we've told Manga Studio to do is to fill in white. So, as soon as it detects pixels that aren't white, it stops. But if we change our color margin, change that to around 30, you'll see that the white halo is decreased, and that's because we're adding a nice margin to our fill, and that's bleeding over into that. So if we want something to look a little bit more organic in the way that it's filled and not leave white jagged lines, we can just change our color margin. We can also turn on area scaling like we did it when we were using our pen tool. And if we're filling in a reference layer like line work, for example, we can turn on our area scaling and then we won't have any white edges. It's similar to this color margin here, but it works on reference layers. We can also change the reference point for our fill. So if we tick that on, we can choose between all layers, reference layers, the selected layer, or all the layers in our folder. We can change the opacity that we fill in. So, at the moment, that was 100%. If I change that to around 50, it's filling in at 50%. We can also turn on or off anti-alliasing to give us sharp or smooth edges. Lastly, we've got the gradient tool. So, our gradient tool, it works in a very similar way to Photoshop. Once we click on the gradient tool here, we have a few different gradients to choose from. So if we go to our sub tool, we have foreground to transparent, foreground to background, stripe, background color stripe. And then we can choose all of these different color presets. So I'll leave it at foreground to background now. And show you all the tool properties. So once we choose foreground to background, you can see that our foreground color is here and our background color is here. And they fade and meet in the middle and fade into each other. We can also drag these triangles and dictate how far our blend goes, so at the moment they're meeting somewhere in the middle, but if I drag that towards there, you'll see the majority of our gradient will be blue. And that will suddenly fade into red. We can change the shape of our gradient. So at the moment, I have a circle. But we can also choose a straight line or an elipse. And we can also change the edge processing of our gradient. So if I show you what I have at the moment. At the moment I've got it set to do not draw. So if I drag a circle like that, you'll see that it creates a gradient inside the circle that I draw with our foreground color starting in the middle, radiating out to our background color. If I change that to do not repeat, you'll see that it creates this blue gradient and it fills the whole rest of the layer. We can also change these edges to repeat, so if I put it onto repeat mode, there, what it's doing is creating concentric circles with the same gradient in it. So that's our initial gradient and it then goes larger and larger, fading outwards from foreground to background. We can also invert that to create an effect like this. If we're on a linear gradient, I'll change that to linear, the step angle option becomes available, and if I tick that, it's set to 45 degrees. If I try an draw a line, you'll see its snapping at 45 degree increments. The last two options we have are similar to our fill tool so we an change the opacity of our gradient and we can also change the combine mode. One last thing to mention, if you've made changes to your tool that you don't like and you want to go back to the presets that Manga Studio came with, all you have to do is click this small icon that looks a bit like an aperture at the bottom. It will say, Set selected sub tool content to initial settings. Click OK, and all your initial settings will revert back to normal. In the next lesson, I'll show you how to work with rulers.