 Hello ! Bonjour ! In this new video tutorial, I want to show you how I made this character design. It's one of my original characters, and it's in the style of the RPG video game that I love, and I made it using only a grayscale to color workflow, and without using any sketch or line art, it's directly painted with grayscale. And that's something that might interest you. So, I will try to detail all the steps, more or less, but detail at least what I did, and yeah, let's start. So, I will start this new document with a new image. I will pick a 3840 by 2160 document. It's a custom document. This is a 4k 16 by 9 document. And for the content, I will go with two layers, and a background color of a light gray. It's the color, you can write it here, C0, C0, C0. It's easy to remember. And this light gray will just be a little bit more easy than a pure white canvas. I prefer to reserve the pure white for the reflection or for the direct light. If you are curious about how I put my brushes like this in two columns, or how my advanced color selector is a square, or how I have the three slider on the top and my tool option here, I explain everything about this, about my interface, in a previous video. So, I invite you to watch the start of this long video. If you want to have the same setup, because it hasn't changed since this time. So, I'm starting the artwork here with the silhouette of the character, and I'm brushing this one with the rake tool. It's the rough rake brush tool. It's a tool from my previous brush kit, and you will find the link in the description. It's a free brush kit. And this brush is slightly textured and doesn't have clean edges. And that's something that I really need when I'm brushing a silhouette like that. Because if the brush has very clean edges, and also has no texture, and it's very clean, I'm very tempted to just dive into the details and start rendering the material and all. So, having a brush like this really helps me to just keep the thing rough and broad for this step of the workflow. I also selected a mid-gray color, and you can see it on my advanced color selector. And this mid-gray helps me to see the character like if it was in the fog. And this is really great for stimulating my imagination. And because it's a first silhouette, it doesn't mean that I'm not paying attention to the proportion. Here I want an RPG character, a little bit like for an old video game. So I have proportions that are with a slightly bigger head, but this is totally along my style. And I'm also high-balling a perspective. You can see in the alligments of the foot and of the knees also, I'm just trying to make my volume sticking to a space. And this is important. If you see some lighter, brighter tones on the silhouette, it's because of the pressure sensitivity of my stylus, because the brush is a pressure sensitive, so sometimes it has more opacity. And I also used the E key, it's the eraser key on the keyboard, just to brighten some area or just to erase outside the silhouette and make a precise shape. And when I need to overlay some other shape, like for the belt or like some little shading on the air, I'm using a darker gray, and I just press the K key on the keyboard. This key will just select automatically a darker tone. It's mnemonic, a K darker. And the L is lighter. And I'm not really caring right now about putting the exact value at its place, like making the black, pure black, and the reflection pure white and everything. I'm just keeping the things relative to the mid-gray of the start. So I'm just designing this way. It's faster for me, just overlaying some shape and saying, oh, this one is darker. This one is definitely brighter. And press the K and L on the keyboard to play with that. You also saw me flipping the canvas. And this is with the M key on the keyboard, like M for mirror. And when you flip the canvas, your brain just refresh and you see the picture under a new angle. And suddenly you see a lot of mistakes. This is a big classic flipping the canvas. And I'm doing it. I try to not abuse of doing this because as soon as your eyes are getting used to this flipping aspect, you are losing also the ability to see the mistake. So I'm flipping. I'm taking advantage of putting the mistake and press the control T or select the transform tool. This is the same. And then try to fix the things as fast as I can. And after I flip back, one of the advantage of starting directly with shape like this painting shape in comparison with starting with a sketch with thin line is you can overlay to the infinity a lot of shape and just erase put something else without falling into a lot of construction line and a mess of a draft line. So once I have this tiny sculpture made of values gray that are not really contrasted, I will try to shade this. And I want to do the shading in black and white. And for that, I will pick the Lambert lighting blending mode. It's a new blending mode that tries to improve the hard light blending mode. And if you follow the channel, you see that I lose a lot the hard light blending mode. So this one is my little new favorite. And it's exactly the same usage. You feel the layer with a mid gray color. And this mid gray for the Lambert shading blending mode will be like transparent mid gray equal transparent. And everything you paint in brighter over this mid gray will be interpreted as light. So there will be a special blending that makes something that looks more like natural light. And everything under will looks more like a shadow, everything under this mid gray. So this is a very convenient blending mode for this. And I was really happy that in Krita, it was the 5.2. I think that it was added inside the Krita. And so I'm using it in production now all the time. And that's at this point that I will change brush. And I will pick something smaller, still from my brush kit. You can see it on the brush selector. And I will start also to zoom in. And I'm zooming in because I want to detail the face of the character. This is the main selling point. It's normal for a viewer of your artwork to just directly jump and see the face of the character. It will tell them about the character, the emotion, about the style, about the deformation, about a lot of things about your artwork. And this is known to be the main selling point of your artwork. So it's normal to spend time now on it and making it to your taste. When the face is enough detailed, and you are happy about the result, you think your selling point is effective. The little smile, the style, how the emotion of the character, everything is going good, you have to choose. Or you can just leave the drawing as it is. Just detail a little bit more the hand, a little bit some details that just attract the eyes. Like maybe here it would be the shield and the staff, the thing that she is holding in her hand mainly. But for other parts, like the feet, like some drapery, you can leave them with large brush stroke. But for this tutorial, maybe because I was recording, I decided to start to detail a bit everything. So this is tedious. This is a lot of hours that went into. But yeah, I was motivated to do that. So I did it. And if your character is motivating you, you can do it. It's a good quest because you will review all the tiny detail and you can of course keep to design them, to improve them, to make some pattern on them. And this is great. So once you have detailed your artwork in gray, and be careful because you can really spend a lot of time and go crazy on this step. But you have to stop at one point and it's time to color it. And for the colorization, what I do is I start to flat all my layers stuck. So I keep only the character in grayscale. And I will duplicate this one. And I will set the duplicated layer as a color layer. So the color blending mode just affects only the color and not the value. It's a very good blending mode. And the first thing I will do on this layer is I will call the filter color balance. And the color balance filter has three categories. You have the highlight, you have the mid tones and you have the shadows. And I will just do a contrast of color. It's just a draft. So often I just put the shadows in warm tone and the highlight in cold tone or the reverse. You have the shadow cold and the highlight warm. And this is just to test if my grayscale is enough contrasted. Because if it's not, you will see that even this type of monochromatic color red things doesn't work over your artwork. So it's good to keep this color balance. You can accept it, apply it, and then go to the layer under your grayscale and contrast it a little bit with curves or with level. It's up to you. But this tiny step fixes many, many, many grayscale I had in the past and many grayscale issue. Because sometimes I had many muddy areas or not contrasted well artwork. And a step like this is a very good step to overcome this problem. After that, I create on the top a regular empty layer and I set it to the color blending mode. And on this layer with the color blending mode, I will just start to fill every shape I can. But I will fill them broadly. I will not enter into the detail and clean the edge. You can do that later because this is flexible. You can just color pick and do it because this layer influence only the color. So even if you go outside your character, you can just pick the color of the background and paint and just fix it. And I'm saying this because if you start shape by shape, you will have some problem because the first shape will be like a first island of color isolated into everything outside a bit desaturated or without any color. And color is very relative. So you need to at first run the the faster you can and and fill every shape with a basic color. You also have to keep in mind that it's not like selecting a color for the skin, for example, and painting all the area with the same color. It doesn't work this way. We don't have the same temperature of color everywhere. The shadows are more reddish. There is part on the face that are a little bit more yellowish, some other part that are a little bit blueish. You have to put all of that. If you put the same color everywhere, it will really look like a cheap work of someone who paint an old photo. And you don't want that. You want something that is a little bit more richer. It's also a very flexible workflow. So try many things. You can see that I tried in blue, in green. That's character design. That's the fun part of it. And unfortunately, you can't really have a good coloring with just a single color layer blending mode. From my experience, it's always good to just plug another layer, a new layer on the top, and put it in overlay blending mode. And this layer will help to just fix a little bit the contrast and put a little bit more saturation on some material. And when you will be done with all this lasagna of layers blending mode, you will still have some problem with the edge and with some cleaning. It's normal. Sometimes the color will go a little bit outside. And sometimes also the presence of this color will show you the material and you know that you can push it a little bit more further. So that's when I usually just flatten the layer stack with all these layers. And I duplicate it and I will start to paint over. And in this artwork, I selected just a brush preset that is like a color red pencil because there is a little texture. And I reintroduce here and there little lines, little detail. And I'm reorganize tiny things here and there just for the quality. So this is a very nice moment of the painting because there is no risk, everything is built, the light system is working. So it's only just doing some improvements and rendering. That's one of my favorite part about painting. And that's all for the detailing of this character and the most difficult remains. How to name her? I have no idea. And it's true, it's really true. I try to question myself and all. So I will leave this to you in the comment section. And you can also write it on Mastodon. This is not a call to get the algorithm on YouTube or something, just for the fun. I just want your feedback and your creativity about this. Oh, and by the way, I decided to release this character also as a creative commons attribution character. So it's a free liberal culture character. You can reuse it in your project, you just have to quote my name as the designer. But even on a commercial project or a game project or anything, if you like this character, please go ahead and reuse it. I hope you liked the tutorial. If you did, you know how to help the channel. There is the like, the subscribe, and all the patronage that really helped me to make this with only free Libre and open source software. The recording, it's OBS right now that is recording. And we have the caddy and live for the video editing and all of this running on Linux. It's the federal Linux KDE Plasma right now. And I'm really happy to take the time to make this type of production. And you probably haven't seen, but this is the first video in Quaid AG. It's not anymore a 1080p. I am trying to make a better video with a higher quality. Just like this. I have some projects for 2024 or future video. So yeah, stay tuned. I will try my best. It's difficult to find days to make all the recording and then the video editing. It will be a challenge. But I have some plans. Until then, see you. Bye bye.