With traditional media, a comic book artist might think in terms of line when a painter might be thinking in terms of value and light. And considering the tools they use, this makes a lot of sense. But with Photoshop, you have the ability to drift between lines and value. But as a quicker reminder, if you look below the post, you'll find links for free brushes and worksheets, as well as in-depth premium series available in the control paint store. So a lot of what I'm doing involves squinting at the image and picking out big areas of value. So I'll be jumping back and forth between hard edge brushes and soft edge brushes. But mainly what I'm trying to do is just rough out the shape, looking at the reference to see where the value arrangements are. I'm doing a lot of sampling with the alt key using the brush tool and the eyedropper together to quickly switch between colors without ever opening up the color picker. So it's hard to give a set of steps to follow with this. It's pretty intuitive. It's mainly a case of looking at the reference and blocking in areas of light and dark. So I've jumped ahead a little bit, but I'm doing the same exact process. Switching between hard and soft brushes and just refining these shapes. So I'm trying not to think in terms of frog or eyeball, but instead, where is the angle of this light reaching this shadow? Only later will it start to emerge into a likeness, and I'll actually begin thinking in terms of the anatomy of the frog. But right now these are just shapes defined by light and shadow. And you can do the same thing in color, but I think that eliminates one variable to do the sort of exercise in black and white first. So I've jumped ahead again here, and there's really not a lot of specifics that I can tell you about this process, other than lots of observational drawing will really help you observe values better. Because it's surprisingly hard to look at values and to paint them accurately onto your canvas. It's thinking in a way very different than it is working with line. But it's really how we see objects in space, and it can help make them look more convincingly three-dimensional. So studies like these will actually help you work on skills that'll transfer over pretty well into imagined objects. So when you're drawing that sci-fi monster or dragon, you can remember how the light fell across these actual forms, and it'll help you with your value relationships. And so you could refine in this way as long as you wanted, and you could end up with a pretty tight drawing. But instead of starting with a linear under drawing, here I'm just doing refine, refine, refine, all through shapes of value. And once you've gotten to a certain point of clarity, it's time to start zooming in. And again, just like the linear approach, I'll usually open two document windows at this point. So here I can zoom into my reference, into my image independently, even though it's the same document open twice. So having established the major areas of value, I can now go in and refine a little details. Again, not good to jump to these two early, but once you've established it to a point where you're happy, then you can zoom in and start working with smaller brushes and more slowly. Again, the same process from large and fast to small and slow. It's a very safe way to work. An unlike in traditional media, where a pencil is very different from a paintbrush, in Photoshop, the distinction between drawing and painting and line and value is really a pretty blurred continuum. So some artists will find that they really like working with value, but will sometimes shrink their brush diameter and make some very thin marks that are pretty much just like lines. And likewise, if you're a pretty linear artist, sometimes you want to make that brush really big and all of a sudden you'll be painting with big areas of value. So since you have the flexibility given to you by Photoshop to jump back and forth between line and value, it's a good idea to familiarize yourself with both of them. Sometimes I like to do the study of something like a frog, maybe a subject matter that I'm unfamiliar with, and I'll do first one as line, and then I'll do another study as value. And this is sort of like a right brain, left brain activity. And I think it helps me understand the form even better because I approach it both from a linear standpoint and from a formal standpoint. So you can continue this refining process as long as you like, but at this point I'm going to call my study finished. Now I challenge you to give both of these methods a try. Try drawing something with lines and then try approaching it from value. I think you'll find that one of them will probably feel more natural to you, but it's good to mix them both when you're doing a painting. Thanks for watching.