Hey guys, this is Matt Kor from www.controlpaint.com and on our way to drawing a dragon, today we are going to continue by working on the Komodo dragon. If you remember where we left off was this rough blue line sketch. This is very much like those crayon sketches that I talked about doing in college. What we've accomplished is a nice sense of composition. We have our proportions correct. We've done most of the problem solving, so now it's really all about refinement. So here we are in Photoshop and what I'm going to do immediately is to sort of lower the opacity of this whole document. Because I want these lines to be visible, but I don't really want them to be overwhelming the new lines that I'm doing. And you can see that my brush is much narrower. Here I'm using a brush that's maybe only four or five pixels in diameter, and it really allows me to make very careful slow marks. As you saw just there, I used the free transform tool to literally move my eyeball. That's the great part about this. We have our blueprint underneath, but then Photoshop layers allow us to literally work with separate elements. So if the lines look nice, but they're not quite in the right spot, it's really not a problem. Because we can shift these layers around independent of one another until we get the look that we're going for. You'll notice that I'm using the Rotate Canvas tool, and that just allows me to draw more naturally. Because our arm really only works in a couple directions fluidly. And if you need to draw a line that goes in a different direction, rotating the canvas is going to be your best friend. And finally, you'll notice that I'm using temp layers. As in my layer stacks, going to be growing while I do this. Because that just allows me to sort of isolate the current line that I'm making. Especially if I'm making a big long line that needs to be especially smooth, I'll make a new layer, draw the line on that layer, maybe do a little bit of erasing to get it just right. And then when I'm happy with it, I'll flatten it back down. So again, they are temporary layers. And really the only utility they give me is more fine grain control. And then once I don't need it anymore, I flatten them back down into the stack. But all those things I've just described are purely technical. As in if you follow those steps, you can understand what I'm doing in Photoshop. But the really important takeaway from all this, I think, is the sort of mental aspect of starting loose and rough and then moving to progressively finer and slower. So let's just talk about why I'm placing the lines, where I'm placing them. Because if you notice those large underlying blueprint lines are not exactly where my tight lines are. Essentially I have a big mess of overlapping lines that we made in the previous phase. And now I get to pick one of them. If I have a big fat stroke, maybe I'll choose the very edge of it to define with my careful finished line work. If you remember from the last video, I talked about the idea of happy accidents. One way to describe that would be, as these lines start to overlap and create this big jumble, you almost see optical illusions. As you're making that initial rough sketch, you may have created intersections or sort of overlaps that end up looking really cool. You didn't do intentionally, they just sort of happened. They were happy accidents. And now that you're going and carefully picking out edges that look nice and then defining them with a hard line, it's an opportunity to take advantage of those happy accidents and to sort of take ownership to claim that intersection or that edge as your intended final edge. Now, in the case of this drawing, I actually did a third pass. So here on these final black lines, I'm drawing even slower and you'll notice I'm zoomed in really far. This is something I would advise against if you are in the earlier phases. If you're doing your thumbnail, for instance, being zoomed in this far would lead to really bad proportional issues. But since I've solved all those problems in the earlier phases, now I can be confident that the drawing is locked down. I am happy with where everything is placed and now it's just about making those neat details. So here's where I start thinking about things like line weight. We talked about this in a previous video where you can use a thicker line to indicate a little bit of shadow or you could use a thicker line to indicate the outer contour of an image. And then you can use thinner lines to do smaller details or to do areas that are lighter weight or that are being hit by a light source. So as you might imagine, this is slow. I'm not going to finish this part of the drawing in our five minute video. But that's just how it goes. You know, we are finishing the drawing at this point. And really, we're saving time because of the steps we took before this careful slope part. So if you want to see how to take these exact same ideas, but to apply them to a dragon which does not have reference, stick around for next week and we'll finish up our little mini series. Thanks for coming to the site, guys. Have fun drawing.