Introduction
Free Course! 10 steps to make any photo amazing: affinity.sale/10-steps
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Download the example photo: affinityrevolution.com/line-art-example-photo
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
In this tutorial, I'll show you how to use line art to make an invisible clothes effect in Affinity Photo.
This tutorial was inspired by a video done by one of my favorite Photoshop teachers: youtu.be/ztAA4nF7i3k
Content
Today I'll show you how to create invisible clothing using line art in affinity photo.
Let's get started if you'd like to follow along with me, I've left a download link for today's image in the video description.
The reason I chose this particular image is because there's a lot of detail to trace on the clothing.
The jean jacket has a lot of stitching buttons.
Little details like that.
That will really create beautiful line details as a bonus underneath the jean jacket.
We have a hoodie which has letters and this cool cat that we can trace I'll, use this image throughout the video, but be sure to stick around until the end of the video to see some other ideas of how to use this effect.
The first step to this technique is selecting the subject.
So, let's grab the selection brush tool, you can increase the size of the brush using the bracket keys on the keyboard and then go ahead and click and drag to select the subject.
If you ever select too much remember that you can always hold down alt or option on your keyboard and then click and drag over the area to remove from your selection.
Now that the selection is made, I'm going to press on the mask icon to remove the background, then I'll press command or control d to deselect.
The next step is adding the background for this particular effect, I'm going to add a solid color background, so I'll grab the rectangle tool and then I'll click and drag and I'll drag this underneath our subject at this point.
It's time to decide if we want the subject to be on a light or dark background, if we have him on a light background like this, when we trace the lines we'll make sure to trace in black so that the lines really stand out against the white.
However, I want to put him on a dark background, like a black background, so I'll be tracing my lines in white.
Now I don't want the background to already be purely black, because it might make it hard to trace the lines accurately.
So, instead, I'm still going to keep it dark, but I'm going to make it a color that isn't in this photo already.
So I'm choosing a nice dark green here so that we can better see our lines as we're tracing around the jacket.
So now it's time for the fun to start, we are going to trace our lines, select the top layer and then add a new pixel layer.
On top of that, this is the layer that we'll paint on top of then grab the paint brush tool.
There's a few settings to keep in mind make sure that your flow is set to 100 percent and that your hardness is around 80 percent.
Then I'm going to change the color of my paint brush to white use the bracket keys on your keyboard to adjust the size of your brush.
This might take a few tries to get the sizing right.
I think that looks a little thick, so I'll undo that okay, I think that looks good for this image, I'm using a paintbrush with a width of 9 pixels, so for this first step, we're just going to trace around the outside edges.
We're not worrying about the details like the buttons or stitching.
Quite yet so just go ahead and do a nice loose trace around the subject.
Don't worry about your trace being perfect, just try your best to follow the lines if you ever mess up, feel free to press command or control z to undo a line with the outside jacket traced, I'm going to go ahead and move on to the hoodie underneath I'll trace around the hand and then around to the bottom of the hoodie.
Then I'll come up to the top and trace around the hood, I'm not including the hat in this just the hoodie alright! So now you can see that I finished tracing around the outside edges.
Our next step is to shrink the size of our paintbrush and start working on the smaller details.
I'm going to press on the left bracket key three times to decrease the size slightly then I'm going to zoom in and start working on, some of the small details that I can see.
I think this effect looks good when you vary your paint brush size depending on the details you're working on, so the most important detail was the outer outline.
So I made sure to make my brush larger for that, and then I make it smaller and smaller as I get into the smaller details, we're going to do one more phase of this shrinking, but for now just go ahead and keep your paintbrush at this same size.
So right now, I'm tracing over the buttons, the buttonholes, the pockets and all of the stitching that I see to add in some nice details.
At this point I finished with the little details on the jacket and to see what this looks like.
You can turn off your subject layer and then you can just see the outline.
I think this looks really good.
So far, so now I'm going to move on to tracing around the details of the hoodie.
So I'm going to trace around these strings, then we'll move on to tracing around the letters and the cat.
So for these letters I'm not going to fill them in I'm just going to trace around the outer edges and don't stress too much about this being perfect.
This effect looks nice when there's a little bit of shakiness to the lines so that it looks hand drawn now for this cat tiger lion cat thing.
It's a little hard to see.
If I paint over this, the white paint kind of blends into the white cat so we're going to temporarily add an adjustment layer so that we can more easily see.
What's going on so I'm going to select my subject layer, then I'll go to our adjustments and I'm going to apply a recolor adjustment.
Then I'll make this nice and dark and it can be whatever color you want.
This is just temporary, selecting the pixel layer again now I can paint in white paint and more easily see what I'm doing so.
First, I'm just going to trace around the outside edges of the cat and now it's time for some creativity.
So there's a lot of details going on here and it would take a lot of time to trace out all of those details and I don't think it would look very recognizable as a cat.
So now we're going to do some simplifying of the shapes that we see here, starting with the eyes, I'm just going to trace out some lines like that for the eyes, then I'll draw three lines for the bridge of the nose and then I'll go ahead and trace over the nose next I'll trace around the curves under his nose I'll, add in these little fang teeth and then I'll trace around the tongue in the mouth.
Next, let's add a few more details up at the top I'm seeing some stripes up here.
This is probably a tiger, so I'll go ahead and trace those and then I'll go ahead and trace some whisker lines and I'll draw a little bit inside of his ears there, and now we can check in to see what this is looking like.
So far, I'll turn off our background layer and you can see that we have a nice shape.
That's resembling the cat that was already there, but it's a lot simpler.
You can go ahead and continue to add any details that you want.
I think I'm just going to round out the nose a little bit more, but I think that looks pretty good, so I'll leave it like that.
With that done, we can delete the recolor adjustment.
So here's what we have so far.
This looks really good.
I love all the details that I'm seeing here as our final step, we're going to decrease the size of our paintbrush one more time so go ahead and select the pixel layer again and then decrease the size of your paint brush using the left bracket key and I'll press that three times so now you can see we have a nice thin line and we're going to use this thin line to trace any wrinkles that we see.
We've already traced all of the little details, but there are little wrinkles here and there and I think, it'll, look nice just to add a little bit more detail with the wrinkles for the wrinkles on arms.
I usually like to give it a bit of a curve shape.
I think that looks pretty nice but feel free to also do some straight lines here and there, where you see curves and folds in the material, and you don't have to trace over every single wrinkle, but I do suggest doing quite a few of them to give some extra detail as I'm tracing here.
I realized that I missed a few areas on the hoodie there's this line right here, I'm going to make my brush size bigger again so that I can fill in those areas so I'll just increase my brush size by using the bracket keys three times and then I'll trace over this area and the pocket of the hoodie.
I was so focused on our cool cat.
I forgot about it so here we are tracing that little pouch pocket there and the bottom hem and now I'll go ahead and go back to my smaller brush by using the bracket keys again and I'll trace out a few of the wrinkles that we have down here all right.
I think this looks really good.
Here's what we have going on and you can see how all of those little lines just added some nice extra detail.
So now that we have this outline finished, we can go ahead and remove the clothing on the mask to make it invisible.
So I'm going to select the mask layer and then, with my paint brush still selected, I'm going to press d to turn our colors into the default black and white colors.
Then I'll increase my brush size and using black paint on this white mask here.
We're just going to remove everything.
That's within the lines that we just traced, you might want to use a smaller brush around the edges close to him.
If you accidentally paint too much, you can press x on your keyboard to switch your color back to white, and then you can add that back to the mask, so x is a really quick way to switch between your white and black colors, and it's very useful when painting on masks with that done.
The final step is to alter the background I painted in white paint with the intention of changing the background color to black.
So, let's see how that looks, I'll, select the rectangle layer and then select the move tool so that we can change the color, then I'll go ahead and make this black, and you can see how much that pops, the white ink on the black background, looks really good.
You could also, at this point, still put him on a light background.
We would just need to change the color of the outline, so I'll show you what that looks like.
If I change this to white, I could select the pixel layer and then we could add a recolor adjustment to change the color of these lines.
I'll just make this a child layer to that outline layer, and then we can go ahead and decrease the lightness slider and choose any color that we want, if you want it to be pure black, just lower the saturation all the way and lower the lightness all the way, but this is kind of a fun easy way to just see how other colors would look to finish off the video.
I want to show you a few other examples of how to use this effect.
For example, you could outline simpler pieces of clothing for a cleaner look, which is a lot easier to do than the jacket that we used in this video.
You could also do this effect with objects.
After I outlined this old tv, I used the clone brush to fill in the background behind it.
I also used the clone brush to fill in this flowers background which, I think looks really nice.
There's a lot to play with here so be creative.
With this effect, thanks for watching my friends and I'll, see you in the next affinity revolution tutorial.
