PrismaKind Design

Having their ninpo won them the battle with Shredder, “fixed” Karai’s death, and it’s kind of like her last gift to them. Nothing could hurt them now.

Leo worked so hard to master his portals. There were multiple episodes about him being bad at it, how that rattled his confidence. He was finally confident in his portals, (his quick fight with Prime in this scene??? Hello???), so surely he could do anything now.

This scene could easily be Leo just. being Leo. But he's carrying himself with a confidence that he didn't have before, not this deeply. A façade of the narrative he's crafted to cope. He's convinced himself that because they've worked so hard, trained, have their powers, and defeated their biggest enemy, nothing could touch them. He's bargaining.

Their fight with Shredder deeply impacted all of them, even if we don't see it. Losing Karai, nearly losing their dad, etc. they're all a little rattled. Raph spent the entire first half of movie trying to teach Leo the lesson he learned that day: work together, rely on each other, you have your family.

Raph learning this lesson is what awoke their ninpo the first time. It’s why he’s being so strict about it. I’d be pissed too if I finally learned I could rely on my family just for one of them to act like this massive trauma didn’t hurt.

Raph is acutely aware that Leo doesn't understand what he learned that day. He makes as such obvious. Because, unintentionally, Leo throws it in his face. Raph thought he didn't have to carry it alone anymore, but Leo isn't listening. And that didn't matter before, when Raph thought the responsibility was all his, but not only is Leo the leader now, but he wasn't supposed to do it alone anymore.

And Leo throws that in his face. Because Leo thinks Raph doesn't trust him (more on this later), he doesn't realize Raph is hurting. It's not about him.

To finish off the scene, it's Leo's failure to listen and Leo's ninpo that ruins the mission. Their lack of teamwork. On a more symbolic level, their lack of trust. It's Leo literally cutting Raph off before he can reach him.

Another detail I wanna point out is it was Raph to pull Leo away from Karai. He knows Leo was affected by her death. He thought that if he spelled it out for him, he’d finally listen and take this serious; it’s not a game anymore, hasn’t been for a long time. Especially now that the Foot Clan is involved, possibly for the first time since Shedder. I think that’s why Raph is so calm in their argument (until he, rightfully, isn’t).

Leo mocks his stress, so Raph repeats his point. Raph has taken responsibility back. He's placed the weight of all of their lives back on himself, he was supposed to have his family to help him, he wasn't supposed to be alone anymore, (how much heavier does a weight feel when you were free for it for just a moment?) until Leo can get his act together.

But Leo doesn't get it. He think's Raph doesn't trust him. Leo's projecting insecurities he's developed onto him, isn't hearing what Raph is saying. And Raph is frustrated. After everything, you can't take the risk of one of us dying seriously? (He does, it terrifies him, so he makes up a world where that can never happen again.)

It's not that Leo doesn't take the Foot Clan seriously (Warren and Hypno, no. He doesn't think they're threats. Not in the same way.) I’m a firm believer Leo was being serious in this scene. He was doing his typical quip at the beginning, but once the fight starts he doesn't have another one.

He understands the threat here. He does something similar when fighting Krang Prime later on, "Suprise!", "If this isn't the poster shot...", etc. Don't get me wrong, Leo has been insensitive and more than a bit insufferable this entire time, but to his credit he’s listening to Casey here, it’s why he goes for the key in the first place.

But at this point it doesn't matter. Raph is fed up with him and hurt by Leo's actions thus far. You can see Leo considering his options because he doesn't trust Raph's call here (Raph is scared. Raph is responsible for all of them. Dad is hurt.)

Leo makes his decision. The narrative was shattered the second they lost their ninpo, that Splinter got hurt (which Leo doesn't have a very overt reaction to, like he's trying to ignore it). But Leo does understand this threat and goes after the key. He just didn't realize how seriously Raph takes protecting him, that he'd give up his own life to do so (he think's Raph's mad at him, doesn't trust him, that he got in the pod).

(Raph stays to protect him because that's his baby brother and even if he's being a bit of an ass, he'll die to protect him. He looks at him with nothing but love and concern as he places him in that pod.)

Even after this Leo immediately crafts a new narrative: it's CJ's fault. If he hadn't gone after the key, this wouldn't have happened (the whole reason he went after the key was because he trusted CJ's judgement, everything shifts when Raph gets captured).

They lost their safety net, Leo takes a couple tries to try and get around that, but he can't. So, he finds another. CJ said he's the greatest ninja of all time, so he can do this. Raph might not like how he does things, but he was good in the future, so he can do this.

Then that narrative is shattered too. Leo has to confront his fears and not only accept that he has to do it, but he alone can't fix it. He thought that if they just trusted him things would be okay, but he needs to listen to them, to be responsible for them, he can't lose them. The thought terrifies him. It's here that Leo earns the trust he was asking for.

Their ninpo is their connection to each other. Their trust in each other is at an all time low even before the Krang showed up. Donnie and Mikey are affected by Raph and Leo's arguing, and honestly I think Donnie is also a little fed up with Leo. Not as much, but I digress.

Donnie and Raph discussed the escape pods at some point. Either Donnie thought of them or, if they were Raph's/a mutual idea, agreed that they were necessary. He's also coping with some fake confidence, pretty typical for Donnie, see above with him going along with Leo's four shell joke, as well as trying to keep the peace between them and trying not to take sides.

Mikey has faith in his brothers, is willing to call out when they're being unreasonable ("we don't have a plan!"), but he's mostly waiting for everyone to start trusting each other again and is relatively passive in everything.

Donnie fights the most with Leo after Raph is taken, but Leo's being stubborn and he eventually caves. "The world is ending and yet the barbs continue," could have been banter with some truth to it. Donnie (and Mikey, who Donnie spent the entire scene worried about) did almost die in the tunnels he explicitly told Leo was a bad idea. He's frustrated, too, but Leo's able to win him back. I hit the image limit but he's pretty annoyed and cynical about their future for majority of the rooftop scene.

Donnie was the one who almost died when they first faced Shredder. At this point, he's the one who's come closest with death (I think). The only exception is Leo when thrown off the roof, but he was saved by Raph's ninpo.

But Leo's figured it out, and he's able to regain their trust. He's listening, and he wants to reunite them instead of pushing and lashing out. He doesn't want to fight anymore. He gets it, displays his own vulnerability. He might not be able to save them from this, protect them. He could have kept fighting, but he's willing to die for Raph to know that he understands.

I think this insecurity is coming from a genuine place, Splinter's distrust. But that wasn't about him either, it was about Splinter's trauma and fear of Big Mama. That he was placed in the Nexus, a place he spent years being forced to fight, when he swore to never harm another creature. Leo's felt, for a long time, that his team didn't trust him so he has to beg for it. And there was a time they didn't.

But he forgot that he earned Raph's trust, Splinter's too. He thought Raph was mad at him. So he kept acting stupid and lost the trust he had earned because he kept projecting this insecurity onto them, because he didn't listen and assumed Raph just. didn't trust him to be a good hero. It wasn't about him.

It was about what Raph was going through, what Raph needed from him. Leo finally understanding everything Raph was going through, from the pressure of being leader to learning to have faith in his team, is what awoke it the second time. It meant so much to Raph because of how much Leo’s attitude was hurting him. It was Raph’s ninpo that awoke first, not Leo’s, because he didn't have to carry everything alone again. They're able to rely on each other.

First:

We decide a light source:

For this piece, I chose above and slightly to his right (my left). It’s the angle I use most often and it’s fairly simple.

Second:

We start shading using hard and soft edges.

To begin, we first make a new Multiply layer directly on to of the color layer and clip it (So nothing drawn outside of the edge of the flats of the Color layer shows up on the Multiply layer):

Now let me introduce you to the lasso tool:

Idc what's been said about diamonds; the lasso tool is a girl’s best friend. Crank stabilization WAY up and you’re GOLDEN.

We’ll use the lasso tool to get the sharp and soft edges we need for rendering. You CAN use exclusively sharp like they do in cartoons to make animating easier and more cohesive frame to frame:

And this looks great! You can definitely go with this; cel shading is a very popular choice and it always looks very clean. But if you want something with a little more depth, you use sharp AND soft edges. Because light and shadow in real life often start sharp and then bleed into softer edges.

When you use the lasso tool, it allows for sharp edges along where you’ve selected and softer edges inside the selection.

We'll use Leo’s browridges as an example:

On the Multiply layer, make a selection following the shape of the underside of Leo’s brows. 

Then, get an airbrush tool. I used magenta just because I like how it looks when it’s multiplied on different colors. It’s not as saturated when multiplied, but still vibrant enough to add a little interest to the shading. You can pick a different color, but mostly I would encourage you to just not use black or grey; those make things look washed out and muddy. (Black and grey work great for monochromatic pieces ofc haha).

With the airbrush tool, lightly shade the UPPER part of the selection. The light is casting DOWN on Leo, so it would be darkest starting directly on the underside of his brows and slowly fading as the shadow reached the bridge of his “nose”/beak.

Then we’ll shade the side of his head. Follow the shape of the side of his face and toward the crown of his head. Shade heavily at the bottom and lighter at the top. This will give Leo’s head over all more volume. Think of it in terms of a cube:

Objects and people are made up of “planes.” Depending on which plane is facing away from the light, that is the one that gets shaded the most. But there are also areas on the head that "slope" more gently into other planes, so don't shade those edges as sharply; leave room in your selections for those areas so the airbrush can fade naturally.

Now those were basically examples of cast shadows and form shadows. Cast shadows being the shadows that come FROM a protrusion, starting sharp and feathering out, and form shadows being the shadows that cling to the SIDE of the protrusion, gradually darkening until you reach the edge of the subject matter.

Here’s another example of a cast shadow:

In this case, I'm shaping my lasso to be closer to the underside of his chin on his RIGHT side than his left. So when I used the airbrush, it hits that angle and gives the cast shadow a sharper edge CLOSER to where it starts, and then as it moves away from the light sources, I've left room for the airbrush to do what airbrushes to best and get softer.

Here’s another example of a FORM shadow:

In this case, I'm mostly guiding where the shadow ends by the edge of his arm (selecting AROUND his plastron which sits in front). Then the shadow “starts” where the light would start to fade. 

Another way I shade is by taking a smaller paint brush and painting along the edges of shallower protrusions, as you can see with Leo’s lip and mask tails. I use this when the shadow is going to be too thin to justify taking the painstaking time to lasso the edge.

Third:

Lighting. Ngl I get pretty lazy with this one most of the time haha

Remember that cube from before? Well the front and top planes are much lighter than the side one, BUT the top one is lighter than the front. The lightsource for that cube is coming more from the top.

For Leo, we’re going to lighten his “top planes” (I know I drew the light source more to the side just ignore that haha):

We’ll start by adding an Add (Glow) layer on top of both the Color and Multiply layer and ALSO setting it to clipping:

(ignore that I have yet to name the layer, I definitely got very sloppy for this tutorial haha)

Then we airbrush some light on top of Leo's beak/cheeks and his scalp, making it lighter towards his right (my left)

Here is how his completed Light and Shading Rendering looks with all the color stripped away. You can check this easily by making a new NORMAL layer on top of your colors and bucket filling the whole thing with one color (I go with grey). Then you turn on the handy-dandy clipping tool and voilà! The shape of the color layer stays while being completely desaturated for your reference.

Fourth:

Now it’s time to give him a little pop with bounce lighting!

I usually don’t put much time into bounce lighting, but just a little bit adds SO much.

First we add an Add (Glow) clipping layer on top of all of our previous ones so far.

Then we just airbrush a little color to the very darkest and farthest-from-the-light edges of his shading. For the bounce lighting's hue, I usually pick the opposite end of the spectrum to the lighting color. Baby blue in this case :)

If you want to do more of a second light source instead of bounce lighting, do it the same way you would source lighting but from a different angle and with a different color.

Side note:

Now, I’m not going to go into excruciating detail about how I rendered EVERY PART (this post was supposed to be “tips”, I’m already getting so carried away lol 😭). But another tip is to look up references. Especially face and muscle references. You may or may not have noticed, but Leo's bicep on the right side of the picture looks different in the original picture. That's because I still can't draw muscles entirely by memory, and couldn't figure out how to shade what I'd drawn. So I eventually looked up reference. Like I should have done in the first place XD I changed the shape and rendered according the references I'd pulled up.

And look up videos. I’ve learned so much from so many different art tutorials on YouTube. Get specific when searching for tutorials; in this case, you would look up videos on how to render and shade. There are so many other tutorials on other specific subjects too, like lineweight and dynamic poses and clothing, etc.

Fifth:

Add some finishing touches

REMEMBER TO FLIP YOUR CANVAS:

If there was only one thing I could ever impart to beginning artists, it would be USE YOUR MIRROR TOOL. If you're drawing traditionally, use an actual mirror, or hold your paper up to the light. And use it all throughout the drawing process, not just the end!

This way I was able to see not only if Leo was off balance or wonky in his design, but also in his rendering. In the picture above, I noticed his left side (right side when mirrored, my right when not– okay, y’know what? THE DARK SIDE. Let’s just call it that now. The dark side of the Leo XD) I noticed that his dark side wasn’t, well, dark enough. So I added a bit more shading with a giant airbrush and didn’t do any lasso-ing, just deepened the over all shadows on that side a little.

Then I played around with all the layer percentages until they were to my liking:

Highlights:

Add another layer on top of your lineart layer and use a white pen or pencil for this one!

Not everyone does highlights in the eyes, and that's totally cool, but you'd be surprised how much those little white dots really make a character's countenance pop and come to life. I just personally like them a lot :)

Then there are of course the parts of the characters outfit or accessories that need highlights: anything plastic or glass or metal, like blades, beads, belt buckles, jewelry, elaborate prosthetic arms, etc. just as random non-specific examples, y'know.

FILTERS YAYY:

For color grading, first I have to move all layers that make up the main drawing (Leo) into a single folder. Then I do a Color clipping layer on top of that folder and adjust the percentage to make all of his colors a little more cohesive.

And the I add a Noise Overlay layer (no clipping, I want the noise to show up on the background!) and play with the opacity to add a little bit of texture (one of my favorite “cheat” codes!)

Aaaand here he is all finished!!

There are so many other sources for different techniques and styles of rendering, this is just how I do it. But I do recommend learning from multiple sources and experimenting with different methods. Eventually, you'll start landing on something that works best for YOU and also achieves the look you want. There is no ‘right way’ to draw; you collect and create your own methods. I'm still developing my own methods and have grown a lot more in recent years thanks to things as simple (not easy, but simple) as studying the artists I like and practicing new and hard things.

And be patient with yourself! Drawings like these take time and LEARNING how to draw them also takes time! But you're already way ahead by being open to learn. By WANTING to learn. Keep learning always and forever. It's how you continue to grow. And I promise, no matter how fast or slow your development, you WILL see improvement over time.