7Creation Graphic Design Competition Community Tutorial - Charis Loke

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7Creation Graphic Design Competition Community Tutorial

Digital Painting For Beginners

By Charis Loke


Source : Digital Painting For Beginners This tutorial assumes that you have a basic knowledge of how Adobe Photoshop functions as in basic brushing etc - that's all you need to know for now. Digital painting is much easier with a tablet than mouse, but you will find yourself using both at times. Trying to draw a curve with a mouse will prove rather tricky (not to mention frustrating as well).
	First up, and introduction to the Brush tool - obviously our best friend here for digital painting. It's available from the Tools bar as own on the left, and by pressing F5 you can bring up the Brushes window. It is where you can choose your brush tip shape, shape dynamics and other settings for your brush. When the Brush tool is selected, you will also see something like the following appear in the current tool bar:

I'll explain the tool bar very briefly. Brush Presets is where you choose preset settings for your brush, for example the Airbrush preset which mimics a real-life airbrush. You can also change the brush tip here, the mode, opacity, flow and airbrush option (which means if you hold your brush against a certain part of the canvas the colour keeps cumulating, like an airbrush). Make a few strokes and experiment with the opacity and flow sliders. I used the preset Airbrush setting for the example on the right.
Now it's time to play around with the more advanced brush settings in the Brush window. Enable Shape Dynamics by checking the box beside it and choose Pen Pressure. If you don't have a tablet a warning icon will appear beside the drop-down menu. Make a few strokes, then enable 'Other Dynamics' and choose 'Pen Pressure' like before for the Opacity or Flow Jitter. Change the Hardness of the brush, try Dual Brushing, play around with the spacing...you have to discover for yourself how each individual setting works with your style.


	From what I've seen, there are two main styles to approaching painting. One is sketching out the outline either in Photoshop or on paper first before laying down the 'flat' colours, and the other is to just start painting immediately. Personally I prefer sketching first to get an idea of the overall painting. After doing a rough sketch, let's choose our colour palette. This can be easily done by choosing a basic brush, and blocking in the colours of choice into a separate layer. TIP: To avoid continuously having to change brush settings, I save a few presets for my common use, like a sketching brush, colour blocking brush etc. You can do so by choosing your settings, then going to the brush tool bar and choosing New Tool Preset.
Next, make sure you have your light source defined to have realistic shading. Set the layer of your sketch to the 'Multiply' mode, create a new layer underneath it and name it 'flats'. This will be the layer we do our colour blocking on. Choose a fairly large brush and put in the basic colours. I have not done any real shading yet, just defining the main areas of our painting. You can choose to do the next step either on the same layer or a new one. Add the highlight colours, thinking about how the light would fall on the object (in this case an orange). You can begin 'blending' the colours in now. There are a few ways to do this:- -The Smudge tool -Gaussian blur filter -Blending with the brush. I have used the Smudge tool for this painting. Stroke it in a few directions, as shown by the arrows. Now the painting does not have much detail, so we'll need to look into that.
	Using a brush with Pen Pressure selected as the Flow, Opacity and Size Jitter, I set it to Multiply mode and first drew the veins on the leaves, using a moderate green colour. Then I added speckles to the orange. Keep on adding highlights and shadows, sometimes going over the picture with a big airbrush to add toning. I got a lot of speckles done without ruining my wrist by setting the Scattering setting to 1000% and stroking the orange. Now choose some other colours, like light blue, and go over the painting very lightly to add some colour depth. Remember the orange is slightly reflective, so some of the green from the leaves would also be on the orange. Oh yes! I forgot to tell you that along the way I merged the sketch layer with the colour layer. :)
	Here I have added blue and green to the shadow, erased off some of the protruding sketch lines and fixed some things. Finally, I duplicated the painting, set the duplicate layer blending mode to Multiply and lowered the opacity to 75%. This gives us more intense colours, but the orange is not exactly orange now; in fact the leaves make it look like an apple. Sigh. An apple it is then. I adjust the Hue of the top layer and we get a nice apple. Add some drops of water and we're done. Of course that was just meant to show you how a painting can sometimes turn into something unexpected. Our orange is still an orange after all, when some adjustment is made. Hurray! ;)