My painting “secrets”.
I can’t tell you how to paint digitally. My art idols have many different methods, and each of them is “right”. All I can do is tell you how I paint in Photoshop, using a graphics tablet. I won’t claim this is the true, right method. It’s just the one that I’ve developed over the years to get the results I want – all great things develop out of necessity – and it’s the one that works for me.
Okay, there is no such thing as secrets. But I’ve always been browsing for tutorials and information about how my idols paint, and tried out their methods, and lo and behold, some of them worked for me too! And I’m still learning.
So here we go. How I make a digital painting:
I have found that I make the best pictures when I’ve already sketched them in my mind. When I start a painting without any idea about how I want colors, composition, etc. to be, it gets frustrating because I try out many things without knowing what I want. It’s good to have a clear idea of your painting in your head, so you only have to “copy” that picture. It’s mostly the color scheme and mood I’m imagining first.
Looking at other people’s art has helped me tremendously being able to paint pictures in my mind. When you look at pictures often, you will have a big “vocabulary” that can help you make your own, unique phrases – in this case, pictures.
I always start with a colored canvas. The color of the canvas will be one that dominates the picture’s color scheme or contrasts with it (both can yield nice results).
This is better than starting with a white or black canvas, because it helps you choosing the right colors for your scene, and because you can paint both darker and lighter on it. So this is actually very important!
On that colored canvas, I make a sketch of everything – mostly a small concept sketch, no wider than 500 pixels. In that concept sketch, I try out my idea. I want to test if it actually works – composition, light, shadow, color, everything has to be there because this determinates the picture’s final outcome. Just very roughly sketched in.
(Had I lived in the 19th century, I’d have been a follower of Delacroix and his “color-is-most-important”-dogma, as opposed to Ingres who was convinced that line and drawing were crucial XD It’s a very old debate about what’s more important in a painting, line or color).
As soon as I feel it’s working, I make a quite exact line drawing on a bigger canvas (about 2000-3000 pixels wide) of the same color. The line drawing is done partly from reference photos and partly freehand; I try to get proportions and anatomy as correct as possible.
On a new layer, I block in all colors, light and shadow. Here in this very early sketchy stage I already try to determine all light and shadow and color composition, because as mentioned, they are very important! They cannot be taken care of too early.
To illustrate this: Some years back, I used to paint midtones only, then add highlights and shadows until the picture was finished. Now, on the contrary, I sketch all of those in, and everything else is simply refining and adding detail. I can spend a lot of time on that, because shading and highlight has been done already.
This requires of course some careful planning, especially in terms of light, shadow and composition.
Here is an example of a painting in this early stage:
Well, now everything is but refining and detailing. Folds in clothing, facial details, the background, clothes patterns… everything is worked out. Gradients are made more smooth, harsh edges of sketched-in shadows are broken up and dissolved where necessary. Touches of colors are added whereever they can enhance another color (especially when it comes to skintones). Anatomy and proportion errors are corrected. I often repaint some parts, big or small, whenever they don’t work the way they should.
The finished painting; about 10 hours later, looked like this:
BRUSHES:
- I always paint with the brush size and opacity set to the pen pressure of my graphics tablet (otherwise there would be no point in having a tablet). The three brushes I use most are: hard round, soft round and a bristle brush.
- I have a ton of other brushes too but those are not used often; only if I want to experiment with some ways how to make grungy or oil-painting-like surfaces or textures. Some I made myself, some are from other artists.
- Opacity is always set to 100%, the flow is mostly between 25% and 100%, depending on whether I want to paint soft, smooth edges or large, flat areas of color. Experiment with this – it’s fun!
- Sometimes I set the brush to the “soft light” mode; this will make the color darker and more saturated. But this shouldn’t be overused.
- Generally I can say that I paint with a rather light hand and often paint over the same area several times until I get the color I want. This also adds texture to a painting, as does erasing in a similar way.
The initial line drawing I erase more and more, as the painting advances. In the end, there will be no lines left – either they’ve been erased or painted over. Form has evolved from the lines through the means of color.
OTHER “TRICKS”:
- I always have two windows opened in Photoshop while painting: on the left, one window with a very big (original size) canvas – I can only see part of it, since it’s bigger than my monitor. On the right, I can see the whole canvas in a smaller view. This is great since it saves me the trouble of having to zoom in and out all the time. In Photoshop, you can open a new window of your painting if you select “Windows”–>”Document”—>”New Window” (depending on what version you use)
- I always have my finger over the “Alt” key while painting, because this gets you the color picker, much faster than having to click on it. I always need the color picker so I press on that “Alt” key pretty often.
- If you want to make soft gradients, you have to use more than just two colors! Paint the gradient color in between also – use the color picker to pick the color at the transition you’re trying to paint.
- I try to use as few layers as possible, since too many of them will make my computer go crazy. As for layers, less is more. Sometimes I can get along with only three layers: background, line drawing, colors. In general, I rarely ever use more than ten layers.
ON USING REFERENCE
- Definition of reference: Looking at something while painting a picture. Does not equal tracing, copying, or photomanipulation.
- To quote digital painter Lauren K. Cannon: “If you are using references correctly, you will learn far more from them in a finished work than from sketches. In a sketch, a reference is used “impressionistically”–only the surface information is taken from it. If you use a reference for a portion of a painting that is highly detailed, however, you learn a lot more because you are forcing yourself to process much more of the image’s information. This goes regardless of how closely you are referencing. And additionally, I think that no matter what you are painting, it is smart to have a photo of something similar nearby just to look at and check with – or even the real thing or a mirror. Can I paint a face, or clouds, without reference? Of course. But I dig through photos constantly when I paint to prevent stupid mistakes and to reinforce my knowledge of what I am painting. Any artist attempting to achieve realism, who has not mastered the basics (and I freely admit I have not) should be doing this. It’s no different than checking the spelling or meaning of a word when you’re writing an essay–it’s not cheating, it’s learning, even if the knowledge doesn’t immediately stick.”
“Faces are crucial to use references for. Not only to prevent repetitiveness of features, and this happens to all artists, professional and amateur alike. I have heard MANY professional artists who are able to work without references say that they have gone back to studying photos of people when they paint figures because they noticed that when they worked reference-free, all the faces looked the same.
If you know how eyes, lips, and noses look, you can paint a good face. But this isn’t true, because what makes a face believable and individual is the structure beneath it, and the areas of skin between the main features. The only way you’ll learn about that structure is to work from life or from photographs to study those details of the whole face. Saying you know how lips work isn’t really important everyone knows what lips look like, we see them every day! It’s not about knowing how they work, it’s about knowing how to apply that knowledge in the most through and believable manner. And the only way you do that is to study real lips as you work.”
“Of course, I’m not saying you should never do reference-less paintings and studies. They’re a good way to gauge how much you’ve learned. But that’s just it – they’re reflections of your skill, NOT a way to further your skill.”
(Thank you, Lauren, for this wonderful explanation!)
- Personally, I use reference constantly, because of the above mentioned reasons.