Digital Painting Tutorial

There are many different ways and techniques to digitally paint - its all to do with what you’re comfortable with and suits your style of working. Traditional styles of painting using layering acrylics and oils have also influenced me. In this tutorial I’ve just explained what and how I’ve created this painting with screen captures to illustrate it.

Preparing the line art/sketch

I find it easiest to digitally paint if I have a scanned in sketch to work from. I clean it up fist by adjusting the brightness and contrast and erasing bits where necessary. Then I layer it from he background and set the layer to Multiply. The image still looked too faint so I duplicated the layer then merged them. Now the line art is ready I move onto the colour scheme.

Colour Scheme and Texture

On the background layers I used the paint bucket to find a colour I think suits the picture. Once decided I begin painting in rough patches of colour using large textured brushes as seen in the brush palette. All the brushes I’ve collected have been included with Photoshop magazine CDs or downloaded free of the Internet.

When digitally painting, I think of it as if I was tradionally painting onto a canvas. Start by laying in large patches of colour and build up the detail, shading and textures as you go along. I nearly always have the brushes I’m using set to other dynamics> opacity jitter > pen pressure. This means brush strokes are sensitive to the tablet pen’s pressure and give a more natural look to the painting as the colour is built up.

Base colour

It is possible to create a digital painting by painting onto the same layer but it makes life much easier to use layers for different areas of colour. So I create a new layer and started to lay down the girls skin. It doesn’t matter if it’s exactly within the lines or not as it will be tidied up later.

I do the same for the hair and making sure the layer is set above the skin. When painting hair I use strong, confident sweeps with hard brushes set on shape dynamics so the stroke thickness will vary.

I lock the transparency of these layers for now so I can experiment by laying down different colours for the hair and skin until I’m happy. When adding the first blocks of shade, I keep the transparency on but when adding final touches I turn it off.

The dragon has a lot of detail so it’s easier to use the pen tool to create a path around it. Once I’ve finished I go to paths and turn it into a selection then fill the selection on a new layer. I then hide the dragon path layer in case I need to use it or make shape changes later on.

Light and shade

Now the areas of colour are filled in on separate layers, I begin adding shade, depth and more colour. Before doing so I put a layer above all the others and sketch in the light source and where the dark and light areas will be. I will keep this hidden while painting and only refer to it when unsure of where to add light and dark.

Dragon

I don’t paint in each individual scale of the dragon but instead use crosshatch shading and small marks to add a scale like texture and continue to build this up using darker reds and browns for shadows and some oranges for highlights.

Skin

The shading on the skin needs to also help form the face. Its easiest to use the lasso tool to mark out the nose, cheeks bones and eye socket areas of shade. I then go over using a soft yet textured brush with peachy and rosy colours. I use subtle purples with a brush set on multiply and low opacity to define shadows on the face and warm pale yellow for the highlights. I try to avoid using pure black and white or just darker and lighter shades of the same colour. Using contrasting colours such as purple and yellow makes the image more vibrant and lively.

Corrections

As I was painting I noticed the girl’s face looked a bit skewed so I flipped the canvas to fix it. I used the selection tool and dragged the eyes and eyebrow down so they looked right. I also erased and sketched in some of the nose and cheeks. When satisfied with I flipped it back over.

Erasing the line art

As I paint along I find the line art is covering areas and making the picture look messy. I don’t want to erase it all but only where necessary such as the face and hair. I also adjust its hue and saturation so its fainter.

Hair

I had already blocked in the dark areas to the hair but now the line art is erased I began tidying it up. I go over with a small, hard brush with the shape dynamic set on until I have a multitude of tones and realistic texture in the hair. It looks quite blocky and scratchy though I use the smudge tool on 83% with a set of “hair” brushes. These leave a hair strand like effect when dragged through.

Detail

The picture still looks flat at this point so I begin going round it adding detail and more texture. As I paint the detail in I erase more and more the line art. For the dragon I create a layer above it and begin making very small strokes with a warm yellow and dark red. These small sharp, hard strokes make him look hard, shiny and scaly. So they blended nicely with the dragon, I used a slight gaussian blur.

Fading

I decided the girls hair needed to fade to the background a little. To do this smoothly I used the lasso to select the area, then right clicked > feather > 50. Then with the area still selected use a large, soft, low opacity erasing brush to fade the hair. The feathered edge means it fades gradually.

Smoke

As can be seen on my layers palette, I created a few layers for the smoke. The base smoke layers are for the basic smoke shape of it behind the dragon. The highlight layer is on a lower opacity but has wisps that wrap around and over the dragon. I use a more textured, fluffy brush the default Faux Finish Photoshop brushes for the smoke. I also add a layer for darker areas of smoke and another for more highlights. This took a lot of time just experimenting and playing around with until I felt it looked right.

Background

The background looks a bit bland so I use some grunge style brushes set on colour burn to add some texture. I adjust the colour balance and levels so it suits the colour scheme of warm reds an golden yellows more.

Layer effects

To liven the hair up, I used the spectrum gradient overlay set on hue on a low opacity. So the hair stood out from the background a little more, I used a small drop shadow effect. A subtle outer glow was used on the dragon.

Flattening

Now that I am happy with all the shading and effects, I flatten the image and save it as a different file (dragon flat.psd) in case I need to return to adjust individual layers later. Now that is flattened I flip the canvas to check for any mistakes and adjust the colour balance, levels and shadow/highlights.

Smoke definition

I add a layer above the flattened image and with a hard, shape dynamic brush, draw in shapes to define the smoke. As these look to harsh and out of place I soften and blend them using the smudge tool and adjust the layer’s opacity.

Final highlights

I use a low opacity, colour dodge brush to add really glowing highlights to the hair, lips, eye lids, dragon and smoke. I use a blurred gradient layer above set on hue to add some colour to the smoke.

Please do not reproduce this. It is copyrighted to psdmag.

Please contact me at art@mairperkins.co.uk