Devout Pornist

Digital Painting/Drawing is one of the basis for those, who want to learn all of Photoshop's features and meanwhile to learn your Graphics Tablet.

Required: Graphics Tablet (Wacom or Trust)
Adobe Photoshop CS5 or any related Drawing software (SAI , Sketchbook)

Graphics tablet is an essential tool for Digital painting, it gives you pressure control and it makes your workflow overall better, it does things what a Mouse can't.

I will talk about few basic settings how to prepare your artwork.

Document resolution: 2187x2962 ; 240 dpi

This resolution is good balance for a beginner and for details as well. I have worked with 9000 pixels too, but all I can say is: "Too big mouthfull"

When you start working, always make a Sketch. It's usually made pretty fast and it doesn't have to perfect, sketch is mainly meant for setting up shadow / detail locations.

Sketch Brush Settings






Know to ?

Flow and Pressure

Pressure can be set in your Tablet's driver control panel. My Click pressure goes from 0-8 ; I have 2 selected.

Two most important settings are Flow and Pressure. Flow sets how much color comes out in a Brush stroke. The harder you press on a tablet, more color comes. Always have "Pen Pressure" selected or the Brush setting won't work. Pen Pressure can be simulated by using Pen Tool too, but Graphics Tablet Pen allows you to do it all the time.

Mixer Brush

Mixer Brush allows you to efficiently mix colors together, result is a more organic transition of colors.




Let's make a small test with the Mixer Brush and various tools.

Tools in this tutorial:

Mixer Brush, Brush, Smudge, Dodge, Burn


Open up Photoshop and make random sized document. (ex. 600x600)

Select a Regular Brush with a size of 35 px

Draw a shape that resembles short hair



Next, select Smudge Tool (located under Blur Tool) and use a 10 px Brush with 65 % Strength. Now this is where Pen Pressure comes to play, use Smudge to drag some funky looking hair lines, like I got in the image. Arrows show in which direction Smudge tool needs to be dragged

PS! This next step is best done with a Graphics Tablet



One of the most important tools to a Digital Painter are Burn and Dodge (both under quick command O). Burn allows to create darker areas and Dodge lighter areas. Now think through your hair's light source location, that way you can make the light spot on hair and shadows.

Making the Light Spot



Making shadows



After that is done, we use a tool called Mixer Brush. With that you can mix light and shadow together to make a smoother transition from light to shadow. It is important to notice that Mixer starts to mix from 1st color to 2nd color, creating something in between

Selecting Mixer Settings





Finally, Use Smudge tool again to drag some hair lines into the shadow areas



Now let's continue...

Digital Painting in my experience is a very long process mostly because of details, you have to constantly make color layer after color layer, I did a pretty long work recently. Im not making it into a tutorial yet, but I will try to explain simply on how the making of process goes.



First, you start a with a Sketch, this one took me around 30 min to make, I used Ariel Rebel as a reference. Then i went on to make the jean details. First I made the base color with 35% Flow. Once this was done, I used a darker blue color with a 55% Flow to make a new Color layer.

Overall it's a very painful process, but with patience and detail you can get it done in no time.

Here's my final result:



Flow is pretty essential for the smoothness of overall design. I never paint with 100% Flow, because it wouldn't be as smooth as it should it be. I use around 40 - 65 %, everything depends on you and your drawing hand skill.

If you want to know all Photoshop's features and be a true photoshop buff, try it out, it's totally worth a try.

My advice to fellow PS buff: when you start, reference from others, but don't copy them, and through references if you're good enough, you can invent your own style in composition or even in coloring . And once you got that style, don't stick to it for too long, improve it constantly, add something new every time, that makes you more diverse then you can think

Everyday I see those who stick to the same formula and don't go anywhere further, you have present challenges to yourself and be ahead of them