Digital Painting
What is a digital painting?
Digital painting is a new medium that lets us create beautiful artwork, without the messiness of painting with inks or oils. It still requires many of the same skills and techniques as traditional painting, but it’s also easier in many ways.
The only things you need to get started with digital painting are a graphics (drawing) tablet, and Photoshop or painting software of your choice. If you do not have a graphics (drawing) tablet, you can always attempt with your mouse/trackpad, but it won’t be as easy and intuitive.
Photoshop Alternatives for Digital Painting
Krita
Price: Free!
Krita is a free and open-source alternative to Adobe Photoshop. It’s not quite as powerful, though it’s certainly good enough to get started if you’re on a limited budget. Just be aware that you won’t find as much training on it online, and if you want to one day work professionally in an in-house studio or agency, you may need to eventually switch to Adobe Photoshop.
> Click HERE to download for free Links to an external site.
Procreate
Price: $9.99 (one-time payment)
Procreate has been taking the art world by storm in the last few years. It’s very light-weight and easy to use, and while it’s lacking some of Photoshops features, more are being added to it all the time. Unfortunately it’s currently only available for iPad.
> Click HERE to Get Procreate Links to an external site.
How do you paint digitally in Photoshop?
Review Photoshop Painting Tools:
Brush Tool(B): Paints custom brush strokes.
Pencil Tool(B): Paints hard-edged brush strokes.
Gradient Tool (G): Creates gradual blend between colors.
Paint Bucket Tool(G): Fills similarly colors contiguous areas with the foreground color.
Advanced Brush Tips
1. Select a painting, and click the Brush pop‑up menu in the options bar.
2. Select a brush.
3. Change options for the preset brush:
Diameter: Temporarily changes the brush size. Drag the slider or enter a value. If the brush has a dual tip, both the primary and dual brush tips are scaled.
Use Sample Size: Uses the original diameter of the brush tip if the brush tip shape is based on a sample. (Not available for round brushes.)
Hardness: (Available only for round and square brushes.) Temporarily changes the amount of anti-aliasing for the brush tool. At 100%, the brush tool paints with the hardest brush tip, but is still anti-aliased. The Pencil always paints a hard edge that is not anti-aliased.
Import brushes and Brush Packs
You can import a wide variety of free and purchased brushes—for example, Kyle's Photoshop brush packs— into Photoshop. Follow these steps:
1. In the Brushes panel, from the flyout menu, choose Get More Brushes. Alternatively, right-click a brush listed in the Brushes panel and select Get More Brushes from the contextual menu.
2. Download a brush pack. For example, download Kyle's “Megapack".
3. With Photoshop running, double-click the downloaded ABR file.
4. The brushes you added are now displayed in the Brushes panel.
Mixer Brush
The Mixer Brush simulates realistic painting techniques such as mixing colors on the canvas, combining colors on a brush, and varying paint wetness across a stroke.
The Mixer Brush has two paint wells, a reservoir and a pickup. The reservoir stores the final color deposited onto the canvas and has more paint capacity. The pickup well receives paint only from the canvas; its contents are continuously mixed with canvas colors.
1. Select the Mixer Brush tool . (If necessary, click and hold the standard Brush tool to reveal the Mixer Brush.)
2. To load paint into the reservoir, Alt-click (Windows) or Option-click (Mac OS) the canvas. Or, choose a foreground color.
3. Choose a brush from the Brush Presets panel.
4. In the options bar, set tool options. For common options, review the Paint tool options. For options unique to the Mixer Brush, see the following:
Current Brush Load Swatch: From the pop-up panel, click Load Brush to fill the brush with the reservoir color, or Clean Brush to remove paint from the brush. To perform these tasks after each stroke, select the automatic Load or Clean options.
Preset Pop-up Menu: Applies popular combinations of Wet, Load, and Mix settings.
Wet: Controls how much paint the brush picks up from the canvas. Higher settings produce longer paint streaks.
Load: Specifies the amount of paint loaded in the reservoir. At low load rates, paint strokes dry out more quickly.
Mix: Controls the ratio of canvas paint to reservoir paint. At 100%, all paint is picked up from the canvas; at 0%, all paint comes from the reservoir. (The Wet setting, however, continues to determine how paints mix on the canvas.)
Sample All Layers: Picks up canvas color from all visible layers.
5. Do one or more of the following:
A. Drag in the image to paint.
B. To draw a straight line, click a starting point in the image. Then hold down Shift, and click an ending point.
C. When using the Brush tool as an airbrush, hold down the mouse button without dragging to build up color.
Watch this Video on How to Create a Digital Painting
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LU7cL7KySSE&feature=emb_logo
Links to an external site.