If I was only allowed to talk about one topic to a beginner digital painter, this would be it. Form, value, and light are truly the foundation of a painting education. If you want to know more about making your own custom brushes from scratch, make sure to check out the premium seriesBasic Photoshop Rendering.
This video shows me painting a loose still life, start to finish. All of the brushes are made using techniques found in the Custom Brush Design series - and have gritty, naturalistic texture.
If you're working to improve your painting, reference is a necessity. The question is not "should I paint from reference?" but rather "What reference makes most sense for this piece?" This video looks for painting reference in an unusual area: visual effects test renders.
If you're looking for the search terms mentioned in the video, here's a good starting point: Global Illumination (GI), Ambient Occlusion (AO), Caustics, Photons, VRay, Mental Ray, and Radiosity. Search any of those along with "test render", and you'll have some fun reference materials.
The anatomy reference was found at onlinelifedrawing.com
Custom brushes can be a wonderful time-saver for your digital painting workflow. Though they can be downloaded from the internet, the very best ones are those that you create from scratch. This premium series explores custom brush design including real world test-cases, and can only be found in the store.
Part 1 dealt with using custom brushes for their shape, and this video takes an opposite approach. Sometimes brushes need to be used in conjunction with other tools, like clipping masks, to get the most utility out of them.If you want to know more about making your own custom brushes from scratch, make sure to check out the premium series Custom Brush Design.
Custom brushes can be a challenge to use successfully. Digital painters often think of them in terms of traditional brushes: flat, bristle, fan - etc. To get the most out of Photoshop's custom brush engine, a digital painter needs to broaden their definition of 'brush'. This mini-series aims to shed some light on the unusual ways custom brushes can be manipulated in a painting workflow.
If you want to know more about making your own custom brushes from scratch, make sure to check out the premium seriesCustom Brush Design.
Feeling blocked up? Lacking motivation? Deciding what to draw can sometimes seem harder than actually drawing it. Hopefully this video will put the challenge in a different light, and get your stylus moving again.
Though color schemes like the one discussed in this video are not 'rules', they can be a nice way to help structure a painting. This time we'll move into a third basic color scheme, triads, and examine some great paintings by Tristan Elwell.
Sometimes making art feels like a long series of frustrating failures. The truth is that every artist feels this way some of the time. Your mindset can be a huge roadblock to artistic progress if you let it. Hopefully this video will give you a little perspective, and help remind you of the big picture.
Painting color can be done in one of two ways: direct and indirect. Indirect painting is the process of glazing colors on top of one another to achieve a slow build-up. Like traditional some oil painters, many digital painters prefer this method to working 'directly'. If you want to learn about going from a grayscale underpainting to a fully colored image, check out "Grayscale to Color" in the store.
The world of "Color Theory" can seem deep and confusing. This video will help break the ice by introducing two basic color schemes, and show their varried use in a digital painting. If you like the art in the video, make sure to check out Scott Robertson's website: http://cargocollective.com/drawthrough
This episode of the Principles of Design is all about dynamic compositions. The path your viewers' eyes follow though a painting is no accident, so make sure you're using it to your advantage! In truth, each Principle of Design is intended to help guide the viewer's eye, but "motion" is especially effective at this goal. Additionally, if you've been following the series I'm sad to report that the orcs are sitting this one out.
And make sure not to miss the other videos in the Principles of Design Series!
If you've been digital painting for long, odds are you use a stylus. Have you considered what grip you're using? This video will introduce a new hand position, and encourage you to give some thought to the way you grip a stylus.
Creating a "tiling" texture is a very useful skill for digital painters. This video introduces the basic concepts, and shows how a simple photographic tile can add gritty texture to a brush. This is a technique generally reserved for Texture Artists working in video games, but I've found it to be a versatile skill for illustration in general.
Reader Etheryte is kind enough to show alternative tiling texture technique in this video.
The way the stylus lays down marks in photoshop has a certain 'feel' to it; in the same way that you could say painting with a brush has a different feel than drawing with a pencil. Unlike these traditional tools, you can customize the way your stylus 'feels'. Do you have a soft or a light touch? This video expolres both the Wacom Tablet Properties, as well as 3rd party software designed to customize the stylus experience.
Update 1/29/2012: Apparently the newest Intuos 4 drivers have addressed this issue! Make sure to get the newest drivers if you have an intuos 4.
And reader Dado Almeida brings up a crucial point about tablet wear & tear:
"[This is] really important stuff to know if you deal with a Wacom stylus in the daily basis. Using a hard grip, for months, in the same spot of your Tablet surface could dameage the cover plastic faster. Have you noticed how the center area of our Tablets are more scratched? To make my experience with the Wacom smoother I´m using this tool + a protection plastic (those used in the iPad screens) to cover my little Intuos. This way I can change the cover from time to time without any damage in the original surface."
And, as a reminder, this is unofficial software. It might not give you the results you're looking for. If you have a problem using it - or it screws something up - you can restore the factory defaults by re-installing the Wacom drivers. Good luck, and have fun!
Choosing a few pieces of art to represent yourself is a challenge. What pieces should you include?This video considers the challenge in terms of your end goal, and the person reviewing your work. Like it or not, the portfolio you choose to present to the world says a lot about you, and can have a big impact on your art career.
As you practice traditional drawing, you'll want to indicate a light source and cast shadows. Though shadows can be rendered in a variety of ways, crosshatching is a great way to quickly build up tone and volume with a pencil.
The human head is a challenging subject to capture. Especially when drawn from the imagination, the head is an extremely complex shape. This video explains a simplification approach in which the organic forms of the head can be envisioned as simplified planes: a planar analysys. Many illustrators and painters have their own forumlas and methods of simplifying the head, so please tell use your favorite resources in the comments!
This video introduces the concepts of scale and proportion: two spatial relationships that will help organize your composition. Scale deals with the measurable size of an object. Proportion, on the other hand, deals with the size of an object relative to those things around it. Proportion can also be used to compare parts of a whole, for example: my thumb is wider than my middle finger. As you'll see in the video, scale and proportion can help anchor the image in reality and express a sense of depth to the viewer.
To download the orcs, click here!
"Realistic painting" often means "realistic surfaces". If you want to improve the level of realistic detail in your paintings, this premium video (available in the store) is for you. It deals with two primary methods for adding detail: by hand with custom brushes, and with photo overlays. These methods are described in a very versatile way, and will work for any sort of illustration or concept art.