Digital Painting: A Basic Runthrough (Part 2 is up!)

Nyil · September 20, 2011, 12:56:43 AM

So, digital painting is one of my favorite things to do in Photoshop now that I've actually got it figured out. Because I wasted lots of time learning basics of how to do this, I figured I'd post up a tutorial that answers the questions I had problems with at first, in the hopes that it might help an aspiring digital painter. So before I begin, I might as well throw up the final image so people can have a good look at the style I'm going to be running through:

(Full sized image can be found here: http://www.furaffinity.net/view/6526848)
(links to larger images for everything can be found at the end of this post)

What You'll Need:
Adobe Photoshop (I use CS5.5)
A tablet with pressure sensitivity (I have a Wacom intous4 "small')

The canvas size I'm using is a 9x11 inch canvas, at 500 DPI.

Before I get started on the rough sketch, I would like to go over some basics with the brush settings, since this is something we'll be playing with a lot in this little painting. The first is brush hardness - hard brushes have a hard edge and are used for edges and places where definite lines are necessary. The brush tool can be adjusted not only in terms of size, but also in Opacity, which makes the brush more translucent. Brushes with a lower opacity take more strokes to fill in a space with all of their color, and it is a wonderful technique to use low opacity brushes for a painterly effect.
So, here are my brush settings for the sketch:

Note that I'm using a hard brush at a medium opacity - this is so that i can trace over lines I want to keep, and more efficiently ignore lines I don't really care for in the sketch.

Step 1:

After getting an idea for what I want done, I start to sketch. If you were looking for a how to sketch tutorial, I'm sorry, but this is actually my one and only step, I tend to freehand on sketches. (I might do a basic drawing tutorial later for anyone who requests it)
This step isn't very exciting, but I should point out that the pose should be fluid and accepting of shadow - what I mean is that you should probably already have an -idea- of how anatomy and posing works. Digital painting doesn't bring much to stick figures. At least to me - if you want to prove me wrong, by all means, go ahead, I'd really love to see a really well done painted stick figure.
This step should also have most, if not all, of the elements of the final painting. As you might see, a few things are different from the final painting, as they were a spur of the moment thing, but the basic form does not change much. I don't add the markings in here, though, as markings outlined in black don't look as realistic as color against color markings.

Step 2:

I paint bucketed in a deep blue background, and with a low opacity textured brush, I just daubed in a bit of lighter blue to make for a painted undersea background - I purposely chose something that could be interpreted as either a painting or the sea, so it would fit with the surreal elements in the painting.
The reason I put the background in now as opposed to later is so that I could work on the overall color scheme, and because if I work with any light colors in the future, it will easily contrast the blue so that I can more easily paint within the lines I have set down.

Step 3:

We're getting a little more exciting here - colors!
This layer is between the lineart layer and the background layer. If your lineart was done on the white background, don't forget to set it to multiply!
Using a hard brush at 100% opacity, I begin to color in the flat colors on the main figures (me and the fish) - if I were to use a soft brush or a low opacity, I would not be able to paint in a definite place for the figure to end.
The reason I'm painting the darker fur first is because that it's the dominant color on the figure, and because it overlaps most every other element on the figure (headphones, hair, lighter fur).
At this point I think it is worth mentioning that I stay zoomed very far out of the picture. This makes it so that I can see the entire color scheme of the piece as I work on it, so I don't get too overwhelmed with tiny details. That part comes later.

Step 4:

I finished coloring in the darker fur, so now it's onto the lighter fur on the layer below the dark fur. I am still zoomed out, with the hard brush at 100% opacity.

Step 5:

The same techniques and hard brushes are used to color the flats for the entire character and the fish. I applied the red on the fish with a hard brush at ~35% opacity, and just daubed in a few colors - it does not need to be super precise, that will come later. I just want to get in some basic colors, since I think the red will contrast the greens, blues and browns and really pop out.

Step 6, part 1: Shading

In a layer right below the lineart (set to multiply), I begin to shade with a large, soft brush with the opacity set to 100%. I'm just trying to get in the basic shadows here, the large, soft, unrefined shadows. I chose to use a bluish shade, so that the figure looks like it fits in with the surrounding environment.

Step 6, part 2: Refining shadows

Nyil · September 22, 2011, 10:22:57 PM

On with the next steps!

Step 7:
In this step, we'll be highlighting the main figure. The setup is shown here:

Using a light yellow (as a natural light type of thing) along with a large, soft, low opacity brush (~15% opacity) on a layer above the shadows, I start to block in highlights, using the same methods as the shadows: Block in large areas, decrease brush size as the highlights get smaller, brighter and more defined. In this piece the yellow highlights came in three steps:

For the headphones, I increased the opacity of the brush to ~20% to make the material look shinier. Because the surface of the fur is rather dull, I didn't want to make the highlights too intense, so they are somewhat subtle except on a few places. If I had a higher opacity brush, the character would appear metallic and lifeless.

Step 8:
Now we're going to start work on the turtle.
First, because I'm not quite sure what turtles look like, I pester friends and whine "what does a tuuurrrtlllleee look liiiike" at them relentlessly until they throw google images at me. I'm not really satisfied with any of them, so I plug 'sea turtle' into the search engine and find a picture I like that's somewhat similar to the turtle in my painting.

Using a hard brush at around ~50% opacity in a layer above the lineart, I start to block in the base color. I like green because it blends in with the background, even if turtles aren't realistically green. I'm not really going with the original lines, as they were incorrect to begin with. After I get in the basic shape, I look at the picture and decide my next step should be to block in the patterns on the shell.

This was a quick step, and was done with a light yellow-green with a small, hard brush at around 50% opacity still.

With a slightly larger brush, I start to block in brown colors to go along with the shell patterns. The brown will make it look more realistic, and will also keep him from standing too far out from the background.

Soon enough I start to add shadows in with a deep blue color, in order to get a nice shaded feel - I'm not using green or gray to shade because I feel the blue is a nice color that will help him look more like a part of the background than a main character (even though he sort of is)
I continue with this step, adding in bits of brown and blue and erasing bits with no purpose. When I'm done with the shading, I apply very light highlights with the soft brush at around 10-15% opacity. Eventually, I wind up with a pretty, polished turtle.

Digital Painting: A Basic Runthrough (Part 2 is up!)

Nyil

Nyil