Digital Painting

I took a month or so break from working on my cartoon project to study digital painting. When working on my cartoon project I had become overly focused on line art at the expense of rendering form with color and value. I did tutorials from the book Digital Character Painting Using Photoshop CS3 by Don Seegmiller. I enjoyed this book because it focused more on artistic fundamentals in character desgin rather than digital tricks yet still included some tricks I've been able to apply effectively in my own work. I also did Xia Taptara's Female Fusion Figure I tutorial. This was good because you can watch his drawing develop in real time, however his explanations of what he was doing and why are rambling and often lacked clarity. Overall I am very glad I took spent time working on this. I feel like I improved a lot not only in my skill with photoshop but in my over all artistic ability. Ultimately digital painting is just another medium and the better an all-around artist I am the better my digital painting will be.

My results from Digital Character painting tutorials


Female Fusion Figure Tutorial embarrassingly badOther digital painting work
This one is another rendering of the human figure from imagination like the ones I had been doing before. However, with this one I did not map out every muscle in detail before adding the value and color as I had been doing before. Drawing out the anatomy in detail from imagination is a great way to really learn anatomy, however I feel like once you get it, you no longer have to draw out every muscle. Infact, it looks more natural if you don't in most cases as long as you understand that the muscle is there. I've also stopped drawing out every muscle in figure drawing from life too because most people don't have highly defined muscles.
I did this lizard warrior type creature before doing any tutorials to establish my digital painting skill going into it. I hope you can see improvement.