It has been a while since I have posted, because I have bee moving. I am now living in Vancouver. School starts in a couple weeks. In the meantime I have been doing a lot of digital painting. I'm not new to digital painting, but this time I approached it like a beginner over again, and learned a lot.
The fresh start began at
CTRL + Paint, a great tutorial website. Even though I have experience digital painting I learned a little from the digital painting 101 section. Next, I did the
Basic Photoshop Rendering Tutorial. This is the best basic photoshop tutorial I have ever came across. It covers everything you need to get started in depth. I learned photoshop painting basically by trial and error. Learning a few simple applications of the software really changed the way I work in it. I wish I had found this years ago. After completing this tutorial I applied what I learned to my own still life.
Next, I continued re-learning the basics, this time with better control of the medium. I believe the most fundamental skill to know in painting, digital or otherwise, is rendering forms in light in three dimensions. I found these
basic oil painting exercises applied to digital painting. The first covers rendering basic geometric forms. The second cover painting with value. I did not continue with the later exercises as they were less applicable to digital painting. I practiced rendering basic forms from my imagination as well.
Then I began focusing more on color. I found a wealth of information on color on this amazing free resource,
Dimensions of Color. Color theory is much more complicated then I realized. I feel like this knowledge has helped my use of color. As I continue to practice and apply it, more of the color theory will become clear. I made an exercise out of the first section about light and shade. I made a study of the photograph, placing each area of light mentioned on its own layer, ei: one layer for form shadow, one layer for reflected light. Then, I painted a similar sphere from imagination.
After becoming more comfortable with the basics, I did some photo studies to have fun with the medium.
I also spent some time learning to paint
realistic surfaces from
CTRL+Paint. Again I made my own still life to try out the techniques I learned.
Now I am trying to digitally paint figures from imagination. I am much better at it than before I did all the above studies but I still have a lot of work to do.
For comparisons sake here is
my best attempt at painting a figure from imagination about a year ago.
