Digital Painting

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.