Digital Painting

Now before we begin, make sure you've got a tablet and you're using photoshop
Note that you can also use a pencil and practice key principals on paper if you do not have a tablet
Many new tablets nowadays have programmable buttons on them, but some do not

For those that don't, it's a good idea to have your non-dominant hand floating over your keyboard to quickly press shortcuts
Some keystrokes:
Ctrl+Alt+Z (undo) - Preferably program this to a button on your pen if there is one available. This is a very important keystroke
Alt (color pick) - Again, would be advised to program this to a button on your pen (usually pens have 2 buttons on them)
[ and] - Make your brushes smaller and bigger quickly (won't be needed if you've a touch sensitive ring on your tablet)
Space bar (hold) - Easily navigate your canvas if you're zoomed in. Lets you drag your canvas if it's zoomed in to the point where it's not completely visible on your screen.

The first lesson will be on values, blending and brush strokes. DO NOT TL;DR



The best way to distinguish values of an object is to view it from a monotone color scheme with one obvious lightsource. In this case, we'll be using a sphere.
A sphere is a basic shape that is practiced in art because the way light wraps itself around it is found almost everywhere in nature.
Planets; rocks, fruit, round edges, joints, bolts and even heads all have spherical properties when being drawn with a definite lightsource.

Brushes
Some of the most widely used brushes in digital painting are the Hard round brush, Soft round brush, and the Chalk brush
The hard round brush is excellent for a wide range of uses including blocking on color, fine detailing and blending
The soft round brush comes in handy when you need to blend two tones or two colors together.
The chalk brush adds texture and can also be used to blend very well as well as block in general shape.
The image below shows the various outcomes of using each of those brushes.

Process of painting
1) You want to get the shape down with as minimum detail possible. The sphere should have a good shape to it and a base tone. Artists choose to work from darks to lights, so the tone should be the darkest possible shade of the sphere.
THIS TONE SHOULD NOT BE COMPLETE BLACK (#000000). block on a very faint highlight where you think the light is hitting from in a circular motion (see the bottom of the image below)

2) continue to block on lighter shades using your tablet's pen pressure on opacity only. The highlights should be wrapping around the object, so there should be no horizontal nor vertical stroke in your sketch.
Make sure you can view the addition of depth in your sphere, and it should start to look 3d. At this point, you should be blending the tones together so no rigid brush strokes are visible.

How to blend
Blending uses opacity to mix colors and tones together. Hold alt and pick the neutral tone that you want to blend into two different tones. Pressing very lightly, make many strokes untill the edges seem to smoothen out naturally, but at the same time not being dominated by the tone you've selected.
It would help to try brushing a monotone gradient using only your brush on opacity jitter for good practice.

3) Now for the details. Your sphere should have a 3d shape by now, but doesn't seem real enough. Push the values with the dodge tool or burn tool, or paint more intense highlights on a small area to give it a more realistic feel.
Notice how the bottom of the sphere also has light reflecting from it, even though that's the are facing AWAY from the light. This is called Diffused light. The light that hits the ground around the sphere bounces back up and create a spherical glow near the bottom of the sphere.
Make sure this is very faint and not a solid tone on its own.

Now don't follow the spheres below as references- they are not practical examples of spheres in nature. Get a ball or use photos and put it infront of you with one lightsource aimed at it. Recreate exactly what you see; down to the shadows. This is called a life
study, and it is known as probably the best practice for a painter to develope his/her understanding of how light works on different objects.

Try making spheres of your own this week, but don't just limit yourself there. Try to paint anything you think resembles a sphere such as fruits or building domes and include a lot of detail.

For this week focus on just black and white brushing, and next week's tutorial will go into color and more blending.

This was made due to many requests; so pls keep this thread alive and post your outcomes here.

This post was edited by TheShattered on Nov 3 2011 07:53pm

brb buying a tablet just so that i can participate


/e 1st

This post was edited by humari on Nov 3 2011 07:44pm

T_T



that's the spirit

This post was edited by TheShattered on Nov 3 2011 07:49pm

Ima do this till I wreck all of my pen nibs!

Just gotta say tl;dr.
But I think its awesome that you take your time to teach this step by step.
And I'll look forward to seing everyones progress

this is so cute wish i could participate

:|

i'll do eet in the moarning.

wooooo