Sunday 2 October 2011

Digital Painting in Photoshop (So Far)

This was my first attempt at digital painting in Adobe Photoshop. It seemed promising at first, but soon spiraled into horrible, horrible mess. It might be a good idea to mention that not only have I not really done digital painting too often, but I was one of the few art students in the world that avoided painting as I wasn't a massive fan of it, so I'm effectively having to educate myself in the fundamentals of traditional painting techniques alongside the Photoshop methods. Not that I'm using this as an excuse, I look forward to the challenge! Just don't expect anything overly Van Gogh just yet. Unless you count his reputation when he was alive, in that case, expect everything overly Van Gogh.


Right then, back on topic. This next attempt was my way of trying to merge my natural style of drawing with the silhouette technique Phil demonstrated. It worked out somewhat well, although I think the best idea would be to do as I'm told and to not attempt to go wandering off into uncharted territory just yet.
This was simply a sketch that I was midway through converting to a silhouette, but whilst doing this I noticed the pattern I'd laid out resembled the heavy, ink-like shading found in comic books, and I wanted to preserve it. It was totally off topic and I'm not saying I'm going to follow this particular path, but it seemed nice enough to keep it for future reference, as somewhat of a 'happy mistake'.  


4 comments:

  1. Hey Steven! I don't know what you mean by spiraling into a horrible mess. I think these are really interesting and capture the forms really well! Like you said it's your first time digital painting so don't think of your pieces as a mess, think of them as a starting point, a place to improve from. Soon you'll be looking back at this post and then you can call it a horrible mess, but one that encouraged you to keep at it.
    Well I have a few links for you as you said you look forward to the challenge :D

    First one is to a site where there is a mixture of free and charged video tutorials. The best ones are the digital painting 101 videos which are free woo! http://www.ctrlpaint.com/

    http://www.youtube.com/user/FZDSCHOOL This one has loads of digital painting vids, just watching them can be extremely helpful. Think there are silhouette based videos on there too :)

    You might also be interested in this http://www.vimeo.com/10743423

    http://cghub.com/scripts/view/74/ Colour wheel you can download for photoshop as it doesn't have one on some newer versions.

    Don't know if this brush might be useful for you, seems to come in handy for a lot of people so might be worth a shot. http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/192/brushu.jpg/

    Anymore I'll freely spam you with links :P

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  2. Opps another one incase you haven't got it. This isn't just digital painting either. Lots of anatomy talk on there :)
    http://idrawgirls.blogspot.com/

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  3. woah! thanks emma! i'll be working my way through these over the next few days!

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  4. your third image I REALLY like, Steve - bags of drama! :D

    Oh - and Emma? This is exactly what I want from a creative partnership - fab!

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