Helpful(?) tips on digital painting

I thought I'd talk about today, some of the key techniques that I use, while working on a digital painting.  Especially for those times when you get stuck on a painting, and aren't sure what's going wrong, it's helpful to make sure that certain techniques are being implemented in your work. This will help to keep you moving forward productively.  Here are some of the things that I find useful:


1)  Emphasize values strongly.  If you're painting from a photo reference, don't paint too strictly what you see, as photos often can lack interesting detail.  When your painting is looking too flat, you need to play up the value range.  Be sure that you understand the forms that you're painting, and accordingly, increase your contrasts of light and dark.  Even on a flat surface, make the parts of that surface which are farthest from the light source, darker.  Just be careful if you're painting a young woman's face though, as any extraneous lines or sharp plane breaks will make her look older.


2)  When you increase or decrease the value of the color that you're painting with, you often need to increase the saturation.  This prevents your colors from becoming gray and ugly.  Basically, any color that in value, is above or below the middle value, needs to be more saturated than the color with the middle value.


3)  Be sure that a value range is addressed on a large scale, across the entire painting.  Don't just create value ranges in small areas, such as on each arm or leg of a figure.  This large range of values, created first, will become the middle value for each local part of the painting.  To accomplish this in Painter 11, I like to add a new layer on top of the stack, set the layer mode to "Multiply", and then paint with a middle value color over the entire figure, applying more pen pressure to the dark side or area of the body, of course.  Then you can collapse the layers, and go in to each area of the figure and add form and cast shadows, as required.


Man, this post is getting dry.  Let's break for something different:

Well, that was certainly a distraction.  Ok, back to the list:


4)  Vary your colors across the surface of an object.  This increases realism.  Don't just paint with red.  Mix in some splashes of red-purple and red-orange on the same object.  I like to grab a color from an area of the image with the eyedropper, make an slight adjustment to the hue, and then paint with the new color in a low opacity, over that same area, and then blend it in a bit.  


5)  Make sure that your initial drawing is correct, regarding perspective, proportions and anatomy, before you start painting.  It's easy to think that you'll correct any problems in the initial drawing during the painting process, but this really eats up time and can be frustrating enough to make you quit a painting.  I struggle with retaining the good aspects of a drawing in the messy process of painting, but still it's best to get the drawing right, before painting.    


6)  Don't give up on a painting too soon.  For me at least, every painting reaches a point in which it looks like a disaster that can't be saved.  But in the digital medium, a painting is never truly dead!  Mistakes are always open to being repaired.  It's just a matter of having the willingness to make the effort.


Also I must stress that you have the proper equipment for digital painting.  If you don't have a pen and tablet, and a software program that lets you tilt the canvas while you're painting, you don't know what you're missing!  Go get them.


Well, that's it for today's post.  If you want, scroll back up and help that guy with his Speedo.