Digital Painting — Using Photoshop
Digital painting, the application of traditional techniques (watercolours, oils etc.) by the means of a computer, is now a popular way to create concept art. Here’s how you can get started. Remember: digital painting canvasses have a resolution of at least 300dpi.
WHAT YOU NEED
Graphics Tablets
While a mouse can be used to digitally paint, a graphics tablet is essential to digital painting.
There are two kinds of graphics tablets. The first and arguably most common type is essentially a large track pad that is operated with a stylus. The screen is mapped to tablet’s drawing surface, and the stylus tracks the movement and pressure of the mouse. The second type is sometimes referred to as a graphics display tablet or a tablet/screen hybrid. These allow the user to draw directly on the surface of the display.
The primary manufacturer of graphic tablets and industry standard is Wacom. Cheaper, alternative tablets also exist.
Software
The primary softwares that people use for digital painting are Adobe Photoshop(Ps), Autodesk Sketchbook Pro, Paint Tool Sai by SYSTEMAX, Corel Painter and Clip Studio paint (CSP) by CELSYS. Photoshop is usually used for photo manipulation while the rest of the programs listed are dedicated to digital illustration. Clip Studio Paint is usually used specifically for manga and comics.
In terms of accessibility and cost (prices are all in USD), Clip Studio Paint and Paint Tool Sai are the best. Paint Tool Sai costs around $50, and the professional version of Clip Studio Paint goes for $50. Sketchbook pro costs $5 per month (or $30 per year), and Corel Painter and Photoshop are the most expensive; Corel Painter is around $450 and Photoshop is $10 per month*.
What you use will come down to personal preference. The two programs I use are Clip Studio Paint Pro and Photoshop.
*Photoshop’s price will vary depending on the plan. The minimum amount is $10 per month for the Photography bundle (contains Photoshop CC and Lightroom CC). If you are a student, you can get the entire Creative Suite for $20 per month. Some universities also offer the entire Creative Suite for free for their students.
USING PHOTOSHOP FOR DIGITAL PAINTING
Since Photoshop is considered the industry standard due to its versatility, it will be the program this guide will be going over.
User Interface
When you first open Photoshop, it should look something like this. Don’t panic if your interface doesn’t look the same as mine — it shouldn’t be the same. One of the great things about Photoshop is that you can customise the interface however you want and save them as a Workspace. That’s what I’ve done here (it won’t matter but I’m also using CS6 instead of CC); my custom work space is very similar to the default. All of your tools will be on the right, and your layers will be on the right. Your menus are still at the top.
The only thing about my customized interface that I will mention is the Navigator; I use the navigator in every Adobe software I have. As redundant as my description might sound, the navigator makes it easier to navigate through the canvas. It’s especially useful when working on a zoomed in part of the document. The navigator will show a small preview of the document you are currently on, and displays a red rectangle indicating where in the document you are. You can click and drag the rectangle around and it will change your position on the canvas, and control how zoomed in or out you are.
Your Primary Tools
In the default workspace your main tools are on the left side. Every single tool in Photoshop has an assigned letter for their keyboard shortcut. You can also cycle through the subtools with shift + the tool’s keyboard shortcut. You can hover each tool to see what their shortcut is.
The primary tools you will use are the Brush(b), Eraser(e), Lasso Tool(l), Marquee Tool(m), and the Move Tool(v).
Useful Keyboard Shortcuts\
On a Mac Ctrl is replaced with the Command key(⌘).
The basics of the Brush Interface
Since the interface for the Brush and Eraser are practically the same, I’ll only cover the Brush interface.
The most important thing you need to pay attention to is the window with a dot and a number beneath it. When clicked on, it will bring up a windows called Brush Presets, showing all the different brushes to choose from. The gear will bring up a menu with settings as well as a list of Brush Sets to choose from. The Round Brushes with Size is the brush file you’ll use the most. The brushes you will use the most are called Airbrush Pen Opacity Flow. You can identify them by their thumbnail, which shows the opacity changes with pen pressure.
Flow and Opacity will be covered later when I explain custom brushes, and Mode will be covered in the Layer Modes section.
Important: Make sure that Stroke Thumbnail is selected. This will display a preview of the brush when a stroke is made with it, including what it will look like with pen pressure.
Handy Brush Tool Shortcuts:
Alt + Click — Changes your foreground colour to whatever you clicked on.
Right-click — brings up the window with Brush Presets.
How to create custom Brushes
Like many other illustration programs, you can create custom brushes in Photoshop. You can also import them into Photoshop.
To start off, create a new canvas and using whatever brush you want, create the pattern for the brush you’d like. In this example I’m making a brush that will make multiple strokes at once for hair or fur.
Important: Photoshop will not remember the colours you use, but it will remember the values. It’s recommended that you create your brushes in black and white to avoid
Once you’ve created your pattern, use the Marquee Tool to select it.
Then go to Edit>Define Brush Preset… this will create your pattern as a brush. Your new brush will be found at the bottom of the list of stoke thumbnails and within the same list of brushes.
If you notice, the brush doesn’t look like very much, and if you use it now, you won’t get anything that looks like hair. That’s because the settings have to be adjusted now.
To do that, open up the Brush window (Window>Brush). The space in the top right shows all of the different brush tip shapes in the brush file. A preview of what the brush will look like is at the bottom. The first thing to do is decrease the spacing. This removes the spacing between each pattern.
On the left side of the Brush window is a list of settings with empty boxes next to them. First, click on Shape Dynamics and check off the box. You’ll see a change to the stroke thumbnail immediately. Shape Dynamics, as ridiculously obvious as it sounds, alters the shape of the brushstroke. It also allows you to change what controls the shape (i.e. pen pressure, stroke direction etc.) Scatter also changes the shape of the brush (guess what it does), so feel free to test it out.
The final thing to do is enable Transfer. This controls how much of your paint/foreground colour will be applied with your brush stroke. By default both Opacity and Flow are being controlled by pen pressure.
Remember those two options labelled Opacity and Flow beside the window that shows all your saved brushes? Those are related to the “amount of paint” that the brush actually applies. The most important thing about Opacity in terms of the Brush tool is that it will only apply a certain amount of paint (opacity) wherever you paint. Once you lift your pen or mouse button and go over the area gain, it will apply an additional amount of paint. Flow will apply the specified amount of paint every time you go over an area, regardless of whether or not you’ve lifted your pen or mouse button.
Important: When the settings for the brush are checked, Photoshop will automatically define preset settings.
Saving your Brush
Once you have created your brush, you need to save it. To do that, click on the icon at the top of the Brush window that looks like a list with a downwards arrow next to it.
Your new brush with its settings saved will be found at the bottom of the list of Brush Presets.
The final steps involve saving the brush in an actual file so Photoshop will be able to load it later. To do that, go to Edit>Presets>Preset Manager
This will bring up the Preset Manager. The Preset Manager will display icons for each of the brushes. The brush that we created will be at the bottom and end of the list of icons.
The first thing to do is delete the first brush we made because it doesn’t have the settings we made saved to it. Just click on the brush and then Delete.
The second thing to do is click Save Set… This will prompt you to rename and save the .abr file. You must save the file in Adobe Photoshop/Presets/Brushes. On a Mac computer, this directory is located in your Applications. If you are using Windows, this directory will be located wherever you installed Photoshop (by default, this is: C://Program Files/Adobe/ or C://Program Files(x86)/Adobe). Your brush set will come up after you restart Photoshop.
Important: If you want your brush to be in a separate brush set, select all the other brushes in the Preset Manager and delete them before you save the brush set.
Layers — Layer Modes
How you go about actually painting in Photoshop is completely up to personal preference. Some artists such as Marc Brunet usually paint in Photoshop with a basic use of layers, while Artists like Trent Kaniuga practically use every feature layers offer. Some artists don’t even use layers at all.
A common approach to digital painting involves painting everything in greyscale first, and colouring everything using layer modes. The layer modes can be selected from a dropdown menu located above the list of layers, next to Opacity.
The most common layer modes used with this technique are Multiply, Screen, Overlay and Colour.
Anything on the Multiply layer will darken the respective area on the layers underneath. Anything white becomes the same colour of whatever has been painted over it, anything black remains black, and anything else becomes darker. Artists usually use it when they have a sketch or lineart, want to be able to see it as they begin to block in their shadows.
Screen does the opposite. Anything black becomes the same colour, anything white stays white, and anything else becomes lighter. It’s typically used for blocking in highlights
Overlay is the combination of Multiply and Screen.
Colour merely changes the colour of anything below the layer. The values stay the same. It’s used to colour the greyscale painting.
PORTRAIT TUTORIAL
The following tutorial will be a step-by-step guide through a portrait I painted. The original painting was not painted in greyscale, however, I will be going over how it would be painted if it were, to show how layer modes can be used.
Important: Always create a new layer on top of the Background Layer.
The first thing to do is actually drawing the image we want to paint. How you go about it is up to you. Ideally you should have a clean sketch or lineart of the drawing because it makes it easier to see what you’re doing when you’re painting.
Once you’re finished, create a new layer on top of your drawing and set it to Multiply. Then begin to fill in your base values (sometimes referred to as flats) for the painting. Your base values should be the midtones of your painting.
The next thing to do is start blocking in the shadows and highlights. For your shadows, you paint on the base layer, or set create a new layer and set it to Multiply; it’s up to you. For the highlights, create a new layer and set it to Screen or Overlay. In this case I used Screen.
After you’ve blocked in your values, the next step is refining them. Once you’ve got them where you like, the next step is to get rid of the sketch layer. To do that, create a normal new layer and paint over the lines.
COLOURING GREYSCALE — GRADIENT MAPS
The next thing you need to do is add colour to the image. To do that, we need to create a gradient map on top of all the layers. The reason we need to make a gradient map is because if we don’t and try to use the Color layer mode, our colours will be unsaturated. To make a gradient map go to Images>Adjustments>Gradient Map… Alternatively, if you have the Adjustments window open, the Gradient Map is the last icon.
Gradient Maps replace the range of black, grey and white values with a gradient of your choice, essentially colorizing your image. Assuming you’re using two colours, the lightest tones of the image will be mapped to one colour of the gradient, and the darkest tones will be mapped to the other color. You can add more colours to the gradient by clicking below the bar of the gradient map. You can also adjust the transitions of the colours by clicking and dragging the arrows and dots on each side of the arrows.
Ideally you’ll want to create a gradient map for each part of the painting using layer masks, but for the sake of this guide and to keep things simple, I’m only going to make one gradient map for the entire painting. My main concern was getting the colour of the skin, and after that I adjusted the gradient map for the hair.
The final step is correcting the colours of the painting. Since I used one gradient map for the entire painting, certain parts of the painting aren’t quite the colours I’d like. For example, the hair is too blue and the highlights in the hair aren’t very visible. Her scarf also isn’t the correct colour and neither are the shadows of her jacket, her eyes and her lips.
Create a new layer and set it to Color. Then, select the colours you’d like to change, paint over the areas that need to be corrected. To keep things tidy in this stage I’ve used a Clipping Mask so that nothing outside what I’ve painted will be visible.
Because of the values of the lips from the gradient map and greyscale layers we made, I cannot colour them on the same layer. To fix this, I created a new layer and set it to Multiply. Then I painted over the lips using the colour I wanted.
At this point, the painting is almost done. All that’s left is adding a background to the painting. To do that, create a new folder and put everything in it. Then create a new layer underneath it. The reason we want to put all the layers in a folder is due to the gradient map we created; if we put a background layer underneath the layers that have our painting on them, the gradient map would be applied to it too. If we had created a layer mask on the gradient map, we wouldn’t have to do this.
Once that’s done, we need to paint in what we want for the background and we’re done!
