Hi! I'm really interested in learning digital art, but I'm not sure what kinds of programs/tools/techniques people use. Your paintings always look very nice so I was wondering if you could give me some advice on getting started? Thanks!
--So I don't have a tablet or a mouse and do all my digital painting with a laptop trackpad, so my method is sort of low-key and simple. And embarrassing. I work with photoshop elements, which is the cheap version of photoshop, and you can find a lot of online editors that can do everything it can, for free.
But I here! Underneath the cut is a walkthrough sort of deal for how I colour digitally. I'm going to assume you already have clean lineart to work with. I'll include general advice and also some helpful links at the bottom.
So I work with two 100% opacity layers that are both the lineart. Basically just click "duplicate layer." This is the most basic you can be. The top layer you're not going to touch at all, unless you want to make your lineart some other colour than black - if not, you'll just leave it at the top untouched.
I always colour skin first. I'm doing Caucasian skin here, but the basic idea holds for all skin tones - I can link to a good pallatte for other skin tones below, or you can just make your own. The pattern is redish/saturate - yellowish/saturate - very pale yellowish/desaturate. Here's my red.
Oh, yeah, by the way. I colour everything with the paint bucket. If you're doing this you need to click fill twice - like double click instead of single clicking. Single click leaves these nasty little gray/white bits around the lines. Double or triple clicking will fill them in. Just as a side note.
This'll happen, by the way. I just find the gap (below his ear) and close it with the paintbrush. Whatever.
Anyways so you get your second colour (this is like, the first level of highlights)
I just magic select the fill colour (in this case, the pinky skin colour) and use that to make sure I don't highlight outside the lines. And (once again, my method is stupid fucking simple) I use a default hard round brush to do the shading. I was working at about 47px for the brush - bigger brushes look smoother but are hard to work on the face. I set the brush at 26-34 opacity and start filling away from the light source. I like to fill the darkest colour and then add two shading colours rather than a shadow and highlight colour, but that's just me. I don't do shading on a seperate layer, because I'm lazy and hate cluttered layers.
This is the final layer of highlights. Use sparingly.
Here you can see the magic selecty thing I've got going on.
But what if you want to start at medium and add Shadows and Highlights rather than just shading towards the light? I got you covered.
So if our base colour is like this, we go darker/more saturate/cooler for shadow, and lighter/less saturate/warmer for highlight. As a general rule either shadows are saturated, or highlights are; either shadows are warm, or highlights are. I'll link to something that tells you where 'warmer' is from each colour. The important thing here is not to shade with darker of the same colour, or heaven forbid black. Here are the three colours for Sebastian's shirt;
Then I just go ahead and magic select the fill colour so I don't go outside the lines again. Because I'm lazy and I hate making my brush change over and over, I'm still at a 29 percent opacity with a 47 brush. I do shadows first, in layers - as long as it's one continuous stroke, it doesn't get any darker. So just keep clicked down the entire time. Follow general body shapes, creases in clothing, and ESPECIALLY the shadows on the skin. It'll look really weird if your shirt isn't shadowed in the same place as your face.
I think I have about three layers of shadow and two or three layers of highlight in the end (highlight is the same as shadow - 29 percent opacity, I think I made the brush 60 px)
And that's the final product. It is really that stupid simple for me. I do it to all the different colours, then merge the visible layers and post. Basically.
This single image contains the best of the web on colour
This is a bit more complex but still good.
This is neat for figuring out which colours to use!
I used these as a base for colours for a long time before I realized I wanted more cartoony colours.
