important things for new or young digital artists to remember:
don’t shade colors with black
don’t overuse the airbrush tool, especially when it comes to shading
layers have different settings, explore them!
if your lines are wiggly when you draw, check your brush stability settings
if you find your lineart is looking too stiff/not like your sketch, try cleaning up the sketch instead of lining it. it helps keep fluidity and the feel of your original drawing
crop your pictures, don’t leave a ton of empty space unless you add some kind of background
make sure your canvas is set to at least 300dpi
draw on a large canvas ( i draw on a 3000x3000px canvas) it will be easier to line your work and everything will look much smoother even if you shrink it down
.jpeg files save space, but this file type may compress your art and sacrifice quality. when I post art I always use .png
Okay but some why’s would be nice.
Don’t shade your colors with black
Shadows are dark, and adding black to things makes them darker, so it makes sense to shade with black, right?
The reason you see this ‘do not’ all the time is that using pure black for your shadows tends to flatten and wash out your colors. It’s not wrong, technically, but using some other color can make your drawing pop a lot more.
I tend to favor a purple for daytime settings and a grey-blue for nighttime. Warm light sources (that is, light sources in the red-orange-yellow range) tend to give you warm shadows, while cool environments (blue-purple) give you cool shadows. The underlying color of the object plays a part, too. In the example above, the red shading enriches the character’s skin and hair, but looks a little too dark on his green vest since the colors are complementary.
(I’m aware my blue-grey looks pretty close to the black example and I apologize)
A bluish overlay layer over everything can also sell the ‘night time’ look (and saves time on picking out a proper night time palette). Overlay layers are your friends!
Note! This advice assumes that your shading is as a multiply layer over the flats. There are techniques that use solid blacks for the shading, such as those that resemble pen and ink drawings. These do take some time and practice to master.
All of the shading here is hatching with the pen, and a little tone change in the grass. It’s far more time-consuming than cell shading, and can be difficult to get ‘right’. I’m still learning.
Don’t overuse the airbrush tool.
Plenty of professional things use a soft airbrush shading (Disney in particular is a good example of it). It’s really just a form of cell shading, only with a soft edge to it rather than a hard one. The thing is, Disney uses it in their movies because it’s fast and easy, two things you want during an animated movie. For a still image you can take more time on, using just the airbrush for shading can make it obvious you were pressed for time or simply didn’t want to spend much effort on shading.
Experiment, look around at what others are doing, and develop a method of shading that feels and looks good to you. My own personal style is basically cell shading with the edges on curved surfaces softened a bit.
If your lines are wiggly, check your stability settings.
Not all programs have the same settings, and sometimes it may not be your program but your drawing tool (or your hand 83). A graphics tablet should feel reasonably natural to use and give you a nice smooth line. Always make sure pen pressure is enabled! That’s why you’ve got the tablet homie.
If the line doesn’t taper, make sure the pressure sensitivity is on. If the line doesn’t taper and won’t give you a nice smooth flowing line, the pressure sensitivity and the stability aren’t working. In both cases try unplugging and replugging your tablet, restarting the computer with the tablet plugged in, and making sure your drivers are right/up to date. Don’t be surprised if this happens semi-regularly. Even the top name-brand tablets have issues with the drivers.
If you don’t use a tablet and instead use a mouse.. you have my deepest respect. It’s hard to draw with a mouse or trackball.
Crop your pictures and make sure your DPI is high.
Cropping out a lot of empty space is something that all artists, not just digital ones, can learn as part of composition. A lot of empty area, besides forcing your subject to be smaller and thus making people miss all of those details you worked hard on, makes your piece look unbalanced and empty. Not bad if that’s the effect you’re going for, but if it continually shows up in your portfolio it can look as if you’re pretty bad at planning how much space you’re going to need.
DPI stands for ‘dots per inch’. What it really means is that the higher the number, the more pixels you have per inch in the drawing, and the smoother it’ll look. The default is 72 DPI, but 300-600 is generally better for digital art with a lot of details.
Note! The higher the DPI the larger the file, and if your machine is older it may start giving you problems if you try to use a high DPI. My personal motto? If the computer doesn’t lag a little bit when you’re saving, the file isn’t big enough. If the program crashes when you try to save, it’s too big.
Draw larger than you post.
I prefer to start sketching small (400x400), then resize my rough sketch to about 25%-50% larger than my intended final size and do the bulk of the work. A 3000x3000 canvas would just have me sketching in a corner XD
The reason you draw larger than the intended posting size and then shrink your image is because it smooths out things like wobbly lineart and not quite precise details. Don’t expect it to catch everything, however.
It’s also a good idea to continuously zoom out and check your work at the intended posting size. Nothing hurts more than working on a detailed area and then finding out that it’ll be pretty much invisible when posted.
.JPEG for professionals, .PNG for the internet.
It’s true that JPEG files seem to be the worst offenders when it comes for horribly pixelated and mangled images. It’s also true that if you contact almost any business or organization, they’ll most likely request for you to send them examples of your work as a high-quality JPEG.
What this means is that if you’re going to make something specifically for a business, pay attention to the file type and DPI they want and work in that. From off the top of my head I think I’ve seen between 600 DPI and 1200 DPI be the standard.
However, if you’re just posting your art to Tumblr, DA, etc, a 300 DPI PNG is perfectly serviceable. It’s a smaller file size, and generally people on the internet won’t be carefully scrutinizing every inch of your work. It also means you can do transparent backgrounds to images.
Work on a colored canvas, not a white one.
This one isn’t actually on the list above, but it’s still good advice. For one, a bright white canvas causes your eyes to get tired a lot faster. The other, more important issue is that we see colors in relation to the colors around them. On a bright white canvas, especially a back-lit one like a screen, you’re going to perceive colors to be darker than they actually are and attempt to adjust accordingly. This means that when you actually apply a background, your character may have ended up looking far different than what you were going for.
My background color of choice is an, uh, soothing purplish color.
Bonus
Search tutorials. Look at art that you like and really think about why you like it. Is it the anatomy? The posing? The colors? The linework? Try to imitate the qualities you like and incorporate them into your own style. Keep trying. You’re always improving, even when everything you draw looks ‘bad’.
