digital figure painting
2yr
Steve Lenze
So, I decided to get serious about my digital painting. I have been doing studies and experiments to get more familiar with the medium. Having learned a process that I like and that works for me, I did a full digital figure painting today.
My process is as follows:
1) I sketch out my image using straight lines on a new layer. I work out the silhouette and the line that separates the light from the shadow.
2) On a new layer, I clean up my sketch, rounding off the lines and refining the shadows.
3) I create a new layer under the line art, and fill it in with about 50% gray
4) I then fill in my shadows with about 75% gray
5) I turn off the line art layer
6) I then create a new layer above the line art, and paint the image.
I have found that I am in need of some new brushes, this painting needs some texture. So I am looking at some youtube videos on how to create brushes to get what I need.
I hope this is helpful to any of you who are trying out digital. This is not the only way to do it, just the way that I have found that works for me :)
Wonderful! I love the process.
This reminds me of the Creative Illustration course from Society of Visual Storytelling. It's a very clear process for developing a composition that almost gurantees a wonderful painting.
I just started my digital painting journey so this is super helpful for me to see your process.
What method do you use to blend? Mixer brush? Opacity and flow?
Thanks
Steve Lenze
2yr
Hey Christopher, glad this is helpful. I was thinking of you when I described the process because you had said you wanted to learn digital.
The way I blend is by using a brush that uses pen pressure to control opacity. Then I pick values at the edge of the stoke, and paint one into the other like an oil painting, so I guess that would be opacity and flow.
I look forward to your first digital work. I started by doing little studies of materials like leather, gold, hair, etc. It allows you to learn in bite sized portions.
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2yr
That's quite an elaborate process! What I found in my experience is that doing very tight lines first may eventually become limiting and make it rather hard to fix stuff if something is slightly off, however that also resulted in my paintings often have less details than I intended because I painted everything over, and by the time I finished no sketch is visible XD.
Here like the center line of the chest is a bit weird (too much to the left?), And I think that can be traced back to the initial sketch. On digital I think a bit liquify could do the trick but I just find it rather weird to adjust afterwards, it also smudges sharper textures IMO. Overall still nice work!
