Digital Painting Glorious Leader Kim Jong Un
This is an example for the Digital Painting lesson.
After I cover the canvas in a light-middle grey tone, the first thing I do is use the largest brush I can to create the head shape. With digital sketch painting, or speed painting, as some call it, I find it’s best to use the largest brush that you can at every stage. It helps keep me focused on the big picture. You don’t want to get bogged down in details too soon with this method. You should try and solve the biggest problems first and then work your way down to the smaller shapes and eventually the details.

If you follow the same practice it may help you create more decisive and exaggerated sketches. As you can see in the image below, there’s not much here yet. I’m simply dividing the lights and darks now. But even at this early stage, without any facial features, you can pretty much tell who it is supposed to be. North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has a very unique look, which means you don’t need to do much to get a good caricature. It’s not so easy with other, more average looking people. But I want you to remember that the very first shapes of the head that you paint in are really important in the success of the caricature. Everything you do afterwards is a result of these early decisions.
Now, I move inside the face and start sculpting the features. And that’s how I like to think of it when working with digital painting – I sculpt the forms, rather than draw them. Working with the largest brush possible will help you stay in the sculpting mindset. If you use a really small brush, you’ll end up just drawing lines. Eventually, you will need to use some smaller brushes, but hopefully not until after all the big shapes and features are resolved.
I use the large brush to carve away at the features with light and dark values. I go back and forth between values constantly. The way this is accomplished is that my other hand is always over the keyboard pressing the “Alt” key to toggle the paint brush into a color sampling tool. If your drawing tablet has express keys, like all Wacom devices, you can program one of them to be the Alt (or option) key. The toggling of the paint brush into a color sampler is what makes speed painting possible. Once you have a full range of colors or values in the painting you’re working on, you don’t really need to leave the painting area to go to the Color Picker palette anymore. And you can work really quickly.

It’s still a hard round standard brush. I’m merely sampling adjacent tones and then using light pressure with the stylus to create a transition value between a light and a dark. If you do this enough times, with smaller and smaller shapes, you’ll eventually get a very realistic effect with the forms, but an effect that is still painterly, with visible hard-edged brush strokes.

I think digital paintings look best when they mimic the look of natural paints on rough surfaces. And most painting apps today are really good about giving you the tools to create rough and natural paint textures and effects. Play around with them as much as you can and experiment.
When I first started teaching digital painting classes at the Watts Atelier, I encouraged my students at times to work with brushes that were almost too textured or messy looking. I felt it was helpful to experiment with brushes and textures that added so much noise into the process that they would have to develop skills to work around that noise. Plus, all that extra texture would add a gritty element that made the painting feel less digital and perfect and more like a painting on a canvas.
There’s something to be said for giving yourself obstacles in digital painting that you have to work your way around. If everything’s too easy, it can make you a lazy painter and you’ll stop being critical of yourself during the painting process. So when you start new digital paintings on your own, try different texture brushes each time. Just watch out for those brushes with soft, fuzzy edges. You can use them a little bit here and there, but I find that they usually take the painting down the wrong path.

Having a full range of values is essential to that photographic effect. Sometimes it’s okay to not use a full range of values in a painting. It can create moody or atmospheric look, as if there’s a haze in the air. But you need to be conscious of when you’re doing that. Remember that this exercise of creating a caricature using digital paint is mostly an exercise in observing and working with value. It’s basically your first step towards your training as a painter. If you can master the use of value in a monochromatic paint sketch, it will be a lot easier to work with color later on.
Filed in: Caricature • Videos
Super job teaching!