Learning Digital Painting

Learn all about digital painting: mixing paint, working with layers and brushes, using color creatively, sketching, and painting with photographs.

Introduction

• Welcome
• Advantages of painting digitally

1. Expressive Input Devices

• Customizing mouse behaviors
• Introducing the concept of axes of motion
• Using the pen tablet and stylus
• Understanding the Intuos and Cintiq options

2. Expressive Painting Applications

• A world of options
• Emulating analog media with Painter
• Going beyond traditional image editing with Photoshop
• Painting with the iPad app Procreate 2

3. Digital Paintbrush Mechanics

• Introduction to brush mechanics
• Brush tips: Variations on a theme
• Brush color behavior
• Brush and surface interaction
• Emulating media via physical modeling
• Through the looking glass

4. Painting Abstractly

• Introduction to abstract painting
• A great way to explore brush qualities
• Using color to express emotion
• Layers as a compositional tool

5. Painting What's in Your Mind's Eye

• Introduction to sketching as creative self-expression
• Preliminary sketching
• Paint to your skill level
• Going back in time: Undo

6. Painting from Life

• Interpreting reality with digital painting
• Working from a still life in a home or studio
• Using a photo to capture and edit a still life
• Exploring some tips for working on a portable tablet en plein air

7. The Photograph as Wet Paint

• Dipping a paintbrush into a photograph
• Separating brush work from color and composition
• Use a dry brush to smear a wet photograph
• Work nondestructively using layers

8. Clone Painting

• Funnel a photo through your brush
• Using the funnel method to act as a paint reservoir
• Sit back and let the app do the heavy lifting

Conclusion

• Next steps