Painting 1

Info & Technical stuff:

• Time: 5 Hours
• Software: Photoshop
• Hardware: Huion Drawing Tablet

What I’ve learned:

• Don’t think with my graphic design brain.
• Approach the painting as a cohesive unit.
• Use less layers.
• Be careful of adding too much detail.

So it’s probably worth mentioning that I’m a graphic designer by trade; a large chunk of my design work consists of visual content communicating specific messages in the form of flat vector art and illustrations combined with typography and a lot of mind reading. The biggest challenge for me is to think outside the confining world of outlines, shapes, and page layouts and dive into the world of digital painting without any real constraints. If there are constraints, oops… remember, I’m figuring this out!

My first painting was actually a design for a client who wanted more than just vector art. I took advantage of this and decided that this would be my crossover into the world of digital painting. Now, I’m not going to lie to you; I have done some previous digital drawings, but mostly to be reworked into vector art for graphic design purposes. However, this is my first real digital painting where I tried incorporating more depth. So, what was my approach, and what did I learn?

I started with an outline. My brain works with shapes, and I found that this really helped me as a guideline to apply colors. If you are familiar with Photoshop, I would recommend drawing the outline on a separate layer for more control. While on the topic of Photoshop, I also recommend that you are somewhat familiar with basic Photoshop features before diving into digital painting. You don’t need to be an expert, but have basic knowledge of how layers work and how to use basic tools such as the brush, eraser, fill, and selection tools. There are various tutorials on YouTube to help you navigate Photoshop.

Now, where was I? Oh yes, outlines. After I had a basic outline on a separate layer, I started painting base colors for each object using a textured brush, a shade or two darker than the actual color, with the “pressure for opacity” feature on. This helps to avoid flat color surfaces. In fact, I used this feature most of the time. I tried not to confine my base colors within my outlines and intentionally spilled over to adjacent objects. This helped achieve a more natural color blend, as colors in the real world naturally reflect from surrounding objects (fun fact of the day!). You can see me applying a base color in the first 30 seconds of the video. Try to be messy with this step. Imagine you’re a toddler with a paintbrush…

After adding my base color to the entire painting, I kept adding colors to objects. Moving around the painting, alternating between objects and NEVER spending too much time on an individual object, but rather focusing on the painting as a cohesive unit, while adding a darker or lighter shade of color with each layer with more precision.

At times, I found myself zooming in and adding detail upon detail, which is a very good example of going nowhere slowly. You can very easily spiral and end up spending hours detailing the most obsolete object. Lesson learned, I guess: don’t zoom too much and be careful of adding too much detail, unless realism is your thing.

Don’t be afraid to change parts of the initial drawing. If something looks weird, change it. You can see me erasing and altering a section of the mountain (time Stamp 2:10), after which I really struggled to blend the colors to match with the surrounding mountains. Since then, I saved my base colors as swatches for reference.

As a designer, I’m accustomed to working with layers and placing each object on its own separate layer, as I did with this painting. Although it’s a great approach when it comes to moving or resizing objects or isolating them for alterations, it tends to make the painting look flat. I think the main reason is that you limit yourself with blending objects with their surroundings, inherently giving each object a definitive outline. This is the focus point for my next painting: less layers, more blending!

I ended up keeping some of the outlines and changing their colour whilst also adding outlines to objects like the flowers. This is my graphic brain kicking in again. So the final painting ended up being more of an illustration-painting crossover (I just made that up), definitely something to improve upon in the next painting!

I really hope you enjoyed the first painting of my journey. See you in painting 2!