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My first digital painting attempt
Penguin-Factory
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
This was done with a Wacom tablet using photoshop. It's technically my second attempt, done with a reference, the first was a tutorial I got online that didn't come out so well (although it showed me the basic skills). I was tearing my hair out over it but it got much easier once I figured out how to layer colours with low opaqueness and such.
It was really fun to paint, and I like the way it came out, especially since I'm terrible at using real paints. I think I'm going to focus on this as much as drawing (although obviously, colouring skills won't be worth much if I can't draw anything to colour).
Some specific questions: The basic body of the apple was easy, but when I tried to do fine details (the reference apple had a sort of brown area near the hollow bit at the top, for example) they came out looking flat and monochrome. Any tips to help me with this?
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They way I learned to paint with oils is to first limit my palette. Pick out 3 colors (yellow ochre, terra rosa and burnt sienna are nice for this) along with black and white and see what you can do with them while only mixing them together (theoretically this should work digitally). This will help you see the other colors in the green apple because you can't use the actual green color.
This may not work at all in digital, in that case disregard what I said.
Enjoy the reference. However, DON'T use the color dropper to pick colors. That will only teach you to be lazy and really limits what you can color.
And oh jesus do not use the gradient tool whatever you do trust me on this please do not use it.
Thank you. Good luck.
I already have a reference..... although I may eat it later
You're probably right about that.
I don't even know what the gradient tool is
For this one I used 60% opacity and than 20%. Would starting out at 100% not be sort of inflexible and make it harder to get different shades of colours?
Good man!
If you start out at 100%, you may be able to at least get the basic form down. Right now, your apple is VERY misshapen and the edges seem completely undefined. Furthermore, it looks like you went over the same space a billion times with almost the exact same color as before, because your opacity was so low.
You can do "blocks" of color, where you'd just use 100% opacity brushes (of differing sizes**** very important)...and that may actually be a good practice thing to do for you.
Right now, your apple is way too..."green"....like, out-of-the-tube green. It needs more yellows, browns, oranges, etc (even if the apple is completely green. Trust me on this one).
But yeah, the green atm looks pretty unrealistic, like ND said, too "out of the tube". But keep working on it, I look forward to seeing some more
Thanks!
Um..... I'll take your word for it. Adding yellow or brown seems kind of odd though, wouldn't it just make the apple look diseased? (I'm posting this from school so I can't try it for myself at the moment)
It looks pretty good though.
No. Especially yellows in a green apple, and light browns. They can be very subtle but still make all the difference.
And a quick tip: Never colour on a white background, it knocks your colour judgement askew a bit. Choose a nice midtone suitable for your subject and you'll be able to discern what colour choices look good more easily.
This is really important. The background color you choose to color on, even if you end up using a background that you paint in later will affect the mood of the ENTIRE piece.
I used to just pick a midtone at random and I bet a lot of other nubs like me did to, because I thought the important thing was just to not color on white. Then I started to see that things I'ld paint, even when they had similar subject matter, would have completely different feels to them.
It ended up being because the background color affected my color choices.
now that I look at it, there are tints of blue, too. Don't be afraid to draw (and paint) what you see!
It's from when a mod de-modded himself, and changed a whole crapload of peoples' avatars to a smiley-face with the eyebrows. Quite a few of us carried on the tradition through adding winky-brows to our original av's.
I've honestly been meaning to change it for a long time now but I've been too damn lazy.
This one didn't come out so well
It's based on a cloud painting tutotial I found on deviantart. Any suggestions?
I'm trying to improve it, I'll post the reowrked version soon.
Here it is:
I think I improved the light, but the main body of the cloud is still to flat and unfinished looking.
- great animation focused website http://www.catsuka.com