Digital painting apps and graphics tablets, like those
made by Wacom, come together to form an art medium that can do pretty much anything.
Any look or style can be achieved with the right tools and knowledge.
Hey! I’m Court Jones.
And today, we’re going to learn how to use digital tools to get the look of a traditional
painting on canvas.
Stan: Hey. Sorry to interrupt, but legally we have to tell you guys that this episode is sponsored by Wacom.
So, thank you Wacom for making this lesson possible.
If you’re in the market for a new tablet, Wacom’s tablets have always been a favorite
of mine.
Ok, continue!
Court: Now, there’s nothing wrong with a digital painting that has clear signs of being
created on a computer.
Some of my favorite artists are those who make really slick digital illustrations like
Craig Mullins, Loish and Sergey Kolesov, to name a few.
But if you want to achieve the look of a traditional painting on a canvas there are a few things
you can do and core concepts you should be aware of.
I love digital painting and oil painting.
At the Watts Atelier, I taught both traditional and digital art classes for years.
But the vast majority of my caricature illustration work is painted digitally.
Because it’s faster, cleaner and easier to edit when clients ask for revisions.
Whichever medium I use, I try to make my paintings look realistic.
But I also like to see bold brushwork and textures - what some people call a “painterly”
look.
For this lesson, I’ll be sharing 7 practices and habits I’ve used over the years to create
digital paintings that emulate the look of an oil painting on canvas.
And to demonstrate these concepts, I’ll be painting in Photoshop on the huge new Wacom
32” Cintiq Pro.
TIP 1: Follow a Traditional Process
The first thing you can do - and this is a major thing - is to follow the same steps and
procedures as you do when working with real paints on a canvas.
Especially in the beginning stages.
When working with oil paints, I’ll usually start by staining the whole canvas a neutral
or warm color.
Then, I do a quick gesture line drawing before I scrub in additional washes of local color
to block in the big forms or to act as contrast to the colors I’ll use later in the painting.
Doing similar layers of undertone in a digital painting can help set you up for success later
on because those colors often show through in the final painting, adding unique interplays
of the colors and giving an illusion of more texture or color vibration than would be there
otherwise.
Now, your traditional process might be different from mine.
Maybe you don’t have a linear stage and you go directly into blocking in the forms
after the stain. And that’s fine.
But just remember that when you work with traditional paints you learn a lot about the
craft of painting in general and eventually develop a distinctive personal style.
That’s why I always recommend students play with real paints first before going to digital.
TIP 2: Textures!
One of the things that helps make a digital painting look like it was made with real materials
is when there is visible canvas weave or paper grain.
When painting with real brushes on a rough surface, the paint will catch and stick to
the surface in inconsistent ways.
These imperfections in the strokes are part of what give a painting character and a feeling
of being made by physical interactions.
And that’s really easy to replicate in programs like Photoshop, where you can apply a canvas
texture to any brush in your toolbox.
Photoshop now includes a lot of great natural-looking brush sets designed by Kyle Webster.
And other painting apps like Corel or Procreate also have some really good brush options.
But you can, and should, learn how to make and customize your own brushes so that you
can have more control over the look of your paintings.
Here’s a quick tutorial on how I created one of my personal favorite brushes: a streaky
textured brush.
First, draw a circular selection and feather the edges of the selection.
Then, with black selected as your foreground
color use the paint bucket or click Alt + Backspace to fill the selection.
With the eraser tool, erase a few horizontal lines.
Keep the selection active this whole time.
Under the Edit menu, click on Define Brush Preset.
Anything that’s inside a selection will now be a new brush stamp that will appear
at the bottom of your brush menu.
But you’ll need to change a few settings
to get it to work right.
First, resize the brush using the bracket keys.
In the Brush Settings Palette, click on Shape Dynamics and under Angle Jitter,
choose Direction.
This will make sure that the horizontal lines stay parallel to the direction of your stroke,
giving you the streaky effect.
Next, click on the Transfer tab and set Opacity Jitter to Pen Pressure.
So the stroke will fade out with less stylus pressure.
Now to apply a texture: Earlier, I scanned my favorite belgian linen and made
it into a Photoshop texture.
To create a texture from a photo, open the image and then click on Edit, then
Define Pattern.
The image will now appear as a pattern in the Texture tab.
Click on the Texture Tab, select the desired
texture and play around with the Mode for different texture effects.
Overlay mode, Darken and Linear Burn are my favorites.
You can also use the Brightness slider to change the influence that the texture has
on the stroke.
Once you’ve got brush settings you like, be sure to save it as a New Brush Preset
and give it a descriptive name.
Just a warning though.
If you use the same texture everywhere on every brush stroke everywhere,
it can become monotonous
and repetitive, which will give it away as digital.
So experiment with different brushes and different textures throughout the same painting.
TIP 3: Limit your layers
Ideally, paint in as few layers as possible.
Or even one layer, if you can.
When you’re working on a real canvas, you only have one physical surface, or layer,
to paint on.
Using a bunch of layers throughout a painting is kind of a safety net.
Artist often do it because they’re unsure about their process and want to be able to
change or delete something.
But I think it can hold some artists back from being more adventurous and expressive
with their brush work.
When you do all or the majority of your painting on one layer, you’ll be thinking and solving
problems more like a traditional painter.
And when you work more like a traditional painter your paintings tend to look more like
traditional mediums.
Now, multiple layers can sometimes be helpful and are often practical necessities of the
job, like when you’re working for an art director who may want you to move things around
or make revisions later.
But try to keep layers to a minimum and solve visual problems with your brushes.
Which leads us to the next tip...
TIP 4: Avoid special effects
One thing that digital painting allows for is creating special effects, like a soft glow
around a light source where the colors become oversaturated using a layer effect like Overlay.
Also, mathematically perfect gradients and totally flat fill colors are super easy to
do with a single click.
But done this way, there is a really artificial digital look.
Also, this painting was done with a basic round brush, which can be a great tool.
But you can do so much more with digital brushes that mimic real brushes.
So I start this painting again, beginning with the stains of color under the line drawing.
And for this whole piece, instead of a simple round brush, I use a variety of streaky and
textured brushes.
From start to finish, I don’t do anything with a menu command or shortcuts.
I don’t use selections, fills, gradients, multiple layers or automated actions.
And when I paint a glow around this flame, I do it with colors selected from the on-screen
color picker and different brushes.
I keep manipulating the digital paint with careful drawing and edge control.
The luminous effect of the flame is also created through control of my values.
By keeping all the surrounding values relatively dark, the candle flame will look much brighter
by comparison.
And the highlights on the metal will really pop.
The difference between these two styles of digital painting should be obvious.
When problems are solved with brushes, expressive brushwork and smart color choices, it has
a much more traditional look.
Also, when you make a mistake, try not to use the “Undo” command.
Just paint over it.
You may start to think more carefully about each brush stroke and each value when you
treat it more like a real physical painting.
TIP 5: Use a controlled color palette
Color is a huge subject which I can’t properly cover here.
A good way to practice seeing color is to study the works of past masters.
Many of my favorite artists used very limited palettes and achieved great color harmonies.
You can read about what colors they used for some of the more famous ones or just analyze
what you can see in their work and make your best guess.
But when looking at your own subject or reference photo, you need to decide first what the color
temperature of light is.
Like, is it warm or cool.
And then what range of colors should you use in the painting.
I suggest you try working with a limited digital color palette in order to
achieve color harmony.
A great way to do that is to pre-select a limited range of colors in advance and to put
them on your palette before starting.
Try to set up all of the major halftone, transition and shadow colors.
When working digitally, you can just put the dabs of palette colors right on the canvas
you’re working on.
Just keep them off to the side and as you paint, use the eyedropper tool to pick a color
from your palette when needed.
You can lighten or darken the palette colors too.
But try not to add new colors as you go along.
And most importantly, don’t sample colors directly from the photo.
That’s cheating and you won’t learn as much.
The more you engage your brain in this process, the better you’ll eventually get at choosing
colors intuitively.
Remember, to be a realistic painter, you don’t have to reproduce the colors in the photo
with perfect accuracy.
You should just try to make a compelling painting that’s a reflection of your own artistic
sensibilities.
You have a lot of leeway with colors in a painting, as long as your values of light
and dark are convincing.
TIP 6: Stay back!
When painting on a canvas, good oil painters tend to stand as far back as possible.
And great oil painters stand even farther back!
This isn’t something you can really do when painting digitally.
But what you can do is stay zoomed out on your work as much as possible.
Try to keep the whole painting in view while working on it, as much as you can.
That will simulate what oil painters do when standing at their easels.
You’ll probably need to zoom in sometimes of course, depending on the subject matter.
But if you zoom in on small areas too much, it will tempt you to overwork the details
increasing the chances that you’ll sacrifice the unity of the composition.
The farther away you are from the painting while working, the more impressionistic and
painterly your work will be.
And seeing the whole painting while working helps you see how the values and colors relate
to each other throughout the composition which helps with the color harmony.
TIP 7: Forget the lines.
It’s all about edges.
When you start painting on top of a detailed line drawing, you may be hesitant to cover
up those lines with paint and lose the drawing.
But when working with real wet and juicy paint on a canvas, the reality is that you eventually
have to cover up the lines and work shapes back and forth into each other in order to
manipulate the edges in interesting ways.
In fact, edge variation is one of the most overlooked and underused techniques in digital
painting.
And it’s probably the single most important trait of an artist’s style, other than color,
which distinguishes you from other artists.
You’ll get a variety of edges by painting back and forth over the line drawing, pushing,
pulling and smudging the digital paint.
Real oil and acrylic paints mix on the surface, colors overlap and cross contaminate with
each other.
The more variety you add to your edges in your digital work, the more “artsy” and
“painterly” your work can look.
To soften and blend edges, look for brushes that have broken or streaky footprints and
then use a light touch.
There are even some great digital smudging tools in Photoshop that create broken edges.
But you should use smudging tools sparingly.
And don’t forget, for visual contrast, there should be plenty of hard crisp edges in a
painting as well if you want a realistic look.
As a general rule, a good place to soften or even lose an edge entirely is when the
values of two adjacent shapes are really similar.
So you may have noticed a pattern.
The recurring theme here is to try to mimic the procedures of traditional artists, and
to limit your digital tools so that they reflect more accurately the limitations of traditional materials.
If you do that, your digital work will be more a reflection of you and your skills,
rather than the software.
Stan: Thanks Court!
And thank you to our sponsor, Wacom.
This is in my opinion the best digital tablet on the market.
If you want to get one for yourself, my favorite is of course the biggest and the baddest, 32”
Cintiq Pro…
But they also have 13”,16” and 24” options and the MobileStudio line which doesn’t
require a computer to plug in to.
Check out my links in the description.
See you next time!
...and get the look of a traditional painting on canvas.
Hey!
Technically, we have to tell you guys-
I totally forgot my line.
...to get the look of a traditional painting on a canvas.
Oh *beep*!
You were totally enraptured by my performance.
You don't think just a casual douchy push would be better?
Hey!
Sorry to interrupt!
That might be better!