Digital Art #1

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Digital Art is one of the fastest growing art mediums among beginner and professional artists alike. And outside of regular practicing, the right constructive feedback from fellow artists can really help accelerate improvement and support an artist’s growth.

Digital Art features multiple challenges that are specifically unique to its category as well as the main challenges of general art-making.

Whether you’re using a mouse or a tablet, the feeling of painting in a Digital Art medium is notably different and is going to take time to get well-adjusted to. In this first edition of Digital Art Tutorials, we’ll look at the bare basics of drawing and coloring.

Drawing

If you are critiquing the drawing aspects of digital art, you want to ask yourself:

Are the lines clean or jagged? Likewise, are the curves smooth and well calculated or executed? Does the subject matter portrayed resemble a neat, geometric/organic shape or does it appear too rough or too muddled?

Does the artwork use a good resolution as well as anti-aliasing? In a nutshell, anti-aliasing describes the issue of transitioning from harsh pixellation to a more seamless, gradual repair. In other words, if you can count the squares or circles that compose a line, texture or feature, then the artwork is pixellated giving it more of an MS-Paint type of feel.

Is the linework too hard or too thick? Solid black lines with a thick line-weight, especially one that is distributed throughout the entire picture, can be largely unappealing.

Solutions and Advice:

Oftentimes beginner digital artists simply “jump” into a program and use the defaults in doing so—I was guilty of this. Get to know your program and how you can use or edit your brush.  For jagged lines or curves, take your time and draw slowly and carefully, even redraw the stroke for smoothness, then erase errors/inconsistencies. Moving at a normal or rushed speed usually causes mess-ups in lines. Also, feel free to use path, arc and/or line tools or commands.

With pixellation, you will most likely have a smudge or blur tool, use that on your lines on a light setting to smooth them out even more. Or choose complex brushes that have a capacity to “bleed” or blend with the surrounding colors. Some programs feature anti-aliasing options on brush menus.

Too hard? Use a dark gray, brown, or practically any suitable color but never black. Set brush opacity to 60-80%. Too thick? Decrease the size of the brush. 

Coloring

Now let’s look at coloring. For the coloring aspects, ask yourself:

Does the coloring match up well to the quality of the linework? Does it interfere/overlap with the lines, or leave white spots in between surfaces? 

Does the coloring feel too soft, “sprayed”, “brushed” or “rubbed”? This means that the coloring feels broad, blurry, rushed and not fine-tuned to the contour.

  Is the shading too hard or too rough?

Solutions and Advice:

For coloring, NEVER use the bucket tool with complex brushes, those will usually create messy borders of white pixels in between the line and the filled area. NEVER use bucket tool as a finished product of coloring. If you use the bucket tool with lines defined by a simple pixel brush, fill in the area with fine shading, and use a pen tool, or small airbrush tool to smooth the lines. Using selection tools really help create your coloring on one place. If you know how to use layers, before you start your artwork, open a new layer, and do all your linework, open another layer to do your coloring. That way, coloring never interferes with the linework and you can always erase the colors if they go past the lines.

If the coloring is too soft or too blurry, don’t use a large or default size of an airbrush. Shrink it down so it’s just bigger than a pencil/pen tool. Make sure it’s not too low on opacity, you want some amount of sharpness with your painting.

If the shading is too hard or too rough, pick the color of the dark shadow or the bright highlight and work gradually towards it with a light opacity. This may mean multiple strokes to create gradual shades and then using a smudge or blur tool. Seldom use solid black or solid white to create shading.

In Conclusion

What has been listed above are just a sample of techniques you can use to critique and improve digital art in particularly drawing and coloring. As this is just a sample, keep in mind there are multiple ways to reach solutions. There is not just one right way, and some suggestions listed depends on the style. However, if you’re new to digital art, it may be recommendable to go with lines/borders before trying a lineless approach. Likewise, you might want to go with soft shading, however you might be one who likes vectoresque contrast. Either way, whether you’re seeking to improve or improve others, I am hoping that in one way or another you will find the tips helpful.

Thanks for reading

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