Learn the Step-by-Step Process of Digital Painting – Easy and Effective!

Hey guys! For this video, I’m going to be doing a voiceover to explain my painting process and how I get from start to finish. This piece was inspired by a photo that I found on Instagram belonging to Adrienne Marie and I really like the lighting here, so I decided that I’m going to try to make my own characters from it and see what I can come up with.

The first thing that I start with is always a sketch. I like to put a sketch down just so I know where all the different colors are going to go. Unfortunately, I didn’t actually record the sketching process for this video, but what you see on the screen right now is basically me doing a general color blocking for the background. This is just to get an overall sense of the color, lighting, and mood of the painting. I’m not putting in too much detail, I’m not focusing too much on the small things, I’m just trying to get a general feel.

I like to always do the background first because this gives me an idea of whether or not the painting is actually going to work before I move on to the subjects. After I figure out the background, I can then turn the opacity down on the original sketch and go in with the lasso tool to get an outline for the character. This just makes sure that when I do the color blocking for the character with my brush, I don’t go outside of the outline, I don’t change the original form of the character.

This is pretty much just the same color blocking process as the background. I’m trying to get a sense of how she’s going to look in this space, how the light is going to be interacting with her. I’m not going into too much detail right now, because that’s just not necessary. I’m trying to see if the character will fit in the environment. And again, I’m turning down the opacity of the original sketch more and more as I get into the details of the character.

You can see that I flipped my canvas just now. That is a super useful thing that you can do to spot mistakes in your painting. You know, if you’re drawing portraits, it’s really helpful to look at your painting from a fresh angle with a fresh eye and you can spot all the mistakes that you’ve been missing.

Now I am going into a bit more detail with the character, and once I start doing this, you can see that I turn off the original sketch layer because I no longer need that guidance as to where to put things. And you’ll see me turn that layer back on every once in a while when I get to an area that’s less detailed that there’s less information there and I need some guidance. I’ll turn that layer back on.

I only go into smaller details once I’m comfortable with the overall colors of the character and when I see that the character is sitting in the environment well and she’s looking like she’s a part of the environment. I can then go into defining her a little bit more with a smaller brush. You can see that I’m also adjusting some of the proportions on the model.

This was probably one of the best times to make these big changes because you’ve yet to get into too much detail and you can see that, you know, I’m changing like the color of the top and this is the creative freedom you have when you decide to make your own character. I try not to be too limited by the original sketch.

At this point in the painting, I’m feeling like our main character is looking pretty solid, so we can then move on to our second character, which is this little dog thing that I created. Again, we’re starting with color blocking, basic color blocking, not going into the details. This is just to make sure the character sits in the environment correctly before we do anything crazy with them.

Here you can see big brush strokes. I’m trying to get the color down, trying to work with the lighting of it. And once I feel comfortable with that, this is where I move into a bit of the smaller details and stuff, how the eyes are going to look, the big puppy eyes, and some of the lighting on the side.

At this stage, I’m jumping back and forth a bit between our two main subjects, and this is because we are in kind of a final detailing stage now. So any of the small things that I spot that I think I need to work on, I’ll just go right ahead and work on it no matter what area I’m currently working on.

When I’m painting, I try not to get too caught up in the details. I try not to stay in one area for too long, because that’s usually how we end up spending like nine hours on a single painting. I find that my paintings actually look a bit nicer in my opinion because you can see all the brushstrokes and how it’s all done.

So yeah, this is basically my painting process. Hopefully, this was helpful with the commentary, and if there’s anything else that you want to see like a specific tutorial or how I do certain things, feel free to let me know in the comments and I’ll try to cover that topic. Thank you for watching. I appreciate you being here. I’m going to try to get a better mic so that I don’t sound so muffled all the time. But here is the final painting.