Week two of the DIGITAL DREAM, a 75 day challenge I’ve set myself of Studying and Documenting the Process of Learning Digital Painting. I take Thursdays off, so a Digital Dream week is 6 days, and each week I’ll be doing a little blog post, like this one, where I’ll share some of my sketches, struggles, and various tips I pick up along the way.

The main take away from this week, was TRADITIONAL DRAWING SKILLS ARE KEY.

Whereas last week was all about getting to grips with the hardware, software and basic keyboard shortcuts … this week was all about realising how Important Traditional Drawing Skills are to Digital Painting.

At least at this early stage, digital painting appears to be about learning two skills

• LEARNING THE SOFTWARE SKILLS – feeling comfortable with the device and software.
• LEARNING THE DRAWING SKILLS – being able to translate what you want to draw, into what you actually draw.

Even if you mastered, say Photoshop, you’d still need drawing skills. I know it may seem obvious, but I didn’t really think about it like this before. This is cool, because it means you can work traditionally and digitally at the same time :)

Here’s some of the tings I created during the past six days of The Digital Dream art challenge.

Daily Digital Gesture Drawing continued using QuickPoses.com, and on day ten I tried something new by lowering the size of the brush, and lowering the flow amount to 19%, so that I could build up the lines a lot more gently; Day ten was the first time I felt semi comfortable with the brush tool :)

DAYS 7 TO 12

GESTURE DRAWING

DAYS 7 TO 12

STUDY EXERCISES

STUDY EXERCISES

DAY 7 • YUKIKO AMAGI FROM PERSONA 4 SKETCH
Hot off the heels of my Chie sketch from week 1, day 7 saw me sketch her best friend Yukiko Amagi. I didn’t know what I was doing half the time, but I was having fun :)

DAY 8 • MITSURU FROM PERSONA 3 SKETCH
I played around with a piece of software on day eight, called PureRef. It’s pretty amazing really, it allowed me to have a reference image of Mitsuru from Persona 3 on screen, separate from Photoshop. Hard to explain, but I detail it (also known as fumbling about) a bit in this YouTube video.

DAY 9 • FASHION COSTUME GESTURES
This was a fun day. I used photos from The Sartorialist, to create little sketches, capturing the gesture of the various models / costumes.

DAY 10 • THE TINY COLOUR STUDY
This was another fun little exercise from CtrlPaint called The Tiny Study; Like all the exercises so far, this one can be done digitally or traditionally. It’s so much fun, you have to try and match the colours in a reference image without using the eyedropper; much harder than it appears, but so much fun.

DAY 11 • ANOTHER TINY COLOUR STUDY
I enjoy this exercise so much, and feel like I’m learning so much, that I’m going to try and make it a new daily exercise. They take me about 30 minutes, but Matt Kohr, from CtrlPaint.com, who cam up with the exercise says they take him about 5 minutes, so could do a couple of these for fun each day :)

DAY 12 • PERSPECTIVE
The final day of week two was all about Perspective, like Marshall Vandruff, Matt Kohr at CtrlPaint has a way of making this complex subject, much easier to understand.

KEYBOARD SHORTCUTS LEARNT THIS WEEK

• CTRL + T • Free Transform Tool
• RIGHT CLICK WHILE CTRL + T ACTIVE • Flip Layer Horizontally
• CTRL + [ • Move Layer DOWN the stack
• CTRL + ] • Move Layer UP the stack

USEFUL RESOURCES & WEBSITES

• PURE REF • great piece of software for using reference images
• LINE-OF-ACTION • great site for gesture drawing (I like that it has animals) – I still prefer QuickPoses.com though :)
• SCREEN MUSINGS • tons of film screenshots, great for using as reference photos
• THE SARTORIALIST • fashion website, ideal for fashion gesture drawing :)
• SKULL SKETCHER V2 • free tool for viewing the skull from any angle, in any light – great for studying/ sketching

WEEK THREE

Feeling more comfortable with the tablet, pen, and keyboard shortcuts, it was now time to start tackling some more complicated digital painting skills.

Week Three was all about Clipping Masks, which you can find in the WEEK THREE BLOG POST