But I decided against my pessimism and pushed forward to give it a try! After a few brief tutorials on colour theory and which software proved popular for this sort of endeavour I picked out an old picture I drew in my transition year of secondary school:
So with Photoshop in tow, I began to colour in the drawing, using all the techniques I had obtained from previous tutorials. In the beginning I wasn't very pleased with the early results. Without the drawing overlaid, the colours underneath had very little shape or form, appeared blunt and didn't have any sense of the detail the drawing did.
Around this time is usually where my old self would have given up. I don't know where I developed it but over the years I had a bad habit of expecting immediate results and submitting to defeat too easily. And I nearly did here too. But I pressed on. And on, and on. And then something wonderful happened. I was learning to use tools of the program outside of the tutorials, I was losing track of time and most of all I was enjoying it. And when you spend enough time doing the things you enjoy it becomes a labour of love with results that could possibly exceed what you initially planned. Such was my luck in this case. I learnt the virtue of patience all over again and it was paying off:
At this stage I was enormously pleased with myself. I was liking the look more than the original drawing and I had learnt vast amounts about digital painting. All because I actually had patience and took the time to do it. The funny thing is that, apart from having to draw the subject at hand, the colouring part is not that difficult once you get the theory down and have a bit of knowhow about light and shadow. And even in those regards I'm a beginner at best. But with Photoshop you have all the tools you could need to perfect and fine tune things right down to a small shadow, coarse skin or whatever effect you're trying to achieve. It just takes patience and time!
In the end the final product didn't stick exactly to the original picture plan. I altered the background slightly as I DID spend probably around 6-8 hours colour the picture over the course of time. I felt that I could do a quick fix for the background. But funnily enough the background which honestly took about 15-20 mins max ended up blending well with the picture. I feel like I should take credit for achieving the look of it, but honestly it was literally down to another thing I learnt with my first digital painting. Experimentation. By pure blind luck of testing the use of a few tools of Photoshop I stumbled across a background that is simply but compliments the "Water Dragon" I had created. The end result was this:
-Transition Year Drawing
So with Photoshop in tow, I began to colour in the drawing, using all the techniques I had obtained from previous tutorials. In the beginning I wasn't very pleased with the early results. Without the drawing overlaid, the colours underneath had very little shape or form, appeared blunt and didn't have any sense of the detail the drawing did.
- Phase 1: The nearly giving up phase.
Around this time is usually where my old self would have given up. I don't know where I developed it but over the years I had a bad habit of expecting immediate results and submitting to defeat too easily. And I nearly did here too. But I pressed on. And on, and on. And then something wonderful happened. I was learning to use tools of the program outside of the tutorials, I was losing track of time and most of all I was enjoying it. And when you spend enough time doing the things you enjoy it becomes a labour of love with results that could possibly exceed what you initially planned. Such was my luck in this case. I learnt the virtue of patience all over again and it was paying off:
- Phase 2: Wait, what? This is sort of cool!
At this stage I was enormously pleased with myself. I was liking the look more than the original drawing and I had learnt vast amounts about digital painting. All because I actually had patience and took the time to do it. The funny thing is that, apart from having to draw the subject at hand, the colouring part is not that difficult once you get the theory down and have a bit of knowhow about light and shadow. And even in those regards I'm a beginner at best. But with Photoshop you have all the tools you could need to perfect and fine tune things right down to a small shadow, coarse skin or whatever effect you're trying to achieve. It just takes patience and time!
In the end the final product didn't stick exactly to the original picture plan. I altered the background slightly as I DID spend probably around 6-8 hours colour the picture over the course of time. I felt that I could do a quick fix for the background. But funnily enough the background which honestly took about 15-20 mins max ended up blending well with the picture. I feel like I should take credit for achieving the look of it, but honestly it was literally down to another thing I learnt with my first digital painting. Experimentation. By pure blind luck of testing the use of a few tools of Photoshop I stumbled across a background that is simply but compliments the "Water Dragon" I had created. The end result was this:
- Final Digital Painting "Water Dragon"
Simple background, all from messing about. Mind you that won't always provide results, but now I know how to get THAT result if I ever intend to use it again! In the end I think I can say I pulled off a good first digital painting. Of course, I wanted to show it off and have since been recommended to get a tablet for drawing, which I do believe could greatly improve the time I spend on each one. Overall though the sense of achievement was something I haven't felt in a while and I hope this is the first of many I plan to post in the future.
So to close, for anyone who is intimidated about learning to digital paint, don't be. Like all things it takes time but you'll be surprised about how quick you can adapt. Get Photoshop or Corel, scan in your images and starting painting, you'll enjoy it, you'll get really pissed off and you'll be proud!
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And here's a little sneak peak of the next one for anyone interested. It's based off a character called Vin from a book called the Mistborn trilogy. You may have to look her up to get the context of the picture but I'm hoping it will look cool none the less in the end, even for those who have no idea what the hell is going on in the picture:
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