10 Digital Art Tips For Beginners

There are probably a many ways to draw a simple circle so you can imagine the many ways to do digital art in general. There are basic tools and methods that have been very helpful for Digital Art. The Photoshop and a bit of clip Studio Paint, because these are the ones very helpful for digital art. But a lot of these tips will be transferable to other software and often the way you do things are very similar. 

Image Source-Google | Image by- pixabay

·       Work with Shortcuts

Before starting a digital artwork it is helpful to know about keyword shortcuts that are available. This will save you an immense amount of time, especially if your Tablets, Laptop has express keys to assign them to. There are lots of different preferences and you might not even know some of these exist. So there are few recommendations that useful for Digital Art:

 

CTLR+Z	CLTR+Z for undoing things are the most common and should definitely always be on your mind or assigned to one of your express keys.
Hold R	Holding R allows you to rotate your canvas freely and therefore is also a nice shortcut you might want to keep for express key.
CLTR+T	CLTR+T is for the transform tool and helpful if you started to big or to small. Scale, rotate or distort things with this.
CLTR- and CLTR+	CLTR- and CLTR+ are for zooming and especially time saving so I have them on express keys as well.
ALT Key	When you are using a brush, using the ALT key activates your color picker.
Right-Click	Right-Click usually use for choose Brush set and adjust the size of the brush.

 

·       Pick your Brushes

There are some Brushes that are perfect for a highly specific thing like certain textures, clouds and chains. But for most of your drawing and painting, a simple goat brush is enough. You can change the pen pressure, the hardness and opacity. Some Awesome brush sets names are: 

·        Loish brush set.

·        Sakimichan brush set.

·        Photoshop paintbrushes.

·        Photoshop and GIMP brushes.

·        Abstract paintbrushes.

·       Sketching

For sketching use a simple round brush wit slightly reduced opacity. When you are drawing many lines over or along each other, the areas they have in common will come out stronger. You can of course experiment with different brushes if you want your sketch to have certain aesthetic. Put sketch on your layer. That way you can color it I needed. Try not to lose yourself in details too much and rather focus on the overall composition and proportions. While working digitally, you can easily reproduce the picture, which can reveal some errors which you can ignore because the regular work will get you used to it.

·       Liquefy and Transform

Use the Liquefy and transformation tool when any mistake spot after drawing for a bit, there are great tools you can use to avoid having to draw everything from scratch again. There are two liquefy and transform tools. You can mirror the sketch to see any oddities that have gone unnoticed and then use the liquefy tool to push and warp everything to its correct place. You this tool because you can just play around with it, because sometime you are not really sure what exactly is wrong with your drawing until you see it corrected.

Another helpful tool that is also included in clip studio paint is transform tool. There is bit of difference between those programs but the application is pretty similar and great to use on details. Use a circle the area you want to change, the eyes for example. Then use (CTRL+T) transform to create a grid to warp the subject to your liking. It’s especially helpful when you want to match objects to certain perspective, like for example add posters to a wall. Liquefy or the transformation tool is best used while you are still in the sketching process because they lower the quality of the areas you work on.

·       Line Art VS Painting

Sometime that you should be aware of once you are satisfied with your sketch is that you can go in basically two different directions from there. You can continue and start working on a line art which is often the case with cartoon drawing that have significant line art. Or you can work in more painterly manner for a rendered look. In that case you want to work with areas and only use the sketch as your guide. If you choose the line art route you would first create a new layer on top of your sketch. To set the line art apart from the sketch in the process, you can either lower the opacity of the underlying sketch layer or you can color it. Either way, doing this will help you distinguish the line art from the sketch while keeping both visible.

For drawing line arts using Clip Studio Paint or Paint Tool SAI rather than Photoshop. Clips Studio paint creates very crisp and sharp, then lines that look a lot cleaner compared to the ones you can do in Photoshop. But of course you can use whatever you like most. If you want to go more in to realistic rendering, just skip the line art and move on the next.

·       Creating a Base Layer

First we want to create a basic layer that helps us stay inside the lines where we color. You can use the Lasso tool to locate the outer line of your drawing. This way you make a selection of the inside that you can then fill on a separate layer. With a tidy and clean line art that doesn’t have any gaps, the magic wand can save you some time. Select the space outside of drawing and then invert the selection.This will select the inside of your line art. Fill it and you have a solid base layer. When this happens to us, we have to make sure that we paint only on the base and not outside it. For that, you can lock the layer. Now only paint on the part of that layer that already have color in them.

·       Clipping

If you are scared of making mistake and also want to quick adjust and change things, make sure to try using clipping layers. For that you need to right click on the layer and select “Create clipping mask”. Then you can able to paint everywhere. But when you create a clipping mask everything outside the area that defined with base layer disappears. Only the areas that overlap with the base layer will be seen. The rest gets clipped. This is super helpful. Because now we only have to focus on the area inside in the line art. Using this technique you can create layers for single purpose like hair, skin, eyes, clothes.

·       Color Picker

Color picker is one of the essential tools of digital painting. The color picker button should be on your stylus, or at least somewhere easily reachable. The color picker – assist name implies – picks up the visible color so you can use that as follows. Choose the layer you want paint on and start with a shadow tone for example. Now you can press the key to make color and you can do painting with your brush. Of course it also helps you maintain the same color because you will use the same colors which are already present in your painting.

·       Smudge

Smudging tools is not as bad as it seems, the smudge tool actually is pretty versatile. You can use different types of brushes which can create different types of effects. You can use it for textures and interesting transitions. The brush is not standard with Photoshop, but you can easily build such brush for the smudge tool. Pick the smudge tools and open a regular round soft brush. Then open the brush setting and set the spacing to 25%, scatter to 29%, count jitter to 46%, active transfer and done.

 ·       Layer Blending Style

Multiply is great when you scanned your traditional line art and want to start coloring. Just put line art on top and set it on multiply to make the white paper transparent.The screen is very helpful for creating lighting effects. Overlay is best for textures. For give water color of art, use textures and overlay them to add them to your painting. Color is useful to change color on individual areas and play around with color schemes. Create a layer set to “color” and draw on the areas.