Six skills of creating realistic digital painting

Digital painting is now one of the most popular art forms, and a good digital painting standard is to be realistic enough. Of course, for many beginners, the creation of surreal digital painting is a very difficult thing, and even the creative process will appear a lot of difficulties and disappointment.

Indeed, for digital painting, truth is the oxygen that grows. The reason for this is that we can often see ourselves in lifelike digital paintings. So it's not that many designers spend their entire lives trying to create super lifelike digital paintings.

Here, this issue of the translation of foreign products will be a few practical examples to tell you to create realistic digital painting six major skills. Whether you are a beginner or have some experience, these skills can greatly improve the efficiency of creating realistic digital painting.

Come and learn!

First, the use of photo texture in the works

One way to quickly make your digital paintings look real is to use photo textures. To do this, it is not very difficult, as long as the photo texture combined into the digital painting can be.

Photo Textures are part of the photo you are referencing. This step of the operation of the technology allows you to complete the digital painting works, this is not only reflected in clothing, skin, natural details, but also embodied in the work of the intrinsic spirit.

For example, the following digital paintings were created by Johnson Ting, who built a fairly lifelike astronaut with illustration. In this example, you can spend more time studying how he uses a small number of photographs to add real textures to his work.

Figure 01

Second, the use of texture brush

Remember Bob Ross, the giant exploding head king and the "Happy Tree"? For the past more than 10 years, he has been famous for painting beautiful paintings on TV show. In fact, the details of his digital paintings are very lifelike, just simple materials, even the fan brush to paint his signature tree leaves.

In fact, when you know how to use a texture brush in Photoshop, your digital painting is pretty much guaranteed. You can search the web for these texture brushes, or you can create your own texture brushes. Click here to learn how to create the texture brushes you need.

Figure 02

Third, for the bright part of the application environment occlusion

For many beginners, the study of environmental occlusion seems to be a big project. However, if you are familiar with grayscale painting, you may already know the common equation:

A basic grayscale + different blending mode of color = almost complete painting

So what's the most frustrating thing about light and shadows? Indeed, there is a lot of correlation, but the most magical places are always in the bright part.

PS the ability to convert grayscale paintings into color works has impressed many users. But in fact, as long as you use the environment, you can save half of the painting time, or even more, when creating a general lighting scene. When you have finished converting black and white to color, the painting is basically finished. When the color is finished, there is little to adjust, or to make up for the initial vulnerability.

Now many tutorials on the web use this technique, including the author himself. Click here to see how the author uses this technique to create in Photoshop. After reading this tutorial, your workflow habits may change a certain way.

Figure 03

Iv. use of the natural palette

If you have no confidence in your own painting skills, don't worry, there will always be a mature day for your skills. But now there is a technique that allows you to grow quickly, and that is to focus on the color.

Even if you want to use bright, bright colors, try to find the corresponding in the natural color as much as possible. This, we can take samples from the photos and get the corresponding parameters. You will soon see that the use of natural colors will make your digital paintings more authentic.

You can also learn to use natural colors to draw characters. Because in our makeup, the expression of the state of the skin, the natural color than the shadow of the use of greater impact.

In this illustration tutorial of Alice Catrinel Ciobotaru, you can look at how she creates the shadow of her lips to be more authentic.

Figure 04

V. Add Quick noise Filter

Even if you forget to use a different brush or forget to collect many photos for reference, there is always a way to solve the problem simply. That's using the fast noise filter.

The operation is simple, add a new layer (control-shift-n), and fill it with a light gray. Then select Filter > Noise > Add noise, and adjust the number to 15%.

Set the layer overlay to adjust the opacity to 30%.

This allows you to add a layer of veil to your work within a few seconds, as long as you don't overdo adding noise. Of course, if excessive noise is added, it will undoubtedly destroy the painting.

Figure 05

Six, draw auxiliary light source

In every artist's life, there is almost always a portrait of a couple. This is not just for practicing painting skills, but also for experimenting with different lighting settings.

In fact, the best way to study light sources is to study photos. To do a basic Google search, we can know the types of light sources include:

1, Edge Lighting

2. Backlight Illumination

3. Ambient light

4, the combination of different light sources

When I was drawing this well-dressed cat gentleman, I experimented with another light source that might bounce off the painting. This extra light, the orange light source, becomes a magical detail that brings a more exotic visual effect.

You can also try and learn according to your preferences, and you may get unexpected results.

Figure 06

Summarize:

To draw a truly ultra-high digital painting, as with many things in life, as long as you crack the formula, you can achieve success. So the next time you look at your favorite artist's work, it's not just to be awed, but to study their creative processes and skills. In this way, you will find the formula in the process of this study, thus laying the foundation for your success!

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