Recently, in the midst of my t-shirt design work, I took on a favor for a poster idea for a friend of mine. He’s working on a small movie project and wanted a poster image to preview to others.

I thought this would be a great opportunity to share some tips about how to make your digital paintings better with some simple techniques I’ve acquired through research as well as trial and error.

10 Tips For Better Digital Paintings

10. Sketch The Composition

This seems pretty obvious, but one of the first digital paintings I tried to create I first started painting the different components of the painting separately. Afterwords I tried to put them all together, soon realizing that the different components worked horribly together. So first sketch the composition for your painting, even if it’s an incredibly rough sketch. Also include notes on your sketches for where you want the main source of light to be as well as shadow, and additional details.

09. Use Photo References

Not sure what a trench coat looks like? How about the position of the objects for your composition? Find a couple of photo references to base your painting on. Just make sure it doesn’t borderline copyright infringement as a direct copy of the original photo source. There are also plenty of free image websites out there such as sxc.hu, and I’ve been able to find plenty of deviantart.com users, who will allow you to go crazy with their stock images for absolutely free.

08. Use A Gray Base

A technique that is slowly becoming one of my favorites is creating my painting first in black and white. Or Rather black and white with a lot of grays. This allows you to later change the colors of the painting without being restricted by how you originally composed the painting. Starting with different levels of grays also allow you to make the composition more cohesive by concentrating on the lighting of the picture and how the objects or characters affect one another. However, starting off with a gray base doesn’t always work for your painting and is something that you can probably learn through trial and error (as I recently discovered).

07. Paint In Layers

Traditionally on canvas it is probably best to start painting the background first and moving forward. However, an additional wondrous benefit of working with Photoshop is that you can paint in layers. This allows you to essentially have freedom when composing your painting because you can choose to move and arrange items in your painting without greatly influencing any other part of your piece. So if you don’t like the background, you can delete it and start over without losing the foreground.. Did I mention I LOVE Photoshop!

06. Integrate Photo Manipulations

The thought of painting flames frightened me, particularly because in order for flames to come off correctly there are subtle details that have to work properly. So I integrated and manipulated stock images of fire I found from sxc.hu. I duplicated the fire and slightly warped it to fit around the main character. So, whether it’s to save time or just make the composition better, integrate photo manipulations into your digital artwork.

05. Color As a Separate Layer

Setting your layer to the “Color” mode will allow you to paint color on top of the original gray base you started with. Build upon highlights and shadow, and add further dimension to the photo by bringing out additional details with the proper coloring.

04. Use Few Colors

A common trend in many popular digital paintings is using very few colors in your overall color scheme. You can optimize on the level of impact your piece communicates by using 1-3 colors. Painted on top of the original gray base for this poster are two separate cyan and yellow layers.

03. Create Depth

In my old drawing classes my professor would always say that our artwork should have a foreground, middle, and background. Though I don’t believe this is always necessary and is influenced by the medium you’re working with, it is very beneficial to utilize for the depth in your piece. For this poster the main character is i the foreground, with clouds taking up the middle and in the very background is a cityscape. Creating depth allows your viewer to travel into the painting and fully grasp the concept.

02. Take Advantage of Photoshop

Don’t forget that you are working in one of the most underutilized programs in the design world. Photoshop opens up possibilities for you to continue to manipulate your artwork until your truly satisfied with it. For instance, I added an adjustment layer to play with the curves level and bring more contrast between the top and lower levels of the poster.

01. K.I.S.S.

The most important advice in any design is to simply, “keep it simple sweetheart.” Whether it’s the general composition or the color scheme, some of the most powerful pieces of artwork are very subtle in their composition. Understand that design is a continuous learning process that will help you grow as a better artist if you keep at it. You don’t have to always perfect traditional drawing/painting techniques, and it will get better over time.

Additional Tips?

For anyone who has dabbled in a little digital painting, feel free to submit your additional tips for the readers below. And be sure to subscribe to my RSS feed for more updates!

<3 Love Ya!
-Mel

Today’s tutorial is done using video footage from my recent YouTube video entitled “White.” This tutorial would be especially beneficial to bloggers who create the bulk of their own graphics.

Create a .gif animation from video using Adobe Photoshop CS3.

I actually accidentally stumbled upon doing this animation one day when I was looking at the different ways to import files into Photoshop.

Again, I apologize for my schizo screen recorder, and electronically retarded computer for any shakiness that may occur during the video. Although this tutorial takes about 2 minutes and 50 seconds to follow, the actual process itself shouldn’t take any longer than a minute–that is unless you have just as slow of a computer as me.

Tools you’ll need for this animation
Adobe Photoshop (I’m using CS3)
and a short video clip

I really recommend that you use a very short several second video clip, or else the animation may come out in poor quality. Also, as you can see, I made the actual size of the clip smaller so that the file itself wouldn’t be too big.

What happens when you upload a former video as a gif animation to a profile is that the gif becomes changed to adapt to the size of a thumbnail. When it becomes a thumbnail, the animation distorts as its playing. One of the ways to possibly avoid this is to try to make the animation itself the size of a standard profile thumbnail–this size changes though according to the original size of the image, and the standard profile size for that particular website.

The other way to avoid it is to have a shorter video clip because sometimes the actual file size affects how well it plays. The opportunities for what to use this for are unlimited, and I think bloggers can benefit using part of video clips for their 125 x 125 gif animation ads.

This is how my gif animation turned out:

As always, if you need any help in anything I’ve discussed, feel free to leave me a comment.

Final Confessions: I’ve realized that a lot of people on YouTube ask where they can get a discount on Photoshop, or the entire Adobe CS3 collection. I’ll reveal in a post this week where I got my Master Suite Collection for $250.00