It is very common to see people making digital art nowadays. Getting into digital art is possible as long as you have a computer and drawing software. You may not get used to it as you use a pen to draw on paper at first. However, with frequent practicing, you will soon get used to drawing on a computer.
The same techniques are required as traditional painting. You cannot generate a painting with a single click. You still have to draw it yourself. With digital painting, you can avoid getting messy with the colors and oil. You don’t have to set aside a large area to draw your painting.
With a tablet, you only need a place to sit to start drawing. On the other hand, with traditional painting, you need a large area to set up the easel, and coloring. It is faster to produce a painting with digital software. When you finish drawing and painting your artwork, you can export it to an image file on your computer. There is no need to wait for a while for the paint to become dry.
As a beginner, you can first sketch down your drawing on a piece of paper. It is a rough sketch but you should try to make it as close in resemblance to the subject as possible. There is no need to include all the details but it should have the most essential components. The reason is that you may be making lots of changes to it with your drawing software afterwards. So, it does not make sense to include every tiny detail in the original sketch.
After that, you can turn on your scanner to scan your drawing. The scanned picture should be saved in PNG or JPG at the highest quality. The scanned drawing can be opened in a drawing program like GIMP. You should avoid using simple programs like Microsoft Paint as it does not allow opening multiple canvases. It also lacks a lot of features for making a professional painting. If you are serious about digital art, you should consider purchasing a paid digital art software. The best drawing software depends on what type of digital art you are drawing.
Some people prefer to use the pen tool to sketch directly into the program that they are using. It takes lots of practice to draw accurately with the pen tool in the drawing program. If you have a drawing tablet and stylus pen, you can connect it to your computer. You will want to make sure that the drawing software is compatible with your tablet and can recognize your stylus.
If you draw from scratch on the software, you will need to first choose the canvas size. The canvas size should ideally be 300 pixels/inch if you plan to draw it. If you did not plan to print it, you can choose a smaller canvas size of 72 pixels/inch. You should always choose the RGB color mode for your artwork. It can be switched to CMYK color mode afterwards.
In the drawing software, you can make layers for each of the major elements in your sketch. The first layer you should create is the background layer. Creating multiple layers for your artwork allows you to make changes to an element without affecting others. The order of the layers is important. Higher layers will be placed on top of the layers underneath. The orders of the layers can be easily changed by drag and drop in your drawing software.
The more detailed your drawing, the more layers you have to add. For example, on a shirt, you can add separate layers for pockets, and creases. Finally, make sure you merge all the layers and save them into a single file. This is done by simply exporting them as png or jpeg. Some people find that outlining the drawing makes it easier for coloring. You can use various sizes of brushes to color the drawing. The easiest way to color is to use a single color for each area of the drawing.
