For the longest time, it's been my desire to learn how to paint digitally in Photoshop. Now that I have the time, I started taking an online digital painting course last week. Even though I'm not exactly a beginner in drawing, I am a beginner in digital painting especially in Photoshop. I am pleasantly surprised, that I became comfortable with Photoshop quickly, after learning a few tips on how to navigate the interface. That week was sort of a warm-up.
This week, I got a taste of how it's like to paint digitally. Oh boy.... it's was quite a challenge. I didn't realize that painting takes longer, and requires a lot of patience. After watching my instructor's painting demo, I started to do the assignment, Using the sketch of the Vienna statue that I did last week, I scaled it up to just focus on the head for this week.
My first difficulty was blending. I didn't know how to digitally blend the colors using the brush tool and the color picker. I spent hours and hours struggling on this till my hand hurts. This was what I managed that day... She looks angry at me already. Haha... (click to enlarge)
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The following day, I worked on it again,and managed to get the hang of blending that I was pleased with the outcome. I managed to soften her expression. At least she doesn't look angry anymore. I blocked out the hair and arm roughly. This allowed me to focus on other areas, when I got tired of working on the face.
On the third day, I continued on. The face keeps evolving as I work on it. At one point, I painted the lips much too luscious, it looked like Angelina Jolie's lips. I have to tone it down. A good tip Anne told us is to flip the image to get a fresh eye. I knew that, but forgot about it until Anne mentioned it. That helped a lot. I saw some distortions and managed to fix it on this version below.
I was pleased with what I've done with the head so far and decided to take a break from it for awhile. I decided to work on the other part of our assignment, which was to draw animals in interesting poses on a black background. So I did this....
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| Photo Image by Leslie Thief |
The following day, back to the head painting, I decided to finish it up already, because there's more animal drawings to do. I worked on the hair, neck and arm area, plus a bit of the background, I tried to fix the face a bit of any distortions. By this time, my hand started to really hurt, due to my previous RSI. I decided to leave the head study for now and proceed with the animal drawings, and if there's still time, I will work on it later. At this stage, I was happy with the result.
So after painting intensely for a few days by now, drawing animals was a welcome break. I enjoyed drawing them that I drew 6 more animals over two days.
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| Photo Image by Draco Art Stock |
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| Photo Image by Draco Art Stock |
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| Photo Image by Bahaloo |
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| Photo Image by Chunga Stock |
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| Photo Image by Hot N Stock |
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| Photo Image by Deseo Nocturno |
Whew.... I've finished all the assignment for this week and I still have a few days left to spare. So, I thought of going over the head study again and see if I can polish it up a bit. After a few hours of tweaking it, I decided to let it go. I don't want to mess it up unnecessarily. So here is the final head value study.
It's been a very intense and productive week for me, I started out fumbling over how to blend the colors. After hours and hours spent just figuring it out, I managed to get the hang of it by the end of the week. Not too bad.... It's not perfect by any means, but for a start, this is really, really promising. :)
To see previous weeks, click here : Week 1
