Great Tip For Digital Painting Beginners!

Before we get started I'm assuming that you have something like a graphics tablet or tablet PC that you can paint with.

If you don't I strongly recommend getting one. Now there are quite a few useful features in good painting software but for this article we'll keep it extremely basic. We'll use a brush that paints solid flat colors a brush that smudges or blends keyboard shortcuts to change the brush size and of course a couple of tools for choosing colors. 

This method is based on making the broad choices first using flat colors only. 

It's tempting to go straight to shading because that's when things start to look cool but if you want to make changes you can end up redoing a whole lot of work.

Using only flat colors means you can make changes quickly so it's a great time saver. The other big benefit is that you can forget about the shading and details entirely at least for a while and just focus on things like composition and color. So it's one step at a time instead of all at once; broad choices first then working down to the details. Which is probably a good principle for other aspects of life as well!

Okay, now when it comes to selecting colors most painting software will have at least two options. One is in the menu in the form of a color wheel or some color sliders that you can experiment with

until you get the color you want. The other is usually called the color picker or eyedropper and it lets you choose colors directly from your painting. 

This is something I use constantly especially after I've got a few colors on the screen to choose from. Picking and adjusting colors you've already used is way easier faster and more accurate than always trying to create colors from scratch. 

Now it's time to forget about things like composition and color design and just deal with blending or smudging.

I really like only having to think about one or two things at a time and I find that I can relax and enjoy this part of the process a lot more because a lot of the hard thinking has already been done and I'm just working with what's already there.

I recommend using a smudge brush that has a bit of texture to it so the blended areas don't look boring and plastic but if your software only has a plain brush to work with you can always just smudge a bit unevenly to add some variety and interest. 

Though one tip that I've read in a few places is to try using a larger brush size than what you're initially comfortable with.

A lot of us are perfectionists and we try to get more control by using small precise brushes but larger brushes often actually look better in terms of the blending and the process is a lot quicker. This is something I had to learn after reading that advice but I'm glad I've done that now. 

After the main shading is finished you can start looking at adding details and just polishing things up. You might switch back and forth between painting in blending just adding small bits of color and smudging them around.  

The blending brush can actually reshape areas of color as well by pushing one color into another. You can also soften some of the hard edges left by the flat color brush just by using a small size for your blending brush and just smudging along the harsh lines. So it's basically this you lay out the foundation of the picture with flat color then you do the main shading and last of all we add the details. swapping back and forth between flat colors and blending.

It's very simple and I think it's a good way to get started in digital painting but I also think it's good for more ambitious art as well.

To give an example this weird clown picture started with flat colors well actually it started with a drawing where the characters were mostly figured out but the color work started with flat colors which was a really good thing since I ended up changing the background color the overall lighting (the direction of the lighting that is) and the whole shape of the picture. 

If I'd gone straight into shading I would have wasted heaps of work. For the shading stage I didn't actually use a smudging brush. 

Instead I used a brush that both adds color and mixes it with existing colors at the same time which can be a very handy tool I really like it but an ordinary smudge brush I think is better for the main

blending at least for me.

I also used some other software tools like layers and transparency that I haven't really talked about here but the main process was still just flat color then blending then detailing.

So that's it! I think it's a pretty simple method!