Digital Painting for 2D Illustration

Digital Painting for 2D Illustration

“We have reached the end of the course and I hope you feel like you understand a little bit more about digital scene painting in photoshop now. I tried to cover as much ground on as many things that I believe don’t get too much coverage in the digital illustration world, things like colour keys, setting up your art for display, and thinking about visual tricks and elements that reinforce the story. I also hope you learned a little bit about me and my process, so that perhaps if you were struggling with something simple like; setting up your canvas or even preparing to make your daunting first marks with the pencil or brush, just know that it is no different working in the industry and there’s no special trick to it! Now I want to walk you through the process again step by step just to recap what we went through and what we should have learned. So we started with the idea creation, taking several keywords (genre, location, era, action, etc) so that we have our key story and drive for the work moving forward, I am hoping that you found interesting new combinations that pushed you outside your usual comfort zone, I know I did! Once we have that it hopefully has already sparked your imagination and now you are thinking of different scenes from games or films or any other imagery you can pull from your visual library to aid you in your first thumbnails. You can start on paper if it is more comfortable or convenient for you before moving onto digital.

Once we have chosen our preferred thumbnail design we can move onto the colour key stage, where we introduce a colour that not only looks great but also reinforces the story. Then we would push through once we realised which illustration we want to render. We clean up the illustration for many reasons but mainly to clear out any of the insecurities and unknowns of the image before we render. With the sketch ready we move onto rendering by first blocking out all of the major shapes so that we have a clean image to work in and out of and keep our core structure. We can then establish the light and shadow as they’re key to getting the image to read early on. This is the last step before finally getting to render the image, hopefully, you will see that all this foundational work can really set you up to excel in the final painting stage! Rendering is simply painting what we see, understanding how the light bounces and moves around the scene affecting all the different materials, you don’t want to lose yourself in this stage though so be sure to zoom out, flip your canvas, and CTRL+Y to check your values! There we go! I hope you will now have a more clear understanding of my painting process and hopefully, you will have picked up somethings that you can adopt into your illustrations! I will be in the forum checking regularly so if you struggle or need any help don’t hesitate to ask in there or go over the lessons multiple times if you want! I can’t wait to see your final projects! ”

Partial transcription of the video

“Final Project This is the end of my Domestika course. I hope I've inspired you to create your own scenes and compositions and take them to the next level. As you've seen, hard work and dedication to my passion, art, has been crucial to my career, so I encourage you to never give up, try harder, but take a break if you need to. Sometimes that break can be super beneficial by allowing your skills to rest. You may come back energized with new ideas. Remember to set up your Photoshop layout and shortcuts so you can maximize speed and efficiency. It's beneficial to learn this early. Explore your...”

This transcript is automatically generated, so it may contain mistakes.

Course summary for: Digital Painting for 2D Illustration

• Level: Beginner
• 98% positive reviews (194)
• 5483 students
• 5 units
• 23 lessons (4h 37m)
• 5 downloads

• Category

  Illustration

• Software

  Adobe Photoshop

• Areas

  Digital Illustration, Digital Painting, Traditional illustration