Digital Painting Tutorial

Digital painting is a more advance form of illustration. It's not the technique that is more advance though, its the tool. It's becoming more common to see digital painter these days as the technology grows. There're a lot of painting softwares and even a pen tablet to make your life much easier. While some people think this is expensive, I'd say in the long run it's much cheaper.

These are the things you need for digital paintings :

1. a PC (Personal Computer) offcourse. You might want to have a bigger RAM and hardisk space if you want to work on a high resolution images. Otherwise you might experiences lags or delay everytime you stroke your brush.

2. a painting software. There's quite a number of choices here. My recommendations are Adobe Photoshop, SAI, or Corel Painter. For the purpose of this tutorial, I'll use Photoshop. It's heavy and huge in size but it's the most popular among digital painter.

3. a scanner. A lot of digital painter still sketch or do linearts manually on paper. They only use digital for colouring, and colouring is where digital truly shines IMO. It's always easier to draw on paper than directly on the computer. So we need this thing called scanner to upload your drawings into your computer. Or you can replace that with a high resolution camera. 

4. a pen tablet or many prefer to call it WACOM. It's a brand name actually. Wacom consist of a tablet and a pen. The tablet represents your monitor, and the pen represents your mouse or cursor. When you put your pen on top of the tablet, you can move around the cursor just like using your mouse. Basically we need this because it's extremely hard to paint with a mouse. But it's completely optional. I've seen a lot of master artist paint brilliantly with just a mouse. But if you have this, you can completely erase the need for any manual effort like sketching on paper. With practice, you can draw with wacom as good as you can with a pencil. This also erase the need for scanner. A good wacom for beginner would be the bamboo type.

As for now there're 3 products of Wacom. The first one and the cheapest would be bamboo. That's why it's recommended for those who are still unsure and want to have a try. The better choice for proffesionals would Intuos, and for something really flashy and extra expensive you can try Cintiq. For more details you can visit the Wacom official site.

So, do you have what it takes to become a Digital Painter? Let's start with the tutorial then. I created this myself so it might not be the best but I hope it helps. And sorry about the huge size :D