What is Digital Painting?

Digital painting uses software designed for making or modifying images, which has ‘brushes’ that mimic typical airbrushing, stamping, painting etc. You can configure brushes in a variety of ways to achieve all sorts of looks, and with use of a pressure and angle sensitive graphics tablet you have a lot more versitility.

Basically, you hook up a graphics tablet to your computer and run a graphics/painting program – I use Painter and Photoshop. The graphics tablet (which comes with a special stylus pen) has a little rectangular pad that you draw on, and whatever you draw appears on the monitor. It’s like using a mouse with extra functionality, but instead of clicking and holding the mouse button you press and drag the pen on the pad.

There are several reasons I exhibit digital painting over regular painting:

Familiarity – Having used painting software solidly since late 2005 I find myself most efficient in this realm.

Accessibility – Digital painting grants the freedom to stop and start at will without waiting for paint to dry.

Brush Shapes and Application Modes – Apart from being able to customise brushes to any shape (like painting with a rubber stamp), I can set the brushstroke to apply colour in different ways. For example, I can make it add the colour I’m painting with to the colour I’m painting on, subtract it, find an average, or a range of other programmatic combinations, each of which yields a different result.

Colours – I prefer working with the RGB spectrum of light that monitors display in. It gives me access to brighter colours than you can paint with. The way it’s simulated will consequently achieve a different result to regular painting, and creates imagery perfect for use in other mediums which are displayed digitally.

Versitility – Digital painting makes it more feasible to continuously adjust parts of the image until you’re really happy with the result. It enables you to make a more refined image with less frustration if you’re finicky.

If you’re still curious about anything you’re welcome to contact me.
I work differently depending on the task, but here’s an example of an environment concept process. The first panel is the pencil sketch, followed by colour blocking, then detailing: