A lot of people have been asking me what I mean when I say that I've been doing "digital paintings." In fact, some weird kid on the train with a fedora told me he thought digital painting was impossible when he saw me reading a book about it. Like... wut. I'm reading a whole book about it. Also, leave people alone when they're reading on the train. Anyway, I thought I'd do a quick post describing what I'm actually doing when I make a digital painting. (Incidentally, if you're a stranger who's stumbled across this page in an attempt to actually learn how to paint digitally, there's probably a better place to look. Just saying.)
I alluded to this in my last post, but my decision to start making digital paintings came last summer, when I was doing a mediocre job at portraiture. I started doing some exercises in oil in an attempt to strengthen my weak points. The problem was that these exercises took too long and cost too much money (in terms of all the oil painting supplies I needed-paint, brushes, strips of canvas, oil, paint thinner...), so a.) I wasn't making progress as quickly as I had hoped, and b.) every time I made a mistake I got incredibly frustrated because I knew how costly my mistakes were. I needed to find a more efficient way to practice if I was ever going to make any progress.
While I was still in school, I had learned about these really amazing digital tablets that you can use for painting; you draw with a stylus right on the screen, which has 4x the resolution of an HDTV. (Actually I guess the model I've linked to wasn't around several years ago, and I'm not sure exactly what exact features the ones I looked at had.) I've never actually used one, but I imagine it feels an awful lot like drawing on a drafting table with pens, watercolors, or acrylics. Obviously I thought they were awesome, but they are also $2,800. That's almost twice as much as I paid for my car, and as a student living off loans and part-time work, I filed digital tablets away in my brain as something I could maybe afford one day when I'm like 40. I guess I knew there were cheaper models with less features, but the ones I looked at were all ridiculously expensive so I never really thought of buying one as a real possibility. Besides, despite minoring in art, I really didn't take art very seriously while I was in college. I was too preoccupied with finding a "respectable" job, which I figured precluded having any time to do anything creative, ever. (How that preoccupation led me to major in psychology is a definite head-scratcher. It's a long story.)
A few years later, my band was getting ready to play a small show at a local waffle shop and we needed some sort of flier. I had taken on various small illustration and graphic design projects while in school (almost none of which materialized into anything interesting), and I volunteered myself to make us a flier. Somewhere along the line I learned that the media center at the school library had drawing tablets--not the ones that cost more than a new nose, of course--that you could check out and use for a few hours on their computers. I decided to try it out. These ones were much simpler; they didn't have their own display; you just drew on the tablet and it showed up on the computer screen. I was skeptical of how well I could draw with my hand in one place and my eyes focused on another, and the one I ended up using was calibrated wrong so that my drawings were all too short and wide, but even so I was surprised at how easy it was to use. I decided to take a second look at getting one of my own--eventually.
In the end I found one that was very small and had very few frills, even less than the school's tablet. It was only $90, far enough below the price of a rhinoplasty that I felt justified in buying one, even in my newly-graduated state of financial panic. I figured it wouldn't take that long for me to rack up $90 in lousy oil paintings, so it would pretty much pay for itself.
* * *
For some reason I had the tablet for almost 6 months before I actually started using it. I think it was a mixture of the chaos of moving and my crippling fear of failing at something new and unfamiliar. As it turns out, when I finally started painting with it, the painting of Norah Jones featured at the top of this post was the very first finished product that came out of it, so I guess my fear was pretty unjustified. Actually, I painted that one with very little understanding of what on earth I was doing, and when I tried to replicate the results a week or two later I failed miserably. But I've come a long way since then.
I use Photoshop for my paintings. There are a ton of settings for tablets that you can mess around with; you can make your strokes look like they were made with a real paintbrush, or you can paint with things like leaves and textures--anything you want, really. My painting of Norah Jones was done with just a simple circle-shaped brush, set to vary in thickness depending on how much pressure I applied to the tablet. My landscape studies were done the same way. Since then I've started messing around a lot more with brush settings, but more about that in a later post. My digital workspace looks more or less like this:
It's changed a little since I took this picture, but you get the idea. (What? Take a new one? No.) It would be very easy to do things like trace a picture or pick colors directly from a reference photo instead of picking my own, but thus far I've primarily used digital painting as a way to learn things that will carry over to more traditional work, so I do everything freehand and pick values and colors on my own. Eventually I would also like to create digital art for its own sake; I really like a lot of the stuff I've already made, but it's almost all copied from reference photos I got off the Internet, so I obviously couldn't sell any of it. Also, since I'm working on a laptop, just running Photoshop takes up the majority of my computer's memory, so I work in sizes too small to make prints from in order to conserve RAM and whatnot. Someday I'll get a desktop computer with a nice monitor so I can work with lots of detail, and someday long after that maybe I'll have one of those really nice ones. (Or a nose-job; I guess it's a toss-up.) In the meantime, I'm slowly but surely working my way towards making art that doesn't suck.