Digital Art:
Developing Your Skills

To demonstrate, let us look at Figure 1. I wanted this composition to be warmer in tone and a bit more vibrant. However, something about the shading is off-putting in that regard. It is dull and generally prevents the vivid colors from shining. My creative intuition is telling me that I used the wrong color for shading. Instead of shading with black and lowering the opacity I should use orange for shading to help elevate the tone more. Aside from that, my intuition told me to add more depth to the necessary areas to help elevate the drawing.

In Figure 1, I have made my desired adjustments and now I feel like the colors are truly “popping” off the screen. This intuition and instinct I have built up came from years of practice with traditional art. I started off as a traditional artist learning shading then eventually transitioned to digital art. This made it easier for me to tell what feels “off” and how to correct them.

Of course, this isn’t applicable to everyone, some people may have just started art in general and decided to start with digital art. If you are like this, good job! I am very proud of you for trying your best! If you want to “train” yourself to have better creative intuition. I suggest you research on your own on what area you want to improve on. There are many tutorials online about the basics of art. From there, you should start to develop your own creative intuition! Another way to build it is by looking at the artists that inspire you. If it helps you can try asking yourself, “How did x artist achieve this shade and how can I emulate this style?” Do not feel ashamed as if you are stealing someone else’s art style. The reality is that artists inspire each other to create.

If it helps, you can even merge your traditional and digital workflow! A frequent routine many artists do is make the sketch traditionally then finalize it digitally. The reason why is because some artists just feel as if gripping a pen or pencil has a better feel then a tablet pen. From personal experience I can agree to this because my lines are much more confident in traditional art than in digital art.

from Alicja Prints Blog

A very useful tool every artist uses is a reference. A reference is something an artist uses to “reference” for their own work. The most common form of a reference are stock photos with dynamic photos. Artists use these photos as reference to make drawings more accurate to reality and to greatly reduce the errors that could be made in the drawing. Pose references also help artists visualize a pose since it is hard to base everything solely on imagination.

Aside from using stock photos, artists can take their own reference photos if they cannot find what they are envisioning online. If they don’t want to, there are other viable options. One suggestion I have is to use the website known as https://justsketch.me/ . This website allows you to rig your own model for photo reference. The free version is limited to having only a male and female figure but those alone are pretty good. You can adjust all the joints to however you desire to get the right pose.

Most importantly, you should always experiment on what you can do in your art program! I have been stressing it throughout this syllabus that experimentation is important to get a proper feel of the program you are working with. Mere words cannot teach you properly without the experience of it. Do not be afraid to make mistakes and be bold in experimentation. See what shading methods work best for you or what brushes are more to your liking. None of the tips here would be useful if you don’t experiment yourself.