As technology advances, so does the potential of digital art. Many artists nowadays are trying out digital art as a medium of such to do art. However, the transition from a traditional medium to a digital one is not always smooth. Though there are a lot of skills and instincts that are transferable to digital art, there are many aspects of digital art that must be known to help beginners have a better ground on learning digital art.
I’m here to give a few tips and tricks that can be very useful to beginning digital artists! I have experience with the digital medium for five years now so I know the basics pretty well. Some of the advice stated here is directed to beginners only. However, I hope experienced people in the medium could learn a bit more from this!
- V Mokhtar, Staff 2020-2021
I believe I have provided the fundamental tips into understanding your art program. However, there are many more tips I could give to enhance your experience in drawing with your digital program. For that, I suggest you experiment and look up tips on limited features that are useful in your program. Photoshop has plenty of functionality in photo editing in general that is hard to go in-depth here so I think it’s best you explore with videos and experience.
In this section, I will give a few minor tips that aren’t as important as the ones above but are tips that you may want to keep in mind nonetheless.
image from Graphic Design Stack Exchange
Using a stabilizer helps balance out the shakiness in your art! If you use a drawing tablet or a screen tablet onto a pc, all art programs have a stabilizer option. Some programs however have a more complicated stabilizer system to fine tune the stabilizer. You may want to play around with this because if the sensitivity is too high for your preference, some of the lines you were meant to draw may not be shown and be smoothed out by the stabilizer. Other than that, you can adjust the pen’s sensitivity in the tablet’s server app if needed to as well.
image from The Redline Station Tumblr Blog
Flipping the canvas is an extremely useful tip in drawing. In traditional art, you do not have the option to flip the whole drawing but in digital art you need to utilize this function. The relevance of flipping the canvas is to check errors (mostly anatomical errors) that cannot be seen from a regular view. When we focus on one orientation of the canvas, we start getting “adjusted” to the mistakes we made in the drawing. Flipping the canvas helps our eyes find the mistakes and correct them.
image from ePHOTOzine
The select tool is a function limited to digital art layers. The select tool normally has multiple modes: A mode that selects the colors picked and the mode that acts like a “lasso” and selects everything you have encircled. Some programs like Photoshop have a “marquee” wherein you select all that you highlight in a box you can mark.
What does select do? It “selects” the area you have highlighted and within the selected area you can paint, erase, and modify anything in the selected area. All areas that aren’t selected aren’t affected by the changes you’ve made. It is an extremely useful tool if you only want to modify one area. Do take note that if you paint along the edges of the selected area, it has a pixelated texture.
I suggest you overlay that area manually with a brush or avoid painting against the edge. On the other hand, you can use this pixelated effect to your advantage as well if that is your desired texture. Alternatively, you can use clipping layers which serve the same purpose.
Miscellaneous Tips