Digital Art: Miscellaneous Tips

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.