I have been inspired by Tony DiTerlizzi ever since I was a tiny kid who read the Spiderwick Chronicles. He was my art god for the longest time, and I still love his work; his technique is brilliant and the creatures he creates are just alive on the paper. Lois Van Baarle, aka Loish, ( ) has been a huge role model ever since I first discovered her digital paintings in 2012. Her paintings have such wonderful colors, details, expressions and body language!

In art, there are no wrong answers. That is especially true with digital art. There are a million techniques to produce the same piece of art. Some designers start out with a sketch, others create their artwork without a plan of any kind. In this tutorial, we will explain how to create a fantasy digital painting without a sketch. Let's get started!


Digital Painting + Oil Painting Colorful Photo Effect Software Free Download


Download Zip 🔥 https://byltly.com/2yGc8s 🔥



This piece has been painted using a graphic tablet, a Wacom Intuos 4. The tutorial can be followed and accomplished without the use of a tablet as well, but painting with a mouse is not something I'd recommend. You have less precision (at least, with the common mice) and you have no opacity or flow jitter. With the mouse, it's going to take you longer, be harder and it's probably not going to look as precise and nice, which is why, if you want to get into digital painting (and you probably do, since you're reading this), I seriously recommend that you to get a graphic tablet. For starters a Wacom Bamboo Fun is one of the best around and the price should be generally around $50.

I'd like to start this tutorial by stating that this is not only going to be about THE actual painting. There is no point in explaining you just what I did without telling you why and how. Otherwise, you'd end up with a bad painting without having learned anything new. You're reading this to learn something, so I'm going to teach you what you need to know in order to make a digital painting, based on my experience. I'll explain my points of view, my thoughts during the process of creation, and some of my techniques. I can't assure it will be the best way of doing it, because probably it's not. But it is my way, which has been developed during years of practicing and it's the one that currently works best for me.

I began this piece with no clue of what it will be like at the end. I almost never have a precise idea of what I want. I find it a boring way of making art. If you already know in your mind how it's going to look like at the end, then there is no fun. You won't be surprised of the result and you won't enjoy experimenting at all! Instead, I like to let the mind and the hand flow free, waiting to have the right idea. You'll understand better what I mean once you see the first steps of this painting.

Almost forgot: the only brush I used in this painting is the evergreen Hard Round Brush, which is the first brush you find in the Photoshop preset. There are people that when starts painting digitally, usually thinks that a lot revolves around the famous "custom brushes". They couldn't be more wrong. With this tutorial I'll show you that you can do anything with just the most common brush in Photoshop.

We have a color. We've done a lot already. Really. I'm serious. If you decide a background color, then you automatically narrow the field of the kind of environments you can create. It's pink, so we know that it won't be a jungle, for example!

You may wonder: "why these colors?" Orange is for fire, so I'm currently planning to have fire in the final image. It doesn't mean there will 100% sure, but just that in that specific moment I wanted fire in it. That desaturated blue instead is there because it gives contrast to the warm colors there are in it now, and because I'm planning to paint rocks next and usually blue/grey are the kind of cold colors you find in rocks.

Now I've been adding more: a sky, a river (or a sea, or a lake) and a few darker brush strokes. We can start seeing something more from it, some sort of structure. Painting is not that different from sculpting, in my opinion. You start from one block, then you create more shapes until you get something recognizable and then you add details until you reach the desired level of realism.

In the following image I did something interesting that is worth mentioning. When good ideas aren't flowing, I always do this. In Photoshop, New Layer > Image > Apply Image, then with the newly created layer I experiment. What does it mean? I move it around, stretch it, flip it, set it on blending modes (usually darken and lighten are the ones that work better), use random filters, and so on. In this specific case, I flipped it horizontally and vertically and set it on lighten.

Then I added some clouds at the top and made it look like it was some sort of 'smoke' that's being blown out by the clouds. At first it looked like a good idea, then after a few seconds I started hating it. But, hey, wait a second! Idea! It also looks like a mountain lit by sunlight, if fixed!

Then I just kept painting details. I added a statue inside the cave and painted some mountains (image below) to add depth in the image by 'exploiting' the previous layered brush strokes. "Layered" means that, using the pressure of the tablet's pen, we have different layers of the same color that vary depending on the pressure made with the said pen. You can use the same "technique" when painting mist or clouds above something like mountains, in this case.

Now we might have something. So far we created an interesting environment with nice and warm colors and a small and vague story about a statue. But I knew I could do better, which is why now there'll be more experimenting!

Again, Image > Apply image and let's start move it around. In this case, since the painting was getting too 'dark', I decided I wanted something brighter in the middle of the rock structure. First, I tweak a bit the colors using the Selective Colors options, then I press Command/Ctrl+I and voil, now the colors are inverted and so, if before were dark, now are very bright!

As done already before, Image > Apply image. This time I just moved it more to the left as I wanted the rock structure more centered, since it was clear that it was going to be the main focus of the image.

Alright! Now I have finally decided the composition and the main character of the image (well, actually not, but we'll talk about it later). As you can see from the image below, I attempted to create some sort of 'rock monster' by just adding two eyes. It looked awful. It looked like one of those inflatable crocodile that luckier kids than me had.

Since it was looking so bad, I decided to take another try. It wasn't working again since there were no eyes, but whatever. When I don't get good ideas for something, instead of wasting time on that I just move to another area of the painting and work on that. I improved the general shape of the monster, added some sort of 'hands' and a few reptile characteristics, like those things on his back.

So I decided that I didn't want a 'statue' in it, but a person. It wasn't looking like a statue anyway, so good for me. I'm really bad at drawing people, I've never really practiced on anatomy and such, so my knowledge of human body isn't that great. No problem, though. When I don't know how to paint or draw something, and this happens more often than you might think, I Google. I wanted to draw a person sitting on a throne in a bored position and yet still communicating power. As if "Oh, I'm so powerful that I can allow myself to be bored". You get what I mean. I hope. Well, anyway, as I said, I googled. In this particular case, I looked for some photographs, or drawings, or paintings, of kings on their thrones. Googled "king on throne" and tons of references magically appeared. Now we can select a few images that can help us understand the right anatomy and check them out while learning how to draw that specific pose.

I liked the painting. I really did. I saw potential. But there was something that wasn't working. I didn't know what, so instead of wasting countless hours over-thinking it, I tried to stay away from it for a few days. I worked on other projects, went out, saw friends, and overall my goal was to forget about it and, after those couple of days of relax, once I was ready to sit at the computer again, I could give it a fresh look, almost as I was watching it for the first time.

Well, it worked. I immediately decided that the main problems were two: the canvas size wasn't right for the kind of image I wanted to paint and the story was too ambiguous. The piece needed some fixing in order to guide correctly the viewer into a more defined and well-made storyline.

Now, we do Images > Apply Image, Then with the Rectangual Marquee Tool we select a few pixels of the bottom of the current layer (so not the bottom of the canvas, but of the layer!) and, with the Move Tool, we drag the selection down. We do the same thing with the top part of the layer. The same procedure for the top part as well. We should get something like this:

Now, Again: Images > Apply Image, then I made a selection of the upper part of the image (the sky), SHIFT+Command/Ctrl+I, clicked 'backspace' on the keyboard to erase the part of images that are of no use to me, flip the layer vertical, go to Edit > Transform... and transform it with the Perspective and Distort tools until I get something like the image below:

Now, main character! This is the idea that I had once I sat back again at the computer and gave me the inspiration to finish the piece. As I said earlier, I am unable to paint and draw people. I never did it, so I have no idea how to do it. But this painting is also about learning, right? The human figure in this painting, even in the finished image, is not perfect. People more qualified than me in anatomy can spot at least half-dozen of mistakes, but I'm learning, so mistakes are still allowed!

In the following image I painted (on a separate layer, obviously) a poorly painted silhouette of a man with a big coat on his shoulders. Obviously it is always recommended to use references when painting or drawing, it's not cheating, just 'remembering how something is'. There is a very nice journal written by neofox with a lot of links to sites where you can find all sort of references. Recently I've also bought for 6$ one of those wooden human mannequin for drawings, which is incredibly helpful! 152ee80cbc

download after effect portable bagas31

youtube crazy frog

download bahamas form