Setting up the Background

Want to learn digital painting? Welcome to the next part in our series!

At his drawing has progressed, Mark is going to spend a bit more time on the background to get it working a little better with the character.

While he’s working, he’s playing close attention to the contrast that the background is creating with the character.

This is important to remember when you learn digital painting, because your background has the potential to highlight or mute certain parts of the figure.

Touching up the Background

Starting basically from scratch where he left of in the last lesson you can see the background has now taken on a smoky appearance with lighter areas in the upper middle of the painting.

He’s quickly achieved this effect by using different layers and grungy brushes, while adding in different colors to the background.

Adding Stitches

It’s time to start adding some detail into the clothing as you learn digital painting in Photoshop.

Start off by using a darker color to help define the separation and raggedness of the different patches.

The clothing as this point has a fairly dull, neutral color, and you’ll be adding to that in the next step. You can also start to add the stitches in, and for these you should work from dark to light.

First, you will define where the stitch will occur, and then later on paint on top of it. This gives some natural shadow and volume to each stitch quickly.

Adding Color to the Clothing

Mark uses a mix of Photoshop’s wet and dry brushes depending on what he’s coloring.

He’s working quite quickly here, and if you are unfamiliar with these brushes, they can give you a nice painterly effect.

As you learn digital painting, you’ll soon become more confident with every aspect of making art in Photoshop, so don’t worry if you don’t get everything right at first.

While painting he’s taking care to include nice variation in the tone, as well as adding some hints of pulling and stretching to the fabric that plays off of the stitches that he’s previously painted.

We hope this tutorial article has helped you learn digital painting. Why not leave us your feedback below?