Traditional Painting with Digital Media

By adlabs6
11/02/08

Introduction
My first experiences with digital media painting were with ?Dabbler? from Fractal Design, running on a 486 CPU with 8MB of RAM. This program simulated a variety of real world natural media art supplies, as well as papers of varying textures. The work space was designed around the concept of working with the actual type of pen, marker, brushes, or other tools directly on the paper, with each stroke interacting not only with the paper, but other media which had been previously applied.

Moving through the years, my interests and needs outgrew what this type of program offered. I wanted layers, effects, and the stronger photographic editing power of the more advanced imaging software packages. What I found was missing from these packages, was the simulated interactions between the media with the canvas (which was now simply a texture-less white square) and interactions with other media already applied to the canvas. The results of dragging a brush across the canvas in Photoshop, Paint hop Pro, or Gimp may be less visually exciting than the results a natural media program creates, but the tools provide vast creative options.

Experimenting with these applications, I focussed on a few techniques for creating shape, form, shading, and texture manually. These are very straightforward, and I use them for any kind of subject, as you will see in the painting section of this tutorial.

Techniques Compared to Skinning and Profiling
In general the techniques and working methods for a traditional painting style have much in common with those used in creating skins for simulations, as well as profile illustrations. We need to define shape and form, and finalize details with texture and shading. I'll detail my methods for this later on. If you are reasonably experienced with either skinning or profiling, you should be well equipped to begin successfully exploring traditional painting with digital media.