Digital handling of a painting does not guarantee a great masterpiece. In fact, skilled artists sometimes cannot do the task well. Yet knowing what caused a poor digital painting can help as you create your own artwork.
Mind these most common mistakes digital painters commit, along with suggestions to avoid doing them.
1. Wrong Canvas Size
Many painters, often beginners, use a canvas without minding its size’s relation to screen resolution. While setting the resolution’s values is basic, most painters overlook this step. Such practice produces three mistakes: use of a canvas that is too big, too small, or a huge size of the final product.
How to improve: Paint a small piece in large resolution on purpose to make it interesting. Play with the size by enlarging and viewing the material from a distance. See how others view your masterpiece by using multiple devices. Likewise, pay attention to pixels because they form the base of your artwork!
2. Application of Multiple Colors
Since painters do the task digitally, they have more color choices. As a tendency, new painters use several colors to enhance their piece. This method is useless. Colors do not work by themselves alone. Instead, you can play with combinations by considering their relationship, brightness, hue, and saturation. Most painters overlook these factors.
How to improve: Avoid placing too many colors. Learn how one changes its hue given the effect of its environment and backdrop.
3. Getting Shades of Pixels from a Reference
Digital painting gives painters the liberty to copy one shade and use it on another to make an artwork flawless. While this eases the task, more so with making human skin, this does not guarantee the best results. When you pick sample colors from an image using an “eyedropper” tool, you may become dependent on this practice whenever you do digital painting.
How to improve: Study the true color of objects, their hue and brightness, by staring at them. Through this method, you can color objects or persons with the proper shade without getting the pigment from a resource material.
4. Shunning a Strong Contrast
You thought picking two somewhat similar shades of a light color can make your piece striking? This notion is but a misconception. Likewise, never think a bright shade can affect the quality of an image when viewed from different screen angles. Applying dim and bright contrast can make your drawing visible from afar.
How to improve: With a digital painting software, combine two color extremes to highlight an image.
5. Usage of 2D Textures on a 3D-Formed Piece
Smooth surfaces do not always give a 3D picture the tone it must send to viewers. Brighten up the portions to give the image life.
How to improve: Do not merely color a sketch instead use a pattern that can give the image a lifelike effect. Make a visual mesh to twist desired portions while leaving other sections intact.
Other similar errors include use of pure white as backdrop color; absence of custom brush tools; and blending of shades with soft brush for a quick effect.
Shun these blunders and be closer to perfecting your computer-generated masterpieces.
CIIT’s Fine Arts degree program offers a digital painting and sculpture program that will expose you to the study’s key and advanced techniques. Visit this page or contact us for additional details.
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Photo credit: Ctrlpaint.com