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Introduction to Digital Painting (continued from previous page) No scanner, try this Find a simple object near your computer, and do a basic painting of it. Choose something like an apple, a cup, or a small statue. Place it in an interesting position, and make sure there's some kind of clear light source (so that you can see shadows and highlights). Open a new file in Photoshop. Pick a background color, and fill the canvas. Choose a medium shade, something not particularly dark or light. Usually a neutral color is a good idea, something close to gray. As a tip, when you start painting, try to use fairly neutral colors. Many people naturally choose saturated reds, greens and blues, and those don't actually occur much to the human eye. Take a look at your object, and figure out what the base color is (which color dominates it). Don't worry about small areas like logos or other ornamentation, look at the whole of the object. You'll use different shades of this color for your Base, Highlight and Shadow. Paint a silhouette of the object in the Base color. Pay very close attention to the proportions, and take as much time as necessary. This is the most important step. Look at the object and find the highlights. If you're having a hard time doing this, you may need more dramatic lighting. Try turning on a lamp. Choose your Highlight color, and begin painting the highlighted areas. Treat each area like its own silhouette, and concentrate on one part at a time. Find the shadows, choose your Shadow color, and repeat the last step. Now you should have a three-tone painting of the object. Here you can try blending together the 3 tones in spots, creating some smooth transitions and adding realism. As always, base this on the real object. Try to analyze how the light shifts over it. Finally, if there are other areas of color such as logos or ornamentation, focus on each one in turn, and repeat the above process. Figure out the Base, Highlight and Shadow values for each area, and repeat the steps above. This is a very simplified look at what goes into a painting, but it's a good starting point, and can give really nice results when painting simple objects. Practice this type of painting a few times, and you'll definitely begin to see improvements. ___ For great examples of what can be done with digital painting, check out www.digitalart.org. It's one of the web's best galleries, showcasing a variety of digital paintings and drawings (along with 3d work). Click on the Top 50 and prepare to be amazed. Difficult to draw with a mouse? If you attempted either of the above exercises, and found it difficult to draw or paint digitally, your mouse may be cramping your style. It can draw straight lines, but it's just not designed to move in natural curves, so it tends to create blocky drawings. A better solution is the tablet: A piece of hardware that provides a digital pad & cordless pen. It acts like a mouse and allows you to write or draw directly on the screen, with very natural motion. It's quite amazing the first time you see one in action. Here's my primer on Tablets: Introduction to Digital Painting Jeff Priest -- www.JeffPriest.com

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