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ABr i e fI nt r oduc t i onTo

Di g i t a lPa i nt i ng by Daniel Lewis

A Brief Introduction To Digital Painting by Daniel Lewis

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Figure 1: Dawn Patrol

Published by LaChula Press United States of America c 2010 Daniel Lewis. All rights reserved.

Introduction The Definition Of Digital Painting From Wikipedia:

“Digital painting is an emerging art form in which traditional painting techniques such as watercolor, oils, impasto, etc. are applied using digital tools by means of a computer, a digitizing tablet and stylus, and software. Traditional painting is painting with a physical medium as opposed to a more modern style like digital. Digital painting differs from other forms of digital art, particularly computer-generated art, in that it does not involve the computer rendering from a model. The artist uses painting techniques to create the digital painting directly on the computer. All digital painting programs try to mimic the use of physical media through various brushes and paint effects. Included in many programs are brushes that are digitally styled to represent the traditional style like oils, acrylics, pastels, charcoal, pen and even media such as airbrushing. There are also certain effects unique to each type of digital paint which portraying the realistic effects of say watercolor on a digital ’watercolor’ painting. In most digital painting programs, the user can create their own brush style using a combination of texture and shape. This ability is very important in bridging the gap between traditional and digital painting.”

I would agree with the definition of digital painting set forth above, but I understand that many artists do not limit the term digital painting to images created on a computer with software written to emulate natural media. Many refer to photographs which are smeared, smudged, or painted over, as well as auto-painted or cloned images as digital paintings. I am willing to concede that auto-painted, cloned, or smudged photographs might qualify as digital art, but not digital painting. However, due to the popularity of auto-painting features in Corel products such as Painter and Painter Essentials, I understand that the modified photographs produced with such programs are typically called digital paintings by their creators. I call them painterly photo-manipulations which wins me no friends in that community. Those who paint from scratch on a blank canvas and produce work equal to or superior to photo-paintings will never receive the recognition they deserve. Auto3

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painters resent not being able to draw and paint without photographic assistance. Rather than doing the work to develop their skill, they rationalize with longwinded forum posts about how only the results matter. They go so far as to say that digital artists should feel no need to reveal how a work was created. Since they are eighty-percent of nonprofessional digital artists, their opinion holds sway and the people who insist on painting on a blank canvas are treated with contempt by the photo-painting community and software developers who cater to them. Then smudge-painters wonder why thier art doesn’t command high prices or why collectors are not keen on digital paintings. Perhaps this seems a harsh judgement, but it is shared by most digital painters whose work must compete with computer-smeared photographs.

Daniel Lewis Lone Oak, Tennessee

Digital Painting Software There are many digital painting programs available to the digital painter ranging in price from free to hundreds of dollars. I have used Corel Painter X and 11, Artrage 2.5, and MyPaint. These programs all attempt to mimic natural media such as oil, acrylic, and watercolor. There are other programs which can be used for digital painting which are designed for photo editing, adjustment, and manipulation. In this category are programs like Photoshop, Paint Shop Pro, Pixarra TwistedBrush, and the Gimp.

Figure 2: War Between Two Worlds 5

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Artrage 2.5 The most successful natural media paint program for mixing and blending of brush strokes on the canvas is Artrage. It feels like painting with oil on canvas.

Figure 3: Untitled Figure 3 is an oil-sketch with Artrage 2.5. The mixing effect leads to subtle variations in color and a distinct paint texture that other digital paint programs I have used cannot match. I’m not suggesting that one can not paint smoothly in AR; it just takes adjusting the brush parameters and using a lot of thinner. Artrage 2.5 supports layers and mix-modes, but has no filters. I like the fact that it is a pure digital painting program that has thus far resisted the pressures of the photo-manipulation lobby. The interface is intuitive and well-designed. The program comes with several canvas and paper textures and other can be added. Additional color palettes can be added including an oil palette with artist oil colors. Custom palettes can also be created by color-picking colors from an image. The standard tools are an oil brush, pencil, marker pen, crayon and eraser, as well as a palette knife, chalk, paint roller, paint tube and the glitter pen.

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Artrage has come to the attention of concept artists in the past couple of years and the program seems to be gaining in popularity. The most recent version of Artrage (3.0) has added a watercolor brush.

Figure 4: Artrage 2.5 Interface

Artrage’s interface is very logical and intuitive. There are several presets for canvas size and surface texture. All the palettes can be closed to get them out of the way. The canvas can be rotated which is quite useful for sketching and painting. Canvas and background colors can be changed. Even though Artrage Studio Pro 3.0 is priced at 80 dollars, Artrage 2.5 is still available for 20 dollars. This is the best value for a commercial digital painting program one will find.

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Corel Painter Corel Painter is probably the most used digital painting program. It is also one of the most complex painting programs. The latest incarnation, Painter 11, was released with some serious bugs. The patches to fix most of the problems took almost a year to be released. Corel alienated a lot of users by failing to act swiftly to resolve the issues. Figure 5 is a small oil-sketch done with Corel Painter X. The Sargent’s brush from Painter’s artists oil set gives a very loose, painterly effect with good color mixing. It is one of my favorite Painter brushes. I have Painter Essentials 4 which is primarily for photo-painters (but it was bundled with my tablet) and Corel Painter Sketch Pad. Sketch Pad also had problems when it was released, and just like the problems with Painter 11, Corel didn’t hurry to fix them.

Figure 5: The Subway Even though it takes time, practice, and mental-effort to learn Painter well, it has some advantages that may make the brain-strain worthwhile. It has the best color fidelity of any digital painting program and the crispest edges. The brush

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strokes of some softwares look out of focus and fuzzy compared to Painter. Painter comes out of the box with a lot of brushes and art-sets, especially compared to Artrage 2.5 which has only one oil brush. Personally, I think many of Painter’s brushes are redundant and the number could be cut in half. The user has the ability to modify and create new brushes, but it is a very counter-intuitive process so expect to need help the first time you do this.

Figure 6: Untitled Figure 6 was painted with Corel Painter 11 and I think it is a good example of Painter’s color fidelity and crispness. Compare it to figure 8 (page11), Winter Landscape, painted with TwistedBrush. The difference in sharpness is obvious. Despite its recent problems, Painter is still the standard by which all digital painting programs are judged. The interface for Painter is more complex than other digital painting programs. It is not very intuitive so reading the manual may be a good idea. There are many powerful features hiding in Painter’s drop-down menus, but expect to spend some time learning this software.

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Figure 7: Painter X User Interface

TwistedBrush TwistedBrush has bigger problems than lack of crispness. It started out as a sketch-book program which gradually became a decent digital painting program. Unlike any other software that I have seen, TwistedBrush is upgraded (I didn’t say improved) an average of every two weeks so it is constantly changing. The changes seem to be driven through user requests at Pixarra forum. In the past two years the program has morphed from a digital painting program to a rather poor photoediting program. More and more filters and plug-ins to manipulate photographs are being added as well as art sets of (redundant) user created brushes. The term bloteware comes to mind. Hopefully, the software developer will wake up before the program has no market niche left. Anything that TwistedBrush can do to photos can be done with other software costing less money...ie Photoshop Elements or the Gimp. As for the photo-painters, they can get Painter Elements 4 bundled with their tablets. In fact one regular TwistedBrush user did get Painter Elements 4 with a new

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Figure 8: Winter Landscape

tablet and proceeded to auto-paint a photo, post it in the Pixarra gallery, and claim it had been painted from scratch with TwistedBrush. It was selected as the TwistedBrush Picture of the Day. There was a time that TwistedBrush could have competed with Corel Painter for market-share, but that window has probably closed with the introduction of Artrage 3 and MyPaint. Both these programs are becoming what TwistedBrush could have been if the photo-painters hadn’t whined for a cheap man’s Photoshop, combined with a bazillion brushes that no one has time to look at, let alone use. I’m not particularly pleased with having to point out the flaws with TwistedBrush. At one time it was my favorite digital painting software, but now it just seems to be adrift with no real niche.

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Figure 9: TwistedBrush Interface

MyPaint MyPaint, an open-source digital painting program, has seen the a lot of improvement during the past year. MyPaint was developed for Linux, but has been ported to Windows. There is a MyPaint user’s group at DeviantArt. A lot of new brushes were added with the upgrade from version 0.7.1 to 0.8.2, but the user can modify brushes from within the program. Thus far, MyPaint has not fallen victim to the commercial software’s need to cater to smudge-painters and photo-manipulators. Perhaps, it won’t since it is open-source and doesn’t have to add features to attract market-share. I have used Artrage, TwistedBrush, and Painter as sketching tools and I find MyPaint to be just as good as the costly commercial softwares for that purpose.

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Figure 10: MyPaint sketch

Figure 11: MyPaint Interface

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Figure 12: Afternoon Storm Brewing

Madness And Mouses There is a remark floating about in the dark cyber-ocean of the net that always makes me chuckle when I encounter it. There are variations, but it goes something like this—don’t even try to paint without a tablet and stylus because it is impossible. This is followed by—trying to paint with a mouse will make you crazy; no one can draw with a brick, rock, bar of soap, block of wood, etc., and a mouse is no different. That’s what they say, anyway. I started trying to paint in 2006 with Paint Shop Pro 8.1 and a mouse. After a couple of months of that frustration (and I don’t mean with the mouse), I started looking for an alternative to PSP. I first encountered Project Dogwaffle because it was free and I wasn’t ready to spend money on digital painting.

Figure 13: Evening Sky This was my first painting with PD and I thought it wonderful at the time. 15

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Today, this wouldn’t survive long enough to need a file name. Even then, I wasn’t happy about the out of focus appearance of my paintings.

Figure 14: Early Spring Early Spring is another out-of-focus Project Dogwaffle painting, but this prize was framed in PSP. After one more fuzzy PD painting, I started looking for another digital painting program. I think I next tried Pixia, but I didn’t like it either. Then I discovered TwistedBrush which had a fifteen day free trial. Even though I complain about TB’s fuzziness now, at the time, after using Project Dogwaffle, I thought TwistedBrush was great. I joined the forum at Pixarra the day after downloading the trial and was delighted to learn that forum members received an extra thirty days to try out TwistedBrush. It is quite intriguing to start the program the first time and discover that it has too many brushes to count. They number into the thousands with more

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being created daily. Although, I may have tried to paint a couple of strokes with each one of them, I probably haven’t used over sixty more than once and most of my painting with the program has been done with five or six brushes from the oil art-set.

Figure 15: Little River Little River was my first painting with TwistedBrush. It was saved in .jpg file format because I didn’t know to use a lossless format such as .png yet. I posted the painting in the beginner’s area of Pixarra and was treated better than this gold-framed wonder deserved. Most of the 2007 and 2008 TwistedBush paintings were lost when a hard drive crashed. Backup? What is that? It may be for the best that I am spared having to look at my early TwistedBrush work. In June of 2007, I did a thirty day trial of Corel Painter X. I realized two things about Painter during that month. It was

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more powerful than TwistedBrush and I couldn’t paint with it because I spent all my time reading help files. I read help files because I didn’t feel that Painter brushes worked as well as those in TwistedBrush. The brushes in Painter didn’t work well for me because I was painting with a mouse. I had been from the beginning and continued the practice for almost three years. I painted so much that the feet would disappear from a new mouse in less than a month. By the sixth-month the plastic case would wear to the point that the mouse would have to be replaced. I was suffering from Mouse Madness, but didn’t know it. It never occurred to me that the brush strokes with a mouse were different than with a pressure-sensitive stylus. I had noticed that I was losing the ability to write with pens and pencils. I needed my hand around a mouse to make a legible mark.

Figure 16: Cascade This painting from late 2007 was done with TwistedBrush and seems to mark a transition to more awareness of composition. When I first started painting, I was concerned with the details of each thing I painted and paid scant attention to how the things interacted with each other. Even now, I have to consciously remind

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myself to occasionally zoom out, flip the canvas, and consider the big picture. If a thumbnail of the painting’s values doesn’t read, it is better to toss it and begin again.

Figure 17: Desert By early 2009, I had learned to use values, texture, and graying of distant objects to give the illusion of depth to a painting, but I was still painting with a mouse. Only after watching some You Tube videos of Andrew Android Jones did I begin to rethink my aversion to tablet and stylus. I was intrigued by concept art and wanted to move beyond my usual landscape subject matter. I knew that artists like Ryan Church, Andrew Jones, and Justin Sweet weren’t painting with a mouse. So I bought a low-end Wacom tablet just to see what all the fuss was about. I decided almost immediately that I hated it and that it was useless. As I explained earlier, I had lost the ability to write with a pen. My brain was wired through nerves and muscles to the mouse and on to the monitor in a circuit that had been reinforced for hours a day for over two years. It was a totally unconscious process

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that appeared to me to be a direct connection from brain to monitor. I imagined and it appeared on the screen. Using the stylus was different. I was too aware of arm and fingers and muscles between me and what I wanted. No amount of will-power could force the stylus to obey my desires. I couldn’t draw or paint so after three days I went back to the mouse. The tablet was on the desk beside the laptop, but I ignored it.

Figure 18: Witches Gather Witches Gather was one of the last paintings done entirely with a mouse. I escaped the rodent’s clutches by creating a tablet layer on every painting and adding enhancements or details. If it didn’t go well, I could delete it. It took about six-months to liberate myself entirely. My advice to anyone serious about digital painting is to get a tablet and pen as soon as possible and beware the madness of the mouse.

Learning To Paint So far we have discussed some of the popular digital painting softwares and the two input devices—a tablet and stylus or a mouse. Just as in traditional painting, the digital tools one uses should not impinge too obviously into the painting process or the act of creation. Traditionally or digitally, this will not happen without constant practice with the tools that we choose. Much of the frustration of beginning artists is not the lack of artistic vision, but the time it takes to tame the tools so they respond to our will. There is only one solution for the problem—practice, practice, and more practice. Only when the use of our tools becomes a thoughtless (automatic) process can the creative flow occur unencumbered.

Figure 19: Haystacks The desire to short-circuit the process of learning to draw is the reason cloning and auto-painting is so popular. Many want an instant result without having to exert much effort. This is almost the norm in western cultures today. If our 21

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goal is to become a digital painter, using short-cut software to create painterly photographs will not help us develop the skills required. It will likely make us forever dependent upon the computer to paint for us. It is a trap that should be avoided.

Figure 20: Smoky Mountain Stream After the aspiring digital artist acquires a digital painting program and becomes familiar with the user interface and brushes, there are some other related subjects that would be useful to study. Composition and color-theory are two subjects that every artist needs to understand. I studied composition and color-theory in college, but there are articles on the net where a beginner can gain a basic understanding of the subjects. One way to glean an understanding of these areas is to study the work of successful digital painters. Many of them have websites with galleries where their work can be studied and appreciated. Corel has a gallery featuring the work of their Painter Masters that a great place to start.

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The best way to learn to paint digitally is to paint. There is no better teacher than doing.

Figure 21: Smoky Mountain Vista Trees (following page) is my most recent work. It was painted with Corel Painter X. I hope this brief introduction has whetted a few appetites to try digital painting. Most commercial software programs have a fifteen to thirty day trial period so one can try it before spending money. MyPaint is open-source and free. Anyone who wishes to comment (including unhappy photo-painters) can e-mail me at [email protected] or visit my blog at http://2dpainter.wordpress.com/

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Figure 22: Trees