Hello everyone! June has arrived — and in my opinion, the official start of summer! One of my favorite parts of summer is that I have more time to experiment with techniques and ideas that I have not been able to try during the school year. One such technique I have really wanted to try out is digital painting.

Digital art is often a media that I feel less confident in, so I’ve been trying to develop my toolbox over the years. When I started using digital media, I did not use line art. As I worked with digital media more and observed more experienced artists’ works, I switched to using line art in most of my works. While I still cannot seem to get as fluid lines as I would like, I felt my art became much stronger with line art. It was not until the Senior Showcase earlier this year that I felt I wanted to try a line-less piece again. I saw so many pieces that had a painterly quality, even though they were digital — and I was in love! I knew that I had to try something like this out myself!

The Process

My idea was to draw a horse and its rider, galloping through a sunset-lit valley, perhaps in pursuit of an enemy. The horse and its rider would be backlit, and the rider would ride bareback. I chose to use the app Artflow on my kindle. I started with two sketches for my ideas. The first would have a greater emphasis on the environment, while the second would have a stronger emphasis on the horse and his rider.

Initially, I chose to work with the first sketch, as I had worked out a really nice color palette that I thought worked better with the landscape.

I actually got really far in this version before realizing that I was unhappy with the anatomy of the horse. I tried for a long time to fix the anatomy. While I am all for a challenge, I decided to surrender the perfect anatomy and focus on the technique at hand — digital painting. To do this, I cropped the image in a more similar fashion to the second sketch so that the legs were no longer visible.

From there, it was just a lot of practice using the digital media as canvas and paint. I limited myself to the standard brushes, airbrush, and blend tools until the very end. In my usual digital art, I tend to over-blend and avoid texture. This time, I tried to use the brushes as I would in a traditional painting. I used a lot of references, and I think its most noticeable how I developed this with the change in the sleeve. I also saw some improvement in the way I modeled faces and metal.

When I finally got my piece to a more complete stage, I then allowed myself to use a few adjustment layers. While this sort of breaks the whole ‘digital painting’ experiment, I did not mind as much. Digital painting is a fusion of paint and digital media — while I did not want to rely on the adjustments, I was okay with tweaking my work at the very end. (Admittedly, I was also very tired at this point.) As I become better with the technique, I hope that I won’t have to use the adjustment layers at all!

The Result

I know I’m missing a lot of steps from the progress, but here’s the final product — “The Chase”

Overall, I am happy with the end result. The rider himself came out a lot better than I had expected, and his face is probably one of the most realistic faces I have ever drawn digitally. I’m really proud of the hair, and the rim lighting is pretty good. I also liked the hazy glow I added over the piece, even if it strays a little from my original concept. Although I am happy with what I created, there is also a lot I have identified to work on! Texture is still a issue for me, and anatomy is definitely a struggle. The way I lit planes worked well, but I think the light source itself could be a bit more consistent. My biggest regret is not working harder to maintain the first sketch; although this came out well, I felt that I sacrificed a lot of the original piece’s movement.

Digital painting is definitely a skill I want to work more on! Next time, I think I might try something more simple to get the technique down more before I try something so imaginative as this. Perhaps a digital still-life, portrait, or landscape is in my future!!

Thank you for coming with me on this new exploration of art! I’d love to hear about your experiences with digital art and digital painting!