Digital Painting & Drawing – Learn to build your skills.

This is one of the earlier paintings drawn on the Galaxy Note using Samsung’s own proprietary software called “S-Memo”. Again, I was in the initial practice session picking out images that I liked on the web and then trying to replicate the colors and styles. Remember, when you draw for the first time,  you will have a huge selection of drawing ideas swimming about in your head. A word of advice, always choose something that will tie in with your capability and build it up as you become better. In fact, pick something very easy and pick a subject that has something to do with nature, this means avoid subjects such as people, buildings, animals etc.

The best way to get you started and painting with high proficiency is to do a simple landscape without too much details or subjects such as trees, clouds etc. The reason for this is that objects that have symmetry such as people or buildings are difficult to do correctly but with objects like trees, clouds and landscapes in particular are more forgiving. If you skew your drawing of a face, it could look very unnatural, however, if you are drawing a hill and you make it more rounded, it really wouldn’t matter to the overall scene at all. Also, when you paint trees, the leaves and branches are scattered all over the place without too much uniformity and you have more flexibility to experiment. Another good reason for drawing nature, is that the broader use of colors will make you more confident in applying the correct use of colors. For example, landscapes can have a two toned theme to it, one with the sky which use bolder and often controlled colors while the landscape itself can be a myriad of subtle and muted colors depending on the scenes such as a treescape or a mountain range.

Before you dive into painting a colored landscape, I would further recommend that you start working with black and white images of landscapes. This allows you to focus on your drawing ability and reduce your needs to focus on colors and get the most important skill required in painting onto a digital canvas… shading.  I chose this subject here for this painting since it did not have any explicit form and had an interesting array of colors. If you are a beginner, I would strongly recommend that you start with the Beginners Lessons found in the Paintology section of this site to get you up to speed.

Happy Painting!

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