this video is brought to you by clip Studio paint making digital paintings is a ton of fun I'm by no means an expert obviously but by now I've done a few digital paintings and there's actually quite a bit that I learned about making art digitally and in this video I actually want to take you through the process but I also want to show you fundamentals when it comes to digital art making and I will create another digital paint which I'm super excited about so let's go so I think there are two main ways in which you can start a digital painting the first one pretty straightforward it's basically exactly the same how you would start any painting you start with a drawing or a sketch and then from there you build up your painting you add color layer by layer and then slowly you lose your drawing you keep adding paint on top of each other and then slowly that way you build up your fin image the other way is quite a bit different so no drawing whatsoever but it's basically as if you took a brush in real life and you just started painting with color now the cool thing about this approach is that you immediately force yourself to focus on the big picture it creates a very uniform and clean looking image the downside is you have to be a lot more cautious and careful and also present while painting because you constantly need to check your drawing if you get the drawing out of the way first you save yourself fixing proportions etc etc so while I do love this very painterly approach you can basically get the same result by starting with the drawing first at the end of the day I guess it's a matter of personal preference I personally like to make my life as easy as possible when it comes to making art and painting so I think what I'm going to do is I'm going to start with a drawing and then I'm going to try to force myself to still paint in this very loose artistic painterly style so first you have to get your drawing out of the way and it's totally up to you how you do it how detailed you want to have it are you okay with the sketch or uh simple outlines or does it need to be an elaborate drawing doesn't matter how you do it you just have to get it done actually this is already a bit too much I wish I didn't do this much but yeah whenever I start drawing I have the tendency to keep going and keep going so but once you got your drawing finished this is where the fun part Begins the coloring stage [Music] [Music] once I got the drawing out of the way what I like to do is I like to put a layer of color underneath the drawing so I can still see the lines the outlines the drawing but I also have like a basic color composition and all the big different color blocks and color shapes in place so I can play around with it a bit so this would be the the second layer that I'm using and the nice thing about making digital paintings is that now nothing bad can happen to you because well basically you can go back in time you can redo things you can recover things you can try stuff out before you commit to something and that makes this part so much fun just having the reassurance that nothing really can happen I mean you can't mess things up and then what I like to do is I like to have a third layer where I put color on top of the lines because eventually you have to paint over the lines and with these three layers I'm basically able to manipulate the paint and push it around in such a way that I still have my outline that I can use for orientation but I'm also free to paint over them whenever I feel like okay this is where I want to commit and yeah it's very amateurish I have to admit and probably not the way that most other digital artists or actually that proper digital artists would go about but I mean it works for me and I I've gotten used to this three layer start I guess and it's also super simple Le because for me things need to be simple not many options not too many things going on at the same time so I'm actually also still just using one simple brush and in this case it's the traditional gouache brush that comes with clip Studio again keeping my options limited allows me to focus on what's really important and in this case it's obviously getting the basic structure of the painting right from the [Music] [Music] beginning there are two things that I like to keep in mind during the entire process and for me they are pretty much Essential to create a digital work of art the first one is you want to use a big brush and you want to keep painting with the biggest brush possible for as long as possible when I realize that I need to make some small changes or refine areas it's only then that I switch to a smaller brush and I make smaller and smaller changes but I also at the same time try to keep the mixing of the paint to a bare minimum at the beginning so here on the left no mixing at all and here on the right there is some mixing which is great but I try to hold off with the mixing for as long as possible as well and the reason for that is I want to focus on what's actually important and not get caught up with mixing and blending and Transitions and details so I tried to hold off for as long as possible with all of those extra things but that's just a personal preference of mine luckily clip Studio allows you to switch around between different blending modes so you can go from hardly any mixing to yeah almost mixing as if you would do it in real life basically while mixing clip Studio gives you also the option between is standard so this is basically what everyone is used to in digital painting but then they also have something that's called perceptual mixing and this one is much closer to how paint actually behaves in real life it's subtle but while mixing as you can see the program corrects for the brightness of the color and you get a much more natural trans transition while painting I still haven't found the right balance between realism and abstraction unfortunately even I can't completely keep myself from getting caught up in the details while making digital art just because it's so easy to do I definitely got to find the balance there unfortunately I already sort of messed up because yeah I got caught up in the in the dangerous game of zooming in and then focusing on the details far too early so what I'm going to do now is actually I'm going to back off a bit I'm going to zoom out as much as I feel comfortable and I'm going to try to focus again a bit more on the big picture so I'm going to use a bigger brush from here on out stay zoomed out and then try to continue painting at least for a while like this so I forc myself basically to not get caught up in all the small little details that aren't necessary at this point anyway [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] I have to admit making digital paintings for me still is a lot of trying stuff out and a lot of pushing paint around until I find something that I'm mostly happy with obviously I have much more experience in making traditional paintings and I exactly know what's going to happen if I use this technique or this brush but I just don't have that kind of experience when I make digital painting but what I do have and what everyone has basically you don't have to stress too much or you don't have to stress at all because yeah I have to say feels quite liberating to not have the pressure of not messing things up although I got to say I'm still not happy there is so much that I have to do here I guess want to refine some of her armor I do like the painterliness but I feel like pushing the realism and having at least one element apart from like the facial features uh Eyes Nose Lips that's a bit more realistic will round everything off and make it look much more natural and coherent so I think that's what I want to focus on for the last part of the process [Music] and there is so much more you can do clip Studio paint provides you with so many different brush settings and options that you can basically create any effect you want whether it's mixing colors putting paint on top of each other creating traditional or digital effects you can basically do anything you want lastly I'm adding some details and lighting effects to really sort of drive home the whole sci-fi theme and I got to admit making digital paintings is really a ton of fun but there is one thing that I find incredibly hard and it's yeah deciding when to walk away I mean when do you walk away from a digital painting and say oh yeah I I can't make any improvements to this it's so easy to do it's so tempting but yeah eventually you have to call it a day I mean I can't keep working on this forever so yeah this is the point where if I walked away I would actually be quite happy with the painting so I think I'm going to leave it the way it is now it's not perfect by no means the process is absolute chaos and not streamlined and all over the place I'll admit but I'm certainly not an expert in making this but I got to say I kind of like the end result so if you have never tried clip Studio before head over to my description give it a shot try it for yourself it's really impressive it's an incredibly powerful piece of software that basically lets you do anything you want whether it's drawing painting or animation hardly anything you can't do with it and they just came out with a new feature that I'm personally incredibly excited for and it's clip Studio simple mode a beautiful simple minimalistic user interface for clip Studio that lets you focus on what's important and not get distracted by any other tools functions settings Etc super exciting I can't wait to try it for myself maybe something that we can get into in a future video but for now that's it another digital painting is in the books