Learning to Draw Digitally for Beginners

this is an introduction to digital art what part of digital art uh the the drawing part the part where you're sitting at your desk you already have some Hardware to draw on and now you need inspiration to strike you that part of digital art but with less lightning and more Sparkle wait I don't have a tablet or a screen thing or a pen don't worry I gotcha this is a two-part Series this is the part where I talk about drawing and the other part is on my other channel where I talk about the hardware and the software you need to get started for this video I'm going to be introducing you to the tools and the basic techniques and talk about how artists work digitally the cool thing about digital art is there is no right or wrong way to create it what matters is how it looks in the end having a place to start could be really comforting let this video be your comfort food uh don't eat that it's the dessert tray that's just for show what I'll get you a fresh one from the back throughout this video I'm going to be drawing on the iPad using an app called procreate but this is really important you don't need this app or this iPad in order to do these lessons you can follow along in any program that you like so if you'd rather use procreate on the iPad or krita or clip Studio or that old virus-ridden version of Photoshop you found on BitTorrent that's fine I guess are you gonna be okay oh I've had worse there are some resources that we're going to be using here that will save you some time and you can download those on my website for free bradsartschool.com there's some paid stuff there too that's how this channel makes money my new intro to digital art course is packed with step-by-step projects that will get you up to speed fast or on that at the end of the video stop selling get a move on all right all right back to the art if you're coming from traditional art or just starting out there are two things that make digital art great brushes and layers there's a lot of other stuff too but those two things in particular every drawing app has brushes we call them brushes but they can be any traditional art tool recreated digitally this brush looks like a paintbrush when you draw with it this one looks like a pencil this one looks like chalk and this one looks like it was made in unicorn accident I didn't know unicorns were real so yeah brushes can mimic real life tools or do things that can only be done in digital art you can change the size of your brush you can change the opacity or how much paint comes out of your brush and when you draw with a stylus you can change the way your brush looks based on how hard you press with your stylus as I press harder with my stylus more paint comes out those are the basics and all you need to know for now but it gets way more complicated and you can do so much with these a lot of programs let you create your own brushes customize the ones they already have there or import brushes that other people have already created what about layers yes I was going to draw a comic you know old school style on paper I might sketch out my scene first in pencil then I'm going to Ink those pencils with the pen when the ink dries I erase those pencils then maybe I color in my comic with watercolor or gouache gouache is like a really thick watercolor not important right now to do this digitally I would use layers layer one would be my sketch maybe I'd create another layer for my ink and then another one for my colors layers can be turned on and off so when you're done with your pencil layer you don't need to erase or delete it you just toggle it off if your pencil sketch got a little bit dark and you can't see your ink lines really well no problem just turn down the opacity of that layer so you can see it better you can duplicate your layer so you can experiment with your drawing without losing your Originals you can try different color combinations toggle layers on and off to compare those colors there is so much you could do with layers this is just scratching the surface with that out of the way let's do a real project I made some 3D renders here we're going to paint these suckers well one of the suckers this looks hard nah you got this just follow along even if it's not perfect you're probably going to do better than you think if you want to paint along you can screen capture this image right now and paint Along on your own canvas I set up my canvas to be a standard paper size then I pasted in this image moved it to the top and maybe resized it a little bit as needed that leaves the bottom area form a drawing you can get this file for free over at bradsartschool.com if you don't want to do all the set up yourself even though many art programs come with hundreds of brushes I tend to stick to only a few there are four in particular I use a lot a pencil brush for sketching a clean ink brush that has some crisp edges and changes width based on how much pressure you apply with the stylus and an airbrush with some nice faded edges a hard round brush that changes opacity based on the amount of pressure I'm going to be using three of those four brushes here so let's start with our pencil brushes got it now we can use the skills we learned in earlier lessons from season one on perspective to figure out Vanishing points and all that fun stuff but for the purpose of this lesson it's okay to go in and just trace the cube don't worry it's gonna be okay there'll be plenty of time later to figure out how to draw it I am going to make a new layer and sketch out that Cube on its own Lair I just want to get the outline of the cube and maybe sketch in where I think the shadow is going to go now I can take my move tool and move this sketch down to the bottom half of my drawing I can even adjust the opacity of that layer so it's easier to see through on the canvas all right we need a new layer now this layer is going to be our Cube another handy tool in your digital art backpack is the Color Picker tool this lets me choose a color from anywhere on my canvas I'm going to grab the color along the side of this Cube first now I can use my hard edged inking brush to make the outline of our Square now the faster you draw a line the smoother that line is going to be that also means you might overshoot but that's okay you can always grab an eraser tool and take out the extra parts of the line you just drew once we get the outlines we can fill this in with color art apps have a tool called The Fill tool usually it looks like a paint bucket but every app is a little bit different with one click you can fill an enclosed space with color mine does not look good some fill tools work better than others there are settings that make this better but for Simplicity you may have to go in with your stylus and paint in the gross edges let's go back to our reference and grab the color of a different side this one and then we're going to repeat those steps by drawing the outlines and filling that in as well and you guessed it we're going to do this one more time for the top draw in our outlines and then fill it on in you're getting the hang of this next up I want to paint the background let's put that on its own layer now that new layer that I just created I want to make sure that is below my Cube layer anything we paint on top is going to block out the cube we won't be able to see it that's why it has to be underneath I can't see the reference now if we want to fill in just part of the canvas we can use a selection that's another tool those tools usually look like little dotted line icons I could do Selections in squares rectangles circles or even draw my own shape for now I'm going to stick to the square I'm gonna drag it across the area that I want to fill then I'm going to grab my fill tool and boom just fill it with color it looks like the reference has a gradient on it it does that's what the airbrush is for in digital painting there are hard edges and soft edges the cube has nice crisp hard edges but this gradient is a really soft Edge different brushes are going to help us get those different effects so I'm going to use the Color Picker to grab the dark part of my gradient along the top next I want a lay down paint where I've already painted now I can use the selection tool and select that again that works perfect strictly well but there's another setting I want to talk about here called Alpha lock this is called different things in different apps in medibank it's called protect Alpha usually if you see the word Alpha somewhere on your layers you found the right thing now paint is only going to go where we've already drawn something nice now I'm going to make my airbrush super big real big and I'm going to turn down the opacity a little bit maybe to about 50 percent then with my stylus I'm just going to lightly go over the top and I'm going to scrub back and forth and slowly fill in that gradient the less opacity I use and the slower I go the more organic it's going to look this isn't looking right yeah what this really needs to come alive is a shadow to do that I want to make another layer now let's take a look at the reference though see in our shadow it's got this super dark Edge right along the bottom of the block and then over here on the left hand side it's got this gradual Shadow just kind of going out let's do the dark shadow first by grabbing the color from our reference and then I'm going to take my airbrush and I'm going to make it much much much smaller and with that I can just go in and paint in underneath my Cube if your paint appears above your Cube just move the layer underneath it you should be good to go now I want to do the shadow on the left let's create another layer for that you could do it on the same layer but this way if we mess up we only have to redo one part of it because this is probably the trickiest part of the whole thing I'm going to make my airbrush bigger and I'm going to turn the opacity down to like somewhere between 10 to 20 and I'm just going to come in here and lay down Strokes over and over and over again it's the gradual edition of paint that's going to make it look smooth and organic if yours gets that layered effect you can always delete this layer and try again or if you want to earn some bonus points you can see where you're drawing app's blur tool is blurring the shadow is really going to help it look more organic there are other details here worth noticing for example the sides of my cubes aren't perfectly flat colors like I have them painted here sometimes there's a little bit of a bounce Shadow going on down along the bottom I can always Alpha lock my Cube grab that slightly darker color and go over a few times with the airbrush if you're using some of the other references on my site you're going to see a lot of details like that on the rounded cubes you're going to have some soft edges instead of hard edges on that Cube so you're going to have to use the airbrush a lot more there's also some little things like little reflective highlights you're going to have to pay attention to now several of those references were included for free but if you want the big batch with some really super complicated ones to practice with that's all part of my introduction to digital art course what if you just want to learn drawing next check out season one of Brad's art school right here on this very YouTube channel where we cover all of the basics of drawing all right you can talk about your course now it's mostly project Focus so each lesson is a project and you follow along and you can see step by step what I'm doing as I am doing it from a sketch all the way to the finished piece like I mentioned there's a lot of 3D renders in there and I walk you through some of the more complicated ones the course is also slower than this video because I don't have to appease the YouTube algorithm Gods but it's step by step so you can paint along and learn as you go there are lessons on inking there are lessons on coloring lessons on using traditional brushes and comic brushes adding textures to your drawing picking colors changing colors adjusting Shadows more practice sketches then you can shake a stick at you could draw on any painting Pro program that you want I will even provide PDFs so if your app doesn't match up to mine you can go and check and find the right tool go to brad'sartschool.com to check it all out thanks for watching this video

Channel: Brad's Art School

Views: 796,188

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Id: WLU26nqcvfY

Length: 10min 11sec (611 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 27 2022