004 - IFX tutorial - Make a digital painting appear less digital
This tutorial was written for ImagineFX magazine Issue#2.
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How to make your digital art appear less computer painted.
The difference between working with digital and traditional art is quite big. Although, there are ways to emulate the look of traditional painting, and even use a workflow that resembles it as well.The computer screen uses RGB colour, which is completely different from real paint, and you have access to a wide range of colours which will only work on a screen, this can easily make your paintings appear over-saturated.
The most common “mistakes” is to use too smooth brushes; this makes the paintings look too airbrushed and details gets blurry. My suggestion is swapping that airbrush with some other paintbrushes. Even working with a simple round, hard edged brush helps a lot for the feel of painting, and the result, plus its fun!
Try to compare colours from real life. Look at references of what you are painting and try to capture all the colours that actually exist in the surfaces, mix them all together. Also, being moderate when it comes to extreme highlights will help. After all, it is the sharp highlights that do make something look glossy or shiny.
Another trick is to add some grain to the painting at the end. Personally, I’m not too fond of the perfectly smooth results from working digitally. Just look closely at a real painting, or a digital photography, and you will see that there are no perfect transitions, or evenly coloured surfaces. “Messing up” the art paining at the end is one way to give a more believable result.
Hard edged brushes with narrow spacing, or a pencil brush, are both excellent substitutes for the smooth brushes, and great fun to paint with.
Step 1 – Try different brushes:
Using other brushes than the plain, smooth, airbrush-looking soft-brush is a good way to make your art works look more dynamic. Even using a normal hard edged brush makes it resemble a real brush (in the “Brush presets” menu in Photoshop, set the “Spacing” slider to 3-7% to get it smooth). Remember to keep the flow low to maintain control of your shading. More advanced brushes are perfect to emulate pencils or other drawing/painting tools.
Step 2 – Be aware of your shadows and highlights:
It’s common to take the shadows and/or highlights too far when painting digitally. Look at references of the different materials you want to paint, and notice that highlights very rarely is 100% white. Shadows also contain the colour from the ambient light in the scene you are painting, and will never be completely black. Using the dodge and burn tool in Photoshop also easily makes things look like plastic, plus it kills the dark and light values.
Step 3 – Adding a noise grain to your picture:
A trick to make your painting look less “perfect” is to add grain to it. In Photoshop, I do these steps:
1) A new layer filled with the RBG-values: R:128, G:128, B:128
2) Add a “Noise” filter, 400% amount, and set the layer to “Overlay” blending mode.
3) Run the “Brush strokes-Spatter” filter a couple of times.
4) Do a normal blur and set the layer “Opacity” to 5-10%.