Adult

With Darlene Ost

This is an introduction to Digital Painting, for people more comfortable with the software, and/or with some previous experience with digital painting software. We’ll be covering more on workflows, and specific topics on how to approach different subjects with confidence. By the end of this 10-week course, students will have at least 3 quality pieces for personal or portfolio use, getting personal coaching, feedback and critiques every step of the way.

Week 1: Introductions & Tools

In the first week, we will have a refresher on the tools we will be using with the /Photoshop/Digital Painting software, how to flip the canvas to see changes in a painting, use transform, marquee and clone stamp tools.

Week 2: Drawing and Painting Fundamentals

This week in class we will have a fundamental refresher and a quick overview on composition, shapes, values, line, light and shadow, completing an observational painting with an object from home.

Week 3: Portrait and Still Life Digital Paintings

This week we will cover human face general proportions, pairing up and painting each other’s faces digitally or using a mirror and creating a self-portrait, discuss aspects of the face you can realistically manipulate to either caricaturize it, or simply to create a portrait with realistic expressions and personality.

Week 4: Environmental Paintings

This week we will cover landscapes and/or environmental paintings, how to set a scene with a theme, and understanding perspective and how to apply it. We’ll each create at least 5 environment thumbnails and one or more small digital paintings, and consider story-telling in design.

Week 5: Characters and Animals This week, we will cover how to explore character concept art and character illustrations, from human, to humanoid, to animal. We’ll look at examples, collect references, and create our own characters, human, animal or hybrid.

Week 6: First Painting

This week we will choose a theme and topic (portrait, still life, environment, character/animal), and we’ll be beginning the reference-gathering, ideation/sketching stage of our first painting.

Week 7: First Digital Painting: Experimentation & Finish

Taking what we've learned in previous classes and experimenting, creating a piece at student's own pace and looking into advanced filters, textures, and matte painting, really pushing the boundaries of the tools learned thus far and creating our second painting to finish.

Week 8: Speed Paintings: Planning to Finish

This class we will cover the topic of speed paintings and how to approach them, why we do them, and how they help strengthen our skills. Students will complete five small paintings that will take between 10 – 15 minutes.

Week 9: Final Painting: Planning

For this week, the sky’s the limit-- Students will choose a topic for their final painting, and using techniques (or even paintings) from the previous classes, or bringing in something new if they wish, they will begin their final painting.

Week 10: Final Painting: Finishing Touches, When to say When

We’ll go through the process of polishing our final paintings, staying in control until the end, continuing to pick out the shapes we want to show, utilizing all the tools we have at our disposal for an amazing finish!

Materials/ Equipment:

Required:

Laptop/Tablet that is able to run digital painting software.

Examples: Krita, Medibang Paint Studio, Gimp are all free digital painting programs that can be downloaded on laptops. ProCreate is a new popular Digital painting software on iPad tablets. All of these are acceptable for this class.

Medibang Paint Pro, Krita and Gimp software can be downloaded respectfully from: https://medibangpaint.com/en/ https://krita.org/en/download https://www.gimp.org/

Strongly Encouraged:

Digital drawing tablet

Examples: Wacom or Huion are quite good, this hardware can connect to your computer and allow you to draw with a digital pen and pad, to computer, or sometimes straight to the pad. Without this, you’ll be painting with a mouse, and lacking pressure sensitivity differentiation, which allows for more smooth and natural painting. Regardless, you can still learn, but it will be harder for you.

A small object to draw from home (about hand-sized)

Examples: A mug, a deodorant stick, a matchbook, paperweight, pop can, cactus, etc.