What does it mean to refine a painting? How can you spot what’s left to do? Answering that for yourself requires building up some practice, but with these videos, I’ll show you what I’m looking for on this painting.
Hello! My name’s Kanjon and we’re almost done with this part (season?) of Digital Dabbles. If you’ve been following along I hope this excites you, and if you’re new, come join us! The full playlist is in the description. If you’ve never tried art before and want to give it a shot, my channel is about convincing you that anyone can learn to draw. Let’s jump in and start finishing up this background.
We’re going to go right for those trees. We blocked them in before just to give us an idea of shape and color. Now we’re going to add in some detail. On a multiply layer, I’m going to use more of those brushes I mentioned from last time. They’re in the description if you need them. I’m going to smack down a bit of a mess here in a way that might look a little weird, but there’s a secret we’ll get to that we can use. Keeping an eye on my reference, I’m going to try to get in some of those deeper shadows with some vaguely tree-shaped marks.
Remember how we used Screen to add highlights? Well this time we’re going to use “Add”. This is sometimes called Linear Dodge, and can also brighten up a painting. The difference is that Add can push colors up towards white in a more extreme manner. This can be useful for drawing lights in a scene, or super bright highlights outside. But you can also do this with Screen; whatever you prefer.
Remember that you can always change the blending mode whenever you want! If you paint with Screen and then try out Hard Light, or Add, or Color Dodge, and see that you like that look better, then whoops! Art happened. You’re doing it right, keep experimenting.
Now for the magic trick: notice how the trees are out of focus in the reference? We’re going to do that here too and blur both of those layers a bit. Pretty much every art app has a way to blur like this, sometimes as an effect layer, sometimes as a menu option like Procreate here. But you can also get away with smudging the background a bit, and we’ll even do some of that here to get rid of some parts that are a little too defined. I’ll keep mashing in marks with more brushes, smudging things more, and then finally, I’ll turn the opacity of both down to a level that seems nice.
I know I say that I’m “mashing” in detail and that’s because I mean it – spending too much time trying to get it right just makes you frustrated, and with backgrounds, you often want lower detail so it’s not a distraction. This is also kinda why we’re using some pre-made brushes: we could carefully paint the leaves of our background, but that’s not really the point of what we want to accomplish. We just want plant-shaped-somethings there.
Anyway! Let’s do the clouds next. These weren’t in the reference photo, but they’re just so fun to paint that I had to have some. No fancy tricks here, just a new normal layer and we’re going to mash more clouds down. This time I’m using some cloud stamp brushes for quick detail – same artist, also in the description. Just a few grayish marks on the bottom, and maybe some brighter ones up top. No blending modes here, it’s easy enough to skip them. I’ll clip this because it happened to look nice, but really just out of coincidence here; I didn’t plan that. If you didn’t make a new layer or don’t want to clip to the clouds you had before, that’s no problem.
By this point, it’s been quite a while since I’ve looked at the shadows I’ve painted. For most of your paintings, you won’t be doing them over the span of weeks or months, but consider coming back to your art the next day at least. Getting a fresh view can help you spot things to improve, and in this case, I notice that I could make the shadows under the fox a little better. This is the first part of a process called “refining”.
Let’s mess with the shadows on their original multiply layer. I want to add in some of those extra dark shadows that are going to be really close to this animal, where very little light gets in. This is called “ambient occlusion”; if you’ve played a good bit of video games you’ve probably seen this before. It’s an art term too! Using a darker sky color, I’m going to blob some down, and then take an acrylic brush to smudge things and adjust. I’ll do a couple rounds of this: we’re working on a layer and it’s OK to keep changing it.
There it is! Hard to notice in the moment, but looking at the before and after helps to show how these refining tweaks can really polish things up. Try it out! You can go for the same adjustments I made, or try some more on your own. Trying things out differently is how you learn and start to find your own style. Next will be the actual last video on this painting, and it’s where we’ll refine the details of the fox with some of the same strategies shown here. It’s not far away: I hope to release that video next. Enjoy the process of painting, chase that passion, see you back here for the next one.
| Production Info | |
|---|---|
| Music | sero - Love Your Grace; sero - Mid August |
| VRChat World | Sea Breeze by WispyWoo |
| VRChat Avatar | Vulper by Royalty, Meaty, and Reval |