Digital paintings

This page is written on July 2020.

For anime-style digital painting, these 2 channels are really helpful for wide topics, especially if you understand Japanese.

  1. YouTube: さいとうなおきチャンネル
  2. YouTube: Deep Blizzard's Art School

In this page, you can see some links to videos on the above 2 channels, but in their videos, Japanese is mainly spoken and no English translations is added.

Styles

There are some styles to paint colors.

  1. Anime painting
  2. Watercolor painting
  3. Thick painting
  4. Grisaille method

How to draw human characters

Basics

  1. Colors
  2. Shade, shadow, and lights

Anime-style painting

Differences to draw men and women

  1. How to draw a man/woman (Japanese)
  2. How to draw backs of a man/woman (Japanese)

Eyes

Basically, our eyes are consist of these things. It may be helpful to consider these parts while you are painting eyes.

  1. Shadow
  2. Iria
  3. Retina
  4. Pupil
  5. Highlight

Next 2 YouTube videos are helpful to understand how to paint eyes.

  1. Deep Blizzard's Art School: 宝石の瞳を描く!!【超入門講座#07】
  2. さいとうなおきチャンネル: 【完全公開!!】生き生きした目の描き方講座【イラスト講座】

Hair

Watch 4 YouTube videos.

  1. さいとうなおきチャンネル: 【反則技】髪の毛を簡単に描く方法
  2. さいとうなおきチャンネル: 【全部公開】魅力的な髪の塗り方講座
  3. Deep Blizzard's Art School: プロレベルになる髪の描き方の秘密！【超入門講座#10】
  4. Deep Blizzard's Art School: 男キャラの髪の毛の描き方にはコツがあった！【超入門講座#11】

Skin

To paint the skin of human beings, four colors are mainly used.

  1. Base color
  2. Shade
  3. Shadow
  4. Highlight

Next 2 videos are helpful.

  1. Deep Blizzard's Art School: 失敗しない肌の色選び
  2. Palmie - お絵描き講座パルミー: 女性キャラクターの肌の塗り方講座 by Aちき

Digital painting apps

Clip Studio Paint

  1. Change the line color even after I painted?
    • Use transparency color lock not to paint the color to drawn pixels. See this page for more details.
  2. Use "Clip at Layer Below" in order to change the pixels only painted at the layer below.

Pen tablets

Configurations

  1. さいとうなおきチャンネル: 板タブを3倍描きやすくする方法

Troubleshooting

  1. In order to use pen tablets, I needed to push pens hard to tablets and it was getting me tired for a short time.

Process

Steps to draw an illustration for human beings

  1. Decide briefly what illustration you will draw
  2. Decide a layout of it
  3. Take your photos that can be useful to draw your illustration
    1. Set everythings, not only yourself, in photos as much as possible
    2. Decide a camera position
    3. Wear clothes for the illustration as much as possible

Practices

Croquis

Croquis (drawing in a very short time) is one of the way to practice drawing. Here are links to help starting croquis.

Other software

Some of the software introduced on videos written in this page.

Useful tools for drawings

  1. PureRef: The simple reference image viewer
  2. ArtPose: The posing tool for artists on the go
  3. MagicPoser: Easy 3D Characters for Creators
  4. Style2Paints: AI driven lineart colorization tool
  5. Diffchecker: Compare Text/Images and other file types
    • Show differences between two images
  6. Pinterest
    • Get ideas for your illustration