For Digital painting you need hardware facilities and related softwares.

Hardware facilities:

• 1 - a large screen monitor (19'' or 21'' or grater are preferable)
• 2 - lot of RAM (random access memory). If you work with windows and vista OS you need at least 2GB.
• 3 - A powerful and fast CPU and Graphic Card.
• 4 - A stylus pen as a substitute or companion to your mouse. Stylus pens have a separate sensitive digital plate that connects to your USB port through a wire or by wireless means. (You can not paint with a mouse, so stylus pen is a must.)

Softwares

As any other works, painting needs its own program. Graphic programs are many but they do different works. Generally 3 groups of graphic programs exist.

• 1 - 2D(2 dimensional)Pixel based programs or bitmap programs, for example Adobe Photoshop, photo impact, Corel photo paint, Corel painter and twisted brush
• 2 - 2D vector based programs: Adobe illustrator, Corel draw, macromedia Freehand.
• 3 - and finally 3D programs: 3DS Max, Maya, soft image,… are in this group.

Many other programs are in direct or in indirect connection to Digital Graphics (such as web page composers).

Here, we pay attention only to first group: 2D bitmap programs. Among bitmap programs Photoshop is most famous. It has numerous features including advance color adjustment tools, multiple layer facilities, amazing arsenal of filters and many more. But Photoshop is mainly a photo editing program. It has not specifically designed tools for believable painting effects. With some efforts you can draw or paint in Photoshop, as some people do, but it is time consuming and tiresome and results are not satisfactory. There are other programs designed chiefly for painting. They have many useful features of Photoshop (as layers, Masks, color adjustment tools,…) and they have at the same time all traditional painting and drawing tools including pastel, chalk, charcoal, pen , ink, pencil, colored pencils, crayon, watercolors, acrylics, oil, …! Any imaginable textured background is also available: canvas, pastel paper, watercolor paper, charcoal paper, hand made paper… anyway, I suggest you Corel painter as most sophisticated painting program presented ever. The last version (Corel Painter X) is really amazing.

Step 1



In first snap shot I show you the general environment of the program. There, I introduce you to various parts of the software and also a pen, brush and black ink sketch and its model showed. Generally you begin by opening of a new white blank file (you have to define paper dimensions here). Then you give it your desired color and texture. Even you can give lighting effect to the page in this stage. After that, you have to open your photo model and select your preliminary tool for first out line sketch (I will show you such a thing in second snap shot). When you complete your out line sketch (Generally rendered by pencil, charcoal or pen) you can add new layers and begin to build up your color tones based on the drawing.

Two next snap shot show you how to build up colors.

Step 2



Step 3



Step 4



When the work end, you have to save it in your desired format (Corel painter native file format is .rif) through your work you have to save your art piece only in this format, since it contain all painter's qualities (including layers, masks,...) you save you work in other formats only in last step and before closing the program.

So my introduction ends. There are many many subtle details that are not presentable here. You can search the web or buy related books if you are really interested. I am here for further information also.

Regards Shahin

Ps: it is my Gallery address in Corel painter official Magazine. Some of my non portrait works are there.
http://www.paintermagazine.co.uk/show_profile.php?username=shahin



Many thanks to Shahin for this amazing tutorial. Check out his Stars Portraits gallery !

This tutorial comes from iDigitalEmotion.com


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