Digitalmash

Now I’m pretty mediocre as an artist, so keep this in mind. Even though I’ve spent countless hours with a mouse in my hand, the beauty of a tablet is it gives you the control of a pencil or pen. For me, it’s much more natural for drawing.

1. Starting photo

Need sleep.

So here’s the picture we’re starting with. I chose this one because it’s nice and contrasted, which basically makes things easier. It’s not really needed here, but we could always up the contrast to get clearer divisions between light and dark.

2. Trace, trace, trace.

Just follow the lines of light and dark.

So the next step is to halve the opacity on the photo (so you can see what you’re drawing), and simply trace where the light meets the dark on a new layer.

3. Colour inside the lines

Slowly but surely scribbling in the black.

With liberal wrist movements, just colour in the dark. You can afford to be a little messy with this if you’re after a sketchy look.

4. Soft shading

Shading gives it a third dimension.

Change to a softer, larger, round and semi-opaque brush and just gently make long single strokes over the shadows on the face. Really, it sounds harder than it is. You can see there’s a little more crosshatching in places too. You may need to clean up some of the shading if you’ve gone a little overboard. Simply switch to eraser on a soft round brush and go over the white parts of the photo.

5. Man under the hill

Plant more trees.

Now I don’t know why, but the outline of the figure seemed to sort of have the shape of a hill. I thought I’d muck around with this idea adding trees above and roots below.

6. Add a base colour or gradient

Base colours.

It’s definitely taking shape, but it needs some colour. It’s good to start with a base colour, or in this case gradient. As you can see, we’ve let our original tracing photo go and we’re flying on our own now.

7. Watercolours

Fun with watercolour brushes.

Because up until now we’ve only been working with a black or dark brushes, the lighter parts in our image is simple clear, meaning we can do all sorts of things on a layer below. Here I’ve made a few swipes with a few different watercolour brushes.

8. Colour burning watercolours

Colour burning watercolour strokes.

Again, adding more watercolour strokes. The blending mode is set to colour burn, giving some nice colour mixtures. This sort of stuff is always a little hit and miss, so you need to do a little trial and error with brush shapes and colours until you get something you like.

9. Bright sky, dark valley

Dark and light.

Now if we’re going to pull off our ‘man under the hill’ idea, there needs to be a bit more depth in the picture. I’ve added lighting from the top left corner which is our sunlight, and below I’ve added some darker shading to give a bit of mood and mystery to the valley below.

10. All done

Ta-da! Finnito.

And lastly, we can add some more atmosphere with snow-covered mountains in the far distance and some birds flying away from our tree.

Anyhoo, just a little fun. I hope it gives you a little idea of how handy a tablet can be to achieve certain effects. Really, most of the stuff here is probably faster done with a mouse, but the ability to trace images can come in really handy. For those playing along, I’m using the original wacom bamboo.

—Published 12 November, 2008