Painting On Screen Tutorial

By John Pangia You've had your favorite graphics program sitting on your hard drive for a while now, and you've pushed all the buttons, tried all the bells and whistles, and even cranked out a pretty cool logo or two. Now what do you do with it? How about making something new? How about... (drum roll, please) creating your own painting? Here's where you say "Ack! I can't paint!" Well, I'm here to tell you that you can. Chances are that the graphics program you're familiar with has a tool that's used to blend color. Different programs give it different names - blend, smudge, smear, push - but they all do basically the same thing, they allow you to move color on the screen, and blend it with whatever other color it touches. How useful is that? Well, today, right here on our stage, we're going to create a painting, just by smearing around splotches of blue on a clean white background. Take a look at this graphic. I know, I know, it's an inkspot, but it's an inkspot with a twist. Compare the two. The one on top is a spray of blue that I dropped onto the page with an airbrush. I use the airbrush tool a lot because I like the way it fogs color at the edges. For this you can use anything you want, just drop some color on the page. Now look at the second spot. Nothing has been added. Instead, color has been pulled from the center. Notice how the blue has blended with the white background. Each petal on this little flower, which is very basic for demonstration purposes, was created with a single stroke of the blending tool. With one stroke, each petal was given form, texture, highlight, and shadow, just by pulling color from a spot. The finished product would be much more defined, but this is the basic idea. Your blending tool will have different settings to adjust, depending on the software you use. Whatever your particular settings are called, they all do the same thing, control the density or transparency of the brush. As you experiment, you'll see the different effects these settings can have on your finished work, and by all means, experiment, because your software has another amazing tool in its repertoire, the un-do button, arguably the most useful button of all. Now then, let's take things a step further. We'll start with a basic sketch, so you can visualize where we're going. In time, you might do away with the sketch all together, but we'll stick with it for the time being. We're going to concentrate on one area of the sketch, and by using the same technique described above, create a new image from scratch. Spray in some color on one of the petals, without taking the color all the way to the edge. That white edge is going to give us our highlights. You're going to pull more color into areas that you want to look like shadows, and less color where you want the image lighter. Controlling the amount of color you pull will take some trial and error with the tool controls, and a few clicks on the good old un-do. I like to keep the brush fairly transparent, feathering the color out toward the edge, until it fades to nothing, then going back with a few more strokes to pull more color into areas I want darker. You'll find this is much faster than constantly going back to adjust your controls. Start with a light setting, and go with it. Take a look at how the edges of the petal are beginning to form, just by alternating lighter and darker strokes. We're not adding color here, just moving it, smearing it around. Again, lighter strokes out toward the edge, then some extra strokes where you want deeper color. If you pull too much color into a certain area, you can un-do. Check how your software works with this. In some programs, it might un-do "all" your strokes, and your screams will wake up the neighbors. It's sometimes better to utilize all that white space you have there, and pull some of it back into the image. As far as your computer is concerned, that background is just another color, so use it. You can see now how things are beginning to take shape. Using the airbrush, I fogged in some more color near the center of the petal, then smeared it around for more texture. At the lower part of the petal, I used that white background we just talked about, and pulled some of it up into the image for highlight. At the top of the highlight, I added a tiny speck of purple, and with the blending tool, pulled it down into the white. One stroke up, a spot of color, one stroke down. Instant texture and depth. Here is the finished product, with splotches of black added here and there for contrast. So we started with black and white, smeared in some purple and blue, and created an entire painting with one basic tool. That's it, your turn, go give it a shot. Start with something basic like a flower. The nice thing about an image like this, is that it doesn't have to look like Aunt Edna when it's done, it can look whatever way you think it should. After all, who's going to know the difference?   Copyright 1999, John Pangia and Digital Paint, All Rights Reserved