How To Create The Right Brush Effect In Digital Painting

!±8± How To Create The Right Brush Effect In Digital Painting

With the success of the smartphones and tablets, digital graphical and painting activities become more popular. Besides watching videos or editing pictures, painting can be considered as the most creative activity on mobile digital devices.

Digital painting brings to us numbers of powerful tools and features. Many digital painting techniques don't exist in traditional painting art. We can see lots of digital artists creating incredible artworks, with awesome effects and colors.

Starting on personal computers creations, with the booming of mobile digital devices (smartphones and tablets) digital painting becomes now more and more popular amongst artists, designers and art lovers. Painting applications running on mobile devices become more versatile, and also more powerful.

Besides basic painting applications for kids or absolute beginners, high quality professional applications can be found on the market. The professional application level must offer more options and features to the users. But with more options and features, the applications become more sophisticated and more complicate to use.

In this article I'll talk about the topic which I do consider to be the heart of painting applications: the brush effects. I'll not enumerate the thousands different models of brush heads. In fact I'll try to explain how they work and how they are organized. Then how you can take advantage on mobile digital painting.

THE BASIS

Basically, it's easy to understand the mechanism of a brush stroke:

1/ Take a basic image, like a circle.

2/ Then print it once on the screen: you get a printed circle.

3/ Following a straight line, print the image several times: you have several lined up circles. The spaces between the circles is still large.

4/ Now close up the circles until they overlap each other: finally you get a straight line... made with circles.

MORE OPTIONS

On the base of the brush stroke made with circles, we can add some variations of its aspect:

1/ The size: many applications give the possibility to adjust the size of the brush with a cursor (or any other suitable tool). You can also find some applications, for a reason of simplicity, preset all the brush sizes, then the user cannot adjust them, but can select between several preselected brushes according to their size.

All the 2 solutions have its advantages, it's a question of developer's choice.

2/ The opacity (color saturation): this parameter will add or remove transparency to the colors. To fade out a color, you just add more transparency. And with 0% of transparency, the color is totally opaque (100% saturation).

3/ The space between 2 brush heads: this parameter can get you confused with the opacity adjustment. In fact, visually opacity and spacing produce the same effect, but they are totally different. Why spacing produce opacity? If you overlay several low-density images, you'll obviously obtain a darker image. In the other hand, if you increase the opacity (saturation) of a low-density image, it darkens too.

Practically, according to the wanted effect, you have to find the correct balance between opacity and spacing. If you want more transparent colors, spacing adjustment can be done first, then add or remove opacity. Just keep in mind that adding opacity will remove the transparency of colors.

Just one more remark about spacing: the more you overlay the brush heads, the more image duplication you'll get, and the more your device will slower down. It's mechanical. Then sometimes you'll find some sophisticate brush style drawing with a lag behind your finger.

To summarize this, the best procedure to manage the brushes is to adjust orderly the 3 parameters: first adjust the brush size, second select the spacing rate, third choose the opacity.

BRUSH FLUIDITY.

The best way to make the brushes less responsive is to adjust the spacing at the smallest size. Indeed, the worse brush setting is: opacity and size at maximum, spacing at minimum. Then low speed and high darkness are guaranteed.

But a too small brush size is not always best for fluidity, it depends on the form of the brush. Each user will find his own adjustments. Personally I feel more comfortable with a light but fluent brush, even with a big sized one. I prefer to make several small strokes than a large one.

BRUSH STROKES QUALITY

All painting applications don't have the same quality of brush strokes. A brush stroke can be defined by 3 particularities: responsiveness, smoothness and dynamic brush head effects.

1) Responsiveness: is the short delay between the finger speed and the painted stroke on the screen. On the same device, two applications can have two very different speeds of brush strokes.

2) Smoothness: there is an easy test you can make. Open your painting app, take a brush or a pencil, and quickly draw a circle on your device's screen. With low quality painting applications, the strokes will show broken lines, like a train running inside a curve. These broken lines will disappear when smoothness is added to the strokes.

3) Brush heads: all brushes don't have the same optical effects. These effects are created by 2 elements: the form of the head, and the dynamic effects. These 2 elements could be added one by one or all together.

In fact, brush heads are not only made with simple shapes like circle, square, triangle... Their forms are very rich and various.

Brush dynamic effect is about the quantity of color loaded in the brush and the different movements given to the brush in the same single stroke (example: the jitter effect which throws the brush head at random over and below the line of followed by the stroke).

All these advanced particularities make the difference between low quality painting applications and the professional ones.

Artists always create their masterpieces according to the technical evolution. You can see the differences between drawings made with pencils and chalks. The techniques came first, giving more power and possibilities to artists.

Digital painting on PC is widely used by artists and professionals. And now the mobile digital painting is starting strongly, it'll surely become the next painting technique to master absolutely.

How To Create The Right Brush Effect In Digital Painting

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Oil Painting Art Course - Is Using Photographs OK? Edgar Degas and Norman Rockwell Thought So

!±8± Oil Painting Art Course - Is Using Photographs OK? Edgar Degas and Norman Rockwell Thought So

Edgar Degas painted from photos: Degas became a painter just at the beginning of photography. He first had others shoot photos for him for his use in his paintings. Later, he became an expert photographer. Degas' paintings show the influence of photography in the cutting off of figures. Before Degas, the whole person was inside the painting. In many of Degas' work, the figures are cut off mid leg or their figures are cut off on the left, right and top by the edge of the painting. This cropping came from his reference photos.

Photos were a tool in his paintings, drawings and sculpture. Degas' photographs had the look of his paintings. His paintings were based on his photographs.

Students ask me if it is proper to use photos: I have a classmate from the art school from which I graduated. He has had a very distinguished career painting all his life. He said that anything you do to help you develop a painting is a correct method.

Seven Ways to Project or Transfer Photos or Drawings onto Your Canvas: 

1. Tack them up on your easel as reference: There is a famous Norman Rockwell self-portrait (Google it). The painting shows Rockwell painting himself at an easel covered with photos of portraits by Rembrandt and Van Gogh and a drawing of himself. Rockwell is also looking in a mirror as he paints.

2. Opaque Projectors: The opaque projector is a machine that projects photos, book pages or drawings by shining a bright light onto the photo from above. A series of mirrors, prisms and lenses project the image onto a canvas. The artist then draws the outlines of the photo on the canvas using the projected image as a guide. Opaque projectors are available from Dick Blick, Jerry's Artorama or Mister Art online or at some art stores.

3. Camera Lucida: A camera lucida is a lens on a metal arm that clamps onto the artist's drawing board. The camera lucida superimposes an image on the artist's drawing surface. One sees a scene or the reference photo on the drawing surface. You can then trace the outlines of objects.

4. Mirrors: David Hockney, a well-known contemporary artist, was interviewed on "60 Minutes" on CBS-TV. Hockney had Lesley Stahl stand outside his studio window, in full sunlight, facing a mirror set up inside the window. Her image was reflected in the mirror and it was projected inside Hockney's dark studio onto Hockney's canvas. That projected image can then be copied. Hockney had written a book called "Secret Knowledge" about which Stahl did the interview. In the book Hockney theorizes that artists in the 1400's learned how to use lenses and mirrors to project images onto their canvases.

5. Print the photo or drawing on your canvas: You can print your photograph directly onto your canvas and then paint over them in oil paints. Ink jet printer paper suppliers offer ink jet printable canvas. You need to ask your ink jet/canvas supplier how long their inks last according to scientific testing.

There are printing services that offer Giclee fine art reproductions for painters, photographers, galleries and museums on fine art canvas. Some artists use these services to make reproductions of their paintings for sale in addition to selling the original oil painting. Giclee (French for "a spurt") is an inkjet process for making super high quality and long lasting prints. A good supplier uses fade-resistant inks or dyes that some claim last as long as 100 years.

Other artists print photos on canvas at Giclee printers and then paint over them in oil paints. Giclee prints are not only long lasting but also have no visible dots as do most ink jet printers. Google "giclee printers" to find giclee printing suppliers on the web.

6. Camera Obscura: In his book "Vermeer's Camera" Philip Steadman poses the theory that VerMeer used the early version of the photographic camera: the camera obscura. Camera obscura are the Latin words for dark room.

How the camera obscura works:

A box (or room) with a pinhole in the front end is placed in a well-lit room. The room in front of the hole will then be projected onto the inside back end of the box. Later, the camera obscura evolved into what we now call a camera. In a photographic camera, film is placed on the inside back end of the box where the image is projected from the lens in the front end of the box. Using the camera obscura principle with additional lenses and mirror, one can project an accurate image onto a painting surface and trace over the projected lines. Some suggest one can paint onto the canvas directly guided by the projected image. People still make camera obscuras ... Google "camera obscura" on the web.
7. Tracing: Some artists trace and transfer the outlines of photos onto their canvas or other drawing surface. They staple together a "sandwich" of the traced photo, a transfer sheet and the canvas. Drawing over the traced photo drawing on the top of the sandwich with a ballpoint pen causes the transfer sheet color to be transferred to the canvas. They then paint using the transferred line drawing as a guide on their canvas with the original photo(s) tacked alongside their canvas as reference.

Is Using Photographs OK? Like Edgar Degas and Norman Rockwell and countless other great painters and illustrators, I think so.

Oil Painting Art Course - Is Using Photographs OK? Edgar Degas and Norman Rockwell Thought So

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