Digital art advice

[Sam]

Hello all, my attempt at a Gundam RX-78-2 head.

For the digital artists amongst us, I respectfully seek your advice on learning how to do high quality colour / shading / highlights and/or "special effects" please.

Links to online tutorials and/or principles of digital colouring would be much appreciated.

(And yes, I have been searching for them myself...)



http://wildspark.deviantart.com/art/...cess-480578293

[gamblor916]

That's pretty awesome work there. As for advice just experiment. Use the select tools and paths to be precise with the colouring. For the bike I did below I had lots of references and went through photoshop filters just trying things out.

[SMHFConvoy]

Plug all that search criteria into YouTube and no doubt that there will be a ton of tutorials.

[gamblor916]

Here's a couple of tutorials I found useful. Links because the images are huge.

http://home.exetel.com.au/leducly/im...MVdesign_s.jpg

http://home.exetel.com.au/leducly/im...tutorial_s.jpg

[tinyJazz]

I'm not sure if this is exactly what you're after, but I think these are pretty good:

Basic to Advanced Color Theory and Illustration Techniques for Photoshop -it's a single page and image heavy obviously! Lots of small quick refs, tutes and process drawings.


http://www.ctrlpaint.com/ lots of free video tutes, excellent for beginners too.

Plus a basic masks and layers tutorial for digital colouring.

I wish I had a good light tute, because it seems to me that could help you the most.

[Sam]

Hey guys, thanks for the tutorial links - they are great!

gamblor - can I ask how you did the intricate motorbike parts? Did you use some 3D models, simply drew them in, or used photos? They look very detailed and I can't reproduce that level.

tinyJazz- I've been to ctrlpaint as well, now that I think more about it, I think the problem is more fundamental - I just suck at using the drawing tablet.

In theory it should work similar to the mouse but better, however, I find that I am not used to drawing on the tablet, and then looking up at the monitor to see where the line is actually going to.

I know you can get the large Cintiq ones that allow you to see directly on the tablet too - but I don't want to spend $900+ for a non-pro hobby (yes, I know that even as a non-collector I've probably spent more than $900 on Transformers, but that's different! ;p).

Thus I find that I lack the confidence to do fast / strong lines on the tablet than if I simply drew with a pencil on paper.

It's probably simply a matter of spending another 1,000+ hours of practice...