Digital Painting Process Step-by-Step

Welcome to my little digital painting process blog! I’ll walk you through how I created my digital artwork called Goat Goddess. This guide is an easy to follow look into my approach to painting digitally.

If you’re curious about my setup, including my canva sizes, digital brushes, or how to print your artwork, check out my other blog How To Make Digital Artwork.

In this blog, I’ll cover four key steps for painting digital portraits: sketching and planning, adding color, shading and lining, and finally, adding custom design elements.

Step One: Sketching and Planning a Digital Painting

The first step in any digital painting is creating your underlay sketch. You can sketch freehand from a reference image or, if your focus is more on the painting process, tracing is perfectly fine.

Don’t let people tell you that’s “cheating” , it’s not! I like adding some of my design elements during my sketch phase because it will help guide my color choices later on. Plus, you can always add more details as you go.

Step Two: Adding Color To A Digital Painting

I start by blocking in the largest area of color, in this case the skin tone of her face. I add the color very loosely, adding quick shadows to establish some depth early on. This will help you later when you are getting more detailed. At this stage, the image on the left still looks flat and that’s okay, because the next part is adding more dark shadows to give it dimension and shape.

If you prefer to add color to everything all at once, that works too! Personally, I work in sections, it helps me focus and not jump around so much on my digital paintings. I usually choose the section that feels the most challenging, complex, or time consuming to tackle first.

Take a look at the image on the right, you can see I’ve started building on the shadows with darker tones under her lip, around her right eye, and along her lips. These shadows create a 3D effect, adding depth to her eyes pushing her lips forward, and bring her face to life.

Step Three: Shading and Lining A Digital Painting

Adding detailed shading is my favorite part of painting a digital portrait. I focus on building up the darks, adding exaggerated colors to her cheeks, eye shadows and adding subtle colors like the pink in her nose. In reality, human faces contain an incredible range of colors, so if you’re aiming for realism, take a look at all the colors you can find. I tend to creatively take the reference image and add my own colors to match a feeling or emotion I’d like my painting to project.

Next, it’s time to add linework to your digital painting. I use the default Pencil brush in Procreate for details like her eyebrows, eyelashes, and the lines around her eyes. This is definitely a personal choice but you can use dark shadows to mimic fine lines instead of drawing them in directly, it’s all about what you like doing.

Quick Tip: Study the Colors

Don’t limit yourself to colors you think are “supposed” to be skin tones
Pay attention to all the colors found in your reference
Avoid using pure black for shading; try browns, blues or greens

How To Digitally Paint Hair

When painting hair, I like to add the base color first. Trying to paint individual strands on a white canvas can be very tricky and tedious. After laying down the base color, I add the light source and shadows to create depth. Okay, yes it looks so weird but don’t get discouraged! Every painting will always exhibit the ugly duckling phases and not just once but throughout your painting.

Once you’re happy with your underpainting and shadows, grab your liner (pencil brush) and start adding lines. Follow the flow of your reference image and don’t overthink it, the more loose it is the better I think you might like it. The key is for consistent line shape following the head. I like starting from the parting of the hair and working my way down.

In this image, you’ll notice I’ve added skin tones along the top with the strands of light and dark browns. One thing I’ve learned: adding too many lines can make the hair look unnatural, like a collection of lines rather than hair. Remember, no one sees hair strand by strands, creating the illusion of texture and flow is key.

Step Four: Adding Custom Elements to A Digital Portrait

Make it your own! What do you like to draw? Flowers, tentacles, anime, graffiti, or animals add it to your painting! Adding custom elements is a great way to show off your personality or your style. My favorite things to add are animals morphing, flowers and plants. I’ve seen some beautiful portraits that are so rendered and that’s what makes it their style, stylized painting textures or different color palette. This piece of digital artwork is yours to explore.

In the right image, I initially planned to add cherry blossom branches but ended up changing my mind to having some ram horns. I still wanted to add that nature element to my painting so some fun leaf branches were added with a more coloring book style vs a more rendered look like the face. Once I decided on the black background and finished painting the little horns I felt like the background needed more so experimented with more leaf patterns. At first, it felt too crowded, but after lowering the opacity and pushing the leaves further into the background, I loved the results! This is why working on different layers is so important! It saves you time and the hassle of erasing and repainting entire sections. For this digital painting, I organized the layers as follows: her face, the hair, the hood, the horns, the front leaves and lastly the background leaves.

I know this blog isn’t super detailed, but that’s because everyone works differently. My hope is that sharing my process and preferences inspires you to develop your own style and discover new tricks for digital painting that works for you. Thanks for stopping by! If you enjoyed this blog, sign up for my newsletter to stay updated on future posts.

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