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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. 

A digital painting sketch
A digital painting, face underlay
A digital painting with shading
A digital painting sketch

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
A digital painting image of hair

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. 

Digital Painting leaf drawing
A digital painting sketch adding custom elements
A digital painting of a portrait with design elements
A digital painting of a woman with goat horns

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