Creating digital illustrations is a fun way to showcase your artistic talent and skills. There are many ways to learn how to create engaging, beautiful pictures that tell a story!
Illustrations have a rich history that goes back centuries. Today, they seem to be more popular than ever before. Artists use them in all sorts of mediums- from blogs to social media sites like Instagram to printed material and advertisements.
They make for an incredible way to convey a message or picture idea quickly. This article will go into detail about some easy ways to start creating your own illustrative pieces. Let’s get started!
Note: The examples in this article are not professional quality photographs. They were designed as illustrations to give you inspiration and ideas.
Topic and bullet point introductions work well here because it sets up a topic and audience member clearly.
Popular Photo Manipulation Styles
Recent trends in digital illustration include styles that focus more on depicting rich, lush environments or highly conceptualized images. These are sometimes called landscape or environment drawing, environmental portrait, nature studies, space aesthetic, or serene photography.
Landscape artists use natural materials to create their pictures by incorporating textures, patterns, and shapes of plants and foliage into the picture. This adds depth to the image and gives it an overall sense of calmness.
Environmental portraits typically feature only people as objects in the painting. The artist creates a setting with someone in it so that the audience can connect the person to the scene.
Space aesthetics apply bright colors to the canvas to show off the beauty of the surroundings. Artists choose very saturated shades to emphasize how beautiful the area is.
These types of illustrations are not limited to one genre. A few examples will have you thinking “ocean”, “space”, or “nature�”. Many designers adopt such artistic styles for logos, character designs, and other graphics.
Digital Painting
When people use the term digital painting, they typically mean creating still life or landscape paintings that are all done with computerized tools. These types of pictures usually do not have human figures in them.
However, this definition is too narrow. Technically speaking, anything drawn on a surface is considered a form of digital painting.
Digital artists often times will take one or more of these three styles and expand upon it by adding in additional layers and features. For example, an illustrator may add fluff to give their picture more depth before applying another layer.
These additions can be made using software programs such as Photoshop, Painter, Manga Studio, etc. – depending on what type of art you want to create!
There are many ways to learn how to paint digitally, so while some may consider drawing to be the most fundamental part of digital painting, doing either of the other two styles is just as important if not more.
Character Design
A character is always more than just their appearance, they have to tell a story through their expression- something that most people forget about when designing characters. When creating your own stories or writing new ones, you will need strong characters with interesting backstories!
Character design includes things like how tall someone is, what kind of hairstyle they have, if there are tattoos, etc. All these features play an important role in telling the story of the person.
Since we’re talking about illustrations here, none of these things matter unless they relate to the plot. But being able to add some depth to your characters by incorporating characteristics such as these can help gain interest from readers.
There are many ways to take good inspiration for character designs, but making sure your characters stand out and are well defined is a key part of it. Try looking at old books, films, and TV shows, as well as listening to music and studying lyrics, to find all those little details that make up who this person is.
Scene Design
As mentioned earlier, scene design is one of the most important parts of digital illustration. When drawing for an audience, your setting and background are very significant. Yours can be anything from still life to landscape or even close up portraits!
Landscape scenes typically have lots of natural elements such as plants, mountains, rivers, etc. You would also need to include space in your picture, something that’s hard to achieve when illustrating people.
Portrait illustrations are much more focused than those with landscapes. They usually consist of only you and your subject, and sometimes just their feature (for example, nose). This is because there’s not really enough room for other things like trees and buildings unless it makes sense within the context of the story.
Still life pictures require less emphasis on depth so they feel relaxed and calm.
Texture Design
When designing for an app, website, or platform that requires rich graphics, texture is one of the key design elements you will need to add some appeal. With mobile devices becoming more advanced, adding textures to your apps has become popular.
Many people add textures by taking pictures and then editing them in software or using online tools to create looks they want. This can be done very professionally and it takes time to do this correctly!
There are many ways to add textures to your designs so that you are not limited to just natural looking ones. It is important to know how to use textures effectively in your digital art and marketing projects.
Texture cannot always be illustrated completely here because there are too many types! We will go over three main categories: geometric, patterned, and materialized. All three have different applications depending on what type of look you want to achieve with yours.
