Creating digital illustrations is a very popular way to showcase your artistic talent. It’s easy to start creating engaging, beautiful pictures using free software or web-based tools.
There are many ways to get creative with your illustration designs. You can create still life scenes, landscapes, and animal portraits. The best way to learn how to do any of these things is by doing! Experimenting is one of the greatest strengths of this medium.
Digital art comes in all shapes and sizes. Some artists use it as their main source of income, while others use it for personal expression. No matter what you want to achieve with yours, just have fun experimenting and learning new techniques!
This article will go over some basic concepts of digital artwork, and describe some simple methods that anyone can try out. When you’re done, you’ll know some fundamental styles such as illustrative, comic, and graphic novels.
Learn how to create your own unique style
Being able to design in either a digital or traditional medium is very important when it comes to creating illustrations. Whether you want to doodle on a notebook, make designs for clothes, or develop your drawing skills more seriously, having a way to take your ideas and put them into action is integral to what you will be doing.
There are many ways to learn digital illustration. You can take art classes at university or community centers, purchase beginner guides and tutorials, or find free resources online.
By experimenting with different styles and media, you will begin to identify patterns and concepts that work well for you as an artist.
Practice drawing shapes
A very important part of digital illustration is being able to draw basic shapes. You will use these shapes so much in creating your illustrations that you must be proficient in their creation. Some easy shape studies are making an object out of a circle, a square, or a triangle.
There are many ways to learn how to draw simple shapes. You can take any kind of art class where they teach you about proportion, line styles, and shapes. Or you could search online for quick tutorials on it. There are even apps with interactive lessons on this!
Practice as soon as possible! Doing something you love is the best way to perfect anything. When starting out as a beginner artist, there’s no need to focus too hard on exact proportions and textures.
Practice creating textures
A practice of digital illustration is creating textures or patterns in your illustrations. These can be done virtually any medium including, but not limited to, Photoshop, Gimp, Manga Studio, and other programs.
There are many ways to learn how to create textures in these apps. You could take lessons from others’ work or you could just experiment and see what styles you like!
Texture painting is another way to learn how to do this. Rather than using a pattern as an element, you use one piece of content as a source material for the texture. For example, if your text was “Hello World!,” you would mix up red, green, and blue colors to make your new texture.
Tutorials are great resources too because they show you step-by-step how to apply the texture correctly.
Learn about color
Color is one of the most fundamental parts of digital illustration. There are many ways to learn how to use colors in drawing, painting, or designing. For example, you can take pure nature studies as references!
Color theory teaches us about why certain shades work together and what effect they have on your mind. For instance, red makes other colors look more intense like oranges and pinks, green for grass and plants, and blue for water.
Using these fundamentals, you can create lots of different styles with vibrant, neutral, classic, and artistic ones being some examples.
To start creating your own designs, pick an area of interest that you want to cover – maybe shapes, flowers, cars, etc. Then, choose a medium such as pencil, pen, brush, or whatever best fits your style and technique.
Once everything is done, test out your design skills by doing it yourself. You will probably find areas where you need to research better methods or find new ways to do things.
Create a personal theme
When it comes down to it, digital illustration is just like any other type of art — you got some people that do it well and they get paid for it!
The only difference is how they achieve their results. Some use expensive software, or develop their own by learning the basics and then adding onto it as their skills grow.
It goes without saying that the more advanced ones take advantage of all the features this software has. These features can be limitless when you add them into your style.
But there’s one thing that doesn’t change: creativity. Being able to create something inspired is what makes someone get out their pencils or put away their computer.
So, why not pick a genre and design with that? Creating landscapes is great way to start exploring styles in illustrative work. Or maybe study still life pieces to see how creating settings is done.
Whatever style you choose, make sure it’s one you will enjoy developing. If you are never happy with your work, then what is the point? You will spend hours putting effort into something that makes you unhappy, which will waste your time and energy.
Hopefully I have given you some starting points and tips on how to begin designing as an artist in the field of digital illustration.
Use reference images
A lot of people start drawing using digital illustration as their style, but they lack the needed sources for inspiration. They use pre-made stock art or pictures that have been designed before so you can’t really learn anything from them.
Luckily, there are lots of free image resources available online for everyone to enjoy! By looking through these sites and other illustrations, you will be able to pick up some tips and tricks to add depth and complexity to your drawings.
By studying how others drew certain things, you will also be inspired to try new things yourself.
Draw everything perfectly
As mentioned before, illustration is a very artistic field that requires you to use your drawing skills as well as knowledge of design to succeed. But what makes some artists stand out above others is not how beautifully they draw pretty people or landscapes, it’s their ability to add depth and dimension to an image through digital painting.
Digital art comes with its own set of rules and techniques that can be difficult at times. There are many ways to learn this craft, though!
You can start by learning how to create simple drawings in Photoshop or other similar software. Then, move onto more complicated illustrations like making characters and editing them to make them look realistic.
When designing for web or print, keeping things relatively straightforward is best. An easy way to do this is to choose one element of the design (like an icon) and research how professional designers made it. You can then edit and improve upon these styles to fit your style or combine theirs into yours.
Practice editing your drawings
A strong part of digital illustration is being able to edit yourself. You will spend a lot of time in front of your computer alone, so you want to make sure that you are comfortable drawing from scratch or re-doing things that you have already done.
There are many ways to learn how to edit pictures, but one of our favorites is practicing using the opposite tool as what you wanted to do with your picture!
For example, if you wanted to draw a cat, then learning how to use the brush tool effectively is an easy way to start. By doing this, you can create beautiful landscapes, still life scenes, and even abstract designs.
