Matt Dixon takes us through how to approach digital painting with a view to creating an interesting, textural finish similar to traditional media in this tutorial "How to Approach Digital Painting- A Painterly Approach."

Let's start with a few words about brushes. I'm using my Essential Brushes set for Photoshop here but you can successfully achieve a painterly effect with any brush. A brush which has an irregular profile and has some texture in the stroke may help to build an interesting surface more quickly but it's the placement of brush marks, rather than the marks themselves, which contribute most to a painterly feel. It's not the brush, it's how you use it! Experiment to find the brushes which feel most comfortable to you.

A satisfying painterly effect means building an interesting textural surface. This begins with the very first marks you make. I like to establish a rough sketch with line and move to a broad brush as soon as possible, placing tone with heavy marks. Working digitally gives the artist absolute control over the canvas but that control often works against creating an interesting surface. Try to resist the urge to control your canvas too much, keep your marks loose and economical.

Take a closer look at my sketch and you can see how rough things are. Note the mixture of heavy opaque marks and transparent strokes which allow texture and other brush marks to show through. Already this is starting to build an interesting surface.

With the sketch in place, my next step is to ensure I have a pattern of values established before adding color. I set the sketch layer to multiply and add tone on a layer beneath. This allows me to quickly add and adjust tone without interfering with the sketch. Refer to the video to see this section in a little more detail. Notice that I used a big textural brush to block in the basic values which helped to add more subtle interest in the background. Once I'm happy with the values, I flatten the image.

Now it's time to add color. To do this I repeat the process above, setting the toned sketch layer to multiply and working on the layer beneath. The texture and values are contained in the sketch layer so I can freely add and adjust the colors on the layer below. This is a great opportunity to experiment with colors before you commit to a palette to use in the final image. As you'll see in the video, I'm painting the colors in with a big brush, always looking to layer on more texture.

As soon as the colors are set, I flatten the image once again and proceed to work across the canvas tidying up edges and removing any unwanted areas of the sketch which remain. My general approach is to work from back to front, starting in the background and working towards areas of the foreground. Working on a single layer helps to encourage a painterly feel by forcing an approach which is similar to traditional media, thinking of the canvas as a single surface.

I now shift to a smaller brush and begin to finesse the surfaces, adding darks and lights to further model the forms. Pay attention to the different surface qualities in your scene; we want to build an interesting surface overall but that doesn't mean we have to apply a uniform texture across the canvas. Try to differentiate between surface textures by modifying your brush stokes according to the surface's properties.

The image is now nearing completion. Before a final render pass, add any remaining fine details. Try not to zoom in when adding details; adding very crisp detail or controlling the surface too much will work against a painterly finish.

The last step is to give the image a final render pass, picking out any details, adding highlights and balancing any edges that may need it. Global adjustments can be used to tweak color and contrast but avoid too much 'post process' as this give the image a very digital feel which will also work against the painterly feel we're aiming for.

Look at the 50% zoom of the robot and you'll see that the image is more refined than the sketch stage but still has many rough edges and that same mix of opaque and transparent strokes has built up to create a very interesting surface.

The end result is an illusion; an attempt to introduce some of the unpredictable and uncontrollable results found with most traditional media but a painterly approach can also be a very efficient working method. It's often not necessary for the digital artist to have quite the level of control that our tools give to us, and they can sometimes be a distraction from the business of crafting a solid image. This approach focuses on big marks and establishing the important aspects of an image over precise control. Give it a try - it's fun!

You can learn more about this approach in my Cubebrush tutorials Painting With Fury and Building Texture

A new book of my robot artwork, Transmissions 3, is now available in my online shop.