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35 Incredible Digital Painting Tutorials

Quick Summary

Art is not restricted to any medium, nor is digital painting. Yes, you read that right: “digital painting.” It is a new trend in today’s technologically brilliant world that won’t go away any time soon. Here, we’ve gathered 35 tutorials to inspire you to display your creativity through digital painting. We hope you like this collection. Kindly share your comments about it with us. Making of Beauty on the Bed You may also want to check out the following Smashing Magazine articles: * Inspiring Illustrator Artworks By Artists Around The World * 40 Excellent Adobe Illustrator Tutorials * 45 Amazing Examples of Code Generated and 3D CG Artworks * Mixing Up Illustration: Combining Analog And Digital Techniques

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Art is not restricted to any medium, nor is digital painting. Yes, you read that right: “digital painting.” It is a new trend in today’s technologically brilliant world that won’t go away any time soon. Here, we’ve gathered 35 tutorials to inspire you to display your creativity through digital painting. We hope you like this collection. Kindly share your comments about it with us.

Further Reading on SmashingMag:

Digital Painting Tutorials

Making of Spanish Girl This tutorial shows you how to make this portrait of a Spanish girl.

Making of Spanish Girl

Making of “My Prince” “The girl in the picture is a young witch with mysterious magic. The baby dragon is her pet. The baby dragon looks up to the sky naively, strains the leash, and wants to fly into an adventure. Overall, I wanted to create a peaceful scene, just like when we are holding our own pets, that makes you feel warm, or even proud.”

Umbrella Sky Marta Dahlig’s gorgeous “Umbrella Sky” image was unanimously chosen for the cover of Ballistic Publishing’s EXOTIQUE 3. And after submitting it, Marta continued to improve on this exquisite work. Here, she takes us through the process of building on a dream.

Umbrella Sky

How to Create a Fantasy Mother Nature Scene “This tutorial is about creating a fantasy scene called ‘Mother Nature.’ We will use well-chosen images, brushes and, most of all, our imagination, in combination with Photoshop techniques, to create an outstanding image.”

How to Create a Fantasy Mother Nature Scene

Making of Beauty on the Bed “It was obvious that a female character was an ideal subject. I knew I wanted to create a girl with imposing beauty. I am a huge fan of Lara Swift’s photography, and one particular photograph in my collection really inspired and motivated me to start.”

Making of Beauty on the Bed

How to Create a Sparkling Fantasy Photo Manipulation “In this tutorial, we’re going to do photo manipulation using different techniques. We’ll adjust each layer and element to make a compact final image. We’ll use multiple photos and a handful of effects to create this work.”

How to Create a Sparkling Fantasy Photo Manipulation

Modeling of the Dinosaur “When working with ZBrush, I always model something with Z-sphere. It is one of ZBrush’s cool features and enables fast and intuitive modeling of low poly objects. Also, I like that you can constantly check the outcome of your ZSphere form against how it looks when turned into mesh by pressing the ‘A’ key on your keyboard.”

Modeling of the Dinosaur

Feathers and Angel Wings Painting wings is quite similar to painting hair: the first time you do it, it seems impossible, but in fact it’s not, and little tips can help a lot.

Feathers and Angel Wings

Making of Binah “Binah was a difficult and time-consuming project. It was a great challenge for me, technically and artistically. Binah is the third Sephirah of the tree of life in Cabbala. After reading many texts about the tree of life, I wrote some sentences describing my vision of Binah.”

Making of Binah

Making of Jealous Bodyguard In this tutorial, the artist shows you his preferred method of setting up the image and using Photoshop tools. You’ll see a breakdown of how this image was created.

Making of Jealous Bodyguard

Digital Portrait -W- A step-by-step tutorial on creating this digital portrait.

Digital Portrait -W-

Digitally Paint a Fantasy Tree Scene “Learn how to make a fantasy scene using only the standard Photoshop brushes. I describe the basics of color and light theory. In this tutorial, you will paint this eye-catching illustration in less than two hours.”

Digitally Paint a Fantasy Tree Scene

Fantasy Light Effects in Photoshop Fantasy art scenes are usually handled with a liberal sprinkling of Photoshop plug-in fairy dust. But you don’t have to slavishly follow that route. By creating your own brushes in Adobe Illustrator and using scanned elements with Photoshop, creating otherworldly scenes that are alive with glow effects and shafts of virtual light is a simple process.

Fantasy light effects in Photoshop

Making Of Boudicca 3060 A.D. An engaging tutorial that teaches you how to make this beautiful Boudicca.

Making Of Boudicca 3060 A.D.

Painting fantasy eyes To paint a realistic-looking eye, one must understand its form. The human eye is a sphere, covered by upper and lower eyelids. Imagining parallel lines passing along the eyes makes it easier to sketch them correctly.

Painting fantasy eyes

Create Film Sets in Photoshop Film scenes frequently rely on vast backdrops and fantasy imagery that would be too costly or impractical to actually build or find. This is where matte painting comes in. Visual effects artists are called on to create both simple and elaborate illusions by painting over real images.

Create film sets in Photoshop

Creating Broken Link This tutorial focuses on making design choices and a bit of theory.

Creating Broken Link

Red Assassin Digital Painting Tutorial “Here’s how I do my painting. This is a work in progress, so you’ll see the steps I take in creating it. This is a quick sketch over a black background. Then I fill it with colors. I normally place my palette of colors beside the drawing so that I know what the colors will be.”

Red Assassin Digital Painting Tutorial

Do you want to Play with me “This artwork was created in Photoshop CS2 with a Wacom Intuos 3. I will explain in detail how to make this image. Hope many of you will enjoy.”

Do you want to Play with me

Making of Three Lines In this detailed tutorial, the artist teaches us how to make “artwork of three lines.”

Making of Three lines

Making of Willpower “I’ve always found the thought of someone faint and helpless, suddenly being able to fight against the worst of dangers, very appealing. This is the point when everything changes, when the lost decide to escape their fate. In my image, a brave young girl is in a situation she would never believe she’d get into, and then something happens that no one would ever expect!”

Making of Willpower

How to Draw a Digital Portrait In this tutorial, the artist explains how he created this portrait of the gorgeous Scarlett Johansson.

How to draw a digital portrait

Painting Kadaj In this detailed and comprehensive tutorial, the artist shows his best techniques for making this portrait of Kadaj.

Painting Kadaj

Painting realistic hands Painting hands can be very difficult for professional and amateur artists alike. The complexity of their structure makes them one of the hardest parts of the human body to render properly. Painting realistic hands requires two key factors for a satisfying result: a thorough knowledge of anatomy, and a creative choice of skin tone.

Painting realistic hands

Transform a Human into an Abstract Painted Werewolf “In this tutorial, you will learn how to bring a simple concept to life and give it a fantastic final result. Beside illustrating the human-to-werewolf transformation, we will fill the images with cool painted effects and add some abstraction in the end.”

Transform a Human into an Abstract Painted Werewolf

Making of Angelina Jolie “After having collected some pictures of the famous actress Angelina Jolie, I decided to use some of them for this creation. Before starting the modeling phase, I took a moment to observe the features of this beautiful actress—above all, her cheekbones, which are very pronounced.”

Making of the Angelina Jolie

Making of Cold Sky The artist teaches us how to make this beautiful “cold sky.”

Making of Cold Sky

Skin Painting Tutorial “I want to clarify that this tutorial is not the correct or only way to paint. It is just my way of painting, and only that. Feel free to follow it entirely or just the part that pleases you. I will be using Photoshop, but the tutorial can be done on any program that has good painting tools.”

SKIN PAINTING TUTORIAL

Painting Really Old People “The Internet is full of young, pretty people with large breasts. But believe it or not, people do get old. And wrinkly. And nothing is wrong with that. It can actually be fun and interesting to draw people who don’t have silky smooth skin! This tutorial shares some methods I’ve found for painting wrinkles and some thoughts on how to make a character look old.”

Painting Really Old People

Making of Bronze Dragon “In this tutorial, we are going to color a dragon portrait. As I always say, it’s impossible to make a good painting without a good sketch. That’s why, if your drawings are not as strong as you’d like, you should buy a sketchbook before picking up Photoshop.”

Making of Bronze Dragon

Spider Harp “This fantasy is of musician playing the harp on a spider’s web. It was a personal piece and a really big and delicate work. I thank the users of 3Dvf.com and Tdt3D.be for helping my work in progress.”

Spider Harp

Making Frodo A detailed and beautiful tutorial that teaches you to make a great Frodo.

Making Frodo

How to Create a Fantasy Landscape Photo Manipulation In this tutorial, you will learn how to manipulate a fantasy landscape photo.

How to Create a Fantasy Landscape Photo Manipulation

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