digital drawing and painting
You might think Dutch artist Lois van Baarle has brushes where the rest of us have fingers. Influenced by her appreciation of anime, French comic art, and art nouveau, she has developed a style that’s all her own. See how Lois uses brushes in Adobe Photoshop to sketch, color, blend, and refine her digital paintings.
Lois starts with a rough sketch she created using a pressure-sensitive stylus and tablet and paints over it. She selects a color and chooses a rough brush to create an outline of the face and neck. She alternates brush sizes to create different width strokes — broader strokes for the face, thinner ones for the finer details of the hair. Once she’s done, she changes the layer opacity to 13% and creates a new layer. With the new layer selected, she refines the sketch by tracing the outline with a slanted, darker brush.
Lois then prepares to apply the first pass of color. In this multistep process, Lois groups the two outline layers and creates a new layer. Then, she uses a custom oil pastel from the Tool Presets and traces the outer edges of the sketch.
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Lois finds it more intuitive to paint on just one layer. With no need to keep track of different colors on multiple layers, she’s able to maintain an easy flow of drawing.
Lois applies the key colors without focusing on blending just yet. She fills the hair and clothing with orange, then fills the areas of skin with a pale peach using a soft round brush. She uses Replace Color to modify the Fuzziness, Hue, and Saturation of the peach to define the highlights on the face. Then, she highlights the hair with blue and locks the transparent pixels on the top layer to change the color of the faded edges of the hair without “spilling” the color onto the rest of the canvas.
In the final step to distinguish the parts of the picture, Lois changes the color of her brush and gives depth to the cheeks and color to the lips. She uses the Magic Wand tool to select the pink color of hair surrounding the face and then applies a paler peach color to that area using a brush set with low opacity so the strokes overlay each other. Then, she blocks the clothing with a darker color using a wide, soft brush.
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Lois perfects the colors through intuition and experimentation. She starts by choosing colors, then plays with sliders to tweak the Hue/Saturation/Lightness and Selective Color until she’s happy with the result.
Lois periodically duplicates a layer and works on a new one to track the progress of her drawing. The previous layer shows the image at an earlier stage and allows her to make sure the project is progressing the way she wants.
Lois uses the Gradient tool to create a blur between the different color tones of the cheeks for a smoother blend. She then selects and transforms the eye to resize and reposition it. Lois continues to refine features, colors, and textures of the face with more brushwork and adds cheek and eye highlights on a new layer.
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At this point, Lois does a lot of brushwork to finesse the details. Rather than using shadows and highlights, she likes to use different colors to give dimension to the hair, skin, and eyes.
In the final stages, Lois uses the Liquify filter to drag and pull parts of the eye, mouth, chin, nose, and hair to create subtle but realistic changes to those features.
Lois van Baarle has been drawing since before she can remember. She took some art classes along the way through elementary and high school, and a bit in college, but is mostly a self-taught artist who finds inspiration in artwork she finds while browsing the Internet, watching movies and animated films, and taking walks through nature.
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Lois likes to keep it simple and doesn’t add too many tools that could disrupt her progress. When choosing brushes for a project, she usually picks one and sticks with it, since switching brushes takes her out of her flow.
Lois practices sketching and speed painting to continue improving her skills as a digital painter. Sketching allows her to place more emphasis on flow and expression than on anatomical precision, and it reduces stiffness in her final drawings. Early on, she liked to use mechanical pencils (nothing fancy), art markers, colored pencils, and brush pens for inking. More recently, she’s been happy with her drawing tablet so she can create anywhere she happens to be. Lois focuses mostly on character design. But she’s worked with animation, both personally and professionally, and is currently in the process of producing two animated shorts. I’ve always loved drawing ever since I was young, I think the earliest memory of that love started from when I was 5. Drawing & painting has always intrigued me, the way that people are able to create such beautiful things with their hands is something extremely admirable.
As I’m growing up, my sources of inspiration are always constantly changing. When I was 11-13, my source of inspiration was paintings from pop surrealist artists such as Mark Ryden & Camilla D’errico as well as some anime shows I watched. Then it changed to more exclusively anime inspirations when I was 14, then it changed again to the several artists I follow online when I was 15, and they keep changing. Honestly, I wasn’t very sure how I wanted to draw or what I wanted to be. An artist, yes, but I never knew what kind. I’ve done my fair share of realism, cartoonish styles, the entirety of my anime phase, and other artists’ styles but nothing managed to stick with me. It took years of being frustrated, honestly. All because I was stressing myself over the idea that “I have to develop a style right here, right now!”, but it doesn’t work that way.
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The way I draw now has only begun to develop around mid-year 2018, which is not so long ago. Only then was I found something that came more naturally to my hand instead of forcing myself into drawing in a certain way that “maybe others will like more”.
2018 was when I was still doing traditional paintings/drawings with watercolor & markers since I was very comfortable using them. Honestly, I was convinced that I wanted to be a traditional artist and that I’ll continue to paint portraits of characters for the rest of my life. But that didn’t work out.
The need for improvement is the driving force to my creativity, the constant dissatisfaction in my own work pushes me to do things better. I tell myself that “ If I’m satisfied, then I’ll never improve.” because contentment is the enemy of progress. Now, this has its own ups and downs, the key is balance. The balance I did not have. A strive to be better is great, but please don’t ever press on so hard until you break. The other reason being industry standards because of how versatile digital art is as a medium.
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Honestly, it’s pretty nice now that I’m a lot more used to it plus there’s so much more you can do with it compared to traditional mediums. I think the biggest challenge for this change is letting my handwork the tablet. Being so comfortable with my hand feeling the surface of textured watercolor paper to having it on a smooth tablet without a screen was really, really frustrating.
A lot of my digital work up on my account now is centered around 4 main characters who are my own original characters, under the tag #latte_trm. TRM standing for “The Real Monsters”, which follows a group of 4 unlikely friends who are forced to depend on each other. I don’t post much about their individual stories, so instead, I like to illustrate fake comic covers for them, which allows me to generate a lot of ideas and experiment more with concepts for their story. The main focus for my art nowadays is color usage, which I like to express a lot in my character illustrations. Colour has always been my strong point because I really enjoy working with it. Many of my color palettes are inspired by artists such as; Gabriel Soares, Samuel Smith, Sachin Teng & Kat Tsai, all of whom are extremely talented artists.
The very cliche of me to say but, practice fundamentals. Learn proper anatomy, shapes, values, composition, etc. Very boring but man, it’s really useful. I didn’t start with pure fundamentals so now I have to catch up, which explains the occasionally questionable anatomy in my drawings. And try digital painting!! It’ll help you so much! Doing studies from other artists/photographs will help you a lot because when you paint you’re learning how to break things down into simpler elements, just enough information to convey many things. Do you want to be a digital artist, but don’t know where to start? Perhaps you’ve done a Google search before, but felt overwhelmed by all the information, or intimidated by what the
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