#digital painting tutorial

a short/mini digital painting tutorial by yours truly 🫡

I ended up making a little tutorial so. .

My MSpaint workflow!

(not applicable to everyone each person has their own way to use each program)

Start with a sketch!

Do lineart over sketch, and make sure its in a DIFFERENT COLOR!

From here you can isolate the lineart by just erasing the lineart color! (and ctrl + makes the tool your using bigger)

Now we have just the lineart!

From here I color, just using the paint bucket tool and drawing the markings on

Adding the shading, I choose the colors I chose, then use the edit colors tool to make them darker and a slightly different tint.

Now for the painting process, I use this to mix my colors together. Basically find two colors, paint a line inbetween them using this paint brush tool and one of the colors, then select the inbetween color. This is mostly the same as how I paint in other programs.

COLOR TANGENT!! When digitally paintings it is sometimes better to just choose a color that would be inbetween, ESPECIALLY with yellow and blue. Its kinda complicated but how the computer does its calculations it can grey out your colors.

But I basically do the painting mixing and coloring all around the piece, choosing inbetweens everywhere, and smoothing out the shading lines, I tend to go over my lineart here

And Im done!

Just adding a lot of details + I tend to do the bg last

My style depends on which piece im working on, sometimes I use the paint brush for all of the piece so its a lot smoother

This was done with the paint brush in MS Paint (the one I used in the mixing section) but it is still the same process, I would just use the paint brush instead of the pencil

but this one was done entirely with the pencil tool, so its up to you which style your going for

WARNING: THIS IS LONG. I can't stop yappin'.

I was taking a series of screenshots of my art process for my own reference (to review later, see how my process has changed, etc. I’m not much of a timelapser) and figured I’d share my process and show off how much the game Sky: COTL has DRAMATICALLY improved my art (and also have a post to show people in the very, hopefully, unlikely chance anyone ever doubts that I draw my own art). I also have seen a lack of written out with screenshots explanations of art, as video format becomes more popular across not only Youtube, but Instagram and Tiktok as well. This is not a learning style I jive with, so this is something for all the artists out there looking for this kinda thing. 

For reference, here is my FIRST EVER Sky digital painting compared to my most recent (before the one used for this lil infodump). <3 This is CSP specific as far as brushes go, but I’ve seen people make amazing art in freaking PowerPoint, so if I can do it, you can do it. 

F’real. This is the process of a VERY LAZY artist with hand tremors and hecked up wrist ligaments as a result of an autoimmune disease.. I’m talking, drawing in bed in a blanket nest watching vodcasts and cuddling cats. 

(May 2024) -----> (January 2025) 

Added info - the pic on the left is exactly why I wanted to do this. I'm even a little embarrassed by it, now, but when I had originally posted it on another platform, I was questioned and disbelieved that I was able to draw a background at all. This was the start of me taking digital painting seriously (versus general character/creature design) with lineart and a cell shading style. That disbelief from someone who knew me IRL hurt a lot, and I often have the concern of that happening again. This is me alleviating that anxiety once and for all, so I can finally move past it. YAH, FRIENDO, THIS IS MY THERAPY SESSION.

Anyway; I’m nowhere near new to art, but it’s always been a hobby for me so I never sought to actively improve with proper studies -- but wanting to create lore for my silly lil skydude forced my hand. With a semi-open world game that’s genuinely gorgeous made collecting references easy, and the Sky community here on Tumblr has not only inspired but encouraged me to keep going despite 2024 being a very rough year. This game has brought me joy, and I hope you find this lil doodad helpful. 🕯️

Now on with the show! This piece will be a part of a little series I’m working on that will include lyrics to a song that gives me the biggest Sky vibes (To Thus Onto Tyrants by The Oh Hellos). 

The brush that did the heavy lifting (“spread pencil”) seems to be either very elusive or no longer available. Everything else is listed here :) 

What I could find: 

Turnip Pen - Default brush in CSP

“Crunchy” - Specifically the second to last one in this brushpack 

“Hard Round V1” 

“Hard Round V2” 

“YN Soft Round” (Not free, sorry ): ) 

“Pecas” - for sparkleys

“Toothbrush” - For more sparkleys

So the first step is to gather references. They’re a MUST HAVE and DON’T LET ANYONE ELSE TELL YOU OTHERWISE. Use references, redline, and yes - EVEN TRACE. I may make a lil thingy about how to do these things ethically, but for now, just art process. Let’s see what references I used: self harvested! 

Shout out to the Skykid screaming in the background. 

I also used this for a reference for the moth that I grabbed off the interwebs- 

For this, I wanted to try and recreate what it felt like as a moth (but after getting at least one starboi lol). Isle of Dawn will always hold a very special place in my heart. The first impression was impactful, even though I was incredibly confused on what I was doing. I knew I wanted the temple, but there’s something so calming and melancholy about that first cave. Putting these references together, I got the most hot garbage sketch I’ve ever done - but it’s okay! We’re not doing any lineart, so we WANT messy. The more you work on a sketch at this stage, the harder and more intimidating it will be to get to the next step. You’ll become too attached to those details and things you sketched, that if you have to go over them later it will be devastating. Just using this to work out composition :) 

Currently, I have two main layers (CSP makes an automatic background and I just leave that one alone and do not count this as a layer)

Top - moth sketch

Bottom - everything else

Moving forward, we’re working in three main sections. Background, midground, and foreground. I show a screenshot of how I organized these layers later. 

The next step is to block in colors. Layer styles are VALID and AMAZING, I do not use them much. They have their time and place, and I prefer to keep those for finishing touches. For now, I’m just doing my best to eyeball colors I like from the reference photos. Color picking is amazing and helpful too, but I’ll add a little note* at the end about why I try to avoid doing that too often from my reference. 

I put the colors on their respective layers (Four to start with. One for each mentioned above, and another for the moth). I try to block out shading and lighting but I keep it sloppy because it’s likely to change a LOT. This is just planning and fiddling, seeing what colors look good together. 

(Spread Pencil is the one brush I couldn’t find >: at this point, this is the ONLY brush I’ve used. Don’t be tempted by blending things yet. Be sloppy.) 

Once I get the general idea of what I want, I WORK FROM THE BACK. I hid any layer that would be ‘blocking’ that section and allow myself to go ‘outside the lines’ a bit. The overlap is helpful when making changes to the ‘front’ elements later. Remember, we’re still being SUPER MESSY.

I kept the moth/foreground visible so I can still check that the general color theme was working. 

Hide the sketch layer. Do it. We’re painting, not doing lineart. You gotta. I believe in you. Look at this slop. Beautiful. 

Alright, now we’re cooking! The layers are in the following order going from top (front) to bottom (back): 

-Moth sketch (will be hidden later) 

-Moth colors 

-Background sketch (will be hidden later) 

-The rock the moth is sitting on and that little rock section on the bottom left

-The rock behind the moth (hidden in this screenshot) 

-The rest of the cave 

-The temple 

At some point around here I used “Crunchy” on the clouds to blend em a bit. 

NOW IS THE FUN PART. RENDERIIINNNGGGGGG. I started with the stairs because they looked annoying. USE YOUR LINE/SHAPE AND SELECTION TOOLS. These will help you keep your lines straight and achieve crispiness if you desire. More on the stairs in a moment, but while you’re doing this, remember to 

ZOOM THE HECKIE OUT. Make it thumbnail sized and squint. Can you still tell what you’re painting? Evaluate. Are the colors working well together? Is there enough contrast? How’s that composition doing? Zooming out rocks. 

After taking a moment to zoom out and squint, I came up with the following notes: 

Do this regularly throughout your process, even if you’re in the middle of something mundane like drawing stairs. A LOT more contrast is needed, and taking a moment to notate this will help prevent you from doing TOO much that you’ll regret later when you end up covering it up to fix these issues you missed earlier. 

Back to the stairs. 

I blocked things in with the line tool and the turnip pen, then scribbled it around using ‘Hard Round V2”. When I say scribble, I mean literally. Scribble. It’s fun and freeing. We’re not trying to be precise or make anything hyper realistic. We just gotta get those colors down yknow. 

Good luck. 

Water is weird, and I don’t understand it. We guess and hope for the best. Remember that water is clear, and for the most part you’ll be able to see through it, so unless you have a blue toned drawing (like this one), the water itself may not be blue. I generally color pick the areas around it and lighten/darken it based on those. I also knew there’d be a light beam in this area, and the reflection from the moth’s candle so some bright oranges and yellows were nice to add, as well. Don’t forget reflections/highlights if the scene calls for it! 

Time for the part that actually requires a shred of skill. Thankfully, this pose is very simple and the moth’s design is, well, a moth. Don’t be afraid to toggle that sketch layer on and off for this. The moth is the main focus, and should be clear and easy to read as such - requiring a bit more work for colors and shape language. 

Don’t work on one single thing for long. The moment your brain goes “im getting annoyed/frustrated/bored”, move to another piece of the painting. If you notice your character has a horrible tangent with a background piece and it’s just really bothering you - stop working on the character and fix that background area. Give it a bit more bulge (or less), shift things around. Paint over stuff. 

“But I drew this really well, and it would be a shame to cover it up if I won’t be able to do it that well again!” You may ponder, anxiety filling your chest at the very thought of redrawing a hand or that one rock that just looks really, really good somehow. 

And to that I ask - why won’t you be able to do it again? You did it once before, CLEARLY you have the skill and ability. If you’re worried, draw over it on a new layer so if you have to fall back on the old thing, you can. ART IS FUN. Don’t let it stress you out too much. The moment you look at that canvas and go “you know what, I CAN do it again”, you will be able to do it again. 

Trust me. 

With some more scribbling done, we can start detailing things that aren’t stairs. Yay! Let’s work from the back again.

LITERALLY. SCRIBBLE.

You can start blending around now, too, though. We’re getting there, and look at all we have to show for it! I tried to mimic the clouds as best I could from the screenshot because like water - they are weird and wonky and yah, hard. Cloud brushes can be helpful, but give you significantly less control IMO, but to each their own and whatever works for you, works. 

BG looking good, but remember ZOOM OUT. I can see the contrast of the temple/background elements looks a bit better now, and now that I’m bored with that, I wanna bounce to that midground area, and fix up the moth a bit more. I also used an ADD (GLOW) layer to messily test some different ways to paint light beams and to find a nice color. I settled on the same yellow I used on the candle flame. I didn’t work too hard on this just yet, since there’s a lot of elements that will hit that light that I haven’t even thought about yet. 

I fiddle with the main cave texture a LOT. Painting over it entirely MULTIPLE TIMES to find something that sticks. What you see here is not it. I also added some details to the ‘moth rocks’ but this also changes a little as we go. 

Painting/art is a lot of push and pull. You add some darkness, take away some. Add some light, take away some. Add an element, remove one. Go with the flow and trust yourself. Turn on an audiobook or a movie and turn off your brain while you plop colors here and there. An artist I VERY MUCH look up to (Julia Lepetit of Drawfee and Secret Sleepover Society) said, “Zoom in and zone out”. It’s time to turn off that brain and paint. 

I zoned out too hard and stopped taking screenshots because oops. On the top left shows the YN Soft Round, Pecas, and Toothbrush, in that order going from the top and counter clockwise. 

I darkened up the cave quite a bit and finally settled on a look for those upper rock formations. I used a MULTIPLY layer to darken up the moth’s shadow a bit, then merged the layers and used those same colors to blend it with the rest of the rock. I also deleted and added a new ADD (GLOW) layer and fixed up that lighting. This is where we get to darken shadows and add highlights and bounce light to things. Anything in bright, direct light has its original color showing through (from the original layer it’s colored on, that wonky light blue area by the stairs). Rim lighting is a great way to separate elements like this (the different rock edges) without having to use a gajillion different shades/values of the same boring blue to make it stand out. 

Details on the moth are also done now - mostly in the hair. A few hair strands, ESPECIALLY in Sky with the white hair we all have - looks incredible in a painty style IMO. I also SHOULD HAVE added the star on the moth’s cape at this point, but BOIIS, GORLS, AND CRYPTIDS, i forgot until I saved/exported it and had to go back and fix it. But anyway, so you don’t have to scroll up, here’s the finished piece again: 

Thank you for reading, if you did! I hope it was helpful, or at the very least served me in the future like this post is intended to do!

And I will leave you off with the promised note* about color picking -

Color picking from a reference can be really cool and easy and tempting, but you know what makes that NOT work? Color theory. When you blend your colors (this goes for real life, too), there's a LOT more grey and diluted tones than you'd expect. A lot of these bright colors aren't ACTUALLY bright, save for the details on the candle light and the ADD (GLOW) layers. The orange reflections on the rocks and water are actually quite dark and diluted, but because it contrasts so well with the darker blues - it looks a lot brighter. Blending these colors together allows for a more natural soft light. This is also why I try to work on so few layers for pieces like this that are relatively simple. I can easily take a bright color and use a softy kind of brush - the hard round v1 brush is GREAT for this, a little bit of pressure over the colors you already painted down will blend them together with some minor elbow grease and mindfulness. It gets a more natural transition between your lights and darks.

Where as if you zoom in on your reference and color pick - look at it. Look at it all zoomed up, I BEG you. Make it super pixely, and you will see how much that 'one' color varies in that entire area. Unless you're color picking pixel by pixel, which at that point you're not really drawing/painting at all, it's just not going to work out and help you recreate that reference.

Step 1: Sketch it

Self explanatory. Just sketch ur idea down. Since I'm opting for a more realism-esque angle I make sure to pay more attention to anatomy and proportion, and also add note down details I wouldn't normally. This makes things easier in the future, trust me.

Step 2: Line it

Line it. Use whatever brush you think works well for painting. I personally use a gouache brush (my program is CSP) since it blends well. The color you use doesn't matter, just formalize the shapes.

Step 3: Color

The next few steps are what I consider to be the "blocking" phase. Just putting the essential colors down and stuff, just like in real painting (I go with a more traditional approach). Unlike real painting though, we have layers and blending modes! When I block colors, I block the subject's colors and the background on the same layer. It makes it more real if the colors naturally blur into each other, and the rendering depends upon the background and the color of the environment itself (light is refractive, yo). For this, I use the same gouache brush (I'm pretty much almost entirely going to be using the same brush for this).

Step 4: Blend the lines

After blocking, I usually color the lineart by copying the color layer, clipping it over the lineart, dropping the color copy opacity down to about 50%, and merging the color copy and the lineart together. Then I just merge the lineart and color into one layer. I then take the gouche blender and blend the lines to the color, softening them up and making it easier to further blend those in future processes.

Step 5: Blocking the shading

Then I put in the shading. I do this on a separate layer above the color and put it on multiply, lowering the opacity based on how strong i want the shadows to be. When doing this, I tend to use a dark color that's opposite on the color wheel of background color. There's some color theory reason for it I'm sure, but I don't know it off the top of my head. Probably cuz it makes it contrastive. Anyways. Once I've blocked the shadows, I'll merge them down into the color and blend it.

Step 6: Blocking the highlights

For this step I do the same thing as I did with shading, except using a lighter shade of the the background color. I do this on a separate layer, putting it on add glow and lowering the opacity as appropriate. And I often add the highlight into the shadow parts to make that reflective lighting that hits the core shadows, you know the one. I have no clue what the term for it is but I'm sure it's there

Step 7: Intensifying shadows and highlights

I like to also do another shadow/highlight layer on the deepest/brightest parts of their respective areas. Just helps round out the shapes a bit more. It's especially important to help give some form back to all the shapes, as the previous shade/highlighting was very general and undefined. And of course I merge and blend as usual.

Step 7: Definition

This step is what I consider to be the last part of the blocking phase. I take the darkest part of the background color (or just make it darker), and using the thin gouache brush I paint a thin outline on the deepest shadows regions on a multiply set at about 70%. I do the same thing with a lighter color of the background on an add glow layer on 70%, focused on the highlighted regions. I mainly focus on the edges between different areas, so that we get back the shapes lost in the blending. Then I merge and blend as usual, being careful not to overblend on this step.

Step 8: Detail

Okay yeah I know this is very much "step 2 draw the fucking owl" but like... there would be too many things I'd need to explain. Basically you're just really detail out the whole piece. Add in texture, enhance the lighting when necessary, all that jazz. As such, I'd need to talk about how to do fur, and metal, and silk, and eyes, and honestly those need tutorials of their own. For me, I usually work from background to foreground (makes things easier). You just want to bring everything up to near completion.

Step 9: Diffraction

Now we're working on overall lighting! With this, I'm taking a midtone of the background and, using the dry gouache brush on a soft light layer, I block in the areas where the shadows meet the midtone. This is some physics thing I guess, but it helps unify the colors a bit. Then I blend the edges and lower opacity.

Step 10: Rendering shadows

Now I take a deep color and using the dry gouache brush I block in where all the deepest shadows are on a layer at multiply. You'll see I didn't go over every single shadow, but was preferential to those away from the light source. This helps to create a sense of depth in the piece. I then lower opacity and blend the edges. I don't merge down because I feel it's unnecessary at this point.

Step 11: Rendering brightness

I do the same thing but with the highlight color and on an add glow layer. With this, I actually want to be preferential towards the direction of the light source. I'm also much more conservative with this, as overbrightening can make the piece look too shiny and unrealistic. And now lower opacity and blend edges as usual.

Step 12: Ambient light

In the final step, I take a color like the background midtone and block the whole subject with a dry gouache. I set the layer to soft light again and lower opacity. This unifies all the colors both with the scene and with each other, so it all looks more grounded and consistent. And with that, the piece is done! Hope any of this made sense! I'll probably mess around with process here and there the more I use it, but for now this gets me the results I want. Peace o//

It's here! 2.5 hours of me walking you through my digital painting process + a brush pack is up for my patrons <3

All rewards are accessible for $1