The Art of Chelsea Brown

Painter Tutorial - Introduction

In this tutorial, you will learn how to paint shadows and other subtleties to create an almost finished digital painting. This is an introduction to Painter that will teach you how to create artwork using mainly one painting tool and an image already laid out in Photoshop. This tutorial picks up where the Flat Colors Tutorial left off.

Materials required for this tutorial:

Corel Painter (this tutorial is designed to work with Painter 9.5 but may be compatible with other versions)
Photoshop (this tutorial is designed to work with CS2 but may be compatible with other versions)
A graphics tablet is required for this portion, a Wacom Intuos is highly recommended.
A PSD file with flat colors already set up in Photoshop.

Section 1 - Setting up Shading Layers

Before we get into Painter, we have one more thing to do in Photoshop: set up shading layers. What are shading layers? They're layers which allow you to easily block in shadows without messing with your flat colors. Photoshop is better with technical editing things like this, whereas Painter is really more of a "painting" program. Thus we're doing this last technical step in Photoshop.

With your flat color image open, lock the transparency on each of your color layers.

Now duplicate your first color layer by clicking and dragging it down to the "New Layer" button in the Layers window.

You will now have a duplicate of that layer directly above the original called "Color 1 copy." Next, fill that layer (Edit>Fill) with your choice of shading color (this is why we needed the transparency locked). Try to pick a color which you feel will blend nicely with all of the colors below. This may take a couple tries. I usually work with violets as they seem to blend well with most colors. I filled my duplicate layer with a light violet.

You'll notice your original colors can't be seen below this layer because it's solid purple. This won't do. We need this layer to darken the colors beneath while adding a slight hue to them. Simply change the Layer Mode box from "Normal" to "Multiply." Now you can see the colors beneath but they have a nice dark violet hue over them.

Repeat this process for each layer, even the background layer if you'd like to add some shading to that.

Alternatively, these layers can be filled with white and you can just paint in small sections of purple later. Filling it with purple first and then extracting the white will create more dramatic lighting. Filling them with white and shading with smaller bits of purple will create less dramatic lighting, similar to usual cell-shading. You understand more how this works in a bit.

Now save your image again (still as a PSD) and close Photoshop. Time to use Painter!

Section 2 - Understanding Painter

Since Painter is a bit different from the Adobe programs most people are used to, I'm going to take a moment to go over some of the Painter basics to make using the program less confusing.

This is how I like to keep my Painter workspace.

You can arrange yours however you'd like, but if there's something missing, just like with Photoshop, you can go to the Window menu. Instead of having checks for open windows, Painter just says "show" or "hide." If there's an open window that you want to hide you click "Hide WindowName." Obviously, for the hidden windows, you click the ones that say "Show WindowName."

You'll also notice that some of the windows are nested within overall menus like Brush Controls, Color Palettes, and Library Palettes.

That little box in the bottom left corner is the Custom Palette. Chances are, you won't have one of these yet. You make one by dragging brushes from the brush menu into the empty space in the middle of Painter. A box will appear with the brush in it. If you want to add more brushes, just drag them into that box. If you want to add brushes to another new box, drag them into the empty space again. You probably won't need to use this for this tutorial. It's only really useful if you work with multiple tools at once.

Here I've marked the windows that you'll need to have open for this tutorial. Your Windows menu should match this one in all the selected areas.

The Color Sets window is optional but very useful. You can add colors to it and keep the swatches stored there for the duration of your piece and even save it to be used later. Here I've loaded a color set I made a while ago for this character. The + and - buttons at the bottom add and remove swatches. To add a swatch, just click the + and whatever color you are currently using will be added to the set. To remove a swatch from the set, click on it and hit the - button. To select a swatch from the set to use, just click on it. You can also open up a bunch of other options by clicking on that little arrow in the top right corner.

There are several options in this menu that you'll want to note. New Empty Color Set does just what it says: creates a new empty color set. Open Color Set allows you to open a previously saved color set. Append Color Set allows to to add a color set onto one that you already have open. Save Color Set lets you save the current color set to your hard drive so you can use it again later. Also, for some reason, whenever a new color set is made, the default size is set to 24x24. I find this annoyingly large. I like to set the size to 16x16.

Now it's time to choose your tools. My personal favorites are the Oil Pastel and Artist Oils tools. The Artist Oils simulate the use of a real brush with real paint (and therefore "dry out" at the end of each brush stroke). The tools I have listed in my custom palette shown above are: Round Oil Pastel 20 (customized), Oils-Round Camelhair, Blenders-Just Add Water, FX-Glow, FX-Confusion, FX-Fairy Dust, Liquid Ink-Airbrush, Artist Oils-Wet Brush, Liquid Ink-Coarse Bristle, and Artist Oils-Dry Palette Knife.

For this tutorial we're going to stick mostly with the Oil Pastels and a little Artist Oils, but feel free to experiment with any of the other tools listed and find your own preference. Keep in mind that many of the brushes have very different properties than the ones used in this tutorial so not all of the same techniques used here may work for each tool.

Not only does Painter have a wide variety of tools, it also has quite an impressive selection of brush variants.

Since the default brushes in Painter may not always produce the effects you want, it's both fun and a good idea to play around with them and create your own. Just like most of the windows in Painter, the Brushes window has a little arrow in the corner that allows you to open up an options menu. The two options of note are Show Brush Creator and Save Variant. Show Brush Creator opens up the custom brush engine which allows you to tweak pretty much everything about your brushes. I'm afraid I don't cover that in this tutorial because it's rather complicated. The best way I feel to learn how to use the Brush Creator is to experiment with it. Once you've got a variant that you like, you can save it with a different name by clicking Save Variant. Also, if you've messed around with one of the default variants too much and want it back to its default settings, click Restore Default Variant.

Section 3 - Painting Shadows In and Out

Now it's time to finally get to work on that digital painting! Open the PSD file with the flat colors that you did in Photoshop. You'll notice that in the Layers window, all of your named layers are listed just as they were in Photoshop.

Get a brush selected and go to the background layer. We're going to start adjusting the lights and darks in there. Adjust your brush size to be nice and large. You can adjust the brush size using the options menu at the top of the screen, under all of the file menus. You can also fiddle with the opacity and any other features up there. Play around to see what they do. They're different for each brush.

Remember all those shading layers we made in Photoshop? Here's how we use them. First make sure your colors selected are white and the shading color you chose. A quick way to get the shading color is to use the eyedropper on an area that has only white underneath, like the white of the eye. Or you can just copy a small swatch of it over from Photoshop and use the eyedropper on that. How you do it doesn't matter, so long as the color is exactly the same as whatever you filled those shading layers with.

Multiply layers work with addition and subtraction of color. White works as your "eraser." Anything that is white on a multiply layer will be transparent. Anything that is any other color, will darken the colors below while adding a slight hue. Black will just be solid black. So using only white and your one shading color, you can actually pull out highlights and paint in shadows entirely on the multiply layer.

Using the oil pastel tool I've roughed out some fun lights in the background of this image.

And now using the Artist Oils-Dry Palette Knife, I've pulled out some rays of light with a little texture in them. This is actually totally contrary to the light-logic I have planned out but we'll ignore that for the moment. This is more intended to be background design than actual shading.

The things you want to consider are where your light source is coming from, how intense it is, and what areas might be cast into shadow. To sort of fix the light logic problem with my image, I went back in with violet and added a defined shadow behind the dog to give an idea of light direction.

Once you've finished the background, it's time to move on to the shadows on the figure. Now you will finally understand the reason for that complicated layer organization method back in the Flat Colors tutorial.

Go to your Color 1 copy layer. Make sure Preserve Transparency is checked. It should be since we locked the transparency of all these layers in Photoshop. You may want to uncheck the Pick up Underlying Color box if that's checked. What that does is allows the brush to pick up colors on layers underneath the current one. It's sometimes a useful effect, and other times it just makes a mess of things. You decide what's best for each area of color in your own picture. I prefer not to use it for this type of shading work since I want to keep my violets and whites pure on the multiply layer.

Now pick an area and start pulling out some of your midtones using white. Notice that you don't have to select the color using the magic wand tool or anything. Preserve Transparency will keep everything you do within the solid areas on this layer. Now do you see why it's nifty to have all these different color sections on separate layers? If you had tried to do this all on one layer you would have had to select color areas with the magic wand, some of them would have bled together because Painter does that, and it would have been a big unhappy mess.

Don't forget that you're painting back midtones. The less white you add back in, the darker the image will be. If you want your character to be mostly in shadow, leave lots of violet. If you want it to have more normal lighting, add lots of white back in.

Keep on going with this layer until you've got the balance of shadows just the way you want.

And in case you were curious, here is essentially what you've been doing. The shading layer with only white underneath and then nothing underneath would look like this:

Now go through and do the same thing to the rest of your shading layers.

You can also add some highlights using a similar method. Make a new layer above any of you color layers, make sure Preserve Transparency is not checked, set the layer mode to "Screen," fill the layer with solid black, and select a color similar to the base color but slightly lighter and warmer. Screen works like Multiply, but opposite: Black is transparent, all other colors tint and lighten, white is solid. You can paint in some subtle highlights this way.

By now you should hopefully be getting a feel for how the brushes in Painter work. The oil pastel brush involves a lot of blending. I always equated it to painting with butter. Granted I have never actually painted with butter, but I imagine it would be something like this.

You can also, of course, paint directly on your color layers if you want to add additional highlights or shadows, just keep in mind, anything you do to those layers will affect your markings and you could end up accidentally painting over them.

Finally, it's time to save. Go to File>Save. Save your file as a PSD once again. When the little save box pops up, make sure RGB is selected and click OK.

You can go back to the tutorials menu or go straight to the next step.

All content © 2007 Chelsea Brown