WIP Digital Figure Painting Study

Nathaniel Reiser · 2026-05-23T19:41:10.581Z

I have finished my first digital painting, and I'm really happy with it! My biggest struggle was figuring out how to use digital brushes. I was really confused by the soft round brush, expecting that I would be working in singular big marks, but eventually I finally figured out that I needed to build up the values with lots of strokes. That got me to where I could finally start digitally painting, and I actually had a lot of fun doing it which is refreshing! I think my biggest struggle point was making intentional brush strokes. I figured out that I needed lots of strokes to build up a nice layer of values, but I struggled to do that neatly, so a lot of my piece can look pretty messy up close. I think the right idea is to make each individual stroke following the contour of the shape to create a good flow for the brush marks. Is that a good strategy moving forward? The other main issue I think this piece may have is the contrast. I want the face to be the focal point so I tried to make sure that there was some shadow contrast on the eye lids, but I think overall that I could still push the shadows further. I intentionally left out a bit of deeper shadows around where her legs meet her shorts, because I was trying to keep the focal point the most rendered, but I think that maybe I need significantly more contrast on the face and slightly more everywhere else. I would love any more feedback, thank you!

@unicorngumdropHace 3 meses

hi! i have a follow-up on the second part of your post! you mentioned decreasing the amount of deeper shadows outside the focal point, and that’s completely fair. my earlier comment referenced the saturation blend mode, but another blend mode that you might find useful for the effect that you want is the multiply blend mode (or really, any blend mode that has a darkening effect). with the multiply blend mode, you can pick any color that’s in your illustration (often, it helps if it’s already a common color that you’ve been using throughout the piece, as that will tend to make your image more cohesive) and then just airbrush in darker values broadly over the entire piece (except for the face and bust area). this broad-strokes approach allows you to darken basically anything you want without adding more rendering detail (and you can use the lasso-selection tool to ensure that only the parts you want darker are affected by the multiply layer). for this draw-over, i’ve made sure to point out the darker varieties of each hue that result from using multiply. i chose the color of the character’s shorts to to multiply over everything except for the face and more prominent shoulder area, and the draw-over that i’ve included is the result; the face looks brighter by comparison even though all i actually did was to darken everything else. in case my explanation of the logistics weren’t clear, here’s a quick review of the steps that i took: (1) i picked a color that’s prominent in the illustration; (2) i selected the “airbrush” as my pen of choice; (3) i created a layer on top of the original artwork and changed that layer’s blending mode to “multiply;” (4) i used the selection tool to select everything except for the character’s face and more prominent shoulder area; and (5) i used a few strokes of the airbrush (at maximum size to minimize the number of strokes required) to multiply the chosen color on top of all the original colors of the illustration. this darkened the illustration everywhere except the face and more prominent shoulder area, making both of those areas look brighter by comparison. please let me know if you have any follow-up questions. i’m also happy to send you a step-by-step video showing what i did to apply the multiply layer, in case my explanation wasn’t clear. i hope this helps! ❤

@nathaniel50727Hace 3 meses

Thank you, all the steps you laid out are clear and make sense! That is a really interesting way to quickly shift the values of the piece. I guess the closest idea to that in traditional painting is a wash which I would have been intimidated to do without an undo button haha. I guess one follow up question I have is if you have any thoughts about the hue variation in the skin. I have an okay idea where to put more reddish orange into the skin, but a little more trouble figuring out the where different hues should come in on the limbs. Currently the skin tone still looks a little lifeless to me. I'm sure the best way to get used to this would be some studies.

@unicorngumdropHace 3 meses

hmmm...it might have to do with the way that you’ve selected your shadow colors for the piece. oftentimes, shadows will feel more lifeless if they are simply the base color with a bit of black/silver value added to them (somewhat reminiscent of older anime-style cel-shading approaches). by contrast, adding a smaller amount of black value but also moving slightly rightward on the color wheel (and allowing this rightward move define more of the shadow color) can have the effect of making shadows more vibrant. for example, a yellow bird might look more vibrant if you give it a shadow whose hue has been shifted slightly to a more orange-tinted yellow with only a slight darkening of its value. another thing that you could try would be adding what's known as sub-surface scattering (also called a terminator region): basically, you add a red outline to the edge of the skin shadows closest to the light. a trick for doing this easily is to make a new layer on top of the shadow layer, outline the shadows with red, gaussian blur the outline, then use the selection tool to quickly delete all of the red outline that falls outside the shadows. (thanks to the selection tool, you don't have to be super precise when you’re first placing down the red outline; anything too far outside the shadows will be deleted automatically, so you can add the red outline pretty quickly). you'll also probably want to decrease the opacity of the red outline layer (sub-surface scattering often makes things look better when its not immediately noticeable). and again, if you'd like a more detailed breakdown or an example of how to do this, let me know! picking shadow colors can definitely be a challenge, and there's no shame in adjusting things a few times until you get them to a point that you like.

@nathaniel50727Hace 3 meses

Ah, thank you! I was mostly thinking about adjusting the saturation when picking my shadow color and forgot about the factor of the color wheel. I'll absolutely be focusing on that in the future, Thank you!

@unicorngumdropHace 3 meses

this is a really nice illustration, and the fact that this is your first completed digital painting makes it even more astronomical. sincerely, congratulations, my friend! since you mentioned values, i thought it might be helpful to share a digital painting trick. while some programs allow you to see a map of the range of values that you use in a particular illustration, not all painting softwares allow you to do that (and certainly, not all of them allow you to do that for free). but a trick that i’ve learned for instantly checking the values and seeing how much they contrast with the other values around them is to add a pitch black layer on top of your artwork and then set the black layer’s blending mode to “saturation.” as long as that layer is turned on, your entire illustration will be grayscale and will show the relative darkness or lightness of all the values in the painting. i use this trick a lot to check values (though i could probably stand to get better about checking them while i’m still in the sketching phase 😂😂😂), and i can definitely say that it works very well for assessing diversity of color values and appropriate levels of contrast. i’ve included a draw-over to show what the illustration would look like with a pitch-black saturation layer applied. based on the values shown, it looks like you were very effective at brightening the face, though the other brighter areas of the arms and legs may draw some attention away from the desired focal point. with a black saturation layer, you can more easily determine what the current color values are and which ones you might want to change. i hope this helps! ❤

@hannahHace 4 meses

Hi there! I think you are asking very good and important questions here! 1) This is personal preference, but while I paint, I tend to use a seperate clipping mask for every material in the scene. That way I keep a lot of control over the painting to make adjustments if I want to later on. 2) That would work perfectly! You'll often find that traditional skills definitely aren't lost in digital art, once you get used to it! 3) Hard round brush could be good for practise, but I tend to use a round brush with a slightly softer edge and pressure opacity, it's very forgiving and you can learn to build up your colours/values well. 4) Yes! Everyone has a slightly different workflow, but you find it along the way, i think working like this will be pretty non-destructive and a good way to learn! Lastly I added a little bit of feedback on this arm (upper arm a little broader and longer), and the foreshortening in the hand in this angle (flat on the floor they are sitting on) will still make the volume bend upwards from our POV I think. I hope all of this was clear and keep up the good work! c:

@nathaniel50727Hace 4 meses

Wow! Awesome and very helpful feedback, thank you! I plan to fix up that arm, as it will be a perfect test to see how easy it is to fix line-art after already making the mask. I plan to put up the finished version of this later.

@hannahHace 3 meses

I have just seen it! Great improvement!!

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