Digital Painting Class

So last semester one of the classes I took was digital painting. Digital painting is something I know basically how to do, but I was very slow at it and only knew how to do it in the way that I had figured out myself. I wanted to learn more techniques that I had seen other people do. Unfortunately the class was only a three hour class instead of a 6 hour class and we had to learn a massive amount of information so it became very rushed. I'm not really completely happy with any of the finished products because I took too long experimenting with them. I kept trying to figure out the styles I wanted to learn based off of the information I was actually learning in class. A lot of my trouble came from a lack of color knowledge, but thankfully I am taking a color theory class next semester.

The first assignment we had was a landscape we painted in Corel. We were allowed to add a person into the painting if we wanted but the main focus had to be the landscape.

Our second assignment was also done in Corel and was the cover of a type of book we would like to illustrate. I chose a children's book since I would absolutely love to illustrate one in the future. I didn't have an original story in mind and I love the classic fairy tales so I chose a favorite of mine, Little Red Riding Hood. The only problem was we had to look up the standard size for our genre's cover. Children's books can be all kinds of sizes but the standard size was a very awkward square...

Our third assignment was a continuation of the book. We were to take a page from inside the book and illustrate it. I LOVED my original sketch but it didnt fit into the square page as well as I would have liked. For this assignment we could choose to do photoshop if we liked, but the technique I had used on my cover kind of required Corel so I stuck with it.

Our last assignment was to do whatever you want. I had seen a friend do a smooth painted scene for an animation and I wanted to do something similar to learn the technique. Unfortunatley my teacher didn't have the time to really sit and teach me the process so I took what I was doing in Corel and applied it to Photoshop. Thankfully while I was on break between Spring semester and summer school I had time to practice the style I wanted to learn in Photoshop. I haven't perfected it yet but I am a lot better than I had been so I'm pretty excited about it!