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Wanting to start digital art

Aaronimations

Formerly Aaron the Fright
hey guys i was wondering if anyone had a tutorial on how to make a digital art i do pixel art but i want to do artwork. so i need a tutorial for any kind of way on how to make art with any free program. oh and also what free program should i use to make the artwork
 

StellarWind Elsydeon

Armblades Ascendant
Staff member
Administrator
Most tutorials you're likely to run into online are likely going to be for Photoshop or occasionally Paint Tool SAI. Neither of those are free (and Photoshop is prohibitively expensive for those who are actually crazy enough to pay for it) - so if you want to work with free programs, you'd probably be better off choosing a program and then googling tutorials for it specifically.

There's a fuckton of different ways to do digital art. Do you have a scanner allowing you to sketch out your art on paper then do the linework and coloring digitally, or do you plan on drawing everything directly on the computer? If the latter, do you have a pressure-sensitive Wacom tablet (or equivalent) or do you intend to do most of your work with a mouse? What sort of look are you aiming for? These should guide you in your search. And remember, tutorials may be helpful, but ultimately you'll be doing a whole lot more learning by fucking around and learning the quirks of whichever program you choose to study - and that even with them, most of your early works will look absolutely terrible - and that's okay. You can't learn how to get better without sucking for a while. You'll get the hang of it eventually.

Re: programs, While I don't personally use either, I've heard fairly good things about Krita and FireAlpaca. Might want to check these out and see which of them works for you.

Good luck!
 

Rinoa Heartilly

Mother of Meltans
I've learned the hard way that tutorials only get you so far. It all comes down to you as an artist on how you approach your goals and execute them. So many experienced digital artists will tell you that you need to gain a feel on how to handle things on your own first and that you need to practice, practice, practice. Tutorials are more like they're trying to help something click in place understanding wise rather than a straightforward answer. My suggestion would be to watch livestreams! Observation works best for me, personally. As for programs, try out Krita! Tis free and hella badass. G'luck!
 
Definitely give Krita a try - its free to download, which is a massive plus. Its also quite powerful for the price of nothing, and I freaking love it. Its very much catered towards digital art so it lacks a lot of the photo editing techiques that you'd find in Photoshop and Gimp, but makes up for it with the huge amount of things you can do with the brushes. I'd recommend having a look if you're looking for a free program to work with. Just, if you want to add text by typing, you may want to transfer the image to another program. Its painfully annoying to use, but that's the only drawback I've found so far. If you do use it, there are plenty of tutorials on youtube to give you an idea of what its capable of.

Working with a mouse is hard, but completely doable. I did digital art for a few years using a mousepad and a mouse, and there are many people out there who do some amazing stuff with them. They're just a bit finicky to use at first, so if you have the budget for it you might want a pressure sensitive tablet, but if not, don't worry too much about it. Same goes for a scanner - it can help, but you can work without it. Earlier on I found it hard to get proportions right when drawing straight onto the computer, but it gets easier with practice. Everything does. It depends really on how you want to go about doing digital art. Hell, 3D modelling with Unity is digital art.
 
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