Lesson 7, Part 2 - Recognizing Shapes and Values

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Painted with Corel Painter’s Blocky Background brush found in the Sargent brush set

This is the final painting of the final lesson of Isis Sousa’s Digital Painting course on Youtube. I recommend the course to anyone who wants to learn the basics of digital painting. Sousa sensei starts the course by explaining the restricted set of brushes that will be used for all of the paintings. For each lesson she provides reference photos, and students can follow along as she does a demonstration painting of the assignment.

The course is given using Corel Painter, but the basic principles of digital painting apply to any full-featured painting software.

Lesson 7, Part 1 - Shape Hierarchy

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Today’s lesson has two parts; I completed part one, which was to paint a protrait from a reference photo of a Brazilian indigenous man. For this lesson our task was to focus on, 1) recognizing shapes; 2) identifying the large shapes and painting them first, then painting the smaller shapes within the large shapes; 3) working with the largest brushes possible to avoid the inevitable temptation to dwell on details. We used the unpredictable Sargent brush, which has a high degree of randomness built in to it’s soul.

It was fun going through the ugliness of the initial stages to see the image come to life when I added the highlight to my subject’s upper lip. Pow!

Lesson 6, As Final As I'm Going to Make It

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Temple of Isis at Philae

I’ve completed Lesson 6 of Isis Sousa’s Digital Painting course on Youtube. The hardest part of this assignment was to paint relatively straight lines. There are also many parallel lines in the reference photograph, and those are hard to replicate without resorting to a digital perspective guide. The temple also has many delicate carving on the faces of the pylons. I did not include them in my painting. In the interest of time I decided to let the rear towers remain unfinished. However, I did add a figure to give the image a sense of scale.

Lesson 7 will cover portrait painting. This will be the most challenging lesson.

Lesson 6, Day 2 -- Painting the Temple of Isis with Corel Paint

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Painted with Corel Painter and the Grainy Pressure Knife.

Today I continued to work on my painting of the Temple of Isis at Philae. It’s slow going, but I’m enjoying the challenge.

When I first started painting and drawing 5 years ago, I thought, “Why bother blocking out shadows and highlights? Why worry about color relationships? I’ll just paint what I see and be done with it.” It turns out that I simply can’t paint what I see because my brain is very lazy and thinks that people look like stick figures and all buildings are square. My brain also tells me that there are only three colors, bright red, bright blue, and bright yellow. My brain is really just a 5-year old and has a lot of dumb ideas about how to paint.

Check out Isis Sousa’s Digital Painting courses on Youtube.

Lesson 6 -- Painting Architecture Using Corel Painter 2021

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Blocking out the shapes. To be continued…

Today I began with high hopes that Lesson 6 of Isis Sousa’s digital painting course would be easier than painting foliage or flowers. After all, I thought, this temple has straight lines and flat surfaces. Painting straight lines is tough, but, as I discovered, getting the subtle proportions of this temple right is really challenging. I spent most of the evening trying to block in the shapes, painting them in, then painting over them, again and again. This painting will take several days.

The assignment is to use the Corel Painter Grainy Pressure Knife, part of the Sargent brush collection in Corel Painter 2021. The brush has low opacity at the beginning of the stroke and 100% opacity at the end, just the opposite of the brushes I’m used. It takes some getting used to.