(excerpted from Martha Jane Bradford's online article "Digital Drawing." The full version can be found on Bradford's site http://www.marthavista.com. This excerpt is reproduced with permission. Copyright © 2002 Martha Jane Bradford. All rights reserved.) How To Do a Digital Drawing by Martha Jane Bradford The rest of this article is written with the expectation that the reader will have become somewhat familiar in advance with the following chapters in the Corel® Painter 7™ manual: The Workspace, Basics, Painting, Applying Art Materials, Cloning and Tracing, Using Layers, and Printing. The first step in beginning one of my digital drawings is to prepare an image file that will serve as a reference for the actual drawing: • Assemble the reference material in digital form. This can be done using photos from a digital camera; alternatively photographic prints and slides can be scanned onto a CD by a photo-imaging house (sketches and other non-photo material can also be scanned). For those of you who don't want to work from photographs, I would recommend thumbnailing a rough sketch of the planned work in Painter including major lines and solid shapes, resizing it to the final size (see below), and substituting this file each time the reference photo is mentioned below. • Edit. Most photos benefit from at least some cropping and color, brightness, and contrast adjustments. Some require more work, such as moving or removing objects or collaging several photos together. • File format. The final file can be an Adobe Photoshop® Psd or a Tiff. A Psd can be opened in Painter and used as such or saved as a Riff, Painter's native format. (Photoshop cannot read Riffs, but Painter can save them as Psds for Photoshop.) • Mode. If you plan to make your final output an IRIS print, work in RGB mode, as the IRIS atelier often likes to control the CMYK conversion. • Working Resolution. It is important to experiment with Painter to find what working resolution produces a personally acceptable brushstroke. To my eye Painter yields the most pixel information at a drawing resolution of 75 ppi but the whole image looks better when printed as if it had been drawn at a higher resolution, 150 or 225 ppi for example. So a 20 x 30" image might translate into drawing at 60 x 90" @ 75 ppi and resizing the final to 20 x 30 @ 225 ppi. • Output Size and Resolution. The amount of memory in your computer is one major factor in deciding how large the work is to be and at what resolution. The other is the nature of the machine that will output the final image; each printer has an optimal resolution (number of pixels per inch) and a maximum paper size. An example would be an IRIS printer that prints at 300 ppi on a maximum sheet size of 35 x 47", maximum image size of 33 x 45". 33" x 300 pixels is 9900 pixels by 45" x 300 pixels or 13,500 pixels x 3 (for 24-bit color depth), which makes approximately a 400 megabyte file. That is too big for most artists' computers and for the IRIS I use, which can't take much over 100 megabyte files. The solution to this problem is to draw the image at half size and have the IRIS atelier resize it up once it's inside the machine; 33 x 45" @ 150 ppi is 95.6 MB. • Proof the reference file. It is a good idea to print the reworked reference photograph at the final size on your desktop color printer. The image can be broken into sections that will fit on letter or legal-size paper; the printed sections are then trimmed and taped together to reassemble the image. This is an important final step in determining that scale, composition, color, and value choices are correct. Once the reference file is established, prepare the workspace. • Palettes. In Painter, open the following palettes and arrange them so they take up the least amount of screen space: Controls, Brushes, Tools, Objects (open the Layers section), and Art Materials (open Papers and Colors). • Monitor Workspace Layout. Open the file that contains the copy of the reference photograph and drag the edges until it occupies half the space that remains after opening the palettes. Create an empty Riff file of the same size as the reference file. Drag its edges until it occupies the other half of the work space. This file will become the drawing. (See Figure 5 above.) • Establish the Look of the drawing. Select a paper texture from Painter's Papers palette, a color from the Colors palette, and a brush or pencil or piece of pastel from the Brushes palette. To do a digital drawing, for example, select "Dry Media/Charcoal," black for a color, and any one of a number of papers. "Synthetic Super Fine" is a good basic paper, as is "Rougher." "Watercolor" makes great rocks, while "Scratchy" works well for tree trunks. (See Figure 6.) • Registration Marks. With the drawing file active, on the canvas in some part of the image that will remain white when the drawing is finished, create an X for a registration mark with a 1-pixel "Flat Pen" brush with the "Straight Lines" button checked on the Draw Style end of the Controls: Brush palette. On the layers palette, create a new layer, zoom in to about 500%, and make a second registration mark precisely on top of the first (this is because layers can get accidentally out-of-alignment; do this every time you create a new layer). • Begin drawing on the new layer. The strokes will look like blacks marks on white paper, but they will actually be black marks on a transparent layer with the white of the canvas showing through. Do not draw on the canvas itself or you will curtail the advantages of working with layers. If you accidentally draw on the canvas, you can select it all, edit/copy, and edit/paste onto a new layer; then fill the canvas with white. You will have to keep this layer on the bottom of the stack because it is not transparent. • Drawing with white over dark. In digital drawing, negative spaces can be drawn positively; for example, lots of small white lowers on a dark plant are easier to create and look much more alive when done as white marks over a dark background (instead of drawing the black all around the edges of each of the white flowers). When using white over black, it is important to remember to check "Invert" on the Papers palette or the strokes will look mushy. (See Figure 7). • Using Layers to Separate Colors, Lines, Tones, Solids, and Paper Textures. When drawing with white over darks, it is a good idea to put the white on a separate layer because it soon becomes confusing as to whether it is under (on the canvas) or over the black layer. If the whites are all on their own layers, toggling the layers' eye icons will show where they are. It is also a good idea is to keep fine lines, broad lines, solids, tones, and secondary paper textures, both for black and for white, each on its own separate layer. This greatly simplifies revisions, because you can redraw or add to one without affecting the others. (See Figure 8.) Be sure to lock your layers, except for the one you're drawing on to avoid mixing lines and tones or blacks and whites accidentally. Try not to have more than a couple overlapping tone layers done with the same paper texture or the texture will look corrupted. If many multiple layers makes your file too big for your machine, create separate files for each category: colors, lines, tones, solids, and secondary paper textures. When done, collapse the layers in these files into one layer and Edit/Copy, Edit/Paste it into the main drawing. (Here's where the registration marks come in.) Save an uncollapsed version of the files in case of revisions. The hardest thing about drawing on a computer is not being able to see both close-up and far away at the same time. You can see the paper texture best at 100% zoom, but you can't see how your pencil strokes are relating to the overall image. If you zoom out to see the whole image, you can't see what you're doing with your pencil. Partly, experience helps overcome this, but there are also some strategies for dealing with it. • Best Zoom Levels for Drawing Large Images. Broad areas of tone done with big brushes can be done zoomed way out or "Zoomed To Fit." Fine details done with small brushes are best done anywhere from 200-300% zoomed-in. • Using the Reference Photo. The reference photograph is an invaluable aid in orienting you within the drawing and in helping you to keep your brushstrokes in sync mentally with the overall image. This is why the initial work you do on the photograph is such a key component of the digital drawing process. Whichever technique described below is employed, it will accomplish the same thing as projecting a slide onto a wall or a drawing surface, only it's a lot more convenient; it avoids cartooning; and the photo doesn't fade. Here are my suggestions: Split the workspace: having the photograph and the drawing side-by-side on the monitor lets you gauge the overall effectiveness of how you're drawing. Tracing Paper option: This enables you to be accurate about the shape and placement of objects. Designate the reference photo as the clone source in the File menu. When you wish to view the reference photo under the drawing as if you were using a lightbox, click the tracing paper icon in the vertical scroll bar (upper right corner of the file window). If it seems preferable to devote the whole of the workspace to the drawing, minimize the reference photo and maximize the drawing and click "Hide Palettes" in the Window section of the program's menu bar. Tracing paper will still work. Photo on a layer: Copy the reference photo, paste it as a separate layer into the drawing, and drag it to the bottom of the stack. The opacity of the reference photo layer can be adjusted to make the drawing marks show up better. When the drawing is finished, delete the reference photo. The only disadvantage to this alternative is that it makes the file-size larger. How to Spot-check Your Values: Make a black-and-white version of the photograph, created with "Grayscale" Mode in Photoshop or by running a black-and-white Two-Point Gradient on it in Painter. If you set the black-and-white version as the clone source and clone a spot of it into the drawing with the Straight Cloner brush, you can see if your tones are too light or too dark. Then hit "Undo" to get rid of the cloned piece of the photo. Cartoon Layer: For objects that are not decipherable at the zoom level at which you need to draw, create a layer for a cartoon and cartoon the object with a smallish (5 pixel) Flat Color Pen and a contrasting color (red is good) at whatever zoom level you can best see it. Then go to your drawing layer with the cartoon visible but locked and draw the object at the most comfortable zoom. You may want to adjust the transparency of the cartoon layer to make it just barely visible so as not to obscure parts of your brushstrokes. (See Figure 9.) Proof the Drawing: As the drawing progresses, it is a good idea to proof it full-size from time to time as the ultimate strategy for being able to see what you've been doing. Make all the layers that are not part of the drawing, such as the photo or the cartoon, invisible and then save the file as a Tiff. A box will appear warning you that the layers will be merged with the canvas; say "OK." Close Painter and open Photoshop. Go to "Preferences" in the File menu, select "General" and then "Interpolation: Bicubic." Open your drawing file and resize it (this works better than resizing in Painter). Edit-Copy/File-New/Edit-Paste sections of the drawing that are the right size to print on your proofing printer and stick the sections together with double-sided Scotch™ tape. SAVE! SAVE AS! I should have said this a lot sooner. Save your photographs and drawings frequently to prevent losing a morning's work to a crash or power failure. • Save and rename. Every time you make a major change or at least every three or four working sessions, save and then "Save As" and give the file a new name. • Save to a CD. Once a week or so, it pays to save the latest versions of the file to a write-able CD-ROM. That way if a virus eats your hard-drive, you still have your drawing. • File-naming System. Give the piece a title, let's say "Sunset," and then add the date and time: "Sunset020926_1053" (translates as "Sunset" as it existed on September 26, 2002 at 10:53 am -- use military time for PM). Numeric numbering allows your files can be automatically sorted by name in the order that the drawing progressed, making it easy to revert to an earlier version if necessary. You will never overwrite a file that way because the same minute never comes around twice. • Keep a Notebook. It helps to have a record of what you did to each file. It's not unusual to get toward the end of a long project and discover that you have somehow corrupted part of the drawing, left a patch of cloned photo in or forgotten to invert the paper when drawing with white, etc. Being able to go back to an earlier version and clone in a section or Edit-Copy/Edit-Paste whole layers from before the corruption means you don't have to totally go back to square one to fix things. • Final Save. Once the drawing is finished, burn the file onto 3 CDs (one for the studio, one for the safety-deposit box, and one for the atelier). (See Figure 10.) (article continues at http://www.marthavista.com) Digital artist Martha Jane Bradford is well-known for her large-scale, photorealist "digital charcoal" drawings. ^ back to top read other How-Tos here Home | About Us | Advertise | Contact Us News & Reviews | How-To's | Resources © 2002-2005 Harald Johnson Communications. All rights reserved.