Digital Brush Strokes: It All Starts Here!

So just shake out your hands, relax, and start up another digital canvas to experiment on. What you will be doing first is just creating random shapes.

From this exercise, you will learn how to use the digital brush tool, in your program of choice with the options available, to simulate those important brush strokes needed for digital drawings.

1. Loosening up!

Through personal experience, I’ve had students, when asked to draw a straight line, do it with meticulous care. I could see their hands stiff up as they try to get it as straight as possible.

What were the results? Not a straight line at all! It was bending in various directs up close. Not only that, some students go back and forth, creating a straight line that it looks jagged and fury.

When you do a straight line, you do it fast! It’s the same with any other shape. Thus, on your digital canvas, I want you to do various circles and lines fairly quickly and all in one stroke.

2. Developing beyond the hands!

Once you have done that, take your digital tool off from the drawing surface for a little bit. Relax. Now, I want you to do the motion of the shapes in the air just to get a feel for the shape without the friction of the drawing surface.

You will use your imagination as to how those lines will look like as you pretend to draw. While continuing with the motion, slowly drop the digital tool down on the drawing surface.

How does that compare to the shapes that you’ve drawn previously? You will find that it becomes just slightly smoother.

Through a lot of practice you will discover another important point. At first, you will move you hands through your wrist. Slowly, but surely, your wrists begin to tighten the faster your hands move.

Eventually, you will find out that your whole arm begins to move! That’s where control comes from. While you do those longer straight lines or larger circles, you will need the entire movement of your arm to accomplish these.

Hence, only use your hands and wrist when you’re doing finer details!

When you switch between the movements between the arm and the hand, you will find that controlling the type of digital brush strokes, needed for a specific digital painting, becomes easier.

3. Learn those digital brush strokes!

You will need to learn the short strokes first. On your digital canvas, do a series of short strokes that are quick and straight. Do several of them. Then, alternate the direction. There are four fundamental directions that you should focus on: horizontal, vertical, slant, and the reverse slant.

After you have done some practice lessons, you need to do the exact same directions over again. This time though, you want to curve those short strokes in the four mentioned fundamental directions.

And when you’re done that, put those short strokes together to see how those directions interact with each other. Doing those directions will develop your hand and wrist movements to match specific textures.

4. Further digital brush stroke refinements

Once you practiced the variations in the short and long digital brush strokes, the next thing is to put it altogether with a few more complex strokes. For example, you can try to do some wavy lines that look like curls of someone’s hair.

Then after that, you will probably want to make the brush strokes have varying widths. In order to do that, you will learn how to use the opacity, brush size settings, and other options to create those varying widths.

But perhaps the most important part is learning how to use your digital tools to simulate pressure sensitivity from your drawing instrument. This is important for the next lesson of learning: how to create gradients and values.

These are dependant on mostly your brush option settings. However, depending on the type of physical drawing tool, you may find that it has a few options up its sleeves in terms of creating sensitivity.

Have fun with these simple learning activities! Spend some time on practicing those simple strokes as you will need them. Remember to stay motivated!

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Return from Digital Brush Strokes to the 2d Digital Art Guide.