Painting with Photoshop: Learning the Common Illustration Tools to Get you Started!

Painting with Photoshop is fun and rewarding if you know what to do! Along with the drawing brushes, this section will focus on the Photoshop eraser, Photoshop line tool, Photoshop dodge tool, and the Photoshop blur tool to help you become a powerful digital illustrator!

Painting with Photoshop is a huge part of the graphics industry and is something no to miss as an artist (since you can potentially profit from professional illustrations)!

When we look at professional images in magazines or any visual advertisement, we know most likely that Photoshop is behind these amazing pictures.

While photo manipulation is definitely one of the strong points of this program, drawing and painting is another side of the coin that other artists use as well.

Even though the airbrush is your primary instrument, keep in mind that there is a brush tip panel where any brush variances that you choose can be applied to these individual tools I will be introducing.

Your success starts here by knowing the right tools!

The airbrush and the Photoshop line tool

You know that the airbrush, combined with your drawing tablet, will be the main tool that you will be using most of the time. The key here is to get it to recognize pressure sensitivity.

Starting a new digital canvas, you start painting out several strokes while playing around with the stylus pressure sensitivity options. After that, you need to start working out the composition of your paintings.

One of the main things about painting with Photoshop is that you need to plan your composition through perspective. As such, you switch to the Photoshop line tool. Making sure that it is set on 'fill pixel' instead of 'paths', you gently create a simple one point perspective on a new layer.

Sometimes, you can even draw in a straight line using the airbrush. To do that, you draw a point anywhere on the screen, then hold the shift key, and then clicking somewhere else. This will connect the dots to form a line!

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Correcting mistakes

When you are painting with Photoshop, you are bound to make mistakes. Thankfully, the Photoshop eraser will be there to correct it for you. Even better, it can help you paint by targeting unwanted color with the magic eraser!

The eraser tool works best on objects that are on a separate layer. That way, you are erasing that object rather than a section of the composition.

However, when you make mistakes that you rather undo than erase, there is always the history panel. This will save a lot of time in the long run.

For example, as you are painting, you have made several mistakes through several layers. Rather than correct all of it, you simply retrace your steps made using the history panel.

With each click in the history, you are able to revert to specific snapshots of the painting and redrawing from there.

Eventually, you do finish your digital illustrations and move towards color correction...

The Photoshop dodge, burn, and sponge tools

Colors are a big part of painting with Photoshop. For individual object color corrections, you can use the following tools:

• Dodge tool – increase color intensity through brightening
• Burn tool – increase color intensity through darkening
• Sponge tool – increases or lowers color intensity values

For a composition that requires a global effect, you can go into the Images > Adjustments menu and select the adjustments that are most appropriate for your composition.

Just remember that this is a global wide destructive editing procedure where the best way to undo it is through the history panel.

As a rule of thumb, increase the intensity of the color for objects in the foreground while decrease the color intensity of objects in the background.

Returning to your painting and having done what you need to do with color corrections, you move onto the next step...

Excellent resource:

The Photoshop blur, sharpen, and smudge tools

Out of all these tools, the smudge tool is very important as you use it to smudge colors together during and after the painting process.

As for the blur and sharpen tools, these work well with one another in bringing the focus of your painting on a specific area. For example, you want to sharpen an object that is close to the foreground while blurring out sections of the background.

However, on your particular painting, you want to do the blurring and sharpening effects on the whole composition. What do you do?

In that case, you go to the filters section of Photoshop! In there, you will find all the burring and sharpening filters that you need to do a global effect.

Of course, you also realize that this is destructive editing process where you will need to use the history panel to reverse changes that you don't like.

Thanks for following along! Don't you think that painting with Photoshop becomes easier once you know what to look for?

All that is left is to just practice using these tools whenever you get the chance while learning a few new tools here and there.

With enough digital illustrations under your belt, you will eventually have a profitable portfolio where you can earn income from!

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