Digital Painting Adventures

A few months ago I decided to try to learn how to paint and decided to enrol in a Digital Painting class called “Painting with Light and Color” taught by Robert Kondo and Dice Tsutsumi.

The interesting thing about this course was the emphasis on painting from observation - painting from photos was not allowed! I didn’t have any confidence with this but tried anyway. Sure enough, my first few paintings were not great. The use of colour and value was abysmal. Everything looked flat, the perspective was wonky and I just couldn’t capture painting from observation at all. Painting from a photograph was so much simpler, why can’t I just do that?! But I decided to continue trying and after about 4 weeks I started to understand why they emphasised painting from observation. There was so much to learn and study from just observing life and capturing it in a painting. I began to see it more as visual note-taking rather than being pressured to make a pretty painting.

The course took an interesting approach where it really emphasised painting “diffuse neutral” lighting and focusing on “contact shadows” and “local colour” for the first few weeks. This is similar to CG productions during asset Lookdev, and using overcast lighting environments to dial in the materials. The course also introduced an approach where they use Photoshop adjustment layers to “paint” lighting over an existing diffuse neutral painting. They mention they were inspired to use this technique by watching how the Lighting artists at Pixar light their 3D scenes. This technique was really intuitive to me! From years of placing lights in 3D scenes, it turns out I had a good intuition for how the light would bounce and reflect across different surfaces. It was a lot of fun!

One more thing I learnt from this course was that I found “natural artistic talent” isn’t nearly as important as I initially thought. I wouldn’t say I had any real talent for painting, and whilst I certainly don’t think I am great at painting now, I am nevertheless really pleased with the progress I have made. From my personal experience, what seems far more important is persistence, making lots of mistakes, learning from them and just trying to get a bit better each time I practise. Even if it is just improving one small thing, after many different attempts they all add up! After a while this all becomes useful experience and builds both intuition and confidence.

Anyway, enough rambling! Here are some of my paintings: