Digital Learn How

Learn How To Create Digital Art

How to prepare overlays for digital art. I will do my best to teach you. This is a tutorial about the first steps to creating digital art. These steps have nothing to do with making the actual art. They are about how to prepare your ‘blank canvas’ or digital editor for new artwork. After creating digital art just about every day for two years, I do find a distinct rhythm to my art making pathways. It did take the full two years to get the art of how to create digital art down to that distinct rhythm that you can learn too. In the world of painting with any medium, you will make choices based on the best result. Type of canvas for longevity, type of paint for the same reason and lots of other artistic decisions along the way. You must also consider these choices for digital art. How to title, describe, define, copyright, privacy, color for print settings or for web, and a few other choices for sharing who you are and what you do. The properties menu of each image you use as an overlay is easy to get to and edit. Always take the opportunity to stamp your ‘signature’ by way of definition and description in every piece of digital artwork.

So, there is a reason why I no longer paint, mixing color was my downfall, no matter what colors I started with, I usually ended up with mauve. I gave in and said I was having a mauve period but it was obvious, I was no mixologist. If I had stuck with it and sought an education, I would have mastered the mixing of paint but I was distracted by this thing called the personal computer. Early in my experience as a geek, I stumbled onto a simple photo editor that changed everything. I learned how to create digital art and I made so much awesome digital art, I decided to put it all online. It was much later that I realized I could have accessed the back-end of each digital image I used. I could add my name, keywords, copyright and whatever else I wanted. Lots of my digital artwork on the internet have no connection to me after they have been copied and shared by others because I didn’t edit the back-end of anything. Only the title went along with the image as it traveled beyond me and even that can be changed by the viewer. I have found that adding simple info to each image is easy and priceless. Part of learning how to create digital art is knowing how to edit the ‘back-end’ of your work

For more about the post Learn How To Create Digital Art, visit the tutorial page called How To Make Digital Art. There you will take the next step and learn how to make the actual artwork.

Learn how to prepare photos for inclusion as overlays.. A little more about how to edit the back-end of each digital image. You can edit each photo in Adobe or any image editor that will allow property adjustments. There are things an artist must do in certain order when they create digital art. Open your carefully chosen editor. Choose your basic layout ie starting image type, resulting file type and how it will be interpreted long-term by a user based digital language. Consider if your artwork background will be transparent on any part of the image either to facilitate result or as part of the scene and/or story-line. If so, you will save your work as a png or gif file instead of the usual jpeg. If your editor allows you to set your preferred color settings, do so! CMYK for print, RGB for art only viewed online. Set privacy standards, titles, permissions, copyright, attachments and any information you wish to add to your resulting artwork. You can even add your website. It is smart to edit information on each individual image/overlay used throughout one piece of art. I included a short step by step below.

Preparing photos for inclusion as overlays You can edit each photo in Adobe or any image editor that will allow property adjustments.

  1. choose photo editor
  2. set file types- jpeg, png, gif, ect.
  3. assign color print or web
  4. set privacy standards- titles, permissions, copyright, attachments
  5. repeat for each overlay (photo)
  6. title final artwork for web (digital art, how to, artist) or print (artwork title, series, artist)

How I Create Digital Art This is a four set sequence I created for educational purposes.

  1. create background
  2. even more background
  3. add subject matter
  4. embellish

The featured artwork above was created using overlays or different images placed on top of one another. I then embellished each overlay with transparency and color variations to help them work well together. Shown are four of the overlays I used for the featured piece.

To learn more about this awesome four set sequence, visit How to Make Digital Art The featured art called Blade Apophysis, is art by Mary Clanahan