We'll look at how we can shade them nicely.

Gimp does not provide us with an easy way (unless you count the gfig plugin I suppose) For the rest of this ible, I'll be working with the final image shown here, containing a box and a cylinder. If you feel like using a tool in the software you're using for drawing the oulines, go ahead. Any technique you know for drawing things on paper will work here. Cylinders are a bit harder, but if we draw a box, and then change the top and bottom into elipses, it's still quite easy. More complex/accurate ones can be done using perspective lines. A regular (ish) hexagon, and some intermediate lines make a simple box. The bulk of this ible will go through drawing and shading some boxes and cylinders, so let's start out by drawing their outlines. When drawing spheres and cylinders, it is often useful to draw a box where you want them to go. One was the approximate outline, One was the actual castle I was drawing, and the third was guides. I do this on a seperate layer, so that I can turn it on and off as I work on the rest of the drawing.

While there are a lot of ways to start a drawing, i tend to start off with a very rough sketch of the outlines. Why?These three exercises represent just about every type of motor control you'll need in digital art: - The ability to draw straight (doodling) - The ability to draw smoothly (doodling) - The ability to draw where you want (Writing) - The ability to control pressure (sketching) Notice that you can do light and dark lines. Sketch You can also try freehand sketching. GIMP Zen Brush 2 Marmoset Hexels 3 Sculptris Pixelmator Pro Adobe Photoshop. Just for fun take a calligraphy brush, work slowly and carefully and see what you can come up with. The following table (5.2) shows a few to start your therapeutic digital art. I tend to doodle on a moderate canvas of 1024x768. Things like: - Draw a square with straight edges (not using the straight edge tool either) - Draw as round-er circle as you can For these I tend to use a large brush, generally a hard edged one at ~10px.

Doodle Set yourself some exercises to get used to the tablet. If you think you can already draw where you expect to on a tablet, skip this. While a tablet is more like a piece of paper than a mouse, there are still slight difference, and it takes a bit of getting used to to use for drawing.

Digital hexagon paint brushes photoshop