Workshops

Advice and techniques from pro artists…

Create classic steampunk art

Justin Gerard uses digital and traditional media.

Digital painting has many compelling points. It offers a range of fantastic techniques, the ability to undo mistakes, quickly edit an image, and perform experiments on your painting without any fear of ruining it. It has many timesaving features that enable the artist to streamline their process and produce work faster. Working digitally also makes easy colour application possible, and you never have to wait for those colours to dry. To top if off, you’ll never have to clean your brushes. In many ways, it’s magic. However, when I began working digitally, I noticed that my finished paintings looked either too plastic, or burnt out. My digital work felt synthetic and flat and while all the visual information was there, it was missing an organic vitality that my traditional work had. As I investigated further, , I realised this problem lay in the surface texture itself. The digital art just didn’t have it.

I experimented by working digitally over traditionally painted textures and underpaintings, and found that by using real-world texture and traditional work underneath my digital work, my final paintings didn’t feel quite so soulless. It’s an approach I’ve refined over the years.

In this workshop I’m going to be showing you this method step by step, and covering how I combine traditional materials and digital paint in Photoshop to achieve a rich, classically painted look.