A PAINTER’S APPROACH TO INFINITE PAINTER

Fill your silhouettes A

Final line art is a great way to solve problems and refresh your design. But when it’s time to build the layer structure for painting, open the Brush palette and use the Solid Fill brush to fill in the silhouettes of your characters or environment. I use the Solid Fill as both the brush and eraser.

B Adjust your perspective

If you have a dynamic scene that has a unique vanishing point, try using our Perspective Grid tools. By turning off the Magnet I was able to use the grid as a guide for the dragon’s towering body, while turning the Magnet back on locked the architectural drawing into perspective.

C Add detailing

If you create a new layer above the silhouette, you can then use a Clipping Mask to add detail to the layer below without altering your original silhouette. Simply tap the Layer icon in the Layer palette and then clip your render pass to the layer or group below.

2 DOCKING COLOR WHEEL AND TONE LOCK

Here’s a tip to speed up your colour picking. Pick your Brush tool (A), then open your Color Wheel and with two fingers (B) grab the wheel to dock it on to the canvas. Notice the Sun icon on the wheel: try clicking it and turning the wheel. When the Sun icon is active, the value of the colour choice will stay the same as you spin the wheel (C). When spinning the wheel without the Sun icon active, see how a yellow colour is brighter than a blue and how the colour dot (C) no longer adjusts the value automatically.

3 IMPORT FLOATING REFERENCE IMAGERY

Click the three buttons at the topright corner (A) to open the Options menu and hit Import (B). This gives you the option to load an image from your gallery, clipboard or even take a photo with the device’s camera. Once you’ve made your photo selection, you can import it as a Layer or Reference: choose Reference (C). Now your inspiration will float above the canvas. You can resize it, flip it and toggle its visibility by clicking the Pin icon on the top-right of the screen.

Load an image from your gallery, clipboard or take a photo with the device’s camera

4 CREATE A CUSTOM OIL BRUSH

The most important feature to customise in a paintbrush (A) is the “head” shape. Think of the head like stamping a brush with black ink. In greyscale, try to capture the clusters of bristles on a white layer. With the Lasso tool, select your brush head shape

(B) and on the right of the Lasso functions click +Brush. Now go to the “head” section of your brush and change the head to your black and white stamp (C). Play with the other Brush Creator settings to finalise the feel of your new tool.

5 SMART LINES AND SHAPES

Infinite Painter has a wonderfully useful setting that makes it possible for you to activate predictive shapes by holding down the stylus at the end of a stroke. The system can detect all sorts of shapes such as lines, arcs, ellipses, rectangles and even complex paths.

The curved lines in this copy of a Monet masterpiece were beyond my skill set. With one single Smart Curve activated (A), I moved the pins into position to create the curved lines in the architecture and golden frames, then cloned the line by tapping the Stamp icon and moved those new pins down to the next horizontal curve (B).

6 MAKE CUSTOM PATTERNS AND TEXTILES

Seamless pattern projects are great for textile designs and brush making. Open the New Project window (A) and choose Pattern (B). This file type will automatically stitch together the four corners of your illustration, which can then be used as a patterned asset in an illustration using the Pattern Fill tool or as a standalone textile for some wrapping paper. Alternatively, you could even make a custom brush using the pattern as your brush texture, and selecting Warp as the texture setting. Patterns such as fish or snakeskin would make a cool brush!

7 ATTACH A FILTER TO YOUR BRUSHES

In the Brush editor, click the Special column (A) and check out the Filters section (B). In this example, I attached the Stereo filter (C) to an Airbrush that pinpoints the effect of separating the RGB channels. But what if you attached something like Motion Blur instead? You could give the boxing gloves a punching effect by swiping your brush in the direction that you want the blur effect to show. See what kind of cool brush combos you can make by attaching filters!

8 ADD SHAPES TO PERSPECTIVE GRIDS

Using the Perspective Grids is pretty straightforward: adjust your vanishing points and then toggle the Magnet on and off to stick to the grid. Add an ellipse or square with the Magnet active and that shape will snap into that active perspective. Slide it around, and watch how the shape morphs into perspective. You can clone the shape by tapping the Stamp icon, then adjust the new shape as you need it. When your shape is still active, change the brush or brush size to alter the line weight, or use the Solid Fill brush for a solid shape.

Symmetry can be a powerful shortcut for certain designs in concept art or even real-world sketching. Take, for example, the Eiffel Tower, which I painted from life in the grassy lawns of Paris. Open the Drawing tools panel (A) and with the Vertical Symmetry tool enabled (B), move and rotate it into place and lock it. Now all your tools will be mirrored, including the brushes, Lasso, Liquify and more! This tool enabled me to quickly paint the tower. Paint brushes will lay down paint differently on both sides based on the asymmetry of a brush, which adds a subtle variation so that it’s not 100 per cent symmetrical.

10 GENERATE PATTERNS QUICKLY AND EASILY

Rather than starting a new pattern file type to paint, for example, stars on a flag, you can create the star pattern inside your standard file type. When making the first star for the flag, I use the Kaleidoscope tool in the Symmetry section. Then I open the Selection tool panel (A), and with the Tile tool (B) in the Pattern section, I make a box around the star and play with the size of the box to influence the spacing between stars. You can also check some of the mirror-flipping icons to give the pattern a more randomised look.

Symmetry can be a powerful shortcut for certain designs in concept art