Hi, this is Chris Legaspi and today we're going to talk about digital painting. Now, I’ve been a digital artist for many, many years. I’ve been working professionally in the entertainment industry, mostly as a video game concept artist and more recently in the movie poster industry where I do movie poster illustrations and concept art. 

Some of my more recent titles include Deadpool 2, Son of Shaft, Birds of Prey, and various other feature films, as well as Netflix features. Now, and for most of my career, digital painting has been a big part of the art I make for the entertainment industry. Now let’s first begin by defining what digital painting is. It's kind of a nebulous term and maybe it's the first time you're hearing it or you may hear it a lot and you’re not quite sure what it means. So, I'm going to define it today. So digital painting has two words.

First is the “digital” and the second is the “painting”. So let’s first explore what “digital” means. Typically, when you hear the term digital painting, and someone says “digital”, what they’re referring to is some kind of computer interface and electronic interface. And for the last 20 or so years, the dominant digital interface has been a software program known as Photoshop. So you may have used it, you may be familiar with it. It’s what the professional industry-standard right now is. It’s a software where you can make artwork with the computer. So when people typically say digital painting, they’re referring to Photoshop. Now in more recent times, other painting apps have grown in popularity and this is because of the rise of the iPad and the iPencil so many wonderful apps have emerged and the most popular are SketchBook Pro and Procreate.

So now a digital painting, the “digital” part can also include apps that use the iPad and the Apple Pencil. And when you're using painting in Photoshop, many professionals or students and other artists who start to do digital painting, they interface with Photoshop using what’s called a digital tablet. This is basically sort of electronic pen with an electronic tablet that you can interface with it to work like an electronic pencil. You can get much better results than using a mouse. And the most popular by far, and the industry standard for professionals is from a company named Wacom – W-A-C-O-M. And they make many, many wonderful tablets of various sizes and price range so generally when you hear the word “digital”, you think of Photoshop and you think of Wacom tablets.

Now the second part of digital painting is “painting”. And “painting” again can have many, many definitions. It’s a huge, kind of a nebulous term but I'm for the simply define “painting” as drawing plus color. Painting to me is really the act of drawing with the addition of color. Now, again drawing is another term that we will define and explore in further episodes but for now I just wanted to find painting as creating images using drawing techniques and adding the element of color. And drawing basically, in short-terms is mark-making, using your pencil or digital tablet to make marks, to make lines, to make shapes, to make tones. So those are the two things that make up painting to me.

Okay that's the end of the short clip. In later episodes, we’re going to explore further, go into detail, into more drawing ideas or digital painting ideas, more color ideas as well. So once again, I’m Chris Legaspi, until next time. Get out there. Keep drawing, keep painting and build up that mileage. Bye for now.