Want to instantly improve your artwork? By the end of reading this 7 step guide, you will be producing better artwork than ever before.
This post focuses on more theoretical rather than technical improvement methods therefore you can apply these steps right away for instant impact to improve your artwork.
The first step to improving your artwork, is to start telling stories with it. People love stories!! It’s what keeps the gossip in your group chats going, it is why you spend 30 minutes looking at TikTok after a 5 minute glimpse and it’s the reason why you love film and TV.
With anything you do, you want to aim to tell a story and provide a journey that the viewer comes on.
You can do this in various ways without drawing a whole new scene. A lot of it can be suggested through the use of light. Adding certain cast shadows from other objects that aren’t in the canvas’ frame. This can add visual interest and context as to where and when a “scene” is taking place. For example, a cast shadow of tropical plants could suggest being on a beach, a cast shadow of bars may suggest being in a prison. Not only does this add context and visual interest but it also increases the realism to your work just by drawing these easy ideas.
Another clever way to utilise the off canvas method, would be in the use of direct lighting. Think about what colours you’re using. For example, red and blue may signify a police presence in the scene.
As ever, you can always add story telling within the canvas. Maybe there is some action happening or a character showing an emotional reaction to something thats happened. By illustrating this, it will help the viewer to engage and relate to your work.
A simple way to improve your art is to think about its composition, not only that but also contrasting areas. Some areas of your digital drawing you want to be intricate and busy, then others you just want to leave the space clean and bare. You can also use contrast in size of elements, have larger elements that contrast with smaller elements, this also links back to the story telling element as objects and characters of different sizes can represent different status’ and positions of power.
Now there are many ways to use compositional grids such as the golden ratio, and rule of thirds. These are fail safe ways in which you can increase the appeal of your work. You can also use leading lines to draw the viewers eye to the subject of your artwork. A great reference and way to improve this is looking at still frames from films and see how they compose their shot.
Step 3 is more of a technical point rather than conceptual like the first 2 steps. It is a great way to improve drawing skills. Just by shading or hatching in the direction of the form that you are drawing or painting it results in the image not appearing as flat, than if you were to shade and hatch without following the shape of the form.
The lines help guide the viewers eye - hence why you see a lot of line work based drawings with directional lines that follow the form, its also very common in design sketches so that the communication of the form is clear.
Now the use of reflected and secondary lights to help describe and add realism to your sketching ideas is entering a more advanced concept. Reflected light is the light that an object picks up from another near bye object, this is more apparent on smoother surfaces. For example, if you had a red object opposite a cream object they would reflect each others colour. Bear in mind the value of the reflected light can never be brighter than the original, and must be within the value range of that particular object.
Stay away from the use of black, that’s if you are aiming to achieve a sense of realism. Pure black doesn’t exist within the natural world, any use of it in such paintings and images tends to remove the life from a painting and leaving you with less purity within your colour pigment. So where you used to use pure black try and replace that with a dark value of the surrounding area’s hue and colour.
The same rule applies to pure white, but it is less detrimental and therefore you can get away with the use of pure white for only the very brightest of marks.
The same way that pure black doesn’t exist in the natural world nor do lines to separate objects. Instead what you are seeing is dark shadow and ambient occlusion which may appear as lines. Once again when trying to achieve realism the use of lines can also flatten an image or painting whether that be a traditional or digital painting. Instead think of painting the light rather than symbolising the light and shadow to a line to separate areas that are actually just a dark sharp shadow.
A lot of creating imagery is about communication and how clearly a viewer can understand an image. Having a clear silhouette of the subject matter within your canvas will help the viewer immediately identify what that object who have sketched is helping them understand what’s happening with greater ease, rather than searching to understand what’s going on within your piece.
As always the beauty of being a creative is that you can create whatever you want, however you want - hence this guide is useless. But, if you are looking to improve your artwork and sense of realism then take this guide into account and you should also check the FREE 26 extra steps to improve your artwork below.
If this helped you then you can download the FREE PDF of the 26 extra step guide to improve your artwork here …
