digital painting

Techniques to Make a Realistic Digital Painting in Photoshop

Digital painting is a method of doing artwork on a system. It is a way of describing ideas and thoughts on the screen by adapting traditional painting mediums like ink, water, oil, color, etc.

Photoshop software is such a versatile platform that allows us to explore innovate and create so much with all the flexible and multi-purpose tools. One such creation is digital painting.

Digital Painting in Adobe Photoshop

Photoshop produces raster paintings. These paintings usually resemble a real painting made with real brushes and paint. Thus they look more realistic than a vector painting or illustration. This Digital painting can be in Photoshop can be created by spontaneous manner using the brush tool. A digital painting maker tries to mimic the physical objects or people in their virtual manner using colors and virtual brushes.

In this Blog, we discuss about some of the useful tips to help you incorporate different techniques to make a realistic digital painting in Photoshop.

Techniques to Make a Realistic Digital Painting in Photoshop

1. Use of Textures

Instantly add realism to digital paintings is to apply textures. You can easily do this by incorporating the photo textures into work.

Photo textures are parts of photographs that you warp and manipulate to blend into painting. It is technique especially for achieving the perfect texture for skin, clothes, details in nature, and general grit and grunge.

2. Use of Texture Brushes

Texture brushes can be used to add realistic details to our artwork.

There are tones of free Photoshop brushes that will help you to quickly and easily get the textured look you want.

Various sets of best brushes available for creating textures. Also, we can make our brushes and can also find brushes online.

3. Use of Color Palette

Once you are achieving realism is to turn your focus to color. Even though it is tempting to paint with bright, vivid colors, limit your color palettes to colors found in nature.

Take swatches from photographs and test these values in your own paintings.

You will study natural color palettes to understand how to do paint. Because of the makeup of bodies, painting skin, for instance, is more involved than just using different shades of brown.

Through this technique of color palette, we can give a realistic look at our creation.

Soon you will see that you don’t have to be the best painter in the world to make your art that much more in realistic.

4. Paint Additional Light Sources

Every artist goes through a couple of paintings in their lifetime. Not only they great for developing technique but you can also experiment with the different lighting setups.

The best way to study light is to study photographs. Learn about different types of lighting including:

  • Back Lighting
  • Rim Lighting
  • Ambient Light
  • Different Combinations of Light

These techniques make a digital painting impressive. We can also create such type of beautiful realistic digital painting in Photoshop with the use of right color schemes and techniques.

Tips for Makes Digital Painting

Making a digital painting is not an easy task. However, there are various ways to make it, and with practice, we can even develop our unique technique.

  • To start with we first need to imagine what we want to create.
  • It’s always better to have a rough layout
  • It is very important to keep the size of the page in mind.
  • Start by making a rough sketch of your art on the screen using the brush tool
  • Now using brush tool only color your artwork and then do the detailing work later on.

To learn the Techniques to Make a Realistic Digital Painting in Photoshop in depth and on high-level one should join our animation training institute. It is one of the best institutes in Ahmedabad which imparts advanced animation courses.



Animation, VFX, Graphic Design, Web Design, Gaming, Institute, Courses, Ahmedabad, Career Courses, Arena Animation, Job Ready Courses, Designing Courses, Designing Institute, after 12th course, multimedia courses.