by Martha Jane Bradford
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How to Do a Digital Drawing
The rest of this article is written with the expectation that the reader will have some
familiarity with the following chapters in the Corel ® Painter 7 TM manual: The
Workspace, Basics, Painting, Applying Art Materials, Cloning and Tracing, Using Layers, and
Printing.

The first step in beginning one of my digital drawings is to prepare an image file that will
serve as a reference for the actual drawing:

• Assemble the reference material in digital form.
This can be done using photos from a digital camera; alternatively photographic prints and
slides can be scanned onto a CD by a photo-imaging house (sketches and other non-photo
material can also be scanned).
For those of you who don’t want to work from photographs, I would recommend
thumbnailing a rough sketch of the planned work in Painter including major lines and
solid shapes, resizing it to the final size (see below), and substituting this file each time
the reference photo is mentioned below.

• Edit
Most photos benefit from at least some cropping and color, brightness, and contrast
adjustments. Some require more work, such as moving or removing objects or collaging
several photos together.

• File format
The final file can be an Adobe Photoshop ® Psd or a Tiff. A Psd can be opened in Painter and
used as such or saved as a Riff, Painter’s native format. (Photoshop cannot read Riffs, but
Painter can save them as Psds for Photoshop.)

• Mode
If you plan to make your final output an Iris print, work in RGB mode, as the Iris atelier often
likes to control the CMYK conversion.

• Working Resolution
It is important to experiment with Painter to find what working resolution produces a personally
acceptable brushstroke. To my eye Painter yields the most pixel information at a drawing
resolution of 75 ppi but the whole image looks better when printed as if it had been drawn at a
higher resolutions, 150 or 225 ppi for example. So a 20 x 30” image might translate into
drawing at 60 x 90” @ 75 ppi and resizing the final to 20 x 30 @ 225 ppi.

• Output Size and Resolution
The amount of memory in your computer is one major factor in deciding how large the work is to
be and at what resolution. The other is the nature of the machine that will output the final
image; each printer has an optimal resolution (number of pixels per inch) and a maximum
paper size.

An example would be an Iris printer that prints at 300 ppi on a maximum sheet size
of 35 x 47,” maximum image size of 33 x 45.” 33” x 300 pixels is 9900 pixels by 45”
x 300 pixels or 13,500 pixels x 3 (for 24-bit color depth), which makes approximately
a 400 megabyte file. That is too big for most artists’ computers and for the Iris I use,
which can’t take much over 100 megabyte files.
The solution to this problem is to draw the image at half size and have the Iris atelier resize it up
once it’s inside the machine; 33 x 45” @ 150 ppi is 95.6 Mb.

• Proof the reference file
It is a good idea to print the reworked reference photograph at the final size on your desktop
color printer. The image can be broken into sections that will fit on letter or legal-size paper; the
printed sections are then trimmed and taped together to reassemble the image. This is an
important final step in determining that scale, composition, color, and value choices are correct.
Once the reference file is established, prepare the workspace.

Figure 5. This picture shows one way to lay out your monitor workspace. The
reference photo is on the left, the drawing on the right, and the palettes
overlay the upper right corners of each window. (This photo shows the same
set-up as Figure 3 but with the tracing paper option turned off.)

• Palettes
In Painter, open the following palettes and arrange them so they take up the least amount of
screen space: Controls, Brushes, Tools, Objects (open the Layers section), and Art Materials
(open Papers and Colors).

• Monitor Workspace Layout
Open the file that contains the copy of the reference photograph and drag the edges until it
occupies half the space that remains after opening the palettes. Create an empty Riff file of the
same size as the reference file. Drag its edges until it occupies the other half of the work space.
This file will become the drawing. (See Figure 5.)

• Establish the Look of the drawing
Select a paper texture from Painter’s Papers palette, a color from the Colors palette, and a
brush or pencil or piece of pastel from the Brushes palette. To do a digital drawing, for
example, select “Dry Media/Charcoal,” black for a color, and any one of a number of papers.
“Synthetic Super Fine” is a good basic paper, as is “Rougher.” “Watercolor” makes great rocks,
while “Scratchy” works well for tree trunks. (See Figure 6.)

• Registration Marks
With the drawing file active, on the canvas in some part of the image that will remain white when
the drawing is finished, create an X for a registration mark with a 1-pixel “Flat Pen” brush with
the “Straight Lines” button checked on the Draw Style end of the Controls: Brush palette .
On the layers palette, create a new layer, zoom in to about 500%, and make a
second registration mark precisely on top of the first (this is because layers can get
accidentally out-of-alignment; do this every time you create a new layer).

• Begin drawing on the new layer
The strokes will look like blacks marks on white paper, but they will actually be black marks on a
transparent layer with the white of the canvas showing through. Do not draw on the canvas
itself or you will curtail the advantages of working with layers. If you accidentally draw on the
canvas, you can select it all, edit/copy, and edit/paste onto a new layer; then fill the canvas with
white. You will have to keep this layer on the bottom of the stack because it is not transparent.

Figure 6. Nine swatches of paper textures done with the Charcoal brush.

• Drawing with white over dark
In digital drawing, negative spaces can be drawn positively; for example, lots of small white
flowers on a dark plant are easier to create and look much more alive when done as white
marks over a dark background (instead of drawing the black all around the edges of each of the
white flowers). When using white over black, it is important to remember to check “Invert” on
the Papers palette or the strokes will look mushy. (See Figure 7).

• Using Layers to Separate Colors, Lines, Tones, Solids, and Paper Textures
When drawing with white over darks, it is a good idea to put the white on a separate layer
because it soon becomes confusing as to whether it is under (on the canvas) or over the black
layer. If the whites are all on their own layers, toggling the layers’ eye icons will show where
they are. It is also a good idea is to keep fine lines, broad lines, solids, tones, and secondary
paper textures, both for black and for white, each on its own separate layer. This greatly
simplifies revisions, because you can redraw or add to one without affecting the others.
(See Figure 8.) Be sure to lock your layers, except for the one you’re drawing on to avoid
mixing lines and tones or blacks and whites accidentally. Try not to have more than a couple
overlapping tone layers done with the same paper texture or the texture will look corrupted.

If many multiple layers makes your file too big for your machine, create separate files for
each category: colors, lines, tones, solids, and secondary paper textures. When done,
collapse the layers in these files into one layer and Edit/Copy, Edit/Paste it into the main
drawing. (Here’s where the registration marks come in.) Save an uncollapsed version
of the files in case of revisions. The hardest thing about drawing on a computer is not being
able to see both close-up and far away at the same time. You can see the paper texture
best at 100% zoom, but you can’t see how your pencil strokes are relating to the overall
image. If you zoom out to see the whole image, you can’t see what you’re doing with your
pencil. Partly, experience helps overcome this, but there are also some strategies for dealing
with it.

Figure 7. This shows white marks drawn as positives against a black background.

• Best Zoom Levels for Drawing Large Images
Broad areas of tone done with big brushes can be done zoomed way out or “Zoomed To Fit.”
Fine details done with small brushes are best done anywhere from 200 – 300% zoomed-in.

• Using the Reference Photo
The reference photograph is an invaluable aid in orienting you within the drawing and in helping
you to keep your brushstrokes in sync mentally with the overall image. This is why the initial
work you do on the photograph is such a key component of the digital drawing process.
Whichever technique described below is employed, it will accomplish the same thing as
projecting a slide onto a wall or a drawing surface, only it’s a lot more convenient; it
avoids cartooning; and the photo doesn’t fade.

Copyright © 2002 Martha Jane Bradford. All rights reserved. For more information, see www.marthavista.com.