TUTORIAL // giving your digital art a traditional feel
🕑 Added 2024-06-06 09:00:07 +0000 UTCNew month, new tutorial! ✨ This one is on giving your digital art a traditional feel, and talks about the different qualities that traditional art has that we can channel into our digital work. It’s about how we can give our digital art charm, appeal and warmth and avoid common mistakes like over-rendering specific details, creating too much contrast, and polishing away things that give our art the human touch. It’s also secretly a rejection of the AI art aesthetic, but that’s more of an undercurrent than a main topic ;)
The main brushes I use in this video are:
The MaCaLabs HB Pencil brush to sketch: http://cbr.sh/fg8up?ref=loish
The hard round brush and oil pastel brush I used comes from my own free brushset: https://loish.net/free-goodie-bag-for-digital-artists
The gritty butter brush comes from the Wes Gardner 2020 brushset: http://cbr.sh/kfv7sa?ref=loish
The noisy brush came from DaveMH’s brushset: https://gumroad.com/a/610981843/mpshg
I also mention another tutorial called soft & hard edges with the lasso tool. It elaborates more on my technique where I use the lasso tool to create selections and use a grainy brush to paint within that selection. You can find it here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/tutorial-soft-94305496
Here's the final result of the demo I did in the video:

And as always, here's a cheat sheet with the most essential information about this tutorial:


There's also a PDF version with clickable links at the bottom of this post. Hope you enjoy this tutorial! You should be able to turn captions on and off using the embedded player ❤ Let me know if you have any issues with it! And as always, feel free to ask any questions you may have after watching this video!
Comments
Jeannette
second time watching this tutorial and learned even more!!! thanks loish!!!
Loish
thanks so much ewa! I really do try to make the toipcs more general rather than just step-by-step technique based stuff. I feel like that is better for people's artistic growth!
Ewa
Your tutorials are truly applicable to any technique and style, and I've been wondering why that is the case; I've been going through some tutorials (I like coming back to them for inspiration, it always works) and I've just realised that it must be because the way you approach art is coming from somewhere much deeper than surface-level, rule-based creating <3 Thank you so, so much for sharing the wisdom you've gathered over many years, I've been admiring your art ever since DeviantArt days and I'm incredibly grateful you've kept sharing since! All the best!!