Learning how to sketch and paint digitally

[Immortality]

Hello everyone,

I'm Immortality, this is my first post. Thank you to the founding members for hosting this forum, and my gratitude to all the participants also. I'm a beginning artist, and I greatly anticipate learning from you all.

I'm looking for video tutorials or even a (UK-based) online certified course provider that will teach me the basics of sketching and painting, on a digital medium (preferably Gimp, as this is the only software that runs on my ancient Windows 7 laptop). When I search online for: Learn how to draw on a digital medium, I'm offered plenty of results that teach already-accomplished artists how to use software, such as Photoshop, Krita, or Gimp.

But this is not what I'm looking for.
I want to learn the foundations of drawing and painting, not on paper but on software.

Could any give me some insightful feedback?

Kindly yours,

Immortality

[Enug]

Hello and welcome to the ArtRage forum.

Straight off, I don't have Gimp - however, I may be wrong, but as I understand it Gimp is a photo manipulation programme. There are many tutorials for using Gimp on YouTube but none of them show using the software to paint.

There are many painting programmes freely available. I Googled digital painting programs compatible with windows 7 and came up with quite a few. Once you find painting software you like I'm sure you will find tutorials on YouTube.

This is a forum for ArtRage, though some users will also incorporate other software into their painting. I use ArtRage solely in my work.

Have you tried ArtRage 4.0.6 which is compatible with Windows XP so may work with Win7. There are free demos of AR so you can try before you buy.;) If not compatible try out some of the free painting software offered and look on YT for tutorials. Sorry not to have been more helpful. Maybe someone else will join in with some other ideas.

[Somerset]

Hi!

I use GIMP since about 15 years. June is right that it is mainly an image editing software. But, as with Photoshop, you can of course also paint with GIMP. On the german GIMP Forum (closed some weeks ago) there was a woman who painted marvelous fantasy paintings with GIMP. So it works. But painting programs like ArtRage (my fave), Rebelle and others are much more convenient. Especially the interaction between the brushstrokes and the canvas texture and the plastic relief texture of the brush stroke are things that GIMP doesn't offer.

If you have a graphics tablet, in GIMP the Paint Dynamics are important, because they are to (de)activate and adjust the behaviour of the pressure sensitivity of your stylus. For closer informations for this feature, read the Online Help. Possibly you also have to activate the graphics tablet first in the Input Devices panel (menu "Edit"). You only have to set the entries of your tablet to "Screen" and save it. If it doesn't work, start GIMP with the stylus, not the mouse, and try again.

But as I already said, ArtRage is much more convenient for painting and offers much more opportunities for this.

[fablefox]

Hello everyone,

I'm Immortality, this is my first post. Thank you to the founding members for hosting this forum, and my gratitude to all the participants also. I'm a beginning artist, and I greatly anticipate learning from you all.

I'm looking for video tutorials or even a (UK-based) online certified course provider that will teach me the basics of sketching and painting, on a digital medium (preferably Gimp, as this is the only software that runs on my ancient Windows 7 laptop). When I search online for: Learn how to draw on a digital medium, I'm offered plenty of results that teach already-accomplished artists how to use software, such as Photoshop, Krita, or Gimp.

But this is not what I'm looking for.
I want to learn the foundations of drawing and painting, not on paper but on software.

Could any give me some insightful feedback?

Kindly yours,

Immortality

You are lucky. ArtStation trainings are free at the moment. I haven't watch this yet "Making the Most of Digital Painting Tools" but I think it might be what you wanted. Also check on older version of Krita (latest one on steam minimum is Win 8 while the latest on website seems min Win 10).

Long time ago I too have the same mistake thinking that painting digitally means you have access to all kind of brushes, undo and redo, eraser, backup saves, layers, and time saving ( in case of simulating water color or oil - which in real life you have to wait till it dry). it's like normal painting, except digitally (lets forget about those no undo or single layer artist for now). not helping is that some artist that you follow also doing it.

not until i learn clip studio from an artist that truly shows the power of digital (from grey scale -> color layer) to other layer manipulation (day scene turn to night scene) and much more that I realized I need to change my thinking in painting digitally. heck, even an old school comic artist that sadly bring the same mentality to digital, for so long, until the artist saw another artist draw Spawn in clip studio using brushes to instantly draw chain. that artist was like, i need to learn to draw digitally, like, DIGITALLY!

the video in question. which also talks about drawing "digitally".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPpksZToI6E

but i think in the end you really need to find out which software you really want to focus on - because sometimes the trick is software specific if it depending on certain tools.