Free online courseDigital Painting

Course Description

Improve your digital painting from the ground up with a practice-first course designed to take you from hesitant strokes to confident, professional-looking results. You will set up a solid workflow, choose the right tools, and learn how to work comfortably in Photoshop or alternative software, so you can start painting right away with the setup you already have.

Instead of relying on shortcuts, you will strengthen the foundations that make any style look better: clear drawing, strong shapes, believable form, accurate values, and readable texture. You will learn how brush settings affect edges and control, how to blend without muddying color, and how to make intentional decisions about sharpness, softness, and focal points so your images guide the viewer naturally.

As you progress, the course connects perspective, light, and color into a single way of thinking. You will train your eye to understand highlights and shadows, reflected and ambient light, occlusion, and material behavior, then use hue, value, and saturation to create mood without losing realism. Along the way, you will develop layer confidence: organizing files, masking cleanly, using blend modes to build shadows and lighting while protecting your underlying paint, and applying adjustments that help you iterate quickly.

The learning experience is anchored by hands-on painting studies that mirror real creative tasks: painting features like eyes and portraits, building still lifes that strengthen observation, exploring landscapes and environments, and pushing work from rough sketch through refined values, color, texture, and finishing touches. You will also practice designing characters and generating ideas with thumbnails and variations, helping you move beyond copying references into planning your own images.

To support your next step, the course closes with guidance on presenting your work: how to think about a portfolio, how to share effectively, and how to frame pieces for digital painting opportunities. By the end, you will have a repeatable process you can use for studies, illustrations, and portfolio projects, with skills that translate to any painting style you want to pursue.