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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jürgen Hubert" data-source="post: 3235866" data-attributes="member: 7177">After the success of my recent <a href="http://www.enworld.org/showthread.php?t=174110" target="_blank">Cartography Workshop</a>, I thought I'd start another workshop - this time on digital artwork in general, with the eventual goal of being able to create original artwork.And this thread is intended for absolute beginners. You need not ever have had any experience with creating digital artwork before - or, indeed, with creating art in general (beyond that possibly taught in schools...). If you have any questions, no matter how naive it may sound, don't hesitate to ask - someone (either me or other people around here) surly will try to answer them. (And for that matter, I will likely also have some questions - I am still very much a beginner myself, and though I have made some progress, I am still nowhere near as good as I would like).But first, the basics. What you need for this thread - at the least, what you need to follow my instructions - is a <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphics_tablet" target="_blank">graphics tablet</a>. A graphics tablet is a nifty device you can connect to one of your USB ports on your computer. Tablets have a flat "sensor" area, and a special "pen" that you can move around on the sensor area - and the cursor will move around in the exact same manner on the screen! Additionally, if you press the pen against the tablet, the computer will interpret it as if you pressed the left mouse button. With a properly installed graphics program, you can thus "draw" on the screen in pretty much the same way in which you draw something on a piece of paper with a conventional pen! While you can draw images on the screen with an ordinary mouse, using a tablet allows for much more natural hand movements and is much easier to do. Try it out once, and you will never want to go back.I recommend a tablet made by Wacom, which are pretty much universally considered to be the best on the maket. I bought their cheapest one for €50, and it was worth every cent. Not only don't they need any batteries within the pen (which makes the pens large and clumsy, and forces you to periodically buy new batteries), but they also have a nifty little feature called "pressure sensitivity", meaning that the tablet senses just how much you press the pen against it - and that is an invaluable tool for digital art, as will be shown later.You also need a graphics program. For this, I recommend <a href="http://www.gimp.org/" target="_blank">GIMP</a>, an Open Source program freely available for a multitude of platforms which can do most of the same things that commercial programs such as Photoshop can do. Download it, install it, and be free from the World of Pain that is MS Paint.If you can get your hands on them, you can also use Photoshop, Painter, or similar commercial programs - they should work just fine for what I am about to teach, but some of the commands might work in slightly different ways. But the differences should be minor enough so that you shouldn't have any difficulties.Finally, I'd also recommend the <a href="http://wiki.rpg.net/index.php/RESOURCES:_Art" target="_blank">Art Tutorial Links List</a> I have painstakenly assembled over at the RPGNet Wiki this summer. This list has tutorials on a vast range of different subjects, and should provide you with plenty of fodder for your own artistic experiments. BTW, if you find a nifty tutorial somewhere online, and it is about something that's not covered in that list, please add it to the list! Future generations of would-be artists will thank you.   <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /></blockquote>

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