Learning Digital Painting

The Adventure Begins!

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August 2025. The start of a great big adventure! A great big artistic adventure, featuring a new road to traverse, literally and figuratively. After getting accepted into the MFA program at Liberty University I found myself packing my bags and traveling nearly 1,200 miles to begin this new chapter. Now here I am, a student ready for learning, ready to grow as an artist, and to be truly challenged by my teachers and fellow students. It is such a joy to be an art student, I thank God for this amazing gift!

Starting out my classes in the fall I took a course in digital painting. I haven’t spent much time in the digital painting world so this was indeed a fun challenge! The last time I did digital art was during my time in community college about 8 years ago. That being said, I had a lot to learn, and pretty much needed to go over all the basics and fundamentals of the program and techniques. I was so blessed to have the professor I did! She was an amazing digital artist, a great teacher who helped us all learn no matter what skill level we were at, and she knew the programs & equipment very well. (we used photoshop & wacom cintiqs in class) I have learned so much from that class and there is so much more to keep learning!!

Digital painting is just as much an art medium to learn as watercolors, pastels, charcoal, etc. It is an amazing tool with so many options and functions! It allows for a huge variety of colors, textures, and brushes, not to mention all the transforming tools, the layering, and the blending modes. It is an amazing medium to work with and it has so many possibilities.

We started out the semester learning the basics of the program and how to use our cintiqs. We all took part in value studies and material cubes to get ourselves used to using this exciting new art form.

After our initial warm up projects we started on the main projects. Our main projects were first, a still life, second, an environment, and third, a character. All of these projects would be completed over a series of weeks where we would have a final piece at the end that had been revised and polished.

Our creative process started with a week of thumbnail sketches and value drafts, followed by a week of color studies, and finally ending with our final work of art. Each class we would look at each others’ works and share what each of us did well and where to improve our work. It was a very helpful and insightful atmosphere that really pushed us as artists to keep pressing into our work.

Our first main project was our still life. I really enjoyed sketching out the different ideas, playing with the values, and creating the final piece.

My goal was to have a still life that was cozy while giving a bit of nostalgia. I liked the idea of making a piece that was interesting to look at and be an inviting place you’d like to linger.

After going back and forth on some coloring options I completed the work. My favorite part to paint was most definitely the rainy window!!

After the still life we moved on to the environment. I had so much fun in all the sketches and value studies, which needed a lot of tuning up to be sure, but it was fun to get the ideas down!

While I went back and forth between the different environments I decided to move forward with the ice skating concept. Fun fact, I love ice skating and it is a dream of mine to skate on a frozen lake someday :)

While this final work is not my proudest moment, I like to recognize all my work because it’s a great way to track how we improve! As much as I like the concept for this one, I want to someday revisit this and make it into a new final work. In this digital effort I realized that I used too many different brushes and the style of the finished work was not consistent throughout the piece. Some parts look more realistic, while others look too cartoony. That being said, my lesson learned was that sometimes, less options is more. Moving forward I decided to stick to just a few brushes and not to get carried away with all the options at my fingertips. 

With this in mind I moved on to our final project, the character! Yay! I love designing characters and drawing people. I find it so much fun and really liked a lot of my sketches. I will probably come back to these concepts and make them into finished pieces too! Another fun fact, one of my favorite flowers is the lily of the valley!

For this final project we did have an extra week to make further refinements, which was helpful and allowed for more feedback! I really enjoyed seeing everyone’s work and finishing the class on this project. 

Overall, I loved the digital painting class and I will be continuing to use the skills I learned as I move forward as an artist. I look forward to all the new lessons yet to be learned in this digital world. One of my favorite resources that my professor shared with us is a wonderful starting point for anyone interested in digital painting! Check it out > ctrlpaint.com

Finally, my favorite thing about the class was the community of artists engaging in the weekly class critiques. As funny as it sounds to say I loved the critiques, it truly was so helpful and I learned a lot from them. It is so helpful to see through the eyes of other artists to see what they notice and how they perceive the works of art. The ability to see things from others’ perspectives is a great skill to have and is where a lot of growth happens. If you ever feel nervous about receiving a critique, I hope you can find this encouraging and remember to let it be a learning opportunity! The more you receive honest feedback, the more you will be challenged to get out of your comfort zone and step into a higher potential! How exciting!!

Keep learning! Keep being creative!

Jesus Bless You Abundantly,

Christina