Digital Cartoon Painting with Chad Baldwin Review

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If you are interested in digital arts and specifically in digital painting, I would like to tell you about Chad Baldwin’s Digital Cartoon Painting video tutorial collection. It is a series of 5 videos on:

• Cartoon drawing.
• Character design.
• Painting characters that look 3D.
• Lighting and shading a scene.
• Vector Cartoons (Illustrator / Flash)

Digital painting as a medium has recently become mainstream and if you are an artist you should be more than ever interested in adding this tool to your artistic repertoire. If you have worked with Photoshop before and you are thinking about making the transition into digital painting, this series will help you discover the wonders of Corel Painter, a great digital painting software.

Even if you don’t have Painter (you can get a free trial here),Chad has included a special blending brush that will allow you to do everything he does in Painter inside your familiar Photoshop environment. Chad uses Photoshop for editing and final color corrections or if he needs to add a special effect.

Of course, if you have never used any digital art software before like Photoshop and are just curious about digital painting, Chad’s detailed video lessons (some of the videos go for more than 2 hours) can be a great starting point for you. Just pickup 1 or 2 lessons then see if digital painting is for you and then perhaps get the entire collection. I recommend that you go to the Video Tutorials page and then start at a video that matches on your level of training.

What I found great about Chad’s tutorials is that he is always telling you what’s going on inside his mind at all times, why he is using a specific brush, what is he trying to accomplish, what he feels about the intermediate results, etc. Hearing this internal conversation is a huge bonus because you really feel that you are sitting next to him when he’s creating a digital painting, instead of the usual tutorial in which the artist does a session of accelerated video playing or what is known as “speed painting”. Speed painting doesn’t help you learn because everything is moving so fast and there’s no stop no breaks and no way of knowing why or what the artist is thinking or using to accomplish the task.

By following along with Chad in his video series you will be able to:

• Explore and design your own cartoon characters.
• Develop your characters completely from simple rough sketches to fully 3D-looking paintings.
• Create a scene that is beautifully colored and lit.
• Create artwork that can be blown to gigantic proportions without losing quality using vector tools.

If you are wondering how the digital medium works, how to get started on digital painting, how to set up characters, add shading and lighting and organize your layers effectively and cleanly, go take a look at Chad’s Digital Cartoon Painting video tutorial series.

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