If you're composing the rough draft of an essay and you're doing it on paper, anytime you change your mind, you'd have to do lots of erasing or cross things out. Do that same essay on the computer and you have the flexibility to cut, to paste, to undo, to spell check. And the knowledge that these tools are available to you, I think, has a radical effect on the way that you write. You're just willing to take more risks. The difference between a traditional painting and a digital painting is really similar. And my argument is once you understand the options that you have, you are going to take a different approach to the image making process. So without getting too specific about the tools I'm using now, don't worry about taking notes. Just watch the variety of techniques that I approach this spaceship with. Here you can see I'm starting with a humble sketch. I did it on a sketchbook page, snapped a photo, brought it into Photoshop. This is a great start. It's very traditional. But now I need to make a cleaner line drawing. So I'm just going to blow it up, make it a little bit brighter, de-emphasize the line so I can draw right on top of them. So here I'm enlarging an image in much the way you would have done with vellum and a sketchbook page. But I'm just happy to be doing that directly on the computer. The next step is to paint with opaque paint. So here I've chosen a few colors and I'm starting to apply them to the canvas. And you might notice that I'm actually painting underneath the lines. So this right here is the first uniquely digital thing. I made the lines nicely and now I'm painting but I don't have to worry about covering up the lines. They are totally separate. Now you notice I'm being a little bit sloppy. I'm actually painting right outside of the border of the spaceship. Well that's because I know that I have the ability to force everything to stay inside the lines. So I'm going to take a break from painting for a sec here and just define the border of this spaceship. Then once I close it, I can say Photoshop, keep all of my strokes inside of the shape. And now I can make big, confident lines and it doesn't matter if I stay inside the lines or not, it's all going to be forced into that shape. Chipping ahead a little bit now I want to add in the background. Well I can keep these totally separate with layers. So here I'm blocking in the background with big gestural marks and I don't have to worry about messing up the spaceship. When I'm happy with the basic forms now it's time to add those surface details. Some I can sketch in by hand. But there are certain things that just make more sense to prepare in a separate document. So here I've got some just graphic shapes that are going to help make this spaceship look more sci-fi. And I just made them an illustrator. Bring them straight into my Photoshop document. Whop them into respective. Lock the image and then I can just change their colors. Using a similar technique I can just add in a big racing stripe, not worrying about messing up the artwork underneath. And sometimes you want photo realistic details to just add that little extra something. So here I've just grabbed bits and pieces from photos of a jet engine and I can drag them right into my document, skew them into place, change the colors, erase away what I don't need. And now I've got these realistic details without actually doing a whole lot of painting. And to finish things off I'm going to dip into what I describe as photo editing. So now I have essentially a finished painting but what if I don't like some of the colors? Well it is trivially easy to make wide sweeping changes to the colors without making a single brushstroke. And these are tools designed for photographers but they work just as well for painters. And just like traditional painting the final phase of an image is polish and this just takes time. But eventually this is what we're left with. Now I'm not sure what your preconceived notion of digital painting looks like. But in this short image I use drawing, I use painting, I use collage and I use photo editing. And that is by no means a comprehensive list of the tools available for digital artists. I hope you weren't taking notes because we've got plenty of time to get into the specifics. The major takeaway I think you should leave with is that digital painting is a really broad definition. It's important that you understand art but beyond that what I hope to do is to show you what tools are available to you. And once you know what's possible I think it'll change the way you paint. So if you're still interested in digital painting stay tuned. The next video is to watch are the digital painting 101 series. Here we finally open Photoshop and start to get our hands dirty. So get your stylus and I'll see you in the next video.