Role of digital painting in game design

Painting is self-discovery. Every good artist paints what he is. - By Jackson Pollock

Hi Friends!

Did you wonder ever about the amazing background designs in any game?

I am sure that you have played many games and want to know how these graphics designed?

We know that art is every where. Artist inspired with nature and create amazing work. When a game is designed, it involved with various process like story boarding, concept art, character and scene design, modeling, texturing, animation and development work.

In my previous article I mentioned about the graphic artist, today I will explain you how those amazing graphics convert into digital paintings, but let us first understand what is the Digital Painting all about?

As the name implies, “Digital painting” is the digital process of painting and creating artwork digitally on a computer. This is done through various painting software like Photoshop with the help of digital brushes as a main tool.

Not like the traditional painting in which painter needs a lots of color and brush which stroke on a drawing sheet or a canvas and the toughest part was that you need to do from beginning if the art work was not as per your expectation, the artist has the power of advanced painting software since it's less expensive and does not have any physical color and canvas to paint and we can also work on heavy files with quick brush strokes with no slack of time.

Also you can use advanced layers for your work to save time, like we have in software like Photoshop. So the benefit of digital painting using software is the that you paint or draw on various individual layers, So if you want to make changes in any part of the painting than you need to change something simply erase or edit that layer and add new one. That is not all that simple to accomplish with traditional paintings.

As now a days PCs are also so a lot quicker and more amazing it's significantly simpler to get into computerized painting. it's a need in the realm of 2D and 3d gaming. The main idea of behind any digital painting is to paint artwork digitally. 
 

There are various designers working on digital painting with different purpose. Some create artwork to represent their creative painting skills, other people work in media industries and produced awesome concept art for movies, gaming and also print media.

We can say there are below streams in which a digital painter can work:

1. 2D and 3D gaming
2. Movies
3. Books
4. Web Comics and Manga Creation
5. Print Comics
6. Magazine
7. Illustrated Fantasy Novel
8. Blogs

So for being a good you only need below physical devices:

1. Painting software like Photoshop, Corel PHOTO-PAINT which are enough powerful to lets you canvas your imagination into a illustrations.
2. A drawing tablet with drawing pencil, like Wacom drawing tablet with high-definition pen is the most prominent yet there are numerous tablet makers to glance through. 

You can also create drawing with the help of mouse, but it needs lots of practice. Where as with the help of digital drawing tablet you can draw art and produce final painting in short time interval.

The drawing tablet connect with computer and whatever you draw on it reflects with the software you used as painting program, thus the association with the PC and tablet gives you a chance to draw at first glance with an exceptional stylus pen.

As every art needs some learning time cycle so even if you are a good traditional painter or having an amazing drawing skills or imagination you needs a couple of week to get familiar with above process so that you can work digitally and canvas your imagination on digital media. If you are a graduate or even a teenager person you can start your career as a digital artist after doing some advanced digital painting courses or learn by yourself.

Now let us see what is the role of digital painting in game design:

Digital painting plays vital role during game design as it comes with approachability, comprehensibility, efficiency, productivity, creativity.

• Creativity: With the help of digital painting we can shown different shade of the art work.
  We can show how the character will look in different mood, how the game background will look while we play the game, how it narrate the storyboard of the game.
• Approachability: With digital painting you can check how the output will look like.
• Productivity: It enhance the productivity due to lower the chance of work revision and editing in scene look and feel.
• Efficiency: As there are various tools involved in digital painting so it produce faster output with minimal no of effort and hence increased the efficiency of artist.
• Comprehensibility: It helps us to able to be understood the various shades of the emotions we want to add in scene. 

Conclusion:

• In my opinion digital painting plays a very important role while considering gaming and other said domain. It not only helps you in terms of reducing cost of those physical materials but also provide feasibility to make any changes at any time of your development and production phase.
• Digital painting plays vital role during game design as it comes with approachability, comprehensibility, efficiency, productivity and creativity.
• The most important factor for any digital artist to create amazing art work is to have a artistic bent of mind along with knowledge and skill in digital software and is various tools.
• The benefit which Digital artists have over the traditional artist are various digital tools they possess, like a color palette having millions of colors, digital brushes, smudge, dodge, erasers, lasso, 2D and 3D effect, pattern, textures, clouds, ability to correct mistakes, instead of using a physical canvas or sketch book, digital artists would use a mouse or tablet.