10 Digital Art Tips to Make You Draw Better and Faster

Article originally published on Wacom by CS Jones

If you like Ross Tran’s breeziness and visual effects, but find his over-the-top delivery a little overwhelming, Drawing With Moxie is for you.  In this video from earlier this year, he runs us through his top ten tips for every digital artist, using Photoshop CC on a Wacom Cintiq Pro 24 to demonstrate them all during a speedpaint of Pokemon’s Nessa.

Some are old saws you may have heard many times before but are still good to keep in mind while painting: “Remember to flip your canvas horizontally while drawing.”

Others are surprisingly simple, but versatile, Photoshop hacks you might not have thought to use: Like Taylor Oliveras in my last short, he makes excellent use of the lasso tool, using it to both block out areas for soft shading and carve hard shapes out of color fills.

“You can do basically anything with just a lasso tool and a soft brush.”

Yet others revolve around Photoshop tools artists often overlook: He uses the dreaded dodge tool to create great specular highlights on jewelry and skin. “It can be your best friend, but it is also a complete noob-slayer,” he aptly summarises.

And his final tip involves a certain correction tool that’s many artists‘ favourite hack, but that just as many never use at all. “If you’re delicate enough” with this tool, he shows us, “you can change expressions, move eyebrows around…” and use it to make quick corrections without redraws when you flip the canvas and inevitably notice something’s off.

(As a bonus, he also uses the transform tool to move limbs, a layer-based trick I’d never even thought of.)

Spiciest quote: “Brushes don’t matter much … All you need is a hard round brush, a soft round brush, and something that’s fully opaque.”

Tom “Moxie2d” Skender is a freelance artist, graphic/toy designer, livestreamer, and of course, Youtuber, from Melbourne, Australia.  He made his name doing Super Smash Brothers fanart just a few years ago, and since then—teaching himself—he’s rocketed to pro status, improving his art tenfold along the way.  

He specialises in anime art and does it flawlessly, so if you’re an otaku looking for an English-language Youtube teacher who knows the style inside and out, check out the rest of the channel.  He also streams every Saturday on Twitch.

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