Hi
I'm known as Cyberartist and when I get some spare time I enjoy Painting Digitally
Less mess and fuss. I'm not very good or classically trained my background is in Graphic arts and Multimedia production. Digital Art is not photo manipulation although that can be fun and uses some of the techniques, It is totally different as you can see by the picture below of the Site Owner. Obviously he cant fly and he was a little upset about being dropped from a plane so photo manipulation has its place.
As I'm often asked How its done I decided to take you through the basic steps. Firstly you will need a Paint Program you can start out with the one that comes with Windows its very limited but a good place to get a feel of the mouse. Yes all this will be done with a mouse not a graphics pad. If you like there are a lot of good paint programs available, at a range of costs. You Don't need Photo Shop CS2 for this I tend to use several programs but for this exercise I have used Corel Paint shop Pro X if you have older versions that will work just as well. I don't really wish to give an art lesion here I expect you have some feel already for that as I'm just not qualified to explain the subtly of light and shade.
I'm going to use just two tools the airbrush tool and the smudge brush to keep this as simple as possible. Starting with an idea I'll draw a little fantasy setting rocks waterfalls a lake and then we'll place a water sprite in the setting but first some simple outlines so we know were we are heading.
Next I'm keeping the amount of colours to blend down, this you can experiment with later but once you have placed them use the smudge tool to blend them as you want.
Again the size of the Smudge brush is important use it large on open areas and smaller to blend edges.
Now I'll add the water colours and blend again keeping the colour amount down to a basic few. I'm leaving a gap around the waterfall its not necessary with digital to do this just habit used to using the canvas white.
The grass and sky the same way once again I just left strips of white in the upper part of the sky to blend as clouds.
To get the water fall falling drag the stroke in a down ward motion this give the feeling of movement and to create a mist effect try some of the more unusual brushes and reduce the opacity by half.
In the hope of just giving you the basics I haven't given the picture a lot of detail but our water spirit requires a little so as you already know some of the blending and as this is not an Art lesson as such I'll will jump ahead a little.
At this point we have a head and neck and almost finished hair, one tip here is to make good use of the eye dropper colour picker. Any colour that's on screen can be sampled, picked up with the eye dropper giving you a change of colour accurate to what you need to work with play with this feature if your not familiar with it.
Like I said it needs more detail an average painting take me about three hours
This took a half an hour so it's a little raw but I hope it helps those that have been asking....
Adding your comment:
I'll have to rty out that smuging thing 
I'v never tryed anythign like that. Your so talinted 
I hope the picture wasn’t too racy for you but a bit of spice make all things nice lol The Picture of Kevin didn’t take long its way easier to blend two pictures together I just painted the cape in. I did that to brighten up his authors page. I liked the digital art 101 I might steal that 
thanks for dropping by
