Digital painting can be a dangerous place if you're the sort of person who likes to fiddle, because there's always another brush to try, colour to pick, edge that could probably be a little softer. That's one of the things I like about traditional oil painter Jim Musil's work – his landscapes are full of colour and surface detail, yet the actual ingredients are pretty simple: big shapes, a limited palette and broad, obvious brush marks that he's happy to leave sitting there.
In many ways it's a very 'digital' style, and one I've drawn inspiration from when using the best digital art software. Musil works quickly, does relatively little blending, builds his paintings up in layers, and lets the brushwork remain part of the finished image – Musil has talked about his process in more detail on his website.
This is a useful workflow for digital artists to ‘steal’ because we've got an almost ridiculous number of ways to smooth, correct and polish everything… so let's do the opposite; let's try and keep things simple. It's something I do when reviewing the best drawing tablets: to test and have fun. Below, I go into a little detail on Musil's work and how you can draw inspiration from it (he also runs classes).
01. Don't start on white
Musil uses a warm orange-gold ground as the starting point for his paintings, using Quinacridone/Nickel Azo Gold mixed with glazing medium. You can adapt that idea digitally in about ten seconds by creating a layer underneath everything else and filling it with a warm ochre, orange or reddish brown. You don't need to cover it completely later, either; let little bits peek through between your strokes. This is lovely to do in Procreate (read our Procreate tutorials), or even in ArtRage using the Roller, which can pick out the grain in the digital paper, and it's easy to use to create a texture to paint over.
Sometimes in Rebelle I'll add paint directly into this 'wash' layer, using a dirty brush and letting the colours mix live and see what happens. I love to keep all the mess and abstraction in digital paintings, largely because I'm doing this for myself and having fun; there's no commercial goal.
It gives the whole painting a shared warmth and, perhaps more importantly, gets rid of that slightly clinical feeling you can get when every digital painting starts life on a perfectly white canvas.
02. Start with fewer colours
One interesting thing about Musil's process is how little he seems to need in terms of palette. He's talked about moving away from buying lots of different colours and instead mixing what he needs, even mentioning in the Ampersand blog how all those unused green paints sit around because he prefers mixing his greens from yellow and black.
You can replicate that idea very easily in Photoshop, Rebelle or Procreate – read our Procreate art secrets guide to how to easily set up a limited palette. Before you start, choose maybe five or six colours and stick with them. Pick a dark, a light, a warm colour, a cool colour, an accent, and something somewhere in the middle. If you're using reference photos, you can turn the colours into a simplified palette.
Then make the rest by changing the value and temperature of those colours rather than opening the picker every 30 seconds. It sounds restrictive, and it is, which is exactly why it's useful. You'll probably find that the colours start balancing and working with each other much more naturally.
03. Stop blending everything
Digital painting makes blending very easy, so we tend to do it whether the painting needs it or not. You paint two colours next to each other, grab a soft brush, smooth the transition, zoom in, smooth it again, and keep at it until all the personality is wiped away, or at least I do.
Musil's process is the opposite: he starts with big strokes and broad areas, then gradually works toward the details, rather than trying to make every transition perfectly smooth from the beginning.
Grab a reasonably opaque brush, make the sky with a handful of strokes, block in your trees as shapes, throw the highlights over the top, and resist the urge to polish every join and blend edges. Then zoom out to 25% or 50%; all those slightly scruffy marks start to work together.
04. Make your brush strokes meaningful
Ensuring each brush mark means something is another good habit to adopt. Don't think of a brush stroke as simply the thing that puts paint on the canvas, and instead think about what the stroke is doing. A long horizontal mark can describe water, while a vertical one can help sell a tree trunk, and diagonal strokes can lead the eye into a landscape. Short, broken marks can suggest foliage without forcing you to paint every leaf.
Musil's brushwork has this sense of direction, so the marks aren't simply texture sprinkled over a finished painting; they're helping construct the image. You’ll want a good drawing tablet to get the most out of this technique, as you’ll ideally need to adjust the brush mark by rolling the stylus in your fingers (Apple Pencil Pro and the best iPad for drawing are great here), but you don't need to download some enormous 300-brush pack to achieve Musil's look and feel.
A basic textured, opaque brush will do; then change the size, pressure, and direction, and let the marks vary. The important bit is resisting the urge to tidy them all afterwards. Also try using layers, and build up blocks of brushstrokes and colour from dark to light.
Try it yourself: give yourself 10 minutes and five colours.
Fill the canvas with a warm ground, block out the biggest shapes with a large brush, add another layer of chunky strokes, change the direction of those strokes to follow the forms and then, right at the end, add a handful of smaller marks.
Now stop, and don't do the usual thing of zooming in looking for problems. Don't start cleaning edges and don't add 14 new colours because you suddenly decide the sky needs a slightly different blue.
Zoom out and look at the painting as a whole. If the big shapes work, the colours hang together, and your brush marks have a bit of energy, you've probably got a more interesting image than you would after three hours of smoothing and fiddling.
With digital art software, we have endless brushes, infinite colours, and layers you can edit and tweak, so giving yourself fewer choices can actually make painting more interesting. That's been my overall take after looking at Musil's approach and adapting parts of it to digital painting.
