Digital Portraits – Draw Female Characters in Natural Light (German, Eng sub)

Learn to illustrate striking digital portraits with a focus on lighting effects, textures, and natural details
Raide is an illustrator known for her portraits featuring strong female characters, where she celebrates the beauty of both women and nature by combining the two. When she’s not sharing her work on her Instagram account, RaidesArt, which has earned her more than 360K followers, she devotes her time to drawing characters and storyboards for publishers and studios like HarperCollins and the German cartoon series Simsala Grimm.

In this course, learn how to illustrate an expressive portrait with a strong emphasis on the use of light. Raide teaches you the basic concepts of drawing faces digitally and adding lighting effects, shares her personal workflow, and guides you through the process of creating your own characters using these tools. By the end, you’ll understand the relationship between light and shadow and know how to incorporate realistic lighting into your stylized artwork.

What will you learn in this online course?
Meet your teacher for this online course, Raide. She tells you about her artistic journey as a freelance illustrator, her influences, and what currently inspires her.

Begin by creating a mood board to compile ideas for your portrait. Raide then introduces you to her preferred digital drawing program, ArtRage, and shows you the basic settings along with its main features. Learn the fundamentals of anatomy to draw realistic faces and experiment with adding primary colors, soft shadows, and highlights to your line art. Your teacher also demonstrates how to brighten up your drawings with different lighting effects and conditions.

Now it’s time to start working on your final project. Using your compiled references, draw a rough sketch to outline your composition and determine the color scheme. Sharpen your line work, defining the other individual details as you go, before adding shadows and color to your portrait.

Move on to Photoshop and enhance the colors in your piece to make them shine. Retouch a few of the finer details, like strands of hair, using a variety of thin brushes. To wrap up the course, see how to export your finished file in ArtRage and share it on social media.

What is this course’s project?
Draw a portrait based on a reference photo with a strong emphasis on the interplay between light and shadow, while focusing on important details such as your character’s eyes and the texture of their face, as well as the overall mood and a natural background.

Who is this online course for?
Anyone who wants to draw stylized portraits with realistic lighting effects using digital tools.

Requirements and materials
Basic knowledge of anatomy, especially facial anatomy, and a drawing program would be useful, but not essential.

For materials, you need a computer with access to Photoshop or ArtRage; you could also use a graphics tablet to complete the course.