How to Render a Digital Painting for Idiots (A cheap excuse for me to show off my latest drawings)

I while ago, probably back in grade 8, I too was a baby digital artist who had no clue what the word “render” even meant. This blog post will be a short guide giving you, the viewer, a few tips on how to start rendering and levelling up your drawings.

Back when I was in my no line art phase, I had a bit of an epiphany. It all started with this OC sheet of one of my characters that I made a while back.

(I KNOW IT’S CRINGE GRADE 8 WAS A HARD TIME FOR EVERYBODY OKAY..)

This was the first time I ever rendered something, and I did it totally on accident. I didn’t even realize what I was doing. Obviously it still looks pretty rough, since it was my first time attempting to render something, but it looked so much better and had a real sense of form compared to what I had been doing previously. Here’s an example:

Now, what even is rendering? No one had really thought to make an explicit definition of what the hell it was, and it led to me discovering it WAYY later than I should have even though I’d seen people talking about it all over Tiktok. Rendering, in its purest form, is basically drawing over a sketch to create a much more polished looking drawing than you had before. When I render, I totally skip over the process of line art. I take my sketch, add in base colours, and then I go in and mess around until it looks right. You can choose to do Line art and render over that instead, but I think it’s pretty pointless.

There is a little more of a process than just that. I have a sort of “order of operations” for what I do first and what I save for last. I start by colour picking the character than I’m rendering’s skin tone and saturate it slightly, grabbing a slightly redder colour for a sort of blush. It’s supposed to be subtle, but if the character is actually blushing I usually make it stronger. After I go in on the face with some warm/cool colour variations, I switch to rendering the hair. Next is the clothing, and then I’m pretty much done. You can take the rendering process and make it your own, adding in your unique little steps to achieve whatever style you want.

Now, of course the rendering you do will be different depending on what kind of style you want to replicate. My art is mostly semi-realism with a slight cartoony affect to it, meaning if you want to learn how to render for a more anime art style this probably isn’t the place to do it.

Basic steps so far: Let’s cover them.

1. Create a sketch. It can be anything.

2. Colour it in with the most basic base colours possible. You can go in with details like the whites of the eyes if you want (if you drew a person), but you really don’t need to.

3. Start drawing over your original sketch on a separate layer. You can mess around with colour and saturation to make your piece really pop.

4. Draw over almost every pencil mark you can see. You can draw over lines with a Lineart pencil or any basic procreate brush (for your first time you shouldn’t worry too much about covering every little thing, it doesn’t matter too much. As you progress you should start to get more detailed on your own).

See the difference?

5. Now you have your fully rendered drawing, and you can add stuff like overlays. I use procreate so I wouldn’t really know how to add them or what you call them in other apps.

Hope you learned something. You’re welcome and thank you for reading.