Domestika Review: Natália Dias, Female Character Portraits in Procreate

 

Domestika is an online learning website that mainly caters towards the art and design community. Their courses cover a lot of topics from learning to paint and draw basics to game design and 3D design, craftmaking, photography etc. I was curious to try out a few of their courses and hopefully pick up some tips along the way.

I've been following Natália's lovely female portraits on Instagram for a while so I picked her course - Female Character Portraits in Procreate as my first Domestika course to learn from.

Natália is from Brazil so the audio is spoken in Portuguese but the subtitles are excellent and the lessons are easy to follow. There are five main units with the first two units being an introduction, basic overview of Procreate and a brief overview of anatomy, lighting and shading tips.

In the main project videos, Natália introduces the concept and theme, points out a few techniques then the rest of the video is of her painting in real-time. She is meticulous in her detailing and her paintings always exude so much life and joy. Her characters resemble a cool mix between anime characters and Alphonse Mucha's female portraits. 

I've picked up a number of handy tips from this course:

Use a grey background to reduce eyeglare from white background 
Create a moodboard and choose a colour palette
Mix and match faces, hair, clothing, poses from different female portraits
Use the liquify tool to adjust and correct the pencil sketch also check using a mirrored version
Draw the line art in separate parts: hair, face, clothing etc 
Flat colours come first, then the line art is coloured to complement the area it borders
Shading and highlights uses the smudge tool
Clipping layer is used a lot 

Here's how I got along with my geisha piece:

1. Mood board plus picked some colours using the eyedropper tool

2. Sketch phase: I based this pose on three different geisha photos

3. Line art stage. Fairly straightforward so far.

4. Flat colour stage - you can see I made an attempt to colour the line art too.

5. Shading and highlight - Natalia uses the smudge tool a lot and also uses the Add layer blend mode when applying lighter shades

6. Final piece, zoomed in.

I must admit, creating a digital painting in this manner was way outside my comfort zone. I can draw fairly well but I'm just not a good painter as I haven't had much practice. The geisha piece took me a long time to complete and I'm still not really happy with it. Compared to Natalia's portraits, my piece seems to lack life. That being said, it was a fun challenge to do and I learned a lot from the process. 

This Domestika course seems perfectly aimed at folk who already can draw and want to push themselves a little further. Complete beginners might want to check out the other online courses regarding anatomy, lighting and shading if they want their female portraits to be as good as Natalia's. But it's a decent course and Natalia offers a number of useful tips on how she creates her beautiful artworks.

The website also allows Domestika students to submit their work for others to see. Sometimes the teacher will comment too and answer questions. Ideally I'd like a bit more feedback and constructive critique but given the large number of people involved I can understand how this would not be feasible.

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