Many digital painters that I know always zoom out so that the entire image is visible at all times while they paint, rarely if ever zooming in at all, to keep the entire image in perspective. This seems fairly common among people who have Cintiqs, as the monitor is so large and you can swivel it to different drawing angles.

On top of this, I would offer a few more bits of advice:

1. LEARN YOUR KEYBOARD SHORTCUTS. I remember reading about a study where they compared Photoshop users who knew the keyboard shortcuts vs. those who didn’t, and discovered that people who knew and used the shortcuts worked around TEN TIMES faster than the rest. If you are constantly moving your brush hand to choose different tools, select different brush sizes, zoom levels, menu items, etc. it’s a good idea to take the time to learn those shortcuts. Along with that, don’t be afraid to customize some shortcuts to make them more comfortable for you. Also, Intuos tablet and Cintiq users have the many programmable buttons and sliders, to which you can apply many of these shortcuts, which also help immensely. Finally, if there’s a task you do often that require a lot of menu item choosing, consider setting up an Action to handle it and assign a keyboard shortcut to it.

2. TAKE ADVANTAGE OF “DIGITAL MAGIC.” There are many repetitive things that the computer can shorten drastically for you. In addition to keyboard shortcuts and Actions, there are many kinds of customizable brushes that you can set up to do things that are tedious to do by hand. A good example is drawing or painting trees or rocks, especially in the background; creating “leaf” and “rock” brushes in Photoshop or Painter can let you render out your background in seconds instead of hours. You can do this with buildings, vehicles, tech gear, etc. as well. This assumes of course that the style and assignment permits this, but if so this can really save you time. You can always go into the quickly-rendered parts and hand-paint some bits to relieve any repetition and make it more real.

One thing I do a lot is to use Painter’s Glow Brush to create lighting effects and rich, glowing flesh tones, as it lets me do things in a few swipes of the brush that would take many minutes using digital oil or airbrush.

Another idea: let’s say you’re doing a brick apartment building with a lot of windows. Instead of suffering through drawing all those bricks and repetitive windows, especially in perspective, draw one side of the building as if you’re looking straight at it, an “elevation” view. You can quickly fill an area with a brick line pattern, then draw a single window and place it numerous times. Then, use Photoshop’s Transform tools to tweak it so that it’s in the proper perspective and placement.

If you’re doing comic-book or cartoon-style coloring, the *free* BPelt “Multifill” and “Flatten” filters are indispensable and can save you many hours of work. Google them, you’ll find both the filters and lots of tutorials on how to use them.

These are just a few examples, with a little thought you can come up with many more. Doing things like this don’t have to make your work look “digital,” use your head and creativity to hand-tweak things to make them “live.”

3. LEARN FROM OTHER DIGITAL ARTISTS. Everyone has their own way of doing things digitally. You will often find that someone else has found a really fast way of doing something that takes a long time. Forums like CGTalk, ConceptArt.org and many, many others are full of digital artists working in the entertainment industry that share tons of process advice and software knowledge.

I would also HIGHLY recommend the wonderful video tutorials offered by The Gnomon Workshop (www.thegnomonworkshop.com), Massive Black (www.massiveblack.com) and Lynda.com (www.lynda.com), as they are generally quite inexpensive ($30-50) and full of great technique knowledge from the masters of the digital art field. I got a great deal out of Ryan Church’s “Introduction to Painter” disc. These videos are now all available for purchase and download, apart from the Lynda.com stuff which is subscription-based ($25/month).

You can speed yourself up immensely by trying these things, so get to it!

To address one aspect of the original art income, it is possible in some cases to generate further income from all-digital artwork by selling prints in the $10-20 range. Success at this is not guaranteed, but many people have been able to equal or exceed the revenue they’d get from selling a physical original in this way. In general it’s found that if you’re an artist whose originals are in demand, high-quality digital prints will sell to the same audience. Your mileage may vary, of course – it depends highly on the tastes of your collectors!