Digital painting is an established art medium that typically combines a computer, a graphics tablet, and software of choice. The artist uses painting and drawing with the stylus that comes with the graphics tablet to create 2D paintings within a digital art software. There are multiple techniques and tools that are utilized by digital artists, the first being digital brushes. These come standard with all digital art programs, but users can create their own by altering their shape, texture, size, and transfer. Many of these brushes are created to represent traditional styles like oils, acrylics, pastels, charcoal, and airbrushing, but not all. Other effective tools include layers, lasso tools, shapes, and masks. Digital painting has evolved to not just mimic traditional art styles, but fully become its own technique. Digital painting is used by amateur and professional artists alike. Its use is particularly prevalent in commercial production studios that create games, television, and film. There are multiple reasons for this which applies to amateur artists as well. Digital painting enables artists to experiment with different techniques and colors easily as its use of layers, the undo function, and save files, make it a non-destructive work process. Artists can always return to an earlier state within the art piece so nothing is ever truly lost. This not only saves time but also materials while giving the artist more freedom to create. Comparison with traditional painting There are multiple differences between traditional and digital painting. The first is that traditional painters paint on a surface such as a canvas or paper and digital artist paints on a screen. This is a big difference because there’s a gap between the stylus nib and the screen sensor. This is called parallax. Newer tablets have reduced parallax to a minimum level resulting in very little displacement between the nib and the results of the nib. Traditional painters also have to be more intentional, having to plan their surfaces and media to get the size and effect that they want, whereas digital artists have the freedom to alter their paintings throughout the entire process. Digital painting also takes up much less space. With traditional painting, it’s typical to have an easel, a palette, a place to put brushes, water to clean the brushes, rags, etc. Whereas with digital painting all that’s needed is a tablet, which is often small enough to fit in the painter’s lap.