WeiChen Studio | Five Recommended Online Digital Painting Courses for Beginners

On the digital painting road — from the first introductory course, through encountering different styles and techniques, gradually forming your own drawing style — your technique grows more refined and your brushwork more agile. From line art and composition through coloring, detail adjustment, and lighting, these seemingly simple steps hide many techniques and much knowledge of structure and color, out of which your own style is born. Many legendary artists endured long, hard, determined journeys — like Hajime Isayama (Attack on Titan), who recently sparked a fresh wave of enthusiasm, and the pen-wielding legends Hayao Miyazaki, Takehiko Inoue (Slam Dunk), Yoshihiro Togashi (YuYu Hakusho), and Akira Toriyama (Dragon Ball). Many comic artists walked rocky roads, yet their resolve forged timeless legends. To this day, people still draw innovative, exquisitely detailed characters by hand, and the pen tip's charm draws many onto the digital painting road — whether to honor a burning love of drawing or to build a second specialty and become a full-time artist. Today we introduce five online digital painting courses by instructor Wei Chang, himself devoted to digital painting, so you can enter the digital painting world with him — starting from the basics, step by step, and creating a style of your own!

Recommended Online Digital Painting Courses

1. Foundation course — conceiving a work, shaping forms and character traits

Course name: Photoshop Digital Painting Basics x Personalized Creature Character Design
Level: (for beginners new to PS)
Length: 2hr 40m (materials included)
Course portal: https://weichenstudio.com/courses/ps-character/

This course suits friends with no digital painting foundation and those unfamiliar with Photoshop. You'll learn plenty of fundamentals, plus the biggest hurdle before the first stroke: conception. People can spend forever brainstorming a piece, unable to organize their thoughts quickly — yet pre-drawing conception shapes personality, style, color mood, and the arrangement of accessory details. Without a complete concept, it's hard to achieve distinctiveness, and even an original character won't leave a deep impression! In this course, Wei Chang teaches you how to rapidly spark design ideas and create more unique, memorable characters!

Course content: ※ There are many more details — click the portal link to learn more!

• Understanding PS fundamentals
• How to conceive a work efficiently
• Line art — scaffold principles that make coloring and rendering in Photoshop easier
• Basic coloring concepts
• The AO (ambient occlusion) method explained — building light
• Basic concepts of impasto painting
• Building volume and fine-tuning

From this course you can build the most essential digital painting foundation and construct your technique alongside the teacher — line art alone will take a good stretch of training to firm up your fundamentals!

2. Ink-style digital painting course

Course name: Ink-Style Characters
Level: (for intermediate students)
Length: 2hr 24m (materials included)
Course portal: https://weichenstudio.com/courses/ink-painting/

Unlike ordinary saturated color, ink wash carries a delicate, luminous charm. This ink-style course suits friends interested in figure painting and in ink aesthetics. Wei Chang walks you through how to paint ink-wash strokes, how to apply them in figure painting, and which brush techniques work for digital fine-brush figures.

Course content: ※ There are many more details — click the portal link to learn more!

• The all-important base line art — different ways to sketch
• Understanding the ink style — concepts and techniques
• The key to good figure painting — facial features broken down one by one
• Understanding and applying color — painting naturally luminous skin tones
• Reviewing and rounding out your work — finishing well

3. Corel Painter grayscale character course

Course name: Corel Painter Grayscale Character Painting | Draw Dynamic Character Illustrations
Level: (for intermediate to advanced students)
Length: 10hr 54m (materials included)
Course portal: https://www.yottau.com.tw/course/intro/969#intro

In this course, even without any sketching or drawing foundation, you can comfortably pick up coloring and refinement — an entry-level course friendly to complete beginners, following Wei Chang through Corel Painter to draw characters full of motion!

Course content: ※ There are many more details — click the portal link to learn more!

• Painter fundamentals — with small exercises
• Pre-design thinking for dynamic figures — analyzing structure, perspective, movement, and visual guidance
• The grayscale method — presenting light, shadow, and color
• A structured view of the painting workflow — from design and refinement to completion

4. Western-style character design

Course name: [WeiChen Studio] Photoshop Digital Painting Techniques - Western-Style Character Design
Level: (for intermediate students)
Length: 10.3hr (materials included)
Course portal: https://www.tibame.com/course/402

In this course you'll learn to build a character's overall aesthetics as rigorously as an anatomy class — from facial muscle structure, basic skeleton, and limbs through to clothing design. A complete understanding of human structure lets you draw characters with real structural grounding, instead of composing aimlessly from imagination.

Course content: ※ There are many more details — click the portal link to learn more!

• Head structure — creating perfect facial proportions
• Tinting the portrait — from grayscale to color schemes and blending
• Human body concepts — skeleton, muscles, proportion
• Character design — creating a unique character
• Real commission experience — client communication, contracts, and more

5. Photoshop scene design that pushes visual limits

Course name: [WeiChen Studio] Photoshop Scene Design: Pushing Visual Limits
Level: (for intermediate students)
Length: 7.5hr (materials included)
Course portal: https://www.tibame.com/course/840

However striking a character is, it still needs a scene to frame and support it. Scene design highlights a character's personality and backstory, presenting the character more completely! In this scene course you'll learn how to use proportion to create a sense of space, then apply natural color and lighting to build depth and tension! A professional scene artist can work across fields — game art, television, film, and other specialized scene design. Recommended for anyone hoping to work in game art and design game scenes. The course content is below, and you can click the course link to learn more!

Course content: ※ There are many more details — click the portal link to learn more!

• Basic scene design — perspective concepts
• Preparation and concept integration — shape tools and perspective guide lines
• Scene color concepts — grayscale methods, layer usage, painting air into the image
• Key steps before finishing (lots of highlights — click the portal to unlock)

Summary

After all these courses, you've surely noticed how much detail lives in even a single character illustration — from clothing and accessories down to muscles and skeletal proportions. A professional image takes more than picking up a pen; there's endless technique to train. Build steadily from the fundamentals, and through practice your feel for structure and color grows ever finer. WeiChen's online courses never expire, so we suggest buying courses in stages, training step by step, and creating ever better work. The five courses recommended today are all by instructor Wei Chang of WeiChen Studio 維真電繪筆記, a full-time illustrator with extensive experience — game characters, book covers, digital painting instruction, animation concept art, art outsourcing commissions, and more — who has also taught at colleges and universities and held lectures on multimedia and character and scene design. He hopes to use his own painting experience to help students grow their skills and help working professionals build a second specialty. WeiChen also offers other paid and free online courses, recommended to every companion on the digital painting road — we look forward to meeting you there!

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