How To Create a Pixel Canvas With Grease Pencil (for Painting)

Sophie Jantak is one of the leading Grease Pencil artists, mainly focusing on animals and nature scenes. In this video, she explores a technique to avoid some of the current limitations of Grease Pencil that cause hard edges or discolorations in strokes. I really love such experiments where a limitation of a program drives you to figure out 'hacks' to still achieve your goal!

Hi, I’m a digital artist who has been working almost exclusively in Blender since I discovered grease pencil in 2021. I’ve found a pretty comfortable painting routine, but now a new method has come along to change everything!

In this video, I explain how I create a pixel canvas in grease pencil, and how this allows me to get the smoothest color transitions that I’ve ever achieved.

With the way that grease pencil strokes (which are vectors, remember) layer on top of one another, getting soft edges has always been a challenge for me. For a long time, my approach just embraced that this wasn’t possible with this tool. I would make either sketchy art with an emphasis on lineart (bottom left), or I’d use textures to create the illusion of soft edges (bottom right).

But the kind of smooth edges I could get with the airbrush tool in any pixel program remained out of reach.

…Until now.

So, to get the best of both worlds, I have started incorporating pixel canvases into my grease pencil art to get these smooth transitions.

There are many benefits to using grease pencil tools, in my opinion. Its vector-nature gives me more control over my art than I’ve ever had before, and when I try and return to pixel programs, I’m frustrated to not have that control.

(This video goes more in depth about this, if you’re curious)

And now that I’ve incorporated this new method into my painting process, I feel like I have more options than ever! I am making art that just months ago would have been impossible.

I’m still in awe of what this tool is capable of, and I’m excited to keep exploring and of course sharing what I learn. I hope this is helpful!

-Sophie