More Photoshop Practice

Since about the end of the summer I've been reading a lot about lighting, composition, colour and perspective in a quest to become a better pre-production artist as well as trying to brush up on my painting skills. On Monday night I went to see Paul Thomas Anderson's "The Master" at the local cinema and I was blown away by the visuals of the film which perfectly complimented the brilliant performances, I wanted to pause the film on every shot so I could properly take in the cinematography. I have a bit of time off after my next deadline so I'm hoping to get my hands on copy of the film so I can go through it and recreate some of the shots as environment practice.

This morning I've been speed painting between working on essays and other projects (I get bored if I work on one thing for too long) so I decided to try try out some more custom brushes. I've been trying to paint in photoshop without my work looking overly digital (my pre production lecturers are always criticising work for looking generic and photoshopped) so I'm trying to recreate the styles of non digital artists. I've been studying the work of Andrew Salgado (currently my favourite painter) and Lionel Smit (whose paintings I saw in South Africa the summer before I started uni). The aim isn't to get my work to look exactly like theirs (that would be impossible as I only started painting very recently and they have different processes to me) but I want to paint in photoshop with a similar aesthetic but still with my personal style. I've been doing lots tutorials from "Digital Painting Techniques Volume 1" and "The Digital Matte Painting Handbook" so I painting faster and more efficiently every time I approach a new painting. The painting below took about an hour and a half, I began with a default brush and then made a custom brush which made the brushstrokes I wanted. I'm finding my self taking bigger risks with each new painting.

30 minutes;

 60 minutes;

 90 minutes

Photoshop continued...

Here's another photoshop speed painting, I'm currently experimenting with custom brushes and researching the techniques of a range of different artists (I'm trying not to stick to any particular style). I've decided that I'm going to spend the next term focussing on pre-production art as it's the area I feel I'm most suited towards. I've been looking at a lot of digital art online to try and workout what works visually and I'm trying to make sure my work doesn't look like the typical vectorized, solid line stuff you find all over the net. I think photoshop is essentially a (brilliant) tool but if you don't already have an understanding of drawing principles (which I only picked up recently) its not going to improve your work.

I wanted the drawing below to have a different look to the rest of my work so I created brushes which look like they're being used on a textured surface to give the painting a rougher aesthetic and I purposefully muddied the colours. I've been trying to make brushes which look like spray cans and I used them to give the painting my sloppy, messy style. I find that drawing with the navigator in the right hand corner helps as the thumbnail view lets me see the whole composition so I don't spoil the overall concept of the piece. I'm learning a lot about light and shapes and I think this has helped to make my drawings look less flat. The reason I chose this picture (I used a screen shot from the Joel Schumacher's "Falling Down" as reference) was because I noticed that most of my work is centered around expressive eyes so I set my self the challenge of portraying the character using everything else. The aim is to keep learning until I can apply these skills to my cartoons and design work.
It took about 2.5 hours to complete this (so it wasn't really a speed painting) and I learnt a throughout the process. I wish I'd started painting in photoshop earlier because it's the piece of software which has excited me the most!

Learning to Paint with photoshop

Until mid December I'd done all my digital work in sketchbook pro but I decided this christmas I would bite the bullet and learn photoshop. So far I've just been playing around with the default brushes, here's a couple of speed paintings I did to try and get the hang of the program (none of these took more than two hours).