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