As I mentioned before, I am a digital art senior at this point. I've done art in photoshop for roughly 4-5 years now. Here are some tips and resources.
This person posts story highlights of their process as a PROFESSIONAL digital artist. Less about "how to use photoshop" and more "how to utilize photoshop as an artist." It's great if you don't want to sit through a 10-20 minute video on the lasso tool or whatever.
Free brushes! As well as photoshop files for digital paintings to look through and learn from. And again, free brushes!
Hate the way photoshop looks? Already used to digital art programs? Open photoshop, click on this symbol.
Hit "Painting." Now it reformats the structure of photoshop for painters.
Here are some other tools:
Under "Window" you will see this drop down menu. I've highlighted what I will talk about.
Brushes: This is a bit obvious. Having the window enabled lets you see the different shapes your brushes can be.
Colour: This pulls up a colour wheel for you.
History: Long list of the "undo" button. So you can go back multiple steps.
Layers: Lets you draw on one "layer" without impacting the other layer. For example, if you had grass in front of a house and they are both on a seperate layer, you can erase the grass without erasing the house (and vice versa)
Swatches: Lets you see previous colours used, as well as save frequently used ones.
This is a very cool feature.
Click on the drop box that says "Normal."
It's better to experiment with these than to explain, though.
In short: Blending modes change the way the layer you've selected reacts with the other layers.
Normal-->Dissolve: Normal is how your layer is now. Dissolve makes it into a screentone/dotted style.
Darken-->Darker Colour: This, as you can imagine, darkens the layer depending on the layers below it. You can see how it changes the ones below. This is great for shading and adding contrast.
Lighten-->Lighter colour: Opposite of darker colour. See how it reacts to the layers below it!
Overlay-->Hard Mix: This works with both lights and darks. All of these will increase contrast. I use "overlay" constantly.
Difference --> Divide: These will invert the layer, or cancel out what is in the layer underneath
Hue --> Luminosity: This adjusts the "basics" of the layer underneath. For example, if I filled in a layer with blue and applied "hue," it would change everything on the layer under it blue.
Here are other things related to layers that may be helpful:
Eye Symbol: this shows up if the layer is enabled. If the eye is shown next to a layer, that layer is visible on the canvas.
"Layer 52": You can double click to change the name of your layers. This is good for organization sake.
Opacity: The drop down box with a percentage listed is to adjust how transparent the layer is. 100% is a completely visible layer, while 0% is not visible at all.
These are some basics that aren't obvious. So hopefully this helps?
I would love to add more to this, but it's insanely time consuming to type this out. If anyone has any questions or wants advice that's particular to digital art, my email is Kennedy.chinn@uleth.ca. Go crazy.
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