Sometimes you'll find yourself working with a repeating pattern, and want to quickly expand it. This video offers an alternative to the 'Pattern Preset' with a quick, manual, method to expand your subject. This is a technique for keyboard shortcut lovers.
One of the most important aspects of digital painting is edge control, and selections allow you to 'paint inside the lines' effortlessly. What happens when you want to use a few different recurring selections in your illustration? "Save Selection" is one option, though this video offers a quicker alternative.
If you're a traditional painter, something like a flock of birds means only one thing: lots of work. Photoshop offers some time-saving alternatives for digital painters. In this video we'll take a look at the use of duplication to quickly populate an entire flock of birds. Remember: this isn't cheating, you're simply using the tools Photoshop makes available to you.
The goal of making thumbnail sketches is speed. You're trying to get a lot of ideas onto the page as quickly as possible. This video explores the concept of symmetrical thumbnail designs. Specifically, it offers a single-button solution to create these horizontally mirrored drawings. Photoshop actions can be a huge time-saver if you know how to use them - and this 'mirror action' is no exception.
Creating an illustration which sits on a solid color background can be a challenge. If your goal is to have a nice, painterly, edge you might find yourself constantly re-working it. The method shown in this video strikes a balance between the time-savings of Photoshop layers and the painterly edge quality you're striving for.