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Are you having trouble making the leap from observational studies to invented subject-matter? “Observation to Imagination” addresses this common challenge by breaking it into 5 repeatable aspects: form, perspective, light, material, and composition.
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Painters are not cameras. But if what you're striving for is realism, what is so different between an illustrator an a camera? This video discusses the painter's ability to manipulate reality for the sake of composition.
When we're young we learn in terms of colored markers and crayons: grass is green, etc. Learning to paint starts with unlearning these color stereotypes. This video looks at color with a critical eye, focusing on painting white objects. White objects are especially challenging for beginners to paint, though the concepts found in this lesson apply equally well to objects of any color.
How much of an impact does text have in your composition? It's more than you think. This video explores the relationship between text and image, focusing on the relative visual 'weight' of text, contrast, and value. Book covers and websites are a great place to see this in action!
We've discussed a number of ways to blend paint, and the Smudge Tool is strangely absent. Why have I left this tool out of the conversation? Beginners often assume that the Smudge tool is explicitly for blending, but in my opinion it is rarely useful for this. This video explores how the tool functions, and highlights special cases where it is useful for digital painting.
Having trouble deciding what to draw today? Be your own art director: give yourself an assignment! This exercise might seem contrived, but it's a fantastic way to break the paralyzing grip of a blank canvas. As the video shows, sometimes all you need to do is to give yourself a few limitations - and then the creativity naturally starts flowing. After all, artists are natural problem solvers --- they just need a problem to solve!
When you start a painting, how often are you using a white canvas? This video offers an alternative. There are a number of reasons for using a toned canvas, though the easiest explanation is time savings. If you're looking to create a rendered image featuring a full value scale, you might as well start in the middle. In the video I use a warm tan color, though it's worth noting that gray works just as well.
Has the brush ever behaved strangely? It is not working the way you'd expect it to? This video will help you identify some possible problem areas, and give you a checklist for the next time that your brush isn't working smoothly.
Both control the brush tool, but what's the difference? A common point of confusion about the brush tool is the functional difference between these two (similar) properties. Hopefully this video will clear up some of the confusion.
We'd all like more of it, but how should we spend our free time? It's a deceptively simple question, but I find myself asking it nearly every day. Should I spend an hour doing X or would it be better to do Y instead? What if all I want to do is Z? Though this video doesn't offer concrete answers, it will get you thinking about the bigger picture and how to stay vigilant about your goals. Blogs like www.lifehacker.com often talk about planning the hours of your workday, but I rarely see anyone discussing a longer (1,2,5 year) plans. These sort of 'big questions' are not easy to think about, but ignoring them completely can be a dangerous strategy. What is your strategy? Since I clearly don't offer a perfect solution, we'll all benefit from the discussion.
Hopefully by now you're familiar with Blending Modes. What if I told you there was a totally different way to create a texture overlay? In this video we'll explore an often overlooked feature called "Blend-If", in which the opacity of a layer is dependent on it's grayscale value. Sound confusing? Don't worry. Though this seems a bit more abstract than other painting techniques, as long as you know about grayscale values and the Histogram, you'll do just fine. Due to the technical nature of this video, I'd recommend following along in your own photoshop document. You'll need two texture images, and here are links to the two I used from cgTexture.com: the Base metal, and a Rust overlay.
Many Ctrl+Paint videos encourage using photo-texture overlays... but what photos are best to use? Utilizing textural overlays is much easier if you're working from high quality images. I like to use 'base texture photos' created by texture artists. These videogame artists use photos which seem very boring by photography standards: uniformly lit and without engaging camera angles. Though they won't win any photography contests, they serve as great raw materials for textural overlays. Google image search often doesn't return useful images for this process, so knowing where to find them is essential. In this video I talk about cgTextures.com, as well as the characteristics to look for in a good photo-overlay.
What's your relationship with still life drawing? Love it? Cherish it? Most likely, you avoid it. In this video I provide my reasons for practicing still life painting, including how it makes me a better artist overall. Many artists, especially beginners, avoid them because of their association with homework. When I was in Drawing 1 class in art school I daydreamed of painting dragons and space marines. Now that I'm out of college, I often look back with regret: those still life drawings were forming a foundation and all I wanted to do was skip past them. As you teach yourself to paint, it's easy to skip past assignments that seem boring but I encourage you to give still life drawing a chance.