Mountain River

I blocked this in using an alpha channel and gradients. Got the technique from this Mullins tutorial. I definitely learned from this one. :)

Still, I have no idea how to render water.

Block Head

Trying to paint form and light.

Cliffs and water

Trying out a little color. I have no idea how to render water :)

Still working pretty zoomed out all the time.

Trying to have more textured strokes up close and less textured ones farther away.

Texture Brushes

Learning about textures. They are pretty fun to make. :) That picture is just two strokes.


This one is one stroke for the leaves, but then some extra stuff including the history brush to put in the gradient.

Poorly :(.

I did learn a few things from it though. Can be real useful to zoom out and draw from far away. Also just messing around with textures.

The image so bad it killed a barber.

Not at all happy with this one. :( Doesn't seem to have an interesting composition, bad values, etc. Last time I worked from a thumbnail and this time I was working from nothing, maybe that played a part.

I put the flip horizontal command on hotkey, which I found useful.

I also found it helpful in certain situations to set the brush mode to lighten or darken.

Waterfall

Painting Notes:

1. Painted w/ photoshop.
2. Blocked in basic composition from a small thumbnail drawing from my sketchbook.
3. Using the lasso tool, pulled in some textures of rocks from photos.
4. Selected areas of the image with wand and adjusted with levels to define planes.
5. In the middle of painting, took a break and looked at flickr images of fern trees, rocks and waterfalls. (The variations in nature make me feel so damn uncreative.)
6. Trying to vary brush widths.
7. Flipping canvas horizontally multiple times.