I spent a little time recently trying to get to know Photoshop and do something productive with it. I miss paper and pencil.
I know Photoshop is a powerful and robust program. Not only can you touch up photos, you can freehand paint and draw, and even create and import 3D objects. And it probably does a lot more. And yet, for starting out with it, with little to know instruction, it feels limiting. Part of that comes from lack of familiarity with the program and tools and part of it comes from my lack of patience with re-learning how to create art on the computer.
I’ve tested some other art programs that have options for chalk, water color, color pencil, marker, and spay paint as well as oil. They also had blending and smudging tools that worked really well and felt more like traditional art. I keep looking for these sorts of tools or behavior from Photoshop and I’m coming up short and frustrated.
I suspect, to get some of the tools I’m looking for, that I need to work with some settings and presets and perhaps even some custom brushes. I haven’t really taken the time to do this and I don’t really know how to begin with it. And, I’m probably in too much of a rush to get to a finished product. The one thing I do understand, at least a little, is the layers thing. We used layers extensively when I was learning Autocad. They are very handy for being able to isolate what you are working on. Though I get the concept of layers, they are a lot more powerful in Photoshop and allow for sublayers with particular properties and such. Yet, I continue to use them like I did in Autocad.
The experience hasn’t been entirely for naught. My first attempt at the piece of art was fairly dismal due as much to the composition as to the lack of skill with the program. My second attempt has seen some improvement. I got some help with the composition and tried another approach. I found an air brush/spray paint option. It works much more like an air brush that spray paint. It allows for softer and more gradient color and differences is saturation. I’m using it exclusively for this piece of art.
I am also making use of layers and probably not efficiently. I have a whole lot of them because I started out trying first to separate my outlines from my fill, and second I trying to separate the different fill colors so I could adjust the transparency of each. Now I’m lost in layersville.
The good news is that the piece of art is coming along and looking good with a high resemblance to what it is supposed to represent.