The Earth-Toned Pill

Want to see some real PS painting skills? These should be enough to blow you away...

I'm a gigantic tutorial whore when it comes to any of the Adobe apps... It can be the simplest thing, or the most complex task, but I love reading them and trying out new techniques all the same.

I can across this excellent tutorial today that discusses how to create the glossy navigation look for your site in photoshop.

Its short and sweet, and if you've never used these techniques before, quite cool...

PopPhoto.com has another great tutorial from January that I stumbled on that shows you how to use things like adjustment layers and the healing brush in order to quickly and easily remove a few years from someone's photo.

If you've never messed with curves adjustments in photoshop before, this may be a great place to start!

View the tutorial here.

After being inspired by Hideyoshi's amazing AF-014, I decided to embark on something similar. It seemed only natural for me to do some kind of aircraft, because I've always had a love for anything aviation-related, but especially military aviation. I plan to put several hours in this piece, and I'll document the major steps on here as I go.

So to start off, here is what I've got:

Click on the pic for a larger view

I started out by creating a gradient for the sky on the background layer and then laid out the clouds using a standard brush, followed by forming with the smudge tool and motion blur filter.

The initial lineart is just that... Initial. I plan on cleaning it up and adding more details before laying in the flat color layers. Yep, that's right. This one is going all the way. Enough screwing around for me; I want to finally create something digitally (like my traditional-media self portraits) that I can be proud of.

If you have any suggestions or thoughts, let me know!

Hot off the press:

Click on the pic for a larger view

I think I have a total of about 2 hours into this. I didn't do much with the surrounding scenery because I made some technical mistakes early on that would have made that difficult.

Anyway, time for a new project...

Here is a digital piece I'm currently working on:

Click on the pic for a larger view

This started out with me drawing a bunch of abstact lines and shapes in Photoshop, and quickly evolved into what I would call a worn-out robot that has been sitting in someone's backyard for a couple years.

What do you think?

I'm a big fan of the web site deviantart.com for a whole lot of reasons, not the least of which is because it has a highly-active user community that fosters a high degree of cooperation and collaboration amongst users.

I was searching for a good set of Photoshop drawing brushes on the site (of which many exist and are free to use for non-commercial purposes, as long as credit is given to the creator) when I stumbled on this fantastic digital art tutorial by the user aquasixio. If you're like me, you'll knit-pick at the his spelling until you realize he's French and probably doesn't speak great English to begin with.

Anyhow, the tutorial taught me a lot of little things I thought I knew and really helped me get excited again about art in general and digital art in particular. Even better is the fact that deviantart is chock full of tutorials like this one, and although some are honestly of dubious quality or usefulness (an inherent weakness of peer-controlled content environments), all will serve to get your creativity going I'm sure.

And if you have time, stop by my little corner and say hi.

Popphoto.com did an interesting Photoshop job on the 3 current presidential hopefuls by giving them 'stress makeovers'.

Obama, Clinton and McCain were each given a Photoshop makeover that simulates what they might look like after 4 years of stress as the leader of the world's remaining superpower.

For those of you like me who want to know exactly how it was done, read on here for more.