Painting with Photoshop

UPDATE 7/30/2009

/UPDATE

The two most important brushes in Photoshop are the hard-edged circle and the soft-edged circle.

The most important tool is a tablet with a pen.

Set your brush's opacity to respond to pen pressure.

Most things in the world have hard edges. You'll use your hard-edged brush a lot.

Many color transitions on or within objects are soft. You may find your soft-edged brush comes in handy in those cases -- but not as handy as you think -- don't over rely on it.

You can get a huge amount (maybe even most) of your work done with with a pressure-sensitive hard-edged circle.

How do you blend one color into another with a hard-edged brush?

Use a light touch (low pressure) and paint this color into that, and that color back into this.

Your two best hot keys are the size changers, ] for bigger size and [ for smaller size, and the eye dropper key (alt on Windows)

Don't eye-dropper colors from photos. Try to estimate them by eye. Feel free to sample your own colors from elsewhere in your painting.

Personally, I prefer not to let pressure control brush size; only opacity.

If you use the pressure sensitivity feature for any brush settings, take the time to go into the Wacom software and adjust the pressure sensitivity of the tip.

There is a slider that remaps pressure values through a curve. I like to set my pen tip to be one notch to the right of (firmer than) the default setting. I find this brings out the subtlety of the light touch, and helps prevent the tip from slamming from "barely on" to "fully on" without a smooth transition.

Using opacity falloff to model color mixing isn't "true" color mixing. The opacity blending method will only take you so far. If you feel there is a step missing in your blend, you can "help it out" by sticking the color into the blend yourself.

There are other ways to more accurately model digital color mixing within Photoshop. I talk more about that in my Digital Color Mixing with Photoshop post. Here's a sneak preview:

I don't actually use "multiply mixing" that much in Photoshop. It's not convenient. When I paint, I lay down direct color and opacity-blend it as described here. If I need to help a color mix along manually by introducing a third color, I do so.

If you don't like this style of painting and color mixing, look into Corel Painter as an alternative (and in many ways superior) digital painting application.

And don't miss Blue and Yellow Don't Make Green by Michael Wilcox.