Angela's Result - Using One Brush

So I tried Nicole's Using One Brush exercise and here is the result!  The brush was the smeary square 69 brush that comes in the default 'square brushes' set in Photoshop.  The result was a surprising amount of texture in the blending that reminds me quite a lot of oil painting!

SoE Sketch - Nomadic Ramah by =AngelaSasser on deviantART

I'm absolutely loving sketching like this since the texture of the brush does a lot of the work for you and makes the sketch look a little more varied and layered than if I'd used a pencil emulator or hard round.  It forces you to be imprecise and to feel out your shapes with the eraser (which I also had set on the smeary square brush), which leaves a 'halo' of texture around your shapes which gives the image a nice subtle variance.

Definitely recommend trying it out for yourself!  This is definitely going to be my go-to brush for quick concepting now.

Complementary palette

Complementaries here being oranges and blues. For this project I wanted the eyes to pop a lot, so I used not only the complementary blue to all that orange in the skin and hair, but I also played with the lightness and saturation to make the eyes the focal point. One more thing I tried to play with in this image was to use a more textured skin, I’ve been trying to improve my skin tones, which I think I am doing (though there is a long way to go still!) but so fat I’ve never really been happy with the textures of my skin. This time it looks a little better. I think there is a lot to improve and I hope to some day find the delicate balance between subtlety and texture. As my first try with this technique, I guess I’ll have to settle in order not to neglect my other projects. I might actually revisit the complementary colors topic. I actually envisioned something more eye catching. I can't stand the anatomy of the nose, that got messed up as I was painting it. I will need to do some nose studies, methinks.

C&C are welcome!

Digital painting - using one brush

I have yet to watch the video (Enliighten blog by Daarken), but I saw the basic premise of doing a digital painting with only one brush and knew I had to try it. The idea is to use a brush that you wouldn't necessarily gravitate to (i.e. not a round or chalk brush). I chose a 'cross' brush, shown in red next to the painting, next time I'll try something a bit more out there :). This was a speed paint, so only about 20 mins in Photoshop CS5. Also to note, I used the same brush setting for my eraser... actually I just changed the colour to white to remove parts that didn't work.