Speed Painting in Photoshop: Accelerate Your Creative Process

Speed Painting in Photoshop: Accelerate Your Creative Process

“Hi and welcome to the end of this Domestika course. In this final unit I want to share with you some extra tips that will help you master the fast painting technique I shared with you in this course. I developed it over the years and it is very useful to me on movie pre-production for visual development and color key in animation productions. But, as I’ve mentioned before, you can use it in illustration or background painting. This technique is about making each step of the process as effective as possible. Before actually getting hands on your final project, it is important that you work on your brush library. Depending on what your subject is, some kinds of brushes will come in handy: vegetation, architecture, textures, clouds and so on. Customize them and keep them organized as I showed you in Unit 2. When creating your painting, the first thing you have to do is select your subject. It could be a lush jungle, a Mediterranean cove, some snowy fields, an old village or even a desert canyon. Whichever landscape that motivates you the most, the possibilities are endless.

Next, study your subject. My advice is to collect lots of reference images and observe them with curiosity. Take notes and write a quick list of elements you are going to need, what you want to preserve from the reference images, what characterizes this specific environment. And go beyond as much as you can: look at its geology, its flora and fauna. What is the atmosphere like? What kind of light does this environment have? What feeling does the lighting conditions create? Try to understand your subject as much as possible. After that, start with your sketch. I showed you three ways to create very quick sketches, by using lines, values and color to pose the base of what you’re going to work on. Pick the option that you prefer and create your sketch. Look for a good composition, a nice value structure and bold big shapes based on the references. Next, when you’re creating your color blocking with the Lasso tool and basic brushes, keep in mind all the shortcuts I’ve shared with you. I’m also leaving a list of useful shortcuts in Photoshop and examples of basic layer structure in Additional Resources. Then, add some texture and patterns to enrich your painting. The final touches are to work on your lighting and atmosphere. Remember what I showed you about using actions and record them. This will allow you to repeat a series of operations to accelerate your process and let Photoshop work for you. I would love to see how you make this technique your own. I have provided resources such as brushes and my work in progress but I definitely would like to see your own take. I know that learning all those techniques for the first time can be a bit overwhelming so don’t worry if you are struggling a little now, with time and practice you will be able to master everything I showed you. Share your paintings, your process and findings with the community, that way we’ll all learn from each other. I will be there to answer questions and give some guidance. It has been great to share my technique with you. I hope you’ll find this course interesting and useful. Thank you and goodbye. ”

Partial transcription of the video

“Final Project Hi, welcome to the end of this Domestika course. In this final lesson, I want to share some extra tips to master the fast painting technique of this course, I developed it over the years, and it was very useful during movie pre-production for things like colloquy or concept art. As I mentioned before, you can use this for illustration or background painting. The base of this technique is to make every step as efficient as possible. Before getting hands-on on your project, I would advise you to work on your brush library and customize it. Depending on the subject, different bru...”

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Course summary for: Speed Painting in Photoshop: Accelerate Your Creative Process

• Level: Beginner
• 98% positive reviews (191)
• 5109 students
• 4 units
• 20 lessons (4h 13m)
• 11 downloads

• Category

  Illustration

• Software

  Adobe Photoshop

• Areas

  Concept Art, Digital Illustration, Digital Painting, Traditional illustration