The BrikWars Forums

A new art program released earlier this year.
It uses vectors, but looks like regular brushes.
Like vectors you can zoom in and out with no loss of quality on an infinite canvas.

Watch the video here.
I haven't tried the free demo yet.

http://www.madewithmischief.com/index.html

Pro artists use those screens.
I use a Wacom tablet.
The program works with a mouse too.

I tried it and its missing a lot of functionality.
Right now its literally the simplest thing possible to be released as an art program.

Its fun to mess around with for a while, but I would still be using Photoshop to get any real work done.
Hopefully they fill in the missing stuff.

When drawing, it feels like using a Photoshop normal round brush, with some blended edges.

Just messing around:

Tools:
Smudge can sometimes be useful, but you don't need it.
Burn/Dodge never use these, never ever, ever

When people start with PS they use those <a href='http://tinyurl.com/y42zurt'>alot</a>, so did I.
But after a while you learn why its a mistake to rely on them all the time.

Layer opacity:
Making things darker:
So that shadow area I made by
- creating a new layer
- paint 100% opacity black, or maybe gray, with a bit of blue in it
- then on the layer, you can adjust the opacity with a slider, till it looks right
I also painted on it with a low opacity brush, its been over worked really

Making things lighter:
same thing but use a lighter color, adjust layer opacity.

Brush Opacity:
Just paint it with a brush, that has a low opacity setting on the brush,
Like 2% to 15%, then scrub over the area till it looks good.

Try using HSB color picker sliders.
Hue
Saturation, you rarely need full saturation
B (Black I guess) Value, other programs call this HSV, to adjust light and dark of the same color

Brush style:
Just use the simple round Paintbrush and Pencil brushes
- adjust the size as needed
- adjust the opacity
After you block out an area at 100%, you'll be at 2% to 60% most of the time.
You will need to adjust the brush size and opacity 200 times, there is no getting around this.

Draw some boxes

Profit !!!

Pro artists use a stylus on a screen and can use the pressure sensitivity to alter the brush size and opacity.
The tools above will allow you to work with a mouse.

Extra Credit
When making things lighter/darker, don't add low opacity pure white or black.
Use a light or dark color.

I should do screencasts of my photoshop work one of these days.

Burn and dodge are okay for specific very limited applications - basically whenever you don't mind blowing out your saturation all to shit. These occur rarely in nature, so you're best off leaving them to the professionals.

In Photoshop you can stick with just the Brush if you set up your brush palette right (Brush Presets -> dropdown -> Preset Manager) and use your hotkeys.

Smaller / larger brush: [ ]
Softer / harder edge: Shift-[ Shift-]
Previous / next brush: , .

The next trick is to set up a color palette on some unused part of the painting and just sample from there.

Sample color: alt-click

This will get you through 95% of a painting.

If you don't have a pressure sensitive tablet, you can also change your brush opacity manually by using the number keys.

Set opacity: (numbers)
Set flow: (Shift-numbers)

photoshop is for plebs paint tool sai and ms paint are all a real man needs

stubby wrote:I should do screencasts of my photoshop work one of these days.

I'd like to see that.

Hot Keys
I use them in Lightwave because everything is buried in menus and panels.
I never started using them in PS because everything is more accessible.
But I really should be using them in PS. I suppose if it was my job I would already be using them.

Or if you want to buy new, check out your options on the Wacom web site, then buy from Amazon.
Look at the Intuos Pen (previously Bamboo), Intuos Pro only if you literally have money to burn.

Wacom has made a mess of their web site.
There is no way I can see to do side by side comparisons of features.

They changed the name of products.
Bamboo -> Intuos
Intuos -> Intuos Pro

I use what they now call Intuos Pro Large. Nobody needs a large, its too big.
I was flush with cash at the time so it didnt matter, except that it takes up too much desk space.

Wacom is always the brand to go with, but after that a lot depends on how professional you want to be, and how portable. If you're going with a tablet, anything bigger than the Intuos Pro Small is kind of a pain in the ass. The Bamboo / Intuos is kind of too small though, but YMMV. If you're going with a full Cintiq then you want the biggest one of course.

I used to use a version of paint shop from the early 90s, but now I use gimp.

IVhorseman has gimp.