I have to say, using Photoshop to create a painting was a little infuriating to me, even with all the tutorial videos. There are just so many tools that can do a variety of things, and becoming familiar with them, with what they can do, what I can do, etc, took a good amount of time and, for me, a little bit of headbanging when I hit the wrong keys to go backwards to or enhance a brush and it didn’t do what I wanted it to do!

The easiest thing I found I could do about this was placing the brush strokes. I played with quite a few of them to get the texture that I wanted to fit the picture that I chose, which was a bit of a process to get cropped to where I wanted it.

As aforementioned, the hardest thing was getting to know the keys for shortcuts and to manipulate the layers and strokes as needed, and to figure out just how the opacity and flow worked together for each of these brushes. I didn’t have the exact brushes in the video, so I used what I had, and used some that reminded me of watercolor as opposed to true watercolor brushes.

I think doing this exercise could be used quite well for rough digital paintings, and I would favor it for such. I like how it can enhance the feel of a particular picture.

Used with Wayne Barlowe’s ‘What Remains’ acrylic piece.