Photoshop Artwork

I want to learn to be an artist. I want to learn to use Photoshop like some use paper and pencil. Even if I have to draw a bunch of manga characters to do it.
That's what I've decided.

For my lack of creativity, that's a bold declaration.

I'm trying to learn to draw people, but I'm not sure which style I want to pursue. Manga is only one of many forms. They don't all have names; that's just one of the ones that does, and is well known. I'd like to be able to draw people I know, in time.

This is from a lesson I took on how to draw hair. yep. It's mine.
Nothing incredible, but you can recognize it as what it is, So that's a step. My real trouble is learning to draw faces. They've always been very hard for me.
It's kind of ironic, as being a true artist requires seeing thing in parts, not just as a whole. I'm not going to go nuts drawing dumb things. I want to be able to do one thing at a time. the hair I've never been good with - that's one thing down.
Next I'll do faces. It'll take some time to get good at anything. I hope to "work my way" to being more comfortable with drawing people; I've never been good at it, and Photoshop may be my ticket out of this hole.

You basically just draw it with a crude brush, smudge the edges into the desired shape, and use thin dodge / burn strokes on highlights / midtones.

Photoshopping People

I've been working on learning to photoshop people, particularly people.

One notable example is some photoshopping i did of a friend, for fun. She asked me to send a few examples to her.

I think I understand the relationship girls have with makeup now. It's a pain, but once you start, you don't want to stop, and you're never satisfied. No matter how beautiful someone is at point A, you always want to move further and further past point B; sometimes you even do more harm than good...

The most important tools for working with skin are:

• dropper+brush, for smoothing
• clone stamp, for replacing hard-to-brush-over areas
• patch tool, to replace funny shaped areas
• and making a new layer+coloring it+lowering opacity for lipstick, eyes, highlights and shadows, and other coloration changes.

I won't post exact pictures, but I will give another big piece of advice: isolate individual parts, so you can play with H/S/L and Brightness/Contrast and Levels.

If you do that with hair, you can pick whatever natural hair color you want. or something else...

An Apple A Day...

Today I made an apple in Photoshop. It looks delicious.
I learned how to do it through PhotoshopRoadmap.com's tutorial directory.

It uses a sphere for most of the tutorial, and then warps it at the end. It taught me to use path stroking for the stem, a very powerful technique.

It's not perfect, but the things I learned I wouldn't trade for anything.

I'll probably work on it more in the future, and try to make variations of it. The tutorial actually made a green one.

It took a few hours to do, but I was talking to friends on FaceBook for the first half of the job. I also stopped to eat something.

The background was nothing
complicated. Many of the elements were simple.

I learned a very important concept, though- if you make an abstract black or white shape and use a Gaussian blur on it, and then lower its layer opacity, it makes a shadow or highlight.

You can see the tutorial HERE, if you want.