Painting with Photoshop

June 28, 2016

It's been a while!

A lot has happened, of course, but it'll take too long to talk about it all right now.

So, to keep it simple, I'm interviewing for a Multimedia Design position tomorrow, and I have an assignment due right before the interview -- something that displays my skills gives the interviewer something to review and talk about. This weekend was pretty busy as I also had to give a message the previous Sunday. I ended up pulling an all nighter last night, spending about seven hours on it. And now, as I try to open After Effects, my virus detection suddenly decides that it's too dangerous to open. So helpful! ^q^

So, while I'm waiting for After Effects to re-install onto my laptop and pray that my free trial still works, I thought I'd share with you something that I've been trying to do in Photoshop.

When I was in middle school, I found out that all of my favorite artists were drawing with Photoshop, and I wanted to get good like them too. So I had a free copy of PS Elements, and struggled with it for the longest time. I couldn't for the life of me understand how layers worked. Also, drawing with the brush tool, even after I got a tablet, was a really awkward feeling. Those were good memories...very nostalgic.

A couple of years later I downloaded PaintTool Sai (which I am now the proud owner of!) and fell in love with it. It's such a beautiful program, as it really is maximized for drawing. Photoshop takes a little more work to simulate that comfortable drawing feel, I think by tinkering a bit more with the settings, and yet the way in which the brush just... is has been really leveraged to make amazing digital paintings.

The lines in Sai are very crisp and refined. On the left-hand side is a stroke with a stronger S-1 stabilizer. I feel like the edges taper a lot more smoothly, and straight lines are easier to make. I lowered the stabilizer and made a few more strokes -- what you see on the right -- and it felt as if I had less control over the pen, a little sloppy. I'm not sure if stabilizers are a thing in Photoshop, but the looser strokes bear the same feeling as drawing in Photoshop, in my opinion.

So, to repeat myself, I think that because Photoshop was made initially for retouching pictures, it takes a bit of work to make the default paint brushes more ideal for drawing and sketching. I gave up pretty quickly on Photoshop and poured the rest of my time into Sai, potentially missing out on the great untapped potential that Photoshop has. But in exchange, I grew more comfortable with drawing digitally. Maybe some time I'll post some old pictures that I think, revealed my thoughts and feelings towards drawing digitally. It's kind of like when you first start drawing, and you choose not to color your sketches because you haven't ventured that far yet.

Sorry, I'm talking too much. Here are some lines drawn in Photoshop for comparison. One thing that sort of bothers me is the line thickness -- it doesn't taper as nicely as in sai. It definitely comes off to me as being a bit more "blobby", and I think that's why it's more ideal for painting.

So anyway, I wanted to try painting in Photoshop again, and chose to draw an old character from the days when I tried to participate in RP groups on DeviantART.

This is nearly three years old. I think it was right before I made the switch to Sai. One thing that I notice from those days are the muddy colors since I would keep the initial sketch and not commit to lineart.