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[eta: handy links to Photoshop tutorials in the comments]

fanart: I scribbled a background for that one scene... not much to see yet though, probably skippable unless you're interested in illustration as such.

I've been back and forth how to color it. The easiest thing would be just do paint the background onto the original. OTOH this could be a good opportunity to hop into the 21st century and try that Photoshop thing... I got time to fool around with it after all, and if I screw it up it won't really matter.

Hm. In any case I decided against painting the bg separately and pasting in the foreground scene. But I'm sort of tempted to try painting the background entirely in Photoshop. I don't know if that might not clash too much with the foreground though... apart from the fact that I've never painted with that program and barely know how to work with the layers.

Meh. Don't know. Maybe I'll throw a dice.

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::fangirls you::

Ah, thanks. I hope the end result will justify that. :)

Hey btw, thanks for that rec the other day, for 'Where You Want To Be'. Loved it.

Ooooooooooh. Pretty! I've been learning to color in Photoshop, slowly, verrry slowly, but I have some neat tutorial links if you'd like.

Actually yeah, links would be greatly appreciated. I really have no idea what I'm doing here... but I've seen some really cool stuff done with PS recently so I'm getting more and more eager to try it.

(I'm mostly interested in the rather roughly painted, not so glossy style that's used for conceptual art for example.)

This site has some basic stuff that I found useful: http://www.melissaclifton.com/tutorials.html

It took me a while to understand layers, so I needed some handholding.

Here's a really neat one on watercolor style that might be of interest:
http://kidchan.deviantart.com/art/Photoshop-Watercolour-Tutorial-60725825

If you're looking for rougher art, have you thought about trying Painter? I am in love with it. I find Photoshop wonderful for cleaning up my art and doing black and white and very clean lines but a bit difficult for more intuitive traditional work. Painter makes sense to me on an instinctive level.

So far the most useful tutorials I've found are the deviant art ones (I have more linked at work, will add them tomorrow) and also the book, The Photoshop and Painter Artist Tablet Book by Threinen-Pendarvis. She has a real background in traditional media, and so the way she presented stuff made sense to me.

Er, sorry to go on and on! Telophase has hooked me up with many wonderful links and I will list more if you like.

Thanks, those look very helpful!

I put off my plan to do the background entirely in PS because man, that program drains memory like nothing else. Out of curiosity, can I ask how much RAM you have on your computer? It seems that that one gigabyte of mine is really stretching it. What would be the minimum in order to properly work with PS or Painter, without long tea breaks between commands?

Er, sorry to go on and on! Telophase has hooked me up with many wonderful links and I will list more if you like.

I should be set with Photoshop tutorials for now, but if you got anything interesting on working with Painter? I don't have that Program yet, but I've heard of it a lot, listed as one of the essentials (along with InDesign which I also don't own yet).

Er, sorry to go on and on!

Feel free to go on about this stuff - this never ceases to be interesting. :)

Oh I'm glad you found them helpful! My family gets a little tired of me nattering on and on about art, so I worry I'm blathering at times. ;)

Photoshop sucks memory like WHOA. When I was doing most of my recent Photoshop stuff (I toned telophase and rachelmanija's latest comic), I could work black and white at a lower dpi (600) but anything in color or with multiple layers or fancy brushes killed my computer. I had 1 gig RAM then. I just bought a double memory upgrade, so I have hopes I'll be able to do more with it. I found that running no other programs whatsoever, cleaning out as much space on the drive as possible, and alocating some extra memory to it helped some. Here's the RAM tutorial I used: http://www.cgarena.com/freestuff/tutorials/photoshop/optimizeram/optimize.html

Painter isn't nearly as bad, ime. Sure, it sticks sometimes if I'm also running iTunes and have some reference photos open, and chat with people, but mostly, ooooooh baby, it's a dream. I am in love. I'm so in love with Painter that I splurged on a 9x12 Wacom Intuos. It's fantastic. I downloaded the trial version and used it for a full month before buying it. The Education version of Painter is cheap, only 100 bucks, no proof of being a student required.

The book I mentioned above has lots of great Painter stuff, but my favorite tutorials are on DeviantArt. This one is for an older version of painter, but works just fine: http://yumedust.deviantart.com/art/Painter-7-Tutorial-34562471
It's my favorite overall tutorial.
Here's another excellent one:
http://strahan.deviantart.com/art/Step-by-step-Hyde-51055805

There's also some good tutorials in ImagineFX magazine, along with brushes and trials, and stuff.
Here's a list of more DeviantArt ones: http://browse.deviantart.com/resources/tutorials/digiart/dpadigi/corelpainter/?order=9&alltime=yes

I haven't played with InDesign yet. (I work at a uni, so I bought the whole CreativeSuite for education users and now have more Adobe than anyone needs.) My personal favorite for clean line art is Illustrator. You can do some awesome things with it. It now has a single push button thing, where it will change your scanned line art into vector drawings. *tempts you madly*

Also, I meant to include this earlier. Beautiful photoshop brushes that can make doing rough art a hell of a lot easier, and they don't suck RAM either the way the complex ones do: http://missm.paperlilies.com/01_brushes.html
They're free for noncommercial use, but if you do use them professionally, it's only like 15 bucks for ten sets! I used some for the toning project.

Wow, thanks so much. I think the first thing I'll do is check out this RAM tutorial and see if I can squeeze a little more juice out of this baby.

Wow, that looks awesome!

Damn. These just get better and better.

That looks fabulous! I absolutely love the perspective and the arches and what the architecture does to the whole scene.

Personally, I'm a huge fan of traditional art, but I think it'll be cool no matter what you do. As long as you give it some paper-like texture if you do it all digitally, I think you could make it blend.

That looks fabulous! I absolutely love the perspective and the arches and what the architecture does to the whole scene.

Thanks. I hadn't thought of the background when I drew the scene but as soon as I finished coloring it, I clearly saw this vault or whatever it is around it and it seemed pretty essential for the scene.

Personally, I'm a huge fan of traditional art, but I think it'll be cool no matter what you do. As long as you give it some paper-like texture if you do it all digitally, I think you could make it blend.

I'm more a fan of the traditional media as well, and not just because I feel comfortable with them... a lot of the computer art is just so slick and glossy and just - too perfect. But I've seen some cool computer coloring done with brushes (though I think

vom_marlowe is probably right and that sort of thing is likely done with Painter, which I don't have yet).

Anyway, I ended up paining the background with watercolor and acrylics after all... it seems that my 1 gig RAM are entirely insufficient for Photoshop and it drives me crazy if I have to wait a few seconds after every step I take. Gotta upgrade my memory sooner or later.

Now that I have the rudimentary background, I shall attempt to combine the two. Gulp.

Oh, working on huge files in Photoshop is an enormous pain. Photoshop is the only thing that regularly screws up my computer performance.

And yes, it's the "too perfect/not enough serendipity and/or texture" thing that doesn't work for me in some digital art.

Do you need any Photoshop tips? I'm not a pro, but I've played a fair bit, and have combined drawings in Photoshop (sometimes more successfully than others). If I can help, feel free to email me at crysothemis at yahoo.

I agree that the arches and architecture really help ground this and make it look cool. Neat stuff!

Yeah, I think it works much better in the context of that background. (Now I just have to fix a few areas in the colored version which worked against the light blue background, but now not so much.)

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