Even if you're aware of 'glossiness', and can observe its effects, you still need to be able to reproduce it in your own paintings. This video offers some practical advice for doing exactly that. Focusing on brushwork, I'll show how to use layers effectively to work on the specular highlight separately from the base form.
People are good at being creative, and computers are great at repetitive tasks. Why not let your computer do what it's good at and focus your energy on the more creative work? As a digital painter, you should be on the lookout for repeated elements in a painting: large or small. This video shows how to efficiently paint a threaded screw through the use of duplication and the transform tool.
Standing back from your painting to get the 'big picture' is extremely important. Getting up close and personal with your details is important too. What if you could do both simultaneously? You can. There's a feature that many artists don't know about in Photoshop which allows you to open the same document in multiple windows simultaneously. In this video I'll show the practical implications of this command in a detailed illustration. Especially if you have two monitors, the "New Window" command is a priceless addition to the digital painter's workflow.
Painting realistic texture can be a challenge. It's especially challenging when you're drawing objects or characters from your imagination. This exercise is designed to help you strengthen your mental texture library. The most important part of this exercise is the mental extrapolation. Often times painting from reference materials is a 1:1 copy, which doesn't force you to fully examine your subject. This exercise requires you to do more than copy, and strengthens your mental texture library in the process.