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.
If you're a traditional painter, something like a flock of birds means only one thing: lots of work. Photoshop offers some time-saving alternatives for digital painters. In this video we'll take a look at the use of duplication to quickly populate an entire flock of birds. Remember: this isn't cheating, you're simply using the tools Photoshop makes available to you.