Feeling blocked up? Lacking motivation? Deciding what to draw can sometimes seem harder than actually drawing it. Hopefully this video will put the challenge in a different light, and get your stylus moving again.
A safe approach to most drawing is going from general to specific. Large scale before details. This video shows how apply that general form to sketching line-work in Photoshop using layers. Of course, drawing is a personal process and your technique might differ. This is the method I derived over time from my experience as a Comic Book student in art school, and a concept artist after college.
Many beginner artists are reluctant to learn perspective drawing. It is often thought of as 'technical' and 'scary', but it doesn't need to be either of those things. If you want to be a concept artist or illustrator, you need to learn perspective. In this video I'll show a very basic exercise that you can practice for beginning to understand perspective. This is an observational drawing assignment, and should be done with paper and pencil. Have fun!
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.
Improving your painting is often a matter of depicting surfaces realistically. One component of a surface is the glossy highlight, or, "specularity" and it is explained in this video. If you're interested in learning more about surfaces and improving your rendering techniques, you will enjoy two of the series available in the store: Basic Photoshop Rendering and Creating Realistic Surfaces.
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.
In school you've probably grown to loathe the term 'study'. When it comes to math and history, this term is synonymous with painstaking memorization. In the case of art this term can take on a slightly different meaning. On ctrl+Paint I often refer to 'studies', and this video helps to explain my meaning. Though your version might take on a different form than mine, 'studies' are the way you improve at art.