Learning Photoshop

Photoshop

Hello guys,

Today I am going to show you the painting practice that I did on Photoshop.  It was not easy at all and I was only learning the basics of colour blending and the basic options in it.  It took me a while to know how to blend and at first it was not working out properly and the colours did not mix.

At first, I was not able to blend colours properly since it was my first time trying to blend colours together as seen above.  The blue arrow represents where the light is coming from so that I can give the sphere shading and shine to give it a sphere-like shape.

Here as well as the first step, I used a normal brush to try to mix the colours together.  There was an improvement in my second time trying to mix the colours together since I lack the experience.  The reason there is an orange square to the right is because I might lose the colour, so I put it there so I can use it again. 

To make it easier for me, my friend taught me useful brush settings that I can use in this practice and the painting of my pieces.  He showed me how to play with the opacity and pressure of the brush.  Pen pressure is important since it allows me to play with the line work thickness (size of the brush)  and the way I paint since I can go from hollow to dark while opacity is important when shading since I can lower it and higher it whenever I want to shade.  Above are examples of how a brush with only pen pressure settings would look like, how a brush with only opacity settings would look like and lastly, how the brush will look like if they are mixed together.

After using the first technique, my friend introduced me to a new brush setting called the ''mixer brush'' which can be found if you right click the brush on the bar to the left where you can choose it as seen above it is the brush that is selected (it has a droplet above it).  

To use the brush, I started by making black dark circles as the base of the sphere.

As seen here in the layer panel, the layer selected is where I actually added solid colours and mixed them together using the mixer brush.  The layer selected looks unusual since it has an arrow on it.  This arrow is made to make it easier to colour the spheres since no matter where you colour the colours do not go out of the black spheres which was really useful to me.  To make do this, make a new layer above the layer you want to colour on then hover over the new layer using your mouse and press ALT on the keyboard and left click on the mouse and it will activate.

Here are the results of what I did using the mixed brush, and I can say it is my favourite brush to use since I am comfortable using it. Here I tried mixing 2 colours with each colour in every circle. As an example: the first circle consisted of dark and light blue.  To me, the results were great since it was my first day painting in Photoshop and I got better from the first time.

Here I tried challenging myself by trying a material study (Jello, bubble and metal).  I was really impressed with the results since I made the material look quite the same in the first to spheres!  Although I was happy with the last one it did not exactly look like the metal texture in the picture.  In this practice I used more than 2 hues to actually paint the materials since it was more complex than the first practice I did.

Link to the Material Study