Fun with digital painting

I’m mostly a traditional painter. I’ve gotten more experience and practice with Photoshop in the last couple years. But I am more comfortable with a paintbrush to canvas. But since I already had my sketches scanned in I thought I’d try my hand at digital painting again.

I did the first painting above and left it for the night; slept on it. The next day I looked at it again and did some tweaks. Something that helped was adding a Black & White adjustment layer to see the contrast and values better. I love adjustment layers. That’s basically how this painting came about, painting on a single layer (for each shape) and tweaking that with adjustment layers and masks.

I found Obsidian Dawn’s Skin Texture brushes really useful (although I only used Painting 1 and Blending 1).