Digital Painting & Illustration
Created in Photoshop with Wacom Intuos Pro. I also sometimes use Mischief, Corel Painter, and Adobe Illustrator for this stuff. I make my own brushes for textures and distressing or just interesting patterns, but the standard round brushes on varying hardness, sizes, and pressure sensitive transfer settings. But it really is just drawing on the Wacom in Photoshop. I think it deserves its own category and designation. It’s a different media and different mindset than designing in photoshop for a purpose. I have the same tools but I use them wildly differently. Where a design … depending on complexity, could have multiple grouped and sub-grouped folders of layers in it, I rarely work in more than 3 layers at a time for a digital painting or digital illustration. Single layer is more like a traditional drawing or painting and has the flexibility of layered manipulations from time to time. But then I just CMD + E and move on.
I have created a variety of pieces from surreal art like Decay, to fully abstract psychedelic explosions of color like This Page Left Intentionally Blank. Most of them take upwards of 100+ hours to complete because they are huge in pixel dimensions and painted by hand. I’m not against speed painting and texture bashing, and I’ve used tricks and techniques for various purposes in the past for work and design projects, but when it comes to art I create for fun, I mostly just like to use brushes, blending modes, smudge tool, and tons of keyboard shortcuts.