I’m not that big of a fan of photo-bashing. That’s a technique where you take photos and superimpose them on your digital painting in order to achieve textural effects. It can be a cheap cheat that looks cheesy, or it can be a sophisticated process that when done right can really add something. Here I’ve used several different photos of wood and painstakingly masked and shaped them to align with various parts of the character. Hint, “puppet warp” can work better than “warp” for contouring the overlayed image. But the real secret here is putting the texture layer under the shading and highlight layers I created earlier. That way the shading is applied top the wood texture, as opposed to just putting it on top and erasing into it, or something equally barbaric.
Note: I’m not done with the texture stage. There are still sticks I haven’t tinkered with…
Above is the full image in a wintery light. Notice how well the crack in the wood works on the hand. For that I used “puppet warp” and added nodes at different points to adjust the trajectory of the crack. This is coming out better than I’d expected, as I intended this as just another exercise based on a tutorial. There’s a ways to go, though it already looks good. When I do these tutorials I inevitably throw in a bunch of my own techniques, skills, and tricks. Before even starting I did 20 profile sketches just to understand the structure of the head in profile better.
I’ve updated, finally, to Photoshop CC. My old laptop was dying on me, and the final straw was it couldn’t do some Photoshop features anymore, such as “liquify”. There’s a bit of a learning curve that will slow me down for a tad, including dealing with the Windows 10. But my new laptop and new PS will be a real bonus to my digital painting very soon. The custom brushes I was able to download are insane. At very least the program and the computer are comparatively lightning fast. This also means I can work larger with not difference in my process, which is good when it comes to making prints.
~ Ends
Art & Crit by Eric Wayne 
Oooo. That wood texture is auh-mazing. Have fun with your new computer and version of PS!
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How fast are the two computers, the new vs the old?
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They are leagues apart. The old one is 8 years old. The new one has 4 times as much RAM and 3 Times as much RAM on the graphics card. Those are usually the most important things for Photoshop. I can’t be very precise yet, but one thing that is infinitely faster is turning on and shutting down, and opening or closing any program.
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Awesome as always, happy to hear you’ve got a new machine!
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It was long, long, long overdue. I got a “budget gaming laptop” that had options to upgrade the graphics card, put in an extra 16 gigs of RAM, and an extra terabyte hard drive. Now it’s kinda’ like a hot rod.
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Sweet. You’ve done all this recent work with the equivalent of one arm tied behind your back. No more…
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Yap. I’m also looking forward to messing around with Blender some more. I was getting into it, but the old computer couldn’t handle the computational load and was overheating. I’m still using a drawing tablet, whereas the most established digital painters all use graphics tablets (so they can draw right on an image), but I’ll get there a bit later.
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good luck w/ CC and windows 10. do tutorials w/ CC but just dive in w/ windows 10 googling when you get stymied. hint: most of the “features” are useless. a lap top you say? consider a standalone monitor. they don’t weigh/cost a ton these days. I’d be lost w/out one screen for my art work and another for palettes, source images etc
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I plug a monitor into the laptop. The monitor on my old laptop didn’t even work. Yeah, I just Google Windows 10 to disable all the bullcrap so it looks and runs clean.
CC I’m pretty much able to figure out just by poking around if it’s not already obvious. I’ll watch some videos about new features. Probably don’t need to do actually tutorials.
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Congrats on your computer/Photoshop upgrade! Now, try saying “cheap cheat that looks cheesy” real fast 10 times!
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