I'm such a Photoshop n00b!

I still feel pretty new to Photoshop and Digital drawing and painting.

I have always drawn since I was old enough to hold a pencil. I had a fixation with drawing things "broke" when I was little. From "draw car broke" to the slightly more worrying "draw man broke", I always wanted things opened up. I think I just had the same curiosity I still do for the inner workings of things.
It progressed to copying pictures of Superman out of the comics my mum used to buy me, to developing my own stories for Superman to be involved with.
I did some oil paintings are a pre-teen and moved on to watercolours as a teenager.
I doodled through boring lessons at school and had exercise books and exams returned with scores of red pen telling me that these were not the appropriate places for my drawings.
At uni, I doodled some more, and did drawings for some of my friends as they asked for them.
When I left uni, and got a job in Theatre in Education, I produced more drawings for my friends while I was sat backstage waiting to go on.
While in Thailand in 2006, I picked up a copy of Photoshop CS3 because I thought it would be useful and it was cheaper over there. My laptop was in no way up to running it though so it lay dormant until 2008 when I coloured an old drawing I'd done about 4 years prior.

Click here to see it full-sized

At this point, I didn't have a drawing tablet so was colouring entirely using a mouse which wasn't ideal. Doing the hair in the above picture was a pain. A couple of colouring jobs done with a mouse led to me getting a Wacom drawing tablet and working with this since.
Since then, everything I've learnt to do has been self-taught. I've read bits of books on using Photoshop, and when I know there's something specific I want to do, I turn to the internet and helpful tutorials. I have a Pinterest board of tutorials that I want to started incorporating bits of into my future work.
I do, however, still work in quite a traditional way. I hand draw my drawings, either with pencils on paper and scanning them to Photoshop, or drawing them directly into Photoshop. Then I physically or digitally ink it as appropriate, apply colours, usually as flat washes then building up details to a finished piece.

I'm getting better at this and I've recently started using more and more photomanipulation to drop objects into pieces, and to create textures from photos. With the new steampunk Christmas card I've just completed, I decided to take the photo elements from being small items in the background or used as an ethereal overlay, to very much an essential part of the main picture.

Click here to see it full-sized

I still often struggle to get my pieces to look the way I want them to. I think I'm still a little locked into using traditional media and not thinking Photoshop enough. I also think I need to be more imaginative and more abstract with my concepts. I don't think I'm thinking of interesting enough concepts to need half the stuff Photoshop can do for me.

Firstly, I still haven't quite figured out Brushes. While I know the basics of how to create and use them, I haven't quite figured out the why. I tried using a brush I'd created from a photo of a fir branch little bit on the new Coggingtons card, to turn areas of black shadow on the Christmas tree into areas of textured green fir branches. You'll have to tell me how successful I was. Again though, this is very much using the brush as a peripheral feature whereas I know they can be used very much to create essential parts of a piece.

I keep seeing mention of using custom brushes, and I spoke briefly to my friend Adam Ford who extolled their virtues.

So, the next time I get time to do a bit of experimenting on a project, that's what I shall be doing.

-Curt-

Follow me on Facebook: www.facebook.com/CurtisAllenIllustrator