Royal Pair (Photoshop Tablet Art tutorial)

[buloght]

I cannot wait for you to finish this so I can save it and burn it to instant cd/dvd forever.

[Xellie]

I am DEFINETELY not qualified to crit. Only want to let you know that it looks STUNNING so far, and to encourage you to keep at it...

[zabnat]

There's one thing that bothers me. Sometimes it looks like she only has only eye. I know it's behind the hair, but the hair is somehow so critically positioned that it feels like the eye should be partly visible (even though it probably shouldn't). I don't know if anybody else noticed this, it might be just me with my wooden eye
Maybe you could try lowering the hair just a tiny bit? Could be worth experimenting.

Otherwise it's looks really good. And I really like the style also.

[A�rendyll (formerly Yurina)]

I definitely like this image!

One critic: The sleeve of the Queen looks very VERY rectangular. I think it's rather odd...

But aside from that: Great job!!

Cheers, Yurina

[MashPotato]

Thanks Monkey and Buloght ^_^  EDIT: oops!  And Xellie too! ^_^

Maybe after this you could create a "How to draw good for n00bs" tutorial...because that seems to be the first step here...

That is something I cannot do... my drawing technique, such as it is, is so helter-skelter and improper that I do not want to spread my terrible habits to anyone else =^_^=.  I never trained myself to draw properly, and it's probably why I have so much trouble drawing what I want exactly.

Zabnat and Yurina: thanks for the crit ^_^.  I hope I have fixed the problems in my latest version:

[KristjanMan]

Some things I noticed: shouldn't the flower thingy with leaves on it be green or something and (might just be me but) the kings ear is too big. Other than that this is  :o

[MashPotato]

Yes, his ear is a bit too big (the position may be off as well)--thanks, I will fix that ^_^  I made the leaves white because I was going by the design on my deck of cards.  I'm not sure if it's standard, but the queen's flower's stem is white in my deck.  If it looks strange I can change it slightly (it's not like I've been following the design closely anyway ^_^), but I don't want to make it very green because it would be the only green in the picture.

[monkey0506]

No drawing tut then? Oh well...guess I'll just have to admire your wonderful work while I sit here and think how much I'll never be able to create something like that....

[Huw Dawson]

On a slight style point, I think the eyelashes on the queen are a tad too long. Everything else here is awsome.

On a side note Mash, whenever I hear "Mash Potato" now I think of that adorably cute bee you have at your avatar. I just keep imagining it saying "Mash Potato" in a REALLY cute voice. Damn that bee! I can't have bubble and squeak without chuckleing now!

- Huw

[MashPotato]

*sigh* it looks like this painting/tutorial won't be finished... I could just cry: I shrank down my psd files to make the jpegs for this tutorial, and accidentally saved the psd at that size.  I only found out now when I reopened it to work on it... since the queen was pretty much done, I'll try to salvage as much as I can, and post it later.

So let this be another part of the tutorial: BE CAREFUL WHEN SAVING! :'(


Huw: I'm glad the bee brings joy ^_~

[fovmester]

what an anti climax!! 

[Gilbert]

Actually, in my opinion, you should backup the PSDs often (NOT save often, save often can destroy things!) so you may always change stuff by starting again from some in-progress step and to prevent disasters happening when working on a serious piece.
This is especially true when you're making a supposed-to-be tutorial, which in my opinion, at each in-progress step that you want to take shots and show you shall make a copy of the original file, so in case you need it (like say, you want to change some of the in-progress shots) you can always load back the backed-up versions.

[MashPotato]

Indeed.  It would have made sense to do so in this case... I'm just not in the habit of saving multiple files, and I'm usually very careful when I resize.  It's okay, though--I still have the original file with layers, and it's at a viewable size, so I can still finish it ^_^ (just not exactly as I intended)

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EDIT:  here it is ^_^. 

6. Adjusting
I usually up the contrast and adjust levels just before I finish, since I prefer saturated colours.  In this case, I had some fun playing around with the colours and made it darker.




So... that's it!  I hope this pseudo-tutorial helped in some way.  Keep practicing ^_^

[Vel]

What can I say, apart from a big... WOW! Really, really amazing.

[Tuomas]

Now, make the nose stronger, or more visible and it'll be great imo.Too smaal for a desktop icon though

[Shane 'ProgZmax' Stevens]

Moving this to the tutorial thread.

[MrColossal]

A little tip for saving flattened images without flattening:

select the entire canvas, hit Control Alt C and it copies anything in the marquee regardless of layer. It's like taking a print screen of that area.

Then Control N, Control V and it opens a new window and pastes the flattened image to be saved.

I found this on accident and I use it so much it's not even funny.

Sometimes if I start getting crazy with layers I'll Control Alt Copy the entire canvas, stick all my layers into a folder, close it, turn it off and paste the flattened image and start a whole new round of layers.

[MashPotato]

A little tip for saving flattened images without flattening:

Very useful to know.  Thanks ^_^