Assignment 1 - Form Painting

The final product.

The first big assignment for this semester was learning how to use Photoshop's brush tools in order to make convincing paintings of 3-dimensional objects. I've used Photoshop sparingly in the past as part of web design courses, but that delved more into understanding tools related to graphic design, so learning about the program's more painting-oriented tools was a fresh topic. The whole process took a combined total of roughly four hours to complete.

Example of an unblended cone versus a blended sphere.

While I already understood some of the basic concepts like adjusting opacity or creating straight lines for forms, the Mixer Brush tool was completely new to me, and I'm impressed by what it can do. It took some time to get used to it... blending a palette of squares together is much easier than blending colors in a form together, but I eventually reached a point where I'm really satisfied with the end results. It's taught me a lot about putting shades and tints together on objects too, and I hope I can put this newly learned information to use in my own artistic endeavors by improving my own shading technique.