Thursday's Doodle

I've made digital art in Illustrator for years, but I've never tried doing it in Photoshop. My past few blog posts have been a progression of my attempts to create original art in Photoshop. My first attempt, the flowers, were drawn with Photoshop's pen tool. I'm happy with the results, but not the method since I basically created it exactly as I would in Illustrator. The pen tool is not Photoshop's forte, but being more familiar vector art, it was the tool I was most comfortable using. So this piece broke the ice for me, but I knew that on my next one I wanted to use more of the raster tools and techniques that are unique to Photoshop.

So before my next doodle I researched online samples of original art made in Photoshop. There are some stunning photo-realistic creations out there! So I found a photo reference and began drawing these leaves with variations of the brush tool. Creating art in raster-based Photoshop is a completely different practice from creating art in vector-based Illustrator. I had to change the way I approached and thought about digital art, but this was a good learning experience.

After achieving some familiarity and intuition with the tools used to create the leaves, I was ready to try something freehand again. Queue today's post: Thursday's doodle. I spent several hours drawing this girl in Photoshop using the brush tool, the smudge tool, and the dodge/burn tools. The entire piece was drawn on only two layers: one for the hair, and one for everything else. She lacks the texture and tones to look photo-realistic, but I'm happy with it looking like a pencil/charcoal drawing. My next attempt will be to try drawing a face from a photo and doing it in color.