Lizardman's art journey to glory!

[John]

 I'm going back to rendering in Photoshop, any good tutorials that you might recommend to someone looking to get back into it?

Hey Lizardman, I decided to post my reply here rather than my thread.

I go back to this video when I try to remember how to paint: https://youtu.be/cCVorifCKw8?t=4193
I go back to this blog post when I get a general art amnesia: http://karlaortizart.blogspot.com/2013/0...ocess.html

I pretty much use the same thing as her. One textured brush in full opacity and around 25-40% flow as my workhorse brush (I tinkered one of Ilya Kuvshinov's brushes if I do remember it correctly) and a normal hard round with full opacity and flow that's close to a hundred to paint or smoothen things around. Sometimes, I use a different textured brush in some pieces just because I like to explore while I do them.

I stared at a lot of John Singer Sargent's paintings. I read Alla Prima by Richard Schmidt. Book is a bit on the pricey side, but I believe there's a pirated pdf copy floating out there on the Internet.

Hmm.. I don't really have a general tip since I'm still working on it myself, but I think I can credit Amit for setting me on this way of thinking about painting. He said something about planning your brush strokes before you slap them on the canvas. The way I interpret it now is to try and have the maximum amount of information given the least amount of brush strokes. 

Of course, I tend to fall by the wayside just because I tend to over-render sometimes. But that, I guess, is what's fun about doing this thing we're doing.

So much for my long winded answer. Best of luck. Glad to see you are back at it again.