Photoshop Warm Up With a Faerie

I don’t know about most digital artists but when I’m working on a digital piece I typically need to work on some kind of warm-up with photoshop before I get skull deep into a more substantial project, say a commission piece or a uber planned out monstrosity. Granted, if I wasn’t a clumsy chick with lousy hand-eye coordination and crap handwriting this sort of warm up might be more optional skill practicing than total necessity for me.

I started working on this sunset faerie back when I got my glorious pen & tablet set from my sweetie for Christmas (complete with a better version of photoshop than I had). A few steps into this illustration I realized hey maybe I oughta try my hand at doing this up as a tutorial while I’m at it. This will eventually wind up as part of a tutorial [which will link from here when done]. Too bad when I started it I didn’t have or know about a proper screen capture tool; and I didn’t know what the multiply layer in photoshop was actually for (coloring line art), despite fiddling with that extensively over the years.

Since I didn’t know how to color line art properly back then I opted to ultimately do this one up as a digital painting. Hopefully I finish this thing up in the next couple of weeks.

One of the nicest things about calling an art piece a warm –up is that you feel more free to really experiment with the thing. The feeling of figuring little things out and working faster than normal is pretty cool, and sometimes you end up with a much cooler piece of art than if you had approached it more seriously at the start.

Who else loves doing digital art? Do find you work better if you do some warm-ups first? Have you ever made your own tutorial, or thought about doing one? Do you prefer coloring your line art or digital painting?