Digital color blending technique (mouse friendly) - video tutorial

[TDR]

This is a video tutorial I did some time ago for wc3c to stop people from using smudge when blending colors. This technique that I'll show you is used by every digital painter.

This here is a video tutorial (with speed doubled so you won't get exageratly bored; it's quicktime mov format) wich illustrates how to blend colors without using the crappy smudge. It can be used for both painting and textures. This was done in Adobe Photoshop CS2, but it works with all older photoshop versions and with Corel Painter and I think also with Gimp and Paint Shop Pro.

Download link (8MB zip file; the movie file is quicktime mov): http://www.wc3campaigns.net/tdr/smudgesucks.zip

The basic concept is: paint a stroke, then to blend pick the color near the stroke (using the eyedropper; deafult hotkey is Alt, at least in Photoshop and Painter) you just drew and paint with that color inbetween and so on. I used a standard hard edge brush, normal mode, with 20% opacity and 25% spacing and a mouse, although I do have a tablet, but I didn't touch it for this tutorial.

I attached the result and another sample (not featured in the video). It's just a blob, I only show you how do blend them colors. I picked random colors.

Here's a description of the steps I did:

1. I draw a shitty contour
2. Using a brush set to multiply (I didn't knew at the time I made this tutorial, but painting with multiply blending mode is used when you have a drawing you scanned and paint over it) I sploosh around some dark background for the blob
3. Set the brush to the settings I mentioned later (20% opacity, 25% spacing)
4. I define the highlight
5. Define the shadow
6. Add some more wacky colors and blend them with alt+click and so on. By the way, with the mouse I click continuously, I don't use long strokes. Just click click click click.....
7. If you want white around the thing, well...paint with white around it. But never use white backgrounds. White ruins the color and the contrast between white and the color you paint can play tricks on you and the color you paint could be other than what you see.
8. It's done. You can add a sharpen filter if you want. Actually I recommend doing that, it clears the blurrines. I do that a lot. But only sharpen, don't let me see other ducks (photoshop nasty filters) in your paintings!

And if you need smoother blending, decrease the opacity even more and you can also use the smooth edged brush, but use it with care. Too much use it can make your painting very blurry and ugly.

OK, now don't let me catch you using smudge again.