I gotta question for all the digital painters out there who use photoshop v.7.0. When your painting digitally and you get to the detailing phase, how do you detail, that is... I mean... how do you give the painting more depth and such? I just wanna know how I can fix up my where do the days go pic (www.geocities.com/xefonic_images/wdtdg.jpg) and how do you paint a back ground without messing up the pic all on one layer?

Detail is about patience...lots and lots of patience.

Generally you can fit in more detail with a larger image and its all about the zoom. Personally i hate working in detail, perhaps thats why I often do landscapes and studies...

As for the background question, there are problably as many different methods as there are artists, but from a tradtional stand point and one that I often use digitally is that I work from the back forward...that is I start with the background and establish that first and bring in the foreground elements when the bg is more or less done...but for portraits where the bg is bnot really anything real i will lay ina very basic background using colors that will both compliment and be used in the portrait and then I work back and forth fromthe portrait and the background through out the painting - work on them at the same time.

Ther is nothing really wrong with using seperate layers, in fact its oneof the unique advantages digital artists have. However in order tou better unify edges and such I would suggest flattening the image at some point and bring the edges of the subjects and background together. This may not be necessary however depending on how you paint on the separate layers....ok confused now?

:)

Anyways i hope this helps you out.

Cheers.

how can i make a pallete from a picture? Like, I wanna create a customized pallete for painting of that genre, how do I do that? Like, I want to bring it up from the swatches menu.

There isnt any easy method that I am aware of....at least that is for photoshop. You can do it in painter, with a simple command (cant think of it at the moment though).

In photoshop You may have to do it by hand(eye) by selecting or creating colors and adding them to the palette..then its as easy as saving the swatch pallette via the swatches pallete....