Session One Classes at Digital Art Academy Starting

If you have not checked out the classes at Digital Art Academy go now to: Digital Painting Courses

There are a ton of new classes and some of our highest attended classes are being offered again. If you want portrait painting, pet painting, Digital Watercolor, Learning the function of Corel Painter, Artrage, or Photoshop there is something there for you.

Below is a short video sneak peek at the new Composition basics course.

You can check out the classes that are offered at: http://www.digitalartacademy.com/courses/all-courses/

Photoshop Painting at it’s best, CS5 Dry Media Brush Set from John Derry

I am a few days behind the curve but John has released a new brush set for CS5. If you have been struggling with a decent chalk/pastel emulation then this brush set is for you.

CS5 offers some awesome new features for the digital painting geek in all of us. John is one of the leaders in development and education for the new version of Photoshop, we are fortunate John is into painting.

I said it is a brush set but it is really much more than that. Included in the price is 80 minutes of video tuts in the typical John Derry entertaining and Zany style,  Dry Media Tool Presets files (one for the barrel-rotation sensing Wacom 6D/Art Pen and one for the standard Wacom Grip Pen), a cloning layer action, a few pastel color range swatch libraries and the Dry Media papers Pattern Library. A smokin deal for under twenty bucks.

Here is a video that I snagged from Youtube.

So anyway check out the vid, check out Johns blog then trot over to http://johnsdrymedia.com/ and grab the brushes and video training. Even if you have not tried any photoshop painting yet with CS5 you can risk $20.

cheers, -tim

Photoshop Painting With Adobe’s CS5 will be much easier

By Julie Christy Encabo

There are selection of new features that are being developed by ‘Photoshop Labs’, including Painter-style brushes, a new warp tool and more.

The new brush tools aim to match what is found within the Corel Painter application. When you choose a brush, its prototype is displayed so you will get an idea about the type of brush you are about to use.   It has ‘wet’ paints (they have properties of drying out) that you can smudge, smear or blend. Also, there is a shortcut when we want to change the color of the paint on the brush, it is just a one-press command where the color picker will then be shown. Another improvement with the brushes is its shortcut command, when we want to resize the brush, we can use the same command like in the previous version (left and right parenthesis )  but when we drag our mouse horizontally, the size will change, and when we drag it vertically, the softness will change, how cool is that?

Potentially, the new technology could allow Photoshop users to drastically change someone’s appearance or position, as well as modify an environment with more ease.

With the new CS5, A similar tool to the  After Effects’ Puppet tool (Go to Edit -> Puppet Warp) has been added to Photoshop, enabling artists to warp the image by placing pins into areas to lock them down, then moving the areas around them. An overlaid grid or mesh will show up that tells you how the image is being warped, it can be turned on/off and the number of points can be adjusted. By locking down certain areas of an image using digital pins, you could change specific parts without altering the overall subject.

The new spot healing and fill tool will give you a great opportunity to give your picture a realistic view. When you want to use this, you will only need to color/select the area you want to disappear or adjust and the program will use the pattern of the picture and make multiple patches from the surrounding area in order to fill the hole that you just created, not like in the previous version where you need to define a point you want to patch your image from.

All in all a very cool upgrade and well worth the cash outlay.