Working with Layers – For Beginners
After speaking with some of my students, I have come up with some new tutorials and additions to the online mentorship.
Video Tutorials
I’ve been doing video tutorials for many years now, but lately I haven’t been able to produce very many tutorials due to my schedule. Creating a tutorial of an entire illustration takes weeks, sometimes months to produce. Plus I usually don’t have the extra time to create personal paintings.
I have decided to start creating some shorter tutorials that are geared more toward beginners. Watching professionals create an entire illustration is great, but sometimes it isn’t very useful to amateurs. Plus many times the artist assumes the audience already knows the basics of Photoshop. These shorter tutorials will focus more on the basics instead of creating an entire illustration. This way I actually have time to create new tutorials.
The first tutorial focuses on layer modes. I talk about some of the various layer modes I use, what I use them for, what they do, etc. If you are already familiar with layer modes and how they work, this tutorial probably isn’t for you.
I plan on making the next tutorial about blending. It seems that beginners always have a problem with blending in Photoshop. There are several techniques when it comes to blending, so I will go over them in the tutorial. I am not sure when the blending tutorial will be available, but it should be soon.
If my schedule allows, I will still offer free tutorials on my Enliighten site. Unfortunately I have bills to pay, so I can’t always offer everything for free. Providing cheaper and/or free content is still important to me, so look for more in the future.
Personal Paintovers
In my mentorship I do paintovers of every single assignment for every single student. I had one student suggest that I offer paintovers of paintings not created in my mentorship. This would be open to anyone, you don’t need to take my mentorship. This way if you need help with a painting, I can show you how to fix it directly.
The personal paintovers are a little more expensive than my other tutorials, but that is because each tutorial is unique and I can only sell it once instead of creating one tutorial and selling the same one over and over. The paintover is yours and yours alone.
You can submit just about anything you want; it could be an illustration or just a character design. I don’t do very many mechanical things or vehicles, so I am probably not the best person to do those types of paintovers. I also don’t do 3D, so I won’t be doing any 3D paintovers.
You can purchase the personal paintover from my store. After you make your purchase, just send me the image you want me to paintover. A Dropbox link to your file is probably the best way to go.
Advanced Digital Painting – At Your Own Pace
At Your Own Pace Mentorship
This was another suggestion from a student. I understand that many of my students work and have families, so trying to do a homework assignment every week can be very difficult. The “at your own pace” mentorship is tailored to fit your schedule. If you need 3 weeks to do one assignment, you can.
So why would you want the structured mentorship over the “at your own pace” mentorship? The “at your own pace” mentorship does not offer discounts (except for the military discount) or payment plans. The “at your own pace” mentorship also doesn’t allow you to have live chats with all of the other students at the same time. Since the mentorship will be tailored to your schedule, it will just be a one-on-one chat with me and no one else.
I will probably only offer the “at your own pace” mentorship to a few people at a time. Since I will still run the normal structured mentorship, I don’t want things to get too confusing since I will have several students all working on different things. If it turns out to be easier than I am expecting, I will offer more slots.
The Intro to Digital Painting – At Your Own Pace can be purchased here and the Advanced Digital Painting – At Your Own Pace can be purchased here.
You might notice that the Advanced AYOP is a little more when it comes to adding the premium assignments. That is because the AYOP premium assignments will be a little more personal and you will have more input. I will email and discuss them more with you than I normally do with the structured class. Emailing individual students takes time, plus you don’t know how long it will take for people to respond, so I can’t do that with the structured class. Hopefully this will allow you to create an even tighter portfolio.
