Toy Killer

Try Solar flare, adjusting the curves or even using a Sepia effect. I imagine if you were to sepia and overlay or lower the opacity, it would create a warm feeling to the work...

The technique I showed you is called Non-Metalic Metalics, used in miniture painting to get a realistic metal look without using metalic paints (which are, simply, Paints with metal flakes in them). If you have any questions, Just look it up! you'll find plenty of tutorials, just mentally change out water blending with gaussian blur plugin and Model with drawing. How you can recreate it in your work: 1. seperate your metalics from your fabrics/flesh/wood in your painting in it's own specific layer. If you colored in cells this should be pretty easy. 2. Make 5 blank layers above your gold. I personally making the rest transparent for now, but that's up to you. Label them something like 'shadows/deep shadows/Highlights/bright works/ambiant light' or anything to that effect. 3. On the 'shadows' Layer, pick a nice sized brush and go over where the light would recess on the armor (like the grooves behind ridges that block the light) with a deep Terracotta/Red Clay color. 4. On the 'Deep Shadows' Layer, take a finer brush and go over the spaces again, further or less touched by the light with a darker, more mulched brown color (think dark chocolate). 5. use the Gaussian blur tool, and individually blur the Shadow and Deep Shadow layers. choose the blur to fit the color blend, but don't worry if it blurs into area you don't want them, you should need to touch it up anyway. Typically, the Deep Shadows doesn't have to be blurred as much, while the Shadows may need to be blurred a fair bit to look right. Once done, you may have to touch them up so the colors don't bleed into areas that are supposed to rise up, or off the armor completely. 6. the armor should start taking shape now. Now it's times for highlights. Where the light touches the armor strongest needs to be brightened to a nice pastal yellow on the 'Highlights' Layer. 7. Just like with 'Deep Shadows', Bright Work needs some luvin' too! Touch up the very top of the ridges with an off white color (like a sun bleached bone). 8. Again blur to your liking and fix up as with step 5. 9. Now, for Ambiant light. All surfaces reflect light just like a mirror will. It's just not as strong. Shiney surfaces, like gold, show this effect the strongest and require a touch of strong Ambiant light. This is just like Bright Work, but reflecting the exact opposite way of the main source of light. this will have to be blurred, but just slightly. the more you blur it, the more it will throw off the mind's eye in understanding what was intended to be the main source of light. 10. Your armor should look nice and sparkling. I would personally suggest taking the primary color layer and making a copy, putting it higher then all the other layers, and playing with, overlay, multiply, lighten, darken, screen, etc, and most importantly, the opacity. Those colors, most likely are not linear to each other, but by having a layer of one color over them with at 10% opacity, It will draw them together. you can also experiment with noise and and a whole slew of other filters to experiment with the finish of the armor. Side Notes: The stronger the difference between the shading and the highlights, the object appears to have a stronger gleem or luster to it. The more area the highlights take up opposed to the shaded areas, the brighter the source of light appears to be. The darker the shadows, the closer the light source appears to be. The more area the shaded areas take up, the dimmer your light source appears to be. If you have trouble deciding how you want it shaded, try finding a refrence picture and adjusting the curves so it suits your color scheme. Don't just eye dropper the color(you want to learn how to do pick colors yourself!)!

Try Extreme shading and highlighting..? Make the dark parts really dark (Not black, but a very dark golden brown) and the light parts almost white. here is a good tutorial for painting minitures, same concept, different medium:Metalic painting

well, you have some composure basics down. The biggest problem I can really see is easily corrected. Your additions have some sharp outlines, it looks like you need some more time with a pen tool. zoom the hell in and carefully, cautiously make an outline of what you want to cut out. make sure anti-alising is on and feather it a bit, I usually found 0.2 to be perfect on photoshop, I don't know how feathering is handled on PdN. Keep in mind your rule of thirds. If you had a box and cut it into 9 pieces, (3 horiziontal, 3 vertical,) you want 1 of the thirds heavy with content, the middle third, with a mild amount of content and the final with minimal content. you want your focal point to be at one of the corners of the middle box. So, for example, with your top picture, if you moved the model down a little bit, maybe accented her eyes a little bit (maybe don't blur it as much? lighten that specific area), you could make her eyes hit that perfect point focal point. If you balanced the background a good bit, making the darker and more vibrant reliefs closer to her hips and the rest of the bottom of the page, but slowly easing up from the their, it'll keep her head from looking like it's blending into the background. Hope this helps!

I'm a Sailor with an undying love for pigments and acrylics. However, being on a carrier really limits your ability to paint unless it's a bulkhead. Needless to say, I'm not really meeting my creative urge. I had Paint.net but was seriously dissappointed in missing all the functions that Photoshop provided, and it basically killed my digital love (I could hardly afford to keep buying new canvas, let alone the fistful of cash that photoshop costs. Now, I have come to realize all the plug-ins that are availible. These are amazing. Free program, with all the missing pieces of a high cost professional program and it can be run on my laptop, once I get it back. I have a few questions reguarding the various programs: 1) So, Cloud filter exists, what does that scaleable dialog change? 2) Does the pen tool make selections ala photoshop? 3) (My term-fu is off, I havent used a computer based art program since highschool) You can set the style of each layer to things like Overlay and Multiply and such... What are all the options and what (Mathmatically if you know) do they do? 4) suppose I hand draw a picture and upload it to my compy, Would I have to ink it all over again, or is there a way to just make the white transparent? 5) What in the name of all that shpadonkiels is Alpha?!? I'm getting the impression it makes things transparent, but I'm not 100% sure... 6) I get that shape 3d is cool, but what are it's limits? Can you set the size of the individual object (for instance, can you make a 3x6x2 foot box? or are they always cubes?). If you run the plug-in for an empty layer, will it just give you shading? 7) I saw a bunch of fractal-esque images made on this site, is that a plug-in as well, or were they just tirelessly copy/paste/resize/repeat, tirelessly... 8) Is there a section of this website that is for art, which just happens to be created on PdN. I have seen a lot of very beautiful abstract pieces, some great re-workings with game renders and the like, and TONS of photomanipulations... what about just a painting that happens to be cursor painted? If possible, I understand it's a slowly dying artform and all, but can you relate it to me in Painting terms? (I.E. if my suspection of Alpha is correct, It's like mixing PVA glue with the Acrylic paints, making the shade more see-through...)