I really recommend getting a Wacom tablet for this. It’s incredibly hard to make a good painting with a mouse. Tablets easily mimic working with a pencil or a paint brush. Small tablets like mine are anywhere from $50-$60, but bigger and more advanced tablets can cost over $1000. The pen is more expensive than the actual pad, so be careful with them.

Bamboo Pen CTL-460

Tablets

Make a new document. Most of the time I like to stick to the same settings, so my canvas size is usually12x16in (or vise versa) with 300ppi.

Getting Started

HARD BRUSHES

SOFT BRUSHES

Never set this brush to shape dynamics. It won’t work effectively.

STEP 1

First, start with your sketch. It doesn’t have to be perfect (the anatomy on this one certainly isn’t spot-on). You can fix that later when you start to paint. Make another layer under your sketch and fill it with a darker color.

While you paint, always remember to save as a PSD every now and then!

STEP 2

If you’re like me and have several sketch layers (one’s the chest, another’s the hair, etc.) just select the layer you want to work on and paint directly onto it using a hard round brush. Just start to block in the colors. You may want to mess around with the opacity and flow. I fluctuate mine anywhere from 40-100%. But it’s really up to you.

STEP 3

At this point I’m done laying down the color with the hard round brush. Now I’m going to start using the soft round brush as well. You may want to lower the opacity and flow even more.

Alternate between the two brushes to get the best effect.

STEP 4

The face is pretty much done now. I can always add more details later, though.

STEP 5

I repeat the process for the rest of his skin. Feel free to paint a certain aspect all at once. I just always paint the head before the rest of the body for some reason.

STEP 6

You can always go back and change things. Here I made his neck longer. I also started adding in tattoos and earrings. I used a different program for the tattoos but you can always use paths in PS.

STEP 7

To paint hair, just block out the area with a hard round brush. Go over the area a couple of times with this. Then turn on shape dynamics and draw in strands of hair.

STEP 8

Start applying finishing touches. I threw some photo filters and blending modes over certain parts. I also changed some features.

DONE!

You can see that I made some changes, such as shortening his neck and reshaping the hair.

Save as PNG

PNGs are a much higher quality than JPEG.

Save as PNG

PNG detail, yaaay!

Extra

This is just one method of painting. I use a lot of layers this way, sometimes going over 100 depending on what I’m doing.

100+ layers

Another Method

If you’re doing a photo study, it’s much easier to use less layers. I usually only use about 2-3 layers to paint this way. However, it can be harder considering that I don’t work with a sketch for this method.

Start out with a background.

Another Method

Make another layer and start blocking in color with a hard round brush. All the color will go on the same layer.

Another Method

Continue blocking in the colors.

When you think you’re ready, just start switching back and forth between a hard and soft round brush. Then you’ll be done.

Other Tutorials

Here are some tutorials I learned from. A lot of these go into way more depth and the artists are far more advanced than I am. You can learn a lot from these! http://fav.me/d18c4gp http://fav.me/d332s13 http://fav.me/d332scg http://fav.me/d2ef9p7