[glitch13]

I was wondering if anyone could throw up a link to any good shading / blending tutorials.

And while I'm on the topic, what's better for this, painter or photoshop (Keep in mind I only have Painter classic which came with my tablet [have full photoshop tho]).

thanks in advance!

[glitch13]

nothing?

[Frost]

Well Glitch, uh.. hmm... there are a few images I did that might help... but, erm, yeah.
http://www.3dpalette.org/~frost/img/g2000/frost_-_LESSON_Light.jpg

it's a little complicated without any text saying "this is this and that is that", but, that's the kind of "tutorial" I was eventually interested in writing... who knows, maybe I'll get to it eventually. (not that I know anything about anything really...)

[glitch13]

thanks, but I was actually looking more for a tutorial on the technical side of digital painting; the best/easiest way to blend two colors into a seamless sort of 'fade'. you know, so highlights and shadows don't just look like big blobs paint, look more like, well, shadows and highlights.

Maybe I'm looking at this the wrong way, but I figured people started out with a picture and the colors were just sort of abstractish swatches of color on it, then it is blended. I was wondering what the best way to 'soften' and 'blend' these colors, cause whenever I do it, i just lookes like swatches of colors with blurry borders instead of the colors blending in an attractive manner.

[quaternius]

I'm not sure that you're after really "blending". Smudge tools never really work too well - everything looks like you used the smudge tools. Most folks here seem to prefer using halftones to create transitions - like you would do in traditional acrylic, gouache or tempera paints. That is, picking values/colors that are halfway between the two adjacent colors you want to "blend" and running a line of this color along the line where the two original colors meet. If that doesn't create enough transition for you then use more halftones along the new edges. One way to try to do this is by changing your opacity for these halftone strokes.

Or, you might try airbrushes for those really smooth photographic transitions.

Or you can mask and use grads, or lighting effects. I don't remember if Painter classic uses the same current watercolor arrangement as painter6 - but interesting blending effects can be done by painting in watercolor first - then scrubbing out highlight areas (wet eraser). Then when you paint on top of this you'll get overlay effects - but that may just be in painter6 where watercolor is placed on it's own "wet" layer. In photoshop this is accomplished by layers and varying the opacities.

There's lots of ways, but no real magic bullet. Unfortunately, a lot of it is just experimentation.

Happy experimenting.

Q