Photoshop Practice

Hello all! (Rob... and the other 3 or so random views)

It's been a while since I spent any time at all on photoshop, so decided it was time to set myself some summer homework. Today my project was to just loosen up my drawing, something I've been trying to do in my sketches for a while (which I must begin to upload soon). 

I decided I'd attempt a skyline landscape (landscapes are a huge weak-point of my drawing since I mostly draw characters, animals aswell... But that's for another day) without allowing myself the use of the eraser tool or undo at all, and not really thinking too much about what I was doing, and this is what I ended up with after around 7 minutes:

• I started off with a simple gradient background.
• Set a new layer to multiply and painted in the building at random, using a hard square black brush, occasionally using the shift key to get some straight edges.
• Changed the opacity to around 80% to get some colour from the background.
• Created another layer (normal) and using the same brush, only white; I began by colouring in lit surfaces, again not thinking, just going with whatever happened.
• Made yet another layer (normal) and using a hard round brush picked reddish/orange colours (for no other reason than I felt like it) painted on large dots and streaks of colour, holding shift between strokes, which gives the shapes the 'tails'.
• Next just to finish up created a full black/white gradient across the screen on a new layer, and set the layer to screen to enhance the lighting above the base background layer.
• Then another layer, using the pen tool created an offset rectangle and filled it with white, lowered the opacity, and then copied it to the side. I was trying to give the effect of looking through a window, not sure if it worked but for 7 minutes work I can't complain.
• Then poked on the Ratworks watermark in the bottom corner and saved as .jpg.
• That's it!

 I'll set myself more sketching / practice mini projects through-out the summer (a few per week I imagine). 


I'm currently looking for a free recording tool so I can record the whole drawing process as I go, but being on a mac my choices are limited, especially cheap / free choices.

See you the next time I see you!