ChenYun, I find the best medium in painter to be the acrylic. Painter deals very well with opacity of brush so you can overlay very thin washes (while keeping the brush and stroke detail, unlike photoshop which with my setting seems to blur slightly at low opacity) of colour without needing to make changes to full layers opacity.

I use blender:detail blender 3 at low opacity to remove any nasty lines and blend edges which I think gives a far more natural look to any edge.

I believe you can turn the brush tail off in the options somewhere if it gets in the way!

Painter is simply a great piece of kit and i prefer the look and feel to that of photoshop, however the image manipulation (filters and such) in painter and the way it handles layers is not quite as good as photoshop so I use both apps to produce work. Save and port over and save to layer approach (I do it this way as when saving a pic as a .PSD in painter with layers and porting over to photoshop, if you have opacity set on a layer it gets all messed up in the photshop and vice versa, I don't know why it just does? stupid supposed compatiblity issues i guess[:'(] ).

Hope any of that helps. 

My finished pic is up in the final image section. I have no more time to work on this piece but please give final crit here.  

WrakeDesign:

Hope any of that helps. 

It did, thanks!! I'm just starting to realise the full power of this program - I just discovered "Impasto" brushes which are amazing because you can see the actual strokes of the brush!! I just used some oil brushes and detail blenders to make my knight in shining armour actually have shining armour and I have to say I got TOTALLY carried away and ended up putting waaaay more detail into him than I had originally planned (I was just going to paint him gold and add a few highlights and shadows) but these brushes are sooo cool!!

I also used the "Liquify" thing in photoshop to try and "round out" the bricks a bit but I still don't entirely have the hang of that and now the tower looks like a sack of potatoes This is a mid-work screen grab so he's only half done, but drawing his armour was so fun and even though my computer is reeaaally struggling to keep up, I'm falling in love with this program!!

Wrake, that looks pretty damn good to me. If I have one complaint it's that your cards look a little transparent.

Chen, glad you discovered the impasto brushes. I meant to suggest them the other day for your Munch style sky and forgot. The armour on the knight looks great.

you know Wrake, if you put the shattered glass that's on the watch over top of the image I think it may actually take the business away because  now you'll be giving the business a purpose and reason for being there.

it may be worth a short to try. especially if you can make it look like the shattered glass is shattering towards the viewer. 

Cheers peeps I have gone back and altered the opacity of cards, Thanx Banj I must have caught the slider by accident, as to the glass I tried all this morning to get the glass to work but I simply could not, in making it transparent enough to see image through it just looked blurry and you could not tell it was glass. So in the end i just plumpt to use it as a border/frame around edge. Tis ashame cos it is so clear in my head I just could not translate it the way i wanted.

ChenYun, The knight is looking great and the bottom of the tower looks much better!

Nope just the concept of rabbit followed by the cat, the cards, the trees and sign, each ported over to painter for fleshing out then over to photoshop for composition (ended up with around 120 layers in all).

I truly love ZBrush but the flat painting sucks, so I use it mainly for sculpting out real quick concepts for pose and definition (the new Perspective view is gonna be a godsend as will transpose (though tis a bit tricky to use it at first, has taken quite a bit of workflow adjustment,tis much faster though!!)).

I am just getting used to the new set of tools 3 offers & the red wax material is just so versatile. I used this piece as a learning aid in workflow and time keeping. These challenges are a great practice for meeting deadlines BTW.

ok, so I highly doubt it'll get done by the end of this challenge, but I redid my sketch.

Here is....Peeping Pinochio!!!


 

I tried overpainting the sky with impasto brushes but I couldn't get the same "look" as how I had it originally and also since I just removed the paper texture (I think it looks much better than with random dots noisily - I used a technical art term!! - scattered across the picture) I thought I'd leave the sky how it was, especially as I am fast running out of time.

Tomorrow I'm going away for a few days, not sure how long but there is a possibility that it will be beyond the deadline so I'm trying to finish off all the painterly type parts tonight (I have a feeling I'll be working through the night) so I can do the text/cropping etc on my less fancy, non-painter or photoshop, laptop.

The knight still needs his boots finished and some fingers but I couldn't work out how to put the armour on his back because I've only ever seen pictures from straight-on so I just gave him some chainmail. Does he look adequately heavy? I asked my dad and he said to extend the shoulder things to make him look bigger but he looked like some sort of space commander when I did that.

R..... girl with long hair (someone PLEASE tell me how to spell her name I'm begging you!! I need it for the comic words) is a bit of a speedpaint and I just clone-painted the window she's inside (and the prince's chainmail is also just some stock photo). I can't make her spikes of hair look realistic - believe me I know what it's like to only have a few tufts of hair - they seem too small and pixelly but if I increase the brush size or use a special hair-brush it looks like she just has short hair, not like it's been ripped out.

Hrmm, now that I've uploaded it as a whole picture instead of just focusing on one area at a time, I noticed that - considering the Fat Prince of Bell Air is supposed to be, well, large - girl-with-long-hair is much bigger than him. I'll wait to scale her later though, right now I need to finish the prince's legs and hand (ugh, drawing a hand flat on a wall was hard, how am I going to draw one wearing armour??)

Crits are desperately needed and ASAP since I only have tonight to finish the painterly things.
(and I need to know how to spell her name)

The knight looks stupid with a golden collar but no armoured back (I didn't give him a breastplate so the chainmail would show off his tummy, bad move? Oh, and I do intend to squiff the collar over a bit so the center is actually in the center of HIS chest, and not in the center of my image :P ) so does anyone have any tips on what backs-of-armour look like or how to draw them on a fat man in this position?

Great to see the sick and twisted thinking going on here, backed up by the variety of creative imagery.

I'll probably go with

The Frog Prints

Froggie is unmasked by some revelatory photos as a fraud who stole the crown rather than inheriting it.

Update: I tried tapered oils in Painter for her hair and that got me to thinking about the grass preset brushes that came with photoshop. Presenting whats-her-name with yellow grass for hair!!

Thanks Wrake.

Fabled, one day I hope to see you finish a picture. It's been ages since you actually entered something. Maybe if you quite the half dozen jobs and cancel the wedding you will get more time... and maybe lay off that stack of beer by the desk. Actually maybe that last one is pushing it a bit.

Chen... Rapunzel. Plate armour is pretty much the same on the back as it is on the front, just moulded to the contours of the back (although if they had shaped it like the front it would have confused the enemy more when they were running away). I liked her stubble before but it's even better now with that crafty use of the grass brush. Great work so far.

haha. yah your pushing it a bit with the last one there. lol

I have cut one thing off my schedule now though. I no longer need to search for a new job! woo hoo! I've just been hired on as Graphic Designer / Co-ordinator for EB Games Canada. That's the Canadian branch of your "Games" store chain over there in the UK.