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it is finally starting to turn into something
The pic I'm working on is finally starting to turn into something, so I am starting to feel the pressure ease up a tad.

Very small because I don't want to give away the details yet, well, mostly because the details look pretty crappy.
I'm following Jonas De Ro's tutorial on Sci-Fi Environment Design Techniques, which cost $5 (and is a large movie file to download), and is worth every penny. He show you how to photobash and work out negative space and the lighting and suchlike to produce an impressive-looking SF cityscape. Note that it takes him 2 hours to speedpaint his scene and it's taken me about 6-8 hours of work so far to achieve what I've got right now, which is exactly 50% of the way through his tutorial. :) (I've got the video shared with the iPad from my computer, and I play a minutes or two, stop and do the techniques he's doing, etc.)
And I've got ideas for 2 more pictures that are NOTHING LIKE THIS ONE so there may be even a bit more of a light at the end of the tunnel.
Back to the cityscape...

Very small because I don't want to give away the details yet, well, mostly because the details look pretty crappy.
I'm following Jonas De Ro's tutorial on Sci-Fi Environment Design Techniques, which cost $5 (and is a large movie file to download), and is worth every penny. He show you how to photobash and work out negative space and the lighting and suchlike to produce an impressive-looking SF cityscape. Note that it takes him 2 hours to speedpaint his scene and it's taken me about 6-8 hours of work so far to achieve what I've got right now, which is exactly 50% of the way through his tutorial. :) (I've got the video shared with the iPad from my computer, and I play a minutes or two, stop and do the techniques he's doing, etc.)
And I've got ideas for 2 more pictures that are NOTHING LIKE THIS ONE so there may be even a bit more of a light at the end of the tunnel.
Back to the cityscape...

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Also, I'm trying to figure out why my random sketches come out best when I do them while "playing" computer games (i.e. doodling while we're in a cut scene or dealing with inventory or standing around waiting for things to respawn) than when I'm sitting there dedicatedly trying to do art! *headdesk* Am I weird?
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PS for art and digital art instruction: http://www.schoolism.com/ They have limited enrollments--you can enroll in one course at a time, but switch courses at any time for $1, and most of the courses have a self-directed option where you just watch the videos on your own time. It's $144/year, and I only know that because I just got the email that says they have 2000 slots open at the moment; they usually don't have the cost listed on the website. I think I'm going to drop the money on it. If you're curious, I'd suggest signing up for the mailing list--I haven't received any email from them except this one, so they probably won't fill up your inbox. :)
conceptart.org also runs a series of digital art classes, but (a) they're EXPENSIVE and (b) most of them are for 3D artists and people who want to work in games. I took the Becoming a Better Artist by Robert Chang, and while it's very, very good, it's also very intensive and I couldn't put as much into it as I needed to each week. I did learn things in it, but I'd have to retake it and slow down to focus on stuff to get what I really could get out of it. (That price does give you perpetual access to the archived course, though! So I *could* do that!)
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Hey, one last question--is it worth my dropping the $$ on Photoshop and just accepting it as a cost of getting into digital art? Especially since everything has standardized on Photoshop? I'm starting to think that I might as well learn it sooner rather than later.
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That's a hard question, since Photoshop costs so much. :) (You can get the education version if Joe's got a .edu email address, which cuts the cost by a decent amount, even if the university doesn't have one of those stupid-good deals like mine does.)
When you get serious about sitting down to focus on digital art (er, that sounds odd), you'll probably want it, but OTOH there's a lot of amateur artists out there who don't use it.
My main impulse, however, is to suggest you get Photoshop Elements, which is a stripped-down version of Photoshop. As the book Beginner's Guide to Digital Painting in Photoshop Elements, presumably it's possible to paint in it, and it would give you a lot of PS's functions and an sense of whether you think you enjoy this long enough to stick with it and be worth the $$$.
That pretty much the advice I've given to people asking if they need really good paper and pencils and markers and stuff for art: I'd tell them to just get cheap ones while learning, and once they get the fundamentals down, buy the good paper and tools and go from there.
(If you decide you'd rather jump in feet first, I won't judge! That's what I did! XD)
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Gaaaaaaah now I need to stop looking at art by people I was associating with on Deviantart back in 2003-2005 and comparing how much they've improved to how little I've improved in the same amount of time. That gets very depressing. :/
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Now to save for Photoshop CS6...
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I've only gone through part of the first one also, given that I've mostly been exhausted when I get home and am only good enough to stare at the ceiling going "aaaaauauuuuugggghhh".
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