How to Speed Paint in Photoshop

Adobe Photoshop is an excellent choice for painting in a hurry due to its layering functions and many features. Concept artists and sketch artists need to make paintings quickly and may not need an image with a lot of detail or refinement. Speed painting is also a good way for illustrators to learn to improve their efficiency. There's no one way to do it. However, there are a few common techniques that make Photoshop speed painting easier.

Things You'll Need

• Graphics tablet
• Reference photos

Instructions

1. Create your initial art canvas. Choose a color to be the predominant tone in your painting and fill the background with this color. This makes choosing a palette easier.

2. Choose the main colors of your painting. Create a new layer and place strokes of these colors on the layer. This creates your palette and helps guide the painting.

3. Add darker values. Use loose strokes to define the shadows of shapes. Focus on the silhouettes of objects rather than drawing them out with lines. Refer to your reference images to determine shape placement.

4. Switch to the lighter colors in your palette and begin to add lighting. Use lighting colors that are the color wheel opposites of your shadow colors. Yellow light is shadowed by blue or purple. Blue light is shadowed with brown, dark orange or dark red. Maintain higher contrast in the foreground. You should now have the general shape of all objects blocked in.

5. Refine the piece. Use continually smaller brushes to add more detail to the shadows and highlights. Don't get caught up in smoothness or precision. The goal of speed painting is to create the right impression.

6. Add final details with a small, hard brush. Keep these sparse to imply more detail than is actually present. Adjust brightness and contrast as needed to improve the value of your finished image.

Tips & Warnings

• Use pre-set specialty brushes to speed up texturing.

• Most speed painters avoid sketches.

• Work "zoomed-out" from the canvas to avoid over-focusing on detail.

• Use the largest brush possible for the area.

• Avoid an all white background.

• Use hard-edged brushes to avoid mushiness,

References

• Studiochris.us: Speed Painting in Photoshop CS3
• Castlegard on Deviantart: Speed Painting Step by Step
• Chapter 56: Speedpainting

Resources

• Deviantart: Speed Painting Brushes