merging down is a step you should take at some point, but to be fair it does come with confidence, you have to have the realistic mindset that anything you do to push the piece away from the final intention can be repainted or adjusted with no additional layers, I think the best way to do it is, use layers when you are adding an additional level of detail for example shadows, or highlights, or lighting, and then you can flick it on or of to see if it enhances or detracts, and then you can adjust the transparency and maybe colour curves and contrast of the additional layer until it fits the best, then merge down, and I think having 2 full composition layers isn't a bad thing, ie work your piece merge down, then duplicate, work on the duplicate and toggle the top layer on and off see if your composition has improved if not you can go back, most often you won't but it really does offer a reassurance,it also helps you notice if you modify an area that was working well with something not so, you can always re-incorporate the original portion. one massive thing is to not be possessive and 'marry' alot of what you do, if you do something and it looks great in isolation and you are proud of it, but overall it detracts from the composition redraw/re-render it! and selection areas that are off and rotating the crap out of them to fix the anatomy is one thing that is majorly efficient and a definite advantage of the digital medium, redrawing from scratch is something you do in traditional medium because you have to, just shifting rotating and breaking apart components and making them fit then re rendering once you have fixed the issue is definitely something worthwhile, something like this:
would've taken me a long while to change without using that method, it's not really concrete suggestions just illustrating the use of tools (it wasn't very well thought out
), the perspective tool is great for bringing planes into perspective and is often used in alot of compositions I've noticed, easiest way to do ground and is used frequently in concept art, to get a top down texture of the floor and to perspective shift it as the ground plane, it's incredibly flat though so it's limiting, but as a basis for establishing your perspective it can be useful, and for warping ground level elements, also did some rough solid brush paint over on some areas also I did notice a few things particularly you've stuck too close to that reference the character looks incredibly feminine and baby faced even for a youth.
oh and I didn't specify accurately , I never use smudging
as a painting tool, but when you juxtapose rotated segments smudging the resulting sharp edges together and for palettes etc it's a time saver.
and cheap? well it it can be, like anything. but when used effectively it's incredibly useful and time effective, some artists use it as a reference and then paint there own gradient over it with brush strokes to better simulate traditional medium, but using the 'perfect' gradients and shapes as guidelines, and yeah on its own it's cheap but as a really subtle overlay layer to establish the light, then using that to manually light the areas effected it's quite effective.
regarding my paint settings I said so hesitantly and will blame being sleep deprived
I have only used the software a couple times and the interface is not the most intuitive, but just now I opened it and noticed the plethora of parameters so I stand corrected, and what I should have said is that the default brush dynamics aren't to my liking, I assumed there was a way to customized but rushed for time the few times I used it It wasn't that apparent (the brush setting icon is an asterisk
but admittedly mousing over them for tool tips at the time would've been advisable..)
and while creating really comprehensive ramps is useful most traditional artists had a really basic palette, and the mixing was by eye and there was always subtle differences, there may be such a thing as too much palette control
in an analogy like an artist buying 64 tubes of paint Vs 12 , but that's the thing smudge mixing is more suited for simulating colour mixing not colour selection, you select your tubes close to what you want the colour then adjust with another colour, you don't combine red with white to make a brighter red from a dark red base paint, you go out and buy a bright red or you'll just end up with pink, and overmixing is the same in traditional medium it =ugly browns in digital art it =poor murky colours, which is essentially what colour picking from the canvas becomes over time.
and yeah Gpick is quite useful haven't used it personally but even having equivalents of established colour hues is a great benefit for simulated painting.
and if you are looking for movie poster stylings and inspiration I'd look no further than Drew Struzan, google search garnered these:
here is a small selection of his work in one place, or if you have the time his
official portfolio with pages of HQ images of his posters, looks like you used starwars posters as an inspiration for your older piece anyway
