. If any of you artsy type have suggestions, tips and tricks, or links to tutorials for drawing in photoshop please help a brotha out
1. After you finish your sketch layer, lower it's opacity to 20-30%. Then create a new layer and do the new lines on that. They'll come out neater, and you can also make changes to the drawing more easily.
2. Use a reference image. They make drawings look a billion times better. For example, sharks have white bellies that work as a kind of camouflage from below (the light belly looks like the bright, sunlit surface of the ocean). You also forgot the frontal fins of the shark.
3. Use multiple layers. It helps with organizing.
4. Use a nice, solid brush for lining. I use a 4 pixel size brush with dynamic pressure. So, the harder I press, the thicker the brush gets. It keeps the lines nice and crisp. You can also duplicate the line art layer to make them thicker.
5. If you make sure that your drawings are completely closed off (so you have closed shapes, instead of open ones), then you can color easily with the bucket tool by: clicking the area with the magic wand tool (W), going to Select>Modify>Expand, selecting 2 pixels, hitting okay, going to a new layer under the line art layer, and filling in with the bucket tool (G). It sounds complicated, but it's really easy. It helps a lot with bigger images.
6. Name your layers so you don't mix anything up.
7. Do your shading on another layer so that you can fix it easily.
What do you set your eraser tools hardness setting too?, you know it may be intresting to hear some things you do to your workspace(photoshop,gimp or whatever) to make things run smoothly, would you be interested in sharing?
I use the same thing as my brush. Pressure sensitive brush at 100% opacity. I change it's size very often though.
My workspace:
