You may be wondering why we're devoting so much time to painting with textures. Well, one of the biggest complaints you hear about digital art is that it looks too slick, that it is so perfect it has no soul or life. While the main goal of the remaining chapters of this book is to show various methods of painting different types of characters , they also aim to show that digital art need not be sterile. The goal is not to try to emulate traditional techniques but just possibly to invent a new type of image that while obviously digital in execution is not boring to look at.
This chapter builds on the things learned in the previous chapters. The basic information that was presented there will not be repeated here.
The following tutorial assumes that you know some fundamentals of working in Photoshop CS or previous versions of Photoshop. You should know such things as
Where individual palettes are located
How to create, save, and use patterns
How to adjust a brush's opacity
What a layer style is and how to use it
How to create layers and change their composite method
How to resize your brush and sample color from within the image (preferably using hot keys)