Photoshop Student Work

Last weekend I gave a 2 day workshop that was an intensive 12 hour intro to Photoshop and the Wacom drawing tablet. It was a small class, and I am glad because just 3 students really had me hopping with lots of questions. We had a really great time and everybody finished a pet portrait.

The first day I spent the morning with a little demo work and then after lunch everyone isolated their subject, erasing the background on their photos and then spent the afternoon smudging almost every pixel on their digital canvas using the smudge tool.

Pinky & Oscar
By Linda Clemens

Rascal
By Dallas Gorman

Buddy
By Dawn Oberst

On day two I did a little demo work in the morning using regular people photos to show what types of fun Photoshop fixes you can do on humans. I use Photoshop for painting, but I wanted my students to understand some of the great tools PS offers for enhancing our regular snapshots.  Then my students got busy finalizing their portraits by adding color with the finger painting tool and we played around a little with filters. Each student had different challenges and different approaches. Dallas seemed to struggle the most with understanding layers and yet her portrait of Rascal turned out so very cool and so very painterly.  She wanted a Van Gogh feeling with sunflowers and I think she totally achieved it. Linda was very good at the smudging and I think where she really excelled was in creating a very original and dynamic background for her painting that had little shapes representing kitty dreams. Everyone did great on their background choices, Dawn used a red leather texture she shot at home for Buddy's ground and Dallas had a great pic of Sunflowers she shot for Rascal.  Dawn seemed to pick up the tools the quickest and she was able to knock out a second portrait of her pup Lucy.

All of my students really did great work and I was reminded just how hard Photoshop is. We barley skimmed the surface of all that this program has to offer. I kept our focus very narrow and we learned about the paint brush tool, the smudge tool and the finger painting tool. We learned that "command Z" is our friend, and we learned that layers are tough at first, but the most powerful aspect to working in Photoshop.

Lucy
By Dawn Oberst

I really enjoyed teaching this class. My students were great and insisted on buying me lunch both days. That was really sweet. I brought bagels on Sunday and we snacked and played on the computers all weekend. If you are interested in taking a class with me you can follow me on my fine art portfolio site to learn about upcoming workshops. My next workshop is in October.