Quote Originally Posted by Larb View Post
Getting faster is mainly just a matter of practice really. You basically develop a routine or process. Also the improvements are pretty clear already so keep going!

Another thing that can help is knowing your palette ahead of time. Like for my big Reyalinn town map, I didn't have to worry about the colours because I already had them set from previous practice maps.
Thanks, I will. I have given myself 6 months to get my skills back up to speed, So I push myself every day, even if I only get to squeeze an hour of art in on a given day. I like the palette idea and will start saving particular palettes that work for me.

Quote Originally Posted by LunaticDesign View Post
Wow, I really like these!
Thanks, that means a lot!

Quote Originally Posted by LunaticDesign View Post
Definitely not a professional in painting but I've been a photographer for a while and the thing that helped me to improve my speed is to develop a workflow that works for you and to practice. Sometimes this means that I would edit the same image several times working toward the same desired result. I'm still working on my work flow and figuring out what preset actions I can plan using photoshop to minimize the recursive nature of image manipulation. To get to that point I need to learn how to get what I want from the images that I producing and I am certainly working on that point.
Yes, I spend a lot of time in photoshop using the CTRL Z function on things I try and don't like. Back when I was earning commissions, I had a lot of actions made up on things that I did a lot of, like making a selection, inverting it and expanding it by 1 or 2 pixels, and this sped up the process quite a bit. This was just learned from the experience of making maps and thinking about what I could do to take shortcuts on things that I constantly repeated.

Del