The Blog of Glen Moyes

You'll be hearing a lot more about illustration from me in the future as our project develops, and to kick it off here's the brushes I use for most of my illustration work. I didn't include any of my special brushes for things like trees and water; most of those brushes are created on a per-project basis and I only ever used them once, although I did go ahead and include my fur brush. Anyway, these are the brushes I use all the time. Glen Moyes 2009.03 Brush Presets – 85MB Glen Moyes 2009.03 Tool Presets – 85MB Here they are in action. Many of these brushes have a narrow tip like a calligraphy brush, and they use the pen tilt of the stylus to rotate the brush tip, so you really need an Wacom Intuos tablet or better to take advantage of these brushes. I'll get into the advantages of a narrow brush tip when I start doing video tutorials on painting with Photoshop. I've provided a Tool Preset and Brush Preset file for these brushes. You should download both so you c...

NOTE TO CS5 USERS: I've gotten reports that in CS5 (and maybe CS4 but I haven't heard anything yet) that the minimum width of the Swatches panel in the default workspace is 17 instead of 16. The Swatches panel must be 16 swatches wide, otherwise the circular swatch pattern becomes slanted. The culprit is the Layers panel which can't be as small as the Swatches panel, so if the Swatches panel and the Layers panel are put on the same column the Swatches panel will be wider to fit. The fix is to undock the swatches panel, at which point you can dock other panels below it that aren't wide. Three months ago I released a set of RGB and CMYK color wheels . After some user feedback I fixed the CMYK wheel so it has richer colors and pure CMYK data for the Adobe formats that supported it. The files are updated there so go ahead and get them. In addition, also at the request of a user, I made a color wheel with shades instead of tints. The special thing about this palette is ...

NOTE TO CS5 USERS: I've gotten reports that in CS5 (and maybe CS4 but I haven't heard anything yet) that the minimum width of the Swatches panel in the default workspace is 17 instead of 16. The Swatches panel must be 16 swatches wide, otherwise the circular swatch pattern becomes slanted. The culprit is the Layers panel which can't be as small as the Swatches panel, so if the Swatches panel and the Layers panel are put on the same column the Swatches panel will be wider to fit. The fix is to undock the swatches panel, at which point you can dock other panels below it that aren't wide. Edit: I've created a new swatch set with shades instead of tints. In the past I've used the VisiBone2 swatches in Photoshop, and I've been meaning to make an improved set of swatches for some time now, one that's organized like an actual color wheel. So I did. Here it is. The special thing about this swatch layout is that the color wheel is actually ac...

Riven Phoenix's The Structure of Man series, which I've evangelized ever since I received my copy of the DVD set, has to be the best and most affordable (US$45) way to learn how to draw people from memory. Since leaving Rexburg I've had more time to continue watching the series--finally; I've owned it for about 9 months with not enough time to watch it until recently. When I initially started The Structure of Man series I went through the first 19 videos with pencil and paper rather quickly, but then I realized that my final sketches didn't show much of the process of how I got to the final. All the important stuff that the video series is teaching, like the simplified angles and proportions that make up the human body were gone when I started rendering. I could watch the video over and over again until I memorized the formulas, but all I needed was some kind of primer that had all the formulas down on paper as a quick and complete reference. That gave me the idea ...