my first painting

this is my first digital painting. i did a lot of tut surfing then spent 10+ hours on the acutal piece. i mainly used the dodge/burn and smudge tools. any comments appreciated.
--Penguin

Clickie

Good work! Any use of a wacom? (looks like it from the hair). The only thing that needs some work is the shadows on her face...they need to blend in just a bit more. You could use the blur tool...but i would paint a very light gray (~10% opacity) over the shadows. That way its a softer effect and you wont mess up other parts of the image. (also you may want to paint on a diff. layer).

If you havent already (most likely you have from tut surfing) you should head on over to gfxartist.com (great site...but hard though). Ive tried painting (its fun as hell) but i cant even get to they point your at :-(

Anyway again...good work!!!

i didnt use a tablet at all, just optical mouse :-). yea, gfx artist was where i discovered the wonderful world of digital painting. i started about 5 projects before i was satisfied enough after an hour to keep going.

i tried a quik version of the painting over with grey. looks better. thx :-D

Thats awesome that you used a mouse. Im a non-tablet guy so i know how hard it is. Actually i thought about using "brush dynamics" to try and recreate the tablet feel. Might be a bit of work (always changing the settings and all) but might be interesting to use. It would work well for hair atleast!