Custom: 7 Practice to Help Paint Faster

Learn to Use Limited Value to Convey Structures
Every form can be simplified into the basic values, you can work with 3 – 5 tones to show the structure convincingly. If you can, try to avoid smudging and blending. The purpose of this exercise is to prevent yourself from going back to the color picker and brush setting, so you can better focus on painting the structure and really understand how light effects on it. Once you get the hang of it, you simply do not need to guess how to render the object, you’ll be painting believable structure naturally.

By Craig Mullins
Learn to Use Color Palette
Personally I’m not a fan of color palette, but for exercises purpose, it not only helps you to understand which color scheme to use, but also helps you to memorize the colors. Study paintings with great colors to build your own set of palette ‘vocabulary’. After doing it much, you could just pick any colors you want, and will know what colors suit and look the best. No more guessing and making the wrong choice.
Smart Layering Usage
I often heard people suggest to use as much layering as possible. While it offers huge advantage in flexibility, the more layers you have the harder for you to control, since you would have to click the layers you want to paint every time to make that changes in that particular layer. Versus just a single or few layers, you don’t have to be bothered doing that as much, it’s a trade off really.
For practices and personal art, I tend to use the single layer painting concept, which emulates the traditional way of painting. But for professional work, I’ll keep the layer as few as possible and organize them by naming. If you do that, and if you are using Photoshop, you can use the Move Tool and right click the element you want to paint and select the layer you want from the menu. Especially useful when you have tones of layers. You can group layers too once you find that the list is too long.
Use textures
Texturing is known to add details to your painting. However use it wisely, take care of the perspective especially and use the right texture. You can easily find texture at Google Image but don’t forget other site like Picassa, Flickr and other textures site. Download and keep those you use regularly too, to save the time surfing for the same image. Note that texturing can only make your painting more detail, doesn’t necessarily gives you the best painting, but saves your time to paint it. Use it to your advantage, even a painting can be use as an overlaying texture.
Use custom brushes
The function of custom brushes is almost similar to textures. Generally our painting subject doesn’t go far beyond to what we usually paint, so I’m not particularly fond of huge collection of brushes, although I must admit I do tend to have quite a number of brushes. But the point is, if you do not know how to use all the brush, it can only hinder your progress in picking and choosing the brush you want to use. Bottom line in this is, build your own set of brush that you can really be familiar with. If you have the right brush set for you painting, it can really save you the time to look for the right texture since painting manually does offer you a whole lot control.
Customize Your Workspace
Set shortcut keys as well as how you workspace looks like. Don’t let something distract you from painting. When I learn digital painting, my workstation was a 15″ laptop, and in order me to get the highest possible surface to paint, I set shortcuts to photoshop Navigator, Layers, Color picker and Brush Setting. That way I can hide and show them whenever I want. If you can get a second monitor get it, it saves your effort to switch between windows just to looks at some reference. You don’t have to follow what others do with their workspace, the most important thing is it works better for you.
Use references
As much as I don’t encourage myself to use reference in practices, because it blinds my weakness and covering my armature, yet I can’t stress it enough with the right reference, you can be so much accurate and more faster at painting. Just don’t let it control your art, which means if you have to fit your art to conform to the reference you have, the reference is controlling you. You can study the reference for it’s anatomy, lighting, structure, wrinkles or anything, but don’t copy it exactly. It’s not wrong but if you think about the long run, just how many references can you find to make the art that you want, exactly? Do yourself a favor, and build the right foundation.

* Obviously not a painting, but shows you some idea to use reference to create the art you want.