my avatar

inspired by TDR the great, so i made my, i think i used a bit too much time... 1 hour or more ...

btw, i used some smudge in this picture, dont hate it for tat

the smudged background is very nasty, but you managed to mask your smudge good on the face. aniway, I advise you to stop using smudge and you'll see that it's much faster (use 1 tool -brush- instead of 2 - brush and smudge -; you're wasting time just by clicking on buttons when using smudge) and you'll improve better.

well i dunno how to make nice gradients using only brush, and ur video tutorial didnt help, is the trick to set the opacity to damn low or something? Or use the smooth brush, i used to use hard brush

hard brush is all you need. and if you don't have a tablet then yes, set the opacity to around 20.

i always use mouse, da table is too expensive for meh ^^

there's a wacom tablet for 50 Euro O.o. But obviously crap and small... But for a beginnig I wouldn't say no to it, actually I'm gonna get myself one

i have a small one that was rediculously cheap, not becouse its crap, but becouse its an older model. It doesnt even have a USB port FFS, it uses a COM -_-

anyway, thats not at all a bad image, the lighting looks pretty good actually, i quite like it.

yep, the lighting is good, but the background kinda spoils the image imo (not because of the color).