Ive heard good things about artrage, bojan and d0r use it aswell, i think.
love the colours
love the impressionist feel, i never could get water to look that smooth

Ben, if you are doing some digital painting on your own you should really try ArtRage. I know I sound like I'm advertising, but that program hooked me with its simplicity and complexity in the same time.

Setting a brush, saving those settings, making your color palettes, preparing your whole art material with ease... Not to mention the very natural way everything works.
For instance, watercolors are so amazingly set that I can produce true-like watercolor picture and you wouldn't know the difference.

For this image above I just took 3 tools: palette knife, paint roller and pencil. Done the sky first, fixed colors in it with palette knife, then took those same colors and done the terrain, just adding contrast color of violet as a shadows.
Then duplicated layer with sky and terrain, flipped it vertically and made layer with same flipped image but with different color blending. Then used palette knife to add that 'watery mirror image effect'' and added some lighten colors around.
In the end, painted the viking ship on the separated layer and used more darker colors and pencil, then flatten it with the layer with water and blend it with palette knife.

Basically I've used palette knife all the time.

If I wasn't spending that much time on boat details, image would probably be finished in 2 h.
It is very fast and intuitive program so you use less time doing some stuff...

Now I just want to paint more and more, and more landscapes! I wasn't this excited since I acquired Corel Painter IX...
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Also, I forgot, since you are texture maker you would love option to do symmetric images on canvas!

You set how much symmetric points you want (like, for toribash head textures you just need one, at the center of the canvas) and then paint naturally.
I'll post you some examples... That's the superb helping tool!

I really like your artwork and I downloaded this program. I started to learn it, thank you Very convenient, yet strange to use it after photoshop.

this took you 3 hours? are you a wizard or something?

I get hypnotized looking at this water, so good. Do you do this on a hobby or professional basis?

Professionally I do bunch of stuff, but mostly its graphic design for books and magazines. Illustrations. Right now I'm slowly starting to swim in new waters - doing concept art for games and characters design.

When I'm relaxing at home I do traditional art, mostly oil paintings. Managed to sold some stuff through local gallery.


For Ben:
Quick example of symmetry option in ArtRage - this avatar of a cute girl is made using vertical symmetry setting, then I turned it off and added changes (otherwise it would look unnatural), and background is done by using 6 splits of the canvas with symmetry option (I think you can have 8 of them)


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Because you can have layers and export to PS this program is practically 'made' for doing textures in Toribash. ;]

Hint: Horizontal = along the horizon. Vertical = The direction you go when you throw yourself from a bridge.

Typo,fixed, thx.

Btw, depending on the take-off, you can fall in arched trajectory from the bridge. XD

Hm true true.
Anyway, nice painting. I never understood ArtRage. I cannot use those digital simulated tools. I can use them in real life tho, pretty well too. But yeh I guess I prefer traditional art.

The mast isn't going past the sail as far as it is outside the reflection...