I recently stopped doing 3D CG completely, and changed my style to a kind of photo paint mashup painterly style. I do mostly book covers and consider myself an illuitrator rather than an artist, really. Well, writer and artist, really. But when other kids were growing up with classic artists, I was growing up an abused kid exploring the wold completely on my own, without limits. This led me to the classic and more modern illustrators, Maxfield Parrish, especially, and the preraphaelite painters.

 

I said that to paint this. What you want to do takes years of practice and experimentation. There's no pushbutton fix, nor do I expect you're looking for one. But I can give you some suggestions.

Learn to use every single doodad in Photoshop, from dithering to changing ther alpha to edge finfing to...everything. The various filters are ALL valuable, IF you learn to use them and, in my case, to often use them for things they weren't designedto do. Don't think of what you can do with them, think of it as can I use that to do this, even if no one's done it before and you aren't supposed to.

I find Alien Skin's various Eye Candy programs (Impact, Nature, Textures) expecially useful.

Also look for a package of free filters called Mehdi. I use these constantly, for everything.

 

Free filters and actions and such from the Adobe site are the bomb. If I want a particular object in an inage to be gold, I have an action for it.

I strongly suggest you spend mucho time learning to play with layers and using the multitude of blend options available. These are proably my most used tools and you can do a LOT with them once you understand how to use and misuse them. For example, off the top of my head, if you want a particular object or person in a photo tp stand out in some way, duplicate the layer, delete everything but the thing you wish to stand out, the apply the layer in whichever blend style you want at whatever opacity. I often select the object, duplicate it, gaussian blur it for about 5 pixels to expand it then apply it as overlay of luminosity, gives the image a more saturated, mystic, soft focus kind of glow.

Play with saturation and color balance. I tend to often cranck the saturation down jujst a wee bit. Phoptographs tend to see things a bit more saturated than the human eye does, so it boosts the 'reality' factor a bit. Or, I may oversaturate everything, adjusting the contrasta and balance as I go, of course.

Olay with the color balance and replace colors. Play with everything. Photoshop is a huge program, and every drawer has tools packed in them. Tools that most people never learn to use. Or if they do, the only use them for what the manual says to use them for. They don't experiment, mostly because Photoshop does take years to learn and can be pretty damned intimidating.

 

Never depend entirely on one program. WHile Photoshop is a foundation program for me, I also use Painter, another magnificent program that does things better than photoshop, expecially when it comes to blending edges and softening and such, or achieving a certain brush effect. I also use Paint Shop pro a lot, though these days it's mostly for browsing and photo correcting. I also use an old version of it before Adobe bought it and turned it into Photoshop Jr. I also use Corel Graphics Suite, which offers me a great number of options Photoshop doesn't or things it just does better than Photoshop. I also have a simple, free program I can't even remember the name of but what you can probably find on Sourceforge that does all on one thing. It turns photos into HDMI. And playing with HDMI is also a method I use, with layer apply, to get a more illustrative look. While I don't use Art Rage or Gimp, though both are layin around here somewhere, I am told by many people that both programs are truly excellent. I know Art Rage is used a lot in India and Asia.

The most difficult things for me to learn have been hair and shadows. I often use Alien Skin Eye Candy Fur plug in for hair, but it seems to have been been designed to make completely absurd hair or fake fur, so you have to learn to fiddle with it and learn to make peculiar selections and work from the bottom upo, but done well can make wonderful hair that, at the same time, looks illusstrative rather than photographic.  Shadows, well, again, this is where layer apply, especially multiply and opacity come in handy. Because if you put anything, person, anoimal, object, etc, in an image, it has to have a shadow that agrees in nature with the other shadows in the image. For people, unless the inage has crisp, well drfioned shadows that have to match, I most often use Eye Candy's perspective shadow tool, applied in a new layer underneath the subject (though yes, you can shuffle layers around) and then fiddle around with the shaps and size of the shadow to get something that's mostly under the subject or slightly to one side or another depending on lighting, then use multiply to apply it, then mess with the opacity until I get something that looks good. And that's all it needs to do.  The real purpse of shadows in art isn't just to reflect the direction of the lighting or break up the light and dark spaces. For what we do, shadows are the element that places THAT object solidly on the ground, planted, a part of the scene.

Now, go play, have fun and learn.

Talent is God's gift to you. Using it is your gift to God.