Photoshop Tutorial Practice

For Game Design we're coming up with the overall style and look to our board games, so to help us our teacher had us research some Photoshop tutorials/demos that teach us a new technique and practice using the techniques demonstrated. I used this tutorial: http://www.3dtotal.com/team/Tutorials_2/bird_catcher/bird_catcher_01.php   and started with grayscale before coloring. Even though it seems like most professional concept artists start with grayscale before they paint colors over, I didn't really like the method that much. It was nice to be able to play a little more with the colors I wanted, but it seemed to take a lot longer for a result that didn't seem much different than just coloring normally without placing the grayscale shades first.

I did a dragon-monster thing because I was thinking about making all the Stratego pieces into different kinds of monsters instead of soldiers, and to make it a survival-horror LOL. I'm not entirely sure yet though, I still have to play with the ideas I have. I'll definitely keep trying to practice with this technique though, and practice painting in Photoshop more because I'm used to using Paint Tool Sai for digital painting and I like it a lot better 8(  Oh well. Here's to new painting techniques!

Since all of us in the class are doing these tutorials, we also had to do someone else's tutorial, so here's a tutorial Tyler Lariscy did involving FIERY EXPLOSIONS. That's all you need to know, right? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F1dAedHmsuk
And here's the fiery explosion I made using the tutorial's techniques, haha:

SPACE EXPLOSION. Explosions are a little difficult to paint, so I wanted to try this tutorial and see how it worked out. Unfortunately, it could never take the place of a nice hand-painted explosion haha. It was fun to experiment with, though!