Oh I do like to be beside the seaside...

I made a discovery today. To my total delight I discovered that Photoshop is even more powerful than I thought...I can use it to paint!

I bought a book called Creative Photoshop CS4 Derek Lea and this has been my holiday reading...how sad am I?

Anyway I don't mean the paint filters in the menu I mean really paint...using my graphics tablet and a palette of colours. How cool is that?

I can blend paints and layer them and move them around...much as I'd move around oils or acrylic on canvas. I can paint over bits I don't like and change sizes of brush. I'm ridiculously excited about this. I used to paint. I used to paint a lot but somehow with children, by the time I've got all my painting equipment out and started someone wants a drink...or a snack or they've scraped a knee or they want to 'help'. So I'd resigned myself to retiring my paintbox for a while.

It's going to take some practice and this is only my first attempt. Derek Lea suggests scanning in a sketch and working on that but I wasn't sure of the Blipfoto rules on sketches and 'paintings' and I hadn't got a scanner with me anyway. So for now (because I couldn't wait to try it all out) I used a quick snap taken on the beach and sketchified it using a filter so it looked like a crude pencil sketch then I set to work...

Now I'm home I can't wait to get to grips with this new technique and read the rest of the book...there's more...much more.