Thoughts on Lasso Tool

The lasso tool is pretty great. I first found out about its prowess last October. That month I thought to myself, there's got to be a neater way to flat. A much, much neater process which involved much less hair pulling. Up until that point I had been painting on the base colors of drawings by hand. Boy, was I fool. I did some googling and found this video by Michael Russell and boy...did that change my world. Saved time and hair too. I felt like everyone but me knew about this. I felt pretty ashamed. But mostly elated. Through the use of the polygonal lasso tool (and sometimes the magnetic lasso tool which while not perfect, sometimes you feel lucky) I could flat neatly and change the colors easily.
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A friend told me about lasso tool paintings. That idea bounced around in my head for a few months until I got more comfortable with using the lasso tool to attempt some. I started to create shapes with the polygonal tool. Gradually I added more stuff like gradients and textures on top. The artworks above are some examples of my messing around. They're great for quickly thumbnailing ideas for compositions if you're as lazy as me.

Lasso tool paintings are fast. You can sketch something out beforehand or you can block out a shape with the fill tool in seconds. And build more shapes on top of that until you have a neat scene going. Through it you have the freedom to focus more on the silhouettes of objects and their form in space. You're also more free to mess around with colors. You can manipulate the shapes with the transform tool (set to nearest neighbor resizing to preserve the hard edges).

You can do this on any program with a lasso tool. Heck you can make some neat stuff if there's a fill and selection tool. Also, if you don't like the jagged pixels then on Clip Studio Paint after flattening your image you can use the "Smoothing" filter to take the edge off. I'm not sure if you can do this in photoshop.
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Some examples since it's better seeing it at work than reading about it.

Aaron Blaise, an artist at disney creates a landscape with the lasso tool. He has some other neat videos on his channel.

A video of a painting made using the selection tool by the art director of Assassin's creed.
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I don't do as many lasso tool paintings anymore but it's a good skill to add to one's bag of tricks.