I feel like I have suddenly developed some mad matte painting skillz 9__9 I decided to upload it to demonstrate that filters and effects are not your enemy! ... if you're careful. Its like fire, you can be burned by tacky if you are reckless arrrrgh

There's photoshop layer effects bevel (chisel hard) YES, BEVEL. Craquelure filter *cough* around edges, after which THIS IS IMPORTANT I painted over it and added cracks until it didn't look like crap. Same principle applies when adding textures (courtesy cgtextures.com), don't just paste in and set to overlay, use pieces of the image that suit the surface best, erase bits, rotate/distort/skew, overlap and layer multiple textures, then yes, paint over them again. Then I used sharpen tool, smudge, dodge and burn (omg) to enhance some cracks and get rid of others.

I would say it's still smart to avoid this shit at all costs until you are confident in your digital painting ability to know how to paint such things from scratch, but after that this really does speed things up, dang. I LOVE FILTERS LOL

Oh, this is a wip haha, part of a poster I'm almost done with 8D