I was thinking about a few guidelines I usually follow when working on something.
-A lot of the work I do in Photoshop that isn't from scratch involves source images. These are usually background or textural images that somehow get incorporated into the project. An important thing to remember when working with source images is that higher resolution is always better. Things always scale down nicely, but rarely scale up nicely (unless you're working with a vector image or something similar). Also be sure that your source images are not protected under copyright if your work is being used commercially.
-Create a layer for the smallest of things. Layers can always be merged and consolidated, so remember to isolate every aspect of your project on it's own layer. If you want to organize things after the fact, you always can. There's nothing worse than realizing you want to do something over, but have already merged two layers together that you need separate again. In this same vein, remember to save multiple copies of your project as you go along, so you have instances saved at various points in the process.
-Make things from scratch whenever possible. It will give your work originality and it's own unique style. Many silhouettes can be made from combining or subtracting simple shapes.
More tutorials to come..
