blending with the hard round brush - what am i doing wrong?
ive been trying to figure out how to do a more painterly style with my work for some time now and my problem seems to be that I don't understand how to blend well with a hard round brush. Ive attached a sample of a quick sphere painting and a leaf. At quick glance I think the sphere makes visual sense, but if you look there are very streaky lines as the values lighten up, especially prevalent on the leaf. I don't want this, I want a very smooth gradation almost like using a soft brush, but without actually using one. I see so many awesome painterly works and I just don't understand how that smooth blending happens.
My brush is a standard hard round brush, set to pen pressure for opacity and flow jitter, flow is around 60%, build up and smoothing are checked.
any tips or suggestions or links to a good tutorial are super appreciated! (ive watched stuff on ctrl paint and when I copy his blending technique I still get these streaky lines)
Replies
I would maybe try to blend in a more nontraditional brush stroke. To get rid of the lines in the shading, I try to use smaller more concentrated brush strokes in that area, rather than drag it over the entirety of the length of area, if that makes sense!
For painting the advice I hear and give all the time is just a simple "spend more time."
Having watched hundreds of digital artists paint and being around for a long time, this just isn't true
Hey guys thanks for the positive feedback! I posted this on another website and got mostly abunch of responses along the general lines of 'because you suck' haha so thanks for actually providing some constructive critique.
i think i agree with muzz, ive watched a lot of tutorials and watched professionals paint and no one ever uses smudge. ive heard a lot of people talk about the smudge tool being viable but that they never use it. My comp cant seem to handle smudge anyways so its not really an option for me.
lesliesketch that makes sense and thanks for the idea i will try it later today.
If you're going to keep polishing the blending until it looks smooth, it makes more sense to me to use a soft brush instead and get to that point faster.
You seem to want the painterly effect, in this case you can try a different brush stamp (something like a chalk). During blending, it should replace the banding with noise.
Take a very simple doodle i did. The amount of complexity in the forms, and the direct relationship with how light and form turns means that it would turn into a blurry mess if i were to use soft brushes, which becomes very difficult to "sculpt" with.
How many 3d guys decide to sculpt with a brush that is a smooth gradient? i can't imagine many use it in the early stages of the sculpt.
And even once you get it this far, you don't want to switch to a soft brush because rendering to a higher level is more about painting smaller and smaller forms more accurately. Blending just destroys the hard work you did in the early stages of a drawing.
THIS is why we use hard brushes.
Heres a couple scenarios where i dont want to use it. First, watch tutorials by people who replicate 'the blizzard style'. Check out laurel d austin or tyson murphy, they almost exclusively use the hard round brush. If i wanted to replicate that style, it wont look right if im blending with a soft brush. Even other artists like daarken or kekai kotaki - they mostly use the hard round brush for all the ground work and then use textures or textured brushes after.
Another scenario - sometimes photoshop and all of its technicalities tend to slow me down and mess with my artistic flow. If i use a pencil and paper, i can go at it for hours without interruption but with photoshop i need to stop and think about the area i want to lasso or add another layer so i can blend over with a soft brush and hard eraser. All of this forces me to stop and think about what im doing, and it breaks my flow. Sometimes i just want to go for it on a single layer with a single brush and not have to think about technicality, i just want to paint, and it seems like the most logical option is learning to use the hard round brush for that.
So i guess to reiterate im not against using the soft round brush. I just want help learning how to use the hard round brush more efficiently. I do appreciate all of the comments and help so thanks for the responses!
Your problem has nothing to do with technicalities or wanting to do things the "blizzard way". Your problem is that you have two goals that are at cross purposes. You want a soft gradient but you want to make it with a hard edged brush, this simply is not going to work.
Edit: For good measure I looked up a Tyson Murphy video and skipped to a random part of it and wouldn't you know it, he says he uses the smudge brush.
But more importantly ... it is mostly a matter of observation. Because of our tactile sense we tend to think of round objects as smoothly shaded under lighting ... but they really aren't.
Under direct lighting even the roundest of all objects does not need any smudging or blending to appear round - a point on it's surface is either lit or it isn't, there is no smooth transition anywhere to be seen as a very harsh shadowline separates both sides. Forget about preconceived "shading" principles, and train your eyes to see this line, it's everywhere (well, with the exception of reflections, but that's another topic altogether of course).
As far as your leaf and your sphere, I'd paint more. A lot more. One you've painted primitive objects a few times try and do a few still lifes digitally. Then once you're done don't look at it for a few days, flip canvas and then in red circle everything that looks off. Next time you paint a still life find areas of similarity to where you had problems in your previous piece. The biggest mistake people newer to art make is assume that given time and a process they can work through a piece and make it correct. Visual communication is outrageously complex and its only after trying to construct image after image do you learn how to express what we can see in nature easily, clearly.