blending with the hard round brush - what am i doing wrong?

ShadyDev

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)

Muzzoid

Honestly the blending looks fine, you will just get better as you do it more, and on more complex objects.

lesliesketch

I think you're doing great! 

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! 

Greg Westphal

That is unfortunately what you'll get when using the hard round brush for blending in photoshop the first couple hundred hours you do it.  Photoshop is notorious for being difficult to blend colors with brushes in and most people rely heavily on the smudge tool.  I'd drop your background down to a midtone though, cause blending from white will make all of your values read really stiff.  

For painting the advice I hear and give all the time is just a simple "spend more time."

Muzzoid

" most people rely heavily on the smudge tool."
Having watched hundreds of digital artists paint and being around for a long time, this just isn't true

ShadyDev

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.

RN

ShadyDev said:

I want a very smooth gradation almost like using a soft brush, but without actually using one.

Why can't you use a soft brush? If you use a hard brush to blend (like a round or chalk stamp) you're going to get that "hand-painted" texture to some extent.

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.

Muzzoid

The reason why you don't want to use a soft brush isn't really explored by painting primitives. A sphere is a geometrically smooth object where of course a soft brush is going to be the best option for painting a perfect gradient. But this isn't the task an artist has to do.



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.

AtticusMars

Soft brush works fine, use it with a lasso selection or a mask and you can get a nice soft gradient with proper edge control where you need it.

Soft brushes should be thought of like airbrushes, not paint brushes. If you've ever seen a traditional artist work with an airbrush it involves a lot of stenciling, same principle applies to digital painting.

ShadyDev

I should say i dont have a problem using the soft round brush in general for the right application. I understand how to use it to blend and apply it appropriately. But as muzz has said, in certain situations you will get a blurry mess which is what im trying to avoid. i understand using the lasso tool and proper edge control and everything else, im just trying to avoid using soft round brush as much as possible. 

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!

AtticusMars

ShadyDev said:

Check out laurel d austin or tyson murphy

Pretty bad examples considering that of the two painting videos I've have seen Laurel Austin do, the first thing she does after sketching is create a mask and block out the soft gradients with a soft round brush. It's also very obvious just by looking at her work that she makes good use of the soft/smudge brushes when necessary. 

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.

ShadyDev said:

they almost exclusively use the hard round brush. 

Practically every artist is going to be using a hard edged brush the majority of the time, the vast majority of your painting is going to be made up of hard edges and no one wants to spend all their time painting making fuckin lasso selections.

You're trying to connect "uses hard round brushes most of the time" to "uses hard round brushes to blend"

This is completely the wrong way to think about the problem. This is like assuming most carpenters use hammers to screw in screws because you watched a few of them work and it seemed like they spent most of their time using a hammer.

That's not what is happening at all, they are picking the right tool for the job and most of the time that just happened to be a hammer. When he needs to put a screw in the wall though you can be damn sure he's got a sweet photoshop brush in his toolbelt for those special occasions.

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.

pior

What you probably want to do is to get familiar with the Flow setting in the main toolbar. It dictates the amount of pixels being "dropped down" per stroke and is a major component of making a Brush Tool Preset behave the way you want it to. Tip spacing too.

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).

Greg Westphal

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.

Kind of funny cause I was asking a friend of mine who was trying to get employment at blizzard (ended up getting into hi-rez instead) about painting like blizzard. His style was up their ally and was in contact with a few of the guys who work there.  He gave me a toolset apparently used by blizzard guys of smudge brushes.  (apparently the smudge toolset was found http://artsammich.blogspot.com/2013/03/photoshop-brushes_11.html after I looked up the name for it.  and even weirder is that it was from a guy working in the studio down the street from where I lived and had friends working at.)  He said that a lot of them use smudge to just get the form shadows done fast and then goes back and does edge control with a hard brush.  Its just smudge tool can look like ass if you rely on it super heavily when a better tool should be used. Its the same principle as using soft brush and what not, find a tool for the job and while its decent practice to try and blend in photoshop using hard round set to opacity, no matter how good you are it, it'll always be less effecient than using a faster blend method. 

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.