Handpainted textures looking muddy

anedevmek

When you zoom in to my handpainted textures, you can see clear brush strokes and the whole painting starts to look very muddy.
Problems I am having are just general art skills. My hands are not steady enough to draw confident lines. I still want to preserve the handpainted texture look but it just comes out looking amateurish when the paint strokes are super obvious.
The time I take on each texture is around 1 hour and but if I refine the edges it could take me up to 3.






Are there any ways of solving this other than spending time to refine every single edge?
Also, can I get some general painted texture advice?
Thank you

Brian "Panda" Choi

Use darker value, similar hues to "outline" areas you want to "edge" out.  Because you're not using black, it'll blend better.

Also splash in off hues subtly to add more body to your textures.  Like your grass is all green.  NEeds blues, reds, etc. in a SUBTLE application.

Gannon

If your texture feels muddy only when you zoom in really far... is your texture actually muddy or are you just being hyper critical about your own work?

Practice using less brush strokes until you gain the confidence. If you need to create one big brush stroke and come back in with a smaller brush and erase to clean it up.... go for it... or just undo a billion times until you get the one brush stroke you like. Eventually you'll undo less frequently.

These are nice textures, I can tell what they're supposed to be. Just keep practicing!

praetus

As a personal point, when I started learning hand painted I also gave myself really small constraints on texture size.  It's really easy to get lost in the weeds when you use a 2048 for tiling wood or a grass plane or whatever.  I started with smaller stuff like 256 or 512 at most.  When you're limited it makes you really breakdown what is important for the texture to work.