Now and then, a solution pops up that is just... ridiculously obvious and easy. It just brings about this big sigh of relief and a whole lot of inspiration.
Mind you, this isn't an overarching solution to ALL the problems, but it definitely helps with one or two. One of my greatest frustrations working digitally has been struggling with brushes that just don't work how I want them to. I've never really liked working in Photoshop; I still have CS4, so I'm without some of the fancy new blending brushes and such. It always seemed very flat and sterile to me, anyway. So for the past 3 or 4 years now I've been working mostly in Painter, and just using Photoshop for adjustments and effects.
Painter has a HUGE number of brushes, the majority of them designed to replicate natural media. Some, like the Real Pencil brushes, I really like. Others, I just could never get them to work how I wanted to. But I thought, with all those brushes, there must be SOME that work for me, right?? Try as I might, I could never find them.
Now often, I hear digital artists talking about brushes they've made, but so many of them seem just like fancy effects brushes, and I thought, why bother? I have all these pre-made ones anyway. The other day, though, I finally hit my limit of patience with those pre-made ones, and opened up Painter's Brush Creator.
Like most things in Painter, it's hidden in the Windows menu, like it's a palette you need to open and not a "thing you do." It's also a little overwhelming:
ALL the variables to create or adjust ANY brush are all there. The tricky thing is, some only activate depending on other variables, so there's a lot of trial and error. Especially when you're not sure what each variable *does*. I'm sure there's some listing somewhere online. I just went through a lot of trial and error, starting with the scratchboard tool, which I usually use for linework. I wanted something a bit more refined, pressure-sensitive, and variable-width, as linework is a subtle art. After a while I came up with a nice little brush that seemed to be doing what I wanted it to do most of the time.
The week before I'd gone over a character sketch, *trying* to be careful about it, but more or less making a mess:
I started going back over the drawing with my new brush, taking advantage of it's smaller minimum size and ability to widen out and darken where needed:
Huge difference, no?
HUGE difference.
I love traditional media, partly because it's so forgiving. A smudge of charcoal or pencil on paper is in itself delightful because of it's reality, and drawings and paintings are given character through the application of the media. I'm not sure if it's an effect of the opaque media versus painting with light (which is really what you're doing digitally) but digital paintings clamor to be "clean". I think there are a lot of factors involved, but having the right brushes for your style and technique is one of the most important to creating "clean" digital work.
After I got my little lineart pen down, I went back and created a nice soft painting brush as well. Along with two erasures and a blender, I put the new brushes in their own little palette, and I'm very interested in taking some time to experiment with them. If the painting brush can revolutionize my painting (which always looks overly thick and smeary to me) like the linework one revolutionized my lines, I will be extremely happy.
Then I can get to work on all those other things I was frustrated with!
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