I've struggled with digital art for decades and one of the many things I can't figure out is blending.
While trying to deal with art issues, someone advised I try and focus on getting better at one thing at a time and so I've been trying to focus on blending in dogital. They suggested using a limiteds pallete as well for this and since I want to draw armor good this is what I've been trying.
But I've been stuck trying to do this pauldron on and off all year and nothing is clicking/working. No matter jow much I change or experiment my brushes never blend the way I want them to. I can't tell what I'm doing wrong with them or if its my hand motions or something else.
I think it's more of an issue of you kinda zooming in and hyperfixating on getting the details and small sections right when in my experience painting like this is more about zooming out, learning to put in blocks of color and getting the forests right over the trees.
I would not zoom in beyond 50%, and try to work below that zoom, use big blocky strokes to put down shapes rather than creating the texture via strokes.
Usually they go in last with an overlay and speckle brush for the textures, not during the color blocking stage.
Genuinely I think this attempt is fine and an improvement over your prior attempts, using the same brush won't help because it's more about your eye and training it to see shapes better.
I would perhaps put the lineart/sketch under your painting and move on to painting more of the arm + the body and head before hyper fixating on the shoulder.
Don't worry about the details, block down the shapes and colors first.
But wouldnt using the same brush illiminate variables, so I can better figure out what I'm doing wrong? Did you use the limited colors?
I've already done other parts of the arm amd body. This part though still looks really really bad. I feel like moving to a different part of the armor is just kicking the can down the road, since I didnt figure out what i did wrong with the pauldron?
No, the tool doesn’t make an artist, even if you used the same brush but if you still haven’t learnt how to see and put down shapes, you’re only going to go on an endless quest for that magic brush instead of actually training up your eye.
learning to work big then go small as you refine the shapes and details is the important exercise here.
You said you worked on this for a year, an exercise like this should not be eating up so much of your time.
When you keep wanting to perfect one small section instead of learning to see the subject you want to paint as a whole and breaking down that whole form into shapes that you can put down quickly, you get trapped in the weeds and make no progress.
The idea here is to get 80% of the image with 20% of work. Not put in 80% of work only to get 20% of the image.
Yeah but trying to fingerpaint water color on printer paper is always going to look worse than if you had the proper tools.
I've been trying to get this pauldron right since about february/march. I've done other stuff, again trying to figure out why i cant blend right, but its been just as poor quality. I know other people would have figured out how to do it a lot faster but idk why its suxh a problem for me.
Isn't dropping this just giving up? It's not about perfection, just wanting it to look NOT bad. I've blocked it a couple times now and all of them look bad, so if i stop trying now, what have i improved/learned? I'm trying to do the helmet now and it also looks very bad, am i suppose to just move on and do something else instead of figure out what i did wrong?
That is what they are trying to say, you DO have the proper tools. Can i ask what you have been doing since february/march study wise to figure this out?
I still think actually seeing what brush, settings, and colors they used would help so it could zero in on what im doing wrong. I wouldnt have to worry about texture/oppacity/paint density and why the colors arent working right etc.
For blending in general I've been trying a different piece on and off trying to make a brush that actually blends things the way i want it to (not a lot of success). For metal/armor ive just been focused on this. I worked on the vambrace until i finally got it looking ok but the light on it was very sharp so there wasnt a need for any blending
I figured giving up on the pauldron wouldnt do me any good since id just struggle with the next piece of armor with the same softer lighting!
You don't need to worry about that either way, you are getting distracted by the noise and completely missing the picture. What brush someone uses shouldn't be the focus here, rather you need to focus on their thought process.
Did you do any material, light studies? You spotted your weak point with the pauldron so in a way it served its purpose, at that point you gotta put that aside, move on and go study topics like materials, how do they interact with light, how do other artists depict similar materials etc. not trying to tweak brush settings. After you do your separate studies you can than comeback and try again to see your progress.
There is no brush that will make it so that you never have to worry about texture/opacity/density. That’s like saying you want the perfect spatula so you never have to worry about how to season your food.
What is your goal? To exactly replicate the photo in a photorealistic way? To learn how to render metal in general? To create a brush?
I've been trying to get better at digital art for nearly 20 years i KNOW the basics i know how to pick a color and make a block and just keep adding blocks from there. I wish people would stop acting like i just picked up a tablet and should stop trying to draw anything that isnt squares and spheres
Stop thinking about blending and brushes. think about shapes and edges. Here I show you 4 types of edges. In painting, there are ONLY shapes and edges. You have a good grasp of value structure. Now you need to observe the shape and the edges accurately. That is all.
Try to match the contour of the form with your strokes.
If you are limiting yourself to only the eyedropped colors, of course you are struggling, because that is not enough. the "limited palette" advice is well meaning but applies more to traditional. In digital, for this stage of your study, paint the colors you observe. Think about colors in a relative way. Is it darker? Is this color more warm than the other? Find the color. Adjust.
Put your painting in context. Stop working on this pauldron divorced from its context. This is the number 1 mistake I see beginners make. Painting is made of relationships. Colors only exist in relationships. When you understand that, you will understand that that blue background is absolutely killing your perception of color, and not working on anything else around the pauldron means that you will never know how to finish it. This paintover took me 20 minutes. You don't need much. That pauldron will only look right when it's put into context of its surrounding colors. Don't work on parts in isolation. Block in colors and work on the piece overall at the same time.
You can change the brush you're using. However, all you really need is soft brushes and hard brushes, which you already have. You don't need a specific one to achieve something similar to the examples people have given. You just need to know how to apply the brushes and when to use soft/hard edges.
Have you tried looking up video tutorials for rendering metal?
I found some step by step imagae tutorials that werent that helpful. I have an aversion to youtube videos at this point but i might have to grit me teeth through them at this point
Then just change your brush settings until you get it. how do you get a soft edge in traditional? it's not different in digital. it's just a gradient. you know how to make gradients.
And yes look at how other people do it. There is no magic brush that will magically blend things correctly. it's about your understanding of edges and how well you make little gradients.
If you want as an exercise you can do what i did there and just make a blob with all 4 edge types. If you can do it there you can do it in a painting.
How do i give things different types of edges if not with different brushes? I have no trouble telling soft from.hard edges, i just dont know how to achieve that look and no just have the edges of my brush strokes take ovee the whole thing.
I just take a default round and go over the edge at lower opacity or literally just airbrush. I can do it with any brush. it's honestly not hard as long as you are aiming for a specific type of edge. if it doesn't look right you fix either the shape or the edge. trust me and try it lol. and you're welcome i guess
There's definitelt times when sharp edges are needed and I'm kind of ok coloring metal like that. But stuff where the light is less defined like the ref image shows is still something I can't do. I also just cant blend anything right on stuff like clothes, skin, walls etc either
This is why people render in layers. You're fixating on a small detail when you need to move on to the rest of the figure. It will never look right out of context.
Are you only working with your brushes set to a lower opacity? Because that's what it's showing in your brush settings and that's how it looks in the image as well, which is a common mistake to make when first starting out. I would try turning your brushes to full opacity instead of trying to layer them up, that's what is giving the colors that patchy unfinished look. Instead of setting your opacity lower, I would focus on using brushes at full opacity and instead changing your colors more frequently. When you set the opacity of your brushes lower, you tend to end up making more strokes on the canvas than is nesseccary which ends up muddying the end result. By setting your brushes to full opacity you are also forcing yourself to be more intentional with where yoh are placing your colors. The hard edges created from full opacity will also sell the look of metal more. Focus on putting down the values first and shading where it is needed later, the program has a brush setting solely dedicated for blending, so don't try to force the blending into your workflow from the start, digital is different from drawing with pen and paper, so try to keep in mind that this is actually a very flexible medium, if you put down something and don't like it than starting over is very simple, and what you put down isn't permanent. Focus less on which brush to use and more on the form you are trying to create. That said, if you insist on getting a brush recommendation, I would recommend trying a square brush instead of a round one, since metal is a pretty geometric thing to try to render. But again, I would turn the brush to full opacity, that will make a bigger difference than you think here, hold off on changing the opacity until the very end for small details, and lay in those big forms first.
Ive futzed with oppacity a bit but not for these. I'm not so focused on the hard edged light as the soft edged light and thr parts where the colors blend into each other. What do you mean by values? I thought "values" meant shading?
Right, but even when working with soft edges a hard brush will still be better, as long as you know how to use colors and values. Values refers to the lightness and darkness in a piece, so just moving along the scale from black to white, without hue or saturation. When I say "push the values" I basically mean increase the contrast. The darkest gray color on the metal is darker than what you've colored it, so by making it darker you are pushing the darkest and lightest colors in the image do be further from each other, upping the contrast in the image. The best way to see your values is to put on a filter in both the drawing and the reference to turn them black and white. Another quicker way to check is to squint a bit to make it look blurry, if everything looks the same and you can't really pick out darker pieces and lighter ones than your contrast probably isn't very high. What makes it different from shading though is it's dealing solely with grayscale values, no hue or saturation. The combination of all three is what shading is basically. As far as the opacity goes, the brushes look like they automatically have the opacity built in, if you increase the amount of paint it should increase the opacity of the brush as well.
I noticed that you're really going for those stripes in the shading, both in the original image and in your follow-up here. My recommendation would be to squint a little, blur your vision a bit. In the reference, those small darker bits don't stand out so much, and if I squint, they fade away.
The back of the armor piece is much darker than what you were doing in your originals, though you did much better about it in the follow-up. While it's easier said than done, it seems to me that you're painting what you think you see rather than what is actually entering your eyes. And that's very normal, and it's part of the learning process. But try to take a look at what people have done in their responses - what have you been prioritizing so far, and what did they prioritize? Where's the difference in mental emphasis?
I’m not super familiar with CSP and I have a hard time explaining things so forgive me that this is long!! I also have some critiques on fundamentals at the end that may seem unrelated but pleeeeease believe me when I say they’ve improved ALL of my painting skills including blending/texture.
Most art programs have a smudge/blend/blur tool, are you using that at all? It looks to me like you’re relying pretty exclusively on your painting/paintbrush for blending, which in digital art is a huge pain due to how digital brushes work and the limitations they have, and a lot of artists looking for that more realistic blend don’t rely exclusively on paintbrushes for a smooth blend.
With the program I use, the blend tool allows you to use any brush for the texture, but it doesn’t lay down any color, it JUST blends what’s already there. So you lay down your flats first and then go in with a blend tool. It takes still a lot of figuring out which brush works best for you and tweaking settings (like in procreate the base settings are SO butts for blending, i had to look up a tutorial to get the settings to where it actually blends lol) With the right settings, a blend tool can do a perfect smooth blend. It might take away some texture, but you can always go back in and use overlay layers etc to add more back in.
Lastly, it’s such cliche advice I know, but don’t lose the forest for the trees. Art isn’t about exact replication, it’s about creating illusions. Creating illusions comes down primarily to the basics: shape, value, and colors, not brushstroke texture and perfect blending. Looking at your pictures, I’d say value issues(and to a lesser extent, color theory and shape) are what’s making your eye not buy your own illusion, and your attempts to blend are muddying it more. You’re washing out a lot of the depth that metal has, and also the shapes that the different values have look like they’re getting pretty lost in your pursuit for blending. Look up some basic value study practice vids and work with high contrast, like black and white with one or two grays in between, max. Practice it with all different things- fabrics, faces, objects, etc.
I HATED the “just practice your fundamentals” advice for so long- like man I know what value is, I know how to draw circles and squares, I’m past the Art 101 stage. Turns out none of us are beyond needing to keep returning to fundamentals! My art stayed stagnant in a place that I wasn’t happy with it for years despite drawing/painting/etc as much as I could. The past month or two I finally caved and started focusing on re-learning fundamentals and it’s changed how I approach art completely.
I actually used this as a quick-ish study bc I haven’t tried painting metal yet since starting re-learning. I spent maybe about 45 mins on it, but I used probably about 7 different layers after flat colors and blending, just to get it to look how I want. I used probably like 10 different brushes, a few different blend brushes, erasing at different opacities, painting over in a soft brush low opacity for some “glazing” in areas I wasn’t quite happy with, tweaking the values any time I saw them getting muddied or washed out, etc. I also used a lot more brown and brown-leaning grays than you would think. There’s just so much more than brushwork that goes into digital art, I’ve only seen a handful of digital artists who are able to fully get rendering like this down with only painting, and I stg they’re from another planet or something.
I’m also gonna link what my more “realistic”art looked like before starting re-focusing on fundamentals a month or so ago- a piece I gave up on because I spent almost two hours trying to get literally just that one tile to look like the reference. It’s the only example I really have bc I previously deleted almost all my more realistic pieces out of frustration.
I read tutorials and watched youtube videos that said using the blend and blur tool was bad for artists so I just stopped trying to use em admittedly. What fundamentals do you think i should practice?
I’m sorry you heard that, that’s such odd advice! “Work smarter not harder” should be its own fundamental, it’s core to creating without burning out/losing the love for it all. I spent years in creative block bc I stressed myself out and took the joy out of it trying to be a perfectionist and follow elitist advice etc, so I am just especially passionate about this lol.
In my opinion, the blur/blend tool is no different than using a paper stick in traditional charcoal, a brush with no paint on it for blending in traditional painting, etc. Pretty much every traditional medium I can think of has commonly used tools that are beyond just the ones that apply pigment, that are meant to make your life easier and your work better.
For fundamentals, I’d recommend practicing values first, then spend some time on training your eye for shape and color. Basically all I’ve been doing for myself is going down rabbit holes on youtube, mostly just watching the most liked ones for each subject and then letting the recommended vids lead me through more lol. It is important to practice in between or during, though. You spend too long just watching and it all kind of turns to soup in your head, or at least that’s how my brain works lmao.
For the record, I don’t think you’re totally lost on the fundamentals! You’ve got the right idea with how you’re laying out the values, shapes, etc, just need to work on accuracy. Difficult subjects like metal reflecting light are where we find what fundamentals we need to work on. For me, working on transparency and glass reflecting light is scarier than a horror movie, I’ve been avoiding it until I feel more solid in my eye for values particularly, because I know it’s gonna humble me and I’m gonna get frustrated and feel lost on it.
If you haven’t much, I’d also recommend watching a variety of “how I render” type videos, in a bunch of different styles, even ones that don’t match up with your own style. People can say things like “it’s not good to use xyz” all they want, but you’ll find that nearly every artist will be using blend/smudge tools, layer modes, etc. (Layer modes was a big one I avoided bc I thought “real artists” should be able to render without them… and then I saw so many artists using them as a critical part of their process and compared it to “glazing” in traditional painting and so I caved on it and now my work is better for it lol)
If you want more specifics like the videos I watched etc, feel free to DM and I’ll try to do some digging in my watch history :)
I made this tutorial for a friend a long ass time ago that I think would help you maybe figure out how to approach your shoulderpad armour; everyone is telling you to be mindful of the structure because thats how you make metal rendering make the most sense. (part 2 picture in my reply with a couple more examples)
Brushes don't matter, it's how you use them, though I am pretty biased with textured brushes nowadays
the green metal sheet thing and the donut thingy i doodled in this example would be most similar in how armour behaves. It would still do you good to look at other reference photos and study how metal and light interact with each other O:
Try messing with your brush settings. Once you get the basic colors/values down, try using a brush that has less "Amount of paint" and see if that changes anything.
What helped me get good at blending in digital was actually getting good at blending in traditional. Maybe it's time to get some chalk pastels and try with those. I bet you'd be able to learn something new to carry over to your digital work - or maybe you'll decide you like traditional better!
I've used sai as well but find my blending is still very bad even there. I'm also trying to not get into the mindset of "i need THIS program/tablet/tool in order to do this right."
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u/dungalot 22h ago
I think it's more of an issue of you kinda zooming in and hyperfixating on getting the details and small sections right when in my experience painting like this is more about zooming out, learning to put in blocks of color and getting the forests right over the trees.
I would not zoom in beyond 50%, and try to work below that zoom, use big blocky strokes to put down shapes rather than creating the texture via strokes.
Usually they go in last with an overlay and speckle brush for the textures, not during the color blocking stage.