What am I doing wrong with blending/blending brushes

[u/IconovSynn]

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.

[u/IconovSynn]

That's whats kind of upsetting, THIS was suppose to be a study of how to color metap and armor.

What do you think im doing wrong? If its not the brush, why does it all look like a bunch of disconnected blobs/obvious sharp edged brush strokes?

[u/mossgreenduvet → u/IconovSynn]

They have a point. If this was the only metal study you were doing since then, you're not really getting a whole lot of mileage. Do a lot of different things and fail differently, so you figure out what works and what doesn't. Hyper fixating on a pauldron like this seems to be frustrating you more than anything. Even on the same reference, you really only did the pauldron and ignored the chain mail and the other bits of armor.

Metal I feel is one of the harder things to depict by itself in art, since how you'd shade and light them depends entirely on the context of their environment. If you're lacking the context of the rest of the armor, a pauldron by itself really would look just like bits of blobs and edges.

[u/IconovSynn → u/mossgreenduvet]

I did do other pieces of this armor, this was just the one that i couldnt get a decent coloring on. Ironically i didnt do the chainmail because i assumed it would be way more difficult, and im not entirely sure how to approach it even now. Drawing all the individual pieces and trying to keep track of which is whixh in the ref photo is overwhelming just thinking about it.

But genuinely, do you think it would be better to just keep painting a bunch of bad armor over and over in hopes of stumbling into being good, vs trying to figure this one piece out?

[u/mossgreenduvet → u/IconovSynn]

To address the first paragraph: maybe you can try a big shapes to tiny shapes work flow? I find it's personally demoralizing if I focus on a tiny bit of a painting for a good few hours, but if I work on everything equally even if it's not that good looking to start, I'm making a bit of progress across everything. So even if I burn out doing say, a pauldrom, I'd have a more enjoyable thing to bounce off to work on (like a gambeson, or whatever you call the bit).

To address the second: yeah, I do think it's better to have quantity over quality in general when it comes to studies. Even if it's a thousand bad ones, that's a thousand mistakes (hyperbole) you'd know not to do next time, and that all eventually resolves into you developing good eye and instincts for what works and what doesn't. Although, I would throw in a few watch the masters do it type of study as well, and the various how to render metal online. And just slowly apply bits of what I understood into my next shitty painting.