Right, we all know the drill. You feel like drawing or painting something digitally and for some reason, your piece isn't coming together. Your mind starts drifting into a series of thoughts that remind you of that AWESOME ARTIST who you follow on Youtube or Instagram who has all these amazing brushes you don't have. Ugh! If only you had those brushes, right? Then the magic would most certainly happen, right?...RIGHT?!
💔I'm sorry to break it to you💔
But brushes don't operate miracles. Sure, having a sweet set of brushes CAN help you in your journey toward becoming a professional digital artist. But at the end of the day, only one solid truth remains:
🛠 Brushes are just tools 🛠
And no matter how much that expensive set of brushes you purchased on Gumroad cost you, your VISION and your artistic foundation are much more valuable than any brushes you can find. Why?
Because there`s only one of you out there, and your vision matters the most, secondly comes your ability to convey your vision to others which is then based on your artistic foundation.
If you find yourself lost in a forest with a professional artist and ask them to finish a painting using a simple stick as a tool, I guarantee they'd be able to make a pretty sweet painting with that stick. :)😅
🖌 Words are cheap, Galiant! Why don't you prove it to us? 🖌
Sure thing! Let`s paint something! The first step is creating the most silly and unpolished digital brush I can imagine. We can call it THE CATFACE BRUSH😽:
As you can see, it only slightly resembles a cat face (lol). Our next step is making it even more random when I use it to paint. One quick way of doing it is by changing your brush properties to rotate that brush "stamp" as you move the brush across your canvas. This is also called adding an Angle Jitter:
Painting with a BAD brush - How to start
Alright, cool! So we can start painting now, right? In order to really make the point across we need some good COMPOSITION. Luckily, I've previously put together another tutorial presenting 5-tips to achieve great composition in your paintings (Click me). So let`s use that!
Step 1 - Use your vision to create a great composition
Applying the Rule of Thirds was my main compositional approach for this piece. We also need to think about a story that is engaging to our audience. Below you can see the video where I comment a little bit on the story of this painting and how
🌟THE CATFACE BRUSH IS THE ONLY BRUSH I'LL BE USING FROM START TO FINISH 🌟
We then ended up with this rough sketch for our piece, which tells the story of characters meeting up in a dark alley of a futuristic oriental town. One of the characters is an android while the other is a human tattoo artist providing tattoo services to passers.
Step 2 - Use your art foundation to surpass the challenges of a bad brush
Here is the speed painting process for this piece where I brought it to a polished finish using only the CATFACE brush. I painted it in grayscale to have a good understanding of the values. Colors come later.
So what`s next? Well, you could pretty much stop here, but it's always good to add some color if you want to!
Step 3 (OPTIONAL) - Adding color
The good news about finishing a painting in grayscale is that adding colors becomes much more fun! By making an overlay layer in your digital painting software and setting its blending mode to "Color" you are able to play with a lot of different color schemes without compromising your original painting! Making different color washes and combining them can quickly enough bring you to a fully realized painting:
Boom! We did it!
🤖🚨 FINAL REMARKS 🚨🤖
With a fully realized painting comes the happiness of having achieved something that no one else could have made. Much like all original content creators here on HIVE, as humans, we should be proud of what we bring to this world. Trust YOUR VISION.
And regardless of where you may find yourself in your artistic career, above everything else, trust YOURSELF. You're always welcome to share your creativity with us here on HIVE.
With my best regards,
Galiant
