019 - IFX tutorial - Brushes and blending techniques
This tutorial was written for ImagineFX magazine Issue#7.
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Brushes and blending techniques.
If your blending looks too airbrushed and want it to look more hand painted, then maybe some of these tips can nudge you in the right direction:Using soft brushes is fine, but too much of it can break the piece and make it look a bit too much like old fashioned air-brush pictures. The solution is to use a combo and know where to use them.
My suggestion is using the soft brush as little as possible, as this brush doesn’t have any texture or personality which often makes the result appear dull and neutral. Try to do some exercises using hard edged brushes only. Remember to tighten the spacing in the brush tip shape dialogue to around 5-8 percent to get a smooth brush stroke.
It’s all about personal taste, but personally I think that leaving some human marks in a painting like minor errors and visible brush strokes makes a piece stronger and gives it more personality and expression than the perfectly smooth looking ones.
The places to avoid using soft brushes are definitely in highly detailed areas like tiny cracks, wrinkles, folds, etc. Having a good amount of hard edges and contrasts in a composition gives it shape and definition. Try to only use the soft brush on the larger surfaces but never on full cover. Let some of the roughly painted surface underneath show though to give it some texture and personality.
To make your painting less smooth and computer perfect, you can also add some layers with noise textures. You can scan some interesting surfaces and set the layer to “Overlay”, or make some custom made brushes with noise textures. Experiment with other layer blending modes to get the result you are looking for. My favourites are “Overlay”, “Multiply”, “Soft light”, and “Hard light”.
Use sharp edged brushes especially when painting details, and to give shapes in the piece more definitions.
Scan some interesting surfaces, or make some custom made noise brushes and apply then to a new layer to add some extra noise to your painting.