TIL my old digital paintings looked flat because I never used textured brushes

I was scrolling through my old DeviantArt gallery from like 2017 and cringed so hard at how plastic everything looked. Then I opened up a recent piece I finished last month and the difference was night and day. The secret was literally just swapping out the default round brush for some chalk and grain brushes I downloaded off a forum. I also started using layer masks to build up texture instead of just painting solid blocks of color. It took me about 3 years to figure this out, which feels embarrassing. Now I can't even look at my old stuff without wanting to redo every single one. Has anyone else had that moment where one brush pack changed your whole style?

2 comments

2 Comments

tessa_kelly25d ago

Bought this one brush pack that was supposed to mimic oil paint and spent an entire night just making random strokes on a blank canvas, completely forgetting to actually paint anything. I mean, maybe it's just me but those canvas texture brushes are basically magic because I threw one over an old landscape I did and suddenly it looked like something you'd hang in a coffee shop. It's wild how we spend years fighting with tools when the answer was just some guy on a forum sharing his personal brush settings for free. Now I have this whole folder of brushes I downloaded but only ever use maybe three of them.

cameron68425d ago

Read somewhere that professional illustrators actually spend like half their time just testing brushes before they even start painting. Makes me feel a little better about wasting a whole weekend downloading brush packs from every forum I could find. But seriously though, the default brushes in most programs are just awful for building any kind of depth. I switched to a set that mimics actual canvas texture and it totally changed how I approach shading too. Now I'll even use the texture brush to just scatter some noise over a flat color layer and suddenly it looks like real paint.