Illustration #121 + rewards, sketches, doodles and a brush! (Patreon)
Videos
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Calm_August2024_Sketch1.mp4 -
Calm_August2024_Sketch2.mp4
Downloads
Content
Here's the stuff I've been drawing and painting recently. I hope you find a few things here you enjoy! Was in the mood to paint another water nymph, so that's what I ended up doing for the main picture. :)
Here are the download links for the rewards for illustration #121 so you can check out the process if you want:
WIP images
Short time lapse video
Long time lapse video
PSD files
I forgot to share the two sketches I did a couple of weeks ago, so I've included those too alongside their time lapse videos that you can find in the attachments here if you're interested in those.
I'm pretty happy with some of what's going on in the doodles this time around. They've helped me think a bit differently about how I use noise texture and bristle effects on my brushes. I've experimented a bunch with that this past week and I've landed on a brush that feels pretty comfortable.
So, since it is a pretty simple brush in terms of how it's created and doesn't rely too much on software specific features, I went through the effort to try to manually create the same brush in Paintstorm, Krita, Clip Studio Paint and Procreate. I've included the brush file for each of those in the attachments here.
A brush is rarely very useful if you don't know how or why someone uses it, so I wanna quickly explain that.
One of the big benefits of using textured bristly brushes is that, unlike smoother brushes, they can easily imply details with few strokes. However (and this is obviously subjective) I usually feel like erotic paintings are most appealing to me when they don't use heavily textured brush strokes. So I have often used brushes that allow pretty smooth and clean rendering. But that often leads to me feeling frustrated spending a lot of time trying to achieve a satisfying level of polish and details across a painting.
So I wanted to see if I could find a satisfying middleground, where I can have that benefit of textured strokes implying detail, but still maintain the style I think looks hottest. And this brush I'm sharing is an attempt at that. To make sure the texture isn't too much it uses a simple greyscale gaussian noise as its texture, and I keep that texture at its native scale to maintain crisp pixel noise. Scaling the texture up or down ruins the noise by softening it. And the brush tip I use is one that gives a bristly look to the stroke.
I wasn't able to perfectly replicate the brush in each software since they don't all share the same brush settings, but they should be close enough to each other that the brush serves the same purpose and feels similar. I also wanna say the brush isn't so carefully tuned that you shouldn't change it. The noise texture is probably what I'd consider the most important part of it, but beyond that you could probably try to change it to what you feel most comfortable with. For example, the brush tip is not very carefully selected, so you could swap it for a different bristly brush tip if you feel like it's too soft at larger sizes.
The Krita variant of the brush is the one I feel most comfortable with, in case you're wondering. And doodle #2 is an example of how I use the brush. You can see varying levels of finish in that one, which hopefully gives an idea of how I sketch and render it.
If you've paid close attention you'll know I've been flip-flopping between different software recently. Paintstorm feels comfortable but lacks features and has some bugs. CSP has a lot of features but doesn't feel as comfortable to me. Very recently I'm trying to use Krita again to see if I can feel more comfortable there. And I'm pretty optimistic about Krita, so you'll probably see me use that a bit going forward.
Thanks for supporting me! I hope your September will start out great. :)