Hi, everyone! Chiken here.
Welcome to this short lesson about brushes.
I'll just be going through the brushes I
use, and give you a short shading exercise.
So I provided my brush pack for you to download.
If you're using Procreate or Photoshop, you can
download them and use them with me today.
If you're using another program, you can use
any painting brushes that you're used to.
Let's first start out with my hard render brush.
This is the brush that I use for majority of my painting,
and I like to use it at around 60 to 70 opacity.
Or sometimes I even go down to 30.
And what I like about it is that it doesn't blend
that much, so it can give you that rough painted look,
and you can slowly build up colors on top of them.
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So I'm just gonna show you how I
use this brush to create a simple gradient.
I'm gonna make a rectangle.
I'm gonna Alpha lock this layer, so we can
only paint within this layer, and I'll start with black.
Maybe my opacity will be around 30%.
We already have some sort of a gradient here.
If we want to soften it up a little
bit, we will color pick the middle color,
and constantly keep on color picking and going over.
And if I was drawing, or painting a character
and I want the outline, I'm just going to
undo the Alpha lock, turn my opacity up, get a black,
and I'll start going over with the line.
Yeah, this is kind of how I paint my characters.
Painted in first, then go over with the line.
So it does look a bit streaky right
now, but I kind of like that look.
The painterly look where you
can see the visible brushwork.
And if it's too streaky, we will go over
some blending techniques later on with the smudge brush.
So, moving on to the soft render brush.
Similarly, I'm gonna create a new layer here.
Alpha lock it, and we can go over.
You can see already that this brush blends a lot
better than the hard render brush because it has some blending properties.
And I achieved the gradient a lot faster.
But it's the same technique where you
go over with your two extreme colors,
then you kind of take the middle color and you go over.
For example, if I want to do a red to blue,
color pick the middle color and just go over, we have a gradient.
When I used to use this brush, my paintings
had more clean finish, and I kind of wanted
more of that painted and messy look.
That's why I switched to the hard render brush.
So let's move on to the airbrush.
A lot of people will say,
do never paint with an airbrush.
And I do think it's not a great brush
to render, with just cos you can't get those
hard edges, which can lead to muddy looking paintings.
But what I think is really good at, is building
base colors and finishing gradients. Which I'll go more into
in later lessons. So usually the airbrush is only used
at the start and the end, but we can still
practice to create a gradient like this.
Very easy gradient.
Now let's talk about smudge brushes. So let's
say we think this is a bit too
streaky, and we want to soften it out.
We can do so by using the smudge brush.
Let me just duplicate this layer first, so I
just have this basic round brush using the smudge,
we're gonna just tap it.
No need to pull so much, just short
taps and it will blend it like that.
Another brush that I think is really good is
this brush, which is part of JingSketch's brush
pack and you can get it for free.
I'll leave the link in the class notes for this one.
You can freely go over like this.
You can just drag it across
and it will blend really nicely.
I would suggest that you use the smudge brush sparingly,
maybe just a little bit on edges or small areas
or else we might end up losing some texture or
hard edges, and it can make our paintings look pretty
muddy like what we'll get with the airbrush.
So that's it, for the short lesson about the brushes.
I really hope you found a brush that you
like in my little brush pack. For the mission,
use the 3 brushes I provided to create a gradient. Then,
use the smudge tool to smooth out one of them, or
you can use your own brushes if you like.
Remember the technique of color picking the middle,
and then going over. In the next lesson
I'll be moving on to light theory.
It's a really important topic so
I'm really excited to start!