Digital Painting with Bobby Chiu: Lesson 1
Brush Basics and getting familiar with digital painting.
This assignment was a great test of my confidence in my brush strokes and using only the hard round brush to blend without the aid of soft or smudge brushes. The biggest challenge in this assignment was that we could only use the swatches of values provided in the pdf and optimize flow and direction to achieve a nice blend of tones. This exercise also taught me the value of of just using hard round brush to maintain crisp solid edges before developing any further minor details or strokes with the transitions of values.
Further more i found this exercise to be a great warm up before getting to my painting for the day and great for exercising those muscles as well as to just experiment with brush control. Personally i discovered that I'm more confident painting diagonally or horizontally than vertically using big strokes at the beginning and slowly adding tighter transitions of detail. Broad strokes then cut into with either eraser or another value of paint to make more confident marks without worrying about edge control. Optimizing the flow of paint has really changed the way I control and move the paint around the canvas. I found that I like to stick within the 10%-20% flow range as I feel most comfortable when blending paint together also avoiding extreme value changes has helped with blending values. This has also taught me that everyone has a different level of sensitivity they are atoned to or comfortable with when painting. This assignment was very insightful and quite challenging, however I look forward to taking everything I learned from this lesson and applying it to my future work as I start to hone in my process.
I applied this technique of using one hard round brush with optimizing flow and opacity on my own studies to build my own confidents in the strokes and develop my brushwork and brush control. I learned a great deal but also found it super challenging to achieve the results I was looking for.
