That one unsharpened brush at max opacity is ruining your piece

Was looking through the critique thread last night and saw 12 people in a row posting digital paintings with zero texture variation. Just solid blocks of color at 100% opacity with the same hard round brush. I had one guy tell me he didn't know you could adjust brush settings after 3 years of using Procreate. Has anyone else noticed this trend of people treating digital art like MS Paint?

2 comments

2 Comments

lewis.diana1mo ago

Wait, didn't you used to think the hard brush thing was just a style choice though? I was totally one of those people who thought "real artists don't need fancy brushes" but then @sean_foster52 showed me some examples from that critique thread and I felt SO stupid. I literally spent a year painting portraits with nothing but the default round brush at full hardness and wondered why everything looked so flat and plastic. Once I tried dropping opacity to 60% and using a watercolor brush for skin, my whole style changed overnight. It's like the difference between drawing with a sharpie and using actual paint - you still get the same basic shapes but everything has SO much more life to it.

sean_foster521mo ago

and the thing is, those people don't even realize what they're missing. I've watched tutorials where artists literally just layer the same hard brush over and over for hours. It's like they're afraid to try a textured brush or drop the opacity. I found this one guy's work who had been using Procreate for two years and he showed me his brush library was still just the default six. He didn't even know there's a whole world of brushes you can download or make yourself.