How to choose a digital brush that matches the behaviour of a real one?

[Lavoisier]

Hello everyone, I am a beginner and I am not using Krita professionally, I just want to have fun with digital painting, and I think Krita is great.
I have a fairly general question about the approach one should take in trying to reproduce ‘physical’ art, or in fact if that is a legitimate goal in the first place.

To understand a bit more about the field, I watched several videos / tutorials about digital painting and painting in general.

One of the things that I thought (maybe wrongly?) I’d be able to do was ‘emulate’ what one can do with real, physical brushes, but within the digital medium.
By and large this is the case. Several brushes in Krita are amazingly close to what you would see in reality, at least as far as I can tell as a non-expert.
However, in some cases I get stuck trying to reproduce a particular brush stroke or effect, and I end up spending a lot of time tweaking brush settings, eventually giving up because I cannot obtain what I am looking for.

This makes me think that perhaps the advice at 01:26 in this video is correct, i.e. that one should not create their own brushes, but learn how to use the available ones in a different way to obtain the desired effect.

Example: take this video, where the guy shows how to paint a tropical beach (in acrylic, I believe).
Now, I am sort of OK with the clouds and the sea. I used the ‘wet paint’ brushes and it was close enough (for my liking). However, the little hill on the left hand side, where he dabbed with the brush to simulate trees and vegetation, got me completely stumped. I tried several brushes, and none did the trick. Either the next dabs completely covered the previous ones, so you could not get any sense of depth, or the effect was completely artificial compared to the more ‘organic’ feel the guy managed to get.

What general advice would you give regarding this?
Should one actually try to emulate physical painting in a digital medium, or is the latter a field in itself where one should think in a completely different way and find specific solutions?
More concretely, how would you render in Krita the vegetation on the hills on the left hand side of the beach scene I linked here?

Thanks!

[CrazyCatBird]

Play around with the following brushes that come with Krita:

Stamp Leaves
Dry Bristles Eroded
Texture Spray
Texture Splat
Texture Large Splat

Check out the samples on this page (takes a while to load)

Krita 4 Preset Bundle

[tiar]

@Lavoisier

Should one actually try to emulate physical painting in a digital medium, or is the latter a field in itself where one should think in a completely different way and find specific solutions?

Completely different. Sure, there are some nice brushes out there, especially those made by @RamonM that look a bit like traditional media. But in traditional media you have paints and you mix pigment, in digital you mix lights, and since it’s all super complicated, when mixing yellow and blue you’ll get grey.

To paint a nice vegetation, I’d suggest looking for digital painting techniques. Google “digital painting bush” and you’ll find the general idea. And if you get familiar with brushes and what is possible and what isn’t, you’ll learn how to make it exactly the way you want. But I don’t think you’ll find an exact brush that does exactly the same things that a brush with acrylic paint on it would do. In digital painting you have different posibilities too, though, so there is no point to limit yourself to traditional look.

[RamonM]

I agree with @tiar. I love the traditional media, and i was trined in that mediums, but digital is totally different when you open your mind.
One example i explain to my students is that in digital you can paint whatever you want in one layer, wherever you want. And then move it, and transform (like make it bigger and much more) That is much more difficult in traditional media, and impossible in some mediums. And that is only one of the advantages.

So i think it could be useful to define your goals and then start to create things with the round brush. As simple as that. And believe me is incredible what you can create with that brush when you know to manage value, (range of greys) how to control shapes, and more. Is a long road but amazing road.

[Lavoisier]

Thank you all very much for your replies and insights!
I suspected my attempts were a bit misdirected.
I will keep trying, and of course advising Krita to all the people I know who are interested in digital art. You guys have done an outstanding job creating this software.

[tiar]

You can still replicate this painting, just don’t expect the exact same behaviour of the brush and the same effects. Put the correct colors in correct places, and it will already look ok. And in the future you’ll learn more techniques and how to use specific brushes etc. and you’ll be able to get the much nicer effects. For paintings like that I’d suggest using some nice textured brushes, not the simple circle one, because textured brushes will look good without much effort (textured = chalk brushes, pencil brushes, acrylic brushes, bristle brushes, everything that is not too simple but it’s generic enough you could use it for the whole painting).

I recently became a fan of a specific brush from a Ramon’s new brush set: Pink flowers on a hill and there is also wojtryb’s brush pack you might be interested in: Version 6.0 of wojtryb's "Wont teach you to draw" brushpack relased and of course brushes that are already included in Krita, you can search for them “RGBA” in the search box. But don’t spend too much time on this: choose one or two, max three brushes you like the effects of and you think you can paint everything with it, and then forget about all others. (Best way: assign the nicest brush to a new tag; then assign this tag to other nice brushes; and then switch Brush Presets docker to that tag).

[Lavoisier]

Thank you! Yes, I see your point. I am indeed trying to find brushes that I like and I find sufficiently versatile, and I assign them to ‘my favourite’, so I can access them quickly by right-clicking.
On the topic: yesterday I tried out the leaves stamp suggested by CrazyCatBird, and found that it works pretty well to make bushes and trees. In ColorDodge mode, there’s even no need to change the colour: if I select a dark colour for the shaded areas, when I draw over them with the same brush, it lightens them. Not sure I understand how it does it, but hey, I can live with that. I suppose it’s part of the concept that digital tools allow you to do many more and very different things than the physical medium would.
I also did a small study to try and render muraljoe’s clouds. That’s less easy (for me), because that brush stroke where he adds slightly darker edges just inside the brighter contour of the clouds isn’t easy to get. With most brushes, I tend to get a grey blob rather than just a fluffy grey edge. Maybe I need to work in reverse, starting with the darker cloud colour and adding brighter areas on top of it, leaving part of the grey underneath show through.
As you all pointed out, all stuff that one learns by trying.
Just hoping that I find the ‘right’ solutions, and not something that complicates it and isn’t very effective.