Yesterday I found this really interesting video on the Pokémon artstyle and how it has changed throughout the years.
I recall seeing the earlier Sugimori watercolour works as a kid and being mesmerised about it. I was wondering, are there similar resources out there, either as video or in book form that digest certain art styles?
And the second question is: the video talks about how real world brushes tend to round the intersections between two lines that intersect. From the video:
I guess that needs some kind of feathering when lines cross. An issue may become lines nearby, because feathering seems to be a kind of magnetism, therefore has an influence area where “it affects what it catches”. In real life this is no issue, the color will only flow a little bit into the corners if lines cross, on a digital canvas this has to be managed via math → algorithm’s sorting things out.
I think, we’ll have to wait and see what the user’s with coding-knowledge will say about this. But I’m curious if my assumption goes in the right direction.
I’m generally wondering whether people paint over the intersection areas manually to round them or that other software have features that allow you to control this. If this were all drawn as vectors, for instance, that would be easy. But in pixels, I don’t recall having seen anyone work with these rounded intersections.
Hey, do you have access to YouTube? There are a few good channels that do breakdowns and studies of other artists’ styles. The one I can highly recommend if this:
Gave the feathering thing @Michelist described a try. Nearby lines does clump a little bit.
You can isolate the intersection areas to some extent by drawing with Divide brush blending mode and add a Color to Alpha filter mask set to your line color.
Doesn’t work for single stroke lines however.
Hi, it is really difficult to achieve this type of traditional effect in digital/pixels. Mainly because the new brush strokes rarely interacts with other brush strokes underneath.
The Sketch Engine can be interesting for having this effect here and there: brushes like “v) Sketching Chrome” family might be the only one able to intersect with themselves. But it will only affect their current brush stroke. As soon as you release the stylus, the stroke will be considered as dry:
Corel also tried to make an effect like this in their software Painter under a special type of layer (‘Wet’/‘Watercolor’ layer, afair, 14 years I haven’t used it) with a special live refresh of all the pixels on this type of layer while painting. It’s a method probably close to the experimentation of @emilm here (with a progressive animation to give to the user the feeling of ink ‘growing’ into the fiber of the paper). But this system was computer intensive and couldn’t handle the scenario where the brush stroke made 3 minute ago was considered as totally dry. So the effect tends to appears all over the place and it just feels like it was drawn on a sheet of thick plastic with a ink pen that couldn’t dry and spread everywhere.
Yes, I agree. I was under the impression that it might be possible using vector brushes, where you could simply fillet all corners of overlaps to get the desired effect. However Affinity Designer has too many issues converting brush strokes to demo the effect. Thanks for shedding your light on the matter!
Got reminded of a similar effect in DAUB’s Clip Studio Paint brushes and decided to see if it was possible to recreate in Krita.
It’s basically a modified version of @emilm idea, except it works with both single strokes and multiples… Under a few caveats. Mainly having to stick to certain layers, using specific brushes and drawing in black, but hey, whatever works, right?
I’ve stumbled onto two versions, one more opaque than the other. Examples with layer setup:
