I am new to painting especially digital painting and I am trying to understand different ways of painting or different ways of using a digital brush to paint. Assuming a back&white painting, I see three basic ways to paint digitally with the goal to change the value of the brush to paint.
1- Changing the opacity by pen pressure. In traditional media it might be similar to pastel as you press harder you get more paint.
2- Changing the opacity by going back and forward on the same place. In traditional media pencils are similar to this category.
3- Choosing the proper value and use a opaque/hard brush. If it happened to be far from the desired value, then choose another one and paint over. In traditional media using a brush and paint such as oil paint is similar to this way of painting.
To me it seems all other types of brushes are varieties of one of these or combination of these basic categories. Do you agree with these categories? Which one do you use and why? Which one do you find easier to use? Personally, it is hard for me to change the opacity with pen pressure so I like brushes which are opaque or act like a pencil.
All of these have their use cases and i assume most people use all of them for different parts of their works, depending on style and workflow. It’s not really special to digital or traditional, it’s just how some brushes work based on the needs of the artist.
For example I use presets with build-up for sketching, wash mode for shading and full opaque ones for flat coloring. Additionally there are smudge brushes and some special engines like the fx brushes. Some are a combination of all sorts. Not sure if it’s really useful to categorize them at all.
The question is very broad, what kind of insight do you hope to get from this, otherwise I put this into #lounge because it’s more about discussing opinions (where everyone will have their own) instead of getting a correct definitive answer to a specific question.
b)_basic - for Lines and hard shading
b)_airbrush-soft - for big shading parts and gradients
k)_blender_pur - for blending obviously
circle_blend_brush_02 - this one is not a default preset, I got it from HatschYuh, he tried to imitate the water color brush from Paint Tool Sai with it. It works awesome for shading.
Of course I also use other brushes for textures, effects and stuff. But these are the basic ones I always use in my works. Maybe I should note, that I draw in a kind of anime style with them, not realistic.