Your brushes and your workflow for portraits

What are the brushes you use in the default brush library for a (semi-realistic to realistic) portrait? It could also be useful if you would be kind enough to group them according to the style (digital looking -very smooth- portraits and traditional painterly portraits) and according to the phases (i.e. the brushes you use for sketching, laying down flat colors, painting and -adding- details).
I know that even one basic soft and one basic hard brush is enough to do a lot, however, I have some difficulty especially in choosing the right brush(es) when adding details (eyes, eyebrows, creases etc.)

Hey, I’ll not reply for “portrait” specifically and let that to realistic painters around, but here is a documentation about Krita’s default brush presets I wrote and how they are sorted by groups.

It’s a bit outdated in a sense it’s not “Krita 4” anymore (but the kit remains the same), and new brushes appeared since this period ( the oil “RGBa” brushes, watercolor brushes, etc… check Krita’s official Youtube channel or the brush section in this forum to discover more info about them).

I hope it will help you to get a big overview of the defaults!

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@Deevad Thanks a lot Deevad. Actually, I’ve already visited that page more than once. I also subscribed to your YT channel months ago and probably downloaded all your brushes and I am an admirer of your works :slight_smile: Those examples on the page are great and beyond useful. However, as you also have mentioned, currently my struggle with the brushes is more on the realistic portrait/painting field. Actually, I still couldn’t come up with a satisfactory group of brushes on that area (some of which is probably my fault but I could use the advice of the artists on the site).

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Thank you very much. :+1:

You can achieve realism or academic portrait with many workflows and techniques, and they’ll lead to the use of totally opposite brush types. (eg. if you prefer starting with loose/blury edges and a lot of texture, or if you prefer starting with hard edges and flat area for texturing them later and manually bluring/smudging your edges).

I think you could post here references of semi-realistic to realistic portraits style you have in mind.

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I like to experiment with the brushes and make notes of which ones I like for what I want to do. Then I use them for whatever I had in mind.

I might use a thin pencil brush or a pen brush for details, depending how detailed I want to go. You can look in my gallery here and see how I did with the painting of Olga Korbut. I think I wrote which brushes I used.

I got and imported quite a few brushes, many from Ramon Miranda, and the latest ones are from emilm. If you want some texture, use a textured brush. :+1:t2:

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@Deevad As a semi-realistic example, I can give this hair tutorial. I’ve had some difficulty in achieveing the final (semi-realistic and very digital/smooth/refined) look in the video.

It’s painted on Clip Studio and although I get the feel of the hair in the tutorial, the final, very smooth transitions (I used some airbrush and blender to achieve the smooth blending) eluded me (and that part is not focused on enough in the video). The overly smooth works of Ross Draws can also be an example for this genre.
As for realistic, hyper-realistic pieces, this video can be an example: Hyperrealism Painting iPad Pro Procreate Timelapse - YouTube

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Thank you @CrazyCatBird Could you give a link for the emilm brushes?

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Here’s the thread about them… Scroll down to the link that says, “memileo_360light_03.bundle” and that’s where the bundle is.

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Thank you so much @CrazyCatBird. Does the bundle contain only 3 brushes? There are 7 on the resources tab? However, only 3 on the brush presets docker. Actually, it seems like a bug. On the brush presets docker, there are only 3 but when I enter “memileo” in the search tab below, all 7 brushes are there? Krita should have imported all 7 brushes in the preset but 4 are missing and only appear when searched.
Note: After I added a second tag for all the brushes, now they are all visible on the presets docker. Really strange stuff.

I use the default brush set included with Krita, no additional downloaded sets.
The brushes I use for a realistic and smooth look are:

For Pencil: Pencil-6 Quick Shade and Blender Blur.

For Paint: I set the flats down with Basic 1; then on a new layer I use Wet Paint, Wet Textured Soft (good for hair and rougher surfaces), Wet Paint Details, Blender Basic.

And over the top of any style, for additional shading and colour correction, I put a layer above set to Multiply, and use the Airbrush Soft.

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Thank you so much @Sketchy

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I guess you saw the updated bundle further down in that thread? (I have both original and updated bundles.)

Dunno about brushes not showing up. That seems to happen sometimes. Did you restart Krita? Maybe that might help.

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When I added a second tag to the brushes, the brush set just happened to show all brushes.

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I see, maybe then you’ll need a brush with canvas mixing to blend with other colors in place, and a big control on opacity to get these soft gradients. Maybe test a tweak like that (screenshot under) on the default ‘wet paint’:

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Thanks @Deevad I’ll try it asap.

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