This article offers a step-by-step guide on how to alter and utilize brushes in digital art, focusing on changes in size, color, opacity, flow, and smoothing. It also highlights how these adjustments influence the overall look and feel of a digital painting project.
Key Insights
- The article explains how to adjust brush settings such as size, color, and opacity, demonstrating that a higher opacity results in less transparency, hence less of the underlying layers showing through.
- It discusses the concept of flow, likening it to the amount of color coming out while painting, with less flow compared to a dried-up marker that releases less color.
- The article also brings up the importance of 'smoothing' in digital painting, explaining that it determines how smooth the lines are as we draw, with higher smoothing percentages producing more gradual changes in an artist's movements.
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In this video, we'll be continuing to work with brushes. With our file open, I'm first going to change the size of my brush head back down to a reasonable size of around 50 pixels, and let's change the color also.
I'll change it to a dark green, and hit OK. Now if I begin trying to draw here, we'll see that it doesn't allow me to draw. This is because I still have layer 1 highlighted in the artboard.
Instead, I'll select layer 2 found in artboard 4, and now I can begin to paint. I'll hold shift to drag a line down towards the bottom, and here we can see I have a green line. Next, let's practice changing the opacity of this line by going to our options bar, clicking the drop-down arrow, and sliding our opacity to around 20%.
Now, if I click and draw across the previous lines, we'll see that I have a very faint green line. This is because our line is transparent at 22%, meaning it's very light, and lots of the colors and images below will show through. Let's change our opacity again to about 70%, and draw another line.
The higher the opacity, the fewer shows through. At 100% opacity, nothing will show through. Let's put our opacity back to 100%, and hit ENTER.
Next, let's discuss flow. At 100% flow, that means that the full color is coming out as we click and drag. If we were to change our flow by clicking the drop-down arrow and adjusting our slider to around 20%, if we click and drag, we'll see that not much color is coming out, even though the opacity is at a full 100%.
This is similar to a dried-up marker, meaning that less color is coming out as we drag. Let's change our flow back to 100% to finally discuss smoothing. Smoothing essentially refers to how smooth it will make the lines as we draw.
Therefore, it's currently at 10%. Let's change it to 0, and I'll draw a squiggly line moving left and right across the canvas. We can see how the paint follows my movement.
Now, if we change smoothing to 100%, we'll see that as we move left and right very quickly, it smooths out the line as we go, and we get a more gradual change in our movements. Let's put this all in practice by going back to Artboard 1 and adding to this artboard. We'll select Artboard 1, and next, let's add a new layer on top of the blue.
We can call this layer Green Layer. Hit ENTER, and let's rename our layer 1 Blue Layer. Hit ENTER.
With the Green Layer selected, we can then adjust our opacity and flow and smoothing to whatever we want to create an abstract color on top of the blue. I'm going to adjust mine to my liking, however, you can adjust yours to whatever you'd prefer. First, I'll set my opacity down to about 25%.
Let's change the flow to 73% and the smoothing to about 77%. I'll then adjust the size to about 160 pixels, and let's adjust the hardness to about 54%. Looking at my cursor, it still looks like my brush head is a little small for what I want to do.
Therefore, I'll adjust the size again to about 448, and this looks like a more appropriate size. Next, I'm going to just do broad strokes across the canvas, giving it an abstract feel. Feel free to paint yours however you'd prefer.
As you'll notice, once I release the mouse and begin painting again, it adds additional green because the transparencies stack on top of each other. I'll add one more layer, and here we can see we kind of have an abstract green on top of the blue quickly fading. One other quick thing you'll notice, as I drag over here, we'll see that Artboard 2 isn't painted.
This is because the paint is located on the green layer on Artboard 1 only, and therefore it won't affect Artboard 2. Let's now save our project by going to File, Save, and now we have a saved artboard with an abstract feel. In the next video, we'll be continuing painting with brushes and discussing brush tips in the eraser tool. See you there!