Hey! I wanted to do another dryad painting! One that's a little bit more colorful than the previous, I hope you like it! Maybe I went a bit overboard with the wet version, but it's fun. 😅
Check out the rewards in the attachments! You can also always find them in the rewards collection post, alongside all other past rewards you might have missed!
It's been an interesting month for painting, as I've spent a bit more time on doodles relative to the time spent on the main piece, and it's been pretty good for me I think! (But it has caused kind of a live stream drought for a little while, sorry about that!) The doodles helped me sort out some things in my head about my painting process that's been bugging me a bit.
The painting process I talked about last time revolves around progressing from blurry to sharp when rendering the piece and adding details. That's sort of the approach you'll see me use in the main painting if you watch the time lapse video. And it works pretty alright! It feels pretty comfortable and straight forward to me.
For the doodles here, on the other hand, I tried to mostly use a very simple hard round brush with pen pressure enabled for opacity (but not enabled for flow), like you can see here:
Working with a brush like that sort of results in the opposite of the blurry-to-sharp approach. Instead it creates tons of overlapping shapes with sharp edges that I later selectively blend and smooth out to create the final rendered look. The benefit of those hard-edged transparent overlapping strokes you can see in the squiggle above is that the overlapping shapes create a lot of accidental shapes I can use. In contrast, the blurry-to-sharp approach relies much more on deliberate and thoughtful placement of shapes, and it feels to me like that has less room for those happy accident shapes to occur.
The environment doodle I included is maybe the best example of how that brush shown above creates those accidental shapes. That doodle has a lot of overlapping carefree lines that end up creating shapes that turn into sand or rocks or grass and their bumps and crevices without me really planning too carefully where each of those are. And that's sort of the thing that has bugged me in a lot of my painting process over the years. I spend so much time doing deliberate placement of shapes, and it just takes forever, so it could be good for me to lean a bit more into that method where more happy accidents happen. Hopefully it'll help me!
I also briefly wanna mention how you can see in the brush settings above that I like to use a pretty steep pressure curve. I do that so it doesn't require so much force to reach max pressure, which helps avoid wrist strain. I've fortunately avoided any sort of debilitating hand/wrist strain through my career so far (knock on wood), but I have acquaintances who have struggled with it and it sounds like an awful experience, so with the help of little things like the steep pressure curve I hope to keep avoiding it. I know some of you guys out there are death-gripping your pen, so maybe try adjusting your pressure curve and see if it can help. :)
I hope you're all doing great! Thanks as always for your support, I'm lucky to have you guys. And, man, it's December already! Let's see if I can make something cool this month. :)