Artist Oils Brush Settings?

[Lighter]

Hey guys,

I've been spending a substantial amount of my free time playing around in Painter, trying to get a feel for digital painting, since I'm really not very good. I'm a sketch artist, and usually work in charcoal, so I've got some artistic background; but I don't have much experience with paints.

Now, of about all the different 'mediums' available in Painter, I believe I've come to like the look of oil the best, and as such, I'm trying to lay down a good foundation to learn to use these Artists Oils. I've got some good resources through the forum regarding color theory and such, but its the execution that I seem to lack in...

I've seen some tutorials and such, but I've never been clear on a few things regarding the Brush settings most commonly used:

I've read that to blend, it is best to start laying down the dark values first, and build to the lighter values gradually - and sometimes there is mention of having the brush opacity set a little low.

I've heard about avoiding any smudge tools, but to take advantage of the blender tools (or maybe the blender brushes in the Artist Oils category?)

Those would be my questions, really... For these oils, should I paint at 100% opacity, or something low? How exactly do I blend these colors together? With charcoal, nothing works better for me than my fingers to smooth the gentle transitions of light and dark - but with the oils, how do I smooth things out?

Any tips that don't necessarily pertain to these questions would also be greatly appreciated. I'm new here, but I plan on sticking around and making something of my artwork.

[Mr-Joe]

Hey there,

I am pretty new too to digial painting. I like painter, but I could never figure out how to blend well without using the blending brushes, which didnt really look that good. But I really like the artists oils as well. So here is what I discovered.

If you use once basic like brush, I kinda like the wet oil brush, and I messed around with some custom settings, like adding pen pressure to opacy, then I start by laying in basic colors with a high opacy, 80-100%, then I start blending by lowering the opacy to around 20-40% (by pressing harder on the pen I get more opacy) then basicaly I keep my finger on the color picker, and I dab a little of a color around the area I want to blend, then grab that new color it makes, and start dabing again, then grab a new color, and I keep layering on color till I get the blend. Check out this thread here, Its alot of tutorials for painting in photoshop mostly by bumskee, which really gave me a good Idea, although its for photoshop, the idea is , he basically uses just the default brush and makes a whole image by layering colors with a hard edge low opacy brush, so I figured, if you use the oils, and get a hard edge brush, and paint by playing with brush size and opacy, you can do the same thing, but with a more oily paint look, and I tryed it real quick by painting a green apple with no ref, and it came out real good, although I didnt save it because I painted it inside the brush creator hahah stoopid me. Well check out this thread here, and read a few pages in bumskee has alot of good info on painting digitally. http://www.conceptart.org/forums/showthread.php?t=47859

Hope this helps!

[Lighter]

Thanks for the heads up, man! I'll have to experiment with that..

[Jin]

Hi,

With the Artist's Oils variants that use Impasto lighting and depth (thick paint), if you want to blend using one of the Artist's Oils blending variants, or use the method Mr-Joe suggested, you'll find that only color is blended and the Impasto lighting and depth remains as it was when originally painted.

To affect Impasto lighting and depth in these brushstrokes, you'll need to use the Impasto brush category variants listed below (try each of them to see how they work since you'll probably find only one or two, maybe three, that you'll want to use to edit Impasto depth and lighting in thick brushstrokes):

Depth Color Eraser
Depth Equalizer
Depth Eraser
Depth Lofter
Depth Rake
Depth Smear
Distorto Impasto