I was using the wrong brush settings for my whole first year of digital painting

I spent months trying to make my portraits look soft and blended, but they always came out muddy. I was using a basic round brush in Procreate with the opacity set to 100% and just pushing the color around, which never worked right. The tip-off came when I watched a live stream from an artist I follow, and she mentioned her flow setting was never above 70% for blending skin. I had no idea what 'flow' even did. I checked my own settings and realized I'd been using the brush like a physical paint tube, just laying down full-strength color every single time. It completely changed how I layer and build up tones. Has anyone else had a basic tool setting they misunderstood for way too long?

2 comments

2 Comments

christopherwilson1d ago

Oh man, did I ever do something similar? For the longest time I had no clue what "stabilization" did on my line art brush. I just thought my hands were super shaky. My lines were all wobbly for months before I found that slider.

mason.brian1d ago

Honestly that slider is for smoothing, not just stabilization. The real fix for shaky lines is usually in the brush settings themselves, under something like "streamline" or "correction". Tbh I crank that up to like 70% for clean line art. The stabilization you found mostly helps with input lag from your tablet. It's a common mix-up but they do different jobs.

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