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Pro tip: A guy on Instagram told me to drop my blending brush and I'm mad he was right
I was doing this digital portrait of a girl with red hair and couldn't get the skin tones to look smooth. Some random artist named Kai commented on my WIP and said stop blending so much and just layer opaque colors instead. I ignored him for two days then finally tried it and the texture came out way better. Has anyone else had that moment where a piece of advice you resisted actually fixed your whole problem?
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the_brian1mo ago
Hold up, I gotta disagree hard here. Overblending gets way too much hate from people who just never learned how to do it right. Blending is a tool like anything else, and when you use it on the right layer with the right opacity it gives you smooth transitions you literally cannot get with opaque strokes. Layering colors sounds great until you zoom in and see a bunch of harsh little lines that scream "I was scared of the smudge tool." Not everything needs to look like a thick oil painting either, some of us want that soft airy look that blending gives you. Plus trying to do smooth gradients with opaque strokes takes twice as long and still never looks as clean to me. Keep your texture, I'll keep my mud puddles if they get the job done right.
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the_wren1mo ago
Yeah, that’s one of those tricks that feels WRONG at first. I used to blend until my layers turned into muddy soup because I thought smooth meant soft like airbrush. But layering opaque colors with small strokes gives this liveliness that blending completely kills. It’s like the difference between a watercolor wash and actual paint strokes on canvas, the second one has SOUL. Now I barely touch my smudge tool unless I’m doing specific soft edges, and my work looks way more painterly.
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