Texture Brushes: Clean vs. Rough Renders: My Process Video and Tips!

Hi everyone, thoughts about my last practices

Lettuce
There's something peculiar about this practice, I had two versions, the first one was complex with many values and details, but once I finished I felt I lost some of the execution I've been doing lately, which is focused on simplification, so I took a step back and left only a few layers. If you are here because you like the way I paint close to reality, perhaps you enjoy the first part of the process, but if you are a fan of a more simple render, you will like the second part, this is useful because you can see when I paint, what it changes depending on my goal over the same reference, I don't often do this because I felt like wasting my time, but there's some utility of this "happy" accident.

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Cat Lunch
A fun practice out of a little guy getting his/her lunch. What is it to take from here is how I integrate a different geometric shape (triangles) as a stylized way to capture reality, I often use the strokes of the brush in the very end of the process, but this time I wanted to make them more distinctive. This iconic style is something I'm a fan of, as I study graphic design, I do like very simple and flat shapes, perhaps these practices take me in that direction. When translating real images into flat shapes, try to choose the spots of your reference that do not have gradients, or silhouettes that have repetitive shapes, like fur.

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Statue
I've been into a little stress lately, when I saw the gesture of this statue I felt related. The light and colours were very simple, front light, one colour (green almost grey) with small variations of brown and yellow. It was mostly a work of line art in which the goal was to capture such the mood in the man. I spent a fair amount of time struggling with the shoulder and back, because of the way the body was a bit inclined forward, but eventually I figured it out. I've noticed after this practice that I tend to struggle way more with human practices and I've been leaving them for the end of the session, right when I'm tired the most, not a good idea. So in the next session I decided to start with humans.

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Hair
Because the first practice of the session is often an "easy" one, I took some inspiration from my early years of sharing art in social media, in which I mostly chose portraits, this one very odd, because it does not have crazy perspectives, or dramatic expressions, but a very nice and simple profile, in which the real protagonist was the hair. Although I wanted the hair to have a fair amount of information through values, I enjoyed drawing the face features, like the nose, mouth, chin, etc, but from that perspective specifically, when I had a pencil and a paper what I tend to draw is profiles from imagination, I don't know why, but it's fun.

A little trick I like to add when drawing profiles is to position the eyes not at the same height, in this example, the eye in the back is a bit down in comparison to the other at front, this adds an interesting extra layer for two cases. For either pushing perspective or gesture.

When is for perspective, it suggests the viewer is looking at the subject (female face) from the bottom, or down position. When is for gesture, like in the reference, it suggests the character is tilting the head a little to one side. Of course in this case I did not come up with the idea as it's already clear in the reference but is good to consider when you feel it's lacking a bit of spice in your character.

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Butter
I did not want to make the same mistake previously with the lettuce practice, so I chose to leave a big part of the shadow in the butter flat. I balanced the butter simplicity by making the render of the knife more intricate. I've challenged myself into simplicity as a way of not hiding behind too much details, but instead to make something worth looking with as less as possible, it's hard to make it simple and interesting. I believe that the key aspect for now is to make the shadow and the base color very contrasted from each other, where one of the two is saturated and the other isn't, the highlight is a little line that splits them from time to time in a few spots, but so far that's as good as I can articulate this render approach. I'm sure the Japanese already figured it out years ago for animation.

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Swan
This was a nice moment I felt capturing. Almost like made by AI, I don't like to paint AI fabricated images, there's plenty of beauty in the world already captured by cameras, I just don't think it's necessary when pictures like these exist. For the shape silhouette of the swan and the cygnets, I drew loose and squared shapes, I felt it would look better than clean curved lines, no great reason in particular, I did the same with the shape silhouette of the shadow, but I struggled a bit since the color and tone of the shadows vary greatly from the swan body (brown and dark) and the wings (purple and bright) eventually I've decided to apply what I mentioned earlier from the butter practice, about the contrast between shadow and base tone and I quite like it better. To get the plumage texture, I edited the brush "cater", removing textures and soft edges, this allowed me to make the shadow sharp yet complex with a series of repetitive little lines, similar to the plumage of the swan. Some small tricks perhaps can help you keep the clean render while playing with textures.

Practice 56/57 Process Video: https://youtu.be/opSVuYVm0TI

Brushes: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1wHu8wuEHjDk-VfnZqv8iy8rwnvu8Ngmj?usp=sharing

Pre-order my book Life in Every Sketch on the 3DTotal shop: https://rebrand.ly/The-Art-of-RamonN90

Please let me know if you have any questions!

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Update about Pinterest

TL;DR: Due to ongoing issues with Pinterest, I’m moving to Raindrop to share curated reference collections (Shape References, Costume References, Food & Tool References, Environment References).

Why the Switch from Pinterest? Pinterest flagged my boards as "unwelcome," hiding pins from many users. Despite my requests for specific feedback, their responses have been vague, with no clear resolution timeline. While I’m grateful for Pinterest’s past inspiration, I can’t wait indefinitely, so I’m transitioning to Raindrop for now.

What is Raindrop? Raindrop is a simple platform to privately upload, save, and share reference collections. Just create a free account to access the links I'll be sending via Patreon.

How to Access the Links? If you’re currently subscribed to any tier with access to my Pinterest boards, check your Patreon DMs, I just sent you the access links.