thankies, Wolf
hey Night, if you don't care, would you please give us a quick instructional on your edge painting tech thus far.
The horse's edges/muscle definition is the first thing I noticed when i saw your above pic.
Are you painting large soft strokes then sharpening up one side with a smaller harder brush, are you using selections, etc?
Edge stuff is something I'm very interesting in right now.
Sure, what I've been doing so far is very similar to the first method you described. Although I use several soft brushes, one that is very soft, one that is average, and another that is harder but still a bit soft (I'm not sure to what extent this is useful yet btw, seems to be working though), additionally, I also sometimes use an edited smudge tool brush in Photoshop:
With the horse the way I went about it, which might not be very effective now that I think about it, is that I first used a hard brush to lay in the shadows and light, then started softening it using the brushes I described; with the degree of softness being based on the brushes' softness, meaning that on the harder areas I used a harder brush and so on (I found myself using the softest brush very often, alongside Photoshop's default soft brush actually).
There's also the whole thing with "lost edges" I think it's called, which is the area where you essentially leave a single colour/shade in without any definition, so that it doesn't distract the viewer; I noticed that this is often complemented with the edge it leads to being darker on the rim, in that sense it's similar to reflection but exaggerated.
In terms of the brush's size, the process I go through is pretty common I think: when I begin I use mainly large brushes and near the end mostly small brushes. But I have to say that I do that with both hard and soft brushes, although the soft brushes I use are indeed usually larger.
After that I used as you said a smaller harder brush for the details, you do sometimes have to use a larger hard brush however.
Also, it became very apparent to me when I started practising this that the order in which you place the brushes is very important as well - that is, which brushstroke is going to be on top/below of the others (on some occasions when you make hard edges it kind of feels like you're "cutting" through what ever brush stroke was there before) , so that's something to keep in mind as well.
Another thing that might be of importance is that I play around with the flow and/or opacity when I paint.
Here's more..
Edit*
The collab comment from your previous post totally escaped me! That would be fun
