Was inspired to start really trying to learn painting after seeing some stuff from "Tales from the Loop" by Simon Stalenhag. I've got some stuff in my head that needs to get out and I'm going to need painting to do it. So I started with some Ctrl Paint tutorials.

Daily Drawing 1396 Only posting a cropped version of this today. Saving the full thing for another Unnatural History Channel video. I finally started to get the hang of the digital watercolours right at the end of the process, which is frustrating, as I didn't have time to redo earlier parts with my new skills. I shall have to do another watercolour picture at some point soon, because this actually went way better than I thought.

Digital artist woes

So here's something that's bugged me forever that I can never quite find the words to talk about: There's a problem that happens when you do digital art. I can't think of any way a new digital artist won't run into this problem almost immediately. I can only assume every single digital artist on the planet managed to solve this problem themselves, easily, because while I have found some fixes for this, they're all fairly specific. People don't talk about these solutions like they're the solution to this common problem. There's no "oh I remember that, yeah you do X". Its always treated like something that isn't a universal issue. On top of that, the fix for this should logically be implemented into the brush tool of all major digital art programs, yet it isn't. Which implies that its not a common problem, or that the solutions I've found aren't commonly used solutions. But again, I have no idea how anybody can do digital art and not immediately run into this problem.

The problem? Using more than one stroke with a brush that has opacity. You can fix this with complex smear brushes that don't use opacity. Or by colour selecting the overlap and then blending it into the surrounds. But this issue presents itself in some form or another everywhere in digital art, even where those solutions aren't an option, and I always feel like a crazy person when I complain about it. Every program I've ever used defaults to having opacity linked to brush pressure, which immediately causes this problem to show up. Whenever I brought it up, I expected one of two responses. Either "yeah that sucks" from basically everybody. Or "oh, you fix that by doing X" by basically everybody. Because from where I'm sitting, every single digital artist must run into this immediately, and unless there's some trick everybody but me just instinctively knows, they must have to ask around to find the universal fix for this universal problem. But when I ask about it, nothing. Deafening silence. I've asked if its just me being the weird one, and nothing. Its like its a problem that only affects me, but is also so unremarkable that its not even interesting enough to go "oh, weird that only you have that problem". This has been bugging me for ages. I know, for all the reasons I've written out, that this must be something to do with my headspace. Because the responses I've seen to this issue only make sense if most people don't consider this an issue. But I cannot for the life of me figure out whats wrong with my approach to things that causes this to be a problem. This bugs me so much that I decided that my first post on tumblr would be me ranting about it. I'm probably not following the proper tumblr etiquette, but that's okay. I can always delete this rant once I know what the hell I'm doing. Or I'll leave it up as a testament to just how badly this brush stroke opacity issue has been bothering me.