The before and after of my digital paintings shocked me - 3 months of proper brush settings

I used to just use default brushes in Procreate for over a year. My stuff looked flat and messy. Then I watched a tutorial from a guy in Portland who showed me how to tweak pressure curves and opacity. After 3 months of just using custom brushes I set up myself, the difference is night and day. Has anyone else had a moment where simple settings changes totally flipped your art style?

3 comments

3 Comments

phoenix_martin4015d ago

Man, that feeling when you finally crack the code on brush settings... it’s like a lightbulb going off. I had a similar moment with my pressure curve actually, just last year. I got so frustrated with my lines looking all wobbly and inconsistent that I almost gave up digital painting entirely. Then I sat down one weekend and just slowly turned every single slider in the brush studio to see what it actually did, no tutorials or anything. It was a mess, but that hands on mess taught me more than any video ever could. Now I swear by adjusting the streamline and taper together, it’s like magic for getting clean strokes.

nathankim15d ago

Man, the whole brush settings rabbit hole is wild... I spent like two weeks just messing with the taper on my pencil brush and ended up making all my lines super shaky because I went too extreme on the pressure curve. Had to reset everything and start over, which was frustrating but taught me way more than watching tutorials. The real game changer for me was finding out about the texture overlay sliders in the brush studio, that's when my stuff actually started looking like traditional art instead of digital mush.

miasanchez15d ago

Did you rebuild your brush settings completely from scratch or just tweak some existing ones? I've been messing with pressure curves for a month now and my lines are way cleaner, but I'm still stuck making the brushes do what I want. It honestly feels like half the battle is just knowing which sliders to even touch in the first place.