DOES YOUR BRUSHWORK SUCK?? Tips & strategies

hello i'm tyler idolan and i'm back with another episode of the brush silence theater now this week I'll be talking about brush work you know does your brush work suck I'm going to be showing some of my favorite artists some examples of their work and why I like their work we'll be looking at a few student examples and why and how brush work can bring your piece down and then I'll be showing a few quick demos of me kind of getting in there and doing some brush work on some works in progress so if that interests you stay tuned [Music] I haven't made it a point to address this subject often it is fairly difficult for a few reasons namely because I feel it is a bit of an abstract principle with multitudes of subjective aspects now disclaimer aside the general idea behind fantastic brushwork at least for me is to engage and impact the viewer now whether it is the thought provoking mastery of edge control of a digital artist like Jamie Jones - the classically trained illustrator Tom level is delicate and calculated marks it leaves us hungry for more the brush or any tool is our conduit as the artist to convey our emotional response to a given subject and in a sense the notion of brushwork is extremely personal and it defines us as the artist so first off would be Evan Amundson here he he mostly focuses on fantasy illustration and character arts but I love his use of brushwork whether he's doing a very simple character portrait it's very clean but it's also pretty simple elegant and for lack of better words smooth it you can see some of the physical brushwork in there but he hides just enough of it that it comes well as like a very nice refined illustration even for a character concept and then there is the the use of its brush work within painting the paintings themselves and they're absolutely mesmerizing with you know how simple he has some of the brush work how complex it gets and of course his use of color and light it can go a long way as well but you know there's just enough texture where there needs to be and there's just enough of it that's implied but it really gets a very consistent look and it's extremely dynamic and it brings the the subject matter to life no matter what he's doing now next up is Ling Jing over here on a art station right a variety of subject matters but what really kind of caught my eye is back down to the simple things some of the the brush working rocks or in trees or in foliage if you guys really want to practice your brush work don't try to design a city scape or design a character and practice your brush work just go to what's in front of you go it's in life rocks trees the grounds may be a piece of wood the table whatever it may be practice assemble the simple things you can observe and then that way you're focusing purely on your brush work and not on your design but look at that dad this is absolutely awesome there's no rock use there's no there's no stamping of leaf textures it is very dynamic highly energetic there there's a motion there's an energy to it it's just very raw and visceral I'm absolutely entranced by the brushwork that this artist is able to convey here let me look at another one so even in a simple scene such as this I think what my favorite aspect about it is just the sheer variety of marks and the types of mark making some of it is extremely controlled some of it's very loose and implied I think the key word here is there's a lot of variety and that that's to take away so some of this is very very much untouched but some of this is highly detailed and there's small strokes and there's large brushstrokes now let's look at a little bit more of a style I'd example from assessment Simon Byrne a key here what I love about his stuff is that he's able to capture very animated a very bold a very stylistic look and his work and that that is by design and that mostly is conveyed through shapes but if you look and zoom in right at the individual little textures and the mark-making with even like a flat surface like a building or a car or roadway there's a less subtle little dynamics it's almost kind of like pointillism it absolutely makes the color pop because of the sheer variety here and you know one of the best aspects of this is a lot of a lot of these artists you know have some process so I want to skip away to the painting side of things because there's a to learn right you can see simple shapes being made everything is starting very graphic very flat even very simple and then you can see he just refines it he refines the shapes he refines the texture and he goes in heavy with the brush work within the individual shapes and he's using the shapes to control you know those larger brush marks are that how that texture is see when he applies those brush the brush work within that shape he's also using selections on top of using a texture brush so it's going shape selection and then like a textured brush one shoe screen he's able to create a highly dynamic range of brushwork you know within the work I absolutely love it so more on the more natural side of things or classical side we have Nick Shin wrote one of my favorite working artists at Naughty Dog's a lot of artists love and kind of I think a cons anime be a more popular choice but I really love the subtlety that Nick general can then capture just look at this scene here where he has some soldiers riding through a river bank you know with some snow and everything absolutely stupendous amount of work the sky extremely simple you could see hints of brushwork just kind of like flaking through the trees very dynamic in their shapes no tree brushes none of that nonsense it's all you know very intently measured very and sometimes I must say it is more work to get a delicate look like this than it is to get in there intricately paint very precise branches and then of course there's the shapes and the use of texture in the ground so again if you're looking to practice your brushwork do something historic do something tried-and-true use photo reference if you don't want to go out and paint from life it's the best way to just practice your the painting side of things not so much the design and your idea but yeah Nick Nick stuff it's fantastic no matter what no matter what subject matter and genre is doing so again we talked a lot about simple versus complex but there's also a large brushstrokes versus simple right the focal point is easily this mech and he's got very a lot tighter of it's not extremely tight but it's tighter than let's say the ground or even the sky and having that balance again is great for riding it gets gets me as the viewer really engaged in his work and last is mache silhouettes here a bit more of a stylized approach as well but I just love love his use of not not only his texture but his shapes how dynamic everything looks so you like typically right a white lighthouse sorry how do you make a white lighthouse interesting well you try to apply every color but white you could see White's on the border here so there's lots of subtle yellows there's greens the plenty of neutrals there's warm there's cool you know and it's not just the texture on this white lighthouse it's even on the the house or the rocks everything is very active in this painting but very clearly defined shapes so again that's another major key aspect or word that I'm taking away it's like there's a lot of variety and diversity but they're always refined and contained within rather tight shapes and again he's showing us a little bit of the process here as well so I just love these so see like most of us he's starting off very simple very crude he's using selections fairly often to get in there to make much more tight and refined brushwork so I think you know like a like I dip eclis do he's starting with an under painting and then he's layering in elements he's layering in cleaner shapes on top of that the under painting kind of serves to set up the atmosphere it sets up the tone you can put some base texture there as well and I think that's a great way to approach this so see like much larger brush strokes underneath it's smaller tighter refined ones on top and it just absolutely comes together when you build it piece by piece what I see students do most often is they go in there and they try to paint every little thing at once whereas I think it works generally a little better if you systematically go in and build things up over a few layers all right now just to look at a few student examples to to a highlight and show what you bad brushwork or unrefined brushwork and really due to a piece I'm not gonna call out their names or anything but it's purely here for our educational purposes so see here's a great piece like I I think the composition it's fine I think you know it's a simple awesome practical piece it's not trying to reinvent anything and that's perfectly fine but this is also the perfect place to really get in there and and practice brush work so what my major you know concern or thing I'd like to highlight on on this particular student piece is it looks like the brushwork is nearly universal whether it's for the grass the tree the mountain the obelisks here or even the sky where it's if we zoom in see it's got a very kind of soft wispy feel the edges overall are clean but it's within that everything feels kind of soft and ghosty and that I think that would have been okay if one of those elements look like that but when every element is kind of composed the same way that's what can give it a little bit of a stale feeling so even if the lighting is on point if the compositions on point this is one example of how brushwork can bring down the overall piece alright see you next up is another piece right at the perspectives on point the drawing is on point and the lighting is pretty great too I love the subject matter and some of the detail stuff but it feels like it's being held back by brushwork to me and look at the flowers for example everything is very equally the same size the same rhythm and almost like the same to mention if there was more variety like Ling's work that we looked at earlier I think that would come alive as well on top of that there's a lot of this brushwork right being made internally like whether it's an individual flower or all these blades of grass it gets very very noisy and one thing again that I look at or that I try to bring into my work that I observed from artists is that you need some areas of rest some simplicity to counteract and counterbalance counter weight that that heavier use of brushwork on top of that there's elements in this that just feel unresolved something like the tree bark right where if you're going this heavy with your brush work and then just having that very bear that's that's gonna stick out where you'd want to see more of that bounce light you know underneath there you're gonna want to see more fill light you know on this side have those highlights wrap around the the forum rather than just cutting stop so while I think it's starting to show that you're gonna have a lot more drag on that so you're gonna see basically a much greater range of mid-tones in there and then this this highlight - no it's it's more than just the brushwork things you know can bring an average piece and elevate it much much further and I had to call it quits because I started getting into lighting and I'm trying to keep trying to keep the focus and the emphasis on the brush work today right here's another great piece right again simple subject matter something we can all easily observe here's a great example of when rhythm and repetition again gets very still and can bring back you know hold back the painting a lot so every circle every mound every tuft of grass in this area for example is very much the same size the same sort of weather and it's even carrying through over here and when we can identify these sort of patterns in our art that might be a good indication to switch to swap things up and give him something simple like this can be fixed relatively simply like if I copy and paste this whole section and just to show you how how much more this can change things if I add a slight skew to this and start to really change up the variety of those marks you know adding big adding small adding dynamic you know movement in them see like there's movements coming in now with these shapes it that starts to help it out quite a bit and that's because this is simple you know this is complex this is dark this is light can really bring things through there's also the subject or the aspect of things where things can just feel unfinished like there's no control which is another huge part of brushwork there's just it feels like there's absolutely no control going on in the water we look at water there's a lot going on there's reflections there's depths there's a refraction and it looks like it all came control and I and going to make a video in the feet in the near future on water if I can it's noted I see a pop up a lot in the comments so yeah that's another example right here last but not least right another another great image overall the Lighting's really nice the feeling in the atmosphere is there but when we zoom in and we take it from a hole it does a pretty good job I feel but when you zoom into the individual elements that again a lot of things in this all tend to have that everything tends to have this wispy and loose sort of aspect for it so again I recommend if you're gonna go something like that on the tree or on the cloud or on the individual texture within the rock there tighten some of that up create that variety have that control and I think that will help it you know a good painting it'll make it a great painting this for me the biggest offender might be the group of trees it's just like it's a lot of information there's a lot of brushwork there and I think just starting to simplify it separating those shapes out just a little bit more will do you know wonders for this sort of piece all right now for just a few quick little demonstrations here's another work in progress I'm working on and so I'm starting out with the shapes moving to selections I hid the selection using command or control H depending on your software and basically I'm going into those shapes with much larger texture heavy brushes these in particular are from Jeremy Fenske I also like Greg Road Scout skis brushes they tend to work pretty good for me and I can get a variety of marks with them so as you can see I'm not settling just like the first mark that the brush makes but I'm kind of searching for a bit of a synergy that will work something that doesn't look too busy or too noisy but something that I can imply detail without deliberately actually like zooming in and painting a lot of it you know painstakingly by hand and this and then this um method or approach I tend to use a wax on wax off sort of mindset where I I throw on some marks some mark making we in with the tools and then I go back and erase into that using a different type of eraser buddy the way this is fairly consistent with how I always paint and build up a scene I lay down some foundation color work some tones and then I go in with more specific sort of marks now the brush does not matter at all like you can do these with any sort of brush and you can adjust and change the settings to yield drastically different results from them and so therefore I would say definitely it doesn't involve the brushes doesn't rely on the brushes you can obviously there are some brushes that are really cool and some that are you know would take extra work to make very cool but um yeah it's it's something that I find brushwork extremely personal and it's something I don't really go out of my way to teach I just kind of point it out when it's distracting because it's gonna vary so greatly between different artists and styles but yeah this is kind of out wrapping it up for those two trees there see that the idea is I just don't want to draw attention away from the focal point with it so now I'm moving on to the next part here I want to show you another painting I'm currently working on so again I'm doing with the I'm gonna tone it I'm gonna block it out a few of the shapes and colors very roughly as I'm building this up and then I start getting tighter with the detail smaller with the brushstrokes and then I kind of just continue to build and build and build on these things starting with the larger shapes and masses the wider areas of color to cover them work around and then I find okay where's the focal points zoom in and apply more detail there as you can see the detail around that door is much tighter much more refined than the area up above where I chose to you know kind of where I'm working now where I basically left it a lot more rough and a lot more unrefined I'm gonna go put a little bit more effort up here but I'm not gonna nearly put as much effort as I am down there and I do feel that it is that overall contrast of detail of brush size that can make a dynamically interesting image sure a bit you know an awesome color palette and subject matter can you know that can go a long way as well but you couldn't even show the most mundane subjects with awesome brushwork and make it look exciting and energized and kind of like a photographer a good photographer can grab some mundane subject matter know how to work and use lighting to make it look absolutely fantastic same thing and so in this approach I'm laying in some brush work but I'm also doing a little bit of blending a little bit of smudging with Photoshop smudge tool that way it gives me a little bit of that texture II edge and then I can smoothen and soften some of that out as well of course I'm going with I'm trying to make these shapes pop first of all so I'm using a little micro the marquee tool there to make selections to get very clean edges and parts of that and then I'm losing edges on the other side of them so it's always about finding these dynamics in different ways to keep the rhythm of the brush and the mark making constantly changing so we're before I was doing a very structured approach with larger brushes and selections now I just like to go into counter that with using some straight up like regular brushes and doing some old-school painting you know loose gestural quick marks but I'm trying to make every mark I make on this canvas count I'm trying to make it deliberate nothing you know within my power or skill I'm not trying to leave anything the chance and I'm designing and deliberately making these choices and I think that's a huge difference between what I see some students doing and what the professionals start to do everything is my choice and by design so let's just kind of jump down here I don't even have this walkway for instance in the foreground started yet so again I use like a bigger thicker a very simple brush there's a little bit of green to that and I could just start building it up and I start to like think of shapes and I think how these shapes can make form and so I'm laying in these colors over my this ting colors and I'm in the back of my head I'm just hoping they're gonna work out as good as I I hope them too but but color is all contextual in a subject for another day as you can see I'm adding a little bit of a drag to that mark and so some of them they're softer edges some of them are harder edges and then with the foundation laid right I can go back in there with the selection tool change up brushes literally tiny brush in the world and it really doesn't matter can't stress that enough but see I like this one it's simple I can kind of call out some of those forms with it and I'm working within these little shapes and it helps things keep a very clean and unified sort of look to it and I that's the other thing I noticed too that a lot of students are not doing that they never they never use the selection I guess you don't need to it'd be a pain in the neck to do traditionally anyways sorry I'm a little congested but for me it's a really great way to add a lot of control to the marks that I make on on a canvas I love it see I go when I paint some negative space shapes I I go on top of that paint positive ones so constantly pushing light and dark thick and thin soft in rough detailed and you know not so detailed detailed and simple all these ways of adding contrast to my marks as well as contrast to the entire piece itself so yeah here's a little bit of how I started this area alright so here is a little bit of a recap of what I just worked on added in the foreground elements then I went in and balanced some of that detail removing lots of it in the shadowy areas softened it a good amount of that as well and then started building up you know one more passive details on top of that so it's layer by layer doesn't actually take as long as it may look and it builds up the form the color the brushwork relatively quickly now I got to get back to work and finish this piece so brush work a complex and delicate subject right yeah I feel for me personally it's gonna be a lifelong pursuit just truly master the subtleties of this ever expansive crap now it does leave the question we all must face as artists is your brushwork clean is it sloppy is it uncontrolled if it's chaotic and loose is that by choice or is it a constant battle for your own readability it really has to be something we each deliberately work at and in our own way good brushwork needs a variety to thrive and breathe you can easily achieve variety through contrast now the types of contrast include the contrast of edges soft or lost edges versus the hard place the hard edges near areas of importance a contrast of texture now this is simple versus complex or think of it as detailed versus implied maintain a solid balance of each of these lastly contrast of size large and loose versus small and careful start large you know I like to go expressive and then I refine the smaller areas of the smaller details using smaller brushes lastly I do recommend the slowdown and just be conscious of your movements think and feel the motions so that's it for today's tutorial guys I hope you enjoyed it if you did show the channel some love leave me a like comment or share it and feel free to join the brush sauce community over on discord we do weekly hangouts and all other kinds of fun activities thanks guys and take care thank you for checking out my video you can support the channel if you'd like by subscribing liking or commenting on my videos you can find me on the web on Facebook art station and aunts de gram those are the social media outlets I utilize I also teach two courses at the computer graphics masters Academy architecture design and the fundamentals of design feel free to check those out now if the classes aren't few I also teach one-on-one join the hundreds of students around the world for one-on-one learning and for more info just send me an email also feel free to join the brush sauce discord community there's links below it's fun we do weekly hangouts there's the challenges and Spray place to make friends take care [Music]

Channel: Tyler Edlin

Views: 282,608

Keywords: art, design, drawing, painting, digital art, concept art, illustration, tutorial, help, tips, photoshop, fantasy art

Id: ZVPN3few4uY

Length: 25min 45sec (1545 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 16 2018