Illustration #106 + doodles, 3D experiments, brushes! (Patreon)

WIP images   Short time lapse   Long time lapse   PSD file   Brushes 

Hey! Here's some more stuff I've been working on lately! Still making an effort to get more comfortable posting unfinished work and doodles here, lol. I hope you guys like it. 

These past couple of months I've been having a lot of fun playing around with a more textured painterly look in my work. I'm still a little bit on the fence about how much I want to lean into that, but it's been interesting.

When I work with brushes that create smooth surfaces and gradients I often feel like I'm struggling a bit to reach a level of detail I feel is acceptable, so the textured painterly brushes I've been using have helped introduce some of that accidental detail that make surfaces look finished a bit more quickly. I like that. Maybe I've mentioned it before as well, but I do feel a little bit unsure about the textured look for erotic paintings. Textured brush strokes look nice, but I keep asking myself "Do they help make things hot?" Looking nice and looking hot are slightly different things, after all. I guess it's a matter of personal taste, but going too textured can sort of work against the hotness of it for me. I'll keep working on it and try to figure out where I wanna go with it.

I've attached some of those painterly Paintstorm brushes I've been using recently if you wanna try them. I'm afraid they don't work in other software, as far as I'm aware. Sorry about that!

You can also see in one of the pictures here that I've been messing around a bit with 3D again. I bought a new VR headset recently so I could give Substance 3D Modeler a proper try. Sculpting in VR feels really nice and intuitive, so for me, as someone who dislikes when my workflow feels too technical, it kinda works well for blocking in scenes that I can paint over or just use as reference. I'm not really at a point where I'd want to commit to it as a part of my painting process, but it's fun to experiment with it, and the 3D+2D workflow does allow me to achieve camera angles and lighting in my paintings I doubt I'd ever be able to pull off with my regular purely 2D painting workflow, so it has some real benefits to it there that I'd have loved to make more use of.

I'm hoping I can maybe show off the VR sculpting workflow a little bit eventually in some time lapse videos, but it is a little bit more of a pain to record than regular painting, so we'll see, lol.

Anyway, I hope you're all doing fantastic. Thanks for your support, it's a great way to  help me explore and improve. I'm really grateful for that. :)