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Today there are many brush tools available and the question is how do you know which one to use? For sure with some research you can have an idea of what certain brushes do but what if you want to get the best for your digital paintings? If you are a beginner and this and looking for some guidance we want to help. Good for clouds and fog, as the name suggests, or just less boring gradient fills.When you are a digital artist you know how important are the tools that you use. Watercolorīest used for smooth blending, washes, gradients, and smoky atmospheric effects.īasically a grittier version of the watercolor tool, because too much smoothness weird me out. I use it for everything from rough washes to more refined shaping and polish. I don't use any textures with it because I think the shape of the brush provides enough of that by itself. I like to use the canvas texture on this brush to help break up the unnatural smoothness that usually accompanies digital brushes, but it works just fine without.Ī brush tool set to flat bristle ( try saving this bitmap file to your elemap folder if your version of SAI doesn’t have it) is by far my favorite to paint with.
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It's heavier than my usual workhorse brush, for faster color application and rough blending, but not as heavy as the pencil tool, which has no blending at all. The plain ol' brush tool acts as sort of an in-between for me in terms of brush flow. I find the line quality to be much more crisp than Photoshop, and you can manually adjust in-program stabilization to help smooth out hand wobbles. Mostly made this because I'm lazy and I didn't want to have to keep turning my textures off/opacity up when I wanted to ink something (even though I don't do it very often), or lay down flat colors. Lower opacities give it the feel of different pencil hardnesses, while full opacity makes it more like a palette knife, laying down hard-edged, heavy color for detail work or eventual blending with other brushes. I use the pencil tool with SAI's native paper texture both for sketching and for applying opaque color with no blending.
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