Just realized that texture pack advice was way off for my character art

Some guy on a Discord server told me to use a heavy oil brush overlay for all my digital paintings. I spent 3 days following his lead on this dragon piece and it came out muddy and gross. Finally tried using a simple flat brush with low opacity like I used to do in Procreate. The difference was night and day, the scales actually popped after that switch. Anyone else get burned by following bad texture tips from random people online?

3 comments

3 Comments

jamieburns2mo ago

Did you try fixing it with a layer mask on top of the muddy stuff or did you just scrap it and start over?

beth_sanchez472mo ago

Totally agree with you @jamieburns, I tried a layer mask on a muddy mess once and it just made it worse honestly. Ended up starting over from scratch and that new version came out way cleaner than anything I could have saved. You ever just hit that point where you know no amount of tweaking is gonna fix the foundation?

beth_green1mo ago

I gotta push back on this one a little! Sometimes that muddy mess is actually hiding a decent structure underneath, you just gotta strip it back layer by layer instead of scrapping the whole thing. I've saved projects by duplicating the file, flattening everything down to one layer, and then painting back in the details on top of the flat version. It's way faster than starting from zero, and you keep the color balance and composition that actually worked in the first place.