Spent 3 hours tweaking brush settings just to get a simple cloud texture right

I was trying to paint this sky for a landscape piece and the clouds kept looking like muddy blobs no matter what I did. After digging through tutorials for way too long, I finally realized I had the opacity jitter set way too high on my basic round brush. Has anyone else wasted a whole afternoon on a single setting they could have fixed in 30 seconds?

2 comments

2 Comments

ben4021mo ago

Manually painted a whole sky once using a basic round brush with flow and opacity tied to pen pressure, took forever but the clouds actually looked soft and natural instead of those hard edges you get when the jitter is off. The trick for me was turning off all the randomness stuff and just setting the brush to a simple fade out with pen pressure controlling like 60% opacity. Also realized I was zoomed in way too close trying to fix tiny details that nobody would ever notice from a normal viewing distance. Had to step back literally and metaphorically and just let the brush do its thing with big sweeping strokes. Sometimes less settings really is more, just a plain round brush and a light hand can get you those fluffy clouds without fighting the software the whole time.

singh.jessica1mo ago

Three weeks of trial and error with custom brush packs taught me the exact opposite honestly. @ben402 I think plain round brushes are boring and miss the whole point of having texture options in digital art. I loaded up a custom cloud brush with like 15 different settings for scatter, jitter, and dual brush blending and got perfect whisps in half the time you took manually blending. Zooming in is essential for my workflow because those tiny details become obvious once you export at 300 DPI for prints. The randomness stuff exists for a reason, it mimics natural variation that a steady hand alone cant reproduce without taking way longer than necessary.